If you spent anytime downtown at the Plaza, you saw Bob. He usually sat alone at the north east end on a bench, long hair hidden under a knit cap no matter the weather, writing in his small notebook. It took me over a year to learn how to approach Bob and get him to look me in the eye and speak to me. When he did speak, you could hear an educated intellect in his language. From time to time, I’d notice the huge swelling of his hands and feet then he’d be missing for a week or so. I would later learn he’d been hospitalized to drain the fluid from his body only to return to downtown in hospital slippers to reclaim his bench. Once, clean shaven from a recent hospital release, I was shocked to see how young he really was. Over the course of the last two years, Bob had been taken to the hospital several times and then he died this year. Yes, Bob was homeless and his death was stoically accepted by the rest of the homeless community.
Even if you didn’t know Bob or don’t care one way or another about homeless people, the expensive, systematic and ultimately useless emergency medical care he received should concern you. Our community absorbed the cost of caring for Bob but we never followed through, to our communal moral disgrace. Housing First, with wrap around services to follow up on care, has been proven in cities all across the nation to not only be the most effective, cost efficient solution to chronic homelessness, it is the essential, moral one. Let’s hope the "Home Again St Johns" commission gets it right this time.
--Mary Lawarence
originally appearing in the St. Augustine Record, 08/31/09
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