The Gap- A homeless issue most people don't get

The Gap- My name for the space between a homeless person having $5 to buy lunch, and the $2,500+/-  per month of consistent income it takes to actually get to the next level, which is often a weekly motel room.  Crossing The Gap is one reason why there are so many more chronic homeless people, long term street people, today.  Myself included.  This idea has been in my head for years, so I finally did a quick sketch to help visualize it.  There's a HUGE difference between having $5 -$7 in your wallet to buy lunch, and the money needed to rent a room, any room, week after week, or month after month.  A low wage job usually won't come close to the initial money needed to work off the streets.  That's a homeless person with a shopping cart on the left, my sketchy sketch.  

I avoid writing about homelessness for the most part, partly because there are just too many aspects that average working people just don't get.  People aren't dumb, it's just that they just don't live in the homeless world day to day, and see the actual issues keeping so many people on the streets.  It would be like me understanding the issues an airline pilot has day to day.  I'm not in that world, so I don't understand the nuances.  

Right about now, you are most likely thinking "but that's what shelters are for, to get people off the streets, right"  No, homeless shelters, and most programs, funnel homeless people into two tracks, addiction or mental illness, and these two tracks have a bunch of programs to "help" homeless people.  They do help in some ways. The part most people don't get is that these programs help homeless people get into a structured environment, and those vary widely.  But the purpose of nearly all "homeless programs" is to process the person through a series of programs run by organizations, some non-profit, and some for profit, that get that person on every possible government assistance program.  Those government pay for for homeless shelters, motel rooms, "tiny homes," other temporary housing, and eventually "permanent housing." This can be Section 8 housing, or another program.  

During this process, there are addiction programs, mental health counseling programs, and medical programs.  Nearly all of these are paid for by your tax dollars, or sometimes by grants, to the organizations.  In and of itself, there's nothing wrong with that, if these were all efficiently run programs, and got all the homeless people possible working and paying taxes again, renting their own apartments at some point.  Shouldn't the point be to get homeless people paying taxes again, whenever possible, instead of living off of them?    

But that is not the point of homeless programs.  The point of most homeless programs is to get homeless people into a living situation where government funds, your tax dollars, pay for these people to NOT work... for the rest of their lives.  Yes, there are a lot of homeless people who will never work a normal job again for medical or other issues.  Bu there are also a huge percentage  of people who could work again, and our current programs actually pay them not to in most cases.  Social Security Disability is full of scammers, millions of them, it appears, who live in apartments, buy food, watch Netflix, and play video games all day, usually with plenty of drugs, if they choose.  All this is paid for, sometimes dramatically overpaid for, with your tax dollars.  

To get off the streets, and actually start working and making a decent living again, IS NOT the goal.  For someone who just wants to get back working again, and renting our own apartment, we need to cross The Gap.  To go from panhandling or recycling $5-$10 to buy lunch and bus fare, to earning around $2,500 a month, from the streets, to pay for renting a weekly motel room ($450-$550 a week), or a roommate room ($7000-$900 a month) buy any meds, do laundry, have transportation money, and day to day essential items.  If you get kicked off of Food Stamps for working and earning too much, then you need food money as well.  

If you go into housing programs, and find a decent paying work, you'll most likely lose your food stamps, Disability, G.R. SSI, or other payments before your earn enough to rent a room of some kind, and pay all normal expenses.  Plus you may lose your medical, and everyone on the streets has some kind medical issues, if only minor ones.  

In addition, homeless people in prorams are often treated like little kids, have overly strict rules, curfews, and other rules that make the temporary housing programs worse than living on the streets.  Yes, rules are needed, I get that.  So what I've seen happen, over and over, is people go into programs, and they just work the system for a couple of months, maybe a few months, until they get sick of the B.S.m the rules (can't smoke a cigarette inside or outside, can't have friends into their room, etc.).  Then they have a meltdown, or just go AWOL from the program, because they'd prefer their personal freedom on the streets to the life in the program.  Then they live the street life of their choice (drugs, alcohol, prositution, or just living alone and free, whatever), until the programs seem worth another chance.  That's usually when bad or cold wather hits.  Ask a paramedic how many ambulance calls they get right before a big storm or a cold spell.  Homeless people call ambulances just to try and get out of the cold all the time.  

