Sarah Connor, in hiding before the war
streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com
streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com
As the blogpost notes: "There are already lots of hidden homeless passing for normal, couch surfing, etc. People tend to not realize it."
Fortunately right now, I'm at very low risk of homelessness, but I can imagine scenarios where it could happen. Some people don't have family to fall back on. Some people's family are terrible people and it's questionable whether they are better off with them or living rough.
A lot of people live in their cars or vans for a while.
Here in Austin, urban camping was decriminalized (I am not an expert, this may not be entirely correct) and now there are quite a lot of tents popping up all over the place.
As a civilian, it's impossible for me to tell what situation a person is in; are they potentially violent, do they live in the same world as me, are they mentally and physically capable but undergoing hard times? They are all people, and they should all be helped, but help for one person isn't like help for another; and just lumping people together and parking them doesn't help anyone.
The solution, at least for the "harmless homeless" is to credibly broadcast to civilians and authorities their benign circumstances and histories. With widespread facial recognition and augmented reality, this might not be as hard to do as it seems. The homeless can be assigned a social credit score based on their criminal record, user rating by shelters and other provider institutions, employment history, and how long they've been homeless. Authorities, and potentially even civilians, can instantly identify and flag homeless people that are likely to be problematic.
Without a doubt, this regime would certainly make life better for the harmless and down-on-their-luck homeless types. Yet my guess is most would oppose such a system. The point is tradeoffs exist in the social design space. Most of the down-on-the-luck homeless are unfairly stigmatized because society at large lumps them in with the violent, destructive and anti-social. We can make more efforts to draw a visible class distinction between those respective groups, yet it's often homeless advocates that oppose doing so.
These two avenues are completely orthogonal to each other. There's no reason that you can't create a path out of homelessness, but still make the time somebody spends homeless more pleasant. Effort in one doesn't negate the other.
And yes, without a doubt adding visible class distinctions between the down-on-their-luck homeless and the violent, destructive homeless would almost assuredly make life better for members of the former. You may still oppose the idea on other grounds, but there's absolutely no reason to doubt why raising a sub-group's social class status wouldn't improve their life.
You have no idea what people have been through. The circumstances that may end them up with a poor credit score have little to do with how responsible or diligent that person is.
Have some understanding. Not shocked your post has garnered more downvotes than mine.
And yet, very few people support the abolition of financial credit scores. Or support expunging people's criminal records after they're done serving time. Or oppose the existence of sex offender registries. Or believe that restaurants should not be able to turn away someone on the basis of "no shoes, no shirt, no service".
All of those things are ways that social institutions flatten people out into making quick, and often rough, decisions about people. All are subject to the very same criticism you raise. Their are all sorts of exigent circumstances that might make someone wind up with bad credit, or a criminal history, or on a sex offender registry, or without clean clothes for the day.
Yet we as society accept a wide variety of surface level decisions about the human beings around it. We accept that the inevitability of false positives, because the overall gains of being able to easily segment people into social classes makes society as a whole more pleasant for everyone. At the end of the day, it's simply a matter of utilitarian calculus.
If anything, a social credit score for the homeless is less unjust than any the above. Because there's no element of coercion to it. Ir wouldn't be used for any official institutional purposes, it's simply a way for users to quickly gather more information about the homeless people they're interacting with.
I'm genuinely curious would you bite that bullet. Should we ban credit scores, and permanent criminal records, and sex offender registries, and dress/hygeine codes on the same basis that you oppose social credit scores for the homeless.
How, exactly?
I envy you. Ignorance is absolutely bliss.
And the "undeserving homeless", the violent drug addict with mental health problems - well (s)he deserved our help about ten or fifteen years previously, when under funded health services let him slip through the net, or neighbours and uncles and aunts did not want to believe her dad was actually doing that to her and ....
A lot of people have shitty lives and deserve our help - not just when the symptoms are impossible to ignore.
I kind of see what you are reaching for - that there must be some solution. Yeah there is - but it's about a decade or two before people hit the streets, so we need to fix all the problems in our society that let children doing well in Kindergarten, fall that far. And we also need help for those that have fallen right now - and the article had some pretty good ideas about that I thought.
You're citing this as if the concept of "deserving poor" isn't something that's already enshrined in public policy. For the vast majority of American voters segmenting the deserving from the undeserving poor is a feature not a bug.
That's the reason we don't have unconditional UBI, and instead have a welfare system that's based on life circumstances. When we're more generous with children, the infirm, and the elderly than able-bodied adults who eschew work (or even worse commit crime), that is the concept of the deserving poor. And frankly I agree with that class distinction.
> the violent drug addict with mental health problems - well (s)he deserved our help about ten or fifteen years previously
And yet the very same criticism can be said about permanent criminal records or sex offender registries. Yet the vast majority of people in our society accept that committing a violent crime is "crossing the rubicon". Once you've done so, you'll always be a second-class citizen at best.
This isn't something controversial, policies based on this belief are nearly universally supported by voters. Regardless of prior personal circumstances, American society always lays the blame primarily at the perpetrator himself.
