I just spent 6 months in an economically challenged county. A large % of the population is under poverty level and the majority of the families get public subsidies. The joke is that mostceveryone there “works” for the government.
Drugs, criminal proclivity, mental illness, homelessness, poverty, lack of employment opportunities are all big time factors there. Those items intermingle so it’s difficult separating from them from each other.
There used to be a large psychiatric hospital there. Now, there is a small unit that focuses in getting anyone admitted or committed out within 3 days. Its not place to stay. So there are many more homeless roaming the area. Many refuse to stay in the homeless shelters because of the rules and because they feel the accommodations are not to their liking. Few reported assaults of any police events from those shelters—I checked. Families and community refuse to give this population shelter because many of them have burned those bridges with abuse. One, a cousin, had her house go up in flames when her adult son fell asleep smoking (so is the story anyway) and he had left horrible messed for her to clean up each time she let him stay with her.
It’s jail and the streets for many of them. Really, they have to hide because the area does not permit setting up a tent or home in the open, unlike cities like SanFrancisco and Seattle. These vagabond endure a lot of abuse. More than the State Hospital residents in the past? I don’t know. But old timers who had family in there say, those who were kept in the SH were clean, decently fed and more were easier to have at home for visits. DH had family members who spent time in there, and he affirms that criminal records, filth, physical medical issues were not as pervasive as they are for these homeless now living worse than feral cats in the area.
I am not equating this group with those who are also homeless in that they have no place of their own to live but have a place to go with friends, family etc. Yes, I know a number of those too. Who often move on to some subsidized arrangement more private than a friend or family member’s sofa. I’ve subsidized some of my own kids that way. The ones I see driving around town or in the backwoods, look entirely different.
Some have been taken to other locales and walked a hundred miles or so back “home” which is what they consider their local homeless haunts here. They avoid the hospital, jail and shelters with equal verve.
I don’t know what the answer to this problem is. I’ve known the area for 50 years, and there was not this large number of homeless nomads, who live off of dumpster, trash leavings. Handouts, cat-food ( yes, a lot of people here leave out food and water for the large feral and stray cat population ), begging, theft, prostitution, drug sales keep them going. Drugs are a huge problem for much of the area population, and this group is right there in the midst of the traffic. Few attend the outreach programs that are in place. The police reports have a number of them featured each week.
There is a lot of public housing in this town, and upkeep and crime, an issue there. But this group is not welcome even in the Public Housing area because they’ve burned that bridge and can’t keep to the sanitation and laws required to stay in those units. A cousin who grew up here knows a lot of them, and says they are mostly mentally ill and unable to function to care for themselves in the most basic hygiene and behavior standards. Whether their mental state is due to drugs or illness, is often not discernible. Often both, and they refuse to sustain any treatment for either.
So what do you do with a growing population that does break the law, filth up the area, bother people on a regular basis? Who do not want any of the alternatives offered. Many value their freedom above all. It has been attempted to set up “camp” in an area away from town, providing rudimentary shelter, water, outhouses, food, but when a cluster of these folks are created anywhere, problems occur. That they are scattered throughout the area keeps the impact of their issues lower. Better some of the dumpster house some of them singularly, and other locales have them hiding out than a critical core when in fighting becomes an issue and trash accumulates. I have photos of some small encampments, and the county dump and the worst hoarder homes look like resorts next to what these areas have become. Needles and other paraphernalia all over the place along with excrement and other garbage. The county swoops in and cleans up these outposts several times a year.