Tommy D. has precisely identified all the services available to homeless in AP (and how we out do the rest of the county).
So if there are still 25-116 homeless in town, they might be among the chronic homeless, resistent to standard outreach, as in the the two articles which follow. ================================================== Off the Street and in an Apartment, but Unable to Escape Homelessness http://tinyurl.com/2r8k9g <http://tinyurl.com/2r8k9g> June 11, 2007 NYT Off the Street and in an Apartment, but Unable to Escape Homelessness Selected excerpts: For years, Johnny Five lived not on the streets but below them, in the dark underworld beneath an abandoned train station in the Bronx. Peter D. Beitchman, the executive director of the Bridge Inc., a nonprofit group that provides housing and services to mentally ill homeless people and others, immediately arranged for him to move into an apartment. It is easy in a sense to take the city's homeless people off the streets, but it is harder, as Johnny's odyssey illustrates, to take homelessness out of them. He had bold ambitions of starting over. Sister Lauria and two case managers, one from the Bridge and one from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, planned to help him make the transition. "Sometimes the one living in that cardboard box is happier than the one living at the penthouse," he said. Johnny's homelessness was not about a lack of housing. It was more complicated, a result of a variety of spiritual, psychological and emotional causes. Weeks after moving in, he kept returning to the cave. "There was no life in the apartment. I will compare it to a spring break, with all the utilities and this and that and whatever. But no, it's not for me." The Bridge had offered him another apartment and tried to have him undergo a psychiatric evaluation, but Johnny missed those appointments. "We hope that Johnny will come back," said Mr. Beitchman, the executive director of the Bridge. "We do hope. Our experience in all these years is that folks are at different points of readiness at different times." In the end, he left the apartment for reasons that made sense only to him. "Even though housing seemed like a baby step in light of everything else going on in his life, it was too much of a big step," she said. Johnny said he was now sleeping in a plywood hut he had built near the cave. He was a jumble of emotions, a paradox of hope and despair. ============================================ Proselytizing "turns homeless people off." Excerpts: From Library Edgy Over Order To Tolerate Homeless - New York Times <http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20613F73C5E0C7\ A8EDDAC0894D9494D81> Morristown, NJ ...the library ... a symbol of security amid insecurity and, more tangibly, a sign of this community's edgy coexistence with its homeless. ...Unease Behind the Granite Walls:...In the aftermath of Judge Sarokin's ruling, the library's atmosphere seems uneasy. Two days later the Headquarters Plaza hotel in Morristown offered to enroll Mr. Kreimer in its job programs for the homeless and for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics from the Market Street Mission here. He refused the offer. ...but [Mr. Kreimer, homeless] now spends his nights in Lidgerwood Park and his days, it seems, bedeviling and befuddling town officials and others trying to help him. ...Mr. Kreimer objects to what he has called a religious element in the mission's rehabilitation work. "That turns homeless people off," he said in an interview last week. ============================================ Even with highly professional outreach and follow-ups, many poor souls still slip through the cracks. Seems like major efforts are needed to reach out for the most highly competent among the psychiatric, spiritual, social worker and legal professions. None of which are documented for JSRM/MSM. Call in the county, the state, the feds; the Vatican retinue in Trenton or similar to take on the burden. If you can't access the full text, private me for a copy/paste.
