Comments on Hearing the Homeless

wow, Erica's still reporting? For a while there today it was nip and tuck.

Good to have her back

Teasing us i can't wait

At the risk of undercutting all of the impressive speakers...

Quote of the night (overheard while waiting to sign in): "I usually wouldn't come out tonight. It's the anniversary of the Challenger disaster. Yep, 22 years."

As 3 says, lots of very impressive speakers (from the homeless, homeless advocates, church reps, and just normal folks who are appalled at what the city is doing and recommending).

After I left, I was walking by Key Arena and really cold wind was blowing. An older guy (late 50s, early 60s?) with a cane and small backpack asked me if I knew where a shelter was. I suggested he go to the Rainer Room and ask one of the very well paid city employees.

And getting her 11th grade Marxist on (in a good way)

What does that even mean?

Is 11th grade Marxism any less unpalatable than regular 'ol Marxism?

"I suggested he go to the Rainer Room and ask one of the very well paid city employees."

...Oh sure. The "very well paid city employees" were probably sitting there, sneering at the citizens and lighting Cuban cigars with $100 bills.

But I'm sure that self-righteous gesture made you feel good about yourself, and that was the point of it, wasn't it?

The One Night Count that is done by the Seattle Homeless group indicated that people living on the streets has increased 15% over last year.

Bottom line; Seattle is worried more about high priced condos than they are about affordable housing or funding programs to help the homeless.

This liberal rag has so much hippie funk in it I cannot even use it to light my cigars rolled from grassy roofs of Haitian mud huts.

The homeless have no right to sleep on public or private property. They have no right to testify in taxpayer funded conference rooms or drink from taxpayer funded fountains. If these vagrants want my pity, I suggest they work in our salt mines, light the whale oil in our candles, and shovel coal in our fires. Should they refuse such work, than they serve no purpose to our society and should be hunted for sport.

If you have a problem with our government, feel free to pack your bags and move to Europe and polish their many gold statues of Carl Marx. I hear their health care system is in such shambles that many are dying on the street from the common cold.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with the owners of Baltic Ave.

Good Day,

Dr. Martino Cortez PhD.

"Formerly homeless teen, Ivy, testifies at Seattle Center tonight"

I would have a lot more sympathy for the homeless if their advocates weren't making speeches using their Matrix names or whatever. Shouldn't this chick be identified by her real, full name, like everyone else in the newspaper?

One word: hummingbirds. I got 'em, you don't. God, you gotta love those crazy little fuckers.

You know what I used to love when I was homeless? People like you all: people who were willing to fight -- and fight hard -- for my right to sleep under a fucking bridge, in the toasty warm glow of decomposing garbage.

Now that I'm one of those condo-owning yuppies you all seem to hate so much, I'm happy to say that your particular take on morality and the social contract isn't compelling to me in any way, because you obviously have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

You patronize so-called homeless "advocates" whose rhetoric focuses on the failures of the community at large, but who avoid pursuing any practical plan for addressing homelessness in its specifics (mental health, substance abuse, youth and young adults) or for holding people who choose to be homeless -- and yes, believe it or not, that does happen -- responsible for their impact on the rest of us.

I suspect you like these people because they speak to your liberal guilt, without asking for anything specific from your liberal wallets. Americans love someone who says, "We must do better," because everyone can agree with that. And as long as those people avoid the messy details, we can all just sit around agreeing with each other.

Isn't that fun? Let's all agree that "we must do better." Just take a minute to bask in that moment of community consensus. "We must do better."

Ah.

Feels nice.

Hey, Judah. What is "liberal guilt"?

I hear people talk about it but I've always wanted to ask them what they were referring to.

#9 - FTW
#11 - there's a pill for that.

@12

Obviously different people will use the term in different ways. I use it to refer to a tendency on the part of liberals to pay lip service to social justice by maintaining a litany of things they feel bad about or get outraged about, in lieu of taking actual action.

It's the liberal equivalent of conservative hypocrisy. For example, there was a video floating around the internet for a while where someone went to a bunch of sororities and frats and asked rich white college students A) if they voted for Bush and B) if they thought invading Iraq had been a good idea. Everyone said yes to both questions. Then the interviewer asked those people if they would be joining the military to support the invasion. Everyone had an excuse for why the would be more useful supporting the war effort from the comfort and safety of home.

Liberals are perfectly happy to castigate "well paid city employees" for doing the wrong thing, or not doing enough. But at the end of the day, even the most ambivalent city employee has probably done more, in practical terms, to help and protect homeless people than 90% of the people who read the Stranger, just by virtue of sitting behind a desk and doing the work of keeping the urban infrastructure working. But Stranger readers (and obviously this is a broad stereotype) still feel like they're the righteous advocates for the homeless because they feel more empathy for the crazy guy on the sidewalk. Nevermind that all that empathy and $1.50 will barely buy you a cup of coffee.

"Obviously this is a broad stereotype."

Ya think?

I still don't understand what it is the liberals feel guilty for. What bad thing did they do that is now eating at their conscience?

Ya think?

Aren't you cute.

I still don't understand what it is the liberals feel guilty for.

Good luck with that.

@11 and @14 Thanks Judah

I couldn't have said it any better myself. Very well stated and typical of much of the blather seen on these pages.

they feel guilty that they dont do enough to make the world a better place and they live in the proverbial "lap of luxury" so they half ass it and make everyone try to do something through spending other people's money.

Hang on- if they're so wise, why are they homeless?

and seriously, judah is the motherfucking man. I want to buy this man a beer.

Whenever I enjoy luxury, I simply enjoy it. I don't se what reason I have to feel guilty. I didn't steal it, did I? I've never met anybody who told me they felt guilty for having nice things. And I'm a little confused about how on the one hand they are in the lap of luxury, meaning they are rich, while on the other hand they want to help the homeless with "other people's money." If they think of themselves as rich, why do they think somebody else should pay? And if they are motivated by their own guilt, why don't they themselves want to pay?

If I'd ever met one of these guilty people you describe, I'd probably follow your point. And I have a little trouble with how contradictory the thinking of your imaginary guilty liberal is. This person you describe sounds utterly dysfunctional. If they are so dysfunctional, how did they get so rich? Dumb luck?

lap of luxury compared to homeless people. a shower and a bed is a luxury compared to no shower and no bed.

why arent you helping homeless people more elenchos?

why arent you helping homeless people more elenchos?

You're saying that anybody who is relatively better off than a guy laying on the sidewalk is wracked by guilt? I know why you Angry White Males are so angry. Nobody understands what you are trying to say, and it must get frustrating.

i'm saying almost anyone who wants tax dollars and government spending to be the solution is doing so out of guilt for not doing more themselves to fix the problem.

as for Angry White Male? Doesnt fit; minorities integrating into the economy is good, immigration good, some form of health care incentives for poor people good, a lot of things are good. I have nothing to really be angry about. not even your libvag babble.

@21

"Guilt", in this context, describes the tendency of liberals to sympathize with suffering, rather than acting to prevent it. The guilt doesn't necessarily imply a conscious awareness of complicity in the suffering of others, though that does happen. It refers to overwrought expressions of moral indignation and/or sympathy on behalf of people who are suffering. These expressions often contain condemnations of "society" or "the powerful" with no evident awareness that the speaker is part of those groups: kind of like people who sit in their cars, stuck on I-5, and complain about "traffic". In some cases the speaker may lament their own "internalized x" such as "internalized racism" "internalized homophobia" etc or may, as a kind of rhetorical flourish, acknowledge their own privilege without pursuing remedies for that privilege in specific terms: "Homeless people do not have the same opportunities I have, and that is a moral outrage."

All of these behaviors, broadly, fall under the heading of "liberal guilt".

But hey, you just keep pretending to be too stupid to wrap your head around any of this. That tactic is kicking ass.

Judah sounds exactly like the sort of unprincipled smug condo owner who has encouraged the city to write these draconian rules.

About 80 people spoke at the forum last night. In addition to the folks who were obviously homeless, we heard from the Program Coordinator at the Compass Center, the Director of the Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless, several reps from non-profit affordable housign developers, case managers, social workers, the Executive Director of Real Change, priests and rabbis on the Interfaith Task Force to End Homelessness, and many concerned citizens who have donated food and blankets to homeless people in their neighborhoods. In other words, dozens of good people who spend their time, both paid and volunteer, to work on practical solutions to help people who are worse off than themselves.