In the meantime, when a new program gets going, their workers motivation is to stay employed, and the program's motivation is to keep that program going, so they need a continuing stream of new bums to sign-up.  I'm not saying these programs don't have value, they help some people leave the streets, and live on a govrnment check, sometimes permanently.  S.S. Disability IS Universal Basic Income already, in effect, if not in name, for some sick people, and a lot of lazy people, usually with addictions.  These programs, collectively, now run into the billions of dollars now in some metro areas, over a few years time.  

Both of these become feedback loops.  Homeless people, particularly lazy ones, and many addicts, are used to bouncing in and out of programs, living for months on the street in between.  On the flip side, many homeless programs (non-profit and profitable) have a neverending stream of their needed commodity, homless people.  These feedback loops have been growing for 20 years or so, and those people who earn their living working in these programs plan to KEEP making their living in them.  These cycles keep growing, so the visible street (and RV/van) homless populations keep growing, and the dollars flowing to programs keep growing as well.  

Just a reminder, the 10 Year plan to End Homelessness had its 20th anniversary in 2022, it began in 2002.  There were  A LOT LESS homeless people in 2002.  

Meanwhile, the people who are temporarily down and out, and just trying to find decent work again (a "normal" job, gig work, some other legit source of income) have to cross The Gap, from coming up with $5 to $25 a day to get by, to a stream of income of around $2,500 a month to rent a room (motel or roommates), then pay for food, transportation, laundry, new clothes, a storage unit, perhaps education/training, and basic everyday needs.  They have to do all of that, while doing what's needed to survive and get by in the streets, or some sketchy situation day after day.  It's damn near impossible.  

That's why most people just lay back and bounce in and out of programs.  Some wind up in Section 8 eventually, some just bounce between the streets and programs indefinitely.  This is also why we now have about three men who are unemployed and NOT looking for work, for every "officially" unemployed man that's counted in the unemployment data (See Men Without Work, Nicolas Eberstadt).  The numbers are lower for women, but there's a similar trend.  The homeless programs are one of many things pulling working age Americans out of the workforce, permanently.  Less workers, more strain on Social Security for retires, and government programs of all kinds.  

This is just ONE little aspect of the homelessness issue, which I've learned way too much about, and which I really don't want to spend time writing about.  But the general lack of understanding of the issues involved bug me.  I'm going to get my ass kicked, in some way ,for writing this post.  But it needed to be said somewhere.  

The Haro Bar Hop- the lesson I learned from my first how-to trick

Here's a Bob Haro demo in the U.K. from 1983, The Master, official inventor of freestyle, wowing the kids in the U.K. in the early days.  This was the year that the Haro Master, the first BMX bike built for "trick riding" came out.  I couldn't find a video of Bob actually doing the bar hop, but this clip is from 1983, the year I saw Bob's how-to in BMX Plus!.

As I've said many times in my blogs, I got into BMX in the summer of 1982, in Blue Valley trailer park, outside of Boise, Idaho.  It was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school, and there were about ten junior high and high school guys in the park.  Isolated from all the kids in town, we'd gather after dinner each night by the basketball court, at the end of the pond, to do something.  There were only four teenage girls in the park, and only one of those who didn't have a steady boyfriend.  With no girls to chase, us guys wound up playing basketball, football, whiffle ball, threw rocks at each other, or rode our BMX bikes, for a couple of hours after supper.  In early summer, we'd switch off on the evening activities, one day football, one day whiffle ball.  But as the summer of 1982 progressed, we spent more and more time out at our little jumps, pushing each other on our sketchy BMX bikes.  

By late summer, we started buying BMX magazines once in a while, which spurred us to ride harder.  At the end of October, we found the BMX track, and three guys raced one race, then we all piled into my dad's van the next weekend, and the whole crew raced the last BMX race of the season.  We were hooked on BMX big time... just as winter began to roll in.  Come spring time, we were amped to get riding again.  It was sometime that spring that I bought a copy of BMX Plus! that had a trick how-to from Bob Haro himself.  It was called the Haro bar hop.  The trick was amazingly simple, ride along, standing on the pedals, jump up, kick your feet through your hands, and land sitting on the crossbar, still rolling forward.  At the time, I was still the worst rider in the trailer park, and jonesing to learn a trick the other guys didn't know, hoping to move up to second of third worst rider.  "BMX freestyle" didn't have a name yet, it was still "trick riding."  

