A few days ago, I was going out to eat with my roommate at chipotle and as we were walking in the doors, we passed by a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk in corner outside the restaurant. He did not disturb us at all and we proceeded to walk in to order our dinner. When we were standing in line, my roommate told me she wanted to buy that homeless man a burrito bowl because she felt bad that he was sitting outside a restaurant with nothing to eat. So, she bought him a burrito bowl, and as we were leaving she walked up to him and offered him the food. But to her surprise he actually rejected her, saying that he already had food and that he wanted money instead. It became pretty obvious to us that he was intoxicated in some way. My roommate was taken aback by this and preceded to leave the food next to him and walked away. Back in the car, she made a very interesting comment to me. She said “that is the reason why no one wants to help them. All they want is money for drugs”

On our drive back to school I thought a lot about what she had said. It got me thinking again about society’s perception of the homeless. How they are portrayed as drunks and druggies. From being in this class, we know that the majority of the homeless are neither drunks nor druggies. But the rest of the world’s knowledge about the homeless comes from their 2 or 3 second interactions with them on the streets. So when they run into a drunken man or one who appears to be strung out on drugs, they then assume that all homeless people are one in the same. One bad experience can deter people from desiring to help. This is the problem! One drunk man does not define the whole of the homeless population. Just like one white person does not define all of American or one NBA player does not define the whole national basketball league. We cannot confine ourselves to these constricted views of our world, but especially of the homeless. It is stereotyped views like these that hinder the rest of the homeless from being trusted to hold a job or receive assistance. It hinders them essentially from being able to be apart of society because no one wants to hire a drunk or a druggie.

This weekend i went to las vegas with my fraternity and when i was walking around las vegas during the day and the night sometimes off the strip and on the strip. I really noticed something that there really is not that many homeless people or of this population that seem to  be around this area. I saw a few homeless people and just watched them for a couple minuets just looking at them and their body language and what not it was really weird what came to my mind as i watched and observed several of them i thought about the homeless population here and how huge it is and how the homeless people here act. When i thought about that i just thought about how the homeless population or some homeless people will just come up to you and ask you for change or something and when i was in vegas i walked past a couple homeless people at different times and i assumed they were going to ask for some money or spare change but surprisingly they did not and this sort of made me think about the different cultures and the different areas and why most people here in California will go out of their way to ask and the people of las vegas really don’t or just do not want to bother people. This was just my observation of some homeless people on my trip to las vegas. Its really crazy because before taking this class i would never have thought about this and took my time out of my weekend to do this and actually be so curious about it.

After our class session today, I was interested to see how recently in Los Angeles, money was being allocated to homeless services. I found that measures to increase services and housing are the main recipients adding onto what currently exists in L.A. county.

Interestingly, L.A. has the highest number of chronically homeless in the nation.

Some updates to the plan include new housing programs, citywide mobile restrooms and showers, and overnight parking sites. City councilman Jose Huizar said that the services should be not just in areas like Skid Row, Hollywood or Venice, but throughout the city.

Much of the draw back to helping the homeless in a city like L.A. are the costs to focus on proposed projects and services and also finding the money to maintain them.

Chronic homelessness is the most costly with long-term housing solutions and mental health and substance abuse treatment.

Our class also discussed the method used in the state of Utah with Housing First which reduces the cost of providing for the homeless by more than half of what it costs to be in and out of jail and hospitals.

The new county homeless initiative in L.A., headed by Phil Ansell, reiterates, “A real bed is much less expensive than a jail bed or a hospital bed”.

With these costs in mind, should other cities model their funds in a similar way to L.A.? Will costs being determined by public officials be effective in regulating homelessness in the future? Should there be federal regulation on behalf of cities with the highest population of homeless?

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-city-county-homeless-plans-20160208-story.html

During class we discussed  Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance, by Lyon Callo, he sought out to explore homelessness in Northampton, Massachusetts. It became especially difficult to address the homeless youth. The shelter staff had all the wrong methods in embracing the youth, for example Hannah proposed that staff become parent figures that would help the youth address the reality of where they were at in life. The staff saw the youth lacking the skills needed to get a decent job, the staff failed to see the structural components of society (low wages, lack of employment, mental issues etc) The youth were resistant to the shelter rules and its attempts to normalize them. It would only further establish hierarchical relationship with the staff and holding them accountable for their personal homelessness will further push the youth away. Lyon Callo suggests that the staff take time to build a relationship with the youth and helping them figure out what they want, many of them had great disdain towards the American middle class. It was simply not their fault that the wages they received were not enough to pay for an apartment! Many youth like Susan were angry that the system failed them. She had experienced sexual and emotional abuse and actively sought out work, but even then she had no money for rent. Susan would end up pregnant and receiving family assistance. How will the chain of homelessness be broken? How will our youth survive while on the streets? Who will advocate for the youth?

