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A real estate company's simple way to offer the homeless a house and a job

166 points by Geekette 8y ago

rectang 8y ago
That the quality of these homeless job candidates is surprising reflects the inaccurate prejudices of the homeless-hating U.S. population. In the U.S, with its comparatively poor social safety net, many good people fall through the cracks. But a large segment of the U.S. desperately wants to see those who end up homeless as moral failures who have brought disaster on themselves. Thus, the cognitive dissonance between the quality of the work these people do and the need to see them as dissolute scum.
- dgzl 8y ago
  Don't we spend quite a bit of money on safety nets in the US? I believe and often say that our government is inefficient with money. Maybe our programs could use a redesign?
  - ohazi 8y ago
    The priority of one party is to spend money on social safety nets, while the priority of the other party is to hobble these safety nets to the point of uselessness. It should be no surprise that we ended up with expensive and ineffective social programs.
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      To be clear: Are you claiming the expensiveness and ineffectiveness of social programs is due to only one party?
      - berbec 8y ago
        I believe the point was one party makes the programs expensive and the other party makes them ineffective. I hadn't thought of it that way before!
    - pmiller2 8y ago
      We're dangerously treading into political hot water here, but I just want to add that I don't think it's fair to say that one party prioritizes safety nets. It's more correct to say that most of the safety nets we have in the US have come from one party, and since the 1930s.
      - dgzl 8y ago
        I would generally disagree with this, just because I believe that government is inherently inefficient. I've been a government contractor and have seen this first hand. I wouldn't disagree that many people in power, both inside and outside the government, work to undermine the programs.
    - adventured 8y ago
      That's of course not always the case. We're in a thread about homelessness, so this is quite appropriate: NY Times 2008: "The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday." "the officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country." https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homelessweb.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homelessweb.html 2013: "The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America" https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-astonishing-decline-of-homelessness-in-america/279050/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-ast... Ultimately culminating in an all-time record low rate of homelessness in the US by 2017. The George W. Bush administration deserves the negative flak it took for its various bad policies. It also deserves credit for the positive things like its policies on homelessness or PEPFAR that were astounding successes.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Step 1: cut funding disguised as a redesign. Step 2: complain that it doesn't work and needs a redesign. Step 3: go to Step 1. It absolutely needs a redesign but it also needs funding -- and people who don't want to fund these programs have gotten very good at using the former to avoid doing the latter.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Social Security hands money to literal billionaires while excluding many of the elderly poor. Now, we can argue if it’s good use of money, but these programs are intentionally set up this way.
    - madengr 8y ago
      There aren’t many billionaires, and SS taxable income is capped; $128k this year. So a billionaire receiving SS is rightly entitled to receive what he contributed. You can strip SS from the 1% and it will make no difference. You can do the same for the 10% and it will make little difference. The 10% payed FAR more in than they will receive.
      - Retric 8y ago
        So, you agree SS is not a safty net? PS: Social Security is hardly fair. That cap is by far the largest benifit for billionaires from social security’s design. People in the 10% pay a vastly higher percentage of their income to support others. A fair system would be something like X% up to a cap that you get back and y% that you don’t with everyone paying their share of the y%. But that starts to look like a safty net. On top of that married couples get a larger benifit with a single large income vs two incomes of half that size.
        madengr 8y ago
        Agree, SS is not a safety net. Neither is Medicare. What I should have made more clear is that stripping the 1% of SS benefits will provide no increase to the 99%. SS is supposed to be the third leg in the retirement stool, with pensions and individual investments the other two. SS is a very short leg, nearing insolvency. Pensions are a thing of the past. That leaves a pogo stick of individual savings. If you don’t want to be eating Alpo in old age, you need to be investing 20% of your income, and hope you can ride that pogo stick until death.
    - toast0 8y ago
      Social security is a mostly old age and disability insurance program with eligibility requirements and weird rules, and maybe some solvency issues. My understanding is there is some coverage for disabled children that's not based on previous earnings, but I'm not familiar with the details. Everything else is based on eligible earnings, so I wouldn't consider it a safety net -- if you didn't earn enough or long enough, you may not get anything out of it. I think you're going to get a lot more resistance from high income/ high net worth individuals if you take away their social security payments than if you raise the pay in caps, and set the payout percentages to be even lower at the top end. Or scrap the whole thing and build an honest steal from the rich and give to the poor guaranteed minimum income tax scheme.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Yes, the considerable, positive results from the dramatically expanded US social safety net are widely ignored. It's a mistake to ignore those results, they should be held up as a triumph. It worked, we have the positive results to show for it. The US child poverty rate has dropped by over 50% since the 1970s. It's at an all-time record low solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net. US homelessness is near a record low (it hit a record low two years ago), solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net. The overall US poverty rate is near a 40 year low. The number of people with healthcare coverage is at record highs, primarily thanks to the expansion of Medicaid, CHIP and SS disability.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    We do, but at the same time, we spend considerably less than our developed peers. Right now we mostly get what we pay for: we pay a reduced rate and get reduced results, which in this case largely translates to more poor people suffering. We could change that, certainly we have the funds necessary, but we've collectively decided not to.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  The experience most people have with the homeless is being harassed by the chronically homeless as they go on about their regular lives, especially downtown. I worked a block from a homeless shelter for a few years, and there was an overdose or knife fight a couple times per day, not to mention people shooting up drugs or shitting on sidewalks. It's great to hold a moral high ground, but at some point we need to connect with reality. There are people who are chronically homeless and certainly not moral guiding stars, and there are many more situationally homeless people who need help and are perfectly fine folks.
  - Spearchucker 8y ago
    How d'you know what most people's experience with the homeless is? Also, distinguishing between "homeless" and "chronically homeless" (which makes it sound like an extreme sport) by your definition can only happen once you've been stabbed, stabbed another, or squeezed one out on the sidewalk. So until one of these things happen you don't really know. Forgive me, but it sounds to me like an easy way to justify hating on the homeless. Chronic or otherwise.
    - darawk 8y ago
