According to volunteer organizations, the real number of homeless people in New York City is close to 200,000. It is impossible to confirm or refute this information, as in the summer vagrants prefer to spend the night in the streets, and official statistics (60,000 homeless people) are based solely on data from city shelters.
The homeless in New York City has become so large that some parks lack free benches. They’re all busy with dirty vagrants carrying all their stuff. Social media even have special groups where tourists and residents drop photos of homeless people.
In no city in the world have there are so many vagrants, says Hing Li, a tourist from Hong Kong. – While you visit the subway in Times Square, you can count 10-25 vagrants sleeping on the stairs. Homeless people can be found in cars, cinemas, big shopping malls.
The reason for the large number of homeless people in the Big Apple is not only the constantly rising rent prices and high unemployment but also the total inaction of the authorities. Mayor DeBlazio and City Council Speaker Marc-Vivarino have banned the police from driving vagrants from public places. As a result, there are sometimes unprecedented incidents that defy any logic.
So, in Greenwich Village, a homeless man walks into a fancy restaurant and sits down for a table. The officials tried to throw away a stinking vagrant, but he stated that he wanted to stay cool for several hours (the temperature in the street was high for 100 Fahrenheit). The business was a dead end, and the police arrived three hours later.
The biggest problem is the aggressiveness of the homeless. Feeling supported by DeBlazio, they became arrogant and arrogant. They demand money, touch people, and sometimes attack passers-by. Last weekend, a vagrant beat a man with a big wooden stick for refusing to help him financially. He was hospitalized with numerous contusions and a broken nose.
In the meantime, some travel companies specializing in tours of New York advise their clients to go out with gloves and gauze on their faces. This is necessary to prevent a vagrant from passing on any infection, lice, or fleas.
New York is a city in which the number of homeless shelters has been growing by leaps and bounds lately.
Why do many people prefer to be illegal in the United States than to live legally in their countries? But at least because in the States there is a system of shelters where everyone can be saved from cold, hunger, get medical care, and all this without unnecessary questions about documents, status in the country, and the circumstances that brought a person to the shelter.
A former employee shared with me information about the internal regulations in establishments of this type. You cannot give an interview openly to her: when you get a job in this system, you sign a non-disclosure document, which is valid until the end of your life. Even if an employee has retired or quit, he is not allowed to talk about certain things. Otherwise, up to prison and deprivation of pension. But in ordinary conversations, please tell a lot.
So, according to one of the laws of New York, no one can remain homeless in our city. This has been the practice since the Great Depression when people stayed in batches on the street if they lost their jobs. And therefore, if a person from the street gets to the hospital, then after he has been cured, they have no right to send him back to the street. He is obliged to find either a hospice (if a person dies) or a shelter. And special hospital staff are looking for him social workers. If a person has lost a place in a shelter while he was in the hospital, they must find a place in another shelter.
You can live in a shelter not just for years, but for tens of years. And people live like that. Those who are younger go to work during the day (if it is not there, then collect alms, begging and the elderly or the sick often do not go. What for? There is always a bed with clean linen (it is changed more often than once a week), there you can always wash, feed there, first aid is provided on the spot 24 hours a day on demand.
You can be illegal, you can have no documents at all this is not a reason to deny a person shelter. So they spend the night there for years.
All shelters in NY and, in general, any city in the United States are divided into male, female, and family.
It is sometimes dangerous in men, despite the presence of the police, but in general, it is possible to live, although the homeless complained to me that they did not go there, because they kill there. In women’s order, it is often akin to a women’s prison and they fight, and they can disfigure. In family silence. There are wonderful shelters where families often expect free housing. Families also often settle in city hotels and this is also at the expense of the city.
As this employee told me, every February all employees of the Department of Homelessness in New York take to the streets to persuade the homeless to go to the shelter to wash at least change into clean clothes Sometimes they go out like this in January, if it is cold.
“But,” she said, “Almost no one comes to us from the streets. You have to understand that many of those who have been living on the streets for years are mentally ill.
The homeless complained that it was dangerous there, so they went out into the streets. “Well yes!” She replies, “I, a woman, worked in a men’s shelter for more than ten years, and it was not dangerous for me there! And yes to them! Who are you listening to?” On the streets live those who do not care at all. Or those who can not help taking drugs can not help but drink this is prohibited in shelters. But women’s shelters are hell. This bottom is like a prison and even worse. But even here it’s better to go to a shelter than freeze to death on the street.
Yes, if a person is on the street, then according to statistics, he will live for five years. As a rule, homeless people drink to keep warm, and they usually die because of alcohol cirrhosis, intoxication, freeze drunk on the cold ground As for the difference between men’s and women’s shelters, may have appeared because men sink to the bottom more slowly and not with such, say, willingness and speed as women. In a pair a degraded woman and a man of the same kind, a woman is usually more aggressive and dies faster.
In the family type of shelters, absolutely normal people often live, not asocial. In this way, they can wait for public housing, and from there they often leave for a completely normal life. There are usually legal people who work there but cannot afford to rent a house at market prices.
There are shelters in New York in a variety of areas.
It is relatively easy to get a place in a shelter if you, for example, do not have pets. Recently, however, we have opened a place here where they take dogs and cats too, but it is already overcrowded.
In general, the procedure is as follows you must contact a special office for a place in the shelter before ten in the evening. Then, according to the law, the applicant must be given a place. If he applied later, he can stay to sleep right in the office there are wooden benches in the visitor’s room, but many simply sleep on the floor. The next day, during the day, they must find a place.
If a person does not speak English, then an interpreter will be provided for him or an employee will be found who speaks his language. And then for another ten days, the shelter staff will check how it happened that the person was left homeless.
They will go to the place where the person lived before, talk to friends, the landlord If necessary, they will help to sue the landlord, or to protect themselves from an aggressive husband or wife And anyone who has arrived from another country and is in America illegally will be helped to buy a ticket back home. More precisely, to anywhere in the world, if only he flew away. Nobody will punish for living illegally in the United States for years, no. Just go to the shelter social worker and say: Buy me a ticket home.
They will buy it for the asking person and for his whole family, if necessary. And they will help to restore the lost passport they will contact the embassy of the country from where the person flew to the United States.
Do you know how many people have asked for a ticket to that very friend of mine who has worked in the shelter system for 25 years?
Two. One of them was from Estonia, the other not “ours”, but from somewhere in Latin America.
Illegals prefer to return home a clean bed in a shelter in the United States. And at home and at home? So my son flew to the USA, my mother died during this time, my sister-brother became strangers. In the US, he seems to have nothing, but if something happens, the ambulance will take him and the doctors will come out, he will be well dressed we have hundreds of charitable organizations here, he will be fed the same situation, plus, the mayor’s office also feeds people around year.
They don’t ask for documents on the streets just like that. The climate is relatively warm (I’m talking about NY, but in general, the United States is a rather warm country). This is how they live here to a ripe old age, or just to the point when it is time to move either to a hospice or immediately to a cemetery for the homeless.
The budget for 2019 has already amounted to two billion two hundred million dollars. In the first six months of 2020, 1.5 billion was spent on the needs of the urban homeless. According to official statistics, there are no more than 80,000 of them in New York, which means that for everyone living on the street or in a shelter, more than 18 thousand dollars were spent.
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