As others have said, this is pretty out of touch with the reality of homelessness. It assumes that homelessness is primarily a condition caused by laziness. While that's occasionally true, it's such a small minority that it's an absurd place to start. It'd be like rebuilding your football team starting with your second-string punter.
As a prelude, remember that your proposed system basically exists. Project housing isn't a novel idea. The homeless are by and large the folks that can't or don't want to get themselves into project housing.
In a rather odd turn of events, when I was 19, I ended up staying in a homeless shelter for a week. It was an incredibly interesting experience. For most of a week I stayed there, ate in soup kitchens and had a rather interesting look from the inside.
For the most part, in the shelter I was in, I saw two big categories of folks that were there:
- Folks that were crazy. This included long term drug and alcohol addicts. They were probably a slight majority. The type and severity of crazy varied, but you got the sense that the goal with those types of folks was helping them to the extent possible, but in most cases, they were often going to need assistance for the remainder of their lives.
- Folks that were pretty darn normal, but had two things go particularly bad in their lives at once. This group was pretty surprising for someone from a middle class background. These people seemed totally normal to me. There was one combination of events that was so common that I saw it several times -- people who'd lost their jobs and their wives (it was a men's shelter) had kicked them out at the same time. Some of these people had graduate degrees, reasonably respectable middle class careers, and so on ... but for one reason or another all at once they had no money and nowhere to live.
Neither of those cases would be especially well addressed by your proposal. I'm skeptical that it would do anything other than make rich people feel better about complaining about the homeless, but really, that sounds like what it's designed for.
Neither of those cases would be especially well addressed by your proposal.
Really, wouldn't option #1 help the normal, hard-luck people quite a bit? It would give you a permanent bed, and address to get mail, etc. while you applied for jobs and got back on your feet? It seems like an immensely superior option to the status quo.
As for the crazy people, I agree, which is why I edited my answer to make it clear that there should be government provided permanent living arrangements that are supportive for the types of problems people have. The normal hard luck people should not have to live in dorms with crazy people and drug addicts.
As a prelude, remember that your proposed system basically exists. Project housing isn't a novel idea. The homeless are by and large the folks that can't or don't want to get themselves into project housing.
In a rather odd turn of events, when I was 19, I ended up staying in a homeless shelter for a week. It was an incredibly interesting experience. For most of a week I stayed there, ate in soup kitchens and had a rather interesting look from the inside.
For the most part, in the shelter I was in, I saw two big categories of folks that were there:
- Folks that were crazy. This included long term drug and alcohol addicts. They were probably a slight majority. The type and severity of crazy varied, but you got the sense that the goal with those types of folks was helping them to the extent possible, but in most cases, they were often going to need assistance for the remainder of their lives.
- Folks that were pretty darn normal, but had two things go particularly bad in their lives at once. This group was pretty surprising for someone from a middle class background. These people seemed totally normal to me. There was one combination of events that was so common that I saw it several times -- people who'd lost their jobs and their wives (it was a men's shelter) had kicked them out at the same time. Some of these people had graduate degrees, reasonably respectable middle class careers, and so on ... but for one reason or another all at once they had no money and nowhere to live.
Neither of those cases would be especially well addressed by your proposal. I'm skeptical that it would do anything other than make rich people feel better about complaining about the homeless, but really, that sounds like what it's designed for.