Tag: homelessness

We need to stop mandating people who live outside to housing in situations they would not choose of their own free will. We need to stop focusing on “getting them housed” and start accepting that people have a right to sleep outside on public land, and that homelessness may well be here to stay. 

Andy Pope writes how his point of view evolved from someone who lived inside most of his life to someone who lived outside for 12 years to someone who began to live on the inside again. Each season, he wore a unique pair of glasses through which he saw the world.

I mentioned that on July 17, 2016, I prayed fervently to be released from years of demeaning homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also reported that ten days later, on July 27, 2016, I stepped off a bus in Moscow, Idaho, and have been inside ever since. So how did this remarkable change of circumstance come to pass?

I often compared homelessness to a turnstile at a BART station. I was stuck in the turnstile, as its wheels rolled me rapidly around and around. Eventually, I would be spewed out of the turnstile, on one side of the other: either inside or out.

I completely understood why people didn’t want to have me over, because I probably wouldn’t want me over either. But at the same time, I asked them, where is compassion? Who has a heart? Can’t somebody bend for a little while? When is anybody going to realize that I’m not going to be able to solve any of my “boundary issues” or exacerbations of ADHD or Bipolar Disorder if I don’t find that somebody loves me enough to make a simple sacrifice — and, yet, nobody will.

I may never be homeless again. But that doesn't mean I have to forsake all the things that were good about homelessness — or at least about homelessness in Berkeley.

Before becoming homeless, you should know that people will not treat you as a full human being with needs, rights and sensibilities akin to those of the rest of the human race.