Sounds like some US cities.
[Correspondents Report - abc.net.au]
[excerpted]
“Osaka has developed Japan’s biggest homeless population through a combination of economic and social factors. For years the city was a key part of Japan’s rapid economic progress. Industrial growth required workers to build it, and Nishinari in Osaka was the centre for day labourers who could gather here in the morning and be pretty much guaranteed a well-paid day’s work.
But the economic downturn of the 1990s changed that. The work dried up. And the men who’d come to rely on it found themselves unable to pay for the hostel beds they slept in. Many of them ended up on the streets, and many took up residence in the local Nishinari Park.
Today it’s a ramshackle expanse of tents and tarpaulins. Men carry trolleys with crushed aluminium cans and scrap metal.
The smell of raw sewage is overpowering.
Kazuo Furuya is the head of the Homeless Support section with the Osaka City Government.
“As the economy is improving slightly, I think there’s been a small decrease in the overall numbers,” he says. “But there are still many homeless people around the city. When there are many homeless people they become the primary factor in the increase in government assistance. Osaka City has the highest rate of support of all the major cities of Japan.”
Osaka has been trying to tackle the homeless problem, providing shelters and developing what it calls a self-support facility, where up to 200 homeless people are given shelter and support to find work, so they’re able to become self-sufficient.
But there’s a dark side too. Earlier this year police and officials clashed with homeless people they were trying to force to leave one of the city’s parks.
The issue still grates, and supporters of the homeless population say there’s a city plan to force people off the streets against their will.
“In short, they’re scrapping tents,” says Masaaki Yokota, part of a group that raises funds for Osaka’s homeless. “The city officials say be self-sufficient, but what they’re really saying is live in the self-support centre. Only 20 per cent of the people who go to the centre get jobs. And those 20 per cent are asked to leave after two or three months, then they go back to living on the streets.”
City officials like Kazuo Furuya admit there have been problems, but the Government is trying to do what it can.” (more…)
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