I have been reading alot about homeless men recently. The numbers of homeless men as compared with homeless women are very telling of the current bias in American society today. I found incidences of shelters forcing homeless men into condemned buildings and even one report of men being forced to leave shelters to make room for women.
I could find no real overall data on the actual numbers of shelters available to men, women, children or any combination of the three. I did several general searches on specific areas and found that usually men only shelters were a very real minority in most cases being out-numbered by womens only shelters 10 to 1. Most cities had to have a population of over 200,000 before they even had a male only shelter where as women only shelters (and every women only shelter also allowed dependant children) were common in communities of 50,000 or less. I counted private as well as public shelters and of course my searches were pretty limited but more than likely more exhaustive a search then a normal homeless man would be able to initiate.
These numbers are interesting when you take into account that over 50% of all homeless people are men leaving women and children to fill out the other 50%.
This quote from the 2006 HUD report about why men seem to be allowed to stay shorter periods in shelters read:
The shorter lengths of stay
among unaccompanied males also may be affected by daily turn-out policies – i.e., policies
that require all homeless persons to exit the shelter after a one-night stay before returning the
next night. Such policies are more often used in men’s shelters. Shelters for women are less
likely to have turn-out policies that require daily exits
Take this information as you will. There is plenty of documentation out there although I couldn't find a source just comparing men's examples to women's.
Just another example of how a dis-portionate amount of this country's social money is spent to appease women and leave men out in the cold.
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