I'm Sick of Hearing about "The New Face of Homelessness"

I'm Sick of Hearing about "The New Face of Homelessness"

It doesn't have a new face, it just has a lot more faces

Homelessness does not have a new face. A lot more people are on the street but they are not "a better class of people." People who were living without homes before have similar stories, the economy has just made those stories a lot more common.

In America, health related issues and medical bankruptcy have been major causes of homelessness for decades. Any human being can become sick or get injured and if he loses his insurance he has a pretty high chance of losing stable housing, too.

The lack of affordable housing and lack of a living wage have also created such issues for a long, long time. Job loss is another long-time culprit.

Decent, hard working people have never been immune to losing their homes. Yet every other article out there on homelessness stresses this concept of "the new homeless" or "the new face of the homeless" - as if something has changed about the people rather than the economy.

People have this very limited idea of working poor citizens. They think of the bums and panhandlers who can be found in any given American city as the "old face of homelessness" when, in fact, those people have never been representative of the majority of people living on the street. You could see about 15-30 panhandlers or obviously homeless people in the streets of Chicago, even ten years ago. It sounds like a lot but if you consider that, at the time, there were about 6,000 living without housing in Chicago it wasn't even one percent of them who were behaving like the stereotypes people associated with them. Less than one percent of a population is not its face. The real face of homelessness has not changed. No one ever noticed the majority of homeless people because they looked just like anyone else.

What people are labeling as "the new face of homelessness" and "the new homeless" are really just the real face of the situation and the reality of folks with nowhere to live. People living without housing are just what they describe, people who are down on their luck, people just like you and me in lousy circumstances- and that is how it has been for a long time now.

photo by H Dominique Abed, SXC

Advice from an Old Pro: Where to Sleep

I Guess We Could Call It Urban Camping for the Disadvantaged

When I had no home I was constantly tired. My thoughts were consumed by a burning need to sleep somewhere safe. I usually couldn't find any such a place.

Eventually, I learned how to avoid most dangerous and uncomfortable street-sleeping situations. I wrote this article both to share that information with others who might need it and to enlighten homed people as to the conditions people without suffer.

Maybe the shelters are turning people away, you got assaulted in or near the shelter too many times, or you just don't like getting scabies with your night's lodging. Whatever the reason, you may need to find somewhere else to sleep. I am in no way representing these suggestions as either legal or even necessarily all that safe. I'd like to share some ways I learned to cope with the inconveniences and terrors of sleeping in the rough while living on the street.

Read The Article

Keep in mind that these were actions of desperation. I take no responsibility if you choose to use any of the ideas in the post.

• Where I Sometimes Slept While Homeless
• https://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/2016/05/where-to-sleep-when-youre-homeless.html
  You can read about some of the places I slept while homeless when I was trying to avoid getting beaten up, harassed, or bothered by police.