A real estate company's simple way to offer the homeless a house and a job
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I've worked on many homeless-service programs, and it's disheartening to see cities allocate vast sums for them: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f... while simultaneously using zoning laws to make sure they won't be very effective.
The common theory is that US real estate market was overbuilt pre-2008. Prices in several markets, like Detroit, Baltimore, Mississippi delta, Appalachian coal towns, and San Bernardino county among others, have not returned to 2006-2007 levels.
There are also markets with very lax, sometimes non-existent, zoning laws. Houston being the flagship example.
In addition, Houston has de facto zoning through land use restrictions: https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-h...
I've noticed that most cities strike some kind of middleground tone, where they say "homelessness is a big problem affecting us, but surely we can't live in a world without zoning regulations (because we want to keep property taxes and assessments high)."
These programs for the homeless are mostly just lipservice to the actual problems you pointed out.
I would know-- I was employed and homeless for 4 months until I found a girlfriend to split a very distant apartment with!
Deliberate action. Back in the day, there was a lot of transient housing. Shared rooms, boarding arrangements, and the like for people whose economic condition didn't allow entering into a long term lease. Property owners found these people undesirable, and zoned those living situations out of existence. This was a deliberate and malicious effort.
It makes me worry that as neighborhoods get more connected (as mine has, with Facebook, and others are with Nextdoor), this problem is going to get much worse before it gets better.
There are also longterm effects. Low income families tend to be net negative on taxes. This means that a city has less money to fund the basic necessities. Pair a higher strain on those same necessities and a declining tax base and it's not hard to see what happens. And even within the US low income families tend to have a far greater fertility rate than higher income families. Those earning < $10,000 per year currently have about 50% more children than those earning $200k+ per year. [1] This again compounds all the other already existing effects.
I think focusing on race prevents people from actually having any sort of conversation since it's just a straw man. How do you deal with the above while also having the desire to enable more people to achieve a better life? It's not an easy question, but one that has to be answered. Good intentions mean nothing if the actions effected do more harm than good.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
I agree that race has nothing to do with this. Being educated or just considerate has.
I'm not saying race is the only factor - this is a multifaceted problem for sure. But race is definitely one of the facets. If you trace the history of a poor urban area back just a few decades, the relevance of race becomes increasingly apparent.
I do agree that it's unproductive to simplify the issue down to just one of the many factors.
I have a task for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_Unit...
This country was built on racism, which has naturally codified itself into the system. This means that racial biases have become an emergent property of the system when applied to this society. If you give this system to a mindless computer to run and optimize for economic output, you'll end up with very similar results compared to if you gave it to a racist person to run. Our legal and economic neural network was trained on biased data and it's no surprise that it produces biased output. We're trying to solve an optimization problem without having social inequality as one of the dimensions. It's easy to get good results with the function we have if we don't care about that metric.
I agree that race is definitely not the only angle from which to approach these problems. But if we ignore it completely, the ugly ghosts of our past will continue to haunt our society.
Nothing I did was particularly remarkable. And many of my peers had literally the exact same opportunities laid before them. Yet many of them failed to take advantage of them. One guy I was good friends with in school I ended up bumping into at a restaurant where he was waiting tables having ended up getting into drugs and also getting a girl pregnant. He was a smart kid and had a decent and supportive family. He was certainly more than able to know about the consequences of the lifestyle choices he was making. Yet he made them. What can you do?
There are definitely some cases where people fail to achieve because of things completely outside of their control, but in the vast majority of cases it's going to come down to these bad decisions. So why are people making these bad decisions? It doesn't even make sense to attribute it to race since the exact same problem expands outside of race. It even expands outside of class. Look a the Waltons for some of the biggest wastes of air on this planet, in spite of having more opportunities available to them than nearly every single living person today.
Or even look at other issues. Consider obesity. Everybody knows obesity is horrible for your health and isn't exactly going to do great things for your sex life. Yet people, of all classes, are eating and drinking themselves into obesity at rates like never before. And then lying to themselves. By contrast, I noticed myself getting a bit porky, significantly cut down my calorie intake, increased my physical activity, and now I'm in better shape than ever. Again something hardly unique, but why does it seem like so few people are doing these things? You see a problem - you formulate a solution - you execute. You fail, reformulate, and repeat until success.
