I live in an apartment in downtown Atlanta . It is a great apartment. I have way more space than I could ever fully occupy, the commute is easy, and the rent is low. But there’s a catch. I live next to what I’m fairly certain is one of the worst homeless shelters of all time.
When I moved into my apartment I was not aware of its proximity to the shelter – thanks to a very informative property manager and her staff that assured me it was in, “A great lively urban neighborhood.”
So, you’d think my greatest frustration is the fact that I live next to a homeless shelter, but you’d be wrong. Let me be clear. I DO NOT oppose helping the homeless. My frustration comes from the fact that this particular shelter is being shut down for being run by an epically inefficient nonprofit that does nothing more than give drug addicts a place to sleep. In other words, a proper shelter gives a hand up, not a hand out. It teaches a man to fish instead of giving him a place to cook that “fish” up in a spoon and shoot in into his arm with a used hypodermic.
In the event our readers ever aspire to open their own homeless shelter, let me outline some important guidelines to save you from the same plight as my soon-to-be-homeless-themselves neighbor:
1. Proper screening: A properly run shelter should record who comes and goes. While there are plenty of reasons people become homeless, a few jump out: drug abuse and mental illness. As such, anyone who wants to stay at the shelter should be required to be drug tested and have a mental screening. This is to determine if they have a serious, long-term problem or have just simply fallen on hard times. Why would this differentiation matter? Because it helps decide the next step in getting them the help they need.
2. Provide Opportunities: A proper shelter organization offers job training, medical help, and/or drug counseling to those in need. It treats the long-term “disease”, not just the short-term “symptoms”.
3. Monitor Progress: Make sure individuals are moving through the system and aren’t abusing it.
These all seem pretty common sense, right? Now I’ll paint you a picture of the shelter I live next to:
Looking out of the back windows of my apartment at the desolate cityscape teeming with vagrants casually urinating in view of public roads, fighting in the street, sleeping under heaps of old rags, openly smoking crack while sitting on the crumbling foundation of an abandoned business, it’s not hard to imagine I’m in “Escape from New York” or just on any street in the greater Baltimore area.
Why is this you ask? Because the particular shelter I reside next to fails to drug screen any of the 700 men that call the shelter home. They fail to offer them any services other than warehousing them in a decrepit shithole. And since there’s no limit to how long men can stay in the shelter, many have been abusing/relying on it for years as a place to sleep while they aren’t panhandling or using drugs. The shelter simply aides these people in continuing their cycle of mistakes, which ultimately leads to their death instead of getting them back on their feet.
It’s easy to hate on people you can’t immediately relate to, or to judge people for mistakes you’ve never made (or even had the opportunity to make) yourself. I get that, and I understand that caring for the homeless isn’t for everyone – pick your cause and run your 5K; my concern happens to be the homeless. And all I’m trying to get across to you – potential homeless shelter owners of the future – is that if an organization is going to put itself out there as a “solution” to the problem, the LAST thing they should be doing is inadvertently making it worse.
How much worse? (and keep in mind, I’m not being embellishing…)
I see ambulances loading corpses in my parking lot at least once a week. Many nights, I wake up to the sound of shrieks and moans. When I go look to see what’s up, I see a horde of homeless people gathering in the street. And when I say “hordes” I really do mean hordes – like in zombie movies.
The shelter can hold up to 1,000 men and it’s not uncommon at all for me to look out my window and see upwards of 100 people standing around doing drugs or prostituting. The shelter’s lack of screening allows these folks to perpetuate their bad habits, which – spoiler alert – brings in the dealers that prey on them and in turn brings even more crime into the shit-hole neighborhood than already exists.
It’s a 4×5 block area of complete lawlessness. It really is almost like being in a zombie movie sometimes. “Barricade the doors, they’re coming for our electronics!”
I joke, and I know I sound over the top, but this shelter fails to meet hardly any standards by which shelters are judged (aside from perhaps having a roof…) – so much so that it ranked dead last out of 20 shelters in the Atlanta area and had its funding from the government pulled.
Yay! Good riddance, right?
Not so fast. The ownership is planning a rally/protest this weekend where their supporters will encircle my building. I have heard many people unfamiliar with the situation offer support for this cause because they think the big bad city government is just trying to blindly shut down a homeless shelter, when in reality the best thing for the homeless of the city is to shut it down and lead them somewhere else where they will actually get help.
So please, Atlanta readers, if you hear anyone who is uninformed talking about this issue, let them know that this shelter gives homeless shelters and the people who volunteer for them – good people, who do good work – a bad name.
Related posts:
Loading ...