I checked down the hill, no one was out at the basketball court.  The coast was clear.  I took my bike, a red Sentinal Exploder GX (K-Mart special type bike from a store cheaper than K-Mart) and my copy of BMX Plus, determined to learn the trick before I showed the magazine to anyone else.  It took about 20 or 30 minutes, but I got the Haro bar hop down.  By the time another kid showed up, I was hopping over the bars, landing on the crossbar, and riding 10-20 feet like that.  Boom!  I was the kid with the new trick, upping my BMX game in the trailer park, which was my whole plan.  My perceived level of BMX suckage dramtically decreased.  Within 15 minutes, three other guys were learning the trick, rolling around the old, rough asphalt of the basketball court.  

It was that drive to out-do the other guys that pushed us all.  We were pretty broke, none of us were much good at anything, and we lived in a trailer park, where there was lots of negative reinforcement that we would always suck at pretty much everything.  We were HUNGRY, we wanted to prove people wrong, just in general.  We all wanted to be good at something.  BMX skills became our way to do that.  So we kept pushing each other.  That spring day was the first time I was the kid with the new trick, and I won't lie, it felt fucking good.  

As the months passed, I did Haro bar hops now and then.  I wound up learning one of my biggest BMX lessons from that simple trick.  One day I tried one, and my toe caught the handlebars, and I got squirrely and ate shit, getting jabbed in the side by the end of the bars in the fall.  It hurt like hell for a minute. and I cussed and stumbled around.  Since my side hurt, I didn't try the trick again that day.  A day or two later, I tried it again.  I was scared.  I couldn't jump my feet over the bars.  I either didn't jump right, or I caught my toe, and fell.  My mind created a mental block, and I never learned to do that trick again.  Ever.  I never landed another Haro bar hop, easy as that trick was.  

That bummed me out, but the lesson was clear, when I crashed on a trick from then on, if I could move at all, which I usually could, I got up immediately, and tried to land the trick again.  There were tricks I never landed, and a few, like boomerangs, that I learned, but gave up on, in that case because everyone did them, and the killed my wimpy abs.  But I didn't lose another trick after that while I was riding consistently.  If I fell, I got back up and tried, usually until I landed it at least one more time.  Later I also learned that visualization can help overcome phobias and mental blocks to many tricks.  

But it was from the simple Haro bar hop, the one trick I actually learned from a how-to by Bob Haro himself, taught me my first life lesson from BMX.  Get back up, keep trying, no matter what.  

Crazy as it sounds, that lesson is something I do every day, in my current sketchy life situation.  Things are rough right now, just in day to day life, but I get back up each morning, litterally of the ground, and work to do something creative every day.  Standing up each morning, is another example of that lesson, keep going, no matter what life throws at you.  Forty years after learning that simple lesson, I'm still applying it daily in completely different circumstances.  Whatever your level, whatever your era in BMX, we all learned more than just tricks by riding day after day for years.  That's a great part of the lifelong legacy of spending time in BMX freestyle, or in other action sports.  

Before BMX, I was a kid who daydreamed amazing ideas.  Man, I invented great shit in my head, or sketched out on paper.  I had wonderful answers to the world's problems, and dreamed up all kinds of stuff.  And then did nothing.  I was a dreamer who didn't act on my great ideas, for the most part.  When I did try something, if it didn't work, I'd be like, "Well I tried, it didn't work," and I'd give up.  We all know what Yoda said about trying.  BMX taught me persistence and perseverance.  Life keeps testing me, and all of us, on these, and many other, basic life lessons.  

These days my writing/blogging focus in more on what's happening now, in 2023.  But most of you reading this blog check my blog out because of my Old School freestyle BMX tales.  So I'm going to write a series of posts on the life lessons learned from BMX, to add to all the other BMX posts I've written.  Enjoy.  

BMX, action sports, and the 2023 recession...

Here's a really good look at where the bike industry is, as things slow down going into 2023.  Recession?  We're probably in one.  Maybe.  But this guy from Top to Bottom MTB channel does a really solid job of explaining the wild ride of the whole bike industry since the beginning of 2020, how it got to where it is today, and where things seems to be heading.  It's a 7 minute video, well worth checking out if you ride any bike on a regular basis.  

As a Generation X, middle-aged geezer now, I remember being part of the BMX/skate industry in early 1989.  I was working at Unreel Productions, the video arm of the Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear empire.  Yep, kids, "street wear" happened about 35 years ago.  Anyhow, I was basically a production assistant at a company that sponsored skateboarders, snowboarders, and BMXers.  I used my business card to get into the big bicycle industry trade show in Long Beach, in January of 1989.  At that time, BMX freestyle had peaked in its first big wave of popularity, BMX racing was peaking in its 2nd big wave, and skateboarding was peaking in its 3rd wave of popularity.  

