We need a societal-consensus answer for how to deal with the homeless-by-choice
Alas that we no longer have a frontier.
We live in Lansing, Michigan. So far as I know (especially compared to what I see from west coast friends), Lansing doesn’t have an especially large homeless population. I tend to encounter it in two locations. One, waiting for a bus downtown in the winter, there are people sleeping on nearby steam vents. And two, and more commonly, in the summer, you see men who apparently just prefer to live outside, “in the woods” but still inside the city. And “homeless by choice” is the group of people I’m thinking about here. If something tragic happens in your life and you end up on the street, but if a nonprofit offered you a room for the night (or many nights), you would happily take it, I tend to think we have at least an answer for such people. My mind is more on those who would reject such an answer, because they prefer to be homeless.
Take the Lansing River Trail (a great bicycling and running trail) around sunset on any day, and you’ll see men on bicycles, hauling trailers or pushing grocery carts, often loaded with an irrational amount of stuff, headed to their campsite. I was behind a guy a few days ago hauling a mattress, and PVC pipes stretching across the whole trail, so I couldn’t pass him. It is at least a problem because it degrades the public environment for everyone else. Why is there this World Market grocery cart, in this otherwise beautiful natural environment, two miles from the store? Because some guy decided he needed it for transportation, so he stole it, and once he was done with it, he just left it. It isn’t going back, if he needs another one, he’ll just steal another one. That’s not acceptable behavior.
Having a “wild frontier” brings various benefits to a nation, and I think one of them has always been that if you have rough men (and you always have some), who don’t feel like they fit into society, they have a place to go, and maybe even do great things out there. I wish we still had that option. No, you cannot live outside in the middle of the city, but here is a train ticket to the end of the line out west, and once you get out there, you can walk out into the wilderness and live as you’d like. I brought up this question on Twitter, and got two replies to the effect of, “sounds like a great reason to purchase Greenland!”, which is funny, but probably not quite what I’m looking for. Also got this reply:
That is my thought as well, but I also do not know where such a thing could be implemented, or if it would work if we tried. But I do think the current answer, where we basically do nothing because it’s a hard group to police (we’d much rather police the people who are easy to police), and we aren’t sure what to do about it, cannot be the permanent answer.
The natural answer is, of course, predation. Allow nature to balance itself.
We still have frontiers. They're not nearly as off the grid, because we can all be tracked now. But as you note, even in Lansing and other cities in Michigan one can go into the woods, set up camp, and live at a remove from civilization.
The substantial homeless problem in cities has more to do with encampments invading neighborhoods and creating menacing conditions for everyone nearby. And, the encampment dwellers attacking each other and killing themselves with drugs.