-Have a pet? Not coming with you. A stint at the pound, likely followed by euthanization due to overcrowding.

-How about a family? If you can even get into a shelter, odds are it's going to be male or women and children.

-Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk.

-Very little space for personal possessions, high incidence of theft.

>Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

I would strongly encourage you to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Not only do they need the help, you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs.

I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence, full of dangerous people with drug and mental health problems.

This is the equivalent of suggesting that there is irony in the position that one can support animal welfare but still be against the position of beating animals with a stick (rather than an iron bar).

Homeless shelters can be violent. They are certainly full of people with (often untreated) mental illnesses. They are also not a solution to homelessness, but rather a solution to the problem of people sleeping on the street.

Solutions to homelessness often require providing permanent housing to people whom you may not like and who you, personally, may believe do not deserve a "free" apartment or house. It involves giving people a permanent foundation on which they can start to build a post-homelessness life. This is why it is never a popular solution - what I find ironic is that voters who want to "solve" homelessness never actually start with the simplest solution, giving away secure and dignified housing.

A real solution involves notions of security, safety, etc and often requires homeless people, particularly those who have lived homeless for a long time, to unlearn those strategies they have employed in order to survive. Shelters do not provide this type of support.

I suppose it makes sense from a certain perspective, but I think the lack of a safety net is a costly economic mistake. Take bankruptcy as an example, you can take risks and if something goes wrong (including bad decisions), you are not necessarily ruined forever because we allow you to walk away from some or all of the debt.

There's a cost to allowing bankruptcy, but I think it's worth it even though I've had to "pay" (indirectly) for other's bad decisions. I think about all the value lost to society because we make the danger of not having a job, even for a short time, very high for most members of society.

Homeless shelters typically lack privacy and security from other residents (something most, even high density, regular housing does not lack for very good reasons). So, even if dangerous people were no more common in the homeless population than the general population, the small number of them would drive others out of shelters, and they'd become super concentrated there.

And advocates for better treatment of the homeless tend to acknowledge the greater incidence of serious drug and mental health problems in the population as something services need to address.

So, where is the irony?

Is this not also a problem at homeless encampments?

They said homeless shelters have a lot of drug activity. You implied encampments do too. What was your point if it wasn't about encampments?

Your comments about making homelessness illegal seem like a non-sequitur.

xnyan explained problems with shelters relative to unspecified alternatives. They didn't mention encampments either. The comment they replied to didn't mention encampments. And you pointed out some of their points don't make sense if they were just comparing to encampments. The strongest plausible interpretation of what they said is they weren't just comparing to encampments.

This entire conversation is about the dangers of encampments, and how to solve that problem.

Also you haven’t explained how your comment isn’t a non-seqitur. As far I can see it is an out of context contradiction that doesn’t change anything about the meaning of anything.

I have considered it, and I don't care. I live in one of these high homeless cities, and it's horrid. No one who hasn't lived in a place like this can really understand the decay that a lot of homeless inflict upon a city and upon social cohesion. I am leaving as soon as possible. The lives and cities of productive members of society do not deserve to be ruined by homeless people. Go to the shelter or go to jail. Camping on the sidewalk or in the park should not be an option. I don't care if the shelter sucks, that still doesn't give you the right to camp in the park. I don't care if the park sucks either, that doesn't give you the right to camp in my back yard, which has actually happened and the police declined to remove the person.

If we have to sacrifice a few people who are overwhelmingly drug addicted or mentally ill or just unintelligent to make our lives and cities orders of magnitude better, sorry, but I'm voting for that option.

Theft and assaults happen at shelters, so maybe there's a bed available but do people feel safe? If you were assaulted at a shelter would you want to return the next night? Forcing people to chose between two unsafe options (shelter or jail) feels cruel.

Addiction also complicates things. Should a shelter allow substance abuse? If so it can be a really bad place for recovering addicts. If shelters do not allow substance abuse, then addicts have no place to legally exist. If locking them up actually helped their addiction that might be ok, but it does not.

There are other problems with shelters. Many of them have weird hours and capacity limits. Many are gender segregated. What people need is a space where they feel safe, they can store their belongings, they can come and go as needed to get to appointments and services, they can live with a partner or on their own. These are the things that will help people get back on their feet, overcome addiction, etc, and "shelters" are totally inadequate.

Many homeless choose the street over the shelter for this reason

They do, and this is sometimes why homeless people avoid the shelters. You cannot hold someone in a shelter against their will.

You can't jail someone for not sheltering themselves. That would most probably violate their civil rights and would not survive a test in the courts.

Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in.

You need to do more research on the topic. VICE has some decent documentaries on the issue.

Then solve this problem.

The problem I constantly see with homelessness in America is that municipalities constantly half ass every attempt to fix it, and then throw up their hands and say "well that didn't work, I guess there's nothing we can do!" Building homeless shelters without making them safe places to be is the perfect example of half-assing. I mean ffs, it's in the name: shelter. A homeless shelter not being safe doesn't mean that homeless shelters don't work, it just means your execution was shit.

In contrast, some of the other homeless "shelters" I've seen are just barely funded enough by the city to keep the roof from leaking and the lights on with minimal staffing. That just doesn't work.

But if the only response to “how can things be done better” is “send more money”, anyone who has been on the funding side of things will just move on.

Not “half-a*ing” things doubtless has a lot of components. If you are as successful in your shelter as you say, you have a bunch of proven best practices that can be implemented by other shelters and those who certify them. What are those? How can a funder support the implementation of even one of those specific ideas? That will bring out the wallet faster than a blank check appeal. (Are there even certification and rating programs in this space?)