Disregard for Homeless People and Seeing Them as a Problem

In an open letter to Richard Girard regarding Manchester’s homeless problem, I wrote a response to his plan to eradicate the problem of them being in our city. I feel that he thinks the problem of homelessness can be wiped away like bird shit on a windshield

My response:

I read your words and you wonder why people distrust you, old friend. You have a young innocent face but you advocate enforcement, draconian measures, lessening services?

You are not trying to end homelessness. You just want the problems of homelessness in Manchester,NH to be eradicated. 

You want to be in charge of the largest city in New Hampshire with a mandate that uses the police to hunt down and kick people to the city lines or put them in custody. Losing the ability to have a proper shelter, food, water and sanitation are not crimes Mr. Girard. The crime is someone who wants to make a group of people disappear because they make you uncomfortable.

These are people who are friends and family to someone. I know of one woman who is one of my old school friends, Linda, who was stuck on the street with a drug problem so severe because there were no rapid detox programs to get her out of the cycle of dependency. She was never lazy. She was the hardest working teenager and young adult I ever met. She was always busy working one or two jobs. This is never about the lazy who don’t want to work. It’s about someone who fell so hard and no one was there to catch her.

As of this date, I know Linda is safe and sound working again and trying to live her life. To be clear, Richard Girard did not say anything about the homeless being lazy but it is heard so often from people all around me and you, who have no idea that one trip and fall sometime can lead to severe drug use and problems and then homelessness. 

The fear that it could suddenly happen to them prevents most people from doing anything for them.

What’s clear to me Richard is that you want to kick a person when they are way down.

You talk about enforcement and denial of services. We are the biggest city in the state and you think your words mean anything to the communities around us or the governor who is stuck with a council and oversized congress that makes the big decisions for him. Passing the buck and saying you are in communication with the others is not doing anything. They are here and will keep coming.

You are paying lip service to our community and that is not fair. Becoming mayor with an idea of regular street sweeping, and that’s all you have at the moment, is going to go by the wayside and the problem will continue. You need real plans and not to lessen the city’s services.

The only way you are going to keep the homeless from making a mess and lowering your precious real estate values is to have a welcoming organization who will census the homeless, find out where they are coming from and file lawsuits against those communities so they aren’t receiving federal and state funding. Many other cities and towns receiving free money to help those people may just be shipping them here.

Money should go into a plot of land to build a large permanent clean facility (begin with giant circus tents) that will allow for heat, clean water, food, shelter, and disposal services. If these people are struggling to just eat and go to the bathroom they aren’t running off to lawyers ready to sue the city.

This kind of help should be under our good samaritan laws anyway.

The people refusing to live in the current shelters are not prisoners so they are not going to be part of some concentration camp. The rules for those who have serious drug problems and mental illness do not work. Lessen them. Other countries create safe spaces for people to live and die as they wish.

Now let’s get more serious with your flawed plan. You claimed this in your plan: “With the vast majority of the homeless being those who abuse drugs and or suffer with mental illness,…”

You actually have no idea. That claim came out of some of the aldermen’s mouths as well as the businesses who are complaining to you. The homeless as a whole should stop being lumped into one group. They don’t have phones to make their points known. They are barely surviving. It must surprise you that less than 10% of the homeless (This yearly census says 164 people are unsheltered out of a homeless population of 1,739, which is 9% 

Link to the report itself: https://www.nhceh.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2020-State-of-Homelessness-in-NH-Report-Online-Final-compressed-1.pdf  

Link to the web page where the report is held:

https://www.nhceh.org/research-advocacy/state-of-homelessness-in-new-hampshire

Nine percent are refusing help. If they want to take drugs and overdose, give them the space to do it but stop bringing them back. There should be laws about a three strikes rule that after it is used up, the city will have a legal DNR, signed by them after they are properly detoxed and sober enough to do so.

The actual number of homeless who commit petty crimes aren’t stealing to build out their vast empires. You talk about being a Christian and yet you totally forget Proverbs 6:30 “Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry;”

I stop writing here for a moment and realize again, your plan isn’t to solve the problem of homelessness but to remove the problems they cause. You want to sweep 164 people to the curb regardless of what they need.

Whoever will become mayor, I believe that number may have grown to 200 after the year of covid but that number is so low, a camp could be built with running water, food, shelter, and sewage using money that is already in place. This camp could have counselors and nursing staff to allow the people a safe place to be themselves even if it is to their own destruction.

Why are we stopping 200 people from hurting themselves?

The police cannot stop the other 100,000 residents from hurting themselves or others. They can only react.

It may not be nice or Christian but you don’t even scratch the surface with reasonable solutions when you expect to act like God and control how people live or die. It is not our responsibility as a community if those who do not want any help at all to get better but it is our responsibility to give them an open space to live without our judgement. The bible says bring them to areas outside of the community and let them live there and not roam into the areas where people are following laws and wanting a good basic life but not forgotten or tortured. If their crimes inside the camp are too awful, we as a community can manage 200 people with existing programs like prison, criminal mental health facilities, etc.

You should not become the Mayor of Manchester when just the amount of man-hours you want to put into play to enforce your draconian society, would outweigh the budgets of the Fire and Police departments.

People argue that if you give the homeless everything they need they will constantly ask for it. That’s the chance you take but the numbers in the article I posted above do not support that argument.

See if everyone was a devout something or other (Christian, Muslim, Hebrew, good neighbor) and the councils around them devoted to the people they are supposed to serve; a big beautiful giving and receiving community, we wouldn’t be facing any issues with homeless. People could come and get what they needed without judgement but with limits.

Guess what, that doesn’t exist. Politicians and business owners want the problem to disappear and promote the homeless as a single virus that must be stopped with all possible speed.

200 people who refuse to follow the laws of a community and will not be taken up by the yoke of the state need a different solution.

I may not have perfect solutions to the problem that exists, but I know I do not need a politician who smiles like a preacher and wants to keep kicking these poor people even harder than they already are.

Tell the people the truth Pontius Pilate, you want to wash your hands of the homeless instead of actually helping them. 

#manchesternh #homeless #homelessness #homelessnessawareness #homelessshelter