Wait, what? Equating criminals should be punished with some people are more deserving than others is not the point - the deserving poor was a kid victorian justification for selectively providing assistance to a (conveniently limited) number of people while letting the majority of poor rot away in plain sight.
It was a means of ignoring the systemic issues that created and sustained grinding poverty - and is IMO something we are doing still - the underclass has shrunk, yes, we have lifted many people out of overfly in the West, but prisons are populated mostly with men with poor backgrounds, educational low attainment, mental health issues and drug problems - waaaaay too out of proportion to be confidence, thus making those issues part of the modern day systemic faikures that mean some of our fellow citizens have the odds stacked against them.
That said, if someone has no such mental issues, yet a low social score, what else should be done - Who deserves to be exposed to that?
> A lot of people have shitty lives and deserve our help
our help? who's that? The employer who ends up with a violent or maladjusted employee bears the burden themselves - not us.
What's relevant is the proposed tech empowers the average person the street to quickly access and synthesize already public information. It's essentially no different than a real-time background check.
And I would almost certainly think that you'd agree that in a situation where your personal safety is potentially at risk, that you'd prefer to have this information available to you. If you were hiring a baby-sitter for your kid, would you not conduct a background check. If the background check revealed that said babysitter was a schizophrenic meth addict, would you still hire that person?
Of course not. That person needs help, but you as a private individual going about your life is not the entity capable of providing it.
> That schizophrenic meth addict deserves help as much as anyone else does.
Does that not imply op suggested otherwise?
Besides, the school system needs more than just money, just like the "homeless problem". I don't feel comfortable passing judgement on one class of people vs another solely because of the circumstances they were born into.
The part 'vs another solely because of the circumstances they were born into' from the parent post does not reflect what the GP post actually says. The GP was solely arguing on the practicality and the costs and benefits of doing it; solutions to problems have trade-offs, it is no good wishing them away.
That said, how the homeless are treated in a lot of rich nations today are a complete disgrace. Increasing a well off persons well being is worth far less than increasing a not so well off persons well being IMO.
I think you're conflating separate questions: how to act around a given homeless person, and what kind of system is needed to help them at scale.
As for helping them, while there will be nuances to any group of people, I don't think it's a waste of time to make general statements about what solutions might look like. There may be complicating circumstances, but the fundamental barrier is the same: our society (unfortunately) requires you to make some amount of money and to have a place to live if you're going to participate in it and have much hope of upward mobility. And there's a circular effect, where if you don't have those things, it's incredibly hard to "bootstrap" your way into it.
This core mechanism applies to nearly all homeless people. So anything that tries to solve that bootstrapping problem will apply to a whole lots of people, even if it needs to be combined with other things like addiction help, mental healthcare, etc on a case-by-case basis.
For anyone else here in Austin, this is a great organization that works on this problem: https://www.caritasofaustin.org/
I think you're right, and it probably has to do with the context of my interactions.
It bums me the hell out that a year later after I first bumped into him, he's still homeless. As I said, he's basically the "model" of how we think homeless people should act when asking for help, and yet for all that, at best it's probably just kept him out of jail.
Just throwing more money at the problem would have helped, but certainly wouldn’t have solved the problem.
I worked at an emergency homeless shelter for a while, long ago, and saw the same kind of thing you talk about. I'm not sure it was quite as deliberate, but you can absolutely set someone up in a perfectly nice free apartment and they'll still somehow find themselves back on the street in short order.
Now, that's not everyone! Not by a long shot. You're absolutely right that throwing money by itself is not going to eliminate homelessness, but throwing some money would probably take a good-sized chunk out of it.
Yeah, we were a safety-net hospital across the street from a prison. We got a lot of inmates, had a locked wing on most floors for prisoner patients, many many uninsured illegal immigrants, etc. We had quite a few patients that should have gone home, but we couldn’t safely discharge them, so we were just their free hotel while they hung in social support limbo - we were owned by the county, so taxes paid for their stay, and they were in no rush to leave.
It was very much a case of seeing how most failed social policy ultimately ends up in the hospitals.
Working in wealthier hospitals is way more fun. Treating disease is much more satisfying than “treating” poverty.
Given how expensive medical care can be, doesn't this indicate that perhaps our current system is more expensive to society as a whole? (I mean, there are other factors, but given that the cost of health care is something that even more 'well off' people care about, perhaps it is a better angle to push for discussion and reform?)
To be clear I'm not implying this is everyone, or that money wouldn't help, but it's complicated.
The CBC followed this one homeless man for a while in Toronto, he was given a $1200/month basement apartment for free. After a few months, he walked out, choosing to live on the street (in wintertime no less!). He complained that the carpets were 'dingy and musty and disgusting'. Now it wasn't really apparent if they were or not, but literally as he's saying this, the camera pans to the shelf where there are about 40 empty 'tall boy' beer cans.
I could only think that since he's not really doing anything all day, he could probably work out a deal with the landlord to remove the carpets if they were really that bad, or else, file a material complaint if they were, but it honestly didn't seem like it was an especially negative situation to begin with.
