Peter the Great: His Life and World talks about a 300-year-old attempt to handle some of the problems of poverty:
The Tsar decided to do something about the clamoring hordes of beggars who pursued citizens up and down the streets from the moment they left their doors until they entered another house. Frequently, the beggars managed to blend their pleas with a simultaneous deft picking of the victim’s pockets. By decree, begging was forbidden and so was the encouragement of begging; anyone caught giving alms to beggars was fined five roubles. To deal with the beggars themselves, the Tsar attached a hospital to every church, personally endowed by himself, to provide for the poor. That the conditions in these hospitals may have been stark was suggested by another ambassadorial witness, who wrote, “This soon cleared the streets of those poor vagrants, many of whom chose to work rather than to be locked up in the hospitals.”
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We are too PC in the U.S. to even consider something like this. hRC got backlash for mocking homeless on otherwise boring Jimmy Fallon interview.
For whatever reason, homeless people in the US go to great lengths to avoid entering homeless shelters, and the reasons for this have never been discussed in public media. We could probably put a big dent in the embarrassing homeless problem in the US just by opening homeless shelters that homeless people actually having no problem with staying in.
The two theories I have come up with is that they can’t do drugs in the shelters, and that their personal safety is at risk there.
Incidentally, the policy that has been proven to work most effectively turns out to be to just have the government pay for an apartment for very poor people, but doing this has the obvious problem of people preferring to have beggars in the streets to knowing that someone is getting something for free.
No, the free apartment isn’t most effective unless the homeless person has to follow some ground rules. Utah does this, for example, but the part about the homeless person having to follow rules like “live clean and don’t curse” is generally left out when their program is reported on.
There was a heavily promoted case a few years back of a guy who cost a lot in (written-off) medical expenses being “cheaper” with an apartment he destroyed about annually. But that is misleading accounting.
Homeless men avoid homeless shelters for obvious reasons. Homeless women will go to them if they are woman and young children only.
Wasn’t this Russian system pretty much exactly what was done in the USA until the 1970s? Most chronically homeless on the streets today would have been forceably committed to mental asylums up until people decided that was too mean.