On Homelessness In America

retirement

2011-05-22T11:52:00.001-07:00

This blog is in retirement.

Thanks for reading!

got Section 8? Want a mansion?

2010-10-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

I've suspected something like this has been going on since the housing bubble burst, here's an article actually confirming it though:

Link goes to MSN

Be sure to enjoy the epic classism and latent racism proudly on display in the comments section too. I saw this link originally through Fark and the comments section there was even worse.

dwelling portably

2010-04-03T11:19:00.001-07:00

I just happened across a site that I added to the sidebar links (over there >) that I thought was worth highlighting with a post. Aside from having a really helpful and informative website for people in the sorts of living situations that most of my readership are in, the authors of Dwelling Portably have been cranking out a zine for the last 3 decades encompassing tips, tricks and practical knowledge on the general life of low-budget nomads and Hobos. The cool thing is that they sell compilations of each decade in book form online for seven bucks each. I'm planning on picking up the most recent anthology, which was for 2000-2008, as soon as I have a stable mailing address to send it to!

helping the homeless by iphone

2009-12-18T21:55:00.000-08:00

I saw this site:

The Extraordinaries

on the nightly TV news at some points last week. To give it the most succinct summary I can, it's basically an organizing nexus for people with iphones and other internet-enabled portable devices to donate their time while they are waiting at the bus stop, on a train, etc. to some non-profit charitable cause or another that has use for computer based micro-tasks that just about anyone can do.

The question/challenge: could something like this be parlayed into grassroots homeless assistance somehow?

awesome

2009-11-20T22:11:00.000-08:00

Homeless in Poland, Preparing an Odyssey at Sea

Two dozen homeless men are building a ship to sail themselves around the world at the St. Lazarus Social Pension here, in the yard of a former tractor factory ... their endeavor echoes mythic themes of escape, adventure and redemption that can seem out of reach in a world of biometric identity cards and debt-collection agencies."

Snapshots of Homelessness 4.5 - Next Door Shelter Update

2009-09-12T10:09:00.001-07:00

Due to extreme brokeness plus a need to stay in the city virtually all summer to handle endless amounts of school paperwork, I recently partook of a brief and delightful return stay at the Next Door shelter.

I am pleased to report there have been some improvements since I last visited. Some things are no different at all, however, and they have backslid in a few areas.

First, the short summary for those readers with busy hobo schedules:

AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT - Food quality and quantity, dining procedures, paper towel and toilet paper availability, hand soap availability, plumbing response time, laundry service

LITTLE TO NO CHANGE - General sanitary conditions, lower-level staff attitudes and behavior, enforcement of "no intoxication" policies, security, toilet sanitary ring availability, soap and shampoo availability, courtesy to those working

BACKSLIDING - "Check-in" procedures and curfews, prison atmosphere, taking initiative in assisting clients with moving on from homelessness to stability, noise control at night

The longer version:

To address the positive first, the food has taken a remarkable turn for the better. Apparently, there are two regular donors now who keep the shelter supplied with good dinner rolls, bread and sausages of various types. More often than not, meals were adequately filling and appetizing, and there were even a few that were shockingly good. There were a few dog meals, but nothing on the order of the "two skinny hot dogs, bleached buns and canned fruit cocktail" special that regularly made an appearance on weekends in previous years. The morning coffee even tastes like real coffee now and is brought out in adequate quantity.

Dining procedures are also no longer goofy and arbitrary. At most meals, the wait for food was reasonable, the line moved smoothly and there was more than adequate seating.

While I noticed that the same fungus colonies I'd seen in corners of the mens room in previous years were still there and growing ever bigger and more healthy, in general the bathrooms are now better supplied. Toilet paper and paper towels were only very rarely completely out of stock, whereas TP was usually scarce every single morning before. Hand soap was also available nearly all days and times that I was there. Plumbing response time to plugged toilets occured on the same day, or the next day at the latest.

Washers and dryers are now free, and they have also opened up a reading library in the basement.

Unfortunately, aside from the supply of paper and hand soap, sanitary conditions are not much better in general. As mentioned before, corners are not scrubbed and there's some pretty frightening funk building in parts of the restrooms and showers. Showers were as mildewy as ever, curtains seemed to be replaced more frequently but still got fairly disgusting and did not appear to ever be cleaned. While boxes of soap bars made more frequent appearances than in the past, seeing pubic hairs and other miscellaneous detritus in one box put me off from actually using them. Shampoo is still an extremely rare find.

I understand that the shelter cannot do much about the attitudes of their clientele, but there are a number of policies that are contributing to making the place even more oppressive, prison-like and hopeless. My past experience with the "case managers" there was generally positive, but now they apparently seem so put upon with work that it's more than a month from check-in before they schedule an initial meeting with a new client. More people than ever seemed to get away with being drunk and high and disruptive at night, and rather than aggressively sending disruptors to detox, they were usually allowed to stay provided they contained their shit-talking and yammering to their bed area. I can't even imagine how a working person could pull themselves up and out here, because between all the druggie/drunk disruptions and the loud TV blaring late into the night, sleep deprivation is endemic and it's very rare to get 8 unbroken hours unless you're on pills or completely exhausted.

OHIA v. 3 up, with change of plans

2009-07-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

On Homelessness In America version 3 is up over at Cloud Bird Trail, follow this link to it.

Please note that Lulu still has v.2, if you want a paper copy it will not be up to date, that'll be a while while I come up with an easier way around Lulu's formatting conversion problems.

I did some re-writing and a whole lot of editing for punctuation, but there's not very much new content after all. As I was working on it, it occurred to me that the new content was really just stuff that had been said already re-written with only very minor expansion, and while many passages could stand to be revised, did they really need to be v.s. spending this time working on Hobonet or other things instead?

I decided the most important thing was that it was simply available in a free, readable, well-formatted HTML version and so that's what I concentrated on. I'm thinking about re-working the new material into a "Coda" chapter and adding it later, but I'm undecided at this point.

If you've read the book in the past there's probably not enough new material to merit going through it again, but do point your friends and neighbors to the nice new easy on the eyes HTML link if you so care to.

OHIA v3 delays, and preview

2009-07-04T11:07:00.001-07:00

My projections were overly exuberant, as seems to usually be the case, and the third edition of On Homelessness In America will likely be finished sometime later in the year than the end of summer. Partially this is due to deciding to do an even more thorough re-write of the whole thing, and to add some new content after all. Another part of it is that I am once again well and truly Homeless and nearly broke. This is a temporary situation for a couple of months in the summer, but it greatly cuts down on my energy, writing time and ability to do research.

Donations certainly are not unwelcome at this point, but if you wish to donate via Lulu for a PDF copy of the book, I'd suggest waiting until version 3 is done, as I don't have a means of tracking who has paid through Lulu (and I feel it only fair to send a complimentary PDF to anyone who donates this close to a new release.) The book will still be freely available, in a much better formatted and more readable HTML layout than the present version, at Cloud Bird Trail when it is complete.

For now, here's a small preview of the extent of the re-written content for the upcoming version, on the roots of homelessness and poverty and how we can only truly begin dealing with it properly:

In the so-called "First World", we wholly depend on centralized industrial manufacturing processes to keep the infrastructure of society together. These industrial processes inevitably create toxic effluence which much be disposed of. As industrial manufacturing processes inevitably lead to toxic wastes, so too does industrialized society inevitably produce homelessness and extreme poverty as a by-product.

This is a complex subject and may seem outside the scope of this book, but it must be addressed in at least a basic way, because there is no "patchwork" solution that will "end homelessness" within the context of this society, yet that is what we constantly have pitched to us as the cure for homelessness by politicians, government agencies and charity groups. These "solutions" are simply designed to manage homelessness and poverty and direct the energies of the homeless and poor in as controlled a manner as possible, under the ruse of "ending" poverty once and for all. For the problems of homelessness and poverty to be "solved" - along with a myriad of other social problems! - the only true answer is in large scale social structural overhaul.

I will attempt to demonstrate how society as we know it inevitably causes homelessness and poverty, and why there is no "adjustment" to present society that will fix that process, in as concise and basic a manner as I can.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Throughout the whole of the history of organized human society, since the advent of agriculture split us off from nomadic isolated tribal systems and began the settled and centralized societies that we now think of as "normal", we have simply been shifting from one system of rule to another. By "rule", I mean top-down, hierarchical systems wherein a relatively small group of social elites determine and dictate terms to the rest of the society, usually to their own benefit.

We began with the rule of Warlords and Emperors, gradually shifted to the rule of Kings and Priests, and currently are situated in the midst of the rule of Merchants. This period had its initial roots in the Enlightenment, but became cinched as a global ruling trend with the French and American revolutions. This is not the rule of men who ship goods about the world and Kareem who owns the corner store, but international bankers and financiers who create and control the currency systems that both individual states and the "global economy" as we know it are wholly dependent on. Just a step beneath them are politicians - both the Feel-Good Obamas and the Evildoing Right Wingers - as well as the CEOs and upper management of international corporations, the heads of militaries, the heads of "spook" agencies, and all the various others who are usually blamed for being the evil masterminds behind everything.

Part of the effectiveness and duration of the rule of Merchants is the fact that relatively few people under their rule believe that they are actually being ruled. The rule of Merchants breaks from the traditions of direct force - which is still employed, but more as a last resort than a preferential choice - to an emphasis on misdirection, spectacle, control of educational systems, control of news media and communications outlets, and propaganda to control behavior on a grand scale. Most people in the world are made to believe they exist in systems of representational democracy which are ultimately ruled by "the people." When things in these systems go wrong, or the people feel they are oppressed, they rarely are capable of seeing a direct line between their suffering and the root cause of Merchant rule. Instead, they blame one of a myriad of ready-made alternative outlets maintained specifically for the purpose of shunting their negative energies. The rule of Merchants also breaks from the tradition of the most powerful members of society appointing themselves as Godheads - and thus very obvious targets for populist wrath - with a constantly rotating cast of well-kept underlings who play out the role of society's "bad guys" when called for.

Now, what does this all have to do with poverty and homelessness? These are required components of Merchant rule. Vast amounts of poor and "working class" are required, not only to directly supply the elite class with their myriad of luxuries and indulgences, but to also simply maintain the global infrastructure that allows them to conduct their business, control populations and the flow of both currency and ideas, and to simply move about the world freely in a manner that rulers and tyrants of the past could only dream of. Most of the jobs required to maintain this social structure are at the least dull, and at the most highly unpleasant and physically dangerous. To convince people on a wide scale to actually perform these tasks, the Merchants must first create the illusion of scarcity even when restaurants regularly throw out food and people leave luxury electronics goods on the curbside and in the landfills on a daily basis, and they do this by essentially locking up as much as possible of what is produced and then guarding it by force of arms. Various sophisticated social, political and religious systems are employed to keep people believing that this is a just and fair arrangement, and that they are to expect that the great bulk of the work they perform and what they create in their working life is to be skimmed off by a remote "owner" with whom they likely have little to no contact.

Artificial scarcity is the first component in making the industrial ruling system of the merchants work. Even though there is a superfluity of goods around them, people are led to believe they are constantly on the edge of ruin and must struggle, scrape and compete with everyone else around them to survive. A vast class of working poor must be maintained, and even the homeless and those typecast as "non-contributors" to the economy have their role to play in this great game. Thus, all talk of "ending poverty" or "ending homelessness" by anyone or any group plugged into and dependent on this social order is automatically disingenuous and hypocritical. The social order cannot exist without poverty, just as the massive amounts of police and security industry specialists would cease to have viable incomes if crime was truly eliminated.

(to be continued in edition 3!)

the only thing you have to lose is your hobophobia

2009-06-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

Oh man, I would never normally link to a site like this one, but ... it just gets more and more hilarious as it goes on.

thanks!

2009-06-06T12:03:00.001-07:00

There was a small surge in downloads of On Homelessness In America from Lulu last month. I'm still not sure where the traffic came from, but thanks! It was enough to actually get Lulu to cut me a payment, which I thought would never happen

toward a healthy home

2009-05-01T17:30:00.000-07:00

If we must have state-run, state-funded shelters - and at present we must, given there is little in the way of viable alternatives to freezing on the streets for many right now - their efficiency in stabilizing people's lives could be improved greatly by a simple division of the population using them.

As of this writing, at the shelters and all other related services, homeless and poor people are lumped together in a general way as the "dregs and dross of the Earth." Very tight living quarters are shared between addicts, freshly released ex-cons, schizophrenics and just "regular people" with financial hardships and an inadequate social support network.

The reason that so many of these "new homeless" flock to tent cities, such as the one Oprah famously stomped through and effectively destroyed recently in Sacramento, or live in their vehicles rather than seek out state aid for shelter and other basics, is that they do not want to live in the dehumanizing, demeaning, crazy sorts of conditions I've outlined here with some of my firsthand reports from shelters and "human services."

One simple but major step towards improving the quality of life of the homeless/poor person, and the success rate of returning the unfortunate to "normalcy", would be simply by dividing the shelters, and perhaps select other services, so that the following groups - who are presently all lumped together into the faceless mass known as "the homeless" - are largely segregated from each other and in an environment where their unique needs can be met:

1) Those with serious behavioral/mental disabilities, such as schizophrenics
2) Alcoholics and addicts who at present have no real desire to quit substance abuse
3) Alcoholics and addicts who are actively seeking to quit substance abuse
4) People whose problems are primarily financial, and those with non-substance or sex related compulsion issues (such as gambling addiction)
5) Sex offenders
6) Recently released prisoners

At present, all of these groups share intimate space at the shelters, soup kitchens and other services, and it is far too volatile of a mix.

There are numerous problems with the present "lump everyone together and treat them all like crap" arrangement.

**** (one full month later ....) ****

A few examples -

I've been in three different shelters now where low-functioning schizophrenics were mixed in with the "general population". Out of five incidences, all five ended badly. The first guy randomly decided to set his mat up on top of a table one night instead of on the floor, and when confronted, jumped on the table and tried to wrestle anyone who approached him (eventually had to be slammed to the ground by a big dood and held until help could arrive.) The second guy grabbed a staff member by the throat out of nowhere and slammed her against a locker. The third guy smeared feces all over the bathroom one night. The fourth guy took a shit in someone else's bed over some perceived slight that no one could figure out. The fifth guy mumbled creepy stuff to himself all night like "You know this is gonna hurt but you HAVE to do it", got caught masturbating into the urinals in the mens room a couple times, and finally wandered off leaving a laptop behind in his locker which he never came back for.

Schizophrenics are sometimes able to suppress their symptoms long enough to get into a shelter, a hotel, go to the bank and cash an SSI check, etc. Once they perceive that they are safe, however, let the Schiz Party begin! Generally they start out harmless in a shelter situation, sitting in one spot all day or walking around talking to themselves. Inevitably, however - at least in the five cases I've personally seen - they explode in some crazy/violent act. And they do so because they are forced into a situation that they are not suited to - and the people around them are forced to adjust to them or hit the road.

I don't mean to be unsympathetic, since there's little alternative for them to go to, and the state of California particularly seems to like cutting them a $1000 monthly SSI check and then letting them go and wander untreated as much as they please. But therein is exactly the problem. While they might end up just mumbling to themselves at night and annoying whoever gets stuck sleeping next to them, there's always a chance they'll do any or all of the things I've described here. Shelter staff is generally not trained to deal with this sort of thing, and shelter residents certainly shouldn't be subjected to it just because they are poor/homeless. People suffering from mental illness at this level need separate facilities where they can get needed treatment and have living conditions suited to their situation, but under our present "social safety net", they're tossed in the mix with everyone else - and if something tragic happens, hey, it's homeless people, who gives a damn.

To address the division between alcoholics and addicts who are "on" and "off" the wagon - I've had the pleasure of staying at a de facto wet shelter, the Next Door shelter in San Francisco which I've featured here previously, and I've watched how the shit attitudes of the "I'm a drunk and I don't give a damn about anything" types bring down people who are genuinely trying to turn their lives around, put undue strain on them, and eventually pressure them into either relapsing or just saying the hell with the whole system of shelter and recovery. The drunks and active druggers pick fights, they talk loud shit and instigate, they shit up the bathroom and showers in all sorts of delightful manners and piss everyone else off. They steal pills and anything else of value they can get their hands on. If you really want to make a difference in turning the lives of addicts and alcoholics around, putting them through this unnecessary gauntlet of stress and negativity certainly doesn't send the message that you do. It sends the message that you are disingenuous, and all you care about is warehousing them so the tourists and the yuppies don't complain about them being an eyesore in the streets. Let the "wet" drunks and druggers have their own spartan shelters where they can shit things up however they please. You aren't going to force them into any sort of mold, and there's no point in trying to by threatening to cut off their beds or their food. But if they see an example of proud people, who used to be addicts on the street, living in dignity and getting a fair shake from society, maybe it will give them the initiative to try to walk that same path themselves.

People who simply have financial hardships and no social safety net to catch them do NOT need to be subjected to the Dark Carnival Of The Soul found in our modern don't-give-a-shit-about-you-human-trash shelters and service systems, and I don't have any Hard Numbers to back this up, but I promise you they are coming out worse for the wear, picking up drug and drinking problems, and generally being converted into a more Hardcore form of the homeless because of it. If you reduce them to the level of some pissbum who ruthlessly fucks off his own life, how do you expect them to start viewing themselves?

The final point I'd like to quickly address is that of freshly released prisoners. I don't think anything is "wrong" with them that they have to be isolated from everyone else. To the contrary, the ex-cons I've spent time with in the shelter systems have by and large been the most respectful, hardest working, and most committed to getting their lives together out of anyone. And that's exactly why they don't need to be right back in the middle of the pissfest, of asshats using and abusing, sheltering up in the worst drug-filled neighborhoods because that's where the city sticks all the "undesirables". They're supposed to have paid their debt already. Homelessness, as it is in America at present, is like a second sentence, and one that potentially can be for life.

paul ave. sweepup

2009-04-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

I found this recent Chron article to be interestingly demonstrative of the sort of suburbanite thinking that the paper caters to, particularly as regards homelessness.

The article is about a defunct Caltrain station at the edge of the Bayview neighborhood. Local resident Larry Winum, a realtor (natch), apparently enjoys strolling about his neighborhood and pointing out incidences of urban blight to the city, which I suppose would be fine in and of itself, except it seems he regards "the homeless" as being on the same level as the garbage and detritus that offends his aesthetic sense.

Not that there's anything particularly special or malevolent about this guy - SF is chock full of the gentrification-minded, he's just the one that happened to complain loudly enough to get his name in the papers. I'm not really interested in villifying him here so much as I am deconstructing both his perspective (representative of a much larger group perspective) and the way in which the Chronicle did its reporting.

You'll notice this is part of the Chron's "ChronicleWatch" series, an ostensible regular feature of "watchdog journalism" designed to showcase city problems and what is or is not "getting done" to fix them.

Interesting to me is the language in the article.

"Winum contacted both Chronicle Watch and Caltrain, saying that graffiti was still there, along with trash on the hillsides leading down to the old waiting area. Homeless people live in the environs, Winum complained."

In the wealthy, suburbanite view that the Chron represents, the "homeless" are completely dehumanized, an object reduced to not even getting feature billing in the paragraph over graffiti and trash.

"Winum's follow-up prompted Caltrain to dispatch another crew to the Paul Avenue Station - and to promise Winum that more will be done. The transit agency will install an 8-foot-tall welded-wire fence by the Paul Avenue bridge overlooking the station "to make it more difficult for people to access the area," Mark Simon, special assistant to Caltrain chief operating officer Chuck Harvey, said in an e-mail."

Not once does anyone raise the concern that human beings in the area are being forced to seek shelter from the elements and rest in defunct train stations. The situation is simply an "eyesore" that is to be swept up by the police. The solution to the problem is not engaging with the people seeking shelter there to find out what their situation is, but to "make it more difficult for people to access the area" by installing an "8-fot-tall welded-wire fence".

"We will continue to closely monitor the location for homeless activity."

Again, the "homeless" are reduced to nothing more than a garden pest. One that all involved no doubt wish social laws and mores would allow them to treat with traps and poison sprays.

"Now that the sign is gone, and the station below is free of TVs and the like, this part of southeastern San Francisco near Highway 101 is a bit more pleasing to residents like Winum."

And that's what really matters. Maintaining the Disney-esque illusion, the facade of peace and beauty that masks the revolting social mechanisms required to maintain the sort of opulence Mr. Winum and people like him enjoy. Cheers and beers all around. The "homeless" have been run out of town or jailed.

The problem is solved.

homeless versus blight

2009-04-24T19:14:00.000-07:00

This article focuses on how artists are buying up homes for as little as several hundred dollars in areas like Detroit and Cleveland and are attempting to form their own communities, and even rallying some government grant help in the project.

It strikes me that the hordes of presently homeless - very few of whom are the "worthless bum" stereotype popularized in the media, and most of whom have a staggering variety of socially useful skills and abilities - could, through government subsidy programs which could likely be funded with a fractional amount of what's going to waste on present failed programs, prisons and the like, be housed in these decaying neighborhoods and create their own revitalized communities, using the houses as a base to start their own businesses and services for both the immediate community and the nation at large.

open source food mapping

2009-04-24T19:01:00.000-07:00

Urban Edibles is a microcosmic example of one of the things I hope to accomplish with the (still percolating) Hobonet project. Specific to Portland Oregon present, it lists locations of edibles that can be foraged using Google street maps and similar tools.

I'll have to ask your forgiveness as I read this two weeks ago in a copy of the SF Guardian at the laundromat and don't remember all the specifics, but I recall that a law was recently passed that makes foraging in state/Fed parks illegal. I would not at all be shocked to find that that was a response to possibilities like the Urban Edibles site starting to become realized - if you can get your food from outside of the control system reliably without currency, that's a huge step towards becoming independently sufficient of the control system! And of course we absolutely cannot have that in America. Whatever the case may be, don't let it stop you, just be aware of what land you are on and be appropriately cautious.

OHIA 3rd edition

2009-04-22T14:07:00.000-07:00

I've started work on a third edition of On Homelessness In America, which will be done by the end of this summer.

Like the previous edition it will be freely available online, but it will now be in HTML format and broken up into chapters in the same manner that An Honest Bark is over on Cloud Bird Trail.

Unlike the previous edition, I'm not adding any substantial new material (or at least not planning to right now), but I will be doing quite a bit of re-writing of what's already there.

Walgreens "Take Care" clinics offering free basic treatments for 2009

2009-04-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

If you live near a Walgreens "Take Care" clinic, apparently they are offering free treatments for basic services like allergies, infections and skin conditions through the remainder of 2009.

According to this article, the caveat is that you must be on state unemployment insurance or be able to show an unemployment determination letter. The article does not make clear whether you have to actually be receiving payments to take advantage of this. But apparently you can't just walk in without some form of paperwork showing you lost a job recently.

