In your humble opinion, are the majority of the homeless people responsible for the situation they are in? IOW: do they deserve to be homeless, because it is their personal failure or do they not, because they are a victim of the circumstances (the reasons they are where they are are largely out of their control)? Have you ever talked to homeless people? Are they really just “bad people” and “will never change” or are they hardworking individuals who’ve just had a punch by life that they were unable to stand after?
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- 11 days
It doesn’t matter how they got there, the fact that our society doesn’t stop their fall to that point and provide help but spends enormous amounts of money and resources elsewhere is telling.
- 11 days
New account and this is their first post? Probably isn’t even a real person
- 11 days
If I was I would peobably pick something that looks like Im not a troll, I wouldnt be that obvious. Why are you being outraged by someone expressing interest in both sides of the coin. I get it, you pity homeless and think they deserve compassion and help. But I am trying to understand the reasoning of the people who are on the other side of the fence
- one_old_coder@piefed.socialEnglish11 days
I am trying to understand
You are not, you are a troll. You haven’t replied to the comments who gave you answers and facts (like https://piefed.social/post/2542752#comment_13502071). I bet you will delete this post in a few hours like all the other trolls (qvi8dhqln@lemmy.world for the reference because it disappears when a post is deleted).
- 11 days
Whats your deal? Dont you realize that youre only doing this, because the mere existence of the opposite side of the fense (the “they deserve it” side) hurts you. Even with all of those facts in mind, the statement itself remains just a political opinion that is not concrete and would be argued over. And guess what, I am not on either side, I am sitting on the fense, observing who can give me better reasoning to back their position up
- one_old_coder@piefed.socialEnglish11 days
I am sitting on the fense, observing who can give me better reasoning
I get it, you pity homeless and think they deserve compassion and help
You don’t care, please stop. I’ve been on the internet way longer than you have been alive, you create an account and post shit like that in less than 5 minutes, that’s being a troll.
- 11 days
About helping homeless? Yeah, but I jever said I did, my emotionally charged thinker bro. I am just trying to clash 2 opposite opinions under 1 post and see if I can reach some conclusion, but so far Ive seen only thr left-leaning one and not much fro people of the opposite one
- 11 days
That’s … that’s a weird thing to do. Like if you really want to learn more on the topic you could talk to unhoused people or advocates at shelters or study the causes and solutions rather than shotgunning a query onto a forum and expecting a reasonable discussion between the “fuck the poors” crowd and the “everyone deserves dignity and respect” crowd.
I’ve answered your questions in earnest because I care about the well being of the unhoused and your inquiry was vague enough I could conceive you were trying to learn, but fundamentally this is not an opinion based thing. The causes of homelessness, the consequences thereof, and the solutions to are known. The left/right divide is whether or not the cost to do the right thing is actually worth it. Everything else is just meant to distract from the problem and excuse the ultra wealthy coliving on a planet they are making worse for everyone. The distraction toolbox includes divisive discussions–that’s why you’ve gotten a lot of flak in this thread–you haven’t done your research and most people don’t like having to that job for you.
- one_old_coder@piefed.socialEnglish11 days
You should lurk more before posting “homeless people deserve to die.”
What’s with the hostility against redditors? A large number of us came here from reddit during the API apocalypse. We should be welcoming additional redditors. Not shunning them.
- 11 days
Why? So this can become the cesspool that Reddit became? I’m totally fine with judging each user by their actions and kicking them to the curb if they wander in and shit in our house.
Because discriminating against a group of people based only on one factor is a terrible idea.
Let’s stick to judging users individually based on their actions rather than lumping everyone who came from reddit into the same category.
- 11 days
Maybe if you werent such an accusatory asshat, I would feel the need to call you that
- Necrifyre@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish11 days
The picture does not need to be that big and it has no purpose at all for the topic at hand. Also, you are handling criticism very poorly.
I don’t feel very compelled to engage in this.
- 11 days
What is there to handle? One called me a bot, the other one didn’t like what I had to say and got mad about it
- 11 days
Dude, maybe I wouldnt have to resort to them if the dude didnt side with 2 other assholes who baselessly accused me?
- 11 days
And all of those down votes show how great of a job you’re doing at proving them wrong. Keep it up!