Some creeps would rather fill space with justifications for their own cruelty, rather than make decent moral decisions.

what is moral gurldoggie? does that kind of philosophical question mean i wont be invited to your sweet 16?

Bellvue, the assertion that this is motivated by guilt takes us full circle back to the start. The existence of this supposed guilt is the key. It is, as I said, the very foundation of your entire argument.

You really need to work on proving the existence of the guilt. You need to find some evidence for it, because without it, you've got nothing. It's worrisome that my repeated attempts to get somebody to show me the evidence get nowhere. You're repeating yourself instead, which suggests you're out of ammo.

Judah, the thing you have just defined is hypocrisy, not guilt. If you want to make an accusation of hypocrisy, then retract everything you said about guilt, and start over with your attack based instead on hypocrisy. "Guilt" means you did some offense; it is the remorse you feel when you did wrong. If you want guilt to be the foundation of your argument, it would help if you could explain why these imaginary guilty liberals feel they have done something wrong.

Unless you think they feel guilty for not helping the homeless, and the reason they want to help the homeless is because of their guilt. If you said that, I'd say you'd drawn another circle.

Also, these quotations you offer as examples. Who are you quoting? Are they real people or imaginary?

Judah sounds exactly like the sort of unprincipled smug condo owner who has encouraged the city to write these draconian rules.

Yes, that's me, the smug unprincipled condo owner who spent three years working for a social services non-profit serving homeless people in Seattle; the smug unprincipled condo owner who helped write the grants that pay the salaries of some of those social workers and case managers you were so impressed by last night. The smug unprincipled condo owner who's read thousands of pages of historical data on trends in homelessness in the Seattle area and the effectiveness -- and lack thereof -- of various solutions over the last 25 years. Smug and unprincipled all the way. That's me.

You know what you sound like to me, Gurldoggie? Someone who doesn't know what the fuck you're talking about.

But hey, you clearly feel really passionately about this issue. And that's all a good liberal really needs to do.

you don't think people who think they are socially progressive and more caring than others don't feel guilty that they, themselves have a great quality of life and arent sacrificing that for other people to live better? the wrong they have done is having a better quality of life than others while not helping other people nearly enough. and you don't think this will motivate them to want to get other people to do something about it?

while i understand one might be hard pressed to prove the actual emotion of guilt, it seems that from an observer people are compensating for their own good lives by trying to do something for those less fortunate, but not in an effectual way. in a "I give money to the homeless on the street all the time, therefore I'm not as bad as the schmuck who never gives to the homeless and also lives on capitol hill"

perhaps it is a semantic quibble you have?

would "liberal compensation for having a better life than the ones you feel need a better life, but are ineffective in providing" work better for you?

I don't believe you Judah. You're lying.

No one who has worked for three years serving homeless people in Seattle can perpetuate the crap about people choosing to be homeless. The vast majority of people who live on the streets are there because they can't afford to get or keep housing, or don't have access to the services that help them to stay stable.

Just keep filling up this space with words. Fill it up, fill it up. There must be SOME WAY to feel better about hating people who just need help.

Judah, it's funny how you feel entitled to stereotype whole swaths of people as guilty liberals but you bristle when somebody stereotypes you as a smug condo owner. And by funny I mean hypocritical.

I've never understood what's wrong with being a condo owner. I think it's hipster snobbery. Or something; I dunno.

Bellevue, why don't you just admit you have no idea why people want to help the homeless? You can't read their minds, so you don't know if it is compassion or guilt or what.

See, if you guys disagree on how to help the homeless, explain what you disagree with. An ad homeniem attack based on this supposed guilt is doesn't fly.

Thanks Judah. It is nice to see someone take on this liberal crap and call the real issue into question.

Elenchos, I respect you alot in your postings. I'm hoping you or someone else can seriously shed some light on this question(s):

If a given area of city 'X' (let's say Seattle), is proportionally much more expensive to live in than another area, why don't we offer services and concentrate all our social service dollars in a specific part of town that is cheaper.

I'm very frustrated that we have a homeless population that chooses to live in this area because they believe all the wealth and affluence of the area will lead to more charity and bigger handouts that they will receive. I've specifically heard the "so-called homeless" who pander at Interstate offramp intersections say they like the King county area, because it allows them to rake in more free handouts compared to panhandling in Tacoma, Everett etc..

