H 23°, L 4° | Tomorrow: 
H 22°, L 6°The city of Madison has always attracted a large homeless community. Panhandling is a legal, everyday occurrence in the city’s streets and for many homeless men and women, Madison is a welcoming and tolerant city. With low winter temperatures settling in on the isthmus, the homeless community is once again in danger.
Freezing temperatures and a lack of adequate shelter space create a dangerous environment each winter for Madison’s homeless. In response to this, the Madison Warming Center Campaign organized a protest Thursday. City residents and University of Wisconsin students joined the group in urging Mayor Dave Cieslewicz to set aside the proper funding to open an emergency homeless shelter. Marching from Library Mall toward City Hall and into the mayor’s office, approximately 75 protesters met with Cieslewicz. The mayor told the demonstrators that he had set aside $11,000 of the city’s budget for homeless relief to couple $45,000 raised in the private sector.
Certainly, Thursday’s protest offers a strong reminder of the need for a shelter in Madison. With several homeless people dying in the streets each winter, the city needs to play a significant role in preventing this sad, annual occurrence.
But while the sympathetic action of the MWCC protest should be applauded, the rally is untimely. Waiting until the winter months to hold such a demonstration shows a lack of perseverance on the part of the protesters, whose December demand for an emergency warming shelter ignores the time it takes to budget, plan and build such a structure.
Surely, we are all more aware of the problem when we ourselves feel the cold winter weather, but some foresight on the part of the MWCC would have added weight to the demands of the protest.
An emergency shelter would certainly be of great service to the city of Madison, but it is an undertaking that requires significant planning. Such a structure should be designed while keeping in mind the problems that cause and coincide with homelessness, making the safety of its temporary residents its greatest concern. Madison needs a homeless shelter, but it is a project that needs to be a year-round endeavor on the part of the city and the MWCC.
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It’s been said that most of the homeless here in Madison aren’t originally from Madison, or from Wisconsin. Why not just give ‘em a one-way Greyhound ticket to Texas or Florida. They might still be homeless when they get there, buy at least they won’t freeze to death. I mean, if you’re gonna wind up homeless, at least have the brains not to be homeless someplace where your well-being is imperiled by adverse weather conditions. You can’t always count on there being a shelter where you can keep warm.
Okay, maybe homeless people aren’t the smartest people in the world, but we could really help them by sending them to another state. That’s what most states did to help them get here. It’s time the rest of the country pulled their own weight. They can’t just keep sending their homeless population to Wisconsin or Minnesota. They have to take care of their own for a change. We’re through up here.
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Oh yeah, what we really need is to encourage these deadbeats to come to Madison where they can harass people for spare change all day and have a warm bed at night. Great idea!
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“Why not just give ‘em a one-way Greyhound ticket to Texas or Florida.”
Great idea! Seriously. You’d be surprised how many other states would slap a voucher in a poor person’s hand to buy a Greyhound ticket just to get rid of them. Ask homeless people out on the street here in Madison where they are from and they’ll tell you “Chicago”, “Memphis”, “St. Louis”, “Little Rock”.
These states fight poverty by eliminating their poor population through the purchase of one-way tickets to somewhere else. And it’s states like Wisconsin and Minnesota that end up with more welfare cases than they can handle. Instead of taking them in and taxing ourselves to death, why don’t we just send a message to those deadbeat states to start taking care of their poor people.
Hello, any liberals out there interested in taking up the cause?
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“They can’t just keep sending their homeless population to Wisconsin or Minnesota.”
Sure they can.