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Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

199 points by dankohn1 8y ago

kuroguro 8y ago
Getting a 404. Did they take it down or is this one of the new EU block things?
- massivecali 8y ago
  It's up, but behind one of those garbage begwalls.
- realthing 8y ago
  What EU Block things
sidesentists 8y ago
This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified.
- NTDF9 8y ago
  > This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified. Great point. Look at how paradoxical it is. Every time unemployment is high, they pump in more money (raising asset values). But unemployment is not high because of "lack" of money. The real problem is unequal distribution of money pumped into the system. Unemployment is a joke. It's not like the world has run out of things to do. I can think of so many more jobs that need people (like more Boeing testers, more street cleaners, more infrastructure repairers, more artists, mores school teachers, more nurses etc.) None of that is happening because of lack of money. No, its happening because money is being sucked by the few at the cost of the society.
  - neffy 8y ago
    Actually - no they don't. Changing interest rates doesn't change the money supply. But you're right, the real problem is the uneven distribution of money - the precise causes are a little more complex though.
    - NTDF9 8y ago
      > Changing interest rates doesn't change the money supply. It does by discouraging creation of new money by way of loans. The uneven distribution of money is because of an unbalanced wealth creation system. Money trickles down from the Fed into assets (owned by banks and wealthy) who then loan that money out to others. Some of that money goes into business activities such as procuring goods and services, thus creating demand. The rest of that money goes into speculation and buying up more "assets" that will pay out in future. Notice how labor is not important in any of this at all. Labor is almost a side-effect of this economic system of assets vs assets. Unfortunately, no human is born with assets. Most humans still make money from labor. If money printing goes into assets but humans make money from labor, it's obvious that this will throw most humans out of the system. This is like a video game where some people got the cheat code while others didn't.
- syshum 8y ago
  Unemployment rate has only been a part of the factor, and the U3 number is a VERY VERY bad indicator or economic health which is the number the news reports U6 is much more comprehensive but even it has its limits, you have to contrast it with Workforce Participation numbers which is still at a Decade low number though it on on the rise 2009 (peak of economic rescission and unemployment BTW): 65.7% of people where in the workforce 2018: 62.7% of people where in the workforce U6 Unemployment sits at almost 7.3% where U3 is 3.8%
- deleted 8y ago
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- snakeboy 8y ago
  The adoption of slavery can reduce employment rate to 0 quite effectively.
  - anfilt 8y ago
    Kinda a dark point, but defintely a counter example to why unemployment may not always be the best index/stat to look at. However, I think there are probably better counter poonts than such an extreme.
neonate 8y ago
https://outline.com/gJ6Ux7 https://outline.com/gJ6Ux7
- ng12 8y ago
  Thanks. There's something funny about a publication subtitled "democracy dies in darkness" fading to black.
cronix 8y ago
KOMO TV in Seattle recently (last Sunday) did a big report on this called "Seattle is Dying." Down south in Portland, it's the same thing. Down in San Francisco...same thing. Down further, same thing. This is spreading quite quickly, all over in the big cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53uiRFq4Ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53uiRFq4Ds
- egypturnash 8y ago
  FWIW KOMO is now owned by Sinclair, and is increasingly rabidly right-wing. What to do about the homeless situation in Seattle is a big topic of discussion currently; we had an attempt to tax big companies to get some money to deal with this get shouted down by all the folks in Amazon's pockets.
  - Fellshard 8y ago
    The solutions proposed by the Seattle City Council are to aid and abet addictive habits, and to pursue 'more of the same' for every policy that put things where they are today. No amount of tax money they would receive would fix the problem, because they have shown they cannot spend it competently.
    - grogenaut 8y ago
      Care to elaborate and point to specific policies? Are you referring to safe injection sites or something else?
      - Fellshard 8y ago
        That's the primary example, yes. This in addition to curbing police enforcement of actual drug use and possession, from what I've heard in reporting and from officers themselves. One anecdote I've heard through my brother, who has been in law enforcement and monitors things in our old home region. He told me an officer he knew left the force because those types of restrictions were becoming untenable to deal with. Secondhand, so take this, too, with a grain of salt.
mnm1 8y ago
What is the problem with people living in tents? Why are they forced to dismantle and kicked out by cops? It makes no sense. How can Americans be so cruel to the most vulnerable, most helpless people in our society that they won't even let them live in tents and insist on disrupting their lives constantly? What kind of sick society does this? Is it just so rich assholes don't have to look at them and be reminded that this is one consequences to them being rich? It's utterly disgusting and indefensible. These are real people just like everyone else, with emotions and feelings and hopes and dreams. Are Americans really that callous that they are impervious to the suffering of so many? Are they really that entitled and naive as to think that only people who can afford insane costs of living deserve to be treated with dignity and respect? The homeless don't hurt anyone just by living in tents. They are just trying to get by like everyone else. What is wrong with that?
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  It's not just rich assholes, a surprising majority of the population want all evidence of poverty out of sight in their lives. Santa Cruz made it illegal just to sleep visibly in public in an attempt to criminalize homelessness so they could hide the problem.
  - Fellshard 8y ago
    We should not hide the problem, and we also should not elevate it to 'a valid lifestyle'. Surely we can try to find other options between those two.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      I get the impression some people see criminalization and housing the homeless in jails as more than just hiding the problem.
    - pmiller2 8y ago
      What’s the problem with someone of sound mind (i.e. not due to mental illness or addiction) living on the streets by choice? The only issues I have are that sanitation is a problem, and the places we force them into are not safe for them, or for non-homeless people, for that matter. Would you criminalize someone who’s eternally “backpacking through Europe,” metaphorically speaking? No one should be forced to live on the streets in a country that has a large multiple of vacant homes per homeless person, but if someone makes a voluntary choice to do so, why stop them, as long as it doesn’t harm public safety? Broadly speaking, you’re allowed to do stupid things in the US, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.
anongraddebt 8y ago
Here is one database on homelessness in the U.S.: https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/ https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/ At least with this database, homelessness appears to have decreased over the last ten years. ---- Posting this because it isn't clear whether the "changing face of homelessness" is such that current methods for calculating homelessness are problematic or not.
