Engineer Converts Used Van into Mobile Laundromat, Offers Free Loads to Homeless
nbcbayarea.com
nbcbayarea.com
But how come there are so many homeless people in the richest country in the world?
Source: am American & formerly homeless
>> Powers saw a way to address a need in his community and share his faith in the process. A devout Christian, he wanted to shift from discussing the teachings of the church to living them out by helping others.
The California "Loads of Love" charity which this person seems to have founded http://www.loadsoflovesb.org/
How to make donations: https://www.networkforgood.org/donation/MakeDonation.aspx
Their FAQ re Tax: https://networkforgood.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150073...
"Network for Good issues tax receipts at the time of donations."
So ya, this is does seem to be a registered charity and donations are tax deductible.
Individual charity doesn't work at scale. Organized private charity doesn't work at scale. This is why the social security administration was established.
This is a question without any prejudice. I'm from another part of pale blue dot where the situation is exact opposite.
I don't want to reduce this complex issues to just one cause, but
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic
might help to understand at least parts of what we are seeing.
Given the numbers of homeless, obviously many do not. Not even for vets who risked their lives and gave their physical and mental health for their country.
Unless you redefine community to mean 'anyone within a particular geographic area' which renders the concept meaningless.
Source: have had a friend slide into homelessness. It was horrible for all friends and family, and probably worst of all for the one becoming homeless.
After you've elected to trust that individual one more time only to find the last remaining valuables you owned have been pawned for a fix.
If you stroll into homeless communities you'll see a pretty common thread: Addiction. When someone ends up homeless due to drug/alcohol abuse, there's often very little a family can do to (productively) help short of an ultimatum "Get Help or Get Out". Whether it's effective/right or not, many of those families feel they are taking care of them by giving them the choice of continuing to live the life they've chosen or accept help ... with a myriad of conditions attached.
People in poverty have difficulty accessing health care, and birth control goes along with that. Depending where you live, there might be a holy war being waged on free birth control. If your parents are homeless, you might be put in a foster home until you're old enough to be a homeless adult.
However if I were expecting to be homeless soon I would wish to be in Finland.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
Surely it is the other way about. Americans give to charity much more than Europeans as far as I can tell and volunteering and doing things like this engineer's mobile laundry seem much more common in the US. On the other hand governments in Europe (at least northern Europe which is the part i know most about) seem to put rather more effort into housing the homeless and making the lot of those without a job more bearable.
That’s not true. Or if it’s true then Canada doesn’t have those either.
> For the same reason there is little to no universal health care, welfare, retirement, workers rights, or higher education system — the US values short-term profit over basic humanity.
For many, going to school for 7 years to become a surgeon is motivated by the lifestyle/paycheck that being a good surgeon can offer. For many, having to pay for healthcare keeps them from using the services unnecessarily, and not getting care. In countries where universal healthcare exists, some people who need care wait in line for it. Neither are good outcomes. But summarizing an opposing political viewpoint with "Those guys are just dumb/evil" rather than trying to understand the complexity of all of the issues involved (even if the outcome is "good for you" but "bad for someone else" and being willing to weigh those two outcomes as equal with participants who have an equal right to their life/liberty/property) is one of the reasons we are where we are in America.
Being able to read and write helps and that seems to be best provided by universal primary education, which does seem to be provided as a right in the US (even though it is not guaranteed by the constitution).
Being healthy also helps and that seems to be best provided by universal free at point of use healthcare, which is not provided as a right in the US.
Why should you get one 'free' and the other not? After all the education also has to be paid for by someone else.
No workers rights, despite the same unions as other countries, legal protections and regulations? No higher education, despite the greatest concentration of attractive universities in the entire world? Do you actually believe your statement or was it made to ellict the emotional response I had?
If one deducts the fraction of GDP spent on propping up terrible regimes, it has even less to spend on citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
> But how come there are so many homeless people in the richest country in the world?
Unfortunately, it feels a lot like "it's someone else's problem to solve" ... unless the solution is complaining about others not solving the problem. Or that supporting "public policy", higher taxes and things "The Government Should Be Doing" is enough (or even a good idea)[0].
