No, it doesn't make sense, and yes, most of this has been tried.
1. The vast majority aren't. The few that are, aren't going to be fixed by mental health services, because as I said, mental health services are totally ineffective when someone is experiencing the ongoing trauma of being homeless. And the fact that you said "including other homeless" doesn't fix the fact that your #1 concern is that homeless people are dangerous, not that homeless people are suffering.
2. Again, your concern is that someone will be traumatized by hearing someone talk to them in a way that they don't like, rather than that someone will be traumatized by being homeless?
3. Everyone knows that homeless people are mentally ill and is happy to talk about it: that's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that they are mentally ill because we as a society are unwilling to give them the only help that is effective: homes.
4. The results of forcibly imprisoning people are predictably bad. I'm not aware of any forcible treatment programs for the homeless, but this has never worked for anything else and I'm not sure why you'd think it would work for this. It again sounds a lot more like you're trying to help people who are scared of homeless people, rather than help homeless people.
Why on earth would you think this would work? What, you imprison someone for 6 months or a year and force them to act "normal" in a situation that's not normal, then throw them back on the street and somehow they'll be able to cope with being homeless long enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
5. Alternative hypothesis: the homeless people you encounter aren't interested in the help you're offering because the help you're offering is of the flavor you've proposed in this post, i.e., not help.
* You seem absurdly confident that homeless people don't need what literally everyone else by definition has: a home. Why? What habit do you think you'll be able to build in them that will overcome lack of privacy or inability to keep their possessions safe?
Why are the funds even a concern here when we have people so rich that one of them could literally build homes for every homeless person in the US and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world? We have enough resources to house the homeless right now, but we will never have enough resources to satisfy rich people's greed.
1. I know most aren't. Part of what I'm getting at is having different strategies for different segments of the homeless population with different needs. This idea would target that small number of the most...disruptive? of them (I'm really trying to use terminology that isn't offensive or dismissive, maybe you can help me out?), in a way that would be beneficial to everyone. I know that there is very little chance for most of them to be fixed. It's a bit like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where many of them become lifers. But I truly believe this is better for everyone than having them just out on the street because there's no program or solution catered to them.
I'm not sure what you mean w.r.t the "including other homeless" comment. What I'm trying to say is that this small but highly visible population creates problems for the rest. I work next to a dining room and food pantry, and the majority of people that use those services and inhabit the area do so in a generally civil fashion. I would assume that they don't appreciate the few that cause a ruckus any more than anyone else, probably less even, for drawing unwanted attention and making things harder for them.
2. I'm just talking about solutions. The reality is that a lot of people are scared of and angry about homeless people, and develop a callous "just get them out of my neighborhood" attitude. My thought is that this is driven more by extreme encounters with the small number of outliers than truly having a problem with someone just trying to find a place to sleep.
"Talking to them in a way they don't like" is a huge understatement indicative the denial I was talking about where we don't want to confront the fact that there are some seriously damaged individuals. Almost daily I hear someone violently screaming deranged things and they're usually talking to themselves although actual altercations do happen as well. The other day a woman was blocking the road and taking her shirt off. When I lived in the Tenderloin on many days there was a guy outside a bahn mi shop that loudly said "HI. HI. HI." all day. Yes these people are badly traumatized and it's awful but is it really more humane to just leave them there traumatizing everyone else (again, including other homeless people) than to collect them and move them to a care facility? It was perhaps a mistake to call them dangerous, they're mostly not going to attack you or anything, but they exhibit erratic behavior like running out into a busy street.
3. The elephant in the room is that neither shelters nor homes are going to provide relief to the worst off. There are different types of homeless people with different needs, there is no one-size-fits-all.
4. I mean, we do have prisons, and while there is much to debate about whether we are using them properly, do you accept that it is a valid concept and some people should be jailed? Or would you abolish them altogether (honest question, I can see arguments for the latter)? What about people being committed to psyche wards? It's basically that. Again, the idea is not to just round up anyone on the street as the primary solution to homelessness, but to target the few individuals that have virtually no hope of benefitting from other solutions. The status quo here is that police come by and do their thing, either leaving without changing anything or pointlessly taking them to jail for a few days.
I imagine it would work similarly to every other type of rehab facility. What you described seems pretty accurate. Do all alcoholics, criminals, or schizophrenics come out of rehab magically completely fixed? No. Fixing people is hard, sometimes nigh impossible. Does that mean we should just not try? Just leave them on the street instead? Or build them a nice house and move them into it and hope it all works out?
5. I think homes should be made available to them. I just think there are other strategies that could be effective as well. You're laser focused on the one true and only solution that's perfect for every homeless person, simply place them in a home, boom, problem solved. I think there are a lot of people that would benefit from homeless encampments being made legal and more integrated with city services so they don't feel like criminals that can be fucked with at any moment. Maybe some lockers get installed. There are ways to help them out that don't require big capital projects and the challenge of displacing them and getting it to stick. Some of them do actually have a sense of community and home in an encampment even if it's not perfect.
6. The funds are a concern because the article was about a large amount of funds essentially being squandered, leading to the question of how they might be better used.
1. The vast majority aren't. The few that are, aren't going to be fixed by mental health services, because as I said, mental health services are totally ineffective when someone is experiencing the ongoing trauma of being homeless. And the fact that you said "including other homeless" doesn't fix the fact that your #1 concern is that homeless people are dangerous, not that homeless people are suffering.
2. Again, your concern is that someone will be traumatized by hearing someone talk to them in a way that they don't like, rather than that someone will be traumatized by being homeless?
3. Everyone knows that homeless people are mentally ill and is happy to talk about it: that's not the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is that they are mentally ill because we as a society are unwilling to give them the only help that is effective: homes.
4. The results of forcibly imprisoning people are predictably bad. I'm not aware of any forcible treatment programs for the homeless, but this has never worked for anything else and I'm not sure why you'd think it would work for this. It again sounds a lot more like you're trying to help people who are scared of homeless people, rather than help homeless people.
Why on earth would you think this would work? What, you imprison someone for 6 months or a year and force them to act "normal" in a situation that's not normal, then throw them back on the street and somehow they'll be able to cope with being homeless long enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
5. Alternative hypothesis: the homeless people you encounter aren't interested in the help you're offering because the help you're offering is of the flavor you've proposed in this post, i.e., not help.
* You seem absurdly confident that homeless people don't need what literally everyone else by definition has: a home. Why? What habit do you think you'll be able to build in them that will overcome lack of privacy or inability to keep their possessions safe?
Why are the funds even a concern here when we have people so rich that one of them could literally build homes for every homeless person in the US and still be in the top 10 richest people in the world? We have enough resources to house the homeless right now, but we will never have enough resources to satisfy rich people's greed.