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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Your inability to "get used to" cold may reflect a survival technique the body has, to avoid hyothermia. Sleeping cold has very high risks.

Aside from this, I am truly sorry you had to live through this experience, and that others continue to live through this experience. It has been a revalation to me how quickly local authorities here in Australia could house rough sleepers when they had a specific intent (disease prevention) in mind. I always suspected persisting homelessness was both complex (causative reasons) and simple (to fix) but what surprised me was how simple: they just had to decide to do it.

Shame on them, shame on us, for continuing to vote for authorities so apathetic to the problem of homelessness.

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The same thing happened here in the UK. A relatively tiny amount of money (a million £/month or so) got >95% of rough sleepers off the streets and into secure accomodation where many have taken the opportunity to deal with their addictions, mental health issues, even education and job prospects. Turns out it's way easier to get off drugs/alcohol and sort your life out when you don't have to spend all your time finding the next meal or a safe(-ish) place to sleep.

The problem of rough sleeping can be dealt with using tiny amounts of money (at least in the UK), but unfortunately the wider problems of homelessness, where many are inviisble because they are permenantly couch surfing or stuck in hostels or at chronic risk of losing their homes if they have them are much more complex and difficult to deal with without changes to how housing works here.

At least housing probably works better now than it did in 1931?

The Spike http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part1

Note that Blair/Orwell is spotted immediately as NRS social grade A, which may explain why Winston Smith couldn't make the to-me-reasonable jump to the free proletariat in 1984:

> "The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty, who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself, he looked hard at me, and said:

> 'You are a gentleman?'

> 'I suppose so,' I said.

> He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he said, 'that's bloody bad luck, that is.' And thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect."

Yep, although that's not saying much.

The housing market in the UK is pretty screwed at the moment, and has been for a long while.

> Sleeping cold has very high risks.

When I was very young, I took a survival course. We were taught our highest priority was to produce shelter[1], insulated from the ground, the night sky, and prevailing winds. Only after that came things like water supply, etc.

[1] biWak: besonders im Winter arschkalt.

(one wonders if the angle bars on the heating grates serve any engineering purpose?)

I'm almost certain it is 'anti-homeless' features to keep people from sleeping there.

See for examples - https://interestingengineering.com/15-examples-anti-homeless...

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