- kevinpet 8y ago
  It's unfortunate for this family, but as long as there are some desperately poor, you'll be able to find stories like this. If the changing face of homelessness is not actually going hungry that often, being given notice when the police are coming through to clean out the encampment, this might be an improvement over recent historical trends. I'm disappointed with the lack of data and style reporting on homelessness as a whole. Inconsistent statistics or lack of any context makes it hard to form an opinion. The site you linked which should be a good source of data makes it hard to see data over time and inexplicably colors the map by total population, rather than fraction of population (https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/). From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_yearly_timeline_of_people_experiencing_homelessness.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... it appears it has fallen over the past 12 years without much correlation to the economy.
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    Yeah, the lack of high-quality, public databases for certain issues is unfortunate. A couple years ago I sat in on a talk by a guy in D.C. who had led a small beltway coalition for over a decade to get data processes standardized across the largest departments within the federal government. Things they achieved, that made one think the U.S. was simply moving from being stuck in the 70's to being stuck in the 80's ,were quite clearly exciting wins for him.
jlangenauer 8y ago
If, in the Soviet Union, people had to live in tents while working, most sensible people would blame the economic system in place. Yet in capitalist America...?
- syshum 8y ago
  I would blame are current economic system, which is pretty damn far from Free market Capitalism as over the last 80 or so years we have instituted a wide range of socialist inspired programs and regulations that have largely stopped and in some cases rescinded the gains against poverty that a actual free market system brings. if you look at any economic data you will see Poverty rates where Plummeting until the "War on poverty" began and the government started trying to "solve" the problem. Government: If you think society has problems, wait until you see our solutions
  - freshcatch_ 8y ago
    Free market capitalism has never existed and will never exist.
- hourislate 8y ago
  I would point you to the following expose on Homelessness. https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is-dying?jwsource=cl https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is... It is an excellent discussion on the causes and remedies.
- nannePOPI 8y ago
  the housing market, especially in the US, is far from being capitalistic. You have all kind of weird rules, zoning laws maybe are the first culprit, and guess what is the result? You don't have enough houses, people are homeless and prices are most often ridiculous. This despite the fact that you have really a lot of land and the kind where you could build really high structures to house people.
- yonran 8y ago
  > Yet in capitalist America...? Restrictive zoning is the prohibition of creating housing capital, so it’s ironic and incorrect to blame capitalism for the housing shortages in restrictive metros such as the Bay Area. Landlordism or rentierism might be better words for the capital repression.
i_am_proteus 8y ago
These are my personal observations: When I first moved to the SF Bay area, I was surprised by the amount of visible homelessness and by the number of service economy workers who drove nearly two hours to and from work. I also had my first experiences with the "campuses" of major technology companies, where money was made hand-over-fist. I think the recent widening income gap is a natural consequence of the technology we have invented. A relatively small number of people are able to generate a relatively large amount of profit; this is the nature of the software industry. But that relatively small number is still enough to dominate the economy of a major metropolitan area, and so it has, and the demand for labor routinely outstrips the supply of housing for those laborers (artificially constricted, but also geographically constrained), and so those who work in software and electrical engineering and cetera can afford to live in the area. Those who do not, can not. I look at the cities where this is an issue and I see similar threads: industries where money from everywhere flows to a relative few. Technology skims off the top in San Francisco. Finance skims off the top in New York. Government skims off the top in Washington, DC. So the rise in visible homelessness is perhaps the expected result. Cities are economic systems, and it is easy and myopic to cater only to the demands of the prime mover. But the prime mover has auxiliaries it needs to function, without which the system will collapse. And my experience with collapses is that they are not gradual, but rather, they are sudden. Last night, a fire raged through abandoned vehicles parked under Interstate 280. Black smoke poured out from under the freeway and choked Portrero Hill. I watched fire crews advance on the flames and extinguish them. What will happen when the people we rely on to extinguish our flames cannot afford to live in our cities?
- angarg12 8y ago
  > So the rise in visible homelessness is perhaps the expected result. But this happens in the US disproportionally more than, say, many countries in Europe.
  - paganel 8y ago
    Because the social safety net in the US is almost totally absent. As an European that is one of the main things that keeps me away from ever wanting to work in the States, down there it looks like you're either a successful person, meaning you have a house on which you can afford to pay mortgage, which in turn means that you have a successful job which allows you to navigate the inevitable recessions, or you're always one-step away from being homeless, there's no in-between state where you can live an ok-ish life on a not-so-great job without having nightmares about your economic prospects each and every night.
angel_j 8y ago
The US has an annualized growth rate [0] of ~.7%, or ~2M/yr, and this an historically low rate (probably b/c of economic problems) Annualized "new housing starts" is 1.28M/yr [1] And we already have a housing deficit, proven not only in homelessness, but in adults sharing rentals, the high cost of rent, new grads completely besides themselves in lack-of-prospects, student debt, etc... In other words, it's getting worse. Clearly, the only answer is building more housing, and the market is not answering that call. Or give me 40 acres and a mule... [0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population-growth-annual-percent-wb-data.html https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population-growth... [1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts
- davidw 8y ago
  The market is constrained by rampant, rabid NIMBYism, among other things.
  - angel_j 8y ago
    They all want to own a rental too, since it only costs a down payment to possess the property iff somebody else pays the bank. But it's more than NIMBYS. There's foreign capital holding land and property, dog-eat-world construction developers operating nationally and globally, and infestations of anonymous YUPPIES who are basically living in w/e city like it's an extended career commute, and have no incentive to gaf about local problems, but want their sensibilities and stuff to be safe and protected by police—it's these people's tax dollars city politicians clamor about needing to attract in order to fix local problems and ofc pay expensively to police.
mlinksva 8y ago
