re: #886 Ward Cleaver

Good morning all.

Boy, I’m glad I live outside the city of Dallas, and don’t have to pay for the all the crap they’re wasting the taxpayers’ money on:

Dallas likely to pay for 500 homes for homeless

Un.believable.

It’ll cost even more to rebuild them after the tenants decide to be homeless again.

It has been my experience that the two largest groups of homeless are the mentally ill and what my grandmother called “shiftless”.

The mentally ill homeless won’t be helped by giving them a house. They need care, and probably lots of it. Some of them would no doubt be wards of the State for life.

The shiftless will strip the copper out of the homes, sell it, and move on. There’s no cure.

I have a theory (with a small t, so no rocks, please) that part of the shiftless issue is the rapid development/change of society compared to our genetic makeup as hunter/gatherer/scavengers. When this country had a frontier, people that could not “hold down a job” had a chance to make a living for themselves either on the outskirts of “civilized” places or in the wilds. These days they have no place to go. There was a case in Houston of a perfectly nice man who scraped money together by selling paper and cans. He lived in a treehouse he built himself, back in the woods on public land. They forced him out, and suggested he was crazy. I think he was perfectly normal - for him. Others turn to crime and fraud. And that’s going to be the majority of the people lined up for “free” housing.