The point of this all is that I do not think being disadvantaged is a significant cause of anything in and of itself. We live in a world that is not only more color blind than ever, but also has more opportunities than ever before. This is why I think that thinking based on working from the result backwards is going to lead to fundamentally broken solutions.
I've coached chess for years and the one thing I've found is that who achieves and who fails has very little to do with who is smart or who's dumb. It invariably comes down to what happens when a person runs into a bumpy streak, which happens to everybody at some - even world champions. One group of people will decide well they just must not be smart enough, or somehow weren't born with the ability to play, or maybe they're just too old. And the other group will grit their teeth and continue pushing forward. Not all of those that push forward will succeed, but many will. However, exactly 0 of those that resign themselves to outside forces will ever achieve success - the resignation to those outside forces becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
But on a societal level, we see real patterns that result from the workings of our system. Is obesity rising because people are getting lazier? Or has stagnant wages, decreased access to fresh food, poorer education, increased marketing of junk food, and a relentless optimization of food profitablity had a hand in it? I believe that, for any particular person, it's their own duty to keep themselves healthy, no matter what obstacles are in their way - no one else will do it for them. They could justifiably blame society, but in the end, their health is their own responsibility. At the same time, I think there is a lot that society can do to reduce the obstacles, and make it so that, on average, more people succeed in keeping themselves healthy.
When making public policies, I think there is a balance to strike between the individual and society. We can't just keep rewarding success and call it another opportunity; opportunity is making it easier to succeed by taking down barriers.
If we ask some people to work twice as hard as others for the same reward, we can't be surprised that those people, on average, are going to fall behind. There will always be survivors, but we shouldn't be using survival of the fittest as our guide. I don't mind if some lazy people can thrive, but I do mind if hard working people can't advance, which still is far too common of an occurrence.
So should we tax soda to death or even consider banning it? That's where I would not agree. I value freedom over anything else in a society. Since if you have freedom, you can make the decisions that you see personally most likely to produce positive results for you. And as the recent GDPR vs EU Copyright Act emphasized, in a strikingly brief period of time, the same powers that can be used to do things we perceive to be beneficial for society can, and will, then be used to turn against society to the benefit of entrenched interests.
I also think it's important to consider what 'same reward for same effort' would imply. Should I choose to write books, ought I expect the same reward as Stephen King choosing to write his next book? If I choose to get into basketball should I expect the same reward as an individual who's hyper athletic and 6'11"? Of course not. Equality of reward is an idea that sounds like something you ought desire but underneath the surface it is a dystopia that requires complete and indistinguishable sameness in absolutely every way. As without this sameness, the same effort will invariably yield different results. The game of life is all about finding what your maximizing function is there and pushing it.
I'm not one to deny true market values, but we can level the playing field a bit. And when I say that, I don't mean taking others down a notch to make things even, I mean raising up the floor so that everyone is at least at a reasonable baseline level where they can make there fair effort to get further. (I guess "leveling the playing field" is a bad analogy, since it sounds like trimming down the peaks. I wonder if there's a better one that implies raising up the bottom?)
And I agree that banning soda doesn't make sense, but I could see an argument for taxing it, the same way we do with alcohol. A lot of products have external costs that aren't factored in and are instead borne by the public. Increased sugar consumption results in greater costs to public health. Regardless of who's fault it is, it affects all of us. Taxing it would be a roughly fairer way of distributing the burden. It's definitely not a perfect solution, but would probably give better results than what we have now, if looking at the big picture. I do think personal freedom of choice is extremely important, and we shouldn't have the government exert too much influence on those choices. But I think there is a healthy balance to strike where we can shape better outcomes for society as a whole, while keeping things fair at an individual level. A small tax would only be a disincentive, a suggestion, not a prohibition.
By contrast a small tax is mostly just going to be passed onto consumers (and then some, as is often the case) who are already making financially and 'healthfully' dubious decisions. This is also analogous to the situation with the EU trying to force Netflix to have 30% of their catalog in each region come from region-sourced material. Instead of this, which is going to result in the bare minimum adherence, imagine if they instead granted Netflix a sliding tax reduction dependent on what percent of their revenue was generated from local region-sourced material. Now they suddenly have a major incentive for that material to succeed. Make people want to do good, and they will.
