What does DTK need?

[ac3r]

I genuinely think that for each public addict we see, there are 50 more "working homeless" behind the scenes that can turn their lives around with minimal investment from the state if they just had a place to do it that didn't consume 80% of their income.

As for involuntary commitment, I think that's an extremely high burden to clear with medical ethics to actually get someone committed. It's genuinely a political non-starter, especially with how the charter of rights has been interpreted for the last 40 years and all that built up precedent behind it.

This is a good point and one I wanted to point to, though I didn't want to make my post too long. A housing first policy most certainly would help the thousands of working homeless (another term I like is invisible homeless...invisible because they may still work, or have the benefit of living out of a car and so on) and I think we really need to look into what it would take to begin a project to help those people.

But it's the homeless addicts most of us think about and see - who recognize these individuals are worst off - who are quite a different story and who require a much more sophisticated solution if we are to help them.

Build houses. Build rehabilitation facilities. And also build a new framework of interpretation and solutions that can actually have a greater chance of success, because our hands off approach sure as heck isn't doing much.