I know much of the readership here is in the Bay Area, in spite of the preponderance of Walgreens around us, bad news for us - there apparently aren't any Take Care clinics in California, the nearest ones being in Las Vegas, Tucson and Denver. You can use this website to see if one is near you.

this year in homeless music history

2009-03-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

"Another Day In Paradise" was the last Billboard #1 single of the 1980s, selling millions of copies worldwide.

Three years later, Collins would purchase an $8.5 million dollar Beverly Hills mansion.

Three years after that, his net personal worth was estimated at $367 million.

"Ooooooh lord, is there nothing more anybody can doooooo"

BONUS BLITHELY IRONIC QUOTE - "I see what is happening on the street from my car, the same as everybody else. I see life, I don't live in a cocoon"

technical difficulties

2009-03-12T17:23:00.001-07:00

I finally got "expand this post" functionality for the blog, but I had to upgrade it from the Pleistocene template I was using previously. In doing so I lost all my sidebar stuff. So I'm rebuilding the links list as I remember what was over there - if you had a spot previously and want it back, please email or leave a comment!

There's also an issue with the word "undefined" popping up at the point of the ellipsis when you expand each post. I might not even bother fixing that.

bum porn

2009-03-12T16:19:00.001-07:00

As it happened, I hadn't seen/heard of this Pimp This Bum website that's been going around in the mass consciousness as of late prior to my previous "homeless porn" post - apparently Tim, the "bum" in question, is going to be a guest on the Rachael Ray show and has raised enough money at this point to get into a 5-week detox program at the sort of place that upper-middle-class types with drinking problems usually check themselves into as well as catch a flight there.

You might be surprised to hear that I'm not really offended by the site. That is, I don't think it is a black-and-white issue. After looking the whole thing over, I don't get the sense that this is a cynical scheme on the part of the father-son duo that set it up. There is some self-interest on their part, certainly; but I think, from within their frame of reference (the frame of reference of two men who never had any direct contact with homelessness at all before they came up with this), they genuinely see this as an altruistic act that just happens to coincide with a self-interested business need that they have.

Most of the criticism of the site seems to be focusing on the word "pimp". What I don't like about it centers on the word "bum".

The major problem with it is not what they are doing with this homeless man - he may well come out the better for it, though I am cynical about what a detox facility catering to yuppie recovery will do with a hardcore street sleeper in five weeks - but the stereotype that they are blithely furthering in their rush to "do good (and, hey, generate publicity for our business while we're at it)".

Once again, in the public consciousness, the whole sphere of homelessness is equated with the "bum", with street-sleeping, panhandling and hardcore substance using. Are you aware that 40% of the homeless nationwide are families who have at least one child that they are living with? Did you know that out of San Francisco's estimated 15,000 homeless, less than 2,000 are actually living on the streets and panhandling, and that those numbers are pretty similar if you look at the homeless statistics in just about any major American city?

The creators of this site certainly don't appear to have bothered to educate themselves, before making proclamations like "most homeless are alcoholics". Dude, seriously, you've told us you already don't have any direct experience with the homeless beyond last month, so you really need to cite a reliable source or STFU with generalizations like that.

Most of the visible homeless - people like Tim, the street-livers and the hardcore - are alcoholics or habitual drug users, that's true. People like that, however, actually constitute the minority of the overall homeless population in America - but they become the public face and the whole of "homelessness" due to being the most readily seen by the mainstream community, having the most "colorful" behavior, and making the greatest nuisance out of themselves.

So exploitation of Tim is not really the issue here. He's a grown man, seems rational from what we see of him through the site, and is free to make his own decisions in this regard. The problem is the reckless furthering of the same old tired stereotypes about homelessness, which in turn furthers the same old status quo justifications that keep the problem of American poverty in an endless unresolvable state.

homeless porn

2009-03-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

Homelessness has always been covered from a voyeuristic slant by the American mass media, and that's the interest people usually take in it - much like watching a horror movie, they get a kick out of the fear of imagining it happening to them while simultaneously feeling a rush of gratification for the material insulating layer that keeps them from it.

That layer is gone from more and more lives, however; good, solid conformists and servants of the Mammon Machine, who never thought they would come to this, find themselves put out of houses they can no longer pay for and jobs they are no longer needed in. The other morning I happened to catch a piece on the Today Show called "Middle Class to Shantytown"; that is the focus of the present American mania for homelessness, as it really always has been. Everything must be framed in terms of the "middle class"; politicians scramble to fete it to get elected, and those who have not reached it (or who have been removed from it) scramble to get into it. All will be well if you just get back into it; America tells you that is all that you can possibly do with your life.

And so the Mammon Machine mobilizes its communications network to head off a potential mob of angry, torch-wielding revolutionaries at the pass. The news specials focus on the "unemployed", the camera on "investment bankers" in the middle of their posh, still-well-furnished homes as they agonize about "what they are going to do". We then see the Shantytown, where the less bulwarked among them have landed in the wake of the sudden upheaval of their lives.

Nowhere in any of this display are the millions of already existent working poor and homeless, just as we were absent from the high-soaring rhetoric of the campaign speeches of our new President, just as we are always absent from the national discussion. The circular logic that has always applied to our situation continues; if you are at the bottom, you must be guilty of something, and nobody needs to know any more than that.

Our new homeless and jobless brethren will be directed to the numerous Career Centers and Networking Groups funded by generous grants from Big Business; fewer and fewer positions will be available as more and more job seekers pack the rooms, but the ones who are not so fortunate as to find a new source of income will at the least dissipate their energies in chasing phantoms and focusing only on themselves, their own situation and their own potential misery. They will not look to those around them, the "failures", as their new community, as a mass of potential allies with the power to create a new social arrangement that does not involve begging corporate masters for non-unionized wage slavery at horrid terms. They will be too tired in the unemployment benefits chase, the housing chase, the employment chase, inevitably the food stamps and shelter chase, that they will have no thought that this is a beast that they should band together to fight against instead of vainly struggling against each other to appease it.

But perhaps I am too judgmental, too bitter from a life of taking the worst behavior of humanity as an expectation of the norm. Perhaps they will understand that this represents a unique opportunity. I know they are angry; eight years of George W. Bush and bailout bucks to massive multinationals while they lose their homes have caused even the most timid and repressed to at least rumble a little in some way, even if it amounts only to a blog post or holding forth to a nearby companion during the nightly news. They have always known that they were being told a lot of lies, but in a nice warm home and comfortably drugged up, they never overmuch felt the need to care. Now they feel that sting. Maybe they will do the right thing with that feeling, let it lead them to the right place. Maybe at least some of them will.

Maybe at least some will choose not to participate in the making of the new homeless porn, the media-broadcast struggles and strivings to climb back into a system that has wholly failed them. Maybe they will be tired of being a visceral thrill for the pampered yuppies who collectively hold a loafer on their throat. Maybe they will get sick of the condescending pity of those whose selfishness and willful ignorance holds them down. Maybe that sharp sting will remind them of the essential realness of this world in which they have a life and a stake just the same as any other living being. Maybe they will find it bracing, remember that they are men and women, that they are not rodents, not meant to live scurrying in fear and clambering over each other to get to crumbs.

above the fold

2009-03-07T15:17:00.000-08:00

Edit 03/12/09 - Done and done! Thanks again Cym for the link to the handy Blogger Buster script

If you've used Blogger or similar WYSIWIG blogging services, you're probably aware that you can install various templates made by third parties to quickly and (fairly) easily change the layout and look of the blog, and add new functionality.

This blog uses the most basic, generic default template that Blogger offers. I've been looking for a custom template lately, not just to make it less generic, but also one that offers a "below the fold" option for posting. The first example of this offhand that I can think of is Slashdot; the way you get the first paragraph or so of the post on the main page, and then there's a "Read More" option which brings you to the permalink of the full post along with the comments.

Since so many of my posts here reach tl;dr proportions I'd like to implement this to make navigation easier. But random Google searching hasn't turned up anything useful yet. Do you know of any? Please leave a comment or email me if you've encountered something that would fit the description, I could use some suggestions.

Also, a couple of items that have been in the air lately - first of all, I'm still brainstorming on the Hobonet project re: layout and implementation. Like I said about a month ago, I was hesitant to mention it so early in the process since so little has been done and so much is left to do. But I'm chipping away at it. The other thing is the ongoing series on the Next Door shelter; I intended to write a conclusion about the many different people I met there and some members of the staff, but now I'm of a divided mind about that, so it's on indefinite pause until I sort that out.

San Francisco 2009 budget cuts put further squeeze on the homeless

2009-02-28T11:32:00.000-08:00

With the city, country and state all in "budget crisis" mode, apparently social justification is now in place to let the homeless, disabled and needy just die out on the streets.

It has been a trend in San Francisco that since Gavin Newsome took over as mayor, hard budget cuts to non-profits, health and human services have taken place each and every year, progressively putting more and more of a squeeze on the most marginalized of the community and literally forcing them to either leave or die.

Most devastating to the homeless community in the city this year is the proposed closure of the Tenderloin Health Center, not only a needed medical facility for hundreds of chronically ill folks each day, but one of the primary locations (along with 150 Otis) for shelter bed reservations.

THC is the most high-profile closing, but not the end of the assault. Nearly every charity, non-profit and human service will take some sort of massive hit. Health services are disproportionately being attacked this year. Walden House is losing 25% of its city funding; Larkin Street Youth Services has had so much funding slashed it essentially cannot continue to operate; the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which will carry the weight of the overlap of people formerly relying on Tenderloin Health Center for care, is projected to lose about 10% of its city funding.

Homeless minors, already a nearly-invisible and underserved segment of the needy, are for some reason taking the heaviest hits. Walden House has coped with its budget cuts largely by eliminating their inpatient treatment program for adolescents, and with that, the seemingly inevitable Larkin Street Youth Center closure, and the now possible closure of Huckleberry Youth Services (the city's only 24-hour emergency shelter for minors), those among the most vulnerable of the homeless population will literally be left with nowhere to turn.

Snapshots of Homelessness #4: Next Door Shelter, Pt. 2

2009-01-29T12:22:00.000-08:00

PART 2 - GRUB

For all I have to say about the poor way in which Next Door is kept, getting in still feels like something akin to winning the lottery when you are homeless. If you've been at the emergency shelters or out in the streets, it's incredible to have any kind of a bed for six months, much less a locker, and a space you can occupy 24 hours a day (no sleeping past 8 A.M., but you can be at your bed all day if you like), and with showers and a toilet (gross though they may be) also available constantly.

An in-house kitchen also serves breakfast and dinner. One of the great logistical problems of homeless life is often getting to and from a soup kitchen for meals while also trying to make appointments, look for work and meet other various needs. Rigid times and lack of proper nutrition, however, make the kitchen worthwhile for only those that have absolutely nothing else available to them.

Breakfast is at 7 AM sharp for the third floor. The "floor monitors" helpfully yell it out when breakfast time rolls around, but get down there more than a few minutes late and you'll likely find a closed gate and no food for you.

As with much of the rest of the operation here, food is dispensed in a very controlling, prison-like style. Depending on who is doing the serving, the men might be able to just form a line and get a tray as they become available; more often, the kitchen crew forces everyone into a needlessly complex system of calling whole tables up at a time when all the trays have been made ready for them. As the cooks are serving from steam trays, it seems odd and unnecessary to do it this way; I'm not the only one to wonder about it and it becomes a frequent point of loud complaint.

The coffee is watery decaf, but you'd think it was Starbucks with a triple shot of espresso the way the men fight over it when the pitchers are sporadically brought out. Some people try to balance three cups in their hands simultaneously. After I learn that it is not real coffee I no longer bother with the jostling required to get it. After I learn that the meals here have very little in the way of real nutrition, I no longer bother with coming down to the kitchen at all.

Aside from the coffee and water, condiments like butter pats, salt, sugar, ketchup and mustard are the only things left out in the open and not dispensed in a controlling manner. Street mentality precipitates more pointless hoarding here; men come away from the table with giant fistfuls of butter and sugar, stuffed away into pockets, and the supply is quickly exhausted.

The typical breakfast at Next Door consists of bland synthetic eggs and some soy sausage on the side. The sausage can appear in two forms - two small links, which are just tolerable enough to get down, or a small patty, which tastes like a condensed fart.

The pictures you see here are from the SFHomeless group shared Flickr account; I did not take my own pictures as these are adequately representative of the meals served at Next Door while I was there (the photographer and I were apparently there at nearly the same time, though I do not know him personally).

On the bottom you can see one of the more spartan breakfasts, which would appear generally twice a week or so. A bowl of either watery oatmeal (plain) or grits accompanied by the aforementioned egg (not always) and whatever bread happened to be on hand at the moment. At the top is the "deluxe" breakfast - once a week there would be some decent pancakes (drowned in syrup) accompanied by a scoop of canned fruit cocktail.

Topmost in the dinner shots you see the only beverage ever served outside of coffee and water; a styrofoam cup of Kool-Aid, non-refillable. Dinners frequently consisted of rice, canned vegetables, mashed potatoes and whatever else was on hand hastily cooked and jumbled together. There is actually a "menu" prepared in advance, which is posted on a bulletin board so that customers can arrange their dinner plans well in advance; to the bottom you see the standard fare of "hot dog night", which was usually every Saturday.

Snapshots of Homelessness #4: Next Door Shelter, Pt. 1

2009-01-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

Note : The following comes from firsthand experience with the Next Door Shelter as a result of stay(s) occurring from 2007 to the present. The exact dates are not given and details are obfuscated for the purposes of preserving my own anonymity. Events from more than one stay may have been run together in order to provide better narrative. Every detail, regardless, is a true and factual occurrence, experienced firsthand unless otherwise noted.

The Next Door shelter at Polk and Geary is one of the few city shelters that guarantees a bed for more than seven consecutive days; it is possible to stay for up to six months, though as with all city shelters, there is a waiting list. The shelter is a large, featureless four-story rectangle that would readily blend in with the hotels and apartment buildings on the blocks adjacent were it not for a perpetual crowd of bedraggled humanity hanging outside the front door, smoking, talking, sometimes hustling, puking and fighting.

The floors of the shelter are divided by circumstances of stay; the first floor contains the "seven day beds" doled out through the Byzantine city CHANGES shelter reservation system. One cannot access these beds by going to the front desk of Next Door, but one can get on the waiting list for a six-month "case managed" bed by coming directly here. As to how long that wait takes I cannot say; as with Ella Hill Hutch, my status as a military veteran enables me to bypass the time-consuming city rigamarole and inject myself directly into one of the thirty beds set aside for vets and filled through the VA. From my initial contact with a veterans representative at the 3rd and Harrison VA drop-in center, it takes only five days for me to get into the shelter. To most of the non-veteran homeless population in San Francisco, this is an unimaginable luxury.

(For those who are concerned - I did not "snatch" a bed from a needy vet. Let us not forget that I am still to this day legitimately homeless myself, and I initially approached the shelter out of a genuine need for some form of housing when money was very low. Also, during the entirety of my stay, which encompassed mostly the warmer months of the year here, very rarely were the vet beds at 100% occupancy. When I first checked in there were five beds open to take my pick of.)

I will spend my time here on the third floor, the general-purpose men's dorm for those with six-month stays. The fourth floor is for the women in long-term beds, and the second is for medical respite patients who have special needs.

................

PART 1 - HOME SWEET HOME

A long wheelchair ramp leads to the one entrance and exit to the facility; you cannot enter freely but must knock on the door until noticed by the desk staff and buzzed in. A security guard usually waits to check the contents of any bags you might have; as of October of 2007 you are also funneled through a rather chintzy metal detector that begins beeping if so much as breathed on.

The reception area is clean, sterile, hospital-like; one or two people man the front desk at all hours. I have been given a paper with instructions beforehand by the VA; I am to arrive at ten for "intake", and I should bring any clothes that I intend to have during my stay with me to the intake as they will be surrendered to the staff to be washed (apparently a response to past bedbug infestations).

Two black ladies are manning the desk when I arrive, and another who appears to be a staff member is lounging nearby chatting with them. I am instructed to sit in a plastic chair off to the side, along with several other "intakes" who have arrived before me. I have tried to "dress down" as much as I feel is appropriate for being in a shelter, but apparently my appearance is not nearly haggard enough to prevent some quiet suspicion and speculation as to what circumstances brought me to this level of lodging - "Muss' be a pedaphile", decides the lounging one, and that brings the speculation to a close. Aside from being personally insulting, her unwarranted contribution is also my first indication that people with records of sex crimes are not necessarily screened out here as they usually are in other secular shelters.

As you may have noticed if you have read my other Snapshots of Homelessness, black women with bad attitudes and poor judgment on what to say to clients are a recurring theme of the low-level staffing of the San Francisco homeless services system. As I will find out during my stay at Next Door, the staff of the vast majority of the city shelters and drop-ins are made up of recently-released convicts who can find little else in the way of work.

"Intake" consists of a meeting with whatever Case Manager happens to be on duty; at the moment, this is a personable guy named Ludwig. We have to wait for him one at a time, though; a quiet Midnight Rambler sort of dude goes in first, and I strike up a little conversation with a sweet older lady who is sitting and waiting with me. She's been on 7-day stays for a few weeks now, and still isn't totally sure she's going to get her six-month bed. She draws disability but not enough to even get an SRO; she's on a couple of the endless waiting lists for a subsidized room, with no idea if or when she'll be called.

Ludwig is affable and polite and the meeting goes smoothly; there's forms to fill out, of course, the inevitable sheet with the Rules of the House makes its appearance, and I surrender the clothes in my pack to a giant plastic bag. I am told they will be washed by staff and returned to me by 8 PM. The only bit of weirdness here is that I'm told the clothes I am wearing have to be washed at some point today too; when I ask what I will be given to wear during that time, the response is "Um, well we don't really have anything, but you'll be up on the men's floor and you can wrap up in a sheet or blanket or something." As it happens, however, no one ever demands the clothes. I don't think I would have gone through with it if they did.

The instructions now are to return at 1:00 for "orientation"; until then, I'm free to go as I please, but apparently can't stay here. Ludwig helpfully asks if I need directions to St. Anthony's or Glide for lunch, but I've got enough scratch at this point to get something a little more satisfying out of my own pocket. I want to make a run to my storage unit anyway for some "shelter basics" that I like to have, so I use the time to do that.

If you'll permit me an aside here, I think it would be useful to share my shelter packing list; I don't doubt that many people reading this may be contemplating entering that situation for the first time. I would say flip-flops are the most indispensable element; you can expect the floor of any shelter shower to have residual traces of cum, blood, piss, pubes, spit, mucus, tobacco and general funk at any given time, unless it has just been bleached and scrubbed. Next is a spare roll of toilet paper; shelters are supposed to provide it, but it often runs out and is slow to be replaced. I would bring my own towel - most shelters have them, but they are usually grody and usually in short supply. A small Army field towl works well for price and convenience; if you are in San Francisco you can get them for a couple bucks at Kaplan Surplus on Market between Sixth and Seventh, otherwise check your nearest military surplus source. Also wise is a pack of those toilet seat covers; travel packs of 20 can be had at Walgreens for 99 cents (look near the tissues and other paper goods). Sanitary towels are a good choice as well, though be sure not to try and flush them if the plumbing is antiquated as is typical of shelters; I found a better choice to be a small bottle of hand sanitizer, which I squeezed a healthy dollop of into a wad of toilet paper and then skimmed over the surface of the seat. At most shelters that provide lockers, they also provide a lock; not Next Door, so I also dig through my goods for one of the many padlocks I have accumulated in the course of my adventures. If you don't have a good community around you and have something of value you really need to protect, I would suggest a disc lock; they sell them at storage places, for 8 to 10 bucks, but they are essentially pick-proof and nothing is getting through them short of maybe an acetylene torch. A small or compressible travel pillow is also recommended; Walgreens has nice ones for 4 bucks now. If you do get a pillow at a shelter - which is rare - it will be vinyl and it will be highly uncomfortable. Also, a water bottle to keep at the bed; you can just use a plastic bottle if you plan to keep it out at all times, but Walgreens again has some decent stainless steel bottles for $3, provided you don't mind locking it up when you are not around. Aside from your standard hygiene items, I consider these the basic fundaments of shelter equipment.

Returning to the shelter - "orientation" occurs in a small room off of the dining area, which is in the basement. I see we will be partaking of classy downtown living; the stairs are off-limits to all but employees, so we are forced to wait on one of two elevators to go anywhere in the facility. There's nothing really to remark on here; we go over all the rules of the house with Ludwig, and he makes sure to impress upon us the #1 reason why people are "DOS'd" (Denial of Service - kicked out) of the shelter, which is for missing curfews three times in a thirty day period. Curfew, which consists of being at your bed for a "bed check", is at 8 PM, at which time no one is allowed back out of the facility until 5 AM. Additionally, at 10 PM, one must be at their bed for a second bed check, which is when the lights go down. On Friday and Saturday nights, the curfews are extended to 10 and midnight, respectively.

Finally, we get to the bed area. I'll pick up with my subjective narrative later; right now I just want to stick with a description of the facilities. Each bed is metal, military/prison-style, with a drawer slung under it that you can secure with your padlock. You get a mat about two inches thick, maybe a vinyl pillow (if one of the neighborhood rip-and-runners hasn't secured it for themselves already). I'd assume somebody is supposed to clean the beds when people move out, but they don't; the drawers are cluttered with junk and soil of the previous occupant, there's dust and gunk all under the beds, the surface where the mat lays could stand a good wipedown.

Some bed locations are much better than others. Some people are out in the middle of the floor with people adjacent to them in every direction; the floor has some sort of an odd art-deco style going with yellow divider walls placed at intervals. The veterans section occupies a nook at the far end of the floor, next to one of the walls and several dividers; most of the vet beds have a wall on at least one side of them, and a few are wedged into corners so that you only have three immediate neighbors. The prime real estate is offset by being located right next to the impromptu "day room", which has a small TV mounted high on the wall, and a pay phone very close by.

A bathroom with four toilet stalls (one handicapped), seven sinks and two urinals serves the up-to-100 men on the floor at any given time. As expected, there are peak times of use; from about a half-hour before "lights on" at 6 A.M. to about an hour afterward (when breakfast is served), there is a line for the toilets and sink space for shaving and washing is at a premium. Only two stalls have paper dispensers; the other two have mountings for them, but they have been removed for some reason. During my stay, I will find that the dispensers will appear and disappear from different stalls for reasons I never do uncover. There is no guarantee of either toilet paper or sanitary seat covers; they are sometimes kept on a desk in the main corridor, and every now and then someone will thoughtfully leave a roll of TP on the floor or back of the toilet seat, though these usually get flooded and/or contaminated fairly rapidly. In the morning, when bathroom use is at the peak for the day, paper can usually not be found.