I'm not so hot on external cost calculations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that if you're going to factor in external costs to something, should you not also factor in external benefits to something? Pollutants have a substantial external cost associated with them. At the same time those very pollutants are arguably the single biggest factor in why we are today a 'modern' society. How much ongoing revenue and productivity can be directly attributed to these very pollutants? The second is because it's difficult to objectively measure external costs. Imagine all of the things that you can show some paper or another (and at times the consensus) attributing directly to video games. The cost could almost certainly be shown to be in the trillions of dollars.
I completely agree about trying to increase equality of opportunity, but at the same time I think we're already much closer to that plateau of sharply diminishing returns than our current state of inequality would suggest. I mean in all reality you can go from poverty to not-poverty with little more than doing well in school and choosing a productive major. Bill Clinton became one of the most powerful men in politics and came from what could only be described as white trash beginnings. Obama, a half black middle class man with a Kenyan father who lived in Hawaii, would do the same. I used to always think that a true sign of equality of opportunity would be most of everybody doing well. Spending a while in the workforce destroyed that idealism. On top of making completely illogical decisions, many people just don't seem to have have any ambition or direction whatsoever, and I do not think can be attributed as an effect of the system of work itself.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
Even just consider the crime side of things. How much does a murder cost? There is an immense amount of legal fees, prison fees, police cost, and other related expenses. I really am reluctant to link to a social sciences study, but maybe we can say it's a way to at least start the conversation. This [1] slate article references those numbers. And they're pretty jaw dropping - ranging from $41,288 for a car break in to $17,252,656 for a murder.
We've only considered a small fraction of all costs, yet already those densely packed low income neighborhoods suddenly aren't looking like such a good bet after all.
[1] - http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2010/1...
By building more housing on a given plot of land, each unit cost would be lower, but total would be higher.
Housing has always been the most influential factor in whether I was able to achieve even temporary stability. For the periods of time that I wasn't homeless, my place to stay was wither explicitly temporary (often for arbitrary, unknown periods of time) or cost nearly 100% of the income I was able to scrape together.
Just three months ago, after nearly ten years, I was offered the opportunity to live in, maintain and fix up a small investment property in the middle of nowhere. As it stands, this arrangement should last a year, after which I can opt to stay and pay rent at market price (which in the middle of nowhere is very low).
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am stable enough to apply for school (starting in October, fingers crossed!), and try to really focus on doing some freelance website work for small businesses on the side. I wake up every morning and actually eat breakfast, which doesn't seem that significant, but for me that has been historically difficult or impossible because of my severe, sometimes crushing existential anxiety.
I still have problems, but they are considerably smaller and more manageable. In these three months I have spent most of te money I've earned on either food or supplies for the house. As of right now, my most pressing problem is getting $40 to get a copy of my high school proficiency certificate, and beyond that it would be nice to get a beer at the only bar in town to meet some folks, but I'll take that set of problems over worrying about being cold, or hungry, or getting arrested for sleeping outside any day.
So yay! These arrangements can be an absolute godsend for people that otherwise would have difficulty digging themselves out of a hole.
If you have the means, you should document your story on social media, photographing what you build. "Homeless guy trades handy skills for renovation" (while possibly exaggerating a bit) is a catchy story and could lead to more, stronger opportunities.
Not quite the same, but I've done many "work trade" situations where I've lived on a property with some kind of house/structure and other furnishings/utilities provided in exchange for doing farm work or other labor. It never worked out economically well because the amount of time I had to put into where I lived made it difficult to also work elsewhere for money.
In the U.S, with its comparatively poor social safety net, many good people fall through the cracks. But a large segment of the U.S. desperately wants to see those who end up homeless as moral failures who have brought disaster on themselves. Thus, the cognitive dissonance between the quality of the work these people do and the need to see them as dissolute scum.
It should be no surprise that we ended up with expensive and ineffective social programs.
NY Times 2008: "The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday."
"the officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country."
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homelessweb.html
2013: "The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America"
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-ast...
