Homelessness Is A Choice (Script & Sources)
Added 2021-03-14 16:54:28 +0000 UTCBeing homeless is a choice. Not THEIR choice, of course, but people who have the power, money, and resources to end homelessness, TODAY - chose not to.
The fact is, we don’t know how many homeless people there are in the United States - and it’s not because we can’t find out, or that it’s too expensive, it’s not.
We just don’t care.
Ending homelessness is absurdly simple and surprisingly cheap. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it can be totally eradicated, for $20 billion dollars annually. That’s a fifth of what we spend on our PETS every year.
There are about 10,000 unhoused families in New York City, and almost 20,000 vacant apartments and condos in Manhattan alone.
And housing is just one part of the equation. 45% of people without homes have a mental health condition, which without resources, can lead to self-medicating through drug use.
But instead of treating mental illness and addiction, politicians figured it was cheaper to criminalize homelessness by making it illegal to panhandle or loiter, thereby shifting their status from being sick and needing help, to being criminals and needing punishment.
And by and large, the police who dole out that punishment are not even remotely trained to deal with mental illness, which is why, in San Francisco for example, most of the people who are killed by police are mentally ill.
Did they deserve to die because they were suffering from a medical condition, or did they die because as a society we’ve made peace with the idea that instead of spending less than one-tenth of one percent of our GDP on ending homelessness forever, we figured it was cheaper and easier to just ignore it and let the cops kill the ones who needed the most help?
