This is a cool program for a small number of people but the missing word in the article is "zoning." https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclu.... Growing homelessness problems come from many cities and suburbs making it illegal to build housing. As the supply of something is restricted in the face of demand, prices rise, causing many people on the financial edge to be pushed over it and into homelessness. If you want to comprehensively fight homelessness, building more housing is the first step.
I've worked on many homeless-service programs, and it's disheartening to see cities allocate vast sums for them: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f... while simultaneously using zoning laws to make sure they won't be very effective.
Do you feel their actions are from accidental incompetence, or from deliberate action?
I've noticed that most cities strike some kind of middleground tone, where they say "homelessness is a big problem affecting us, but surely we can't live in a world without zoning regulations (because we want to keep property taxes and assessments high)."
These programs for the homeless are mostly just lipservice to the actual problems you pointed out.
I would know-- I was employed and homeless for 4 months until I found a girlfriend to split a very distant apartment with!
> Do you feel their actions are from accidental incompetence, or from deliberate action?
Deliberate action. Back in the day, there was a lot of transient housing. Shared rooms, boarding arrangements, and the like for people whose economic condition didn't allow entering into a long term lease. Property owners found these people undesirable, and zoned those living situations out of existence. This was a deliberate and malicious effort.
It's not just short-term housing; it's not even just residential zoning. It appears to be all zoning in places with engaged residents. In my sister's Jeff Park neighborhood in Chicago, there's a bitter fight over whether to allow dense multi-family developments; in Oak Park, where I live, people litigate repurposing vacant lots(!) for fear of the clientele benign businesses will attract. It's not like liquor licenses or banquet halls, it's just basic services, and the subtext is always "keep new low income black and latinx families out".
It makes me worry that as neighborhoods get more connected (as mine has, with Facebook, and others are with Nextdoor), this problem is going to get much worse before it gets better.
I remember in Streeterville there was a big kerfuffle against construction of a Ronald McDonald house. I'd like to think people felt guilty when it turned out that the house would be a place for families of cancer patients to stay while their kids were getting treated at the children's hospital...
It's trite to imply everything is some secret racial motive. There's a extremely strong connection between low income and crime. That already is a major deterrent to low income housing. But it has effects aside from that. The crime and other consequences tend to make it less safe to simply live in areas, and also simultaneously destroy home values - which destroys the wealth that people in an area have paid for already. Nobody wants this.
There are also longterm effects. Low income families tend to be net negative on taxes. This means that a city has less money to fund the basic necessities. Pair a higher strain on those same necessities and a declining tax base and it's not hard to see what happens. And even within the US low income families tend to have a far greater fertility rate than higher income families. Those earning < $10,000 per year currently have about 50% more children than those earning $200k+ per year. [1] This again compounds all the other already existing effects.
I think focusing on race prevents people from actually having any sort of conversation since it's just a straw man. How do you deal with the above while also having the desire to enable more people to achieve a better life? It's not an easy question, but one that has to be answered. Good intentions mean nothing if the actions effected do more harm than good.
I'm not saying race is the only factor - this is a multifaceted problem for sure. But race is definitely one of the facets. If you trace the history of a poor urban area back just a few decades, the relevance of race becomes increasingly apparent.
I do agree that it's unproductive to simplify the issue down to just one of the many factors.
I have a task for you. I'm going to send you data on US real estate areas completely scrubbed of any racial or location indicator. All you'll have is important impartial data like crime rates, income rates, development rates, foreclosure rates, etc. Your job is now to take this information and rank areas in grade A-D in terms of investment security and desirability. Now, unless you intentionally hamstring your measurements, some guy is going to be able to run around declaring you're a "redlining" racist. Race is not a facet here. Most people, and absolutely most companies let alone banks, could not care less about race but they do care deeply about other things. And those other things are not equally distributed. Focusing on race is, at best, going to be divisive and counter productive.
Race and socioeconomics are inextricably linked in this country. A lot of white families in the past did not want to live next to black people. The banks knew that and factored that into their "desirability" metrics. This, along with countless other challenges, results in perpetuating the feedback loop of poverty and racism: Keeping people disadvantaged confines them to crime and poverty, which results in stereotypes and biases (including unconscious ones) against them, which results in more biased decisions that keep them disadvantaged.
Keep running that cycle and you've strengthened the link between race and income and crime. Keep running that cycle more and you end up maintaining the racist results of yesterday without having to be racist oneself.
This country was built on racism, which has naturally codified itself into the system. This means that racial biases have become an emergent property of the system when applied to this society. If you give this system to a mindless computer to run and optimize for economic output, you'll end up with very similar results compared to if you gave it to a racist person to run.
Our legal and economic neural network was trained on biased data and it's no surprise that it produces biased output. We're trying to solve an optimization problem without having social inequality as one of the dimensions. It's easy to get good results with the function we have if we don't care about that metric.
I agree that race is definitely not the only angle from which to approach these problems. But if we ignore it completely, the ugly ghosts of our past will continue to haunt our society.
I mostly agree with you, but the one area we sharply differ is in the reason for the ongoing inequities. I, like many people, grew up in poverty and managed to get out without all that much trouble. I did well in school in spite of lovely things like semi-regular drive by shootings and a mostly absent parent. Doing well in school meant I was able to get into college and, for better or for worse, the current predatory system of loans means there are practically no limits to the extent of 'free money' available to ensure that money was never an issue. I got a degree in a STEM major knowing I needed to make money to live a decent life, and suddenly the world was my oyster.
Nothing I did was particularly remarkable. And many of my peers had literally the exact same opportunities laid before them. Yet many of them failed to take advantage of them. One guy I was good friends with in school I ended up bumping into at a restaurant where he was waiting tables having ended up getting into drugs and also getting a girl pregnant. He was a smart kid and had a decent and supportive family. He was certainly more than able to know about the consequences of the lifestyle choices he was making. Yet he made them. What can you do?
There are definitely some cases where people fail to achieve because of things completely outside of their control, but in the vast majority of cases it's going to come down to these bad decisions. So why are people making these bad decisions? It doesn't even make sense to attribute it to race since the exact same problem expands outside of race. It even expands outside of class. Look a the Waltons for some of the biggest wastes of air on this planet, in spite of having more opportunities available to them than nearly every single living person today.
Or even look at other issues. Consider obesity. Everybody knows obesity is horrible for your health and isn't exactly going to do great things for your sex life. Yet people, of all classes, are eating and drinking themselves into obesity at rates like never before. And then lying to themselves. By contrast, I noticed myself getting a bit porky, significantly cut down my calorie intake, increased my physical activity, and now I'm in better shape than ever. Again something hardly unique, but why does it seem like so few people are doing these things? You see a problem - you formulate a solution - you execute. You fail, reformulate, and repeat until success.
