I am utterly bewildered as to how this would do any good. Especially when the definition of a homeless person, ignoring the adjective applied to the noun, is 'an indigent “whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive assistance.”'
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Foolish, in my opinion. As one late-night talk show host pointed out (in not so many words)... CAN'T give the person needing food on the corner a sandwich but CAN give the (ahem) hooker on the corner your life savings...
Posts: 1355 | Registered: Jul 2006
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That's probably the biggest rip on the current mayor of Vegas, Oscar Goodman. He and his administration have been notoriously unfriendly to the homeless.
Posts: 202 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I've seen this in other places, and some fairly reasonable arguments for it, including property value, crime, and keeping the homeless in a specific location to keep track of them, particularly the dangerous and the insane ones.
It seems horrible at first glance, but given what happens to areas that let themselves be overrun by the homeless, I can't really argue with the logic. They don't advocate starving the homeless, just limiting generosity to a certain location to keep property value everywhere from collapsing. Las Vegas, in particular, has an invested interest in keeping its streets clean, safe, and free from harassment for the drunk and the scantily clad.
This'll probably be an unpopular position, but I'll try to find other arguments which convinced me. I've had experience with both sides, both working with a Catholic charity to shuttle around food and drink to homeless colonies in LA, and shaking my head to rows of beggars as a broke college student working two jobs, and I can see why some cities might want to implement this policy. It's all but official in most places anyway -- I've never heard of a major city without its own Skid Row, and all this would do is keep high-rent areas from becoming homeless haunts themselves.
Posts: 3293 | Registered: Jul 2002
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That just makes me want to load the car up with sandwiches and drive to Vegas to deliver them to the homeless.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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It makes me want to load up my car with Las Vegas homeless people and take them to ketchupqueen's house Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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Well, we don't have much room, but I would at least feed them. And my community is a little more tolerant of our homeless.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:Originally posted by ketchupqueen: That just makes me want to load the car up with sandwiches and drive to Vegas to deliver them to the homeless.
Me too... Sandwiches and soup... and some free juice too. Or maybe milk as it's healthier...
Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I wouldn't give an alcoholic a bottle of wine, or a drug addict a rock of crack. Sure, they may want the drug, but you're not helping them by giving them their poison.
If you enable a homeless person to remain homeless, give them no incentive to try to be self-sufficient, no incentive to stop living in a gutter and spending their money on drugs and alcohol, you're not helping them.
Yes, provide shelters. Provide drug treatment. Provide inexpensive clothes and job placement help. But giving a homeless person money or food generally doesn't help them in the long term.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
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quote:Originally posted by MightyCow: If you enable a homeless person to remain homeless, give them no incentive to try to be self-sufficient, no incentive to stop living in a gutter and spending their money on drugs and alcohol, you're not helping them.
Yes, provide shelters. Provide drug treatment. Provide inexpensive clothes and job placement help. But giving a homeless person money or food generally doesn't help them in the long term.
There are a lot of homeless people that aren't just drug & alcohol addicts - some just got there through bad luck or wrong choices.
I had a nice conversation with a homeless person a few weeks ago. She had been married to her well-paid husband for about two years, one day, he runs off and takes everything. She can't pay for the house with no income, so it gets lost - now she's out on the streets trying to live while she pulls herself together and looks for a job. While we were talking, she gave away the food I gave her to another homeless person who she figured was much worse off than her.
True, food and money may not help in the long run, but it helps keep them on their feet and alive while they try to get help for the long run.
Posts: 22 | Registered: Jun 2006
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In Las Vegas, most of the homeless live in the general area of "downtown", which isn't the same place as The Strip. Downtown is where the oldest casinos are, as well as the city and county government buildings. I have given money to people begging around the courthouse on more than a couple of occasions. I do this when I have cash to spare, which isn't all that often. If I have it, I'll give it to them even if I'm pretty sure they're completely lying to me. I figure it's no skin off my nose.
