By Michelle Chen Want to Feed the Homeless? Be Prepared to Pay the Government for the Privilege "Quality of life" laws are criminalizing compassion in the United States. But erasing homelessness from public spaces doesn't solve the problem. Homeless people, by definition, have nowhere to go – but now in many cities, they have even fewer options. While real estate developers tout “green space” and the economic “revitalisation” of urban landscapes, it’s the sidewalks, parks and plazas that have become hostile territory for the poor. City lawmakers are trying to “clean up” the streets by barring homeless people from parks, shunting families into overcrowded shelters and, in some places, making it a crime even to help the homeless. Last week, when a 90 year-old activist got arrested for feeding local homeless people at the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, his outrage pointed to a nationwide trend of criminalising compassion in the United States. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, since the start of 2013, 21 cities have imposed measures to restrict people from sharing food with the needy in public. In downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, for example, churchgoers have been prohibited from distributing food to homeless people in a local park in a residential area. In Raleigh, North Carolina, local humanitarians have reportedly been banned from giving meals to the needy in city parks without first getting a temporary special permit that costs some $1,600 per weekend. Meanwhile, local governments have used “quality of life” strictures as a pretext for barring homeless people’s public presence. About a third of the cities surveyed by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty have sought to destroy homeless dwellings by prohibiting “camping” in public – a 60% increase since 2011. About the same percentage of cities also ban “loitering” and some explicitly prohibit sitting or lying down in certain public places – presumably just to make sure the homeless don’t get too comfortable. While a city can profit from the fines, fees, tourism revenues and real estate investment generated by commodifying public space, the ultimate cost is borne by those who can least afford it: the impoverished and the homeless. These days, even those who reach out with a simple act of charity are punished for their “misconduct”. But these regulations aren’t about maintaining “quality of life” for the local community’s residents: the laws are simply about colonising the commons to make it safe for the rich, typically to the exclusion of others. Their proponents are using the allure of social harmony to paper over the shame of massive inequality. The anti-homeless crackdown is just the latest episode in the long history of the battle for common space. Governments have always deployed “nuisance laws” to marginalize unruly people whom the affluent disdained as an environmental blemish: beggars were rousted, vulgar gathering spots like “bawdy houses” got busted in “vice raids”. And today, low income tenants get policed at every turn, while their communities are systematically displaced by development and zoning policies that fuel gentrification. The authorities have a point: some elements of urban life do make the streets seem disorderly, even chaotic. But simply erasing them from the landscape degrades the color and vitality of the urban social fabric. More dangerously, by excluding working-class people from common spaces, cities scrub their streets of evidence of the real human condition without solving any actual social problem – just the appearance of one. Handing out food to the homeless is certainly not a long-term solution to homelessness or chronic hunger. But eliminating charity isn’t magically going to make homeless people opt for a different lifestyle. The choices of the homeless are constrained by the absence of social programs, healthcare and income support that people need to find permanent housing and stability. Policies that criminalise the mere sight of homeless people uphold a social order driven by racial and economic inequality and social alienation, while privatising what few shared resources we have left. As millions struggle with joblessness and stagnant wages, many low-income households are just one medical emergency or missed rent payment away from homelessness. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, amid soaring rents, extremely low-income families face a deficit in the supply of affordable housingof roughly 4.4m affordable units. Meanwhile, the supply of subsidised public housing has tumbled by about 10,000 units per year. This widespread instability is the reason why more than 600,000 people nationwide were without a home on a given night in 2013 – a quarter of them children. Many could be served by welfare, mental health and transitional housing programs, but they are isolated from the social service infrastructure and now they’re being shut out of parks and shoved off the streets. There is, of course, a more straightforward way of eliminating homelessness: providing them with homes. The Housing First approach runs on the philosophy that homelessness is primarily a housing problem, and that housing is a human right. The first step is to satisfy the immediate need for stable shelter, and then supplement that with strong long-term supportive services – from case management for someone seeking drug treatment to placing someone in job training, or just helping someone pay her first security deposit. Housing-focused programs have proven successful in significantly alleviating homelessness in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Seattle, and Housing First been shown in various studies to limit the time that people spend in jails, shelters and hospitals. And, under this approach, homeless people aren’t arrested or banished from sight: they get access to stable housing and supportive social services. Taxpayers win, too, as long-term solutions eliminate costly short-term interventions and emergency room visits. If this common-sense solution seems absurdly obvious, remember why cities resort to exclusion and policing in the first place: we’ve grown accustomed to seeing walls and fences as the only solution. After generations of trying to make “undesirable” people vanish from the public’s midst, too many privileged people no longer even recognise the signs of desperation that surround us. We’ve forgotten what our own humanity looks like.
