Don't Feed The Homeless

This is exactly what I said was going to happen lol. I've only recently come back to FFXI and FFXIAH and I almost forgot for a moment how opinionated and personally driven these forums are lol.

Back to the original point of this post. When (if) you guys ever give to charities I bet you look for charities that shovel as much of your dollar to the actual cause as possible right?

I mean if 70 cents of your dollar goes to the starving kids with charity X when only 25 cents gets there with charity Y, you'd rather go with charity X right?

Apply this to LA and it's communities giving money to the homeless. If one is going to help one has the very same right to want to help as directly as possible. Perhaps the people of LA don't perceive filling their public spaces full of homeless people and perpetuating their self destructive behavior is a smart thing to do.

7 things noone tells you about being homeless

Just cause the whole thread reminded me of it

Terrible article. Some points of it were valid, but a vast amount were not even close at all.


What?............... no seriously what? lol.

I have to agree. that whole thing was terribly reminiscent of a 6-8 month period shortly after dropping out of college that I drank like a fish, & lived in my pathfinder. as crappy as that sounds or w/e, I was employed, & enjoying myself, really. I wouldn't call a 20 something dude all *** up on whatever & living in a vehicle homeless, he's just a goon at that point.

I loved the part where it's telling me I have to spend 150$ on a stove and camping gear. Best homeless advice ever. /endsarcasm.

True enough. Honestly from that side of the Atlantic the only experience I had with being homeless was through a good friend of mine that I helped through a rough patch.

So in general my view is that I prefer to side with compassion rather than be too harsh when not able to see the full picture.

I ate 6 dollar "tombstone" or w/e frozen pizzas from a bar. that was an ample amount of food for the day....

You're missing the point then, at least of the article. He touched on that at the end. According to him, and which I tried to verify but was unable to because the link was broken and I don't have the time at the moment to search for, only 16% of people are chronically homeless. A large sum of homeless (he claims three-quarters, but I'm apprehensive to trust such a generous number) are only temporarily homeless (1-2 months), and he was a part of the group known as "the hidden homeless" because he basically couch surfed and lived in his car. The fact still stands however that he was homeless. Just because his anecdotal experience doesn't line up with your perceived notions of homelessness (he has more authority than any of us on the matter based on first-hand experience) does not make it irrelevant.

Hence you were enjoying being homeless and eating liver killers:P Now you know why all the vanadiel adventurers are so thin^^

https://www.onecpd.info/resources/documents/2012AHAR_PITestimates.pdf

p. 4

You can survive for a good bit of time off 400-800 calories per day before sickness and severe weight loss start kick in. I want to say 3 months before health becomes an issue. That is if you are starting at a normal body weight and healthy though.

nonsense. I did the same damn thing. that's not being homeless, it's having a lack of direction, at best.

<3 Kara

If you are without a home Mosin, you are homeless.

if you are without a home, sit down, you're home.

:P

All I can say is, if we are not prepared to help our fellow man, at Christmas, then those people should not celebrate such a holiday with their families that is all about good will to all man.

Cliche, yes, but accurate, well let your conscience deal with it.

P.S. I have personally been attacked by 10 homeless people in the last 15 years in Scotland. This has not sullied my attempts to help them and I volunteer at the Salvation Army (Homeless Shelter) to help these people.

Now I don't endourse helping people in the street, on your own because that is just plain dumb, anyone could be a violent nutter.

Doing so in designated places is a safe option, that can be organized in places not near Home Owners homes (ie City center's) where you have a higher number of homeless people, this in turn allows you to help a larger number of people.

It also facilitates the policing of the ones who are violent.

I am fully in support of helping people, but in a safe responsible way. Also on Page 1, there was a situation where someone offered a Homeless crew roughly £10 Meal, instead of a £1.00, while I agree that was the right choice, ordinarily homeless people who just need food, will go to the homeless shelters and don't approach strangers for money, reasons for this are obvious, They have a source of food and are not starving and then just want to be left alone, where as SOME of those who beg and approach people for money are Drug Users, or people trying to prey on our sympathy to allow them to make 5~20x the minimum wage (min wage here is like £6.00 and some homeless people are making £50.00 per hour on street corners in London).

About the article Tymoris posted.

Cracked is a comedy news/weird article site that tries to provide some information in a comical way. It's not supposed to be an in-depth journalistic review.

ok that puts things into perspective. I'll shuddup.

hey! are you going to vote to secede from the UK? or is that all a bunch of nonsense I was reading? tell me more, my Scottish comrade!

*edit*

cause I got excited & wrote the wrong word

Several years back I was delivering auto parts for a dealership and one day had to go to another dealer to pick something up. On my way there, I came up to a red light and was eating a sandwich when this homeless dude was staring at me through the driver side window. I felt bad so i reached in my lunch bag and rolled down the window to offer him an apple. He looked at me and laughed then walked away. I thought to myself "what an ungrateful ***". About an hour later, I was driving back through and pulled up to the same intersection on the other side and I saw him standing there so I thought to myself, "im gonna fix this dude". I rolled down my window and yelled for him to come over and that I'd like to give him some money. He came running as fast as his feet would take him and when he got to my vehicle, I said hey man, I'd like to give you 5 bucks and he got all super excited. I said here, i wanna give you 5 bucks but you gotta break this 100 dollar bill. He said F'k you and walked away, so I said no, f'k you , you shoulda took the apple ***! Point is, they dont want your food, they want your money to go get drunk and thats it lol.

