The Homelessness Crisis Isn’t About Lack Of Housing ｜ Proof For Your Liberal Friend
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
173.05667
Summary
A couple of homeless people were given free housing in Tennessee, and this is how they reacted to it. They complain that it's no better than being on the street, and they want a bigger place with a yard. Meanwhile, they destroy the place that they were given.
Transcript
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I would prefer this personally to living on the street.
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It's really about the same because we would have more freedom out there, though.
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This is some, I think, quite revealing footage that's been circulating.
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It's from apparently an Instagram account that I guess goes around and films stuff like this,
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And here we have a couple of homeless people who are no longer homeless, technically,
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shortly after they moved into this public housing arrangement.
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This is how they are responding to being taken off the street,
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rescued, you'd think, from this life of vagrancy.
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This is Isabella Towers, an apartment complex in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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But you could kind of make this nice about the size of mine back home now.
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Come on, we've got to learn a little gratitude.
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I would prefer this personally to living on the street.
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It's really about the same because we would have more freedom out there, though.
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To where I could actually go outside and do yard work.
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Achieving that from this place is substantially easier than achieving that from the streets.
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But I would say this is a good transitionary point.
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Have a place where you can take a shower, freshen up, and then go to work.
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And then from there, you can eventually have your first life in security for a place that you actually would like.
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They have a bathroom, a shower, A.C., kitchen bed, a door they can lock.
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And you would think much better than sleeping on a cardboard box out on the street or under a bridge or something.
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They say that it's no better than being on the street.
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They won't accept anything less than 3,000 square feet and five acres, you know.
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Meanwhile, if you look at the video, you can see that they've already totally destroyed this place that they were given.
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Very few people, we always hear about, let's have an honest conversation about this and that.
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Well, when are we going to have the honest conversation about homelessness?
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That's a conversation that very few people want to have.
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Even though we all kind of know, you know, and it's one of those classic sort of conversations that you have in your living room, but people don't want to say it out loud.
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But, you know, at a certain point, we just have to be real about it.
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That you give homeless people free housing, and they destroy it, and they complain about it, and they don't want it, and they end up back on the street.
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And by the way, many, you know, you talk to people that work with the homeless.
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You talk to people who, anyone who's tried to help the homeless in any way.
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I mean, I'll never forget, my sister has a story of seeing a homeless person in a parking lot once, and, you know, it's just an anecdote, but, like, there's just many, just symptomatic of the larger problem.
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But didn't want to give cash because, you know, not really excited about the idea of helping someone's drug habit.
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So she gave, I think it was a homeless woman, she gave the woman a gift card.
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She went out and she went to a local takeout place and got a gift card for whatever it was, you know, 20, 30 bucks to go get some food.
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And the homeless woman complained that she didn't like that restaurant.
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I mean, they say beggars can't be choosers, but it turns out the beggars very often are choosers, at least in these kinds of cases.
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So I've said many times on the show, and I've been mocked for it every time, that you cannot fix homelessness by giving people homes.
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I know, when I say that, it's very easy. What do you mean? They're homeless, Matt. Of course you can fix it by giving them homes.
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No, you can't, you moron. This is what happens.
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The problem with homeless people is not that they don't have homes. The lack of homes is not actually the issue.
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I know it's shocking for some of the dumbest among us to hear that.
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You know, the homelessness is a symptom. It's a result of the problem. It's not the actual problem.
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And we know that because when you give them free housing, this is what happens.
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They destroy it, first of all, and then they're back on the street.
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Okay, you could give every homeless person in America a free house with three square meals a day for free,
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and we would have zero homelessness in America for about a week.
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And within two weeks, we'd have the same amount that we had before.
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And that's obviously the case. It's obvious because in most cases,
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if a homeless person really wanted to be in a house, they could be.
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They're not out on the street because they couldn't get a job and they couldn't afford a house.
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Because the vast majority of these people are not trying to get jobs or get houses.
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And when you see someone on the side of the road, you know, with the change cup, like they're not,
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this is not someone who's trying every single day and putting in applications and trying to get a job.
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They're really not making, they're most likely making basically zero attempt to change their situation.
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Um, in fact, they're so uninterested in finding housing that again, if you give them housing,
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they'll end up back on the street in many, many cases.
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I think it is obvious to almost everyone, whether they say it out loud or not.
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First of all, many of these people are drug addicts.
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Uh, I can't say for absolute certain about the two individuals in that video.
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My guess, if I had to guess, I think it's a safe assumption that when they talk about the freedom
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of being on the street, they're talking about drugs.
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He means he can do drugs on the street, but he can't do drugs in government housing.
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Um, you know, homeless people are homeless in many, many cases because they've dedicated
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And if you give them money, if you give them, if you treat me very generous, uh, and give
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them even, you know, say you go to a homeless person, you give them a hundred dollars, let's
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You might've just killed that person because they're going to go spend it on drugs and overdose.
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Um, and they're apathetic at best about their housing situation.
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And I don't know why people pretend they can't wrap their minds around this sort of thing.
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But a lot of homeless people really don't actually want homes all that much.
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Uh, these, these are, these are, you know, often, often not desperate and starving people
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They might be desperate in many ways, but, uh, the yearning for the house part is, doesn't
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And again, anyone who's ever worked with homeless people knows this, um, whether they say it or
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There's not gonna be a time when there's no homeless people, but you can address it.
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It doesn't have to be like, you can't walk down the street in any major city because it's
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Well, if you have the stomach for it, the problem is that our leaders and a lot of people
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They don't have the stomach to deal with these kinds of problems, the way that they need to
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There's, and there's really only one way most of the time.
