Word: homelessness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...chronic mental patient and crack abuser who terrorized Manhattan's Upper West Side, or Andres Huang, the transient accused of building the campfire that recently set off a raging blaze in California. "About two years ago, we began to see what is almost a national arms race to criminalize homelessness," says Madeleine Stoner, a professor of social work at the University of Southern California. "People are beginning to fear for their safety." Concurs Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, the man charged by the Clinton Administration with devising a solution: "A backlash is growing. What I believed...
Lost in the rush to shed collective guilt, however, is the distinction between the majority of the homeless, who require only temporary shelter, and the chronic street people -- the 15% or so of the unhoused population who are the most unstable, the most sick and often the most visible. Also obscured is the inevitable fact that herding the homeless out of one neighborhood only forces them to take shelter elsewhere. Some communities, acknowledging that reality, are seeking a proper balance of compassion and practicality...
...this point, however, innovation is the exception. Even in communities that boast a spirit of tolerance, citizens are turning their energies to driving out the homeless. In San Francisco, city planners have designed sleep- proof seats to chase the homeless from bus shelters. Santa Monica's police issue citations to people who loiter in parks after midnight; repeat offenders go to jail. Legislators in Madison, Wisconsin, have outlawed "aggressive panhandling." In Atlanta, where civic leaders want to polish their city in preparation for the 1996 Olympics, new ordinances make it illegal to sleep on park benches, wash motorists' windows...
...York City voters sent a clear signal when they elected Rudy Giuliani mayor last month. The former U.S. Attorney's campaign included proposals to boot the homeless out of shelters after 90 days and rescind the city's unique, state-imposed decree to provide emergency shelter for anyone who asks for it. Generosity is clearly ebbing. Soup kitchens and food banks across the country report a drop in donations by as much as 40% this Thanksgiving. Sometimes the backlash expresses itself in ugly ways. Last month a homeless man in San Francisco was critically injured when attackers doused him with...
Perhaps the most telling sign that even America's softest hearts are hardening is a radical reframing of the debate into terms that reject a sympathetic view of the homeless. In the '80s, the issue's leading spokesman was Robert Hayes, founder of the Coalition for the Homeless, who identified the three main causes of homelessness as "housing, housing and housing." People who challenged that thinking were accused of blaming the victims. Today the leading voices are authors Alice Baum and Donald Burnes, who claim the very word "homelessness" is a misnomer coined by activists to persuade the public that...