
Sarah Connor, in hiding before the war - DoreenMichele
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2020/02/sarah-connor-in-hiding-before-war.html
======
csours
"Homeless" is one of those catch all words like "plastic" or "cancer", where
the things being described only look relatively similar from the outside.

As the blogpost notes: "There are already lots of hidden homeless passing for
normal, couch surfing, etc. People tend to not realize it."

Fortunately right now, I'm at very low risk of homelessness, but I can imagine
scenarios where it could happen. Some people don't have family to fall back
on. Some people's family are terrible people and it's questionable whether
they are better off with them or living rough.

A lot of people live in their cars or vans for a while.

Here in Austin, urban camping was decriminalized (I am not an expert, this may
not be entirely correct) and now there are quite a lot of tents popping up all
over the place.

As a civilian, it's impossible for me to tell what situation a person is in;
are they potentially violent, do they live in the same world as me, are they
mentally and physically capable but undergoing hard times? They are all
people, and they should all be helped, but help for one person isn't like help
for another; and just lumping people together and parking them doesn't help
anyone.

~~~
dcolkitt
Is this not the problem that "credit scoring" systems are designed to solve?
You've identified a major issue, certain segments of the homeless population
are much riskier for "civilians" than others. The problem is the guy who
couldn't make rent last week is lumped together with the schizophrenic meth
addict with a long history of violence.

The solution, at least for the "harmless homeless" is to credibly broadcast to
civilians and authorities their benign circumstances and histories. With
widespread facial recognition and augmented reality, this might not be as hard
to do as it seems. The homeless can be assigned a social credit score based on
their criminal record, user rating by shelters and other provider
institutions, employment history, and how long they've been homeless.
Authorities, and potentially even civilians, can instantly identify and flag
homeless people that are likely to be problematic.

Without a doubt, this regime would certainly make life better for the harmless
and down-on-their-luck homeless types. Yet my guess is most would oppose such
a system. The point is tradeoffs exist in the social design space. Most of the
down-on-the-luck homeless are unfairly stigmatized because society at large
lumps them in with the violent, destructive and anti-social. We can make more
efforts to draw a visible class distinction between those respective groups,
yet it's often homeless advocates that oppose doing so.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
The problem here is you just re-invented the term "deserving poor".

And the "undeserving homeless", the violent drug addict with mental health
problems - well (s)he deserved our help about ten or fifteen years previously,
when under funded health services let him slip through the net, or neighbours
and uncles and aunts did not want to believe her dad was actually doing that
to her and ....

A lot of people have shitty lives and deserve our help - not just when the
symptoms are impossible to ignore.

I kind of see what you are reaching for - that there must be _some_ solution.
Yeah there is - but it's about a decade or two before people hit the streets,
so we need to fix all the problems in our society that let children doing well
in Kindergarten, fall that far. And we also need help for those that have
fallen right now - and the article had some pretty good ideas about that I
thought.

~~~
dcolkitt
> The problem here is you just re-invented the term "deserving poor".

You're citing this as if the concept of "deserving poor" isn't something
that's already enshrined in public policy. For the vast majority of American
voters segmenting the deserving from the undeserving poor is a feature not a
bug.

That's the reason we don't have unconditional UBI, and instead have a welfare
system that's based on life circumstances. When we're more generous with
children, the infirm, and the elderly than able-bodied adults who eschew work
(or even worse commit crime), that is the concept of the deserving poor. And
frankly I agree with that class distinction.

> the violent drug addict with mental health problems - well (s)he deserved
> our help about ten or fifteen years previously

And yet the very same criticism can be said about permanent criminal records
or sex offender registries. Yet the vast majority of people in our society
accept that committing a violent crime is "crossing the rubicon". Once you've
done so, you'll always be a second-class citizen at best.

