Finally, A Key West Homeless Forum With Substance
Thursday, 9/11, brought a link to the above video of the recent homeless forum from Father Steve Braddock.
Steve heads up Florida Keys Outreach Coalition, which gives down and out people a chance to get their lives back on track and living back inside.
I wondered how many homeless veterans the white Christian guy (G.W. Bush) and the black Christian guy (Barack H. Obama) produced with their wars the homeless man Jesus didn’t sanction?
And how many more veterans of those two wars, who are not yet homeless, will get there sooner or later?
Homeless vets were discussed at the recent homeless forum in Key West.
The forum ran nearly 3 hours, non-stop. I attended and spoke the allowed two minutes during citizen comments at the end.
The forum was excellent, substantive, compelling. As opposed to a number of homeless forums/summits in the past, which were political noise and bleating by people who had no clue what they were dealing with, in my opinion.
If you did not attend the forum, I hope you will take the time, several sittings will break it up, to watch and listen to the entire forum.
You will get a very different picture from what you read in the Citizen and hear from local officials about homelessness.
You will learn criminalizing homeless people is the most costly, by far, and the least effective, by far, approach.
You will learn what works and what doesn’t work, to try to deal with homelessness.
You will learn the federal law local governments are required to follow in dealing with homeless people.
You will learn feeding homeless people enables them … to live.
You will learn anybody can become homeless.
You will learn, with rare exceptions, homeless people do not choose to become homeless.
You will learn – yikes! – all the many cities in Florida, which have a homeless problem, believe it is because their city alone is such great place to live.
You meant Floriduh, didn’t you?
Thanks Sloan! Your mention of Jesus puts things in perspective. WWJD is always a good one. The Buddha teaches love of “the other” and to see oneself as “the other”…So many Americans are only a couple of paychecks or an illness away from being homeless and that is a scary place to live. Let’s work together to figure this out.
I wish there was a way to figure this out, Alex, but, as I said during citizen comments at the county-city homeless summit last spring (that was a different event than the one reported by me in the article to which you replied), there is no solution that will make everyone happy, the best that can be done is try to manage the problem. County Commissioner David Rice, a licensed psychologist, who for years ran the Guidance Clinics of the Florida Keys, which processed many homeless addicts, drying them out, rehabbing them, sending them on to Florida Keys Outreach Coalition’s residence shelter recovery program in Key West, said he agreed with me.
I said during citizen comments at the recent homeless forum, which I reviewed in the article above, that putting homeless addicts, who are still using, into free housing is a waste of time and money; and while the city’s entire focus, so far, is to get its street people inside at night, the city’s focus instead should be on helping new homeless people get back into their own place to live and back on their feet, before they become old homeless people, or street people, who are so much more difficult to turn around, especially if they are addicts, which 90 percent of them were when I lived on the street; and to help people just a pay check away from being homeless, mostly due to very high cost of rental housing down here, to have affordable housing, too. It’s going to require a lot more public rental housing to help those two groups, I said.
I hope you and others interested will have chance to watch the video of the recent forum. It cuts to the chase. There are no politicians holding forth during the panelists’ presentations and conversations. It’s hugely refreshing and educational. As are most of the citizen speakers during citizen comments toward the end of the event.
So, did the mayor flat out say that the city isn’t interested in doing jack about the homeless situation or did I misinterpret?