Surely life in a tent or on the street is far more dangerous than life in shoddy but formal housing, like the complex the protagonists of this story were living in before it was condemned for being unsafe. Of course such a moral quandary shouldn't be necessary: allow and subsidize the cheapest possible permanent and safe housing everywhere.
- Fellshard 8y ago
  Do you have evidence that such houses are actually used when made? I've heard - and this is hearsay at the moment - that when those have been built in Seattle, they were unused.
  - djakjxnanjak 8y ago
    Are you saying that somebody build a home in Seattle and put it up for rent or sale, and nobody was willing to move in, at any price? I would find that hard to believe. I can more easily imagine a poorly-administered housing subsidy program that failed to utilize some housing.
    - Fellshard 8y ago
      Looks like it was a women's only experimental camp, 'low-barrier'. https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-to-close-controversial-low-barrier-homeless-camp-in-march https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-to-close-controversi...
throwawaysea 8y ago
I echo others' sentiments here, that these problems will not be fixed unless people from all sides stop trying to 'win' on ideological grounds, stop trying to gaslight each other, stop trying to demonize, and simply evaluate the situation for what it really is. This requires making hard decisions, selecting the right incentives/disincentives, accepting that no solution is perfect, and instituting transparent well-audited policies that serve the interests of local constituents. Here are some of my thoughts regarding this topic: - No one is entitled to live wherever they want, doing whatever job they want, at whatever pay they are able to demand. Different places carry different degrees of desirability, and the resulting demand for locations means that prices will be different for different locales. People need to show some personal responsibility and choose locations, jobs, etc. that are feasible. Choosing to move to a location in a line of work that is not compensated enough is going against the incentive structure built into our market dynamics - namely that a reduced supply of labor for some job will result in wages for that job increasing. - Long-time residents of an area may find it unfair that they are being displaced by newcomers or a sudden boom or other changes that push prices upward and beyond their reach. Those cities could consider establishing policies for subsidized rent for those long-time residents below some income level. That is, not rent control that impacts individual landlords but subsidizing the cost of housing for long-time residents (e.g. 5+ years) across the entire city's tax base. I keep saying "long-time" residents because there has to be a disincentive for someone moving to expensive locales and using the safety net/goodwill of the public as a means to enable an otherwise irresponsible move. For example, those moving to Seattle or SF in the 2010s have no excuse for expecting anything other than an expensive life, and need to carefully evaluate if they can make it there. - Cities could assist residents in finding viable jobs and locations to live in if they can't make it locally. They could even help pay for it. For example, it is possible there are people that are homeless in some expensive city and could make it elsewhere, but don't have the funds necessary to get over the hump of moving. Cities could pay for them to move and get settled. In the Seattle area, we spend over $1B a year on homelessness (https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of-homelessness-seattle-king-county-costs.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of...), which comes out to $83K/year/homeless person (since there are 12000 homeless persons in the area). For $25K we could move someone to a more affordable middle-America location, pay for a year of their housing, and potentially even their food/utility costs during that time. Perhaps we could go a step further and match them to jobs. The flip side is that those people need to accept that they may not do a job they want to do. Sometimes you need to suck it up and do something you might consider menial or unmatched to your skills or unmatched to your passions - but that's just life and everyone has to make tradeoffs. And as with my other idea, such services have to only be available to long-time residents so as to not induce free-riders. - Not all homeless people are 'bad'. Some are well-meaning people down on their luck job-wise. Some are long-time residents who have been priced out or displaced from their locale. Some may have encountered some one-off hardship. Either way, we need cities to meaningfully identify these various cohorts precisely, so taxpayers can selectively provide support to those who deserve it. The mechanisms used for such identification need to be trustworthy. As an example of an untrustworthy process, in Seattle the city uses self-reported answers from homeless people to claim that most are from here. But most video interviews you see on TV (or anecdotally, when I've spoke to homeless people myself) indicate they are not actually from here. Those point-in-time surveys are facilitated by homeless activists, who are likely coaching people towards certain answers, which is why the only viable answer is to rely on positive identification for claims about local residency. - Homeless folks need to accept services. Refusing services (whether by way of housing or for addiction treatment) is a non-starter. The law-abiding tax-paying residents who support a city don't have an obligation to forfeit their public spaces to transients, permanent nomads, or addicts. - Cities need to enforce laws. They can't look the other way when property crime is committed, or when littering takes place, and so on. Or worse, they can't selectively apply laws differently to different people (see http://mynorthwest.com/1046331/construction-worker-rv-ticket/ http://mynorthwest.com/1046331/construction-worker-rv-ticket... for an example). People pay taxes and elect local governments to serve their interests and support their quality of life. The trend of urban transient campers usurping public spaces is unacceptable - people work hard to make it in expensive places to enjoy those amenities, after all. These are just some off the cuff ideas - I'm sure there is room for improving them and I'm sure there are other good ideas as well. But I do think the current direction of many of these cities - which is basically spend more and show no result for it - is the wrong answer.
davidw 8y ago
If you want to get involved with housing politics in that area, these are some good places to start: * https://www.sfyimby.org/ https://www.sfyimby.org/ * https://cayimby.org/ https://cayimby.org/ Look at the crazy tweet quoted by a Palo Alto city councilor for instance: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1109500565971763202 https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1109500565971763202 "Why there's a housing crisis, exhibit #29393911". People who don't believe in supply and demand.
rambojazz 8y ago
Is there a non-paywalled mirror of this article?
dgzl 8y ago
