Quote:
Originally Posted by Dusty_Star
I agree with the first part of your post - we have as a society turned our backs. I think it started in the late 60s when court cases were won that made it very difficult to put people in mental institutions. Soon, states closed down mental institutions & now there is very little help or places for these people to go. The vast majority are either mentally ill or have addictions - pretty much unable to care for themselves. It is cruel, not enlightened to have removed support for these people; living rough is dangerous, unhealthy & these people would be better off in an institution. I acknowledge that some of the institutions had problems & needed improvement - but closing them altogether was a terrible mistake.
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Bingo!
In Minnesota (with similar occurrences in most other states) the push began in the early 70's with a court case, Welsch v. Noot; Patty Welsch being a young disabled woman and Noot being the Minnesota Commissioner of Public Welfare. The gist of the case was that A) persons with mental and physical handicaps deserved to receive habilitative services; and B) that such people deserved to live in the least restrictive setting possible for their needs. Hard to argue with that, but as the years went by and people were moved from the large institutions ("State hospitals" in Minnesota; "Colonies" in neighboring Wisconsin) those large edifices, many approaching a century old, no longer had any use and were gradually consolidated and closed. The irony was that persons over 18 who were NOT under State or private guardianship or in the custody of corrections had the right to live where they pleased. Also, it was recognized somewhat vaguely that such people had the right to be mentally ill and as such, if they chose NOT to take their meds, it was completely up to them.
The result was inevitable. When it was recognized that some of these people could NOT be helped other than in an institution, the institutions either no longer existed or had been transformed into prisons. In Minnesota, particularly in the Minneapolis - St. Paul metro and first-ring suburbs, dozens of homeless encampments sprouted, mainly in the public parks but one in particular that caught everyone's eye was one on a hillside close to the St. Paul Cathedral. I saw it last about two years ago. It was huge; tents, chairs, people lying on the grass, people urinating (and assumedly defecating) in the open, etc. The Minnesota-based Wilder Foundation, back in 2018, stated that "An estimated 19,600 Minnesotans experienced homelessness on any given night in 2018. 50,600 people experienced homelessness over the course of the year." That was four years ago, and as I understand it, for a variety of reasons, the estimates are far beyond that today. Remember--this is Minnesota, where living outdoors might easily mean snow for six months of the year and temperatures on the coldest nights reaching -30 f. or even lower.
The impact on the communities has been far from just financial. Before our retirement my wife worked in downtown Minneapolis, riding the bus there from a suburban park-and-ride, and what she saw sometimes were beyond shocking. The homeless would come into the city from the parks and basically take over the bus stops particularly in the winter. My wife witnessed people doing their business completely in the open. There've been numerous instances of public masturbation and people having sex, again in the open. Panhandlers have gone from asking for money with a sad song-and-dance spiel to actively and aggressively demanding money from passers-by. There've been assaults, by homeless against one another and against passers-by. Drug use is rampant. Inner-city Minneapolis is going from a bustling city to, more and more, a deserted place as people who work there either find other jobs or take advantage of working from home. I know less about the situation in St. Paul, but last I heard things are pretty much paralleling Minneapolis over there. One particularly noisome and obnoxious practice over there is the homeless using the skywalks as toilets as well as sheltering in them at night. Though I cannot remember the particulars I recall an action over there that opposed closing the skywalks at the end of the business day because the homeless would be inconvenienced.
Yes. Our short-sighted policies created this monster (or actually "monsters" because most large cities probably have similar stories to tell). And yes. I have sympathy for these people. But how it is being handled, in all too many cases with kid gloves, is NOT working. If there is a growing homeless problem here in TV, then I will make it a point to crusade for the authorities to clean it up posthaste. I have seen firsthand what it can mushroom into. And I don't want to be anywhere near it.