Motel Living and Slowly Dying
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
It sits a bit uncomfortably with me that the meaning (of hotel stays) for those living precariously is cast in such negative terms. Perhaps that seems necessary to motivate people to try to do something about the problem, but I am not so sure that works. The pity with which other people clearly saw me when I was on the street rarely motivated anyone to help me, though I was only asking for help with figuring out how to effectively make money online. The pity itself seemed to be a barrier to the connections and useful information I desired. The pity seemed rather corrosive to my finances and not some means to channel assistance my way.
While I can understand the strong feelings people have about how galling our high rates of homelessness are, I am not so convinced that this framing is particularly helpful to some cause of trying to make headway against such things.
They thought it would be a brief stay, but they ended up staying in various hotels like the Red Roof Inn and the GuestHouse Inn for the next two and a half years. All six of them would pile into one room, with two of the boys sleeping on the floor and everyone vying for bathroom time. They could rarely stay at a hotel longer than 28 days—many establishments have time limits—and so would have to pack up their bags every few weeks and find a new place to live. “I think the worst part of it was not having your privacy, your own room, we all had to share one big room,” Karina told me. “And not having a place to call home during Christmas.” ...
Moving into a place where they had a kitchen and some privacy was an almost indescribable relief. Karina posted pictures of scrambled eggs she made on Facebook, puzzling friends who didn’t know that the family had been homeless for two and a half years, because being able to cook in her own kitchen again filled her with joy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/the-nev...
I am not asserting that their quiet desperation is invalid. But please don't dismiss my experience as invalid.
I do a lot of writing on things like homelessness and housing issues. I wish tech giants would abandon their advocacy of UBI and replace it with trying to solve affordable housing for this country. But I cannot begin to tell you what a kick in the stomach it feels like for you to try to "educate" me on the issue of homelessness here, like I have no clue whereof I speak.
Your comment also comes across as subtly dismissive and accusatory due to what you choose to comment on here. If you only wish to engage in discussion, why feel the need to criticize my reply? Why not say something constructive in response to my top level comment above?
Women, people of color, the poor and other disenfranchised groups face this sort of thing a great deal. It is rather maddening as it puts people in a no win situation. Such groups get no respect. When they complain of it, it is yet another thing to criticise them for.
It would be nice if the world stopped such insidious patterns.
Ultimately, cost of living is one of the big differences between first-world society and the rest of the world. UBI is a way to share the fruits of productivity of the first world among its common classes, effectively reducing their net monthly expenses.
Then the rest of the article talks in glowing terms about how lovely it will be for underpaid workers to have this extra money. These articles never actually explore what life would be like if your $50k job disappears, you are doomed to only get $10k UBI and have no hope of getting another job.
Another issue is that we have a serious, long standing shortage of affordable housing. We tore down about 80% of SROs in a couple of decades and never replaced them. Average size of new housing has more than doubled since the 1950s. If you do nothing to address the issue of affordable housing, then UBI solves nothing.
My fear is that tech giants focusing on UBI means that restructuring work to better distribute it, addressing the need to fix health care and affordable housing will all get ignored because UBI is supposed to be some panacea. But it's not. It is basically rich people imagining they can solve this by cutting a check. They can't. That doesn't work. If there simply isn't affordable, basic housing, UBI won't get you off the street.
The kind that is described in the article. Some of those will probably pay you for moving in.
And then you have whole day to yourself to figure out additional income on top of UBI.
But maybe the US should just try fix mental health, regressive taxes, low minimum wages, high housing costs, cruel prisons, and health care.
Then move on to decent unemployment benefits, day care, maternity leave and maybe in some far fetched future you can talk about UBI.
Today UBI in the US seems like wishful thinking. You have lots of low hanging fruit you could fix first. The idea of helping people who needs help isn't controversial, maybe try that first?
One point in favour of UBI is that it could replace all of these individual benefits.
If healthcare is allowed to eat into UBI it will quickly find a way to consume it completely.
When it's your baby, the idea of paying $50 000 for a 1% chance of not needing to amputate her arm is a snap - of course you'll pay. But the single payer says hold on, that means we're paying an average of $5M per arm saved, arms aren't worth $5M, our tax payers say they're not willing to give us more than $2M per arm, offer the treatment for $20 000 or no deal.
Making people invest in their healthcare _can_ help with some personal care decisions, like whether to take exercise, eat better, maybe give up smoking, people who feel like it costs them money when they're sick are a little more careful in some ways. But a LOT of healthcare spending is unpredictable, so isn't affected by this at all, including very expensive urgent and emergency care. Overall single payer wins out in terms of both how much you spend and outcomes.
A UBI does leave open the question of what you do with the small handful of people studies suggest will not spend their UBI wisely. If you give everybody $300 per week, 999 out of 1000 of them will spend it mostly on food, and shelter, and other useful things. Their priorities might not be my priorities maybe they eat a Big Mac instead of making a healthy salad, but they are behaving wisely by their own standards. But one person out of a thousand will spend it all on lottery tickets, booze or heroin, and then what do we do about that? Leave them to die? Really?
What do we with people that sell their food stamps and/or use their existing means tested cash benefits that way?
Is this a problem? Sure, but it's not a new problem with UBI compared to the status quo.
I have a coverage from employer, but chose not to use it because I don't trust the institutions enrolled in the program, and they're further from my home. It's all about having more choices. I have also bought coverage for my child, and I'm pretty sure it's much better than anything that comes already paid.
If you have cancer, of course you would want to be taken care of. But if you live a routine life, I don't see how you are benefitting from throwing money at healthcare.
WRT "one of thousands". Water from drink fountains is free. Dumpster diving is free. You won't starve in a week, and by the time next BI payment arrives, they will probably learn something.