I'm from a small town in Oregon that sees a lot of nomadic traveling folk, either homeless or lifestyle (the PCT comes through the area, for instance), and the town is generally pretty receptive of these people. Growing up I would hang out and spend time with them, just chatting and playing music and enjoying the area. I carried that to adulthood and I now live in Portland, where the homeless problem is quite severe. Last weekend, looking at food carts downtown, a man who looked quite disheveled and in shock starts trying to talk with me. He tells me he just got off the bus from the hospital, and that morning he had been attacked with a knife by a homeless woman with gang affiliation. He showed me his wounds and hospital bracelet, and I decided to spend some time with him and try calming him down. Before long he tells me that he's only been homeless a few months, and before that he was collecting enough SSI to sustain himself. He says a while back he had spent time in jail and been released, but the jail never put that in the manifest. Apparently (someone) looked into his record and it looked like he had escaped, causing him grief that suspended his SSI payments, in turn putting him on the street. He was expecting payments to continue soon. We talked about things like honor, culture, respect, family. Eventually I let slip that I was a software engineer and he started telling me that he used to really be into Linux, and his old work had him using BSD and Unix, and we eventually started talking about physics which he was much more knowledgeable than I. After I thought his shock was gone and feeling a little better, I bought him some food to help him through the evening. That same night I had conversation with a different homeless man, who was more rude and rather creepy. He talked a lot about how the homeless are being fed human meat, and how addictive it is. --- A friend who's from a wealthy Asian-dominated town in California tells me there's a service where people will drive around and pick up homeless people and give them a free ride to the neighboring town. The first gentleman in my story above told me a similar thing: Las Vegas was apparently giving free bus tickets to the homeless to come to Oregon, because our homeless services are top-tier.
- berberous 8y ago
  On the last bit, that was all over the news for a while. CA and NV had a big fight over it: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposal-in-nevada-patient-dumping-case/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposa...
Animats 8y ago
If you're a PHP/Javascript programmer today, that's your future at age 50.
- deleted 8y ago
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- dang 8y ago
  Yikes. You're a great HN contributor but please don't do this here.
  - Animats 8y ago
    It's harsh, but may not be wrong. One day I was eating at the Burger King near the cable car turntable in SF, and listening to a group of homeless people. They were printers. Or used to be. That was a good-paying skilled trade for several hundred years. Now it's dead. Typesetting is automated, modern presses take very few people to run, and short-run jobs run at FedEx Office, not a printing plant.
    - dang 8y ago
      That's already a more informative and substantive comment than the first one.
n00bdude 8y ago
I've lived on the streets of NYC since 2017 & been employed (min-wage job) but only do so in order to afford more free time to creative write.
- mxstbr 8y ago
  That is fascinating, can you share more of your experience? How does living on the streets work, how did you end up in this situation?
  - n00bdude 8y ago
    It started w/ an Aladdin story & dream-chasing .. but to cut to it, @ present, I basically operate in / out of a storage unit. The routine basically goes: Wake up, run / shower @ gym (some days, meditate in tanning booth), go to cafe & write for ~3-4 hours, Citi Bike to day-job, work it & once finished, go to sleep on soho-streets @ night. I ended up in this situation because I put myself into it so as to be in New York City (publishing house Mecca) I am from CA but going for it ;)
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - thrden 8y ago
      do you have any public writing? I'd be interested in reading what you've written.
      - n00bdude 8y ago
        Wow, that'd be 100% awesome .. If you visit my site, https://blondyn.com https://blondyn.com , you will find Episode 1 of my Aladdin adaptation (Aladdin Exponential) for which I moved to the city. Also, I recently self-published an NYC short story compilation (Lit Art: Vol.1 - LOL POP), which right now is free to read if you've Amazon Prime. If you're interested in a fun & light read, I'd recommend the short stories. Aladdin Exponential is a novel - a spin on Aladdin ~ the premise ~ instead of a Genie coming out of the Lamp, the Aladdin character gets pulled inside to discover a Whole New World .. adventure ensues.
hultner 8y ago
Article is paywalled for me, does anyone know if this was in the paper version? And if so what issue?
jammygit 8y ago
Is there a win win business model that helps these homeless people while not being a charity? There are so many issues: drug addiction, mental health, a changing economy. It doesn't feel impossible though.
throwaway713 8y ago
A little bit unrelated, but does anyone else get severe anxiety reading articles like this? I’m currently employed in a well-paying tech job, but it always seems like I’m just one giant disaster away from this kind of thing. Granted, I have a family “safety net” to fall back on in a worst case scenario, which I realize a lot of people don’t have, but it’s always in the back of my mind that the economy could crash, that my skills are suddenly not in demand, or some weird health insurance disaster wipes out my retirement savings. I constantly feel like I need to save up as much money as possible to reach financial independence as quickly as I can so that I’m prepared for some kind of unforeseen catastrophe.
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- perfmode 8y ago
  Yes. I won’t survive a perfect storm.
  - TomMckenny 8y ago
    It need not be perfect, we're all one modest car accident away from a life on the streets.
- MIKarlsen 8y ago
  I'm a big worrier myself, and these thoughts often get the better of me. I have been unemployed for a couple of months last year, and although I live in a scandinavian country, it was still tough to see others in the same situation struggling. I think society has a great responsibility in educating citizens correctly. A lot of the people I met had no grasp of technology, or its role in society, which is a big warning-light in my eyes. Everyone is saying "AI and robotics wont take your job", but it absolutely will, as the jobs the new industry creates seems to be STEM-jobs that require long STEM-educations - something not everyone is cut out for. I feel like we're yet to see the full consequence of technology's role in our society, and I fear that we will end up with a big chunk of people who cannot actively contribute to the workforce.
- 8y ago
jorblumesea 8y ago
As someone who deals with this every day in Seattle, the core issue is that the US doesn't have a cheap and effective healthcare system that can deal with addiction and mental healthcare issues. So cities are forced to try and patch holes where they can. But the reality is that without coordination at the federal level there's little chance of success. It's a national problem that requires a national solution, but our response is only at local levels.
RickJWagner 8y ago
It's awesome she can keep her dignity, and have hope and the means to advance. I admire her gumption.
pndd90 8y ago
Having come to the US with a few dollars behind me, I totally understand the circumstances of being poor. having said that, there is no way you need to be homeless in the US. There is more social help here than in a lot of places in the world. subsidized living support is real, food stamps and church support, among other things. I cannot judge the people in the article, I dont know them but I think when two people work, are not disabled, they do not have to live on the streets in the US, unless they have some kind of a psychological disorder. yes, life is tough, but there is no way it is tougher than in a lot of other places where people in worse conditions monetarily make do. if they are not on social security or not in subsidized housing, then they make enough to not be on it. homelessness in the US is a very odd state of affairs to anyone to was truly poor before.

