Anyone here that wants to see the actual picture, needs to hang out at the PILOT Truck Stop on portland ave.

I was there last night waiting for a fella to meet me and sell me an intake manifold.

The whole time I was at the PILOT there were two cops at the truck stop also. Even with the TPD presence, I was approached by a nasty strung out hooker, while my wife was in the car. Another loser tried to stop us as we pulled out of the parking lot by blocking us with a shopping cart.
The whole back street behind the station looks like a literal garbage dump with people living in trash piles. Its fucking disgusting.

Later that night I take the wife and cruise around Tacoma/Ruston. I park down in a hidden pull off by the waterfront and go on a walk along the water with the wife. I notice TPD pull up next to my old 82 Z28 that hasn't been registered/transferred in over 17 years. He spotlights it while he runs the plates. I walk over and tell him its my car. He is a nice younger fella that is also a Apache pilot in the military. We had a talk about how most of the homeless are "predatory bums" and very aggressive.

He thanks us for being normal folks and not hiding out there to shoot drugs, shoot people, or dump trash. He doesn't even care about the old Z thats not even registered/titled.

The truth is, the majority don't want help. The ones that do seek it from the numerous sources that are out there.

They all vote. A percentage even have the right too.

Start by contacting your politicians and urging them to just HALT all wasteful free hand outs. This only makes the problem worse. It's NOT working, regardless if the people are drug addicted or mentally ill. If they want to spend OUR money, just 20% of what THEY waste would make some excellent drug treatment centers.

For drug addiction, find out the BEST treatment clinics/centers near you and support them. Monetarily, politically, voluntarily. A lot of people don't want these in their backyard. Hey I get it, but we are not talking about heroin injection sites. Treatment ONLY. There are places.

For homeless with kids, start there. Mothers with kids. Highest priority. As mentioned already.

If you really want to help them, get them arrested. Do whatever you need to (legally) to do it.

Let me elaborate. The Komo and King5 and Kiro7 pieces and shows and documentaries done on this over the years shows that 99.9% of all the 11,000~ or so "homeless" on the streets who refuse shelter are essentially all substance abusers and/or major mental health cases most of whom also abuse drugs. And when I say drugs I mean heavy narcotics.

Voluntary treatment doesn't work. The Rhode Island MAT interviews all show that, those inmates ALL said that if they hadn't been arrested they would have died on the street.

Let me tell you what happened to me.
As a child I watched one of my uncles descend into heroin and meth. He never held a steady job, was often asking family for money, he was in and out of treatment centers and jail, depending on the week. Eventually he died in his early 50s from several different conditions, mostly as a result of heroin and meth damage to his organs. His death was miserable, I will never forget seeing him in the hospital bed, hooked up to so many machines I could not count. His skin was pale and discolored, his eyes were droopy and lifeless. His hair was thinning and falling out. He looked like he was 100 years old, like a zombie. He was always writhing around in the bed moaning and jerking. The doctors told us he had used so many drugs that they thought it was making him resistant to the pain meds they were trying on him, and they were reluctant to use heavier ones. He lingered in that state for almost 2 months before his organs failed and he died. It was torture for him and for his family, us, to witness. This is how the heroin and meth stories really end. There are no successful 90 year-olds who are happy, retired and healthy who use heroin or meth. I remember my parents telling me how they begged and pleaded with authorities to keep our uncle locked up, that if he was in jail long enough he’d break the addiction. As it was the short stays and repeated failures in optional rehabs just prolonged his misery and eventual death.

Then I watched a cousin begin this journey. She had started out OK in life and even went to college, but then heroin got her so wrapped up that all she cared about was the drug. She began stealing and luckily, she eventually stole an expensive car and it forced her into prison in another state and cut off from her suppliers and friends. This saved her life. In prison she was forced to get clean and kick her addiction. Once she was out of the withdrawal period she recognized what had happened to her. Years later she is a productive member of society and has a new family and a career. If she had not spent over a year locked up she would have eventually died as well.

I am currently watching my nephew slowly die on heroin and meth. He started using drugs when he was 17. Unfortunately he also has a young daughter. He has never held a job down for more than 2 months, and most of the time he gets fired for failing drug tests or blowing off work or coming to work intoxicated. He began robbing people to support his drug habit, did some short time in local jail, but not enough to get clean. After he got out he disappeared into the “homeless” population. Occasionally he’ll surface on social media and send word to his parents, although the last time they heard from him was almost 2 years ago. When he started living on the streets everyone in our family begged and pleaded with 2 different regional county sheriffs to arrest him on any number of felony and misdemeanor drug and property offenses, even one violent charge. However the politically correct Puget Sound governments that wink and nod to the Homeless Industrial Complex would not act to save his life. Voluntary treatment does not work. We expect a call any day now that he is found dead on the side of the road somewhere, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Don't give them money. Don't give them any material or financial assistance. There is already a BILLION dollars LOCALLY a year spent on them helping them to kill themselves, which works out to almost 100 grand each, which is still higher than the median salary in WA, and that's insane. If you really want to help them, get them arrested for the crimes they commit and maybe you'll save their life. Maybe it won't save their life but it's literally their only chance.

