In Utah, homeless used to restrict their AO to the downtown area. There is a homeless shelter there and free food and free clothes. Salt Lake City has one of the most generous homeless support systems in the nation, and it may attract homeless from other states (my speculation). Of course, homeless people make the downtown area a vile and disgusting place. Not only are they unsightly and smelly, they also defile everywhere they go, including the public library where they sit on the chairs (yuck) and pee their pants (triple yuck). The homeless also like to kill each other with rocks or bricks from time to time, with an occasional “put him on the railroad tracks” murder. A couple of years ago there was a heinous disembowelment murder committed by a homeless person.
During the last year I have noticed that the homeless are no longer confined to downtown. Now they are at nearly every freeway exit, as far as 12 miles from downtown.
Personally I give nothing to the homeless. I give nothing to panhandlers, I give nothing to the homeless shelter. My philosophy is that if we provide for them, then others are motivated to follow the same course.
But now we have these disgusting guys who have not showered for a year with shopping carts full of crap all over the Salt Lake valley, driving away legitimate business and defiling everything. Two days ago, one tried to intimidate me at a stop light. I guess he thought that if he stood really close to my car and looked in the window at me with his begging sign in hand, I would be motivated to give him cash, but that’s not gonna work.
I wonder if the proliferation of the homeless is just another sign of how terrible the Obamaeconomy is, or if there is another cause.
Interesting,
I was in SLC, Utah yesterday & noticed the same thing. I was with a client who had a court appearance & there were a noticeable increase in homeless in the courts & around the AO etc.
Of course it’s contributing to homelessness. 40%+ of Americans have lost their fortune/money from the OBVIOUS flailing economy. There are no jobs available other than propped up FED or “grant jobs” to that are a stop gap to make the numbers not look so bad for the election. Pretty obvious. Manufacturing jobs have been moved OCONUS as part of this economic choke for control.
There is a scene in Outlaw Josey Whales that parallels a lot of what is transpiring today if you watch it closely. There’s a lot of truly epic lines in that film.
"When the Silver stopped the town stopped thriving …, sound remotely familiar ?
“Governments don’t live with each other, people do”…
The Target is American Exceptionalism & Patriotism 100%.
As far as what can or should be done is to stop sending so much money of foreign aid programs or CONUS pork barrel spending & get these people into job training, rehab programs like we have had in the past that make a real difference towards making inroads into changing the homeless situation. I would personally prefer to see these programs implemented than money going to Lompur etc. or funding for projects among Lesbianism among Seagulls (that is legit BTW) etc et al
Tell them to get a job? As if it’s easy for homeless people to get jobs, considering most college graduates can’t even get one.
Or just shoot them all? Wow, that would be easy! They are disgusting and wretched people, just rounding them all up and executing them would be easy. Hell, it would lower the unemployment and homeless rate substantially! :rolleyes:
It would be interesting to see you lose your job, house, and everything you own and be tossed out in the street, unable to find work, and see how you cope with it.
As a LEO I deal with homeless people every day at work. The guys you see with the shopping carts are most likely the kind of transient that chooses to be homeless. Most of them are mentally ill. There are programs out there to get them housing and jobs but they dont want that. If you live on the street you have no responsibilities.
We have one local transient who was a nuclear scientist of some sort before. Made over 150k a year. One day he said fuck it and told his family he was leaving. Now he lives behind a 7-11 and is drinking himself to death.
Also a lot of the beggers on the side of the road are not homeless. You can actually make some decent money begging on the side of the road. Its not uncommon for us to go kick someone off the corner and then watch him go to the nearby parking lot and get in their car and drive off.
Dang man. You are seriously combative. I won’t pretend to speak for 500, but from reading his post it seems as though he is merely making an observation and asking a general question as to the causality of the issue.
There was a news anchor years back from one of the SLC channels that did it as a story. He dressed like a bum and panhandled outside of the building where he worked. He made more in one day doing that than he makes as an anchor! Pretty sad.
They are everywhere it seems. More and more, every exit from the parking lot of any shopping area is covered. I avoid downtown so have not been there in a while so cannot comment on the conditions downtown.
However, in SLC, there are lots of private and public programs to help these people if they want it. There is no need to stand outside Wal-Mart and beg with a sign in order to eat.
There are regular drives to help the Utah Foodbank restock their pantry, and all sorts of faith based groups and other volunteer food as well as labor to run the shelters and meal lines.
I am not sure what you can do about the mentally ill. In the past (pre-Reagan) they would just commit them to institutions, as I understand it. Now they cannot do that easily without the person’s cooperation. (I am not commenting on how it should be, just how it was / is).
I certainly wouldn’t be out pee-ing my pants at the library or standing on the street corner looking for a handout. I would first and foremost be going to my extended family and then my church for help. If I did not have help to find there, I would avail myself of the private and public programs for shelter and nourishment and do my best to find a job. Pounding the streets, filling out applications, whether temporary or full time work. I would be proactive in trying to change the situation.