199 points by dankohn1 8y ago

kuroguro 8y ago

Getting a 404. Did they take it down or is this one of the new EU block things?

massivecali 8y ago
It's up, but behind one of those garbage begwalls.
realthing 8y ago
What EU Block things

sidesentists 8y ago

This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified.

NTDF9 8y ago
> This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified. Great point. Look at how paradoxical it is. Every time unemployment is high, they pump in more money (raising asset values). But unemployment is not high because of "lack" of money. The real problem is unequal distribution of money pumped into the system. Unemployment is a joke. It's not like the world has run out of things to do. I can think of so many more jobs that need people (like more Boeing testers, more street cleaners, more infrastructure repairers, more artists, mores school teachers, more nurses etc.) None of that is happening because of lack of money. No, its happening because money is being sucked by the few at the cost of the society.
- neffy 8y ago
  Actually - no they don't. Changing interest rates doesn't change the money supply. But you're right, the real problem is the uneven distribution of money - the precise causes are a little more complex though.
  - NTDF9 8y ago
    > Changing interest rates doesn't change the money supply. It does by discouraging creation of new money by way of loans. The uneven distribution of money is because of an unbalanced wealth creation system. Money trickles down from the Fed into assets (owned by banks and wealthy) who then loan that money out to others. Some of that money goes into business activities such as procuring goods and services, thus creating demand. The rest of that money goes into speculation and buying up more "assets" that will pay out in future. Notice how labor is not important in any of this at all. Labor is almost a side-effect of this economic system of assets vs assets. Unfortunately, no human is born with assets. Most humans still make money from labor. If money printing goes into assets but humans make money from labor, it's obvious that this will throw most humans out of the system. This is like a video game where some people got the cheat code while others didn't.
syshum 8y ago
Unemployment rate has only been a part of the factor, and the U3 number is a VERY VERY bad indicator or economic health which is the number the news reports U6 is much more comprehensive but even it has its limits, you have to contrast it with Workforce Participation numbers which is still at a Decade low number though it on on the rise 2009 (peak of economic rescission and unemployment BTW): 65.7% of people where in the workforce 2018: 62.7% of people where in the workforce U6 Unemployment sits at almost 7.3% where U3 is 3.8%
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snakeboy 8y ago
The adoption of slavery can reduce employment rate to 0 quite effectively.
- anfilt 8y ago
  Kinda a dark point, but defintely a counter example to why unemployment may not always be the best index/stat to look at. However, I think there are probably better counter poonts than such an extreme.

neonate 8y ago

https://outline.com/gJ6Ux7 https://outline.com/gJ6Ux7

ng12 8y ago
Thanks. There's something funny about a publication subtitled "democracy dies in darkness" fading to black.

cronix 8y ago

KOMO TV in Seattle recently (last Sunday) did a big report on this called "Seattle is Dying." Down south in Portland, it's the same thing. Down in San Francisco...same thing. Down further, same thing. This is spreading quite quickly, all over in the big cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53uiRFq4Ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53uiRFq4Ds

egypturnash 8y ago
FWIW KOMO is now owned by Sinclair, and is increasingly rabidly right-wing. What to do about the homeless situation in Seattle is a big topic of discussion currently; we had an attempt to tax big companies to get some money to deal with this get shouted down by all the folks in Amazon's pockets.
- Fellshard 8y ago
  The solutions proposed by the Seattle City Council are to aid and abet addictive habits, and to pursue 'more of the same' for every policy that put things where they are today. No amount of tax money they would receive would fix the problem, because they have shown they cannot spend it competently.
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    Care to elaborate and point to specific policies? Are you referring to safe injection sites or something else?
    - Fellshard 8y ago
      That's the primary example, yes. This in addition to curbing police enforcement of actual drug use and possession, from what I've heard in reporting and from officers themselves. One anecdote I've heard through my brother, who has been in law enforcement and monitors things in our old home region. He told me an officer he knew left the force because those types of restrictions were becoming untenable to deal with. Secondhand, so take this, too, with a grain of salt.

mnm1 8y ago

What is the problem with people living in tents? Why are they forced to dismantle and kicked out by cops? It makes no sense. How can Americans be so cruel to the most vulnerable, most helpless people in our society that they won't even let them live in tents and insist on disrupting their lives constantly? What kind of sick society does this? Is it just so rich assholes don't have to look at them and be reminded that this is one consequences to them being rich? It's utterly disgusting and indefensible. These are real people just like everyone else, with emotions and feelings and hopes and dreams. Are Americans really that callous that they are impervious to the suffering of so many? Are they really that entitled and naive as to think that only people who can afford insane costs of living deserve to be treated with dignity and respect? The homeless don't hurt anyone just by living in tents. They are just trying to get by like everyone else. What is wrong with that?

newnewpdro 8y ago
It's not just rich assholes, a surprising majority of the population want all evidence of poverty out of sight in their lives. Santa Cruz made it illegal just to sleep visibly in public in an attempt to criminalize homelessness so they could hide the problem.
- Fellshard 8y ago
  We should not hide the problem, and we also should not elevate it to 'a valid lifestyle'. Surely we can try to find other options between those two.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    I get the impression some people see criminalization and housing the homeless in jails as more than just hiding the problem.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    What’s the problem with someone of sound mind (i.e. not due to mental illness or addiction) living on the streets by choice? The only issues I have are that sanitation is a problem, and the places we force them into are not safe for them, or for non-homeless people, for that matter. Would you criminalize someone who’s eternally “backpacking through Europe,” metaphorically speaking? No one should be forced to live on the streets in a country that has a large multiple of vacant homes per homeless person, but if someone makes a voluntary choice to do so, why stop them, as long as it doesn’t harm public safety? Broadly speaking, you’re allowed to do stupid things in the US, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.

anongraddebt 8y ago

Here is one database on homelessness in the U.S.: https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/ https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/ At least with this database, homelessness appears to have decreased over the last ten years. ---- Posting this because it isn't clear whether the "changing face of homelessness" is such that current methods for calculating homelessness are problematic or not.

