Page 1 of 1 [ 9 posts ] 

goldfish21
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 17 Feb 2013
Age: 41
Gender: Male
Posts: 22,490
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

17 Nov 2022, 12:34 pm

Just kidding; we don’t have one. :/

Instead charities & shelters are requesting donations of Winter survival gear like jackets and rain suits because we have ever more homeless people here and the weather just turned from extended Summer to Winter in 48 hours, entirely skipping Autumn this year.

FFS, we have a 20’ chandelier spinning under a bridge for vanity’s sake and somehow can’t figure out basic shelter for the very poor, disabled, injured, mentally ill & drug addicted. Ever more money gets spent on services for these folks, literally Millions of dollars Per Day, yet the problems are all accelerating vs getting solved. It’s WILD.


_________________
No :heart: for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.


klanka
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 31 Mar 2022
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Posts: 1,888
Location: Cardiff, Wales

18 Nov 2022, 8:47 am

In the UK the government is very good at housing anyone. The only people sleeping on the streets are disadvantaged immigrants, drug addicts and severly mentally ill people.

We have outreach workers combing the streets looking for rough sleepers in the morning.

I've seen documentaries about people in the US being one paycheck away from homelessness but dont you have government housing?



KitLily
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Jan 2021
Age: 55
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,074
Location: England

18 Nov 2022, 9:15 am

Stop trickle-down economics, is the answer. It doesn't work.


_________________
That alien woman. On Earth to observe and wonder about homo sapiens.


FleaOfTheChill
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 31 Jul 2020
Age: 309
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 2,907
Location: I'm stuck in the dryer

18 Nov 2022, 9:17 am

I live in the states. Depending on where you live, public housing is a joke. Not last summer but the summer before, a friend of mine had the apartment building he was living in burn down, rendering him homeless. He is physically disabled. About a year before that he applied for public assisted/govt housing because his mom had died and he could no longer afford his apartment. He was barely making it when the place burned and only doing so because his mom died while having covid so he got money to help with housing due to that. He would have been homeless then without that covid money. Anyway... when his place burnt, he'd already been on the govt assisted housing wait list for a year. He spent four months living in a hotel (thanks to go fund me and the generous people who paid for that) before he finally got a place. Living in a hotel is considered homeless in the states. That didn't help him any though. They just finally got him the spot he'd been waiting for. It is fair to mention, my town is full of poor people...so yeah, public housing is in high demand here. It's likely less brutal in other places.

In my city, you get higher priority if you are a homeless, single woman with children. If you are single, you're looking at a year wait minimum. Then when you do get placed in a house, you get no say in where you go. In my city, the two main public housing places (including the one my friend is in) are going to have roaches and mice/rats. So yeah, he waited almost a year and a half to move into a place with roaches and other critters... Not to mention that people are often stacked in on top of each other (he's on the 10th floor despite not being able to walk). It's loud, not well maintained, full of drug addicts and all kinds of nonsense. You're lucky if you can get into a house that has been chopped up into apartments. They tend to be a bit nicer. But again, those go to single moms with kids. God help you if you are single.

There's a big difference though in the types of homeless people. People like my friend, who due to circumstance find themselves homeless (and the one paycheck away types), and chronically homeless people. The chronically homeless ones do tend to have mental health issues and more often than not, drug related issues (often because of the psych stuff, trauma/cptsd, things like that). It's way easier to take people who fall bassackwards into homelessness, give them a place to live and poof, problem solved. It's way harder to deal with the ones who are chronically homeless because simply putting someone in a house doesn't deal with the underlying issues that made them homeless in the first place. Unfortunately, more often than not, the best you can do for people in those situations is to try to do things like give them warm clothes, and food, water... and offer up solutions like free therapy, valid id obtained for them, cell phones, and beds in drug/alcohol treatment centers and stuff like that. Until the underlying issues get resolved for that demographic, they'll just end up back on the streets again. And you can't make people get help/treatment unless they want it. And stuff like not being numb, addressing issues, and detoxing are scary, scary things. So is the unknown, even if the unknown is likely way better for you.



KitLily
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Jan 2021
Age: 55
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,074
Location: England

18 Nov 2022, 9:19 am

Some statistics about Britain's homelessness situation:

Homelessness facts and statistics: The numbers you need to know in 2022

https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/b ... ard-facts/


_________________
That alien woman. On Earth to observe and wonder about homo sapiens.


goldfish21
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 17 Feb 2013
Age: 41
Gender: Male
Posts: 22,490
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

18 Nov 2022, 11:01 am

klanka wrote:
In the UK the government is very good at housing anyone. The only people sleeping on the streets are disadvantaged immigrants, drug addicts and severly mentally ill people.

