A lot of people in Baltimore are homeless. There are some who are not mentally capable of holding a job, some who can't find jobs, and some who prefer to live on the streets. Some are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, and others never touch either. Some might say the system failed them, and others might say they failed the system. A lot of them ask for money on sidewalks and traffic intersections. A lot of times, they're out on a particular intersection for a full day.

Homeless people are talked about fairly often, with questions about what can be done to help them. I've heard people asking, "if we have so many abandoned houses in this city, how come we still have so many homeless people?" That's a tricky question, one that raises a lot of other questions: "Who owns those 'abandoned' houses?" "What are the plans for them, if any?" "What would happen if we gave those houses to certain homeless people?" It is possible that the city might seize some of those houses and turn them over to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is also possible that the city could sell the houses for a dollar and ask that people invest in them, revitalizing the neighborhood, as they did with the Otterbein area in downtown Baltimore. There are many community gardens that utilize vacant lots and decaying structures in the city. Some of them go toward feeding homeless people.

Without getting into talk of gentrification and citizens with low-income, and housing programs and things like that, the fact that there are a lot of homeless in Baltimore may seem disheartening. The tents under the highway overpasses, the collection of people at the St. Vincent de Paul church at the end of the JFX. Homeless people are part of the city, like any other citizen.