When I was homeless, when we went to the council they gave us this electronic test questionnaire thing :
http://england.shelter.org.uk/get_advice/downloads_and_tools/does_the_co...

to see whether we were 'really' homeless, and whether our situtation entitles us to be housed!

if i messed my bed up like that in the temporary housing shelters I would have been out! Although I do remember seeing the Emin piece in 2004,at the YBA show at the Saatchi Gallery, LND - alongside that Tent of her's and a photo with all the cash inbetween her legs. it was the first major big exhibition that I had ever seen (since i dont live near London)and it made an impression on me at 15, and I knew in that moment that I wanted to be a contemporary artist. Not that I wanted to run around and pickle sharks and sheep and that, or indeed share too much about my personal life, but I got a really weird feeling when I was looking at the exhibition, some kind of awe. which is obviously something to do with seeing my first 'real' art exhibition - but also to do with the conceptual developement of ideas to a kid being made to copy Georgia O'Keef paintings in art class.

When I entered the system in NYC they asked me a lot of questions to verify my worthiness. Since I was near dead at the time I don't remember much other than one interviewer noting that her last name and my mother's maiden name was the same (Jack, originally Jaques but pronounced Jakes -- interesting quirk of history that my black interviewer and my mother's French/Scottish/Jewish family share a name but that's for another time).

At no time did anyone think to send me to a doctor, conveniently located down the hall at Bellevue Hospital proper (the homeless intake center is located in the old psychiactric hospital, and looks it -- spooky). Instead I was put on an old school bus and taken to Wards Island then, two days later, upstate to Camp LaGuardia where I finally saw a "nurse practitioner" who diagnosed me with hayfever and gave me a prescription for Loratidine. It took six months for me to see a real doctor who quickly got to the root of my problem with a simple CAT scan.

Meanwhile, in my zombie existence, I had hernia surgery and all my teeth pulled out for dentures, which NYU Dental took nearly a full year to make.

Homeless shelters in NYC are run by "faith based organizations" like Volunteers of America overseen, somewhat, by a governmental body called Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and the Human Resources Administration (HRA). Our mayor, in his wisdom, has decided the best way to end homelessness in NYC is to called DHS something else. If there's no Department of Homeless Services there's no homeless! Brilliant.

I can't stress enough how sick and downright evil the organization Volunteers of America is, My wish is to see their board of directors do the perp walk for all the money their employees have skimmed. And the people who work for them are sickos. They love to put abused women in charge of men's shelter because, you know, if a single male is homeless it must be because he beats women and got thrown out of his house. The homeless shelters for men are just holding tanks for finding out if you have an outstanding warrant. When they do make a computer match they haul you out of bed at three in the morning to send you to jail God, you know, punishes guys like that eventually, with the help of VoA.

BTW, uber-do-gooder actress Susan Sarandon did a bus ad for VoA last year touting how wonderful they are for giving "homeless schoolkids" (you know, really deserving homeless people) backpacks. I had to see her face on the sides of buses every time I managed to make it back into the city telling me how wonderful the people who nearly killed me are. Her babydaddy, Tim Robbins, did ads for the Coalition for the Homeless "acting" like a homeless bum (This could be you, so give!), an art world favorite charity that's simply a useless non-governmental organization fronting for the government. The real irony is that the Coalition sprung from the homeless encampments in the 'eighties that eventually led to both the Tompkins Square police riots, where I was beaten, causing part of my health problems, and the Callahan Decision, which ordained the minimum amount of space (60 square feet) a human deserves.

So lets stop with the whole "homeless" crap, it's abandonment and entrapment, plain and simple.

Agreed! Indeed, the non-governmental agencies organizations fronting for the government are totally sick and corrupted.

My worst memory was when I was split up from my mom for one night, and had to be moved to Sheffield (I live in Doncaster a big town,45 miles away from Sheffield) to a Salvation Army drug addiction centre for under 25 year olds because they couldn't find anywhere else for me to go, and I had overstayed at my friends houses for at least another 2 weeks [they didn't know I was homeless because I was ashamed of my position back then] and it was too cold of a night in Feburary to sleep in the car.
Not only did the staff treat me in such a manner where their attitudes totally encapsulates your last sentence, "...lets stop with the whole "homeless" crap, it's abandonment and entrapment, plain and simple...".
They wouldn't give me straight answers, or make nice polite conversation with me. They snatched stuff off me and called me by my room and bed number. Because that's all I was. Scum.. a number, regardless of whether I just needed a bed to sleep in over night, or if I was a drug abuser it made no difference.
If this wasn't enough, because I have never dabbled in the drug community, the other residents could totally sense it. I just had a change of clothes and my school bag, but my jeans went missing and when I asked the girls in the bunk above me and beside my bed, they just looked at each other and laughed, hysterically. And then mocked everything about me. I tried to do my homework, ironically an essay on the Marxist perspective on Crime and Deviance - but they would pretend to look at the books and just chuck them around the place. So i moved to the common area where I was confronted by a huge guy who was blind in one eye who asked me for some money. when i said I didn't have any except my trainfare to get me to school the next day, he just tripped out started to shout. I'm a quiet kid, so I had enough at this time, in all honesty I was scared. And completely miserable.
When I asked to go out, the staff told me I wasn't allowed. I asked why the other people were allowed, i was just curious plus I wasn't in drug rehabliltation and then they shouted at me saying I was over riding their authority.
I soon realised that they just assume that every homeless kid is into drug addiction, just like every homelessman must have beat his wife and kids, and like every homeless woman must be a prostitue or something similar of the sort.
Luckily I didn't have another night as bad as that.
But the fact remains, the system is totally messed up and continues to reproduce inequalities through discrimination and greedy profit which increases these types of situations.
even though my experience as 'homeless' was still pretty trumatic(to me), I think that what Murph went through is beyond what any human being should go through, especially in a Westernised country, for just basic humanistic survival such as Shelter.
I also worked for the homeless company called Shelter in the UK, for a part time job at college. I wanted to help people to get out of homelessness, like I had, but yet again I was disillussioned. I lasted 2 weeks when I found out what I was doing only half of it helped people, the other half went to some big cat at the top of the company.
I'm left with that anomie feeling, that I sometimes get as an artist, how does one make a 'real' difference? And I like to think that's one of the elements of what I love about New Media art, it's much more accessible and quite alot of it is a satire or parody of things that corrupt.

Ah, thanks Murph!!

It was abit difficult to read (in the layout...was it suppose to be like that, for added affect?)
I can see that it's written by a bunch of pampered cultural elites! But it made for a great read... thanks for the recommendation...

It certainly sparked up a debate in my head, might write a post on it later on in the week... as it is right now, I don't have time with working and writing a different paper.