Here’s an effective plan to help the homeless. The city can allow tents, campers or cars to stay on city owned property. Such sites can be managed by CAHOOTS, who will do a better job than the police and — you know what, forget it. This idea will be tossed in the garbage like every other one because, reasons. Cost, security, NIMBY, blah blah. We can continue to ignore the poor in the deluded hope they will go away or the problems will fix themselves.

The real reason there is no real help is simple: people don’t care. There are lots of solutions, it’s not really that hard. What’s missing here is the motivation to do anything.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, hires the homeless to pick up garbage (often left by other homeless). They get paid for a day’s work — a free meal and access to social services. There, a simple approach. A solution doesn’t need to be some grand plan enacted at once. Change happens with kindness and an act of kindness, no matter how small is never wasted.

We can choose to uplift others and in doing so uplift ourselves for a better, healthier community or we can continue to not care and fall further from grace.

Alisa McLaughlin

Eugene