The point of this all is that I do not think being disadvantaged is a significant cause of anything in and of itself. We live in a world that is not only more color blind than ever, but also has more opportunities than ever before. This is why I think that thinking based on working from the result backwards is going to lead to fundamentally broken solutions.
I think your point is reconcilable with mine. At an individual level, I totally agree that the ultimate responsibility to guide our lives is ours alone. Even if others are holding us back, we have the duty to do our best given our circumstances.
But on a societal level, we see real patterns that result from the workings of our system. Is obesity rising because people are getting lazier? Or has stagnant wages, decreased access to fresh food, poorer education, increased marketing of junk food, and a relentless optimization of food profitablity had a hand in it? I believe that, for any particular person, it's their own duty to keep themselves healthy, no matter what obstacles are in their way - no one else will do it for them. They could justifiably blame society, but in the end, their health is their own responsibility. At the same time, I think there is a lot that society can do to reduce the obstacles, and make it so that, on average, more people succeed in keeping themselves healthy.
When making public policies, I think there is a balance to strike between the individual and society. We can't just keep rewarding success and call it another opportunity; opportunity is making it easier to succeed by taking down barriers.
If we ask some people to work twice as hard as others for the same reward, we can't be surprised that those people, on average, are going to fall behind. There will always be survivors, but we shouldn't be using survival of the fittest as our guide. I don't mind if some lazy people can thrive, but I do mind if hard working people can't advance, which still is far too common of an occurrence.
I'd also like to think optimistically of society. And so if something is wrong there it's natural to want to assume an extrinsic cause. And certainly you can always find something. I certainly agree with your comments about food, yet at the same time I'm not sure we can assume that society itself is not the problem. For instance if people simply stopped drinking soda that alone would send obesity rates down significantly. And soda is far more expensive than tap water and a filter, or tossing tea leaves or bags in a $10 coffee machine. Yet people choose to pay more for a liquid that's detrimental to their health. And it's not a secret that soda is bad for you.
So should we tax soda to death or even consider banning it? That's where I would not agree. I value freedom over anything else in a society. Since if you have freedom, you can make the decisions that you see personally most likely to produce positive results for you. And as the recent GDPR vs EU Copyright Act emphasized, in a strikingly brief period of time, the same powers that can be used to do things we perceive to be beneficial for society can, and will, then be used to turn against society to the benefit of entrenched interests.
I also think it's important to consider what 'same reward for same effort' would imply. Should I choose to write books, ought I expect the same reward as Stephen King choosing to write his next book? If I choose to get into basketball should I expect the same reward as an individual who's hyper athletic and 6'11"? Of course not. Equality of reward is an idea that sounds like something you ought desire but underneath the surface it is a dystopia that requires complete and indistinguishable sameness in absolutely every way. As without this sameness, the same effort will invariably yield different results. The game of life is all about finding what your maximizing function is there and pushing it.
I'm not pushing for equality of reward, but rather equality of opportunity. So not that your writing should be valued the same as Stephen King's, but that if you want to write, you should have access to quality education and publishing resources.
I'm not one to deny true market values, but we can level the playing field a bit. And when I say that, I don't mean taking others down a notch to make things even, I mean raising up the floor so that everyone is at least at a reasonable baseline level where they can make there fair effort to get further. (I guess "leveling the playing field" is a bad analogy, since it sounds like trimming down the peaks. I wonder if there's a better one that implies raising up the bottom?)
And I agree that banning soda doesn't make sense, but I could see an argument for taxing it, the same way we do with alcohol. A lot of products have external costs that aren't factored in and are instead borne by the public. Increased sugar consumption results in greater costs to public health. Regardless of who's fault it is, it affects all of us. Taxing it would be a roughly fairer way of distributing the burden. It's definitely not a perfect solution, but would probably give better results than what we have now, if looking at the big picture.
I do think personal freedom of choice is extremely important, and we shouldn't have the government exert too much influence on those choices. But I think there is a healthy balance to strike where we can shape better outcomes for society as a whole, while keeping things fair at an individual level. A small tax would only be a disincentive, a suggestion, not a prohibition.
I'd again generally agree, but with some variations on similar ideas. Here for instance instead of trying to tax sugary beverages, I think positive motivators tend to work much better. Imagine a sliding incentive scale on caloric content for non-water drinks that do not contain artificial sweeteners. Anything with fewer than perhaps 100 calories liter of liquid would receive a 40% tax deduction. Anything with less than 50 calories per liter of liquid would receive a 60% tax deduction, and anything with fewer than 5 calories per liter would receive an 80% tax deduction. This would not only encourage more competition from new companies, but even incentivize current companies to diversify (and advertise!) their healthier options.
By contrast a small tax is mostly just going to be passed onto consumers (and then some, as is often the case) who are already making financially and 'healthfully' dubious decisions. This is also analogous to the situation with the EU trying to force Netflix to have 30% of their catalog in each region come from region-sourced material. Instead of this, which is going to result in the bare minimum adherence, imagine if they instead granted Netflix a sliding tax reduction dependent on what percent of their revenue was generated from local region-sourced material. Now they suddenly have a major incentive for that material to succeed. Make people want to do good, and they will.
I'm not so hot on external cost calculations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that if you're going to factor in external costs to something, should you not also factor in external benefits to something? Pollutants have a substantial external cost associated with them. At the same time those very pollutants are arguably the single biggest factor in why we are today a 'modern' society. How much ongoing revenue and productivity can be directly attributed to these very pollutants? The second is because it's difficult to objectively measure external costs. Imagine all of the things that you can show some paper or another (and at times the consensus) attributing directly to video games. The cost could almost certainly be shown to be in the trillions of dollars.
I completely agree about trying to increase equality of opportunity, but at the same time I think we're already much closer to that plateau of sharply diminishing returns than our current state of inequality would suggest. I mean in all reality you can go from poverty to not-poverty with little more than doing well in school and choosing a productive major. Bill Clinton became one of the most powerful men in politics and came from what could only be described as white trash beginnings. Obama, a half black middle class man with a Kenyan father who lived in Hawaii, would do the same. I used to always think that a true sign of equality of opportunity would be most of everybody doing well. Spending a while in the workforce destroyed that idealism. On top of making completely illogical decisions, many people just don't seem to have have any ambition or direction whatsoever, and I do not think can be attributed as an effect of the system of work itself.
