12 ms·

Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life

195 points by cgtyoder 13y ago

themodelplumber 13y ago
I'm familiar with some similar situations here in California. Families where codependency somehow pulls everyone together despite struggling under the yoke of alcoholism, mental illness, early pregnancies, physical and sexual abuse by various in-laws and other distant relatives, etc. You can pull the children away from the parents, but all of the teaching remains and the children go on to slide into the same situations. Those who get out of the cycle (which actually happens more often than I expected) seem to need every resource that their communities provide, just to stay afloat. The author of the article seems upset at the city government for their finger-wagging approach toward forcing the homeless along some path to success, and I would just add that when winter comes around and people still aren't moving up your ramp to success, it's time to err on the side of charity.
- douglasback 13y ago
  It's probably worth noting that the New York Times has, since 1912, run a fund called The Neediest Cases, which raises money for social welfare agencies throughout New York City. Though it seems like this particular article isn't part of the series, the paper runs pieces daily that tell similar stories of those in need throughout the months of November, December, and January. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/neediestcases/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/neediest...
danmaz74 13y ago
"almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line" This really looks crazy to me.
- kingkawn 13y ago
  They have been made invisible under Bloomberg.
  - eli 13y ago
    Seems a lot to lay at one man's feet
    - kingkawn 13y ago
      It would be presumptuous to lay the direction of NYC over this era at the feet of anyone else. I think he's had a tremendous impact on the city. Some of it has been really nice for a part of the population, but the neglect is starting to burst through the seams of his tidy-departing gifts to de Blasio.
- gadders 13y ago
  Probably because it will be on a measure of relative, rather than absolute, poverty which can be defined to be whatever people would like it to be.
  - danmaz74 13y ago
    You mean that the line is drawn per-city? I would expect it to be national.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    New York subsidizes housing for the poor. A histogram of income in Manhattan is a bathtub curve, with a bunch of poor people that are being encouraged to live there, essentially none in the middle, and then a whole lot of people above 100K.
daeken 13y ago
Homelessness is something I've been thinking a lot about lately and all I keep coming back to is: I want to help, but I have absolutely no idea how I can do so. In the short term, volunteering at soup kitchens and things along those lines is always a help, but it feels like a bad ROI; I don't mean that I get little out of it (on the contrary, it certainly makes me feel good to do volunteer work), but that there must be a way to make my efforts go further. I used to volunteer at a clubhouse for the mentally ill, a place where people could get food, play pool, take classes on computer skills, find employment, etc. My efforts were relatively small, but due to the fantastic management of the place, everything I did was magnified; fixing an old PC meant another 20 people might've been able to learn the skills they needed to find a job. It's been many years since then, but it's what I hold up as a good example of the sort of lever you can use in volunteering, and I just don't see an analogue for helping the homeless. What am I missing? How can I help?
- qeorge 13y ago
  Find a local organization that helps the homeless, and offer yourself as free IT help for a full day (or three). You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like: - cleaning crapware off computers - removing spyware/viruses and installing antivirus - fixing email issues - networking printers - answering questions about Excel, Word, and so forth By helping this way, you'll improve the productivity of the organization drastically, which will have a real impact you can feel good about. Best off, your contribution will act as a multiplier, lasting well beyond the initial time you'll put in. -- If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families. My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.
  - smacktoward 13y ago
    It seems like it'd be even better to have a central agency that multiple non-profits could turn to for this stuff, rather than each one needing their own IT guy (of varying skill) to do it for them individually. A Helper's Help Desk.
FedRegister 13y ago
"Nearly a quarter of Dasani’s childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings." Okay, not to victim blame, but eight children when her parents can't even support themselves?
- smokey_the_bear 13y ago
  I think the article was pretty clear that the parents are to blame for many reasons. But it was about Dasani, who is not at fault, not her parents.
  - kingkawn 13y ago
    That Dasani is demonstrating so much vivacity is impressive to us and so worthy of note that we have an article about her. But we expect the opposite, because all of her environmental cues are encouraging the opposite. how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?
    - FedRegister 13y ago
      It makes sense to lay (some of the) blame at the feet of her parents because they had a choice. Everybody has a choice. Mom didn't have to smoke crack. Dad didn't have to deal drugs. Did they have the same opportunities as rich white kids from the Upper West Side? No. Does that mean that the choices to smoke crack, deal drugs, and have eight kids is something we should just ignore? Certainly not.
      - kingkawn 13y ago
        It is true, however in a system like this there have to be failures. Only a small portion of the kids demonstrate enough intuitive capacity for learning, like Dasani, that the meager resources available are utilized for them. Therefore the percentage of the population who fails is by necessity larger. So her parents are of course autonomous human beings, but they lived in a structure that was incapable of not producing them.
amerika_blog 13y ago