Ultimately culminating in an all-time record low rate of homelessness in the US by 2017.
The George W. Bush administration deserves the negative flak it took for its various bad policies. It also deserves credit for the positive things like its policies on homelessness or PEPFAR that were astounding successes.
It absolutely needs a redesign but it also needs funding -- and people who don't want to fund these programs have gotten very good at using the former to avoid doing the latter.
You can strip SS from the 1% and it will make no difference. You can do the same for the 10% and it will make little difference. The 10% payed FAR more in than they will receive.
PS: Social Security is hardly fair. That cap is by far the largest benifit for billionaires from social security’s design. People in the 10% pay a vastly higher percentage of their income to support others.
A fair system would be something like X% up to a cap that you get back and y% that you don’t with everyone paying their share of the y%. But that starts to look like a safty net.
On top of that married couples get a larger benifit with a single large income vs two incomes of half that size.
Everything else is based on eligible earnings, so I wouldn't consider it a safety net -- if you didn't earn enough or long enough, you may not get anything out of it.
I think you're going to get a lot more resistance from high income/ high net worth individuals if you take away their social security payments than if you raise the pay in caps, and set the payout percentages to be even lower at the top end. Or scrap the whole thing and build an honest steal from the rich and give to the poor guaranteed minimum income tax scheme.
America for example lowers the tax rate for low income people, just not as low as dividends are taxed.
Citation needed;
Bush tax cuts maximizes dividends and long term capital gains tax rate at 15%;
While, our first two progressive income taxes are $9525 at 10% and $38700 at 12%; (and if head of household these are $13600 and $51,800.) And that's without counting any deductions, like $12k standardized deduction!
So, dividend tax rates are only lower than low income people if you're counting the top 10% as low income.
Social Security and Medicare are 12.4% + 1.45% and have no ‘deductions’ on earned income below ~125k adding up to: 13.85%. People paying more than 1.25% on earned income are rather common.
Many very low income earners are blocked from reviving any benefits from social security, but they still paid.
The US child poverty rate has dropped by over 50% since the 1970s. It's at an all-time record low solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net.
US homelessness is near a record low (it hit a record low two years ago), solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net.
The overall US poverty rate is near a 40 year low.
The number of people with healthcare coverage is at record highs, primarily thanks to the expansion of Medicaid, CHIP and SS disability.
Right now we mostly get what we pay for: we pay a reduced rate and get reduced results, which in this case largely translates to more poor people suffering. We could change that, certainly we have the funds necessary, but we've collectively decided not to.
It's great to hold a moral high ground, but at some point we need to connect with reality. There are people who are chronically homeless and certainly not moral guiding stars, and there are many more situationally homeless people who need help and are perfectly fine folks.
Forgive me, but it sounds to me like an easy way to justify hating on the homeless. Chronic or otherwise.
However, there's a large class of people that are not out there panhandling, not making themselves visible to regular people who are homeless, and are perfectly responsible and capable. These people can and are benefiting from programs like this.
Let's not blur this distinction for some misguided sense of social justice.
It really isn't difficult to imagine becoming homeless, which then leads to depression and other mental issues and then using drugs to escape that. So some proportion of the "problem group" are going to be redeemable too.
For example, I knew a man that was incredibly ornery, almost always drunk, and prone to occasional violent outbursts. Everybody (including the rest of us in the camp) avoided him. About a year after I left the camp, I ran into his daughter and learned that he had been a normal, successful eletrician that had sustained a severe brain injury at work, and his employer managed to avoid paying for workman's compensation or helping with his medical bills, leaving him permanently disabled and with no safety net.
I knew another man that also received a brain injury during a car crash in which he also lost the only extant copy of his masters' thesis in anthropology (the crash occurred in the 80s), and was in a similar position.
I knew a man that actually managed to get a section 8 apartment, but lost it because he opted to move back to the riverbottom and let a pregnant homeless woman stay in it in his stead. He was then also cut off from ALL social programs.
I saw a man get banned for life from an entire network of shelters spanning a huge chunk of the state for taking three (3!) single-use packets of Tide laundry detergent out of the facility.