"Even when we take the conservative political philosophy at face value, though, we should note what it implies: that sense of futility, that feeling that you can’t do anything to substantially change the world, you’re stuck with it as it is. This is the way things are, and if your life sucks, it probably sucks out of necessity or because of your own personal failings. As Ben Shapiro puts it, “in a free country, if you fail, it’s probably your own fault.” Once we have freedom, whatever happens next is the natural order of things, and if you try to change it, you’ll be trying to muddle with things that cannot be changed, and you’ll end up destroying freedom. ... I hate it on a gut level, and my hatred is probably because I have spent much of my life thinking that the battle for my self-confidence and happiness was also necessarily a battle against this type of thinking. What type of thinking, exactly? The type that sounds like this: If you’re sad it’s because you’re weak, if you’re poor it’s because you’re stupid, if you’re marginalized it’s because you’re culturally dysfunctional, if you’re being screwed over you shouldn’t have signed the contract, if you did something horrible it’s because you’re evil, if you don’t understand it’s because you haven’t paid attention, if you’re angry it’s because you’re resentful, if you’re sentimental it’s because you’re not a Man." - Nathan Robinson, "Why Hopelessness is Conservative" -- https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/why-hopelessness-is-c...
I'm definitely not saying anything is the 'natural order of things'. Far from it I'm saying that what people will become is a product of decisions yet to be made. And you are the master of those decisions. Make bad decisions and you will probably not see good outcomes. But at the same time make good decisions and you probably will. Think about this. Imagine the amount of time you will spend over the next 5 years on social media. Instead of doing that dedicate it to learning [x]. With the time allocations of most of us, you would be an expert on [x] by the end of those 5 years. The one and only thing separating you from that achievement is self discipline. It's really quite remarkable if you really consider what this means.
I've coached chess for years and the one thing I've found is that who achieves and who fails has very little to do with who is smart or who's dumb. It invariably comes down to what happens when a person runs into a bumpy streak, which happens to everybody at some - even world champions. One group of people will decide well they just must not be smart enough, or somehow weren't born with the ability to play, or maybe they're just too old. And the other group will grit their teeth and continue pushing forward. Not all of those that push forward will succeed, but many will. However, exactly 0 of those that resign themselves to outside forces will ever achieve success - the resignation to those outside forces becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
That article is extremely lacking precise data and methodology, but seems to be directly misrepresenting 'revenue' by ignoring costs. There's an ironic joke in the poker world. 'I won $100 this weekend. Oh yeah, but how much did you lose!?' Poorer neighborhoods are generally going also have poorer occupants, higher crime, and related issues. This means vastly greater expenditures on welfare, medicare, various social programs, law enforcement, and more. So you may have received $x in property taxes, but how much did you lose?
Even just consider the crime side of things. How much does a murder cost? There is an immense amount of legal fees, prison fees, police cost, and other related expenses. I really am reluctant to link to a social sciences study, but maybe we can say it's a way to at least start the conversation. This [1] slate article references those numbers. And they're pretty jaw dropping - ranging from $41,288 for a car break in to $17,252,656 for a murder.
We've only considered a small fraction of all costs, yet already those densely packed low income neighborhoods suddenly aren't looking like such a good bet after all.
There's also a connection between low income and turning up the stereo to an obnoxious level, which renders your own home useless for intellectual pursuits.
I agree that race has nothing to do with this. Being educated or just considerate has.
What can people do to be effective actors against the societal inertia that inevitably throws well-off, as tptacek put it, "engaged residents" (they're always instant experts in the next arena of material advantage, eh?) against fair zoning due to fear of poor people/non-whites? What are historic models of activism? Book recommendations? I get the feeling zoning and housing is one of those unsexy problems less broadcast within mainstream liberal and left politics, like gerrymandering or campaign finance.
Workers need to demand a wage that allows them to live roughly where the job is (some commute is normal) . Once the workers demand solid wages, the places w/o supply side issues will start to be attractive to companies. I saw this very concretely in Calgary, AB in the 90s when it was inexpensive to live there and taxes were lower so many companies moved to the city (from Vancouver and Toronto, for example).
Is US running out of affordable housing supply though?
The common theory is that US real estate market was overbuilt pre-2008. Prices in several markets, like Detroit, Baltimore, Mississippi delta, Appalachian coal towns, and San Bernardino county among others, have not returned to 2006-2007 levels.
There are also markets with very lax, sometimes non-existent, zoning laws. Houston being the flagship example.
Houston is not a great example because most of the cheap real estate is at the perimeter and that perimeter keeps moving outward at a quite astonishing rate.
I'm not sure about that. There's an immense amount of cheap housing throughout the city. The reason that people don't want to live there is because it's also riddled with crime, gangs, and other such things. In the city you end up with cheap high crime housing, or expensive low crime housing. You're just describing the relatively new third option - moderate priced low crime housing an hour outside the city.
I am happy to read about programs like this. I have struggled financially for the better part of a decade due to a variety of issues ('08 crash wiped out pretty much every job that paid a living wage in the city I lived in, sickness/cancer in my family, people that I relied on for work dying, my personal issue with PTSD, etc.)
Housing has always been the most influential factor in whether I was able to achieve even temporary stability. For the periods of time that I wasn't homeless, my place to stay was wither explicitly temporary (often for arbitrary, unknown periods of time) or cost nearly 100% of the income I was able to scrape together.
Just three months ago, after nearly ten years, I was offered the opportunity to live in, maintain and fix up a small investment property in the middle of nowhere. As it stands, this arrangement should last a year, after which I can opt to stay and pay rent at market price (which in the middle of nowhere is very low).
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am stable enough to apply for school (starting in October, fingers crossed!), and try to really focus on doing some freelance website work for small businesses on the side. I wake up every morning and actually eat breakfast, which doesn't seem that significant, but for me that has been historically difficult or impossible because of my severe, sometimes crushing existential anxiety.
I still have problems, but they are considerably smaller and more manageable. In these three months I have spent most of te money I've earned on either food or supplies for the house. As of right now, my most pressing problem is getting $40 to get a copy of my high school proficiency certificate, and beyond that it would be nice to get a beer at the only bar in town to meet some folks, but I'll take that set of problems over worrying about being cold, or hungry, or getting arrested for sleeping outside any day.
So yay! These arrangements can be an absolute godsend for people that otherwise would have difficulty digging themselves out of a hole.
Interesting situation - best of luck with everything!
If you have the means, you should document your story on social media, photographing what you build. "Homeless guy trades handy skills for renovation" (while possibly exaggerating a bit) is a catchy story and could lead to more, stronger opportunities.
Thanks for reading! 90% of what I read about on here is stuff I don't fully understand that I read juat for self improvement, so it's nice to be able to contribute to a thread occasionally :)
Good luck with the renovation and I hope things continue to get better for you. You could look at lambdaschool.com as an alternative to going to university if what you want out of it is a job rather than humanistic education.
