A friend of mine was in a similar situation as Reay. He had no addictions, and no psychological problems, but ended up homeless.
He used his remaining 2k to purchase a 1 year membership at Chelsea Piers sports club. It turned out to be the smartest way he could have used that money. Chelsea Piers is an enormous facility with 20 showers, locker room, huge lounge area with Wifi and couches. He hung out there for most of the day, worked out, learned php, took some freelance web development gigs, got enough experience and knowledge to eventually move on to a full time programming job. In a few months he saved enough money for an apartment in Queens.
I remember hearing on the radio about the UK Government, many years ago doing a census of all the homeless in the UK.
They had somebody on the radio who worked with the homeless who was tasked to do it in her area. Her instructions were only to count those on public property - i.e, if they were in a shop doorway or a car park they didn't count.
Funnily enough the count showed a large decrease in the number of homeless, congratulations all round etc etc.
We need to come up some better language for people who could afford a house in another town, but prefer to live in the open in order to be in some particular geographic spot. "Homeless" is much too broad. Are you homeless if you prefer "high-profile but low-profit" jobs, as this man did? Well sure, but being homeless does not always mean that conditions outside of your control have left you with no place to live, which is the way it's commonly used. Sometimes you make choices to do things you want.
There was a great story a while back about some guys who came to YC and were living in their car -- they thought that everybody just did it that way. They managed to save, get funded, and graduate YC. They all probably have nice places to live now because they made some choices earlier. Not my thing, and they probably wouldn't make those choices again, but at the time it all worked out for them.
People talk about self-driving cars as being the thing that destroys traditional car ownership, but I'm not so sure. If electricity is cheap enough to be almost free, and cars can take themselves from place-to-place without needing any attention, I imagine there would be a lot of folks -- myself included -- who would consider owning a "room that goes places" instead of a traditional home/apartment. Are those people homeless also? Nyah, the word just doesn't work everywhere we try to use it. Need some other term.
>about some guys who came to YC and were living in their car
Outliers, likely in many ways. Young, talented people, wealthy enough to own a car and smart enough to get into and through YC. They probably had family and a home life to return to if they failed. I agree, that isn't "homeless". You can't point at such examples as the model for most people on the streets, though.
>We need to come up some better language for people who could afford a house in another town, but prefer to live in the open in order to be in some particular geographic spot.
How about "homefree" for voluntary homelessness? Much as people who deliberately choose not to have children have adopted the term "childfree" to describe their lifestyle, as opposed to "childless".
> I imagine there would be a lot of folks -- myself included -- who would consider owning a "room that goes places" instead of a traditional home/apartment
You've heard of a Motorhome or "Recreational Vehicle", right?
I find it hard to understand what circumstances force them into this kind of homelessness. In most cases, within a 1 hr public transit commute, you can find a reasonably priced studio apartment. This reminds me of how poverty can sometimes be tied to behavioral issues, Esther Duflo of MIT has written about this- poor people spending extra money to buy a TV instead of more calories, for example. I wonder if something like that is in play here.
That are just shocking pictures to me. Well educated (as it seams) and hard working people, that can not afford at least a small regular spot of living.
With the last big real estate deal in NY, the problem will be rising.
The federal poverty line does not consider the greed of investment companies. It also does not help, to count the number of breads you can (theoretically) buy.
Lets face it: Human labor is losing it's value. The reason plainly is, that more and more interest has to be drawn for the "investors". Somebody has to pay the bill for the parties held in the financial districts and for the money, the governments squander on the banks.
In the high-payed tech sector, this effect is not so much felt currently, but this will change in the future, when the low-income sector is so much bleed-ed out, that the interest for the big investors has to come from elsewhere.
But isn't most people's response to high rent in NY to commute from NJ and not live on a roof? I can't help but think that this man's choice to live on a roof isn't the one that most people would make.
In this particular case, having read the article, it didn't seem as if the man in question really minded the lifestyle of homelessness.
There is a perception that to be without a static home is a terrible, terrible thing, but really, I can imagine for someone who appears to have his life together in many other ways (and free from other issues that plight the homeless community such as addictions) - then it could possibly be quite a liberating lifestyle.
I can of course see the other side of the equation where it would also be a prison - having to lie about his home for embarrassment etc. But in this very specific example, he seems to have got on with it and made the most of the situation
I've significant amounts of time living without a static home. In 2014, the longest time I spent in one place was 2-3 months at one particular low end hotel, not really by choice (prepping and recovering from spine surgery). Significant chunks of my time were spent living in shared housing - 8-12 bunk beds to a room, no real privacy, shared baths. In the west, if such a living space were filled with crazy drug addicts, it would be called a homeless shelter.
When a westerner has this experience in Asia it's called "backpacking" rather than "homelessness", and most folks will object strongly if I were to describe myself as homeless. Perhaps we should come up with a similar term to describe it when folks do it in the west and similarly compartmentalize their experiences.
I'm currently in this situation myself, but living slightly up north in Canada (expensive city). I live at friend's mostly empty office, luckily for me it's inside an empty room.
I've also gotten a gym membership for a 24 hour place so I can go shower every day.
I highly doubt he's 'ok' with the lifestyle, it's simply what's available right now to him. not having your own space really sucks.
sadly the building is being sold in a few weeks so I hope I'll have enough by then to get myself a place.
I have the same opinion and said the same thing in discussions with some friends. Being powerless is the element that needs to dealt with, by being homeless against your will for example.
I could imagine myself being homeless just because I choose to do so. I could also imagine that I'd live in a home and feel imprisoned by obligation. Between those two cases, I'd prefer self-chosen homelessness.
"We live in a city with 1.5m people living below the poverty line - that means we have 1.5m people at risk of being homeless."
Not exactly. First, the poverty line is federal and does not move with the ebb and flow of NYC life. Second, a lot of homeless in NYC are that way by choice rather than by direct inability to get a room somewhere. Sometimes this is due to mental issues which are not caused by low income. Third, there are people who make money but spend it all, ending up paying taxes above the poverty line but actually having zero or negative savings. Plenty of people in NYC are in that category.
> Second, a lot of homeless in NYC are that way by choice rather than by direct inability to get a room somewhere. Sometimes this is due to mental issues which are not caused by low income.
I've been homeless, so perhaps you'll forgive me for being biased against thinking like that.
I would never class mental illness as a choice, or of poor decisions whilst someone is suffering mental illness as a choice.
It sounds to me a lot like victim blaming. That a person may "choose" to be homeless because they have mental illness... isn't that more like a lack of compassion by fellow citizens to help support those who are suffering from mental illness?
Would it be different if it were a physical illness? That man is homeless because he chose to be due to having a broken leg. That sounds ridiculous, and frankly that's how your statement sounds to me.
I "chose" to be homeless. Sure, my choice. I could've stayed in a violent and sexually abusive environment and living in poverty. But instead it was my "choice" to sleep on the streets to escape it.
I didn't even choose hostels - I voluntarily declined a bed to sleep in - because when you've come from a shared sleeping environment in which you were not safe and feared physical abuse nightly, then you may understand my reticence to enter a shared sleeping environment with strangers, some of whom as you pointed out may have mental illness.
Perhaps this is all just a mental construct to make you feel better about yourself. If you are able to imagine that these people took responsibility for themselves and this was a free choice, you are able to absolve yourself of any individual part of the responsibility to show compassion and empathy towards fellow humans.
If all we've got to offer people as a society, is a "choice" to sleep without shelter, without warmth, without safety... I'm not really seeing how anyone can say that people "choose" this.
Edit: Whilst this issue has attention: http://crackandcider.com/ I'd urge anyone doing secret santa's, or just feeling flush to go there, and buy things for homeless people. They're good people, taking no profit but covering costs, and just giving this stuff to people who need it.
Yeah right ... while some people love to be nomads and not settle permanently, no one chooses to be shelter-less - sleeping outside with improper gear in November rainy night is mightily miserable experience.
While food, clothing, tech, even a lot of services have gone way down as a portion of median income, housing has gone disproportionally up. The only thing to compare it to is healthcare costs.
Various government intervention that collude together to make this happen - mortgage interest tax deduction, building ordinances for areas, housing bubble bailouts. That is, it's mostly artificial.
Innovation in this area seems prime, therefore. This could mean forcing the rules to bend, or by allowing ways to opt out of housing all together as the man described in this article does.
I believe the biggest disconnect is that working requires government authorization but owning real estate does not. Ordinary citizens not only compete with locals for real estate, they compete with the world's millionaires who are looking for (relatively) safe investments.
The basic issue is that food, clothing, and technology are treated as consumer goods, if sometimes durable consumer goods. Housing is treated as an investment asset, and the economy currently runs on asset bubbles.
Housing won't become affordable until we shift the growth-engine of the economy back to sustainable, wage-driven consumption.
