The homelessness crisis.

You can see video from California towns mostly showing streets, parks, vacant land anywhere full of tents.  This seems to work out in California where the winters are not too bad.  It doesn’t work in New Hampshire where the winter temperature can drop down well below zero and stay there for a week.  Nobody can live in a tent, be it unheated or even heated in that kind of weather. 

The problem has a number of angles to it.

   There is not enough housing, and little new housing is being built, and the existing housing is too expensive for ordinary people to afford.  This unfortunate state of affairs is caused by snob zoning.  Many many towns don’t want more housing, the residents think the town is too big as is and they don’t want it to grow bigger.  So they zone for nothing but single family houses, on quarter acre lots.  They zone out apartment houses, trailer parks, and “tiny” houses.  The only fix I can think of are state laws restricting the powers of town zoning boards. 

   There are a lot of unemployed people.  When you are unemployed, you cannot afford any kind of housing.  One part of our unemployment problem comes for having a lot of citizens who lack any usable skills, who cannot get to work on time, and who cannot come in to work every day, or have criminal records, or are drug addicts.  In short they are not employable. This is the result of the failure of the public schools to teach any thing of value and who waste time on lefty things like Critical Race Theory.  We could try remedial operations like the CCC camps we used to run back in the Franklin Roosevelt years.  Such a camp would take in anyone, give them three square meals a day, give them 40 hours a week of work, and offer medical care for any problems the campers might have.  The work might be kinda low end like picking up trash along public roads, raking leaves, or shoveling snow.  It might be things like digging needed drainage, or clearing land for farming or building.On the other hand CCC campers mostly created the Cannon Mountain ski area back in the 1930s.

  And we need to reduce the number of drug addicts.  Right now a lot of doctors prescribe opioids to everyone who comes in their door.  Some states have opioids prescribed in 75% to 85% of   all office visits.  That is ridiculous.  I have lived a long life, I have gone to the doctor’s numerous times, and just once, after a tooth extraction, did the dentist proscribe Percoset for me.  And the patients find the opioids make them feel good.  When the prescription runs out they start to buy street drugs, which are a lot cheaper than prescription drugs.  We need to clap down on doctor’s proscribing practices.  We also need to spread the word that street drugs are souped up with fentanyl.  About 20% of street drugs have enough fentanyl in them to kill you.