This isn't something controversial, policies based on this belief are nearly
universally supported by voters. Regardless of prior personal circumstances,
American society always lays the blame primarily at the perpetrator himself.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
>>> who eschew work (or even worse commit crime)

Wait, what? Equating criminals should be punished with some people are more
deserving than others is not the point - the deserving poor was a kid
victorian justification for selectively providing assistance to a
(conveniently limited) number of people while letting the majority of poor rot
away in plain sight.

It was a means of ignoring the systemic issues that created and sustained
grinding poverty - and is IMO something we are doing still - the underclass
has shrunk, yes, we have lifted many people out of overfly in the West, but
prisons are populated mostly with men with poor backgrounds, educational low
attainment, mental health issues and drug problems - waaaaay too out of
proportion to be confidence, thus making those issues part of the modern day
systemic faikures that mean some of our fellow citizens have the odds stacked
against them.

------
AdmiralAsshat
There's a homeless guy outside of the shopping center where I get most of my
groceries. I think he's been conditioned to conform to our society's standards
of what a "good" homeless person should be: he never stops people walking by,
he never asks for straight-up cash, and he never asks for alcohol or other
things that society feels homeless people don't "deserve" (like junk food). Of
the dozen times I've asked if he needs anything, it's always been very
sensible: some fresh fruit, body wash, or ten dollars to get a haircut
(because he had a job interview).

It bums me the hell out that a year later after I first bumped into him, he's
still homeless. As I said, he's basically the "model" of how we think homeless
people should act when asking for help, and yet for all that, at best it's
probably just kept him out of jail.

~~~
grawprog
I learned a fairly valuable lesson from a local homeless guy I'd seen for
years one day. He always hung out a few blocks up the road from where I lived,
walked with a fairly extreme limp and always seemed like he had some pretty
bad health problems. Was a pretty nice dude, never hassled anybody or
anything.

Then one day I was up the road near where he hangs out, I watched him limp and
stumble down to the end of the block, someone was even nice enough to give him
a hand as he stumbled, then he got down to the crosswalk and started limping
across the street, hit about halfway across, then straightened up, put on a
big grin and strided triumphantly the rest of the way across, met up with his
buddy i'd seen him with sometimes who hung out across the street, high five
and disappear around the corner together. He still hangs out there begging,
pretending to be crippled as far as I know.

Some people don't want to stop being 'homeless', for them it makes a
pretty.good career

~~~
taurath
Whats sad to me is, if we knew that homeless people could get help and be
taken care of, we'd know not to give things to people like this. But since
society has decided to not put resources towards it, we can't make assumptions
like that.

~~~
Jommi
Yep, in Finland its customary to nearly look down on those begging on the
street, as most likely this is related to human trafficking or black market
crime. We can do this because we know that a normal citizen would never need
to do something like this.

~~~
sneak
> _its customary to nearly look down on those begging on the street, as most
> likely this is related to human trafficking_

> _we know that a normal citizen would never_

That took a dark turn quickly.

~~~
205guy
It's poorly phrased such that it sounds disconnected from the GP (about the
lack of care in the US leading to both the needy and scammers on the street),
but your quote leaves off the key word:

> we know that a normal citizen would never need

In other words, when you can trust your society to take care of its residents,
you can be almost certain the beggars are scam artists.

------
chaostheory
According to established research, there are two types of homeless. 80% of the
homeless recover within several months with the help of existing private and
public social programs. They work. Unfortunately, they only work for normal
people “down on their luck”

The other 20% is what is referred to as the chronic homeless. These are the
ones we see on the streets. Very few of them recover if ever. This group is
mostly made of the mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely an individual
suffering from both problems. Only federal medical institutions can help them.
The problem is that they were expensive and extremely mismanaged (stacks of
abuse) in the 20th century. Consequently, the Kennedy family waged a
successful crusade in eliminating them. Sadly, given what we know now, instead
of ending those programs; we should have reformed them instead.

What we have now is a bunch of cities playing a never ending game of “hot
potato” with the mentally ill, using free bus and airline tickets that send
them to another metro to deal with and vice versa.

Most proposed solutions like the ones outlined in the blog post only deal with
the symptoms and not the root of the problem. It’s a mental health issue

~~~
DoreenMichele
_This group is mostly made of the mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely
an individual suffering from both problems._

I'm the author of the piece. I was homeless with my adult sons for nearly six
years. None of us has a mental health diagnosis and none of us does drugs or
drinks. We are all tea-totallers.