As I walked around, I literally heard the same mantra over and over, in several booths, and in small talk between industry people.  "BMX is DEAD!  Mountain bikes are the new thing."  I was a hardcore, if not that great, BMX freestyler, riding every night, just for the fun of it, at that point.  I kept thinking, "What are all of you talking about?  BMX IS NOT DEAD!"  It wasn't dead to all the hardcore riders around the U.S., and some parts of the world.  But it was dead to the major bike companies, and to the corporate sponsors form outside the sport.  They declared BMX dead, and money drained away from the sport.  The fad was over as far as they were concerned.  Almost every BMX freestyle brand dropped their teams that summer.  Top pro riders were left without sponsors.  All of the hardcore riders, regardless of what level our riding was at, went, "What the fuck, dudes?"  

The bad news was that it was really hard to get paid to ride a freestyle bike, even for many top pros.  GT and Haro kept their teams going, and toured their guys all the time, to sell bikes where they could.  This is what causes the waves (roughly ten year cycles) in BMX and skateboarding.  The major bicycle corporations that ride fads pulled their money out, along with corporations that sponsor from outside the bike and skate industries.  They are about profit only, and they ride the "fads" like surfers ride waves.  When one wave is over, they're on to the next one.  In 1989-1990, that meant money flowing out of BMX and skateboarding, and into the new things, mountain bikes (BMX bikes for "adults") snowboarding, and inline skating.  

The good thing about these downturns in the waves, only the hardcore people are left, in the sport aspect, and in the indsutry.  Vert skating was still ruling skateboarding in 1989, but street skating had been slowly rising in popularity.  In the down years, the long economic recession of the early 1990's, World Industries rose up, sponsoring street skaters only.  Many skater-owned companies popped up, like New Deal, Black Label, Blind, Birdhouse, Plan B, 101, and others.  In the BMX world, S&M Bikes was just really getting going as the downturn hit.  Soon after came Standard, Hoffman, Eastern, FBM, Kink, and other rider-owned companies.  In both BMX and skateboarding, the riders and skaters took over their industries.  

Riding and progression didn't slow down, it sped up.  Contests became local events, the big glam events ended.  The main sponsors of BMX and skateboarding in the early 1990's were ramen (23 cents a pack), Del Taco (49 cent tacos), Taco Bell (59 cent tacos), and in the Huntington Beach area, What-a-Lotta Pizza, with $4 cheese pizzas and $5 pepperoni pizzas.  We ate so many of those pizzas at the P.O.W. House, that when no one ordered a pizza for three days, the manager of the local What-a-Lotta Pizza called us up to see if we were alright.  Seriously, that actually happened.  We promptly ordered 4 or 5 pizzas.

If you read my blog on any regular basis, you know I'm an amateur futurist, I write posts about economics, recessions, and shit like that.  (Thank you to the 7 people who read each of those posts).  I think we are now going into a Big World recession, and it will last a while.  A lot of action sports companies will downsize, some good riders and skaters will lose sponsorships, some will get smaller deals, and some industry people will be laid off.  This is already happening in the high tech world.  

But these sports are like a fungus, they never really go away.  They go underground.  Events like Steve Crandall's DIY comps, and Trey Jones' Swampfest will probably be the norm for two or three years.  All the sports will continue to evolve, and a lot of the idiots will wash out of these sports (sorry, not me, I keep blogging from way outside the industry).  The people who really love action sports, athletes and industry people, will stick around.  A lot of crazy ideas will be tried, and really cool new shit will emerge on multiple fronts.  But you might have to get a day job.  Or flip stuff on eBay to  help survive.  When you run out of food, ask one of us geezers who survived the 90's, we all have at least 7 different recipes for ramen meals, most that can be made for under a $1 each.  

In a surfing metaphor, the big set of waves has passed, in the business world.  Now we wait, and try new ideas using very little money.  In a year or two, things pick up some, in 3-4 years, big money will probably flow back in, much more than before.  That's a rough timeline, The Fed is pumping and dumping the economy these days, and they set the time schedule.  Generally, every wave of these sports gets bigger than the last.  Except inline skating, fruitbooting just kind of fizzled. 