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And either you're going to do the thing that works or you're not going to do it because
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So with homelessness, well, first of all, you need to crack down on drugs in a major, major
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way, in a way that we in fact are not for all the talk about, oh, the war on drugs has
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I'll know that there's an actual war on drugs when drug traffickers are being arrested and
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A war on drugs is you arrest the drug traffickers and you put them on trial and you convict them
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and then you execute them as mass murderers because that's what they are.
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And number two is you have to disincentivize homelessness.
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And I know that it sounds crazy if you're completely clueless about these things.
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You just heard it from two people who said that they'd kind of prefer to be homeless.
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Well, you take away the freedom that he's talking about.
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And what he probably means, probably, is that as a homeless person, he can set up a camp wherever
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he wants and there's no expectation of him at all.
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You start arresting people who are doing drugs openly.
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People that set up camps on sidewalks that should not be allowed.
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Real, serious, ugly consequences for the people that are pushing this poison into our communities.
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And if you're not willing to do that, then you are not serious about helping, about solving
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I just don't want to hear it anymore from people that talk about their deep compassion for people
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Because you're not willing to do the things that would actually require to help people
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Here's the latest idea, where they've decided they want to take homeless people and move
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Because they look at homeless people and they think, well, the problem here is that the people
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And so we could solve the problem by just putting them in a building.
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This is, you know, because this is how you think if you're a leftist or if you're a child.
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I can remember having this conversation with my own kids when they were five years old.
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And they would see homeless people and say, Daddy, if they're homeless, why don't we just
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And that's a very good question for a five-year-old.
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But if you're an adult, you should realize that the homeless problem is not, you know,
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it's not simply a problem that they don't have homes.
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Like, there's a reason why these people don't have homes.
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But tell that to the people that are proposing this law.
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Let's watch a little bit of the CNN report here.
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In Los Angeles County, more than 60,000 people are homeless on the average night.
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And more than 20,000 hotel rooms lie empty on the average night.
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By no means do we think this solves a homelessness crisis.
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So the union he leads, which reps hotel workers, gathered enough signatures and Angelenos will vote on a bill
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that would force every hotel in town to report vacancies at 2 p.m. every day,
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then welcome homeless people into those vacant rooms.
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Honestly, would you check into a hotel knowing that the chance of your neighbor,
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to the left or right, is a homeless individual?
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Manoj Patel voluntarily rents some rooms to homeless people who are vetted and paid for by a local church.
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But he's against this bill that would make that mandatory.
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Number two, we have to think of the safety of our staff.
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And number three, we're not professionally or any otherwise equipped with any of the supporting mechanism that the homeless guest would require.
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What services would be provided remains unclear.
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Also unclear, the funding and hotels would be paid fair market rate.
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Can you imagine you pay $900 a night to stay at the Ritz-Carlton or something,
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They wouldn't even, I say next door, that assumes they'd be in the room, which they wouldn't even be.
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You're walking to your room, that you're paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a night,
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and you're stepping over a homeless guy, defecating in the hallway.
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And the great thing here is one of the voices of reason in this report is an actual homeless guy who says,
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The pandemic era program now winding down that inspired this bill by placing more than 10,000 people in hotels that volunteered.
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The technology is not up to par, but, you know, what technologies do you have in a tent?
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This bill would also force developers to replace housing demolished to make way for new hotels,
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as well as making every hotel from a Super 8 to the Biltmore, except homeless people, as guests.
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Maybe for some, but, you know, there's a lot of people with untreated mental health,
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and some people do some damage to these poor buildings, man.
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And she marked all walls, curtains she burnt, thank God there was no fire, even marked the ceiling.
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Opponents of housing, the homeless, and hotels fear this,
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and fear tourists could be put off from even coming to L.A.
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Like, if you're going to Los Angeles right now, at least, you might think that, yeah,
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it's an apocalyptic wasteland out there, and there's just homeless people and drug addicts and criminals,
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but at least I'll be safe inside the hotel room.
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You take that away, and there's no reason to go.
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These idiots, they are determined to just destroy their cities.
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They want to destroy their cities and live in the wreckage of it.
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You do something like this, it is the end of the hospitality and hotel industry in the city,
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and then thus it's the end of the tourist industry as well,
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You know, what's the point of even arguing against it?
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Reasonable people trying to save you maniacs from yourselves.
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But just for the record, this again is what, if you are not a child, if you're over the age of five,
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my children, you know, my nine-year-olds, we had this conversation when they were five,
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they now understand some things about the homeless problem that even adult leftists don't understand.
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And one of the most fundamental things here is that, again, there's a reason why homeless people are homeless.
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Because, you know, if everything else was normal, if these are just like normal, mentally healthy people,
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don't have drug abuse problems, there's no reason why they'd be homeless, okay?
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If you don't have a drug abuse problem, and you're not crazy, and especially if you're physically, you know, able,
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you can at least walk around, then there's no reason why you would end up on the street for any length of time.
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Because there's always some kind of housing option.
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It might not be great, but you can get some kind of job and afford some kind of house.
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It might not be great, it might not be nice, okay?
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Which is why almost every homeless person you see on the street is, has severe mental health problems, okay?
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You know, when you're doing meth and heroin and all that, it's not great for your brain.
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And so you could give them money, you could put them in the house, but all, but they just, it goes right into the drugs.
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And that's how they end up on the street in the first place.
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So to just like leapfrog over the underlying problems, mental illness, drug abuse,
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we're going to leap over that and just take these people as they currently are and put them in a, in a, in a, in a house, put them in a room.
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There's zero chance that that results in anything but total disaster.