busyThe first solution to homelessness is simply to put people in homes. Society needs to guarantee people a place to stay, if it doesn't want them camping out and perhaps freezing to death. Shelters don't count, and neither does any other kind of monitored living. Those interventions drive people away from help. They need their own apartment or house with the same freedoms and dignities as everyone else.
The second main thing the homeless need is income. That means jobs for those who can work, which is a lot of them; or some kind of public assistance for those who can't work. This is much cheaper than leaving them on the street to subsist through begging, stealing, or emergency services.
The third thing they need is resources. That includes everything from supplies to health care. Most homeless aid focuses on very small, short-term things like food or emergency medical care. That might keep people from dying right in front of you but it does not solve the problem. You have to make it possible for them to build up the components of a healthy life.
And you have to do all this in ways that the homeless population will find attractive because it meets their needs, and not shy away from due to strings attached. People don't risk death from exposure for no reason. If they're sleeping in the snow, it is because there are not enough shelters and/or those places are literally worse than death.
It's something I write about, periodically, because some of my characters are homeless. Danso and his family were homeless for months. Turq has been on the street even longer, and it's hard for him to accept help even when the offerings are safe and not judgmental. So I keep an eye out for ways to address these kinds of problems. How do you meet the emergency needs, how do you give people a route back into society, how do you get people back into homes, and especially how do you fix the root causes that drive people into homelessness in the first place? Solutions exist, a few places are using them, but most just can't be arsed.
Re: Well...
September 30 2016, 05:27:20 UTC 4 years ago
Thanks for sharing. It's helpful to remember that people have their ups and downs, sometimes very down.
>> (Not as much as I used to, and these days I consider it useful pain most of the time, rather than meaningless suffering, but it still happens.) <<
I'm glad it's getting better, and that the trend is toward more functional days than miserable ones.
>> I just usually hide on bad days. <<
I think most of us do that. Certainly there are days when I can sit up, but I'm snarling at everyone, and getting online to snarl at people in comments is not very helpful. Because most people filter what they post, it can look like everyone else is fine and you're the only one who's all fucked up, unless you get into forums or on blogs where people talk about the fucked-up parts of their lives.
Re: Well...
October 3 2016, 20:26:42 UTC 4 years ago
But yeah. Some days, I just have to accept are days where I sit quietly and rest.
Re: Well...
October 4 2016, 00:03:37 UTC 4 years ago
A variation of use that I find far more helpful is what appears in people with variable conditions. Frex, my digestion is iffy at best. Most of the time it's usable, which means I'm high-functioning; I can't do a much as someone with a healthy body, but I can do as much as I ever can with this body, which is enough for most everyday purposes. Sometimes my body goes out of whack, which means my focus has to shift from things like yardwork and writing for pay to devoting most of my energy for managing the input-output process. Suddenly I'm low-functioning, and that can last for a couple days or a couple weeks. So I routinely describe my ability level in a range: functional, mostly functional, semi-functional, marginally functional, nonfunctional. This tells people around me approximately what shape I'm in and what things are feasible to do -- or not -- today. I know a lot of other folks who use something similar because they need to communicate an ever-shifting level of ability to their families and/or coworkers. It's not meant as a permanent diagnosis, but one could reasonably average out that kind of description based on an activity log.
My main beef is how little disability support has anything to do with the person at heart. Most of it is about faking normal. This is a problem because health care is supposed to be about optimizing someone's health. There are things I can do to boost my functionality, and that includes acknowledging the low-function times when I have to quit trying to do normal stuff, pop the hood, and figure out how to fix whatever's gone wrong with my innards this time. Almost all of that is stuff I've learned on my although, although I confess that a couple of the most important elements were courtesy of a few good doctors.
Who controls language, largely controls thought. I think we might get better results if we put more effort into coining our own terminology based on our needs, insisting on using that, and refusing to acknowledge the rest. It starts a lot of fights, but the information that gets through is more accurate. The autistic community coined one of the best rules: "Nothing about us without us." That should be a groundrule for every group maintenance ever.