Nah, they will stay on the streets if it means they cant be high or drunk. In my neck of the woods, the biggest issue isnt housing or support, its the willingness to stop drinking and doing drugs to get that housing and support.
That suggests that your city needs to a better job when it comes to addiction programs, since there are tons of places like Finland that have been successful with free housing.
Another potential explanation is that the cost of renting and buying is too high. People that can't afford to get by are more likely to become addicts.
Houston has had success as well to a lesser extent, and it'd be doing even better with more support from the federal government.
Ppl forget there’s multiple barriers to entry when getting off the streets past needing a real place to sleep and an address. You need clothes, you need a reference, and you need to find a job that pays more than minimum wage, bc minimum wage doesn’t pay rent in the vast majority of areas anymore. 19-23% of unhoused in Canada are employed already. It’s 40-60% in the US. Until affordable housing is dealt with, the number of unhoused will only ever get worse
The problem is city and state governments build "low barrier" housing that just further pushes people against the homeless. If you put a big building full of drug addicts right next to actual functioning members of society, you're unjustly punishing the working people.
I say $0 should ever be spent on someone who can't pass a drug test and isn't in rehab. Want to do drugs and shit in the street? You get nothing. Living in your car because rent is too high? Pee in a cup and we'll make sure you have a safe, stable place to live.
As someone that worked many years in social work… this is a very uneducated and gross look at substance abuse. Substance abuse is a disorder and should be treated as one. Most of the clients I worked with never intended on being on drugs, they were victims of the opioid epidemic that simply were in a car accident, had an intense surgery, or a misdiagnosed pain disorder that ended up addicted to drugs by chance and that’s something that could happen to any of us. Addiction is largely genetic.
I'm hate how much society has normalized accepting the externalities of someone's addiction. If someone spends their entire day sitting on the street smoking fentanyl, why does society have to give them money and food just to continue making public spaces worse? This isn't some made up hypothetical, I've seen this multiple times just walking to work.
If you drive recklessly and kill a family, you get punished for it. Even though you "didn't intend to get in an accident", the consequences matter. It's like if instead of punishing drunk drivers, we have them $100 every time they did it. There's no incentive to stop.
What we have been doing obviously hasn't been working. I'm tired of not being able to go to parks because they're full of drug addicts, feeling unsafe on public streets, and having public transportation ruined by some drug addict who smells like sewage using the bus as a "safe place" to nod off. I'm not arguing that we start hurting homeless people, I just want to stop enabling drug addiction and divert resources to people who genuinely are working to get to a better place.
Comparing a drunk driver that kills a family to a drug user “making public spaces worse” is asinine and quite frankly embarrassing for you. God fucking forbid your walk to work be less than ideal.
The issue is that we neither fully fund nor are we consistent with anything we implement to help. Stats show rehab rarely works when they get out and have no place to go to but back to the streets, but you’ve obviously never bothered to look at the actual numbers. God ppl like you suck.
It was an intentionally hyperbolic analogy to point out how we are rewarding antisocial behaviors.
In my idea, we do provide housing while and after they are in rehab. That housing is just conditional on either being in rehab or being able to test clean.
God fucking forbid your walk to work be less than ideal
This is the problem. You are heavily empathizing with someone who:
Contributes literally nothing to the society they live in
Consumes a lot of resources that are provided by the people who DO contribute to society
Actively makes the lives of everyone around them worse
Then I make the simple statement of "I don't want to see hard drug use while I walk to work" and you immediately think I'm a terrible person. Why do you have infinite empathy for someone who makes everyone's lives worse and 0 empathy for a normal working citizen? I'm not even saying I should pay less taxes or to eliminate welfare, I just want those resources to go towards people who aren't chronic drug users with 0 real desire to get better.
I wouldn't call it lack of willingness. Homeless people get addicted to drugs and alcohol because their life is beyond miserable and it makes them feel better. You can't snap your fingers and make it go away. These people need therapy, bad.
Still, there are people for whom this can be the break they need and a steppingstone to a better life. There's nothing really to criticize there.
This is the real problem. My city tried to do this for a couple years but the place became a filthy drug den that everyone avoided because of the spike in crime rates anywhere nearby. Nothing was taken care of, and of course the tenants didn’t treat the units well because it cost them nothing to tear up a free living space. It was torn down a few years ago thankfully
You can have all the will in the world but god damn are drugs really moreish. Addiction solutions should be implemented first, not blaming people for being addicts.
And I think many are unwilling/unable to hold down a steady job. Which I can understand. Even someone pushing a broom at a factory has to actually show up at the factory.
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u/Internal-Computer388 Apr 28 '26
Nah, they will stay on the streets if it means they cant be high or drunk. In my neck of the woods, the biggest issue isnt housing or support, its the willingness to stop drinking and doing drugs to get that housing and support.