kevinpet 8y ago
It's unfortunate for this family, but as long as there are some desperately poor, you'll be able to find stories like this. If the changing face of homelessness is not actually going hungry that often, being given notice when the police are coming through to clean out the encampment, this might be an improvement over recent historical trends. I'm disappointed with the lack of data and style reporting on homelessness as a whole. Inconsistent statistics or lack of any context makes it hard to form an opinion. The site you linked which should be a good source of data makes it hard to see data over time and inexplicably colors the map by total population, rather than fraction of population (https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/). From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_yearly_timeline_of_people_experiencing_homelessness.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... it appears it has fallen over the past 12 years without much correlation to the economy.
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  Yeah, the lack of high-quality, public databases for certain issues is unfortunate. A couple years ago I sat in on a talk by a guy in D.C. who had led a small beltway coalition for over a decade to get data processes standardized across the largest departments within the federal government. Things they achieved, that made one think the U.S. was simply moving from being stuck in the 70's to being stuck in the 80's ,were quite clearly exciting wins for him.

jlangenauer 8y ago

If, in the Soviet Union, people had to live in tents while working, most sensible people would blame the economic system in place. Yet in capitalist America...?

syshum 8y ago
I would blame are current economic system, which is pretty damn far from Free market Capitalism as over the last 80 or so years we have instituted a wide range of socialist inspired programs and regulations that have largely stopped and in some cases rescinded the gains against poverty that a actual free market system brings. if you look at any economic data you will see Poverty rates where Plummeting until the "War on poverty" began and the government started trying to "solve" the problem. Government: If you think society has problems, wait until you see our solutions
- freshcatch_ 8y ago
  Free market capitalism has never existed and will never exist.
hourislate 8y ago
I would point you to the following expose on Homelessness. https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is-dying?jwsource=cl https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is... It is an excellent discussion on the causes and remedies.
nannePOPI 8y ago
the housing market, especially in the US, is far from being capitalistic. You have all kind of weird rules, zoning laws maybe are the first culprit, and guess what is the result? You don't have enough houses, people are homeless and prices are most often ridiculous. This despite the fact that you have really a lot of land and the kind where you could build really high structures to house people.
yonran 8y ago
> Yet in capitalist America...? Restrictive zoning is the prohibition of creating housing capital, so it’s ironic and incorrect to blame capitalism for the housing shortages in restrictive metros such as the Bay Area. Landlordism or rentierism might be better words for the capital repression.

i_am_proteus 8y ago

These are my personal observations: When I first moved to the SF Bay area, I was surprised by the amount of visible homelessness and by the number of service economy workers who drove nearly two hours to and from work. I also had my first experiences with the "campuses" of major technology companies, where money was made hand-over-fist. I think the recent widening income gap is a natural consequence of the technology we have invented. A relatively small number of people are able to generate a relatively large amount of profit; this is the nature of the software industry. But that relatively small number is still enough to dominate the economy of a major metropolitan area, and so it has, and the demand for labor routinely outstrips the supply of housing for those laborers (artificially constricted, but also geographically constrained), and so those who work in software and electrical engineering and cetera can afford to live in the area. Those who do not, can not. I look at the cities where this is an issue and I see similar threads: industries where money from everywhere flows to a relative few. Technology skims off the top in San Francisco. Finance skims off the top in New York. Government skims off the top in Washington, DC. So the rise in visible homelessness is perhaps the expected result. Cities are economic systems, and it is easy and myopic to cater only to the demands of the prime mover. But the prime mover has auxiliaries it needs to function, without which the system will collapse. And my experience with collapses is that they are not gradual, but rather, they are sudden. Last night, a fire raged through abandoned vehicles parked under Interstate 280. Black smoke poured out from under the freeway and choked Portrero Hill. I watched fire crews advance on the flames and extinguish them. What will happen when the people we rely on to extinguish our flames cannot afford to live in our cities?

angarg12 8y ago
> So the rise in visible homelessness is perhaps the expected result. But this happens in the US disproportionally more than, say, many countries in Europe.
- paganel 8y ago
  Because the social safety net in the US is almost totally absent. As an European that is one of the main things that keeps me away from ever wanting to work in the States, down there it looks like you're either a successful person, meaning you have a house on which you can afford to pay mortgage, which in turn means that you have a successful job which allows you to navigate the inevitable recessions, or you're always one-step away from being homeless, there's no in-between state where you can live an ok-ish life on a not-so-great job without having nightmares about your economic prospects each and every night.

angel_j 8y ago

The US has an annualized growth rate [0] of ~.7%, or ~2M/yr, and this an historically low rate (probably b/c of economic problems) Annualized "new housing starts" is 1.28M/yr [1] And we already have a housing deficit, proven not only in homelessness, but in adults sharing rentals, the high cost of rent, new grads completely besides themselves in lack-of-prospects, student debt, etc... In other words, it's getting worse. Clearly, the only answer is building more housing, and the market is not answering that call. Or give me 40 acres and a mule... [0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population-growth-annual-percent-wb-data.html https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population-growth... [1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts

davidw 8y ago
The market is constrained by rampant, rabid NIMBYism, among other things.
- angel_j 8y ago
  They all want to own a rental too, since it only costs a down payment to possess the property iff somebody else pays the bank. But it's more than NIMBYS. There's foreign capital holding land and property, dog-eat-world construction developers operating nationally and globally, and infestations of anonymous YUPPIES who are basically living in w/e city like it's an extended career commute, and have no incentive to gaf about local problems, but want their sensibilities and stuff to be safe and protected by police—it's these people's tax dollars city politicians clamor about needing to attract in order to fix local problems and ofc pay expensively to police.

mlinksva 8y ago

Surely life in a tent or on the street is far more dangerous than life in shoddy but formal housing, like the complex the protagonists of this story were living in before it was condemned for being unsafe. Of course such a moral quandary shouldn't be necessary: allow and subsidize the cheapest possible permanent and safe housing everywhere.