In Washington, DC, you used to be able to go out into one of the downtown parks at lunch and relax and maybe eat your lunch. Few would risk it now, as downtown parks are overrun with the "homeless", most of whom are drug or booze abusers and many with severe psychiatric problems. Women are afraid to even walk through these parks. The stench from public defecation is overpowering. Do gooders from outside the city still stream in and draw vagrants to feeding stations on a daily basis. Then, full of admiration for how wonderful they are, they get back into their vans and motor off, leaving the city's workers and residents to deal with the aftermath. It's easy to write op-eds demonizing people who try to make cities livable for all. Some are thoughtful. Others, like the ones DB posts, are just ridiculous class hatred attacks on the evil "rich" for having the temerity to expect to be able to use a park their high tax bills pay for.
Raleigh has a similar problem in a downtown park known as Moore Square. Do-gooder advocates regularly feed the homeless in Moore Square. The homeless litter, defecate, urinate, and leave used drug paraphernalia all over the park while scaring anyone else who wants to relax or use the park. The situation is out of control as outlined in many local articles. The town council keeps proposing alternative feeding locations so they can "take back the park" to no avail... Raleigh parks director: Moore Square feedings 'out of control' http://www.wral.com/raleigh-parks-director-moore-square-feedings-out-of-control-/12929555/
If they were camped out across the street from your house, I'm guessing you would see it differently. Liberals are very compassionate with other people's property. They tend to have an aversion to eating their own cooking however.
This situation is not unlike the illegal immigration debacle. If you don't enforce your borders, you don't have a country. Deciding who comes in and stays is basic to sovereignty, despite the fact that there are many sympathetic people all over the world who really really would like to come here and live off us. Similarly, if you let the most dysfunctional people in society take over a city, you really don't have a city. You have anarchy. The compassionate thing to do is not to enable their street lifestyle. It is to insist that they abide by some minimal standards. Cities have to strike a balance between doing what they can to accommodate them and get them on a more productive track without being a magnet for more of them. Typically, that involves moving them out of downtown areas and putting them in an out of the way location where they can be housed cheaply and services provided for them. No one wants halfway houses in their neighborhood, and who can blame them? Of course, much of this is the direct result of liberal lawsuits that forced states to deinstitutionalize mentally ill people. It's a tough balance. You don't want people being warehoused just because they are eccentric, but I fail to see how it is compassionate to have mentally ill people living under freeway ramps.