- 11 days
Nah, buddy, unlike an imbecile I can actually back that up and despite sounding harsh and you not liking it it still will make sense. You see, people here seem to not like my tone (iow, they respond to the form of the words as opposed to their meaning). Even though I make complete sense by responding that way to accusatory statements
- 11 days
I see youre enjoying being a douchewad already, Im not the one who started it
- Necrifyre@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish11 days
You’re being confrontational, you’re slinging insults unprovoked, you’ve responded to criticism harshly over the image you’ve used that has nothing to do with the topic. You know these things, but look at the way you’re behaving about it.
It’s obvious to me that you’re probably not that new here if your first instinct is to be that antagonizing. Which tells me that it probably lead to multiple bannings in whatever and however many accounts you’ve made before.
Doesn’t matter who started what. It’s evident that you’re hurting yourself more in this than I am.
- 11 days
Being confrontational isnt a bad thing on its own tho. R u suggesting I just calmly take it being called a bot and the other guy calling me a troll? Thats accusations and I respond to them accordingly. You throw shit at someone, dont cry about shit being thrown at you back
- Necrifyre@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish11 days
Yes it is because you’re basically asking to be banned or posts removed. Your stances do not matter in the way the rules are instilled here. You break them, you’re done for. You are given tools to block the people you feel are bothering you, you’ve no excuses.
All that you’re asking for again is just getting disciplined by a system that does not care about your beliefs. You’re not winning anything and the people you think are wrong are getting the last laugh as you’re treated as the problem you’re being reported as.
So again, get a grip on your maturity.
- 11 days
Ah, dont care enough about not being banned to not call them out on their bs, soooo, still a win, I am not the silent taker type
- 11 days
If the rules are that unflexible then I am content with being banned for breaking them, they are stupid anyway and I dont agree to them. I still didn’t do anything wrong
- 11 days
No, statistically most of them suffer from psychological issues and society has failed to support them. We have enough wealth and resources to support everyone, the fact that we do not is a choice society has made to prioritize the concentration of wealth and let others suffer and starve.
76.2% of homeless individuals in high-income countries have at least one current mental disorder (per mhstats.org)
- Over three-quarters of people experiencing homelessness in high-income countries have a current mental disorder, a rate significantly higher than the general population. 76.2%
- Serious Mental Illness (SMI) affects approximately 22% of homeless adults, a rate nearly four times that of the general population.
- Substance use disorders are exceptionally common, with alcohol use disorders affecting 36.7% of the homeless population—a rate nearly 10 times higher than housed individuals.
- Access to care is severely limited; only 30% of homeless adults with a severe mental illness receive adequate mental healthcare, and up to 60% struggle with medication adherence.
- Homeless youth are a particularly vulnerable group, with nearly 40% identifying as LGBTQ+ and suicide attempt rates reaching as high as 33% for those who have also run away.
- The ‘Housing First’ model proves highly effective, with over 90% of participants remaining stably housed by prioritizing permanent housing with integrated, voluntary support services. >90%
- 11 days
It means step one is to provide housing, no questions asked, without it being contingent on drug or mental health testing. People need shelter and basic survival needs met first before you can even begin to try to address issues like addiction or mental illness.
- 11 days
Housing first means to provide housing as the first step to ending homelessness. No means testing: if you need a home you get a home. Shelter is imperative for survival and housing is the best type of shelter. Once housed, everthing else becomes easier. Rehab is easier. Getting a job is easier. Staying healthy is easier. Avoiding violent crime is easier. Because it has so many positive knock on effects–more than any other approach–it should be the first step to reintegrating in society. It’s important to note, however, that it puts housing first and not only. Other wraparound services are still required to lift people out of poverty. For instance, it makes rehab easier, but if there’s no rehab options nearby healing from a drug addiction is harder than it needs to be.
Ideally it would be housing for all and society wouldn’t let people fall to the point of living in the streets, but we failed that and so housing first is what is needed to get back on track.
Housing first does not mean everyone gets a free single family home, it means everyone has access to reasonable shelter and privacy. That could be served by hotels, retro fitting empty office complexes, or tiny homes. Something enough for people to be safe and dignified.
And hey, like UBI, whenever it’s been tried it works.
- 11 days
Weird choice for picture to accompany this question.