Fellshard 8y ago
Do you have evidence that such houses are actually used when made? I've heard - and this is hearsay at the moment - that when those have been built in Seattle, they were unused.
- djakjxnanjak 8y ago
  Are you saying that somebody build a home in Seattle and put it up for rent or sale, and nobody was willing to move in, at any price? I would find that hard to believe. I can more easily imagine a poorly-administered housing subsidy program that failed to utilize some housing.
  - Fellshard 8y ago
    Looks like it was a women's only experimental camp, 'low-barrier'. https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-to-close-controversial-low-barrier-homeless-camp-in-march https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-to-close-controversi...

throwawaysea 8y ago

I echo others' sentiments here, that these problems will not be fixed unless people from all sides stop trying to 'win' on ideological grounds, stop trying to gaslight each other, stop trying to demonize, and simply evaluate the situation for what it really is. This requires making hard decisions, selecting the right incentives/disincentives, accepting that no solution is perfect, and instituting transparent well-audited policies that serve the interests of local constituents. Here are some of my thoughts regarding this topic: - No one is entitled to live wherever they want, doing whatever job they want, at whatever pay they are able to demand. Different places carry different degrees of desirability, and the resulting demand for locations means that prices will be different for different locales. People need to show some personal responsibility and choose locations, jobs, etc. that are feasible. Choosing to move to a location in a line of work that is not compensated enough is going against the incentive structure built into our market dynamics - namely that a reduced supply of labor for some job will result in wages for that job increasing. - Long-time residents of an area may find it unfair that they are being displaced by newcomers or a sudden boom or other changes that push prices upward and beyond their reach. Those cities could consider establishing policies for subsidized rent for those long-time residents below some income level. That is, not rent control that impacts individual landlords but subsidizing the cost of housing for long-time residents (e.g. 5+ years) across the entire city's tax base. I keep saying "long-time" residents because there has to be a disincentive for someone moving to expensive locales and using the safety net/goodwill of the public as a means to enable an otherwise irresponsible move. For example, those moving to Seattle or SF in the 2010s have no excuse for expecting anything other than an expensive life, and need to carefully evaluate if they can make it there. - Cities could assist residents in finding viable jobs and locations to live in if they can't make it locally. They could even help pay for it. For example, it is possible there are people that are homeless in some expensive city and could make it elsewhere, but don't have the funds necessary to get over the hump of moving. Cities could pay for them to move and get settled. In the Seattle area, we spend over $1B a year on homelessness (https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of-homelessness-seattle-king-county-costs.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/11/16/price-of...), which comes out to $83K/year/homeless person (since there are 12000 homeless persons in the area). For $25K we could move someone to a more affordable middle-America location, pay for a year of their housing, and potentially even their food/utility costs during that time. Perhaps we could go a step further and match them to jobs. The flip side is that those people need to accept that they may not do a job they want to do. Sometimes you need to suck it up and do something you might consider menial or unmatched to your skills or unmatched to your passions - but that's just life and everyone has to make tradeoffs. And as with my other idea, such services have to only be available to long-time residents so as to not induce free-riders. - Not all homeless people are 'bad'. Some are well-meaning people down on their luck job-wise. Some are long-time residents who have been priced out or displaced from their locale. Some may have encountered some one-off hardship. Either way, we need cities to meaningfully identify these various cohorts precisely, so taxpayers can selectively provide support to those who deserve it. The mechanisms used for such identification need to be trustworthy. As an example of an untrustworthy process, in Seattle the city uses self-reported answers from homeless people to claim that most are from here. But most video interviews you see on TV (or anecdotally, when I've spoke to homeless people myself) indicate they are not actually from here. Those point-in-time surveys are facilitated by homeless activists, who are likely coaching people towards certain answers, which is why the only viable answer is to rely on positive identification for claims about local residency. - Homeless folks need to accept services. Refusing services (whether by way of housing or for addiction treatment) is a non-starter. The law-abiding tax-paying residents who support a city don't have an obligation to forfeit their public spaces to transients, permanent nomads, or addicts. - Cities need to enforce laws. They can't look the other way when property crime is committed, or when littering takes place, and so on. Or worse, they can't selectively apply laws differently to different people (see http://mynorthwest.com/1046331/construction-worker-rv-ticket/ http://mynorthwest.com/1046331/construction-worker-rv-ticket... for an example). People pay taxes and elect local governments to serve their interests and support their quality of life. The trend of urban transient campers usurping public spaces is unacceptable - people work hard to make it in expensive places to enjoy those amenities, after all. These are just some off the cuff ideas - I'm sure there is room for improving them and I'm sure there are other good ideas as well. But I do think the current direction of many of these cities - which is basically spend more and show no result for it - is the wrong answer.

davidw 8y ago

If you want to get involved with housing politics in that area, these are some good places to start: * https://www.sfyimby.org/ https://www.sfyimby.org/ * https://cayimby.org/ https://cayimby.org/ Look at the crazy tweet quoted by a Palo Alto city councilor for instance: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1109500565971763202 https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1109500565971763202 "Why there's a housing crisis, exhibit #29393911". People who don't believe in supply and demand.

rambojazz 8y ago

Is there a non-paywalled mirror of this article?