But it's so hard to do something ... it's not. Find a good church. Don't like religion? Find a good service organization. The church I attend, every single Sunday, directly pushes us to "go out into the community". This place does it differently, in some ways, than others. Rather than a top-down "here's the organizations we support" with leadership running them, they encourage members to "go out and do" and if what you're doing is working, they -- for lack of a better word, provide the marketing[1]. They'll provide financial support, too, but it's rarely needed. Out of that, we have hundreds of small service groups, many of which were founded a few hours after a Sunday service by a "someone who showed up that day".
There was a woman at my church who decided to load up on supplies and hop in her minivan driving around the worst parts of Detroit to hand underwear, toothbrushes, and food to drug-addicted sex workers a few years ago. I don't know the latest count, but they were running 8 vans of them within a few months and several volunteers came from the streets the vans were visiting. We have several volunteer run groups that operate like Habitat for Humanity, and we have a rotating shelter staffed with volunteers. There's plenty of ways to reach out to a fellow human being who's life you could be a part of and plenty of fellow human beings who need volunteers to help.
They're doing something right, for sure. Best I can tell is that they encourage us to "take ownership of the problem" and "lead by doing" -- so these groups are all run by people who "go to church on Sunday" rather than "Professional Christians(tm)". They don't worry as much about people going out and "doing something that'll make the church look bad". AFAIK, it's not happened in the 20 years I've been there despite the approach[2], and many of our volunteers don't look like your typical "Sunday Best Church Folks".
My apologies if this sounds like I'm scolding -- I'm am, but I'm no better than those complaining about "Americans Not Doing Anything(tm)" -- it's been a year since I've done any volunteer work and as I've gotten older, the amount of volunteering I've done has been less and less. In my 20s, I was much more involved, and as is typical -- kids/job -- I've made a series of excuses that have kept me from being more involved. I'm tired. I worked hard. I don't have the energy to volunteer. It's stupid thinking, really. I've never left a volunteer activity feeling anything other than awesome and filled with energy.
[0] If the extent of your support for the homeless begins and ends here, it's worth doing a bit of research to determine if your support is counterproductive, or -- worst case -- if the program in question exists to employ a bureaucrat rather than solve a problem.
[1] That sounds really wrong the way it's stated, but my church is a multi-campus large organization. The hard part of any volunteer activity is volunteers. Though external funding is sometimes needed, money is very rarely the problem -- getting people's time is. A huge number of people want to volunteer but want to help doing something that they're comfortable doing. When a church has as many service groups as ours does, there's something that fits -- the tricky part is getting that information out widely enough that you connect the volunteer with the job (and make it one-click to sign-up).
[2] There's no organizations dedicated to anything political/picketing/culture wars -- they don't operate that way. It makes them a little unpopular with the "Big Churches" but if the established folks (most of whom lead dead congregations) are upset and can't articulate the reasons, that's a pretty good indicator that we're doing something right.
The video also talks about external connections for power and water if it's available.
That said, he could easily have a generator rigged up to supply power. A lot of RVs have on-board washers and dryers, so the technology is widely available. If I were going to do something like this, I'd try to find dryers that heated with propane both for efficiency and to limit the electrical draw on the generator.
Seems like a good project anyway. This idea should be spread around.
I know homelessness is more than "houselessness", but it seems like a pretty simple problem to solve. Even considering that other states bus their homeless to Calfornia, fixing the 600,000 who sleep outside (and the 1.5 million who visit homeless shelters each year) doesn't seem particularly difficult.
Though obviously mobile laundromats are a complete waste of finite resources and absolutely not the way to solve homelessness.
One thing that _is_ actually simple is simply criticizing.
I would argue that a lot more good has been done by individuals that decided to "do something about it" that big government initiatives.
That’s why it’s much easier to sit behind a keyboard and make snide remarks about people who actually act.
Is charity making it easier for governments to shirk their responsibilities?
