
A real estate company's simple way to offer the homeless a house and a job - Geekette
https://www.fastcompany.com/90238675/this-real-estate-company-figured-out-a-simple-way-to-offer-the-homeless-a-house-and-a-job
======
jseliger
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...](https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-
explained/exclusionary-zoning-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter). 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...](http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-
economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/) while simultaneously
using zoning laws to make sure they won't be very effective.

~~~
anoncoward111
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!

~~~
rayiner
> 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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
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.

[1] - [https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-
fam...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-
income-in-the-us/)

~~~
lifeformed
It's not a secret racial motive, it's an overt one:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)

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.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
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.

~~~
lifeformed
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.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
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.

~~~
lifeformed
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.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
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.

~~~
lifeformed
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.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
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.

------
bojackstorkman
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.

~~~
rectang
Thanks for the vivid, eloquent depiction of what success in a program like the
one from the article looks like. :)

~~~
bojackstorkman
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 :)

------
spraak
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.

------
rectang
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.

~~~
vorpalhex
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.

~~~
noobermin
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?

~~~
stale2002
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?

~~~
snackbugs
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.

~~~
stale2002
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.

~~~
snackbugs
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.

~~~
stale2002
¯\\_(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.

~~~
snackbugs
>That's probably happened to at least 50% of people

This and every other word in your reply is in complete bad faith. Have fun
posting here.

------
kwhitefoot
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
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.

~~~
smileysteve
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
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.

~~~
smileysteve
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.

------
jl2718
There’s a problem with this. It’s called “squatter’s rights”, and it makes it
very dangerous to give people a chance.

~~~
desdiv
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.

------
xg15
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?

------
lucio
Good idea, but something in the article irked me.

>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.

~~~
sandworm101
But are they being employed? Are they paid money or just reduced rent? Housing
is great, but people need cash in hand.

And dont talk to the IRS about whether you have to pay taxes on that rent
reduction.

------
boomboomsubban
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.

~~~
rtkwe
Took a half second on google to find their annual report:
[http://shelterstoshutters.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/18-...](http://shelterstoshutters.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/06/18-S2SH-103-AnnualReport-R10-Pages.pdf)

~~~
boomboomsubban
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.

------
deft
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.

~~~
eloff
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.

~~~
ahoy
Free to go live under the bridge again. Complete freedom.

~~~
eloff
Free to find another job...