Mayor Goodman, though, has been trying to revitalize the downtown area; it's his single highest priority (and it includes, by the way, the goal to attract a major-league sports franchise to the city). I'm sure he doesn't have anything against homeless people personally. It's just that they're an obstacle to his vision for the future of the neighborhood. How can you modernize downtown and attract investors and visitors if you've got a bunch of grubby homeless people around?
The funniest thing was during the Salt Lake winter Olympics, when he accused Salt Lake's mayor of bussing his homeless population down to Vegas to improve SL's image. That was a riot.
Posts: 202 | Registered: Nov 2005
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They have to survive the short-term in order for any long-term help to be worthwhile, though.
quote:If you enable a homeless person to remain homeless, give them no incentive to try to be self-sufficient, no incentive to stop living in a gutter and spending their money on drugs and alcohol, you're not helping them.
Not all homeless people even have the choice to be self-sufficient or get out of the gutter...40% of the homeless are people under the age of eighteen. How many are too old to work? How many are physically disabled? How many are mentally ill? Even for healthy adults, you can't get a job, in most cases, without an address; and you can't get a place to live without a job...what are you supposed to do? Die?
Someone made the point in the comments thread on that article...what's the punishment? Community service? So many hours the person has to work at, I don't know, a food bank, or a homeless shelter? Just a little ironic.
Posts: 283 | Registered: Jul 2006
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quote:Even for healthy adults, you can't get a job, in most cases, without an address; and you can't get a place to live without a job...what are you supposed to do? Die?
What makes you think that you can't get a job without an address? Even if the catch-22 you present here was accurate (it's not, not in my experience), there are other ways to earn money if you're interested.
In this part of the country, any able-bodied person could walk up to a construction job site or two and ask if they had any work they needed done. A lot of contractors or subcontractors would hire them for the day, even if just to do some lifting or trash pickup, and pay them in cash afterwards. If the person proved reliable, they'd likely get hired on fulltime.
This isn't guaranteed to work, but you wouldn't have to try too many times before you hooked trying this strategy. No address, no SS needed.
Lots of these contractors hire illegals anyway, and will provide both transportation and housing for them (in the right market, anyway).
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Lot of "if"s in these scenarios where homeless people pull themselves up.
If you don't have enough money to open a bank account, you pretty much have to get paid in cash, since you won't be able to cash a check. Some construction or crop-related jobs may be willing to pay that way, usually under the table, but there's still a matter of finding those jobs, and getting to and from them if you can find them.
For some, getting a shower and respectable looking clothes to look like someone an interviewer- even a fast food manager- looks like they want to hire seems both a near-insurmountable task and an impedement to getting enough food to not be hungry or finding a halfway safe place to sleep through the night. A lot of people aren't going to do it.
And in any case, I'm not hearing that the people behind these proposals (or the similar ones that were going through Seattle a while back) are saying "we need to spend more money on shelters, education, 'pull-yourself-up' programs, and making sure the affected individuals are aware of these programs." It sounds a lot more like "These people are an inconvenience, and we want them to go away, so we'll just make it difficult for them to exist."
Yeah, some people might find this an incentive to get out of homelessness. But some people are going to die. That's the bottom line, and no defense of this policy pretties it.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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The homeless people in my community are mostly mentally ill (but harmless) people who were forced out when they shut down the state mental hospitals. They aren't a danger to themselves or others, so they don't end up hosptialized. But they can't hold down a job, and they have no family or family who can't or won't take care of/provide for them. So they end up on the streets, collecting recycling and asking for help and mainly dependent on the kindness of strangers for their safety.
It's sad. I feed them whenever I see them and whenever I can. I don't begrudge them living in otherwise unoccupied spaces in our community. They don't cause problems, and they are generally quiet. There's one woman in particular whom I see looking wistfully at my babies often. I am trying to teach my daughter to be polite to her and others like her, and to help her whenever possible. If I buy her a hamburger or chicken sandwich or give her a juice box or granola bar, I take my kids with me (and sometimes have Emma hand it to her.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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