You're both ***.

I once gave a homeless guy a bottle of Grey Goose and the loser mixed it with store brand cran-apple juice. *** him. Next time he can have Aristocrat.

And you're basing this on personal experience, right?

Could always just get a cheap gym membership. In my area at least (and St. Pete is one of the most homeless populated cities in the area, if not the largest).

Gym membership at YouFit for $10/month would net you 7 day a week access to the showers, even if you touched a single weight in any of your visits there. Sure as hell beats a "I haven't showered in a week, let me get a motel for 50 bucks tonight so I can take one"

I volunteer now with a mission group that gives free health screenings to the homeless in my city. I've learned a lot since then. Yes, many times they want money. Sometimes they're alcoholics. Sometimes they are hard to sympathize with. But what I learned is, it gets under freezing her, most of the shelters in this town only allow a person to check in 3-5 days a month, give only so much food out, close at 5pm at half of them and that leaves people out on the streets for the majority of the winter. The city has made efforts to brush the homeless under the mat, they are not allowed to seek warmth in public places such as bridges anymore and they are to be kept out of sight. There are thousands of homeless in my small town, and I never knew.

I have to and will continue to have to sit through health screenings and consultation to give them information where they can be healthier, get support, and find shelter and food. Many times they smell bad, rant about their problems, and they seem hopeless, but every now and then we are able to actually help someone out. Someone who needed it. Who, because many people see homeless the same way many people on here do, would not have ever had the helping hand because they were turned away as "homeless alcoholic." When I began the volunteering, the coordinator told me that these people sometimes do not even come for the screenings, but because we actually talk to them. We listen to them. We look at them, and we ignore the bad. Because people won't even look at the homeless. We drive by and keep our eyes on the road. We take the long way around to avoid them. A lot of the times, they are lonely. They have no one. So even smiling at them, acknowledging them, can make the difference in their life.

Think about what has happened to these people. It is not as simple as picking yourself up. Majority of homeless come from poverty, and poverty has correlation with so many things especially from a psychology standpoint where depression and mental disorders are huge, which someone mentioned and I agree with, strike the majority of homeless.

So what if every time you try to help, it gets taken advantage of. There will come a time when it pays off, and even if these people seem "low" and "alcoholics" and "scumbags," their life will not amount to yours unfortunately. Continue being passionate and helping, keep your compassion, and be smart about how you help. Do not just give money out, and if they hassle you for money, then move on to the next person. There is people who need the food, the meals, the blanket, the winter hat, new shoes, anything to keep them surviving. And will gladly accept it.

I ranted.

Whoops.

Don't those usually require credit cards and or bank accounts, which require addresses ... etc.

Without proof of residence people can't even get identification.

The one major criticism I can make of that article is that the writer didn't seek out a shelter. Shelters do quite a lot to reduce several of the problems he lists, especially by providing access to things like showers, sinks, and toilets. They also tend to have associated kitchens that remove the need to be able to cook for oneself. The shelters in my city are networked together and getting a bed there (which does not involve fighting for a bed every night as some would indicate) also gives you access to counselors trained in a variety of subjects including job seeking, apartment seeking, child welfare, mental health, and addiction recovery.

He points out a lot of things that most people wouldn't realize, though. Getting into section 8 housing is pretty much impossible unless you're both female and you have at least one kid. Being a minority would also help but, again, only if you're female. Glancing at my city's housing assistance, the single men's access to public housing has been closed for over 5 years. SNAP/EBT is also pretty limited. It is possible to live for $200 a month as a food budget, but it would be a very limited sort of food (lots of high calorie/low nutrition stuff) and $200 is what a single person with zero income gets. If you're making $500/month by working part-time, your SNAP drops considerably. If you're making $1000 as a single person, you can't get any help. I'm sure anyone with a budget knows that $1000/month does not go far when you've got rent, utilities, etc. etc.

Some people stay in the system because getting out is really that hard. If you had a choice between having your basic meets being met by doing nothing and working 33 hours per week and not making enough to cover shelter, heat, and food together, it's pretty easy to see why some people opt for the former, even though the latter is a (in theory) a short-term problem.

On the other hand, my father is a physician and has told me that the first year he did his psych rotation, he thought he could help his patients. The next year when he saw the exact same patients with the exact same problem, he got suspicious. As it turned out, they'd lived within the system for most of their adult lives and the local psych ward could tell when winter was coming because the regulars would chuck a brick through a shop window or spit on a police officer to get locked up 'til spring. They had genuine mental illness (that they were refusing to treat, but that's a common problem even among functioning people), but they were also way too used to the cycle they'd fallen into. It's the exact same habit of failure that keeps petty criminals wandering back inside: they can't cope with the real world after they've gotten used to prison.

I work as support staff in a psychiatric hospital and my supervisor encourages me to connect with the patients when and if they strike up conversation. And they do it all the time, especially with me since I'm new. It's one of those facts of the human condition: we need other humans. It gets a bit chicken-and-egg about why someone ends up in a psych hospital or homeless (there's a lot of crossover), but lack of support and interaction with other people seems to be a big part of either causing it or perpetuating it.

In all seriousness though, tomorrow's thanksgiving, we should probably feed the homeless. -.-

Last year I volunteered giving out Thanksgiving dinners as part of a college event and holy ***did the turnout on the homeless turn heads. It was as if every homeless person in Manhattan converged on this giveaway.

Even the Tofurkey vanished.