Homeless in Vancouver: Another crappy sign of homelessness

First thing this morning I found a discarded panhandler’s cardboard sign; just off Hemlock Street in the alley on the south side of West Broadway Avenue.

This was just around the corner from a 24-hour convenience store where a number of panhandlers like to set up shop for the evening.

The sign is succinct, as it should be:

“Only [13] days to Xmas. Homeless + starving. Godbless”.

The punctuation is mine and the “13” was on a little slip of paper covering up a previous date. Oh, and there were little smiley faces in three of the Os (aww!).

While it was true that as of last night there were only 13 days left until Christmas and I have little doubt that the panhandler was homeless, I really doubt that the person was starving.

There’s a limit to my sympathy

First of all, there’s little reason to be hungry in such a food-filled city as Vancouver (I say this as a homeless person) and certainly not in the Fairview neighbourhood. And a panhandler at Christmas time in Fairview is likely earning three times as much in one hour as the binners in Fairview are earning in a full day of collecting returnable beverage containers.

And I should add that whomever used the begging sign to cover up the big crap they took in the alley certainly wasn’t starving!

Even it it was after midnight and the McDonald’s half a block away was closed—even if the 24-hour convenience store wouldn’t let them use the washroom—there was still zero excuse to make a mess like this.

I don’t care if you’re mindless on drugs. Even an idiot should have the minimal sense to (if nothing else) crap on the cardboard rather than the other way round. Not to mention all the cardboard Dumpsters and recycling bins, with their ready supply of plastic bags, paper and cardboard boxes, all within mere feet of this person’s impromptu bowel movement.

As I’ve said before on this subject, no halfway intelligent homeless person I know would make a mess like this—many of them would rather kick the crap out of any homeless people who do.

I can’t tell you that it’s awful and shitty to be homeless in Vancouver but I can tell you that there are homeless people in Vancouver who seem to purposely make it that way.