What is a Green Roof?
24-hour McDonald’s restaurants are used by “McRefugees” in Japan, China and Hong Kong. This can also include housing in exchange for labor or sex. Homeless shelters: including emergency cold-weather shelters opened by churches or community agencies, which may consist of cots in a heated warehouse, or temporary Christmas Shelters. More elaborate homeless shelters such as Pinellas Hope in Florida provide residents with a recreation tent, a dining tent, laundry facilities, outdoor tents, casitas, and shuttle services that help inhabitants get to their jobs each day. There are about 250 McRefugees in Hong Kong. Couch surfing: temporary sleeping arrangements in dwellings of friends or family members (“couch surfing”). Couch surfers may be harder to recognize than street homeless people and are often omitted from housing counts.
Studies have shown that homeless people have a high level of morbidity and mortality. Statistics demonstrate that the homeless are admitted to a hospital five times more than the general public and stay under care much longer. Moreover, they suffer from a wide range of medical problems, including serious infectious diseases, e.g., tuberculosis, HIV/AIDs and STDs, addictions, and mental illnesses. Homeless people often obtain their care in hospital emergency departments, partly due to their inability to pay for medical services. Notably, the lack of access to adequate medical care for homeless people adversely affects the healthcare system as well.
In 2022, it was reported that Russian authorities were targeting homeless people to conscript them into the war in Ukraine. Modern Times, 1936 film, shows negative effects of vagrancy laws. God Bless the Child, 1988, made-for-TV movie about a single mother (Mare Winningham) living on the streets of New York City with her young daughter. Homelessness in popular culture is depicted in various works. Cathy Come Home, 1966, shows the effects of homelessness on parenthood.
Homeless people are often obliged to adopt various strategies of self-presentation in order to maintain a sense of dignity, which constrains their interaction with passers-by, and leads to suspicion and stigmatization by the mainstream public. Difficulties can compound exponentially. A study found that in the city of Hong Kong over half of the homeless people in the city (56%) had some degree of mental illness. When someone is prejudiced against people who are homeless, and then becomes homeless themselves, their anti-homelessness prejudice turns inward, causing depression. Only 13% of the 56% were receiving treatment for their condition leaving a huge portion of homeless untreated for their mental illness. Homelessness is also a risk factor for depression caused by prejudice.
