Skid Row: Not The Kind of Row Houses We Want…

When most people think of homelessness, their first images are of Skid Row. Here is a description of this terrible predicament that our community has fallen into. It is an excerpt from my book “How To Increase Homelessness”; the chapter is titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Plan” (Click here to see the book):
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It has become a pipeline of low-income and homeless humanity gushing onto the sidewalks, gutters, and alleys of our central city. Sadly, to some people, they are considered human waste who waste away their own lives along with our community resources. So they are pigeon-holed into neighborhoods where nobody wants them. We call it Skid Row.

Skid Row. A derogatory term created years ago when the down-and-out “bums” in the Northwestern logging industry would hang out where the logs skidded down the mountains to the waterways below. Now we see it as a place where human life has skidded to the bottom rung of the social ladder, where people have given up on their personal hopes and dreams, where futures scream to a halt.

Small little cardboard pup tents propped up against urban concrete block buildings. Rows and rows of them, lined up on urban sidewalks, as if they are meant to be there. We drive by them ignoring their predicament, pretending that human beings do not sleep in these temporary street structures. Pretending that this is just an apocalyptic horror movie that we can walk out of after sitting through a couple of hours of terror. But no matter how much we want to wish them away, they’re still there. People skidding down life’s path onto our public streets.

Our streets become their bedroom, living room, and unfortunately, their bathroom.

It’s no wonder that businesses and homeowners living near this predicament are screaming for help. Imagine if dozens and dozens of Greyhound buses filled with homeless people dropped off their passengers in your neighborhood. Imagine if they started erecting cardboard pup tents on your streets, near the stores you shop at, along the route where your children walk to school. There would be a town hall meeting faster than you could snap your fingers.

Everyone loses when nothing happens. Certainly people without homes would rather sleep in an apartment than in a cardboard pup tent. Certainly homeowners and businesses would rather see these people thriving in employment and permanent housing than being arrested or living in squalor.

Everyone knows there’s a problem, and we all want to solve it. We just can’t agree on what direction.