In Los Angeles, the homeless population is out of control and many Angelenos are wondering why so many of them lack motivation. With so many resources being made available to them, why can’t a good portion of them rebuild their life?
In a recent discussion managed by Alex Miller at Motivation Ping, people were gathered to talk about the problem going on with why some homeless people are unmotivated to fix their life. Of course, one of the main reasons everyone agreed upon was that many of them are mentally ill so we decided to exlcude those. So the discussion mainly focused on those who could rehabilitate themselves.
Here are some interesting comments from the discussion:
People blame the homeless person instead of accepting that the leading cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing. It’s easy to point a finger and say “drug addict” and much harder to accept responsibility for the homeless crisis and do something about it. It’s as if people believe homeless are the only ones that do drugs. Right down any street in America, people use drugs in apartments and houses.
Prior to 1983, there was zero street homelessness, yet there has always been addiction and drug abuse. That’s a very real statistic and it proves that drugs are not the cause of homelessness. Yes, in my personal situation drugs and bad decisions played a huge role in me destroying my social network that caused my homelessness. But if there were cheap rooms for rent like there used to be I would have never ended up on the streets, and my addiction may not have gotten so bad.
People take for granted all the luxury they have. Running water, abundant food, shelter… but instead of appreciating what they have they focus on what they can get and in doing so literally become slaves or homeless like this idiot. I tell my young girls “it is a short distance from the front door to the street.”
Stats say about half of all homeless are addicts. No judgment from me, I am recovering. BUT with half addicted and another thirty percent mentally ill, how would affordable housing help those people, unless it was free? Addicts lose everything if they’re really in their addiction. And the mentally ill aren’t capable of living alone…during the Reagan years so many of the psych institutions were closed…there was a huge influx of homeless people during that time. For some affordable housing solves the problem, but not for most.
I have been homeless for most my life. I have seen them as well, and I’ve also got myself off the streets. Things become habit, that’s what keep people where they’re at. Making it easy for homeless people at least in SLC creates more homeless. It will get worst before it gets better. It sucks the homeless are full of excuses as this video shows. They keep doing drugs, stealing, littering, lying, attacking people, damaging property, etc. Not all of them I give you that, but enough that makes it a huge problem. Seeing some of the public act like “poor homeless people” is hard for me, especially when I’ve been on the streets and see first hand what these people are like.