"She then wipes down the family’s small refrigerator, stuffed with lukewarm milk, Tropicana grape juice and containers of leftover Chinese." Eating out is a great way to stay poor.
- daeken 13y ago
  There are two things that make eating out the most viable option for a whole meal when you're poor: The first is that when you have a refrigerator that's sub-par and don't have a freezer, you have to buy the smallest quantities of anything perishable; that means it's expensive as hell. There are things like rice that you can buy in bulk, but if you're in a place with bugs and rodents (like they are), you're screwed on that too, generally. The second is that if you're in a homeless shelter, you can't cook. At most, you can make a sandwich, but that goes back to point #1. Eating out isn't a convenience for them; it's survival.
  - amerika_blog 13y ago
    This is nonsense. Refrigerators are easily found used for under $100 (just like the flat screen TV from someone else's example here). Eating out, at a minimum, is 2-3x ingredient cost. Besides, you're reading way more into my comment than was intended. Its substance was: "To save money, don't eat out." You're projecting.
    - bluedino 13y ago
      The argument to this is that Chinese takeout tastes good (loaded with sugar and grease) and it's fast and readily available when the family comes in to $20. They live in a food desert and the mom never learned to cook. You can't blame the family in the article for falling for instant gratification or 'treating themselves' which is also the excuse for a lot of the other behavior in the article. The mom is drinking a beer on the bus, isn't she? I'm guessing that because it's in a brown paper bag.
    - scarmig 13y ago
      I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more? I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself: Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive. Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices. Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not. Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows. And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't. In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin. That's perverse.
zcarter 13y ago
A story about the benefits of fiber optic cable over investment is often used to dismiss the harm caused by the late nineties internet bubble. What do we have to show for our recent hosting bubble?
- treeface 13y ago
  The simple answer would be that a greater supply of homes means more people can afford homes in the long run (assuming relatively low population growth). But that is hugely dependent on which states/cities/neighborhoods you're talking about. The section of the world that this article is discussing apparently never gentrified like some of the neighborhoods surrounding it. Things tend to be different in highly urbanized cities like NYC vs. relatively open areas like the Inland Empire.
downandout 13y ago
This article is really sad and quick to blame NYC's outgoing mayor for all of the problems, but suggests absolutely no solutions. The only actionable piece of data in it is that 50% of the city is below the poverty line, which suggests that anyone that doesn't need to be in NYC should never go there. Numbers like that foretell an uprising against those that are not poor, either by the citizens themselves through violence, or by the city government through punitive laws and taxes. I now feel very sorry for Dasani, and am more sure than ever that I won't be spending time in New York. If that was the point of the article, then well done.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  oh I am sure the NYT will devote endless pages the next couple of years to blaming all the woes of NYC on him, use it as an excuse for why the new guy can't fit it all fast, and so and so on. The question most New Yorker's should be asking is, how do the people who run this facility (Audburn) have jobs? How do the people the report to allow it to happen and if they do, they why are they employed? Having been around some big city "care" its really simply, the bigger the government the less it has to care and the more people that slip through the cracks. Too many programs competing for the same dollars, too many programs with their own rules they barely serve anyone, too many programs for those who need help they have to spend an inordinate amount of time applying to each. I am quite sure the living conditions don't help the outlook of her parents and in part keeps them down looking for releases. Yet for all the billions spent to take care of the poor it makes you wonder, where is it all going?
  - limsup 13y ago
    It's bizarre to read how right-wing view things. "Fire the city workers, shrink the government, then the homeless will get the care they deserve!" The poor conditions have to do with the budget constraints, which the GOP is actively pushing for.
  - yardie 13y ago
    If you've ever tried to use or know anything about government grants you'll find out that 50% of your time and grant money will be spent making sure you are complying with spending grant money. Usually there will be some outrage over a small sum of money being used inappropriately. Benzes for welfare queens for example. The politicians will do something about it by putting in more checks. A few scammers will work the system. More checks are put in place. Ad infinitum. A few years later 50-80% of the budget to help the poor has gone into making sure they use the aid for what we deem appropriate.
kingkawn 13y ago
Bloomberg's legacy will be, more than bike lanes or 311, the sweeping of poverty beneath the rug during his 12 years of power.
olegious 13y ago
If all the poverty statistics in this article are accurate, in about 10 years we can expect to see a reversal of the decline in US violent crime that's been happening since the 90s. What can be done- what is the right mix of social policy and tough love? Clearly homeless drug users shouldn't have 8 kids- but how can this be prevented? Should we take away children from all homeless or drug addict parents as soon as they're born? How do other civilized countries handle this situation? It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.
- minikites 13y ago
