Homeless turn overnight bus route into Hotel 22
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
I'm not saying that the adults deserve to be homeless, but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation? I can't even imagine how 10 year old me would have done in such a situation. I know kids are resilient, but it sounds absolutely terrifying.
According to a quick search, it is claimed that there are 1.6 million homeless children in America, with 1.1 million enrolled in public schools. That is insane. I can only hope that this number counts mostly children who were homeless for very short stints, and that most of them aren't doing anything like sleeping on a bus for 5 weeks straight.
To answer the obvious questions to follow, the family did try the two homeless shelters. The government ran homeless shelter was quickly abandoned, as it was a haven for rape. There was a non-profit, privately ran homeless shelter for women which did not have the same level of trouble, but they turned my mother-in-law away because she would not convert to their religious beliefs.
I'm not doing reporting this as some sort of pity party. My mother-in-law is a terrible human being and she made many poor decisions that resulted in her being in this situation. I just wanted to make it clear that five weeks on a bus is in no way an outlier among those 1.6 million homeless children.
The problem is that you'll never get everyone to agree that the government needs to be involved in fixing the situation, even though there is no other entity which can be relied upon to solve it.
It's gone from being politics to being religion: Socialism is Evil. It isn't just bad policy, it's Evil and therefore must not be compromised with, for all the same reasons you don't compromise with Satan Himself. The people who believe that will spin stories about how private groups will step up to solve all of the problems, even though they never have in the past, simply to prevent Evil, which they call Socialism.
The government has shown that it, too, cannot be relied upon to solve it.
I certainly don't believe that the reason there are homeless children in American is because of people yelling "socialism."
Cries of "police state" have not stopped the formation and growth of the TSA.
When the government wants to spend money on something it seems to find a way.
The problem is that you'll never get everyone to agree that the government needs to be involved in fixing the situation
A lot of things happen despite a lack of public support. Do you think the public is cheering for the government to send billions to Pakistan?
You don't need everyone to agree. There would be enough people behind it.
This is a matter of political priorities.
You might want to provide evidence to support this claim. Also, if that is the case, then to whom or what group does this problem fall into?
Or do you simply say it's unsolvable and go home to your comfortable bed at night?
> You might want to provide evidence to support this claim.
The evidence is that it hasn't.
Except governments in other countries have a better solution for it than the US government does. Denmark, for example, has a very low homelessness rate:
http://www.english.umd.edu/interpolations/3466
Here's some more statistics on homelessness. You'll need to divide by population to get percentages, which are the only useful way to present this data:
http://www.homelessworldcup.org/content/homelessness-statist...
As for the rest of your post: I'm not saying it's a majority yelling "Socialism". I'm saying it's a minority which has the power to, for example, shut down the government by blocking certain legislation because they think a health care plan created by the Heritage Foundation is Socialism.
So:
> When the government wants to spend money on something it seems to find a way.
Not if a minority within the government has found a way to rig the game such that it can make the rest of the party in control of the House of Representatives terrified of being primaried unless they back Ted Cruz.
Our system is full of checks and balances to prevent a majority from running roughshod over all of the minorities. The converse to that is that you do need broad (near-universal, by comparison to some other systems) support, or at least broad acquiescence, to institute major change. A well-positioned minority can halt things, even to the point of disaster, by digging in its heels far enough.
Sure. But they haven't solved it.
My main point being the the idea that government is the sole entity that can be relied upon to solve it, as claimed earlier post is false. At best they will play a role along with other entities.
I'm saying it's a minority which has the power to, for example, shut down the government by blocking certain legislation because they think a health care plan created by the Heritage Foundation is Socialism.
But what actually happened? The government was shut down briefly, then all went back to as it was. The GOP looked like even bigger fools. The AHCA is still the law of the land. What was blocked?
A well-positioned minority can halt things, even to the point of disaster, by digging in its heels far enough.
