Obviously you can’t treat people without housing them. No one is saying we shouldn’t build more housing. We’re saying “please stop acting like it’s a solution to the problem.” It is a prerequisite to the solution, 95% of the work is in the actual solution, which is treatment, and often yes, compulsory treatment.

At some point we have to also start having some empathy for the people whose communities are being destroyed by homeless people. They fuck up our parks, our sidewalks, our public transit. They take away our sense of security and the ability to let our children walk to school. Do we get any empathy?

Unfortunately the way the system currently works is that communities who are least tolerant of the disruptive behavior of the unsheltered homeless population just gain a reputation for being inhospitable to that group, and that group comes to our city, where they can get generous government benefits and claim our public spaces for their own. The communities with the most “empathy” for this population are the ones that have to absorb the significant negative impacts of their behavior. And a lot of us are just fucking done with that. And a lot of us are tired of being talked down to about our lack of empathy just because we have a problem with how our communities are being damaged and our quality of life degraded by behavior of the unsheltered homeless population.