I wonder if this makes it more difficult for the live-in caretaker to eventually find another place (if that's what they wanted) because they're effectively earning less? I.e. I wonder if the rent is usually R dollars if their salary (S2) is actually S2 = S1 - R where S1 is what they would be paid if they weren't receiving the housing, or if it something more like S2 = S1 - R*T where the amount deducted from their salary is more than the actual rent cost.
Not quite the same, but I've done many "work trade" situations where I've lived on a property with some kind of house/structure and other furnishings/utilities provided in exchange for doing farm work or other labor. It never worked out economically well because the amount of time I had to put into where I lived made it difficult to also work elsewhere for money.
That the quality of these homeless job candidates is surprising reflects the inaccurate prejudices of the homeless-hating U.S. population.
In the U.S, with its comparatively poor social safety net, many good people fall through the cracks. But a large segment of the U.S. desperately wants to see those who end up homeless as moral failures who have brought disaster on themselves. Thus, the cognitive dissonance between the quality of the work these people do and the need to see them as dissolute scum.
The experience most people have with the homeless is being harassed by the chronically homeless as they go on about their regular lives, especially downtown. I worked a block from a homeless shelter for a few years, and there was an overdose or knife fight a couple times per day, not to mention people shooting up drugs or shitting on sidewalks.
It's great to hold a moral high ground, but at some point we need to connect with reality. There are people who are chronically homeless and certainly not moral guiding stars, and there are many more situationally homeless people who need help and are perfectly fine folks.
I live in downtown Vancouver. I'm in one of the more affluent neighbourhoods however about 11% of housing is non-market (depending on how you count). Vancouver has a fairly large homeless population because it is the most temperate Canadian city.
Most of the homeless people are just regular people. Sure, some of them have substance abuse problems.
But stand up in your cubicle when you get to the office on Monday morning. One of the coworkers that you can see from your desk has probably taken an opioid, cocaine, amphetamine, or a prescribed drug for ADHD or anxiety.
And they are fully functional.
Your coworkers are regular people. Just like the homeless that you see. More people than you know are one missed paycheque away from being on the streets.
Many of the "chronically homeless" as you call it are one medicine away or one therapist away from being fully functional. And one of your coworkers is one paycheque away, one bad week away from being chronically homeless.
The very fact that drug-using coworkers are able to maintain a regular job demonstrates that they're stable and functional, though. You can't say the same for most of the drug-using homeless population.
> Many of the "chronically homeless" as you call it are one medicine away or one therapist away from being fully functional.
[Citation needed]
IIRC when SLC got most its chronically homeless into permanent housing and assistance, their problems did decrease substantially. But most still weren't really able to work.
> I think you intended to imply "without a prescription" in grouping such people with daytime cocaine users.
Actually reading the comment the driving point seems to be that there's less separating them than you might think--people on and off the street have legal and illegal uses for drugs, so perhaps the legal distinction isn't very useful at discerning the cause of homelessness.
In fact, the main differentiating symptom between legal and illegal drug use seems to be prison.
What does moralizing have to do with it? These are people who could benefit from systematized programmatic interventions. Relying on some moral guideposts to decide who is worthy and who should be harassed or left to suffer feels really pointless. Just help them, both for their sake and for the quality of life of everyone else around them.
Set aside morality and look at costs and priorities. It’s difficult to help people who just need to interrupt a bad cycle using the same programs as people who cannot, or choose not to, graduate into a more self-sufficient program or lifestyle.
And the answer isn’t simply more money, unfortunately, as there are also limits to qualified staff, effective housing and facility locations, effective following steps that don’t lead to relapse, special education/home visit resources, etc.
Edit: I am writing from a city that has mostly solved homelessness, so I am not saying it cannot be done. Just that an indiscriminate approach is unlikely to work.
Not an indiscrimitate approach; different people require different types of help. But to claim the problem unsolvable and throw up our hands is unnecessarily cruel. All kinds of hard problems get solved so that they don’t harm anyone anymore. Why not this one?
I think “throwing up hands” looks the same as prioritizing with few enough resources available. I agree the original comment wasn’t incisive enough (drug use is way too obtuse of a proxy for receptiveness to receiving help) but I also have seen naive approaches spend resources that should have gone to others first. It’s challenging. My hope is that effective use of vacant properties will proliferate because more responsible people can live in them, freeing up expensive lower-trust facilities for people who shouldn’t be let alone before they've received treatment, cut criminal ties, etc.
Have you not looked at wall street and seen people shooting up drugs or people in our government who have been accused of sexual misconduct myriad times? How about that those same people who are responsible for making many of those people homeless in the first place skating and allowed to bring us on the verge of financial collapse again? Where is the moral high ground for these people?
Hate isn't some limited quantity, such that hating the chronically homeless precludes you from hating rich and wealthy sexual abusers or people who will recklessly create financial bubbles in search of wealth (although I'd argue that today's most notable example of unregulated financial systems would be cryptocurrencies, although the cryptocurrency bubble isn't as big as the financial bubble of '08 - yet).
Ok, and if I were to walk in downtown NYC, next to the the stock exchange, would these wall street traders start harassing me when I am just trying to get where I am going?
No, that doesn't happen. Do you see the difference?
Those financial workers whined and threw fits to receive federal bailouts while everyone else's futures and livelihoods were on fire with no chance of the same white-glove treatment. The banal dichotomy you're trying to illustrate here is just a rationalization for sorting humanity by their wealth.
All I am saying is that they never accosted me on the street for a bailout. They may have "threw fits" metaphorically, but they did not do so to me in the streets, literally.
No, literally threw fits on public television in plain view of people who had lost their jobs without severance or unemployment assistance. But keep insisting that shitting your pants when a homeless person asks you for change is a normal and human reaction.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The interaction you are describing, of me being accosted by a suited wall street trader, has never happened to me. And I'd bet that it has never happened to basically every other people out there.
Now, getting assaulted by a homeless person on the other hand.... That's probably happened to at least 50% of people.
> asks you for change
No. I'm talking about assault and violence, actually.
How d'you know what most people's experience with the homeless is? Also, distinguishing between "homeless" and "chronically homeless" (which makes it sound like an extreme sport) by your definition can only happen once you've been stabbed, stabbed another, or squeezed one out on the sidewalk. So until one of these things happen you don't really know.
Forgive me, but it sounds to me like an easy way to justify hating on the homeless. Chronic or otherwise.
Regardless of what "most peoples' experience" is, people tend to remember things that are extreme. So, the smelly, ranting, alcoholic sticks in one's head. The person sitting quietly at the BART station with a sign, not so much. Someone shooting up in the middle of the station, hell yeah.