This is a BIG recession in the Big World, like nearly all of the world, the big shots who run political parts of the world, and the financial world, are battling it out, and all of us regular people get sloshed around in the meantime.  The world will look quite a bit different in 5 years.  Those of you who try out new ideas, and build some good new shit, will be rewarded down the road, most likely.  All of these sports are much, MUCH larger than they were in the 1990's, so BMX, skateboarding, and other action sports can't totally die, like they nearly did back then.  But things are slowing down.  This happens about once a decade.  Now is when it gets fun.  Learn to live cheap, and think about where you would like to see things at in 5 years.  Then do some DIYing and make something cool happen.  Ride on!

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Trend analyst Gerald Celente says, "The game is rigged"- Is he right?

Here's one of the best future forecasters out there, whose work I've never read.  My mistake, I only learned of him recently.  This is a crazy interview with Daniella Cambone, where he goes into economic trends, World War III, the future of democracy, the recession, crypto, politics, crypto, gold, and much more.  If any of these things interest you, watch this 42 minute video.  

I have a new blog called Adaptive Reuse SoCal, about finding new uses for old, unused, and abandoned buildings, as well as the economy, and commerical real estate in general.  Check it out!

Adaptive Reuse SoCal

Martin Aparijo now... he just keeps getting smoother

One of the original flatland innovators of the 1980's, long time GT pro, Martin Aparijo, is still riding a lot, and he just keeps getting smoother.  Here are a three of his recent videos, all short sequences, of him in the last month or so, from Martin's YouTube channel.  Above he does a silky smooth backwards wheelie variation.  

Here are some more short clips:

Super controlled forwards peg wheelie

Pinky Squeak to backwards elbow glide

The story of Martin's first backflip

And the link to Martin's YouTube channel main page

Martin Aparijo Old School BMX Pro

If you read have read my blogs on any kind of regular basis, you know my BMX posts are usually my  personal stories, sometimes my own little adventures riding, but often something I witnessed, usually involving a top rider or event.  Basically, I write BMX memoir tales, mostly.  It makes sense to add a little story here.  

Thanks to my zine, and meeting FREESTYLIN' magazine editor, Andy Jenkins, at a contest, I got my first chance to do a freelance article for FREESTYLIN' in the spring of 1986.  Andy asked me to write the article for the Tulsa, Oklahoma AFA Masters contest, which I was going to anyway to compete in.  In the magazine world then, freelance writers would pay our way to an event, write the article afterwards, and then get a check for the work when the magazine issue was published, which was usually about three months later.  I was working at Pizza Hut when I got the gig, making about $450 a month.  I flew solo to Tulsa on a wing and a prayer, with barely enough money to scrape through the weekend.  I didn't didn't have hotel reservations, I didn't even know where the contest was being held.  It was the first time I had ever flown to a contest, and the first time I had ever flown solo anywhere.  In other words, I was an idiot at traveling.  

I headed out of San Jose airport, and like every flight west of the Mississippi seems to do, my my plane flew over the rand Canyon, and then had a layover at Dallas/Fort Worth.  My dad had flown through DFW, and told me to find my next gate while on the first flight, since it could be a long walk, even a run, if I had to go from end to end of the airport.  I got my bearings with the airport map in the online magazine, and made it to the gate of my second flight, and waited there.  I didn't see any other BMX riders, but it was a huge airport, so I didn't really expect to.  

Then, about fifteen minutes before the plane was ready to load, I saw Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and some blond guy walk up, across the aisle.  I knew Eddie and Martin from all the magazine photos I'd seen of them.  At the time, I was still incredibly shy, and hated to go up and introduce myself to people.  I was like a Rainman level of shy then, or pretty close.  But it was also my first major trip to an AFA contest, and I needed to meet as many top pros and amateurs as I could, to get info for my article.  I got past the shyness, and walked over and introduced myself.  

Martin and Eddie were totally cool, and they introduced me to the other guy, a kid named Josh White.  Josh White had just done the photo shoot and interview for FREESTYLIN' that would blow him up as one of the top new vert riders, but the magazine wouldn't be out for a couple of months.  So he was still unknown to most freestylers.  I hung out and talked to them until the last boarding call, when I was getting really nervous.  But we all walked to the ramp, and made the plane.  That was the day I met Martin Aparijo, late March or early April of 1986.  

I wound up meeting two other up-and-coming vert riders at that contest.  I met an East coast kid named Joe Johnson at the Tulsa airport.  There was another kid, a younger one, who was doing some crazy variations, as well, but I didn't get is name at the contest.  As fate would have it, that kid got his first editorial photo in my first freelance article.  That article, a review of my zine, and most amazing, the Josh White interview, all appeared in the July 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN'.  The kid who got his first photo was none other than Oklahoma local, Mat Hoffman.  

