Most people don't know what it's like to be homeless, or how bad the conditions are in most homeless shelters.
The shelters in the Boston area will be crowded for the next several months, as they are every year.
There really ought to be recovery meetings at every shelter, every day.
There also ought to be real programs for educating homeless people for something other than service jobs, and those GED and college education programs should be coordinated with every shelter.
There ought to be significant educational and character requirements for working at homeless shelters. A high percentage of the people who work at homeless shelters are both uneducated and abusive.
There also ought to be options for homeless people who have a lot of dental problems other than to have dental students practice pulling out all of their teeth and then giving them dentures. Having bad teeth or no teeth is a serious impediment to getting and maintaining employment and a social life. Despite all of the hateful things that the conglomerate has said about my teeth, I have beautiful teeth by contrast to a lot of homeless people. I have no missing teeth, and I have never had a cavity; most chronically homeless people have never had my past socioeconomic advantages.
There should also be shelters where you can get enough sleep if you working, whether that means being able to work at night and sleep during the day or whether it means that you are guaranteed to have a bed to sleep in when you are a working person. Most shelters do not allow the guests to be there during the day, and many shelters do not guarantee overnight beds to people who are working. The Pine Street Inn is the cleanest and most organized shelter where I have ever stayed, but when I was there, the shelter only had 10 guaranteed beds at a time for working women. That meant that women who were working and who weren't one of the 10 who had guaranteed beds had to do the lottery for beds every night. If you know anything about how strenuous it is to be homeless at all, with the noise and the crowding and the arguing, having no privacy and often not having a secure place to put your things, you ought to be able to understand the inhumaneness of not knowing whether or not you'll have a bed to sleep in at the end of a working day.
These are things that most of the public doesn't know. That's why stereotypes about lazy homeless people who don't want to work are never eliminated, and why so many shelters are filthy, dangerous, degrading places where a lot of people wake up every morning thinking of suicide.
I don't know if it's fact or rumor, but several people have told me that the Woods-Mullen shelter used to be the city morgue. I would not be surprised if that were not a rumor.
Copyright L. Kochman, November 14, 2016 @ 7:56 p.m./additions @ 11:12 p.m./additions November 15, 2016 @ 1:00 a.m.
