Reply to Homeless person sleeping in my front door vestibule

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[quote=Anonymous]LCSW here who worked on a team that did home/community visits with the mentally ill and substance use population. I love housing first but the reality is that someone has to be their neighbors. So many of the clients in my program were resistant to social workers, medical, psychiatric, substance use ect. treatment that has been given to them over the years. Mental illness and substance use makes for (mostly) bad tenants and neighbors. These were some of the reasons people in my program got evicted from their housing first and permanent supportive housing apartments:

-selling drugs out of their unit
-prostitution
-armed robbery of neighbors
-screaming and yelling at hallucinations all night and day (not a reason to hospitalize someone, btw)
-screaming and yelling on the street at neighbors
-fights in their apartment
-feeding/harboring animals (literally feeding raccoons, mice, rats, squirrels in the apartment)
-property destruction: flooding the bathrooms, destroying carpets, cabinets, appliances, walls, common areas
-defecating and urinating in common areas
-letting trash pile up and rotting all over the apartment
-housing multiple people who aren’t on the lease who do any number of the above

Of course there were clients who appreciated and cared for their free housing but the vast majority faced a number of those problems. If you were paying market rate in an apartment building how long would you put up with that? If you were a landlord?

There has to be huge changes made to the system but as a MSW/LCSW myself who has dedicated my career to helping people like the one OP encountered, I would have done the same thing. I have been a victim of violence and witnessed violence from homeless people and they are not all bad by any stretch but trust me this area is saturated in resources and likely he has been helped before and is facing other problems that OP can’t (and shouldn’t!) try to fix. [/quote]

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