Buckminster Fuller was a pioneer of affordable and efficient housing engineering who began his career shortly after the Great Depression. In his 1980 book Grunch of Giants, he makes the prescient observations of the cyclical failure and subsequent bailouts of the US real estate and automotive industries and the high barriers to entry for innovators in this area:
>The first Beech-produced Fuller House was widely publicized. Soon 36,000 unsolicited orders, many with
checks attached, were received for the Fuller House. At this point it was discovered that no distributing industry
existed. The general building contractors had none of the complex tools for several-in-one-day deliveries of the
dwelling machines. None of the building codes would permit their erection. The severest blow of all was that
both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the
prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the
otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively
the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws. No banks were willing to provide mortgages
to cover the sale of the Fuller Houses.
>Fortune made the mistake of assuming that "the industry industry missed" had at last come of age. But
evolution's inauguration of the "livingry" industry had to wait until capitalism had graduated, from its forcenturies-held assumption that physical land property constituted capitalism itself, to the startling realization
that the strictly metaphysical, technological "know-how" had become the most profitable property as the key to
exploitation of the invisible industries of chemistry, metallurgy, electromagnetics, and atomics.
>Reorganizing all its strategies, capitalism has now unloaded its real estate property onto the people by refusing to rent and forcing people to buy their condo or coop homes. Evolution had to wait upon the government guaranteed, forty-year mortgage-financing of housing's costs to exceed humans' financial capability to acquire. Evolution had to wait until the U.S. mass-production of automobiles exclusively as a money-making business had been made obsolete by the technological felicity of manufacturing by other countries' producers, thus leaving U.S. productivity to reorient itself to the necessity of rehousing all humanity in mass-produced, aerospace-level-of-technology livingry.
>Evolution was clearly intent on postponing the inception of the livingry service industry until humanity had graduated from its pre-twentieth century condition as a planet of remote nations to an integrated global society, all of which waited upon completion of a world-around network of highways, airlines, and telephones, and automobiles and jumbo jet airplanes. All these evolutionary events (requisite to the livingry industry) have now taken place or are about to take place in the very near future. If the political systems do not eliminate humanity with their weapons, the half-century-gestating, world-around livingry service-industry will soon be born.
The reason (or at least one of them) is, that our money in the western countries has lost it's value much more, than we should believe. Costs for food and the like is kept low -- so we get the impression, that we get the same for the dollar as before. But in reality, the devaluation of the money is much higher, because of the masses of money that is pumped into the system since 2008 in the US and also in Europe.
The cost for food is kept low, because of different reasons, for example rationalization and also because worker-costs for low-cost work is not rising but falling. But, the discrepancy of our system, where a very small number of people have much much more money has to become manifest somewhere.
According to the FAQs, the pod's internal temperature matches that of its surroundings. So, unfortunately it will still be brutal in the winter, albeit better than exposed directly to the elements.
But more importantly, where do you put this thing? If you were living in NYC without an apartment, I can't imagine you could just plop this down in the middle of Central Park.
Do you mean that male humans don't get anything for free, or do you mean that as in people? Because in certain societies (ahem large swathes of Europe) there are social safety nets in place to prevent precisely this type of thing from happening. Lose your job? You get a percentage of your old salary for a fixed number of months to allow you to transition to a new job.
But i'm not quite sure what you are trying to imply.
[+] [-] johnkpush|10 years ago|reply
He used his remaining 2k to purchase a 1 year membership at Chelsea Piers sports club. It turned out to be the smartest way he could have used that money. Chelsea Piers is an enormous facility with 20 showers, locker room, huge lounge area with Wifi and couches. He hung out there for most of the day, worked out, learned php, took some freelance web development gigs, got enough experience and knowledge to eventually move on to a full time programming job. In a few months he saved enough money for an apartment in Queens.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sofaofthedamned|10 years ago|reply
They had somebody on the radio who worked with the homeless who was tasked to do it in her area. Her instructions were only to count those on public property - i.e, if they were in a shop doorway or a car park they didn't count.
Funnily enough the count showed a large decrease in the number of homeless, congratulations all round etc etc.
[+] [-] dazc|10 years ago|reply
And, someone 'who worked with the homeless' would be unlikely to spot the majority of people who were homeless.
It's not something you go around advertising unless you're in a certain outlying subset.
To my mind, in the UK at least, many of the 'people who work with the homeless' are often part of the problem.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|10 years ago|reply
There was a great story a while back about some guys who came to YC and were living in their car -- they thought that everybody just did it that way. They managed to save, get funded, and graduate YC. They all probably have nice places to live now because they made some choices earlier. Not my thing, and they probably wouldn't make those choices again, but at the time it all worked out for them.
People talk about self-driving cars as being the thing that destroys traditional car ownership, but I'm not so sure. If electricity is cheap enough to be almost free, and cars can take themselves from place-to-place without needing any attention, I imagine there would be a lot of folks -- myself included -- who would consider owning a "room that goes places" instead of a traditional home/apartment. Are those people homeless also? Nyah, the word just doesn't work everywhere we try to use it. Need some other term.
[+] [-] forgetsusername|10 years ago|reply
Outliers, likely in many ways. Young, talented people, wealthy enough to own a car and smart enough to get into and through YC. They probably had family and a home life to return to if they failed. I agree, that isn't "homeless". You can't point at such examples as the model for most people on the streets, though.
[+] [-] logicchains|10 years ago|reply
How about "homefree" for voluntary homelessness? Much as people who deliberately choose not to have children have adopted the term "childfree" to describe their lifestyle, as opposed to "childless".
[+] [-] darkr|10 years ago|reply
You've heard of a Motorhome or "Recreational Vehicle", right?
[+] [-] shas3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kurtz79|10 years ago|reply
Further reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/nyregion/despite-vow-mayor...
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|10 years ago|reply
With the last big real estate deal in NY, the problem will be rising.
The federal poverty line does not consider the greed of investment companies. It also does not help, to count the number of breads you can (theoretically) buy.
Lets face it: Human labor is losing it's value. The reason plainly is, that more and more interest has to be drawn for the "investors". Somebody has to pay the bill for the parties held in the financial districts and for the money, the governments squander on the banks.
In the high-payed tech sector, this effect is not so much felt currently, but this will change in the future, when the low-income sector is so much bleed-ed out, that the interest for the big investors has to come from elsewhere.
[+] [-] amykhar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gloves|10 years ago|reply
There is a perception that to be without a static home is a terrible, terrible thing, but really, I can imagine for someone who appears to have his life together in many other ways (and free from other issues that plight the homeless community such as addictions) - then it could possibly be quite a liberating lifestyle.
I can of course see the other side of the equation where it would also be a prison - having to lie about his home for embarrassment etc. But in this very specific example, he seems to have got on with it and made the most of the situation
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|10 years ago|reply
When a westerner has this experience in Asia it's called "backpacking" rather than "homelessness", and most folks will object strongly if I were to describe myself as homeless. Perhaps we should come up with a similar term to describe it when folks do it in the west and similarly compartmentalize their experiences.
[+] [-] SG-|10 years ago|reply
I've also gotten a gym membership for a 24 hour place so I can go shower every day.
I highly doubt he's 'ok' with the lifestyle, it's simply what's available right now to him. not having your own space really sucks.
sadly the building is being sold in a few weeks so I hope I'll have enough by then to get myself a place.
[+] [-] mettamage|10 years ago|reply
I could imagine myself being homeless just because I choose to do so. I could also imagine that I'd live in a home and feel imprisoned by obligation. Between those two cases, I'd prefer self-chosen homelessness.
[+] [-] jzwinck|10 years ago|reply
Not exactly. First, the poverty line is federal and does not move with the ebb and flow of NYC life. Second, a lot of homeless in NYC are that way by choice rather than by direct inability to get a room somewhere. Sometimes this is due to mental issues which are not caused by low income. Third, there are people who make money but spend it all, ending up paying taxes above the poverty line but actually having zero or negative savings. Plenty of people in NYC are in that category.
[+] [-] buro9|10 years ago|reply
I've been homeless, so perhaps you'll forgive me for being biased against thinking like that.
I would never class mental illness as a choice, or of poor decisions whilst someone is suffering mental illness as a choice.
It sounds to me a lot like victim blaming. That a person may "choose" to be homeless because they have mental illness... isn't that more like a lack of compassion by fellow citizens to help support those who are suffering from mental illness?
Would it be different if it were a physical illness? That man is homeless because he chose to be due to having a broken leg. That sounds ridiculous, and frankly that's how your statement sounds to me.
I "chose" to be homeless. Sure, my choice. I could've stayed in a violent and sexually abusive environment and living in poverty. But instead it was my "choice" to sleep on the streets to escape it.