  Minor nitpick, you almost certainly don't pay 40% in taxes, that's not how tax brackets work: http://i.imgur.com/ZYWWn28.gif http://i.imgur.com/ZYWWn28.gif and http://i.imgur.com/gogxtbv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gogxtbv.jpg And I think the solution is raise the minimum wage and set a long term plan for a sort of guaranteed minimum income / negative income tax. Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-cut-the-poverty-rate-in-half-its-easy/280971/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-c...
  - aestra 13y ago
    Minor nitpick, the parent said they pay 40% in state and federal taxes and social security and you quoted only federal taxes (looks like the last graph includes Social Security) I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes, but that didn't include state tax, either income, property, or sales tax.
    - minikites 13y ago
      What state has a ~20% effective tax rate? I don't see any marginal tax rates that even come close: http://taxes.about.com/od/statetaxes/a/highest-state-income-tax-rates.htm http://taxes.about.com/od/statetaxes/a/highest-state-income-... I'm obviously estimating, but when I look at which is more likely, someone misunderstanding tax brackets, or someone paying an insane amount of property tax in a state that doesn't exist, the first choice seems more likely.
callum85 13y ago
29,388 words. Serious question: has anyone read the whole thing?
- mathiasben 13y ago
  read the whole thing this morning, took about 90mins.
- humanrebar 13y ago
  I'm surprised there isn't more innovation in the media regarding reporting on complex issues. To truly describe complex issues, readers need the ability to both get a high-level view of the story and drill down to details and smaller narratives at times. Along those lines, I'm not sure why primary source material (raw transcripts of interviews, unpublished photos, links to source material) aren't included in even short reports by default. In my mind, complex stories should be reported in a format similar to a small, mostly self-contained wiki where more details are linked or hidden by default. The lack of innovation here surprises me because the news media is starving for reasons for people to consume their content. Involved, wiki-style reporting would be very hard to rip off.
- code_duck 13y ago
  Sure, I just did. As a New Yorker subscriber it seemed a little short.
vinhboy 13y ago
"Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline" Does anyone know of other places in the US that has taken this approach to poverty and what the results are? I am genuinely interested in understanding how "empowering the poor" works in the US. I know there are several reported successes with micro-lending to the poor in other countries, but I wonder if such go-getter mentality exists in the American society.
lewaldman 13y ago
Open site, speakers start to produce sound, close site!
niels_olson 13y ago
The pictures are interesting: they have stuff. What they lack is infrastructure and maintenance. Major items: deteriorating walls, decaying mattresses, a sink in the middle of a room, where's the bathtub? Where's anything near that sink?
beat 13y ago
What matters to me in Dasani's story, and what should matter to many of us, is how difficult it is for children with real talent and ambition to escape their circumstances. Think about the temptations that must be in front of her - sure, her mind and her strength and her beauty could eventually lift her out of poverty, but they could also make her a phenomenally successful drug dealer or thief. Or frustration could drive her to wasting her mind with drugs, or committing small stupid crimes that put her in the revolving door of prisons. I grew up poor, although not as poor as her. I know how frustrating and difficult it is for talented, ambitious children. I got lucky, but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and nearly did. But here's what worries me, and should worry lots of people. Call it arrogance, but I firmly believe real progress in our society is made by those top few percent with both the talent and ambition to do something new, something dangerous and important. Most people either can't or won't. So when society wastes one of them in the ghetto, it hurts all of us.
crazy1van 13y ago
Poverty is incredibly sad, and I understand the desire to want to take some direct action to fight it. And of course, if you want to volunteer your time, you certainly can and I'm sure people will be grateful. However, for those with in demand, high value skills like people HN, I suggest you focus your time on using those skills effectively. You can do more good by just earning more income and donating money to good charities than donating your time. To illustrate this point, consider this extreme case -- what if a young Steve Jobs had poured extra energy into serving soup at a local church to the homeless and had not gotten Apple off the ground? Yes, he would directly help hungry people. However, he has created so much wealth by forming Apple that not only does he have far more money that he could give away, but he's also created an entire company of employees with more wealth that they could also choose to give to charity.
- warfangle 13y ago
  >far more money that he could give away Especially when it came to his illegitimate children. As much as I dislike Microsoft, Gates has done a billion times more for the poverty-stricken than Jobs ever did. Please do not hold Jobs up as some epitome of philanthropy. He was absolutely not, at least publicly.
mschuster91 13y ago
We Europeans have our own troubles with homelessness and beggars (currently esp. German cities with Romanian and Bulgarian beggars), but well, we at least crack down on insecure housing. Something like the mentioned shelter in the article would not survive a single day under inspection. If a landlord would rent (or let people live in) such a house, he would immediately 1) have all people taken out by government and 2) find himself in jail or with hefty fines. I wonder why NYC let this shelter open despite dozens upon dozens of complaints!
- amerika_blog 13y ago
  Why are there so many Romanians and Bulgarians in Germany? Seems a weird choice to make. I mean, Germany's a lovely place, but why a mass exodus to there? "It's Tuesday, let's move to Germany."
  - mschuster91 13y ago