Who remembers anyone who's simply camping for the day at the public library and using it to try and search for jobs?
I can tell you, I've seen all of those and more. I worked with homeless people long term in a shelter for 2 years, and, of the folks I came into direct contact with every day, I don't think 95% of them could survive contact with the real world of employment, paying rent, etc. due to disability (mental or physical), addictions, and/or general lack of a support system. Granted, I worked with people who were not in the shelter's higher tier programs (where housing was provided for a set period, and job assistance provided, in exchange for attending training and religious sessions). The more vulnerable ones, the ones I worked with, were the ones you'd see out on the street, collecting cans and bottles or panhandling.
People "hate" the homeless because the ones they come into contact with who are visibly homeless are often not functional members of society. Simply put, they violate social norms in a way that disgusts most people. Nobody "hates" someone who's couch surfing or living in a car, but who's clean, not an addict, and is trying to get out of the situation the best they can.
There's a pretty reasonable distinction to be drawn here. The real problem here is that the homeless that most people experience really are what they seem like: drug addicted, mentally incapacitated, or completely irresponsible and unaccountable. These people are not good candidates for jobs, and it would indeed be surprising to see them successful in a role like this.
However, there's a large class of people that are not out there panhandling, not making themselves visible to regular people who are homeless, and are perfectly responsible and capable. These people can and are benefiting from programs like this.
Let's not blur this distinction for some misguided sense of social justice.
One also has to wonder how many of the homeless who use drugs, or have mental issues came to do so because of their situational homelessness.
It really isn't difficult to imagine becoming homeless, which then leads to depression and other mental issues and then using drugs to escape that. So some proportion of the "problem group" are going to be redeemable too.
In my experience of living in multiple shelters/streets/camps in multiple cities is that there is a lot of truth to this idea.
For example, I knew a man that was incredibly ornery, almost always drunk, and prone to occasional violent outbursts. Everybody (including the rest of us in the camp) avoided him. About a year after I left the camp, I ran into his daughter and learned that he had been a normal, successful eletrician that had sustained a severe brain injury at work, and his employer managed to avoid paying for workman's compensation or helping with his medical bills, leaving him permanently disabled and with no safety net.
I knew another man that also received a brain injury during a car crash in which he also lost the only extant copy of his masters' thesis in anthropology (the crash occurred in the 80s), and was in a similar position.
I knew a man that actually managed to get a section 8 apartment, but lost it because he opted to move back to the riverbottom and let a pregnant homeless woman stay in it in his stead. He was then also cut off from ALL social programs.
I saw a man get banned for life from an entire network of shelters spanning a huge chunk of the state for taking three (3!) single-use packets of Tide laundry detergent out of the facility.
I have also met a (very) small handful of genuinely odd people that just preferred to live mostly off the grid but still wanted to be near their families/veterinary clinic/spouse's grave/etc. but they are very much the exception and not the rule. I think that for some people with limited experience with the homeless, people that are chronically homeless might appear to all fall into this category.
I do 't think this happens all the time, or even to a majority of the population, but it is an idea that I have heard repeated numerous times.
From my experience, the details are almost always surprising, and the search for simple explanations or solutions is frustratingly unsatisfying.
This is the theory behind "housing first" programs, and it works. Literally getting people off the street provides stability that helps them get other things in their life right.
Ya, I don't mean to suggest that they're all irredeemable. They're definitely not. But the problem group is a lot riskier and takes a lot more investment to help.
The links seems so obvious to me with the often mentioned "mental health" symptom of shouting at random strangers: in a high density environment, our universal gut reaction to seeing a stranger in misery is to pretend that we did not notice, that we did not see them. I've never been on the receiving end of this, but I imagine that it can only be a matter of time until a healthy human mind will try anything to break that invisible barrier (even if it only makes things worse).
Homelessness doesn't cause depression, which is a biological illness. Depression, uncontrollable anxiety, addiction, etc. are the root cause of the vast, vast majority of homelessness.
Two thirds of homeless people reported alcohol or drug abuse led to their homelessness [1]. 20 to 25% of the homeless have severe mental health issues. [2]
The chronic homeless are a different group than the normal homeless person.
Most homeless people just couldn't make ends meet, then saw their resources cut off like dominoes falling. They haven't given up on the capitalist dream, and they will purchase shelter again from the free market, once ends do meet.
As a German I have to say I was impressed by the amount of blight I’ve encountered in inner cities as well as in rural areas of the US. You immediately see that the government provides much less than in Europe, but I also got the feeling that people care a lot more and are more personally engaged in helping the poor than in Germany.
Yes, this may be often motivated by religion - but who cares? No surprise to me that the most progressive state in this sense seems to be Utah (Mormons are encouraged to devour a percentage of their time to social causes, the state switched to provide every homeless with a roof first, ask questions later ...)
As a Swede, I have to agree that the level of overt poverty in US cities is shocking (specifically, as it is juxtaposed with so much overt wealth). I don’t know if Anericans care more about helping the poor, but clearly enough people don’t care sufficiently to actually fix the problem by voting for effective social policies. This level of poverty, homelessness and poor health is a political choice, not a law of nature.
> clearly enough people don’t care sufficiently to actually fix the problem by voting for effective social policies.
Unfortunately, with money driven election cycles (rather than policy driven election cycles) social welfare never has a good chance to see the light of day in washington. Perhaps this will change soon, but when both parties take money from the same people, the resulting debate will probably avoid important topics.
Money is important, but I think the biggest reason is cultural.
There are a lot of people in the US who believe that the chronically homeless are moral failures who deserve their misery (they "fail at life", to quote an acquaintance); that social welfare to help them constitutes rewarding moral hazard; and that the most effective way to minimize homelessness is to dial up the disincentives and make their lives as painful and humiliating as possible.
The role money plays is avoiding discussion of the roots of homelessness, which affects the general population as well—social, cultural, economic, and medical discussions. An easy way to see this is the obsession over the employment rate, despite being very narrow in what it measures (i.e. whether someone who is looking for a job finds one, not the quality of the job they find, nor the number of people who stop looking).
Ultimately, I can’t hold people’s apathy towards homelessness against them. Homelessness is often the product of a system that failed them, and the thought of helping directly is incredibly daunting given how much the deck is stacked against people without money, shelter, ids, or skills. Facing an individual who clearly faced a wrong, people tend to help. When faced with a group of people society chewed up and spat out, the comforting things people tell themselves each day reach their limits. What’s another comforting topic on top of it—that people deserve what they get?
If we accept the underlying problems affect all of us, maybe we won’t have to do mental gymnastics to see how policy could improve lives. This is potentially an electable approach.
