I was homeless in a small town once. The cops were deliberating whether to arrest me or drive me to the next county over and dump me off. I got like a warning that McRae Georgia doesn't have homeless people and convinced my mom to get me a hotel

Gwinnett County Georgia also doesn't have homeless people. It's affluent. We're arrested or sent to other counties as a solution

I have an apartment right now but I'm technically homeless because it's through a housing program for people with mental illness. I'm lucky. I have it because I didn't lose my car and could drive to various agencies across two counties to fill out forms and prove I deserve basic human dignity that is housing because means testing

I've been this desperate and Fox News is out there painting people like me as a public health problem and a horror instead of addressing the root cause of homelessness. Capitalism

I never shit on the sidewalk but I would have if I ended up somewhere where the bathrooms have locks

Capitalism has no mechanism to provide homes for people who can't afford them under capitalism. It has no solution forglobal warming. It incentivises discrimination. It's end goal is concentration of wealth among a few people. It's immoral. We can do better

Wow. I enjoyed this read, but didn't expect to see my home state in here - If the homeless problem in Nebraska is really as bad as they claim, I can personally confirm how invisible these people are...And being invisible usually means being vulnerable.

Here's an article from NE that talks about this same issue, if you're interested.

They aren't living in the boxes. They aren't you know, visible necessarily. But they are there,” said Cheryl Holcomb, executive director of Central Nebraska Community Services. “They're just your domestic violence victims. Your veterans. The veterans are becoming more prevalent in the rural areas.

“It doesn't look like your typical homeless in Chicago or the bigger cities, where you can drive down a certain street and they're all lined up or they're all in boxes,” Holcomb said. “That's not necessarily true in the more rural areas. You might have them where they're couch surfing. Or they might be living in a small camper.”

If anyone has access to JSTOR, I'd love it if you could find a way to send me the full text of this research on rural homelessness in the Great Plains. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

This paper suggests that the general structural frameworks, which have been developed to model homelessness in metropolitan areas, can serve as a useful starting point for understanding rural homelessness in Nebraska. By using a "key informant" survey of homeless service providers in Nebraska it is clear that there are several niches of homeless persons (Native Americans, migrant workers, meat-packing workers, and transients) present in Nebraska that are not discussed in the existing literature.