      There's a pretty reasonable distinction to be drawn here. The real problem here is that the homeless that most people experience really are what they seem like: drug addicted, mentally incapacitated, or completely irresponsible and unaccountable. These people are not good candidates for jobs, and it would indeed be surprising to see them successful in a role like this. However, there's a large class of people that are not out there panhandling, not making themselves visible to regular people who are homeless, and are perfectly responsible and capable. These people can and are benefiting from programs like this. Let's not blur this distinction for some misguided sense of social justice.
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        One also has to wonder how many of the homeless who use drugs, or have mental issues came to do so because of their situational homelessness. It really isn't difficult to imagine becoming homeless, which then leads to depression and other mental issues and then using drugs to escape that. So some proportion of the "problem group" are going to be redeemable too.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  The practice of screening everyone out causes this. Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition. I know one woman whose roommate got into a domestic disputes in the backyard. The police arrested everyone in the house, and dropped everything within 3 hours.
  - dev_dull 8y ago
    Was she booked? Being put into handcuffs is a lot different than being charged with a crime.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    > Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition. lol, that kind of stuff should be illegal. As long as an employee doesn't have to go to jail it should not be allowed to fire the employee for anything that happens outside of the workplace, much less blanket automated policies like that one you describe. And stuff that's gotten dropped should be either erased or at the very least sealed from the public instead of being provided on Google for all eternity.
    - Boxbot 8y ago
      It will never be made illegal because the threat of ostracization for any dissent or minor opposition to the status quo is an enormously powerful political tool. You don't even have to put much effort into it, just arrest someone for "resisting arrest" and every reputable company and landlord will do the work for you.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Would you put your child in a daycare with less than the most stringent background check policy? Put your money in such a bank? Allow such a company’s employees into your home or the sensitive areas of your business? Sign off on a regulatory audit for a company that lets people who have been arrested hold admin credentials, keys to the server room, codes to the vault? A lot of this shit is driven by popular demand. There’s a perception that rigorous background checks are foundatational if a corporation is to act responsibly.
- frozenport 8y ago
  Nope. These guys didn't recruit people who are chronically homeless, they recruited from people who are about to become homeless. The proposition is more like, if you can't pay rent we'll let you work it off in our building. As the article notes the chronically homeless have a high rate of mental illness, among other issues that make them completely unfit to work.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  I don't think this is a fair assessment, and I actually think the article does a good job differentiating between the chronically homeless (many of whom do have severe mental illness or substance abuse problems) and the temporary homeless. As the article points out, you actually don't see, or at least associate, the temporary homeless as being homeless, because these people have jobs and are just trying their best to get by. So most of the homeless that people associate with being homeless are chronically homeless, where many times the stereotype is actually not that far from the truth.
- woodpanel 8y ago
  As a German I have to say I was impressed by the amount of blight I’ve encountered in inner cities as well as in rural areas of the US. You immediately see that the government provides much less than in Europe, but I also got the feeling that people care a lot more and are more personally engaged in helping the poor than in Germany. Yes, this may be often motivated by religion - but who cares? No surprise to me that the most progressive state in this sense seems to be Utah (Mormons are encouraged to devour a percentage of their time to social causes, the state switched to provide every homeless with a roof first, ask questions later ...)
  - stenl 8y ago
    As a Swede, I have to agree that the level of overt poverty in US cities is shocking (specifically, as it is juxtaposed with so much overt wealth). I don’t know if Anericans care more about helping the poor, but clearly enough people don’t care sufficiently to actually fix the problem by voting for effective social policies. This level of poverty, homelessness and poor health is a political choice, not a law of nature.
    - drb91 8y ago
      > clearly enough people don’t care sufficiently to actually fix the problem by voting for effective social policies. Unfortunately, with money driven election cycles (rather than policy driven election cycles) social welfare never has a good chance to see the light of day in washington. Perhaps this will change soon, but when both parties take money from the same people, the resulting debate will probably avoid important topics.
      - rectang 8y ago
        Money is important, but I think the biggest reason is cultural. There are a lot of people in the US who believe that the chronically homeless are moral failures who deserve their misery (they "fail at life", to quote an acquaintance); that social welfare to help them constitutes rewarding moral hazard; and that the most effective way to minimize homelessness is to dial up the disincentives and make their lives as painful and humiliating as possible.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  A significant part of this, in my opinion, is that the consequences of homelessness have changed substantially over the last decade or so. The major shift comes because of the smartphone. Previously to be homeless meant to be completely disconnected from society. No mailing address, no land line, you don't exist. Today you can have a phone number and high-speed internet access without a permanent address. This alone makes the prospect of dispensing with your digs when you can no longer afford them far less unattractive than previously. People live relatively modern connected lives from vehicles and tents today. I'm not speculating, I'm speaking from experience. I've lived a very vagabond lifestyle for years in CA, and this approach has really taken off in the last 5-7 years or so. Batteries last a long time, solar panels are cheap and efficient, prepay phones are affordable. I used to spend a lot of time in various cafes around the SF bay area. The outlets at these places started becoming contended for by ostensibly "homeless" people looking to charge their smartphones. In 2018 "homeless" people have smartphones, they watch netflix, they do all the things. The last time I was at Java Beach in the outer sunset a guy who just moved off the sidewalk into a van was playing 3d games on a gaming laptop using the cafe's wifi and electricity until closing. I know his situation because he told it to me. He was wearing pajamas getting some gaming in before they closed up to retire in his van down the street. That's a pretty damn comfortable "homeless" life. It's not really much different than what people are doing in their $3k+/mo apartments he parks in front of. I don't know where he bathes though, there is the ocean right there in the worst case, right? I'm not passing judgement. It just shouldn't be surprising, given these circumstances, that relatively sane and capable people are slipping into "homeless" lives. The severity has substantially diminished vs. the homeless of the past, especially places where the climate is nice year-round. I think if there were no smartphone, these "homeless" people would feel much more motivated to relocate someplace affordable. It doesn't bother me if folks are choosing to live homelessly someplace desirable instead of relocating someplace less desirable where they can afford a home. Apartments are overrated, where the weather is nice.
  - bojackstorkman 8y ago
