I was thinking this morning of when I first became class conscious.
For several weeks I volunteered to serve meals to people experiencing homelessness. Afterwards, I volunteered at a charity dinner soliciting donations from wealthy patrons where the level of opulence and disconnect was staggering to me.
The dinner was hosted at a private estate where they owned more than a dozen cars and 5 houses for a family of 7. This was fewer than 5 miles outside of a city with overflowing shelters and people freezing to death. Here was all the wealth needed to provide homes to every person presently surviving in a shelter, and it was squandered in the hands of people entirely detached and unaware of the scope of the problem. In their minds, through petty charity they could live with a clean conscious believing they’d done their part.
The egregiousness of the disparity, the obliviousness of our guests, and their astonishing reluctance to donate left me furious for days. My own hypocrisy left me feeling crushed and crumpled inside for much longer.
I get it, you see these people in the street and it makes you feel bad. The thing you don’t realize is a lot of those homeless people choose to be homeless. If you gave them a home, they would destroy it and go back to the street where they want to be. If you gave them as much money as a middle class family, only a small minority would use it to change their lives.
I’m not saying every single homeless person is like this, but I was homeless for a while – if you’re intent not to be homeless you don’t need to be. We have won the lottery by being born in the richest countries in the history of the world where there are unimaginable resources available for someone who wants to reach out and grab them.
I don’t just mean through capitalism. If you’re homeless, and you legitimately don’t want to be, we also have the largest governments in the history of the world with all kinds of resources specifically dedicated to getting people off the streets. I got off the streets by paying very little rent to live in an old lady’s basement for a few years. It worked out pretty well for me. My story isn’t unique, there are plenty of people who find themselves homeless and they put the work in and they are no longer homeless.
But are you sure it isn’t your own classism shining through thinking that everyone should be more like you? It isn’t very nice being homeless, but there are some absolute benefits. Just to have a home means you’re taking on a lot of responsibility. You need to follow rules. You need to live in a certain way. You have obligations. By contrast, if you just sit in front of the home Depot all day with a sign talking about how poor you are, if you get bored of that you can take whatever money you’ve gotten and just go do whatever you want. For some people, it’s a decision that they make because although it’s an ugly looking decision it’s also the freest. You don’t owe anyone anything, nobody’s going to ask you why you haven’t paid the taxes or mortgage on your cardboard box, and if you want to sit there and do drugs all day you just do it.
I once thought like you do. Realizing that I had lots of opportunities that other people wouldn’t have had, I found a bunch of people who really could be better off and tried to help them out. I put my all into it. There were lots of weeks where I didn’t have another penny because I had done everything that I could. I did that for years, and the people that I tried to help did have some very nice nails, and they did get to go on a bunch of trips, and they bought themselves the nicest useless trinkets, and for a little while I felt very good about myself, but they didn’t change. They didn’t want to change. Instead, they just resented me for not giving more.
It would surprise you how many times I help someone who is legitimately in need, such as a guy who’s wife died of cancer and he had to live watching her die without a paycheck for a year, and then one of the people that I was helping at the time said “you know, you could have just given that money to me”.
The poorest guy I know, who is presently officially homeless, he was working full-time and he collected the checks from the government for covid and welfare at the same time. Despite making a full-time paycheck and getting additional top up from the government and getting welfare, the reason he’s homeless is because he chose not to put together the pittance he needed to pay rent on his low rent apartment. His landlord was actually taking pity on him until he realized how much money that guy was getting from covid top-offs and still wasn’t paying his rent. You can hate the landlord and consider him evil, but this individual chose to go buy junk or drugs or do other things that didn’t help him, while taking multiple handouts, and not completing any of his personal obligations for months and months. He burned his Bridges with his entire family over years, but one family member took pity on him and brought him in, and he just started using them too, so she had to kick him out. Now he’s homeless, despite getting overwhelming resources, throwing more money at him is not going to change anything. Trust me, I tried. It just freed up more money for him to buy useless junk.
Another individual on the bottom of the food chain, she just doesn’t want to live the boring life of stability. She’s stunningly beautiful and has been courted by doctors and lawyers, and comes from a rich family that cares about and supports her, but she finds those people who work hard for most of their lives boring. She is presently living in squalor in a house with all boarded up windows with a guy who fences stolen merchandise for a living. She complains about her life but she doesn’t want to do the things that’ll get her out of it. She actively pushes back when it looks like she might actually start doing well.
All the people I’m talking about have complained to the sky about how hard they have it, and they can tell you a very compelling story, but it’s a lie. Overwhelmingly, the people who actually need help who deserve help who will use help are also people who are too proud and hard-working to take help. And even at their worst off, they’re never that far away from getting back on their feet.
I support my family by going out and doing a job nobody else wants to do for days at a time away from home. These people I’ve spoken of want the paycheck but would never accept the life required to get the paycheck. I’ve had to become colder and more callous because it’s easy to be used. Greed is not monopolized by the rich.
I think you make a valid point, I have seen people in the same situation, they legitimately don’t want to change their situation and it is true that if you give them money It will probably by used for nonsense but I think that homeless people or poor people in general dont necessarily want to be poor, it’s not like they wake up one day and say: “You know what’d be great, have no money and beg for food in the streets”, I think it’s a matter of luck, I for example was lucky enough to have a good education and make something out of it, but there are people who are born in the streets and of course they think there’s no way out of it, nobody taught them otherwise.
I strongly suspect that the majority of homeless (say 51%-65%) do not wish to be homeless and would choose something other than panhandling and whatnot, given the clear opportunity. I also suspect that, if for no other reason than that it would be a good electioneering claim, that some politicians somewhere would solve this problem if they believed it to be a tractable problem. Therefor, I conclude, that it isn’t a tractable problem. Which is bizarre, because we’re not talking about some violation of physics principles or whatever. Build a house, or even just a room, and a homeless person isn’t homeless.
So, from that I take that the intractable nature of homelessness must be some sort of sociological phenomenon. And it turns out that it is! The reason homelessness isn’t solved in some districts, regions, and cities (even if politicians elsewhere would just be indifferent to the problem), is because when homelessness is solved in one area but not another, the number of homeless people increases there rather than decreases.
The homeless aren’t chained to the ground where they are now. And they aren’t stupid either. If they heard of a magical place where homelessness is solved, they would go there. They’d panhandle for a bus ticket fare, or they’d hitchhike. If they had no other choice, they’d hoof it.
And now a program that solved homelessness for 150 people has 4000 of them, and not enough money but for the 150.
Politicians aren’t stupid either (whatever else one might say about them). In the back of their mind, they know that solving homelessness actually attracts more homeless to their city, to their county. And that instead of solving the problem and looking like a hero (maybe even becoming a viable presidential candidate), they will end up with more homelessness than before and it will tank their career. And so, instead of “solving” it, they just give lip service to the idea and pass the buck.
This is a game theory problem. Anyone not looking to solve the game theory problem will never end homelessness.