I have also met a (very) small handful of genuinely odd people that just preferred to live mostly off the grid but still wanted to be near their families/veterinary clinic/spouse's grave/etc. but they are very much the exception and not the rule. I think that for some people with limited experience with the homeless, people that are chronically homeless might appear to all fall into this category.
I do 't think this happens all the time, or even to a majority of the population, but it is an idea that I have heard repeated numerous times.
From my experience, the details are almost always surprising, and the search for simple explanations or solutions is frustratingly unsatisfying.
Homelessness doesn't cause depression, which is a biological illness. Depression, uncontrollable anxiety, addiction, etc. are the root cause of the vast, vast majority of homelessness.
[1] http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf [2] http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pd...
Who remembers anyone who's simply camping for the day at the public library and using it to try and search for jobs?
I can tell you, I've seen all of those and more. I worked with homeless people long term in a shelter for 2 years, and, of the folks I came into direct contact with every day, I don't think 95% of them could survive contact with the real world of employment, paying rent, etc. due to disability (mental or physical), addictions, and/or general lack of a support system. Granted, I worked with people who were not in the shelter's higher tier programs (where housing was provided for a set period, and job assistance provided, in exchange for attending training and religious sessions). The more vulnerable ones, the ones I worked with, were the ones you'd see out on the street, collecting cans and bottles or panhandling.
People "hate" the homeless because the ones they come into contact with who are visibly homeless are often not functional members of society. Simply put, they violate social norms in a way that disgusts most people. Nobody "hates" someone who's couch surfing or living in a car, but who's clean, not an addict, and is trying to get out of the situation the best they can.
That just leaves me speechless
And the answer isn’t simply more money, unfortunately, as there are also limits to qualified staff, effective housing and facility locations, effective following steps that don’t lead to relapse, special education/home visit resources, etc.
Edit: I am writing from a city that has mostly solved homelessness, so I am not saying it cannot be done. Just that an indiscriminate approach is unlikely to work.
"just 31 percent look favorably on corporate executives and Wall Street"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-19/wall-stre...
No, that doesn't happen. Do you see the difference?
Now, getting assaulted by a homeless person on the other hand.... That's probably happened to at least 50% of people.
> asks you for change
No. I'm talking about assault and violence, actually.
This and every other word in your reply is in complete bad faith. Have fun posting here.
Most of the homeless people are just regular people. Sure, some of them have substance abuse problems.
But stand up in your cubicle when you get to the office on Monday morning. One of the coworkers that you can see from your desk has probably taken an opioid, cocaine, amphetamine, or a prescribed drug for ADHD or anxiety.
And they are fully functional.
Your coworkers are regular people. Just like the homeless that you see. More people than you know are one missed paycheque away from being on the streets.
Many of the "chronically homeless" as you call it are one medicine away or one therapist away from being fully functional. And one of your coworkers is one paycheque away, one bad week away from being chronically homeless.
I think you intended to imply "without a prescription" in grouping such people with daytime cocaine users.
Actually reading the comment the driving point seems to be that there's less separating them than you might think--people on and off the street have legal and illegal uses for drugs, so perhaps the legal distinction isn't very useful at discerning the cause of homelessness.
In fact, the main differentiating symptom between legal and illegal drug use seems to be prison.
> Many of the "chronically homeless" as you call it are one medicine away or one therapist away from being fully functional.
[Citation needed]
IIRC when SLC got most its chronically homeless into permanent housing and assistance, their problems did decrease substantially. But most still weren't really able to work.
Most homeless people just couldn't make ends meet, then saw their resources cut off like dominoes falling. They haven't given up on the capitalist dream, and they will purchase shelter again from the free market, once ends do meet.
Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition. I know one woman whose roommate got into a domestic disputes in the backyard. The police arrested everyone in the house, and dropped everything within 3 hours.
lol, that kind of stuff should be illegal. As long as an employee doesn't have to go to jail it should not be allowed to fire the employee for anything that happens outside of the workplace, much less blanket automated policies like that one you describe.
And stuff that's gotten dropped should be either erased or at the very least sealed from the public instead of being provided on Google for all eternity.
A lot of this shit is driven by popular demand. There’s a perception that rigorous background checks are foundatational if a corporation is to act responsibly.
