Quotes About Homelessness

Homelessness advocates often level serious charges at people who disagree with their view of the problem and the solution. In the early 1990s, a Harvard sociologist who wrote a book on homelessness noted, "those who see the homeless as passive victims of circumstances beyond their control often react to [the evidence of service refusal] with a mixture of fury and disbelief.

Heavy drug and alcohol use degrades the health of homeless people. Drug overdose is the leading cause of death among the homeless.44 Skin infections and disease are more common due to injecting drugs like heroin and meth. Respiratory diseases are common due to smoking tobacco, crack, heroin, fentanyl, and meth.45 And about two-thirds of the time of hospital emergency departments in San Francisco is spent serving the homeless.46 Social

the twentieth century was best represented by an unwilling traveler. "I mean, think of the millions of soldiers mobilized by wars. And all the people made homeless because of them. Now the world is full of people who don't belong where they end up and long for the places where they did.

Housing without people, and people without housing.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

With all the homeless folk in SF, the fact that these woods remain unmolested is sort of a mystery.

Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.

The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality—and now it's time to make a different choice.

Canadians and Europeans pay higher taxes and get universal health care, less poverty and homelessness, lower addiction rates and arguably more humane societies, and that's probably a worthwhile trade-off.

BY EVEN A CONSERVATIVE COUNT, there are more than half a million homeless people in America at any one time, including nearly two hundred thousand living on the streets rather than in shelters. Homelessness has increased in the last forty years even as America has become much wealthier, because of a confluence of factors. After World

Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done.

For every man there are certain words that are as if closer and more intimate to him that any others. And often, unexpectedly, in some remote, forsaken backwater, some deserted desert, one meets a man whose warming conversation makes you forget the pathlessness of your paths, the homelessness of your nights, and the contemporary world full of people's stupidity, of deceptions for deceiving man.

Will you take me home with you ?" I ventured to ask, emboldened by his honest kind eyes. "I have no home," ho said mournfully, "otherwise I would. I sleep under bridge-arches, or doorways, or anywhere I can; where I am not hunted away" "But that must be very miserable?" "Yes, it is miserable. But there are tens of thousands of human creatures that do*the same. I must not complain.

When I slept outside in winter, it wasn't unusual for me to wake up blue in the face with icicles on my nose. In those days, there was no such thing as hypothermia.

empty, what was to stop vagrants, or even

The first person to really speak to me was Andy, which was lucky, since he was the least crazy. He stank, but I suspected I did too. I never took off my clothes, always ready for fight or flight, needing to feel a little armoured. Deodorant was a luxury I couldn't afford, and I wasn't about to attempt a bath in a room that didn't lock, and which was always in high demand. Not to mention that there was no plug for the tub, or hand soap, or towels, or curtain, or mat.

The old man was going nowhere to nowhere. He had no hat for his head no pack for his back. He had not a penny or a purse to put it in. He barely even owned his own name, and even that had been worn thin and threadbare through the years.

The old man was going from nowhere to nowhere. He had no hat for his head and no pack for his back. He had not a penny or a purse to put it in. He barely even owned his own name, and even that had been worn thin and threadbare through the years.

Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint onto lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back.

There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill.

In a city where human beings struggle for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates

Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”

Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”

To this very hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed, we are brutally treated, we are homeless.