I’ve made mention on other threads about a couple of planks in Japan’s platform for reducing homelessness. Two that may be applicable here (cued up to the right parts of the video).
Each segment is just a couple minutes long:
The residential home (“flop house”) – particularly germane to the concept of very low square-footage accommodations:
Public housing:
There are unique stories of well-paid people living in their car like this one:
Technically he’s homeless, but clearly it’s a financial decision rather than an option of last resort.
I don’t have a lot of articles to back things up, instead, I’ve watched a bunch of youtube videos of people more or less bragging that that is what they are doing in order to be able to live near where they have a good job, but not have to pay ridiculous rent or mortgages.
I could direct you to some van life videos if you are interested where people talk about this.
But, much as they seem to enjoy the life, it’s becoming problematic as cities and local municipalities have started cracking down. There was one where he was living in his employer’s lot, along with a couple other employees and the city cited the employer for a zoning violation, as it was not zoned “as an RV park”, so now they are parking on residential streets.
So, even though they are a completely different demographic than the stereotypical homeless, they still face a similar stigma against them.
That’s kind of what I meant by a different definition of “homeless”. If someone chooses to live in their car because they don’t want to pay rent or a mortgage although they are able to, that’s an entirely different situation than someone who is living in their car because they can’t find housing that they can afford. Which is something that does happen to people who have jobs paying far less than 6 figures.
I think we are in vicious agreement on this point. Which is why I say there’s no one size fits all solution.
That’s the thing, they cannot afford a rent or mortgage within a several hour commute of where they work. I saw a video of a guy that does have a nice little house way far away from the city, but he spends the week living in his vehicle near to where he works, I have no idea how you would count him.
But, you do also have people who aren’t making 6 figures, but a more modest income as a cook or server who also cannot afford to live within a reasonable commute to work.
The former tend to have pretty decked out rigs, full kitchen and bathroom, truly a home on wheels. The latter tend to have an older SUV or van in which they can keep a bed, and rely on gyms for personal hygiene and restaurants for food.
And then you have people who lost their house or apartment, and are just sleeping in the backseat of their Escort.
Overall point being that pretty much anyone who doesn’t boast a permanent address does have a similar stigma attached to them, even if the solution to dealing with high wage techworkers is completely different from dealing with a schizophrenic drug addict.
I wish I could be more specific with cites, but this information is gathered over dozens of hours of videos of many different channels. I am fascinated by the lifestyle, and envy it to some extent, while OTOH, I do much appreciate having a house and knowing where I am going to sleep tonight.
It can take a lot of money to move into even a modest appartment. First and last months rent plus perhaps a cleaning deposit that you will never get back. Background check, criminal history, poor credit rating? You probably won’t get in.
I live close to the coast in NW Oregon and the people who work here in the service industry, like hotel maids, cannot really afford to live here so they drive from the Portland metropolitan area. There just are not any appartment spaces available. If you can find a two bedroom you will pay at least $1400 per month, if you can find it that is.
So how many people who lose their living conditions, or job or get divorced, or whatever caused their homelessness can come up with $3000 to get into a new place? Not many. They may still have jobs but not the savings needed for an emergency like losing the place that they live. Once you are out on the streets it can be almost impossible to get back inside.
The people in these videos may be saying that on $100K they can’t afford afford to live closer than several hours away from work, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. ( and if it was, I don’t think they would be bragging) The highest median rent I could find for a one bedroom was NYC with a median of about $3500. That’s the median, which means half are less expensive - and studios will be less expensive and it will be less expensive to have a roommate or to rent outside of NYC but within commuting distance.* I fine it very hard to believe that there is anywhere in the US where someone earning $100K could not afford to rent an apartment less than three hours away from their job. I’d actually be really surprised if there was anyplace where $100K was not enough income to afford an apartment within an hour or so. There’s a difference between being unable to afford $2500 in rent for an apartment an hour away from your job and preferring to live in a van in your employer’s parking lot rather than paying that much in rent and then having to commute. And if it’s a preference ( as living in a van or RV often seems to be) ** there isn’t going to be any “solution” to people having that preference.
* The median for the NYC metro area is much lower- about $1800 for a one bedroom.
** There is some small number who live in their vehicles because they prefer that to the combination of rent/commute that is available to them and there is “vanlife” , which seems to mostly be people who actually like the lifestyle and aren’t tied to a particular location by a job or anything else.
Quite honestly, this seems like a situation which the person can address themselves, but they need to be proactive about it. If someone lives in an expensive city and they’re one missed paycheck from being on the street, then they need to take steps to get on more stable financial footing. If they don’t have any savings, they should shave their expenses to the bone until they can build up savings. If they can’t afford to be financially secure in that expensive city, then move to a cheaper part of the country. These are common scenarios that people become homeless, but it’s really more from a lack of planning rather than being struck by unpredictable events. Stuff like losing a job and having sudden expenses are part of normal life. This isn’t the case for everyone, but some of these “suddenly homeless” situations are more about living too close to the edge rather than societal issues.
