In the Netflix documentary, "Lead Me Home", we follow different homeless people's situations in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We get to look at their lives from a different perspective because we get to personally know about how they live their lives, their struggles, and how they became homeless. Now living in San Francisco which has one of the highest homeless populations, it makes me wonder if are there enough community resources for them to take care of themselves physically and mentally. Because in the documentary it showed how some were not given the proper rehab that they needed in order to change their lives around and live a better life. I know that the Tenderloin, in San Francisco, is usually the place where the majority of homeless live on the streets and I don't know where they would get their food or any resources they need to survive the cold nights. Also in the film, we learn about how some of them became homeless and what would happen if they got enough money to rent a place to live/provide for their family. A few reasons why they became homeless were because of domestic violence, mental illness, bad home situations, addiction, and a number of reasons. When some do get enough money to provide they have to choose whether to pay for a house to live in or to get food to feed themselves and/or their kids and of course, they would choose to get food in order to live. I thought this documentary was really interesting to get an insider perspective and to learn how they try to live out in the streets and it does make me believe that there are homeless people genuinely trying to change their lives.
TED Talk: Poverty isn't a lack of character; it's a lack of cash- Rutger Bregman
In this TED talk, Rutger Bregman quoted the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, that said "poverty is a 'personality defect'. A lack of character." This quote kind of shocked me because I'm pretty sure a lot of people think this way of the homeless but it's not really said out loud like that because you're just being mean to someone who's already having a hard time in life. But I do understand what the quote is trying to get at, like if they're trying to get out of the streets then why do they keep repeating their mistakes by relapsing, spending all of their money, not working hard for it, or just making any poor decisions in general. Bregman then talks about how an experiment on sugarcane farmers showed that their IQ scores before the harvest were much lower than after the harvest, so it's thought that by just being poor, you're more likely to make more poor decisions. I could see why people would agree with this idea but I think that I would disagree because I think it just depends on the person's mind when it comes to money. It could depend on how determined you are/ how motivated you are to change your life in order to thrive with money.
Homelessness - Challenges and Progress
So the article talks about how homelessness commonly occurs because of economic forces, and those dealing with mental health issues, and addiction problems. The economic issues are usually gentrification with the loss of affordable housing. Gentrification was a cause of the fall of the i-hotel (international hotel) in San Francisco, right near Chinatown. Basically, the i-hotel housed elderly Filipinos, especially veterans that served during World War II and they had to tear it down with a wrecking ball because a company bought the land to replace it with more corporate work and tall buildings to look presentable. But this really affected the elderly Filipinos and it disturbed their communities within/near it because they were close to Chinatown, so they had no other place to go for affordable housing. I think the only way to better the homeless' living is to put up more housing programs so they have a place to rest and eat, fund a clinic for them to go get treated, and to have the willingness of residential neighborhoods to allow construction of new facilities for access to necessary resources.
SF Weekly- The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Regan Made Homelessness Permanent
Around December of 1982, there were meetings to address the homeless situation in New York City and San Francisco because there were 36,000 homeless people on the streets combined with both places. After World War II, there were factory and office workers who lost their jobs in the global recession that not only included Vietnam War veterans but women, children, and families. The president, Ronald Reagan, at the time tried to fix this issue by saying "every church and synagogue would take in 10 welfare families." But this was a very controversial solution because it's like he put all the problems onto the church instead of him and the government personally solving the problem. So what the homeless people did was, "many of them war veterans, others unemployed workers struggling to adapt to a changing labor market that no longer needed their skills -- city leaders in Chicago decided to take action. They would keep a "large building heather through the night to house the homeless poor." This just shows that they can't wait for the government to do something, they need to make the change immediately in order to survive.
Systems of Poverty: Understanding Structural Causes of Houselessness
What stood out to me in this article is the 'Criminalization of Homeless People Perpetuatues the Crisis of Homelessness section'. It says, "The criminalization of homelessness is cyclical, meaning it is both a product and a producer of homelessness." This quote made me come to the realization that this is true because after some people are released from jail, they end up going back to the streets because they have no job to go back to or they don't have a home to go back to. How are they supposed to change their lives around when the housing prices have continued to rise when wages haven't. I think even minimum wage jobs should give them a chance.
KRTV- Chronic Homelessness in the US is often Generational
Chronic homelessness is generational, which means that every 1 in 5 women in shelters had experienced homelessness as a child and about 2.5 million children experience homelessness every year. Situational homelessness is when it happens to you during your adult life due to economic forces, mental illness, or addiction. Now knowing about this data brings more awareness to families who are homeless and struggling to feed multiple people, find a good job to pay for food, and try to find an education so they don't end up homeless for the rest of their lives. The children that experience homelessness will likely struggle with housing instability as adults and this is why we need to provide more resources to help generational homelessness become less and less.
The Dallas Morning News- The Problem with Pulling Yourself Up by your own Bootstraps is not Everyone has working Bootstraps
People that help you get to where you are should deserve some credit for your success because without them all the good things that happened to you wouldn't have happened. I feel like using as many resources you have surrounded yourself with to the best of your ability is how you'll change your life around. Having good connections is always good to have them in life.
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