How best to help Jamestown’s homeless population is a problem with no easy solution.

It was easy to mobilize resources a couple of years ago when tents started popping up in Brooklyn Square and along the Chadakoin River. The homeless placed themselves very much in the public eye for nearly an entire summer. But now that the homeless are largely out of sight, they are also out of mind.

It’s easy to rail against city and county governments to simply build shelters or repurpose abandoned buildings to create shelter. But that’s not a solution without large sums of recurring money that local governments often don’t have. Shelters may be able to be built with one-shot revenue, but they then become a yearly cost. If there is no state or federal aid, local governments end up faced with the choice of keeping a shelter open or paying for things like police officers and firefighters.

It became painfully obvious to well-meaning community organizations pretty quickly a couple of years ago that trying to help the homeless isn’t an easy task. Volunteers who opened their churches or buildings to create cold weather shelters found themselves dealing with issues they couldn’t have imagined. Many of the homeless who need shelter need other forms of help, too – and it’s help that volunteers with the kindest of hearts often can’t provide.

And, to further complicate matters, when one talks to some of Jamestown’s homeless, they often don’t want help. Help for the homeless isn’t like Field of Dreams. If you build it, they may not come.

So what is the best path forward?

That’s a really good question for which we frankly don’t have an answer.

In our opinion, discussions like the recent League of Women Voters forum are a good start. The county’s move away from using hotels as emergency shelters to focus on solving the root causes of homelessness is another – but that shift will take time and resources. Cold weather shelters are probably part of a solution, too, though it’s obvious how those shelters are provided needs to be the subject of more discussion and planning after our past experience with them. Like we said, it’s complicated.

The one thing we do know is this. The homeless may be out of sight. They shouldn’t be out of mind.