Also, it seemed that the homeless man was very cantankerous and antagonistic.
So just consider that nugget: 'carpets not nice enough for me so Ima rough it' is the logic employed here.
I mean, possibly the carpets were toxic, but I doubt it, moreover, any other reasonable person would find a way to fix the problem considering the 'glorious' opportunity of having quite a nice little flat in one of the more expensive parts of the country for free. But it ends up in argumentation, aggression, complications, and literally 'back on the street', by choice.
I wonder to what the degree of anti-social behavior is learned or is an adaption of 'street life' or if these types were always like that, and if som, does an excessive degree of anti-social behavior count as 'mental illness'. There's a really interesting degree of hyper-libertarianism going on there as well, that 'street life' at least implies a kind of 'absolute freedom' with no rules, no clocks, no responsibilities of any kind, no concept of social order etc..
There are some studies that delineate between the 'temporary and long-term homeless', it might be that it's really important to nab people as they are just descending into this darkness before all of those ugly social features start to encroach upon someone's identity and they don't come back from the mouth of madness.
It is not at all clear that "most homeless people have mental problems" because it is not at all clear how many people are homeless. There are many people who are couch surfing around friends places with no actual home of their own. They are homeless, but they don't necessarily count amongst the homeless figures. They are also completely mentally competent. They may also outnumber the official homeless, but we don't really know.
Then one day I was up the road near where he hangs out, I watched him limp and stumble down to the end of the block, someone was even nice enough to give him a hand as he stumbled, then he got down to the crosswalk and started limping across the street, hit about halfway across, then straightened up, put on a big grin and strided triumphantly the rest of the way across, met up with his buddy i'd seen him with sometimes who hung out across the street, high five and disappear around the corner together. He still hangs out there begging, pretending to be crippled as far as I know.
Some people don't want to stop being 'homeless', for them it makes a pretty.good career
One dude pretending to be crippled is much less socially destructive than an asset-stripping hedge fund which loads up multiple viable businesses with debt and then kills them.
The difference is the former is still relatively powerless, while the latter can be responsible for multiple instances of homelessness.
So it's not a question of "help" - it's about making sure that homelessness is an absolutely exceptional situation, not the systemic default for anyone who finds themselves on the wrong end of the value creation process. As well as the mentally ill.
> we know that a normal citizen would never
That took a dark turn quickly.
> we know that a normal citizen would never need
In other words, when you can trust your society to take care of its residents, you can be almost certain the beggars are scam artists.
The stipulations for receiving aid are fairly light, so I think the viewpoint may be that if you aren't receiving assistance, you aren't willing to play by the simple rules they have.
Of course, this is someone from the US speaking, and basing this on my conversations with people from Finland from 10-20 years ago...
The panhandlers who beg in areas where there are more middle class people around are almost all phony.
I later saw “her” pull off the nun garb, pull out his Mets hat, buy a beer and get on the Amtrak to head upstate.
The real answer to the OP's point is that a homeless person who is assertive in terms of asking for money may find himself on the wrong side of someone with some kind of authority. Also, certain verbiage works better than others for panhandling.
Every day I walked past the same people pan-handling on the same corners. Many had signs with invented stories to try garner pity from suckers, stuff that was obviously fictional to anyone who had been walking past these people every business day for years, like "Stranded traveler, need money for bus fare" kind of stuff.
One day it became clear why some stuck with the stranded traveler story; it enabled them to wear normal, even classy high-end clothing, and not even have to be dirty-looking. On that day as I walked past a woman doing this I noticed she was wearing a new pair of some exceptionally fancy shoes, and the price tag sticker was still visible on the sole: $499.
On another occasion, I recognized one of these people but off-duty, crouched against the exterior wall of Sears trying to light a cigarette with a match, with their wheeled suitcase parked between themself and the wall. It was windy (Chicago) and I had a lighter, so I went over to help them with a light and as I got close enough to reach their cigarette I saw inside their "stranded traveler" prop suitcase they had left open: it appeared to be full of cash. Another pro for the stranded traveler gimmick: it gives you reason to have a suitcase to hide the sizable stash.
These folks probably weren't homeless, they just earned an easy living by acting like they were in a relatable bind of a situation to fellow tourists in a busy city.
I got to know someone who lived homelessly for a few years on the streets of Chicago, and he said real homeless people in Chicago are easily identified by their clothes and possessions being bleach-stained. Apparently the municipal crews would spray down the encampments on lower wacker where they'd stay warm through winter, without warning. So people who slept down there would have all their possessions/clothing ruined by the bleach. This was decades ago, I don't know if it's still applicable.
The craziest part about this is that the people doing the spraying were probably way fewer emergencies away from being homeless than the people deciding to spray bleach in that area.
I wonder what it would have been like to be one of those city workers - Did they just see it as trying to make a living? I mean, they definitely know where saying "no" might get them...
