First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out

First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.) Second, the essay's argument matches up pretty well with my experiences living in a variety of poor (by American standards) areas: most poor people get by ok on a broad network of informal favors, workarounds, and grey-economy gigs. Cash and no-questions-asked for a room in a ramshackle roachhouse, swapping cable box discounts for rides to the grocery store, Greg the wheelchair-bound erstwhile addict who watches your place at night in exchange for dinner, etc. High COL areas make these relationship networks harder (as do strict regulations and government oversight). But personal destructive tendencies make these relationships harder too: Greg gets free dinner, but his buddies who just show up to smoke crack on your porch get their ass kicked by your angry housemate. And so they go somewhere else (the local train station, perhaps). So I wish the article had addressed the social causes of "informal economy breakdown," as well as the economic ones. All the anecdotes above are real, by the way.