Tagged: homeless

Removing the homeless from the streets

                        The New York City Rescue Mission recently posted a video on their website of a social experiment examining whether or not a person would recognize his/her own family member dressed to appear homeless. To no surprise, the test subjects did not recognize their family member as they walked past them on the street. Watching the powerful video not only puts homelessness into perspective for those individuals who did...

Philip Seymour Hoffman, the prevalence of heroin and the experience of homeless drug users

  Just about four weeks ago the public was shocked: Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his New York apartment. But what most people talked about after the first trauma was not only that the world had lost a great actor. It was the needle in Hoffman’s arm. Hoffman had suffered from drug and alcohol problems earlier in his life. The public knew about that. Most people, however, believed him clean for the last 23 years. Hoffman himself was...

"You'll get moved on here"

(by kiddingthecity) The other day I came across a great piece of ruin, an other fragment of this incredible city: a London based charity invites people sleeping rough to author a ‘Homeless City Guide’ by drawing listed signs on the wall in order ‘to help others to read the city’. By scrolling down the list of symbols, I felt a sense of hollowness reading tags like ‘an attack happened here’, or ‘strong police presence’, and ‘unfriendly place’. Risk is a...