Let’s Outlaw Being Homeless! That’ll Work!

+1 for rats playing poker and the cat joining them

“Background details rulz”
Looks like Texas holdem?
- They should only be holding 2 cards for Texas Hold'em... So I'm not sure what this is.

Very unrealistic. How come he's still alive after talking back to a cop while being black?

Didn't you see the last panel - he's rich.

Wait y'all have cops that don't just start wailing on that guy for not moving? Cops in my city absolutely call backup and go squad deep when homeless people stand their ground.

Or when they dont. In my twenties I worked with unhoused populations, and someone who I was kind of point of contact for came inafter being missing for a couple weeks. She had really weird injuries. I recognized a few of them, not all, and I'm pretty familiar with broken bodies so that was surprising. Apparently she'd been kidnapped and tortured by cops for at least a week. I found out basically everyone has a few of those. The cops just do that. Theres no reason, There's no jusrification; they just take who they can.
And why should someone who's been thrown away like that give a shit about your comfort? I know when I was thrown away and ended up homeless, I lost a lot of respect for my environment and 'normal' people. I didn't get as bad as a lot of people.
Do you have a good reason for them to care? To care about something other than the next fix? Maybe a future, or a chat with a friend? No? Then maybe shut the hell up about how icky the actual living human beings you let get thrown away like trash make you feel when you have to walk through their fucking homes.

Who the heck is downvoting this? This is such a reflection of our society.

The cop in the comic, probably

They want free prison labor instead of helping people. All programs that gave people shelter and UBI had high success rates of getting people off the streets. If you give people resources and real help. They can be housed, it isn't unsolvable at all.

They want free prison labor instead of helping people.
They don't even really want that, at this point. Prisoners are increasingly geriatric, malnourished, and prone to mental illness, making them unreliable employees at their best and completely unprofitable more often than not.
All programs that gave people shelter and UBI had high success rates of getting people off the streets.
Ah, but you're forgetting the mystery third option. Pack undesirable people into cages during a plague or a heat wave and kill them from behind bars. This is significantly less expensive than either enslaving them at a loss or funding housing/UBI.

Open sufficient shelter and then ban camping.

Sorry, but I’ve worked in SF and Portland and getting yelled at while avoiding shit and syringes is not great.

Have to get rid of the "no drugs" rules then.
If it's a choice between heroin and a roof, then one of them they can do without. The roof isn't going to win.
- I think the best solution would be daily free drugs in exchange for maintaining behavior in and around the shelter.

anti-homeless spikes? Pfft, just learn how to sleep on a bed of nails like those magicians.

Some say there is a missing panel where a acorn hits the cop and he unloads a full mag on the guy.

I love that the cat just joins the rats playing poker.

Background Details Rulz

Second of all those fat loser fucks would be beating the person in the second panel.
One popular move employed by city cops is to steal all a homeless person's belongings and trash them right before a big freeze or rainstorm or heat wave. This deprives the homeless population of protection from the elements and increases the rate of homeless death by exposure.
- There was a Duke Nukem game where all the cops were literally pigs. I thought it was satire/fiction. How wrong I was.
I hate cops too and I'm fat. Why am I catching strays lol.
It's such a disappointment. We try to build a system with people to entrust our well-being to and help those in need, but it always goes wrong.
From ancient times and the king's guard, to modern cops in some town. It always becomes corrupted.
- “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
  —Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Creighton (1887)

Yes, that's part of the problem. Pay for rehab with what money? Homeless shelters also aren't a solution to homelessness, because shelters are not housing.
- No. The rehab is free.
  Province is even putting people up in apartments.
  Only rule is: no drugs in the apartment and you enroll in a free rehab program. 80% are turning it down willingly.
The shelters aren't near where people work. They're also often more dangerous than the street.

And then in a few years, after making no efforts to create a space where homeless people can live the way they want or a path for them to get a job and a home, the enforcement of these laws will loosen up and you'll be back to stepping over people on the sidewalk.

What is on his T-shirt?

I dunno, but these background details rulz.

I too would rather stand in the median of a busy highway interchange for 12 hours a day, in the rain or snow, with a bag of my stuff getting ruined, holding a sign and watching everyone turn their head away from me to not make eye contact, day in and day out, than get a job. I'm so glad you understand
/s
- Had coworkers who would insist the guys panhandling on the street were making more than we were. In fairness, we were being paid shit. But there were so many back-of-the-envelop assumptions and urban legends flying around - "Well, if he gets $1 on every light and there's 20 light changes every hour..." / "I hear they all drive nice cars and just pretend to be poor..." / "I heard on the AM Radio that there's a trick homeless people use to get rich quickly..." - that you couldn't have any kind of serious response to the right-wing rumor mill.
There are always going to be dirtbags that think they are too good to get a job but stand on the same corner at the same time every day.
There are always going to be far more dirtbags who let the rich convince them to betray their inherent solidarity with other struggling humans because of morality stories about who deserves empathy and who doesn’t that have ZERO percent to do with reality, actual effective policy or even common sense.
These dirtbags have used the incredible capacity of the human mind to mutilate their empathy and committed a colossal waste of time by using such a powerful organ of consciousness….. to rationalize not extending a basic mercy to those in need, which even children who know nothing of the world can easily identify as evil because ignorance is wiser than years of rotting the core of one’s soul out with hateful conservative rhetoric.
Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness
Housing First’s early goal was to create 2,500 new homes. It has created 3,500. Since its launch in 2008, the number of long-term homeless people in Finland has fallen by more than 35%. Rough sleeping has been all but eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains, and where winter temperatures can plunge to -20C.
But Housing First is not just about housing. “Services have been crucial,” says Helsinki’s mayor, Jan Vapaavuori, who was housing minister when the original scheme was launched. “Many long-term homeless people have addictions, mental health issues, medical conditions that need ongoing care. The support has to be there.”
“We had to get rid of the night shelters and short-term hostels we still had back then. They had a very long history in Finland, and everyone could see they were not getting people out of homelessness. We decided to reverse the assumptions.”
There are always going to be dirtbags that think they are too good to get a job
Rich failkids don't live out on the street.