Yes, but my belief (clearly not argued well, I concede) is that many times things get halted because the majority has, for political reasons, decided to acquiesce, not because they lack the means to overcome the resistance of the minority.
This is not always a bad thing, but it suggests that even if the government, in the abstract, has the means to accomplish something in practice they cannot be relied on to do it, because of political self-interest (including, for example, being beholden to their campaign financial sources).
I presented my argument wrong. My position is that the government is the only entity that can be relied upon to solve it entirely, not the only one that can be relied upon to help solve it. Private entities are too small to institute the broad changes needed to solve this, as has been demonstrated in the past, when they had the chance and failed.
My complaint was against the people who are convinced that the government must not be involved in any of this at all, because Socialism Is Evil.
> But what actually happened? The government was shut down briefly, then all went back to as it was. The GOP looked like even bigger fools.
The GOP only looks foolish to the people who were against it to begin with. They look like Brave Freedom Fighters to the people who voted them in, and will vote for them again in 2014, simply because they stood up to the Black Muslim Fascist Socialist (who is Black, by the way).
> Yes, but my belief (clearly not argued well, I concede) is that many times things get halted because the majority has, for political reasons, decided to acquiesce, not because they lack the means to overcome the resistance of the minority.
If the non-Tea-Party majority of the GOP in the House decided to risk being primaried en masse they could, indeed, kill the Ted Cruz contingent. I agree with you there, sure. But that's an extremely hard road to follow; it's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma, something right out of a game theory textbook, and politicians are trained to be risk-averse. (Which, in other scenarios, can be a good thing.)
> even if the government, in the abstract, has the means to accomplish something in practice they cannot be relied on to do it, because of political self-interest (including, for example, being beholden to their campaign financial sources)
And here is where I disagree with the Libertarians (including the Tea Party, which are Libertarian on this issue): The Libertarians say that if the government isn't perfect, it can never be part of the solution. I say that if the government isn't perfect, it's time to improve the government.
We already did agree that the government needs to fix the situation. As a result we have the foster care system which will provides homeless children with housing and care. As far as I'm aware, no remotely mainstream politicians advocate ending this system.
I get that you want to bait people into a debate about socialism. But if you want to argue for a change in policy, you need to do more than just criticize your ideological opponents (who don't disagree with you on this matter); you need to actually delve into technical details.
Yes, they do. The ones screaming about Socialism damned well do disagree with me on this issue.
(Granted, I'm under the impression that these systems suck. But it's not as if there is no effort to care for the children.)
We are the product of a mindless evolutionary process, and for the most part societies also take shape mindlessly.
> but can't everyone agree that no child should be in this situation?
Prioritising basic guarantees of well being, above people living in the absurdly precarious situation described, above endless growth and winner-take-all game playing, is actually asking a lot of this world.
Well, yes. Look at the last sentence:
As many as 3.5 million people experience homelessness in a given year (1% of the entire U.S. population or 10% of its poor), and about 842,000 people in any given week.[36][37] Most were homeless temporarily. The chronically homeless population (those with repeated episodes or who have been homeless for long periods) fell from 175,914 in 2005 to 123,833 in 2007.[38]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Stat...
The people who put these statistics together seem to have an interest in bucking up the numbers. I'm guessing "homeless" could include all manner of things like switching jobs and so being without an apartment for a few days.
IMO it's a disgrace that this situation exists, but if she has good grades and nobody has figured it out yet, her dad isn't some sort of nut and is taking care of her. They will get through it. She's better off on the bus that rolling the dice with some foster situation.
I'd see the same faces night after night. Some were grumpy, years of living on the streets having turned their faces and attitudes to weathered stone. Some were friendly; willing to chatter, unbowed by what the fates had given them. I'd say hi, but not much else; we didn't have much in common -- my ipod and sidekick were very out of place for them.
There were routines, ways to keep their semi-warm, if bumpy, beds. People getting off at Harbor to transfer to the 43 bus. Long bus line there, could get lots of uninterrupted sleep. People getting on at Harbor; they'd done a round trip, needed to change to the 60 so they could get to the 57 for another good trip, another few hours of sleep.
