Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I used to volunteer at a clubhouse for the mentally ill, a place where people could get food, play pool, take classes on computer skills, find employment, etc. My efforts were relatively small, but due to the fantastic management of the place, everything I did was magnified; fixing an old PC meant another 20 people might've been able to learn the skills they needed to find a job. It's been many years since then, but it's what I hold up as a good example of the sort of lever you can use in volunteering, and I just don't see an analogue for helping the homeless.
What am I missing? How can I help?
You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like:
- cleaning crapware off computers
- removing spyware/viruses and installing antivirus
- fixing email issues
- networking printers
- answering questions about Excel, Word, and so forth
--
If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families.
My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.
I think we have a tendency to want to use our Special Talents to help people, when that's not always the most effective thing to do. For example, I prefer building websites for non-profits any day of the week to running anti-virus, but that's often not nearly as helpful as just upgrading everyone's copy of Internet Explorer and removing all the toolbars (speaking from first hand experience here; I've done both). Also, if you only have a day or two to offer, you need to be realistic about what you can finish. No one benefits from work half-done, and everything needs maintenance.
So instead of waiting for the perfect storm of Your Skills meets The Perfect Charity, just go down to the office of a charity you care about and offer to help with IT stuff. Its not glamorous, and you might not self-identify as an IT person, but you'll be more able to help than you might realize.
You seriously won't believe what you'll find. For example, new laptops purchased from a big box have so much crap starting up that they make the laptop run poorly. It might seem obvious to you what programs should be uninstalled and easy for you to do it, but that's not true for other people.
Just email them and say you'd like to setup a chair in their office X day(s), all day, and anyone with any computer problems should come see you and you'll do your best to help, no job too small. I think you'll find your offer well received and useful, but there's certainly no harm in testing it out.
As a computer person, you're in a unique position to help and you can have a big impact. Don't dismiss this idea so easily!
Volunteer work in general is mostly about spending some of your time to get a good feeling for yourself, and advertising the charities in question. Basically everyone who haves a profession of any kind gets the best ROI in charity for their time by working, and donating the money earned doing so. This is abstract and feels less like helping people, but if your purpose really is to help and not purchasing happiness for yourself, it's what you should do.
Homelessness is a complex problem but if you want to help that child, the second best bet is to help her parents. Help with whatever problems they have, help with overcoming racial bias, mental illness, drug addiction, poor cv, whatever.
The first best bet is of course to pay for her scholarship to a boarding school. which rather stuffs her baby sister. Complicated.
I assume you are some kind of fairly well paid professional -- work an extra three hours a week and donate the extra money to e.g. a food pantry. You will do them a lot more good than spending those same three hours doing unskilled labor for them.
Has GiveWell done evaluations of programs to end homelessness?
The volunteering doesn't benefit the organization so much as it benefits oneself, and by extension society at large by removing one more potential spigot of hateful nonsense.
He took the time to set up a very simple website to register "runners" for the event ($25 is asked per person, but not everyone pays, obviously), and got the permission from the city to have a few police officers make sure participants weren't run over. Truth is, it is more of a community event almost like a parade, where some people wear turkey hats, dress up their dogs in costumes, and everyone has a little fun Thankgiving morning before everyone overeats later in the day. But if you want to run 5k you can. Most walk.
In any event, that first year a few hundred people attended. This year, it's estimated that over three thousand people participated. You can do the math for the ticket sales. Several of us volunteer our time to support this annual event now (I do the postcards & posters). This year we even received generous corporate sponsorships to further reduce overhead costs.
It's only once a year, so it isn't a huge time drain. But the impact is incredible and does help a lot of people in need. If almost every neighborhood could do this...
In my experience with a few charities whose websites I've been brought in to rescue, they're often left in disarray after they hired a well meaning but inexperienced developer who they were introduced to through personal connections. This works well initially, but becomes costly to maintain - both in terms of financial cost and managerial time spent overseeing the project.
If you can commit to either a monthly check-in to keep the website fresh, or to helping them build a more sustainable workflow so that they can easily update their own content, that could have a huge ROI for them in terms of fundraising, finding volunteers, and, perhaps most importantly, reaching the people who need their help.
As it relates to homelessness, many homeless people have access to the internet via a mobile device or library. For these people, an intuitive website can be the best way to connect with charities and receive their aid. Many charities still don't have responsive sites, so they're essentially cut off from reaching the mobile population. I think the ROI on that alone would be a great place to start.
If you do this you could also work with one of the homeless charities and explain what you are doing so that they can help provide support. Helping at a soup kitchen is admirable, however that doesn't solve the problem of needing somewhere secure, safe and stable to live.
