I went to the Assembly Homeless Public Hearing today. There were about 40 people in the audience and about 25% were wearing masks most of the time.
Let me highlight what I took away from the meeting. These were the three issues that seemed to be problems that were raised for the Assembly to try to resolve or at least understand.
- Measurement - HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) - They've come a long way since I took the Olé 8 week homeless class. To plan for the future they have to count the homeless. They have to be able to identify the different kinds of homeless - those who have lost a job or had overwhelming medical expenses; those who are working but don't earn enough; those who are chronically homeless, perhaps addicted or mentally ill or badly physically disabled. Several people mentioned a man with no hands who is homeless.
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These aren't problems unique to this data base. Competing interests for which data to include, how to integrate the data, and usefulness to end users are always problematic. And the more you add the slower it all gets and harder to use.
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- Obstacles Homeless People Face Getting Service
- One speaker mentioned that people get to her agency with complaints of not being helped by other agencies. An Assembly members asked why the others couldn't help. The answer was: Different agencies have different grants which often restrict who they can serve - maybe women with children, youth, long term homeless, disabled. Or they are funded to provide a specific service.
- The data base is supposed to help coordinate these kinds of problems, but, as I understood it, it's easier to find programs than to track individuals as they use services of different programs
- Problems Getting Appropriated Funding To Service Providers
- The Assembly has appropriated monies for different agencies, but the process of actually getting the money to them is slowed down by federal requirements. The slide below was put up in part response to this question, but I don't see that it addresses the issue in detail
A number of agency heads or high level employees answered questions from the Assembly.
David Rittenberg is the Brother Frances Shelter Program Director
[Sorry, I was sitting on the left and got only profiles.]
There were slides that showed numbers of homeless in recent years in summer and winter. There were predictions of the numbers of beds needed this winter. Most of the slides about how many homeless at the meeting are at this url.
But I left sort of scratching my head. What was the goal of this meeting? Was it for the Assembly to get information? Most of this they should already have. Was it a public education meeting? There wasn't much public there. (Maybe it was televised, I didn't check.) For me the three bullet points above seemed to be the things the Assembly members found most helpful - the measurement issues, the obstacles to getting service, and the hold up of the appropriated money getting to the service agencies.
But the critical issues - what's going to happen when the federal funds to keep Sullivan Arena open as a homeless shelter end in August? - well I didn't see much progress toward answering that question.
You are missing the elephant in the room. You have a lot of people who do not want help and they are the ones that are causing the problems. Drive by Northern Lights and Seward Highway any day. They use to have laws against vagrancy and loitering that need to be enforced. Back in the day they use to have something called 'tough love'. The city needs to set a space aside for these folks, you can do your drugs and drink all you want you just can't do it on the street (or have sex at the corner of Denali and Northern Lights in the middle of the day}. Yes I know many of these people have mental problems but it does not give them the right to do what ever they want where ever they want. By not getting them off the street you are just enabling them to kill themselves a little quicker ( I think one got hit by a motorcycle yesterday). And, I am getting tired of having to adjust my life cater to their whims and life style. There are parks and trails I cannot go to anymore. Went to Titlewave and someone has to take you to the bathroom because they keep them locked as well as a lot of other places. What I call the 'homeless industrial complex' is not going to solve this.
ReplyDeleteOliver
Oliver, I've debated whether I should respond to this or just let you have your say unchallenged. But I do recall someone talking about elites who had special privileges that allowed them to get vaccinated before others. Things like access to computers and internet so they could make appointments.
ReplyDeleteNow it seems you're looking at the result of a society that sends people to war and doesn't give them the mental and physicalhealth services they need to function when they get back. A society that wants every pregnancy to result in a live baby, despite the mother's wishes, but then doesn't take care of the unwanted kids that result. A society that has gotten rid of lifetime employment in companies, pensions, unions to protect workers, and has automated people out of jobs.
I sat through eight weeks of classes on homelessness in Anchorage a couple of years ago. The Muni and Rasmuson and a bunch of organizations that deal with homelessness and the services that the homeless need had put together a system to actually count and track the homeless. Not an easy task. They were developing a system to help people get on their feet, despite the governor relentlessly cutting the state budget and refusing to raise new revenue for basic services people expect.
But you use the old view and call them vagrants and loiterers. Half of them are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs and/or alcohol to self medicate. The rest are victims of the new economy - they had a health crisis that wiped out their savings and ability to work, or they've been working at jobs that kept them living from one pay check to the next. And we live in a society that lures people to buy what they can't afford - through relentless advertising and credit cards with usurious interest rates.
These are human beings who just can't keep up with the pace of modern life. I thought you were sympathetic to those without a college degree and who didn't have access to computers and internet, the poor. But not all of them I see. Rather than treat them like criminals we should provide them the education, health care, and social services they need to get off their addictions, to help with their mental health problems, get them skills for working and managing their money. Not simply jail them for violating vagrancy rules.
Many people hate the homeless because the homeless remind them of where they themselves could be if they got severely injured in a car crash or if they lost their job. Or if they got a mental illness, or all of those things. These vagrants as you call them are by-products of the US economy, the throwaway people. They're not just here, but all over the country. There are around 2000 of them in Anchorage. We can help them out humanely.
But we have to consider the whole picture of why the US produces so many homeless and fix that system, not simply blame the victims of the system.