Article:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/09/17/us/los-angeles-yale-graduate-homeless/index.html
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You don't have to be a high school valedictorian or a Yale graduate to know where and when the free meals are. Everyone who is homeless knows that.
That article is at Google today.
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Hollywood strikes again:
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One of the major problems with homelessness is that re-integration with the nonhomeless population is difficult. Putting everyone into an isolated government facility, which the article mentions the Trump administration is considering, won't solve that problem. People won't stay there, either. Adults don't like being told what to do.
The Long Island shelter in the Boston area was closed a few years ago. It was an isolated facility. It was an unbelievable hive of addiction and other problems, in dreadful conditions. I wrote about it during my first years of conglomerate-induced homelessness. No doors on the bathroom stalls; people worried about modesty would go to the farthest stall and put the trash can in front of them. The place routinely ran out of blankets in the winter. I often slept in my clothes, my coat, my hat and gloves, with a plastic bag tied around my feet so that they would be warm. I was told by another homeless woman that she'd been gang-raped by staffpeople there.
Working with homeless people to establish individual and community, human connections in the areas where they want to be housed would probably help. You can start that process while people are still living in shelters and on the street. The lack of those connections is an impetus toward homelessness in the first place.
What needs to be broken down is the psychological barrier between homeless people and everyone else, but you can't do that by saying "All homeless people are just like everyone else" or that they just need more places to live. Everyone needs more affordable places to live. The way to talk to homeless people is on a case-by-case basis, one person at a time, the way that you would talk to anyone. If you think, which the social services do, that you don't have time to do that because there are too many of them, you're not exactly wrong, but you're also not going to solve homelessness.
