http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/110707/nes_215688836.shtml
Joy, just what we need! That was a masterful move by those mayors, portraying themselves as "caring" and getting the homeless out of the beaches, two problems solved, they don't have to pay and the homeless get moved, check mate!
during winter times, aren't these shelters so full that people get turned away?? If true, then how are the people at the beaches helping them??? I don't know why we have to deal with the city, JTA and the beaches idiots all the time. We should actually be sending them some of ours, so that we have a fair amount of homeless.
QuoteGhioto referred to "Miss Ellen," a woman with schizophrenia who lived 12 years on Jacksonville's streets and was honored at Sulzbacher's Transformations benefit last month.
For years, the Hope team visited Miss Ellen and invited her to come to the shelter. Finally last year, she agreed. Ghioto said Miss Ellen was dirty, paced frantically, slept on the ground and wouldn't talk to anyone.
In July, Ghioto leafed through the images on her desk and saw a picture of a smiling Miss Ellen at a birthday party with her hair done and her nails manicured. Ghioto could hardly believe it was the same woman.
God bless them, perhaps we could be the City that DOES give a damn!Ocklawaha
No worries guys... I am now loading my truck full of homeless people everytime I visit the beaches, st. augustine, baymeadows, southside & mandarin. I tell them I have beer and pull up to a nice home and get out. Then after we get to the door, I tell them I forgot my keys in my truck, while they wait by the door. I then drive away. It's pretty entertaining if you can stay long enough to see the neighbors reactions as they drive by. I think I may start purchasing those white food containers and putting a messy meal and some napkins in, then handing them out as well. That way they can litter those neighborhoods like they do ours.
OK, so i'm kidding. But, we really should consider a homeless delivery service. Those other areas of town are missing out!
Why not take abandoned properties owned by the city and let them work fixing them up? They can stay there, get food, some minor spend money, a few mentors/tutors to make sure they have basic skills to find jobs, get donated clothing, and build a communial house... then use that as a base until they can get decent jobs?
Like a WPA project from the 30's?
Maybe we could get BRT approved then go after funding for picks and shovels... Let's see, 2,000 men, add in a few women and we'll have it up and running before 30 years is up! All for pennies on the dollar...
Ocklawaha
Quote from: hanjin1 on November 09, 2007, 09:35:22 AM
during winter times, aren't these shelters so full that people get turned away?? If true, then how are the people at the beaches helping them??? I don't know why we have to deal with the city, JTA and the beaches idiots all the time. We should actually be sending them some of ours, so that we have a fair amount of homeless.
lets just send the homeless people to hati
Cold in winter? Hummmm....
Little story to tell.
Winter of 85/86... Jersey Shore, Asbury Park...
(Greetings!)
I was part owner of an alternative restaurant called The Owl and the Fiddler. One of the others was a eco-geek more interested in his compost pile than doing panrty, and the other was a computer geek, who couldn't even do pantry or work the house, front or back. I was also on an alternative newspaper called The Flowering Tree. I would make sure I would hit the copper dance floor at The Green Parrot, an "alternative" music rock and dance club. The Jersey Shore has a train line run down it, and the restaurant was in Red Bank and the club in Neptune City, near Asbury. I would ride the train often, so came to know that at 11pm Asbury Park police would open the lobby of the train station (also the lobby to city hall on one side and the police station on the other-no kidding, mixed use, a city hall and police station along side a railroad track with the train station in the middle, one building).
Why would they do this, because the homeless didn't have a place to go, and they even had a security camera, seldom watched, so the homeless didn't freeze to death.
I was aware of this because of being a train rider. Monmouth County has a semi-central homeless center at Fort Monmouth, an Army base (high tech electronics/radar), which you had to be at by 6 pm, IF they had space for you.
Without buses running there, many homeless, some of who still worked, would be trapped miles from where they are able to scrounge for scrap, or go to work. That and buses and other public cost money and it's not a centralized place like Jax, and there arent that many, so they were like a dirty little secret rather than a city-wide problem like here.
So here I am, not long before Christmas. I saw a show at the Parrot, I think it was Living Color, and I'm coming back along a road that runs four 40 mph lanes on the West side of the tracks running North, tracks on my right, the Atlantic a mile further. The east side road running along the tracks North-South was also four lanes, and small city, like a few five and six story buildings, but mostly 2, 3, 4 story, stores with apartments on top. Most buildings from the late 1,800's to early to mid 1,900's. I'm driving home and it's cold ass a bitch, like 15-20 degrees. I get caught by a red light and stop right at the North traffic signal that crosses the tracks, which are just on my right, station/municipal complex next, then Main Street. I could see about 30 or 40 homeless inside, and know that there is no one who gives a damn about these people.
Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding the lights start and I know a train is coming, and I don't know why but without even thinking about it I spin my wheel to the right and zip across the tracks before the arm goes down. I was going there, and the train signal was like a wake-up call. I remember thinking that there was no one who was helping these people, no services or anything for them. I made the next right and was now on Main going South. I look into the glass windows of the lobby, figured 40 to be safe and went to the Wa-Wa
(hey, anyone ever go to a Wa-Wa? Ain't they great?!)
At the Wa-Wa I rolled in like Skot... quick step, no warning go right up to the coffee and tell the guy working there I need to make more and how much for about two gallons!
