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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

I wandered down green lanes yesterday at around 8:30 and noticed several people sleeping rough! Including a man and a women! Both sides of the lanes.

Has this problem got out of control? Is there anything the council can do?

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That would be really useful Con - there are very few Harringey services on the Homeless London website or in the Pavement listings 

Unfortunately this is a visible sympton of the housing crisis we have in London. Unless we tackle the issue of affordability and security of tenure we will continue to see increasing amounts of rough sleepers. This is a problem that has been left untackled for a generation.

Councils are in a bind. They effectively have to ration social housing as they don't have enough housing for people and end up "gatekeeping". Basically doing all they can to discourage people from making a homeless application. Even if you are accepted as homeless the council will do nothing unless you are priority need. i.e vulnerable in some way, with children etc. single people have absolutely no chance of getting any assistance from the council beyond a list of private rentals at exorbitant prices.

The answer seems glaringly obvious. Scrap the right to buy and allow councils to borrow the money for a mass social house building programme for rent. we need to build hundreds of thousands of new homes in London at  genuinely affordable rents with permanent tenancies. The private sector cannot provide this only LA's can. Andthe housing needs to be of good quality, bring back the Parker Morris standards. There is no point building hundreds of thousands of tichy, badly designed boxes that we're stuck with for the next hundred years. 

There is an element to this that I failed to mention and that is that possibly one of the reasons you see so many "hardcore homeless" on the streets of Haringey is that neighbouring boroughs Hackney and Islington are clamping down on aggressive begging as well as issuing ASBOs to homeless people that make a nuisance of themselves.  Is there something utterly perverse about prosecuting homeless people for begging and then issuing them with fines that they can't pay without going begging to pay for them?  Yes there is.  But has it reduced the number of aggressive beggars in their boroughs.  Yes it has.  To our detriment.  So are Islington and Hackney doing the right thing by serving the needs of the majority over the needs of a handful of people who have made spectacular mess-ups of their own lives?  I honestly don't know.  But I feel much happier walking the streets of Islington than I do Green Lanes.

I'm more concerned that myself and my street dwelling friends and neighbours have had to put up with some pretty 'hardcore' supercilious and patronising bourgeoisie in green lanes over the last few years with their aggressive petitions and sponsorship forms, it seems neighbouring areas - Islington, crouch end, muswell hill have been drivingthese ppeople out and we've got too now put up with them to our ddetriment , with their buy to let's and their loft conversions. Can't the council do something, give them asbos?
It's really bad at the moment. In my view the new influx of beggars is caused by the unchallenged drugs trade in Manor House and near Barclays on green lanes that has moved from kings x/Caledonian rd since the regeneration. Obviously this is linked to the large number of street sleepers in the area. Quite a strange place to sleep rough considering other parts of London but makes sense if that's where the dealers are.
So I'm curious...what have you done to assist your "neighbours" in their plight? Anything?

Have i wandered into the charles dickens characters room by mistake ?

Am I meant to assist them in some way? Why do they need assistance from me?

Throughout this thread homeless people are associated with drugs, being hardcore, aggressive, a nuisance, detrimental, an influx. One person even complains this iissue of homeless people never came up when they were researching the area! They are spoken of as almost sub human, not like us proper respectable people

Jesus, just have some empathy and humanity, stop ttalking as if they are the problem. Homelessness is a symptom of a failed housing policy. They are not responsible for the lack of housing and it's unaffordability. Give them a break

jj you make a very good point, thanks

I'm not going anywhere near your last point, other than to say the issue is more a lack of planning rather than immigration per se. But I understand a lot of what you say, it's thoughtful and considered. There is no simple answer to your point about the damage that modern society can do to individuals, but as a society if we cannot provide a safe, secure and affordable home for us all in our local areas with our community networks then we are failing in one of our primary duties. The points you raise are true, but they cannot be addressed without the underpinning of secure and affordable decent homes for all. We don't want to add homelessness to the existing problems of struggling people

Economically our housing system is a disaster. It sucks money out of the economy, dead money going to service debt to banks rather than being spent stimulating the wider economy. The human consequences we see on green lanes
I just find it odd that your "empathy and humanity" don't extend to doing anything practical to assist....only judging me for trying to do something tangible to help
I don't think your advocacy of cracking down on homeless people on green lanes, basically for being homeless, will do much tangible to help. Other than maybe help you not having to see them anymore. When you contacted no second night out did you tell the people you were going to do this. Did you ask if this was something they wanted?

Unfortunately you or I cannot provide them with a home. I think the most effective way of helping is to fight for the rights of homeless and badly housed people. Don't vote for parties with tterrible housing policies. Pressure your elected representative.

People need rights. Without that there is no recourse, other than to charitable crumbs.

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