What can be done- what is the right mix of social policy and tough love? Clearly homeless drug users shouldn't have 8 kids- but how can this be prevented? Should we take away children from all homeless or drug addict parents as soon as they're born? How do other civilized countries handle this situation?
It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.
And I think the solution is raise the minimum wage and set a long term plan for a sort of guaranteed minimum income / negative income tax. Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-c...
I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes, but that didn't include state tax, either income, property, or sales tax.
I'm obviously estimating, but when I look at which is more likely, someone misunderstanding tax brackets, or someone paying an insane amount of property tax in a state that doesn't exist, the first choice seems more likely.
I said "I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes."
The GP might be counting all their payroll deductions as kinda a "tax" depending on how you look at it. It doesn't matter, I just pointed out you didn't include state taxes.
That's a bit of a cheat, though, since "taxable income" is the number you get after accounting for all the politically contrived deductions and exemptions. As a percentage of my total income it's more like 25%, and if I also don't include FICA (since that's just the government holding onto my money for me until I'm old, right?) it goes all the way down to 12%.
That said, 25% is the reality, although it does feel like 40% sometimes.
You clearly didn't read the whole article. This particular family inherited $40k but spent it on heroin. The naivety of that Atlantic article is astounding.
I think New York City has done an absolute ton for this family. This girl might have done okay, except her mother encourages her to fight her peers (and the mom picks fights with store clerks in front of her children). That is ultimately going to be her downfall, and I am not sure what the city is supposed to do.
Dasani's story is sad and it happens far too often. For whatever reason there are plenty of people (like the parents in this article) who will fuck up every chance that you give them.
Being from a crime-ridden, poor city I have to see this every day.
I wonder how much of this has to do with scale. Americans often look to European countries as models of what governments should do, but I think we often forget that most of those countries have smaller populations than New York City[0]. And, if I can vaguely trust what I'm reading, many of the larger countries have poverty issues that are not unlike those of the U.S.
So, your 40% tax rate is used to combat the issues of ~313 million people across wildly different situations. I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues, the government could do a lot more to combat poverty. But, NYC only gets a piece of the pie, and the federal government needs to figure out how to help the homeless in NYC as well as the homeless in Washington, DC, and Chicago, IL, and.....
Given that, I tend to think there is not a technocratic solution to poverty in the U.S.--that is, it isn't just that we haven't quite found the proper program, or implemented it properly. Homelessness and poverty have been around for a long time, and while during some periods, some governments may have done alright in dealing with it, no one is ever going to turn a knob and make poverty magically disappear. That's not say we shouldn't try, but we also need plenty of organizations that simply get out there and provide basic help for the homeless (food, shelter, etc).
[0] I'm making a broad generalization, yes.
NYC has an income tax on top of state and federal income taxes. It's based on NYS taxable income. For example, at $65,000/yr you'll pay $2,047 + 3.648% of 5,000, for a total of $2,229.4[0].
0. http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/nyc_tax_rate_sche...
a good start would be to find ways of eliminating "poor taxes" (i.e. the myriad ways in which poor people end up paying more than rich people for the same goods and services), and to replace intrusive criterion-based aid programs with simply giving the poor money (something that studies have proven to be more effective), possibly by way of a negative tax bracket.
Maybe the problem isn't the money involved, but the methods involved. After all, they say that to repeat the same actions and expect different results is a form of pathology.
For example according to this table Germany spends 27.4% of GDP on welfare (excluding education), while the US only spends 14.8% of GDP.
I now feel very sorry for Dasani, and am more sure than ever that I won't be spending time in New York. If that was the point of the article, then well done.
The question most New Yorker's should be asking is, how do the people who run this facility (Audburn) have jobs? How do the people the report to allow it to happen and if they do, they why are they employed? Having been around some big city "care" its really simply, the bigger the government the less it has to care and the more people that slip through the cracks. Too many programs competing for the same dollars, too many programs with their own rules they barely serve anyone, too many programs for those who need help they have to spend an inordinate amount of time applying to each.
I am quite sure the living conditions don't help the outlook of her parents and in part keeps them down looking for releases. Yet for all the billions spent to take care of the poor it makes you wonder, where is it all going?
The poor conditions have to do with the budget constraints, which the GOP is actively pushing for.
Usually there will be some outrage over a small sum of money being used inappropriately. Benzes for welfare queens for example. The politicians will do something about it by putting in more checks. A few scammers will work the system. More checks are put in place. Ad infinitum. A few years later 50-80% of the budget to help the poor has gone into making sure they use the aid for what we deem appropriate.