I'm really tired of the "junkies and crazies" meme about homelessness. I don't
think it's accurate. It's just another way we throw our hands up and claim "It
can't be solved, and not because I don't care."

I think we need to solve our health care issues in the US. Medical issues
contribute to chronic homelessness.

I think other special needs, such as being ADHD, contribute. ADHD isn't a
mental health diagnosis of the "he's just insane and can't be made to behave"
variety. But such issues do create inherent challenges to regular employment.

I have inherent challenges to regular employment. I began doing freelance
writing online while homeless and that helped me get back into housing
eventually.

My blogging mostly doesn't pay my bills. I occasionally get tips and I have a
little Patreon support, but I've been told for years "Get a real job. Writing
just doesn't pay, you slacker you." and it's like "Writing is something I can
do without it creating high medical bills and making me unable to work at all.
I do it well enough to sometimes hit the front page of Hacker News. Why the
hell shouldn't this be a means to support myself?"

And I think some portion of it is I'm a woman and I'm poor and those are
contributing factors. People don't want to admit sexism and classism influence
which websites they are willing to support financially.

But, regardless of all that crazy making stuff, doing what I could do helped
me improve things:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-twist-
on-...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-twist-on-spoon-
theory.html)

Anyway, it's probably time for me to walk away and not reply to too much stuff
here. A lot of it will likely end up being personally offensive to me, but I
didn't want to just let this remark pass without some push back. I'm so tired
of the "junkies and crazies" meme. The data I'm familiar with says it's not
true.

~~~
j8014
I worked in HMIS for years and the chronic homeless are almost ALWAYS
"mentally ill, drug addicts, or most likely an individual suffering from both
problems." Additionally, you make a choice to support yourself however you
want but "Why the hell shouldn't this be a means to support myself?" is
nothing more than entitlement and wishful thinking. There are a bunch of other
things that I do that make money, make sense for me, but dont pay the bills,
so I adult and find work that does support me.

~~~
prostheticvamp
I’ve worked enough EDs that this strikes me as quite true (about drugs and
mental dx), but it’s not clear which way causality runs. Homelessness is not a
condition in any way conducive to maintaining mental health. I’d be hard
pressed to intentionally design something more effective at damaging the
psyche.

I agree with the entitlement comment as well. “Doing this thing works for me”
is not the same as “doing this thing is valuable to anyone else”.

~~~
DoreenMichele
When I had a class on _Homelessness and Public Policy_ , the professor said
something like "I'd drink too if I were homeless. The sidewalk is cold and
hard."

While I appreciate you bringing up that element, I actually think it's more
complicated than that. In a nutshell, I think addiction generally arises out
of other problems, a la the phrase "driven to drink." Blaming everything on
"You drink" fails to address the underlying problems concerning why you drink.

But I don't think elaborating at length while being described as having an
entitled attitude because I think I should be able to get compensation for
work I can do that other people clearly do value to some degree is likely to
be constructive.

~~~
lostmsu
> people clearly do value

There's a difference in valuing something 10$ vs under 1¢. 100 of one can feed
a person for a month, and a 100 of the other can buy you a single gum.

------
alexandercrohde
I think this post is missing the distinction. People might say they hate
"homeless," but I don't think anybody cares if you have a house.

People care if you are unshowered, drunk/high, schizophrenic/screaming, asking
for money, going to steal, etc.

It just so happens that the two correlate a lot.

