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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

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.

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.