> clearly systemic in nature
Having been involved in charities, and having witnessed the destruction that a well meaning government program can bring, I'm not sure that even if charity is making it easier for governments to shirk their responsibilities that it would really be a bad thing. That's not coming from the position of "Big Government Bad(tm)" but rather a practical one -- at least as far as America is concerned, most of the money comes from Washington and it doesn't come without strings attached. It is the least efficient way to pay for something, and they are operating in a vacuum of information.
A (local) charity is in the community and knows what the community needs. The money is spent very efficiently, and there's not much of it to spend. They get taken advantage of less frequently, as well. Even injecting government into that situation breaks it. Once a large amount of money is a potential outcome, criminal activity is not far behind -- you see small organizations getting formed out of larger ones, spending 90% of donations on administration (spending all of that money on the appearance of being the right, small, charity ... because the real ones don't have the budget for lobbiests).
Doesn't the fact that there are systemic causes at the root of a problem means that trimming the branches is not an efficient manner of resolving the issue?
Note that I am asking this as someone who spends more than 1/2 of my life "trimming the branches."
Obviously, the way that government deals with systemic issues is highly flawed, but that is all tied up in the systemic issues that need to be resolved right?
> I would argue that a lot more good has been done by individuals that decided to "do something about it" that big government initiatives.
"It's amazing to me in a country as rich as ours", "In a city with the wealth of San Francisco", etc... Check your calendar. How many of us did something, last year, anything (beyond voting/picketing/"complaining") that directly helped this problem?
Hell, how many of us gave even $100 to an organization helping the homeless? How many of us even did the basic research to find a suitable organization to donate to (rather than just tossing that money at a charity run like a big government initiative)? There was a movement a while back to get people used to the idea of spending $4.00 for an app (you spend that much on a cup of coffee!). We have tons of government initiatives to help with poverty/homelessness. Upset that too much of our taxes are spent on war? Your donation is tax deductible. So tossing some money at a homeless support organization results in you indirectly re-balancing things. Less of your money supports things you don't and the money you've moved away from things you "do support" is being used more efficiently toward that support.
I did.
> How many of us even did the basic research to find a suitable organization to donate to (rather than just tossing that money at a charity run like a big government initiative)?
You may sneer at "big government". But the advantage of having an efficient government that does good work is people can simply throw their money at it and assume that things will be taken care of. By making everyone do research, it increases the barrier to help for a lot of people . Not everyone has the time or knows what to look for in a good charitable org.
Imagine if government health inspectors didn't exist and you had to rely on Yelp reviews and word of mouth to decide if a restaurant was clean enough to eat at.
> Your donation is tax deductible.
Only if you itemize taxes. Most renters do not. And it's a deduction to taxable income, not a tax credit.
> the advantage of having an efficient government that does good work is people can simply throw their money at it and assume that things will be taken care of
Unfortunately, what usually occurs is this large, resource-heavy (financially both directly and indirectly) organization becomes a really attractive target for people wanting to do things other than "help the homeless". And I'm not really picking entirely on government here. There are some very large charities that have made the mistake of attempting to centrally manage these sorts of assistance programs. It doesn't work as well as moving that money to local organizations that are already demonstrating their effectiveness.
> Imagine if government health inspectors didn't exist and you had to rely on Yelp reviews and word of mouth to decide if a restaurant was clean enough to eat at.
To be clear: I'm not saying taking away government inspections wouldn't result in things being worse than they are, today. I'm simply saying that given the choice between the two, I'd feel safer in a world with Yelp and no government inspections than the other way around[1]. I don't have data to back it up, and I'm one of those people that always looks up a place before we eat (my wife usually beats me too it, though). The "fun" stories I used to hear from my high-on locker partner about how he "got that large arm bandage" cooking at Ram's Horn... you don't want to know.
Outside of restaurants, I would trust a large number of positive reviews (assuming appropriate context) for a hair stylist who is unlicensed (hypothetically, since I've never really paid any attention to the funny looking document hanging by the mirror -- I assume I've never visited an unlicensed stylist, but I can't be certain) over a stylist with a license and no reviews.
