NSFW!- of course... it's the late great, George Carlin. If you remember him, you know he's really smart, really funny, and cusses like a drunk sailor. He figured out the answer to homelessness about 30 years ago, let homeless people camp on golf courses.
My thoughts on golf mirror Carlin's pretty closely. I did, though, spend two summers after high school managing a small amusement park, with a miniature golf course, in Boise, Idaho. By the end of the second summer, another worker and I both had tied for the course record, 31 strokes for 18 holes. You've never heard Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicolas, or Tiger brag about a score like, because they've never done it. So if you think you're a great golfer, and want to challenge me to a game of miniature golf, hit me up.
When you get past the provocative title to get your attention, the point of this post is to say this: if your city is going to build a homeless shelter, build one geared to the realities of the 21st Century homelessness issues, not one based on a model from 80 years ago.
Before I get into this post, let me share four facts:
America's "Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness" began in 2002. There are now far more homeless people than there were in 2002. The plan was a failure. What happened?
There are more spare bedrooms and empty buildings in the United States than there are homeless people. It's not that we can't house nearly all the homeless people in the U.S., we, as a society, simply choose not to.
Homeless people, at all the various levels of homelessness, are nearly all U.S. citizens, or residents, and have all the rights that everyone else has. You may not like that, but that's the nature of our democratic republic, everyone has certain inalienable rights that cannot be taken away. Period.
One of the biggest misconceptions about homelessness is that people become homeless primarily because of drinking or drug addiction issues. For some that's the case, but the real reason for most homelessness is a lack of a strong family or social network to help the person work through a tough situation.
I'm currently homeless, and working as an artist, blogger, and social media content creator to create my own job (aka small business), make a reasonable living, and get a decent place to live again, as soon as possible. I don't drink. I don't do drugs, legal or illegal. I'm a smart guy, I work hard, yet I've still struggled with homelessness for a variety of reasons. I was working 80 to 100 hours a week as a taxi driver in 2007 when I got to a point where I couldn't make enough money to rent the taxi anymore due to industry changes. I became fully homeless the next day. I've struggled with homelessness for nearly two decades.
My weird personal story aside, in a conversation at McDonald's this morning, I was turned on to this local newspaper article, by journalist Hillary Davis. The man who mentioned the article said they were putting a sprinkler system in at the Newport Transportation Center, a large OCTA bus stop hub, a couple of blocks from Fashion Island Mall, in Newport Beach. The city or county (not sure which) plans to put in a sprinkler system to force out the homeless people who have put up tents and camped there, having moved there after being forced out of other places around O.C..
I know this, because I am one of those homeless people. I slept there last night. I started sleeping there a little over a month ago, when I got back to Orange County after years back East, when there were about ten tents at the Newport Transpo Center. I found a better place to sleep about a week ago, under an overhanging roof of a long abandoned building that nobody cared about. I think the building was an REO, but someone apparently bought that building, suddenly, and just began upgrading it. So I moved back the NTC last night. At this point, all of you reading this, who don't know me personally, have a series of ideas about me. Most, if not all, of your assumptions about me, are wrong. These misconceptions about homelessness are one of many issues that make the problem worse. But that's not the point of this blog post.
The point of this blog post is to tell you, the fine, upstanding residents of Newport Beach (and neighboring cities), that building a homeless shelter will not solve the city's homeless issue. In all likelihood, it will almost certainly increase the number of homeless people in the city over the mid and long term. This brings us to another little known fact about homeless shelters:
When your city builds a homeless shelter, the taxpaying residents, in a very literal way, are adopting some of the homeless people who go to the shelter. You tax dollars will support many of the people who go to the shelter, for the rest of their lives.
Wait? What? Here's the dynamics. I learned this firsthand, after to moving from Orange County to central North Carolina right when The Great Recession hit. Unable to find work while living in a small town with my parents, I went to the much larger, nearby city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I stayed at a homeless shelter, and began to look for work there. What I found was that homeless shelters don't help homeless people find work, get back on track, and become functional working people again. What homeless shelters actually do is to pressure homeless people into one of two tracks, addiction or mental health issues. The homeless person gets a case worker, and they begin to jump through a series of hoops to get free housing, Medicare and/or Medicaid, and, most importantly, to get on Social Security Disability. The homeless shelters in NC actually worked against people who were trying to simply get a decent job, and get back on track after some kind of personal tragedy.
This is the quiet truth. Homeless shelters are a 100+ year old concept, going back to a time when there were lots of jobs, very few homeless people, and most of the homeless were lazy drunks or just deadbeats. We live in a much, much different world now, where tens of millions of good paying jobs have been lost to new technology, outsourcing, and changes in the dominant industries. Today's homeless problem is powered by long term demographics major business disruption, workplace changes, and often by catastrophic medical costs, as well as more well known issues like addiction to alcohol or drugs. Homeless shelters are a really old idea, and they push people toward absolute reliance on social programs for the rest of those people's lives.
By building a homeless shelter in Newport Beach (or Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, or wherever), you're actually going to attract MORE homeless people, never put most of them back to work, and wind up paying for their rent, food, and medical costs, indefinitely. Hey, you Newport Beach residents re loaded financially, we all know that. But I doubt that's where you really want to spend your tax and philanthropy dollars.
I've found no solid numbers on how many people are on Social Security Disability nationally, but it seems to be AT LEAST 12 to 15 million people, most getting $700 to $1,200 a month, or more, per month. You're paying, through your tax dollars, for those people to sit in cheap apartments, watch a big screen TV they didn't pay for, watch Game of Thrones again, and play video games. That's the system for the homeless we now have in America. It's broken, and few are even thinking about trying to fix it.
In this 2016 news segment, think tank thinker, researcher, and author ,Nicloas Eberstadt, explains about the group of 7 million plus men (at that time), in their prime working years, that aren't working, or looking for work. At the very end of this segment, he mentions the "Disability lifestyle," I'm speaking of. I spent over a year total, 3 or 4 months at a time, over about three years, living with a couple hundred of these men in shelters in Winston-Salem. The vast majority of them had worked most of their lives in the various textile mills and furniture building factories in that area. When the factories shut down en mass in the 1980's and 1990's, these men couldn't find decent jobs. Felonies are another huge issue, as well, as Mr. Eberstadt mentions, that hamper finding good jobs.
Now virtually all of those men "get a check," as they say. That means they're living off of S.S. Disability, a military pension, and/or other forms of government assistance. Homelessness, and homeless shelters in particular, have become a sort of railroad to lifelong government assistance. They document their actual medical issues, and most cases fake serious mental issues, go through a long approval process (about three years now), and scam Social Security Disability. Once approved, these people get a check for life, though they're re-checked every five years or so.
Having spent a lot of time living with hundreds of these men in shelters , I think AT LEAST HALF of the people on Disability have scammed the system, and are living off YOUR tax dollars, indefinitely. I truly believe, having spent ten years in North Carolina and Virginia, that West Virginia and Kentucky in particular, the Southern States to a huge extent, and now probably a lot of the Midwestern states economies, rely heavily on Social Security Disability to survive.
By building a traditional homeless shelters here in Newport Beach, and surrounding cities, you will just grow the non-working population in this area, like it has grown in much of the U.S. already. By creating a hub for homeless services, you will actually be attracting more homeless people to your city. The shelter will house SOME OF THOSE PEOPLE at any given time, but others will be camped out in the general vicinity, living in cars or encampments.
You may have noticed that the areas I mentioned as having huge numbers of people living on Disability, are also the states where opiate addiction is a much larger problem. The "Disability lifestyle" is a key part of the opiate problem in this country, which is another huge part of this issue.
There's another way I saw in NC that people living this "Disability lifestyle" make money. They are incredibly litigious, and the worst of them are constantly looking for chances to sue someone with money (that'd be you, Newport Beach city, businesses, and residents), for harassment, falls, "accidents", and the like. So by building a traditional homeless shelter, you will attract more homeless people to Newport Beach, without a doubt, attract more homeless people, and the number of lawsuits, frivolous and legitimate, against the city (for accidents and harassment by police, etc.), will undoubtedly increase, as time goes on.
So what's the answer? How do you deal with homelessness in this, or any other, city?