\--

This doesn't negate the question of how to help these groups, but real
solutions do require us to be honest with ourselves.

~~~
gowld
People also care if you are not well groomed, wear clothing with holes, are
sitting in public for too long. It just so happens that the two correlate a
lot.

> going to steal,

Think about the thought process that leads someone to believe you are "going
to steal", and how much prejudicial stereotyping that entails.

> unshowered, drunk/high, schizophrenic/screaming,

All things that people who have houses are free to do without being punished.
So yeah, anybody does care if you have a house, _practically_ speaking.

~~~
alexandercrohde
> All things that people who have houses are free to do without being
> punished. So yeah, anybody does care if you have a house, practically
> speaking.

I don't think so.

If I go to a restaurant and am refused service, it's not because I couldn't
present a deed. It's based on whether your state makes everybody around you
uncomfortable.

 _Maybe_ if you have a suit, then you can get away with yelling or more
drinking, but that's a stereotype about attire (or really class-ism), not
about having a house. Houses actually have very little to do with any of this.

~~~
pwinnski
It seems the GP's point was that you can be drunk, unshowered, and yelling at
home, and nobody cares. It's when you don't have a home that it is seen as an
issue.

~~~
wang_li
A homeless person could be drunk, unshowered, and yelling out in the woods by
themselves and no one would care. It's the drunk, unsanitary, and loosely
coupled with reality around other people that is a problem. No one cares about
these things unless there's a chance it's going to turn into violence or a
public health/sanitation issue.

------
jessaustin
The comment about lockers is interesting. I have often found myself wishing
that lockers were available when "traveling light", i.e. using various forms
of public transport and walking/biking rather than driving an automobile. I
have the sense that public lockers used to be common especially at e.g. bus
stations and airports, but they are not common now. Were these eliminated in
order to inconvenience the homeless?

~~~
fxj
No because of bomb attacks during the 1970s. At least in Germany.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Sprengstoffanschl%C3...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Sprengstoffanschl%C3%A4gen)

~~~
jessaustin
Unless they're also doing away with trashcans, I don't see how that is an
explanation.

~~~
zabzonk
In London, at the height of the IRA bombing campaign, they _did_ do away with
rubbish bins in public places.

~~~
andrewaylett
Even today, they're of a special design to limit their use as extra shrapnel
around a bomb.

The UK does reasonably well at "hidden" security features. Another type are
"decorative" features -- like the word "Arsenal" outside the football club, or
the ponds in front of the Scottish Parliament building -- which just happen to
be in the right place and of the right strength to prevent vehicles crashing
through.

------
ck2
I can't speak for others but I've been homeless a few times (but I did have my
car to live in, badly as it was full of my "stuff" had to sleep upright)

The thing is, after the first few days, first week, you are not yourself
anymore, your sleep is terrible, your thinking is beyond rational, beyond
logical, every day is just searching for simple patterns for survival, for
moments of peace.

Some people, not everyone, seem to think homeless can pull themselves out of
it with enough resources. It doesn't work like that and sometimes it's not
even for lack of motivation to not be homeless. You get caught in a web, it's
a descent into someone not yourself anymore.

Sanders is not someone I would vote for in a primary but I am curious to see
if he does become president if he tries to make a dent in not just reducing
national homelessness in this country but preventing it in the first place
which is an equally good idea if not even more important.

------
nate_meurer
> _I would like to have meetings once a week for supporting people interested
> in trying to make money online. ... Having a place to be for an hour once a
> week to get plugged in, charge your devices, get free wifi and a free cup of
> coffee and talk with people about building a financial future and what your
> dreams are -- this would be humanizing. This would be a constructive
> connection to society that most homeless currently lack. ... It would be a
> connection to a vision of a future self that is better than what you have
> today and it would be done in a nice way, not in a punishing way._

Yes, and if I might add to this, a place to shower and clean their clothes,
and access to grooming services like haircuts.