But a lot of the time, unfortunately, they seem to want to be that way.
A couple of months ago while sitting in the parking lot of my local bank eating my lunch I watched a guy sitting at an intersection with a sign “Need Food, please help”.
Quite often, people were stopping and giving him money. However, in only the 30 min that I was sitting there, 2 different people stopped and gave him a large back of McDonalds food.
Both times, he waited for a few minutes, took the food over to the garbage, and tossed it in, then went back to sitting there with his sign.:rolleyes:
I have never been in that type of situation and I hope to God that I never am, but I do know that I damn well wouldn’t be taking advantage of people like that if I were.
I agree that the elimination of mental institutions were a bad thing, not a good thing. Spend the effort to clean them up and make them decent, don’t force people like that to try and fend for themselves.
During college I volunteered 2 years at a privately funded Christian homeless shelter for families. That doesn’t make me an expert on homeless statistics nor causes, but I did help a lot of people directly, hands-on, and saw a lot come through the shelter. Because I did intake, I heard a lot of the reasons for being there, and had to try and filter out those who didn’t need to be there. Whatever the % of the homeless that may be homeless by choice, there’s also a significant and too-large % that are there through ‘no direct fault of their own.’ Abused mothers with kids who are on the run and have no family to help, teens from broken or abusive foster homes who have nowhere to go, situations like that. It’s more common than some might think, especially lately.
There are plenty of the homeless that really need help (as opposed to lazy-ass panhandlers who want to live under a bridge, bug you for handouts, and are frequently addicts). The point is to tell the difference between the “deserving poor” versus the rest, and then help those who really need it, and who will try to help themselves if you give them a chance.
If anybody wants to actually help the homeless who need it rather than bitch about the ones who don’t, there are plenty of opportunities to make a constructive difference, such as:
Volunteer time, money, or food/clothes/stuff at PRIVATELY RUN (often religious) shelters that have a good reputation in your area, and
Contact state/local legislators and urge that government funded programs require ACCOUNTABILITY from those who get assistance. For example, no program should be doing anything that “enables” self-destructive behavior or encourages dependency (like giving food repeatedly to able-bodied men who refuse to work, or giving needles to drug addicts). The private program I volunteered in required able-bodied men to work. Government funded programs should do the same or be scrapped.
I have seen this first hand. Years ago I worked in a machine shop. One guy literally had one leg and was on crutches. They paid him a good wage for that time just to stand there and watch one machine and punch a few buttons occasionally. That’s all he had to do. The guy literally got the equivalent of union wages in a non-union shop; he made more than me.
He quit that job because he said he made more money (and tax free) hanging around an exit ramp with a “will work for food” sign.
I never again gave money to someone with one of those signs.
I figure if someone has the courage to come up to you and actually ask for money, then they probably really need it. Standing there with a sign is nothing.
I used to live in Long Beach CA. My neighborhood was filled with homes that were valued at over 500,000.00$ at the height of the real estate bubble, not that they were really worth that much. We had a rehab and social service business that was buying the homes in the neighborhood at a good rate. They would buy a house, put 4 people per bedroom in and tell the little old lady next door that the rehab was their neightbor. The little old lady would take any offer the business would make and run away. The city welcomed the homeless because they would bring in federal money. The survey of the homeless was done by the local agency that made money on the amount of homeless it found, confilcit of interest?
One of the last days before I retired and stopped driving thru the town, I stopped at a KFC for dinner before going to work. A young (early 20ish) black man came up to me at the drive thru window and banged on my window and demanded money. The server was trying to hand me food thru the other window and I was trying to take it so I told the punk to FO. He made hand gestures that I took as give me money, I tod him again , No and drove off. He was standing there in disbelief that I wouldn’t give him money.
I now live in Fullerton, CA. The downtown is a dining mecca, people come from all over SOCal to eat. The city doesn’t like the crowds, just the tax dollars. They just built a three story parking structure for the train station and all the clubs. We had one homeless man beat to death by the PD and three officers are going on trial for that. The chief retired on a medical and three of the city council were recalled for the death coverup. I see very little homeless in the downtown area
The treatment of homeless will bankrupt any city that tries to help them, the more you give the more will come. Long Beach has a park where the homeless are bussed in from surrounding cities during the day and picked up to go back to the shelters at night. Church groups from LA and Orange county will go to this park and hand out food to the homeless, when they run out the homeless demand they bring more.
I dont feel any sympathy for the homeless, I have had too many beg for money or steal from me to care about them any more. If one of my relatives needed a place to stay, I would give them a room. If they needed treatment, I would take them to the doctor. I realize that some homeless don’t want a room or treatment, that is their desire. I can’t or won’t feel guilty about that.
I cant help but always feel sorry for them because i know one just like that. A brother of my dad’s friend. This guy was some kind of a genius mathematician. We’re talking Einstein and Hawkins stuff. Then he kinda went Unibomber minus the bombs. Started living like a hermit and eventually became homeless and refused any help or contact with people