The Plight of the Homeless

It is winter in California, and we have rainy days almost every week. Occasionally, there's water in our rivers ....

A local news story on my NPR station this morning told of how police and social workers in Ventura, the next city down the coast from here, had spent yesterday clearing out homeless encampments from the bed of the Santa Clara River, I did not catch the total numer of people that they rounded up, but they said they had removed 17 tent camps and 14 tons of trash.

While camping in a riverbed in the raining season is certainly not a very good housing situation, I thought for a long time afterward, wondering how many of the people will actually be helped into a better situation as a result of this action. I expect that most of these are people with multiple problems that put them in this miserable place; pick a few from this list:
- military veterans with PTSD
- learning disabilities
- mental illness
- illiteracy
- brain damage from years of substance abuse

In an ideal world, we would have a "boarding school" where we could house those who are willing to be treated for some of these problems, with the goal of getting back to a functioning state and in the best cases, employability.

But in a state with a twenty billion dollar budget deficit, such things just do not happen.