So why do we insist on subsidizing their lifestyle wherever they want to live? What gives them the right to live in one public area for such continuous lengths of time?

I'm personally pissed off that the homeless and their advocates are allowed to define "public" spaces to be their right to congregate (read: live) in a semi permanent fashion in areas designed to be public... E.g, they are open to everyone to spend time at for periodic lengths of time.

Public areas were not designed or intended to support people trying to squat on a piece of real estate and by their very presence intimidate others into being around them. In effect, that is what has happened in many areas of the city.

Seattle wants to be a vibrant, affluent city with an image of cleanliness, high tech business, and prestige. All the citizens and private businesses who also want to promote that image, invest $$$ into the infrastructure etc want the homeless to move somewhere out of the downtown corridor.

Hell have them move south into the Warehouse district at the very least...

This may sound cruel and insensitive, however there comes a point when you have to be realistic. By providing them a concentrated area to receive shelter, food and medical services, you can work with them to help them make a better life. By enacting stricter panhandling,and squatting laws, It will also serve to weed out those who are manipulating the system, and damn well can earn a living, but who just would take an easier path out of life.

It is not cheap to live in King county. I'm tired of my taxes increasing so that others can assist in subsidizing the lifestyles of those who can't afford to live here.

Reality Check

I don't believe you Judah. You're lying.

No one who has worked for three years serving homeless people in Seattle can perpetuate the crap about people choosing to be homeless.

Huh. Well, that's a poser. I honestly have no idea what to do with that one.

Tell you what. You go work the floor in a drop-in center for one year, then come back here and tell me that there are no homeless people who would rather live on the streets than accept treatment for their substance abuse. Come back here and tell me that there are no homeless people who avoid shelter services because they find the bureaucracy of the shelter system intimidating, and they think it's easier to stay on the streets. Or because they have access to social and economic power on the streets and they're unwilling to abandon that power for the risks of the case work system.

Hell, I don't even think you'd have to work a floor. Just go to a drop-in center and as a caseworker, off the record.

None of that suggests that services for homeless people should be withdrawn. But people who choose to be homeless do exist, they are incredibly expensive to maintain, and it's perfectly rational and moral to at least consider criminalizing some of their behavior. Because, see, they're people and, like all people, can and should be held responsible for the repercussions of their actions.

Gurldoggie, you're ignorant. care to cite a reference on % homeless people's causes for being homeless? care to cite a reference on the median amount of time each group of people are homeless for?

what would you say if it were:

80% homeless for less than 3 weeks
10% for two months
10% chronically

That was meant to be "ask a caseworker" up there @35.

Eh, Reality Check, I'm not sure I'm up for a point by point answer to every single issue you raise. I agree with some things you say, and disagree with others.

I believe you are missing that there was a court ruling that requires Seattle to give the homeless somewhere to go, rather than ban them from every part of the city. Instead of blaming strawman guilty liberals, why not read the court ruling to see what the basis of their reasoning is? If you want to criticize what the judges ruled, by all means, point out their errors.

I don't think anybody has a right to live in a fashionable city they can't afford, but I don't see a fair way of excluding one type of person over another. Rather than even try, I would concentrate my efforts on mental health treatment and heavy supervision for the mentally ill. That probably would have saved Shannon Harps, and many others.

Solutions that stop at the city limits are doomed to become magnets for other jurisdiction's problems. We need a Governor and President that can offer solutions everywhere.

Anyway, I don't have all the answers to this but I don't think you can solve anything by pretending you can read someone's mind and know if they feel guilty or not. It's good that you are addressing the problem itself and not trying to psychoanalyze those who disagree with you.

So what else should be allowed in public parks? If the argument is that the city hasn't provided enough shelter, therefore public parks should be a safe harbor for homeless encampments until the city does provide enough shelter - by extension of that logic what other activities should be condoned in public parks? Drug use and public inebriation certainly fit the bill then - after all we don't have enough slots in substance abuse programs to go around. And until we have enough mental health beds, parks should be open-air mental health wards, right? And since jail capacity is limited, why not just make parks a law-free zone altogether? It won't make parks a very pleasant place for families to enjoy, but aren't families and children the real criminals here? Josh, Erica, you with me?

Wow!

