Posted on 05/01/2011 3:42:35 PM PDT by Brilliant
Larry Bogan knows precisely how much it costs for a bus ticket from Atlantic City back home to Pompano Beach, Fla.: $126. Unfortunately, that's $126 more than he has...
And so instead of cooking in a restaurant or driving a tractor trailer for someone like he used to do, Bogan eats at a soup kitchen and sleeps on park benches or in a train or bus station each night. He's one of about 500 homeless people living in the nation's second-largest gambling market.
Reducing Atlantic City's homeless population is a key element of a new effort to help the struggling casino resort get back on its feet... A state agency plans to allocate just under $100,000 to a local homeless shelter to buy bus or plane tickets back home for any homeless person who wants to leave...
If the travel program is the carrot, there's also a stick being brandished: the prospect of stepped-up sweeps of the entire Boardwalk to move homeless squatters along.
Bogan, 55, came to Atlantic City years ago... "I fell into a little slump, and I'm on the streets now," he said. "You hope when night time comes you can get into a nice bed or lay down on a couch. But you just sleep on a bench."
Bogan says he lost his wallet two years ago with all his identification... He wants to travel to Jacksonville, Fla., in order to obtain a copy of his birth certificate, the first step toward getting a driver's license...
"It's one of those quality-of-life issues for our visitors and frankly, our residents here who are confronted by the needy," [said Susan Ney Thompson, director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority]. "We're looking for a good way to help those people who end up stranded here get back home..."
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
Sounds like every major city is doing this.
Make them work for their food and bed and I bet they’d find their own solution PDQ.
Hobo > tramp > bum.
We have a lot here in Florida, perhaps we can ship them back to Jersey.
The slow motion economic decline caused by the prevailing constituents behind the debt regime (contemporary politics) is sending the middle class (government employees, service employees, all) back home with them before long.
It’s a bipartisan feeding frenzy under a falling globalist house of cards.
Wouldn’t it be better to start the program when the weather gets cold, and then when it warms up for Florida to send them back? Timing seems off on this program.
you’re not seeehnsetive!
“Bogan says he lost his wallet two years ago with all his identification... He wants to travel to Jacksonville, Fla., in order to obtain a copy of his birth certificate,”
HIS will be real, I bet.
This article actually makes it sound as if he’s homeless, BECAUSE HE LOST HIS WALLET! And here I was, insensitive Republican with a fat gut, a Scotch, and a cigar, thinking substance abuse had something to do with it.
The good news is that he will be eligible to run for President.
There are some pretty good fakes available if he can just get to D.C.
Well I’ll be hanged.
His “hometown” is right next to my “hometown” Lauderdale by the Sea.
I think I might move to the Boardwalk come November.
There are some “out of the box” solutions to urban homelessness that on the surface sound loopy, but in practice work well and save a lot of money.
Seattle discovered, for example, that if it provided its confirmed alcoholic street people a small, refurbished hotel to live in, 3 charity meals a day, used clothing, and kept a nurse on call when they had medical problems, it ended up saving a small fortune in city services and emergency room care. If freed up police for more serious problems, and it made small businesses and the public much happier.
Though they didn’t do it, there was even a suggestion that they could provide both cheap alcohol and mixers for the alcoholics as well, so there was no need for them to spare change for anything.
Another proposal, during an economic slowdown, was to segregate the homeless, providing support for homeless families, that usually recover quickly, in town. Then provide a regional homeless town shared between cities, in a rural area, for single homeless that are still able to work.
By taking homeless services out there, rather than keeping them and the homeless in the cities, it makes it much easier for them to get work, and build up savings so they can eventually leave.
When we first moved down here to Delray Beach, they used to stop them from panhandling in Boca. I’ve noticed now they don’t. Must have had some lawsuits or something.
First, if they have homes to be sent to, how are they homeless?
And second, South Park did this exact thing a couple of seasons ago in an episode titled Night of the Living Homeless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Homeless
I wonder how many of the AC homeless started their sojourn in AC as a visitor to its casinos, lost everything gambling and from that point on their continued “residency” began.
They need to bring that sort of thing back.
In the late 50s and early 60s, several southern states paid bus fare for their homeless to Newark, NJ because of the excellent welfare programs (part of the Democrap strategy of bulding a voter base of dependency!).
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