Homeless: Can you build a life from $25?
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
I came to several conclusions:
1) You can try to infect them with a can-do attitude all you want, but the concept of working hard to build the good life is so alien they never buy into the program. Yes, the guy in the story is right, success does come down to attitude. But changing someone's attitude is much, much harder than just giving out money.
2) The existence of the minimum wage hurts the homeless. The people I worked with were incapable of producing $6 an hour of value for an employer. If there was no minimum wage, they could work $2 an hour of value and then gradually work their way up. I don't know how many would actually do this, but at least they should have the choice. Because they are legally prevented from getting a job, they usually end up doing black market work like selling flowers or collecting cans which has no path of upward mobility.
3) I tend to think supportive housing is the best you can do. Give them stable place to live and gradually push them towards being more productive. It often ends up being cheaper than the cost of shelters + emergency room care + police monitoring of the streets. Of course, few cities want to build this kind of housing for fear of becoming a draw for the homeless.
Keep in mind, I'm talking about the hardest cases. There were people who managed to have a good attitude and rebound very quickly. One great example was a woman who just got out of prison from drug use and was looking for a job. We helped coach her on how to answer interview questions about her past, and she ended up getting a job at Sears.
Didn't end up homeless though. Just stayed with friends, worked double menial full-time jobs, and put it all back together.
Anybody can _get_ homeless. Staying homeless is an emotion-related disease. My opinion only.
I feel for the homeless and the poor. But I don't think giving them cash every month (as San Francisco does) or giving them other handouts is helping much of anything at all. Simply because something troubles you morally does not mean that there is a moral solution.
Since you asked, my first wife and I split up, I moved into a boarding house that agreed to take all of my stuff. Now this just wasn't everything I owned -- it's worse than that. My mother had decided to remarry and gave me all of the things from my childhood home. So I had all of that with me as well.
Being pretty messed up over the bad marriage, I wasn't working, so I got behind on the rent (a month or two as I remember) The family told me they were moving so I had to move out. I told them I was going to stay with friends for a couple of days to see if I could stay with them. When I came back, the entire house was empty. Nil. Nada. SOBs even took a 1979 Pontiac I had out front. So I had 2-3 changes of clothes and the car I was in. That's it. I believe that's what they call "starting from nothing"
I never did find my stuff. I checked the VIN on the car several times with the police but nothing showed up. I guess the worst part is the pictures -- you just can't replace those pictures. I'd give half of what I have now just to get those pictures back. The rest of it? Just stuff. If anything, it was a great lesson in how life can be more about your stuff than yourself. In a lot of ways, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I know that sounds cliche, but it's true. Even now, I wouldn't mind living on Ramen noodles for a few months while kicking out some code in a startup -- it'd be a blast. Whereas I think if I never had that experience I would somehow feel that I was "better" than doing that. I consider myself very lucky.
Thank you for sharing, I really appreciate honest sentiments like this.
It would be great to know more about their backgrounds, but so far I haven't figured out a good way of doing it - they probably are not too keen on making their sad state public.
That's how to do it, BTW. Just talk to them. They're real people, and people generally like talking about themselves.
Talk to them: scary if I think they are crazy.
Oprah
Here is another bio on Oprah read between the lines : http://gale.cengage.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/winfrey_o.htm
Her unmarried parents, Vernon Winfrey and Vernita Lee, separated soon after she was born, leaving her to be <b>raised by her maternal grandmother</b>. "She certainly wasn't an educated woman, but she taught me the shape of letters, and she taught me my Bible stories," Winfrey recalled in Life magazine. By the time she was six, Winfrey had moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother.
Winfrey said her father saved her life. <b>He was very strict and provided her with guidance, structure, rules, and books. He required his daughter to complete weekly book reports, and she went without dinner until she learned five new vocabulary words each day.</b> She joined her school's drama club and became a prize-winning orator, winning a $1,000 college scholarship after delivering a short speech entitled "The Negro, the Constitution, and the United States" to 10,000 Elks Club members in Philadelphia.
I know that my own emotional resilience has increased over the years - demarcated by reading the right fiction, oddly enough - but I'm not under the illusion that this means anyone can just grit their teeth and get it.
