AFTER some 20 years selling the Big Issue I know about homelessness and, as usual at Christmas, everybody feels enough empathy to perhaps try to talk to one of the many homeless on our streets.

And while I can understand the frustration of residents in South Hampstead witnessing the use and sale of hard drugs and their nimbyism rides the wave of their anger so that they push for these undesirables to be moved elsewhere (Hard drug dealers on our doorsteps, December 8). But where?

Despite many residents feeling Camden has most of the homeless in the country, homelessness is a national problem and most homeless are people who (before they were homeless) lived and or worked in the borough. So how can moving them to a strange town improve anybody else’s lives apart from the nimbys?

Local councils, by trying to fulfil their wishes of moving these folks on, are playing a game of homeless pass-the-parcel.

So now they become somebody else’s problem.

Moving to a new town where you know nobody, and possibly with a drug habit acquired to help you get through each day living on the streets, within a short time your life can again spiral out of control and you’re back on the streets. But hey! At least it isn’t in Camden!

One nil for the nimbys!

The current economic situation has put a great many people just a couple of pay packets away from being homeless.

A couple of costly accidents and there isn’t enough money to cover the rent. Other factors such as being an ex-serviceman with PTSD or a girl trying to escape a relationship full of domestic violence and drug use can become overwhelmingly tempting.

Stop thinking that the homeless are homeless because they are drug users. They are drug users because they are homeless.

Moving the homeless elsewhere certainly isn’t the answer and with the economy as it is, we must all get used to there being more people on the street – unless some safety nets removed by austerity cuts are restored.

PAUL WHITE
Address supplied