Bless you for your work, Joe.

Wouldn't it be even more exciting and enjoyable if the government spent, say, half the amount per homeless person as it does per prisoner? With a homeless population of 250 @ $20,000 per person, that would give you five million dollars to work with.

Not to belittle the complications arising from the individual humanity of each homeless person, hospitals, for example, face perhaps a greater variation in individual needs they must serve. And beleaguered as they are, they don't find these vast differences themselves an overwhelming obstacle--because in comparison they have much greater revenues and institutional depth to draw on--insurance, medicare, medicaid, Affordable Care, and so forth.

The plea of scarce government revenues makes me sick: An analysis by Bloomberg estimates the new tax bill will create a one trillion dollar loss in revenue over ten years. If we can throw that much away, couldn't we have held back a hundredth of that for our half million homeless neighbors?

In Maine the death rate per 100,000 is about 10--high in part because Maine's population is relatively old. Point-in-time surveys of Portland Maine's homeless population show about 500 people. In 2017, forty homeless people died in Portland, a death rate 800 times that of the state overall. (And of course the rate is higher compared to their age cohorts, because homeless people die on average 28 years earlier than the general population, so they don't GET to be old.) It's a freaking plague! No, it's not, it's a policy of decimation.

To me it's a national disgrace that agencies serving the homeless have to rely on volunteers and scramble for non-profit donations and what they can get from municipal budgets after operating costs are covered.

I love what you do, Joe, but it's a shame you have to do it.