A homeless man built a life underground Hampstead Heath (2020)

I was homeless off and on for years, blending in. Crashing in college campus common areas, or living in my car. Bumming showers from friends once in a while or paper towel baths in gas station bathrooms. Would sometimes sleep in the trunk when it got cold enough. I was normally employed, had friends, and most knew nothing of my living situation. I knew how to hide. Part of that invisible homeless population. Thankfully I had my youth, my health, and the will to find many types of work, save, find my way out. Most are not so lucky.

Later, on my feet, I would often try to help visible homeless I had developed some empathy for. One day handing out 50 sandwiches at Lake Eola Park in Orlando, like I did every month, I was given a warning by a police officer to stop. I tore it up in front of him and dared him to arrest me. I was already out of food for the day so he walked away. Dozens of others who doing a larger scale regular feedings with Food Not Bombs were actually arrested over a few months.

Feeding 25 people was the limit, and cops went in undercover plain clothes to catch who would commit the crime of feeding the 26th hungry person at Lake Eola park.

They would often arrest the homeless too, for loitering and other such nonsense. Friend of mine had been arrested for this, and then repeatedly arrested over a dozen times for failing to pay the fines, jail costs, and court costs related to the previous arrests and so on burning endless taxpayer time and money. At least he got a hot meal and a bed in jail some nights.

Once in a local court myself for a traffic citation, I saw a man in front of me issued a $200 fine by a judge for holding up a sign asking for money in a public place.

The homeless are not helped in most of America. They are not seen as human, but as vermin to be removed, along with anyone that gives them too much unsanctioned help.

You can hardly blame them for breaking a few laws to survive, when it is against the law for them to even exist.

Exactly. You can save a lot of money upfront by demanding cities allow shanty towns and slums but they'll only bring heavy costs and problems down the road that are far reaching and hard to clean up. The richest nations on Earth can more than afford to do better. Real, safe, sanitary housing is not impossible, it just requires investment.

We should also be giving consideration to where we build that housing so that we're not hurting the local environment by pushing biocapacity too far. We need to quit hurting ourselves with stupid shortsighted cheap temporary workarounds that just cause more problems and focus on long term sustainable solutions.

The "Homes for All" council house building was a key part of Britain's post-war reconstruction. Unfortunately all of that came to an end with Thatcher's Right to Buy[0] in 1980, with long-term public assets sold off for short-term private gains (sometimes in direct exchange for votes[1]), thereby creating the country's current shortage of affordable housing.

Edit: One anecdote to illustrate - Just a few streets away from the bunker in the article, a council home was sold for £775K to someone who immediately flipped it to overseas developers for around £1.5M and moved overseas himself, and the developers then applied to tear it down and build a much larger house with an "iceberg basement" to sell for £5M[2]. Now if all of that >£4M profit went to the council to build replacement homes it might not have been so bad, but it didn't (and in this case the money didn't even stay within the country).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Buy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homes_for_votes_scandal

[2] (Apologies for the Daily Mail link) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3281930/Ex-EastEnde...

How the homeless are treated tells me all I need to know about the people in power.