Comment on Daily Discussion Thread: Saturday, 18 January, 2025
TheWitchofThornbury@aussie.zone 3 days agoAll it takes is one nutter going on a rampage, and the other inhabitants of a dorm would be adversely impacted. Also, keeping people in dorm conditions encourages theft and abuse - source : boarding school with upper middle/upper class kids (guess who the worst thieves were).
Alamutjones@aussie.zone 3 days ago
Yeah.
Given the instability of a lot of the homeless community - through mental health issues, substance issues, interpersonal stuff which gets so much worse when you have nothing except what you can keep safely with you - having a shared dorm setting has the potential to get really sketch really fast.
I live pretty much next door to a homeless hub in the CBD. The community garden which we so carefully planted and cared for turned into a homeless encampment because of overflow from the outreach centre…and while some of the regulars were okay if you were courteous with them, some were really, REALLY not. We had a couple of deaths in our garden, and more close calls on top of that.
None of us who had built the garden felt safe using it, and it’s only recently - having had the area cleared, fenced off so we could fix it without more rough sleepers immediately moving in, and a regular rotation of working bees now that the fence has come down - that we do.
I don’t know what the answer is, sadly.
Seagoon_@aussie.zone 3 days ago
Homelessness causes mental illness too. So having emergency dorms would save many people from that
TheWitchofThornbury@aussie.zone 3 days ago
Please, add in the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s relevant.
TheWitchofThornbury@aussie.zone 3 days ago
I’ve been homeless too, and drug addicted at the time. And at the time, I would have run a mile from anything even resembling an emergency dorm. You say homelessness causes mental illness? I’d put it the other way around for 90% of people.
Sorry if I seem a bit adversarial about this, but the topic is one that I care deeply about, and I also refuse to tell myself comforting lies and indulge in nice fantasies about the actual effects in the real world. Cos I’ve seen the real thing. It ain’t pretty. And no-one’s grateful until they’re already half way back into ‘normal’ life.
Alamutjones@aussie.zone 3 days ago
I’ve been homeless, in large part because of the fact that I was severely mentally ill. I was homeless for a full year.
The solution you’re proposing would get wildly scary within about three weeks