Understanding The Homeless Condition

A woman recently wrote on Facebook that she was interested in learning more about the homeless population.

We, in America, rarely express interest in “the other.”

We already know everything we need to know. They aren’t us. They are living wrong. And mostly, they’re gross.

This was the entire premise of the whole “separate but equal” laws of the United States. These were actual constitutional laws that said as long as everything was “equal” then they can and should be separate.

Basically, the premise is: I should not have to use anything a black person uses.

This aversion to people who don’t look like us is, of course, based on nothing. The color of their skin has nothing to do with disease or hygiene.

American government has a long history of not being particularly bright about these kinds of things. 

I think most Americans have seen the error of that kind of thinking.

However, in 2018 we still have headlines like this: Police tackled me for stealing a car. It was my own.  – Chicago Tribune

To think that we have fully understood the difference between races is naive. While we currently have class work to do these days, our work on race is far from over.

Our understanding of homeless people is brand new. Most people know very little of this section of the population. While I am now a huge fan and supporter of homeless people, it wasn’t very long ago that I was surprised to learn that most homeless people can read, write, use computers and talk in complete and grammatically correct sentences.

I’ve had government officials utter the words, “Let’s be honest, no one wants to live next to homeless people.”

I’ve had a government official publicly berate me for not being fair to my neighbors because homeless people are walking around my property.

I’ve had church leaders tell me that “these people” need to put down the needle and get a job.

These are sentiments of a completely ignorant and base-level bigotry.

When people feel comfortable saying these things publicly it means we have SO far to go to develop even a basic understanding of people living in our society.

Further, we need to understand these people because homelessness is only getting worse. There is no political will with even the most liberal politicians to have any interest in a population that has no money and doesn’t vote. Even Bernie Sanders is mostly focused on the “working class.”

You can see it this very week:

Government Shutdown 2018 Hurts Food Programs: ‘Families Will Be Forced to Make Hard Choices About How to Feed Their Babies’

The U.S. Department of Agriculture office, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has seen its staff cut by 95 percent this week, according to the USDA.

The extremely poor and the homeless have very few advocates. So, it’s easy to sweep them under the rug.

When you add that these people are villainized then it gets even easier to disregard them and scorn them.

They are lazy, no good drains on society.

The question is: how true is it that these people are what we think they are? Are they just lazy drug addicts?

Let’s talk about the lazy idea.

If you think a homeless person is lazy then you simply don’t understand what being homeless is.

You take a shower once a week because it requires you to walk 3 miles and stand in line at a facility. Taking a shower will take you half a day.

You wash your clothes once a month. This requires that you bag up as many clothes as you can carry on your back and walk them for miles to a facility where you can wash them. It will take most of the day.

But in the meantime you have to walk miles to get to a meal for the day. Laundry, shower and food are rarely, if ever, in the same location.

You have to hide your belongings as best you can because people will steal them for no other reason than just to steal them. Leaving your camp is a major risk.

Your things often and regularly are stolen.

On top of this you often have a mental and/or physical disability. You were injured at work. You are diagnosed with anxiety, depression and bipolar. Your medication got stolen. You don’t have a phone.

A homeless person is in a constant battle with their surroundings. Everything is extremely hard.

On top of that, people won’t look at you. If you beg for money you are sure to get yelled at.

You already feel like a total loser. Fellow citizens will gladly remind you that they agree with you. You do, indeed, suck. Either get a job or disappear.

On getting a job.

Have you ever tried to rely on the bus system here in Akron?

I’d probably rate it a “C”. (Having a bus system probably gives us a “C” just for existing.)

Buses come every half hour to an hour. Typically, a bus will take you to the transit center where you pick up another bus. A trip that might take 20 minutes in a car could easily take 2 hours on a bus on a schedule that is not very regular. I regularly see people losing jobs because a bus was late or didn’t run during the hours of their job. Being late by 15 minutes in America today is pretty much a guarantee you will get fired. Employers have no loyalty or commitment to the people any more.

A one way bus pass costs $1.25 but does not include a transfer. So you really need to get a day pass for $2.50.

If you recall what I said about all the things you need to do just to survive then trying to get money for a bus pass is incredibly hard.

