Spring semester halted. Will Harvard house the homeless in their empty dorm rooms?

In Campus Reform, Leo Thuman reports,

When Harvard told students to leave its dorms for the rest of the spring term earlier in March, most would have expected that they would be empty until the fall. But if some students have their way, the dorms will soon be filled with a new kind of resident.

A petition calling for Harvard to house homeless people in its residential properties has gained serious momentum, having already amassed over 1,000 signatures.

Read more here.

"Vainglorious propaganda"

In the Aspen beat, Glenn Beaton writes in part,

If we didn’t have a “homelessness problem” (and I can remember when we didn’t, in economies far less prosperous than the current one) then the left would have to manufacture one in order to feel good about themselves. Here in Aspen and elsewhere, they’re doing precisely that.

The victims of their vainglorious propaganda are the rest of us – including the vagrants themselves.

Read more here.

Welcome to the Hotel California

"The homeless crisis is what happened when lefty cities legalized drugs, stopped institutionalizing the severely mentally ill, while legalizing street camping and pouring billions into homeless services."

Daniel Greenfield writes in FrontPage Magazine,

Allowing people with mental illness and drug problems to live on the streets has led to unsanitary conditions and disease outbreaks that have primarily hurt the homeless.

...The homeless aren’t the victims of the free market, but of the socialists using them as political weapons.

The homeless crisis is what happened when lefty cities legalized drugs, stopped institutionalizing the severely mentally ill, while legalizing street camping and pouring billions into homeless services.

Homes don’t solve homelessness. Treating mental illness and fighting drug use does.

Read more here.

"BS spewing out of their mouths onto the streets. It's gonna get so bad that it will eventually reach the hills that you go run away to and hide in!"

Don't just come from a place of anger and negativity. No host for the Oscars? That is a metaphor for the lack of connection they have for the working people of America who watch their television programs and movies.

"...the homeless tent cities are the broken eggs of the progressive urban omelet."

In the Ace of Spades blog, Oregon Muse takes a look at the ingredients of homelessness. Read more here.

Ace of Spades commenters discuss homelessness

After reading CBD's post about deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill I decided to see what the Ace of Spades commenters had to say about the issue. Citizen Cake wrote,

Meanwhile, in LA, there are 58,000 homeless living in the shadows of the mansions of people who call me a heartless Nazi.

tu3031 wrote,

I really think liberals LOVE seeing large swaths of the homeless because
they think it's a form of propaganda against capitalism.

Until you want to move a shelter into their neighborhood.

Gunslinger wrote,

My workplace is right across the street from a Gospel Mission.
Most of these people are zombies. We cannot be afraid of "taking their rights away". They are completely unaware of life in general.
I have always thought that involuntary "housing and treatment" would get them clean, and/or sober, and/or force them to take their meds they so badly need to bring them back to reality.

Leaving them to continue as they do is not compassion, regard for their rights, or anything else like this. It is criminal neglect.

When Reagan shut down all of the Federal Mental Institutions, he gave the money to the states in block grants. What did the States do? Why, they hired bodies and built a bureaucracy that wastes money and gets nothing done.

Like they do...

Read more here.

Homelessness in San Francisco

Cinnamon Stillwell writes in SFGATE about San Francisco's incredible homelessness problem.

...San Francisco would do better to take a page from New York City, which under Mayor Rudy Giuliani successfully eliminated widespread homelessness. Giuliani took a tough-love approach, strictly enforcing laws against criminal behavior, pursuing arrest warrants and no longer allowing homeless to sleep on the streets. At the same time, he made use of the city's already plentiful shelter system for those displaced in the process. No longer were violence and drug use tolerated in shelters. Also, state regulations making work and other welfare rules conditions of residence for the able-bodied were enforced. Giuliani addressed the disparate conditions among the homeless population, including the mentally ill and, above all, he promoted self-reliance.

Giuliani's reforms were met with howls of protest from New York City's homeless advocacy community and its defenders, including then senatorial candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. But in the end, it was Giuliani's approach, and not their enabling, that actually got people off the streets. It also led to improved conditions for all city residents and today the proof is in the pudding.

Go here to read much more.

h/t Gerard