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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

You’re seeing up a false dichotomy. For one, the fight wasn’t with staff, it was with a random roommate he was paired with. Your equating the two when they’re not equal at all. I don’t know about you but I’ve always gotten to pick my roommates.

> Ronnie was always very clear about his needs. He knows he’s a volatile person. He doesn’t want to be in a shared room, especially with a stranger

So perhaps listening to what the people need instead of forcing them into unwinnable situations is the right answer. If your question is how you scale personalized care in a way that’s financially sustainable I don’t know. But pretending like the orphan crushing machine was turned off, to use your words, isn’t capturing the picture as I’m seeing it. Seems pretty crush happy.

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Read the article again. There was a violent incident with the staff as well. The system did listen to that man's needs. It provided him with a hotel room all to himself. Here's the result:

> All seemed to be going well. But in September, Morrisette got into a fight with staff at the Monarch and was evicted. “It was devastating,” Barrows said. Because she was out of town dealing with a family crisis, she couldn’t intervene or help him lodge an appeal.

> It angered her that one bout of bad behavior could cost him so dearly. Given his background and mental health issues, the Monarch should have cut him more slack, she thought.

It’s always easy to volunteer others to be assaulted.

Prison guards get extra pay compared to the work they do, and great benefits, to compensate for the assaults.

Hotel staff do not.

Nowhere did I suggest that housing homeless in general purpose hotels is a good idea. If that’s the housing that’s available, then the staff need to be trained and capable of handling such issues. And since density might be higher than normal, you need lots of people around who can help deescalate situations before they reach violence and to council the people who have such needs on how to better manage their anger. But all of that costs money to run well, money most people aren’t willing to spend because “eww homeless” or “it’s their mess, I shouldn’t be paying for it”. So you end up spending a lot on half measures that helps no one.

You didn't, but she clearly thought that in the circumstances they should have "given him more chances":

> Given his background and mental health issues, the Monarch should have cut him more slack, she thought.

Which is the equivalent of "hotel staff should just take abuse".

Or perhaps, and this is going to sound purely insane, they person requires a higher level of care, and we need comprehensive healthcare and social safety nets that are equipped to deal with most cases whether that be a person with a cold, a single mom, or someone with mental illness. It literally costs more to keep these people in the revolving door of prisons and institutions than it does to just give everyone proper care. On top of that now you don't have that person being violent in the streets or doing petty theft for drug money.

Those could all be true (and likely are) but "we don't have what we should, so low-paid hotel staff are conscripted to provide it" is a particularly unworkable situation.

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