I dunno the last time you went and visited a homeless encampment in the US, but many of them do indeed have showers and internet, too (sometimes provided by the government, other times just because these tent cities are legitimate cities).
I've seen a lot of tents with cooking areas too, and some even with portable generators, TVs, and fridges.
So can we exclude them from the homeless statistics yet?
1. Can they safely store valuables? If you have an apartment, it's reasonably easy to keep your laptop around. I'd wager that in a tent it'll get stolen eventually.
2. Is this temporary? The German government is expecting refuges to regularly visit the job center and to apply to job openings or to attend language school to improve their employability.
So if someone can shower, has internet access, can keep a work laptop without it getting stolen, and has been homeless for <5 years then yes, let's exclude them.
But my impression (based only on pictures in the newspaper) is that this won't include many tents in LA.
The camps in state's major cities notoriously have armed guards to prevent people from looting or moving the tents, and given that these tents already have all kinds of other furniture like couches, chairs, cabinets, etc, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they have lockable cabinets or drawers. One of the camps nearby has actually formed a "governing board" where they assign people jobs in the camp such as security, gathering more materials and food, etc.
>So if someone can shower, has internet access, can keep a work laptop without it getting stolen, and has been homeless for <5 years then yes, let's exclude them.
AFAIK the vast majority of homeless people in my state's major cities have only been homeless since last year.
So I guess we can remove at least 10k people from the US's homeless statistics now?
I've seen a lot of tents with cooking areas too, and some even with portable generators, TVs, and fridges.
So can we exclude them from the homeless statistics yet?