A new way of getting along

Now that the various services available to the homeless are making changes while staying within the new rules, things are getting back to a new kind of normal. That's a good thing for the homeless people in the shelters. For the unsheltered homeless people it's a bit different. While there are few homeless / poverty level services available for the unsheltered, they are slowly getting back to their mission but with difficulty.

In prior posts I spoke about the difficulties getting food with many food pantries being closed and transportation to get to the food pantries that were open was difficult to use when several bus routes were not running. That's just the beginning of problems facing the unsheltered homeless and the campers.

In my neighborhood alone there are 6 people in 5 camps. One fellow has a regular if low paying job, one receives Social Security and the rest mostly do temp jobs or whatever they can to survive. The city is reminding everyone to not give us anything directly but to give money and donations to the shelters or other organizations that serve the homeless. Problem is that the unsheltered homeless fell through the cracks and seldom have ever received anything from those organizations. What the city says does make a certain amount of sense but there are many reasons why an unsheltered homeless person or a camper will not go to any shelter or any other place to find services. He or she has to get supplies from you directly. That's the only way. Unfortunately there are the people who do take advantage of those people that wish to give. Makes an honest unsheltered / camper look bad. Even so, giving directly to the people on the street in parts of town away from the shelters is the best way to help those who are struggling.

The other day I discovered, according to the homeless count done last January, that while the numbers of sheltered homeless people has risen by something like 3 or 4 percent, the numbers of unsheltered homeless has risen by more than 15 percent. I know for a fact that the reported increase in unsheltered homeless people is on the low side because not all of them are counted. In my 15 years in the area, I have only been counted once. The numbers of people I run into who are campers are far more numerous than the numbers reported. I'm not picking on the people who do the count in the field because it's harder to find someone camping in the woods after dark than it is counting someone in the shelter or on the sidewalk.

For those of you who do attempt to help those who are unsheltered or campers, please be careful that you don't get scammed and don't take everything at face value. One last thing, many of the people you see on street corners asking for money are basically professional panhandlers....