People do give out bus passes. In fact, a donor give me a stack of bus passes just recently. I might as well have been handing out crack cocaine. They are like gold. If you want to give something to panhandlers (and break the law in certain Summit County townships for illegally handing something out your window) bus passes are usually a welcome contribution.

Learned Helplessness and Psychogenic Death.

These are two very important real psychological conditions that plague the homeless population.

Learned Helplessness – What It Is and Why It Happens

Learned helplessness occurs when an animal is repeatedly subjected to an aversive stimulus that it cannot escape. Eventually, the animal will stop trying to avoid the stimulus and behave as if it is utterly helpless to change the situation.

Giving up on life can lead to actual death in less than a month — Quartz

“Psychogenic death is real,” says University of Portsmouth researcher John Leach in a related statement. “It isn’t suicide, it isn’t linked to depression, but the act of giving up on life and dying usually within days, is a very real condition often linked to severe trauma.”

I see these every day. I’ve had multiple people over the years come to me saying they came to our village to kill themselves.

I see it in the form of a complete lack of human dignity. The system and society strips them of human dignity. The shelter system is a place where you are looked down on and disrespected. The street is a place where you spend all day thinking about what a failure you are.

Are the homeless dangerous?

I spend every day with these people. I never feel unsafe. If anything they help me feel more brave. These are not victims. These are survivalists. They have taught me strength.

Yes. They sometimes yell. Impulse control is something you lose on the street and were likely not taught at home. But they often apologize for yelling. They create these walls to protect themselves emotionally. I’ve been learning this skill as well. You simply can’t take all the cruelty and disparagement these people encounter without defense mechanisms.

This entire topic deserves thorough study. I’ve often wished sociologists would spend time with us to better understand this section of humanity. They are incredibly interesting.

But what I want you to know is this: they are not less than you or me. They have a certain wildness to them that comes from being thrown out of the social system. So, if get to know them you will experience that they do behave and act slightly differently than a regular middle class person. That doesn’t make them inferior. That just makes them different. And, if we’d learn about their differences, we could very likely find places in society where they could thrive. But until we learn about them we will never be able to work with them. 

People will often say things like, “they want to be homeless.” This is incorrect. They just don’t have a path back into society that meets their needs. Society doesn’t yet care about them and their needs. So it’s our way or the highway. That’s why our tent village got shut down by the government. The government doesn’t have even the slightest curiosity why a group of people would prefer living in tents than living in a shelter.

Until we can convince our government to ask the utterly basic question of “why do people choose to live in tents?” we will never help integrate these people back into society. They will live unserviced in the wilderness. Hepatitis A outbreaks will occur nationwide, they will defecate in our stairwells, they will leave needles on the sidewalk, they will throw trash anywhere, they will steal food from grocery stores.

You don’t have to be a compassionate person to want to help the homeless of your city. When you engage homeless people where they are today in the way they want to be engaged you are helping your entire city.

The fact that government officials are so myopic and close-minded that they can’t see this is utterly confounding and short-sighted. Do you want to make your city a place people want to move to? Then help your homeless population!

The Darkness Of Our Tent Village Dismantling

REGISTER FOR OUR TENT VILLAGE DISMANTLING EVENT HERE. It is Thursday, January 3 any time between 9am and 5pm.

I want it to be Easter.

While Christmas is my favorite holiday, Easter is, without a doubt, the coolest of all holidays, in my mind.

Easter is what matters. There’s death on Friday. Saturday is this day of quiet. And on Sunday: HE IS RISEN!

You barely have any time to be sad. I mean, we even call it “Good Friday.” It makes my head spin. Resurrection. It’s the greatest story of optimism ever told.

I’m listening to 12 Days of Christmas right now. We have all these sweet, charming Christmas songs. We bring a fluffy green tree into our house and light it up and make it pretty with decorations.

We tie it to the birth of Jesus even though we all know full well he wasn’t born on December 25. No one knows the month he was born or even the year.

The church co-opted the Pagan winter festivals like the Winter Solstice. I’m glad they did. They are all lovely and wonderful. Christianity really needed a winter holiday.

But the fact of the matter is it’s a time of darkness.