    Though I strongly disagree with the overall sentiment here, as well as some of your specific statements, your post touches on some interesting points. In an earlier post, I mentioned a very, very small group of people that I have met that were almost mystifyingly homeless despite them having very few limiting factors that regularly contribute to homelessness. The one thing they all had in common was that they stayed in places that didn't have harsh winters or dangerously hot summer (e.g. coastal California). I have not, however, met any person that fits that description in the Oregon/Washington deserts, Utah, Colorado, or even inland California. In a nutshell, yes it is technically possible to sleep outside in coastal California without risking death from exposure. However, climate does not mitigate the risks posed by arrest for illegal lodging, violence from those around them (other homeless people, and others that are simply cruel), starvation, theft etc. It also does nothing to help with access to (even critical, immediate) healthcare, counseling, education or really any other factor that helps people get into a better situation. As far as smartphones go, I agree that access to one can be life-changing to a homeless person, bt I could not disagrew more strongly with your characterization of that access making living on the street -with all the risks that that entails- as "less unattractive". To be earnest, I suppose I don't understand that point. If your landlord shows up with a police officer to forcibly remove from your home for not paying rent, the relative "unattractiveness" of what comes next for you isn't a variable that is taken into consideration. You have what you can carry, and hopefully an idea of where to walk next. If "what you can carry" includes a smartphone, your chances of getting access to help is certainly improved dramatically, and yes, if you can find a spot that is near an open wireless AP, you might watch some Netflix. It is hardly the equivalent of living in a 3k/month apartment. From my experience, cars and vans break down or get towed, phones break, phone plans run out of data (or in some cases, phone minutes. The poorest peole often still don't have reliable access to unlimited plans, even in 2018), you can get banned from coffee shops for making others uncomfortable by your appearance alone (people don't like to look at a person that has to carry all of their belongings with them). I lived in a car for a while, but sold it for $300 for a train ticket to a place with fewer police. I had an eight year old laptop running an old distro of Ubuntu (without a working battery) that I traded for a weekend inside during a particularly bad cold snap. On two different occasions I have had to leave every single object I owned behind, and start over with only the clothes on my back and whatever was in my jeans' pockets. If your point is that there is a differnce between homeless people and, as you put it, "homeless" people, then yes I agree. The biggest difference here is that of access to resources that can help bring one off the street, and whether or not perfectly healthy, capable people are making intentional decisions to reject those resources. The latter group is a genuinely fascinating anomaly, and does not reflect the reality of the problem. Personally, I find that "move somewhere that's more desirable or manageable" to be problematic. The only reaon why I was able to leave a particular city was because I had a car to sell for tickets. If I hadn't, I simply would not have left. Even when I got there, I didn't have two nickels to rub together, so housing prices didn't really matter. I would encourage anyone that feels this way about the homeless to do a bit more digging, or just have a conversation with a few people that are currently or were recently homeless. This particular attitude of lumping everybody under the umbrella of The Worst Examples doesn't seem to serve the goal of fixing this problem.
- ummonk 8y ago
  From the article: "Finlay had read an article about the number of people who are homeless because of job loss or other temporary circumstances. He realized that his preconceptions about homelessness, shaped by the chronically homeless people he saw living outside, were wrong. “The majority of homeless are people that we never really see because they are trying to work, they’re getting day labor,” he says. “They’re living out of their cars. They’re not panhandling and living under the bridge . . . These are all people that were employed, had good job histories. There was just really no issue that would preclude them from working other than they didn’t have an address.”" The prejudices and hatred are towards the chronically homeless, not the temporarily homeless. Nothing in this article suggests those prejudices are false.
  - chii 8y ago
    but how long before the temporarily homeless becomes the chronically homeless? How hard does a person has to be kicked and how much mishap has to happen before they fall into despair, and become one of those who has to live under the bridge (as they lose their car due to uncontrollable circumstances)? The existence of a large homeless population is a symptom of a society that does not care - reflected by the lack of taxation on the populous. If you examine a scandinavian country (such as sweden), why do they have way less homeless per-capita than the US?
    - thrower123 8y ago
      If I had to make a sweeping generalization, it is because Scandinavian winters are so much harsher. Freezing to death in Stockholm is more of a danger than in San Francisco.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  People mix up "homeless" w/ pan handlers, mentally unstable homeless and drug users. The latter is what people do not like, but they use the term "homeless" to address them.
deft 8y ago
Homeless converted to live-in slaves. Sounds nice! Company towns are coming back, and probably going to be worse than ever, with big brother FB planning on doing similar.
- lwhalen 8y ago
  This was my first thought too. Don't know why you're getting down-voted because of it.
- eloff 8y ago
  These people are free to leave whenever they like. They're not enslaved physically, financially, or otherwise. Don't just throw around words like slavery casually. There is a huge difference between slavery and a job.
  - djrobstep 8y ago
    Apart from the fact that you get to choose which company you're forced to generate profit for, not really.
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      the threat of being homeless if you quit your job is quite severe, but i'm not sure it's an apples-to-apples comparison to a situation where people will chase you down and whip you near to death if you try to leave.
      - djrobstep 8y ago
        It absolutely the same. Try continuing to use food and shelter but without the money to pay for it: you'll be attacked by men with guns and thrown in a cage. Sometimes they'll even shoot you.
  - ahoy 8y ago
    Free to go live under the bridge again. Complete freedom.
spraak 8y ago
I wonder if this makes it more difficult for the live-in caretaker to eventually find another place (if that's what they wanted) because they're effectively earning less? I.e. I wonder if the rent is usually R dollars if their salary (S2) is actually S2 = S1 - R where S1 is what they would be paid if they weren't receiving the housing, or if it something more like S2 = S1 - R*T where the amount deducted from their salary is more than the actual rent cost. Not quite the same, but I've done many "work trade" situations where I've lived on a property with some kind of house/structure and other furnishings/utilities provided in exchange for doing farm work or other labor. It never worked out economically well because the amount of time I had to put into where I lived made it difficult to also work elsewhere for money.
jseliger 8y ago
