WHERE IS MIKE ROYKO'S SHOCKED FACE?

In "Don't Make It Easy," Sarah Hoyt wonders whether Our Progressive Betters aren't enabling homelessness.

In fact, there has been a growing bleeding heart argument that we should just let people camp and defecate on the street, or it’s “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The cities are dealing with this the way they deal with this, and the do gooders ditto. The way the cities deal with it, is by building at great cost, houses to put these people into. The do-gooders collect money, build shelters, and generally try to make it easier on people who are in these circumstances, in the hopes they’ll pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

They seem to think the people camping on the streets, randomly attacking passerbyes, defecating and masturbating in public are doing this because housing is too expensive. Or that there isn’t enough housing. The latest renaming of “homeless” to unhoused puts the emphasis on that, making it sound like these people are really, really, really just on the streets because mysteriously there aren’t enough houses to go around.

Now, I’m not going to argue with any of you that housing and rent isn’t too expensive.

Once again, the technocrats of today have to undo what technocrats of a previous age thought was working the problem.  "Mike Royko wrote a column about the proliferation of beggars in the Loop, in which he suggested that closing the asylums and condemning the flophouses in the name of urban renewal provided the cause.  Now comes a columnist who, while not calling for a return to the days of the cuckoo's nest, suggests that people who required institutionalization required humane and helpful institutionalization."

It is not to the genuinely disturbed or addicted that she turns her attention.

Listen here, perhaps we get more and more homeless every year because we throw money at it. You get more of what you pay for. It’s basic economics. Everything else is a cope session to claim economics is wrong in this case.

We sneer and point fingers at the Victorians because they put the poor and homeless in work houses. But you know, from where I stand, I don’t see where “hand them everything with no judgement and don’t demand anything of them” is better. Do you? At least they — failing and with massive recidivism — tried to encourage bourgeois virtues, not spit on them.

Perhaps we should stop treating those who fall by the way side as impaired, incapable and victims, and stop throwing money and care at them with no conditions.

If you ask me, encouraging them towards normalcy and a productive life would be better for everyone. Including themselves.

Well, yes, sooner or later deconstructing bourgeois norms turns out badly.  "All across the nation, such a strange vibration, it starts with the mellow flower children and it ends with the reality-challenged, enabled by the so-called enlightened."