This is part of why the arts scene there is so vibrant: "starving artists" have always been able to get by in New York in a way that they couldn't elsewhere.
(Though even they've gotten squeezed in modern times: Roger Ebert quoted John Malkovich saying back in 1989 that "to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can't afford to starve there anymore." http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/slaves-of-new-york-1989)
Putting living there aside and just looking at visiting, though: if you never visit NYC, you're missing out on one of the great urban experiences the world has to offer. If you're at all interested in the things cities have to offer, it should be a bucket-list destination.
I don't know about "great place to be poor," but yes, it's a great place to be if you're rich. I have a friend who used to live there, and he said that based literally on your income alone you will get invited to parties and be able to make friends with other rich people. The place is basically the epitome of rich people wanting to associate only with other rich people.
While the statement makes some assumptions, I do think that NYC provides many more services and fallbacks for the very poor that you don't find, say, in Appalachia.
The linked article presents a quite bleak existence, but many of the problems it brings to light are that the services the city provides are of low quality, whereas there are so many places where those types of services don't exist at all. Rural poverty in America can be, from what I understand, far more persistent than most urban poverty.
The fact is that NYC will always have a ton of poor people. It's almost guaranteed by virtue of its providing subsidized housing, etc, that all the poor from the surrounding areas will migrate to NYC.
Just to take one small example, De Blasio talks about the two New Yorks, but meanwhile he took a lot of money from the large taxi medallion owning companies, and is threatening to close down the new apple green outer boroughs taxis. That's a program that unequivocally targets the "other NY".
I agree. He's a strong leader who didn't start doing everything "for the poor" and instead focused on making the city strong and beating back the criminal element that ruined it.
That's never popular with the self-pity/white knighting crowd (who seem to have discovered HN, alas).
Okay, not to victim blame, but eight children when her parents can't even support themselves?
how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?
If the point of a system is process then you have the classic "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the bureaucracy" situation. At some point you need to look at output.
Each of those children, knowing only their own lives, may grow up to have n-more children that they can't afford. Is it suddenly their fault, or is there a bigger, vicious cycle of poverty at play here?
The blame lies with the society that refuses to help impoverished children break the vicious cycle. Most of the people who deride the need for these kinds of services have never even exchanged words with somebody that poor, let alone been in that situation themselves. They have no idea.
Open that door and you get a whole world of ugly answers and precious few good and/or socially acceptable answers.
edit: s/Chile/Child
If you bother to actually ask the child here she will tell you she'd rather stay with her parents and family then have better material circumstances with others.
That said, in spite of my (probably uninformed) opinion, the courts in New York think that this family is better together in this shelter, so what do I know anyway?
It's really more that economics doesn't properly serve as a predictor of human behavior (news at 11! ;-))
Your options for dealing with the consequences of those choices are limited by both the lack of preferable alternatives and the need to act with humanity in enforcing them. If you throw the kids into the care system, it's not clear they're going to do any better.
As for stopping people making those choices in the first place, I don't think people who view it as not the parent's fault really disagree with you there. But how?
Making a good choice with respect to employment and the law and so on, and sticking to it, requires that you be a certain kind of person. You need the ability to draw motivation from distant goals, the abstract knowledge to see the path to the goal in the first place, it requires - to a certain extent - that others around you share those qualities, it requires self-control to deny yourself short-term rewards.
And if you don't have those things, you can't make those choices - at least not to start off with. The choices we make are made within the context of our lives, and our beliefs about those lives and where they can be going. What sort of choices would you make if you had their capabilities and their beliefs?
You have to make smaller choices, that make you more the kind of person for who those choices would make sense and be practically achievable. And you have to see those smaller choices making you happier, having a positive effect on your life - to try and develop some sort of self-confidence and motivation.
That latter part is a very complex problem that impacts areas of life beyond just homelessness. It's no particular surprise that unemployment, teen pregnancy, low educational outcomes and so on tend to group together. They're all influenced, to lesser and greater extents, of to be somewhat pithy for a moment, 'Not having your shit together.'
Well get your shit together then.
Yeah, okay, how do we create an environment where that's gonna happen? Given that choices determine the sort of person you'll become and that determines your later choices, early intervention seems likely to be a part of it - perhaps through improving education to the poor. Maybe breaking up communities of homeless people and rehousing them into richer communities so they have better chances of falling within catchment areas of good schools - and aren't subject to a culture of generational poverty.
