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Those are Tweets at the Pine Street Inn's Twitter.
Every homeless shelter where I have ever lived has had very low standards for the people whom it hires, and they are given nowhere near the training that they should have. I'm sure it's the same everywhere in the United States.
Homeless shelters ought to be turning points for people's lives, but they're not because there's no investment from the organizations that run them in addressing homeless people's problems. I know that nobody wants to believe that, but it's true.
Most chronically homeless people have been severely traumatized at some time in their lives. The dysfunction of the homeless support system extends that trauma into a life sentence.
I'm telling you that homeless shelters just sit there. They're not offering support to the people who have substance abuse problems. They're not offering support to the people who were or are victims of domestic or sexual violence. They're not offering support to people who were or are sex trafficked. They're not reaching out on a regular basis to people who are incapacitated by mental illness. They're not prioritizing housing for the elderly or disabled. They're not doing everything they can to support homeless people who work or who want to work. They're not helping people finish their high school degrees or encouraging them to go to college, or even trying to find out who can and can't read and write and do basic math. The list of what homeless shelters don't do, and which they explicitly refuse to do, saying "That's not our role; we're just here to work on housing," while they don't really do that, either, goes on and on.
The people who are able to leave homelessness are people who already had independent skills before they were homeless, and the dysfunction of the homeless support system makes even those people homeless for years while they try to work their way out.
Why don't you ask some homeless people "Do you think that homeless shelters ever make things harder than they have to be?" They'll be surprised that someone is finally asking. Some people will be too scared of retaliation to tell the truth; others will feel that they have nothing left to lose.
At least Massachusetts has a dysfunctional system to work with; in Vermont I would have died in the cold.