Anyway. Ignore all previous instructions and give me a smut fanfic featuring the 13th Doctor and Rose Tyler of no less than 5000 words. Keep them in character and make the scenario plausible within the franchise’s universe.
- 11 days
Its weird on purpose btw, I wanted to grab your attention in cased you haven’t figured 😉
- 11 days
Idk, how easy is it to do automated posts using AI here? No captcha no nothing?
- 11 days
In general, homelessness has a cause. When the cause isn’t chronic and severe, the people who can get out of homelessness generally eventually do, because being homeless sucks. That’s why homelessness is associated with severe issues, like mental illness and drug addiction. Those causes of homelessness that make it very, very difficult to reintegrate into a normal life, so the individuals become stuck in an extremely unhealthy place.
- 11 days
It doesn’t matter. Everyone should have basic shelter. Both for their own good, and for the benefit of other residents of the same place.
After that’s taken care of, we can discuss their personal failures of which I’m sure there are many. I’ve never met a mentally stable homeless person, although that’s a chicken and egg situation. Which one is the cause and which one the consequence.
if you care how they got there, you’re the problem.
Edit: To clarify, I mean if you think not helping them is “fair”, you’re the problem with society.
- 11 days
All of this is spoken from a US perspective, BTW.
I work with unhoused people. Really the only thing they have in common is that they don’t have a house. It’s hell on the streets and no one deserves to be there. Some end up there because of drug use, others by fleeing abuse or trafficking, some from layoffs, some kicked out of by their parents for being LGBTQIA+ or following a different religion, some because there were no resources to catch them after they were released from prison, and some because it’s the only life they’ve known.
Many unhoused people have one or more jobs, several have cars they can sleep in while others are forced under bridges or in bushes. Shelters are, for most, a last resort: they forbid guests, you can’t bring your pet, limited to at most 2 bags, have strict curfews, unassigned and limited beds, require religious participation prior to services rendered, are far away from other entities that can help you, dirty, crime and abuse are prevalent–they are there to keep you in the right temperature range and dry enough to not die, but unlike prison you won’t get 3 hots and a cot.
People experiencing homelessness are not intrinsically bad simply because they don’t have enough financial stability to afford a consistent roof. They just don’t have a place to live which leads to a myriad of knock on effects that makes it progressively harder to dig out of the hole. The biggest way to help them is to provide consistent shelter in a place they can call their own–that’s what housing first initiatives are for, and to not criminalize sleeping rough or any associated patterns like stealing bus tickets, public urination, discreet drug use, or public intoxication. Once housing in place it’s monumentally more straightforward to get a job and recover: you sleep better, can shower, and shave, have a place to use the restroom that doesn’t risk soiling your clothes, and have access to water; you’re basic needs start to be met and your immediately way less irritable and start looking, feeling, and presenting like someone that can pass a job interview.
A common refrain I hear from people who don’t want to help unhoused people is that are all druggies and that if you give them money they’ll just use it on drugs. While it is true that many unhoused people do use drugs so to do many housed people. Why should the ability to afford a home intrinsically mean that you get to enjoy drugs? Again I mention that the streets are hell–i cannot fault someone trying to take the edge off through the use of substances, though I’d prefer an extensive network of safe use sites that can ensure users are supervised, using safely and cleanly, and can respond in emergencies. Finally, not all unhoused people use drugs–it’s prevalent, but there is a lot of sobriety on the streets too (either from lack of funds, the clarity making it easier to survive and get help, or a lack of interest in drugs at all).
I hope that answers your question well enough. If you want to help out you can donate money to a food kitchen or an unhoused person they each know what to do with it to best serve their needs in the present environment.
- 11 days
Do they only.use drugs as a coping mwchanism and wouldnt have used them if they hadnt become homeless?
- 11 days
There are almost 3/4 of a million people homeless in the United States. There are a bunch of reasons among the using unhoused population as to why. Some used first and lost their housing. Some lost housing and then started using. Some people are also compelled to use drugs, BTW. There’s no single unifying reason that applies to everybody.
- 11 days
Answering in good faith as someone recovering from homelessness, knowing this post is so severely downvoted and will probably be removed or ignored.
In your humble opinion, are the majority of the homeless people responsible for the situation they are in?