These are easy things to say and often far more difficult to realize in practice. This is particularly true if you have the burden of enormous medical debt (the United States is virtually the only nation in the developed world that has people routinely carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unresolvable medical debt), student debt (enough already said about this to not have to rehash), poor credit rating (often due to circumstances out of the persons control and sometimes even due to errors by credit rating companies which they refuse to fix), and so forth. “Stop spending so much, work harder, and save as much as possible,” is the mantra of the self-reliance crowd which works great until you find yourself in one or more of the above circumstances and end up in a spiral of poverty, unable to “shave expenses to the bone until they can build up saving”, “move to a cheaper part of the country”, or otherwise “get on more stable financial footing”.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about it, good for you; you’ve been fortunate in life and well-educated in managing your finances. Many people are not fortunate, face dire financial circumstances beyond their control, and have never received any kind of education in responsible financial management and indeed may have been encouraged by our financial system to take on enormous amounts of debt that they will never be able to pay off in the form of student debt and ‘NINJA’ home mortgages.
Stranger
So… you COULD put a homeless person there for the $50k in tax money you spend on each of them, yes? Granted, they’re just a “lockable bedroom” as you put it, but that’s still a significant step up from sleeping in a crappy tent on a sidewalk.
Great. So they have a place to wash up so they don’t stink, they don’t have to shit on the sidewalk, and they have food to eat. Sounds like a great start, do more of it.
Presumably, the poor people living there are not “locked in” but can go in and out at will. It’s a safe, secure place to sleep and keep some belongings. There are people who live in cars and vans with less square footage and manage to have a life.
My first apartment was 10 x 10, and that space included the bathroom and the kitchenette. Tiny, but it was safe and secure and I could keep my stuff there. 32 square feet would be tight, but if I didn’t have much in the way of possessions I could do it. It wouldn’t be great, it wouldn’t be as much fun as the lordly 900 square feet I currently occupy, but it would sure as hell beat sleeping on a sidewalk or trying to live out of a car.
Keep in mind that the weather is more temperate in California than in, say, Chicago. As a long term Chicago resident I twice encountered corpiscles on my way into work, it’s a lot harder to freeze to death in, say, Los Angeles.
There is a very, very long history of the destitute and/or desperate going south to warmer climates, and it has nothing to do with politics and a lot to do with survival factors like “just how effing cold does it get around here?”
Here are examples of people I know personally who are a hairline away from homelessness:
Older guy who did okay running a bait shop until larger than local economics put him out of business, now he works at Costco and makes a good bit less. He has supports a number of unemployable relatives who have lived off his meager income most of their lives. This man is one major medical event from not only losing his house but putting his relatives on the street too.
My house cleaner, who has a modest income, older and lives alone with her cat, no near relatives, whose new landlord has turned out to be crazy, evil, and a liar, shut off her water to try to evict her, who has a lawyer friend who is making her life miserable, Legal Aid won’t help her, she is losing the battle, and she will be homeless soon in an incredibly tight housing market. There is just nothing out there to move into.
There are thousands if not millions of people like them – narrow income, modest savings, worked hard their whole lives without doing anything extravagant, no drug habit, not crazy, and in this tissue-thin safety-net country with its sickeningly punitive attitude toward need of any kind, they are frighteningly close to homelessness.
You won’t see them in a homeless encampment. But they are only a couple tiers up from that.
A very nice turn of phrase.
And millions of people are but a paycheck or two away from being homeless. That’s just too small of a margin for error.
To add to the discussion:
From that article:
The felony is punishable by up to six years in prison. Felony convictions in Tennessee result in the revocation of an individual’s right to vote.
Well, that is a good way to feed the prison-industrial complex.
The United States is #1!:
Stranger
Also a good way to make certain poor people cannot vote.
It is an ancillary benefit but given that most of these people lack a fixed address they are likely not registered to vote anyway.
Stranger
Six years in prison for a homeless encampment?! I can understand the argument for criminalizing it, but that’s insane.
Republicans have been aces at restricting voting rights. If you look at recent elections they have been close. A few votes can really matter and they know it.
Anecdotally, I used to play EVE: Online. It was a game where you got a percent here, a percent there as you progress. Never anything mind-blowing. But, it added up over time and each little percent mattered.
Same here. Shave off a few voters here and there and no one notices. Do it a lot and it matters.
The republicans are pushing voters likely to vote democrat out. This is not an accident. They explicitly put it in the law.
And, as @Blalron said, six years in prison for this is insane.
I can’t even understand criminalizing homelessness. In many cases, these people literally have no place to go other than overcrowded shelters that themselves have a reputation for being filthy and unsafe, and unless they are given viable options displacing them from one encampment is just forcing them into another. Prosecuting them is an absolute waste of time, money, and bandwidth of the legal system as well as inviting abuse and hostility from law enforcement that would pretty much rather be doing anything else. It is a worst-on-worst solution that wastes money that could be better utilized in practicable solutions.
No argument about the GOP systematic gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts but for the most part the chronic homeless don’t (and in most places can’t) vote. I would opine that the real point of this is to appear “tough on crime” on an issue for which homeless advocates don’t have strong public support or any real funding base, and to keep profit-based prisons sufficiently full of people rotating through despite the fact that it costs far more to house and feed a prisoner than even the most wasteful homelessness abatement program.
Stranger