Quote:
Originally Posted by dktshb
What is your point trying to call homeless people street people?
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Because this thread is constantly conflating two separate, but overlapping, topologies. This isn't a thread about homeless, it's a thread about street people. The Tenderloin is overrun with street people, not homeless. The Tenderloin is packed with SROs for street people. Most of the "scary" people have homes.
My wife used to be involved in a public-private committee to identify the homeless population in NYC. The highest share of homeless, by far, are in the fringes of the city, in places like Far Rockaway, Queens. But good luck finding a "bum" in Far Rockway. Manhattan had the lowest share, but Manhattan is obviously where street people are most visible. The homeless are coming from public housing, mostly, and are heavily African American and Hispanic single mothers with small children. They aren't visible; they're couch-surfing, or living in cheap by-the-week hotels, or with random friends or dudes. They rarely have issues with alcohol or drugs, and tend to not have mental illness issues outside of depression.
The schizoid junkie you see shooting up in the Tenderloin likely has a permanent address. Some literally live on the streets, but this is a subset of the street people population. So why are we calling both populations "homeless" and conflating the issues?