Society has thrown away a group of people. A group of people that are just seen as a problem and nuisance. They built a beautiful thing. As Frank Sinatra once said, “I did it my way.”

They were creating a bridge back into society. They were making an on-ramp to re-enter society.

They built a small, secluded village made out of simple tents and tarps because that’s all they could afford. It was meager and simple. But it was theirs. They built it. They organized it. They governed it.

And all the government did was chastise them and ultimately force them to tear down their creation. “You are not living your best life,” they said. They are living “beneath human dignity,” they said.

And then once they forced them to tear down the beautiful little village they created they kicked them on the way out the door by saying how patient they’ve been with them.

It’s just all dark, sad and lacking all empathy or even a tiny bit of interest in why these people decided living in a tent was better than living in a shelter.

No matter how mad it makes them for me to say it: They simply have zero interest or care in their hearts for the homeless. It’s an undeniable fact.

We are already beginning to move people back into the woods. We are trying our best to hide them from violent human predators, thieves and, most importantly, the government. The government hunts them so they can find them and move them on to a new place so they can find them and move them on again and again. It’s like a sick game the government plays with the most desperately poor people of their community.

I want to tell you HE IS RISEN. I want to tell you we have a resurrection coming tomorrow. But we don’t. All we have is darkness.

The powerful throwing the poorest of the poor back into the woods in the coldest time of the year. It’s just darkness. It’s just dark.

But Christmas is important. It sets the table for the inevitable light that is coming. The light is not here today. It won’t be here tomorrow. However, you can be assured of one thing: the light is coming.

We have these celebrations around the darkest time of the year so that we are reminded that the light is coming. The light is guaranteed. You literally can set your watch by it.

That’s the beauty.

In fact, we can only have the light and hope because of the dark.

We had created the light and hope of a homeless-run tent village. And in the darkest time of year the government snuffed it out. They turned out the light. To send the homeless back into the wilderness alone in the dark.

You can’t make up a more symbolic, man-against-man allegory filled with underlying moral and political meaning.

And sadly, I write this to say that the darkness has not yet turned a corner. We must fully destroy the tent village. We must tear down every piece of it so that nothing remains. I’m quite sure the government will come inspect to make sure every piece of it is gone. I face fines and criminal charges if this doesn’t happen.

I’m writing this to ask you to be part of the final dismantling of our homeless tent village. We need your help. Everything must be cleaned up by Friday, January 4.

Seeing things come to an end is sad. But it is also part of life. And it is how life begins anew.

We are going to have an open house event on Thursday, January 3, 2019 from 9am – 5pm. There is much work to do. We will need many hands. If you are interested, you can come any time for as little or as long as you would like.

We will need people to clean up the tent village. But we will also need food and drinks for the day.

So, there will likely be work that needs to be done in-doors as well as outside.

We would LOVE for you to be part of this process.

You can register for the event BY CLICKING HERE.

Today there is darkness. But the light is coming. Fear not. All will be right with the world. Some day.

Going Homeless (Again)

This picture is the stuff of a friend of mine who got evicted this morning.

He lived in this apartment for the last year.

He got evicted because a friend of his overdosed in his apartment. He had 4 friends over for his birthday. This person when outside, found one of the many dope boys that trolls Akron. She shot up, came back to the apartment and overdosed.

If he had let her die he probably would still be housed. If he had carried her out of the apartment and dumped her on the sidewalk he would almost surely be housed.

But he called 911. The paramedics came and that was all the agency who runs his house needed to hear. He had to go.

The police always walk through a house in overdose situations. They found no drugs or drug paraphernalia. My friend wasn’t doing drugs. None of the other people having dinner with him for his birthday were doing drugs. It was just a bad situation he got caught up in. 

This is how our system works. The system is the system. It has very little room for interpretation. When you’re poor every interaction with the government is a threat to your existence. 

On top of that, no one in this system asked my friend where he was going to go from here. He came from our tent village. They knew he was homeless previously. There wasn’t even so much as a single question as to what he was going to do next. Not even, “Can I drop you off in the woods somewhere?” Nothing. He is dead to them.

That’s not their problem. There was an overdoes in the house. He had to leave.

What’s the chance he’s going to get subsidized housing now? Or ever again? Maybe in a few years he could try again.

