>It’s just hard to enforce that when people don’t have a private place to use in.
The problem is feeling like you owe it to addicts to provide them with a place to use. Privatize all the public spaces: parks, sidewalks, etc. Grant strong property rights to those spaces.
You can get all high and mighty about who deserves what, or you can actually solve the problem and give people housing for free (or throw them in jail.)
Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness?
> give people housing for free (or throw them in jail.)
This is a false choice.
>Would you rather be right, or live in a city without homelessness?
I can be right and also live in a city without homelessness. I'll just ship them to wherever you live, because you're so nice that you are volunteering to take care of the problem.
You will never eliminate severe mental illness. You can, however, create systems that understand human incentives. If you can't even imagine options that don't involve systemic centralized planning, we are so far from moving towards peaceful solutions that my only incentive is to ship the antisocial people to your neighborhood.
I asked a pretty straightforward question and you responded with a very vague tangent. What other options are there besides giving people homes or allowing them to live on the street?
Privatize all property. Eliminate zoning, licensing, labor laws including minimum wage, price controls, and building codes. Eliminate inflationary monetary policy. Dismantle the military industrial complex which creates the veteran->streets pipeline. Eliminate laws which reduce/limit liability of drug manufacturers.
These policies eliminate the cliff off which people fall, resulting in living/defecating on the streets. There will still be some tiny fraction that are too ill/handicapped to work, but once their numbers are so small it becomes easier to help them on a case by case basis. Defining a top-down, centrally planned strategy from afar is the opposite of how to help anyone.
I'm telling you explicitly that the idea that you need a policy is the whole problem with how you are thinking about this. "We" will do literally nothing. I might do something. You might do something. But no centrally planned collective action whatsoever.
At the scale we're talking about here, the problem described in the subject of this thread is already solved.
The problem is feeling like you owe it to addicts to provide them with a place to use. Privatize all the public spaces: parks, sidewalks, etc. Grant strong property rights to those spaces.