This is a cool program for a small number of people but the missing word in the article is "zoning." https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclusionary-zoning-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclu.... Growing homelessness problems come from many cities and suburbs making it illegal to build housing. As the supply of something is restricted in the face of demand, prices rise, causing many people on the financial edge to be pushed over it and into homelessness. If you want to comprehensively fight homelessness, building more housing is the first step. I've worked on many homeless-service programs, and it's disheartening to see cities allocate vast sums for them: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f... while simultaneously using zoning laws to make sure they won't be very effective.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Do you feel their actions are from accidental incompetence, or from deliberate action? I've noticed that most cities strike some kind of middleground tone, where they say "homelessness is a big problem affecting us, but surely we can't live in a world without zoning regulations (because we want to keep property taxes and assessments high)." These programs for the homeless are mostly just lipservice to the actual problems you pointed out. I would know-- I was employed and homeless for 4 months until I found a girlfriend to split a very distant apartment with!
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > Do you feel their actions are from accidental incompetence, or from deliberate action? Deliberate action. Back in the day, there was a lot of transient housing. Shared rooms, boarding arrangements, and the like for people whose economic condition didn't allow entering into a long term lease. Property owners found these people undesirable, and zoned those living situations out of existence. This was a deliberate and malicious effort.
    - tptacek 8y ago
jl2718 8y ago
There’s a problem with this. It’s called “s
jl2718 8y ago
There’s a problem with this. It’s called “squatter’s rights”, and it makes it very dangerous to give people a chance.
- desdiv 8y ago
  Squatters are defined as people who occupy building or land _without permission_. As soon as you give them permission to occupy, i.e. with a caretaker's employment contract, they are no longer a squatter, by definition.
bojackstorkman 8y ago
I am happy to read about programs like this. I have struggled financially for the better part of a decade due to a variety of issues ('08 crash wiped out pretty much every job that paid a living wage in the city I lived in, sickness/cancer in my family, people that I relied on for work dying, my personal issue with PTSD, etc.) Housing has always been the most influential factor in whether I was able to achieve even temporary stability. For the periods of time that I wasn't homeless, my place to stay was wither explicitly temporary (often for arbitrary, unknown periods of time) or cost nearly 100% of the income I was able to scrape together. Just three months ago, after nearly ten years, I was offered the opportunity to live in, maintain and fix up a small investment property in the middle of nowhere. As it stands, this arrangement should last a year, after which I can opt to stay and pay rent at market price (which in the middle of nowhere is very low). For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am stable enough to apply for school (starting in October, fingers crossed!), and try to really focus on doing some freelance website work for small businesses on the side. I wake up every morning and actually eat breakfast, which doesn't seem that significant, but for me that has been historically difficult or impossible because of my severe, sometimes crushing existential anxiety. I still have problems, but they are considerably smaller and more manageable. In these three months I have spent most of te money I've earned on either food or supplies for the house. As of right now, my most pressing problem is getting $40 to get a copy of my high school proficiency certificate, and beyond that it would be nice to get a beer at the only bar in town to meet some folks, but I'll take that set of problems over worrying about being cold, or hungry, or getting arrested for sleeping outside any day. So yay! These arrangements can be an absolute godsend for people that otherwise would have difficulty digging themselves out of a hole.
- rectang 8y ago
  Thanks for the vivid, eloquent depiction of what success in a program like the one from the article looks like. :)
  - bojackstorkman 8y ago
    Thanks for reading! 90% of what I read about on here is stuff I don't fully understand that I read juat for self improvement, so it's nice to be able to contribute to a thread occasionally :)
xg15 8y ago
So does that mean their apartment is now tied to their job? E.g. what happens to their right to the apartment if they want to switch to a job outside the program or quit for whatever other reason?
lucio 8y ago
Good idea, but something in the article irked me. >The turnover rate for entry-level employees in the industry is around 50%. For the formerly homeless people hired through Shelters to Shutters–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances–the retention rate is more than 87%. >–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances– That's a blatant lie. Their home is directly tied to their job. That's the best explanation for retention. edit: this is not a critique of the good idea of employing homeless.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  But are they being employed? Are they paid money or just reduced rent? Housing is great, but people need cash in hand. And dont talk to the IRS about whether you have to pay taxes on that rent reduction.
kwhitefoot 8y ago
It seems to me that one big problem with US zoning is the unwillingness to mix industrial, residential, and commercial properties in the same area. In many places in Europe it is possible to live without a car simply because one can walk to work and to the supermarket.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  The minimum price of owning and operating a car is substantially cheaper in the US than in Europe so it's not as big of a hurdle here. A sub $1k car powered by $2.50/gal gas will get you to work reliably enough that you can get a ride from a friend or figure out something else out on the several days a year it may not be derivable. Vehicle repair is a service that it's common for poorer people in the US to trade as a favor among each other. A much larger fraction of low income people self-teach vehicle repair out of necessity so it's much easier for low income people to find a friend to change brakes for cost+$50 them than it is for the HN crowd.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    What you're missing here is insurance; Which while state required is often ignored, putting the owner and other drivers at risk and risk of financial ruin. Insurance prices drop with credit and higher deductibles; So, while a car $1k car may itself be cheap to insure; if you're driving in a city with Teslas driving around, and you purchase insurance, you're likely under insured.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      People just pay a $100ish 1-month premium one month every other year when they need to renew their registration. The letter of the law is irrelevant when you can't possibly afford to comply. I didn't include it in my comment because I know that that reality is not popular around here and the specifics of how one evades paying for insurance varies from state to state. Driving uninsured or under-insured really doesn't matter when you have no assets and are living on the edge of poverty. The idea that someone who's only reasonable way to get to work is driving would not drive just because they're not insured is laughable. You're not going to get insurance by not going to work. It's not really a big additional risk compared to all the other things in day to day life that could push you over the edge. Regardless, insurance is still the same or cheaper in the US.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
They hired some homeless people, it worked well, so they started a charity? I don't understand the point of the charity, I can't find their financial records on the IRS website or their own.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  Took a half second on google to find their annual report: http://shelterstoshutters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18-S2SH-103-AnnualReport-R10-Pages.pdf http://shelterstoshutters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18-...
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    That's nice, but I was looking for their 990 form. That seems to have the relevant information on it, and I believe they're only required to give me an actual copy if I contact them, but it's still odd to me that it's not in the IRS database.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

