Quote from 2006:
Article:
https://www.forbes.com/2006/08/25/us-homeless-aid-cx_np_0828oxford.html#7c55fecd777e
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"The 'least' deserving."
Homelessness costs more, year by year and over decades, than housing everyone would cost.
However, what nobody other than me seems to be saying is that homeless shelters don't even try to help chronically homeless people to break the cycles that make them homeless. The majority of them are in buildings that should be condemned. Impartial investigations of all U.S. homeless shelters, and probably shelters around the world, would confirm this.
The Pine Street Inn's main location is a moneymaking screen. It's where people can volunteer to serve dinner and tour the facility, and assume that the Pine Street Inn provides services for:
-survivors of sexual violence
-survivors of domestic violence
-addiction
-illiteracy
-violent or other criminal tendencies
The Pine Street Inn does not even try to help homeless people with these issues. In fact, it actively, verbally refutes the responsibility. Scratch the surface and you'll be told "You can't make people take help." You won't be told that help is not available, unless you are told "That's not what we do here; we help people with housing." The Pine Street Inn spends a lot of time and money not doing that, either.
If it were to expand its training programs past teaching a small percentage of homeless people at a time to be cooks and janitors, it would not be able to make money off the trainees as they work in the Pine Street Inn kitchens, clean the Pine Street Inn shelters, and work in the Pine Street Inn's laundry service.
When I left the women's shelter in 2019, homeless women were not allowed to do their own laundry in Pine Street Inn machines and homeless employees were not guaranteed beds to sleep in at night. There was a waiting list of months for lockers. I had initially carried around my backpack for more than 3 months, until my knee was distended and I had to go to the ER. That's when I signed up for a gym membership at the nearby Boston Sports Club location. I paid around $80/month for a small locker, somewhere to change and steam my clothes for job interviews and work, bathrooms which I could use at other Boston Sports Clubs locations throughout the Boston area without having to spend more money to buy things at businesses, and showers for which I did not have to stand in line during a window of a few hours every night for a 10-minute shower during which shelter staff yell to hurry up or you'll be given an overnight suspension. That is also why I paid for a gym membership at the YMCA near Tufts Medical Center for part of my 2-year homeless stint from 2014-2016. I don't know if the hidden, illegal cameras were ever removed from the YMCA locker rooms. I know that there were hidden, illegal cameras in the women's locker room at the YMCA; there was nothing to stop the people who put them there from also putting them in the men's, boys', and girls' locker rooms. I was threatened with legal action for blogging about it.
My guess is that homeless "support" services all over the country are touting permanent "supportive" housing as the cure-all for homelessness for two reasons. One is that it's an excuse for the decades of negligence and mismanagement which have caused the homeless population to grow by the hundreds of thousands. The other is that the permanent housing that is owned and operated by the organizations which have previously only provided nonpermanent services turns the homeless into a permanent source of income for those organizations. Helping homeless people with their problems so that they can move into apartments wherever they want with money from employment, Section 8 or both takes homeless people permanently out of the homeless support system; it does not turn homeless people into a source of income.
This is how much permanent supportive housing costs to build:
Quote:
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This is achieved through fund-raising and donations. Usually, the rent is paid by Social Security or subsidies that are specific to that housing. I don't know if it's the same everywhere, but Pine Street Inn housing does not accept Section 8. I would have had to relinquish my Section 8 to move from the Pine Street Inn Women's Shelter to Pine Street Inn housing.
I have a mobile Section 8 which can be applied to rent a 1-bedroom apartment in every state. To move into Pine Street Inn housing would have given the Pine Street Inn total control over my life. I was frequently told by Pine Street Inn employees that it would be a good idea for me to move to Pine Street Inn housing. It also took me a long time to figure out why there was inconsistent motivation from Pine Street Inn staff to prevent the expiration of my Section 8 voucher while I was seeking what I thought was appropriate housing. I chose to be homeless and living in the women's shelter from 2017 to 2019 and to file for extensions for Section 8 rather than to move to Pine Street Inn housing.
By June 1, 2019, when payment standards for Section 8 had been raised and I could finally use the voucher to apply for a building that I hoped would be safe, Metro Housing Boston had stopped giving me extensions; I was already in the appeal process against having the voucher taken away. I had to fight through Section 8 discrimination from the building to be approved, while knowing that I'd lose Section 8 if my application wasn't approved. I moved in on the last day of August 2019.
The stereotype of a homeless person is someone who is mentally ill. You try being homeless for a few years; you won't feel sane.
I'm not saying that there's no place for permanent, supportive housing. However, building 75 units at a time is not going to end homelessness, nor is portraying permanent supportive housing as the ultimate answer going to motivate organizations such as the Pine Street Inn to modernize their treatment of homeless people. It absolutely has not done that; it has done the opposite.
Excepting the Forbes article, there is nothing at this page that I haven't written or otherwise blogged about before.
