Street Life Solutions

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One Too Many Problems

on August 17, 2019

AFuture

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Independently Poor: A Twist on FU Money -- a.k.a. "FU, Money"

While I was homeless, I had a descriptor in my profile on some forum that I was "Independently Poor." That was more than just tongue-in-cheek humor. Although I was homeless, I had alimony and I was doing freelance work and I had a degree of agency that you rarely see among poor people. I was able to arrange my life to prioritize taking care of my health in part by doing gig work (and this post is being written expressly for r/GigWorks , a forum I run). In other words, I had a degree of independence and agency that you normally only see in the Jet Set -- people who get called independently wealthy -- or comfortably well-off retirees. I had more control over my time and my life than your typical working stiff. I was able to get to that point in part because I'm pretty financially savvy. I think anyone can get to that same place mentally and logistically, even if you don't currently have much money. A lot of it has to do with feeding your mind the right stuff in ...

This is Real. That's Not.

We all grow up in our own little bubble. Getting perspective on ourselves and/or our own lives is one of the harder things to do in life. I've always liked the following scene from the movie Overboard (1987), but it took on new meaning for me after I was homeless: Most of us go through life...knowing only that one little station to which we were born... you...have had the rare privilege of escaping your bonds for just a spell... I was on the street about a year before it dawned on me how upper class my mother's expectations were. It took even longer for me to begin to comprehend how well off my parents had actually been at one time. While I was growing up, my parents always conveyed this narrative of "We are just plain folks with blue collar jobs." I was a child, so I believed what I was told and it took a stint "on skid row" to get a clue that this wasn't the whole story. I actively and intentionally used my time on the street as a me...

Real Solutions Tend to be Non-Obvious

I previously said that I fantasize about Aberdeen, Washington's library having longer hours. I do wish this were true but this is also potentially an attractive nuisance that would help the homeless but worsen Aberdeen's homeless problem. Aberdeen has a large homeless population for such a small town but that's because this town of around 17,000 people is "the big city" for this area and this is where the services are and where the region comes to shop. So Aberdeen's homeless problem is similar to how California is the dumping ground for the nation's homeless : This small town is the dumping ground for this region's homeless population. Homelessness is a hard problem to solve in part because the knee-jerk "obvious" answer of wanting to "help the homeless" is rife with perverse incentives that help keep the problem alive. Wanting to "do something about the homeless problem" in Aberdeen is similarly prone to makin...

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