@futurebird A great service for homeless people would be lockers where they could keep their really important small items but God forbid we treat homeless people like actual people, right?
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@futurebird brought a tear to my eye. (Am formerly homeless myself)
The things that make homelessness an annoyance or "inconvenience" for people who aren't homeless are mostly down to people not having a place to live. When you address that those issues* go away, and they just become your neighbors.
*It' s really absurd that when one person in suffering, sick on the train because there is no where else to go everyone is concerned about the people on the train who have a place to live but that is where the politics is.
More to the point the shelters in NYC are not a place anyone wants to be and with very good reason.
There is a lot of low hanging fruit. Anyone who is homeless with a job and kids should just be admitted to this kind of program with few questions. These are people who will get on their feet again if we'd just stop making it so hard.
There are more complex and difficult cases and maybe the shelters could do a better job if some of the pressure was taken off.
@futurebird There are a lot of lies about homeless people like that most of them “don’t want housing and refuse it,” which is actually them not wanting to stay in temporary shelters that are unsafe and/or will require them to give up their stuff, separate from loved ones, etc.
Almost all homeless people are homeless because they don’t have money and the rent is too damn high, not because they are contrarians or something.
@futurebird Arizona is well known for criminalizing unhoused people. There seem more and more very visibly week by week. Our area had very few 3 1/2 years ago when we moved to West Phoenix. Now I’d guess there are 20-50 per square mile out here where it’s a long walk to grocery or convenience stores.
I was a crew chief for the census in South Bend Indiana years ago. In January is/was the annual count of “unhoused” and “unhoused transient”people. It was always afternoons to catch people in shelters and middle of night to catch those not in shelters.
BUT you were only allowed to count people in “gathering spots” or encampments identified the previous July. Thus you had to blindly pass people here and there and only proceed to a certain empty lot or park that was no longer a gathering place. The whole process was set up in the oddest ways to make sure the count “was not TOO HIGH” so as to embarrass the town. I’m sure these patterns are persisting in any census count. I’d hope somehow NYC is able to include more people than just a few.
I tend to come into school early. When I was at a different school from the one I work at now I came in at 6:30 one day and found one of my students in the back of the room. He'd discovered that the big cabinets at the back of the room weren't really being used for anything and taken one over to store his stuff. He'd hung up posters inside and neatly stacked his clothes and sneakers. He was listening to music and didn't notice me walking in.
"David* when did you get here?"
*not his name
"The school opens at 5, miss." He said.
Basically, he'd made himself a little corner of a typical teenager's bedroom in the storage cabinet. Because at the shelter your stuff might go missing.
Not because people steal either, no the people who run the shelters just throw things away without warning.
Think about what that does to you mentally, to never feel like you can even put an item down and ever find it again.
In the next year he and his dad were doing much better.
But for most of that year he'd stay at the building from 5am to 7pm every day.
I had a chance later to talk to someone who works at a big city shelter and I told them about my student and how traumatized he was by having his stuff just vanish without warning. She swore up and down it didn't work like that, but reading between what she said I detected that there are just too many people, not enough staff and not enough space.
So, the people running the shelters have "trash out days" where they just throw things out. Otherwise the place would fill up with garbage.
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