Word: homelessness
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...priority is not its natives; the business community’s concerns lie elsewhere. Even the most energetic public relations effort by the aforementioned booster, the doyen of the Hyannis Main Street Business Improvement District and Hyannis’ leading Babbitt, cannot reconcile the Kennedy Compound with the homeless camp, the lobster-wielding old salt with the shuffling transient and the undulating sand dunes with the drifts of tiny liquor bottles that sanitation workers shoveled into dump trucks in mid-July. The homeless camps hurt the tourist industry; the homeless camps...
Razing the camps did nothing, of course, to solve the underlying problem of homelessness on Cape Cod. Some of those living in the camps were alcoholics; since no Cape Cod homeless shelter allows alcohol— a so-called “wet” shelter in Hyannis has met with stiff opposition—these people have few housing options. Some of those who had been living in the camps were released from mental institutions in the de-institutionalization movement of the 1970s, and struggle with their mental health. Although local charities such as the Salvation Army provided emergency...
...recent editorial, the Cape Cod Times—the Cape’s only daily paper—argues for the removal of the Hyannis homeless shelter from its current location. “If plans proceed to move the Cape’s only overnight shelter and related medical services from their downtown locations to a site further out of town—or even to another town—the prospect of some of the homeless panhandling on Main Street, sleeping on the village green and urinating on the sidewalks, may become less convenient...
Like the platoon of Babbitts who succeeded in having the homeless camps removed from Hyannis, the Cape Cod Times seems to believe that removing homeless people from tourists’ view will resolve the problem of homelessness—that the only problem with homelessness is its unattractiveness and its undermining of the Cape’s bucolic image...
...interview the Cape Cod Times conducted the day after the city hauled away the remains of the six camps, a homeless woman complained: “We’re not bothering anyone This town doesn’t want the homeless here. They are trying to get us all off the Cape.” Like an aging courtesan, Barnstable is learning the danger of relying on its looks for a living—and like an aging courtesan, it has yet to learn that handsome is as handsome does...