    We're the first rich country when they move to the east (from a Romania/Bulgaria POV) - and Germany is the last of Europe to have a reputation for being financially stable, providing social/healthcare coverage and not being overly racist. France/Great Britain, in contrast, are not very favorable target countries: France has a strong nationalist/right-wing extremist political movement (Le Pen's Front National), and Great Britain, while rich, is not covered by Schengen agreement and excepted from a lot of EU regulations - so it's both difficult to get into, and stay in.
    - amerika_blog 13y ago
      I didn't know this. Thanks for elaborating. I always enjoyed Germany, but I liked France too.
      - mschuster91 13y ago
        If you're interested in learning a bit more about this topic and want to learn about the lifes of those immigrants, read: 1) http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/arbeiterstrich-in-muenchen-scheissegal-ich-mache-alles-1.1487608 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/arbeiterstrich-in-muench... 2) http://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/aufstand-geschaeftsleute-gegen-arbeiter-strich-bahnhofsviertel-tz-3077856.html http://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/aufstand-geschaeftsleute-geg... 3) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeiterstrich http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeiterstrich 4) http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.im-hauptbahnhofviertel-arbeiterstrich-die-kreuzung-der-armut.0825ef04-2d33-45b3-b573-17103a9fe0c1.html http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.im-hauptbahnhofvi... 5) http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/tid-34337/armutszuwanderung-in-muenchen-der-arbeiterstrich-schaedigt-unser-geschaeft-doch-woher-kommen-diese-maenner-_aid_1140045.html http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/tid-34337/armutszuwanderun... These all deal with the situation in Munich, but it's the same in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and other German cities.
known 13y ago
To alleviate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_poverty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_poverty every https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world nation Currency should be pegged to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opec https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opec Oil for 4 years till https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma is resolved.
auctiontheory 13y ago
A good time to repost this wonderful article about a little girl living on the edge of a trash dump: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ So much talent shows up in unexpected places, but in a bifurcated America (or Mexico) it has to fight too hard to make itself seen.
goggles99 13y ago
As much as I think that people should be free and hate the government telling people what to do, I sometimes wonder if a situation like this can only be prevented or alleviated by force. Why do people like this keep having more and more kids (a freedom)? Birth control is free for them. Why doesn't this family move to a more affordable state or city (a freedom)? Why don't they move somewhere where they can find jobs (a freedom)? I don't care if their jobs are picking fruit or mopping floors, Illegal aliens live better than this. Why do they blow all their money as soon as they get it (a freedom)? They live rent free and make 33,000 in combined income. This is like the after tax incomes of someone making 40k+ a year. This is more money than my single income in-laws have (after they pay their taxes and the mortgage bill) with their 6 children and they are not living in poverty. They have a minivan, they go on vacations to Disney Land. Their kids have clean new looking clothes. They Are not malnourished or un-bathed. They suffer none of the plights that the family in this article do. Why? It is about choices. I almost want the government to (I don't want to say it but) force people who have proven that they will never do the right thing to do just that. I actually don't really want this loss of freedoms. There is a better way, but will it ever happen? How can you re-instill good standards and moral values in a selfish and morally bankrupt generation? Religious conviction used to fill the role of prompting parents to do the right thing, but now it is heavily watered down and in many cases gone altogether. Ever since good standards and moral values stopped being passed down from the majority of fathers and mothers (who rarely divorced back then by the way) things have been and will continue to get worse. Eventually things will get so bad that it will come down to people (like this family) losing their freedom (in essence a partial return to slavery) If they want to continue living off the government. I was just thinking about the efforts in government to make minimum wage $10/hr nationally. Well now why would these parents go out and get jobs making $10/hr? they would have no more income than they get from welfare today. Plus now they have to go work 40hrs per week? Do you really thing that they would do this? Mike Rowe was on CNN recently saying that there are over 100k job openings currently. Most of them are labor jobs that people just don't want (they are actually hard work imagine that). Many of them start at 40k per year yet still no one wants them. Well why would they? they get an equivalent of that much right now for doing nothing. This country is in a downward spiral. This family is only a symptom of it.
- 13y ago
nicolethenerd 13y ago
This hits incredibly close to home - I work in Brooklyn, very close to Dasani's school, and also teach computer science (through http://www.tealsk12.org/ http://www.tealsk12.org/) at a school nearby. Many of the locations in the article are familiar to me - and it breaks my heart to see that kids who are basically in my neighborhood are living like this. I would've loved for the article to have been followed up with a "here's how you can help" - it seems to me that the best thing I can probably do for kids like Dasani is donate money, but where and to who? A quick scan of Givewell didn't turn up any great leads for charities helping out with homelessness in the NYC area - does anybody know of any?