There's a whole lot of services I'd be willing to ditch the government side for commercial options that didn't exist when the government option was created. I don't believe there's an adequate replacement for credentialing for doctors/surgeons, but -- even in those scenarios, if I have a choice, I'm going to research the hell out of that doctor -- the government-only solutions are helpful, but they're part of a broader set of data -- much of which are not/can't realistically be provided from the government source.
> ... taxable income ...
[0] And had tens of visible violations -- one of which wagged its tail, looked longingly at me and occasionally left a foul-smelling gift. We loved the place, were never sick, and we ate there twice most weekends for three summers (as did many local celebrities, which was one of the reasons we loved the place).
[1] I've put a little though to this one over the years ... Family who owned restaurants/personal/friends/family experience in food service. I have a sibling who was a C-Level exec at the company who's logo is on all of the equipment in the kitchen (I've even seen it on flatware) at practically every legally operating restaurant in the US (look at the soft drink machine for three letters in a circle -- they're one of those weird ubiquitous logos, like UL, that once pointed out, you see everywhere)
The costs involved here are a bottomless pit. That donation made me feel good, but if it helped even one person, it was only for a couple of months.
Housing in San Francisco is a zero sum game. Unless attitudes towards development and density can be changed, the only way to house 10,000 people is to outbid 10,000 others. It is hard for a charity to win that game.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
Our cost of living is high, especially considering surrounding areas, but $12,000 would be a dream budget for projects I've done. While it's hard for "a charity to win that game", there are things a charity can do that a business cannot.
The example that comes to mind was a nightmare project I did two days on. The story was the foundation was bad, we had a terrible spring, the basement started torrent-leaking revealing mold and other dangerous things (it was finished, to boot). The water was up to your neck when I saw it the first time. It took four weekends (and a few Thursdays for some of the teams), I believe it was high 4-figures, most spent a month before on environmental-related -- high cost even when the services are being nearly donated.
Outside of that, We had a master electrician and plumber, a licensed architect who owned a local survey company, many former builders, and between them got the cement company donated labour on with nothing more than a phone call and an explanation. This was all done for no real benefit to those providing the services -- this was a small church program that if you called their direct line would likely take several tries to find someone who even knew we were affiliated with them. Almost all of our weekend labour were folks who had jobs/owned other companies and attended my church on Sunday[0]. It was the most difficult job that I can ever remember working on. My favorite part is that all of the work "us inexperienced jackasses" (those of us, like me, who hobby in this stuff but haven't done it for a living) had everything we did pass inspection on the first go. Generally, everything did, but the project was delayed for a few weeks because the mold removal was incomplete and (I think) the sump Radon system needed a near re-do, and I believe the latter one was something we had to pay someone to handle, originally[1]
[0] That's not always the case -- our church doesn't do the whole "we only talk with Jesus People" thing. I remember because this specific case, the owner of the cement company (initially, uncomfortably, probably out of fear we'd be interested in Bible-Thumping him) let us know he is Jewish. He stayed 6 hours after his truck left, hanging off the side of the house nailing in boards for the roof repairs (he looked about 80, I'd guess he was 70+cigarettes). Incidentally, he saved us thousands of dollars because the roofing company just ... didn't show up, phone disconnected ... vanished into thin-air ... and he ended up getting the entirety of a two-day estimated job done with another man and his 20-year old son.
[1] ...and I remember this specifically because we were really frustrated. Ended up that one of our "former construction" guys took copious notes, showed up the next day/ripped it out and re-did it rather than bringing back the bozos who cost a fortune and did it wrong. Certain that wasn't legal, but it passed inspection and it works. But the piles of stupid was that there was one guy who inspected each of the various things and for whatever reason, they refused to send him here one time to do each of the 5-minute inspections all at once, like makes sense for everyone involved. It wasn't even his fault -- the lone inspector had no control over his own schedule!
In San Francisco there is no changing the numbers of people who can and can't get housing. Affordable housing work can only mess with their identities.
> It sounds like your community's affordable-housing problem is fighting the ravages of nature and entropy to build and maintain habitable structures.
