Go to Our Family Clean and Sober House
- Add a comment
- Go to Who are the Homeless?
Dear MakeToShort, You Wrote A Very Good Post Concerning Homelessness...
but I must correct you on a few things.
First, I have no idea what part of the country you live in, but there were plenty of people living in the streets in the 1970s, and even in the 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, etc.
Just to give you one example, there were plenty of people who were homeless -- by choice -- in the 1950s and 1960s -- but it is just that they were not called "homeless" back then. They were usually called "hobos," "bums" and "transients."
And there were literally thousands of men who lived that way back in 1970s and before -- and most of them lived as they did because they were "free spirits" who had made decisions to separate themselves from general society.
As a matter of fact, I was born in 1946, and grew up in Los Angeles. And during the 1950s when I was a little boy, the neighborhood I lived in was teeming with "hobos," "bums" and "transients who road the rails."
So far as a "shortage of affordable housing" for the working poor, such a situation does not really exist.
Are you not familiar with Section 8?
Well, many, if not most, individuals and families with low incomes live in "Section 8 housing" which allows a family to pay on $200 or $300 a month for a $700 a month apartment. Specifically, the tenant pays the landlord only $200-$300 a month and the remainder of the rent is paid to the landlord by the government (consisting of a combination of local, state and federal funds). To be even more specific, the amount that the tenant pays for rent each month is based on his or her income, or the combined family income.
I am not contending that there is not a "homeless problem" in America -- however, the problem is not nearly as critical as most people believe, or have been led to believe, it is.
And I worked in the system for quite some time, and one of the things that I learned is that a great many people in this country want to "live under the stars" -- and a great many others desire only to live in institutional settings. They have abosolutely no desire to live on their own in a house, apartment or SRO hotel.
The truth is, the dynamics of the "homeless problem" is very complicated and the problem is only going to get worse. And that is largely because an evergrowing number of people are finding it very difficult to deal with the demands posed by "modern life."
More and more are finding it easier to "live under the stars" than to put up with all the, er, shit, that we have to put up with in today's increasingly complex world.
posted by
Feenix
on June 5, 2003 at 9:44 AM
| link to this | reply