I'm sure you've thought about all of this, but these are the things that I
notice right away. I can tell a person is homeless (as in actually living on
the street), in any context, in a fraction of a second based on subtle visual
cues such as hair, their gait, the fit and condition of their clothes, and the
extra things they carry. Tiny cues can add up to a striking impression even if
the person is trying to hide them, and that's before I get close enough to
smell the cigarettes and their clothing.

Clothing is, I believe, a solvable problem, but it takes more effort than
simply throwing free clothing at them. Clothes have to fit and be at least
visually clean, or else they can immediately identify a person as homeless.
The bar here is low. America is swimming in clothing. Goodwill and ARC take in
so much clothing that they're kind of picky, and readily throw away anything
with even minor wear or damage. It certainly seems that some organization
could find success in helping folks into clothing that doesn't showcase their
poverty.

~~~
DoreenMichele
The problem with clothing is that maintaining a middle class appearance
essentially requires a middle class life.

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. My mother sews
beautifully and clothes was a very big deal for most of my life. I spent some
time wishing I could be an image consultant or fashion model. I still
fantasize about starting my own clothing line and I recently took over
r/ClothingStartups.

That background helped me pass for normal while homeless. I am capable of
picking out clothes that work for me without trying them on. I was often
mistaken for a tourist because I was clean and dressed casually.

But the kind of fit and social signaling and cleanliness you have in mind more
or less requires housing. In practical terms, homeless people don't have the
means to store clean clothes, change into a clean outfit daily, etc.

I didn't wash my clothes. I wore it for a week or three, acquired a new
outfit, tried to shower if possible and threw the old outfit in the trash.

I didn't typically carry spare clothes. I typically only had the clothes on my
back.

I've been back in housing for over two years. I still largely handle it the
same way.

I'm in a hundred year old SRO. There is one washer and dryer for the whole
building and it isn't especially clean and that's not a solvable problem
because of the tenants in the building. There is one laundromat that I know of
in town and it has limited hours. I'm not currently in a position to hand wash
and hang dry my items.

I am still "under housed" and don't have my own kitchen and my fridge is
currently dead and so forth. By some definitions, I would still be classified
as "homeless", though it's vastly better than sleeping in a tent and I've
always wanted to live in an SRO and it's been overall a terrific experience.
Still, to have a normal job and dress like a normal middle class person for it
would be challenging in my current circumstances.

I'm in the process of trying to remedy some of the issues with my unit. I'm
waiting on my tax refund and when I get it I expect to replace the fridge,
among other things. (Management offered me a used fridge, but I have a
compromised immune system. It's not clean enough for my needs. They don't
charge enough rent to cover luxuries like new fridges.)

Anyway, I do think about things like the hygiene issue. I wrote a piece about
wanting to encourage hotel stays to help homeless people access showers more
consistently.

But I really think we need to do things like bring back SROs and Missing
Middle housing. Some things really can't be fixed while you are still
unhoused. Trying to stay presentable in a "middle class person with a regular
job" way is very challenging. I was only ever able pull off "Passes for a
tourist on vacay, that must be why she's in sweat pants and a t-shirt."

People sleeping in their cars do have some storage. They may be more able than
I was to address some pieces of this. But while living out of a back pack,
there were limits to how middle class I could make myself look, in spite of
having enormous personal strengths in the clothing/appearance department
thanks to my mother and my personal background.

~~~
nate_meurer
> _But I really think we need to do things like bring back SROs and Missing
> Middle housing. Some things really can 't be fixed while you are still
> unhoused._

I thought about that as I wrote my comment. I can live out of a backpack for
weeks, no showers, no change of clothes, scrounging for food. But I've only
been able to do that while suitably "housed", whether couch surfing or in
short term rentals. If I had to do that on the street, I'm confident
everything would quickly go to shit.

I'm a big fan of housing-first in general, as long as it's supported with
mental health care, and properly policed to keep units from becoming drug
dens.

I read all your stuff btw.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Thank you.