I took the phrase “grow the middle class” from section 6 of Heise’s book and typed it into Google, and the second link that popped up was a list of the top 10 solutions for cutting poverty and growing the middle class.

Reading through the article there is definitely some overlap with Heise. Both talk about creating more jobs, raising the minimum wage, increasing earned income tax credit, reducing funding cuts to programs that help low-income families, supporting pay equity, and investing in high-quality childcare and early education. The four solutions talked about in the article that Heise doesn’t mention are: providing paid leave and sick days, establishing functioning work schedules, expanding medicaid, and reforming the criminal justice system.

Ten solutions may sound like a lot, but frankly these things aren’t that hard to do. Take supporting pay equity for example. This article believes closing the gender pay gap would cut poverty amongst working women and their families in half, and add half a trillion dollars to America’s GDP. With many of the presidential candidates focusing on economic growth it seems we can hit two birds with one stone by simply accepting gender equality. Having paid leave and sick days is something many countries have been doing for some time already and proves to be effective, most our own population disagrees with reducing government spending by cutting programs like food stamps that help low-income families, and reforming the criminal justice system can help over one million incarcerated Americans get jobs after their sentences.

Throughout our class I kept asking myself why nobody is doing anything about the issues of poverty and homelessness. But after reading section 6 of Heise and this article I ask myself HOW we haven’t made the changes needed to address these issues; its astonishing to me that we have all the information we need to make the necessary changes, we have people attempting to make those changes, yet somehow these changes are not nationally supported. I think this goes back to public awareness, if the idea that the impoverished are the scum of society can be changed I don’t think poverty would be an issue.

Top 10 Solutions to Cut Poverty and Grow the Middle Class

Why do you think people end up on the streets? This morning I was researching common myths people seems to have about homeless people because this seems to be such a hot topic in our course throughout the entire semester. I came along an article in the LA Times written by Adam Murray on December 31, 2015. Although this was written a few months ago the content seems to still be very true today. He discusses the four myths people have specifically about the homeless people in Los Angeles. The first myth described is the idea that these people want to live on the streets. Yes, there are people who do not want to take charity from others or do not want to live in shelters, but he describes that is different from wanting to stay on the streets. The second myth people make about homeless people in LA is that they want to come and be homeless in LA due to our nice weather. Although this is a reasoning many people homeless or not come to California it is not likely that once homeless these people made the trek out to California, most likely they already lived here prior to becoming homeless. The third myth is that most homeless people are mentally ill. As we have discussed in our class this is a reasoning for people becoming homeless, but not the only reason. The final myth he discusses and my personal favorite myth is that it is too expensive to get all of these people out of homelessness. In one of my previous blog posts I discussed how housing first is actually much cheaper in the long run than the expenses that arise with so many people living on the streets.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1231-murray-myths-about-la-homelessness-20160101-story.html

So i know that this really is not an article or a thing to help homelessness but was a very heated conversation i had with my friend today to dinner. I was talking to my friend about my classes and how i’m taking this course and i went into a lot of detail about it and what not and she was very intrigued by it. So talking more about the class we started talking about homeless people and her opinion on homelessness that it was all their fault and its their problem and how we should not help them and thats were i lost it. I told here that ya it might be their fault sometimes but a lot of the other times it is because its the way life runs its course and there are always natural disasters and after going in on this topic and conversation i sort of opened her eyes to a whole new way of thinking about it and talking about homeless people as another outcast but as equal human beings. I brought us how when i have spare change i always give it to homeless people to try and help them out in any little way i can, And my friend was so against that idea and i can in some ways see it as a bad thing she brought up to me how i can either feed into their addictions of some sort or i can actually really help them. She brought up the point of how when you give them money that you are just messing up our economical system and in someways i agree but i really do not understand how it is messing it up. Can some one please shed some light on this topic to help me better understand? I just wanted to sort of share another experience about how active conversations can change peoples opinions of others and also demonstrate a change in life.