166 points by Geekette 8y ago

That the quality of these homeless job candidates is surprising reflects the inaccurate prejudices of the homeless-hating U.S. population. In the U.S, with its comparatively poor social safety net, many good people fall through the cracks. But a large segment of the U.S. desperately wants to see those who end up homeless as moral failures who have brought disaster on themselves. Thus, the cognitive dissonance between the quality of the work these people do and the need to see them as dissolute scum.

dgzl 8y ago
Don't we spend quite a bit of money on safety nets in the US? I believe and often say that our government is inefficient with money. Maybe our programs could use a redesign?
- ohazi 8y ago
  The priority of one party is to spend money on social safety nets, while the priority of the other party is to hobble these safety nets to the point of uselessness. It should be no surprise that we ended up with expensive and ineffective social programs.
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    To be clear: Are you claiming the expensiveness and ineffectiveness of social programs is due to only one party?
    - berbec 8y ago
      I believe the point was one party makes the programs expensive and the other party makes them ineffective. I hadn't thought of it that way before!
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    We're dangerously treading into political hot water here, but I just want to add that I don't think it's fair to say that one party prioritizes safety nets. It's more correct to say that most of the safety nets we have in the US have come from one party, and since the 1930s.
    - dgzl 8y ago
      I would generally disagree with this, just because I believe that government is inherently inefficient. I've been a government contractor and have seen this first hand. I wouldn't disagree that many people in power, both inside and outside the government, work to undermine the programs.
  - adventured 8y ago
    That's of course not always the case. We're in a thread about homelessness, so this is quite appropriate: NY Times 2008: "The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday." "the officials attribute much of the decline to the “housing first” strategy that has been promoted by the Bush administration and Congress and increasingly adopted across the country." https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homelessweb.html https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/30homelessweb.html 2013: "The Astonishing Decline of Homelessness in America" https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-astonishing-decline-of-homelessness-in-america/279050/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-ast... Ultimately culminating in an all-time record low rate of homelessness in the US by 2017. The George W. Bush administration deserves the negative flak it took for its various bad policies. It also deserves credit for the positive things like its policies on homelessness or PEPFAR that were astounding successes.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Step 1: cut funding disguised as a redesign. Step 2: complain that it doesn't work and needs a redesign. Step 3: go to Step 1. It absolutely needs a redesign but it also needs funding -- and people who don't want to fund these programs have gotten very good at using the former to avoid doing the latter.
- Retric 8y ago
  Social Security hands money to literal billionaires while excluding many of the elderly poor. Now, we can argue if it’s good use of money, but these programs are intentionally set up this way.
  - madengr 8y ago
    There aren’t many billionaires, and SS taxable income is capped; $128k this year. So a billionaire receiving SS is rightly entitled to receive what he contributed. You can strip SS from the 1% and it will make no difference. You can do the same for the 10% and it will make little difference. The 10% payed FAR more in than they will receive.
    - Retric 8y ago
      So, you agree SS is not a safty net? PS: Social Security is hardly fair. That cap is by far the largest benifit for billionaires from social security’s design. People in the 10% pay a vastly higher percentage of their income to support others. A fair system would be something like X% up to a cap that you get back and y% that you don’t with everyone paying their share of the y%. But that starts to look like a safty net. On top of that married couples get a larger benifit with a single large income vs two incomes of half that size.
      - madengr 8y ago
        Agree, SS is not a safety net. Neither is Medicare. What I should have made more clear is that stripping the 1% of SS benefits will provide no increase to the 99%. SS is supposed to be the third leg in the retirement stool, with pensions and individual investments the other two. SS is a very short leg, nearing insolvency. Pensions are a thing of the past. That leaves a pogo stick of individual savings. If you don’t want to be eating Alpo in old age, you need to be investing 20% of your income, and hope you can ride that pogo stick until death.
  - toast0 8y ago
    Social security is a mostly old age and disability insurance program with eligibility requirements and weird rules, and maybe some solvency issues. My understanding is there is some coverage for disabled children that's not based on previous earnings, but I'm not familiar with the details. Everything else is based on eligible earnings, so I wouldn't consider it a safety net -- if you didn't earn enough or long enough, you may not get anything out of it. I think you're going to get a lot more resistance from high income/ high net worth individuals if you take away their social security payments than if you raise the pay in caps, and set the payout percentages to be even lower at the top end. Or scrap the whole thing and build an honest steal from the rich and give to the poor guaranteed minimum income tax scheme.
- adventured 8y ago
  Yes, the considerable, positive results from the dramatically expanded US social safety net are widely ignored. It's a mistake to ignore those results, they should be held up as a triumph. It worked, we have the positive results to show for it. The US child poverty rate has dropped by over 50% since the 1970s. It's at an all-time record low solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net. US homelessness is near a record low (it hit a record low two years ago), solely due to the expansion of the US social safety net. The overall US poverty rate is near a 40 year low. The number of people with healthcare coverage is at record highs, primarily thanks to the expansion of Medicaid, CHIP and SS disability.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  We do, but at the same time, we spend considerably less than our developed peers. Right now we mostly get what we pay for: we pay a reduced rate and get reduced results, which in this case largely translates to more poor people suffering. We could change that, certainly we have the funds necessary, but we've collectively decided not to.
vorpalhex 8y ago
The experience most people have with the homeless is being harassed by the chronically homeless as they go on about their regular lives, especially downtown. I worked a block from a homeless shelter for a few years, and there was an overdose or knife fight a couple times per day, not to mention people shooting up drugs or shitting on sidewalks. It's great to hold a moral high ground, but at some point we need to connect with reality. There are people who are chronically homeless and certainly not moral guiding stars, and there are many more situationally homeless people who need help and are perfectly fine folks.
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  How d'you know what most people's experience with the homeless is? Also, distinguishing between "homeless" and "chronically homeless" (which makes it sound like an extreme sport) by your definition can only happen once you've been stabbed, stabbed another, or squeezed one out on the sidewalk. So until one of these things happen you don't really know. Forgive me, but it sounds to me like an easy way to justify hating on the homeless. Chronic or otherwise.
  - darawk 8y ago
    There's a pretty reasonable distinction to be drawn here. The real problem here is that the homeless that most people experience really are what they seem like: drug addicted, mentally incapacitated, or completely irresponsible and unaccountable. These people are not good candidates for jobs, and it would indeed be surprising to see them successful in a role like this. However, there's a large class of people that are not out there panhandling, not making themselves visible to regular people who are homeless, and are perfectly responsible and capable. These people can and are benefiting from programs like this. Let's not blur this distinction for some misguided sense of social justice.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      One also has to wonder how many of the homeless who use drugs, or have mental issues came to do so because of their situational homelessness. It really isn't difficult to imagine becoming homeless, which then leads to depression and other mental issues and then using drugs to escape that. So some proportion of the "problem group" are going to be redeemable too.
Spooky23 8y ago
The practice of screening everyone out causes this. Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition. I know one woman whose roommate got into a domestic disputes in the backyard. The police arrested everyone in the house, and dropped everything within 3 hours.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  Was she booked? Being put into handcuffs is a lot different than being charged with a crime.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > Many employers will terminate you instantly for any arrest, regardless of disposition. lol, that kind of stuff should be illegal. As long as an employee doesn't have to go to jail it should not be allowed to fire the employee for anything that happens outside of the workplace, much less blanket automated policies like that one you describe. And stuff that's gotten dropped should be either erased or at the very least sealed from the public instead of being provided on Google for all eternity.
  - Boxbot 8y ago
    It will never be made illegal because the threat of ostracization for any dissent or minor opposition to the status quo is an enormously powerful political tool. You don't even have to put much effort into it, just arrest someone for "resisting arrest" and every reputable company and landlord will do the work for you.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Would you put your child in a daycare with less than the most stringent background check policy? Put your money in such a bank? Allow such a company’s employees into your home or the sensitive areas of your business? Sign off on a regulatory audit for a company that lets people who have been arrested hold admin credentials, keys to the server room, codes to the vault? A lot of this shit is driven by popular demand. There’s a perception that rigorous background checks are foundatational if a corporation is to act responsibly.