It's not obvious to people how rapidly that unravels when you don't have
routine access to normal middle class stuff. It's part of why I blog. A lot of
what I experienced wasn't anything I could have ever predicted.

I found that after I was able to arrange one night a month in a hotel, it
became vastly easier to pass for normal.

I got showered. I got a break from life on the street. I watched a little TV,
something not available while sleeping in a tent and which is a common source
of small talk for most people.

I went more than two years without a proper shower. My first hotel stay took
two showers to get the dead skin off.

After that, I stayed occasionally in a hotel, but not once a month. I took
baths instead of showers to soak the dead skin off. A shower wasn't enough.

But with monthly hotel stays, I no longer needed to soak the dead skin off. My
feet stopped turning black. Cleaning up at sinks in public bathrooms in the
weeks in between did a lot more for me than it did when it was all I had
access to.

And I absolutely would not have ever sat down and tried to dream up "How many
days a month do I need to be in a hotel to pass for normal?" This isn't a
thought experiment that would have even occurred to me to try to pursue.

I only know this stuff because I lived it and that's how it went down, not
because I would have ever in a million years tried to figure out "How many
showers a month do I need to make cleaning up in sinks sufficient most of the
time?"

~~~
nate_meurer
Ok, now _that_ is fascinating and completely unintuitive to me -- that just
one day a month made that much difference. Do you think many other homeless
people would benefit significantly from such a small dosage, or do you think
your particular constitution allowed you to take advantage of it better than
others would? I'm assuming your kids were with you... did it do them as much
good?

~~~
DoreenMichele
Given that I have a genetic disorder that significantly impacts all epithelial
tissues, which includes the skin, I would guess that others could potentially
benefit as much from even less -- assuming they followed some of the same
practices I followed to avoid grime, which is not a given.

It's possible other homeless could get similar results from a hotel stay once
every six weeks, just as a wild ass guess.

Edit: it's also possible I'm guessing in the wrong direction. 0_o

------
ALittleLight
I was interested to read about the lockers. That definitely seems like a
tractable problem, of the kind "This is something needed that could be built."

This website [1] has locker systems which could go outdoors for between 6-20k
from what I can tell. Certainly seems like a raisable amount.

I'd imagine you would need an area to set it up, the support of local
government and possibly a local business or shelter to get the space for the
installation. Then you need to raise the 20k. Then you need to work with the
management software to make sure it supports this use case. Then you'd need to
do the work of maintaining it, which would probably be non-trivial...

Are there existing charities that setup locker systems like these? Is there a
way to do it profitably? Charities could make a limited number of lockers
work, whereas profit could make many more.

1 -
[https://www.luxerone.com/market/residential/](https://www.luxerone.com/market/residential/)

~~~
icebraining
In Lisbon, Portugal an organization designed, produced and installed what they
call "Solidarity Lockers": [https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-
difference/2014/012...](https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-
difference/2014/0124/Duarte-Paiva-helps-the-homeless-by-designing-lockers-to-
house-their-things)

Apparently it cost about 5000€ all-in, including installation, though manual
labor is relatively cheap in Portugal.

That said, I'm sure there are extra costs (at least in volunteer time) keeping
them up, and that's often disregarded by these feel-good articles.

------
scarejunba
Well, it's not that I disrespect them. It's just that in any veil-of-ignorance
metric of human happiness, the marginal dollar goes not very far when given to
the arbitrary homeless person. There is:

* a discovery problem - I don't know which guys the marginal dollar will provide more than a dollar's worth back in human value

* an antagonist problem - There are actors intentionally muddying the waters so that spending the dollar will yield negative value

* a comparative advantage problem - These guys are not an efficient spend of money

And I must make these choices because a 40 year old shitting himself on Powell
St. is really not more valuable than a 2 year old who will die of a disease
unless I fund part of a doctor, and I have limited resources in which to
choose who to help. And neither of them are more valuable than getting extra
meat on my Chipotle. I know this because I think about that $3 sometimes when
I'm ordering and I'd rather have the meat than give the $3 to help either of
them.

------
pmarreck
> Most homeless people seem to be dealing with a lot more personal drama than
> gets genuinely acknowledged. I think if you think of them as sort of
> guerrilla warriors fighting an unacknowledged personal battle with those
> problems and with the systemic issues we have, it maybe helps to see them
> with real respect and not just view them as losers.

This is both the most succinct and most “beware” statement about the homeless.
You don’t know how correctable/systematic the hidden problems are, and some of
them could explode into violence...

------
thrower123
It'd be nice if there was something along the lines of youth hostels, or the
boarding houses that existed a hundred years ago. In some places, you've got
dive motels that cater to truckers and itinerant construction workers and the
like, but even at the cheapest you're looking at something around $40-50 a
day. There's a big gap in the market there that isn't being served.