The toilet situation is complicated by fragile plumbing, the flushing of contraband, and the use of wads of paper as impromptu seat covers in place of the oft-unavailable wax ones. During my time at Next Door, there are maybe a week's worth of cumulative days where all four toilets are operational all at once. There are two periods where we are down to only two stalls, and it generally takes about a week for a clogged stall to be fixed by maintenance. During the period that the clogged stalls are inoperational, a large, transparent plastic bag is placed over the toilets to dissuade their use - many people have no compunctions about adding to the rich stew of an already-clogged toilet until it threatens to overflow. The bags do nothing to hide the sight and little to hide the smell of days-old piss and feces ripening at room temperature.

Needless to say, the stalls are used for all sorts of things other than their intended purpose. The best time to use the john is during the afternoon, when most of the shelter population has departed to make appointments, work, socialize, hustle or get high. At night, particularly after the 8 PM curfew when everyone is forced inside, the toilet stalls become a combination shooting gallery, smoke pit and peep show booth. After being driven out by the smell of crack smoke one night, and the sound of my neighbor rustling a magazine while noisily applying lube to his dick prior to settling in for a thorough jerk-off session, I give up on using the toilet after 8 PM any given night except in extreme emergencies.

Heroin addicts frequently blow veins while using the stalls for their vice. In this particular case, the blood around the rest of the stall took 24 hours to be cleaned after staff was notified; the blood on the sign in the picture remained there for nearly a week.

The shower stalls, in a separate room just down the hall from the toilets, also come in fours - three standing prison-style showers, where you must continually press a metal plunger in to get about fifteen seconds of water, and a shower with a bench and nozzle for the handicapped. Cleaning appears to consist of a bleach-mopping of the floors once daily; the walls are caked with soap scum and mildew. When I first arrive, the shower stalls have mildew-encrusted curtains for privacy, though one must dress and undress in the open air; the only provision for your clothes is a hook on the wall of each shower, frequently soaked by inconsiderate previous users, and plastic chairs also often soaked by someone's wet ass sitting on them.

After about a month at the shelter, the mildewy shower curtains are taken down; they are not replaced, however, completely eliminating what little privacy there was. Finally, after almost four weeks, fresh curtains are installed, which are up for the remainder of my stay.

During the time that the curtains are up, the showers are another popular location for furtive activities. One morning, after entering an empty shower room and getting all wet and my hair all lathered up with shampoo, a creeper enters the stall at the opposite end and lights up his pipe. The acrid smell of crack smoke instantly fills the poorly-ventilated shower room. Not wanting that shit in my system, but wet and naked, I start yelling at the idiot to take that shit somewhere else. Only when I start drying off, putting my clothes on and threatening to come over and beat the fucking life out of him does he finally scurry out of the room.

I'm sure he probably thought it was a privilege that he was sharing his secondhand crack smoke with me.

Clogged drain in the shower furthest from the door; this puddle of standing water remained in place for about three weeks. During that time, people continued to use both the stalls around it, continually adding bodily effluence to the stagnating mass.

Mildew on the curtains and walls; while the curtains are apparently replaced once every few months, the walls never appeared to once be scrubbed.

forthcoming

2009-01-27T13:27:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in the previous post -

I was intending to wait on this a bit until I had a clearer idea of the overall structure, but I don't know how long that will take and I don't want to lose any potentiality that may be gathering.

My thought on the matter of transcending our mutual material poverty is that the best first step is to render ourselves healthy and fit, so that we are in a suitable condition to render mutual aid and to contend where contention is needed.

What I envision, and this is not a finalized name but just something to use as a reference during brainstorming, is a Web-based HoboNet, or a HoboNexus. Again, I am not certain about using "hobo"; I feel it is appropriate, however, given the character of people moving to find resources (in the tradition of the honorable 'bos of the Great Depression), and it certainly is easy to remember and to pass along to others. I am very open to ideas on this point.

Whatever the name may be, the idea is to have a Wiki/Web 2.0 style platform that can be contributed to and edited by users. Inspirations and models include the SF Homeless Wiki, StealThisWiki, and the RoadDogs Forums, but I intend for this to go far beyond those in scope, and to have *mutual aid* as the first priority and central theme rather than simple cataloging.

Now, I don't intend to use Haves and Have-Nots as regular descriptive terminology; that was a one-off generalization in a piece intended to drive home a particular point. If i may borrow the terms again for just a short minute here, however, as Tom pointed out in the comments we are going to have a number of new Haves joining us in the homeless / working poor world, the extent of which is presently not precisely foreseeable. This, potentially, can change the dynamics of how poverty is represented and viewed in this country.

I want to start laying a foundation so that everyone in this situation can readily find whatever aid they need with as little trouble as possible. We will map out existent social services, charity and community organizations, with clear, precise and current details (coming from people who are in the area or have been there and accessed the services themselves firsthand recently, or from workers at the services) on what exactly one can avail themselves of, what the exact procedures are to do so, and what to realistically expect in terms of likelihood of actually getting the aid needed (this is a major failing of social services websites and 211 - they make it sound like things like shelter beds are always available, when the reality is you may end up needing to wait in a line for a better part of a day and then still not get in, and they frequently do not make clear the specifics of how to access the beds).

We cannot be satisfied with the present government-and-church-backed "safety net", however. We must begin forming our own bonds by sharing knowledge - techniques, fit locations for camping and jungling, good deals on material needs, free giveaways, locations of available natural resources, etc. There is a concern here in how much to reveal publically, since they may then be easily located and removed by the owning classes; I am considering using a chain of PMs (with vital information collated and redistributed by "regional experts" who have been around for a bit and are trusted) or some sort of a P2P system for registered users for certain aspects of the site rather than a traditional out-in-the-air Wiki.

We also just need to talk. Homeless people desperately need to talk without feeling judged, to feel engaged and part of a real community in which they play a needed role. Forums and a chat will be a key part of this, and we will see about implementing VOIP telephony via services such as Skype as well.

This is a very rough sketch. More details will be added here in time. After I have mapped out the initial skeleton a bit better, I intend to pay for DNS registration and some form of hosting out of my own pocket to get this up with a simple, easy-to-remember web address. From there, it is time to marshal the troops and begin building.

Keep an eye on the blog for further developments.

have and have not

2009-01-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

Please don't let the title of this post kick your brain into Ignore mode automatically; this is not another tedious Rich v.s. Poor, wealth distribution screed. I want to talk today about the Homeless Haves and the Homeless Have-Nots.

I imagine this is a tough concept to get your head around if you have no direct personal experience with homelessness, but for those of us immersed in fringe living, it is going to be immediately familiar. The Homeless Haves are simply the homeless who, in spite of their economic/material position, have retained to a great degree their sanity, dignity, physical and emotional health. They are able to navigate confusing social service systems, such as the ones we have here in San Francisco, keeping a clear enough head to provide for themselves as much as is possible. The Homeless Have-Nots are having a rougher time of it, for one reason or another. These are the shopping cart pushers, the doorway-sleepers, the wild street corner prophets, the public toilet trashers, the endless crack chasers.

If you are reading this blog there's about a 99% probability that you are a Homeless Have. The Have-Nots don't usually bother to access even the free library computers; decades on the street likely have rendered them incapable of operating one, perhaps without even the functional literacy level to read and understand this. I am certain the vast majority of the audience for my writing consists of Homeless Haves who are searching desperately for resources to help them pull themselves up and out of their situation.

This post is meant for you, and it concerns our role - an attempt to figure out what we should consider our responsibilities to be, really - within the greater community of the impoverished.

The Homeless Have-Nots are a major problem for us as Homeless Haves. We are not unsympathetic, but at the same time, they make our lives and our struggles tremendously more difficult. They have, essentially, co-opted the identity of poverty in America wholly for themselves, with their flagrant abuses of the "social safety nets" and "colorful" public behavior. All of the "social service programs" we have are designed with the Have-Nots in mind; the public opinion, with all of its stereotypes and knee-jerk reactionary NIMBYism, is also shaped by the antics of the Have-Nots (in cooperation with a corporate mass media system more concerned about optimizing profits via entertainment than social responsibility).

I am not really here to place blame, but we do need to honestly assess the situation. I recently snapped a picture from Ninth Street, put up by I don't even know who, that asks the following question :

The reason we will not have that revolution is because, at present, the bulk of that 15,000 is unorganizable. They are too mentally disabled, too wrapped up in the self-absorbed world of drugs and alcohol, too mired in depression.

From here we have a further sub-division in the Have-Not world, and unfortunately, this is going to involve placing some blame : those that cannot be organized due to a legitimate disability beyond their control, and those that simply choose not to due to a personal decision to be an asshole.

...........

I am not without sympathy or understanding for the homeless assholes. I think there are very few among them who had lives going relatively well and then one day just up and decided, "You know, I think I'm gonna be the biggest drain on society that I possibly can while slowly killing myself over a period of decades. That sounds like an entertaining and reasonable way to spend the rest of my life."

I think most of the Have-Not assholes live the way they do because they think there is no alternative. No one, the Homeless Haves included, have thus far shown them a reliable working one. Put it this way - most homelessness and extreme poverty in America, if it does not involve a legitimate disability, begins with a bad childhood. Abuse, neglect, or both. If you come up with bad parents or no parents, little to no real community ever around you (as few of us have, especially in the big cities), have the superficial capitalist American dream of greed and hoarding as the way of life in your face 24/7, butt up against stereotyping and prejudice continually, live with the judgments of the cold-shouldered consumption-based society, and live with material want all the time while resources are wasted all around you, it's pretty easy to rationalize yourself into a hedonistic, "live for the moment" mindset that makes everyone else around you into either something to be used for personal gain or a useless background object. You might as well just rip, run and take whatever dirty alley pleasures are available, because you don't see anything else worth living for. I understand that; I've felt similarly before.

There is, however, ultimately a point of personal responsibility; a place where the decision is in your hands, you know what the outcomes will be, and you choose to go one way or the other. The difference between the asshole and the non-asshole is in the spaces where those decisions are made, however few or far between they may be.

Let me give you an example. You might think that I would shove all addicts into the Have-Not Asshole box, but that is far from the case. I was in a shelter in San Francisco for a couple of months back in 2007; pretty bad shelter, on the whole, but the scene was decent. The area right around my bed-space at the time was made up of a community of what I would call Homeless Haves, who looked out for each other as much as possible. We took turns keeping an eye on the bed area and warded off the short-termer crackheads who would come wandering over looking to grab and dash; we stood up for each other when the lazy, incompetent and sometimes abusive staff doled out unwarranted paperwork; we smuggled food in for each other when someone had money or food stamps and the dinner that night sucked (which was frequent); and if anyone had anything anyone else needed they shared it freely, whether it be material, information or just a sympathetic ear.

Anyway, a couple of the guys in this scene were addicts. One was a pretty hard-core coke fiend, apparently used to make a pretty good living, as the habit took over the income he downshifted to crack in order to economize. I didn't get too much into his personal business, but he was managing it somehow, meds or dosing I would guess. I don't doubt this guy stole, cheated, defrauded, did whatever to get drugs at some point in his life. I don't doubt that he'll relapse at some point, hit the streets again, do whatever again to get a hit. But in the time *in which he was in control*, he engaged with the community around him, he went to meetings and did what he felt he had to do to get a handle on his issues, he looked for work and took it when it could be found. More than once, I or someone else in the area would be at our bed messing with something and idly muse out loud about lacking some basic fundamental or another for which it would be a pain to get, and without any prompting he would dig under his bed, shuffle over and supply us with whatever it was we needed.

No one should be expected to be perfect, though the social services system comes damn near to making that a requirement for basic care. People who have suffered extreme want, abuse or both all of their lives are psychologically wounded, often very badly. They will do irrational things, stupid things, selfish things, destructive things. But if, in their moments of clarity, they choose to move forward, they choose community over self, they step on to something approximating Buddha's "Eightfold Path", even if they wipe out and start over again a hundred times, in time, attrition of positive quality will build up and circumstances will align to enable them to step up, out and back into the fullness of the world.

We know, however, there is nothing at all to be gained from the destructive, ripping-and-running "sulky bum" route. All that route can promise is more of the same forever - a quick hit grubbed here and there at tremendous expense - likely capped by a premature, painful and messy death, bringing nothing but trauma and trouble to all that are in the wake of it.

.............

Homeless Haves, however, are far from beyond blame. We exhibit traits of the Have-Not Asshole, to varying degrees. In some ways, we are forced to - by the top-heavy social structure, by artificial material scarcity, by a social safety net that requires one to compete with their fellows for basic needs. We have our own problems, which seem overwhelming and perhaps hopelessly insurmountable. We wonder when we will get *ours*, when *our* lives will become better. Maybe we tell ourselves, "Well, there's not much I can do now, but once *I'm* taken care of, I'll certainly do what I can for the rest of these fellows."

We are not nearly as destructive, no. We do not turn the greater community against us with our behavior. We don't grab more than we need, burn it all fast as we can and then come back for as many more helpings as we can get away with, literally taking resources right out of the hands of others. We don't hustle. We don't beg because we know we don't really need to. We frequently give more than we take, when everything is tallied up. We look for answers instead of creating more problems.

But we could do better. What we all really want - Haves, Have-Nots, assholes, working people, rich people - are the fundamental things that we lost some time ago, when we felt we had to build and hoard because someone else was always doing so and always threatening us, when we became high on our own power and knowledge and ability to effect the world around us, when we allowed ourselves to become blinded by the novelties of the five senses.

What anyone wants is to have the ability to take care of their basic needs without unnatural hindrance, to have an adequate and comfortable place to live, to eat and drink decently, to love and be loved, to be a part of a community and to be wanted by it. If anyone has that, barring serious mental illness, they will be content. The more we have focused on producing the material, the more we have lost the rest, and now with material production mastered, people see nothing left to do but to try to hoard as much as possible. And so, even the material is taken away from many, in an age that focuses on material surplus above all else.

The point of all this rambling philosophy is that society, as structured, is clearly not going to create the solution to the problem. I believe that we - if we are capable of grasping the problem in its fullness - now bear the onus of breaking ground on the task. We are the unencumbered and un-affiliated; we can be whoever we choose to, and we can, if we bear our will to it, create whatever we will.

It is on us to teach without teaching, so that there is nothing to teach. Society points to us as the hell-pit, the horrible fate that lies waiting if the millions of cogs that power the Mammon Machine refuse to conform, refuse to bend their heads downward and serve. But we have been here for years, most of us; we live lightly, we are not miserable or ashamed. We can give, we can love, we can change ourselves and what is around us for the better.

We can organize. We can turn this technology, designed to keep us where we are, against its masters. We can bring the best of our minds together with relative ease; there is nothing stopping us but refusal to do so. We can figure out how to take care of ourselves, and we can pass this on to the others who have not yet been reached. We can begin by forming a community, the very ragged and hazy early vision of a society beyond pettiness and political ideology, and through such a visible community we can plant seeds of hope. We cannot cure crack addiction or mental disability, nor can we take care of the hooting and the drooling and the rip-and-running and the very far gone, but we can exert pressure to make sure that those who can do their jobs properly.

We can begin to remove ourselves from "the grid"; that is, the grid of social services through which the destitute are funneled and controlled. We can create our own systems, bases of operations, resource centers. We can become an ad-hoc army without hierarchy or marching orders, our enemy being ignorance, despair and the darkness in the human constitution.

And maybe, when they begin to see viable alternatives, the assholes will reconsider their lives.

We have a small window at this point in history, right this minute, which is open for an unknowable amount of time. However long this time is, we will have an American government that will not send tanks and choppers and armed agents to move us along, and we will have the rest of the world looking upon us with favorable and charitable eyes for the first time in a long time, believing in us for the first time in a long time.

This is the direction I intend to set my work in this coming year. More concrete things will follow, when they are ready. You are invited and I hope you will join in.

what i've been trying to say

2008-12-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

It is nice when someone does your work for you.

"Transferring policy decisions to the hands of small citizen assemblies would serve as part of a larger confederation of similar assemblies, as Bookchin suggests, would do much to put power back into the hands of the people. A single national or global economy with a multitude of smaller, self-sufficient, communal economies linked together in a similar confederation based on their need to exchange resources. This would force people and communities to consider the impact of their
decisions on others, leading them to put people and the planet before profits. For, as Bookchin points out in his essay, Market Economy or Moral Economy, our present lack of economic justice stems largely from the fact that the market economy depersonalizes economic transactions making them not a personal exchange between human beings, but a transfer of commodities from manufacturer to retailer, from retailer to consumer. The result is a completely amoral economy. Just as it was
easier for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington to allow a power plant to be built in Seabrook over the townspeople's objections than it would have been for the town's government to do so, it is far easier for a multi-national corporation with a warehouse full of unused grain to allow a nation to starve than it is for a farmer with a silo full of corn to allow her/his neighbors to starve. In an economy based on community ownership or resources and means of productions, the needs of the community will always come first, and in a small community, the needs of the community tend to coincide with the needs of the individual. When the domination of one person over another inherent in capitalism is eliminated, the human desire to dominate the earth will soon fade as well."

...

"Our government has grown too big and too centralized to meet the needs of its people, and has grown so close to business and industry that it has no desire to do so ... But size is not the only factor in the failure of the present system to meet the needs of individuals and communities. Small governments often fail their people as well. As Murray Bookchin has pointed out in his ground-breaking work on community-based government, the replacement of the face-to-face politics of the Greek polis and the New England town meeting with a representative government has done much to diminish the voice of the individual in the policy-formulation process. A community of neighbors has a sense of its own identity and a basic sense of the needs of its members. On the other hand, a large government or corporation, however progressive it may be, can't really have a good understanding of the individual needs of its citizens or employees for the simple reason that it must deal with millions of them at a time."

A letter from a small New Hampshire town protesting a nuclear power plant forced into their community over their objections by state and federal forces

spawns this eloquent summation of why capitalism is so bad for everyone but the elite, and why homelessness and poverty will always be with us until we change the whole structure

organized activism to house homeless in foreclosed homes

2008-12-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

Occupation of foreclosed/abandoned homes has been going on since there have been foreclosed/abandoned homes but it always has been a socially marginal, illegal, and usually somewhat dangerous activity.

An activist group for the homeless in Miami has organized to locate unused properties and move local homeless people into them.

To me, the most heartening point of the article -

"Miami spokeswoman Kelly Penton said that city officials did not know Rameau was moving homeless people into empty buildings — but that they are not stopping him.

“There are no actions on the city’s part to stop this,” she said in an e-mail. “It is important to note that if people trespass into private property, it is up to the property owner to take action to remove those individuals.”

If this sort of homeless activism was organized, on a large scale all across the country, it could literally change the rules of the whole social game. This is an opportune window in which to do so. Many properties are abandoned and the housing market will take years to recover if it ever does. City officials are clearly taking a hands-off approach to this with much more to deal with on their plates.

That leaves the landlords, the hierarchical masters, without de facto social validation to lean on to enforce the unfair social compact. All that leaves them is themselves for enforcement - which thus far has amounted to sneaking back and changing locks when the homeless occupants are out. I don't think they would dare go beyond that. The community would retaliate if force was employed.

If you're in a position to strike, this is a good time ...

The Hobo News

2008-12-05T22:18:00.000-08:00

A newspaper published from 1936 to 1948 in New York by Ben (Hobo) Benson, aka the "Coast Kid"

Given current economic conditions it might be primed for a comeback.

New New Deal

2008-11-24T17:32:00.000-08:00

I attended an interesting series of presentations at my school recently, focusing on the anniversary of FDR's New Deal program. One of the most interesting aspects was how many public works projects from that period are now either unlabelled, or not recognized as such. The Living New Deal project at Berkeley seeks to uncover and document those in the state of California, and some of their findings are amazing. Most of the city halls and fire departments in our state, for example, were built as part of New Deal work programs.

There has been talk (link goes to a Ralph Nader opinion piece), ever since the banking collapse began and the "bailouts" started, of a New New Deal, which it is hoped will be administered by incoming President Obama's administration.

Is there interest amongst the homeless circles in the United States for this? There are certainly massive public works that can be undertaken, for example, reviving a light rail network across the country. Would a significant portion of the homeless be interested in such programs if offered fair pay, decent work conditions and housing in return for their labor?

tent cities on the rise in the mainstream

2008-09-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

Article at CNN.com

For at least three decades now most major American cities could have really used some sort of tent cities as an option to improve the quality of life of homeless people and the very poor, but they always meet with resistance for a variety of reasons. Maybe one positive offshoot of this latest blitz of economic issues is that it will make tent cities seem more visible and thus publically acceptable.

Bailout Logic

2008-09-18T18:05:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I happened to see Mitt Romney on the news, and he had this to say -

"A government bailout is the right thing to do when the cost of letting a company fail would be greater than the cost to the taxpayers of the bailout."

Why does that rationale only apply to giant corporate entities?

What if we applied it to the homeless world? To each and every individual human being?

We let an individual "fail" - that is, we do not give them a reasonable avenue by which to bolster themselves when they have no community and no material support - and they turn to drugs or drinking as a substitute means of coping with their pain.

The cost to society frequently becomes enormous - emergency medical rides and treatment never paid for, unpaid child support when they leave families behind, court and jail costs when minor infractions they are ticketed for (due to their homelessness) go unpaid and turn into arrest warrants and jail time.

Would it not end up costing society less to simply take proper care of people whenever and wherever they have their difficulties, right at the beginning?

cognitive dissonance

2008-08-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

John McCain doesn't know how many houses he owns and thinks $5 million per year income is the minimum qualification to be 'rich'

And yet, I know a bunch of homeless veterans who ardently support him

homelessness in Japan

2008-08-01T15:57:00.001-07:00

A fascinating look at a recent trend among the homeless in Tokyo and other major Japanese cities :

Japanese homeless spending their nights in 24-hour internet cubicles

This article isn't so much about the 'hardcore homeless' in Japan as what they call the NEET generation (No Employment, Education or Training), who work temporary construction and part-time retail and service jobs, but can't make nearly enough at that to rent even the most humble of accomodations in Tokyo, which is probably the most expensive overall city on Earth to live in.

""Home for Tanaka is Manga Square, a 24-hour internet cafe and comic lounge in the Ikebukuro neighbourhood of Tokyo. It is one of thousands of cafes across Japan that have become de facto shelters for people who can't afford to rent a place of their own: the unemployed and others, such as Tanaka, who depend on daily contracts in construction work to survive. According to a recent government survey of the people the media has dubbed "net cafe refugees", 5,400 people spend at least half the week living in cafes such as Manga Square, though most have little or no interest in the internet. Instead, they are attracted by the low cost of a night's accommodation, an expanding array of services and the sympathetic attitude of cafe owners."