So i was reading this article and watch a little video on the abc news website about a veteran that was living on the streets for countless years in Washington DC. Tony jones is an African American male that got a great opprotunity to make his life better and change his life around. The news reporter met with Tony months before and now he got a chance to meet with him again in a different setting now his own apartment. Tony lives in an apartment that the veterans association has paid for him to live in, Tony now has a job as a local delivery boy riding his bike for a law firm delivering messages from place to place. He has furnished his apartment stocked it with food and has turned his life around. The quote that he says in the interview is ” Im living large now. You know? Im living large”. This is crazy to think one day he was living on the streets with nothing now he is in an apartment with a solid roof over his head. They got a chance to talk to the veterans association that put Tony into his beautiful home and they said that in their city they have about 1,500 veterans on the street and they plan on ending homelessness in DC by the end of the year. I honestly think this is so amazing i know that not all homeless people are veterans but i feel like its only right that they are being helped because they risked their life on the line for our country and they do not deserve to be living on the streets, no one should have to do that. But like they say once you make a change in someones like people see that and it makes others want to help out.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/homeless-veteran-top-world-moving-apartment/story?id=37936686

Treat others as you would want to be treated”my mom used this phrase constantly growing up, so much that it became engrained in me, part of who i am. And a few days ago I witnessed something that made this quote ring even more true to me than before. I was at the park with 5 of the clients from the shelter. We had been there for only a few minutes when one of the clients, a loud, outspoken, lesbian African American girl, began loudly making fun of a boy who was acting a little different on the playground. This boy was about 9 years old, I would say, and seemed to be minding his own business while talking to himself. This girl began to be so rude, I could barely stand to hear what she was saying and I became embarrassed that I was associated with someone who had so little tact that they would call out someone who obviously, to me, had some form of a disability. She toned it down once the staff there scolded her, but she still continued to act in such a way toward him that I thought was so extremely rude. As we were leaving the park I began to think about how we all see each other. This girl obviously saw this little boy as something different and so for whatever reason she decided it was okay to mock him.

This seemed so strange to me because I thought her of all people, someone who from what I had gathered had been kind of out casted her whole life, would be sensitive to such a thing as mocking those who were different. All of this came together and I realized that most people who are different in one way or another don’t see themselves as anything similar to those who maybe different in a separate way. I wondered how she would take it if someone had outwardly made fun of her for being lesbian or even for being homeless. And maybe she had been taunted for that and that is why she does it to others, but this idea of treating others as we would like to be treated struck me in the that why do we put others down in order to bring ourselves up. We all want to be treated with respect so why can’t we do so to others?In our society we take comfort in knowing that there is always someone below us. We as humans never want to be the bottom of the “chain.” So to make sure that doesn’t happen we pick on those who we view as “below” us to boost ourselves up above.

But these ideas got me thinking that whole idea of a hierarchy within our society maybe the reason why we have and had such a prominent homeless population. They are the lowest of the low in our society, and as screwed up as it is, people feel comforted in the fact that there is someone who is worse off than they are. So maybe there is a psychological resistance to the banishing of poverty. Maybe society feels uncomfortable with the idea of leveling the field, and having little or maybe even no homeless population might make all of us on the same “level.” Who knows. But the one thing I can tell you is that if we treat each other with respect, there would be a lot less conflict in our society.

I have had many discussions with my friends and family about homelessness: what life is like, why people become homeless, and how we can combat the issue.  One thing that I noticed in almost every one of these discussions is that every time the word “veteran” is brought up, there is a shift in people’s tone.  Sure, having fought in war takes a severe toll on people, physically and mentally.  Even members of the Republican Party, who have a conservative and hands-free approach to dealing with homelessness and poverty, feel an obligation to give back to veterans, and make sure they are taken care of.

In some ways this is a good thing, that we are making sure people who have served this country have basic necessities (or at least saying we are).  But what  infuriates me is how it polarizes different groups of homeless people and glamorizes war.  If you fight, we actually care about you.  But any other circumstance by which you are homeless, we may or may not.  Isn’t domestic violence just as big of a toll as war a lot of the time?  What about disease or disability?  We are such a militarized country that we tend to put all of our energy to only homeless veterans, and classify others as undeserving or unworthy.