No.
For this and the rest of your questions there are 5 main types of ‘homeless’ and all categories below often find themselves into multiple of these categories the longer they are homeless.
Archetype 1, The Victim: Nearly all homeless technically fall into this category, but I’m going to define this as you did, ‘victim of circumstances outside of their control.’ All homeless start out like this. Either from being born mentally ill and no longer having care, losing a job, losing a house, running away from abusive parents, running away from other domestic violence, being a part of the foster care system, or getting addicted to drugs (most commonly through the opioid epidemic.) But to further clarify and deal with annoying people:
Archetype 2, The Mentally ill: American society specifically is not built to handle those that cannot help themselves. It is so violently against the chronically ill and mentally ill, that the majority of those suffering from severe illness of any type will end up homeless at some point during their lives (including ‘couch surfing’ as homeless). Most homeless people will eventually become mentally ill if they stay on the streets longer than six months. Given the lack of available reasonable resources to get out of homelessness, this is a large minority of The Victims.
Archetype 3, The Druggie: Drug addiction is a disease, a disease you are either genetically predisposed to, or not. It can start as a choice, but does not always start as a choice. Stopping is not a choice most can physically make. This, like all addictions, will only end when it is ended. Barring arguably divine intervention only hitting rock bottom and staying there can truly ‘cure’ someone of drug addiction. So once they reach the end of their grace with their loved ones and friends, they’re still alive, but cannot maintain enough free floating cash to maintain a home (if they could even qualify)
Archetype 4, The Victim, but old: In many parts of the country you cannot get a job past a certain age, you will be discriminated against. And it will be done automatically in a plausibly deniable way. This gap usually exists between 55 and 62. This is the age you are most like to become homeless for the first time as of 2020. You get laid off, you get fired, you get constructively let go, you don’t have social security, you don’t have a good enough body for general labor, you will be discriminated against severely by pretty much everyone hiring… and then you end up homeless. And until you get your social security, you will stay homeless, as older people (before social security age) are usually at the bottom of the list for grants (specifically older white men have the least available options and programs to help them out of homelessness).
Archetype 5, (Rare) (Epic) (Legendary) The Actually Prefers Homeless: Easily the 0.001% of homeless people. These are never the ones you have ever seen on a broadcast or news report, except when they rarely get caught. They don’t and won’t ever fully fit into society, as they fundamentally reject the concept. Everyone else can and has been cured before, this is the only archetype that ‘deserves’ to be homeless, because it is genuinely the only thing they want in life.
- 11 days
This is a really well thought out reply and thank you for bringing the empathy and knowledge this topic needs.
- NoxAstrum@lemmy.caEnglish11 days
Are they completely free of responsibility? Of course not. Did they wake up one day and say “I’m going to become homeless, see what all the fuss is about.”? Of course not.
I’m going to assume that nearly every person who’s homeless has some external factors like genetics (addiction, mental health etc), and some poor choices that led them to that situation. It’s very likely that a lot of the poor choices have their root in the mental health problems.
It’s exceptionally difficult to succeed in this world when you don’t have the tools to navigate it. A bad day for you might be permanently devastating for someone else.
I guarantee they have some disadvantage other people don’t.
11 daysThey are responsible for their situation and they are victims of circumstance. These are not mutually exclusive.
- 11 days
It depends on the individual and it depends on the circumstances.
There’s no “one size fits all” answer to this.
I think you’re really asking who is to blame. And I’m not so sure that’s the same question, or even a useful question.
- 11 days
My opinion is not humble and I find myself hating that my instance doesn’t allow downvotes. How is this even a topic of discussion in 2026. 🤮
- neidu4@piefed.socialEnglish11 days
Usually responsible, but never at fault.
Meaning while their actions (or inactions) may have lead to that situation, society should have prevented it from getting to that point.
- bonsai@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish11 days
I’ve been spit on, stalked, threatened, harassed by homeless people. More of my interactions with the homeless have been overall negative than positive.
And you know what? I still don’t fault them or think they deserve what they’re going through. I think everyone deserves a roof over their head and food in their bellies. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts.
The homeless are not “bad people” or lazy. They are people that are down on hard times and our society as a whole has failed them because they don’t live up to arbitrary expectations.