In the meantime, he is now homeless. 

He was an administrator at our village previously. I’m putting him in one of our houses. It needs some leadership that I think he can provide.

The model we are working on is to get run down houses and then have homeless people move in and update the houses. One of the biggest things these people are missing is having a sense of purpose. It’s an incredibly important part of being human. Our program tries to get these people involved in a community as fast as possible. 

Dignity and self-respect. These two things are major driving forces of being human. You don’t realize how important they are until they are taken away. The system is incredibly efficient at stripping dignity and self-respect. “You are a failure and a drain on society. Go away!”

On the drug issue:

America is a very judgmental, moralistic society. So we have a tendency to make snap judgments of people when they are involved in drugs. Yet, this decade is the heaviest drug use per person per year in U.S. history.

We can’t just always turn our backs on people with drug problems. It does nothing to help the situation.  It’s bad for us and it’s bad for them.

We have so far to go as a nation and world. And sadly the answer is just simple compassion mixed with a little forgiveness.

Judgment does nothing other than hurt the world. But sadly, I see no evidence that the powerful have any interest in doing anything other than blaming the victim. I see it in every system I have the “pleasure” to work in. The system is fine. It’s the people the system serves that are the problem. And so, making change becomes a Herculean task. The powerful hold all the cards. They have little to no oversight. Getting them to change even a little bit takes massive energy.

But it’s worth it. Otherwise, oppression will just get worse. We must push against the machine. Always. The writers of our Declaration of Independence knew this well. They told us to be aware of a government with a “long train of abuses and usurpations.” Pushing against the machine is almost an American obligation.  It is our right and duty to do so. 

Right now I have one simple goal: To get the government of Akron to say the words: “We have a homeless problem and we need to explore more ways to help these people.”

I’m not even at the point of asking them to do anything. I just want them to acknowledge there is a problem. Because so far all they have said is that they have a “Sage problem.” The homeless would be just fine if Sage would go away.

I’m not going away.

Mayor Horrigan Went To Bat For The Homeless

I see myself as a person that is attempting to Speak Truth to Power.

The Quakers coined the phrase “Speaking Truth to Power” in the 1950s. 

It’s not a particularly comfortable place to be. Upsetting powerful people is never without risk.

But it is a necessity. Every time there is progress in civil and human rights it usually can be tracked back to someone speaking truth to power.

I am no anarchist, however. I am not here to deconstruct the system. I am here to reconstruct the system. I’m a remodeler not a bulldozer.

So I am always looking for the slightest glimpse of connection. I am looking for a path forward together.

Today was a first step forward together.

We applied for a conditional use to be able to establish a group home for up to 10 people in the house we own.

We had the Housing Administrator come by to do an inspection yesterday. He said because we only have 1 full bathroom and with the square footage of our rooms we can have up to 6 people live in the house.

The best news is: THE PLANNING COMMISSION APPROVED OUR REQUEST TO HAVE A 6 PERSON GROUP HOME.

They unanimously approved it.

On top of that, both the planning director and zoning director of the city recommended they approve this conditional use. These two people work for the mayor. So, really, Mayor Horrigan recommended that we be permitted to have a group home to help the homeless.

This is fantastic on so many levels.

Granted, we didn’t get our 10 person request. That’s simply a matter of housing code restrictions. But the house meets the housing code requirements for 6 people.

Even more importantly, however, is the symbolic meaning of this.

The City of Akron didn’t have to do this. They didn’t have to make a recommendation to approve this application. But they did and that is awesome.

It is a glimmer of hope that we can work together to come up with solutions to help the homeless.

I’m really excited about using the abandoned and dilapidated houses of Akron for transitional shelter for the homeless. In our program the people living in the houses are also required to help fix up the houses.

Homelessness is a not just a person simply missing a house. Homelessness is often a complicated condition that must be worked on multidimensionally. Reintegrating back into the traditional societal structure takes work and time.

We are far from done working on homelessness in Akron. We have a long, long way to go. I won’t stop standing up for the rights of the homeless. That will likely include calling out the misunderstandings of those in power.

But today the Truth to Power is that the powerful worked to help the homeless.

