a dark thought experiment about homelessness

On the day I met my buddy Tom to go eat at Manimal, two months ago, I sat on a convenience-store porch with Tom after lunch and shot the shit. At one point, we were talking about poverty and homelessness and shithole cities, and I suggested a dark thought experiment that I will now relate to you.

Let's say we adopt the most Hitlerian, Pol Pottish of solutions to the homelessness problem, and we round up all the homeless. We put them in one place, then—I don't know—we take flamethrowers to them or gun them down or something. We ruthlessly kill every single one of them, and we apply this solution to every single city where there's a homelessness problem. The roundup of all these people might take some time: they can be clever rats when they want to be, scurrying and hiding when they know they're being hunted. But let's say we catch every last one of them, toss them into a huge, concrete mosh pit, then do them in.

Problem solved! Right? No more homeless people, so no more homelessness problem!

Except we know exactly what's going to happen within six months: another wave of homeless folks will appear. Why? Because killing all the homeless didn't eliminate the causes of homelessness. Those causes still lurk inside the afflicted minds of a fraction of the populace, and until you find a way to eliminate those causes, you haven't solved the problem at all.

It doesn't help that "homelessness" is a simple label for a devilishly complex problem. Just consider one angle: drug addiction as one cause of homelessness. Some people seem to think that taking the fight to the cartels is the way to go, or they contend that tightening the borders to minimize the amount of drugs coming into the country is the solution. But the problem is that, as long as there's a demand for drugs, there will always be a supply, which means there will always be suppliers. It's easy, for example, to want to blame China for exacerbating the current fentanyl crisis in the US, but China supplies the US with fentanyl because the US is full of users. And what constellation of causes turns a person into a user? That's as complex a question as what causes homelessness. So if homelessness is a function of things like drug addiction, clinical depression (and other forms of mental illness), laziness/indolence, etc., and if each of these things is itself caused by a myriad of personal and social factors, where on earth does one even begin in trying to tackle the problem?

It's tempting to view homelessness from the point of view of statistical sociology: pick your metric, and people form bell-curve distributions across that metric. Age? Bell curve. Intelligence? Bell curve. Crime? Bell curve. Homelessness? Bell curve. Statistics would seem to affirm Jesus' assertion that "The poor, you will always have with you." Maybe that's how it is with homelessness: it's an inevitability, the thin part of the bell curve, in any society with X number of people. Kind of a depressing thought. It's like that little line of dust that, when you're sweeping, never quite makes it into the dustpan. It's a remainder.

If remainders really are that ontologically stubborn, then there's no getting rid of them. The best you can hope to do is keep the problem down to a bearable minimum.