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The Destruction of Civil Society
We were in Washington over Christmas and noticed pup tents all over the place. This wasn’t the case three years ago when we attended the podcast summit. I realize that the homeless problem doesn’t have simple solutions, but allowing people to sleep overnight in parks and elsewhere will lead to many problems. The defund the police movement disproportionally affects poorer communities. George Soros has funded the election of prosecutors who are not enforcing laws. It appears that the solutions posed by the broken windows movement are being ignored, and our cities are returning to the widespread lawlessness we lived through from the 1960s-80s.
This is in front of Union Station.
Published in Policing
They should not do it on public or private property.
You may wish to clarify ‘the business’ you are in….
https://zandercutt.com/2018/02/19/the-power-of-the-unseen/
Genuine chuckle out of that.
Community mental health and serving on a board for homeless. Actually pushing three decades now I think on it.
That post seems like you are wanting to use that to take me to school. OK, let’s do this. Present your evidence that women with substance use disorders and mental illness have more friends and are less isolated than men once using sex has been removed from the picture.
See, I worked with those populations directly for 25 years. I had women tell me why they were not homeless. It was not girlfirnds or family.
Where is your evidence or expertise?
I never said that or anything like that.
I said “women are less likely to end up on the street than men due to the fact that women as a group form stronger social bonds/relationships than do men”. I never mentioned mental disorders or substance abuse. You’re subsetting the population to those you’ve seen in your experience. Thus my link to to the story about the planes that didn’t come back. You’re talking about the homeless. I’m talking about the ones that never become homeless.
As am I.
Talking about women who don’t become homeless even though they have SA and MH issues.
So the idea is that a smaller number of women become homeless to begin with, perhaps because they are less likely to wreck their social supports, or never form them to begin with? I think that’s possible, though now that I think of it, I wonder whether women are actually more socially bonded, or whether I’ve just been told that so often that I now believe it without evidence? Hmmnnnnnn.
I would suggest —and ask Bryan to weigh in—that men, being men, are more daring and less fearful (and so more likely, even when insane, to strike out on their own). Men are also more prone to acting out violently, however, and with violence often comes involvement with the criminal justice system not to mention some pretty permanent ruptures of relationships (e.g. restraining orders). How does violence enter into this?
Or are severe mental illnesses (schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder, bipolar 1) more common in men in general, and what we’re seeing on the street is just a subset?
ALl of that being said, I was in DC recently and it was a bummer to have to walk past the tents. I was with—as usual—an armed man, so I wasn’t afraid, but there is something eerie and morally disturbing about picking your way past what amounts to a person’s house, and hearing him wailing and talking to his demons on the other side of a thin, poly-canvas tent “wall.”
I remember thimking about this when my children were small, and we would visit New York city. Here in Maine, a shirtless man raving and screaming as the sleet falls down upon his bare torso..is someone who needs help.
In our major cities, are American children in the process of being trained to pass by on the other side?
That is what I would attribute to the overwhelming number of men living on the streets, though it’s just an educated guess. Men are the sex that enjoys outdoor camping, hunting for their food, and peeing on the ground in the first place. It would also account for the high numbers of Vietnam Veterans on the streets – guys who’ve had experience living in jungles and sleeping on the ground.
Women are more prone to depression and to example do anxiety disorders. Men or more Prone to schizophrenia.
Women who become addicted to drugs are more likely than men who have been abused though abuse and men who are dictated to drugs is pretty high.
There’s nothing in my experience upon less men and homeless women that would lead me to say that more men are homeless because they’re more adventuresome are just like living in the woods.
Men are more likely to act out their pathology meaning that they get into trouble faster with the people around them. It’s not that women are more social it’s that men are more likely to be aggressive. Is the effects of testosterone a real.
For the entire history of the species women have traded sex for security. My experience is that is the primary reason that women are less likely to be homeless than men. Women can trade sex for roof over their head and food in their belly. Can do this for themselves and they can do this for their children.
Being in the field, I appreciate your insights, but please clarify this sentence, because it doesn’t make sense to me:
“Women who become addicted to drugs are more likely than men who have been abused though abuse and men who are dictated to drugs is pretty high.”
Abused by others. Emotional, sexual, physical. Women how are addicted have a higher rate of abuse. Still higher than mean in men, too, but ve5high in women.
These camps were not new even three years ago. Along I-5 in the city they would congregate, above and below the freeway. Driving home through the city I would have to keep an eye out in case some squatter ambled across the freeway. They destroyed the parks created to preserve beauty for all to share: cutting down trees to burn, turning meadow and grass into muddy pits reminiscent of battle trenches, building the kind of shacks that progressives deemed a blight a century ago, risking everyone with haphazard application of propane for heat and light. The progressives of the city and county eventually cleared the areas under the freeway after propane explosions and fires under similar structures caused destruction elsewhere. However the bored residents of these camps have begun throwing debris onto the freeway for entertainment.
In Seattle the homeless-industrial machine got so out of control a government initiative to create a village for the homeless was taken over by it’s manager, not allowing government in to oversea the facility. The city council members routinely obstruct city, county, and even state efforts to minimize the horrors. If you claim to want the best for these people, why would you obstruct efforts to clean up these camps and rescue the children caught in there.
The worst part is that these issues are no longer limited to urban areas. In rural Oregon the drugged out indigent wander market districts. Outside Stanford University the sidewalks and bike lanes previously enjoyed by residents are now consumed by tents, RVs, campers occupied largely by people from outside the city; a city which considered offering housing assistance for anyone making less than $250,000. ( They’re still there as of February 2020, I assume they still are. )
I understand the concerns for liberty associated with compulsory detainment, however these hives do breed horrible outcomes including deadly drug crime, involuntary prostitution, homeless infants and toddlers, murder and theft. There is no libertarian solution I can see to these problems. We made a mistake listening to progressives who made their careers lying about the true state of the institutions where we housed people who would not take care of themselves, now we must finally adopt policies that we know work.
If you cannot take care of your children, you must find someone who can, preferably not the state. If you cannot take care of yourself and cannot find someone who can, you should be committed until you can. You should not be left on the street to spiral ever further downward. There are solutions, but right now the system feeds itself by promoting politicians who are supported by the institutions that they direct public money to.
That was pretty eye-opening! Some of those links lead to disturbing predicaments in the homeless and progressive world.
There isn’t. And if liberty is the issue, then these people need to be on land that doesn’t belong to individuals or government on behalf of individuals.
Vagrancy, loitering, and ‘no visible means of support’ laws are often misused and are rightly distrusted for that reason.
But these are the people the laws were actually created for.
And if the answer to ‘you can’t stay here’ is “I got nowhere else to go,” it shouldn’t be a surprise when the people who told you that you can’t stay send you elsewhere.
Arizona [and no doubt other states] used to bus their homeless to other states so that their winter tourists didn’t have to look at them.
I say ‘their homeless’ but they weren’t necessarily AZ residents. Part of the problem is that there are better and worse states in which to be homeless. New York is relatively generous as is much of the Pacific coast (though I suspect a lot of homeless there are people who came to find work or fame and found neither). Arizona is not generous, but it is warm. Homegrown or imported, these states end up with more homeless than most others.
In the 1990s the city council of Santa Barbara raised the rainbow flag over municipal buildings and rousted the homeless off of State Street.
Priorities.