Just ship them all to Molokai.

Not going to argue with that. AT a very basic level, you are correct.

When they are released from jail or prison, they all have government issued photo ID (jail or DOC ID card).
They must burn it in the parking lot, because we all know that most people don't have photo ID and it is ludicrous to ask for it in order to vote.

....



this...

its a revenue generator for local .Govs.

................until that shit stops then they're in effect trading lives for money.

This will be kinda long, but this used to be my job pretty much. Payed well but man you see some shit. From my experience with the city, to even begin thinking of a solution to this complex problem you must come from a place with compassion for your fellow man and countryman this was probably the hardest thing for me to learn and understand. I grew up not taking help and with a stigma to being homeless, a stigma that is very much alive and well. To begin to help these people you must erase your previous notions of what you value and try to understand with a blank slate. This issue is very divisive and can spark some emotions, it's important to realize when this is happening because it can cloud judgement and thus effect the quality of help or outreach you can provide. This is the biggest hurdle I see for the general populace to understand.

Again this is a deeply complex issues from multiple factors (lack of mental health care, failed drug war, opium crisis, lack of affordable housing, lack of affordable healthcare, wage divide, less home ownership, failings at a federal level, not enough accountability from people up top etc etc.) and it brews the perfect soup for homelessness. From my experience Seattle does an ok job if you compare it to the rest of the country, the intention is there and it helps at times (which is more than 90% of the country) but at the end of the day Seattle is a victim of the entire countries policies.

We need action at the federal level, together as one.

We’re very big on state and local government. Homelessness is mostly tackled at the local level. That means unequal services are available in different places. If you’re a local government, you know that the more money you spend on homeless services, the more homeless people come to your area to get those services, and the more you have to spend. Your goal was to reduce homelessness in your area but you can accidentally increase local homelessness even while decreasing overall homelessness. This creates a tragedy of the commons situation where no city wants to go too far above and beyond on homelessness. This is why many cities offer homeless people free bus tickets “home” (any city they claim as home). It sounds like you’re reuniting them with their family but for most of them, you’re just getting them out of your city and making it someone else’s job to help them. After all, if they have a family that wants and is able to help them AND they want the help from their family, the family could probably buy them a bus ticket.

This is why I think we need federal action on homelessness so we can stop spending money to just shuffle people around but instead have a unified nationwide approach. That would obviously be complex and difficult but the localized approach just isn’t sufficient, even with Seattle's budget on homeless and the absurd humanitarian cost to help them. We should be following many EU countries efforts to eradicate homeless, they are radical by our standards but they've had amazing success I like to see us begin to use Finland's approach. Article is two years old, but turns out unconditional housing access gets people off the streets and just that alone is enough for a major change for a lot of folks because it removes a lot of the factors that compound against them when they're living on the streets vs in a house.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019 ... melessness

It still won't solve the issues surrounding mental heath and the affordable healthcare in America but that is another big issue that I could write a book about. Anyways an untreated paranoid schizophrenic refusing treatment is still a untreated paranoid schizophrenic regardless if you throw him in a hotel or not. But it is undeniably the only first step you can take to begin addressing this. Nothing else matters if you don't have a safe, clean, and dry place to sleep. Even just looking at the opposite end of the country in NYC they're constitutionally obligated to provide housing to all citizens which is why they’ve got an extensive network of shelters, hotels, etc that house people. It’s no where near perfect but it’s something. If we can even just take that and approach this solution at a federal level I think we can see some meaningful change. This will be difficult considering the climate we are in now, but I have hope for the future and the younger generations seem to be realizing this and are more open to trying new things and ideas. Which is good because this problem will outlive us all on here.

I can keep going but I'll stop there for now because I've rambled enough. Time for a beer.

Good insights

I do want to point out that Finland’s population is only 5.5 million, and in the 13 years they’ve been working on this, the homeless population decreased from about 20,000, to 5500.

It’s a little tougher with nearly 600,000 homeless in the U.S.

The other problem is that you can offer housing, but can’t force someone to take it.

They used to commit people, but not anymore.

I’m all for trying something new, however, because a good portion of the tens of millions a year spent on it, gets pissed away...

The guardian? Mental illness? Economic hardship?

These false excuses are what helped kill my uncle and my sister and are what's killing my nephew.

It's drugs. Basically all of it, the amount that isn't is a rounding error.

No more excuses or dispensationalism. Wake up. The fake liberal talking points are killing people and bleeding our money to do it.

Exactly!

like I have said a thousand times before and will keep saying it....when you know what the Democrats end game is, NONE of this comes as a surprise. I expect this from them.

100% true

My means test is simple. Find out why they NEVER try tough love. Oh they will give you a lot of words - in fact they are set up to respond with all the compassionate buzz words. Then ask them if they have actually tried it. More bullshit, because they haven't. They REALLY don't want to "solve" anything.