No doubt some small portion of scammers have an effective scam around homelessness. Other scammers do better on other things. My guess is that most people become homeless through lack of skill and knowing the best scams is likely one more skill that most homeless people don't have. Obviously, income stream available for people to "make a career" out of fake homelessness is so small that only a small number of people can be doing it. And, of course, that a given person might be lying in a way that seems like they imagine will get them money doesn't mean they get much more or that they aren't on the streets through general dysfunction (homeless people aren't angels, people in general aren't angels but people face the demand to be angels much more strongly when homeless).
When I lived in the Bay Area is that 90s, honestly, the scamming skills were far higher than they are now and as naive student, I'd have people scam me for a few bucks, which I generally could afford to lose, (with the worse thing being a person invited over who stole from my roommates). The beggars of today lack such skills (just pick pocketing has faded, etc).
The lessen for an average here is, imo, is give to homeless people but don't give more on a sob story, don't give only to a sob story. Just giving money to portion of people really more efficient than giving to agency X. If you're not selecting for scammers, it should work well.
My solution has become to give food if I want to give something.
Unless they are honestly trying to sell something legally or perform music or something (I really have a soft spot for anyone actually trying to work):
- If someone plays music I might once in a while give something along the lines of $5-10 if it isn't too bad. It actually brightens my day to walk by someone playing.
- Recently I also bought a magazine from a friendly old chap. I don't know how common this is elsewhere but in Oslo severely disadvantaged people can apply for jobs as salespeople for "=Oslo" which is a monthly magazine that is only sold by people like them. Based on my first impression (this months edition) I might very well buy again. The price is 100NOK which translates to just above $10 and for that price I got some actual journalism and I get to support a person who is in a rough spot but actually want to work.
Being on the streets can mess-up a person's digestion. A lot of homeless people won't take random food because they don't know if they can keep that food down - and, here in the US, you don't know if someone who hates the homeless might be trying to poison you.
I'd happily donate to a homeless person who was actively cleaning the street, for example. But for some reason people seem to prefer deciding who to blame rather than proposing solutions.
We refuse to do this out of nebulous concern for individual freedom (political left, libertarian) and economic incentives (political right, libertarian), no matter that persistent homeless have mental health problems (acute or non-clinical) that are contradictory to simplistic notions of individual liberty and individual accountability. (Because the real concern is the hypothetical liberty and accountability of people who otherwise would never have trouble staying housed, not those rotting on the street.)
Saying "Either take your free room, or get your own room, or leave the city, or as a last resort get committed." doesn't strike me as particularly bad as far as freedom goes.
The other 20% is what is referred to as the chronic homeless. These are the ones we see on the streets. Very few of them recover if ever. This group is mostly made of the mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely an individual suffering from both problems. Only federal medical institutions can help them. The problem is that they were expensive and extremely mismanaged (stacks of abuse) in the 20th century. Consequently, the Kennedy family waged a successful crusade in eliminating them. Sadly, given what we know now, instead of ending those programs; we should have reformed them instead.
What we have now is a bunch of cities playing a never ending game of “hot potato” with the mentally ill, using free bus and airline tickets that send them to another metro to deal with and vice versa.
Most proposed solutions like the ones outlined in the blog post only deal with the symptoms and not the root of the problem. It’s a mental health issue
Drugs don't frequently destroy lives, but the cops do so regularly when enforcing those laws. They take houses, cars, money, and time away from people. They take your children and brand you for the rest of your life as a criminal. Someone who is 21 has an entire life ahead of them. Are you really advocating that that kid be prosecuted, jailed, and branded simply because they chose an intoxicant that you don't approve of?
I'd agree with this if you also took care of all your healthcare personally. If the gov't is coming in and providing healthcare and services to the downtrodden, which it does especially for the homeless, then they should also work to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. And since there's a link between hard drug use and future homelessness, enforcement of hard drug use becomes part of the gov't charter. You shouldn't expect gov't services AND the freedom to destroy your life to then depend on gov't services.
From the "Conclusions" section:
> "With few exceptions and despite increasing investments in enforcement-based supply reduction efforts aimed at disrupting global drug supply, illegal drug prices have generally decreased while drug purity has generally increased since 1990. These findings suggest that expanding efforts at controlling the global illegal drug market through law enforcement are failing."
I'm the author of the piece. I was homeless with my adult sons for nearly six years. None of us has a mental health diagnosis and none of us does drugs or drinks. We are all tea-totallers.
I'm really tired of the "junkies and crazies" meme about homelessness. I don't think it's accurate. It's just another way we throw our hands up and claim "It can't be solved, and not because I don't care."
I think we need to solve our health care issues in the US. Medical issues contribute to chronic homelessness.
I think other special needs, such as being ADHD, contribute. ADHD isn't a mental health diagnosis of the "he's just insane and can't be made to behave" variety. But such issues do create inherent challenges to regular employment.
I have inherent challenges to regular employment. I began doing freelance writing online while homeless and that helped me get back into housing eventually.
My blogging mostly doesn't pay my bills. I occasionally get tips and I have a little Patreon support, but I've been told for years "Get a real job. Writing just doesn't pay, you slacker you." and it's like "Writing is something I can do without it creating high medical bills and making me unable to work at all. I do it well enough to sometimes hit the front page of Hacker News. Why the hell shouldn't this be a means to support myself?"