Indeed. But there should be some level of common sense in the system. For example, while a sexual offender certainly is not supposed to work in childcare, he still can work flipping burgers or in a factory. A pot smoker may be unfit for driving trucks, but why not as a coder? Someone who got arrested protesting Nazis is someone I'd actually prefer to hire if I could. And so on.
And to make stuff worse we're only talking about arrests here, not actual convictions by a court. How are people supposed to rehabilitate and be productive members of society again when they're basically forced into an eternal life of poorness and criminality?!
The data these checks deal with is garbage, and offenses can be classified in different ways based on jurisdiction, disposition or a dozen other factors. Was that "reckless driving" charge a plead down DWI? Was that battery charge actually a sexual offense that was offered in lieu of victim testimony? Was the arrest mistaken identity?
No HR person will risk getting into the news for making a judgement. IMO the answer is to classify the data so it's not available in most cases.
Germany and Europe in general goes fine with not publicizing arrest records.
As the article points out, you actually don't see, or at least associate, the temporary homeless as being homeless, because these people have jobs and are just trying their best to get by. So most of the homeless that people associate with being homeless are chronically homeless, where many times the stereotype is actually not that far from the truth.
Yes, this may be often motivated by religion - but who cares? No surprise to me that the most progressive state in this sense seems to be Utah (Mormons are encouraged to devour a percentage of their time to social causes, the state switched to provide every homeless with a roof first, ask questions later ...)
Unfortunately, with money driven election cycles (rather than policy driven election cycles) social welfare never has a good chance to see the light of day in washington. Perhaps this will change soon, but when both parties take money from the same people, the resulting debate will probably avoid important topics.
There are a lot of people in the US who believe that the chronically homeless are moral failures who deserve their misery (they "fail at life", to quote an acquaintance); that social welfare to help them constitutes rewarding moral hazard; and that the most effective way to minimize homelessness is to dial up the disincentives and make their lives as painful and humiliating as possible.
The role money plays is avoiding discussion of the roots of homelessness, which affects the general population as well—social, cultural, economic, and medical discussions. An easy way to see this is the obsession over the employment rate, despite being very narrow in what it measures (i.e. whether someone who is looking for a job finds one, not the quality of the job they find, nor the number of people who stop looking).
Ultimately, I can’t hold people’s apathy towards homelessness against them. Homelessness is often the product of a system that failed them, and the thought of helping directly is incredibly daunting given how much the deck is stacked against people without money, shelter, ids, or skills. Facing an individual who clearly faced a wrong, people tend to help. When faced with a group of people society chewed up and spat out, the comforting things people tell themselves each day reach their limits. What’s another comforting topic on top of it—that people deserve what they get?
If we accept the underlying problems affect all of us, maybe we won’t have to do mental gymnastics to see how policy could improve lives. This is potentially an electable approach.
We do not live in a just world. Pretending that success and failure are attributable to merit alone is the the self-serving moral vanity of the fortunate.
So what if the homeless "fail at life"? There but for the grace of dog go you.
Again, I agree with you. I also think this viewpoint is depressing to the point that people will reject it and invent some fiction to excuse their relative comfort. How it can be empowering—delivering tangibly improved quality of life for the people around you—is hard to tie to the premise that people are fundamentally subjected to their environment before their character. Rhetorically, anyway.
Europe with its revolutions, world and cold wars had a lot of „chances“ to wipe the slate clean. Including its welfare systems.
The major shift comes because of the smartphone.
Previously to be homeless meant to be completely disconnected from society. No mailing address, no land line, you don't exist.
Today you can have a phone number and high-speed internet access without a permanent address.
This alone makes the prospect of dispensing with your digs when you can no longer afford them far less unattractive than previously.
People live relatively modern connected lives from vehicles and tents today.
I'm not speculating, I'm speaking from experience. I've lived a very vagabond lifestyle for years in CA, and this approach has really taken off in the last 5-7 years or so. Batteries last a long time, solar panels are cheap and efficient, prepay phones are affordable.
I used to spend a lot of time in various cafes around the SF bay area. The outlets at these places started becoming contended for by ostensibly "homeless" people looking to charge their smartphones.
