This is Real, That's Not

We are all a product of our environment. Those raised in developed countries, especially those who grew up with money, or at least not without money, will have certain attitudes toward the poor and homeless that likely won't be the same as people who grew up in poverty.

You had some horrible experiences as a kid. That sounds awful. I was mugged once as an adult, and that shook me enough, and took time to emotionally deal with. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have that happen to you as a child, and more than once.

> but a developing country, where everyone is struggling to some degree, so the homeless there to me always seemed like they are homeless due to their own bad choices.

This just doesn't make sense to me. You claim two seemingly conflicting things: that everyone is struggling, and also that those who have struggled more to the point of homeless must have gotten there through their own bad choices. Do you believe that everyone -- including your family -- who was struggling, was in that state due to their own bad choices? If not, it seems pretty arbitrary to draw the line at homelessness. Because it can be a very thin line between being housed or being on the street.

> So either I am a psychopath

I don't think you're a psychopath. I think you were scarred by your experiences, and decided to leave it at that. It's hard to have empathy for a group when some subset of that group has treated you so poorly, especially at such a formative age in your life.

> or everyone here truly is a Western naive person who has no idea how the world works even if they were homeless

I think "how the world works" isn't any one thing. How the world worked in your -- understandably very narrow -- experience as a child in your country is not the same as how the world works in some other country, which is not the same as how the world works in yet another country, and so on. I obviously can't say this for certain, but I expect that your experience was not even "how the world works" for everyone in your own country.

> (to me being homeless in a Western country is something my brain cannot understand given that most such countries in Europe have wellfare states).

Just because some governments offer large welfare programs, it doesn't mean that they're distributed equally or equitably, or that the people in need are able to navigate those systems all that well. Another commenter somewhere here pointed out that Germany's welfare bureaucracy is notoriously hard to figure out, especially for the mentally ill. Many homeless people have been so damaged by their experience that they aren't able to get the help they need.

All of these problems do exist, I assure you, and yet you claim to be unable to understand that they do. Please take some time to think about that fact, and of the broader implications. You speak of the "Western naive person", but maybe consider that the people of the world are in a huge variety of different circumstances (both good and bad) than you originally thought was possible. And while some of them do end up using those circumstances to attack and exploit others, some are just genuinely in trouble and would appreciate some help getting back on their feet so they have the stability to get their life back on track.

But also! Consider that those people who use their situation to try to attack and exploit others may have gotten to that point because they are just as cynical about the world as you are about them. You see one act that is the result of a culmination of their entire lives. You have no idea if they were always that way, or, more likely, they became that way as their circumstances crushed them.

Most of the money is going to places that aren't immediately visible: it's paying to keep people with marginal financial situations in their homes (and paying to keep newly re-housed people housed). Without that help, there would be many more people living on the streets than there are now. The stuff that you do notice, like hiring people to do street outreach and try to help homeless people directly, is a small part of the homelessness budget.

That doesn't mean it's going super great. There are still a lot of people on the streets, obviously, and depending on where you look, either it's getting worse, or at best it's like they're treading water.

But it turns out combating homeless is just expensive, even though arguably it can be cheaper than just doing nothing (taxpayers end up paying for those 911 calls and unpaid emergency room visits after all), but there are a lot of people who have an aversion to "just giving away money to people who don't deserve it". They'd rather pay to clean up after a homeless person, year after year, than pay to make that person not homeless, even if the latter would cost less. So funding is hard to fight for, and funding levels are never enough to fix things.

San Francisco's allocation for this is a single-digit percentage of the city budget (your assertion that their budget is "huge" is incorrect; here it's a few hundred million on a $5B budget), and yet it is one of the biggest, most obviously visible problems the city is facing. Sure, simply throwing more money at a problem doesn't make it go away, but insufficient funding -- as is currently the case -- is going to ensure the problem remains.

We can't, but we can certainly judge that perspective to be counter-productive.

I'm concerned about outcomes. Let's stop for a minute and assume that I'm an unfeeling, non-empathetic person who doesn't care about anyone but himself. Even then, I would advocate to allocate more money to homeless services, regardless of how that money is used, because doing so would benefit me: I don't want to see human feces on the sidewalk, or used syringes, or disease-carrying rats running around near tent encampments, or mentally-ill people screaming at me as I walk by.

People who adopt the attitude that we shouldn't give people a generous safety net because they haven't done anything to "deserve" a handout are quite simply cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They're making their lives actively worse just to "teach a lesson" to those "undeserving" homeless people.

If we all took the point of view that any government spending that doesn't directly and immediately benefit us personally should be cancelled, no government spending would be likely to happen at all. It's an inherently right-wing/individualist position.

I think this is an issue of right-wing media spin, rather than beliefs that working-class families innately hold. (Also since my experience of working-class families' views is generally the opposite of your claim.)

There is a lot more egregious government spending distribution problems than this one, which get ignored. In general, government spending benefits the middle classes (and upper classes) far more than it does the working class, and that's true in other areas more than it is in education.

From https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/does-uk-government-sp... e.g. "The wealthy also drive three times as many miles as the poor. This makes them big beneficiaries of spending on roads, worth £8 billion a year. Poor people make up ground elsewhere: they use buses twice as much. But bus subsidies are smaller."

1. The amount that you "borrowed" is a fake number, though, with no correspondence to the true cost of the course and is non-existant for e.g. Scottish students in Scotland.

2. Your salary will (is expected to) inflate; the repayment threshold currently does not, so the "time value of money" has something to say about how much you repay. Someone whose salary remains constant on the equivalent of £40k will find their repayments an increasing burden.