User:Zsanders

--Zsanders 19:43, 16 December 2009 (UTC)Homelessness is Seattle, is and is rapidly becoming a real problem for Downtown Seattle residents. Most of the city homeless persons live in downtown Seattle, or with a traveling group called tent city. Homeless person are typical drawn to this area because most of the city’s recovery, shelter, and social services, and some medical services are located downtown. Downtown Seattle has a large population of homeless person that sleep in the local parks. In the recent years county executives put strict time restriction laws on our parks. This to me was to control where the homeless people go and what times they can be in the parks. Parks are a natural resource, and should be shared by all of the community.

Often Homeless person have limited opportunity to earn a living wage or get public support, in the form of social services. Educational and functional disabilities (substance abuse included), prevents most homeless men from getting jobs that pay a higher salary than minimum wage. With out employment, many homeless men can’t afford to pay rent anywhere in the U.S, even with disability services. There is a financial grant provided to some men though our local DSHD offices. It is called General Assistance. This grant is usually a max of about $350.00. Even with this income you still cannot afford a median priced studio or one bedroom apt, in Seattle or King County.

Criminalization of homelessness is a major factor in how we view and treat our homeless population. Men are frequently arrested for loitering, sleeping, urinating, or drinking in public places. These activities are legal and natural behaviors in the home, but when you are homeless this activities are natural but made illegal because they are done in public. These types of activities which are done in public, manifest them selves in the form of criminal records, even though it is non criminal behavior. This also leads to a high unemployment rate. With criminal convictions, most employers will not hire you. And how can homeless men pay court ordered fee’s that are required, because of the criminal conviction. To get a criminal record in Seattle expunged is hard to do. Seattle is limited; the last place I knew where you could get it done was Central Area Motivational Services.

Single men after the age of 18 cannot receive or are not eligible for health coverage. This has many effects, for example, with dental issues; you are not able to obtain dentures or replacements for missing teeth. A smile is usually the first thing you see on a person, so to not be able to smile, has self esteem effects, which can see seen in human to human inter actions. Also employers are not highly likely to hire some one with no front teeth or no teeth at all. Most of these teeth have been lost to poorly maintained dental issues, also drug use plays a big part in losing teeth, which brings me to my next issue. Healthcare also provides chemical dependency assistance. Chemical dependency has been defined as a medical issue and thus a person needs to have health insurance to find chemical dependency help, and counseling services combined to keep them clean and sober. But with no health care how is one to do that.

These are just some of the issues that are plaguing homeless men in Seattle and other places in the U.S. There is no one solution to combat this problem. To eradicate homelessness, there has to be a combined effort. There needs to be employment for convicted felons, there needs to be assistance with expunging criminal records, there needs to be medical services so every one can strive to be clean and maintain that through medical care and counseling services. There need to be housing available, educational services, and the right of basic human privileges needs to be reinstated, so men can begin to combat their issues. It will take a community to make this happen, so until we are all willing to stand united there will continue to be citizen of our communities that will fall by the waist side.

"Healing Hands". HCH Clinician's Network. 11-30-09 .