195 points by cgtyoder 13y ago

I'm familiar with some similar situations here in California. Families where codependency somehow pulls everyone together despite struggling under the yoke of alcoholism, mental illness, early pregnancies, physical and sexual abuse by various in-laws and other distant relatives, etc. You can pull the children away from the parents, but all of the teaching remains and the children go on to slide into the same situations. Those who get out of the cycle (which actually happens more often than I expected) seem to need every resource that their communities provide, just to stay afloat. The author of the article seems upset at the city government for their finger-wagging approach toward forcing the homeless along some path to success, and I would just add that when winter comes around and people still aren't moving up your ramp to success, it's time to err on the side of charity.

douglasback 13y ago
It's probably worth noting that the New York Times has, since 1912, run a fund called The Neediest Cases, which raises money for social welfare agencies throughout New York City. Though it seems like this particular article isn't part of the series, the paper runs pieces daily that tell similar stories of those in need throughout the months of November, December, and January. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/neediestcases/index.html http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/newyorkandregion/neediest...

danmaz74 13y ago

"almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line" This really looks crazy to me.

kingkawn 13y ago
They have been made invisible under Bloomberg.
- eli 13y ago
  Seems a lot to lay at one man's feet
  - kingkawn 13y ago
    It would be presumptuous to lay the direction of NYC over this era at the feet of anyone else. I think he's had a tremendous impact on the city. Some of it has been really nice for a part of the population, but the neglect is starting to burst through the seams of his tidy-departing gifts to de Blasio.
gadders 13y ago
Probably because it will be on a measure of relative, rather than absolute, poverty which can be defined to be whatever people would like it to be.
- danmaz74 13y ago
  You mean that the line is drawn per-city? I would expect it to be national.
- danielweber 13y ago
  New York subsidizes housing for the poor. A histogram of income in Manhattan is a bathtub curve, with a bunch of poor people that are being encouraged to live there, essentially none in the middle, and then a whole lot of people above 100K.

daeken 13y ago

Homelessness is something I've been thinking a lot about lately and all I keep coming back to is: I want to help, but I have absolutely no idea how I can do so. In the short term, volunteering at soup kitchens and things along those lines is always a help, but it feels like a bad ROI; I don't mean that I get little out of it (on the contrary, it certainly makes me feel good to do volunteer work), but that there must be a way to make my efforts go further. I used to volunteer at a clubhouse for the mentally ill, a place where people could get food, play pool, take classes on computer skills, find employment, etc. My efforts were relatively small, but due to the fantastic management of the place, everything I did was magnified; fixing an old PC meant another 20 people might've been able to learn the skills they needed to find a job. It's been many years since then, but it's what I hold up as a good example of the sort of lever you can use in volunteering, and I just don't see an analogue for helping the homeless. What am I missing? How can I help?

qeorge 13y ago
Find a local organization that helps the homeless, and offer yourself as free IT help for a full day (or three). You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like: - cleaning crapware off computers - removing spyware/viruses and installing antivirus - fixing email issues - networking printers - answering questions about Excel, Word, and so forth By helping this way, you'll improve the productivity of the organization drastically, which will have a real impact you can feel good about. Best off, your contribution will act as a multiplier, lasting well beyond the initial time you'll put in. -- If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families. My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  It seems like it'd be even better to have a central agency that multiple non-profits could turn to for this stuff, rather than each one needing their own IT guy (of varying skill) to do it for them individually. A Helper's Help Desk.

FedRegister 13y ago

"Nearly a quarter of Dasani’s childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings." Okay, not to victim blame, but eight children when her parents can't even support themselves?

smokey_the_bear 13y ago
I think the article was pretty clear that the parents are to blame for many reasons. But it was about Dasani, who is not at fault, not her parents.
- kingkawn 13y ago
  That Dasani is demonstrating so much vivacity is impressive to us and so worthy of note that we have an article about her. But we expect the opposite, because all of her environmental cues are encouraging the opposite. how does it make any sense to blame her parents who are the products of the exact same structure she is now struggling against?
  - FedRegister 13y ago
    It makes sense to lay (some of the) blame at the feet of her parents because they had a choice. Everybody has a choice. Mom didn't have to smoke crack. Dad didn't have to deal drugs. Did they have the same opportunities as rich white kids from the Upper West Side? No. Does that mean that the choices to smoke crack, deal drugs, and have eight kids is something we should just ignore? Certainly not.
    - kingkawn 13y ago
      It is true, however in a system like this there have to be failures. Only a small portion of the kids demonstrate enough intuitive capacity for learning, like Dasani, that the meager resources available are utilized for them. Therefore the percentage of the population who fails is by necessity larger. So her parents are of course autonomous human beings, but they lived in a structure that was incapable of not producing them.

