To the editor:

Friday morning I took some camping equipment out to the homeless shelter, a backpack, a rain poncho and a fleece blanket. The staff were happy to get them, but everyone else was looking very sad. There were old men outside the building, one in a wheelchair. A mother was pushing a baby around inside with a walker. I smiled at the baby, then at the mother, but it didn’t put a dent in her gloom. There was a man in his 20s with a hat on and a pack on his back, sitting in a folding chair waiting to be turned out in the rain.

We can spend thousands of dollars for bike lanes and a tunnel under a street where few people have any reason to cross, but we can’t find the money to put a roof over the heads of another 25 homeless people turned out of the shelter on Friday.

Craig Voorhees,

Lawrence