The scale of this issue is so incredibly large that it's kind of hard to understand unless you yourself have recently had to pack all your shit up and find a safe place to park for the night (assuming in this case you've got a car, which many do not).
I applaud your efforts to create more jobs, which WILL BE HELPFUL, but it's kind of akin to offering bandaids in the WW1 trenches. Useful! But not the solution.
The concept of being homeless didn’t really hit me until after I was homeless. I was sleeping on the floor of someone I just met, and at one point the room got a bit too small for the two of us and he kicked me out. I remember thinking to myself “where am I going to put my stuff tonight?” I could find a place to sleep, but I couldn’t necessarily find a place to sleep & not lose my stuff. I had a laptop that was my lifeline to searching for work, and without that I would have been royally jacked.
Some of the associated problems are hard to deal with. Mentally you end up in a spin, spending all your mental energy on making money go far enough.
I had very unstable self-employed IT income. No ability to get a job because I'd dropped out of University (because of lack of money). As much as I was never at risk of sleeping rough, it was still a humbling experience.
I hadn't really made bad choices*. In hindsight there were many things that I could have done better, swallowing my pride and telling people being at least one. But hindsight is 20/20 and has the benefit of years of reflection.
The financial problems took years to resolve even when the income became more stable. It also became a puzzle. In order to get a house you have to have a bond, even finding a share house they want stable income (to be clear I wasn't making nothing it was just sporadic).
Not being aware of even where to ask for help is also problematic (There are websites now that help with this a little).
There are many reasons that people end up homeless, and to varying degrees. Society tends to lump them all together.
Drugs and mental illness may be issues that cause homelessness, but so are unstable finances and domestic violence.
Now, it will absolutely be COVID19 related, but that won't change the negative experience.
In the meantime, I will continue to offer the spoonful of assistance I'm capable of offering while much of HN seems to pass the popcorn and watch the world burning like it's entertainment.
Well done for doing something, DoreenMichele.
As I said repeatedly in my post this is a good idea and I applaud her efforts. My point was (I'm sorry that this isn't clear) that the required changes need to be at a much larger scale than individuals creating jobs (unless it's organized at a... much larger scale).
While I am absolutely delighted to watch people do what they can, and encourage it wholeheartedly, I'm not all-in on the whole "job creators" idea as a panacea. Infact, if a person chooses to do ONLY the "job creation" thing and declines trying to address systemic issues, I'd also in some cases view them as eating popcorn while they watch the world burn with the added activity of patting themselves on the back.
If you were offended by my post, I apologize.
> I blog about a variety of topics, including things like homelessness and earning money from the street, something I have firsthand experience with.
Employer provided healthcare is the dumbest idea ever, it should be outlawed. I don’t care what it’s replaced with just as long as it’s gone.
From 1862 to 1934, over 1.6 million homesteads were created through the Federal Government. For a filing fee of $18 (~$200--$500 in 2020), and five years sweat equity, a 21 year old male could claim 5-640 acres by building on and working it. Homesteading continued as a vastly reduced practice, though remaining an option, until 1976 in the lower 48 and Alaska until 1986. Open range provided for additional livilihood based on unowned acreage for ranchers, and mining stakes were prospected throughout the West. But by 1890, the notion that there was unsettled land for the taking had passed; the frontier was closed.
Not that this access was available to all; blacks, Native Americans (this was originally their land), Mexicans, Chinese, Catholics, and other non-Anglo groups were routinely denied rights to land.
Prior to 1860, unorganised squatting was common. A Free Soil movement, based in part of free or cheap land grants to white farmers also emerged.
Too at the time, wage labour was relatively uncommon -- many households were effectively their own businesses, most farmsteads, others practicing trades or professions. The rise of factories, railroads, steel mills, and coal mines gradually shifted this balance. But exposure to the money economy was often lower than now. Less upside perhaps, but also less systemic risk for most households.