Starting with meeting Martin, Eddie, and Josh, that was the coolest weekend of my life up until that point.  Joe Johnson introduced me to the Haro guys, and I crashed in one of their rooms for the weekend.  I seriously felt like I had won some contest.  The GT guys were at a different motel, but many of the top riders were at the trusty old Holiday Inn, where I stayed.  It was a crazy weekend.

Right about the time that Tulsa article came out, I got flown down to Wizard Publications, to interview for a job there, and getting hired changed the course of my life.  Part of my new job was driving Windy Osborn, the photographer, to photo shoots.  One of the first bike tests we did was for a GT freestyle bike.  We did a photo shoot with Martin Aparijo on a sidewalk in Redondo Beach, doing Miami hop hops.  That was the first time I really talked to Martin at any length.  

Here's Martin praying those mags would hold up, in that FREESTYLIN' photo from 1986.  Windy Osborn photos, borrowed from the web.

Martin's an all around cool guy.  Besides being a pioneering freestyler and a better dirt jumper than most people realized, he's always down to tell you a story or two.  If you're struggling, he's likely to give you a pep talk to get back on track.  When I make it down to H.B. Tuesdays in Huntington Beach, Martin's always there, gliding some new variation of the classic tricks, and telling stories.  

I wanted to do a quick post tonight, and the thought of showing everyone who reads my  blog Martin's YouTube channel seemed like a good idea.  If you haven't already, go check out his channel, as he keeps adding more videos, and keeps getting smoother and smoother it seems.  

Cheap living: Flophouses vs. L.A. homeless "tiny homes"

Though I lived in the P.O.W. House for two stretches in the early 1990's, I didn't have a video camera at the time,so I shot very little video there.  So here's a bit of Dave Parrick's video footage of Keith Treanor in the backyard, then Dave Clymer on the spine ramp out front, about 1992-93.  

Sometime around 1989, a group of BMX racers formed, rented a house, and dubbed themselves the Pros Of Westminster, or P.O.W.'s.  It was the first serious BMX rider house, a four bedroom, two bath, single story place, on Iroquois Road in Westminster.  There was a total of 22 riders that lived in the house, officially, over the course of about five years. There were also at least 200 or more traveling riders, from across the U.S. and around the world, that spent one or more nights there at some point.  The best known members of the P.O.W. house were Dave Clymer, Chris Moeller, Alan Foster, Brian Foster, John Paul Rogers, Todd Lyons, and Jay Lonergan.  

A few riders, Dave Clymer, in particular, were there for long stretches, years, and others were there for a few months,at a time.  Riders were moving in and out over the life of the P.O.W. House.  Generally there were two guys in each bedroom, usually on single matresses on the floor, sharing the bedrooms.  It wasn't as freaky as it sounds, it was just a bunch of 20-something, hardcore BMX riders, living cheap during the long recession of the early 1990's.  We had 8 to 12 paying roommates pretty much all the time, though often several were away traveling.  Rent on the house then was around $900 a month, I think.  With utilities, each guy paid from $90 to maybe $120 a month for rent and utilities.  At the time, renting a room in a nice apartment, in a traditional California roommate situation, was $350 to $400 a month.  A one bedroom apartment was $600 or so.  With rent and bills right around $100 a month, we could spend a lot less time working, and a lot more time riding our bikes and traveling, which was our main priority then, other than beer and women.  

For about $1,200 initial rent and deposit, the P.O.W. House's changing group of roommates provided a dirty, rowdy, fun, and CHEAP, but sort of decent, place ot live.  It worked for that time period, and for our group of guys, a couple of women, and Bob the Dog.  No one was trying to escape homelessness, but we had a cool, if usually dirty, self-directed, super low cost, housing solution for all the guys looking for a super cheap place ot live in Southern California.  Another house, the H.B. House, took over a couple years later, for more young BMXers, in the mid and late 90's.  

Just to be clear, to me a "flophouse" is a house or apartment with a lot of mostly unrelated people living there, with cheap rent being a priority.  In my mind, it's not a drug den, though there may be people getting high.  Those places are crackhouses, a completely different thing, in my mind.  The P.O.W. House was a bunch of us living cheap so we could ride our bikes more, basically.  Artists and musicians and many college students have been living cheap for generations, and it's normal among action sports people and  punk rock musicians to crash on people's couches and floors while traveling.  I'm not trying to diss the P.O.W. House, just use it as a personal example of living cheap, compared the the homeless world.