I start a pot, then go looking for cheap food... mini-doughnuts and some pastry...
I gate loads of packets of sugar and cream, stir sticks, napkins, and when the guy asked what I was doing, I told him I was going to the train station to feed the homeless who has to sleep there and were camped out and mostly walking around like zombies with blankets over them.
The guy is moved by what I'm doing and doesn't even charge me for half of it, or the coffee, which I had in a tall plastic tub.
So it's like between 3:30 and 4, and I get there, and there are about ten people sleeping and around 25 awake. And I ask for help bringing stuff in...and two guys do.
Then I start pouring coffee and ask about the cleanest looking of the guys to pass out the pastries and doughnuts. Everyone who looked so dismal, like someone has just killed their kitty, started talking and cheering up.
I started listening to their strories. Just so they could tell someone they though cared, they opened up. I met a guy who I used to see playing folk guitar at some clubs. I recognized him. He said his car died and he couldn't get to his gigs, which made him from $30 to $75 a night plus tips. So he lost his apartment, and his car was towed. He lost everything.
The next night, at the Owl, I took chicken scraps and made a stock, and used scraps and made a soup, and took our old bread (we made our own organic), and when I closed and got done cleaning up, about 11:30, drove 20 minuets and fed them soup..
This became a regular thing. Asbury Park and Neptune is like the downtown and Springfield of Monmouth County. You would figure a shelter would be there, and one was until developers bought the land and closed it (sound like anywhere you know?)
I was asked about a week later by someone at the restaurant why I was making "scraps" food and putting so much effort into a big meal and what I was doing with it, and I told her. She made a phone call to someone, then asked me if she could come along.
Now I had someone interested in helping.
A week later, the gals at The Marine Bar came over about 7 pm with two pans of lasagna and a pack of paper plates and forks in two pans. They hugged me and told me that was for the homeless.
That night I saw a new guy, well dressed young black dude walking around like he was in a daze.
He was thrown out of a place that was in his name. His girlfriend said he hit her, a domestic, but I don't think this guy had it in him. He caught her cheating, some guy in his bed, in his place, and she had him thrown out. He was a mason by trade, and for two months masons had not been working because it was so damn cold. He had just paid all the bills, so was broke, and there wasn't a check coming, so he had no money, the clothes on his back, and wasn't allowed in his own home, in the middle of winter.
I actually found him a job with a guy who put on cedar siding a week later.
Some of the homeless would be like that forever. They have no skills or education and were basically retarded for all social purposes. Funny this wasn't long after Reagan put them all on the street, the SOB.
Some were just down on their luck and needed help. I remember one guy asking me who I was with, what church... I said none, then he asked what agency, again "None". He was shocked that this was just a roughe thing, just one guy who wanted to help people he didn't even know, and when others found out what I was doing just by myself, they started showing up to help, too.
I had people bringing food and blankets and coats to the restaurant, and I didn't solicit a damn thing. There was no structure to do what I was doing. Others started getting more involved, and eventually neptune and Asbury Park got together and gave a house away to the people who had the shelter that got closed.
I think in part that they were sick of waking people up at 6 am to clear them out before commuters started showing up at the station, but I'd like to think they wanted to help.
I was never really vocal about it until one night. I had not seen one guy for a day, then his "friend" had told me they had a lover's spat and he was kicked out of the station by the cops and not allowed to return.
He was sleeping under the boardwalk, so in 10 degree weather we searched in the middle of the night, about 5 am I think when I found him, frozen under the boardwalk, still as can be.
I didn't go home but waited for the mayor, and when he came in I explained to him my night before, when he tried to blow it off. It became a little confrontational, but it wasn't long afterwards a vacant home was given up for the people who were running the shelter to get into.
They wanted their "homeless" problem gone as well. No one wants it, but does anyone try to solve it? A few do, and there is some headway sometimes, but there are more right behind the ones we fix to replace them.
Jax to me is like all the problems of Monmouth County on steriods... And it all ties to the drugs and alcohol, lack of education, lack of safety nets for people and families, and a social system based on pawn shops and bail bondsmen and scrap metal and blood banks....
So when you see homeless being sent to Jax for help, maybe part of it is to get rid of them from the beaches, and maybe another is to help them. One thing is for sure, when you look at Jax demographics and know that there are 10,000 empty houses and apartments and too many homeless with no where to go, it makes you sick.
Some people would have the Soilent Green truck come in. I could see a Bush signing the order and a Peyton carrying it out.
It takes such nominal effort to help someone stand up again sometimes. What does it say of us when we don't? The beaches need to deal with their fair share, not just dump them elsewhere. I'm waiting for "centers" to actually have people ordered there, to get them out of the way, and can see being homeless criminalized.
We need to fix the causes of it instead of trying to sweep it away or under the rug.
Hats off to those who are trying to do that, there are some places and people who are.
But when I know a family living in a motel on 10 and Lane, and they are trapped there, I think we can do better. It is in our Constitution to help each other... promote the general welfare!
That's government's job, but aren't WE the government?
I think the Beaches can maybe send us a few, but that they should deal with their own more as well.
I'd suggest halfway houses, but someone would just use code or an overlay to get rid of them because they are too close to them.
Maybe we can make a work camp or follow Ock's advice there...
But then again, there's always Solient Green!