Quinlan

The vast majority of homeless people are not people that could otherwise work and just choose not to, or as some people on this thread have called them, the "I ain't never worked a day in my life" folks. The fact is, a very large number of homeless people suffer from debilitating psychiatric/mental problems and Houston does not have the facilities to help these people. Many of these people do not have the support structures of family and friends in their life that can help them weather hardships when they occur and it is a downward spiral from there. Here is a link to an article in the Chronicle that touches on this: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metrop...ay/5076635.html

I don't think the issue is really living next to "traffic". Living on Pecore is one thing, but living next to Interstate 10 is another, where over 200,000 vehicles a day drive by. For some reading about the effects of living close to a freeway: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/airtoxic/casesty6.htm http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/healt...la-news-science http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_44451.html http://www.familiesagainstcancer.org/?id=251 http://voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2007/0...ealth022007.txt