In 2018 "homeless" people have smartphones, they watch netflix, they do all the things. The last time I was at Java Beach in the outer sunset a guy who just moved off the sidewalk into a van was playing 3d games on a gaming laptop using the cafe's wifi and electricity until closing. I know his situation because he told it to me. He was wearing pajamas getting some gaming in before they closed up to retire in his van down the street.
That's a pretty damn comfortable "homeless" life. It's not really much different than what people are doing in their $3k+/mo apartments he parks in front of. I don't know where he bathes though, there is the ocean right there in the worst case, right?
I'm not passing judgement. It just shouldn't be surprising, given these circumstances, that relatively sane and capable people are slipping into "homeless" lives. The severity has substantially diminished vs. the homeless of the past, especially places where the climate is nice year-round.
I think if there were no smartphone, these "homeless" people would feel much more motivated to relocate someplace affordable.
It doesn't bother me if folks are choosing to live homelessly someplace desirable instead of relocating someplace less desirable where they can afford a home. Apartments are overrated, where the weather is nice.
In an earlier post, I mentioned a very, very small group of people that I have met that were almost mystifyingly homeless despite them having very few limiting factors that regularly contribute to homelessness.
The one thing they all had in common was that they stayed in places that didn't have harsh winters or dangerously hot summer (e.g. coastal California). I have not, however, met any person that fits that description in the Oregon/Washington deserts, Utah, Colorado, or even inland California.
In a nutshell, yes it is technically possible to sleep outside in coastal California without risking death from exposure. However, climate does not mitigate the risks posed by arrest for illegal lodging, violence from those around them (other homeless people, and others that are simply cruel), starvation, theft etc. It also does nothing to help with access to (even critical, immediate) healthcare, counseling, education or really any other factor that helps people get into a better situation.
As far as smartphones go, I agree that access to one can be life-changing to a homeless person, bt I could not disagrew more strongly with your characterization of that access making living on the street -with all the risks that that entails- as "less unattractive". To be earnest, I suppose I don't understand that point. If your landlord shows up with a police officer to forcibly remove from your home for not paying rent, the relative "unattractiveness" of what comes next for you isn't a variable that is taken into consideration. You have what you can carry, and hopefully an idea of where to walk next.
If "what you can carry" includes a smartphone, your chances of getting access to help is certainly improved dramatically, and yes, if you can find a spot that is near an open wireless AP, you might watch some Netflix. It is hardly the equivalent of living in a 3k/month apartment.
From my experience, cars and vans break down or get towed, phones break, phone plans run out of data (or in some cases, phone minutes. The poorest peole often still don't have reliable access to unlimited plans, even in 2018), you can get banned from coffee shops for making others uncomfortable by your appearance alone (people don't like to look at a person that has to carry all of their belongings with them).
I lived in a car for a while, but sold it for $300 for a train ticket to a place with fewer police. I had an eight year old laptop running an old distro of Ubuntu (without a working battery) that I traded for a weekend inside during a particularly bad cold snap. On two different occasions I have had to leave every single object I owned behind, and start over with only the clothes on my back and whatever was in my jeans' pockets.
If your point is that there is a differnce between homeless people and, as you put it, "homeless" people, then yes I agree. The biggest difference here is that of access to resources that can help bring one off the street, and whether or not perfectly healthy, capable people are making intentional decisions to reject those resources. The latter group is a genuinely fascinating anomaly, and does not reflect the reality of the problem.
Personally, I find that "move somewhere that's more desirable or manageable" to be problematic. The only reaon why I was able to leave a particular city was because I had a car to sell for tickets. If I hadn't, I simply would not have left. Even when I got there, I didn't have two nickels to rub together, so housing prices didn't really matter.
I would encourage anyone that feels this way about the homeless to do a bit more digging, or just have a conversation with a few people that are currently or were recently homeless. This particular attitude of lumping everybody under the umbrella of The Worst Examples doesn't seem to serve the goal of fixing this problem.
Even your post is conflating what I was describing as "homeless" for people living out of vehicles/tents as living rough on the street.
But the general vocabulary everyone uses does not distinguish between the two, it's all just homeless. And this is how we arrive at people being surprised by the quality of people they find as technically homeless.
