This is a good idea, but it doesn't address the systemic failure to attempt to support and rehabilitate the majority of the chronically homeless population.

https://www.boston.gov/landlord-guarantee-pilot-program


____________________________________


-Despite the high percentage of homeless people who have or who have had substance abuse issues, I have never lived at a shelter that has substance abuse recovery meetings.  As far as I know, I have lived at almost every homeless shelter in the Boston/Cambridge area, and a few past that also, in addition to some of the homeless shelters in Vermont.  This is my 6th year of conglomerate-induced homelessness since 2011.  In all of that time, I have never known even one shelter to have even one 12-step meeting that is for people who have addictions to alcohol or other substances.  The conglomerate knows that I have never had even a drink or a cigarette during all of the years that it has ravaged my life.  If I had had a substance abuse problem before the conglomerate started to persecute me, I'd be dead of an overdose by now, without a doubt.  My life is so excruciating that I have sometimes thought about asking people whom I know to be addicts where I could buy the first and last heroin that I'd ever do in my life; so far, I haven't, but the shelter system fails so miserably to help addicts that I'd know whom to ask.  I'm sure that I'd never be able to inject it; the conglomerate would be ecstatic to observe me finally doing something illegal and it would have me arrested for drug possession before I could kill myself with it.  That's another reason that I have never followed through on that plan, one of the many suicide plans to which the conglomerate has hounded me throughout the years of social and psychological torture that it has inflicted on me. 

-There are no literacy screenings at any of the shelters.  If you think about all of the people who can't read or write somehow managing to work around their illiteracy for years, then you have to admit how much intelligence is being wasted by the shelter system not even attempting to figure out how much the homeless population can or can't read and offering basic education to people who need it.

-There is no support for people who have just been released from jail/rehab.  They're healthier in all ways when they are released from jail/rehab than they are after a month, six months or a year of living in shelters.  The recidivism of people who do the rounds of shelters, rehabs and jails for years is a consequence of the shelter system's horrifyingly low standards for personnel, environment and training and the system's vindictive refusal of all responsibility to holistically address the issue of chronic homelessness.

-There is no support for people who have experienced sexual trauma or domestic violence or who are contemporarily fleeing physical threats.  I have never lived in a domestic violence shelter; maybe support for people who have those issues is discussed by staff at DV shelters.  From what I hear, those shelters are always full and there are waiting lists for them. From what I know, there are neither announcements nor posted resources for people who have those issues at the shelters that aren't specifically for survivors of domestic violence.

-There is no support for people who are overtly mentally ill.  It is one thing to give people who have already been brutalized by the mental health care system the space to make their own decisions; it is something else never to approach them to offer support, not to intervene as their problems worsen every year of their homelessness, not to train staff not to yell at them as if they're deaf rather than cognitively impaired, not to do everything possible to avoid suspending or barring them when the emotional cruelty to which they are subjected finally is too much even for the maladaptive psychological defenses with which they shut out the world years ago.  Those people worsen; eventually, they disappear.  They and the elderly with dementia are the easiest and most obvious targets, the least capable of advocating for themselves, the least likely to report robbery, rape and other assault, the least likely to have people who care about them, the most likely to have been forced into homelessness by relatives who are tired of them or who don't have the financial resources to help them.  

-As far as I know, there is no local, state, national or federal board to which concerns about conditions at homeless shelters can be reported.  If the Boston Public Health Commission is supposed to serve that function in Boston, then all I can say is that there isn't a chronically homeless person in the Boston area who doesn't know that the shelters run by that organization, Woods Mullen and the former Long Island shelter, were the worst shelters around for decades.

There is no oversight for how homeless people, male or female, are treated; none.  All of the work that is done to help them in environments where there is oversight isn't supported, continued or capitalized upon by the shelter system; it is ruined by neglect and abuse.

Do you have to guess where the blame for the shelter system's failure always falls? 


Ask a homeless person if he or she ever feels punished for trying to work or attend school; ask a homeless person if he or she has ever felt bullied or ridiculed by shelter staff, ask if deadlines are forgotten, ask if things that were promised to be done never were, ask about letters offering housing that are given to their intended recipients months too late or not at all, causing those people to have to start all over again, even if they have already waited 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 years for housing, even if they have children who were taken from them because they had nowhere to live and the housing that they were supposed to have would have reunited their families, ask about the verbal abuse, the negligence, the arbitrary infliction of rules that are made up by individual staffpeople even in violation of the few written rules that there are to protect our rights (and which the illiterate among us cannot read, understand without explanation or apply), ask about abuse of power, ask about old and dilapidated lockers that aren't repaired or replaced because the assumption is that we'll mess them up anyway, ask about the waiting lists of months even for those lockers because there are never enough of them for everyone, ask why elderly and disabled women have to carry around bags and roll suitcases even in the winter, ask about grievance processes that have no results, ask about retaliation for reporting abuse, ask about the problems that are unaddressed week after week and year after year. 

There are other questions to ask; start with those.

Some homeless people are so used to living this way, or so afraid of repercussions, that they won't tell you the truth; they will tell you what they think they have to say, or even more sadly, what they have been conditioned to believe, which is that the only people who have a problem with the shelter system are people who are ungrateful. 

This is my 6th year of homelessness since 2011.

This week is the first that I have heard about the Metrolist or the informational resources at the City of Boston's website.  Nobody told me, and I didn't even hear about them from someone who works or who lives at a shelter.  If I didn't know about them, then how many other homeless and impoverished people also don't know about them?

I'm not saying that funding for homeless programs isn't part of the problem; however, people who work in shelter systems who say that lack of funding is the primary reason that there's no real training for the staff are either unaware of the main issues or are in denial about them.  The belief system about homeless people's worth and capabilities is the problem; it hasn't changed for centuries.  We are herded like cattle; there are probably even cattle populations who are treated with less negligence and outright sadism.

There are good people who work at shelters; they are outnumbered by the bad people, they are stymied in their efforts to be helpful by the lack of training and by the malice of their crueler coworkers, they are demoralized by their inability to be anything other than temporary bandages for the wounds of a few.  They leave after a while, or they adapt to their surroundings and their initial empathy and work ethic are dulled, or they even turn into new versions of the cruel employees who chided them for their attempts to be supportive.