Homes For The Homeless

[n2doc]

by Susie Cagle

San Francisco’s homeless are harangued and despised while conservative Utah has a radically humane approach


David Hogue isn’t sure that he should tell me his name. He sits in a back office in the shelter where he has lived for the past 18 months, hands folded neatly in his lap. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to talk. He tells me about how he’s had trouble finding work. He tells me about how he’s bounced between homes for years. He tells me about how his brother dropped him off here the day after New Year’s.

But to identify himself as homeless – this is new.



The condition of homelessness is fluid, and so is our definition of it. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) placed the homeless population in January 2014 at 578,424, but advocacy groups such as the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness say that more than 3 million Americans experience an episode of homelessness each year: a night, a week or a month in a motel, in a recreation vehicle or on a friend’s couch might not make you ‘homeless’ in the eyes of the federal government, but they certainly define your lived experience.

The US has always had many shades of destitute, but this particular era of homelessness marks a new chapter in the country’s history. The causes of this crisis are no great mystery. Real median household income has plateaued since the 1960s. Adjusted for inflation, minimum wage has fallen since the 1970s. After the manufacturing industry contracted and unemployment grew in the 1980s, the homeless populations in US cities rose precipitously. For the first time since Hooverville – the shanty town built by homeless people during the Great Depression of the 1930s – American poverty was laid bare in its parks and on its streets. Since then, about 600,000 people have lived without a home on any given night in the US.

more

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-utah-is-giving-homes-to-the-homeless/?src=longreads

[marble falls]

1. Its easy to knock and make fun of Mormon's. But they tend to live by helping others a step....

above the level of charity most other Christians practice.

[merrily]

2. We have known for years that housing the homeless costs society less than leaving them homeless.

We'd rather punish them and let them die of exposure than save money by housing them.

To the degree that we don't even provide a place where they can do laundry and shower safely.

True, there are some who cannot handle living independently, even for free. Remind me what we do for them.

[n2doc]

3. There is no 100% solution

But it would be nice to reach 60-70%, right? Or should we just throw out hands up and say, "nope, if we can't fix all the problem we won't fix any of it!"

[vinny9698]

4. I worked for the Salvation Army for 4 years.

I once asked a lifelong homeless man, how many homeless shelters he had stayed in? His answer was 57 over the course of his life. He was an ex Marine with a VA health issue. I then asked him which was the best place he had stayed in. Tulsa, OK was his answer. There the Salvation Army provided beds and meals, across the street the City of Tulsa provided a community center, with lockers, free laundry mat, health clinic, day laborer work center, a lounge for homeless to hang out, TV, board games. Lunch time they would walk across to the "Sally" for their meals.
He mentioned in Montana, there is a homeless shelter that serves wild animal, deer, moose, hunters donate the carcass to the homeless shelter after their kill, they just want the head. Also during the winter, road killed deer and moose are picked up by
the state troopers and delivered to the homeless shelter for processing.