frozenport 8y ago
Nope. These guys didn't recruit people who are chronically homeless, they recruited from people who are about to become homeless. The proposition is more like, if you can't pay rent we'll let you work it off in our building. As the article notes the chronically homeless have a high rate of mental illness, among other issues that make them completely unfit to work.
hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I don't think this is a fair assessment, and I actually think the article does a good job differentiating between the chronically homeless (many of whom do have severe mental illness or substance abuse problems) and the temporary homeless. As the article points out, you actually don't see, or at least associate, the temporary homeless as being homeless, because these people have jobs and are just trying their best to get by. So most of the homeless that people associate with being homeless are chronically homeless, where many times the stereotype is actually not that far from the truth.
woodpanel 8y ago
As a German I have to say I was impressed by the amount of blight I’ve encountered in inner cities as well as in rural areas of the US. You immediately see that the government provides much less than in Europe, but I also got the feeling that people care a lot more and are more personally engaged in helping the poor than in Germany. Yes, this may be often motivated by religion - but who cares? No surprise to me that the most progressive state in this sense seems to be Utah (Mormons are encouraged to devour a percentage of their time to social causes, the state switched to provide every homeless with a roof first, ask questions later ...)
- stenl 8y ago
  As a Swede, I have to agree that the level of overt poverty in US cities is shocking (specifically, as it is juxtaposed with so much overt wealth). I don’t know if Anericans care more about helping the poor, but clearly enough people don’t care sufficiently to actually fix the problem by voting for effective social policies. This level of poverty, homelessness and poor health is a political choice, not a law of nature.
  - drb91 8y ago
    > clearly enough people don’t care sufficiently to actually fix the problem by voting for effective social policies. Unfortunately, with money driven election cycles (rather than policy driven election cycles) social welfare never has a good chance to see the light of day in washington. Perhaps this will change soon, but when both parties take money from the same people, the resulting debate will probably avoid important topics.
    - rectang 8y ago
      Money is important, but I think the biggest reason is cultural. There are a lot of people in the US who believe that the chronically homeless are moral failures who deserve their misery (they "fail at life", to quote an acquaintance); that social welfare to help them constitutes rewarding moral hazard; and that the most effective way to minimize homelessness is to dial up the disincentives and make their lives as painful and humiliating as possible.
newnewpdro 8y ago
A significant part of this, in my opinion, is that the consequences of homelessness have changed substantially over the last decade or so. The major shift comes because of the smartphone. Previously to be homeless meant to be completely disconnected from society. No mailing address, no land line, you don't exist. Today you can have a phone number and high-speed internet access without a permanent address. This alone makes the prospect of dispensing with your digs when you can no longer afford them far less unattractive than previously. People live relatively modern connected lives from vehicles and tents today. I'm not speculating, I'm speaking from experience. I've lived a very vagabond lifestyle for years in CA, and this approach has really taken off in the last 5-7 years or so. Batteries last a long time, solar panels are cheap and efficient, prepay phones are affordable. I used to spend a lot of time in various cafes around the SF bay area. The outlets at these places started becoming contended for by ostensibly "homeless" people looking to charge their smartphones. In 2018 "homeless" people have smartphones, they watch netflix, they do all the things. The last time I was at Java Beach in the outer sunset a guy who just moved off the sidewalk into a van was playing 3d games on a gaming laptop using the cafe's wifi and electricity until closing. I know his situation because he told it to me. He was wearing pajamas getting some gaming in before they closed up to retire in his van down the street. That's a pretty damn comfortable "homeless" life. It's not really much different than what people are doing in their $3k+/mo apartments he parks in front of. I don't know where he bathes though, there is the ocean right there in the worst case, right? I'm not passing judgement. It just shouldn't be surprising, given these circumstances, that relatively sane and capable people are slipping into "homeless" lives. The severity has substantially diminished vs. the homeless of the past, especially places where the climate is nice year-round. I think if there were no smartphone, these "homeless" people would feel much more motivated to relocate someplace affordable. It doesn't bother me if folks are choosing to live homelessly someplace desirable instead of relocating someplace less desirable where they can afford a home. Apartments are overrated, where the weather is nice.
- bojackstorkman 8y ago
  Though I strongly disagree with the overall sentiment here, as well as some of your specific statements, your post touches on some interesting points. In an earlier post, I mentioned a very, very small group of people that I have met that were almost mystifyingly homeless despite them having very few limiting factors that regularly contribute to homelessness. The one thing they all had in common was that they stayed in places that didn't have harsh winters or dangerously hot summer (e.g. coastal California). I have not, however, met any person that fits that description in the Oregon/Washington deserts, Utah, Colorado, or even inland California. In a nutshell, yes it is technically possible to sleep outside in coastal California without risking death from exposure. However, climate does not mitigate the risks posed by arrest for illegal lodging, violence from those around them (other homeless people, and others that are simply cruel), starvation, theft etc. It also does nothing to help with access to (even critical, immediate) healthcare, counseling, education or really any other factor that helps people get into a better situation. As far as smartphones go, I agree that access to one can be life-changing to a homeless person, bt I could not disagrew more strongly with your characterization of that access making living on the street -with all the risks that that entails- as "less unattractive". To be earnest, I suppose I don't understand that point. If your landlord shows up with a police officer to forcibly remove from your home for not paying rent, the relative "unattractiveness" of what comes next for you isn't a variable that is taken into consideration. You have what you can carry, and hopefully an idea of where to walk next. If "what you can carry" includes a smartphone, your chances of getting access to help is certainly improved dramatically, and yes, if you can find a spot that is near an open wireless AP, you might watch some Netflix. It is hardly the equivalent of living in a 3k/month apartment. From my experience, cars and vans break down or get towed, phones break, phone plans run out of data (or in some cases, phone minutes. The poorest peole often still don't have reliable access to unlimited plans, even in 2018), you can get banned from coffee shops for making others uncomfortable by your appearance alone (people don't like to look at a person that has to carry all of their belongings with them). I lived in a car for a while, but sold it for $300 for a train ticket to a place with fewer police. I had an eight year old laptop running an old distro of Ubuntu (without a working battery) that I traded for a weekend inside during a particularly bad cold snap. On two different occasions I have had to leave every single object I owned behind, and start over with only the clothes on my back and whatever was in my jeans' pockets. If your point is that there is a differnce between homeless people and, as you put it, "homeless" people, then yes I agree. The biggest difference here is that of access to resources that can help bring one off the street, and whether or not perfectly healthy, capable people are making intentional decisions to reject those resources. The latter group is a genuinely fascinating anomaly, and does not reflect the reality of the problem. Personally, I find that "move somewhere that's more desirable or manageable" to be problematic. The only reaon why I was able to leave a particular city was because I had a car to sell for tickets. If I hadn't, I simply would not have left. Even when I got there, I didn't have two nickels to rub together, so housing prices didn't really matter. I would encourage anyone that feels this way about the homeless to do a bit more digging, or just have a conversation with a few people that are currently or were recently homeless. This particular attitude of lumping everybody under the umbrella of The Worst Examples doesn't seem to serve the goal of fixing this problem.
ummonk 8y ago
From the article: "Finlay had read an article about the number of people who are homeless because of job loss or other temporary circumstances. He realized that his preconceptions about homelessness, shaped by the chronically homeless people he saw living outside, were wrong. “The majority of homeless are people that we never really see because they are trying to work, they’re getting day labor,” he says. “They’re living out of their cars. They’re not panhandling and living under the bridge . . . These are all people that were employed, had good job histories. There was just really no issue that would preclude them from working other than they didn’t have an address.”" The prejudices and hatred are towards the chronically homeless, not the temporarily homeless. Nothing in this article suggests those prejudices are false.
- chii 8y ago
  but how long before the temporarily homeless becomes the chronically homeless? How hard does a person has to be kicked and how much mishap has to happen before they fall into despair, and become one of those who has to live under the bridge (as they lose their car due to uncontrollable circumstances)? The existence of a large homeless population is a symptom of a society that does not care - reflected by the lack of taxation on the populous. If you examine a scandinavian country (such as sweden), why do they have way less homeless per-capita than the US?
  - thrower123 8y ago
    If I had to make a sweeping generalization, it is because Scandinavian winters are so much harsher. Freezing to death in Stockholm is more of a danger than in San Francisco.
maerF0x0 8y ago
People mix up "homeless" w/ pan handlers, mentally unstable homeless and drug users. The latter is what people do not like, but they use the term "homeless" to address them.

