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Amazon Begins Housing Homeless In Seattle (jeffreifman.com)
reifman writes: Amazon announced that it will commit one of its buildings to housing 200 Seattle homeless people for the next year, allowing a nonprofit organization to oversee the facilities... With more than 4,505 living on the streets, Seattle's mayor recently declared a homelessness emergency... More than 45 people died on the streets in 2015, heroin related deaths in King County are at a 20-year high, and neighborhoods are up in arms about homeless drug use, crime and people living in cars.
The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site. (The nonprofit will pay the site's utility bills).
The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site. (The nonprofit will pay the site's utility bills).
When Amazon goes to reclaim the property to begin building, they'll be reviled for taking the shelter away...
>> The Seattle Times notes that Amazon's construction on the lot isn't scheduled until 2017, so they reached out to the homelessness nonprofit to temporarily offer its use, hoping to later offer the group a second site.
my experience (volunteer) with a private business being the owner, but not operator, of a homeless shelter, opens up a "deep pocket" lawsuit probability.
One out of 50 children or 1.5 million children in America will be homeless each year.[4] In 2013 that number jumped to one out of 30 children, or 2.5 million.[5] There were an estimated 57,849 homeless veterans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
The gap between poor and rich is ever increasing.
People are not homeless because they are poor. They are homeless because they are mentally ill, usually combined with alcohol and drug abuse.
We need to address both poverty and homelessness, but they are two very different issues.
To be fair to these people, I'm starting to wonder why I work when I could collect welfare instead.
Go apply for welfare, and you will find out. It is unlikely you will qualify. Neither do most homeless people. America spends far less on welfare than most people realize.
You should apply for SSDI instead. Just say your back hurts.
That isn't always true. There was a time when I was poor, sleeping in my car and taking showers at a friend's flat. The job I had then was best I could find at the time but it didn't pay enough to be able to afford a place to live. This was in the San Francisco bay area, where rents are extremely high. After living that way for some time, I eventually saved enough to move to a distant location that wasn't so expensive.
As far as I know, Seattle is even more expensive, so it's entirely possible that people are homeless because they are poor.
Not always. Money exhausted by medical bills and a disabling condition after 30ish years as a software dev.
I came very close to homeless and use no drugs and drink little alcohol. Don't generalize.
People are not homeless because they are poor. They are homeless because they are mentally ill, usually combined with alcohol and drug abuse.
We need to address both poverty and homelessness, but they are two very different issues.
This is often true, and the homelessness/poverty cycle is a vicious circle. Mentally ill often self medicate with alcohol and drug abuse, which can quickly lead to being unemployable (if they weren't already unemployable in some fashion), and being unemployed they have little or no money, certainly not enough to afford housing. No housing means you're gonna be living on the street, which can exacerbate both mental illness and a state of being unemployable. It's an ugly cycle, very difficult to extricate yourself from once you've fallen into it.
There are, however, some people who genuinely do want to be homeless, but in general they're a fraction of those who are homeless. Most would prefer to have shelter and some sort of place to call home.
As far as Seattle goes, I've been seeing more and more people hanging out at freeway entrances/exits looking for handouts in the last few years. I don't recall seeing nearly as many of them 10 years ago, or even 5. Homelessness has definitely gotten worse here as far as I can tell.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The Panama Papers puts the lie to everything you say about it being better in private hands.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"Tough love?" How is that going to help someone who is homeless because they had a catastrophic illness and lost their job and home? How is that going to help the disabled find a job in this economy, so that they can actually get a place to live? How do you practice "tough love" on the mentally ill, on those who can't keep a job because of side effects of the drugs that help their illness - it's not like taking away their meds is going to suddenly make them employable? How do you practice tough love on a rape victim who has been afraid to get on a bus for a decade so she can look for a job or see the doctor? Or those who are long-term unemployed because they and all their co-workers have been RIF'd and now they are all competing for a much smaller pool of jobs?
It's not like everyone can suddenly become uber drivers to make a few bucks. If they have a car, they're sleeping in it.
I mean, sure, it sucks for them now and it's a terrible shame and stuff, but at what point do you say, "Damn, this person needs to make some better decisions!"
Better decisions? Hey, let's extend that idea. I should have decided to have better parents because they gave me juvenile diabetes. And if I had decided not to be friends with a high school classmate that I didn't know had a long history of schizophrenia, I wouldn't have gotten PTSD when he killed his old man in front of me. And if I hadn't read Dr. John Money's fake research that claimed gender identity was mutable (a whole generation of doctors bought into this before he was exposed as a fraud) I could have decided to transition earlier instead of conforming for as long as I did.
