LogFAQs > #954598870

Kimbos_Egg posted...

its almost as if the vast majority of homeless people are addicts or mentally ill or something, and its just not as easy as giving them a free home.

Giving them a free home, however, does make solving those other problems substantially easier, while also being quite a bit cheaper than alternatives. There's a town in Alberta that completely eliminated homelessness with a housing-first approach, which cost them ~$60,000 per person per year. That sounds like a lot, but it was already costing almost twice that to police the homeless population, so they actually ended up saving money while also dramatically improving the prognosis.

Obviously, additional supports are still needed to solve the real problems and keep people from depending on free housing for their entire lives, but housing-first intiatives have been shown to work better than just about anything else. The only reason they aren't more common is because so many people get so butthurt over whether or not they "deserve" housing and let that get in the way of actually solving problems.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.