> Stepping over the homeless, weaving between the street corner schizophrenics
Imagine having a chronic disease simultaneously with an absolutely intolerable fear of doctors, hospitals, institutions and the social safety net. That's a hard problem.
Imagine having a chronic disease simultaneously with an absolutely intolerable fear of doctors, hospitals, institutions and the social safety net. That's a hard problem.
But the point was broader, that relative to the rest of the industrial world the US has far more people at the "bottom" , falling out of the net. Walking around cities in Europe, you generally don't find people sleeping on park benches or camping under highway interchanges, etc... In most US cities, that's fairly routine. And many of us consider that a bad thing.
Note that none of that excuses the poorly informed and counterproductive moralizing in the linked article. The author is a jerk. But the problem is real.
And again, it gets to the safety net argument. It's not that the english are accepting shelter where the americans are not, it's that the english don't need to "accept" the homeless shelters in the first place because they are sleeping at home.
"A mixture of street counts and estimates indicated 557 people slept rough on any one night in London 5,678 different people slept rough over a year in London (April 1 2011-March 31 2012)"
"According to SFGov, the total number of homeless individuals and families in San Francisco for 2011 was 6,455."
There are definitely more homeless as percentage of population in San Francisco though.
Is that really true? http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statist... puts Europe, US and UK at very roughly 3-5 homeless per 1000.
But in any case, my point is about the chronic homeless and http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentall... suggests that most chronically homeless are mentally ill in some fashion. How society should properly care for its mentally ill is an extremely hard problem. Strait jackets and padded cells? Forced drug treatments? Or let them camp under bridge overpasses?