Uh oh, an item in the news snapped one of my nerves this morning. Rant alert.
It was from the local ABC news affiliate in San Francisco. The headline was “San Francisco develops new app to help the homeless.”
Finally, I thought, at least one city has come to realize that homeless people are never going to get the help they need from other human beings. So we’ll give them an app for that.
No. That’s not it. The “app” in question is an added feature of the city’s 3-1-1 system. Seattle has one of those, too. You call 3-1-1 on your phone to make non-emergency calls to government offices, including police, so you don’t tie up the emergency 9-1-1 system.
As the story describes it, what’s new with the app is that the person using it can easily report non-emergency conditions such as “I see a mentally ill person here,” “I see a homeless camp over there,” or “Here’s someone acting loud and aggressive.” This will help homeless people by getting their needs known and addressed thanks to the helpful reports from concerned, proper and decent non-homeless citizens.
Fortunately, a lot of homeless people have their own cell phones now. Isn’t it amazing that a person who can’t pay $1000 a month for an apartment can still get a cell phone? No it isn’t.
Cell phones don’t cost $1000 a month.
People desperately need ways to make calls now that public phones aren’t available, so they scrounge for ways to get their own mobile phones, government phones, used phones, whatever. Monthly fees can be bad but nowhere near as hard to come up with as rent, and having a phone is often your only way to line up services or land the job that will really help.
So the users of the San Francisco app will probably include a lot of homeless people themselves, calling in to report things like, “Some jerk in a suit is watching me and texting about me. He may be mentally ill. Can someone get him a life? I’d help, but I’m too busy surviving.”
Here’s what I want all these pinheads in city governments, pinheads in the federal government, pinheads in social service agencies and community services to grasp: The way toward helping people — the absolute essential first step — is finding out from them what their problems and needs are, and finding out from them how you can stop doing whatever you’re doing that is keeping them down and keeping them from solving their own problems.
Stop treating homeless people as the problem. They aren’t problems that you need to report. The problem is a system that makes homelessness inevitable. It’s the same problem that drives your rent too high. It’s the same problem that makes owning a house so hard. It’s the same problem that makes college so expensive. Fix the system that makes homelessness inevitable, and you will also fix your problems, too.
In the meantime, homeless people need services. Get better ways for them to ask for services. It’s very kind and well-intentioned to encourage “concerned citizens” to report poor helpless homeless people in dire straits, but if you provided more channels of communication directly from homeless people to the agencies that could help, I might stop screaming and stop calling you all pinheads.
Here’s a thought for San Francisco, Seattle and all you caring cities out there: It’s still really hard for homeless people to scrounge up funds to get cell phones, in spite of the assistance that’s available. So why don’t you up that assistance and encourage homeless users of cell phones to use them to tell you how you’re failing them.
Exercise to propel further understanding.
The author clearly believes homeless people know better than college-educated social workers what they need. That’s contrary to common sense. To illustrate how wrong he is, think of five things that any random college-educated social worker must know about you, in spite of never meeting you and talking to you.