[SolarNet]

> But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.

I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.

The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.

[brewdad]

The causes of homelessness are plentiful. Some, perhaps a majority I don't know any exact figures, would be helped by simply giving them money. Others are suffering from mental health crises and/or drug addictions that must be dealt with first before they can have any hope of taking care of themselves when given the money to support themselves.

This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.

[FireBeyond]

Hah, yes. In Australia when I was growing up there was a program called Work for the Dole (Unemployment) after you had been unemployed for a while. During the dotcom era, that was me. There was one program that was tech and web development skills. I went to a church twice a week (the organization running the program wasn't the church, they just rented rooms), and we poked at shitty old computers while I tried to help the staff figure out how to get Dreamweaver running on them (I knew more than the staff) in a way that was basically trying not to break the licensing - since they'd only bought one copy for the entire classroom. I knew more than the staff, the computers were decrepit, etc., and we were stuffed in the back room of a church.

I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.