And I think some portion of it is I'm a woman and I'm poor and those are contributing factors. People don't want to admit sexism and classism influence which websites they are willing to support financially.
But, regardless of all that crazy making stuff, doing what I could do helped me improve things:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-twist-on-...
Anyway, it's probably time for me to walk away and not reply to too much stuff here. A lot of it will likely end up being personally offensive to me, but I didn't want to just let this remark pass without some push back. I'm so tired of the "junkies and crazies" meme. The data I'm familiar with says it's not true.
I agree with the entitlement comment as well. “Doing this thing works for me” is not the same as “doing this thing is valuable to anyone else”.
While I appreciate you bringing up that element, I actually think it's more complicated than that. In a nutshell, I think addiction generally arises out of other problems, a la the phrase "driven to drink." Blaming everything on "You drink" fails to address the underlying problems concerning why you drink.
But I don't think elaborating at length while being described as having an entitled attitude because I think I should be able to get compensation for work I can do that other people clearly do value to some degree is likely to be constructive.
There's a difference in valuing something 10$ vs under 1¢. 100 of one can feed a person for a month, and a 100 of the other can buy you a single gum.
While homeless, I was throwing up my lunch one day in the bushes because of my medical condition and someone driving past in a car yelled out their window "Drink too much last night?" taking glee in what they were all too happy to assume was evidence that their prejudice against the homeless and hatred of them was justified.
I will also note that I'm quite nonplussed by the people showing up here to insist in writing in public that they were part of "the good homeless," the deserving homeless, the folks in need of a small break and not like those people.
My father was mixed race and routinely told racist jokes. I've recently realized he probably looked a lot more mixed race than I understood growing up because of photos I've seen of a full-blooded Native that bear an uncanny resemblance to my father. So I strongly suspect that my father told racist jokes to implicitly signal he was white and "not one of them" in a racist world that does terrible, horrible things to non-whites on a routine basis.
To me, that reads as an expression of fear and an act of self preservation in an ugly, hostile classist world. But it's an act of self preservation that preserves the status quo.
I blog to try to present the data and point of view I'm aware of that conflicts with the accepted narrative that I believe keeps these problems entrenched.
Perhaps it won't make any difference. But perhaps it will.
I did not say I was part of the “good homeless”. What I said was that the vast majority of the homeless aren’t chronically homeless and I was part of that non-chronic population. I’m also saying that for the chronically homeless, homelessness is just the symptom of the underlying problem of mental illness. This is another way of saying, “they didn’t get the right kind of help that they needed”. When people still can’t be high functioning with all the social safety nets available, we have to re-examine the strategy that isn’t working for them. I don’t feel the half measures you’ve described is enough for the mentally ill
We’ve had this discussion before months ago. We can just agree to disagree.
Social phenomenon are inherently hard to study in some kind of objective fashion. People will give the answers they know are expected of them in a world that is openly and unapologetically hostile to them.
"How to lie with statistics" is one of my favorite works. Two people with different points of view can look at the exact same data and reach completely different conclusions about what the data means.
Humans are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. Humans look for the data that supports their existing world view and hand wave off data that conflicts with it. This is a very well known phenomenon.
Edit in response to your edit:
We’ve had this discussion before months ago. We can just agree to disagree.
Sure. I don't recall discussing it with before and I didn't start this discussion. You did. You chose to reply to something I said here, knowing we've discussed it before and we don't agree.
So calls to "agree to disagree" sound a bit like I should just shut up and let you have the last word.
I'm not rebutting every single comment in the discussion of the article I wrote. If you didn't want to actually talk to me in specific, you absolutely didn't have to.
It’s hard to lie with data when mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are involved. Many of these people were discharged from institutions for financial reasons, which adds further credibility for the studies’ conclusions ie these people needed special medical help and society just kicked them out into the streets
At no point did I call the chronically homeless “bad” which really angers me when you accused me of it.
Your personal anecdotes are always interesting but they don’t give people the big picture
I wasn't making insinuations. I generally do my damnedest to try to phrase things as neutrally as possible and make sure, to the best of my ability, that I'm not making insinuations.
You aren't required to engage me. If you don't like engaging me, then don't. You don't have to.
You can just let your original comment stand on its own. Nothing I say erases anything you say.
Readers here are generally intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions and can see that "These two people seriously don't agree."
There's zero need to formally state that while continuing to engage.
That's not an insinuation. It's a description of online social dynamics that isn't readily and immediately apparent to a lot of people because it runs counter to how in-person conversation works. (That includes me. It took me eons to figure that out.)
This will be my last comment in reply to you. If you feel the need to reply further, that's up to you. I'm absolutely not looking to have some pointless fight.
I need to engage your ideas because I do not feel they provide HN the larger picture on homelessness. Chronic homelessness is a mental health issue and not a primarily a housing issue
People care if you are unshowered, drunk/high, schizophrenic/screaming, asking for money, going to steal, etc.
It just so happens that the two correlate a lot.
--
This doesn't negate the question of how to help these groups, but real solutions do require us to be honest with ourselves.
