Internet access is quietly changing Seattle’s tent cities
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
For me, internet access while homeless was a means to keep myself occupied so I wouldn't go crazy, a means to have social contact and meaningful discussion even though I wasn't very presentable, a means to do research to problem solve, access to online banking and other financial stuff, access to reward programs that helped keep me fed and so much more. Having a virtual life made a huge difference in my quality of life while homeless and eventually helped me get back into housing, in part by leading to earned income, in part by allowing me to find a place I could afford.
This was vastly different from the homeless people I saw sitting at the park all day doing nothing while their social skills, self esteem and self image deteriorated and their only means to make money seemed to be recycling and pan handling.
With internet access, a cell phone and mailing address, being homeless is much less of a hardship than if you have none of those. You aren't simply cut off from society, news, information and the power to make plans and build a future.
I don't know how to express how incredibly empowering the internet can be for a homeless person. I always thought of it as if it were a kind of magic. It helped me feel like a whole person. It kept hope alive by keeping options open in a way that simply wasn't previously possible.
Today, a homeless person can go online and look for information and communities for van dwellers, digital nomads, remote work and other things of that ilk that open up the opportunity to see yourself as simply living an alternative lifestyle rather than being straight up a social outcast. That makes taking adequate care of yourself so much more feasible and makes a path back to a more conventional life vastly more navigable, even if you don't qualify for any programs, many of which are aimed at specific populations, like addicts or single parents.
Thank you for this.
I occasionally think it has to be one of the cheapest and most effective homeless services on the planet. And it's just a free discussion forum.
I see these results in spite of it attracting trolls, judgey middle class assholes who are there to lecture homeless people, and people who clearly have serious issues and can't manage to behave in a pro-social fashion. Amidst all the muck, lives are quietly being kept from suddenly unraveling and other lives are being slowly knit back together.
That's the power of the internet. It fosters lightweight solutions that couldn't happen any other way, including crowd sourcing wisdom and practical advice.
I love it.
Answer questions in online forums.
Point people to online resources, including some of my websites. Among other things, I blog about homelessness as a lightweight means to empower the powerless.
Pass out cards with URLs to homeless people and tell them where they can get internet access and electricity. When I was first homeless, it was news to me that you can get free Wi-Fi at the library.
Give away cheap wiped smart phones or tablets to homeless individuals.
Contribute to online resources that curate information, such as where to find Wi-Fi.
Give homeless people Starbucks gift cards so they can get a coffee and get online and plugged in.
That seems easy enough. Challenge accepted. I'm seriously going to buy to a few cheap data capable burner android phones to hand out to people that are asking me for money. Giving them cash instead has the obvious downsides.
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com
http://worldwidewebworks.blogspot.com
They happen to be my sites.
Oh, and r/homeless, which is not mine.
You are making one of my fantasies come true. I dreamed of establishing such programs when I was still homeless. So thank you.
The "Doreen phone" should totally be a thing.
There could be a custom Android ROM specifically tailored to the challenges and specific processes of homelessness. Like an offline map of free hotspots, or offline maps pre-downloaded already. Settings tailored for maximum battery life. A contact book pre-loaded with important hotlines, resources, etc. Things like that. I’m sure the customizations could get very creative and useful.
This is actually an idea I’ve been toying with over the past year as I’ve made friends with some homeless people around my building and they tell me about their troubles.
So, here is your Github repo: https://github.com/DoreenMichele/Phone
I have no idea what I am doing on GitHub. Apologies in advance for my lack of technical chops.
I will add that my lack of technical chops means custom Android ROM is a new concept for me and sounds like an excellent way to solve the additional support element that I commented on elsewhere. I never could think of a good way to do that because ideally I would like the phone itself to provide some of that information while also pointing to other resources. I just didn't know how that could be done.
https://www.obamaphone.com/obama-phone-faqs
There is also an application process. While homeless, it was such a godsend whenever someone just gifted me something I needed, no hoop jumping required.
It takes time to develop an online income or do research to find a cheaper place to live etc. Long term solutions don't happen overnight. While working on them, people who are destitute still need other services to stay fed, clothed, etc.
But I think it is a lightweight means to support long term goals that many programs currently actively undermine. If you have to stand in line for two hours to get a free meal and do this three times a day to stay adequately fed, it's incredibly hard to job hunt, research what other services exist, etc.