We have outreach workers combing the streets looking for rough sleepers in the morning.

I've seen documentaries about people in the US being one paycheck away from homelessness but dont you have government housing?


Umm, you said they were very good at housing anyone.. and then listed three classes of people that remain unhoused. That's not being very good at housing anyone/everyone.

We also have outreach workers from various agencies, non profits, volunteers etc, especially in the DTES of Vancouver.

I'm in Canada, not the US. Provincial government subsidized housing does exist for low income people where peoples rent is based on their income, but the wait list is something like 6 years long or something like that. Wouldn't surprise me if it's longer now as rents have risen and incomes haven't. Government stopped building subsidized government owned and operated housing/apartments in the early 1990's so there hasn't been any additional supply created in 30 years as demand has skyrocketed.

A lot of the people on the streets are mentally ill/drug addicted, yes (that started when the government shut down the major mental hospital here and kicked everyone out onto the streets in the 90's), but not everyone. There are tons of people with jobs who live in their cars or in tents etc because there's nowhere available to rent Or they choose not to pay most of their income for rent/can't afford to pay rent and eat etc. Homes costs Millions of dollars now and rents are astronomically high, so it's created a new class of homeless people. Also, shady landlords evict people so they can raise rents, often leaving them homeless as there's nowhere for them to move to. etc. Rents often exceed 100% of peoples' incomes these days, so there are tons of people with roommates or people renting just a single small bedroom or couch to sleep on etc. It's pretty brutal.

I'm not sure what the counts are, but they're in the thousands. There are little tent cities on the sidewalks of the DTES, and they pop up in parks, then there are moves by the city/police/fire to clear them away, followed by protests and court cases, violence etc as people literally have nowhere to go. A few of the SRO (single room occupancy) hotels (cockroach/bedbug infested tiny rooms with 1 shared washroom per floor, drugs, violence.. like living in a horror movie.) have been condemned and a few more have caught fire and burned and a couple are under renovation.. so with hundreds of units of housing off the market in the worst neighbourhood + more and more people becoming homeless thanks to the financial crunch of living where everything is exorbitantly expensive and people are just barely hanging on by a thread, especially if they're on disability or welfare, homeless numbers are rising. And I'm sure the accounts are impossible to keep accurate due to the number of people living in forests and parks out of sight - there are 100 people living in the forests along the 8km stretch of beaches where I hangout, and apparently Stanley Park is "full," - that's a wooded park larger than Central Park in NYC and all of the hideaway spots where people can sneak off in the forest and live/sleep are taken.

It's one big giant mess with no easy solution. So, for now, they're asking for warm clothes & rain suits.


_________________
No :heart: for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.


KitLily
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Jan 2021
Age: 55
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,074
Location: England

18 Nov 2022, 12:05 pm

goldfish21 wrote:
klanka wrote:
In the UK the government is very good at housing anyone. The only people sleeping on the streets are disadvantaged immigrants, drug addicts and severly mentally ill people.

We have outreach workers combing the streets looking for rough sleepers in the morning.

I've seen documentaries about people in the US being one paycheck away from homelessness but dont you have government housing?


Umm, you said they were very good at housing anyone.. and then listed three classes of people that remain unhoused. That's not being very good at housing anyone/everyone.


Yes, those are the types of people who most need help and somewhere to live IMO.


_________________
That alien woman. On Earth to observe and wonder about homo sapiens.


lostonearth35
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jan 2010
Age: 50
Gender: Female
Posts: 11,786
Location: Lost on Earth, waddya think?

18 Nov 2022, 11:30 pm

Amazing. Politicians can never give homeless people actual homes to live in. And yet they always have money for war. Always always ALWAYS. Maybe they should send homeless people to war, ha ha. :roll: Many of those homeless people are likely suffering from PTSD because they went to war in the first place. What a wonderful world. :roll:



KitLily
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 7 Jan 2021
Age: 55
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,074
Location: England

19 Nov 2022, 9:20 am

lostonearth35 wrote:
Amazing. Politicians can never give homeless people actual homes to live in. And yet they always have money for war. Always always ALWAYS. Maybe they should send homeless people to war, ha ha. :roll: Many of those homeless people are likely suffering from PTSD because they went to war in the first place. What a wonderful world. :roll:


Yes and most politicians have more than one home themselves! Apparently our PM has 12 homes! WTF.


_________________
That alien woman. On Earth to observe and wonder about homo sapiens.