Back when I was doing this frequently, the work was mostly centered around making homes livable/saleable that had problems the home-owners couldn't deal with (many, many cancer patients with weakened immune systems who couldn't live at home due to environmental toxins). We never touched the dangerous stuff, but after the folks in HAZMAT suits clear out, you're going to be hanging a lot of drywall, at a minimum. Often houses with these kinds of problems had several others that weren't found until the obvious problems were removed.
Reading over my responses, I'm a little disappointed at how frustrated some of them sound. While I am frustrated at folks who choose to complain rather than doing something. There's this thinking that "If I complain, then I'm putting myself outside of the group that's 'causing' the problem"...meanwhile the sentence often ends with "...in America!", where the person complaining is often located.
And, frankly, where I live -- charity, and government dollars would be better spent elsewhere.
[0] Like most who are "from Detroit", I live outside the city limits.
This shouldn't be surprising at all considering that the city is already spending money on anti-homeless programs, and the 10,000 people are the people who are homeless despite those programs. Housing those 10,000 is hard because the "easy" homeless people have already been housed, and the 10,000 left are the "hard" ones. In the same way, ensuring that your SaaS is up for 1 hour isn't really hard, but ensuring that your SaaS has less than 1 hour of downtime a year (99.99% uptime) is significantly harder.
My family member is a NYC social worker and there is a bit of nudging and winking when it comes to working with the homeless. His job is to get them off the street and out the shelter and into a home. Some of that can mean purchasing bus tickets to warmer climates. Since he can't actually fly out there and verify they have a "cousin in California" he has to rely on the client being truthful.
California has the unfortunate gift of being a coastal state with temperate, dry climate. Even if it was able to house all the homeless, more would show up because who wants to be homeless, wet, and cold when you can knock out the later 2 by moving to a warmer state.
Millions of people are unhappy at their jobs. If one could just "drop out", stop working, and be provided a decent home, enough food, and medical care some percentage of those unhappy workers would do it. People with homes and jobs actually resent homeless people, which, if you think about it, is a really weird reaction to have, eh?
I'm a Bucky Fuller fan since childhood, so I've talked to a lot of people about using technology to set up a kind of utopia (economic, not political) where everyone's basic needs are met, and often folks ask, "But who would pick up the garbage?"
There's a lot to unpack there. But the underlying assumption is clear: without the threat of destitution and vagrancy no one would do the unpopular or unpleasant jobs.
I could go on, I could cite Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents"[0], or talk about the Indian Wars et. al. and the tension between the New World and Old World cultures, the stigma attached to "going native", and the hideous efforts to remake indigenous people in the image of the colonist. Or we could talk about how mainstream culture tends to revile the "hippy", the "dropout" who just wants to be at peace and live in harmony with Nature.
Long story, really, but yeah, the bottom line is that we have the technology to make a kind of secular economic utopia nearly overnight, and our problems now are mostly psychological or social.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Disconten...
> Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-citys-spending-on-home... [2] https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/#:~:text=people%20are%20....
> easily solved with just a few extra dollars.
There are two problems: (1) I can't guarantee I can deliver on this promise, and evidence would suggest that it's not a promise any person or group of people can make and (2) well, there's a variety of reasons a lot of us wouldn't accept that but it almost always falls into the category of "I worked for that money, I should get to choose what's done with it"[0]
Sadly, a lot of government programs designed to solve this problem become "ways for the government to employ people". The motivation to solve the problem is missing -- even stabilizing the problem would reduce the (yearly increase to the) budget for the program, which will bring the unions out. After a while, we'll start fighting "in public" about the destruction of this "valuable program" but behind closed doors the argument is about not pissing off a special interest/lobbiest of some kind.
[0] Yeah, some of us don't want to admit it but if you can't put your money where your mouth is, it's a really good idea to find out exactly why that is. If you feel it's wrong to feel entitled to the paycheck you worked for, and feel badly giving it away to something claimed a "life or death" cause, there's a moral contradiction taking place.
So he should just throw up his hands and let the perfect be the enemy of the good?