[ExI] Forbidden Words

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 12:07 PM,  <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> In the Silicon Valley, the prices of any living structure has gone from
> crazy to absurd and now that the Apple Mothership has landed and Elon Musk
> has moved into the neighborhood, rents have risen steeply from there.  We
> know we can never afford to house homeless people here.  No way.  We get
> that.  But we can feed and clothe people here.

We can build shelters.  Somewhere zoned for dense, multi-story
residential.  Two problems:
1) the people who don't want to shelter, due to A) past trauma or B)
mental problems
2) the people who make problems for their neighbors (turning more
homeless into problem 1)

For 2 - well, the whole problem you're trying to solve is that they're
homeless, so just kicking them out isn't a problem.  Maybe
institutionalize?

For 1, you have to help them deal with their problem.  The solution to
1.B used to be to institutionalize, and perhaps may be again.  1.A is
more common, and for that you have to keep the shelters actually safe
and secure - don't just lip service it.  That requires monitoring and
human intervention, such that if you're going to have a truly large
homeless shelter, you may want to just build a police station into or
next to it (or build the shelter next to a pre-existing police
station).  Either way, though, you have to get these people off the
streets - which may mean making vagrancy a misdemeanor with the
"sentence" of being placed in shelter, though that may cause people to
see the shelter as a jail they should escape from.  You would also
want to place this close to a public transit center, though a large
enough one can argue to have a new public transit center built in or
adjacent.

> We are seeing homeless communities pop up here and there, people living in
> motorhomes and such, but these are being actively discouraged.

A variant of the above I've seen suggested, is to construct a parking
garage specifically for RVs.  Such things are expected to be
multi-story and so could run into less NIMBY objections, may be able
to slip past zoning regulations against residential areas, but would
still have the security and public transit issues.  It would also have
less ways for people to be bad neighbors (if they permanently mess up
their living space, their RV can be hauled off and the concrete hosed
down before a new RV comes in), though it would not be a solution for
people who can not even afford a RV.