Now, I realize it's 30 years later, and everything, except pizza, oddly enough, have gone up in price.  OK, $5 pizzas are now $6 at Little Caesar's or 7-11 with their bonus program.  Anyhow, rent has gone up dramatically, and the whole internet age has happened since.  

In addition, the population of chronically homeless people, here in the L.A. metro area, and in nearly all major cities, has exploded.  One of the resources being used to house some of these homeless people is called "Tiny Homes."  These small, 8 foot by 8 foot, prefab shelters are built in little groups, on obscure pieces of land, since land is so expensive in Southern California.  The people in these little communities share bathrooms, showers, and get some food from the people who run the places.  They get to keep their foodstamps, to help them eat other meals.  

It gets people off the streets, and into semi-permanent places, under a roof.  These are temporary housing, while homeless people work through programs to get permanent housing, Section 8 or something like it, paid for by a group of government resources, aka your taxi dollars.

So far, that makes sense to most people.  Give people a small place to live temporarily, get them off the streets, and into programs for whatever issues they are dealing with.  But as a homeless guy myself, and a blogger, I've learned there aren't really programs for people who want to actually earn a real living again.  The housing people talked to all of us in my current area, for a while, about the options.  My first option was to share a tiny home with a street friend, a raging (though very funny) drunk, occasional meth user, who was prone to violent outbursts.  I declined.  I asked a lot of questions, since I've stayed long times in shelters while I was back east.  I know theft, daily backed up toilets, lots of drama, and occasional fights, are always issues when you put a bunch of fucked up people in close proximity to each other.  

I also did a bit of research.  Having spent a long time in various forms of homelessness, I know that homelessness is now an industry in certain aspects.  There are people working at non-profit organizations, and some businesses, making their living from "the homeless problem."  I have no issue with businesses making profits, that's a major point of business.  But back east, I learned how many crony deals work between non-pofit organizations, taking in donations, grant money, and taxpayer money, and funneling it into their buddies' businesses.  Old fashioned cronyism.  Some organizations are legit, but there's a lot of shadiness as well.  

So I began to wonder how much these "tiny homes" actually cost.  It was hard to find good numbers at first.  One article said the tiny homes cost $7,000 and up.  Another source I saw a while back said they cost $17,000.  For quite a while, I had no idea what these "tiny homes" cost.  

The subject came up while chatting with someone on Facebook, and so I took another look.  I found this report, which comes up at the top of Google now.  According to this report, by an organization that has been digging through records for years, to bring obscure info like this to the public.  

It turns out L.A.'s "tiny homes" for the homeless, cost from $32,712 per bed, to $60,047 per bed, for an average of $42,344 per bed, for the 224 beds in the "tiny homes communities, built, at the time of the report.  The report also says the service providers who are running the camps get $55 a night, per bed, for the services they provide on a continuing basis.  

OK, this is a SHITLOAD of money to house 224 of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 homeless people in Los Angeles county these days.  Yes, Pallet, the company making these tinyhomes, is doing well, really well, their business has increased 7,000% in a couple of years early in the pandemic.  Again, I have no problem with businesses making a solid profit.  The "tiny homes" idea makes sense as one way to work on the huge homelessness issue in major cities. 

My point here is that a bunch of us young BMX riders, 30 years ago, figured out a way to house ourselves for about $100 a month, which would equal $218 today, per bed, per month, figuring in inflation.  We lived in a flophouse, a BMX rider themed flop house.  That was during the long, double dip recession, and era somewhat like today's, in that sense.  

My point is, I'm pretty sure we can do better, here in California.  We are close to 40 million people as a state.  That includes many of the most innovative people in the country.  I'm pretty sure a few businesses here could build what are bascially pre-fab tool sheds, with a power outlet, and some portable bathrooms and showers, for less than $84,000 each (tiny homes are made for two people).  You can buy a 8' X 12" tool shed, which is 50% larger than the "tiny homes," for $3,700 at Home Depot (link below).  

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of contractors who could safely wire tiny homes for a single power outlet, in a small community.  There are companies, like this one in California, that make good portable restrooms and showers.  There are also lots of other types of small housing options that could potentially work to house homeless people, like myself, at many different price points.  YouTube "real estate whisperer" Kristina Smallhorn has a bunch of videos on these options.  Here are a few:

"Real" homes made from shipping containers

Affordable "homes" at Home Depot for less than $20K

5 manufactured tiny homes you can buy on Amazon for under $40K

Tiny home kits starting under $50K

Pallet's Tiny Homes, and other small house ideas...

