Comments

1
If you have been dealt a shitty hand, it seems like it would be much safer (and maybe more hopeful) to end up in the foie gras and bisque neighborhood than its un-gentrified counterpart.
2
Hopefully she'll grow up, get educated, and become a strident atheist pro-choice advocate. That's what I did when I got out of my overly populous poor religious household. Support the children, but do everything you can to help people have smaller families.
3
There are hundreds of suburban communities around the United States, nowhere near cities, that offer clean and affordable apartments in sunny, spacious complexes, many of which take Section 8s and whose rents are affordable even with a minimum wage job.

I have little or no sympathy for a system that insists on keeping poor people enslaved inside of expensive dirty and crime ridden center cities. It serves the bureaucrats, not the poor.
4
Bailo, let's say that minimum-wage job was $8/hr. (That's much more than some minimum wages in many states and most low-wage workers can't get fulltime, but anyway.) Gross wages would be $1,312; take-home maybe $1,100. Out of that the worker would have to ay rent, food, utilities, bus fare/gas, and all those things you don't worry about.

Assuming the worker didn't get Section 8 (because that benefit has been drastically cut over the years), let's say the worker has about $400 remaining for rent, in -- as you claim -- a clean, sunny, large aartment. In a suburb, yet, nowhere near that worker's job.

Of course I'm doing what no one should do: comment on your idiocy.

5
@4,

The article also details the family's struggles to move out of New York. They desperately wanted to move to Pennsylvania, hoping to find someplace affordable to live, but their hopes were dashed when the father's EIC tax credit was seized for child support.

It's sort of a moot point though, because I'm pretty well convinced that that family would not have been better off in Pennsylvania. They would have been guaranteed to wind up homeless there as well, and, unless they landed in Philly, their homelessness would have resulted in them living on the street, not in a vermin-infested shelter. As shitty as the services are in large cities in New York, at least there are services.
6
This story brought me to tears and inspired me to send $200 to my friend in NYC - she teaches at a public elementary school in Harlem. One of her students lives in a Bronx shelter with his 8 siblings and has to take 2 buses for an hour to get to class. Most of the other kids aren't much better off. Her classroom has one working power outlet. I'm hoping she can use the money to get the kids something to keep their minds occupied over winter break.
7
Parents are unemployed, have a criminal history and history of drug addiction, and crapped out EIGHT kids along the way. But let's keep blaming the "system" (whatever that is).
8
#4, 5

So it makes more sense to stay in NYC where apartments cost twice as much?

I don't understand the logic.

Here's a place in Harrisburg, PA that offers some apartments for as low as $700.

http://www.apartmentguide.com/apartments…

Here's some in Allentown for as low as $500 a month!!!

http://www.apartmenthomeliving.com/apart…

At some point it would be cheaper for all the social service agencies to get poor people out of NYC, and completely fund their existence in a place like Allentown whether or not they have means to get there and get even a minimum wage job until the find said job!

I really am calling Bullshit on this...the only reason these people are being kept in squalor is not for any rational reason, but only because it serves the interest of the bureaucracies supposedly are there to help them. The poor are moved around like pawns on a chessboard. They are not being given what they need...a low cost apartment in a low cost town!

9
@8 You make a good point.
11
@10- Yes, this 14 year old girl really shouldn't complain. She could have fixed up her rodent-infested shelter room that she shares with 7 siblings and her parents to be pretty. She must not "like nice things".

Also, did you notice that this story might not be about you?
12
When Balio starts sounding reasonable its time to realize something is really really broken.

Liberal group think did this, as usual, the unintended consequences prevailed.

There are no answers left but to pay people salaries to create help organizations to look into how to house, feed and educate poor people in one of the most expensive cities in the world. So lets raise taxes to pay for this! its not like there is anything else that needs to be done.

If every bleeding heart in this thread who wants to save this child took in a family thats being held up by social services, or sad individuals camped out in the hobo jungle or their cars, we could have this solved in no time. But people don't want to fix it, they want a huge bureaucracy that created this problem, to move it out of view, using someone else's money.

People need to stop the kneejerk awww poor peoples lives suck gawking, and ask what problem your trying to solve. You want little dietpepsi's life to be better? get her away from her toxic family and adopt her. Don't want to break up her family cause its sad? too bad you can't have it all.
14
@13- Again, you totally miss the point that this story is about a child.
15
@12,

In a better world, those kids would be better off being taken away from their parents and adopted out to better families. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where most of those kids will be worse off in foster care and all but the youngest, who's still a baby, will languish in foster care until they reach the age of 18. It's too bad the state didn't intervene when the children were still young enough to be adoptable, but it's a little too late for that now. The fact is that those children are now better off with their parents given that their parents aren't going to hand them a plastic bag full of their clothes and show them the door on their 18th birthdays.

Did you miss the part of the article where the family lost a housing subsidy that cost $1,200/month for taxpayers, which landed them in a pest- and sexual-offender-infested shelter that cost the taxpayers $3,000/month?

That earlier subsidy involved less bureaucracy and lower costs than the shelter, so why was it cut? Maybe because your let-them-eat-shit mindset ruled the day?
16
@12,

Also, by my count, there are five "bleeding hearts" in this thread. A little too few to solve homelessness, don't you think?
17
Paul Kuniholm Pauper supports the Punk Rock Flea Market, which supports LIHI.org, providing housing for Washington State's most deserving citizens.
18
@13 Did you read the article? People working there would frequently tear through folded piles of clothes and stuffs to find the microwave and just be trolls.

Unless you think that poor people should never be allowed to have *gasp* things!!!! How can they be suffering if they have things?!!!

The free pile in my building has more shit in it.

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