How many homeless live in London? Nobody knows. Of course, there are estimates. However, 99.9% of them (estimated) acknowledge their methods flaws and most accept an undervaluation of the true figures living in London's streets.

How much does Homelessness cost London's economy in terms of crime, anti-social or otherwise? Crime that could easily be avoided with a realistic housing rental market, or fairer government assistance programmes. From the time spent by officers bothering beggers, to escaped or misdiagnosed mental health problem sufferers, and the sandwiches stolen every lunchtime all over the city. Ignoring homelessness and tolerating it's enforced legal resence - for there are no shantytowns in London - makes beggers of us all.

Where do they come from, all creeds, colours, languages and cultures flowing into the Capital of England - why do they come? For liberal tolerance, for the money, for the friendly atmosphere? Does there have to be a reason? In minute quantity, life on the streets is bearable, it's when it goes on and on and on it becomes dangerously unbearable in body, mind and soul.

Where do some people come from, to judge rather than to give what they can, if even a smile, dry - turgid, sad in it's complacency...To be homeless is not a crime, it just feels like one, every single second. 

When someone employs a homeless person, do they provide any consideration to the difficulties present in their meeting the job's demands? From the legal perspective, they don't have to. In the human perspective, all too often they just don't want to.

When all is said and done, what does it mean of a country to be 'developed' when it can't even meet the three fundamentals of survive to all of it's population? Food and Water and Shelter are surely more of a human right then misnomers like freedom of expression and assembly. 

Who is responsible for the mess in Housing in London, and the UK generally? Is it the people, the corporations, or the government? Or is it all three? Regardless of playing blame games who cannot see that development is kept down by regulation of the government, rather then enhanced?

Who cannot see that building on green built land isn't the best option: It's the lazy-businesman's get rich quick scheme option. The same with more building in the floodplains, more future marshes for the poor, zero insurance - ghetto's in the making. Because it's not about someone travelling and building a home, it's about massive construction firms throwing up neighbourhoods in three months.

Why can't innovative building with community consideration be undertaken sensitively yet productively? Why can't we built underground, build upwards, build sideways, make special portable homes like builders have for their tearoom on the side of the site even? 

Why is there more spent on foreign misadventures, unusable dangerous nuclear deterrents, and diversity training then helping the homeless, in London and across the UK out of misery? Why does the government intrude enough to help trains run, yet not enough to be sure children don't sleep rough, men aren't murdered whilst asleep, and women repeatedly raped to pay rent. All of which happens day in and day out.

 Is the market to blame? Surely where private enterprise fails, government should step in and subsidise the bottom of the market to facilitate demand. Currently, government is just looking after it's own, although not very well, with silly private public partnership keyworker schemes, and housing benefits, which few landlords care for the hassle of dealing with.

 So many questions to be answered, and even when the answers come, they will sound like excuses, and calls to action will sound hollow and lifeless. The answers to why a problem exists will always be unsatisfactory, without the balls to call out the solution as well. The press will carry on ignoring the guts of the issue, and the homeless can admire the new keyworker flats, whilst they move into the parks to wallow in newsprint. The simple irony of media protecting both the homeless from the cold, and the governmental industrial complex from the heat, on what is the defining measure of what kind of society we are.

 For a society is judged by the state of it's poor.

---