I’m sorry, but your screenname and avatar just… oh it’s too weird and perfect. 
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Here’s a town in Brazil going about it differently: Curitiba.
"“The “green exchange” employment program focuses on social inclusion, benefiting both those in need and the environment. Low-income families living in shantytowns unreachable by truck bring their trash bags to neighborhood centers, where they exchange them for bus tickets and food. This means less city litter and less disease, less garbage dumped in sensitive areas such as rivers and a better life for the undernourished poor. There’s also a program for children where they can exchange recyclable garbage for school supplies, chocolate, toys and tickets for shows.
“Under the “garbage that’s not garbage” program, 70% of the city’s trash is recycled by its residents. Once a week, a truck collects paper, cardboard, metal, plastic and glass that has been sorted in the city’s homes. The city’s paper recycling alone saves the equivalent of 1,200 trees a day. As well as the environmental benefits, money raised from selling materials goes into social programs, and the city employs the homeless and recovering alcoholics in its garbage separation plant.” (ICLEI-Canada)”
(take from page 4 of:
HuffPo has a 2013 update:
Another world is possible. Like, in this world, even.
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In the 9th Circuit, that might be actionable conduct by the city under Lavan v. City of Los Angeles, 693 F.3d 1022 (9th Cir. 2012).
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North of downtown, technically in Old Town/Chinatown. There is also a massive new tent city in North Portland.
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Certainly the American Red Cross has a few:
As part of her effort to run the Red Cross more like a business,
McGovern recruited more than 10 former AT&T executives to top
positions. The move stirred resentment inside the organization, with
some longtime Red Cross hands referring to the charity as the “AT&T
retirement program.’’
From this article:
The Corporate Takeover of the Red Cross — ProPublica
Congratulations, you’ve spotted the message. It’s a shame you don’t seem to have understood it. Apart from the inhumanity of it, keeping people homeless is more expensive than not doing so. It creates problems - everything from the trash you complain about (where do you put the stuff if you’re homeless?) to petty crime (you’ve not eaten for a while, is it so bad to steal food?), to more serious crime (put people under enough stress and they tend to snap, often hitting out at whoever is close by). If you end up homeless, it’s very hard to get back in to normal society.
Many years ago I got chatting to a homeless guy begging on my street. He told me about his degree in aeronautical engineering, how he’d been working as an engineer but then lost his job, hit some personal problems that lead to him losing his apartment. He spent a while sleeping on friends sofas, but didn’t like to burden them, and found himself homeless. His life, at some point, was so similar to mine, that it really scared me. I haven’t thought about homelessness in the same way since. It can happen to any of us, and surprisingly quickly. The humane thing to do is help people when they’re in trouble, not blame them for it.
But if you can’t understand that, stick to the economic message. It’s cheaper, in the long run, to house people.
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I do feel quite badly about it, but not for the reasons you suggest.
It might also be insulting to suggest that rootless living is itself obviously a problem, which is why I made my original comment. Being made to live a certain way because millions of people assume that you must want property or a job is horrifically dystopian.
Who likes to be told every day that how they live is essentially a problem that needs to be fixed?
You really believe that a significant proportion of homeless people choose to live that way?
Also: rootless != homeless.
Also also: nobody, so far as I can tell, has proposed forcing the homeless to live by some set of standards- the proposals have focused around providing access.
If, as you point out elsewhere in this thread, people continually misconstrue your comments, you are left with one of two options:
- Most people are incapable of understanding what you’ve written because they’re a bit dim.
- Most people are incapable of understanding what you’ve written because it makes very little sense.
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Help might also mean letting people help themselves, and each other, rather than relying upon somebody else’s institutions of healthcare and education. If people were truly free to organize, some would establish their own instead of being dependent.
I was comparing not having a home to LGBT ironically, to point out the inconsistencies in some people’s reasoning. If that’s what you are doing here, that’s fine. But if you are suggesting that living without a house or territory is a form of ignorance or pathology which needs institutional intervention, then this would be repugnant to me. It is a war of cultural assimilation against people who don’t live the way you do, and I find it condescending. But, of course, people tend to be blind to this when they naturally assume that the subjects of their concern really prefer to live like them. Some of them might. But what then is to be done with those who do not?
There are conspicuously no laws in the US which stipulate that people need to have territory or property. Probably because requiring this of people would be unenforceable. There is no evidence that avoiding these things is any more pathological than requiring them. Yet society in general seems to find this idea deeply unsettling, bordering upon unthinkable. Why is it that people crumble, and cannot even tolerate discussing people’s right to be homeless? Can you honestly not comprehend that there are real, sane people who might not choose to live as you do, nor pay lip service to those same ideals?
No, I am certainly not. You are missing one which is just as likely, which is that people often become socially conditioned to only model problems or accept solutions which fit certain inherited criteria, defined by others.
You honestly believe that people consistently misinterpret you as a result of them being socially conditioned?
And, further, that despite you living in this society, you’re somehow immune to socialization’s effects?
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That’s making it out to be a personal problem. What I honestly think happens is that people do have blind spots to whatever doesn’t fit into an immediate ideology. When it is their own, personal ideology, they are likely to be aware of it themselves. When they are trying to fit into a background ideology, they do so mostly unconsciously. It’s quite easy to observe. Whether troubling info from outside comes to them from me or others is mostly irrelevant. How else do you explain people with no firsthand knowledge asserting in all apparent earnestness that “No sane person would choose to live that way?”, or “no significant number”? These function as ways of categorically dismissing the input of certain people. Doing this is the actual social process of disenfranchisement, which often happens even in well-meaning people, in progressive environments like this.
What is “this society”? I never claimed that people don’t have any effect upon me. Is it not possible that I could have simply been socialized to a different society than you were? Or is your social sphere somehow conveniently everything to everyone? Is it perhaps not assuming too much efficacy in the process of socialization to believe that USians all truly share the same norms, customs, and ideologies? Might these assumptions not work against our myths of freedom of choice and multiculturalism alike?
You mean except for all the homeless folks that want to have a home, right? Which is most of them.
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Mod note: No, just no.
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My apologies. I didn’t see if anything came afterwards (so am assuming you mean my screed) but in my defence, even though it was constructed crappily, I really took pains to only write what I meant.
But, like I indicated, I respect the decision to remove it.
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I don’t have to wonder. Grandad told me shortly before he passed that he was disappointed ‘this 50’s witch hunt garbage’ was going around again. he didn’t like specific groups of people and could be considered racist, but he understood that as HIS views, not the way the government should work.
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A good documentary on this subject focuses on Dignity Harbor, a camp on the St. Louis riverfront. It does pretty well on showing people’s daily lives in Dignity Harbor and their experiences with the city government.
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I wasn’t aware that staying on topic means that people need to share the editorial position of the people who run the forum. But hey, I am sure that most of you can homesplain to me what homelessness is really about, since you have more experience.
Please, try to learn how to handle polite disagreements with some maturity.
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Are you addressing the moderator?
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