> going to steal,
Think about the thought process that leads someone to believe you are "going to steal", and how much prejudicial stereotyping that entails.
> unshowered, drunk/high, schizophrenic/screaming,
All things that people who have houses are free to do without being punished. So yeah, anybody does care if you have a house, practically speaking.
I don't think so.
If I go to a restaurant and am refused service, it's not because I couldn't present a deed. It's based on whether your state makes everybody around you uncomfortable.
Maybe if you have a suit, then you can get away with yelling or more drinking, but that's a stereotype about attire (or really class-ism), not about having a house. Houses actually have very little to do with any of this.
As a human justice issue, I care that people get basic needs of living met. Whether that’s a house or some sort of communal arrangement doesn’t interest me. This is an intellectual feeling though - I have recurring donations to appropriate organizations, and sometimes I volunteer my time, but it’s out of a general feeling that I need to help my community.
But I do find it far more pressing that I not be made to feel personally uncomfortable or unsafe. That’s not an intellectual commitment - that’s as immediate a need as water when parched.
I care about homelessness; I -! Care !- about that other stuff though.
And you are correct that they are correlated but not the same. I used to live across the street from a halfway house, and a block up from an assisted living facility. It was not uncommon for people housed and fed there to come out for the day, sit on sidewalks, pretend to be homeless, and go back “home” at the end of the day. I saw it daily. They exhibited all the things I’d want to eliminate, which a casual passers-by would associate with homelessness.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Sprengstoffanschl%C3...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_the_London_Undergro... [2] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/09/throwing-it-a...
The UK does reasonably well at "hidden" security features. Another type are "decorative" features -- like the word "Arsenal" outside the football club, or the ponds in front of the Scottish Parliament building -- which just happen to be in the right place and of the right strength to prevent vehicles crashing through.
Alas I cannot answer your question really, if regular old “drop a bomb in me and nobody will notice” bins are common in your locale it seems safe to assume that public lockers have not been removed due to safety concerns. If I had to guess I’d say they were not utilised/profitable.
The "efficient market in lockers" theory is not a null hypothesis. ITT, we haven't eliminated the "because homeless people use them" explanation for the widespread lack of public lockers.
Terrorists tend to strike a major targets, so you’ll definitely find a difference in security measure between downtown Chicago and say Peoria.
I believe one or both of these bombs explains why lockers were removed in NYC (and this may have led to other places removing them too).
[0] https://observer.com/2016/01/why-hasnt-washington-explained-...
The idea was to reduce the number of hiding/storing places for bombs and weapons.
Was the whole idea of public lockers at transport terminals just poetic license?
They may very well have been common at one point in train stations when people traveled that way more.
I also suspect though that, to the degree lockers were useful as a plot detail, they were possibly created when they weren't actually that common.
I know the Stockholm airport still has locker rentals.
The thing is, after the first few days, first week, you are not yourself anymore, your sleep is terrible, your thinking is beyond rational, beyond logical, every day is just searching for simple patterns for survival, for moments of peace.
Some people, not everyone, seem to think homeless can pull themselves out of it with enough resources. It doesn't work like that and sometimes it's not even for lack of motivation to not be homeless. You get caught in a web, it's a descent into someone not yourself anymore.
Sanders is not someone I would vote for in a primary but I am curious to see if he does become president if he tries to make a dent in not just reducing national homelessness in this country but preventing it in the first place which is an equally good idea if not even more important.
Yes, and if I might add to this, a place to shower and clean their clothes, and access to grooming services like haircuts.
I'm sure you've thought about all of this, but these are the things that I notice right away. I can tell a person is homeless (as in actually living on the street), in any context, in a fraction of a second based on subtle visual cues such as hair, their gait, the fit and condition of their clothes, and the extra things they carry. Tiny cues can add up to a striking impression even if the person is trying to hide them, and that's before I get close enough to smell the cigarettes and their clothing.
Clothing is, I believe, a solvable problem, but it takes more effort than simply throwing free clothing at them. Clothes have to fit and be at least visually clean, or else they can immediately identify a person as homeless. The bar here is low. America is swimming in clothing. Goodwill and ARC take in so much clothing that they're kind of picky, and readily throw away anything with even minor wear or damage. It certainly seems that some organization could find success in helping folks into clothing that doesn't showcase their poverty.
My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. My mother sews beautifully and clothes was a very big deal for most of my life. I spent some time wishing I could be an image consultant or fashion model. I still fantasize about starting my own clothing line and I recently took over r/ClothingStartups.
That background helped me pass for normal while homeless. I am capable of picking out clothes that work for me without trying them on. I was often mistaken for a tourist because I was clean and dressed casually.
But the kind of fit and social signaling and cleanliness you have in mind more or less requires housing. In practical terms, homeless people don't have the means to store clean clothes, change into a clean outfit daily, etc.
I didn't wash my clothes. I wore it for a week or three, acquired a new outfit, tried to shower if possible and threw the old outfit in the trash.
I didn't typically carry spare clothes. I typically only had the clothes on my back.