This is one of the most vicious arguments between people that probably fundamentally agree with each other I have ever read.

i have an idea as to why people do what they do, i just can't conclusively prove it. i think the motivations of a lot of people who want to allow homeless people do have free reign to do whatever they want on public property are motivated by their own failings to address the issue. "if we can't make them play by our rules, we shouldnt try to enforce and standard upon them"

no one is arguing that homeless people should be rolled upon for being homeless, but if the services exist, and they can take care of most the homeless people (such as shelter, food, etc) and if homeless people reject those services, then fuck em. roll on them.

camping in a park illegally? public intoxication? panhandling? these might be symptoms of being under served or they might be symptoms of rejecting the system. what is underserved though really?

Here's the most recent statistics compiled by the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, hardly a liberal "feel good" group.

Homelessness disproportionately affects adult individuals, especially men. 47% of all sheltered homeless people are single adult men living in shelters, while only 20 percent of poor people in the U.S. are adult men living alone.
Homelessness also disproportionately afflicts minorities. About 59% of the
sheltered homeless population and 55 percent of the poverty population are members of minority groups, compared with only 31% of the total U.S. population. African-Americans constitute 12% of the total U.S. population but 45% of people who are homeless.

Severe mental illness and chronic substance abuse are risk factors for homelessness. 25% of all homeless adults are disabled.

17% of the sheltered homeless population and 30% of the unsheltered homeless population are chronically homeless. The share of all homeless people that are chronically homeless is 23%.

Nearly one-fifth (18.7%) of adults who access an emergency shelter or transitional housing program are homeless veterans.

How is it that these people have earned so much of your scorn?

You want more data?
http://www.huduser.org/publications/povsoc/annual_assess.html

it is the 10% that earn our scorn. the ones that reject services. the ones that go out of their way to remind us that chronically homeless people have issues that are better served in mental institutions, better served in prison, better served in detox and rehab programs.

the scorn for homeless "advocates" goes to the ones who are homeless apologists. who justify things like homeless encampments in public parks, who justify panhandling, who justify all sorts of shit that homeless people do.

Gurldoggie:

First of all, you just looked those statistics up. Having done so hardly constitutes an in-depth understanding of the problem.

Second of all, those statistics don't really address the causes of homelessness, which is what BA was asking you to think about.

Third of all, don't confuse a realistic appraisal of the situation for "scorn." I have a lot of scorn for you, because you sound like a bleeding-heart liberal twit with no meaningful understanding of the situation under discussion, but my feelings about homeless people are pretty mixed. I've met plenty of homeless people -- particularly when I was one of them -- who definitely deserve a lot of scorn. On the other hand, there are a lot of people out there who would benefit from services, were more services available. But there is a distinction, and the distinction is important. When you grow up, you'll understand that.

Thank you Elenchos. We agree fundamentally on many things, although it may not always appear to be the case.

I think Bellvue Ave @ 41 has a point that we might not be addressing in all of this.

Sure there are many who are truly deserving and needing the assistance on some level.

But there seems to be a proportionately higher incidence of those rejecting assistance outright from a mentally sound standpoint, and those who reject assistance due to a factor that limits there sane sound judgement.

There are many folks who simply want to walk around not being a part of a civil orderly society, and simply want to live for their next fix or high. They have no care or interest in all of the efforts going on in their behalf, and simply exist on a day to day basis. No amount of increased assistance or additional laws banning them will deter them doing "whatever they want whenever they want".

This is all a moot point. Noone has the political balls to aggressively take a stance that would physically move/arrest/incarcerate these individuals even if laws were strengthened/created to address the issue.

Until we take that firm stance to make change, groups will come and protest for the minority of homeless on behalf of all the homeless. Unfortunately their efforts are doing more harm than good, as they can't seem to see the forest from the trees.

Reality Check

My kids love parks with homeless encampments in them. They get to swing, spin on the merry-go-round, play in the sandbox, make pyramids out of empty beer cans and play the "is that dog feces or human feces?" game. It's really fun.

Thank you for clarifying Judah. Your opinion isn't based on a meaningful analysis of facts or statistics. It's based on generalizing your personal experiences, and combining that with an ad hominem attack. I suspected as much.

I can agree with Bellevue that there may be 10% of people who choose to stay homeless rather than seek institutional care. But I don't agree with him that they deserve hatred. Treatment maybe, or a wider range of options for housing. But criminalization of their shelters? I don't see how that benefits anyone.