amerika_blog 13y ago

"She then wipes down the family’s small refrigerator, stuffed with lukewarm milk, Tropicana grape juice and containers of leftover Chinese." Eating out is a great way to stay poor.

daeken 13y ago
There are two things that make eating out the most viable option for a whole meal when you're poor: The first is that when you have a refrigerator that's sub-par and don't have a freezer, you have to buy the smallest quantities of anything perishable; that means it's expensive as hell. There are things like rice that you can buy in bulk, but if you're in a place with bugs and rodents (like they are), you're screwed on that too, generally. The second is that if you're in a homeless shelter, you can't cook. At most, you can make a sandwich, but that goes back to point #1. Eating out isn't a convenience for them; it's survival.
- amerika_blog 13y ago
  This is nonsense. Refrigerators are easily found used for under $100 (just like the flat screen TV from someone else's example here). Eating out, at a minimum, is 2-3x ingredient cost. Besides, you're reading way more into my comment than was intended. Its substance was: "To save money, don't eat out." You're projecting.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    The argument to this is that Chinese takeout tastes good (loaded with sugar and grease) and it's fast and readily available when the family comes in to $20. They live in a food desert and the mom never learned to cook. You can't blame the family in the article for falling for instant gratification or 'treating themselves' which is also the excuse for a lot of the other behavior in the article. The mom is drinking a beer on the bus, isn't she? I'm guessing that because it's in a brown paper bag.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more? I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself: Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive. Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices. Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not. Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows. And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't. In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin. That's perverse.

zcarter 13y ago

A story about the benefits of fiber optic cable over investment is often used to dismiss the harm caused by the late nineties internet bubble. What do we have to show for our recent hosting bubble?

treeface 13y ago
The simple answer would be that a greater supply of homes means more people can afford homes in the long run (assuming relatively low population growth). But that is hugely dependent on which states/cities/neighborhoods you're talking about. The section of the world that this article is discussing apparently never gentrified like some of the neighborhoods surrounding it. Things tend to be different in highly urbanized cities like NYC vs. relatively open areas like the Inland Empire.

downandout 13y ago

This article is really sad and quick to blame NYC's outgoing mayor for all of the problems, but suggests absolutely no solutions. The only actionable piece of data in it is that 50% of the city is below the poverty line, which suggests that anyone that doesn't need to be in NYC should never go there. Numbers like that foretell an uprising against those that are not poor, either by the citizens themselves through violence, or by the city government through punitive laws and taxes. I now feel very sorry for Dasani, and am more sure than ever that I won't be spending time in New York. If that was the point of the article, then well done.

Shivetya 13y ago
oh I am sure the NYT will devote endless pages the next couple of years to blaming all the woes of NYC on him, use it as an excuse for why the new guy can't fit it all fast, and so and so on. The question most New Yorker's should be asking is, how do the people who run this facility (Audburn) have jobs? How do the people the report to allow it to happen and if they do, they why are they employed? Having been around some big city "care" its really simply, the bigger the government the less it has to care and the more people that slip through the cracks. Too many programs competing for the same dollars, too many programs with their own rules they barely serve anyone, too many programs for those who need help they have to spend an inordinate amount of time applying to each. I am quite sure the living conditions don't help the outlook of her parents and in part keeps them down looking for releases. Yet for all the billions spent to take care of the poor it makes you wonder, where is it all going?
- limsup 13y ago
  It's bizarre to read how right-wing view things. "Fire the city workers, shrink the government, then the homeless will get the care they deserve!" The poor conditions have to do with the budget constraints, which the GOP is actively pushing for.
- yardie 13y ago
  If you've ever tried to use or know anything about government grants you'll find out that 50% of your time and grant money will be spent making sure you are complying with spending grant money. Usually there will be some outrage over a small sum of money being used inappropriately. Benzes for welfare queens for example. The politicians will do something about it by putting in more checks. A few scammers will work the system. More checks are put in place. Ad infinitum. A few years later 50-80% of the budget to help the poor has gone into making sure they use the aid for what we deem appropriate.

kingkawn 13y ago

Bloomberg's legacy will be, more than bike lanes or 311, the sweeping of poverty beneath the rug during his 12 years of power.

olegious 13y ago

If all the poverty statistics in this article are accurate, in about 10 years we can expect to see a reversal of the decline in US violent crime that's been happening since the 90s. What can be done- what is the right mix of social policy and tough love? Clearly homeless drug users shouldn't have 8 kids- but how can this be prevented? Should we take away children from all homeless or drug addict parents as soon as they're born? How do other civilized countries handle this situation? It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country.