We still have to get final approval from City Council. But today we won. Together we won.

My sincere hope is that this is the beginning of exploring more creative ways to get the homeless off the streets of Akron.

 

 

We Must Always Move Forward

I’ve often told budding entrepreneurs that success in business is a path laid with bricks of failure.

You must train yourself to see each failure as one more hurdle you’ve overcome to get closer to your success.

Failure has incredible value.

“I’ve made every mistake in the book,” is a common phrase you will hear lifelong, successful entrepreneurs say.

You will never learn a lesson more thoroughly than living through doing it wrong.

In the case of the city forcing us to take down our tents, that isn’t so much a failure on our part. But it is a setback just the same.

The city is exhibiting very similar traits to other addicts. “We don’t have a problem. We are fine. It’s other people that are causing us problems.”

The city is addicted to a system that is getting in the way of them leading “their best lives.” That is causing them to live a life “beneath human dignity.” The system is a drug that has taken over every part of their lives. (For reference, both of those quoted phrases are things the city has chastised the homeless with for wanting to live in a tent instead of a shelter.)

We cannot stop helping the city wake from their self-induced comma of ignoring the human suffering plaguing their poor citizens.

But we can also not stop moving forward. We must always look forward to the path we can take today while we make plans for new paths tomorrow.

Houses.

Abandoned, broken, left-for-dead houses.

These are the low hanging fruit of helping shelter the homeless of Akron today.

We are SO close to closing on a house from the Land Bank. It will cost us about $4700 to purchase the house. And we can legally put up to 5 non-related people in the house. That is less than $1000 per person for the structure. Then the utilities and taxes will probably cost around $400/month. That’s a pretty efficient model.

There are no special requirements to house people in houses. We don’t need occupancy permits. We don’t need fire inspections. We can just put people in houses.

And because we are a completely private operation we can do things that organizations with federal money can’t do.

We don’t need any identification. We don’t need background checks. If you are legally allowed to live in society you can be in our house.

Obviously, our houses will need rules. We’ve learned that very well in our tent village.

But each house could have different rules.

Maybe we have a house that is for people that work at night.

Maybe we have a house that is Christian-based, or Muslim-based, or atheist.

Maybe we have a house that is for people recovering from opiate addiction and we make sure we always have Narcan on site to be ready for an overdose.

These houses become a new kind of emergency, transitional sheltering concept that is different from most other sheltering concepts.

Because there are only a small number of people in a house we can more easily cater to the specific needs of those particular people. They can have fewer rules than a large, monolithic shelter because they aren’t ‘catering to all people from all different kinds of walks of life. The rules can be specific to these few people and their specific situations.

I’m calling these: Micro Shelters.

They instantly get people off the streets in-doors. But they are tailored to the specific person.

So, as an example, a person would come to our day center (which is not going anywhere and is going to be better than ever). We would ask them a couple basic questions:

  • Are you currently using any drugs or alcohol?
  • Are you in recovery?
  • Are you coming from an abusive relationship?
  • Are you currently in danger?
  • Do you have any mental health issues we should be aware of?
  • Do you work? If so, what are your hours?

These kinds of questions would allow us to put a person in the best Micro Shelter for their needs.

I envision an ecosystem where a person never has to spend a single night on the streets.

Then once a person is in one of our Micro Shelters we would have case workers that would go from house to house helping these people get on the list for housing, get mental health treatment, get addiction treatment.

This model is a low impact solution for the surrounding neighborhood. In fact, we are looking at purchasing a known drug house and turning it into a Micro Shelter.

By taking the worst houses of the neighborhood we can potentially be a positive influence for that local community.

Our foundational principle is that we are “by the homeless for the homeless.” So we will be teaching these people to repair and remodel these houses.

They will be learning skills and will be a needed part of the Micro Shelter program.

“When a door closes, God opens a window.”

You must always look for the window.

This Micro Shelter house model is a really exciting and innovative strategy that has a lot of potential in a city with abandoned, low-cost real estate inventory.

We also are trying to get a conditional use for a house that we currently own that would allow us to put up to 10 people in it. If this works and we could apply it to other houses, we could instantly double our capacity with each house we buy.

