I really liked this article.
Thanks, James.
PS: I also added that article to 'editors picks' section. It will stay there for at least a couple months.
-Oliver Wendell Hayes
Baltimore Homelessness
I was homeless for 5 weeks in my mid-30s in Baltimore and have been homeless since June of 2018. However, I have been gainfully employed during all of my periods of homelessness and have had the assets to get in out of the cold.
The cold is the number one enemy of the homeless, almost all of whom are men, many being middle-aged such as myself, many, unlike myself, unable to afford to get in out of the cold by patronizing a diner or coffee shop or to keep clean by using my employer’s bathroom...
A 7 minute read at:
Alienation Nation: Surviving Cultural Free Fall
We've spent a considerable amount (my wife and I) of our time and our money TRYING to help people that need a hand up - either getting ready to get kicked out of their rental home, or actually living on the street without a "place to go".
The folks who are actually in a house, with their family, and getting ready to get evicted for non-payment of rent, or getting the electricity cut off, are often decent folks, not addicts, and who have a job of some kind ... BUT their problem is impulse control. They have enough money to live on, except they spend $250/mo on smart-phone service, spend $200/mo on the Lotto (it's their retirement plan), have dogs and cats that eat more than they do, and they eat out about 8 times a week. They don't understand that people can live without all that, so they don't pay their rent and don't pay the utility bills and they can't figure out what happened.
In my area, there are empty rooms in shelters just waiting for someone to occupy them. HOWEVER, the shelters do not allow you to sell or shoot up drugs in the rooms, they do not allow you to smoke dope or tobacco or crack in the rooms, they do not allow you to be drunk and unconscious in the rooms, and they don't allow you to hump, sell, and beat up women in the rooms. And BECAUSE these guys "have to" do these things, they do them on the street, and are "The Homeless".
Amazing, these days, how in the cities, we have completely done away with hobos, tramps, hard-core unemployed, junkies, and winos. They're all gone. All that's left are "the homeless" ....
What do you think?
From my experience most homeless guys of my racial type have elected to get high or drunk rather than have a home, with a glaring exception being older black guys who get put out by women in places like Baltimore, where the shelters are so dangerous that men get raped! I've helped a number of such men get off the street via employment, which makes them attractive to a woman with subsidized housing, who usually kicks him out in short order as soon as his grocer money topped out at $12 an hour and he no longer looked like a better prospect than a drug dealer. The fact is, I could only offer 2 men of 40 on my roster enough money to keep a roof over their head, so the other 38 were still at the mercy of women they paired up with.
Fulltime employment—if you can get it, something I could only offer to 8 in 40 men—in service jobs often cannot secure an apartment. You have to know somebody like Sensei Steeve who will illegally rent you a room. I have found that my business connections saved me when I joined the homeless ranks. Guys that never had a connection other than government or a woman have no such options.