One day in October 2019, I woke up with this idea for a big writing project. I have been an armchair futurist thinker since I was a kid. I've been trying to figure out what comes next, and where society is heading for many years. I'm just a geek on economic and future trends and stuff like that, I read big books and listen to content that would bore the crap out of most people. I had a whole bunch of ideas, based on theories I first read about in the 1990's, that the 2020's would see a major recession, maybe a great depression, and a whole lot of other change. These ideas were al kind of related, bouncing around my brain. I hadn't tried to organize them in any coherent way.
The big idea was to watch 20 or 30 trailers to dystopian future movies from the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, and see how the future those writers and directors predicted compared with that year, 2019. I realized I was living in the "future" of my high school self. In a weird coincidence, the sci-fi classic Blade Runner, from 1982, was set in Los Angeles in November of 2019. That tripped me out.
That idea turned into a 7 month project, and became a 20 chapter "book/blog thing" I titled:
Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1
I wrote and published this project as a blog, from November 2019 until the first week in June, 2020. So I started this 3-4 months before the pandemic his U.S. shores. It's had a little over 3,000 page views in 3 years. Not bad, considering it's big, theories most people have never heard of, and hard to read.
Today I wrote a quick Facebook post, linking a news piece of how Republican judges are begging the Supreme Court to shoot down the "Boise decision," which validates the civil rights of homeless people in western states (the 9th Circuit). The ruling allows homeless people, like me, to sleep outside legally, when the city doesn't have beds available for everyone.
That post that I didn't think much about got 10 or 12 comments in minutes, from across the spectrum. So I liked everyone's comment, thanking them for adding their 2 cents worth, even if I disagreed. Then I wrote a big response of my own, several bullet points that most people don't realize about homelessness. One major point is that the rise in homeless people is a nationwide issue, in big cities in red states and blue states, and it's not a Democrat or Republican fuck up, it's a bi-partisan shitstorm. The homeless issue is not just a San Francisco, L.A., Seattle thing. Pick a major city, red or blue state, and look it up with "homeless crisis" on YouTube. There's bums (like me) pretty much everywhere. Except Gary, Indiana, there's like 12,000 abandoned houses there.
In that initial Facebook post, I joked that I was "just waiting for the bus ride to the concentration camp," because that seems to be the solution many people on the far right favor to deal with homelessness. I also mentioned that homeless people were the first people in the Nazi concentration camps. I heard that from a Pacifica archives interview, on KPFK radio, in the early 2000's. Back in the 1960's, I believe, someone was interviewing a woman who was 8 or 9 years old when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, and she lived in Berlin. She said the first time she realized something was really wrong was when her family drove around Berlin one day, and all the homeless people had disappeared. Just GONE. And the adults wouldn't say a word about it. As a young girl, she knew something was wrong. It was months, maybe a year or two, before rumors of intellectuals, dissidents, Jews, Gypsies, and others were being taken to camps. But the sudden disappearance of all the homeless people was the first clue she had to how bad things were beginning to get.
As mentioned in this You Tube short video, there were badges on the German concentration camp uniforms, designating what group a prisoner belonged to. A downward pointing black triangle was for lesbians, derelicts (aka homeless people), and some similar groups. There were several other badges, the most well known being the gold Jewish star for Jews.
I've been trying to simply make a living, as a writer/artist, in a 21st century way, for over a decade now. I've spent over 15 years in and out of homelessness, in the past 24 years. I was working for 35 hours or more (up to 80+) a week, for 7 or 8 of my homeless years. If there was a job I could get, and actually do, that paid enough to rent a room or apartment, I would have done it a long time ago.
