| | I don't know if most homeless people would qualify as mentally ill, or, alternatively, terminally lazy. I think that it's usually a combination of things: poor health, including chronic fatigue syndrome, loss of job and home, lack of education, criminal record - often for victimless crimes such as drug use, drug and alcohol addiction, plus possible mental illness or neuroses and/or laziness, of course.
One local homeless couple that I have known for almost a decade now are probably typical. The wife is actually quite bright and personable, although not at all pretty, after decades of being out in the weather. Because I've helped them out on occasion, she will sometimes drop by with flowers and a vase or some such thing for me. She even has a college degree, I believe, and was once a successful bank official. Her husband is actually quite handsome in a raffish sort of way, but not very bright. He is totally illiterate, due to some kind of learning disability. Both of them are alcoholics when they can afford it, as well as users of whatever other drugs come their way. They spend their days pushing around shopping carts and collecting sellable or recycleable trash.
The wife could leave and make it on her own, but she is in love with her husband, and, even though he frequently beats her, when he catches her cheating on him, and occasionally goes to jail as a consequence, she always waits for him to get out, and they always make up. My impression is that they have found a lifestyle that suits them, and have learned from sad experience that if they ever do get together enough money to rent a small business office to sleep in, as when the husband gets a part time job sweeping some liquor store for $3/hour under the table, they will then spend the rent money on booze and drugs within a couple months and be back on the street. Overall, they seem fairly harmless.
It takes a LOT of money to simply have an authorized permanent abode in many areas of the U.S. The real estate interests do their best to keep prices sky high, including inventing all kinds of zoning restrictions, restrictions on how many unrelated people can live in one house, etc. Here in Southern California (SoCal), it is fairly easy to live on the street, due to the mild climate and the overall level of wealth, but there is a competition between municipalities to drive the homeless out of their area and into the city next door.
Thus, every few months, the local libertarian newspaper will carry some story about how some OC city just lost yet another lawsuit relative to some totally unconstitutional abuse of police powers against the homeless. Most cities in SoCal have ordinances, for example, against sleeping on public property or in a vehicle. Many people who are down on their luck will give up an apartment they can't afford, put their belongings into storage - which itself has skyrocketed in price in recent years in the OC - and try to camp out in their cars.
Up until the '80's, there was a quite large population of "Vonuists," and a movement, with newsletters, how-to books, and a lot of networking. These were people who typically lived in some kind of camper or motor home and traveled around the country. Many of them were libertarians who wanted to stay invisable to the state. Others simply liked the lifestyle. Still others were retired - usually couples - who had money enough to live in a big motorhome and liked roaming around and exploring. Ocean Park in Long Beach in the late '70's would typically have fifty or more such people camping out on the street in the park. Since most such "homeless" people actually had money, jobs or other resources, and didn't cause trouble in general, there was little incentive to persecute them.
But then Reagan, as governor of California, decided to turn most of the mentally ill out of the hospitals and onto the streets, and the whole scene went to hell in a handbag from that point, as the mentally ill invaded the restaurants and any other convenient facilities for the use of the bathrooms, etc., and a whole cycle of vindictive sanctions began aimed at making life HELL for them, in order to drive them out of whatever city they wandered into.
The cops will typically wait until Friday to roust anyone they've spotted sleeping in a vehicle, throwing them in jail for the weekend, as there are no hearings on Saturdays or Sundays, and, of course, towing their cars. The tow companies locally are often owned by retired cops, and managed by off-duty cops. So, they charge enormous fees for a simple tow of a couple miles, and then more huge storage fees for the weekend, meaning that now the person has lost his car and is on the street for real. A lot of the local homeless got that way via that route.
The cops in the OC's largest and poorest city, Santa Ana, used to simply beat up the homeless and sieze their meager possessions without recourse, until the ACLU took them into Federal Court and shut that down, as well as getting hefty compensation to some of the victims. So then Santa Ana passed an ordinance that made it illegal, not to sleep in public, but to sleep in public with a blanket or sleeping bag. So then you would see the homeless walking about with 6 layers of clothes on.
For every successful lawsuit against some city, of course, there are probably fifty such ordinances enacted which never get challenged, as it costs money and a lot of time to go up against a city on such an issue. Occasionally I've met homeless people who virtually live in the law library, pursueing such cases on their own, under the Federal laws that guarantee even a pauper his day in court. They often win those cases - or the city settles quietly to avoid setting a precedent.
The problem is that there is no political incentive to create solutions on the state level. It's the same problem that you see with traffic lights. Everyone would like to have synchronized lights, to speed traffic flow, reduce pollution, etc., but any city that does synchronize the lights becomes a thoroughfare for the neighboring cities as a consequence, so the advantage is largely lost and the street maintenance costs soar, meaning higher taxes for the locals. So, every city deliberately desychronizes the lights in order to force the traffic elsewhere. A state policy that punished or rewarded cities for such policies might quickly solve the problem, but no local state congressperson is likely to introduce such legislation.
Similarly, if there were not the myriad of local ordinances that criminalize things like sleeping in a vehicle, then life would be much easier for the homeless, and the route back to normalcy, for those who were temporarily out of luck, would be much easier to navigate. Note that a large proportion of homeless do in fact have jobs, just not ones that pay enough to rent an apartment - especially here in the OC., with a small apartment running $1,200 or more per month.
But that would take an improbable set of State mandates and penalties to accomplish as well. The hundreds of thousands of retired couples that used to roam the country in their motorhomes have dwindled from the backlash of the anti-homeless ordinances, so that constiuency - which probably were registered to vote in some other state anyway - is effectively nil, and few of the homeless vote at all.
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