It saddened me. Couldn't do much about it. I donated when I could to shelters, even when people in my social circle would question my sanity for it. "Fuck you, got mine" being the mantra of entirely too many. After all, this was a county where a light rail system was vetoed because of fears that "those" people would have too much mobility and become visible in areas where they obviously didn't belong.
Unfortunately, a few years back, the Powers that Be decided to cut even that most slim of safety nets. Budget cutbacks, no need for busses in those wee, cold hours. Regardless of the passengers inconvenienced, regardless of the people thrown even deeper into misery. Regardless of people working those late nights. Having a soul is too expensive in times of austerity.
explain.
No one's willing to gives these guys work.
Welfare in America was designed to "help poor single moms" at a time when most poor single moms were widows and intentionally having a baby out of wedlock was a huge taboo. The very framing of it changed the social contract and actively undermines the social fabric. It has helped foster an atmosphere actively hostile to fathers and has single handedly all but put an end to the practice of "shotgun weddings." In Europe, programs are more generally designed to help women (like maternity leave), help children, help families -- not POOR women, not POOR children, not POOR families.
America requires you to be a failure before you qualify for assistance. Therein lies the problem. It actively creates a culture of failure and too many broken, shamed people.
It's a terrible system. Just terrible.
But I don't really want to discuss this at length tonight.
Later.
I am really disgusted how we let people fall this far.
We should all be ashamed.
The comments on that article are even more disturbing but I am going to assume it is people trolling because they are in warm homes with computers so they feel comfortable being asses.
However, I think there's a case to be made that startups can become an important part of solving these problems: they rake in money from wealthy sectors of the population, they're usually quite high-margin, and they are headed by small, smart, effective groups of people, who could make the decision to engage in Effective Altruism with their proceeds.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing more for the world's problems than any little start-up aiming to help people track their dogs' sleep-cycles--but it could have been started way earlier, when Microsoft was way smaller, and still be having just as much of an impact--if it had been the whole organization on-board, instead of just a private hobby of the founder.
(Really, any company could join in on this at any point, but the more bureaucratic and self-sustaining the business culture has become--which usually happens proportionally to scale--the less likely it is to happen. Far easier to convince a few guys in their garage that this is their end-goal-after-the-end-goal, rather than to convince a company already making big money that they should reorganize their corporate vision to doing good.)
Well, there are outfits like YC's Watsi which, while small, are looking to make a difference. And just yesterday the guy behind this said he'd be sending his profits to Watsi:
buy.startupnotes.org
So perhaps there are ways of using the startup mindset to create outfits that can help with social problems.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine a Watsi-esque startup that was an AirBnB for (rigorously screened) homeless people and/or families, i.e. trying to scale what this LA lawyer did (giving his house to a homeless family for a year):
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lawyer-house-homele...
It's not just startups -- businesses tend to focus on earning money. I don't know if we can realistically expect private industry to take an interest in social or economic problems. At the lowest level, there are founders trying to choose a niche that gets them from debt to break-even as quickly as possible; at the highest level, you get into transnational corporations which act only in their own interest.
I would be happy if Apple or Google were to dump their excess billions into social welfare or government reform, but it is vanishingly unlikely.
Many companies choose to make marginally more profit by moving production to 'low cost markets' rather than manufacture here. I believe firmly if you make your product overseas it should cost some amount of money in duty to bring your product back to the United States, ideally about (or maybe more than) the difference in cost between what it would cost to make your product here and what it costs to make it there - is it an easy to implement solution? no. But its the right thing to do.
That said, I believe that rising transport costs will eventually solve this problem for many types of goods, probably within the next 10-15 years or so.
Give me a break -- that's some nonsense PC excuse to mask a decision purely driven by profit.