A phone with internet service can potentially allow you to work on things like that while standing in line at a soup kitchen.
Even without the additional support that I would like to see, just having a phone number makes it easier to do things like job hunt. This is critical to getting your life back. Standing in line at soup kitchens keeps body and soul together. It doesn't help you find your way back to a middle class life. It can actively be a barrier to finding your way back.
So, yes, I think it has a lot of potential. A lot of current programs intended to help homeless people get back on their feet aren't terribly effective from what I gather and are much more resource intensive.
The most extreme example of this I even came across was someone saying that refugees, escaping the Libyan civil war, were clearly fraudulent because they had phones. There's some kind of unconscious assumption that having a phone indicates a high-level of wealth.
Source http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2017/09/a-virtual-l...
Non-homeless people would use such a service as well, but it would be especially valuable to homeless, who could be given bitcoin/altcoin or perhaps obtain it from crypto ATMs.
Not having a physical address is a huge impediment to functioning in our society. Without a physical address, you can't have a credit card or a bank account. Without a credit card, you can't have a cell phone for internet access, or a gym membership to take a shower.
But shower facilities or gyms that allowed you to buy one month at a time with crypto, coupled with internet access that could be purchased with crypto, would allow people to function pretty normally in this society without a physical address. Neither of these would need to be specifically for homeless, nor would they need to be tax payer funded.
It is still an impediment, but it is not a showstopper. If you start making enough money, you stop identifying as homeless. You either get back into housing or you start identifying as a digital nomad, which is simply a lifestyle choice.
Even digital nomads talk about how that lifestyle can make it difficult to sit down and concentrate on your work. Being technically able to work from anywhere doesn't change the fact that lack of a dedicated work space (and routine, etc) tends to hamper productivity. Some digital nomads settle in someplace for a few weeks or months at a time in order to carve out blocks of productive time.
Unlike well heeled digital nomads who can spend fair sums at cafes, homeless people tend to not be welcome to hang out on their laptop or tablet for hours at a time. They aren't presentable enough and they aren't spending enough money. They tend to get thrown out and told to not come back if they try to hang too long at a commercial establishment.
Urban areas should just give wifi internet access away though, it's not terribly costly.
Even the tiny town of Pescadero, CA has free high-speed wifi internet provided by San Mateo county.
Block YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and Reddit's video service, plus Facebook.
Magically, 90% of the issues there resolve themselves very quickly.
> Bandwidth limiting would need implemented, which make make the network useless for VoIP or streaming.
Not necessarily. You could implement a fast-lane that only allowed access to a few sites, like Google Voice, to allow VoIP for those who really needed it.
* * *
The biggest concern with this would be the privacy implications it could have. Especially considering that the homeless are less likely to be in-the-know with infosec, it seems like an incredibly quick way to have a lot of personal information stolen quite quickly.
How is this any different from any other deployment of wireless service to a given population? It's just the taxpayers pay the bill.
Or are you suggesting that some users are going to deploy multiple clients to hoard the bandwidth? That seems like a solvable problem.
I just wanted honestly answer the comment about why cryptocurrency is better in this case (even if it’s not all cryptocurrency).
I could also say why it’s worse: price instability (that $100 you had to your name is now $70), no way to force a refund, not widely used, and you have to manage keys. I’m sure there are more.
See The Jungle:
This must be a mistake, somehow. That comes out to $6,100 per hot spot, which was still apparently not enough, alone, to fund them.
On top of that, you've got ongoing maintenance, abuse, etc... dealing with that bullshit costs money, and even more if you allow anonymous connections.
As for the cost... For the record, I've lived over a year around the poverty line... In Australia--An even more expensive country. I also did a loop around the country, saw and went everywhere I wanted to go, spent most of my time at the beach or mountains, and surfing... and oh yea, had internet the entire time. Even amortizing that cost over ten years, this is still double what I spent on wifi.
Literally everything about public wifi, from the wiring and build costs, to the hardware and antennas, to the bandwidth itself is significantly more expensive. $6,100 per point sounds completely reasonable.
The article states they are providing up to 834 people with internet access with 50+11 hot spots.
I shared a 20$ data plan with two+ travelmates while on gap year in Australia, and it worked extremely well. $7/person cost. Give or take for US data rates and inflation since then.
Even with generous assumptions, these wifi hot spots are at least 50x, and coule be 100x, that cost.