Number Of Homeless Children In America Surges To All-Time High: Report | By DAVID CRARY and LISA LEFF SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged in recent years to an all-time high, amounting to one child in every 30, according to a comprehensive state-by-state report that blames the nation's high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence. Titled "America's Youngest Outcasts," the report being issued Monday by the National Center on Family Homelessness calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013. The number is based on the Department of Education's latest count of 1.3 million homeless children in public schools, supplemented by estimates of homeless pre-school children not counted by the DOE. The problem is particularly severe in California, which has one-eighth of the U.S. population but accounts for more than one-fifth of the homeless children with a tally of nearly 527,000. Carmela DeCandia, director of the national center and a co-author of the report, noted that the federal government has made progress in reducing homelessness among veterans and chronically homeless adults. "The same level of attention and resources has not been targeted to help families and children," she said. "As a society, we're going to pay a high price, in human and economic terms." Child homelessness increased by 8 percent nationally from 2012 to 2013, according to the report, which warned of potentially devastating effects on children's educational, emotional and social development, as well as on their parents' health, employment prospects and parenting abilities. The report included a composite index ranking the states on the extent of child homelessness, efforts to combat it, and the overall level of child well-being. States with the best scores were Minnesota, Nebraska and Massachusetts. At the bottom were Alabama, Mississippi and California. California's poor ranking did not surprise Shahera Hyatt, director of the California Homeless Youth Project. The crux of the problem, she said, is the state's high cost of living, coupled with insufficient affordable housing. "People think, 'Of course we are not letting children and families be homeless,' so there's a lot of disbelief," Hyatt said. "California has not invested in this issue." Hyatt, 29, was homeless on and off throughout adolescence, starting when her parents were evicted when she was in 7th grade. At 15, she and her older brother took off and survived by sleeping in the tool sheds, backyards and basements of acquaintances. "These terms like 'couch surfing' and 'doubled-up' sound a lot more polite than they are in practice," she said. "For teenagers, it might be exchanging sex for a place to stay or staying someplace that does not feel safe because they are so mired in their day-to-day survival needs." Near San Francisco, Gina Cooper and her son, then 12, had to vacate their home in 2012 when her wages of under $10 an hour became insufficient to pay the rent. After a few months as nomads, they found shelter and support with Home & Hope, an interfaith program in Burlingame, California, and stayed there five months before Cooper, 44, saved enough to be able to afford housing on her own. "It was a painful time for my son," Cooper said. "On the way to school, he would be crying, 'I hate this.'" In mostly affluent Santa Barbara, the Transition House homeless shelter is kept busy with families unable to afford housing of their own. Executive director Kathleen Baushke said that even after her staff gives clients money for security deposits and rent, they go months without finding a place to live. "Landlords aren't desperate," she said. "They won't put a family of four in a two-bedroom place because they can find a single professional who will take it." She said neither federal nor state housing assistance nor incentives for developers to create low-income housing have kept pace with demand. "We need more affordable housing or we need to pay people $25 an hour," she said. "The minimum wage isn't cutting it." Among the current residents at Transition House are Anthony Flippen, Savannah Austin and their 2-year-old son, Anthony Jr. Flippen, 28, said he lost his job and turned to Transition House as his unemployment insurance ran out. The couple has been on a list to qualify for subsidized housing since 2008, but they aren't counting on that option and hope to save enough to rent on their own now that Flippen is back at work as an electrician. Austin, due to have a second child in December, is grateful for the shelter's support but said its rules had been challenging. With her son in tow, she was expected to vacate the premises each morning by 8 a.m. and not return before 5 p.m. "I'd go to the park, or drive around," she said. "It was kind of hard." The new report by the National Center on Family Homelessness — a part of the private, nonprofit American Institutes for Research — says remedies for child homelessness should include an expansion of affordable housing, education and employment opportunities for homeless parents, and specialized services for the many mothers rendered homeless due to domestic violence. Efforts to obtain more resources to combat child homelessness are complicated by debate over how to quantify it. The Department of Housing and Urban Development conducts an annual one-day count of homeless people that encompasses shelters, as well as parks, underpasses, vacant lots and other locales. Its latest count, for a single night in January 2013, tallied 610,042 homeless people, including 130,515 children. Defenders of HUD's method say it's useful in identifying the homeless people most in need of urgent assistance. Critics contend that HUD's method grossly underestimates the extent of child homelessness and results in inadequate resources for local governments to combat it. They prefer the Education Department method that includes homeless families who are staying in cheap motels or doubling up temporarily in the homes of friends or relatives. "Fixing the problem starts with adopting an honest definition," said Bruce Lesley, president of the nonprofit First Focus Campaign for Children. "Right now, these kids are sort of left out there by themselves." Lesley's group and some allies have endorsed a bill introduced in Congress, with bipartisan sponsorship, that would expand HUD's definition to correlate more closely with that used by the Education Department. However, the bill doesn't propose any new spending for the hundreds of thousands of children who would be added to the HUD tally. Shahera Hyatt, of the California Homeless Youth Project, says most of the homeless schoolchildren in her state aren't living in shelters. "It's often one family living in extreme poverty going to live with another family that was already in extreme poverty," she said. "Kids have slept in closets and kitchens and bathrooms and other parts of the house that have not been meant for sleeping."