Read on Twitter
Just a couple of quick fact checks on this thread, which I'm not going to spend my day responding to in full. It's inaccurate to say that homeless advocates were arguing to keep the Jungle open. They were the ones actually working there and trying to get people indoors.
For a man to refer to the Jungle as a "rape camp" is lurid and designed to stir fear. It dehumanizes sexual assault victims and plays into the conception that people in the class "homeless" are all violent criminals.
Simply kicking everyone out of the Jungle did not save countless lives, as Lindsay claims; it actually created the system of encampments we see all over the city now, because there were not nor are there currently adequate places for the region's 15,000+ homeless people to sleep.
No one is demonizing conservatives for "focusing on" mental illness and addiction. Advocates with expertise and experience are, however, BEGGING them to stop treating people with these conditions in dehumanizing and counterproductive ways.
Similarly, no one is saying permanent supportive housing is the "only" solution to homelessness, and it seems Lindsay doesn't know the difference between PSH and "housing first." These are overlapping concepts but not the same.
"Housing First" is the deeply researched and evidence based concept that people need stable housing before they can tackle underlying problems like mental illness and addiction. I'll briefly highlight two key aspects of this conceptL
First, getting sober while sleeping in a tent and struggling to survive is nearly impossible. This is also true in jail, the place where Lindsay and like-minded people want to send those who steal or sell drugs to feed addictions. Jailed people get sober in spite of jail.
Second, using alcohol and drugs while living on the street (particularly meth, which helps people stay awake at night, when they're most vulnerable) is a form of self-medication against the condition of homelessness. Housing is thus a partial solution to this problem.
Permanent supportive housing, meanwhile, is a form of extremely service-intensive housing that people with complex medical problems, for example, can call home indefinitely. Most people without homes do not need permanent supportive housing.
I have many other frustrations with the idea that we should lock up homeless, hungry, and addicted people "for their own good," but there is also endless evidence that this approach doesn't work. Here's one such survey of the data. http://archives.seattle.gov/digital-collections/media/collectiveaccess/images/1/6/9/1/64428_ca_object_representations_media_169170_original.pdf
Forced treatment, sadly, isn't the magic wand people who haven't studied treatment imagine it is. Most *housed* people who leave treatment don't stay sober. When your destination on Day 29 is a tent, you hardly stand a chance.
If I sound tired, it's because I am. The "lock 'em up" side of this debate is Reagan-era armchair psychology, guys sitting around and thinking about how to scare people into not having brain diseases and the corresponding neurological syndromes.
Addiction doesn't care about these arguments. People have been screaming that addiction is a moral failing in the US since the 19th century and yet it has failed to listen, because it's a disease, not a decision.
It seems I failed to include the original thread from @splindsay, because Twitter is hard, apparently. Here it is: https://twitter.com/splindsay/status/1339293643123769344
