They are actually posting no trespassing signs on bridges around here. I assume that means there are regular police checks. It sucks enough to be homeless in the Midwest in the winter, but it’s becoming both illegal to be homeless and unaffordable to have a place to live. I have no idea what people end up having to do, but I do notice a lot of people walking way down a highway where it will take them a good hour to get to the edge of town early in the morning, presumably to get to some shitty job that pays them minimum wage.
They finally put out the no sleep benches in my city. For a long time it looked like they weren’t going to, and I had some respect for who ever was saying no to them.
Thankfully, there’s way too many low concrete walls in this city for them to be able to do that, but the library (my wife is a library administrator) also lets them stay there all day and even sleep in a chair or sleep outside the library as long as they don’t set up camp. They’re also opening up a new branch in another part of town where they will have a sign-up sheet and one person at a time will have access to a room with a washer, a dryer and a shower. All free. Libraries are amazing in what they do for the poor, let alone the community as a whole… so at least someone is trying to help the desperate people in this town, but it’s not nearly enough and there’s so much fighting against it, even against the library. People came to the board meeting where this got approved from the neighborhood talking about how they had homeless people camping in their backyards (what have they tried actually doing about it if that’s even true) and it would bring even more to the area. And fuck those NIMBY assholes.
