Homelessness

I too am looking for precidents addressing homelessness, particularly parks and urban agricultural developments. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I found these:

Read Walter Hood and check out some of his projects.

http://www.dwell.com/design-101/article/peoples-park

Check Walla Mulla and Bourke Street Parks, City of Sydney, Australia

Check out Supportive Housing. This is primarily created for homeless people with a history chronic substance abuse. This is a concept being used throughout MN and I believe in Washington or Oregon with great success. No – it doesn’t address the root causes of addiction and social inequality. It meets people where they currently are and moves forward from there under the philosophy of harm reduction. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supportive_housing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETGd2EP4z70

Yeah the best way to deal with homeless people in our public space is to not provide them with places to rest their bones. It doesn’t matter if the tax paying public ends up with crappy public space – just keep those people moving.  If a city really has its act together they keep them out of site as much as possible…like NY. Hassle them until they go hang out in a less desirable place. That way we don’t have to deal with people with mental health issues and substance abuse problems, even though many of them are veterans of our armed forces or just good people down on their luck.

Sheesh, if we could keep the musicians, skateboarders and street artist away there might be more room for the “nice” people. Who says we LAs need to care anyway?

Yeah. Because being homeless is so awesome, who wouldn’t want to stay homeless for a free sandwich every day? Personally, I just love sleeping in a bleach-smelling cell with a plastic mattress and thin holey blankets. Its totally worth it even if I can’t get into the shelter until 10:30 at night and have to leave again at 6 in the morning. And who wouldn’t love sleeping in a park-bench tent in -14 weather. Its just like winter camping! That is the life!

But seriously folks, some of you are seriously out of touch / misinformed about what it really means to be homeless, who is homeless and why people are homeless. There are a wide variety of reasons people become homeless, including mental illness, substance addiction and domestic abuse, but the greater reason is the lack of a safety net that I would bet money we all have access to – and that’s not a government safety net, but a family-community-health-cognitive safety net that most of us take for granted. 

And PLEASE don’t tell us that nobody ever helped you a day in your life, you got where you were all on your own because that is absolute bunk. Struggles are NORMAL. Not having the social-emotional-cognitive-health resources to overcome those struggles is what puts people at risk for homelessness. 

Robert, you’re entitled to your opinion but I find it extremely disturbing. I don’t expect every landscape architect to have fighting homelessness on their list of “top 10 reasons I became a landscape architect”, but it is ABSOLUTELY within our purview. In fact, in areas of high homeless populations we might be thought of as being negligent in our life and safety responsibilities NOT to take this population into consideration. I had no idea that being a landscape architect excused us from involvement in serious societal issues – and in fact our profession is, at least in the United States, BASED on this. Central Park was conceived of and created as a ‘pressure release’ for the extreme poverty and poor living conditions that New Yorkers faced at that time.

Providing food, shelter and other resources for indigent people is not making people ‘equal’ or some great communist plot. It IS a moral and ethical response to people in need.