As unacceptable as it is to force people into this sort of housing, a lot of homeless here in the U.S. (myself included) would kill to have such resources available to us. A private, lockable cubicle with free internet access and free drinks for the whole night for less than $10? That's unthinkable here - I know of absolutely nothing that even comes close. There's some Kinkos and such that are open 24 hours but charge an exorbitant amount for internet by the minute, aren't private and would probably boot you the second you fell asleep. Same for any 24 hour restaurant, most of which are in proximity to trendy clubs and bars and will give you the same boot so as not to offend the party kids that they cater to.

Interesting question for the "free marketeers" out there - why has Japan come up with (something of) a solution to the shelterless with income, yet America can't even come close?

"Tanaka has been dividing his time between internet cafes, capsule hotels and all-night saunas for the past three years since fleeing his home in Saitama prefecture, north of Tokyo, after falling behind on his rent. "I know it's cramped here, but there is no way I could afford the deposit and rent on an apartment, even a one-room place," he says as he devours a Slush Puppie with a plastic spoon. "All the drinks are free, I can use the PC for as long as I like, and there's even a shower upstairs."
For all this he pays about 1,000 yen (£4.30) a night. On days when there is no room at the cafe, or when he craves a little more comfort, he pays a little more and stays at a capsule hotel - a bed and a TV in a room only slightly bigger than a coffin, with communal showers. What little cash he saves goes on occasional trips to a nearby "soapland" - sex shops where the female staff administer soapy "massages" - for 15,000 yen (£65) a time. "Even though I'm penniless, I am still a single, ordinary guy, and I like to play a bit from time to time," he says."

For example, capsule hotels. There's clearly a huge market for them in the cities - so where are they, Invisible Hand?

"Official figures show that 640,000 Japanese under 35 are classed as Neets. The Dai-ichi Life Research Institute, a private thinktank, estimates that if current trends persist, the Neet population will rise to more than a million over the next 10 years."

Blade Runner / Neal Stephenson here we come.

"Image-conscious cafe owners have also criticised the popular description of their customers as refugees. "There are certainly some [customers] who have a hard time finding regular work, but ... these people are very important customers," says the Japan Complex Cafe Association, which represents about 1,300 internet cafes. "Some reports give the impression that groups of vagrants and homeless people gather at internet cafes every night. The media should be aware that such reports can scare off customers."

Here's another fascinating bit of cultural contrast - here in the U.S. they'd be doing everything possible to run them out and get the police to take care of it, even if it meant losing steady business from these people. I think people here get frightened when they see such poverty, it reminds them how close to the edge they always really are.

Anyway, fascinating read all around.

oh, and incidentally ...

2008-07-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

President George W. Bush, who was so cowardly and irresponsible he went AWOL for months from a cushy stateside Air National Guard post, is threatening to veto a bill expanding housing and shelter for homeless vets that has passed the House with massive approval (only nine votes against it).

Maybe Bush is just afraid that after he's done being tried for war crimes and serving his bit in PMITA prison, he won't be let in to the new shelters, given that they are for Heroes.

the fact that they call him a "czar" says enough by itself

2008-07-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

Change in San Francisco 'Council on Homelessness' leadership - labor lawyer Phil Ginsburg to step down from Mayor's Chief of Staff position after 18 months on the job, to be succeeded by current "homeless czar" Trent Rhorer.

"Good job Trent, you've done a fantastic job slashing services and funding, making sure the homeless are consistently demonized in the press, and have generally made this city a much better place for rich white people to dine out, party, bulldoze affordable housing in favor of ugly condos, and conduct their exploitative business. Time for you to take your career to the next level!"

Speaking of which ...

"Rhorer, 39, said he won’t be making any major changes, although he did hint that he would move the administration to the “next level” on homeless policy."

Jesus Christ ... since 2004 it's been nothing but slash-and-burn and criminalization pushes in an attempt to drive the homeless out of town ... what exactly does 'taking it to the next level' mean? Is the next level Soylent Green?

for those of you wondering why you should give a damn ...

2008-07-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

... about the San Francisco-specific poverty related issues that I keep on rambling on about here, this is why -

Gavin Newsome forms exploratory committee for 2010 Governorship of California

It's a poorly kept secret around here that "Gavs" has his eyes on nothing less than the Presidency of the United States and, given his charisma, and barring any major scandals or slipups, I don't see any reason why he can't end up being the Democratic contender in 2016, maybe even 2012. Pay attention to the way he deals with poverty, inequality and social justice in San Francisco now, because his methodologies are, most likely , going to be a nationwide issue in all of our lifetimes.

I've said it before, but I don't think it can be said enough - San Francisco is an advance microcosm of American society, one of the front-line battles in the new American class war. What happens here, and in places like Manhattan and L.A. will, eventually, happen on a broader scale all over.

Snapshots of Homelessness #3 : The County Adult Assistance Program (General Assistance)

2008-07-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

Or, How Under Gavin Newsome, GA has become a supplemental income for drug dealers and pimps

Next up on my list to investigate was the County Adult Assistance Program (CAAP), formerly known as "General Assistance". This is the place to go in San Francisco to apply for food stamps and emergency cash aid. The office is located on Mission Street between 8th and 9th, a short walk from the Civic Center.

I was almost positive I would not qualify for any sort of aid due to my receiving grant money from school (about $2000 per semester, a rather paltry amount given the cost of living, but still more than enough to disqualify me from any other forms of state or federal aid). I decided to apply for food stamps as an experiment, however, just to go through the process fully and thus be able to write about it. And if I somehow did actually qualify for food stamps, I certainly could make use of them, as I do not make nearly enough money to provide for myself year-round paying even the low market rates for anything.

As it turns out, I did indeed not qualify for any sort of assistance at all. However, the experience was a great crash refresher course in both the insanity of the bureaucracy of government aid, and the levels to which these programs dehumanize the people that come looking for assistance.

....................

The correct entrance to the CAAP office is not immediately apparent, as the building is not really marked or numbered at all. Coming from 8th, the first entrance you see is crowded with people and has a uniformed security guard standing by, but this turns out to be some sort of work program unrelated to the main CAAP office. The actual entrance consists of two ramps leading to a recessed basement-level doorway. One is for entering and one is for exiting, and neither is marked from the outside in any way, so the first time you visit you stand a 50% chance of going the wrong way and having to retrace your steps.

Once inside you pass through a metal detector, and bags are checked at a desk staffed by security personell. A genuinely helpful and friendly guard points me towards a stack of applications - anyone who wants food stamps, GA or any other sort of aid must first fill one of these out, and bring it to Window A. Incidentally, I notice there is a fish bowl nearby full of condoms, with a sign politely requesting that you take no more than three at a time. So if you are in need of condoms and short on cash, this is apparently your spot.

The application doesn't ask for anything particularly shocking or offensive and I am soon headed toward the back of the building to join the long line snaking toward "Window A". The line is a mix of people who look mostly working class, no really visible homeless. If I have any concerns about looking out of place, they are quashed when I notice the lady in line in front of me has one of those Lobot phones grafted to her ear, complete with gratuitous blue LED lights and everything.

It takes about fifteen minutes to work my way up to the hallowed Window A, where a hipster/gay looking azn kid takes my application. I am told that I am blessed enough to be able to be seen by a "worker" this morning, and they will call me when they are ready, but first I must go back to where I started from and be fingerprinted and photoed. I am also given yet another application to fill out which must be brought to the "worker".

Now, I know those of you of a radical bent are screaming "Nooo! Government privacy invasion database tracking system! DON'T DO IT!" But you know what? I was in the military, and my dad was in the military and volunteered to have me and my mom brought in and fingerprinted back when I was a young child too, "they" already have both my prints and plenty of photos of me (not to mention some DNA extracted as part of the military basic training course for "corpse identification purposes"), so honestly, it really doesn't matter anymore. Nor do I even particularly care if Federal employees making fat paychecks voyeuristically package together databases on me and make ridiculous conclusions about my character and behavior based on spurious observations, which they then mark down in some file somewhere that no one ever actually looks at. Fuck Big Brother. Peep all you want. Come back around Christmas and I'll shoot some eggnog in your face.

Where was I?

Right. Fingerprinting. An unpleasant-looking squat little toad of a woman is halfheartedly picking her nose at the outside of the fingerprinting room. She looks incredibly put out to have to move and write something down on a chart when I inquire about being printed. "You number 4" she mumbles dully and resumes picking.

I sit down in the "Fingerprint Waiting Area" and begin filling out the second application. Three chubby black women next to me are having a raucous time loudly clowning on people who are entering through the metal detector, 9 out of 10 of whom seem to set it off somehow, and about 7 out of 10 of whom are waved through anyway by the guard without any kind of inspection. The black ladies loud comments seem motivated mostly by jealousy, which is rather odd considering the bedraggled spectacle of humanity that is pouring through the gates. For example, a woman who says something sharp to a security guard when he stops her for further search is derided with a "fuck that skinny bitch", while a tall guy with what appears to be a silk shirt on gets a "who that nigga think he is coming down here with that on".

Between the loud laughter and clowning of the ladies next to me, the constant blaring announcements over the loudspeaker, and the general ambient noise of all sorts of people chatting, and my own concentration on puzzling questions on the application such as "If you had or owned money or assets in the past two years, and you gave them away, can you make a list of who you gave them to?", I do not at first hear the nose-picking toad-monster call my number. Some tall hippie-looking guy sneers at me with a "Psshhhhhh" when I get up, like he is incredibly offended that I am not as ready and eager to jump through the hoops of the social service system as he is.

Actually, if you will permit me a brief aside here, it might surprise you to find that poor people, at least the sort of institutionalized poor people you find around welfare offices and such, are actually some of the most fascist-minded motherfuckers I have encountered in this society, worse by far than police and the American Legion. The spartan crumbs that the system doles out, combined with the dehumanizing and prison-like way in which it treats them, conspires to breed this petty, rat-like, back-biting attitude in many of them. They have absolutely no concept of class or unity as the disenfranchised; they are like a pack of feral dogs ready to whirl on any one of them that falls over or starts to lag behind.

Anyway, the toad-creature can't resist a crack at me as I walk by into the Fingerprint Room - "You got that selective hearing, huh?" Aside from the fact that that really makes little sense as an insult, it could also be grounds for disciplinary action or even a termination if it turned out I actually had some sort of hearing loss. The primary hiring qualification for security guards and desk clerks in the San Francisco county offices is apparently sour disposition, however, not intelligence, capability or professionalism.

The photo and fingerprint process is done digitally and does not take very long. I am now shuttled off to the "Interview Waiting Area" to wait for a "worker" to call me in. There's a good amount of people waiting - maybe twenty or so - but "workers" are calling names in fairly rapid succession to (in Monty Hall style) one of three doors through which they enter and exit. In spite of the seemingly quick turnover, new people just seem to keep materializing out of nowhere.

It takes about an hour and a half for them to get to my name.

Entering through "Door #1" (what has he won, Monty?), I am greeted by a Filipina woman who waves me over to her desk in the midst of a gigantic cube farm. There have to be at least twenty "workers" back here, conducting interviews with people, in what looks like a telemarketing "boiler room".

I see little point in going over the details of this interview. The woman was sweet and polite, but the process was entirely bureaucratic. Not once up to or during this "interview" was I specifically asked what I need and what I didn't need. They simply thrust more and more paperwork at me to read hastily and then sign, accompanied by a barrage of questions about your living situation, income, marital status, cash on hand and other technical particulars.

Finally, after all the photos, the fingerprints, the snide remarks, the long waits, the questions and the signatures, I am finally told that I do, indeed, not qualify for food stamps. One must have no more than $422 in the bank in order to qualify, and I am in possession of several hundred dollars more than that at this time (so much for "honesty is the best policy", I guess). Additionally, they chafe when I inform them I am a full-time student. It is acceptable to be going to a vocational school, I am told, but the simple fact that I am enrolled in a 4-year degree program of any sort, regardless of my financial situation, is enough to disqualify me from any kind of state aid (know your place in the caste system, plebe is the implicit message that seems to go along with this particular rule).

Actually, I am handed a helpful checklist that apparently contains all the possible reasons for which one can be denied food stamps and CAAP assistance, and that is not the only ridiculously bureaucratic one. My personal failings in this regard are that my "Savings/Checking accounts exceed the current stipend/payment amount", and that my "Student status is not acceptable". However, amongst the other reasons that one can be apparently denied are that "The value of your motor vehicle exceeds $4,650", "You own more than one motor vehicle", or "You are the resident of an institution" (meaning that they deny food stamps to people who reside in shelters that serve meals, even if those meals are only once or twice a day, and often wholly nutritionally inadeqaute).

..................

All of this gives me the impression - and I have gotten this same impression from going through the Food Stamps wringer in other counties - is that financial assistance is only available if you have absolutely nothing to your name, and then they only give you a tiny bit of assistance which is not nearly enough to actually stabilize your life off of. If you have a small amount of resources to your name, and are trying to keep your situation from getting any worse - forget it, Jack, go drain your bank account, sell your vehicles, drop out of school, move into a shelter, and then maybe we'll cut you $130 a month for groceries.

One must then ask - who does this system actually benefit? Who actually uses this as a "safety net" to get them through a brief period of turbulence?

The answer is, just about nobody. The only people this system works for is low-level drug dealers and prostitutes. I am entirely serious. It only functions for people who receive their money in cash and entirely off the books, and thus can use the food stamps and GA checks as a periodic boost to their income. There is simply no way a legitimate non-criminal person can use the scanty offerings, under the incredibly restrictive terms that they are offered, to get their life back to any semblance of normalcy and stability.

Additionally, in San Francisco, the dealers and pimps can use their GA status to hook in with the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and get a free or subsidized SRO room to use as a base for their small-time dealing and pimping. This is why so many of the "homeless hotels" in the city are nasty crack dens that the non-druggie homeless people want no part of; if you think I'm exaggerating, read The Bluoz blog, written by a resident of one of the Sixth Street SROs run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic that puts up people on GA, who documents in both writing and video the crack-fed antics that occur there on an everyday basis. If that's not enough I can refer you to any number of people I've met in the shelters here who can tell you their own stories about leaving "free rooms" voluntarily because of danger, filth, constant noise and traffic all night long due to the dealing and the pimping, corrupt management, and generally horrid and squalid conditions. No one except dealers, pimps and their customers wants to live in these places.

"homeless intellectual"

2008-07-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

From moongypsy at photoforum.ru

Snapshots of Homelessness #2 : Ella Hill Hutch

2008-07-02T13:58:00.001-07:00

The main point I want to impress on anyone who reads this, the one 'take-away' I want stuck in your head even if you ignore the rest of this story, is that the way that Ella Hill is run it is impossible to get 8 hours of sleep there.

Look at the shelter's hours of operation - 10pm to 6am. That's 8 hours that it's open, but that doesn't mean that at 10pm on the dot they let everyone flood through the gate and crash out immediately. First you have to hope that the staff actually opens the doors at 10:00 and begins the check-in procedure right then, which they frequently do not, sometimes leaving everyone standing outside waiting until 10:10 or 10:15. Then, depending on how they choose to check people in, which seemingly varies from night to night, it could be 10:30 to 10:45 before you are at your mat with linen in hand. Want to use one of the two toilets stalls, one sink or one cold-water shower that is shared by the 80 to 100 people there on any given night? Wait on another line (if they're working). Best-case scenario, if you don't get a real noisy or stinky neighbor, is getting to sleep at 11:00, which is when they put the lights out. The wake-up time is ostensibly 6:00 AM - but it turns out that's actually the time they want everyone out of the gym by, so wake-up procedures actually begin at 5:30, with the lights coming on and so much banging around then that it is virtually impossible to sleep the extra half-hour even if you wanted to. So you're looking at, realistically six-and-a-half hours at maximum. And that's on a good night. Most nights aren't good.

This is not to say that sleep deprivation is the only abuse of the homeless going on at Ella Hill Hutch - far from it. But I feel it's the most important one on the list.

But let's go back to where our story left off at the last Snapshot, and work forward from there. We'll get around to everything else in due time.

.............

A quick recap for the newcomers : Last time out, I had secured a 7-day bed at Ella Hill via a group for homeless veterans called Swords to Plowshares. This happened on a Friday. That night, I was rudely turned away by the shelter manager, who claimed that "my name wasn't on their list". Too late to make a bid for another shelter, and with Swords closed for the weekend (and thus unable to rectify the situation), I am ejected back onto the streets of San Francisco at about 10:30 PM with no gear and nowhere else to go.

Deciding it is way too late to bother with either another shelter or a hotel room, neither of which I am likely to get, I go and have a slow dinner, hang out at a rinky-dink 24 hour coffee shop and have some peppermint tea for awhile, hang out at Buster's Place (the 24-hour drop-in center) and catnap in a plastic chair for a few hours, then take the BART to my school in the morning to use the bathroom, clean up, catch up on some online coursework, and make hotel arrangements for the weekend. I stay at a nice-but-budget place that I know about on the edge of the city, kind of a hidden gem that turns out to be extremely refreshing. As it happens I'll be needing the renewal badly, as the rest of the week is horrendous and exhausting.

Monday morning I call Swords first thing when they open and verify my name was on their list, and that same list was faxed to Ella Hill on Friday afternoon. It was, they assure me, and I'm still down for that 7-day bed. They further assure me that they will fax the list over again this afternoon. I guess it could have been Swords that caused the cockup, but based on what I've observed of Ella Hill and how it is run, my money is that it was on their end. But there's no way to know for certain. I head back that night at 9:30, but I spend the afternoon mentally bracing myself for yet another near-sleepless night if they fuck it up once more.

Same old line of characters, everyone from Hispanics in clean work clothes to totally gone guys wrapped in blankets who look like that famous mugshot of James Brown from when he was arrested for drunk driving a few years ago. Just after 10, one of the male volunteers comes out and goes down the line, checking everyone's "reservation number". Then everyone is let in all at once, instead of being checked one at a time like we were last time. The lack of hassle is night and day from what I experienced on my previous visit. I'll come to find out that literally every night the entry and exit procedure at Ella Hill is changed, for reasons no one fully understands. One night you'll be rigidly controlled and let into the building only in twos and threes, and Trina will glare at you and scrutinize you to the utmost, and then other nights everyone just kind of wanders in all at once and Trina just sits in the office bopping to some R&B tunes and seemingly not caring who comes in. Sometimes the line is reversed and enters through the opposite door. On different days, you have to exit the gym through certain specific doors. My only guess is that it is some "bush league amateur psych-out stuff" that Trina (or someone above her in the chain of command) came up with simply to reinforce the atmosphere of authority and control, and also possibly to confuse and disorient the mentally feeble and those under the influence so that they experience an extra measure of discomfort.

I'm early enough in line to get two sheets and a blanket. Generally, only the first 40 people or so get two sheets and a blanket. After that, the next 30 or so people get a sheet and blanket, and then the final stragglers get only a blanket. Incidentally, the city is attempting to cut $300,000 this year from the budget from which sheets and blankets are purchased and maintained. The linen is spotlessly clean - the one thing the city does right - but the woolen blankets often have strands of hair ingrained into them that the washers can't ever seem to dislodge. I'm sure they've been sterilized, but it's grody all the same.

I select a mat, put my sheet and blanket over it, and make the mistake of heading to the bathroom to brush my teeth, floss and pee like a civilized man. During the five minutes I am in there, someone swipes my bed. I come back to find an incredibly dirty, stereotypical wino type lounging on my sheets, picking his nose and staring at nothing in particular. Congratulations, wino, now that you've funked up my bed, I don't want it (some of these dudes have bedbugs in their clothes, nevermind the raw dirt and funk on them). Fortunately, the Gods of Linen are with me, and when I explain my situation to the lady passing them out (a sweetie with a much more even temperament than that of Trina) I'm at least able to get a sheet and blanket for the night. There's still plenty of mats available, so I just relocate and write the whole thing off as a learning experience (the lesson - go to the Safeway up the street to pee and brush before coming here from now on).

Theft is always an issue, especially in the short-term emergency shelters, where crackheads who don't even own shoes are a risk to rip and run with anything not nailed down that you take your eyes off of. Violence is very rare - most people are just too old and worn out to even make the effort. Being probably 20 years younger than the average median age of all assembled, and being in the habit of projecting a "don't fuck with me" aura, I'm at little risk of anything here as long as I keep my stuff close at hand. The mats are so close, however, that if you have a pack of any size, you virtually have to use it as a pillow. Pillows are not distributed at the time I am here; I have heard the city has started using vinyl pillows, but I do not know if the perpetually underequipped Ella Hill shelter gets any of them now. Most people use clothes, the hardcore street sleepers just crash head-on-mat and don't care. I came prepared - I fold up my hoodie, place it on my pack, and on top of that a compressible camping pillow that I snagged from a Longs for $5 some months ago.

Just as I'm settling in, I get a neighbor - and it's the hand-up-the-bung old man that I was behind in the line last time. Jesus. He smells even more ripe than he did before. No sooner is he down on the mat (doesn't even bother to spread his sheets) than he's got his hands in his pants and is going to town on both his bung and crotch with vigor and enthusiasm. By the time the lights go out, he's sitting down at the end of his bed and looks, from my position, like he may be masturbating. I decide to roll over and not enquire any further. If he skeet skeet skeets it'll go in the opposite direction of me anyway.

I don't know if my neighbor was masturbating, but *somebody* was. At about 2 or 3 in the morning I am awakened by Trina yelling - "Sir, are you maaasturbating? Are you MAAAASTURBATING? Get up - get up on out of here! You can't be maaaasturbating in this shelter! God damn gross mother fuckers!"

I say an incantation against bedbugs, herpes, lice, Hepatitis C and try to get back to sleep.

At 5:30 the lights go on, and all the tweakers and the jonesers get up to get out and about their morning fix, whatever it might be. With the sound of them dragging their mats across the floor (I seem to be the only person that bothers to pick mine up), the footsteps all around me, the lights going on and the staff talking loud to each other, 5:30 might just as well be the official wake-up time, though technically I guess you can lay about until close to 6. I hope to use the toilet, but the one stall that has a door on it turns out to be broken - the other stall has no door whatsoever, and the men have to poop prison-style with a line of people as their audience. Painful as it is, I decide to hold it. No showers in the morning either.

Stinky, bedraggled, bleary, with mussed hair and griping bowels, and in yesterday's clothes, I am ejected back out into the cold and foggy morning. Every further night here will be exactly like this one, aside from amusing random variations in the entry and exit procedure.

.........

I talk to a guy who's been living at Ella Hill for over a year - a year! He's quite content, because he tells me he's just waiting for death, and he feels like he's going to die in a year or two (nevermind that he looks healthy and about 55 at the oldest). Spends his days hanging about the Civic Center, getting plastered on cheap liquor when he has the money. Goes to the library when they are open, and McDonalds when they are not. He's looking forward to another year at the shelter.

Maybe the body adjusts after a time, or maybe he takes "micro-sleep" naps. If I go two days with less than seven-and-a-half straight hours of sleep I'm so frazzled as to be near useless, and I'll doze off the second I sit down. I can't even tell you how someone twice my age does it. I wonder why he doesn't try to get into one of the "better" shelters, like Next Door or MSC South, but I figure that question is too intrusive for someone I just met and let it go.

..........

Shelters are never in nice neighborhoods. People want to help the homeless, but they want to do it without seeing or interacting with them. Ella Hill survives without complaint because it is smack dab in the middle of government housing projects in the Western Addition neighborhood, just across Van Ness from where City Hall is. It's not the most dangerous neighborhood - it's certainly no Watts or Compton, not even Hunter's Point or the roughest parts of the Tenderloin - but it is one of the parts of town where drug dealing is centered and people consequently get shot from time to time. It's also nowhere near a god damn thing. There's a bus that stops right by the shelter, but I have no idea if it's running at 6. If you're walking, the nearest usable bathroom that's open is the McDonalds about 3 blocks away, but there's a mad rush on that one, so the next option is seven or eight blocks in any of the other directions. Food, medical care, anything else you might need is in the Tenderloin, back across Van Ness roughly half a mile.

..........

On the final night of my stay at Ella Hill, Thursday, I notice that both of the toilet stalls in the men's room now have their doors removed for god knows what reason.

I break down and decide to get a cheap flophouse hotel room for at least a week. I'll come back to my shelter investigations when I've had a chance to clean off all the grime and feel like a human again for a little while. That's a luxury most of the other people stuck there don't have and maybe never will.

the tribe of crow

2008-06-30T09:27:00.001-07:00

On a total coincidence, just about the time I was finishing up the 2nd edition of the book, I happened to pick up Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" off the shelves of the local library. It mentions homelessness in passing, and Quinn's theory of what homelessness is really about.

Now, I read his original "Ishmael" about a year-and-a-half ago, enjoyed it, and for the most part agreed with his general ideas about the Leavers and the Takers. However, there are certain components of his thought that are a sort of jumble of both true insight and inaccurate guessing. What he has to say about the homeless in modern society in My Ishmael is one of those components. He's partially right, but it seems to me that he came to this subject after he had his greater social theory already established, and he sort of kicked and hammered the homeless into place with it in the parts where the evidence didn't quite line up with the already-established borders of his theory.

What I take issue with is that he focuses too much on homelessness as a sort of subconcious, not-fully-articulated rebellion against the social order. Though our thought overlaps on more ground than not, my thesis is almost exactly the opposite - there is not enough rebellion against the social order among the homeless, they are instead too much internalizing the lessons that are being heaped upon them from all sides. Dissatisfaction with the social order is most certainly a component, but the people that Quinn portrays as the "Tribe of Crow" are actually a very limited subset of the homeless. Many homeless people, particularly those hung up on drugs and alcohol, are actually just repeating the patterns set by the leaders of civilization (there are a lot of fundamental underlying similarities in the behavior of a crackhead and a greedy CEO). Quinn also glosses over the role of mental illness, and almost completely fails to mention unresolved childhood trauma and lack of proper community while growing up, which I personally think is probably the biggest direct contributor to an initial state of homelessness that there is.

In short, what Quinn paints as the "Tribe of Crow" are the nomadic kids who camp and hop freight trains, and the guys with shopping carts who make their living collecting cans and jungle up in alleys for safety rather than going into shelters - people like that. This is far from representing the whole of the dynamic of homelessness.

Like I said, I agree with most of his thought, but I think his few blind spots are caused by simply being too detached from the situation. He's looking at it through the lens of his developed (and largely academic, though it is not typical of traditional academic thought or style) theory. I have no idea what his life situation was before writing Ishmael, but he apparently attended some very expensive private schools and seems to have been working steadily as either publisher or writer ever since. What I mean to say is, I doubt that he has ever been homeless, and I suspect his direct contact with extreme poverty is very limited. I maintain that you cannot fully understand any situation until you have been immersed in it, and I cannot see how Quinn could have ever been immersed (especially in his post-Ishmael life, since the book won him a $500,000 grant from Ted Turner). He's looking in from the outside and does not see a few things - namely, that society is not so much trying and failing to re-mainstream the homeless, but that it it carefully managing homelessness so that few actually make it out, and the majority just exist in a controlled limbo where they can be used to some degree for the benefit of various organizations, and also can be kept from organizing and becoming a powerful anti-hierarchical force.

Much better than his brief treatise in My Ishmael is his book Beyond Civilization, which is freely available online - particularly Chapter 5, entitled "The Tribe of Crow", which deals entirely with homelessness in America (and in the rest of first-world industrialized societies).

This chapter deals more directly with what it is society should be doing about homelessness, what would be both the most humane and non-detrimental solution. I completely agree with thoughts like this -

"We know what "combating" homelessness looks like. We attack on two fronts. On one front, for example, we open shelters for the homeless but (since we don't want them to stay in the shelters) we make them as unwelcoming as possible. On the other front, we pass anticamping legislation that criminalizes those who won't stay in the shelters. This legislation allows (or compels) the police to harass the homeless, who are "out of place," who turn up where we don't want them to be. Until the homeless straighten out, get jobs, and somehow magically lift themselves into the mainstream of middle-class America, the game is going to be "Heads we win, tails you lose."

Acceding to homelessness would look like helping the homeless succeed WHILE being homeless. What an idea! I can almost hear the howls of outrage from both liberals and conservatives that must greet such a concept. Help people succeed at being homeless? We want them to fail at being homeless! (So they'll return to the mainstream.)

Step one in acceding to homelessness would be to decriminalize and deregulate the homeless. We can happily deregulate trillion-dollar industries capable of doing immense harm, but deregulating the relatively helpless poor—what a thought! The officers of deregulated savings and loan institutions may have bilked us out of billions, but at least they didn't hang around street corners in shabby clothes!

Regulating and criminalizing homelessness is equivalent to defying earthquakes with rigid structures. Deregulating and decriminalizing homelessness is equivalent to acknowledging that "the machinery of the system has . . . created a world it can no longer control." We should abandon control of homelessness therefore, because it's beyond control, just like the earthquake. Since we can't defeat it, we should learn to make the best of it."

... and this ...

"In our culture, for some odd reason, we teach kids to despise scavengers. Prey and predators are heroic, but scavengers are contemptible. The truth is, our world would be unlivable without scavengers. We'd be buried in corpses. Scavengers make their living by ridding the world of its biological refuse. Far from cursing them, we should bless them. Right now most road kills are made to disappear by birds like crows and vultures. If these birds ever become extinct, we ourselves will have to take over their duty. What these scavengers presently do for us at no cost, we'll have to pay for out of our pockets.

The only "honest" living available to the homeless in general is scavenging—and in general they're quite content to make that living. It's work they can do without having an address, submitting to supervision, punching a clock, or maintaining a wardrobe of socially approved clothing—and it's flex-time all the way."

... and his conclusion ...

"Acceding to homelessness—actually allowing the poor to make a living on the streets—would open the prison gates of our culture. The disenfranchised and disaffected would pour out. It would be the first great movement of people to that social and economic no man's land I call "beyond civilization."

The Tribe of Crow, no longer suppressed, would grow—perhaps explosively.

We wouldn't want that to happen, would we? Heavens to Betsy, no.

It would be chaotic. It might even be exciting."

Unfortunately, what he suggest can never possibly happen with a power hierarchy such as the one we have at present. Homelessness as it stands is not so much the result of repeated bungling attempts to apply failed machinery to the resolution of the "problem", but has become a carefully managed social control apparatus that attempts to both "recycle" the homeless as a resource to be used for the benefit of others, while at the same time curtailing what could become a potentially explosive nucleus of discontent and insurrection against an ever-more-wealthy elite.

OHIA 2nd Edition is now available

2008-06-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

On Homelessness In America, 2nd Edition is now complete and available.

Chapter VI : Divide and Conquer is the major new addition to this one, adding about 60 more pages to the total. As promised, you can download the whole thing here in .DOC format absolutely free of charge.

If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so by going to my Lulu page and purchasing the somewhat-easier-to-read .PDF version for $2.50, or a paper copy for $9.89 (plus whatever Lulu charges for shipping, probably $2 or $3). Each PDF purchase puts $2 in royalties in my pocket, whereas the hardcopy only nets me $1.60. Lulu eats up the rest of the money for printing costs and their own profits. (Lulu actually lets you set seperate royalty amounts for the downloads and hard copies now, which they didn't back in 2006 when I first published the book, so I adjusted the royalties down a bit on the print version to keep it under ten bucks).

This book isn't a money-making enterprise, I would really rather just that people read it and talk about the ideas in it, and get more informed about how poverty actually works in this country. That's why the .DOC version is free and always will be. However, I am still homeless myself, with no real prospect of economic stability anywhere on the horizon (at least not until I finish college, which is about 2 more years away). I'm not gonna play the violin for you, my situation is really not all that bad - at least, I don't consider it to be. Most people would find my life pretty spartan and possibly even kind of depressing, but I'm actually pretty happy most of the time, and all my basic needs are fairly easily taken care of. However, I do have to find somewhere to live in this expensive-ass area for the upcoming school year, as I can't do homeless shelters and camping with a full-time school schedule all year long. So a donation certainly helps, and will be put to good use. It also frees up more time for writing, since it's less time I have to be running around finding ways to hustle up food, hygiene concerns, the rent, etc. Anyway, I appreciate it if you do, but don't feel obliged, is my main point.

Anyway, if you do read it and give it some serious thought, I'd appreciate your comments. I don't consider the book "finished" by any means; it is and has always been an introduction to these issues, and I'd like to continue to hash things out on the blog over time. So come back and leave a comment or two if you'd care to, and thanks for reading.

whuf

2008-06-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." - Orwell

... And I'm just working on one additional chapter!

But seriously, whuf. I just finished the first draft of the new chapter of the second edition of the book - I'm not sure what the page count is going to shake out to be, but it's long.

I've devoted just about all of my time this past ten days or so to it. I feel like it's not going to need a whole lot of editing, so the book should be ready sometime before the end of July.

Reading it over it strikes me that some of what I've brought up is redundant to what I've already written. However, I think not only that these are points that bear repeating, but they are perhaps developed and presented a bit more clearly. I feel like I personally have quite a bit more clarity on the subject, having not really been cognizant of the "intentional disenfranchisement" factor when I initially began writing in 2006.

Not to say there's not plenty of new material. I got to plumb the depths of social services financing more thoroughly than I ever have before. I also got a chance to take some long-simmering shots at the "twelve step" movement, the "career centers", and even that asshat C.W. Nevius. It's Serious Business, with cussing and everything :)

OK, that's more than enough words for today. Off to rustle up dinner then collapse on my cot. G'night

a nation of rubber hobos

2008-06-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

L.A. seeing uptick in vehicle living. Actually, EVERYWHERE should be seeing an uptick in vehicle dwelling, considering that we have now reached the point where there is not a single county in America in which someone working a 40-hour week at minimum wage, all year without a vacation, can afford market rate rent on a median one-bedroom apartment.

the encyclopedia of homelessness

2008-06-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

This is scanned at Google Books, I just came across it at random while doing research for the 2nd Ed., it was just too massive for me to pore through even on a fairly fast WiFi connection, but maybe there's some good stuff in there?

schedule of "stand-downs" for homeless vets

2008-06-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to this year's schedule of "stand-downs" for homeless veterans; I assume in coming years it will update to reflect those as well.

If you are a military veteran and have never been to one of these, apparently it's a concentrated source of a lot of resources. I've heard they often give out surplus gear such as clothing, boots and camping equipment, have good hot meals, doctors and dentists on hand to check you out on the spot, and sometimes even judges who clear up minor issues on the spot as well. I've never been to one before but there is going to be one in San Francisco on July 23rd; I'll likely be there.

why i hate the homeless

2008-06-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

I came across this article at random recently; it partially illustrates the point I am attempting to make in the second edition of the book about "homeless branding".

the fortress by the bay

2008-06-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

I've yet to post my write-up of my experiences staying at the Ella Hill Hutch shelter, but by the time I get to it, it may be a moot point - the newly released San Francisco budget for 2008-9 has it slated for closure, along with the usual round of huge cuts to services.

Ella Hill is a crappy shelter, probably the worst I've ever personally seen on the whole, but still, it was an emergency desperation place to go much needed by a lot of homeless, especially veterans who could get into it at any time with little trouble instead of going through the random and nightmarish city system.

Even more troubling, though, is that $300,000 is being cut from the budget for health & hygiene for all the city shelters. I can already tell you, from personal experience, that the hygiene in the city shelters is atrocious at present - bathrooms inadequately cleaned, toilets left broken and full of feces for days on end, showers left plugged up with standing water for weeks on end, never enough sheets and pillowcases to go around, never enough hand soap and sanitizer, etc. - and it was in need of more funding, not 300 grand less.

This whole thing is a slow and creeping trend since Gavin "Oh he's so adorable!" Newsome took over as mayor in 2004. He is a typical neo-liberal, he caters to neo-liberal interests, and while he runs this fantastic PR program about how he's "fixing homelessness in San Francisco with compassion and etc.", what he's really been about from the start is slowly and quietly chopping away at services and funding until homeless people become so pinched and uncomfortable that they migrate to other cities. He serves the ridiculously rich who have infested the city since the dot-com boom, the massive corporations, the hotels and tourist industry, and the asshole Eurotrash who have been descending in waves on the poor neighborhoods like the Mission and taking advantage of the weak dollar to snap up what little housing there is and party all night every night at freshly built nightclubs and bars. He has been a net overall horrid mayor for the poor and downtrodden, but he makes the ladies pussies wet (and the boys buttholes twitch, this being SF) and runs this slick "I'm a leftist and a populist" PR machine and gets away with it all while looking like Mr. Dapper Jesus.

(Is it perhaps coming through that I have issues with the present administration?)

Aside from trashing the detox centers and mental health programs, he also wants to close the Next Door shelter on Polk Street during the daylight hours - this is one of only two shelters in the city for singles that is presently open all day, the other being MSC South.

grand unifying theory of homelessness

2008-06-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

When I wrote On Homelessness In America, it was done in intentionally broad strokes; my intended audience was not other homeless people, social service workers, sociologists, or anyone else already intimately acquainted with this world. My target audience was Joe and Jane Q. Public, your average "solid citizens" who have little to no personal interaction with homelessness and extreme poverty, and thus have their opinions about it shaped almost entirely by biased mainstream media coverage, popular stereotypes, and inherent prejudices. My intention was that the book serve as a primer to the uninitiated; a general introduction to the topic that could perhaps act as a gateway to further learning and further action.

I thumbed through the pages yesterday, for the first time really since I self-published it at Lulu, and I still feel that it functions well enough for that purpose. It is amateurish, and there are some small things I would correct and elaborate upon. Coming back to it now, with a further year-and-a-half of writing experience, firsthand experience living at "the bottom of the world", and a much enhanced sense of how to properly investigate a subject and prepare a detailed report, I feel I could of course do a much better job were I to rewrite it. However, I have many other things in front of me now, and I don't have any intention of doing a full re-write ... that is, I don't think the book is weak enough that that is really necessary.

That said, there is one major thing that I failed to realize when originally writing the book, and that I am kicking myself for not catching on to until recently. In the book I stated that neither I nor anyone else can tell you what the "root cause" of homelessness is - there is no one thing, or even cluster of things, that one can point to and say, "If we just made these few changes here, homelessness and extreme poverty would decline sharply". It is a highly individualized situation, as I have pointed out repeatedly.

However, there IS one thing that I can state with absolute certainty, and that is the root cause of why people who are homeless and poor have such difficulty obtaining the basic things that they need to live well and "right the ship". That root cause is the fact that "homelessness", as perpetuated through the mass media and in popular culture, is a label intentionally designed to disenfranchise those with the least left to lose, and by doing so prevent them from organizing and rebelling against society's elite.

Homelessness is, at least in America, a social control mechanism. In short, the goal is to keep the elements most likely to rebel perpetually busy with self-interested minutiae and also to keep them blaming themselves wholly for the state that they are in, shunting anger and frustration that might otherwise be used to organize and start demanding the heads of the rich on pikes (and other such unpleasantries).

I have been doing much research on this theme, and it is shocking how nearly every inexplicable action by the "authorities" and by the managers of charities suddenly becomes completely sensible within the context of this explanation.

To this end, while I do not intend to completely rewrite the book, I do intend to create a second edition. The existing content will largely remain the same, though it will be edited for further grammar, clarity, etc., and I will likely add significantly more to the 'homeless lingo' section at the end. The one major addition will be a new final chapter exploring my new thesis, one that will likely be nearly as long as the rest of the book combined.

The book will still be a free download in .PDF format, but I am thinking I am going to add the option of leaving me a tip if you care to. I backed off of charging money for the book originally, because I thought it was too close to profiting off of homelessness to make me comfortable, and also because Lulu does not allow you to make royalties off of the print version of the book while simultaneously giving the PDF away for free (you are forced to set the royalties to the same amount for each, so if I tried to make $1 off sales of the book, I would also have to charge $1 for the PDF download).

The new format will be as such - the PDF of the second edition will still be freely available, but it will be hosted somewhere other than Lulu (probably at my other site, Cloud Bird Trail). At the Lulu site, you will have the option of purchasing a print copy of the book for what will likely be $8-and-some-change, or purchasing the same PDF download for $2. In this way, you can get the book freely, and if you like it and want to support my further writing, you can leave a tip of $2 through Lulu.

(I do not like operating in a capitalist matter, but the fact of the matter is that I do need at least a little cash here and there to keep body and soul together, you know?)

Anyway, this is just in the beginning phases of writing, and I have both other personal projects, some part-time labor work, and full-time school beginning again in August, so it may not be done for several months. I do intend to have it done by year's end, however, and see no reason why it can't make that deadline. I'll post an announcement here, at my other blog (riveroffireflies.blogspot.com) and at Cloud Bird Trail (cloudbirdtrail.talkspot.com) when it is ready. Thanks for stopping by, as always.

redefinition of terms

2008-05-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

We've all seen that thing floating around, "A hobo travels to work, a bum neither travels nor works, etc." It's cute, but it's also from the Great Depression and as such is antiquated.

Here's my proposal for how to redefine terms commonly used (and interchanged) regarding homelessness -

HOMELESS : Neutral, non-pejorative term to describe anybody without a stable living situation, regardless of circumstances. More people are actually homeless than would probably care to admit it.

HOBO : Someone who travels freely and provides for themselves as much as possible. I don't like the proviso "travels to work", because that implies that the only legitimate way of providing for yourself in this situation is to enter into a wage-slave compact with someone, which is a common attitude towards homelessness that really needs to be eradicated.

BUM : Someone who has decided to fuck their own life off, but doesn't have the grapes to actually pull the trigger or jump off a bridge, so instead hangs around draining the community that they are in and slowly poisoning themselves, usually with alcohol or drugs. "Bum" is most definitely a pejorative term, and there are a whole lot of self-centered assholes out there who actually deserve it. A good rule of distinction between being or not being a bum is if you do any of the following -

* Beg aggressively for spare change and then swear at people when they don't give it to you
* Piss/shit in people's doorways and in the middle of sidewalks
* Center your whole life around alcohol, heroin or crack rock

- you are most likely a bum. Please note, however, that you don't necessarily have to be homeless to be a bum.

TRAMP : No one has used this word since Flappers were doing the Charleston, please erase it from the lexicon.

..........

Any thoughts? Further ideas?

the economic stimulus plan is a crock of shit

2008-04-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

You're probably getting your "stimulus check" or whatever right about the time you read this, and I know nobody really wants to criticize this thing too much as it's basically free money for everyone.

If you set aside the immediate gratification of a few hundred dollars and really take it apart, though, it makes absolutely no fucking sense at all.

First off, anyone who is a "conservative" or "right winger" or whatever, and who regularly complains about how "the government shouldn't be in the business of handouts", and who is either a) waiting eagerly for this money to hit their bank accounts or b) actually spends it once they get it, should be invalidated from ever expressing an opinion in public ever again, on the basis of rank and colossal hypocrisy.

Then there's the question of, where the hell is this money actually coming from? Didn't we have some gigantic Middle East war sinkhole, ridiculous trade imbalances, a record low dollar, etc? Somehow handing out $600 to every shlub is going to fix the economy? You really think this money is going to gas and food for people living on the edge of starvation? Or do you think the new Girls Gone Wild video is going to suddenly sell a record amount of copies in May and the liquor stores will suddenly increase their business threefold? Gee, I wonder.

And then there's the way the handouts actually break down. Let's see, so you make $75,000 a year and are thus getting by quite comfortably, unless you heroically waste money and arrange your life in a moronic way? Here's $600 for you, good job! Married to a spouse who also works? Have another $600, what the hell! You make $12,000 and are barely making rent and food each month? You only get $300 - work harder, you bum! You made $2,000 last year and then got laid off and haven't yet been able to find work in this shit economy? FUCK YOU POV, YOU GET *NOTHING*!!! People who don't actually need it are getting the most, and the people who most desperately need it get the shaft! What the fuck is this, the return of Reaganomics?

The most insulting thing to me personally, is the way that this invalidates every fucking argument ever about how government can't afford to provide a good basic service infrastructure for the poor. I don't know exactly how many taxpayers we have in this country, but I know the overall population is something like 300 million, and we can assume at least HALF of those pay taxes and thus are eligible to receive stimulus checks (and that's on the low end of the scale I'm sure). So let's say, $300 average per person (again on the low end of the scale), times 150 million - FUCKING 45 BILLION ON THE LOW END! Given that the official unemployment rate is something like 10% nationwide, it's probably significantly more than that.

So we can just hand out $45 billion+ in some untested theory that may or may not actually "rejuvenate" the economy to a degree that we actually notice ... but we can't have enough beds open for homeless people that need them on any given night, we can't get three nutritious meals per day to people who need them, etc. It's fucking retarted, and the worst of it is that - as usual - no one in the corporate-owned mass media will ever call out this blatantly obvious contradiction. This "stimulus package" shit basically invalidates every right-wing mean-ass "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" pro-wage-slavery argument ever, but no one is either going to notice or care. Too busy spending that stimmillis check on bullshit, I'm sure. And all that money is going to flow right back into the hands of the assholes that are causing all the problems.

Snapshots of Homelessness #1 : Emergency Shelter Shuffle in San Francisco

2008-02-19T12:55:00.001-08:00

I have been very hesitant in the past about narrating my own experiences accessing homeless services, in order to protect my anonymity. However, my disgust with the continuing trend of slashing social services and "cracking down" on homelessness by mayor Gavin Newsome and his Council (and the wealthy, gentrifying neo-liberal interests to which they cater) here in the city of San Francisco has prompted me to do a little investigative reporting on what being on the streets is really like here in the city, and how the PR-heavy self-promoting presentation that the Mayor's office puts forth clashes with the reality of what is actually going on.

I will be doing this during winter, during the cold and wet months, when shelter is most needed. My experiences will be published some days or weeks after they occur, so as to protect my anonymity, but all occur during the first quarter of 2008.

My first "experiment" is with the most fundamental component of the homeless services network - obtaining an emergency shelter bed, a safe place to sleep out of the elements without fear of robbery and harassment.

......

I have no idea how someone who is new to being homeless on the streets of San Francisco would even know where to start when looking for help and resources.

The city's service network is a widely spread pastiche of independent groups and organizations that are only open for certain hours on certain days, and usually send you bouncing from one to another and then back to your starting point again before getting the services that you need.

In San Francisco, you cannot just look up "homeless shelters" in the phone book and go directly to one. You must be referred to one by a facility known as a "resource center". Like all other services in the city, they are only open for certain windows of time, and have persnickety rules and procedures for obtaining a bed.

SFGov.org, the city's official website, used to have a page devoted to homeless resources in it's Human Services section when I first arrived here in 2005. The information was partially outdated even then, but it at least listed some addresses and phone numbers to get you started. The city has since redesigned it's website, and has buried the information on homeless-related human services so deeply that I can only conclude it was intentionally done this way. Using the page's search bar, you may eventually land on this page, which tells you that "All HSA-funded shelters for single adults are accessed through HSA resource centers. Reservations for one to seven nights are made at resource centers and stays may be extended in some shelters with an agreement to participate in the shelter program." Whereas there used to be a list of specific shelter and drop-in locations and places to get food, the page now only contains the address of one of the resource centers - 150 Otis Street - and the main phone number of the Department of Human Services.

Of course, most homeless people don't even have internet access, unless they go to the library for a free hour per day, or pay for access at a coffee shop terminal. The only means that I can think of for them to find out where services are, are to ask other homeless people on the streets.

Let us say, however, that you somehow are referred to or wind up at the listed resource center at 150 Otis. Not only is that location only open at night, it is the "last resort" location for giving out shelter beds that come up empty at the last possible minute, and anyone relying on that location for shelter will likely come away empty handed.

......

There used to be quite a few "resource centers" around the city. Since Newsome initiated his Care Not Cash initiative in 2004, these have been methodically shut down over time. Anyone who wants a realistic chance at obtaining a bed now usually goes to either the Glide Memorial Church or the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center early in the morning, and while these locations up your odds of getting a bed, even they do not guarantee you shelter any given night.

I won't go into too much detail on the city-run emergency shelter system, because this Guardian article published just a week ago does a fantastic job of documenting how difficult, confusing and simply reliant on blind luck it is to get shelter in the city. I suggest reading it before continuing on.

As a veteran of the U.S. military, I have a significant edge on most of the homeless in the city. There are a couple of veterans-only organizations that have "ins" with certain shelters, in the form of a number of beds set aside specifically for veterans. If you are a vet, disabled or a woman it is slightly easier to find basic shelter in the city, but it is still not guaranteed to you, as I will come to find out.

Thanks to my "vet card" advantage, I am able to sidestep the city's irritating "reservation" system. While it might be more of an accurate report for me to go that route anyway, I feel the problems with it have been well documented by others at this point, and quite frankly, it's raining and it's cold. It is no time to be stuck outside for the better part of a week waiting for a bed.

So I go down to a group called "Swords to Plowshares", a non-profit that deals entirely in helping homeless vets with various issues. Swords has an arrangement with a shelter known as "Ella Hill Hutch", where they have 25 reserved beds that take precedence over those booked in through the regular city system. Very rarely are Swords vet beds entirely full, even when the weather is bad; I can drop in there anytime during business hours Monday to Friday, book myself a bed for up to seven days at the front desk, and I'm in just like that. Now, Ella Hill is a really crappy shelter, but even so this is still an unthinkable luxury for most of the homeless population of the city.

I stop by and book my bed around 9 A.M. on a Friday morning. Even though the weather has been cold and we just came off nearly a solid week of rain, I'm only fifteenth on the list of the twenty-five available beds. In less than ten minutes I have my reservation and am good to go; if need be, at the end of the seven days, I can come back to Swords and extend it for another seven as often as I need to. Again, as crappy as Ella Hill is, a lot of homeless would kill for this convenient of an arrangement.

Ella Hill is not really dangerous, but it's definitely theft-heavy, so I've stashed all my goodies and gadgets in my storage locker across town. With little else to do until bedtime, I take the BART over to the school library and spend most of the rest of the day catching up on my online coursework.

......

Good fortune is with me; the weather is decent that night and the forecast is for a high-pressure system to sit over the area all this coming week. Not a bad week to have to do the emergency shelter thing. If I had to truck around with an umbrella and wet shoes and pants, it'd be a lot more hellish. About 9:30 P.M. I'm on Van Ness Avenue, making my way to Ella Hill Hutch for a check-in time of 10 PM.

......

I've been here before, so I know the procedure, but for a first-timer the approach is confusing. The address that they give you, 1050 McAllister, takes you to the front of a locked and darkened community center with not a soul in sight. The actual shelter is in the gymnasium, which is around the back of the building (on the Golden Gate Avenue side) behind some tennis courts. People line up along the wall outside, mostly quiet and keeping to themselves, waiting for the doors to open at 10:00. Again I am thankful for the stretch of good weather, as there is no overhang or covered area to protect those waiting from the rain.

In line, I stand behind a tiny little old man who smells to high heaven. The whole time we wait, he keeps scratching himself all over. I stand back a few feet to ward off both the smell and possible bedbugs. After a few minutes, he begins scratching his ass. And I don't just mean an ass cheek through his pants. He puts his hand down there, all up inside the crack as far as it will go, and has himself a thorough and prolonged scratch up the bung that lasts for minutes. I make a mental note to carefully watch what he touches.

The doors to the shelter open a few minutes after 10, and the call goes out - "Seniors, disabled, women, Swords". These four groups of people get to enter first. Aside from getting out of the elements more quickly, there is one other advantage - the city is supposed to allocate enough blankets and sheets for every bed in the shelter each night, but they almost never do, and latecomers frequently have to go without a sheet (and may even not get a blanket depending on how bad the shortfall is that particular night).

I feel a little bad being the only healthy and able-bodied person under 50 who gets to jump the queue, but that's the sad reality of the ruthless and spartan San Francisco shelter system - you have to use every little advantage you can just to get the most basic of services. I wait for everyone else in the early group to go inside first, and then slide into the gymnasium. A line is formed leading to a makeshift office in the corner, where the shelter manager checks people's names and "last four" against her master list of reservations for the night.

The manager of this particular shelter is Trina Johnson, and never has the word "bohemoth" been more appropriate in describing a woman. She is at least 300 pounds, and all of it attitude. Not that cute black sassy attitude like the maid on The Jeffersons, but that bull moose overbearing aggressive "I-'ont-gives-a-fuck" attitude. I am convinced she is a former convict, because she runs her operation in the same manner that jails are run. Everyone falls in line and goes through the exact steps of the routine in Soup Nazi style, or they are immediately yelled at and escalated to being thrown out with relatively little further provocation. Once inside her gym, you wait on a line to report in to her and have your credentials checked. The next person on deck to see her has to stand with their toes behind a peice of red tape laid out on the floor, just like in prison. No one can ever approach her desk fast enough to not be yelled at to hurry up. Even if you were able to master the art of teleportation, or simply charged and shoved over the person she had just got done seeing to clear them out of your way, you still would not be moving fast enough for her.

I notice the line this particular night is both moving at a markedly fast clip, and a lot of guys are not taking blankets and heading into the shelter but instead returning outside. I find out why when I get to the front of the line. After rattling off my last four, Trina tells me "You're not on the list". She then mutters something about "There 25 Swords, ain't no 25 Swords on this list, someone been passing this list around".

"Excuse me", I venture, "but I was just put on the list this morning. Is that the most current list?"

Before I can even finish the last part of that sentence, she already has the list shoved in my face and is yelling - "SIR look at the date on this list. Do you see the date on this list? Do you see the date on this list?" She is correct - my name is not on the list and it bears today's date. However, it is the wrong list. I remember that I was #15 when the desk clerk at Swords wrote my name down. This list has only ten names on it.

Long story short, at least five veterans were improperly denied shelter that night. Myself included.

When there's a cockup with The List, Trina will never look into it, or make any effort at all to help. She presumes that everyone who comes through her door is a scumbag looking to cheat her, and thus deserves to be treated like dirt. Unfortunates who aren't on The List, for whatever reason, are all told to go to 150 Otis and "get a reservation". What that means in plain speak is "Get a reservation if you are incredibly lucky, and if you can manage to make it the mile-and-a-half over there before 11 PM, when they close".

It's a little before 10:30 when I leave Ella Hill Hootch. I'm not going to bother to go to Otis. Even if I just make it over there before the deadline, the odds of getting a bed are so low as to be virtually impossible. Swords is closed until Monday. There won't be any new lists sent from them to Ella Hill until Monday at the earliest.

Swords operates outside the comprehensive city system, which means I don't have to be fingerprinted and photoed and put in a database like most homeless people here, but also means there's no one else I can contact to clear this up until the weekend is over.

Even though I have a valid bed reservation, obtained in the most painless manner possible to a homeless person in San Francisco, I've still been shut out for the whole weekend.

Wonderful system of care they have here.

...............

I have money. That's not the issue. But it's almost midnight, on a Friday. IF I can find a hotel room in town, it'll be at some ridiculous weekend rate. Most places don't even check people in this late anyway. Even if I were a millionaire, I'd have nowhere to go right now.

I'll hang out all night. Not like I haven't done it before.

There's plenty of stuff you can do, if you have some money. You can ride various buses around all night, for example. Or lurk in a coffee shop/fast food joint until they kick you out, then move on to another. All horrible, degrading, and exhausting experiences. After a late meal at a cheap diner and a little tea to settle me, I decide on spending the night at Busters Place.

.............

Busters is the only remaining 24-hour drop-in center for homeless people downtown. At one point, there were four around town. That's dwindled under Gavin Newsome's reign. Busters just came into being in 2006; six months after it opened its doors for the first time, it was being threatened with closure due to budget issues. They got funding, somehow, and stayed open; there was another threat of closure in 2007, and another last-minute save. The Mayor's budget for this year once again had them closing in February; they got a last-minute extension to April/May, and right now it remains to be seen if they'll escape shutdown for the third of their three years in existence.

If you can't get a bed - as many can't - Buster's is about the last free indoor option you have after dark in the city. You sign in with your "last 4", and in return get a plastic chair (if one is available) to sit in for as long as you like, and try to sleep. There's a bathroom and a shower, but if you get up, you run the risk of not having your chair when you come back. Some way or another, people manage to sleep for hours here, contorting their bodies into whatever position they can without lying down (which is forbidden).

I sit down at a chair in the back, loop my backpack straps around my legs, pull my hood down, and doze. I manage to get four hours of off-and-on catnap in, which sees me through to 5 A.M. - the time when the earliest of the restaurants and coffee shops in the area start to open. I grab a coffee and sit until the BART starts running around 6:30 A.M. I head for school - it's too early for anything to be open yet, but the aboveground BART station near my school has a bathroom, and I desperately have to go. After that's all squared away, I go to McDonalds for cheap coffee, apple pies and yogurt, and a place to sit for breakfast until the school library opens at 8 AM. I pop in, and use the computers to do a little of my online coursework. What a supportive learning environment, huh?

.......

For the rest of the weekend, I get a budget motel room on the edge of town, yet something most city homeless would consider plush beyond their wildest dreams. On Monday I'll return to Swords to try to find out what happened with my reservation, then make another tilt at getting my bed at Ella Hill.

.......

Next time - the Ella Hill Hootch Experience

about an asshole

2008-02-14T20:05:00.000-08:00

I hesitate to give this any more press ... but it's negative press, I guess, so ...

Anyway, you may have seen this article going around about a rich kid who went into a homeless shelter with $25 and ten months later built himself up to $5,000 in savings, and owning a pickup truck and an apartment in order to "test the viability of the American dream".

This is, obviously, bullshit for a number of reasons.

The first is that he did it all to write a book. Now, before you say it, the book I wrote was an outgrowth of what I experienced as a homeless person, not something I planned to do from the beginning as a profit-making, personal publicity maneuver.

The kid did this as a stunt for his own benefit, and it can now be used as fodder for further anti-homeless sentiment and social safety net slashing.

He says he wrote it as a reaction to Nickel and Dimed. Nickel and Dimed was a flawed book for a number of reasons, mostly that Ehrenreich managed her money very poorly, but it was at it's core an honest attempt to shed light on the situation of impoverished workers.

Listen to this quote from the article -

The question isn't whether I would have been able to succeed. I think it's the attitude that I take in: "I've got child care. I've got a probation officer. I've got all these bills. Now what am I going to do? Am I going to continue to go out to eat and put rims on my Cadillac? Or am I going to make some things happen in my life...?" One guy, who arrived [at the shelter] on a Tuesday had been hit by a car on [the previous] Friday by a drunk driver. He was in a wheelchair. He was totally out of it. He was at the shelter. And I said, "Dude, your life is completely changed." And he said, "Yeah, you're right, but I'm getting the heck out of here." Then there was this other guy who could walk and everything was good in his life, but he was just kind of bumming around, begging on the street corner. To see the attitudes along the way, that is what my story is about.

What a fucking cock. Didn't this guy learn *anything* during his shelter time? No, he probably didn't, because he likely went in with his superior, profiteering attitude, convinced that everyone around him was a fuckup and leech and deserved what they got. His little typical Republican spiel on "attitude" and all this "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" shit doesn't take into account, among other things, that he was young and fit, from an upper middle class background (with all the acquired body language and social conditioning that goes along with that), didn't have to deal with the crushing depression and hopelessness of seeing no way out of a horrible situation, had no addiction issues, and perhaps most importantly, NO SERIOUS MEDICAL OR MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES.

What this kid did, ultimately, is exploit the homeless for his own profit. He didn't try to understand the situation at all, he just came in determined to prove that he and his social class are superior and that everyone else deserves what they get. It's bullshit, and it makes me angry that no one in the mass media is calling it.

standard harrassment procedure

2007-10-24T15:08:00.000-07:00

Replace "black" with "homeless" in this video clip (or, for even more turbulent results, merge them together) and you have a pretty accurate picture of how things will go down if you're ever walking in a suburban area after dark looking a little too "different" from local standards -

http://youtube.com/watch?v=KGGyRLQ2wNQ

(well, except for how easy they let the dude off despite all the sass he was giving back. that part is pretty inaccurate.)

bullshit hotel

2007-10-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

This Vice Hotel article, which ran last week in the SF Weekly free paper, illustrates why "Gavs"'s little Care Not Cash scheme has been direly in need of some real hardcore undercover investigative reporting since day one.

At best, these Tenderloin SROs they put you in are filthy and poorly maintained, with living space looking like something out of a Third World country (any reactionaries out there screaming about how the homeless are getting "free apartments" need to at least rustle up some pictures of what these places look like. Be sure to take note of what neighborhoods they are in too). Anyway, that's the best you can hope for - that it'll just be dirty and the management will be indifferent. At worst they are hives of low-end drug dealing and pimping, and dangerous in addition to being filthy.

This is neither "safe" nor "supportive" housing. You get, what - $140 in food stamps (for only six months out of the year), maybe a little over $100 from General Assistance if you're lucky? Lots of these people end up going right back out on the street and sitting out there panhandling even though they have a place to live, 'cause there's no other way to get their other neccessaries. Still out there in their soiled old clothes and whatnot.

Then you have the drug issue. Drug dealing always brings violence and drama. A big group of the people in these hotels are trying to move away from drugs and addictions, which gets real hard when you have Charlie the Crack Pusher living in the room next to you being allowed to openly deal whenever he wants.

And outside it's still the same old shit - despite tons of donations the two major soup kitchens serve bad jokes of a meal half the time, the Mayor's office is slashing services and benefits left and right, and what's left of the services are all centered in the Tenderloin (drug central, and the city allows it to be that way).

The alternative to all this is that you're supposed to get on GA and get into one of these nightmare pits of SROs. No wonder there's no less people on the streets than there were when I arrived here two years ago.

SF street sheet

2007-10-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

San Francisco's Street Sheet, a newspaper printed and donated to homeless people to vend for a dollar, has a website that I've just recently come across. As you can imagine, there is a lot of talk about the "homeless sweeps" issue that I've been bringing up in this space recently.

Honolulu community group eyes decommissioned Navy destroyer as homeless shelter

2007-09-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

Teh story

They'd like to convert the Acadia, a 642-foot destroyer decommed in 1994 and built to hold a crew of 1500, for use as a floating homeless shelter in Pearl Harbor

another reason why shelters don't work

2007-09-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

... is that they are often not designed to.

There is quite a lot of government and private grant money to be tapped into by administering social services programs, and many of these "charities" are just veiled capitalist enterprises - more about creating comfortable paid positions for their directors and upper management than about serving the needy.

The particularly scurrilous thing is the absolute rock-bottom cost-cutting mentality that is a necessary component of such an enterprise, and how the needy have to scrape by with horrible food, unsanitary facilities and inadequate rest so that the money that these organizations take in can be redirected.

And everybody from the top on down gets their fingers into the pie. At nearly every homeless shelter or services center in the world you'll see the paid staff combing through the donations as they come in, taking the choicest bits out for themselves and their families/spouses/boyfriends/other people who are making enough money to pay for their own clothes and goods, and redirecting donated food out the back doors and into the trunks of waiting cars.

street art

2007-09-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Apparently these are popping up in a number of different places

don't you dare take care of yourself

2007-09-04T13:31:00.000-07:00

An article near and dear to me, on a young guy who was camping in the woods and going to work in Maryland, and was of course harassed and run out by the police simply for doing these things

(thanks Cyberhobo)

project homeless connect

2007-08-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

They're doing what I think is the 13th one of these in San Francisco, just outside the library here at the Bill Graham auditorium. Basically the idea is that they invite all the city's homeless people in and give them a shopping bag and let them go around and get all sorts of basic needs stuff, I think one time they even gave away a bunch of brand-new pricey looking sneakers. They also have referrals to all sorts of services, shelter, health stuff, etc.

That's what they say on paper, anyway. I haven't actually been inside one, so I honestly don't know what the pros and cons are. First one I saw was I think the 6th or 7th, and I was pretty hardcore homeless at the time and probably could have used the services. But, first I saw the huge line to get in stretching around the block. Then, I saw the evangelical choir from Glide Church or wherever standing in front of this unsteady line of sadness and singing "Praise God! Look at what he's done for you!" and that pretty much made up my mind on what to do with my afternoon. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that it's going on and that on paper it seems a fine idea, exception of the choir telling people to praise some god for what he's done to them.

This does lead in to something though - the story of why I call Gavin Newsome "Mayor GQ Jesus". Well, at least the Jesus part - one of his things is that he apparently goes to these and rubs the feet of a few homeless people for a photo-op. You can probably figure out the GQ part on your own.

front page crackdown

2007-08-28T17:10:00.001-07:00

The San Francisco Chronicle is the major "mainstream" newspaper for the Bay Area, and has a heavy circulation throughout much of the rest of California and even into Nevada and Oregon. Something I have noticed about the "Chron" during my time here is that it has a tendency to embark on miniature front-page crusades, which inevitably seem to lead to a flurry of activity by the local government to amend whatever social issue the "Chron" has declared to be foremost in the minds of the public at the moment.

Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. Four months or so ago, about the time I was returning to San Francisco for the year, the "Chron" ran a front-page article on how much money the MUNI transit system was losing to "fare cheats" who hopped onto trains without paying at above-ground stops, or snuck in through the back door of crowded buses. Now, when I first lived here in 2005, I admit I used to regularly jump the MUNI in such a manner with impunity. In four months of almost-daily use I never once even saw a fare inspector. Now, ever since the "Chron" ran it's front page feature, I see a fare inspector about one out of every three trips - even on oddball lines, and at times of day that they are nearly empty.

About a month or so ago the "Chron" began a new crusade - that of beating the drums for a crackdown on homeless camping in Golden Gate Park. The city has since instituted a "zero tolerance" camping policy and is apparently moving-along, confiscating from, citing and jailing those that remain in the park.

Discarded syringes in a place where children play are a real problem; so is human feces on walking trails, and all these other things that the "Chron" and the mayor's office cite as reasons for this recent hardcore park crackdown. The thing is, they're no more prevalent there now than they've been in the past decade - and no more so than they are downtown, in SoMa, in the Mission, at Ocean Beach, in Bayview and many many other areas of the city.

This whole thing is an object lesson in precisely who owns the media, in this case the "Chron", and how it is used to control people's thoughts and achieve political ends. This whole "homeless crackdown" is not about the Golden Gate Park being overrun and out of control like some homeless Mad Max scene - as a frequent visitor (and former resident ... shh) I can tell you that it is no different now than at any time I have seen it in the past two years, and is actually one of the *cleaner* areas of the city! The pictures of huge piles of garbage and beer cans that the "Chron" reporters are digging up for the papers have to be coming from entrenched homeless encampments in the wilderness, off where visitors and tourists do not venture - and I would not be surprised to find that they had been collected together and "arranged" somewhat prior to the pictures being taken.

What is it about, then? Well, for starters, it's about the major economic forces in San Francisco - the hotel and tourist industries, primarily - waging their steady campaign to erode San Francisco's entrenched "haven for all" ethic and bring it more in line with the corporate sanitized safe-for-exploitation vision of America, which does not include homeless people able to move about freely. But that's only a small part of it. It's also about Gavin Newsome, that slick little choad who represents the rule of Liberal New-Money Aristocracy, being back up for election as the city's Mayor.

It's about running the most impoverished and marginalized out of one of the few places that they can sleep safely and comfortably in this peninsula blanketed in concrete and high winds. It's about creating an "issue", by trumping up a really relatively harmless situation that has existed for years and years now, so Mayor G.Q. Jesus can appear to be a "results-getter" and boost his approval ratings.

And it's also about the Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness being an abject and stupid failure, which has done nothing to make an appreciable dent in the homeless population yet has continually cut services to those that need them. It's about how we are nearly halfway through the Plan's allotted time now and people are still seeing the same homeless crowds that they did before Gavin came into office. And it's about how everyone involved has to make themselves look good at any cost - and that means more and more hardcore crackdowns, more pushing and shoving of the homeless under the carpet and off into the corner, more starving them out in the hopes they'll wander off to another city, anything to just make them "disappear" and keep them from embarassing a whole lot of prominent politicians. Politicians who never harbored any real desire to make anyone's lives any better in the first place, I might add.

I mentioned this briefly in the book, and I've been saying it since I first became aware of homeless issues - these Ten Year Plans (and any other plan with some arbitrary time limit) are dangerous things, because when they (inevitably) fail, there is only one option to prevent a spate of damaged careers and resignations - the jackboot. The truncheon. We are seeing it now in San Francisco, with the news media as willing partner, and I fear we will only see more of it and worse as the years continue to pass.

the banking concept of homelessness

2007-08-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

" ... The oppressors use their "humanitarianism" to preserve a profitable situation ... Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them, for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated. To achieve this end, the oppressors use ... a paternalistic social action apparatus, within which the oppressed receive the euphemistic title of "welfare recipients". They are treated as individual cases, as marginal persons who deviate from the general configuration of a "good, organized and just" society. The oppressed are regarded as the pathology of the healthy society, which must therefore adjust these "incompetent and lazy" folk to it's own patterns by changing their mentality. These marginals need to be "integrated", "incorporated" into the healthy society that they have "forsaken".

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not "marginals", are not people living "outside" society. They have always been "inside" - inside the structure which made them "beings for others". The solution is not to "integrate" them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become "beings for themselves". Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors' purposes"

- Paulo Freire, "The Banking Concept of Education"

(this was written in response to the educational system, but not a word of this passage is any less applicable to the system of homelessness and homeless services in America and many other nations)

second edition?

2007-08-21T13:06:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly one year since I wrote this book. At the time that I published it, I had been homeless for just over one year. Now, I am approaching the end of my second year, and this additional period of experiences and study have led me to consider a revision, or second edition, of the book. I feel it's still fairly sound factually, but I have now what I think is a more complete understanding of certain issues, and there are certain things I would choose to present a little differently in light of this. There are also new issues I would like to address in detail, such as interactions between law enforcement and the homeless.

Now, I did anticipate this sort of thing when I published the book (which always was more from the gut than intended to be any attempt at a comprehensive sociological study), and this blog was created to address this very situation. However, there are such a substantial amount of things that I'd like to add, change and revise that I feel tacking information on through a series of lengthy posts is an inadequate solution.

Only problem is, I'm bogged down in so many other activities right now (full-time college, martial arts classes, writing other books that I honestly feel more passionate about at present, miscellaneous personal projects and the occasional trip to the finquas for some wage slavery) I don't know when I'd really have time to sit down and do this properly. So, it could be awhile, but it is something I am considering.

learning to count

2007-08-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

It's far from uncommon for cities to intentionally undercount the number of homeless they have for various political purposes, but I think Chicago just took the award for absolute brazenness -

City census counts only 24 homeless people living downtown

why shelters don't work

2007-07-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

This is ground I've covered in the book, but some new experiences/observations have made me want to tighten and refine my argument.

The function of the homeless shelter in America, generally speaking, is (at it's absolute minimum) to give people a safe and hygienic place to sleep while they sort out their housing situation. Realistically, outside of a tiny handful of exceptional circumstances, this is only going to happen in one of two ways - either they get on disability/SSI or some other form of permanent monthly stipend related to inability to work, or they find regular full-time employment, and in both cases have enough of a stay to save whatever they need to cover their initial move-in expenses. The former people are failed quite often by the shelter system, and the latter are failed nearly one hundred percent of the time.

Let us take the situation of the employable homeless person, who wants to get off the streets, out of the shelters and back into proper housing as an example. To illustrate the impossibility of their situation, I am going to plug them into the San Francisco homeless services network. It may seem that I pick on San Francisco particularly, but I use it because it is one of the systems I am most familiar with. It is also typical of the systems employed by many major American cities at present, and is one of the most well-funded in the country. Ostensibly, or at least according to it's own claims, it is among the cities doing the most to help the homeless. Yet, with all the charity groups involved, programs present and vast financial rsources available, it has done little to make an appreciable dent in housing and caring properly for the homeless and is a model of what is wrong with homeless services in this country.

Now, let's say our hypotheitcal homeless person is released to the streets of San Francisco. He is employable, without significant physical or mental disability, and willing to work full-time at any reasonable employment. He has three primary needs that must immediately be addressed - shelter, food and hygiene. Without these regularly and reliably in place, he can proceed no further in his quest for stability.

To get a shelter bed he must first visit one of the city's drop-in homeless service centers. Up until recently, a number of these were open 24 hours a day, and in addition to dispensing reservations for shelter beds they also provided basic human services such as toilets, showers, lockers, snacks and a place to sit. San Francisco is one of a very few American cities that has ever offered such services on a 24 hour basis. Over the past three years however, these drop-in centers have been systematically shut down by the Mayor's office, and only one 24-hour drop-in center remains as I write this. It is located in the dangerous gang-filled Bayview/Hunter's Point neighborhood, far removed from the cluster of homeless services downtown. A person seeking a shelter bed, therefore, must visit one of the other drop-in centers that have regular business hours. To actually have a realistic chance of getting a bed, a person must arrive as soon as they open around 6 or 7 A.M. The city dispenses beds in a rather odd and confusing system whereby some are first-come first-served, and then the remainder are dispatched via a lottery (there are about 1400 beds in the city to accomodate a homeless population that is usually counted at around 15,000). Depending usually upon sheer luck, a person may get one night in a shelter, seven nights, thirty days or nothing at all. Additionaly, when a person gets short-term stays such as one or seven days, they may be moved to a new shelter in an entirely different part of town when their stay is up, sometimes hopping shelters several times in the space of a few weeks.

Let's say our homeless person manages to land a shelter bed on the first try. Unless they're seriously disabled, a veteran or a woman, it's not likely to be for more than 7 days. Obviously, it's hard to hold down a job not knowing where (or even *if*) you'll be staying from week to week. Even if you somehow manage to arrange long-term shelter you are still up against significant difficulties. The city shelters are exceptionally spartan. Most are open from 10pm to 6am with no exceptions. This does not mean you get to sleep from 10pm to 6am. They (hopefully, and not always) open the doors to begin processing people at 10pm. You stand in a long line to have the last four digits of your Social Security number checked against a list. 10:20 to 10:30 is a much more reasonable time to expect to begin bedding down. But if you want a shower, they must be taken at night, so expect to burn up anywhere from another 15 to 45 minutes waiting in line for that. And lights do not usually go out until 11pm, so there are people coming in and going out and talking and moving about until at least then. 6am, additionaly, is not wake-up time. That is the time you must have vacated the shelter by. Rousting begins around 5:45am. People are usually up and making noise in force around 5:30am. Therefore you have, at best, six flat hours in which to sleep each night. This presumes there are no middle-of-the-night interruptions; for example, ambulances coming, intense snoring, intense odors, people going crazy, people shitting themselves, staff banging around for whatever reason at 2 A.M., and so on. Even if you can manage to drop off like a rock immediately, it is impossible to get a full and satisfying night of sleep. You are also sleeping on mats, either in a gymnasium or on a church floor or some other similar arrangement. Most of these mats are old and so worn through that, if you sleep on your side, your hip presses against the floor and becomes sore after an hour or so. The shelters are supposed to have adequate blankets and sheets sent over for every person they have a reservation for, but somehow they always seem to be short. The first in the door get a blanket and sheet, the rest get just a blanket, and some at the tail end may get neither at all. Pillows are not even considered - you use your clothes, a backpack or whatever you can. The result of this is an almost perpetual state of exhaustion, and a need for daytime naps that can be met in the park when the weather is nice but not otherwise (it rains often in the winter, and can be cold here even into July).

We then come to the issue of hygiene. I have mentioned that most shelters allow showers only at night (if they have such facilities at all). The only other showers are available at a drop-in center that allows access to them from 9am to 4pm each day. If you must be at work early you are entirely out of luck. Even if you have the time, you must devote a considerable chunk of your day to travelling to the drop-in and then waiting on a line for a rather ill-used shower no doubt crawling with who knows what variety of pathogens (at the very least, however, there *is* some sort of shower facility available daily, which is more than the majority of American cities can claim). Rudimentary towels and soap are usually provided, but one is on their own for shampoo (considered a bourgeois luxury item I suppose). Scrabbling together other basic hygiene necessities when broke - a comb, deodorant, razor, nail clippers, q-tips, tissues - can involve visits to three or four separate charities and churches and service agencies, each of course keeping their own particular hours, and none of whom guarantee to have anything in stock at any given time. Then there is the issue of toilets. Like all Major Metropolises, San Francisco is notoriously mean about providing public toilet facilities. The city's answer to this problem has been the installation of a token handful of pay toilets on the streets that cost 25 cents, the majority of which close at dark and are by day continually occupied by drug users and street prostitutes entertaining clients. If one wants a regular toilet available one must essentialy hover near a drop-in center or one of the accessible public buildings such as a city library.

Finally, there is food. If one is flat broke one may be able to procure a food stamps card in one to three days from the General Assistance office. If one has even as little as a couple of hundred dollars on hand, however, they may be disqualified. There are several churches downtown that serve regular meals each day, but only at specific times, and the lines are always very long. If one ends up in a position, as most people do, of needing to go to the churches to get a decent meal, one must give up a chunk of several hours of their time hovering around the Tenderloin area in order to do so.

So, in order to get the three basics taken care of, at best there is a lot of running around and eating up of time, and at worst there is a lot of random chance of getting nothing at all. One cannot work a regular job while trying to deal with all of this.

There are additional issues with shelters - upon entering one for the first time, you are almost guaranteed to get sick with some sort of cold or other virus. It is practically an inevitability. It may even be something as debilitating as norovirus or some other intestinal bug, which is a lovely thing to have when in a situation where it's hard to find a usable bathroom. Combine this with the perpetual sleep deprivation and the constant walking around out in the elements (which are frequently cold and windy) and the body quickly begins to break down. And guess what kind of work is the only kind often available to down-and-out people? Tiring physical labor.

Additional trends in American employment stack the deck against the homeless person even further. Even for minimum-wage, bottom-of-the-barrel, could-train-a-monkey-to-do-it jobs, thanks to the terrible economy and explosive immigration there is always some competition. As a result, employers are now expecting applicants to do a little soft-shoe, shuck-and-jive and smile real big even for the lowest of menial labor positions. Minimum-wage warehouse pick-and-pack jobs require a resume and have two to three interviews. Standards that once applied only to professional college-grad jobs are now being expected of waitstaff and buspeople. These are not jobs to be smilin' real big about under normal circumstances. The exhausted homeless person living in the shelter, or possibly camping out because they can't even get in to a shelter, has even less inclination to come bounding into the interview eager to serve and full of pep. Previously, management understood the position of the low wage-earner and didn't expect such ridiculous displays of submissiveness and obsequity, but in this Brave New Corporatocracy that we live under everything is apparently going to be ratcheted as tightly as possible. The homeless person also has trouble dressing for such an interview - first of all in obtaining proper clothes, and then in having a place to leave their other belongings (shelters do not allow you to leave things during the day, and the public storage for homeless people in the city allows one to store only one bag of clothes with no exceptions as to content - and they do search).

There is also the matter of searching for a job. American cities are full now of these "one-stop" centers, essentially a bank of computers at which the job seeker can sign up to surf Craig's List along with thousands of others, and look at a wall full of postings printed out from Craig's List. There are also approximately 80,000 volunteers waiting eagerly to help one prepare a resume. Of course, if there are significant gaps in work history or a lack of skills to begin with, a shiny formatted resume will probably be of use only as emergency toilet paper. What people who are down-and-out actually need, which is direct placement in work and/or skills training, is absolutely verboten. They will give you everything but that. There are some vocational training programs, but the terms under which you enter them would make Joseph Heller proud. You have to be so broke as to be basically living on the streets, and then they will pay for your tuition at a community college or some other sort of low-end trade school. But, they will do absolutely nothing to assist with housing or any other basic human need.

How does one "get out" of homelessness, then? Don't look to the state for too much help. The only ones they are serving, under programs such as Care Not Cash and Housing First, are the most hardcore public inebriates that tax the city budget with their constant need for emergency medical services. The city is prioritizing care to these people and putting them up in private rooms for free not out of enlightenment and humanity, but because it is a cheaper alternative. Stuff them in a substandard room in a disgusting SRO in the Tenderloin surrounded by others of their kind, give them no other resources, and just let them drink/drug themselves stupid in privacy where they will receive less emergency medical attention and cost the state less money as well as remaining out of view of the tourists. Meanwhile, working people and others who have it together and need only a little bit of help to stabilize are completely ignored.

There is little to nothing to move up to from the shelter system. Subsidized housing wait lists run into the years if they are open at all. Transitional housing and long-term programs are usually addiction-recovery based, obviously doing nothing to help someone who is not an addict and limiting those who are to few hours that they can work if at all. And once the addict has completed the program they are tossed right back out onto the street. The whole system, essentially, exists to keep the homeless person alive but perpetually exhausted and forever homeless.

As I've said elsewhere this will never be "fixed" until the social order is fixed, and I think it more likely that humanity will find a way to kill itself off than it will to arrange a society based on cooperation and full realization of the individual. However, we could do a few things to make the situation better. Shelters that actually provide what people need, condensed services, and job placement would all drastically improve the lives of people who are in a deep hole at present and see no way out.

new technology deployed in the War On Bums

2007-06-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've got a post up over at my other blog requesting some help in getting information on a new form of remote video surveillance that yells at homeless people in restaurants, any info on who these assholes are would be appreciated. Thanks.

UPDATE - All right, found 'em. They don't have much direct info on their site about their creepy restaurant monitoring, McDonalds and TGI Fridays and a bunch of other corporate crap constitute the client list though (not surprisingly).

street spirit

2007-05-29T14:01:00.001-07:00

Another good homeless paper out of the Bay Area, sold on the streets and available online - http://www.thestreetspirit.org/about.htm

seven nights in hell

2007-05-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

One man's experience with the San Francisco shelter system

once upon a time in the tenderloin

2007-05-22T16:51:00.001-07:00

A great article about San Francisco's legendary homeless haunt

homelessness and the police

2007-05-21T17:31:00.001-07:00

Here's a long one, buckle in -

...................................................................

People who've been homeless for any good stretch of time (and I mean real outdoors-and-nowhere-to-go homeless and not just surfing couches and shelters) don't need anyone to tell them about how to handle the police. Through direct experience, they probably know more than most paralegals and public defenders do about the law and how it ends up being interpreted by those who enforce it. People who are new to the streets, however, probably aren't aware of how easily some seemingly innocuous act such as walking down a public street, sitting down or stretching out for a rest can quickly turn into expensive citations and even time spent in jail.

To understand what you can expect from the police when you are homeless, and how to deal with police stops, it is first necessary to understand both the function of the police and the mentality and motivations of the common beat-patrolling police officer. Understanding these things allows you to see all the dynamics in play from the moment when a police officer spots you and decides to roll up on you all the way through to whatever the conclusion to the situation is (whether it be freedom, fines or jail). Knowing these things will allow you to steer the situation towards the best possible results for yourself, and indeed to avoid even being put in conflict with the police in the first place.

........

THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF POLICE

The police are not here because those who hold power in our society love life, or genuinely care that every citizen of this country is safe and secure and able to live happily and well. The primary function of police is not to protect individuals from harm, but to protect the Social Order. Protecting people from harm in the event of emergencies, such as robberies and rapes and murders and et cetera, is sort of a tangential effect of this primary directive - the order of society demands that people not be able to do these things without official sanction and approval. Now, our society is ordered as such - the people with the most money are regarded as being the most important, and so on in proportionate measures moving down society's economic ladder. Therefore, the extent to which the police are here to "protect and serve" you is related primarily to your level of wealth and influence, and at a certain point along the lower reaches of this ladder the benefit that the police provide to you is mitigated and then eventually negated by the ways in which they restrict and oppress you. Homeless people are at the very bottom of this ladder, and therefore to them the police are threat and predator much more often than they serve as help and social benefit.

Police are not known for their intelligence, and there is indeed no shortage of strikingly dumb motherfuckers amongst their ranks, but this is something that nearly every officer inherently comes to understand, even if it is never expressed to them as such (nor do they ever develop the literacy level to put it into words). In the police view of the idealized Social Order, everyone has a distinct place and role. If you attempt to step out of that role, the police play an active part in clubbing you back into it (and if you will not be clubbed, then incarcerating you for as long as possible and perhaps even killing you). A cop is only supposed to question and detain you if they have significant reason to believe that a crime has been committed or is in progress. That is the rule as it sits on paper. In reality, the cop questions and detains you when you appear to have stepped outside of your social place, regardless of any indication of crime. This is why people doing nothing more than walking, laying down, sitting or standing get stopped, carded, searched and arrested every day. This is the homeless person's place in the Social Order - they are considered effluence, as they contribute little of value to society. However, the popular mood prevents their mass execution, starvation or internment in forced labor camps, so they must be tolerated. If they are to be in society then, they are expected to be tagged and cataloged in a shelter, being put through some Program or another designed to constrict and control them and eventually inject them back into the ranks of the struggling working poor. It is either that, or they are expected to hide in some deep dark hole somewhere where no one ever sees them. If you are a homeless person and you are not doing one of these two things, expect to be stopped and hassled by the police.

THE MENTALITY OF THE POLICE OFFICER

Police work is one of the only jobs that, aside from a high school diploma, has no educational or experience pre-requisites and yet pays a comfortable salary (over $30,000 per year) at entry level. For high school jocks that weren't quite good enough to get athletic scholarships, yet were also disinclined or unable to perform well enough academically to pursue a college education, this is obviously an attractive option and quite possibly their last hope for finding meaningful work. Police work also commonly appeals to another type, misfits and outcasts in school who have little in the way of financial prospects and want desperately to be an alpha male. Between these two personality types you find the bulk of the police applicant list. Nearly all cops are bullies at heart, even if they previously never had an opportunity to be one in deed. One has to be this way to thrive at this sort of a job. Cops are people who want to be Billy Badass, but have no means by which to do it in real life, so they take a job where the State sanctions and rewards such behavior. And like all bullies, they're essentially cowards - they can only live out their power fantasies when hiding behind the vast resources of government, in a situation where the people they confront are rendered essentially powerless to resist. If a young cop goes in to the job genuinely wanting to do good for humanity, the hard realities of the job will soon erode that naive spirit of goodwill and over time push him to conform to the general attitudes of his peers. This profile may not account for every single cop but it damn sure covers the bulk of them.

Cops are motivated by money, professional and social advancement, and the power trip. They could give a flip about civil rights or social justice, except insofar as legal and social pressure requires them to. All a cop cares about is what makes his job the easiest, what will most quickly advance his career, and what will afford him the opportunity to sate his need to bully and dominate. This is what is going through a cop's mind as he cruises his beat. Little to no room is made for honest ethical and moral considerations, or any view of "right" and "wrong" that diverges from the edicts of the State.

Homeless people make excellent prey for the police. Even if they want to be in their proper "place", i.e. a shelter, there often is not one available. They are forced to roam and continually vulnerable. The beat cop looking to make a quick citation or arrest to pad out his record rejoices at the sight of a roaming homeless person, particularly if they have wandered into an affluent neighborhood.

POLICE TECHNIQUES FOR TURNING NOTHING INTO SOMETHING

The police have a whole suite of techniques they use to turn innocuous actions into crimes, and a whole bag of tricks to get you to incriminate yourself or otherwise give them an excuse to cite or bust you. The only place that a homeless person can legally physically occupy without being in violation of something or another is a public street. Even then, there are loitering laws that mean that, to be in strict compliance with the letter of the law and beyond all possibility of citation, a homeless person would have to walk continually in loops among public streets until the flesh wore off their feet. The country has been almost completely parceled out into private property. What remains as "public" land, such as parks, is really just property of the U.S. Government (which itself is the property of the major corporations of the country and which The People have long since ceased to play any meaningful part in) and is subject to their strict rules of use. A homeless person can sit in a park during the day, but they generally close around dusk and do not re-open until dawn. During the night, there is literally nowhere anymore that a homeless person can go to where they will not be violating some law or another. Homelessness has, effectively, been made a crime in this country.

So, if you sit too long on a public street, that's loitering. If you do it on private land, that's trespassing. If you attempt to set up shelter for yourself on any sort of land, or if you just lay out on a public street or bench with some sort of shabby blanket covering you, that's illegal camping. Even if you are walking down a public street, you'd better be damn sure to be on a sidewalk and not jaywalk when you cross (even if there are absolutely no vehicles around), because there's another opening for a cop to cite you. This is the manner by which walking, sitting, standing and laying down become chargeable criminal offenses in this country.

When a cop spots you doing any of the above, or even if you're just legally walking down the street at an odd hour or in a place you're "not supposed to be", the only thing that is going to stop you from being detained and harassed is if the cop has bigger fish to fry at the moment, or if their current level of laziness and lack of desire to do paperwork outweighs their want to advance their career and abuse their position. When a cop rolls up on you they have every intention of citing or busting you for *something*, even if nothing is immediately visible that they can use. The cop thinking in this situation is that some poor-looking people commit crimes or have warrants or are carrying drugs or weapons, so therefore all poor people need to be stopped and questioned. Cops can get away with using logical fallacies to direct their behavior because they have guns and they have radios with which they can call for a nearly unlimited supply of backup guns. In any event, it's an excellent gamble for the cop - if he can devise a pretext to search you, the odds are favorable that he will hit upon something that can be used to cart you off, and if he can ID you and run your name you may well be wanted on some warrant or another. Even if you come away totally clean, the odds are very low that you'll have the knowledge or resources or will to bring a succesful complaint or civil action. So, even though there is no law on the books in this country that you must carry identification or submit to police interrogation without cause, the police do not hesitate to demand your papers or question you at any time at all and for no specified reason at all. A middle class person might be shocked to have police come up out of nowhere and demand "papers please", but the very poor and the homeless have become quite used to it.

Imagine yourself in this situation - it's late and you have nowhere to go. Perhaps you've been trying to arrange something, a stay with a friend or a bed at a shelter, but it didn't work out. Now you need to find a secure place to sleep for the night and the only way to do that is by walking. Or, you've been sleeping out somewhere, but now really need to get some food or find a safe place to use the bathroom. In either case, it's nighttime and you're walking down the streets, obeying all laws that you are aware of. A cop drives by you, and then after a bit makes a U-turn and comes straight back towards you. This is how the situation is most likely going to unfold - the cop starts out with the buddy-buddy tone, asking you a bunch of personal questions ("Where are you headed? Where do you live? What do you do for work?") like he just pulled up looking to make a new friend. This inevitably culminates in "So, do you have any ID on you?". There's no law that says you have to carry an ID, and a police officer's got no call to be asking you for an ID unless they have probable cause to believe you're involved with a crime, but that's in the on-paper world. In the real world, cops always want your ID, and they aren't letting you go anywhere until you show them one. There's a lot of websites out there like Flex Your Rights that will advise you to stonewall the cops, that you have rights that you should vigorously enforce. These websites are mostly written by liberals with comfortable incomes who are working off of theory and don't personally have much occasion to get stopped by the police. The reality of the situation is, you do that and you're going to be hauled down to the station to be fingerprinted, and along the way they're going to do a whole lot of things to try to make a criminal out of you. Likewise, they're going to search you. The cop only cares about themselves. They aren't concerned about the role they're playing in nudging society even closer to a corpo-fascist ideal that parallels what the Nazis were building. They don't care how scary and sad it is to live in a society where you can be searched and IDed at random just for looking different than what you're "supposed to" or being in some place they arbitrarily determine that you "don't belong". None of that matters to them. Cops are gonna do what they're gonna do and if you get loud, you're looking at more charges and if you try to walk away, you're going to wind up on the ground in cuffs with your ribs and your stomach bruised.

