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Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

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Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#91

Post by n00bdude »

mxstbr wrote: post #88
n00bdude wrote: post #85

I've lived on the streets of NYC since 2017 & been employed (min-wage job) but only do so in order to afford more free time to creative write.

That is fascinating, can you share more of your experience? How does living on the streets work, how did you end up in this situation?

It started w/ an Aladdin story & dream-chasing .. but to cut to it, @ present, I basically operate in / out of a storage unit.

The routine basically goes: Wake up, run / shower @ gym (some days, meditate in tanning booth), go to cafe & write for ~3-4 hours, Citi Bike to day-job, work it & once finished, go to sleep on soho-streets @ night.

I ended up in this situation because I put myself into it so as to be in New York City (publishing house Mecca)

I am from CA but going for it ;)

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#92

Post by snakeboy »

sidesentists wrote: post #4

This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified.

The adoption of slavery can reduce employment rate to 0 quite effectively.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#93

Post by [deleted] »

closeparen wrote: post #60
baq wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we don’t and the rich suddenly notice that dollar notes can’t provide nourishment and don’t do laundry.

The rich got by for thousands of years without cooking, doing laundry, or running affordable housing programs. The service sector lived on its customers’ estates, often as part of their households. I expect this is where we’re headed. Several people I know who work on poverty wages in the arts industry here pay their room and board in elder- or child-care for a homeowner. We often hear that terms like “feudalism” and…

[deleted]

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#95

Post by nannePOPI »

jlangenauer wrote: post #22

If, in the Soviet Union, people had to live in tents while working, most sensible people would blame the economic system in place. Yet in capitalist America...?

the housing market, especially in the US, is far from being capitalistic. You have all kind of weird rules, zoning laws maybe are the first culprit, and guess what is the result? You don't have enough houses, people are homeless and prices are most often ridiculous. This despite the fact that you have really a lot of land and the kind where you could build really high structures to house people.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#96

Post by rboyd »

justboxing wrote: post #87
berberous wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the last bit, that was all over the news for a while. CA and NV had a big fight over it: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposa...

Correct. This was literally nuts. Nevada bused in and dumped over 50 mentally ill patients onto the streets of San Francisco, and the consequence was that you couldn't walk in downtown San Francisco without encountering 1 of these patients acting crazy on the streets. It's somewhat lame that the City settled for a measly compensation of 400K. They should've all been rounded up and send back to Nevada, to the hospital…

How do you determine what hospitals (or city) they belonged to? Just that they were checked in there first? That they had legal residence in some city at some time?

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#97

Post by pmiller2 »

Fellshard wrote: post #74
pmiller2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the problem with someone of sound mind ( i.e. not due to mental illness or addiction) living on the streets by choice? The only issues I have are that sanitation is a problem, and the places we force them into are not safe for them, or for non-homeless people, for that matter. Would you criminalize someone who’s eternally “backpacking through Europe,” metaphorically speaking? No one should be forced to live on…

Sanitation, and sometimes (though certainly extremely rarely) infrastructure damage, as seen in the 2017 collapse of an Atlanta overpass. I don't think this is the best point to argue on, especially as it's arguing from extremes, but it's a point to consider if more examples crop up. I've heard of similar fires starting in Seattle, but with less risk since the're not being set near other material likely to catch fire…

I suspect many of the tent and tarp folks are doing it because there’s no better alternative. If cities would just build simple housing with proper sanitation (tiny houses, SROs, whatever) to get those people off the street, I’m sure that would take care of a majority of the public sanitation issues.

Once you get someone into a home, it is vastly easier to help them stabilize their other issues (mental health and drug abuse among them). Housing first works, and it’s been proven to work time and again.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#98

Post by mynameishere »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #28

These are my personal observations: When I first moved to the SF Bay area, I was surprised by the amount of visible homelessness and by the number of service economy workers who drove nearly two hours to and from work. I also had my first experiences with the "campuses" of major technology companies, where money was made hand-over-fist. I think the recent widening income gap is a natural consequence of the technology…

the people we rely on to extinguish our flames cannot afford

What a strange example for you to use. First, firefighters in most urban areas make muchos, muchos dollars. Second, firefighter jobs are extremely desirable, for that reason and many others ("heroism", firefighter groupies, extreme lengths of downtime, early pensions, etc) Third, in poorer areas, volunteers are all-too happy to be firefighters.

As I said, strange example. Maybe you could fret about garbage collectors instead...?

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#99

Post by NTDF9 »

neffy wrote: post #86
NTDF9 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified. Great point. Look at how paradoxical it is. Every time unemployment is high, they pump in more money (raising asset values). But unemployment is not high because of "lack" of money. Th…

Actually - no they don't. Changing interest rates doesn't change the money supply. But you're right, the real problem is the uneven distribution of money - the precise causes are a little more complex though.

> Changing interest rates doesn't change the money supply.

It does by discouraging creation of new money by way of loans.

The uneven distribution of money is because of an unbalanced wealth creation system. Money trickles down from the Fed into assets (owned by banks and wealthy) who then loan that money out to others.

Some of that money goes into business activities such as procuring goods and services, thus creating demand. The rest of that money goes into speculation and buying up more "assets" that will pay out in future.

Notice how labor is not important in any of this at all. Labor is almost a side-effect of this economic system of assets vs assets.

Unfortunately, no human is born with assets. Most humans still make money from labor. If money printing goes into assets but humans make money from labor, it's obvious that this will throw most humans out of the system.

This is like a video game where some people got the cheat code while others didn't.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#100

Post by benatkin »

Fellshard wrote: post #80
benatkin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thrust of your argument seems to be "lots of homeless people don't belong here, and if we figure out who belongs here and who doesn't, and help them accordingly, we can improve the situation dramatically". Not a great opinion to have if you want to work with homeless people. They aren't bad people, and they aren't stupid people either, and will see the condescension from a mile away. So even if your solutions are…

I think you're demonizing, just like GP observed people are doing. It is unwise to assume that 'homeless people' are a single group that have identical traits. There are many subcategories, each with its own causing problems, attitudes, and required solution if they are to escape homelessness. Lumping them all into one category of 'not bad, not stupid, avoiding condescension' is itself condescending and reductive. If…

I didn't say that they have identical traits. I just wanted to take GGP's post Not all homeless people are 'bad' one step further, and I don't think it's inaccurate to say that homeless people aren't bad people.

BTW GGP put bad in quotes and that makes sense (though an editor would probably strike the quotes). I think calling someone bad is reductive, as you say.

As far as demonizing, the only thing in this article's discussion I'd demonize is KOMO's video, which I concur with Real Change [1] is a hit piece. I don't know enough about any commenter to judge them like that, nor do I think it's my place. So if it came off this way to GGP (I don't think I did), mea culpa.

1: https://www.realchangenews.org/2019/03/20/komo-asserts-seatt...

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