The homeless in your town...

[Mastertank1]

What desensitizes New Yorkers to the homeless

is seeing the same guy, for the 400th day in a row, hanging out in the same place, telling anyone who slows down enough to listen that he just got out of prison yesterday and just needs ten dollars to tide him over night until his job starts tommorrow.

And reading an article in the New York Times about how they followed this guy who sits in the middle of a busy street in a wheelchair begging for money from passing cars 10 hours a day five days a week, then goes to a parking lot five blocks away, folds his chair up and puts in the trunk, WALKS to a gym, works out, showers, changes into good clothes and drives to his five room house in the suburbs. They said he gathered an average of $300 a day.
That was a much higher income than most of the working people who gave him money.

Then there was the other beggar who cleared almost $2000 a week, and once a month went to Atlantic City to gamble, and got comped a room for the weekend because he was such a high roller.

Then there were the blocks where over 100 panhandlers would ask you for money before you could get off the block. That is NO exaggeration. Over 100. And more on the next block, and the one after that.

And when you rode the subway to work every morning, and after every stop a new homeless person entered the car to work it for change, then went on to the next car. Sometimes, one of them working the train from front to back and another working from back to front would enter the same car from opposite ends at the same time, and get into a screaming argument, sometimes a fistfight, over who was going to work that car.

For those who did not become desensitized, it became unbearably depressing. I have seen newspaper stories about people who attempted suicide, allegedly because they were so depressed over not being able to help the huge numbers of homeless. I suspect them of being drama kings or queens, but there are so many homeless in NYC that the story is at least plausible.

Myself, I concentrated on helping homeless who squatted in abandoned buildings and made improvements, thereby establishing a constructive claim to ownership under New York State law. I used to help them file claims and see that all the right forms were correctly filled out and turneed in on time, with all required documentation. I figured I at least knew for sure that these were seriously trying to better themselves, and deserved what help I could give. They were usually working homeless, with regular jobs.

 

[brianspencer66]

Here in NYC you have lots of free weekly newspapers in boxes on almost every street corner. Ive seen guys selling these free papers in the subway and people actually buying them! And not to get off subject but there seems to be a proliferation of born agains who are most likely slightly ill people who want to preach in a crowded rush hour subway car early in the morning. Imagine going to work in the morning half asleep and all you want is some downtime to read your paper mabey drink your coffee and here is this nut screaming about fire and brimstone and how we are all doomed to damnation.

But I too wont say im desensatized there are lots of people that need help its quite obvious, but it is quite overwhelming and something is very wrong when the richest country and the richest city in the world allow this type of thing to get worse ever year.

 

[Mastertank1]

Just to inject a note of unpleasent reality;

Many people are fond of the phrases "surely a country as wealthy as the USA" or "Surely a city as rich as New York" can do this and accomplish that and alleviate the other.

And each of those statements is perfectly true; IN ISOLATION FROM ALL THE OTHER SIMILAR STATEMENTS.

BUT...start adding them all up, and you will rapidly get to a point at which the truth is that no, even with all our riches we just cannot pay for one more program without cutting back or cutting out something we're paying for now. The wealth is vast, but it is NOT unlimited. We could afford a lot that we're not doing, but we cannot afford to do everything.

 

[Goodieluver]

Call it irony but

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hKIJu9iqyQA

 

[brianspencer66]

Many people are fond of the phrases "surely a country as wealthy as the USA" or "Surely a city as rich as New York" can do this and accomplish that and alleviate the other.

And each of those statements is perfectly true; IN ISOLATION FROM ALL THE OTHER SIMILAR STATEMENTS.

BUT...start adding them all up, and you will rapidly get to a point at which the truth is that no, even with all our riches we just cannot pay for one more program without cutting back or cutting out something we're paying for now. The wealth is vast, but it is NOT unlimited. We could afford a lot that we're not doing, but we cannot afford to do everything.

I was once on public assistance and as you may know they now put people on welfare to work I believe its called a WEP program. Mainly they send people out to work in city parks or for the transit authority cleaning subway cars. Now what these people are really doing is taking the place of trainsit workers who make 15 dollars an hour doing the same thing or parks workers making 12 dollars an hour. Why not a common sense solution perhaps and have these same people do this work on a test basis for perhaps 6 months and if they work out put then to work for the city with a real living wage. And let say someone is homeless for example? There are plenty of skilled people willing to volunteer their time in a city of 9 million who can show the homeless things like computer skills. There is plenty of empty classroom space in the evenings or weekend or even in the public libraries. This does not have to be expensive and costly to the tax payer. As things are riight now the system makes it hard for people to leave the cycle of homelessness or welfare and I really think its just a matter of common sense to solve some or alont but perhaps not all of the problems we have with the cycle of homlessness. As things are now with lots of corporations moving their workforce overseas lots of us working people are really in truth 1 or 2 paychecks away from being homeless ourselves. When you have airlines claiming bankruptcy and workers having to work more hours in order to make ends meet while the CEO gives himself a pay raise of millions well there is a serious problem in this country same thing with companies like Enron where thousands lost everything because of corporate greed. I beleive there is more than enough money here to start giving back and it all does not have to come from government sources.

 

[Mastertank1]

It IS a good idea...

I was once on public assistance and as you may know they now put people on welfare to work I believe its called a WEP program. Mainly they send people out to work in city parks or for the transit authority cleaning subway cars. Now what these people are really doing is taking the place of trainsit workers who make 15 dollars an hour doing the same thing or parks workers making 12 dollars an hour. Why not a common sense solution perhaps and have these same people do this work on a test basis for perhaps 6 months and if they work out put then to work for the city with a real living wage. And let say someone is homeless for example? There are plenty of skilled people willing to volunteer their time in a city of 9 million who can show the homeless things like computer skills. There is plenty of empty classroom space in the evenings or weekend or even in the public libraries. This does not have to be expensive and costly to the tax payer. As things are riight now the system makes it hard for people to leave the cycle of homelessness or welfare and I really think its just a matter of common sense to solve some or alont but perhaps not all of the problems we have with the cycle of homlessness. As things are now with lots of corporations moving their workforce overseas lots of us working people are really in truth 1 or 2 paychecks away from being homeless ourselves. When you have airlines claiming bankruptcy and workers having to work more hours in order to make ends meet while the CEO gives himself a pay raise of millions well there is a serious problem in this country same thing with companies like Enron where thousands lost everything because of corporate greed. I beleive there is more than enough money here to start giving back and it all does not have to come from government sources.

And has been tried several times.
Unless it is TOTALLY funded from private sources, the people who run the government agencies that are supposed to help the homeless see to it that all such programs fail. If all else fails, they just dry up the funding by sending it to less sucessful programs. With the programs that are completely private funded, the goverment types try to kill them off by not referring any clients to them. Why, you ask, would the goverment workers behave this way? Two reasons; One, they fear that a decrease in the number of people their programs serve would lead to firings, layoffs, or downsizing that might cost them their own jobs.
Two-beureaucratic empire building. They are constantly trying to build their own liitle cog into a whole gear train, and bitterly fight anything that takes away from that goal.
It works like this; a lowest supervisory level worker has two workers under him.
If he can convince his next-above supervisor that he needs four instead of two, he gets a promotion to one level up.
If the first guy's boss gets the guy under him that promotion, then HE has to get promoted to level three, because he now has a level two under him!
And so it goes, at all levels. It's disgusting, and actually doing anything for the people they were hired to help is the first casualty. Actually doing their jobs is never allowed to interfere with building their petty little empires.