Yes, taking responsibility is also part of it, but... if it's anyone besides yourself that you're judging, try to have some compassion.
I'm not surprised that he achieved mediocrity with the confidence of education and safety-net of a credit line and a weathy family. You could do similar by working at McDonalds. This sort of thing is possible in many Western countries. Infact, you are probably better off in a welfare state than in America if great wealth does not interest you.
>A former college athlete with a bachelor's degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C.
Sounds like he had quite a bit to me. Most homeless aren't lazy, as this would seem to suggest. Most have developmental or addition problems. The fact that a bright kid can make it doesn't prove anything, really.
whatever happend to the spirit of self reliance?
This is exactly in accordance with the theory that the chronically poor are poor because of ignorance of basic life skills (and/or because of genuinely bad approaches to life)
Here's how this really happened. This guy read Prozac nation or one of the many "Reality Books" that are populuar these days and decided, "I know, I'll go talk to publishers and see if they'll pay for a book like this based on my experiences."
He found a publisher, then went to get some "experience" to write about. End of story. Yet another pretentious pseudo experiment which teaches nothing about life other than if you come up with a good enough concept, some publisher somewhere will pay you to write about it.
If the article is true, this man turned $25 into an apartment, a truck, and $5,000 in savings in under a year. It shows that it can be done, at least for a single random sample. I hope that the fact that he wrote a book about his experience doesn't prevent people from seeing the result of the experiment.
IMO, most poor people are not mentally stable and living on the edge tends to unbalance them even more. Take an educated person with zero mental of physical issues who is willing to do without TV, Drugs, etc and they can climb out of poverty quickly. However, for whatever reason many don't so saying they can leave does not let us understand why the bottom third of our nation is so marginalized.
I'm saying it probably doesn't help, and I can think of a couple situations where it would hurt.
1. You interview two relatively equally qualified candidates for a job. One is desperate for a job; he is broke and has a few days of food left. The other knows there are other opportunities out there for him, and has an emergency credit card in his pocket. As a result, the second is more relaxed and confident, and can talk to you as an equal. Maybe the first is a pressure player and would rise to the challenge, but assume he's not--you can tell he's desperate for the job. Who do you hire?
2. The same people now have similar minimum wage jobs. They make ends meet, but just barely. The situation sucks and they want to look for a better one, but taking time off for job hunting is likely to get them fired. In other words, it could land them back in situation 1. This is a greater risk for the first person than the second.
I don't know whether this is a major or minor factor. It's probably a complex issue. Still, I don't see that the guy in the article overcame poverty. He just won in a poverty simulator.
I agree.
He had the single most overlooked aspect of a college degree: he had achieved something. He KNEW he could succeed; that's often half the battle.
Many down and out people can't imagine succeeding, so they don't.
This story reminds me of Robert Allen's old claim, "Put me anywhere in the United States with no money, and by the end of the day I will own some real estate." He did it every time. And to this day, with my limited real estate knowledge, I don't know if I could do the same thing even once.
Nice story, but run4yourlives is right; it doesn't really prove anything except that it's mostly in your head. Then again, maybe that was the whole point.
The whole time I read the OP, I felt like I was watching a trapeez act with a safety net. The young man KNEW he couldn't fail (just like the trapeez artist can try something extra difficult because he KNEW he wouldn't die.)
Kinda took the wind out of what was otherwise a good story.
If you don't see how this proves nothing, you've never lived in the south. And to use this as proof that people who are poor are poor because they -choose- to be is to defy reason.
1.Don't know better.
2. Health illness (major cripling one, or mental reason).
3. You come in this country at a late age (i.e. 55+)
There are really no other reasons. I have two families, one of my uncle, and one of my first cousin, that came to the US (with green cards), and had to restart their lives all from the beginning.
All they had was 5k. For a family of 4, that is very little, and goes by very fast, yet, 10 years later, they are both doing great.
My uncle had to work as pizza deliver person, then truck driver, until found a good job in a car dealership. His wife, had to be a waitress for a while (it sucked, as she was not good for it), but eventually ended up becoming a "accountant helper" for a hospital. 8 years later, she is primary person, managing their money, both of their kids ended up in good private schools, and now one goes to Dartmouth, the other to a good college. They own a house, (bought at reasonable rates, before this buble), cars and all that, living the true american dream.