Yep, all bad decisions ... I really need to make better decisions, and that will magically fix everything! It's all my fault. Random chance had nothing to do with it.
Fortunately an amazing therapist who has experience dealing with transsexuals with PTSD who are also victims of sexual assault helped me realize that it's not all my fault, some things are truly random events that you cannot protect yourself from or find a reason for when you look back on them. Not everything happens for a reason, not everything is predictable or preventable. That makes the universe a bit scary, but it's reality. Victim-blaming is seen as ugly for a reason.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
As a follow-up:
The woman who is afraid of going on the bus for more than a decade never told anyone else about the rape by her ex. She told me 2 years ago. The stigma is that bad, I couldn't convince her to come with me to get some help at the hospital.
Another woman can't walk alone on the sidewalk of any street with traffic since she was hit by a car that ran a stop sign and banged her up pretty good. She couldn't even cross the street to go to church. Her life is basically limited to a few blocks where there is no traffic. Other than that she stays home alone.
Neither of these women were using illegal drugs or booze. So, if they were to end up homeless, what bad decisions did they make? They have withdrawn so far from the world, in self-defense ... they wish they weren't that way, but they have no control over it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Good luck getting them out of there when you're ready to repurpose the property.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Uhh, the Panama Papers is a leak about how corrupt government officials are hiding their wealth, not about how private enterprise is mishandling what should better be public enterprises.
Plus, you have 20-40% of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America who are transgender and whose families threw them out because of their gender status. And later, they get denied apartments because they're transgender.
America is a hard place if you're different. I can only imagine what it's like for someone to be in this position.
http://homeless.samhsa.gov/Sea...
You are welcome on my lawn.
In the bronze age, Aristotle wrote in Ethics: "The poor will always be with us." (To be repeated a few times in the Christian story books much later). So this is a rather old problem.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Nah. We have an all volunteer military and if they weren't quality people we would have a draft to get enough of them in. As it is now, we are turning people away.
The issues with vets has to do a lot with transitions from a very structured life to a very non structured life and wars or experiences from wars they were in. It isn't exactly easy going from knowing you could die at any time to relative safe environments with some of the self preservation behavior resurfacing. This causes conflict in some situations where there should be none and behavior that seems strange in others.
I worked with a guy who would duck slightly when loud sharp noises happen. It was more like a startled twitch but we knew it was reaction from Afghanistan and he really wanted to find cover. He would soon after appear a bit anxious and become short tempered. If it wasn't for a supervisor being a veteran too, he probably would either have lost his job or be well on the way to it. We had several vets there (I don't work there any more) and most were perfectly fine while some had issues all were good people.
Yes, but I wonder how many homeless people and people currently struggling to make ends meet could be helped more efficiently through state and national public services if Amazon and other corporations paid their fair share of taxes? The US poverty and homelessness rates are almost as shocking as the amount of money that is being taken out of public circulation (i.e. to serve everyone's interests) so that a small number of oligarchs and bankers can play on the Wall Street casinos.
Remember back when George Lucas built low income housing? He did it out of spite. His neighbors wouldn't let him build a film studio, so he built the housing instead and there was little they could do about it. (I haven't been following it, I don't know if his neighbors finally gave in.)
I wonder if something similar is going on here. Building housing for the homeless is a great way for someone rich to spite his neighbors. They can't complain because the area is zoned for housing and objecting to helping the homeless makes them look bad. Meanwhile you know very well the housing is going to drive property values down and cause lots of nuisance for your neighbors.
My parents threw me out because I was 18 and graduated high school.
In a country with hundreds of millions of people there are a lot of "one counterexamples".
There's more to conservatism than fiscal policy. I read right-wing media, and they often regard benefits as a moral problem, because they come from taxation. It's the government saying 'I'm going to steal your stuff and gunpoint and give it to someone who did nothing to deserve it.' They admit homelessness is a problem, but the protestant work ethic makes it clear that giving someone resources they didn't work for is out of the question - unfair to the giver and degrading to the recipient. It's quite common to see benefits described as 'government slavery' because it deprives people of the dignity of work and independence. Rather than redistribution, the conservative approach to poverty is to increase jobs by removing all the regulations that hold back industry - like environmental protection laws, the minimum wage, mandatory employment benefits, health and safety regulations, and so on. This will then create lots of new jobs. Not good jobs, they admit that, but a person working twelve-hour shifts packing boxes and making just enough to live hand-to-mouth is still a person living independently and free of government control, which is morally far preferable to a person living in benefit slavery off of the hard work of other people.
