Councilmember Ruben Wills is stepping into the shoes of our city’s homeless, quite literally.
Tuesday morning, Wills began a three-day journey in which he intends to live the life of a homeless person and experience any hardships firsthand.
“He’s really going all out,” said a spokesperson for Wills. “He wants to get a perception of how people would react to him.”
The councilmmember started his experiment at the Q6 bus shelter on Rockaway Boulevard and Baisley Boulevard, dressed in jeans, a sweater, a camouflage jacket, scarf and hat. He slept there before heading to a nearby gas station to “pump gas for change” for transportation costs.
In between hours of pumping gas, Wills went to eat at a local soup kitchen. Tuesday evening he was on his way to the South Ferry Terminal, where he plans on spending the night.
Tomorrow, Wills is going to try and get into a local homeless shelter and the next day hopes to visit a hospital “to see how quickly they [admit] him and how they react to him,” said the spokesperson.
The spokesperson added that he does have a cell phone on him, but “we really had to force that on him.”
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