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moonbunnychan t1_j9h89wo wrote

Reply to comment by pomegranatecloud in Two-thirds of McPherson Square homeless remain on street, D.C. says by SnortingCoffee

There's a decent number of people that honestly just have zero interest in rejoining society. A lot of people don't want to accept that. "Just give them homes" isn't a catch all solution.

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Wonderful-Emu-8716 t1_j9ii7da wrote

With the caveat that definitions of homelessness range widely, comparisons of rates of homelessness across the OECD seem to show that while, yes, there might be a baseline amount of homelessness that will be extremely difficult to solve, there is significant improvement to be had. Again, the statistics may be off, but Italy has 40% of the homelessness that we do and some of the Baltics have 33%. Japan's rate is essentially 0 (5000 total out of 125 million). I'm not arguing that any of those countries has it exactly right, but just saying a core group doesn't want to be housed seems to ignore that much larger numbers in other places are successfully housed.

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Cheaperthantherapy13 t1_j9imh2x wrote

Consider that the countries you referenced might not have the same (perhaps overly-) robust protections for the individual liberties of the mentally ill. If a schizophrenic person wants to remain unmedicated and living under a bridge, there’s very little that can be done to force them to assimilate to live like a ‘normal’ person or be permanently institutionalized. That’s not the case in Japan.

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ClydeFrog1313 t1_j9jvvi1 wrote

Totally agree, I was wondering how other countries go about dealing with homeless a couple days ago. I currently have pulled up (but haven't read yet) a 20 page policy review on Dutch strategies to combat homelessness. I'm sure in someways they are much more progressive but in others more conservative.

What I've found is that in many places in Western Europe, they simply wouldn't tolerate homeless living in public parks like in DC but at the same time probably provide much more safety net obviously. I'm just curious how they treat that underlying baseline that seems to exist everywhere.

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