Follow Up on the Homeless in Providence and Neighboring Cities

The homeless population in the US is continually maintained and grows from foreclosures, mentally disabled and untreated veterans and other citizens, by job loss and a growing lack of affordable housing. Sometimes one gets the impression that certain political persuasions are trying to establish of "serfs" or peasants who are willing to work under any conditions to earn a living. Why it that the first things cut from budgets are those items for those who need it most.

In Rhode Island there are three "tent cities'. One tent city is in East Providence, two others in Providence. We have an ongoing saga about people bumped from an uncaring society, being ordered about form place to place while the state has sent technicians to offer state services to them but where is the roof?

True concern and compassion can be seen by Chief Wilfred "Eagle Heart" Greene and a descendant of the Revolutionary War hero Nathanial Greene, of the Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe on the Wampanoag Nation Reservation has offered to take them onto their lands but where is the state taking the lead in all this? Where they have taken the lead is in issuing restraining orders barring them from state owned property because the land is "unhealthy, unsafe and illegal." This is what happens when you're homeless! Too bad they couldn't expend as much energy in finding them a place to live. Why can't this state "break their yoke of poverty?

Isaiah 58:6 "Is this not the fast which I choose,

To loosen the bonds of wickedness,

To undo the bands of the yoke,

And to let the oppressed go free

And break every yoke?

⁷ "Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry

And bring the homeless poor into the house;

Non-profit agencies such as NOP (Neighborhood Opportunities Program) barely hanging on themselves, never lost focus on what is important to our society; that ALL are part of society. NOP was saved by a campaign conducted by Rich (Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless) who had to force legislators and politicos to acknowledge the plight of the homeless and the work of NOP by reinstating funds that were cut...there it is again...for the year 2010. But what happens the next year? The state pays more than that to undeserving certain retirees who make more in retirement than when they were in service. More than that gets paid to the over-time cheats we see on the news.

As of August 14, 2009, the State of Rhode Island has asked a judge to evict tent city residents while they accept government funds to bail them out of their own mismanagement.

http://www.abc6.com/news/53233012.html

http://www.abc6.com/news/53037317.html

Gregory Smith, Providence Journal Staff Writer,Saturday, August 8, 2009

www.nationalhomeless.org/.../ForeclosuretoHomelessness0609.pdf