I Used to Be Homeless
&gt;You can start by not judging the homeless.<p>Instead of flying out the gate accusing people of judging homeless, consider this:<p>Not everywhere is like San Francisco where you have actual homeless people living in tent&#x2F;tarp hovels on sidewalks in busy neighborhoods, come to downtown Indy and many of the &#x27;homeless&#x27; people you find randomly around are absolutely not homeless and simply know they can make much easier money off of people coming&#x2F;going from bars and restaurants. The bulk of the properly homeless people congregate around the Wheeler Mission shelter downtown, or are in suburban neighborhoods spread out over 368 (three hundred and sixty eight) square miles.<p>If there isn&#x27;t a big event downtown, or it&#x27;s a slow bar&#x2F;restaurant night, you&#x27;ll notice there&#x27;s considerably fewer of them. If the weather is harsh, you&#x27;ll notice there&#x27;s considerably fewer of them.<p>A few years back we passed a law (here&#x27;s an article how it was only partially effective  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wthr.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;panhandling-law-loophole-lets-roadside-begging-continue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wthr.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;panhandling-law-loophole-lets-r...</a>  ) here preventing people from pan handling within so many feet of intersections, guess what happened? Within a month they were completely gone, they quickly discovered they couldn&#x27;t make worthwhile money that far away from the stoplights and stopped. I used to say multiple every day on my commute, now I only ever see the occasional people in suits &#x27;collecting donations&#x27; <i>cough</i>bullshit<i>cough</i> for their &#x27;ministry&#x27; and they will just pop up at a busy intersection with a long light for an hour or two because they know they have a very short window until they get run off by police.<p>What I&#x27;m getting at is, a lot of &#x27;homeless&#x27; people get judged because there are a considerable amount that aren&#x27;t actually homeless in many places. I honestly believe I&#x27;ve NEVER seen a homeless person on the street until I visited San Francisco in June and saw tent&#x2F;tarp cities and people passed out on the middle of sidewalks in broad daylight.<p>Here in Indy the common homeless you&#x27;ll see have relatively clean nice clothes, will usually have some sort of phone, look well fed, shoes in great condition, and sometimes are considerably overweight. In San Francisco I saw people in filthy clothes, a few people had shoes that were beyond shot and had clearly been worn well beyond their useful life, that were often pushing being underweight. From my window at the Proper I watched a man sleep on the sidewalk all night, when public transportation started running in the morning he got up and paced the sidewalk wrapped Assasin&#x27;s Creed-style in his blanket with sneakers that looked nearly as old as I am, that guy was legitimately homeless, the feelings I have for the &#x27;homeless&#x27; in Indy are nothing what like I felt for that man, watching him for an hour or so over the course of 12 hours left me in a funk for days, the &#x27;homeless&#x27; here you walk by thinking &quot;I bet he makes more in a few hours on the weekend than I will in a day of work&quot;. Truly homeless people here aren&#x27;t a common site in public unlike what I saw in a day and a half in San Francisco. There&#x27;s absolutely a homeless population here but the bulk of &#x27;homeless&#x27; that we see are fakers, so we get conditioned to judge.<p>They&#x27;re also attempting to pass more legislation to end panhandling downtown as it&#x27;s still very much a problem <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indystar.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;indy-proposal-seeks-eliminate-panhandling-downtown&#x2F;1303768002&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indystar.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;news&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;indy...</a>