Homeless people

A couple weeks ago I was sitting on the D.C. Metro reading about how they were planning to remove the carpeting from the floor of the trains as a cost-saving measure. The carpets had originally been included to convey a "sense of luxury" to the subway system of the nation's capital. I looked around the train car I was sitting in. Across from me sat a homeless woman who I suspect gets on the train with all of her possessions and rides it all day for a warm safe place to sleep. Sitting next to me was a regular-looking man who must have had some kind of mental disability, as he was loudly talking to himself. The rest of the rush-hour passengers pretended not to notice, or they were too busy basking in the luxury of thin, ugly orange carpet.

My encounters with homeless/mentally ill people on Metro are becoming more common. Today a totally insane homeless women loudly wandered (in the middle of the train ride when normal people are sitting or standing still) into my general area, forcefully plopped herself down on a seat, sending a poof of putrid air out in a cloud around her. She then turned to the woman next to her and unleashed a viciously profane, racially-charged verbal attack, that included threats of physical violence. The woman got up and ran away in horror, as other people scattered from the area out of fear and disgust. Her stench was so overwhelming that I got out at the next stop and took the next train. I feel like the smell is still clinging to all of my clothes.

Here's a rather disturbing and heartbreaking piece on TomDispatch about how the nation's library system is basically day care for homeless people. I don't know if the author's math is right, but he argues that "we could solve the problem for less than it costs to manage it," meaning the entire existing system of managing the related problems of homelessness and mental illness:

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it's downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.