If choice of production locations is driven by concern for our brothers and sisters in the developing world, why aren't we making stuff in India? Or Liberia? Or Bolivia? And why are we generally operating in a model that shifts liability for things like pollution and labor problems to local partners?
This kind of selective altruism, where you care about other Americans so much that you'd make comparatively marginal improvements to their lives instead of making drastic improvements to the life of a foreigner, is the moral equivalent of racism.
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/11/21/hong-kong-citizens-l...
Which is not a good way to live, but much much better than riding a bus.
Zoning and fire codes and whatnot means this may be illegal here. But really I think people here are more comfortable with homelessness than allowing uncomfortably affordable housing to be built.
it is what "we the people" through our elected representatives use to keep unwanted (i.e. weak/ill/less fortunate ones) out. Shame.
>fire codes
this obviously a necessary and what is most important - pure technically solvable thing for minimum amount of money.
We don't have to go for extreme HK approach. A city like PA, MV, Sunnyvale could easy build on a single-family size lot a shelter that would take a busload of homeless. Considering that MV (San Antonio/El Camino) and Sunnyvale (near downtown) have just had huge redevelopment projects going so fitting a couple of 10-20 bdrm appartments somewhere on the back alley (so it wouldn't offend eyes and noses of our sensitive citizens) would be noise for the projects' cost.
If we would just provide adequate shelter, then we wouldn't have to worry about offending our noses.
Or it's what we the people, through our elected representatives, use to keep the strip club and petroleum refinery from opening across the street from the elementary school.
It's not black and white. Zoning laws are a way for the people in an area to have a say about how their community is developed. That's both good and bad.
Anyone know of any examples?
People paying to sleep on a bus clearly shows the problem here is ridiculously bad.
I would argue that it's difficult to determine if the problem is worse, better or the same. The best intentioned efforts sometimes go off the rails -- homeless people might prefer buses, because they are safer, cleaner and more comfortable than shelters.
SF is doing a massive underground dig for a subway line. I often wonder: how difficult would it be to create some more room down there, and let the homeless just pitch a tent or crash for the night? But that would solve the shelter problem, which isn't that hard. It's the other facilities that are needed, which make the problem intractable.
With a little bit of money, this problem of secure safe sheltered housing could be solved, even if all the other problems leading to homelessness could not. As you say there are often other issues leading to the lack of a stable life which cannot be easily solved.
Just as an example, we have sheltered housing round the corner from me in London for the homeless in a normal house - people have their own rooms, and it works, even if it doesn't solve their other issues. People seem to stay a few years then hopefully move on to a more stable life, I think that's the idea anyway. The provision here is inadequate as in the states, but it can be done with more money.
... and therein lies the problem. I know my evidence is anecdotal, but: there have been many cases here (in SF) of such security guards actually running protection rackets for drug dealers and participating in associated criminal activities.
Look: I know that if you throw _enough_ money on a problem, you can mostly solve it (or mitigate it). If we had $1MM to spend per homeless person, I'm sure we could put them up in top-notch places with full care. But then the ~7000 homeless people in SF would eat up the entire budget, leaving $0 for the rest of the city.
I wish there was something I could personally do.
Some homeless people avoid shelters even if there are space because they are frequently giant nests of disease and violence. Besides catching some rather unpleasant diseases and pests, your odds of getting stabbed increase dramatically.
So you'd have to pay for hygiene, health, and security expenses well above and beyond the norm. And that's just if you want to pursue the "containment" side of housing the chronically homeless.
If you want to pursue the "rehabilitation" side it gets even crazier. A large portion of the population suffer from severe mental health problems that prevent them from any meaningful integration into mainstream society, and mental health care ain't cheap.
That said I do believe it should be done, but it isn't "oh yeah just levy a tiny tax" territory.
Homes with lock, bathroom, AC/Heat, kitchen, bedroom, living/dining area, and food.
I predict 50-70% of the issues disease and violence would go away if they had homes and not shelters.
A security,sanitation crew could probably bring this disease and violence down even further.
