Best Ways To Reduce The High Cost Of Homelessness? (employment, drug, health care)

[tijlover]

On a national average, I've read the costs to taxpayers to have a homeless person on our streets is $42,500 a year, similar to both direct and indirect incarceration costs. So what can we do to reduce these costs?

[Crazy-Cat-Lady]

• Guaranteed minimum payments to all to cover living costs (rent, healthcare food and education if needed)
• Construction of more affordable housing
• Investment in mental health care
• Drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs

[James1202]

Originally Posted by tijlover

On a national average, I've read the costs to taxpayers to have a homeless person on our streets is $42,500 a year, similar to both direct and indirect incarceration costs. So what can we do to reduce these costs?

Links to the $42,500 amount would be helpful.

I found this: National Alliance to End Homelessness: Cost of Homelessness

[jertheber]

Cause and effect: Solving problems requires more than the usual emotional outbursts from those afflicted with anger, self righteousness, and a heightened sense of self interest. The underlying social construct in America is intertwined with the old agricultural imperatives of hard work, self sustaining abilities, cohesive communities, and family backgrounds that encouraged the embrace of all these attributes. With the disappearance of that agricultural community we see a rise in the numbers of people who never had any exposure to those positive facets of childhood development.

Homelessness isn't the root problem, it is simply the result of certain societal views with regard to our sense of a collective institutional obligation. Poverty, education, cultural bias, classicism, racism, all come into play as an integral part of early childhood development, when looked at as a recipe we can see the mixture as the base for so many of our social ills. If we want to reduce the amount of homeless people we need to see their lack of a home as a symptom/effect, but not the cause.

As long as we allow our institutions to be monumental failures with regard to their utilization in developing our youth in ways that lead to productive lives, we will more than likely continue to deal with the cost of their lacking in those positive qualities. Reducing the cost of homelessness shouldn't be looked at solely in terms of a monetary cost. The presence of a rising army of people who failed to align themselves with those qualities mentioned above should be a much greater concern than the dollar cost of their predicament.

When our cities begin to take on the appearance of an apocalyptic social failing I'm wondering if the bulk of America will still be in denial. We need to invest in all that may stave off the trend toward a heightened sense of individualism and see OUR problems as a shared concern, OR, we can move further out to the burbs and leave the cities, and their remaining inhabitants, to rot.

Organizing the current crop of homeless people, encouraging self governing villages of people engaged in a collective scenario of helping each other, create value for these collectives by encouraging their involvement with work and making money from various enterprising business ventures, plan on overhauling our institutions with a view toward prevention of those early childhood circumstances which promote homelessness, drug usage, and a learned helplessness. Yeah, it will be very difficult, but we are known as the country of opportunity, and in that vein we need to make certain that the least of our citizens are given those opportunities before handing them over to a continuous stream of foreigners looking for a better life.

[reneeh63]

It's not just finding them a place to stay...obviously they have issues that got them kicked out of wherever they were last. Mental illness, developmental disability, alcohol or drug problem, lack of vocational skills, criminal activity, etc. Housing and food is something but it's not all that they need.

[tijlover]

I was briefly homeless in Denver, back in 1972, and it was a cinch to go from homelessness to employment, but times have changed, way too may barriers in place.

Desperate for a job, I applied for a job at a nursing home as a nursing assistant, and perhaps they were as desperate as I was, and I started out as an apprentice, and after a week I had my own patients to tend to, pay was very low, as expected, but enough for me to rent a room in someone's house.

Today, that would be absolutely impossible, as you'd need to have your CNA license (schooling), a CPR card, undergo a background investigation, fingerprinting, a TB test and drug test.

I'm sure, among those homeless, there's a number of them that could give a darn good massage, but today, even that field requires going to massage school, up to $14k in tuition to complete a year's program. And a massage license, in the end, at $300.

So let's remove some of those barriers, one way of reducing the high cost of homelessness.

[jertheber]

Originally Posted by tijlover

I was briefly homeless in Denver, back in 1972, and it was a cinch to go from homelessness to employment, but times have changed, way too may barriers in place.

Desperate for a job, I applied for a job at a nursing home as a nursing assistant, and perhaps they were as desperate as I was, and I started out as an apprentice, and after a week I had my own patients to tend to, pay was very low, as expected, but enough for me to rent a room in someone's house.

Today, that would be absolutely impossible, as you'd need to have your CNA license (schooling), a CPR card, undergo a background investigation, fingerprinting, a TB test and drug test.

I'm sure, among those homeless, there's a number of them that could give a darn good massage, but today, even that field requires going to massage school, up to $14k in tuition to complete a year's program. And a massage license, in the end, at $300.

So let's remove some of those barriers, one way of reducing the high cost of homelessness.

You didn't state the reasons for your situation in 1972 so I'm a bit lost as to your notions of lowering the bar to employment in the care fields as a solution to finding work. Maybe the answer is to prepare people for work and help with the expenses involved with training. I know there is a huge demand for caretakers in the US today and adequate training is a must if we are going to be trusting people to do that work.

[eok]

In the distant past there were poorhouses and strict vagrancy laws. If we really wanted to end homelessness we could bring those back. But do we really want to?

Depending on how much we wanted to spend to end homelessness, we could make the poorhouses more modern and less oppressive. And even people who weren't homeless could go there for free meals or other poverty services such as job training or whatever they might need.

[TerraDown]

Get the politicians out of the pocket of lobbyists, and use the taxpayers money wisely. Do not allow politicians to take money from the lobbyist's/corporations.

[Blondebaerde]

Originally Posted by Crazy-Cat-Lady

• Guaranteed minimum payments to all to cover living costs (rent, healthcare food and education if needed)
• Construction of more affordable housing
• Investment in mental health care
• Drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs

1. Dangerous criminality = prison work-farm
2. Vagrancy = compulsory work to provide value to society, from breaking rocks to harvesting crops
3. Substance abuse = drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs
4. Investment in mental health care
5. Dismantlement/razing/replanting of cesspools like "the Jungle" in Seattle, waterfront in Sacramento, other antisocial hubs of vagrancy criminality.

Interesting to see I'm not in "entire" disagreement with what this center-right Conservative suspects are generally-leftist positions (the quoted).

And I understand 3. and 4. may be additional taxation. I'll pay it, if there is accountability among said-vagrants, see #1-4.