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In my life and in my line of work tales and verified examples of outrageous behavior abound. Like many who've spent long periods of time on the street, things I've seen - and done - while in active addiction and/or living homeless would shock the conscience of any "normal" and rational human being. The sad part of this however, is that while I, and many of my brothers and sisters out there still on the street certainly account for many of these examples, the outrages perpetrated upon us by the community members charged with assisting us to make better choices under better living conditions are damned near as frequent.
Let me provide you with just a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean.
A.
A local affordable housing provider "specializing" in working with homeless individuals is advertising and heavily promoting available units "rent free until you find employment." Great, except that they then expect an application fee and $250 security deposit before the client can move in. So tell me how it is they haven't thought through perhaps fronting the individual the cost of the app fee and deposit until they find a job as well??? This has got to be one of the most stupidly designed programs I've ever encountered.
B.
A state agency charged with providing the Section 8 vouchers in a city have used so many attorneys over their lifetime to sue clients for backrent as a result of evictions has lost thousands of pieces of the paperwork associated with those court cases and cannot tell whether someone has actually discharged the debt or not. Even when prospective applicants for the Section 8 vouchers do prove with a court document they've met their obligation, the agency doesn't update their files, forcing the person to 're-prove' their debt-free status at every renewal or when the individual needs to move. If the record is an old one (after 7 years, I believe but am not certain), the court document goes into "long term storage offsite" which means that the wait times from the court to receive the document could be several weeks, effectively closing the window for the person's eligibility for the Section 8 voucher. We cannot even begin to guess how many people, when presented with the challenge of obtaining their court paper proving their debt discharge, have thrown up their hands in despair and resigned themselves to life under a viaduct in a cardboard box.
C.
Sometimes, the programs designed to help become the end-all to some providers and end up causing them tunnel vision. The Vulnerability Index, (VI) created by Dr. Jim O'Connell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeless_Vulnerability_Index), is a fantastic tool to assess who within the homeless population in a given city is likely to die on the streets within the next year if left untreated and homeless. The tool is excellent at starting dialogue, getting city officials and concerned community members to pay attention, and as a mechanism for assisting outreach workers in laser-targeting high priority engagement efforts. But the VI should be one of many tools, not the only tool in the box any community uses to end homelessness.
Case in point: a few days ago, an outreach worker came upon a 67 y/o Vietnam combat veteran who was in a wheelchair and missing a leg and who has been homeless since early November. When an outreach worker attempted to procure rapid housing for the gentleman, he was told that "the provider using the VI as their triage tool for placing individuals into housing stated he did not "meet the criteria" for the VI because - get this - the man hasn't been homeless long enough.
Excuse me, but what the fuck? Where is the mechanism - the process - for triaging newly homeless individuals into the VI priority list who may rise quickly to the top of the list, regardless of the length of time they're actually homeless? This massive flaw in this tool, when it is used as the exclusive mechanism for prioritizing and moving the most vulnerable of our society into housing quickly, is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of the VI, especially when cities, trying to laser-focus their oh so scarce resource dollars on those "most vulnerable" (spell that C O S T L Y to the city) use the VI exclusively as the only path to housing.
I could spend the next several hours listing examples for you, but I hope you by now are getting the point; for those of us who've committed to leaving some of our own challenges, behaviors, and/or problems associated with life on the streets, when we see the kind of gross incompetence, egregious treatment, poor planning around social services supposedly available to us, and then have to deal with service providers who don't have a clue, are judgmental, and add to our own trauma with their callous disregard for the challenges we face in transitioning into housing, sometimes life on the streets doesn't seem like such a bad option after all.
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