Wow. There's so much to respond to here, I don't know where to start. I guess I'll start with the fact that my day job is to work with local governments and non-profits to conduct research of homeless issues and develop public policy to address the issues raised by the data. As I write this I am at the National Alliance to End Homelessness' annual conference in Washington D.C. - a week spent talking with service providers and colleagues from around the nation and the globe about how to end homelessness. I don't see the need to address the original poster's feeling about a homeless facility near his home. I think many of my fellow IHB posters have raked him over the coals enough already. I find the best way to addess the concerns expressed is to educate. Two great resources for all of the homeless research data that's current is to go to the National Alliance website - www.endhomelessness.org - and to the research site where HUD posts research - www.hudhre.info.
There also isn't enough space here for me to fully post where local and federal policy currently stands on housing the homeless. But, suffice it to say that although complicated, the trend nationally is to house the homeless in permanent housing of some kind as quickly as possible, or to keep them from becoming homeless in the first place. there will probably always be a small population of people that need some kind of shelter system, so shelters will not completely disappear. But, for the same reason many of us on IHB like being housed permanently somewhere we can call home, the same is true of most homeless.
To the poster that pointed to the homeless man that is charged with murdering the young lady in LA last week...yes, some homeless are mentally ill and are dangerous. But the proportion of that homeless subpopulation is not any higher than that in the general population. School shooters, for example, tend to have some type of mental illness or cognitive impairment, but I can't think of any in recent memory that were also homeless. Every population has it's problem members.
And, one last note of interest. The current homeless data show that family homelessness comprises about 60% of most shelter residents (meaning at least one adult with at least one minor child). Therefore, a far smaller number of the homeless are the "chronically homeless", or the type of homeless profile that scares people like the original poster, or the one charged with Ms. Burk's murder. This subpopulation is generally harder to serve, but newer approaches to housing them and providing them with services suggest that these approaches may one day mean that none of these folks will need to be on the streets for months or years. I don't have the reference handy, but an article published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association printed one such study (I believe in February).
Hope these references are helpful to you IHB data junkies.
Watch, when Graph and Cacyi buy that big North Tustin home and they want to get crown moldings they'll be asking for my dad's number...just remember, GITOC has dibs on his services.
