Adrianna Tan
Dystopian California in which counties are simply bussing homeless people around instead of building more housing or providing actual services. The very definition of sweeping problems under rugs, except there isn't even the pretense of a rug
#California #SanFrancisco #SanJose #Sacramento #LosAngeles #Homeless
Adrianna Tan
I'm always appalled by the lack of empathy and the ignorance of some housed people who believe our homeless neighbors simply choose to 'live like that'. Dude, if you knew what they experience on the streets you would not even think that anyone would choose to live like that.
Two books (about other states) but that really show you what being poor in America is like and how expensive it is to be poor here: Matthew Desmond's "Evicted" and "Poverty, by America". They should be required reading
Adrianna Tan
Sometimes I meet foreign tourists or people who are visiting and they say disdainful things about our homeless. I tell them the average cost of an apartment, and ask them if they make 3x that amount monthly. Then I tell them that's why there are so many homeless people. That helps often (with the visitors, who simply don't know).
With people who live here and who don't already know how bad it is, I feel like they're just not listening or they may even be straight up cruel, so I don't engage
Adrianna Tan
@douglasvb SF actually has a very large no of people for whom it is the only big city they have ever lived. I live in the TL by choice and I have not have a public safety issue. Learning how to differentiate between 'homeless guy having a bad day' and 'person having a mental breakdown' (who may or may not be homeless) is integral to existing in any major city, anywhere in the world, but especially exacerbated by the poor state of mental health services in SF and CA as
Douglas
@skinnylatte Sometimes I wonder if it's because people have bad experiences with homeless people but if my best friend, who ended up in the hospital missing his front teeth after he got curb stomped by a homeless person in SF while he and his wife were waiting at a MUNI stop about 15 years ago, can empathize with the homeless, anyone should be able to see homeless people as humans.
Chris Petrilli
@skinnylatte I think there’s also some amount of othering to allow people to maintain the illusion that they too are not one catastrophe away from being unhoused. To face that would require addressing our economic system’s structural problems. Much of the US (all countries but it seems especially prevalent here) depends on a deep delusional state being maintained.
Adrianna Tan
@RubyJones thank you for sharing about the book, and your experiences.
Ruby Jones
@skinnylatte >people often like to say that we're all only a few pay cheques from the streets, but some people have much less of a safety net than others, and once you slip through it's very, very much harder to get back on the other side.
Lavelle's book struck me with how similar his experiences were to my own, and how I just scraped by, clinging on to being housed, both as a teenager and when I became chronically ill my 30s.
Ruby Jones
@skinnylatte this is about the UK, but I think there would be a lot of overlap: I've been trying to get everyone to read Daniel Lavelle's Down and Out: Surviving the Homelessness Crisis, released 2022. Lavelle talks about his own experiences of being unhoused and those of people he knew and interviewed over the course of years.
We* think we know these things, but own-voices accounts bring them into painfully sharp relief. The path to being unhoused is so tied to disability, MH, and abuse >
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