~~~
lotsofpulp
There’s lots of liability involved with housing people and a reason why it’s
not sustainable to offer prices lower than what you can find.

~~~
trevyn
These should be solvable problems, considering that much lower prices exist in
most of the world.

------
nikodunk
Just wanted to say this is one of the best articles I've read this month. Such
a different outlook now.

I live in California so this is constantly top-of-mind.

------
akeck
Note: Doreen also writes www.pocketputer.com, which I enjoyed reading.

------
lostphilosopher
> "I think if you think of them as sort of guerrilla warriors fighting an
> unacknowledged personal battle with those problems and with the systemic
> issues we have, it maybe helps to see them with real respect and not just
> view them as losers."

~~~
gowld
Why is it OK to disrespect losers?

------
torgian
I was homeless for half a year. Fortunately I was 19 at the time, and the
military gave me a way to get out of that situation.

I'm 37 now; if I became homeless, it would be much, much harder to get out of
it.

------
6510
Welcome to egocentric society, leave your sanity by the door it's every man
for himself fromhereon!

Praise the homeless people for they are the most productive members of
society! You think you are productive? hah! The homeless are working day and
night! Their shift never ends! They produce more value than the rest of us
combined!

How it works? I doubt you really want to know.

With a bucket, a sheet of plastic and some straw I can build a fabulous house.
Without the bucket and the plastic it would take a bit more time. Give me a
pile of bricks, some mortar, bit of wood and some roof tiles and ill build a
house that looks from the outside exactly the same as any house build by a
construction company. It wont take me 6 months. In the 14th century the roof
tiles became mandatory because straw is a fire hazard if you cramp houses
really really close together.

I'm getting to the point, wait for it...

There is plenty of space to build plenty of houses, it takes a bit of effort
but it won't have to cost an insane amount of resources. We can plant the
trees 20 years in advance if we kept our sanity.

While all that sounds like a lovely idea and it would certainly work in a
loving and caring society - that is not what we have! It's a terrible idea!

The housing ponzi needs an artificial shortage. Its 30 k worth of bricks and
labor and 500 000 market value. We need for this to go UP NOT DOWN. We have a
lot riding on this housing ponzi! You are not seriously expecting me to get a
job and work for my money - are you?

If anyone was to create a surplus in places to live it would do terrible
things to our investments! It would harm the economy and the economy is more
important than anyone in this neoliberal storm of poop.

Imagine how bad things would be if we didn't have a surplus in demand, if we
didn't have plenty of homeless people, plenty of permanent guests sleeping on
sofa's, plenty of hard working people living in tiny houses they can't afford!

Purchase power of minimum wage is racing down, people are expected to work
flexible hours and rent is going up faster than you can say cul-de-sac.

Praise the homeless for no one works harder to keep the productive members of
society down. We should all shake their hand and thank them for their
contribution. Without them non of this would be possible.

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alpineidyll3
This is actually a genius piece.

