Homeless in Paradise

Where to start?Well, as RAZD has suggested, with homes.Many homeless people will not use shelters for pretty good reasons: they are often "dormitory" style places where the vulnerable homeless are at risk from disturbed and/or predatory residents.As my schizophrenic brother said when calling from his first stay in a psych ward, "Get me outta here these people are crazy!"Estimates of the number of mentally ill homeless people usually come in somewhere around one third of the nearly one millon homeless. Many of them were turned out from public institutions under the rubric of rights and liberties, but more accurately under the pressure of state and federal budgets. I suspect the numbers of both homeless and the proportion of mentally ill among them are considerably higher.I should also note that there are many families among the homeless, some of them with children who are honor roll students.As Anatole France said, ""In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread." Similarly, the law preserves the rights to liberty for the sane and psychotic alike; as one wag commented elsewhere on the web, that's like arguing that Alzheimer's patients have an inherent liberty right to wander the landscape aimlessly.U.S. cities and towns are just chockablock full of empty houses now; they would make great residences for the homeless, but the federal government and bad mortgage companies are providing funds to raze entire blocks in cities like Detroit. Treatment of the mentally ill would reduce the social stigma of both homelessness and mental illness.I don't think what Hawaii is doing is so bad, as long as a heaping helping of help goes along with the relocation. Lawmen used to give "vagrants" a bus ticket to the next town, but I suppose that has limited applicability in Hawaii .We will greatly ameliorate the problem of homelessness when enough of us want to do so. As I've noted in another context (GMOs), we already have the power to end starvation; ditto, homelessness.We just lack the will.