I don't think there is any architecture that coders or startups can bring to help this problem overall. I would suggest private charity and learning to identify those who need and truly want help in your personal spheres to be a greater benefit than concocting a grand plan to save everyone.
You also need to work on outreach -- letting people on the streets know that there is a place they can go to get help. Social services departments tend to not be nearly explicit enough in helping get people to the right sorts of help they need; additionally, a lot of social workers are overworked and underpaid, which leads to a good amount of burnout which further exacerbates the problem.
Saying we need more housing shows a misunderstanding as to why this problem exists. There are a lot of things that need to be done before, and concurrent with, housing in order to fix this problem. Otherwise, you'll end up just whitewashing the situation.
no, what you end up with is homeless people having a chance to sleep under the roof whenever they want and for whatever long they want (why shelters kick people out on the street every morning? At least why not provide the homeless with a fixed guaranteed bed every night and a locker to keep her/his stuff?)
http://santacruz.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/t...
Linked from that article: http://www.unitedwayla.org/home-for-good/
But if they could keep their shit together well enough to navigate that system, they would probably just get a job.
The nice thing about the Blue Line is they generally don't make you get off at O'Hare. You can doze until the train goes back downtown. That means you can get a 2+ hour sleep in a round-trip between Forest Park and O'Hare.
Most of the formally homeless people I know are now in the food industry. That is because at the shelter I worked at they would rotate who cooks the meal, so all homeless 'in the program' learned to cook, and now they all work at the cheesecake factory.
Which pays enough to live comfortably in my hometown. Don't know how viable it is here in the valley, though, with both higher expenses and more competition.
Remember you will need to start from the ground up. "To start the computer -- that machine in front of you -- press the button that is right there"... then, in about a year, perhaps you could teach them to code.
Look at this guy for example: "NYC Homeless Man Learns To Code And Builds App In Four Weeks" http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2013/09/27/nyc-homeless-man-lea...
Want to help? Make a company, hire people at the bottom who need help getting their sons and daughters out of shelters and to school on time at 7:48 am with a full breakfast in them after a good night's sleep. Keep your company going by providing excellent and valuable service to your customers. And when your janitor invites you to his daughter's middle school graduation, put on your best suit and go. Just because a man has darker skin, tattoos, a shaved head, doesn't want to talk about his past, and clams up with a frown and a thousand-yard stare when discussions get heated at the office, doesn't mean he's spending his pay on drugs and hookers. He's probably thinking that his girlfriend needs him to keep his job so he can make the car payment and the rent and buy groceries so he can feed the three year old at home that's watching Curious George right now.
I am actually saying to this person: "go ahead and help out there". I have shown computers to people who couldn't figure out how the damn mouse work!
So no, most of them probably can't.
It makes me wonder the thorough and complete disconnection from reality that much occur for someone to suggest this sort of thing seriously.
I've noticed that techies have a tendency to drift into absolutist thinking, probably because we're so isolated from mainstream society, so our brains, being the wonderful bayesian-esque learning machines they are have relatively a relatively small sample of non-diverse data on the subject. And the abstract world we work in is artificially absolute. And maybe it's partly the type of person that's drawn to this field.
Which is just a complicated way of saying that we're often really crappy at modeling the real world in our heads unless we've forced ourselves to get out there and gather some experience.
Please god let this have been sarcastic.
Getting a programming job is nice in theory until nobody will hire you. Programming freelance is a nice idea in theory until people on Odesk take your work and disappear. Bootstrapping a startup is a nice idea until you realize you don't have a good idea for one.
I'm ill, got fired from a tech support job I loved because of it, and have tried several times to support myself with coding from home. If I didn't have a loving wife who works hard to provide barely enough to pay rent and have decent health insurance, I might be homeless now. If I didn't have a home or own my own computer I would have even less of a chance.
There's a disconnect between the imagined reality where skill and effort instant translates into wealth and the actual reality where luck or the generosity of others is required.