If you were a bookie... Polls and bets on the 2004 elections

[On the other hand, I was wondering, why my new born sister didn't wear a nun habit (My father worked as a doctor in a hospital, run by "sisters" .]

Nimh writes:


Makes you wonder why considering that NYC was firmly in control by the benevolent Democrats at that time

Actually the homeless do tend to gravitate to the larger cities where the best services are available to keep them fed, clothed, housed, doctored, etc.

<shrugs> not really ... your Democrats are the equivalent of our right-wing parties, after all, in many respects, and I would hazard a guess that homeless policy is one of them.

Correct :wink:

How do homeless people live in Netherlands and Germany?

In Germany, they either live on the street or at nights in special homes (in my state, every community should have one; but mostly the smaller just entertain one for a couple of communities, financed by all) or in houses/apartments.

The latter especially for couples and families, but there are singles living there as well - greater towns have house for singles and for couples/families.

For instance, where I live - a small town with 70,000 inhabitants - we have a home just for nights with 24 places and about 20 houses with some dozen apartments altogether.

Sounds like what we have, Walter. I was wondering if your and nimh's countries did it differently, as nimh was so surprised to see homeless people on the street.

I think the main contributor to our street people is our criminally cruel mental health system. How's yours? Is your govt dumping mental patients out in the street? Wondering what nimh thought was different where he is--the reason he didn't see homeless people in the Netherlands.

You can thank your boy Reagan for that one. Though I'm sure you will disagree.

Cycloptichorn

Everyone gets health support, homeless people and others, who get money from the social security, completely free.

Of course, this includes mmental health service. (You rarley find them among the homeless on the streets!)

Cyclop--Actually, unless I find new information, I do give Reagan a large share of the blame for that. But, one man can't have that much of an impact ALONE. Glad you brought it up, though. I do want to look a little deeper.

Walter-- Then that must be the difference. I remember seeing a report stating that the large % of our homeless are mentally ill. (Haven't checked the stats on this in a couple of years, though.) I guess you know our country has taken to dumping MI people in the streets. They like to refer to it as moving MI services into the community where the MI can be more mainstreamed. It works for mildly MI people, or those with VERY supportive families. But, what can I say? Most of these people require institutionalization. A big mistake.

Rarely. At least not the kind of supllied in "homes" or hospitals.

I live in the county with the highest rate of menatlly ill persons in all Europe (due to the fact that we had had six clinics with nearly 4,000 patients {from all over the state] vs. 300,000 county citizens).
The number of patients has been reduced within the last couple of years to under 1,000 (including 300 criminal mentally ill) - all the others are now living in own groups or by their own.


Well, I don't doubt that many of your homeless people are mentally ill and many of them need some kind of guidance ... or eeven institutionalisation, but ... :wink:

Here it's getting worse and worse, is my impression. Ever greater numbers of homeless people, for one. Partly economic troubles lead ever more people to get in over their head with debts, and when this coincides with psychological problems, divorce and/or drink/drug abuse people end up losing their home. On the other hand (though related), a major problem is the reform of psychological care, a combination of severe government subsidies cuts and a shift in paradigm which has had heartbreaking consequences. But I wrote about that a couple of times already - here, for example (please read ... it makes me so sad/angry).

In Utrecht, there are shelters and low-cost places to sleep (the sleep-inn costs 7 euros a night), but as the capacity is insufficient they usually apply limitations - for example, you can only sleep there two nights a week. Another problem for many homeless people is that while some shelters are very religious (obligatory prayers and so on), others too are very strict - and many of those who've been living on the street for long don't have the kind of skills anymore to always behave accordingly, so they're kicked out.

Meanwhile, the city offers daytime shelters or at least (since two years ago or something) "users rooms" for the drug addicts (the idea being that if they can't be made to give it up, it's better to have them use clean needles in a place where there is emergency help and where they can get advice - plus, it serves to take them out from among the commuters and shoppers in the shopping centre). It also subsidizes a so-called "tussenbus" (literally a bus, stripped of most interior) that has coffee and a place inside in the "in between hours" of early morning and late evening. Subsidy was almost struck down last year but a last-minute action saved it.

One thing that long kept people on the street once that's where they ended up was the catch 22 of asking for unemployment/disability/etc benefits. Here, you can in principle always get some kind of benefits, they don't run out - it's just that after the relatively generous WW benefits in the first half year or year of your unemployment, you fall back into "bijstand" (social security), which is much less. The problem is that in order to ask for "bijstand" or anything, you need to have an address. But how do you get to afford an address (a place of residence), if you don't have any money coming in? This has bedevilled homeless people for years.

This has now been worked on I believe, and in principle I think it's possible for homeless people to ask for welfare through a collective address of a city institution of sorts - don't know exactly how it works. They get less because money for rent etc (which they are considered not to need) is detracted. The system doesnt quite work though, it seems - many people fall through. And though its true that they dont need to pay rent, the Sleep-Inn is expensive too, not to mention all the stuff involved in living on the street - you dont have a kitchen to cut yourself a slice of bread in or anything, you can hardly keep stuff - so its an expensive, unhealthy fast food life so to say. Hard to save up money too - where do you keep it, it'll be stolen, etc. Can all keep you trapped.

One bright side is the Street News - the homeless people's monthly newspaper. Number of homeless people earn a fair bit with it, and because it's a stable sort of income (they are provided with a max number of newspapers per day to sell, which they usually manage to sell out), some of them actually succeed in using it to move a step up. The Street News association has now expanded into setting up transitional housing projects too, where homeless people learn to have a place of their own again - a much-needed thing, seeing how quickly many ex-homeless people, having lost all their normal-life skills, fall back again even if they make it out of the life.

Problem with Street News is that they have that max number of papers per day for a reason. Since the goal is to have it be a kind of real job for the sellers, a stable income, they don't want to flood the market. Consequence is that there's a waiting list - the StreetNews pass is a coveted possession. And anyone who misbehaves loses his right to sell it any longer, so those who have truly lost their grip on themselves are still reduced to begging.

Well, things are obviously different in Germany than in The Netherlands then, or perhaps it's a difference in perspective. IMHO, you hit the nail on the head Sofia - as mentioned in my previous post, the cuts and reforms in the mental health system I believe is one of the main if not the main reason for the escalation of homelessness here this past ten years. I am ashamed to now see scenes that do remind me of what I saw in NY in 1988 - not quite as bad, but so much worse than it was ten-fifteen years ago - and so many of the people now roaming the street are obviously severe psychological cases.

It's unnerving, because there's many roaming around downtown where I live, and it seems to be almost every second or third night that someone is yelling at himself or the world outside or cursing at the top of his longues or beating the wall. It really unsettles me, perhaps because I feel it's just this thin layer that separates us/me from them, and its so sad. I can see the point of the whole paradigm shift - from isolated institutions out in the forest to "reintegration" processes - but so many fall by the wayside, through the cracks. And there are simply too few places left for the hopeless cases, so the institutions shun them (high cost, low success rate after all, and their budgets are allocated/cut on the basis of their success rate ...)

Well, see this post again, I dont wanna be repeating myself ...

We have a welfare system that's very generous by American standards. In particular, we have welfare payments called Sozialhilfe which are permanent. If you are poor enough forever, you get them forever. Depending on a variety of factors, they are typiclly about $500 a month plus some housing subsidy (Walter, please correct me if I'm wrong). This is not much, but it's usually enough to save poor people from becoming homeless in the first place.


Judging from nothing but personal impression, it does look as if you see more crazy people among the American homeless than among the German homeless. I don't know much about the German mental health system, but it would surprise me if they dumped large quantities of mental patients into the streets.

$500 is correct - when you take all together.



Actually, they stay(ed) much too long, got hospitalised and therfor had to stay there again
This has changed, however, since a couple of years, and they can live on their own (nearly, at least).

Whole new topic, perhaps?

This is a good discussion.

Cycloptichorn

Your situ looks very much like ours, except you have the added assist for the addicted (and places to get them off the street). Most of our shelters are for night only--

Definitely understand the Catch 22.

Thanks a lot for the detailed response. Street News is a good idea. They sell TO street people? This is of no interest to employed people? (Thinking of trying to co-opt the idea.)

The collective address is a great idea, too. thx

Those papers are sold to everyone in the streets - btw, it's the very same situation re this here in Germany (and France and the UK, as far as I know personally).

The homeless in Albuquerque and Santa Fe do have a little Street News paper that they use to communicate with each other and also sell to passing motorists. I'm not sure how they get it published--note to self: check that out--but I am fairly sure it is funded by one of our numerous local agencies that provide services to the homeless and permanent or temporarily poor.

Yeah, exactly. Thats it. <sigh>

One recent newspaper report: after a deal with the mental health institution, a number of psychologically disturbed teen girls are now "housed" in prison. Not because they were sentenced for any crime yet - just that they caused too much trouble (are violent, etc) to be able to live at home, and yet there was no place or budget for their kind of cases in the institutions, so a deal was struck. With the prison.

<angry>

I asked my therapist - how the **** is it possible that there's money to treat people like me, nice sessions every week, a test extra, if I want to talk with another person I can, no problem - and yet there's no decent care for such really desperate girls?! She said she didn't know either, something about different budget flows, allocations ...

<shakes head>