There are Reasons for Someone Staying with the Homeless 24/7

   If you have a delicate portion of society, you take care of them best you can. You shower on them all the attention you can, all the love.
  And you are there, onsite for them, attending to their minute needs.
  Children? We wouldn't think of raising them without being there nights, even though they seldom wake us from our sleep with a problem. (Okay, I've never been a parent. Do I need to take that back?)
  The homeless? They can be like children, some might even say like problem children. We can imagine there are nights when they argue, bicker, fight. There must be nights when they get sick, vomit, and need to go to the hospital.
    Some of them -- like a child -- might become frightened in the night. If you were sleeping with a room full of disheveled and unkempt strangers, might you not be scared? A child, when scared, runs for the safety of parents. And, every night when they go to bed, their parents are there to tuck them in, tell them a bedtime story, and give them peace.
   I do not know how well it works with the shelter attendants. If perchance some of them provide such care, do they all?  Seems to me, we should consider having someone right in there with them, same room, watching them through the night.
  And, of course it follows that someone should be there during the day, even monitoring their comings and goings as best possible. Such presence of a "parent" would discourage drugs from coming in, if nothing else. Not that you would stop it all, but it would dampen it.
  How good of "parents" you could find for our shelters might be another matter. Many are too authoritarian. For all that the homeless can be like children, there are also ways they are not. They are old enough, obviously, to make their own decisions. Still, to have a loving, tolerant, understanding person in with the homeless would be a good thing, someone not just sitting at a front desk, but right in with them, listening to and helping them with their burdens and needs, doing everything from helping them in looking for jobs, to listening to their life stories and problems.
  If we warehouse the homeless, we cannot expect theirs to become more than lives on a shelf. Bringing them into a traditional shelter might not be much more than that, though they do have some services available. Still, those services cannot fill needs as well as someone being right there with them 24/7.