It’s all about the incentives. A small detail that gets ignored by the Freedom Market™ zealots.
The rest I'm going to just ignore.
What do we do now? Why does that have to change?
It is entirely possible UBI could leapfrog a lot of the profit-taking industries that have built up around the US social safety net the way cell towers leapfrogged telephone lines in the developing world.
So: of course staying in motels is far preferable to life on the streets, and it sounds like you had it far worse than the family profiled in the Atlantic. My sole point was that precarious living in a string of motels is still homelessness and -- as the article explains -- far more challenging than the average HNer (like me) might think.
Thank you for clarifying.
But as the story points out, shitty old motels are an important rung on the ladder between homelessness or living in a shelter, and being able to afford one or two thousand dollars to move into an apartment.
This year our little "angel tree" that exclusively services those old motels has over 160 kids on it. I hate to think where those kids would be without the old motels.
Tearing them down does not make the problem go away. It makes it worse.
The problem these people are trying to solve is not that those children are trying to solve is not that those people are living in a crap situation, it is that those people are living near them. See NIMBY, banning Single Room Occupancy hotels, minimum lot sizes, maximum occupancy, minimum square footage, etc.
Middle class people ban choices they wouldn’t make, news at 11.
One of the points I think a home (or apartment, etc) should make is keeping unwanted noises on one side of it's walls. Outside noises out, inside noises in.
It very much annoys me how easy it is for the un-thoughtful to make the lives of those around them hell.
I think having better sound isolation in apartments would make them substantially more liveable, and it's not comparatively expensive versus many other upgrades you can make to multi-family housing.
While they can afford to do that, they can also often afford to buy the laws in the place they prefer to live for reasons other than the pre-existing laws, and they often do so instead of relocating.
to bed fair, if snow is common then the roads and infrastructure should be aimed at handling it, right?
There is some, perhaps better, provision for state funded emergency housing over here but claiming any kind of perfection would be very wide of the mark. It can still leave whole families in single rooms for long periods of time.
https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/homelessness/t...
Edit: I missed out acknowledging the author’s talents as a writer, and the plight of those (on downward or maybe as another commenter points out, upwards trends). This was a very moving piece. The picture it paints is captivating and bleak.
I stayed in two separate youth hostels in Switzerland. One was amazing, the other was basically a camp for American students with speakers to wake you up each morning.
I look at how much of my paycheck goes to taxes and it seems like there should be enough to ensure that kids don't go hungry but apparently not.
But the solution remains the same as always. The bureaucrats bleat "we need more money" - I don't think I've ever heard one say "we need to do a better job with the budget".
The fact is though we spent something on the order of 13 trillion dollars on a plane for the USAF that's not yet flown a single mission since it was purchased in what, 2008? Until that type of stuff starts getting cut, I refuse to buy the argument that "we can't afford it." BS we can't. Right now we won't afford it but that's not the same thing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/31/how-dods-15-trillion-f-35-br...
We've spent less than a trillion on it so far. I don't know where you got your 13 trillion dollar expense, but I'd like to know more about the claim.
I don't argue that we don't have the money to take better care of the poor. I'm just reluctant to advocate for more money until our welfare system demonstrates its efficiency. If it kicked butt, I'd want much more money going into the welfare system. But it's awful that so many good intentioned people run a system so poorly and the most vulnerable take the hit.
You might get angry realizing everyone has it better than you; but perhaps debt, lost love, resentment and bitterness is funding those extravagant purchases.
Nationwide, less than 30% of the money spent on welfare actually winds up as cash in the hands of the needy it's supposedly benefiting. Most of it is spent on other things (some of which are no doubt good, others of which may not be so good). Surely one can suggest taking a hard look at these other expenditures without being accused of taking bread out of the mouths of children?
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...
In California (one of the better states) only about 45% of the money supposedly spent to help poor people actually winds up in their hands. Some states are much, much worse.
The guy who got flagged suggested (in a rather combative manner, true) that too much of the welfare budget is spent on the salaries of bureaucrats. I don't know about you, but > 50% overhead seems like too much to me.
not sure i agree one way or another, but penny for your thoughts.
My impression was that it showed up dead. I vouched for it, to no avail.
Assuming you mean this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848548
Thanks.
And all of this needs a solid, informed and rational discussion about how best to help people in need, which we cannot have because the narrative of this country seems to be locked in this mindset that the poor are the people who failed, the people who made dumb choices which apparently warrants a lifetime of check-to-check starvation, or in the most extreme cases people who have offended God or whatever and had their wealth taken from them. And that's not even going into the issues around everyone here being "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and not wanting to tax the rich, because when they get rich, they don't want to be taxed.
The whole thing is screwed, not even just in the Government but in the culture.
I feel like societal investments in combatting poverty are so low that the inefficiencies we see are because we’re paying just enough to keep the lights on.
Flipping things around, imagine a startup that was only making < 50% more in profit than its total costs. We wouldn’t be so critical. We’d say, “Wow, you’re profitable? Congratulations!”
Flipping things a little further, imagine how much more quickly a startup could become profitable if employees were paid the same as social workers. I'd argue that the delta in pay is at least partly attributable to the delta in how much each class of worker truly believes in the mission of the organization. That’s a sobering thought.
[1] https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/05/19/what-its-like-to-li...
In perspective renting a cheap Motel in my city for one month would be the equivalent of renting a fairly big middle class house.
Moving into an apartment usually requires a month (or more) deposit, potentially a credit check and employment verification. There's a growing precariat in the US who cannot provide this, so motels provide a solution in a society that operates on free-market principles and has little social safety net.
"The Florida Project" is a good film that dives into this part of American society a little bit. As an immigrant who started out in this country near that run down part of the US-192 in Florida, it's spot on.