There are many people who technically qualify as homeless who are simply not paying expensive ass rent, but living out of vehicles in desirable areas where the rent is expensive, and doing so quite comfortably and connectedly thanks largely to the smartphone.
We need a different word to describe this class of homeless people. They're more willfully homeless than the classical meaning of homeless, because their homeless option doesn't really suck as much as it used to.
I've lived out of a car quite a bit throughout the bay area, and talked to a bunch of people doing the same thing along the coast in the process. There are numerous folks living out of vans waking up to million dollar views every day without paying any rent or mortgage. They're living the dream, should we still call them homeless?
If a person is at risk of assault or arrest for their inability to go indoors and has no immediate ability to remedy that, I have no issue calling that person homeless. Regardless of how one views that person's life decisions they face the same systemic issues as any other homeless person.
If your point is strictly that the language is ambiguous, perhaps it would be more appropriate to use "people that choose a vagabond lifestyle" (which is close to your original statement) over a confusing mix of "homeless" and " "homeless" " to refer to the tiny subgroup that you are referring to.
A couple decades ago in San Francisco, I used to host an open mic. One of the regulars was Keith Savage, a poet who would occasionally compose and perform appreciations of the other regulars who had moved him. He was so empathic, so good at capturing what people were trying to communicate and then reworking it and responding... he gave so many people a rich reward for being brave enough to take the open mic stage.
Keith happened to be homeless, though that's not the most important or interesting thing about him... Folks, if you exclude the homeless from your life, you may be missing out...
"Finlay had read an article about the number of people who are homeless because of job loss or other temporary circumstances. He realized that his preconceptions about homelessness, shaped by the chronically homeless people he saw living outside, were wrong.
“The majority of homeless are people that we never really see because they are trying to work, they’re getting day labor,” he says. “They’re living out of their cars. They’re not panhandling and living under the bridge . . . These are all people that were employed, had good job histories. There was just really no issue that would preclude them from working other than they didn’t have an address.”"
The prejudices and hatred are towards the chronically homeless, not the temporarily homeless. Nothing in this article suggests those prejudices are false.
How hard does a person has to be kicked and how much mishap has to happen before they fall into despair, and become one of those who has to live under the bridge (as they lose their car due to uncontrollable circumstances)?
The existence of a large homeless population is a symptom of a society that does not care - reflected by the lack of taxation on the populous.
If you examine a scandinavian country (such as sweden), why do they have way less homeless per-capita than the US?
The latter is what people do not like, but they use the term "homeless" to address them.
Insurance prices drop with credit and higher deductibles;
So, while a car $1k car may itself be cheap to insure; if you're driving in a city with Teslas driving around, and you purchase insurance, you're likely under insured.
I didn't include it in my comment because I know that that reality is not popular around here and the specifics of how one evades paying for insurance varies from state to state.
Driving uninsured or under-insured really doesn't matter when you have no assets and are living on the edge of poverty. The idea that someone who's only reasonable way to get to work is driving would not drive just because they're not insured is laughable. You're not going to get insurance by not going to work. It's not really a big additional risk compared to all the other things in day to day life that could push you over the edge.
Regardless, insurance is still the same or cheaper in the US.
tldr; Our zoning is horrible, and it's not just because owning a car is cheaper, it's more because the people with car insurance subsidize those without. Also, police and criminalizing the poor.
>The turnover rate for entry-level employees in the industry is around 50%. For the formerly homeless people hired through Shelters to Shutters–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances–the retention rate is more than 87%.
>–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances–
That's a blatant lie. Their home is directly tied to their job. That's the best explanation for retention.
edit: this is not a critique of the good idea of employing homeless.
And dont talk to the IRS about whether you have to pay taxes on that rent reduction.
Moreover, there is something insidious about it being run by a real estate company, an entity that might very well have contributed to homelessness in the first place.
However, apartment management gigs are frequently part-time-ish, with on call hours. I've known a few apartment managers who have outside income. In a small complex, say 30 units, the job can be done by an onsite individual on a part time basis. For that sort of scenario, I would expect that the pay comes largely in the form of subsidized rent. For a larger apartment complex, I would expect that the pay would increase commensurately.