The hurdles we will face are strong personalities in close quarters. Homeless people are strong-willed, independent people. They can definitely get along with other people. But they also can definitely clash pretty significantly with each other. We will need to work on giving people even a small bit of private space of their own in these Micro Shelters. I have some ideas on that. But that’s for another time.

I am so excited for what the future holds. I have very little space in my mind and emotions to spend much time looking backwards. I truly believe there is a need for triage tents to at least temporarily get people off the streets and out of danger. So, I am not giving up on tents or even tiny, transitional homes. But that is not today.

Today is houses.

Today is exploring and testing the concept of Micro Shelters.

I hope this idea excites you like it excites me. Because, truthfully, the only way we do this is as a community together. The government, from top to bottom, has no interest in being part of a plan to help people living abandoned on our streets. We, the people of Akron and America, are their only hope.

 

 

 

Our Tents Must Come Down January 4, 2019

My mom has been dead for a couple years now. I still haven’t really clearly understood the emotions of that experience.

It’s like a punch to your spirit, I guess. Like an emotional flu.

It’s not anguish. It’s more like a depletion. Like someone cut a limb off.

I bring it up because the emotions I felt when my mom died remind me of the emotions I feel today about being forced to take our tents down.

There’s just a big “Why?”

Why did this happen? Why now? Why couldn’t I have done more to keep her alive?

But I’m a funny guy. In the same moment where I’m feeling this significant loss, I’m also looking forward. What is next? Where do we go from here?

I have heard that optimism is a trait you are born with. I have more optimism inside me than any single person should probably be allowed to possess.

In business, you learn very quickly to just accept the economic and governmental factors that are in place. There’s no point in being outraged by the way things are. You accept the way things are and adjust from there. I’ve learned that lesson very well.

Almost instantly from hearing the news that we have to shut down the tents I started doubling down on our future.

Our day center with our clothes and food and laundry and computers is not going anywhere. This is important: OUR DAY CENTER IS STILL GOING STRONG.

And then we need to double down on getting houses. We already have one house. We are applying to allow up to 10 people stay in that house.

We are working on getting a house from the Land Bank. And there is another house that is a drug house nearby. We’re starting the process of buying that as well.

So houses. Houses are the easiest way to get people in-doors.

Tiny houses that are connected to utilities are also a great interest to me. But they are probably going to be a phase 3 idea.

Phase 2:

I’m going to be writing a lot about where we go from here. It’s important that we all understand where we are right now and what our next steps are.

  • Continue building up our day center. My dream is to make it 24 hours.
  • Buy more houses for emergency sheltering. If we can get nearby houses where people can sleep in the houses and then come to our day center during the day that would be great.
  • Work on our makers school that teach people skills. We’ve already starting screen printing and bike repair.
  • Transportation for the homeless. Getting to appointments is a huge barrier for the homeless to get back into society.
  • Expand our food pantry. People are literally starving in our neighborhood of Middlebury. We need to get more food to these people.

There is also going to be an activist component to this.

Most governments in America simply refuse to understand that there are people suffering on our streets. They are more interested in their image than their people. It’s like they are covering their eyes and ears yelling “La la la, I hear nothing. I see nothing.”

Our governments must wake up. Their citizens are being subjected to a brutal existence that no one seems to want to do anything about. Men, women and children are living alone on the streets. It is wrong. We must do better.

Ultimately:

We will never stop fighting. We will never stop helping.

We can do this. My experience along this journey is that the people of Akron have a strong desire to help the homeless of their city. We have to inspire our leadership to develop a similarly strong desire.

As one example: we have women regularly coming to us because our women’s homeless shelters are full. What are we supposed to do about that? Do we just chalk it up to: “That’s the way it is?” I simply can’t, in good conscience, do that.

I don’t know if our government understands this but: While they have successfully shut down our tents, tents are not going away. People will be living in tents in much worse circumstances throughout the city. With no running water. With no toilets.

This is such a missed opportunity for the city. They are moving backwards. Not forwards.

But whatever. It is what it is.

We will never stop fighting. We will never stop helping.

This is unfortunate and sad. But it’s just the next phase.