@47

I suspected as much.

Well, your suspicions certainly turned out to be well-founded, didn't they?

You're hilarious.

@47: Oh crap, not an ad hominem attack. Quick, compare somebody to Hitler!

people learn a little about fallacies then feel they have to use them all the time. this lasts about 6 months.

"...The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

Nice to see that enlightened Seattle is as progressive as we pretend to be, huh?

What actual harm does it do to anyone if (let us say) 10% of the homeless "choose" to be on the streets? Are people so fragile that being asked for change now and then traumatizes them so?

@39 - public parks are not at issue in this proposal (now former City Attorney and Rudy Giuliani-wannabe Mark Sidran promulgated the Parks Exclusion Ordinance to kick the homeless out of those). What is at issue are hidden away pockets of public rights-of-way under bridges, alongside freeways, and other similar locations where homeless people go to try and remain out of sight, and where the vast majority of other citizens never set foot.

Sounds to me like Judah has classic symptoms of the burnout/secondary trauma that affects social service providers. These include (but are not limited to)

Perfectionism
Irritability
Impatience
Greater need for dogma

and last but not least

Anger/rage at others or at those you are helping.

You really ought to seek psychological help for this, Judah, before you start sounding even more like the typical right-wing idiots who post on the homeless at Sound Politics and/or the PI Soundoffs.

#44 - Did you deserve a lot of scorn when you were homeless, or is scorn reserved for those bad homeless people who weren't you? Also, your posts are pretty patronizing, and that's not helping your case. Go, gurldoggie!

X @ 51 - Actually it is about parks. The Parks Exclusionary Ordinance hasn't kept encampments out of Kinnear, Bhy Kracke and other parks. ECB links to the policy - I lost track of how often parks are mentioned in it. The policy is about how exactly the Parks Exclusionary is enforced and therein lies the rub. The ordinance is meaningless without enforcement. I wish you were right that the only encampments were in little-used public rights of way underneath freeways, but unfortunately that's not the case.

Lionel @ 35,

Sorry, but you're just plain wrong - there are already policies in place for City parks that allow the removal of encampments (and also the legal exclusion of campers from park property). This new proposal seeks to expand policies (including something similar to the Parks Exclusion Ordinance) that would remove encampments on ALL City-owned property.

Believe it or not, there's a pretty big difference there.

X @ 54 - Do you care to address the phenomenon of encampments in the parks I mention @ 53? BTW - It looks like the Seattle Times has it all wrong, too (cue tired joke about the Times always getting it wrong). I guess that encampment in Kinnear Park is figment of my imagination, and Sharon Chan's.

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=homelesscamps27m&date=20071127&query=kinnear

Look, I get it: if you can make it just about greenbelts and the underbellies of freeways, the encampments appear to be almost a victimless crime. But Kinnear Park is about as underutilized by the public as the I-90 ROW precisely because of its reputation for being taken over by homeless encampments. Seriously, Kinnear looks like Yellowstone... without the geysers and bears.

Sounds to me like Judah has classic symptoms of the burnout/secondary trauma that affects social service providers.

Boy, this thread is just full of fucking mindreaders, isn't it?

I never worked in direct service. I worked on grants, which means I read reports from people who did work direct service, and sat in on their meetings. No burnout; just a broad perspective acquired by reading thousands of pages of narrative and statistical reports and listening to the experiences of caseworkers.

You really ought to seek psychological help for this, Judah,

Yeah, I'll get right on that.

@56

You do know that you can experience secondary trauma vicariously through reading those reports and talking to those caseworkers, don't you? Your wealth of ignorance astounds me.

The social services field is a lot better off without you.

@55 - I already did - there are rules and policies in place against encampments on parks property that allow them to be removed, and the City now seeks to expand them to all public property.

The fact that the homeless continue to exist in inconveniently large numbers (ie - you can remove an encampment in a park, but people often return for lack of another place to go) does not obviate the FACT that the policies are already in place to remove encampments from parks.

And, the FACT is, while some encampments may occur in parks, the vast majority don't.

Oh, and notwithstanding my last post (which is perfectly accurate from a clinical standpoint), I was mostly just being sarcastic @ 54, but I'm thrilled to have pissed Judah off so much. Makes my day, really.