deft 8y ago

Homeless converted to live-in slaves. Sounds nice! Company towns are coming back, and probably going to be worse than ever, with big brother FB planning on doing similar.

lwhalen 8y ago
This was my first thought too. Don't know why you're getting down-voted because of it.
eloff 8y ago
These people are free to leave whenever they like. They're not enslaved physically, financially, or otherwise. Don't just throw around words like slavery casually. There is a huge difference between slavery and a job.
- djrobstep 8y ago
  Apart from the fact that you get to choose which company you're forced to generate profit for, not really.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    the threat of being homeless if you quit your job is quite severe, but i'm not sure it's an apples-to-apples comparison to a situation where people will chase you down and whip you near to death if you try to leave.
    - djrobstep 8y ago
      It absolutely the same. Try continuing to use food and shelter but without the money to pay for it: you'll be attacked by men with guns and thrown in a cage. Sometimes they'll even shoot you.
- ahoy 8y ago
  Free to go live under the bridge again. Complete freedom.

spraak 8y ago

I wonder if this makes it more difficult for the live-in caretaker to eventually find another place (if that's what they wanted) because they're effectively earning less? I.e. I wonder if the rent is usually R dollars if their salary (S2) is actually S2 = S1 - R where S1 is what they would be paid if they weren't receiving the housing, or if it something more like S2 = S1 - R*T where the amount deducted from their salary is more than the actual rent cost. Not quite the same, but I've done many "work trade" situations where I've lived on a property with some kind of house/structure and other furnishings/utilities provided in exchange for doing farm work or other labor. It never worked out economically well because the amount of time I had to put into where I lived made it difficult to also work elsewhere for money.

jseliger 8y ago

This is a cool program for a small number of people but the missing word in the article is "zoning." https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclusionary-zoning-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/exclu.... Growing homelessness problems come from many cities and suburbs making it illegal to build housing. As the supply of something is restricted in the face of demand, prices rise, causing many people on the financial edge to be pushed over it and into homelessness. If you want to comprehensively fight homelessness, building more housing is the first step. I've worked on many homeless-service programs, and it's disheartening to see cities allocate vast sums for them: http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f... while simultaneously using zoning laws to make sure they won't be very effective.