I don't know, those are just a couple of things. But, however it's done the basic act of assigning blame seems largely immaterial. The world is what it is, people make the choices they make. What matters is that people are suffering - and what's important is what can be done about it within the bounds of compassion and practicality.
I grew up poor, although not as poor as her. I know how frustrating and difficult it is for talented, ambitious children. I got lucky, but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and nearly did.
But here's what worries me, and should worry lots of people. Call it arrogance, but I firmly believe real progress in our society is made by those top few percent with both the talent and ambition to do something new, something dangerous and important. Most people either can't or won't. So when society wastes one of them in the ghetto, it hurts all of us.
However, for those with in demand, high value skills like people HN, I suggest you focus your time on using those skills effectively. You can do more good by just earning more income and donating money to good charities than donating your time.
To illustrate this point, consider this extreme case -- what if a young Steve Jobs had poured extra energy into serving soup at a local church to the homeless and had not gotten Apple off the ground? Yes, he would directly help hungry people. However, he has created so much wealth by forming Apple that not only does he have far more money that he could give away, but he's also created an entire company of employees with more wealth that they could also choose to give to charity.
Especially when it came to his illegitimate children. As much as I dislike Microsoft, Gates has done a billion times more for the poverty-stricken than Jobs ever did. Please do not hold Jobs up as some epitome of philanthropy. He was absolutely not, at least publicly.
Does anyone know of other places in the US that has taken this approach to poverty and what the results are? I am genuinely interested in understanding how "empowering the poor" works in the US. I know there are several reported successes with micro-lending to the poor in other countries, but I wonder if such go-getter mentality exists in the American society.
The author of the article seems upset at the city government for their finger-wagging approach toward forcing the homeless along some path to success, and I would just add that when winter comes around and people still aren't moving up your ramp to success, it's time to err on the side of charity.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/neediest...
Something like the mentioned shelter in the article would not survive a single day under inspection. If a landlord would rent (or let people live in) such a house, he would immediately 1) have all people taken out by government and 2) find himself in jail or with hefty fines. I wonder why NYC let this shelter open despite dozens upon dozens of complaints!
France/Great Britain, in contrast, are not very favorable target countries: France has a strong nationalist/right-wing extremist political movement (Le Pen's Front National), and Great Britain, while rich, is not covered by Schengen agreement and excepted from a lot of EU regulations - so it's both difficult to get into, and stay in.
1) http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/arbeiterstrich-in-muench...
2) http://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/aufstand-geschaeftsleute-geg...
3) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeiterstrich
4) http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.im-hauptbahnhofvi...
5) http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/tid-34337/armutszuwanderun...
These all deal with the situation in Munich, but it's the same in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and other German cities.
To truly describe complex issues, readers need the ability to both get a high-level view of the story and drill down to details and smaller narratives at times. Along those lines, I'm not sure why primary source material (raw transcripts of interviews, unpublished photos, links to source material) aren't included in even short reports by default.
In my mind, complex stories should be reported in a format similar to a small, mostly self-contained wiki where more details are linked or hidden by default.
The lack of innovation here surprises me because the news media is starving for reasons for people to consume their content. Involved, wiki-style reporting would be very hard to rip off.
I would've loved for the article to have been followed up with a "here's how you can help" - it seems to me that the best thing I can probably do for kids like Dasani is donate money, but where and to who? A quick scan of Givewell didn't turn up any great leads for charities helping out with homelessness in the NYC area - does anybody know of any?
So much talent shows up in unexpected places, but in a bifurcated America (or Mexico) it has to fight too hard to make itself seen.
What do we have to show for our recent hosting bubble?
Why do people like this keep having more and more kids (a freedom)? Birth control is free for them. Why doesn't this family move to a more affordable state or city (a freedom)? Why don't they move somewhere where they can find jobs (a freedom)? I don't care if their jobs are picking fruit or mopping floors, Illegal aliens live better than this. Why do they blow all their money as soon as they get it (a freedom)? They live rent free and make 33,000 in combined income. This is like the after tax incomes of someone making 40k+ a year. This is more money than my single income in-laws have (after they pay their taxes and the mortgage bill) with their 6 children and they are not living in poverty. They have a minivan, they go on vacations to Disney Land. Their kids have clean new looking clothes. They Are not malnourished or un-bathed. They suffer none of the plights that the family in this article do. Why? It is about choices.
I almost want the government to (I don't want to say it but) force people who have proven that they will never do the right thing to do just that.