I am a person who rarely is satisfied with my performance in life. I’m always beating myself up that I could have been better. I could have done better. So, I blame myself for not figuring out the magical formula to inspire our leadership to care about their homeless. And make no mistake: They don’t care about their homeless. You don’t throw a bunch of puppies out of your car and say you care about puppies. Your words don’t align with your actions.

I couldn’t get them to care. Yet.

But I also realize we have made some incremental progress. We have gotten to have a wonderful discussion about the homeless in Akron. Thanks to the media, we all got to think about a problem that maybe we didn’t think about much before.

We also got to build a homeless run facility to help the homeless. It is truly a powerful concept that I’m excited to keep pushing forward.

So, we’ve made some progress. It’s not enough in my book. And that’s why I’m not stopping. But we did make some progress.

And ultimately, we get to move forward from here.

I would be remiss in saying: none of this would have been possible without you. Your money. Your time. Your donations. We run on your energy. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for sticking with us and helping the homeless of Akron. I hope that you continue to find our mission inspiring and helpful. None of this is possible without you.

Thank you for all that you do for us. I love you.

Sage

Torturing Homeless People

Last night I was berated by Akron City Councilman Mike Freeman at the weekly city council meeting.

You can see his lecture to me here:

https://youtu.be/JV2-4vDxMp0?t=4140
(you have to click on the link because they won’t allow us to embed the video on our site. It will take you directly to his speech.)

This dressing down was because I asked city council if they thought about or cared about the homeless.

How DARE I even ask the question if they care about the homeless?

I will have more thoughts on Mike Freeman later. But today I want to talk about the mental torture the city is putting these homeless people through.

As you may know, the city said we had 60 days to house 46 people. That put us right around Thanksgiving.

Then they gave us a two week extension. That put us to yesterday.

NOW they say they made a miscalculation. The deadline is actually Friday.

Imagine if you were on death row and your executioner toyed with you like this.

If ever there was a definition of Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment, this process simply has to be the text book definition of it.

It is December 4. It is 32 degrees.

14 people still live here hoping with all hope that they will get housed.

Most have a path to getting housed… eventually.

But it’s not like everyone is going to be housed by Friday. We are looking at deep into December that HOPEFULLY these people will get housed.

Houses simply aren’t ready.

Agencies are throwing each other under the bus. Blame is being thrown around the room like a hot potato.

All because the city has created uneducated, unrealistic deadlines imposed on the homeless service providers of Akron.

So, yes. I asked if they cared about the homeless. But maybe I should have asked the mayor’s office if THEY care about the homeless. But they never talk to us. So, I would never get the chance to ask them if they care. It’s not like they are at all involved in this process. I would imagine asking them if they care would be a rhetorical question.

I mean, the mayor wrote the second op-ed piece in 3 years of being mayor on this topic and all he did was berate me, and berate the homeless by saying they are living “beneath human dignity.”

All they care about is zoning. I mean, literally, that’s all they talk about. The mayor said it. Freeman said it.

But this is now worse. A lack of care is world’s better than this unknowing and shifting deadline torture.

A person yesterday asked me to let city council know that we are the last stop for him and to please not take it away.

People are here crying, yelling, fighting. Some are depressed. Some are riddled with anxiety. Does any of this matter to ANYONE in power?

How can a powerful person be so callous and have so little empathy for the least among the people they govern? They truly can’t possibly know what they are doing to these people. These people who have lost everything and everyone and are hanging on by a thread are living terrified that some day some powerful person will walk in and force them back out onto the streets. Kicking them off of my private land.

I just asked a person who is living nowhere why they don’t go to the Haven of Rest. He said he would rather live on the sidewalk in a wet sleeping bag in a draft than go to the Haven. His reason was because people that work there treat him like they don’t want him there. He also hates the 3 minute gang showers because it reminds him of jail.

I’m sure Mike Freeman was so angry at me for asking if council cared about the homeless because it touched a delicate spot in him. Listen to his speech. He says it right there. ZONING. Nothing is more important than zoning.

There is no amount of human suffering, anguish and brutality that is more important than zoning.

If you actually care about the homeless you have a funny way of showing it. All I see is a complete disregard for a part of your population that doesn’t vote and doesn’t have any money so they are nothing more than a pain in your asses.

This is brutally disgusting.

 

 

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