minikites 13y ago
Minor nitpick, you almost certainly don't pay 40% in taxes, that's not how tax brackets work: http://i.imgur.com/ZYWWn28.gif http://i.imgur.com/ZYWWn28.gif and http://i.imgur.com/gogxtbv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gogxtbv.jpg And I think the solution is raise the minimum wage and set a long term plan for a sort of guaranteed minimum income / negative income tax. Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-cut-the-poverty-rate-in-half-its-easy/280971/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/how-to-c...
- aestra 13y ago
  Minor nitpick, the parent said they pay 40% in state and federal taxes and social security and you quoted only federal taxes (looks like the last graph includes Social Security) I still don't know how much the parent pays in taxes, but that didn't include state tax, either income, property, or sales tax.
  - minikites 13y ago
    What state has a ~20% effective tax rate? I don't see any marginal tax rates that even come close: http://taxes.about.com/od/statetaxes/a/highest-state-income-tax-rates.htm http://taxes.about.com/od/statetaxes/a/highest-state-income-... I'm obviously estimating, but when I look at which is more likely, someone misunderstanding tax brackets, or someone paying an insane amount of property tax in a state that doesn't exist, the first choice seems more likely.

callum85 13y ago

29,388 words. Serious question: has anyone read the whole thing?

mathiasben 13y ago
read the whole thing this morning, took about 90mins.
humanrebar 13y ago
I'm surprised there isn't more innovation in the media regarding reporting on complex issues. To truly describe complex issues, readers need the ability to both get a high-level view of the story and drill down to details and smaller narratives at times. Along those lines, I'm not sure why primary source material (raw transcripts of interviews, unpublished photos, links to source material) aren't included in even short reports by default. In my mind, complex stories should be reported in a format similar to a small, mostly self-contained wiki where more details are linked or hidden by default. The lack of innovation here surprises me because the news media is starving for reasons for people to consume their content. Involved, wiki-style reporting would be very hard to rip off.
code_duck 13y ago
Sure, I just did. As a New Yorker subscriber it seemed a little short.

vinhboy 13y ago

"Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline" Does anyone know of other places in the US that has taken this approach to poverty and what the results are? I am genuinely interested in understanding how "empowering the poor" works in the US. I know there are several reported successes with micro-lending to the poor in other countries, but I wonder if such go-getter mentality exists in the American society.

lewaldman 13y ago

Open site, speakers start to produce sound, close site!

niels_olson 13y ago

The pictures are interesting: they have stuff. What they lack is infrastructure and maintenance. Major items: deteriorating walls, decaying mattresses, a sink in the middle of a room, where's the bathtub? Where's anything near that sink?

beat 13y ago

What matters to me in Dasani's story, and what should matter to many of us, is how difficult it is for children with real talent and ambition to escape their circumstances. Think about the temptations that must be in front of her - sure, her mind and her strength and her beauty could eventually lift her out of poverty, but they could also make her a phenomenally successful drug dealer or thief. Or frustration could drive her to wasting her mind with drugs, or committing small stupid crimes that put her in the revolving door of prisons. I grew up poor, although not as poor as her. I know how frustrating and difficult it is for talented, ambitious children. I got lucky, but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and nearly did. But here's what worries me, and should worry lots of people. Call it arrogance, but I firmly believe real progress in our society is made by those top few percent with both the talent and ambition to do something new, something dangerous and important. Most people either can't or won't. So when society wastes one of them in the ghetto, it hurts all of us.

crazy1van 13y ago

Poverty is incredibly sad, and I understand the desire to want to take some direct action to fight it. And of course, if you want to volunteer your time, you certainly can and I'm sure people will be grateful. However, for those with in demand, high value skills like people HN, I suggest you focus your time on using those skills effectively. You can do more good by just earning more income and donating money to good charities than donating your time. To illustrate this point, consider this extreme case -- what if a young Steve Jobs had poured extra energy into serving soup at a local church to the homeless and had not gotten Apple off the ground? Yes, he would directly help hungry people. However, he has created so much wealth by forming Apple that not only does he have far more money that he could give away, but he's also created an entire company of employees with more wealth that they could also choose to give to charity.

warfangle 13y ago
>far more money that he could give away Especially when it came to his illegitimate children. As much as I dislike Microsoft, Gates has done a billion times more for the poverty-stricken than Jobs ever did. Please do not hold Jobs up as some epitome of philanthropy. He was absolutely not, at least publicly.

mschuster91 13y ago

We Europeans have our own troubles with homelessness and beggars (currently esp. German cities with Romanian and Bulgarian beggars), but well, we at least crack down on insecure housing. Something like the mentioned shelter in the article would not survive a single day under inspection. If a landlord would rent (or let people live in) such a house, he would immediately 1) have all people taken out by government and 2) find himself in jail or with hefty fines. I wonder why NYC let this shelter open despite dozens upon dozens of complaints!