Life expectencies were far lower than today: 49.3 years in 1901, 60.2 in 1934, 78.8 today. Pensions tended to be private, often failing, or support offered through multigenerational households (an idea whose time may be returning). Those living to old age often found themselves with no means of subsistence. Social Security had a solid basis in real lived pain.
There were frequent economic crises and panics.
You may have heard of the Joads. There's a truth behind that fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
A lot of those people not working are lower class. A lot of professional jobs just shifted to work from home.
We need that one third of Americans working. They need opportunity. They aren't getting it.
Yes, there are some jobs that we do need done and are safe to do, but the labor bubble probably isn't big enough to accommodate all of those currently suffering.
If I hadn't tried to establish an earned income, suicide would have been my only way out of my predicament. No one was going to rescue me.
With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone. The only way to fix this mess is to find ways to get people working again. There is no other real solution.
I get really tired of hearing pie in the sky talk of how people in lousy circumstances "shouldn't have to" do x, y or z. In practice, it winds up being a means to trap them there and give them no way out.
Other countries seem to manage it. Bigger income taxes and use the money to help those who are out of work
I know it may seem like your actions are being criticised, I really don't think that's the case, we're all grateful for the efforts that you're making. But as someone else pointed out, you're walking through the trenches distributing band-aids. At the same time we need to ask ourselves why there are so many people in the trenches in the first place, whilst others are living in mansions 200 miles behind the front lines.
Don't tax the job creators! Those billionaires earned every penny and didn't exploit anyone! We need to cut Amazon's taxes or they might not build another distribution center here that pays less than a living wage!
The current course America has now is to pretend things are normal during an ongoing disaster. It hasn’t been working. People working low wage jobs during this just because they’re struggling to pay rent are quite miserable—more so than before.
The problem is systemic. We are getting really close to the economic events that have happened during the Weimar Republic. We are going to see a huge increase in radicalization and instability if the article is correct. It won't end in a world war but it could get very violent.
People will start squatting in vacant buildings together. Groups that live together will create their own "pet" system of governance that will appear to solve these problems and then there will be rivalrous behavior among them like gangs fighting each other.
The best thing you can do is keep them busy with a job.
I think a lot of the buildings and trails at the National Parks used the WPA (or similar) labor. People 90 years later are still benefiting.
Doing what, and how would you train them at scale?
> We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
This is true, and is primarily the market’s fault. Developers focused on building higher margin luxury development and private equity started acquiring affordable private multi family en masse, renovating it and jacking up the prices.
> We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
Again, this is a battle of competing interests. Those that control zoning and development aren’t as concerned about making cities walkable as those who actually live in them. Fewer and fewer people own the real estate they live in. You make it sound like laziness and that we “need to get our heads out of the sand.”
Unfortunately, the real estate market isn’t that simple, and the single largest influence in making waves in real estate is truckloads of money, plain and simple.
You can't do that for millions of people.
If "world peace" was mentioned too, I would have thought this was a Miss World winner's acceptance speech. "We need to..." sure we do, but since these are worldwide problems, maybe it isn't so easy as dropping a few blog links in a thread?
The world has lifted a lot of people from poverty but then new problems come up as standards increase.
It also forced a certain amount of pragmatism; useless ideologues whose plans failed could get replaced rather than promoted, and at the middle ranks there was even the possibility of them getting themselves killed.
America in the present day is consumed with imaginary internal enemies, which is why it's deploying troops on the streets.
From the Hacker News Guidelines:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
This is part of why I blog and run r/GigWorks and r/ClothingStartups: I figured out how to make money from the street while very ill.
This is solvable. We just aren't working on the right things.
We need to get people working again in a way that doesn't spread the virus. We need to work on resolving our housing supply issues. We've torn down a million SROs and not replaced them. We've largely zoned Missing Middle housing out of existence.
We collectively know how to create affordable market rate housing in walkable neighborhoods. We just basically choose not to in the US.
And now it's A Real Crisis, not "just a few losers with personal problems". We need to get our head out the sand and stop pretending we are too stupid to fix this, good god. We aren't too stupid. That's not the issue.