Or it might simply be for PR. Amazon has some land, they have intent to use it for something profitable in a year but until then it's just sitting idle. A homeless shelter costs almost nothing to run and makes the company look really ethically-driven, which means public goodwill and thus both higher sales and more political influence when lobbying. It's a good investment. They can quietly close it down in a year when it's time to build whatever business structure they have planned.
Yup. They tell me that I'm sane and I've made sure to get second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. opinions on it. (I go talk to a therapist fairly often when I'm home, I find it good to have someone objective to talk to.) Yet, I was a functional addict and alcoholic for years. I would literally leave meetings and shoot up in the bathroom. I kept rigs in my office. I was into Fentanyl (80x stronger than heroin) so I could wear a patch if I had to travel. I also drank. I drank for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We had a bar and a pool table in the back of our home office. I used it often.
I functioned just fine. It wasn't really a problem. In fact, I did quite well. It was when I retired that something broke in my head. I didn't actually use more drugs or drink more alcohol (I don't think) it's just that my body/brain somehow knew it didn't actually have to function any more. I turned into a sloppy drunk and was nodding out and drolling on myself with a rig in my hand and blood staining my trousers. My neighbor, I've mentioned her many times, used to come check just to make sure I was alive - she's the same person I call my house cleaner 'cause I pay her and that's what she does. Sometimes she lets me pretend to be the boss.
Anyhow, it was weird. It's like my brain flipped a circuit. I was no longer a functional alcoholic, I was just a drunk. I was no longer "chipping." I was a junkie. I put shitloads of money in my veins and up my nose - obscene amounts. Like, numbers that would scare people. I've tried to figure it out, using averages and average street prices (I tended to buy in bulk) and the numbers are too shameful for me to actually mention.
But it was something about the no longer needing to be functional, no longer having people depend on me, no longer having a company to keep afloat, no longer having to worry about money, no longer having to worry about appearing to be "normal." That just snapped. I went, without changing usage quantities, to dysfunctional and junkie stage. (Gotta be honest, there were some good times, good times indeed.)
And yes, they insist that I'm sane. I started the alcohol as a kid and the opiates while in my early teens when I broke an ankle and then a wrist in short succession. At first it was the codeine and that warm blanket feeling. Then I pretended that made me sick so they gave me stronger stuff - but I kept the first script, and it just worked its way through that. They didn't do much testing in the military so I kept on going - the corpsman was my friend. Then, 30 years later, I'm strung out and puking and shitting at the same time trying to quit. *sighs* Never again... I don't ever want to go through withdrawals again.
But yeah, they assure me that I'm perfectly sane. I'm not sure that I agree with them so I keep getting second opinions but, so far, they all tell me that I'm not just sane but that I'm pretty much the definition of sane. I'm not sure how they come up with that considering the drug and alcohol abuse/addiction but they're the experts and I'm the junkie.
I did do rehab, by the way. I was on a monster dose of Suboxone for quite a while but I've been weaning myself off of them. I haven't actually taken any in a while now but I have been smoking a bit of weed and I'm in Florida so I can't admit to it but there's all sorts of Bolivian Marching Powder in the area.
They're quite convinced that I'm sane. Three out of the four voices in my head seriously disagree with the sentiment! ;-)
Hmm... I should probably post this as an AC but, alas, I am not a coward and I'm always suggesting that people accept responsibility and be accountable. It would be hypocritical for me to post this as an AC. Well, that and my particular posting style would likely give it away. So, here it is in all its glory.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Have you ever been homeless? Because you sound clueless. Are there social services? Yes, if you fit certain categories. Women with children top the charts (as they should). Out of work men, not so much.
Moving and getting established in a new area takes.. *drumroll*! ... MONEY. What good does it do you to hitchhike to a lower cost area if you don't have money to afford shelter there? Zero!
Also, ponder why it's cheap in other areas.. perhaps because THEY aren't so economically amazing themselves and there might not actually be any jobs, or the jobs available never quite match your qualifications. Sorry you're too old, oh you're too educated, oh you don't have the right qualifications, oops you're inexperienced/overexperienced.. etc etc.
The problem with homelessness is it's pervasive and its mutability. It's not a problem with one quick easy tweetable answer and a lot of people want the homeless to just go away more than they want a solution to homelessness. Gotta have somebody you can look down on after all.
Aristotle didn't know jack shit. Even what we call poor today is 1000 times richer than he can even imagine.
So effing what? The rich today are 1 billion times richer than he could ever imagine. It changes nothing. The poor are poor by our standards, not Aristotle's.
This argument that the poor aren't reaaaallly poor is some conservative nonsense to justify being tightfisted a-holes incapable of empathy. It's the modern equivalent of the welfare queen myth.