I'm not nearly so charitable. In my view, inflicting humiliation on the homeless in the name of helping them is depraved.
We do not live in a just world. Pretending that success and failure are attributable to merit alone is the the self-serving moral vanity of the fortunate.
So what if the homeless "fail at life"? There but for the grace of dog go you.
> We do not live in a just world. Pretending that success and failure are attributable to merit alone is the the self-serving moral vanity of the fortunate.
Again, I agree with you.
I also think this viewpoint is depressing to the point that people will reject it and invent some fiction to excuse their relative comfort. How it can be empowering—delivering tangibly improved quality of life for the people around you—is hard to tie to the premise that people are fundamentally subjected to their environment before their character. Rhetorically, anyway.
I don't think this is a fair assessment, and I actually think the article does a good job differentiating between the chronically homeless (many of whom do have severe mental illness or substance abuse problems) and the temporary homeless.
As the article points out, you actually don't see, or at least associate, the temporary homeless as being homeless, because these people have jobs and are just trying their best to get by. So most of the homeless that people associate with being homeless are chronically homeless, where many times the stereotype is actually not that far from the truth.
"Finlay had read an article about the number of people who are homeless because of job loss or other temporary circumstances. He realized that his preconceptions about homelessness, shaped by the chronically homeless people he saw living outside, were wrong.
“The majority of homeless are people that we never really see because they are trying to work, they’re getting day labor,” he says. “They’re living out of their cars. They’re not panhandling and living under the bridge . . . These are all people that were employed, had good job histories. There was just really no issue that would preclude them from working other than they didn’t have an address.”"
The prejudices and hatred are towards the chronically homeless, not the temporarily homeless. Nothing in this article suggests those prejudices are false.
but how long before the temporarily homeless becomes the chronically homeless?
How hard does a person has to be kicked and how much mishap has to happen before they fall into despair, and become one of those who has to live under the bridge (as they lose their car due to uncontrollable circumstances)?
The existence of a large homeless population is a symptom of a society that does not care - reflected by the lack of taxation on the populous.
If you examine a scandinavian country (such as sweden), why do they have way less homeless per-capita than the US?
If I had to make a sweeping generalization, it is because Scandinavian winters are so much harsher. Freezing to death in Stockholm is more of a danger than in San Francisco.
The practice of screening everyone out causes this.
Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition. I know one woman whose roommate got into a domestic disputes in the backyard. The police arrested everyone in the house, and dropped everything within 3 hours.
> Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition.
lol, that kind of stuff should be illegal. As long as an employee doesn't have to go to jail it should not be allowed to fire the employee for anything that happens outside of the workplace, much less blanket automated policies like that one you describe.
And stuff that's gotten dropped should be either erased or at the very least sealed from the public instead of being provided on Google for all eternity.
Would you put your child in a daycare with less than the most stringent background check policy? Put your money in such a bank? Allow such a company’s employees into your home or the sensitive areas of your business? Sign off on a regulatory audit for a company that lets people who have been arrested hold admin credentials, keys to the server room, codes to the vault?
A lot of this shit is driven by popular demand. There’s a perception that rigorous background checks are foundatational if a corporation is to act responsibly.
> There’s a perception that rigorous background checks are foundatational if a corporation is to act responsibly.
Indeed. But there should be some level of common sense in the system. For example, while a sexual offender certainly is not supposed to work in childcare, he still can work flipping burgers or in a factory. A pot smoker may be unfit for driving trucks, but why not as a coder? Someone who got arrested protesting Nazis is someone I'd actually prefer to hire if I could. And so on.
And to make stuff worse we're only talking about arrests here, not actual convictions by a court. How are people supposed to rehabilitate and be productive members of society again when they're basically forced into an eternal life of poorness and criminality?!
The problem is that splitting hairs as you're talking about means there is subjective judgement and accountability. It creates a situation where everyone wants to know as little as possible, maybe less.
The data these checks deal with is garbage, and offenses can be classified in different ways based on jurisdiction, disposition or a dozen other factors. Was that "reckless driving" charge a plead down DWI? Was that battery charge actually a sexual offense that was offered in lieu of victim testimony? Was the arrest mistaken identity?
No HR person will risk getting into the news for making a judgement. IMO the answer is to classify the data so it's not available in most cases.
Public arrest records are an important part of the distinction between “police” and “secret police.” It should only be permitted to discriminate on convictions, though.
It will never be made illegal because the threat of ostracization for any dissent or minor opposition to the status quo is an enormously powerful political tool. You don't even have to put much effort into it, just arrest someone for "resisting arrest" and every reputable company and landlord will do the work for you.
A significant part of this, in my opinion, is that the consequences of homelessness have changed substantially over the last decade or so.
The major shift comes because of the smartphone.
Previously to be homeless meant to be completely disconnected from society. No mailing address, no land line, you don't exist.
Today you can have a phone number and high-speed internet access without a permanent address.
This alone makes the prospect of dispensing with your digs when you can no longer afford them far less unattractive than previously.
People live relatively modern connected lives from vehicles and tents today.
I'm not speculating, I'm speaking from experience. I've lived a very vagabond lifestyle for years in CA, and this approach has really taken off in the last 5-7 years or so. Batteries last a long time, solar panels are cheap and efficient, prepay phones are affordable.
I used to spend a lot of time in various cafes around the SF bay area. The outlets at these places started becoming contended for by ostensibly "homeless" people looking to charge their smartphones.
In 2018 "homeless" people have smartphones, they watch netflix, they do all the things. The last time I was at Java Beach in the outer sunset a guy who just moved off the sidewalk into a van was playing 3d games on a gaming laptop using the cafe's wifi and electricity until closing. I know his situation because he told it to me. He was wearing pajamas getting some gaming in before they closed up to retire in his van down the street.
That's a pretty damn comfortable "homeless" life. It's not really much different than what people are doing in their $3k+/mo apartments he parks in front of. I don't know where he bathes though, there is the ocean right there in the worst case, right?
I'm not passing judgement. It just shouldn't be surprising, given these circumstances, that relatively sane and capable people are slipping into "homeless" lives. The severity has substantially diminished vs. the homeless of the past, especially places where the climate is nice year-round.
I think if there were no smartphone, these "homeless" people would feel much more motivated to relocate someplace affordable.
It doesn't bother me if folks are choosing to live homelessly someplace desirable instead of relocating someplace less desirable where they can afford a home. Apartments are overrated, where the weather is nice.
Though I strongly disagree with the overall sentiment here, as well as some of your specific statements, your post touches on some interesting points.
In an earlier post, I mentioned a very, very small group of people that I have met that were almost mystifyingly homeless despite them having very few limiting factors that regularly contribute to homelessness.