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zackmorris
This article resonated with me. Being homeless is far, far more difficult than
being part of the rat race. What it comes down to is, people feel that they
suffer an indignity that someone would dare risk everything to be free rather
than be conscripted to an employer. It threatens their entire religious
heteronormative worldview that life is about pulling the yoke to provide for
one's children. If they have to suffer, then everyone else should too. Why
should that guy get out of working when I have to get up at 6 am tomorrow? And
so on and so forth.

Since wealth inequality is so extreme now globally, all labor slides into
full-time and overtime. Some people look at the risk-reward value proposition
of that, and correctly opt out. We label them homeless. But personally, I
think of them as starving artists, freedom fighters and probably gifted. Some
of the most dynamic people that I have ever met were on drugs, suffering with
some form of mental illness like PTSD/ADHD/manic-depressive or one step away
from living on the streets. Luckily they became computer programmers.

To a first-order approximation, homelessness is a measure of how authoritarian
a society is. The choices are the $100k+ career at 40+ hours per week, menial
labor at 50-60 hours per week, or homelessness. We pretend that there are 20
hour per week jobs that pay enough to launch a business, but of course that's
all make-believe. It's not really even possible to work every other year, or
have two people apply to the same job so they can alternate shifts. Systems of
control lock us down by rents and medical bills and debts to the point that
anything short of indentured servitude is not sustainable.

I'm seeing that it's nearly impossible to live off the grid in a medium-sized
city in the northwest where people actively work to ban city camping and
prevent giving tiny homes to the homeless. Surely it must be impossible in New
York or Chicago or Los Angeles. So I dunno, after a lot of trying to create
some kind of free life for myself, after 20 years of struggle and poverty, I
might just have to throw in the towel and get a job at a major corporation. I
might be a slave then, but at least the system would provide for my basic
needs.

This isn't the future I signed up for, and more and more every day I am coming
to terms with the fact that the American Dream is probably dead. I've found
the Office Space/Fight Club/Mr. Robot portrayal of the working world to be
uncannily accurate. I actually enjoy earning a paycheck and working with
people as it happens, but when burnout sets in and I finally find myself
unemployed again, the 6 months of living expenses that I've saved after years
of lost life doesn't feel like much of a consolation prize. The people who
have it figured out are the sociopaths, able to skim income from other
people's labor and rationalize it by calling it capitalism. But there is no
future in hard work. And lately, no market for it either.

This is a garbage comment and I'm not sure I even believe half of it, but it
felt real in the moment so I'm going to go ahead and just post it.

EDIT: In the spirit of offering solutions rather than dwelling on problems, I
think that an answer can be found in the gig economy, sustainability and
expanded consciousness. Maker communities with urban gardens and such might
have enough strength in numbers to provide basic needs between the extremes of
homelessness and the 9-5 job. I'm trying to move in that direction but the
forces that be don't make it easy.

~~~
nullc
> What it comes down to is, people feel that they suffer an indignity that
> someone would dare risk everything to be free rather than be conscripted to
> an employer.

If this were the case wouldn't retirees be a widely hated group? :)

I feel like this essay comes from much of the same spirit as your comment, but
is a lot easier to stand behind: [https://hermetic.com/black/the-abolition-of-
work](https://hermetic.com/black/the-abolition-of-work)

~~~
zackmorris
Thanks for that. To me, what is happening is that we passed a tipping point in
the 1980s where it would be easier to simply automate all work than it is to
continue perpetuating this illusion that work is a necessary evil for
promoting self-worth.

This idea that a strong work ethic is noble is just another system of control
that most people are never able to see beyond.

I don't have an answer yet, but I feel inklings that it lies somewhere along
the vision of the 10 principles of Burning Man:

    
    
      Radical Inclusion
      Gifting
      Decommodification
      Radical Self-reliance
      Radical Self-expression
      Communal Effort
      Civic Responsibility
      Leaving No Trace
      Participation
      Immediacy
    

These are merely a starting point. To manifest the kind of egalitarian society
of something like Star Trek, it's going to take dedicated people living their
truth in order to show everyone that better ways of living are possible.