In all likelihood, you'll do exactly what other cities do, build a typical shelter, actually increase the local homeless population, and government entitlements will continue to grow exponentially, and the local cities will have bigger opiate crises to deal with and more lame lawsuits to fight, costing many, many more millions of dollars in coming years. In other words, I'm sure Newport Beach and surrounding cities will completely ignore me, think short term, and completely ignore the ideas I've presented above.
The sarcastic, punk rock side of me would love to see homeless people camp on local golf courses, like George Carlin mentions above. That would be funny for to lot of struggling, working class people, and make for good news stories. But, in the long run, that's not a viable solution either.
What would a solution to homelessness look like?
What homeless people need, REALLY NEED, is a stable place to live for a while, and to build a solid income, somehow.
They need a way to begin earning a legitimate income that will eventually pay for rent, food, and a"normal" life. That's the long term solution. The vast majority of homeless people are actually homeless for a period of a couple of weeks to a couple of months. They hide in the shadows, they live in their car, or a friends spare room, or a weekly motel, until the new job comes through, or whatever, and then get back to normal lives.
The homeless people you see, the ones that bug you, (like me), are the chronically homeless. Quite a few of them, like me, want to work, but the struggle to simply survive day to day makes the process of beginning to make a living again much harder. This makes the transition to a stable life take much longer. But many will eventually get back on track. These people are the low hanging fruit and, and could be dramatically helped by some new form of viable homeless help. A small subset of the homeless, often those with serious medical issues, are much harder to get back to a "normal life," and will likely wind up on Disability.
What do homeless people actually need in today's world? These things:
-a stable, safe, place to sleep, out of the weather.
-clean restrooms
-a legitimate way to make some money day to day
-food, or money to buy food
-a SAFE place to store personal belongings
-a SAFE place to store and fix food (which would make EBT (food stamp money) go MUCH farther
-cell phone to communicate, look for work, etc.
-access to computers, and/or an older refurbished laptop, and wifi
-a place to plug in their cell phone (and laptop if they have one) and charge it
-free wifi to search for work, connect with other people, and learn online, on their phones, borrowed computers, or laptops
-a physical mailing address
-help getting an I.D./driver's license if that's an issue
-a place to do laundry
-library card
-training on computers, networking, social media/online networking, and how to find work today
-a bus pass to shop, run errands, got to medical/legal appointments, look for work
-transportation to medical appointments
-low cost, SAFE housing, once they do start earning an viable income (where credit score is not a major issue)
-a place for groups to have meetings (AA, NA, mental health, veterans support groups, etc.)
-a way to connect with people outside the homeless world, to network to find jobs, learn skills, etc. Homeless people aren't hiring other homeless people for work
-training in today's entrepreneurial platforms to help earn money, like eBay, Craigslist, LetGo, etc. These can provide much needed extra, LEGITIMATE, income to people getting back to a normal life.
I don't have the answer to homelessness, but a Homeless Resource Center, with the items listed above, and perhaps an area where people can camp safely (and out of public view), is a good start to a 21st Century answer to a new kind, and level, of homeless people. This would help large numbers of people make the transition back to productive lives again.
Or you can just keep paying more and more in taxes, and support an ever increasing number of people who will never work again... It's your choice.
This blog post, as long as it is, just scratches the surface of what is needed to make a meaningful effort, and true change, to get people off the streets and back into viable working lives. Obviously, as a fairly intelligent guy who's had way too much experience being homeless, I have a lot of ideas on this subject. If someone in a position to help this situation, media, government, business, or social organization, wants to contact me, you can email me at: stevenemig13@gmail.com, or message me on Twitter @steveemig43 . I'll be sharing this on Twitter, and be glad to answer comments there.
I firmly believe that Newport Beach will completely blow this opportunity, and follow the crowd of other cities feeding the ENTITLEMENT MONSTER. But I'm putting this post out hoping someone out there may be interested in actually taking on this issues in a viable way at some point. We'll see.
About the blog title... "A Modest Proposal" was a satirical social essay written by Jonathon Swift and published anonymously in 1729, explained here.
I just started a new blog for Marvin Davits, to promote Marvin's business, installing dinghy davits on yachts. Check it out.
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