dgzl 8y ago

I'm from a small town in Oregon that sees a lot of nomadic traveling folk, either homeless or lifestyle (the PCT comes through the area, for instance), and the town is generally pretty receptive of these people. Growing up I would hang out and spend time with them, just chatting and playing music and enjoying the area. I carried that to adulthood and I now live in Portland, where the homeless problem is quite severe. Last weekend, looking at food carts downtown, a man who looked quite disheveled and in shock starts trying to talk with me. He tells me he just got off the bus from the hospital, and that morning he had been attacked with a knife by a homeless woman with gang affiliation. He showed me his wounds and hospital bracelet, and I decided to spend some time with him and try calming him down. Before long he tells me that he's only been homeless a few months, and before that he was collecting enough SSI to sustain himself. He says a while back he had spent time in jail and been released, but the jail never put that in the manifest. Apparently (someone) looked into his record and it looked like he had escaped, causing him grief that suspended his SSI payments, in turn putting him on the street. He was expecting payments to continue soon. We talked about things like honor, culture, respect, family. Eventually I let slip that I was a software engineer and he started telling me that he used to really be into Linux, and his old work had him using BSD and Unix, and we eventually started talking about physics which he was much more knowledgeable than I. After I thought his shock was gone and feeling a little better, I bought him some food to help him through the evening. That same night I had conversation with a different homeless man, who was more rude and rather creepy. He talked a lot about how the homeless are being fed human meat, and how addictive it is. --- A friend who's from a wealthy Asian-dominated town in California tells me there's a service where people will drive around and pick up homeless people and give them a free ride to the neighboring town. The first gentleman in my story above told me a similar thing: Las Vegas was apparently giving free bus tickets to the homeless to come to Oregon, because our homeless services are top-tier.

berberous 8y ago
On the last bit, that was all over the news for a while. CA and NV had a big fight over it: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposal-in-nevada-patient-dumping-case/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-reaches-400k-settlement-proposa...

Animats 8y ago

If you're a PHP/Javascript programmer today, that's your future at age 50.

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dang 8y ago
Yikes. You're a great HN contributor but please don't do this here.
- Animats 8y ago
  It's harsh, but may not be wrong. One day I was eating at the Burger King near the cable car turntable in SF, and listening to a group of homeless people. They were printers. Or used to be. That was a good-paying skilled trade for several hundred years. Now it's dead. Typesetting is automated, modern presses take very few people to run, and short-run jobs run at FedEx Office, not a printing plant.
  - dang 8y ago
    That's already a more informative and substantive comment than the first one.

n00bdude 8y ago

I've lived on the streets of NYC since 2017 & been employed (min-wage job) but only do so in order to afford more free time to creative write.

mxstbr 8y ago
That is fascinating, can you share more of your experience? How does living on the streets work, how did you end up in this situation?
- n00bdude 8y ago
  It started w/ an Aladdin story & dream-chasing .. but to cut to it, @ present, I basically operate in / out of a storage unit. The routine basically goes: Wake up, run / shower @ gym (some days, meditate in tanning booth), go to cafe & write for ~3-4 hours, Citi Bike to day-job, work it & once finished, go to sleep on soho-streets @ night. I ended up in this situation because I put myself into it so as to be in New York City (publishing house Mecca) I am from CA but going for it ;)
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  - thrden 8y ago
    do you have any public writing? I'd be interested in reading what you've written.
    - n00bdude 8y ago
      Wow, that'd be 100% awesome .. If you visit my site, https://blondyn.com https://blondyn.com , you will find Episode 1 of my Aladdin adaptation (Aladdin Exponential) for which I moved to the city. Also, I recently self-published an NYC short story compilation (Lit Art: Vol.1 - LOL POP), which right now is free to read if you've Amazon Prime. If you're interested in a fun & light read, I'd recommend the short stories. Aladdin Exponential is a novel - a spin on Aladdin ~ the premise ~ instead of a Genie coming out of the Lamp, the Aladdin character gets pulled inside to discover a Whole New World .. adventure ensues.

hultner 8y ago

Article is paywalled for me, does anyone know if this was in the paper version? And if so what issue?

jammygit 8y ago

Is there a win win business model that helps these homeless people while not being a charity? There are so many issues: drug addiction, mental health, a changing economy. It doesn't feel impossible though.

throwaway713 8y ago

A little bit unrelated, but does anyone else get severe anxiety reading articles like this? I’m currently employed in a well-paying tech job, but it always seems like I’m just one giant disaster away from this kind of thing. Granted, I have a family “safety net” to fall back on in a worst case scenario, which I realize a lot of people don’t have, but it’s always in the back of my mind that the economy could crash, that my skills are suddenly not in demand, or some weird health insurance disaster wipes out my retirement savings. I constantly feel like I need to save up as much money as possible to reach financial independence as quickly as I can so that I’m prepared for some kind of unforeseen catastrophe.

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perfmode 8y ago
Yes. I won’t survive a perfect storm.
- TomMckenny 8y ago
  It need not be perfect, we're all one modest car accident away from a life on the streets.
MIKarlsen 8y ago
I'm a big worrier myself, and these thoughts often get the better of me. I have been unemployed for a couple of months last year, and although I live in a scandinavian country, it was still tough to see others in the same situation struggling. I think society has a great responsibility in educating citizens correctly. A lot of the people I met had no grasp of technology, or its role in society, which is a big warning-light in my eyes. Everyone is saying "AI and robotics wont take your job", but it absolutely will, as the jobs the new industry creates seems to be STEM-jobs that require long STEM-educations - something not everyone is cut out for. I feel like we're yet to see the full consequence of technology's role in our society, and I fear that we will end up with a big chunk of people who cannot actively contribute to the workforce.
8y ago

jorblumesea 8y ago

As someone who deals with this every day in Seattle, the core issue is that the US doesn't have a cheap and effective healthcare system that can deal with addiction and mental healthcare issues. So cities are forced to try and patch holes where they can. But the reality is that without coordination at the federal level there's little chance of success. It's a national problem that requires a national solution, but our response is only at local levels.

RickJWagner 8y ago

It's awesome she can keep her dignity, and have hope and the means to advance. I admire her gumption.

pndd90 8y ago

Having come to the US with a few dollars behind me, I totally understand the circumstances of being poor. having said that, there is no way you need to be homeless in the US. There is more social help here than in a lot of places in the world. subsidized living support is real, food stamps and church support, among other things. I cannot judge the people in the article, I dont know them but I think when two people work, are not disabled, they do not have to live on the streets in the US, unless they have some kind of a psychological disorder. yes, life is tough, but there is no way it is tougher than in a lot of other places where people in worse conditions monetarily make do. if they are not on social security or not in subsidized housing, then they make enough to not be on it. homelessness in the US is a very odd state of affairs to anyone to was truly poor before.