I lived in my taxi, working 70-80+ hours a week, for 5 1/2 years (1999-2007) and wound up unable to make money any more. The taxi cost $550-$600 a week to lease, and I just couldn't make enough anymore, as the industry declined due to new technology. I went from working 80 hours one week to living on the streets the next week, in November of 2007. A year later, I went back East, to North Carolina, where my family ended up living, and could not get hired for any job, except driving a taxi for a year, for ten years. I couldn't get a job as a gas station clerk, nothing, back there. I started selling my Sharpie art in late 2015 because I couldn't find a "real" job. I wasn't trying to become a famous artist, I was trying to make any money I could with the one thing I could do back there, and sell online. I've been a working, if usually homeless, artist for 7 1/2 years now. I've been able to sell art, and scrape by, but not ratchet it up to a livable income.
My point here is that the huge homeless crisis across the U.S. today is part of a much bigger transition, a change in society from the fading Industrial Age to the emerging, but not fully developed, Information Age. There's a huge demographic issue, along with all the other issues, creating a huge number of people, like myself, who have "fallen through the cracks" of working life. This began with the closing of thousands of factories in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and continues today.
The homeless housing programs don't put people back to work, they put people on taxpayer-paid-for programs that house them for a while. Most people bounce out of the programs within a few months or a couple of years. If they begin to make a living, they lose housing, medical, and everything else. So they don't work, just do side hustles for cash.
Your tax dollars (an now inflation) pay for these people's rent, food, all medical expenses, and even their furniture, big screen TV, and Netflix bills. You are already paying for around an estimated 6 to 10 million people, who are living off of government checks. The housing programs are not set up to get homeless people working, paying their own rent, and paying taxes again. That's reality.
Go to any housing person and ask them, "Show me ten former homeless people who are making $40K or more a year, and paying their own rent." They can't do it. Only a hand full of people, out of every thousand, go back to full time work, and that's usually with help form family or friends. That's the system, homelessness IS AN INDUSTRY.* It pays businesses and non-profit organizations, who pay employees, buy supplies, and do projects.** Once those businesses and non-profits get going, they want to stay in business. To stay in business, they need a continuous supply of bums. Homeless people are a commodity in an industry now, and we all know it, but normal working people, like yourselves, generally don't.
This knowledge, and a whole bunch of other things I've learned about homelessness, is part of a book I don't want to write. One, I'm sick of the issue. Two, whatever I wrote would be used against other homeless people in the future. Most people have no idea what's going on, or why homeless people don't get jobs, and why the number of homeless people keeps going up.
L.A., as just recently reported, has 9% more people than it did a year ago (L.A. Times article). The problem isn't going away soon, even if the extreme right wingers had us all shipped to American concentration camps. There'd be 30,000 more bums on the streets in a year or two, because there are many different forces leading people to become homeless. The coming recession will make the problem worse, for a while, anyhow.
We have something like 12 million vacant homes and condos in the U.S., plus thousands of commercial buildings, empty. We COULD house everyone in the U.S.. We, as a nation, currently choose not to. That's the reality. There's a guy living in a tent, on the sidewalk, in front of a vacant storefront, a mile from where I'm sitting right now. That store has been vacant for about a year. That's the dichotomy of the problem right now. It's not going to change anytime soon.
I think my big "book/blog thing," Dystopia, linked above, explains the Big Picture better than anything else I've seen. It's based on three big theories of human society that most people haven't heard of. If you're interested in that, check it out.
One last thought. The Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness rolled out in 2002. It was adapted in many cities in the 2-4 years after that. The overall homeless population increased dramatically, instead. Perhaps that was really the 10 year plan to MONETIZE homelessness. Or perhaps it just wasn't a great plan. I'm not sure.
Meanwhile, I'll keep writing, drawing my Sharpie pictures, and trying to create my own job, and rent a place some day.
*OK, this former sheriff was very controversial, and I'm not of fan of him, in general. But on this issue, he's right.
** The tiny homes in L.A. have cost an average of $42,000 per bed, PLUS $55 a night, per bed, for service fees. L.A. could house the homeless in Extended Stay Americas for less money. For REAL.
As of the summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack, a platform designed for writers. Check it out:
Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack
