THE MORNING NEWS FROM SEATTLE : Seattle Spends $1 Million On Fences That Keep Homeless Out of Orphaned Spaces Beneath Freeways: The spaces orphaned by highways have always been ugly and hard to manage. Weeds grow there. The sun don't shine there. People rejected by society sometimes find refuge there. Seattle has, according to the Seattle Times, spent a lot of money ($1 million) keeping these rejected people from these troublesome spaces.
But one might ask: Why not spend that huge sum of money on just helping the homeless? But that question is the same as this one: Why don't we build schools instead of prisons?
The problems of crime and homelessness can, of course, be solved very easily. The welfare of humans is not rocket science.
The better question to ask is: Why do we need homeless people? In fact, they are so needed that a city like ours is willing to pay lots of money to make their lives as miserable as possible.
I think the answer is found in the ideology of American individualism. Because it justifies obscene concentrations of wealth, it must also justify obscene amounts of poverty. You are homeless because of choices you yourself made. If it wasn't a choice, then you would not be so smelly, so desperate, so awful-looking. You would do something about it. You are on the street because you are doing nothing about it. The rich are rich because they always make the best choices. And so on, and so on
(Seattle Declared a Homelessness State of Emergency in 2015)