The one thing they all had in common was that they stayed in places that didn't have harsh winters or dangerously hot summer (e.g. coastal California). I have not, however, met any person that fits that description in the Oregon/Washington deserts, Utah, Colorado, or even inland California.
In a nutshell, yes it is technically possible to sleep outside in coastal California without risking death from exposure. However, climate does not mitigate the risks posed by arrest for illegal lodging, violence from those around them (other homeless people, and others that are simply cruel), starvation, theft etc. It also does nothing to help with access to (even critical, immediate) healthcare, counseling, education or really any other factor that helps people get into a better situation.
As far as smartphones go, I agree that access to one can be life-changing to a homeless person, bt I could not disagrew more strongly with your characterization of that access making living on the street -with all the risks that that entails- as "less unattractive". To be earnest, I suppose I don't understand that point. If your landlord shows up with a police officer to forcibly remove from your home for not paying rent, the relative "unattractiveness" of what comes next for you isn't a variable that is taken into consideration. You have what you can carry, and hopefully an idea of where to walk next.
If "what you can carry" includes a smartphone, your chances of getting access to help is certainly improved dramatically, and yes, if you can find a spot that is near an open wireless AP, you might watch some Netflix. It is hardly the equivalent of living in a 3k/month apartment.
From my experience, cars and vans break down or get towed, phones break, phone plans run out of data (or in some cases, phone minutes. The poorest peole often still don't have reliable access to unlimited plans, even in 2018), you can get banned from coffee shops for making others uncomfortable by your appearance alone (people don't like to look at a person that has to carry all of their belongings with them).
I lived in a car for a while, but sold it for $300 for a train ticket to a place with fewer police. I had an eight year old laptop running an old distro of Ubuntu (without a working battery) that I traded for a weekend inside during a particularly bad cold snap. On two different occasions I have had to leave every single object I owned behind, and start over with only the clothes on my back and whatever was in my jeans' pockets.
If your point is that there is a differnce between homeless people and, as you put it, "homeless" people, then yes I agree. The biggest difference here is that of access to resources that can help bring one off the street, and whether or not perfectly healthy, capable people are making intentional decisions to reject those resources. The latter group is a genuinely fascinating anomaly, and does not reflect the reality of the problem.
Personally, I find that "move somewhere that's more desirable or manageable" to be problematic. The only reaon why I was able to leave a particular city was because I had a car to sell for tickets. If I hadn't, I simply would not have left. Even when I got there, I didn't have two nickels to rub together, so housing prices didn't really matter.
I would encourage anyone that feels this way about the homeless to do a bit more digging, or just have a conversation with a few people that are currently or were recently homeless. This particular attitude of lumping everybody under the umbrella of The Worst Examples doesn't seem to serve the goal of fixing this problem.
My point is that the word homeless has become more ambiguous than ever.
Even your post is conflating what I was describing as "homeless" for people living out of vehicles/tents as living rough on the street.
But the general vocabulary everyone uses does not distinguish between the two, it's all just homeless. And this is how we arrive at people being surprised by the quality of people they find as technically homeless.
There are many people who technically qualify as homeless who are simply not paying expensive ass rent, but living out of vehicles in desirable areas where the rent is expensive, and doing so quite comfortably and connectedly thanks largely to the smartphone.
We need a different word to describe this class of homeless people. They're more willfully homeless than the classical meaning of homeless, because their homeless option doesn't really suck as much as it used to.
I've lived out of a car quite a bit throughout the bay area, and talked to a bunch of people doing the same thing along the coast in the process. There are numerous folks living out of vans waking up to million dollar views every day without paying any rent or mortgage. They're living the dream, should we still call them homeless?
I have been homeless in very affluent cities on the California coast, including San Franscisco. I strongly disagree that having a "million dollar view" constitutes "living the dream."
If a person is at risk of assault or arrest for their inability to go indoors and has no immediate ability to remedy that, I have no issue calling that person homeless. Regardless of how one views that person's life decisions they face the same systemic issues as any other homeless person.
If your point is strictly that the language is ambiguous, perhaps it would be more appropriate to use "people that choose a vagabond lifestyle" (which is close to your original statement) over a confusing mix of "homeless" and " "homeless" " to refer to the tiny subgroup that you are referring to.
> just have a conversation with a few people that are currently or were recently homeless
A couple decades ago in San Francisco, I used to host an open mic. One of the regulars was Keith Savage, a poet who would occasionally compose and perform appreciations of the other regulars who had moved him. He was so empathic, so good at capturing what people were trying to communicate and then reworking it and responding... he gave so many people a rich reward for being brave enough to take the open mic stage.
Keith happened to be homeless, though that's not the most important or interesting thing about him... Folks, if you exclude the homeless from your life, you may be missing out...
Don't we spend quite a bit of money on safety nets in the US? I believe and often say that our government is inefficient with money. Maybe our programs could use a redesign?
The priority of one party is to spend money on social safety nets, while the priority of the other party is to hobble these safety nets to the point of uselessness.
It should be no surprise that we ended up with expensive and ineffective social programs.
That's of course not always the case. We're in a thread about homelessness, so this is quite appropriate:
NY Times 2008: "The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday."
"the officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country."
Ultimately culminating in an all-time record low rate of homelessness in the US by 2017.
The George W. Bush administration deserves the negative flak it took for its various bad policies. It also deserves credit for the positive things like its policies on homelessness or PEPFAR that were astounding successes.
We're dangerously treading into political hot water here, but I just want to add that I don't think it's fair to say that one party prioritizes safety nets. It's more correct to say that most of the safety nets we have in the US have come from one party, and since the 1930s.
I would generally disagree with this, just because I believe that government is inherently inefficient. I've been a government contractor and have seen this first hand. I wouldn't disagree that many people in power, both inside and outside the government, work to undermine the programs.
Step 1: cut funding disguised as a redesign. Step 2: complain that it doesn't work and needs a redesign. Step 3: go to Step 1.
It absolutely needs a redesign but it also needs funding -- and people who don't want to fund these programs have gotten very good at using the former to avoid doing the latter.
Social Security hands money to literal billionaires while excluding many of the elderly poor. Now, we can argue if it’s good use of money, but these programs are intentionally set up this way.
Social security is a mostly old age and disability insurance program with eligibility requirements and weird rules, and maybe some solvency issues. My understanding is there is some coverage for disabled children that's not based on previous earnings, but I'm not familiar with the details.
Everything else is based on eligible earnings, so I wouldn't consider it a safety net -- if you didn't earn enough or long enough, you may not get anything out of it.
I think you're going to get a lot more resistance from high income/ high net worth individuals if you take away their social security payments than if you raise the pay in caps, and set the payout percentages to be even lower at the top end. Or scrap the whole thing and build an honest steal from the rich and give to the poor guaranteed minimum income tax scheme.
Bush tax cuts maximizes dividends and long term capital gains tax rate at 15%;
While, our first two progressive income taxes are $9525 at 10% and $38700 at 12%; (and if head of household these are $13600 and $51,800.) And that's without counting any deductions, like $12k standardized deduction!
So, dividend tax rates are only lower than low income people if you're counting the top 10% as low income.
Social Security and Medicare are 12.4% + 1.45% and have no ‘deductions’ on earned income below ~125k adding up to: 13.85%. People paying more than 1.25% on earned income are rather common.
Many very low income earners are blocked from reviving any benefits from social security, but they still paid.
There aren’t many billionaires, and SS taxable income is capped; $128k this year. So a billionaire receiving SS is rightly entitled to receive what he contributed.
You can strip SS from the 1% and it will make no difference. You can do the same for the 10% and it will make little difference. The 10% payed FAR more in than they will receive.
PS: Social Security is hardly fair. That cap is by far the largest benifit for billionaires from social security’s design. People in the 10% pay a vastly higher percentage of their income to support others.
A fair system would be something like X% up to a cap that you get back and y% that you don’t with everyone paying their share of the y%. But that starts to look like a safty net.
On top of that married couples get a larger benifit with a single large income vs two incomes of half that size.
Yes, the considerable, positive results from the dramatically expanded US social safety net are widely ignored. It's a mistake to ignore those results, they should be held up as a triumph. It worked, we have the positive results to show for it.
The US child poverty rate has dropped by over 50% since the 1970s. It's at an all-time record low solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net.
US homelessness is near a record low (it hit a record low two years ago), solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net.
The overall US poverty rate is near a 40 year low.
The number of people with healthcare coverage is at record highs, primarily thanks to the expansion of Medicaid, CHIP and SS disability.
We do, but at the same time, we spend considerably less than our developed peers.
Right now we mostly get what we pay for: we pay a reduced rate and get reduced results, which in this case largely translates to more poor people suffering. We could change that, certainly we have the funds necessary, but we've collectively decided not to.
It seems to me that one big problem with US zoning is the unwillingness to mix industrial, residential, and commercial properties in the same area. In many places in Europe it is possible to live without a car simply because one can walk to work and to the supermarket.
The minimum price of owning and operating a car is substantially cheaper in the US than in Europe so it's not as big of a hurdle here. A sub $1k car powered by $2.50/gal gas will get you to work reliably enough that you can get a ride from a friend or figure out something else out on the several days a year it may not be derivable. Vehicle repair is a service that it's common for poorer people in the US to trade as a favor among each other. A much larger fraction of low income people self-teach vehicle repair out of necessity so it's much easier for low income people to find a friend to change brakes for cost+$50 them than it is for the HN crowd.
What you're missing here is insurance; Which while state required is often ignored, putting the owner and other drivers at risk and risk of financial ruin.
Insurance prices drop with credit and higher deductibles;
So, while a car $1k car may itself be cheap to insure; if you're driving in a city with Teslas driving around, and you purchase insurance, you're likely under insured.
People just pay a $100ish 1-month premium one month every other year when they need to renew their registration. The letter of the law is irrelevant when you can't possibly afford to comply.
I didn't include it in my comment because I know that that reality is not popular around here and the specifics of how one evades paying for insurance varies from state to state.
Driving uninsured or under-insured really doesn't matter when you have no assets and are living on the edge of poverty. The idea that someone who's only reasonable way to get to work is driving would not drive just because they're not insured is laughable. You're not going to get insurance by not going to work. It's not really a big additional risk compared to all the other things in day to day life that could push you over the edge.
Regardless, insurance is still the same or cheaper in the US.
But in the context of the parent; that refusing to zone residential and commercial together makes for a requirement to drive; we shouldn't ignore that, by having uninsured drivers that won't be able to pay, the other 85% are paying for it.
tldr; Our zoning is horrible, and it's not just because owning a car is cheaper, it's more because the people with car insurance subsidize those without. Also, police and criminalizing the poor.
Squatters are defined as people who occupy building or land _without permission_. As soon as you give them permission to occupy, i.e. with a caretaker's employment contract, they are no longer a squatter, by definition.
So does that mean their apartment is now tied to their job? E.g. what happens to their right to the apartment if they want to switch to a job outside the program or quit for whatever other reason?
>The turnover rate for entry-level employees in the industry is around 50%. For the formerly homeless people hired through Shelters to Shutters–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances–the retention rate is more than 87%.
>–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances–
That's a blatant lie. Their home is directly tied to their job. That's the best explanation for retention.
edit: this is not a critique of the good idea of employing homeless.
They hired some homeless people, it worked well, so they started a charity? I don't understand the point of the charity, I can't find their financial records on the IRS website or their own.
That's nice, but I was looking for their 990 form. That seems to have the relevant information on it, and I believe they're only required to give me an actual copy if I contact them, but it's still odd to me that it's not in the IRS database.
Homeless converted to live-in slaves. Sounds nice! Company towns are coming back, and probably going to be worse than ever, with big brother FB planning on doing similar.
These people are free to leave whenever they like. They're not enslaved physically, financially, or otherwise. Don't just throw around words like slavery casually. There is a huge difference between slavery and a job.
the threat of being homeless if you quit your job is quite severe, but i'm not sure it's an apples-to-apples comparison to a situation where people will chase you down and whip you near to death if you try to leave.
It absolutely the same. Try continuing to use food and shelter but without the money to pay for it: you'll be attacked by men with guns and thrown in a cage. Sometimes they'll even shoot you.
I'm upvoting this because I find it interesting. I'm not entirely sure I agree, but your point that having one's employer also be one's landlord puts way too much power in a single entity is certainly valid.
However, apartment management gigs are frequently part-time-ish, with on call hours. I've known a few apartment managers who have outside income. In a small complex, say 30 units, the job can be done by an onsite individual on a part time basis. For that sort of scenario, I would expect that the pay comes largely in the form of subsidized rent. For a larger apartment complex, I would expect that the pay would increase commensurately.
Why is this being downvoted, this is exactly what this is. If anything, this incentivizes making people homeless. Instead of dealing with what causes homelessness we are instead profiting off of the fact that they are homeless.
Moreover, there is something insidious about it being run by a real estate company, an entity that might very well have contributed to homelessness in the first place.
I've worked on many homeless-service programs, and it's disheartening to see cities allocate vast sums for them: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f... while simultaneously using zoning laws to make sure they won't be very effective.