Once a cop spots you and rolls up on you he's decided he's going to try to get you for *something*, even if there's nothing there, and the only possible way out is complete submission. The biggest sin there is, to a cop, is to question their Authority or to challenge them in any way. If you're clean and if you stroke their ego enough, make them feel like the big badass man they wish they really were, they might let you walk away. If you aren't submissive enough for their tastes, though, you're going in for something, even if they have to make something up. And they can, and they do, because when it comes down to your word v.s. a cop's with no other evidence, the cop wins automatically in any court. Only thing you can hope for is someone you know was around and filmed the encounter on their cell phone or something (and that they didn't get arrested and the cell phone didn't get taken). The cop, in his mind, is completely justified in anything he decides to do simply because he is a Cop. There aren't many students of philosophy on the police force, not a whole lot of moments of soul-searching and reflection. The cop is more likely to do whatever he feels like doing and then make up whatever he has to to justify it later.

The cop never outright orders you to fork over an ID, or to be searched, because that's illegal. What he does is he phrases it in a way that it's technically a suggestion, but sounds like you don't have the option to refuse, doesn't leave you any opening except to outright say No. They're counting on you to be ignorant of the law and/or just plain too shook to refuse. It usually doesn't matter if you do, though, because they're gonna contrive a way to make you do it anyway, and if you resist it's gonna get real ugly for you.

God help you if some fine upstanding citizen called the police because you cut through their property or you were sitting on a bench outside their house or business or something. Now it's a "Suspicious Persons" call and you're a "prowler", and the police have all the justification they need to roll up on you with weapons drawn and to put you on the ground if they choose to. Oh, and here's another one the cops love - "burglary tools". Pretty much every goddamn thing in the world that's blunt ("it's used to smash windows!") or flat ("it's used to pry open doors!") is a "burglary tool" to them. Apparently the law really is vague enough that they can get away with this horseshit. Found an interestingly shaped piece of metal along the road you want to use to make something later? Got some tools in your pack? Guess what, you're suddenly a master housebreaker. Combine a "trespass" with "burglary tools" and suddenly you can go from cutting across some corporate lawn to save a few minutes to being in jail on a felony charge. And that's if your lucky, and the cops decide to only classify what you're carrying as a "burglary tool" and not a "concealed weapon".

WHAT TO DO WHEN THE POLICE STOP YOU

First of all, being innocent is no defense. You have to keep that in mind. The cop doesn't care about right and wrong, doesn't care that you weren't doing anything or harming anyone. He's a predator out to use you as prey for his pleasure, and to maybe pad out his arrest record and make himself look like some kind of fucking hero on his next performance report. All you can do is limit his opportunities as much as possible.

The first thing you have to decide when you see a cop car wheeling around to head in your direction, is how to play the encounter. There are only two real choices - either stonewall all the way or comply all the way. If you choose to stonewall, be ready to go to jail for at least a night, possibly more until you get in front of a judge (who has a lot less motivation to randomly hassle you than the cops do). If you resist or try to walk away, you'll be physically harmed, even though you legally have every right to leave if they can't show you probable cause. It's not right, and it's not just, but it's how things are. Best you can hope for is maybe a false arrest lawsuit later (but don't start counting your cash unless you have video evidence, otherwise it probably isn't happening).

If you choose to stonewall - when the cop wheels up he'll start asking you his buddy-buddy questions like "Where are you coming from?" and "What are you doing here?" and etc. Don't answer these. Immediately ask what his reason is for stopping you. He'll try to keep up with the personal questions. Refuse, and keep asking why he's stopped you. At this point, if he doesn't have anything to work with, he'll probably make up some bullshit ("walking in the road" is a favorite of theirs in these situations, even if you were smack in the middle of the sidewalk. They know their word takes precedence over yours. That or they'll claim you "appeared to be walking unsteadily"). At this point they'll probably get pissed, drop the buddy-buddy act, and start to make threats. They'll also demand your ID. Just refuse. The key is, you have to totally refuse to identify yourself, and tell them clearly that you are refusing to identify yourself. Don't make up a fake name and then tell them you don't have ID. They can run your name and birthday over radio now and that's legally acceptable as identification in most states, and now they can get you on a charge of making a false statement to an officer (only a misdemeanor, but enough excuse to search and detain you). No matter how polite you are about all this they are going to get nasty, because they can't stand someone they view as an inferior resisting their power. They'll demand to search you, even though they legally can't they'll find an excuse to. If you have anything that can be potentially construed as a weapon on you, and it's clear they are going to search you, identify it voluntarily. This eliminates a possibility of a concealed weapons charge (a felony), unless the cop is one of those really nasty lying motherfuckers. Then they'll put you in cuffs. Maybe they'll just make you lean on the hood of the car for awhile and try to intimidate you to work out their bully-boy aggressions, but most likely they'll pull some charge totally out of their ass and trump it up to haul you down to be fingerprinted and put in jail for at least the night. If you don't have warrants and they didn't find (or plant) anything on you you'll probably be released after you get in front of the judge, unless you're in Arizona in which case they'll probably find an excuse to send you to the labor farms for life.

If you choose to comply - maybe you feel like this is wrong, you shouldn't have to live this way, but the fact of the matter is it's basically a war in this country by the rich on poor people and the police are the stormtroopers in it. If forking over your ID and not getting loud means you get to walk away free, it may well be a better choice than futile resistance that changes nothing (unless someone can catch it on video and get away and being in jail for a few days won't seriously jack up anything for you, then go for the stonewall). Pick your battles. You can do more damage to the bastards as a free man/woman without a record than you can all self-righteous and incarcerated. Even if you do comply, I still wouldn't consent to a search. If you've given over your ID, aren't wanted for anything, don't look drunk or high and have appeared acceptably Submissive to the officer, they may well let you go anyway even if you don't give a consent to search.

CONCLUSION

I don't ever want to hear that old bullshit about "It's OK for cops to do all the unfair things they do because their lives are on the line every day". Fuck that. It's an emotionally manipulative excuse to justify exploitation and oppression, which is something the cops (and the social masters they ultimately serve) are just chock full of. I come out of a family of cops. I know how often your average Joe Donut patrol officer is really, truly in a situation where his life is genuinely in danger, and it ain't that often. Unless you're an undercover detective or someone that specializes in dangerous situations, don't even come at me with that bullshit. The beat cop spends 3% (at most) of his time in legitimately threatening situations and the other 97% talking some long-ass mess about how dangerous his job is and nobody knows the troubles he's seen and etc. while driving around in muscle cars getting free food and harassing people who aren't doing shit, putting up speed traps and trumping up citations to make easy money for the department and make themselves look good. In any violent situation, the cop has a tremendous advantage. He's well-armed, he's (ostensibly) well-trained and he can call for an almost limitless supply of backup. Some joker waves a knife or a stick or something or hucks a bottle here and there and I'm supposed to believe that justifies all the shit that the cops pull on innocent people? Fuck that. And you know what? There's only a few select parts of this whole country where violent crime is rampant enough that a cop could feasibly claim they *regularly* put their lives on the line for the public, and in those places, the cops don't waste their time hassling poor people just for being poor in public. It's out in these quiet, rural, small sub-200k population towns where shit doesn't ever happen that the cops are the biggest gangs of thug assholes. San Francisco, a city where drugs are out of control downtown and most of the homeless population is on them, you can walk around being visibly homeless at 3 A.M. and 18 cop cars pass you and no one ever stops or even looks twice at you. Fuck, I've had only one encounter with the police in SF - one night around midnight, while waiting for the bus on Van Ness just outside the Tenderloin, some beat cop wandered up at random and offered me a can of beer. Walk down the street in Bumfuck, Wherever around midnight, dressed conservatively with maybe just a backpack or something, and you're surrounded by three cop cars because apparently you're Osama Bin Scumbag on your way to blow up City Hall while raping every child you can find along the way. And this is from a white dude who keeps his hair short. If you're brown or darker than that you might not even get out of that situation alive.

Cops are essentially two things - terrorists, and cowards. You really have to go to the bathroom, but there's no restrooms around anywhere, instead of going in an otherwise innocuous location outside like our ancestors have done for thousands of years you hold it in, experience excruciating pain and risk bowel/bladder rupture just because you're afraid some cop will roll along and bust you for doing what nature calls you to. That's terrorism. When you're afraid to walk down to the local diner or 24-hour grocery after dark because you don't want to get hassled and IDed and searched, that's terrorism. When you're afraid to pass through an area you're legally allowed to be in just because you're the wrong color, that's terrorism. The cops terrify people. They use the threat of violent force to make people change their behavior. They're just as much terrorists as any jihadist, but you've got a tremendously greater chance of being attacked by them than you do by any foreigner. When I walk out at night, or I have no place to go and try to find a location to camp, I don't worry about other homeless people or gangs or punks or whatever attacking me. That's so remote of a possibility as to be nearly impossible. What I DO worry about is cops, the people who are supposed to be ensuring that I can live safely. Cops are THE ONLY thing that keep me from getting a safe and comfortable night's rest easily. I worry about them taking away my freedom, violating my privacy and dignity, confiscating what little survival equipment I have, running me into jail. The only thing I fear in the night is the police. And behind all that swagger and the flashing lights and the "command voices" are a bunch of pussy bitches. They can't fuck with anyone unless they have a ridiculous advantage. They're essentially no better than the gang-bangers they bust, they're just state-sanctioned. Cops are cowards because they take the ultimate conformist job, because they can't handle being an individual and maybe coming in conflict with the State and society and having to endure hardship because of what they believe. They don't even know what they believe. They've probably never really thought about it. They just put their heads down, get their little buzz haircuts, put on their uniforms, do whatever the State tells them to and think whatever the State tells them to think, and get rewarded with a comfortable income. Having someone pull a knife on you once or twice a year doesn't have a damn thing on living broke and isolated for years and yet still carrying on and doing what you think is right, never selling out. Cops talk a whole line about "personal responsibility" but they couldn't ever handle the real thing, what with all the thinking and the sacrifice that it entails. That's why they're in the jobs they're in, the paid thug squad of the rich.

Cop behavior is like most other social problems - the only "solution" to it is complete overhaul of our society and the utter rejection of corporate capitalism, otherwise it's never going to fully go away. One thing that can be done to improve the situation, however, is to have higher standards for police than having a just-above-room-temperature IQ and an ultra-conformist personality. Another is to not put departments in a position where they have to raise their own funding via busts and citations, and yet another is to not make sheer volume of arrests and citations a major factor in how an officer is rewarded and promoted. We live in a time when the government is hot to put everyone under as much surveillance as possible - well, no one needs more constant watching than the cops. If you're handed the kind of social power that they are, along with it should come equally great scrutiny. And finally, this trend towards paramilitary tactics in routine police work needs to be cut off. This big Homeland Security pork barrel party where the town of Podunk, Missouri gets Federal funds to buy armored personell carriers and Blackhawk helicopters and shit is horrendous and stupefying. This throwing around of the word "terrorist" to describe anyone who does goddamn near anything at all but go to work and eat at McDonalds anymore needs to be vigorously rejected and run out of the American consciousness. It is increasingly becoming simply an excuse to violate rights and clamp down on freedoms and further the corpo-fascist agenda.

Denver plans to warehouse all homeless for '08 DNC

2007-05-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

Here's
your typical latte-liberal approach to homelessness in action.

Here's the part of the article I love the most -

"Our goal is to have a way to reestablish the work ethic and get (the homeless) plugged into an industry that has a demand for them," said Deborah Ortega, director of the commission."

Yeah, because all homelessness is caused by people simply not wanting to work. And the solution to everything is plugging people back into low-wage meaningless slave jobs as quickly as possible. Great, Denver, just great.

roaddawgz

2007-04-10T21:19:00.000-07:00

A site with writings and art by the homeless youth of San Francisco

homeless at the library

2007-04-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

A very good article (thanks Cyberhobo) on how libraries have increasingly become daytime homeless shelters thanks to complete lack of any other options for getting out of the elements.

Thanks to various public libraries, I've been able to maintain several blogs and even write and publish a book while homeless, as well as attend on-line community college classes and study for CLEPs and other equivalency exams. During the vicious winter rains of 2005-2006 out here in coastal California it was quite possibly the only thing that kept my near-pneumonia condition at one point from degenerating to crisis level. I might even go so far as to say libraries have been essential to my survival - I've been able to access a lot of information that I may not have had any other way to obtain while being without resources.

perhaps the best article i've read on homelessness

2007-04-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Peter Marin's Helping and Hating the Homeless (Harper's, 1987)

gift bags for the homeless - food cards

2007-04-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

"The Homeless Guy" Kevin Barbieux is a pioneering blogger - I don't know if he was the first homeless person to write about their life and get their voice heard regularly online, but he's most likely the most widely read on the internet. He published an article some time ago, with the suggestion that a quick and easy way to help the homeless is to put together small "gift bags" of commonly needed items and distribute them at parks, soup kitchens, other common gathering places (you can read his original article here.

A lot of people don't like to give money directly to homeless panhandlers because of the fear that it is going to just be sunk into an addiction, thus just perpetuating a problem. A lot of times they are right, especially in urban areas a panhandler is frequently looking for quick beer / crack / heroin money. This brings me to another suggested addition to homeless "gift bags" building on the idea that Kevin has started, which would be pre-paid food cards to various restaurants.

Down in South San Francisco I encountered a program administered by St. Vincent De Paul, one of the largest organized charities in the country. They gave away food regularly at lunch time and one of the staples of their giveaways was McDonalds gift certificates and cards. I don't know if they had some special donations from McDonalds perhaps, but that struck me as a bad choice of restaurant. Now of course in a desperate situation any food is good, and any place where you can sit down for awhile is good, and McDonalds has many inexpensive items filled with protein and such other things that are appreciated by the homeless as coffee and tea. However, it struck me that you could maximize the value to the homeless person by making a wiser choice of restaurants. Homeless people are badly in need of proper nutrition, and while a $1 double cheeseburger does deliver a good blast of protein for the money it also comes with high fat and other nastiness, as does pretty much all of their menu. Additionally, McDonalds has a pro-active corporate policy of kicking people out for "lingering", and after 30 minutes or so at many McDonalds a homeless person faces harassment by management and a "move-along".

In considering what food cards to give to homeless people I believe these are the major factors to be taken into account -

* Nutritional value/substantialness of the food offered for the price
* Ability to sit and rest for a good period without harassment
* Easily located and widely accessible to a person on foot/using public transportation

Across the nation there are going to of course be a lot of local and regional places that are good choices, that is far too much to get into here - I want to just look at a few major national chains that are generally a good choice for homeless gift cards.

SUBWAY - Very easy to find, this is one of the most common chains across the U.S. The menu has a wide array of healthy choices, and most locations have a "daily special" sandwich for $2.50 (though here in the Bay Area I have lately seen this sneaking up to $3 in a number of locations).

STARBUCKS - I'm not a fan of either the corporate policies or bland over-roasted and over-priced coffee of Starbucks, but they are perhaps the most widely dispersed chain in America, and in any urban area it is likely there is one within 1 or 2 miles no matter where you happen to be. Additionally, many locations I have seen seem to encourage people to take their time and relax. Dollar value-wise it's not the greatest choice, and there's not much of nutrition on the menu, but a hot coffee and a warm place to sit on a cold day can make all the difference in the world to someone stuck on the streets.

TACO BELL - While most of their menu is crap, Taco Bell does have some inexpensive items such as rice and beans and chicken tacos that are not too unhealthy and can stretch the dollar a long way

WENDY'S - Wendy's actually has one of the better dollar menus (relatively speaking) of the major fast food chains. They have things like chili, baked potatoes, fruit cups and yogurt. Still not the most healthy choice, but again relatively speaking it's better than a lot of other places.

(this post will be continued - more to come later)

life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

2007-01-19T09:59:00.000-08:00

"The law, in it's majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal their bread." - Anatole France

Indeed you hear much about America's majestic social equality, but what it stems from is mostly vague concepts on decaying parchment and carries over to the present only in the feel-good speeches of men striving to get themselves elected to positions of power and privilege.

It would seem that the basics of human need that are required to effectively sustain life, enjoy liberty and pursue happiness are not included amongst the "certain inalienable rights" that this country has collectively chosen to recognize. Instead we merely have a vague assurance that no entity will forcibly prevent us from enjoying these things, but we should not expect any assistance in acquiring or maintaining them either. Under such cross-examination America's current interpretation of the country's founding principles comes out as rather cold and mercenary, and you can see this reflected in the general state of the country at present.

We must keep in mind that these principles were drafted in an era where the concept of real community was alive and well (and wholly necessary for survival), and seeming no one could conceive of the power that private capitalist industry would come to wield. Indeed, the primary worry of the country's founding peoples was encroachment by the State into their affairs. Now we have only the State's thin protections in the form of labor laws, privacy laws and enviromental regulations shielding us from complete exploitation, enserfment and rape at the hands of these monolithic (and sociopathic) entitites with their utterly insatiable appetites.

The true test of anything is in the empirical, and that includes our social system - what is actually happening out there and not what is in the mouths of government agents or printed in the corporate-owned newspapers. And what we continually see is that the State does not hold all men to be created equal, and does not treat them as such under it's Law. To put it in colloquial terms, the rich skate and the poor take a soaking. Equality under the law is readily exposed as myth by anyone who cares to open their eyes.

When it comes to serious poverty - the kind where one is either in a desperate situation or perpetually one paycheck away from being in one - there is, according to American society at present, never a question of responsibility. The poor person is automatically at fault, by default, 100% of the time, regardless of whatever the actual circumstances.

One has no right to housing and protection from the elements in this country - the ultimate safety net is a patchwork system of homeless shelters that are mostly only present in heavily populated metropolitan areas. If one cannot fit in with whatever the rules and policies are at those places, or if they happen to be full up (as they usually are during the seasons when they are most needed), one is turned away with no further recourse. And though they provide some semblance of a bed and security for the night for some, they mostly close during the day and the sick and weak are turned out of doors in whatever weather (I contend that if the American public library system did not exist and was not so accomodating to homeless patrons, we would see the rate of deaths due to exposure jump by three or four times over what they are at present). Additionaly, if one is turned out of a homeless shelter for whatever reason, there is no one to petition or address grievances to. Shelters are by and large operated by private charities and are merely supported by state and local governments - as private entities their power over their clientele is absolute. One must essentialy waive one's right to privacy, dignity and even (in some cases) security in their person when signing in to such a place. If a shelter happens to be staffed by petty tyrants, crooks or others with lapses in judgement and a bent towards some form of anti-sociality, there is nowhere for one to go to plead one's case and seek justice - one can only return to the streets.

One has no right to eat in this country - the safety net is in this case a similarly randomly dispersed network of soup kitchens, also privately owned and operating under the same terms as shelters, and also usually only serving one meal per day. If the underpaid, underworked and underthanked staff decides to revert to pettiness and tyrannism, well...who can you possibly complain to? One can go in for food stamps, if one is near a welfare office - but if you are a working person trying to make ends meet you will likely be disqualified, because making as little as a few hundred dollars a month is enough to prevent you from receiving aid (even in areas where the cost of living is astronomical). In addition, dealing with the government is no different than dealing with private charity - be prepared for long waits in the welfare office, a battery of personal questions, and something tantamount to a background check in order to recieve an amount that might provide adequate groceries for two weeks or so.

Where else can one turn? Unemployment insurance, Section 8, other low-income housing programs, job training? All riddled with bearaucratic pitfalls, interminable appointments and waits, underfunding and waiting lists around the block, labrynthine sets of conditions that are constructed to deny and repel as many people as possible rather than deliver aid to where it is needed. If something in the process goes wrong? *shrug*. Too bad for you. In America nearly everyone is disposable, you see.

The system does not even have the decency to attempt to hide it's hypocrisy and failure anymore, but puts it on display in high-profile legal cases for the public to consume as entertainment. The extent of your right to live and be healthy and happy under this country's law is determined by the contents of your bank account, and nothing more.

putting it all together

2007-01-19T09:52:00.000-08:00

Another issue that I wish had occured to me earlier is that of the tenuous position that people who are in recovery from drug/alcohol addiction get placed in, when they are not on any sort of disability income and must work for a living while pursuing their recovery programs. This was discussed to some degree, but I failed to emphasize how time-intensive recovery really is and how much it conflicts with the normal full-time working schedules one needs to pull themselves up out of shelters and car living and into adequate housing.

It is particularly rough on families. If one or both of the parents have done jail time, they were likely ordered into some sort of recovery program upon release (practically a given for parolees on a drug-related offense). The appointments they need to keep and meetings they need to attend are of course during normal business hours. If these meetings and such are not attended, paroles can be violated, cutody of children can be lost, etc. Now of course the State encourages these people to work - just not during times that conflict with mandated recovery stuff, which eliminates a whole swath of potential jobs from a field of potential employers that is already quite narrow. Add to this that the family is likely forced by lack of means to stay at a shelter, and that most shelters do not allow one to work graveyard shifts because they close during the day, and the situation often comes down to a frustrating choice of recovery or work but never both together. During the recovery process, which can last for a significant period, people are forced by this dearth of options to remain in extremely vulnerable positions in shelters with little to no means of financial support.

a hot meal

2007-01-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

One major issue that I am kicking myself for not raising in the book is the inanity of the rules against use of food stamps for the purchase of hot meals/hot drinks. In the frigid winter a truly destitute homeless person has no means of purchasing so much as a warm bowl of soup ot hot cup of coffee. Food stamp laws prevent the purchase of prepared foods that are served hot, for those not familiar - so if I go into a supermarket deli I can purchase a cold pre-wrapped turkey sandwich, but run that sandwich through a toaster oven and suddenly it is strictly off limits.

Food stamp rules and regs are absolutely laced with beaureacratic goofiness such as this - another fine example, a pack of chewing gum qualifies as "food" and is entirely purchaseable, whereas an energy or protein bar (such as Powerbar or Tigers Milk, and one of the best protein-and-nutrient-per-dollar values a hungry person in a tight situation can get) is entirely prohibited.

Needless to say, the poorest members of society who are most in need of emergency food stamp assistance are also the one who usually have neither means of cooking nor storing food - these restrictions end up hurting the people that they are most intended to serve.