anoncoward111 8y ago
Do you feel their actions are from accidental incompetence, or from deliberate action? I've noticed that most cities strike some kind of middleground tone, where they say "homelessness is a big problem affecting us, but surely we can't live in a world without zoning regulations (because we want to keep property taxes and assessments high)." These programs for the homeless are mostly just lipservice to the actual problems you pointed out. I would know-- I was employed and homeless for 4 months until I found a girlfriend to split a very distant apartment with!
- rayiner 8y ago
  > Do you feel their actions are from accidental incompetence, or from deliberate action? Deliberate action. Back in the day, there was a lot of transient housing. Shared rooms, boarding arrangements, and the like for people whose economic condition didn't allow entering into a long term lease. Property owners found these people undesirable, and zoned those living situations out of existence. This was a deliberate and malicious effort.
  - tptacek 8y ago

jl2718 8y ago

There’s a problem with this. It’s called “s

jl2718 8y ago

There’s a problem with this. It’s called “squatter’s rights”, and it makes it very dangerous to give people a chance.

desdiv 8y ago
Squatters are defined as people who occupy building or land _without permission_. As soon as you give them permission to occupy, i.e. with a caretaker's employment contract, they are no longer a squatter, by definition.

bojackstorkman 8y ago

I am happy to read about programs like this. I have struggled financially for the better part of a decade due to a variety of issues ('08 crash wiped out pretty much every job that paid a living wage in the city I lived in, sickness/cancer in my family, people that I relied on for work dying, my personal issue with PTSD, etc.) Housing has always been the most influential factor in whether I was able to achieve even temporary stability. For the periods of time that I wasn't homeless, my place to stay was wither explicitly temporary (often for arbitrary, unknown periods of time) or cost nearly 100% of the income I was able to scrape together. Just three months ago, after nearly ten years, I was offered the opportunity to live in, maintain and fix up a small investment property in the middle of nowhere. As it stands, this arrangement should last a year, after which I can opt to stay and pay rent at market price (which in the middle of nowhere is very low). For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am stable enough to apply for school (starting in October, fingers crossed!), and try to really focus on doing some freelance website work for small businesses on the side. I wake up every morning and actually eat breakfast, which doesn't seem that significant, but for me that has been historically difficult or impossible because of my severe, sometimes crushing existential anxiety. I still have problems, but they are considerably smaller and more manageable. In these three months I have spent most of te money I've earned on either food or supplies for the house. As of right now, my most pressing problem is getting $40 to get a copy of my high school proficiency certificate, and beyond that it would be nice to get a beer at the only bar in town to meet some folks, but I'll take that set of problems over worrying about being cold, or hungry, or getting arrested for sleeping outside any day. So yay! These arrangements can be an absolute godsend for people that otherwise would have difficulty digging themselves out of a hole.

rectang 8y ago
Thanks for the vivid, eloquent depiction of what success in a program like the one from the article looks like. :)
- bojackstorkman 8y ago
  Thanks for reading! 90% of what I read about on here is stuff I don't fully understand that I read juat for self improvement, so it's nice to be able to contribute to a thread occasionally :)

xg15 8y ago

So does that mean their apartment is now tied to their job? E.g. what happens to their right to the apartment if they want to switch to a job outside the program or quit for whatever other reason?

lucio 8y ago

Good idea, but something in the article irked me. >The turnover rate for entry-level employees in the industry is around 50%. For the formerly homeless people hired through Shelters to Shutters–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances–the retention rate is more than 87%. >–who may feel more loyalty to the job because of their circumstances– That's a blatant lie. Their home is directly tied to their job. That's the best explanation for retention. edit: this is not a critique of the good idea of employing homeless.

sandworm101 8y ago
But are they being employed? Are they paid money or just reduced rent? Housing is great, but people need cash in hand. And dont talk to the IRS about whether you have to pay taxes on that rent reduction.

kwhitefoot 8y ago

It seems to me that one big problem with US zoning is the unwillingness to mix industrial, residential, and commercial properties in the same area. In many places in Europe it is possible to live without a car simply because one can walk to work and to the supermarket.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
The minimum price of owning and operating a car is substantially cheaper in the US than in Europe so it's not as big of a hurdle here. A sub $1k car powered by $2.50/gal gas will get you to work reliably enough that you can get a ride from a friend or figure out something else out on the several days a year it may not be derivable. Vehicle repair is a service that it's common for poorer people in the US to trade as a favor among each other. A much larger fraction of low income people self-teach vehicle repair out of necessity so it's much easier for low income people to find a friend to change brakes for cost+$50 them than it is for the HN crowd.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  What you're missing here is insurance; Which while state required is often ignored, putting the owner and other drivers at risk and risk of financial ruin. Insurance prices drop with credit and higher deductibles; So, while a car $1k car may itself be cheap to insure; if you're driving in a city with Teslas driving around, and you purchase insurance, you're likely under insured.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    People just pay a $100ish 1-month premium one month every other year when they need to renew their registration. The letter of the law is irrelevant when you can't possibly afford to comply. I didn't include it in my comment because I know that that reality is not popular around here and the specifics of how one evades paying for insurance varies from state to state. Driving uninsured or under-insured really doesn't matter when you have no assets and are living on the edge of poverty. The idea that someone who's only reasonable way to get to work is driving would not drive just because they're not insured is laughable. You're not going to get insurance by not going to work. It's not really a big additional risk compared to all the other things in day to day life that could push you over the edge. Regardless, insurance is still the same or cheaper in the US.

boomboomsubban 8y ago

They hired some homeless people, it worked well, so they started a charity? I don't understand the point of the charity, I can't find their financial records on the IRS website or their own.

rtkwe 8y ago
Took a half second on google to find their annual report: http://shelterstoshutters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18-S2SH-103-AnnualReport-R10-Pages.pdf http://shelterstoshutters.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18-...
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  That's nice, but I was looking for their 990 form. That seems to have the relevant information on it, and I believe they're only required to give me an actual copy if I contact them, but it's still odd to me that it's not in the IRS database.

deleted 8y ago

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