Mat

Communes

Maybe communes are the solution to homelessness. People keep trying to get the homeless to integrate into society, but that doesn’t acknowledge what they are willing to admit that others trying to help them can’t. The labor market today is exploitative of people in their financial situation. So is the housing market. Need for community or spiritual well being isn’t met by services that provide food, temporary housing, or jobs that people don’t want anyways. The people running those services want to help but can’t be there 24 hours a day.

So maybe what would work is propping up the societies they form themselves and allowing then to be more official and productive. Why can’t we designate a piece of land and work with them to come up with a plan for what they will produce and how they will govern themselves? They don’t want to work within the system, but it’s better to help them set up their own than to keep kicking the can down the road or to keep trying to force them to fit into a mold they never have.

Trying to pick them out of their chosen families one by one and cleaning them up clearly doesn’t work often enough. And with all the money getting stolen and wasted by programs that are supposed to be helping the homeless today, I bet the resources to do something like this already exist.