Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Was shutting down mental hospitals the right thing to do?

I'm generally against anything that limits peoples freedoms, but news came to today that one of the fires in Southern California was caused by a homeless encampment. The Skirball fire. Which generally comes as no surprise, I've been talking about this almost all year.

I knew this was just a matter of time. Hell I wrote about here. And I quote :

"In San Jose a week doesn't go by that an encampment doesn't go up in flames. If you drive the 680 freeway in San Jose every few miles you can see where the homeless have set the trees on fire. And they won't even move to a new place. They are like - well, at least this place won't burn now. Then they set camp right back up in the burn site. It's all fun and games until they burn down an actual home. Until then people just turn a blind eye."

Well.... now they've burned down a bunch of houses. And just last night a tweet of of San Jose. Nearly 20 fires along Highway 680 in San Jose cause suspicion.

Suspicion to whom?! How is this a mystery? The people who work at the city have to drive the same roads I do and see the fires every mile or so on the freeway in San Jose. Right?

This new breed of homeless is clearly incapable of taking care of themselves. This is more than homelessness. And it occurs to me that these are the people they used to just lock up. Which probably made them sort of violent. Instead we have a more complaint form of mental illness just walking around. But this whole homeless thing is now turning into a real public safety hazard with the Hep A outbreak and now they burned down a dozen or so homes.

Do people really think about the money we are spending just to ignore these people? There was a homeless encampment in Sacramento that they cleaned up that cost millions of dollars. I can't find the link now. Sometimes I wonder if Google tries to bury these links.

At this point the cost of cleanup of the garbage the homeless are accumulating is overwhelming the ability for the cities to combat or care for the homelessness to any degree. How can they create any new shelters when it costing millions of dollars just to clean up these garbage heaps? And I'm not a greenie, but seriously - this is California, I thought it was a big deal to pollute rivers and streams.

Additionally - say if you weren't homeless and had a house but kept it in the same condition as these camps are in - the city would swoop in and start citing you. There has to be some boundaries somewhere.

2 comments:

  1. Hey homeless ...

    YOU GET TO DRINK FROM THE FIREHOSE!

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't want to abuse them. It's also not fair they strain they are putting city budgets under just removing tons of trash. Just yesterday another house in San Jose was burnt due to a homeless encampment. I mean, these people can't even camp right. People seem top go camping all the time and have fires and they don't seem to burn down the forest every other day.

    ReplyDelete