It's common to blame homelessness on "liberal" policies. Yet I never hear what solutions conservatives offer. If anything, conservatives tend to oppose anything that could plausibly reduce the problem.
Homelessness is a symptom that can be caused by a wide variety of situations. There is not a single cause nor is there a one-size-fits-all solution. Some people are temporarily homeless for a period of time for a variety of transient reasons - loss of a job/reduction in salary, loss of a lease, conflict with family, natural disaster or other damage/destruction to their home, etc. Some of these people would benefit from temporary assistance (either government-based or private charity) and others will move past their temporary homelessness on their own even without that assistance.
More than half of the chronically homeless are driven to homelessness by their addictions and the prioritization of feeding those addictions over shelter. For these people it is often not that there are no options available to them, it is that they choose not to utilize shelters or personal connections which place restrictions on drug use and aren't willing to seek treatment for their addictions (again, something that already tends to be freely available). Giving these people housing simply gives them a resource to be neglected and mined of scrap. They are unwilling to hold down a job beyond the amount of time it takes to raise money for more drugs. Giving direct subsidy simply funds their self-destructive habits. I'm not sure of an appropriate conservative response to people who have other options available but are unwilling to abandon their self-destructive lifestyle to take advantage of those options other than to respect that they have made their decision and arrest them where they violate the law.
Another significant cause of homelessness is severe mental illness. SAMHSA claims a full quarter of chronic homeless suffer from severe mental illness, and certainly a significant number have their situation worsened because of a less severe mental illness. I don't have a good answer to this either, other than likely having to reestablish forcible institutionalization for some of them.
If they have a solution, why don't conservatives pitch those solutions and thereby gain political power as a result?
With a few notable exceptions of strongly leftist cities who have gone out of their way to encourage homelessness through direct and indirect subsidies, I'm not sure homelessness is a big enough issue to make political hay on. In those cities where it is actually a huge issue, the voters absolutely aren't going to elect conservatives no matter how good their ideas relating to homelessness are.
Is this another case of conservatives vaguely associating something bad with opposition without actually proposing any solution? Because that seems to be the real platform of the republican party nowadays.
You do realize that the criticism you've leveled against conservatives and the republican party above also describes your post precisely, right?