So worst case scenario, just buy them all smart phones and data plans for a small fraction of the cost of this current setup.
A hotspot provides access for an untold number of people, potentially hundreds. Of course it's more expensive than your individual bill.
I could provide wifi access to 10 people with only my cheap data bill + phone. It wouldn't be an ideal situation, but it would still be a better user experience than the dial-up internet I grew up with.
You're still underestimating the man hours, equipment costs, and recurring nature of this endeavor. And this service is providing a needed connection to important information, contact with loved ones, and a safe source of entertainment. It is not comparable to the luxury service you grew up with.
So, you mean violate the AUP on your phone and push the costs for the people selling you the data plan upwards? sure, maybe that'd kinda work until the upstream noticed.
If you mean that it would have been cheaper to just give each homeless person their own phone +data plan... that might actually be a better idea, if you can find a cheap enough data plan/phones and you aren't supporting that many homeless people.
To go back to the restaurant example, you have to hand out a lot of soup before running a soup kitchen becomes cheaper than just handing out McDonald's "free item from the dollar menu" coupons.
That's a reasonable thing to consider, assuming that the quality is good enough.
I was just saying that if you want a wifi access point that supplies a bunch of users, well, someone is gonna have to hook that up to the internet, and deal with the inevitable abuse problems that come from providing internet access to people you don't know. And yes, a lot of people do this for free, which is probably why it seems so cheap for you. Which is fine; I mean, I'm all for people giving out free services, I use a lot of free software myself, but don't pretend that those people aren't giving you value, or that it wouldn't cost a lot of money if you didn't want exactly what they were giving.
Even if you've got free labor, you've gotta run power and internet access out to that wifi access point. Real internet connections are expensive; even consumer-grade stuff is expensive if the provider isn't already where you are, and consumer-grade connections shouldn't be shared.
Have you ever tried to talk a network provider into running a line across the street, when they don't already have customers in that area? Here in silicon valley we're talking in the high thousands/low tens of thousands of dollars to get a connection across a street.
I mean, it's great that you were able to find wifi for yourself on your vacation, but that doesn't have anything to do with how much effort and money it costs to maintain those wifi access points.
If I am able to provide a wifi hotspot for a year at some cost, that has some relevance to providing a wifi hotspot at some other cost.
You weren't providing a hotspot to others in any systematic sort of way. You were consuming internet services provided for free or near free by other people.
I'd compare it to the difference between spending for a year feeding yourself through asking for alms or through the McDonalds dollar menu, and running a restaurant. Both involve food, but the former does not predict the difficulty level of the latter.
It wouldn't occur to me to just give people low end data plans, because for office environments? even the very high end data plans are not acceptable compared to a quality wifi setup. You might very well be right that the low end data plans are good enough for this use case, that the hit you take in reliability and accessibility is worth it to save some money.
This is actually... a problem that I (and I think a lot of technical people have) when looking at solutions; we want a good solution, and our every instinct shouts in horror when you suggest something trashy that is going to be broken half the time. But... as you point out, there are a lot of people who's expectations are so low that the low-end cellular data plan seems just fine.
It certainly seems to me like if you could get a good municipal wifi setup, that'd be worth a lot to the community. Of course, most of the 'community wifi' attempts I've seen have been failures, because making wifi work at scale with random users is a lot harder than it looks, but I think the win is big enough that it's worth trying again every few years, as we gain better wifi technologies.
But really? I'm a sysadmin, not a social worker. I can tell you a lot about setting up wifi access points, and about getting network access where there isn't any network access. I can't tell you what issues you are gonna have trying to give homeless people internet access, or what issues you might have trying to give them special phones (all the really cheap cellular providers around here don't allow you to bring your own device) or how reliable network access has to be in order for it to be useful to the homeless population- I just was offended by the implication that setting up a multi user WIFI AP for random users in places that don't have wired connections is cheap or easy.
Anyways there are poverty rate statistics for single people, and families.
And for the record, I was hardly roughing it. I met an awesome French girl who claimed to have spent 6 months in Oz on under 1k EUR (doing mostly woof'ing).
>But money proposed for Wi-Fi was spent on more pressing needs... >In 2016, Seattle Public Library stepped in. ... funded in part by $305,000 from Google.
So the govt proposal for WiFi was underfunded, then the Public Library stepped in with different funds partially from Google.