#UrbanAlchemy, that #CA company the right flank of #PDX city council approved to carry out their peculiar vision of #homeless services seems super nice https://bird.makeup/users/pplscitycouncil/statuses/1748082539145966064

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#DanRyan #TedWheeler #ReneGonzalez #Portland #cruelty #sadism #orpol

Pela zona do Centro de São Francisco encontrei montes de pessoal com blusões da Urban Alchemy. Cheira-me que isto a longo prazo isto tem tudo para dar errado. Uma milícia/força de segurança semi-privada que ainda pode redundar numa máfia...

#SanFrancisco #SF #UrbanAlchemy #NonProfits #Homelessness: "Miller started the nonprofit with $36,000 and a contract to manage public toilets in San Francisco. “You can’t polish a turd,” she says. “Well, we polished that turd.”

In five years, Urban Alchemy has amassed at least $62 million in contracts, mostly with cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sausalito in California and Austin in Texas. UA boasts that its budget has increased some 500 percent in the past two years. It says it employs 870 practitioners, 94 percent of whom have been incarcerated or unhoused. And UA wants to take its model nationwide. “We’re the Google or Instagram of social services,” Miller says.
(...)
Critics say Urban Alchemy is policing public space, while UA says its workers, who are not state-licensed private security guards, “provide complementary strategies to conventional policing and security.” Even if UA calls them “ambassadors” or “practitioners”—and even if, according to one former employee, the nonprofit stressed to the ambassadors that they were not “security guards” in internal communications—a search on LinkedIn shows employees describing themselves as security guards.

“It sounds good on paper,” says Couper Orona, a street medic who was unhoused in San Francisco from 2016 until recently, but the reality is that UA is “another Band-Aid instead of fixing the actual problem” of homelessness. “It’s a security force that can bully people into doing what they want—but it’s OK because it’s not the police.”"

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/homelessness-urban-alchemy/

How #UrbanAlchemy turns #homelessness into gold
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/homelessness-urban-alchemy/

#houseless #homelessindustrialcomplex #povertypimps