amerika_blog 13y ago
Why are there so many Romanians and Bulgarians in Germany? Seems a weird choice to make. I mean, Germany's a lovely place, but why a mass exodus to there? "It's Tuesday, let's move to Germany."
- mschuster91 13y ago
  We're the first rich country when they move to the east (from a Romania/Bulgaria POV) - and Germany is the last of Europe to have a reputation for being financially stable, providing social/healthcare coverage and not being overly racist. France/Great Britain, in contrast, are not very favorable target countries: France has a strong nationalist/right-wing extremist political movement (Le Pen's Front National), and Great Britain, while rich, is not covered by Schengen agreement and excepted from a lot of EU regulations - so it's both difficult to get into, and stay in.
  - amerika_blog 13y ago
    I didn't know this. Thanks for elaborating. I always enjoyed Germany, but I liked France too.
    - mschuster91 13y ago
      If you're interested in learning a bit more about this topic and want to learn about the lifes of those immigrants, read: 1) http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/arbeiterstrich-in-muenchen-scheissegal-ich-mache-alles-1.1487608 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/arbeiterstrich-in-muench... 2) http://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/aufstand-geschaeftsleute-gegen-arbeiter-strich-bahnhofsviertel-tz-3077856.html http://www.tz.de/muenchen/stadt/aufstand-geschaeftsleute-geg... 3) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeiterstrich http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeiterstrich 4) http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.im-hauptbahnhofviertel-arbeiterstrich-die-kreuzung-der-armut.0825ef04-2d33-45b3-b573-17103a9fe0c1.html http://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/inhalt.im-hauptbahnhofvi... 5) http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/tid-34337/armutszuwanderung-in-muenchen-der-arbeiterstrich-schaedigt-unser-geschaeft-doch-woher-kommen-diese-maenner-_aid_1140045.html http://www.focus.de/panorama/welt/tid-34337/armutszuwanderun... These all deal with the situation in Munich, but it's the same in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg and other German cities.

known 13y ago

To alleviate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_poverty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_poverty every https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_world nation Currency should be pegged to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opec https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opec Oil for 4 years till https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma is resolved.

auctiontheory 13y ago

A good time to repost this wonderful article about a little girl living on the edge of a trash dump: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/ So much talent shows up in unexpected places, but in a bifurcated America (or Mexico) it has to fight too hard to make itself seen.

goggles99 13y ago

As much as I think that people should be free and hate the government telling people what to do, I sometimes wonder if a situation like this can only be prevented or alleviated by force. Why do people like this keep having more and more kids (a freedom)? Birth control is free for them. Why doesn't this family move to a more affordable state or city (a freedom)? Why don't they move somewhere where they can find jobs (a freedom)? I don't care if their jobs are picking fruit or mopping floors, Illegal aliens live better than this. Why do they blow all their money as soon as they get it (a freedom)? They live rent free and make 33,000 in combined income. This is like the after tax incomes of someone making 40k+ a year. This is more money than my single income in-laws have (after they pay their taxes and the mortgage bill) with their 6 children and they are not living in poverty. They have a minivan, they go on vacations to Disney Land. Their kids have clean new looking clothes. They Are not malnourished or un-bathed. They suffer none of the plights that the family in this article do. Why? It is about choices. I almost want the government to (I don't want to say it but) force people who have proven that they will never do the right thing to do just that. I actually don't really want this loss of freedoms. There is a better way, but will it ever happen? How can you re-instill good standards and moral values in a selfish and morally bankrupt generation? Religious conviction used to fill the role of prompting parents to do the right thing, but now it is heavily watered down and in many cases gone altogether. Ever since good standards and moral values stopped being passed down from the majority of fathers and mothers (who rarely divorced back then by the way) things have been and will continue to get worse. Eventually things will get so bad that it will come down to people (like this family) losing their freedom (in essence a partial return to slavery) If they want to continue living off the government. I was just thinking about the efforts in government to make minimum wage $10/hr nationally. Well now why would these parents go out and get jobs making $10/hr? they would have no more income than they get from welfare today. Plus now they have to go work 40hrs per week? Do you really thing that they would do this? Mike Rowe was on CNN recently saying that there are over 100k job openings currently. Most of them are labor jobs that people just don't want (they are actually hard work imagine that). Many of them start at 40k per year yet still no one wants them. Well why would they? they get an equivalent of that much right now for doing nothing. This country is in a downward spiral. This family is only a symptom of it.

13y ago

nicolethenerd 13y ago

This hits incredibly close to home - I work in Brooklyn, very close to Dasani's school, and also teach computer science (through http://www.tealsk12.org/ http://www.tealsk12.org/) at a school nearby. Many of the locations in the article are familiar to me - and it breaks my heart to see that kids who are basically in my neighborhood are living like this. I would've loved for the article to have been followed up with a "here's how you can help" - it seems to me that the best thing I can probably do for kids like Dasani is donate money, but where and to who? A quick scan of Givewell didn't turn up any great leads for charities helping out with homelessness in the NYC area - does anybody know of any?