The reality

https://endhomelessshelterhype.blogspot.com/2019/03/march-25-3019.html?m=0



The case manager discussed in that blog post has done the same thing to a lot of other homeless people.  She is personally responsible for lengthening the homelessness of people whom she was supposed to help by a year, two years or indefinitely.

Her behavior has been reported to the Pine Street Inn's administration since 2018.  Not only does she still work there, she has been able to ruin housing opportunities for one guest after another since the administration was first told about her lies and incompetence.

People who have never been poor or otherwise part of a stigmatized population can't believe that social services are this bad.  It is their assumption, which the system encourages, that everything other than the system's dysfunction is to blame for homelessness and other chronic problems.

If it weren't like this and worse everywhere, there wouldn't be over half a million homeless people in the United States.

I won't argue with people who want to build more affordable housing, but dearth of affordable housing is far from being the only problem.

The system is more than happy to have the world believe that homeless people aren't motivated to be housed, when it is the system which isn't nearly as motivated to help people be housed as it pretends to be while it solicits donations all year.  The system knows that it is not accountable for its failures, that its failures aren't investigated, that its failures are blamed on the homeless and on high costs of living.

The Pine Street Inn has spent several years convincing the media, politicians and donors that the only feasible housing for homeless people is "supportive" housing owned by the Pine Street Inn, and has funnelled most of its funding into its own buildings rather than into raising the standards in its homeless shelters.  It has also all-but-abandoned the mission of helping the people in its shelters to look for housing other than to be on a waitlist to eventually have the Pine Street Inn as landlord.

The case manager who is described in the blog post which I have included at this page was also my case manager from 2017 to 2018.  After I told the director of the Pine Street Inn women's shelter about the case manager's evasiveness and flat-out lies, the first thing that happened was that I was treated as if I were the problem and retaliated against.  Although I was able to be assigned to a different case manager, the first case manager's lies followed me and prevented me from accessing crucial help from the Massachusetts Legal Clinic for the Homeless.  I was also told by the director of the Pine Street Inn women's shelter "Maybe it would be better if you lost your Section 8."  That is an exact quote.  In the same conversation, the director told me that she didn't think I was capable of maintaining an apartment by myself, that she thought I'd do better in "supportive" housing such as that owned by the Pine Street Inn, and that she wouldn't follow up with a non-Pine-Street-Inn-affiliated property manager whom I had contacted and who was willing to rent to me.

I wrote about that conversation at my first Twitter about homelessness and homeless shelters.  That Twitter was shut down not long after I published Tweets criticizing Metro Housing Boston.  It was never reactivated, and I almost lost Section 8.