LA Currents segment on Pallet Tiny Homes - The ones L.A. is using now, for and average of $42,000 per bed average.

The Life Pod

The Homeless Man who built his own portable house on Hollywood Boulevard

Iglou Insulated Shelter

The Gypsy Wheeler

10 most innovative portable shelters and pod homes

These ideas don't included using empty houses, empty retail buildings, empty office properties, buying current motels out, renting apartments, houses, and any other possible options.

Way back in about 1997, before my struggle with homelessness began, I worked as a furniture mover.  one day we were moving a dirty Dogloo, an igloo-shaped, molded plastic dog house.  Joking around, I asked my co-worker, "Why don't they make these things for homeless people, call them Bumgloos?"  We laughed, and kept working.  

The idea stuck in my head, and at one point, while homeless, years later, I was thinking about writing a novel about a guy who starts making the Bumgloos, (8 foot diameter, four foot high walls, with a domed roof that fits over them- so several could be packed on a flatbed truck) and builds a community for the homeless.  That also winds up housing some artists, and BMXers and skateboarders who want to live super cheap.  They build a skate/bike park, art studios, a mini mart, a miniature golf course, a P.O. Box shop (homeless need mail) and Kinko's type office place (computer rental for homeless people).  Those businesses help put some of the people to work, and help pay for the community, drawing in business from the local city people.  That was the basic idea, not just housing, but work and fun as well.  I never wrote the novel, but I thought it out pretty extensively, while homeless, and unable to find any job, when I was in North Carolina (2009-2012, 2017-2018).  

Obviously, that idea is similar to the current tiny home communities, happening in many parts of the U.S..  What you might not believe is that even Andres Duany, a major urban designer, and proponent of the New Urbanism movement, has been paid big bucks to share somewhat similar ideas, with his clients.  

Several years ago, he was hired for a sizeable sum to help re-design, and help kickstart Highpoint, North Carolina's business development and economic prospects.  Highpoint is a former industrial city, a leader in the furniture industry, that got hit hard by factories closing down in the 1980's-2000's.  One asset they had was the dying Oak Hollow mall, a now fairly typical "dead mall."  Duany's team suggested, (are you ready?) turning the mall property into a business incubator, using lots of shipping containers to let entrepreneurs and artists build the containers into live/work spaces, as well as using the mall's indoor area for similar purposes.  Duany understands, and says so in the long videos of those Highpoint meeetings, artist, small business people, and entrepreneurs all need the same thing: CHEAP places to live and work.  Cheap live/work places help them get their ideas off the ground.  

Build a place where these people can do that, and you'll attract a lot of people with new ideas, who can then bounce off each other's creativity while living in this incubator community.  In my nomeclature, this is nurturing "Creative Scenes."  The leaders of Highpoint did not see benefit in the "crazy" shipping conatiner ideas, and they didn't apply any of these ideas.  But I believe Duany and team are right on track for what's needed in so many places around the U.S. now.   These same ideas could be used to house the currently homeless, as well as other groups of people looking to live really cheap for a while.  

So there it is, a whole bunch of potential ideas to help chip away at the homeless issue in L.A., and anywhere else.  Sheare your ideas and thoughts on Facebook, if you want to weigh in.

This blog just topped 140,000 page views- Thank You!

Being a homeless guy, the places I charge my laptop are usually not open on holidays.  So I didn't check this blog the last couple of days, after running my battery down watching videos the other night, before New Year's Eve.  Much to my surprise, my stats say I got over 1,500 page views on December 30th, but I'm not sure which post got them.  In any case, the popped the total over 140,000.  Cool!

The post by post stats aren't showing that crazy number, about double what I usually get in a month, these days.  Thanks whomever checked my blog out.  My previous blog page view record was a little over 125,000, for the original Freestyle BMX Tales blog, back in 2009-2012 ( deleted that blog in 2012).  This blog topped that last year, or maybe in 2020.  In any case, thanks for checking out my blog, I'll try to keep putting out pretty solid content.  Sooner or later this writing thing may even pay, again.  I don't get paid for page views, but it shows somebody is checking out what I'm rambling about.  Thanks everyone!  More stuff coming soon...