"According to the council’s annual rough sleeper count, nearly twice as many people are sleeping on the streets of Manchester as last year. Seventy people were counted in one night in December, compared with 43 on the same evening in 2014. There were just 10 in 2011."
"Walk around the city centre on a Friday or Saturday night and you’d think the problem was even worse than the reality. Morrison estimates that for the 20 or 30 beggars you may see on the Deansgate thoroughfare on the weekend, or in the Northern Quarter nightlife district, a maximum of 10 are homeless, with the others “sofa surfing” or in precarious accommodation."
“If you are sitting on the cold ground, begging, you are not going home to a nice house to live it up on the hundreds of pounds you have made that day"
"The biggest Manchester camp – of more than a dozen tents and washing lines hung between guy-ropes – is a minute’s walk from Piccadilly station. This miserable mini-shanty town provides an uncomfortable welcome to the city anointed the centre of the government’s shiny “northern powerhouse”."
"The city’s homelessness crisis went global in October, when the former Manchester United star Gary Neville allowed a group of squatters, some homeless, to spend the winter inside the city’s old stock exchange building, which he was planning to develop into a luxury hotel.
The city’s visible homelessness problem jars with itself-projected image of prosperity: glitzy shops and nightclubs, ever more cranes building multi million-pound penthouses on the horizon, supercars parked brazenly on double yellow lines outside restaurants by footballers and sheikhs who earn the fine in a minute."
The city’s visible homelessness problem jars with itself-projected image of prosperity: glitzy shops and nightclubs, ever more cranes building multi million-pound penthouses on the horizon, supercars parked brazenly on double yellow lines outside restaurants by footballers and sheikhs who earn the fine in a minute."
From the above quotes it is evident that Manchester has a serious problem with homelessness. For instance all you have to do it walk around the northern quarter or Piccadilly to spot numerous homeless people-some in which even have become cultural to the city. As when discussing this with friends it arose that some almost appear as celebrities "the poem guy". The problem with this being the more money given directly to the homeless, the less likely they are to get off the streets, as this is most likely feeding a habit. The solution being charities, which are usually underfunded. This may be an area in which my book will tackle, with ways in which to aid the homeless being noted.
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