I actually don't really want this loss of freedoms. There is a better way, but will it ever happen? How can you re-instill good standards and moral values in a selfish and morally bankrupt generation? Religious conviction used to fill the role of prompting parents to do the right thing, but now it is heavily watered down and in many cases gone altogether. Ever since good standards and moral values stopped being passed down from the majority of fathers and mothers (who rarely divorced back then by the way) things have been and will continue to get worse. Eventually things will get so bad that it will come down to people (like this family) losing their freedom (in essence a partial return to slavery) If they want to continue living off the government.
I was just thinking about the efforts in government to make minimum wage $10/hr nationally. Well now why would these parents go out and get jobs making $10/hr? they would have no more income than they get from welfare today. Plus now they have to go work 40hrs per week? Do you really thing that they would do this?
Mike Rowe was on CNN recently saying that there are over 100k job openings currently. Most of them are labor jobs that people just don't want (they are actually hard work imagine that). Many of them start at 40k per year yet still no one wants them. Well why would they? they get an equivalent of that much right now for doing nothing.
This country is in a downward spiral. This family is only a symptom of it.
These 'parents' can't even look after themselves. But why would they listen to a government who is also grabbing what they can?
You can't change these problems by force. I think this can only be changed from bottom to top. People around this family could learn them how to take care.
Eating out is a great way to stay poor.
The first is that when you have a refrigerator that's sub-par and don't have a freezer, you have to buy the smallest quantities of anything perishable; that means it's expensive as hell. There are things like rice that you can buy in bulk, but if you're in a place with bugs and rodents (like they are), you're screwed on that too, generally.
The second is that if you're in a homeless shelter, you can't cook. At most, you can make a sandwich, but that goes back to point #1.
Eating out isn't a convenience for them; it's survival.
Refrigerators are easily found used for under $100 (just like the flat screen TV from someone else's example here).
Eating out, at a minimum, is 2-3x ingredient cost.
Besides, you're reading way more into my comment than was intended. Its substance was:
"To save money, don't eat out."
You're projecting.
The mom is drinking a beer on the bus, isn't she? I'm guessing that because it's in a brown paper bag.
I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself:
Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive.
Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices.
Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not.
Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows.
And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't.
In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin.
That's perverse.
"I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more?"
I might say:
"Having a messy codebase is a way to keep having bugs."
That's analogous to my original statement.
"In a good month, their combined efforts can bring in a few hundred dollars."
They are in a situation where they cannot afford to save money in most conventional ways.
Spending $100 on a fridge that they can't properly use (because they can't cook in a shelter) isn't a wise appropriation of a significant portion of their monthly income.
When you're poor, homeless, and don't own a car, moving refrigerators is not practical.
When you're poor and living in a nightmare hole of a shelter, your nice new fridge might well be just taken from you.
A friend of mine recently, moved into social housing. I donated some of my furniture to him for free. I also paid 50 euros for a moving van and 20 to have some guys help me.
The furniture cost $0 to him, a little bit to me.
Blasphemy!
In order to have food stored, it basically has to be packaged in plastic or glass. Peanut butter. Jelly. Bread.
A jar of peanut butter is the perfect food for someone without fridge or pantry. It can be stored at room temperature, it is calorie-dense, it is cheap, and it actually has some nutritional value.
If I am ever forced to live at poverty income without basic residential infrastructure, I would definitely walk to the nearest actual grocery store and carry back peanut butter. You can also keep eggs around a while, even in the US, if you can replace the cuticle (removed during processing) with wax. I'd probably cook them in their shells with an electric kettle, dip them in paraffin from plumbers' candles, and put them back into the container.
If you have some method of heating, you can add pasta and rice and beans and oats and sweet potatoes and lentils.
If people are really lacking these tools, I'd be happy to write a check to a New York charity that provides them.
(re your last point, I don't see how this family is going to take advantage of incremental assistance like that)
Whether that's true or not depends where you live. The US and Europe have developed different systems for egg production and storage.
Obviously none of the things I listed will form a complete diet, but if you are eating mostly take-out they are probably a superior substitute for some fraction of those take-out meals.
No, this isn't a technical problem. It's bigger than that.
Eating normal food, with some organics but not all, is reasonably affordable if you're willing to cook.
That takes longer, but results are better.
I don't know how people afford to eat out. It seems that unless you go Taco Bell (and there's no shame in that) two people is $25-50 per meal.
Reading Daeken's comment would be a good start toward turing that around.
It's an effective piece -- it's able to wring fresh emotion from people who've been hearing similar stories for decades and have become desensitized. But it's not a policy discussion, and it's not even a good starting point for a policy decision.
Source: former journalist.
A culture of independence.