It's a derailment because the people bringing this up aren't actually organizing towards helping homeless men. These two issues, women's shelters and men's shelters, aren't actually in contradiction with each other but the commenter I was responding to is treating it that way.

The reason women's shelters exist is because activists in the 60's and 70's decided to build them and gain support, and eventually fought for funding. What is stopping any of you from actually building a movement to help homeless men, instead of complaining about the activists who try to help women in need of housing?

Why complain about the activists who focus on women's shelters because they're not ALSO tackling the issue of men's shelters, when you yourself could prioritize the issue of men's shelters?

Edit: The people who are dedicating their lives to helping homeless men do not see women's shelters as competition, they see women's shelters as valuable resources for knowledge with lots of carryover (such as approaches for addressing mental illness, drug addiction, and poverty). If you yourself have zero interest in putting in real effort towards a solution outside of opportunistic internet comments, why should anyone listen to you?

Take the lead, do some research, and build something.

> The reason women's shelters exist is because activists in the 60's and 70's decided to build them and gain support, and eventually fought for funding. What is stopping any of you from actually building a movement to help homeless men, instead of complaining about the activists who try to help women in need of housing?

Do you feel this way about institutions built for and by men, that women have demanded (rightfully so) access to, instead of building their own from the ground up?

> What is stopping any of you from actually building a movement to help homeless men, instead of complaining about the activists who try to help women in need of housing?

Maybe ^^ is afraid of misandry and people like you who get angry/offensive when someone wants to help men as though it's a competition about who has it worse.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_are_wonderful_effect

This competition angle really only seems to be coming through in your posts. No one in this thread has complained about women's shelters, the commenters who brought them up originally was AGREEING with a comment about the lack of long term women's shelters.

i dont know much about this topic but it doesn't sound as easy as you make it out to be

not that setting up any shelter type would be easy of course but i vaguely remember Erin Pizzey (who set up the first women's shelter in the UK) saying in an interview that she tried at one point to get funding to set up a men's shelter but she couldn't get a single penny.

what she was taking about sounded like it was a long while ago but I seem to remember a guy in canada recently committing suicide because he had tried for years to get funding from the government for his mens shelter but same deal.

whether men have the same trouble setting up shelters in other countries I don't know