My other's cousin family, is having a little bit harder time, as they have to get menial jobs, but my cousin became a teacher assistent, (teaching french), and eventually she would move up to something better, while their kids are doing great in school.
As I said, poverty is b/c ignorance. If these two families, can move from a different continent, and re-build everything from scratch, and provide great education to their kids, then everybody else can.
In this country hard work, and perseverance will pay off. B!tching about your conditions, and doing nothing about it, wont.
Sure, you can blame racism, but from experience, it is not that. It is the huge amount of hard work and ethical mentality, and the strong family values that drives all these immigrant families, who while starting dirt poor, they do well, and much better than the american born poor.
I live in a suburb of Chicago, and I run into quite a few homeless people around our shopping districts and public transportation. I usually strike conversations up with them - which terrifies my wife, by the way - and most display fairly obvious symptoms of mental illness even in the brief moments I spend with them. I can't begin to imagine what symptoms they might exhibit if I was around them for longer periods of time.
I think mental illness is much more widespread than people realize, and our society really doesn't have an appropriate way to deal with the situation. I'd like to see this young author try to 'pull himself up by his bootstraps' if he was paranoid schizophrenic and hallucinating. It's rather hard to interview for a job when you think the interviewer is trying to kill you and you have leeches crawling out of your ears, for example.
They used to all be committed in mental institutions. The laws changed and now they're out on the street. Pick your poison: government power to lock non-criminals up and force treatment, or free crazies wandering the streets and hurting themselves.
I don't see what's wrong with pushing the message that as long as you have the mindset and will to succeed, you will succeed.
Don't get me wrong, there are still places in the South where racism is extremely prevalent and a hinderence to success; but typically those are extremely remote/rural areas (where more than likely the racists themselves are poor too). It's very different from the more progressive metros. Given your post I can probably ask you the same question, "Have you ever lived in the South?"
This study (conducted in Chicago and Boston in 2002) indicates that resumes with names like Todd and Brendan get a 50% higher callback rate than names like Rasheed and Kareem:
http://www.chicagogsb.edu/pdf/bertrand.pdf
Presumably it's worse in the south. Not that I've ever been there.
I read a while back a similar study done (sorry, can't find a link), but comparing different white names. Jennifer and Meghan got far more callbacks than Rainbow, Peace and other hippy names.
More anecdotally, my friend Dikshit Gupta got far fewer callbacks than Dave Gupta, even with identical resumes (both are obviously Indian).
I'd be curious to see a similar study done comparing generic names to generic "dead president" names (George Smith vs George Washington Smith), rather than made-up african sounding names.
My Indian and Asian friends used to know if a telemarketer was calling because the maybe-it-sounds-like this mangling of their surnames and sometimes first names. With the recent outsourcing of telemarketing to Indian call centers, I wonder if pronunciation of their names has improved, if any.
Please tell me you're kidding...
> got far fewer callbacks than Dave Gupta, even with identical resumes (both are obviously Indian).
Maybe "Dave" implies a certain level of cultural assimilation? (Or at least a willingness to sell out ;-)
Theorem: If someone has been educated on how to operate (and succeed) in the current microeconomic environment, then that person can succeed in the current microeconomic environment.
Proof: The author knows how to succeed, and he does. QED.
Only problem? It needs a larger sample size.
(Also, there are skills and habits you learn in college that cannot be put on a resumé.)
The article is not saying that the American Dream is either "real" or "possible" for most people; on the contrary, this seems to be a contrived situation in which unjustified conclusions are drawn from the experiences of one example.
Work - He started out with out a job but soon he was able to get one. Age - He had a perfect age to work. Health - He was in good health. Education - He was well educated. Family - He only had to support himself. Location - He lived in the U.S.
So he really had no factors for being poor.
Did he talk using a simpler vocabulary than that which he learned at college?
Absolutely amazing!
I'd have a hard time building a startup by writing ruby in a spiral bound notebook and hoping to successfully pitch a VC with it. ;-)
- Better Option: Blog about it.