I've been back in housing for over two years. I still largely handle it the same way.
I'm in a hundred year old SRO. There is one washer and dryer for the whole building and it isn't especially clean and that's not a solvable problem because of the tenants in the building. There is one laundromat that I know of in town and it has limited hours. I'm not currently in a position to hand wash and hang dry my items.
I am still "under housed" and don't have my own kitchen and my fridge is currently dead and so forth. By some definitions, I would still be classified as "homeless", though it's vastly better than sleeping in a tent and I've always wanted to live in an SRO and it's been overall a terrific experience. Still, to have a normal job and dress like a normal middle class person for it would be challenging in my current circumstances.
I'm in the process of trying to remedy some of the issues with my unit. I'm waiting on my tax refund and when I get it I expect to replace the fridge, among other things. (Management offered me a used fridge, but I have a compromised immune system. It's not clean enough for my needs. They don't charge enough rent to cover luxuries like new fridges.)
Anyway, I do think about things like the hygiene issue. I wrote a piece about wanting to encourage hotel stays to help homeless people access showers more consistently.
But I really think we need to do things like bring back SROs and Missing Middle housing. Some things really can't be fixed while you are still unhoused. Trying to stay presentable in a "middle class person with a regular job" way is very challenging. I was only ever able pull off "Passes for a tourist on vacay, that must be why she's in sweat pants and a t-shirt."
People sleeping in their cars do have some storage. They may be more able than I was to address some pieces of this. But while living out of a back pack, there were limits to how middle class I could make myself look, in spite of having enormous personal strengths in the clothing/appearance department thanks to my mother and my personal background.
I thought about that as I wrote my comment. I can live out of a backpack for weeks, no showers, no change of clothes, scrounging for food. But I've only been able to do that while suitably "housed", whether couch surfing or in short term rentals. If I had to do that on the street, I'm confident everything would quickly go to shit.
I'm a big fan of housing-first in general, as long as it's supported with mental health care, and properly policed to keep units from becoming drug dens.
I read all your stuff btw.
It's not obvious to people how rapidly that unravels when you don't have routine access to normal middle class stuff. It's part of why I blog. A lot of what I experienced wasn't anything I could have ever predicted.
I found that after I was able to arrange one night a month in a hotel, it became vastly easier to pass for normal.
I got showered. I got a break from life on the street. I watched a little TV, something not available while sleeping in a tent and which is a common source of small talk for most people.
I went more than two years without a proper shower. My first hotel stay took two showers to get the dead skin off.
After that, I stayed occasionally in a hotel, but not once a month. I took baths instead of showers to soak the dead skin off. A shower wasn't enough.
But with monthly hotel stays, I no longer needed to soak the dead skin off. My feet stopped turning black. Cleaning up at sinks in public bathrooms in the weeks in between did a lot more for me than it did when it was all I had access to.
And I absolutely would not have ever sat down and tried to dream up "How many days a month do I need to be in a hotel to pass for normal?" This isn't a thought experiment that would have even occurred to me to try to pursue.
I only know this stuff because I lived it and that's how it went down, not because I would have ever in a million years tried to figure out "How many showers a month do I need to make cleaning up in sinks sufficient most of the time?"
It's possible other homeless could get similar results from a hotel stay once every six weeks, just as a wild ass guess.
Edit: it's also possible I'm guessing in the wrong direction. 0_o
This website [1] has locker systems which could go outdoors for between 6-20k from what I can tell. Certainly seems like a raisable amount.
I'd imagine you would need an area to set it up, the support of local government and possibly a local business or shelter to get the space for the installation. Then you need to raise the 20k. Then you need to work with the management software to make sure it supports this use case. Then you'd need to do the work of maintaining it, which would probably be non-trivial...
Are there existing charities that setup locker systems like these? Is there a way to do it profitably? Charities could make a limited number of lockers work, whereas profit could make many more.
Apparently it cost about 5000€ all-in, including installation, though manual labor is relatively cheap in Portugal.
That said, I'm sure there are extra costs (at least in volunteer time) keeping them up, and that's often disregarded by these feel-good articles.
* a discovery problem - I don't know which guys the marginal dollar will provide more than a dollar's worth back in human value
* an antagonist problem - There are actors intentionally muddying the waters so that spending the dollar will yield negative value
* a comparative advantage problem - These guys are not an efficient spend of money
And I must make these choices because a 40 year old shitting himself on Powell St. is really not more valuable than a 2 year old who will die of a disease unless I fund part of a doctor, and I have limited resources in which to choose who to help. And neither of them are more valuable than getting extra meat on my Chipotle. I know this because I think about that $3 sometimes when I'm ordering and I'd rather have the meat than give the $3 to help either of them.
This is both the most succinct and most “beware” statement about the homeless. You don’t know how correctable/systematic the hidden problems are, and some of them could explode into violence...
Of course, I'd be sure to follow the article's advice - they're looking for foreign students, and it's to tell you they're full if they don't like your looks.
I live in California so this is constantly top-of-mind.
I'm 37 now; if I became homeless, it would be much, much harder to get out of it.
