Reply to Tenleytown Library homeless issue

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Tenleytown Library homeless issue"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote]
Anonymous wrote:

As someone who's worked with the unhoused for years, I can tell you many don't want shelter. There are almost always significant mental health challenges that contribute.

Police used to arrest them for minor offenses, when others find them to be inconvenient and call 911, like the smell and blocking people when walking into to a public facility (merely being there isn't trespass but blocking public right of way is). But that is a bad "solution" for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is they are back on the street in a matter of hours. So what was the point other than to give them a criminal record?

It's a mental health issue butting up against multiple constitutional issues. And there truly isn't an easy answer.

Of course there is. You just don't want to hear it.

People do not have the right to disrupt others in public places. They do not have the right to trespass or camp out in public spaces.

We need mandatory day shelters and night shelters. If you have no where else to spend the day, off you go.

Libraries should not serve as that function.
[/quote]

I agree with this.  The lack of housing/shelter for the mentally ill as a result of the mass de-institutionalization of the 1980s has caused all of this.  But people also have got to be willing to pay the not-insignificant costs of this type of quasi-institutional structure.  There would need to be DC employees (some type of law enforcement) tasked with ferrying people from the libraries to the shelters.  Once there, the shelters would need to be staffed with trained mental health professionals, plus security.  Because these types of places wouldn't be on lockdown (unless we changed our commitment laws), it would be a continuous round robin of collecting people from the libraries, depositing them at the shelter, and then re-collecting them after they walk out.  Honestly, there would have to be some leniency re drinking and weed---better to have someone reeking of urine in one of those shelters than the library.   But this is not an easy fix to actually implement.   DC did a variation of this when they handed out housing vouchers to the long term mentally ill but then required no monitoring or check-ins---with the result that there are now a lot of apartment buildings which are slowly morphing from market rate private buildings into unsupervised mental asylums.  We need to stop talking about the "homeless" as one generic category and instead talk about humane treatment for the mentally ill---both for them and for society.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics