Chapter 28

Everyone of us figured it out that nothing was as easy as we had expected. I knew that was always the case when you deal with a government entity. Since I had been working on it a few weeks before the others demanded admission to the project, even I had an no idea of how hard it was really going to be. I had been looking into the jungle idea for several weeks longer than either of the others. I was not too shocked by the news from the others.

Gerome had declared himself point person for the effort, so he was the most disappointed. I understood how he felt, like I said I had spent almost a month trying to find a place to put the jungle before anyone else joined me. I knew how futile it could seem to be.

Tommy and I designed and built an emergency housing unit before we had a place to put it. Actually we hadn’t even found a place to try to put the hobo jungle. It was like I insisted on bathrooms nearby and that infuriated Gerome. The reason was that without sanitation the whole project would be easy to dismiss out of hand. We needed to make it work, before we could even start to raise awareness among the common folks.

We spent a month exploring places. Every one of them got shot down for one reason or another. We wanted get a site approved. I could only guess what the reason the opposition would come up with to refuse us permission. They always found something.

The one thing that did go forward was because of Gerome. He posted the video of the first packing case on line. It got enough views on line, so that people started talking about it as an alternative to conventional shelters. The consensus seemed to be that the public would never accept them.

The reason was that people mostly thought that the power structure had too much invested in the existing homeless shelters. They were so invested that they would never approve such an easy short term solution.

The fact that the homeless might prefer a less structured shelter meant nothing to the politicians. The government’s attitude seemed to be, ‘we are paying the bill, so you will take advantage of what we want to give you’ or else.

The pols thought that the electorate needed to feel good about what they were providing, if they were going to support their politicians. So that meant fancy brick and mortar buildings with somebody’s name on them. The fancier the building the less money actually got spent on helping the homeless work their way out of the streets.

It was a lot like the opioid epidemic. No one was willing to make the connection between the national health plan and the easier access to the opioids with training wheels. Oxy was the easy first step to getting hooked.

It was like even with all the money spent on supposedly taking care of the homeless, there were still not enough money spent in the right places. Nobody tried to figure out why more people didn’t go in for rehab. They continued to believe one size fit all. Liberalism at it’s finest. On things works for some people so it will work for everyone.

Some homeless men and women chose not to go to a shelters rather than obey their rules. Those few people were easy to ignore since they easily slid through the cracks. Nobody bothered to speak for them. Those folks who did help them, were content to just just do what they could not make a war of it. It was all about some kind of power struggle to those who played games, but not to those who just served the homeless community. Faith based help seemed to be the easiest to tailor their treatment to a smaller number of people so be more flexible.