IGX

I'm as sympathetic to the true poverty and inequality that our competitive system of economics produces, but these were obviously people who just chose to live in the parks and beg rather than go to school or work.

The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is Philip Mangano, who, since he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the programs of twenty federal agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a magnetic presence, who got his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. In the past two years, he has crisscrossed the United States, educating local mayors and city councils about the real shape of the homelessness curve. Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he argues, allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it’s a problem at the fringe it can be solved. So far, Mangano has convinced more than two hundred cities to radically reëvaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/No ... 76843.html

Barrionuevo was found with $19,000 cash at the time of her arrest. Police believe the money came from bottle collection over the years, according to sources.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:A different attitude seems prevalent here, but I don't get it.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:In San Diego with the family for a few days, and I'm semi-surprised to see the nice parks that are filled with homeless campers. Saw the same thing in Seattle and SF.

What's the deal? This generally doesn't fly in most other cities I've been, where there's a police-enforced attitude of "We made this place to be a public park, not a campground/social center for homeless people."

A different attitude seems prevalent here, but I don't get it.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:In San Diego with the family for a few days, and I'm semi-surprised to see the nice parks that are filled with homeless campers. Saw the same thing in Seattle and SF.

What's the deal? This generally doesn't fly in most other cities I've been, where there's a police-enforced attitude of "We made this place to be a public park, not a campground/social center for homeless people."

A different attitude seems prevalent here, but I don't get it.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:SD is a great place. If you're near Pacific Beach, Barrel Republic is a great beer bar.

Blaidd Drwg wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:In San Diego with the family for a few days, and I'm semi-surprised to see the nice parks that are filled with homeless campers. Saw the same thing in Seattle and SF.

What's the deal? This generally doesn't fly in most other cities I've been, where there's a police-enforced attitude of "We made this place to be a public park, not a campground/social center for homeless people."

A different attitude seems prevalent here, but I don't get it.

In Seattle, the Council have as much said their goal is to make homelessness so obnoxious and so repugnant and visible that people will be forced to act and or tolerate high levels of local taxation to fix it.

The opposite has turned out the be true as you'd expect.
This has resulted in a phenomenal loss of dignity for the disadvantaged and a disturbing amount of low level street violence and animosity towards the homeless.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:In San Diego with the family for a few days, and I'm semi-surprised to see the nice parks that are filled with homeless campers. Saw the same thing in Seattle and SF.

What's the deal? This generally doesn't fly in most other cities I've been, where there's a police-enforced attitude of "We made this place to be a public park, not a campground/social center for homeless people."

A different attitude seems prevalent here, but I don't get it.

nafod wrote:Three words:

Automatic sprinkler system

DikTracy6000 wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:In San Diego with the family for a few days, and I'm semi-surprised to see the nice parks that are filled with homeless campers. Saw the same thing in Seattle and SF.

What's the deal? This generally doesn't fly in most other cities I've been, where there's a police-enforced attitude of "We made this place to be a public park, not a campground/social center for homeless people."

A different attitude seems prevalent here, but I don't get it.

SF's parks have been campgrounds for homeless and vagrants for at least a decade, maybe two.

Turdacious wrote:

nafod wrote:Three words:

Automatic sprinkler system

During the 80's when the homeless problem in Portland peaked, downtown businesses used to hire trucks to clean their entrances every night with the idea being that a cold wet entrance would discourage the homeless from sleeping there.

Two other complicating factors-- women and children fleeing domestic violence and a shelter shortage.

climber511 wrote:Where do all these people go to the restroom? I would think local businesses would be overwhelmed and raising all kinds of hell?

Youth reported that their fear of sleeping on the streets left them vulnerable to sex and labor traffickers and to survival sex.
Securing housing was a primary concern for the vast majority of the youth we interviewed. Sixty-eight percent (68%) of the youth who had either been trafficked or engaged in survival sex or commercial sex had done so while homeless. Nineteen percent (19%) of all youth interviewed had engaged in survival sex solely so that they could access housing or food. This problem is even starker among those who are not sheltered. The incidence of trafficking among drop-in youth—sometimes called “street youth”—was high relative to the sheltered cohort: 24% were trafficked for sex, 13% for labor. Forty-one percent (41%) of interviewed drop-in youth had engaged in the sex trade in some way at some point in their lives. One-third (33%) of them had engaged in survival sex as either adults or minors. Many of the trafficked youth who were accessing Covenant House’s shelter programs said they saw the shelters as safe havens from their traffickers.

In 2013, Covenant House New York completed a study in conjunction with Fordham University which found that an estimated 25% of surveyed NYC Covenant House residents were victims of human trafficking or had been forced to engage in survival sex (trading sex for food or shelter).

According to a study conducted by LifeWay Network and Hofstra University, between 2000 and 2010 service providers in New York City interacted with more than 11,200 confirmed victims of human trafficking. The City of New York contains less than 50 dedicated beds to house survivors of human trafficking.

Traffickers use the lack of youth homeless shelter beds as a way to lure young people in and force them into exploitation. They tell them that the shelters are full and coerce them by asking “where are you going to go, why don’t you come with me.” Coercion techniques commonly used include threats of physical harm to the victim or their family. With threats like these, the naive and hopeful children are soon faced with the violence of forced slavery and prostitution. In fact, coercion is so powerful that if is capable of keeping a victim enslaved without any restraints or violence.

In 2008, a study from John Jay University found that as much as 50% of human trafficking victims in the United States were young boys.

A 2014 medical journal published by the University of Loyola Chicago found that 65% of human trafficking victims in the city of Chicago ended up in the emergency room during their time in forced prostitution. Over 90% needed serious medical help and came into contact with a health professional – or more accurately – were finally allowed by their pimp to seek medical treatment for their injuries.

LGBT youth, while already making up 40% of the runaway and homeless youth population in the US , are exponentially more likely to fall victim to human trafficking in the United States.

Alfred_E._Neuman wrote:Reading through some of Turd's studies is another stomach turning endeavor. We have an idiot in chief who claims that his experience as a businessman makes him somehow qualified to make decisions for a society. Seems to me that the point of any business is to get the most productivity for the least investment. I'd like to see the People Helped/Dollar Spent ratio for investing in social programs here vs. dicking around with our military empire in 130-odd countries and 800-odd bases.