Praise the homeless people for they are the most productive members of society! You think you are productive? hah! The homeless are working day and night! Their shift never ends! They produce more value than the rest of us combined!
How it works? I doubt you really want to know.
With a bucket, a sheet of plastic and some straw I can build a fabulous house. Without the bucket and the plastic it would take a bit more time. Give me a pile of bricks, some mortar, bit of wood and some roof tiles and ill build a house that looks from the outside exactly the same as any house build by a construction company. It wont take me 6 months. In the 14th century the roof tiles became mandatory because straw is a fire hazard if you cramp houses really really close together.
I'm getting to the point, wait for it...
There is plenty of space to build plenty of houses, it takes a bit of effort but it won't have to cost an insane amount of resources. We can plant the trees 20 years in advance if we kept our sanity.
While all that sounds like a lovely idea and it would certainly work in a loving and caring society - that is not what we have! It's a terrible idea!
The housing ponzi needs an artificial shortage. Its 30 k worth of bricks and labor and 500 000 market value. We need for this to go UP NOT DOWN. We have a lot riding on this housing ponzi! You are not seriously expecting me to get a job and work for my money - are you?
If anyone was to create a surplus in places to live it would do terrible things to our investments! It would harm the economy and the economy is more important than anyone in this neoliberal storm of poop.
Imagine how bad things would be if we didn't have a surplus in demand, if we didn't have plenty of homeless people, plenty of permanent guests sleeping on sofa's, plenty of hard working people living in tiny houses they can't afford!
Purchase power of minimum wage is racing down, people are expected to work flexible hours and rent is going up faster than you can say cul-de-sac.
Praise the homeless for no one works harder to keep the productive members of society down. We should all shake their hand and thank them for their contribution. Without them non of this would be possible.
Since wealth inequality is so extreme now globally, all labor slides into full-time and overtime. Some people look at the risk-reward value proposition of that, and correctly opt out. We label them homeless. But personally, I think of them as starving artists, freedom fighters and probably gifted. Some of the most dynamic people that I have ever met were on drugs, suffering with some form of mental illness like PTSD/ADHD/manic-depressive or one step away from living on the streets. Luckily they became computer programmers.
To a first-order approximation, homelessness is a measure of how authoritarian a society is. The choices are the $100k+ career at 40+ hours per week, menial labor at 50-60 hours per week, or homelessness. We pretend that there are 20 hour per week jobs that pay enough to launch a business, but of course that's all make-believe. It's not really even possible to work every other year, or have two people apply to the same job so they can alternate shifts. Systems of control lock us down by rents and medical bills and debts to the point that anything short of indentured servitude is not sustainable.
I'm seeing that it's nearly impossible to live off the grid in a medium-sized city in the northwest where people actively work to ban city camping and prevent giving tiny homes to the homeless. Surely it must be impossible in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. So I dunno, after a lot of trying to create some kind of free life for myself, after 20 years of struggle and poverty, I might just have to throw in the towel and get a job at a major corporation. I might be a slave then, but at least the system would provide for my basic needs.
This isn't the future I signed up for, and more and more every day I am coming to terms with the fact that the American Dream is probably dead. I've found the Office Space/Fight Club/Mr. Robot portrayal of the working world to be uncannily accurate. I actually enjoy earning a paycheck and working with people as it happens, but when burnout sets in and I finally find myself unemployed again, the 6 months of living expenses that I've saved after years of lost life doesn't feel like much of a consolation prize. The people who have it figured out are the sociopaths, able to skim income from other people's labor and rationalize it by calling it capitalism. But there is no future in hard work. And lately, no market for it either.
This is a garbage comment and I'm not sure I even believe half of it, but it felt real in the moment so I'm going to go ahead and just post it.
EDIT: In the spirit of offering solutions rather than dwelling on problems, I think that an answer can be found in the gig economy, sustainability and expanded consciousness. Maker communities with urban gardens and such might have enough strength in numbers to provide basic needs between the extremes of homelessness and the 9-5 job. I'm trying to move in that direction but the forces that be don't make it easy.
This is why we see so much homelessness in, say, Iran? I call BS.
In U.S., AFAIK, nobody prevents a person from starting their own community with mostly their own rules.
But the "free" homeless people you described instead prefer to leech on the streets built and maintained by the working people, paid by the taxes from the income, earned by everyone else in the country, who work their regular jobs.
Even if it is not a feeling of entitlement, that makes them do that, as described in another comment, it is simply stupidity, that makes them unable to recognize hypocrisy of their own actions.
If this were the case wouldn't retirees be a widely hated group? :)
I feel like this essay comes from much of the same spirit as your comment, but is a lot easier to stand behind: https://hermetic.com/black/the-abolition-of-work
This idea that a strong work ethic is noble is just another system of control that most people are never able to see beyond.
I don't have an answer yet, but I feel inklings that it lies somewhere along the vision of the 10 principles of Burning Man:
Radical Inclusion
Gifting
Decommodification
Radical Self-reliance
Radical Self-expression
Communal Effort
Civic Responsibility
Leaving No Trace
Participation
Immediacy