I didn't even choose hostels - I voluntarily declined a bed to sleep in - because when you've come from a shared sleeping environment in which you were not safe and feared physical abuse nightly, then you may understand my reticence to enter a shared sleeping environment with strangers, some of whom as you pointed out may have mental illness.
Perhaps this is all just a mental construct to make you feel better about yourself. If you are able to imagine that these people took responsibility for themselves and this was a free choice, you are able to absolve yourself of any individual part of the responsibility to show compassion and empathy towards fellow humans.
If all we've got to offer people as a society, is a "choice" to sleep without shelter, without warmth, without safety... I'm not really seeing how anyone can say that people "choose" this.
Edit: Whilst this issue has attention: http://crackandcider.com/ I'd urge anyone doing secret santa's, or just feeling flush to go there, and buy things for homeless people. They're good people, taking no profit but covering costs, and just giving this stuff to people who need it.
[+] [-] venomsnake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway13337|10 years ago|reply
Various government intervention that collude together to make this happen - mortgage interest tax deduction, building ordinances for areas, housing bubble bailouts. That is, it's mostly artificial.
Innovation in this area seems prime, therefore. This could mean forcing the rules to bend, or by allowing ways to opt out of housing all together as the man described in this article does.
[+] [-] martingordon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
Housing won't become affordable until we shift the growth-engine of the economy back to sustainable, wage-driven consumption.
[+] [-] laotzu|10 years ago|reply
>The first Beech-produced Fuller House was widely publicized. Soon 36,000 unsolicited orders, many with checks attached, were received for the Fuller House. At this point it was discovered that no distributing industry existed. The general building contractors had none of the complex tools for several-in-one-day deliveries of the dwelling machines. None of the building codes would permit their erection. The severest blow of all was that both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws. No banks were willing to provide mortgages to cover the sale of the Fuller Houses.
>Fortune made the mistake of assuming that "the industry industry missed" had at last come of age. But evolution's inauguration of the "livingry" industry had to wait until capitalism had graduated, from its forcenturies-held assumption that physical land property constituted capitalism itself, to the startling realization that the strictly metaphysical, technological "know-how" had become the most profitable property as the key to exploitation of the invisible industries of chemistry, metallurgy, electromagnetics, and atomics.
>Reorganizing all its strategies, capitalism has now unloaded its real estate property onto the people by refusing to rent and forcing people to buy their condo or coop homes. Evolution had to wait upon the government guaranteed, forty-year mortgage-financing of housing's costs to exceed humans' financial capability to acquire. Evolution had to wait until the U.S. mass-production of automobiles exclusively as a money-making business had been made obsolete by the technological felicity of manufacturing by other countries' producers, thus leaving U.S. productivity to reorient itself to the necessity of rehousing all humanity in mass-produced, aerospace-level-of-technology livingry.
>Evolution was clearly intent on postponing the inception of the livingry service industry until humanity had graduated from its pre-twentieth century condition as a planet of remote nations to an integrated global society, all of which waited upon completion of a world-around network of highways, airlines, and telephones, and automobiles and jumbo jet airplanes. All these evolutionary events (requisite to the livingry industry) have now taken place or are about to take place in the very near future. If the political systems do not eliminate humanity with their weapons, the half-century-gestating, world-around livingry service-industry will soon be born.
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|10 years ago|reply
The cost for food is kept low, because of different reasons, for example rationalization and also because worker-costs for low-cost work is not rising but falling. But, the discrepancy of our system, where a very small number of people have much much more money has to become manifest somewhere.
[+] [-] jlebrech|10 years ago|reply
That's assuming I was doing IT work which required having a business address.
[+] [-] DarkTree|10 years ago|reply
But more importantly, where do you put this thing? If you were living in NYC without an apartment, I can't imagine you could just plop this down in the middle of Central Park.
[+] [-] amyjess|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cubancigar11|10 years ago|reply
Brave. Men don't get anything for free anyway.
[+] [-] toothbrush|10 years ago|reply
Do you mean that male humans don't get anything for free, or do you mean that as in people? Because in certain societies (ahem large swathes of Europe) there are social safety nets in place to prevent precisely this type of thing from happening. Lose your job? You get a percentage of your old salary for a fixed number of months to allow you to transition to a new job.
But i'm not quite sure what you are trying to imply.
[+] [-] lagadu|10 years ago|reply
What? Did I travel back to 1940 and nobody told me? What's wrong with caring for everyone in society, whether they be man or woman or anything else?
[+] [-] GPGPU|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 20150327ASG|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maratd|10 years ago|reply