#homeless in the USA

[fwimmey]

Ok so I've known things have been bad in this country for homeless people but, getting my learners permit yesterday has given me the context necessary to put this into perspective. So bear with me this might be a long post.

Issue 1: There is no public transport in the vast majority of this country. No trains, no busses, not even taxis. The closest we get is Uber which still doesn't cover some areas. This means that to get a job you either have to live within walking distance of your job, or own a car.

Issue 2: In cities due to zoning laws business aren't allowed to be built in the same district as residential buildings, which prevents living within walking distance of your job. Most businesses don't build outside of city limits, so if you were born in a suburb or a rural area you can also rule out walking to work.

Issue 3: Minimum wage works out to about $1,625 a month. Average rent works out to about $1,320 a month for a 2 bedroom apartment. The average house costs about $410,200. Meaning if you have a roommate taking on half of the rent, after rent each month you have $965 left over. Minus roughly $400 for groceries is $565. As we've already established that you need a car to exist in this country let's subtract the average of $915 for car related expenses (gas, insurance, payments on the car because lets be honest there is no way you will be able to afford it up front) and we have suddenly run out of money.

Issue 4: let's talk about getting a license, not the car itself just the license. You will need, your social security card, your birth certificate, 2 proofs of residency, and $25. But what if you are homeless? No proof of residency, no license. Also you have to get someone to drive you there because there is no way you live within walking distance of the DMV, and as we've already established, there is no public transport. But wait there is more. I'm not sure how it works elsewhere, but in my state you have to have had your beginners permit for 3 months before you can apply. So before you can get your license repeat the previous steps 3 months in advance except it only cost $5 this time. You also have to provide your own car for the driving test which leads to a fun catch 22 in that you have to have a job to afford a car, but as we've established you have to have a car to get to your job.

Issue 5: while being homeless isn't technically illegal sleeping in your car is, as is public camping, and begging for money. Benches are being removed. Spikes are being installed under rain shelters. A large percentage of businesses won't hire people with a criminal record, and when you can be arrested for sleeping in the only shelter available to you it can become nearly impossible to get a job to escape homelessness.

Issue 6: homeless shelters are rife with abuse. Homeless people in them often face sexual harassment and abuse, racial discrimination, and sometimes theft by either other shelter residents or caretakers. Not to mention the difficulty of getting into a shelter. They can place a limit on how many personal belongings you can bring with you. They can turn you away if you have any drugs in your system. Many don't allow pets. Many don't have accommodations available for the disabled. Many don't have the facilities to deal with many mental illnesses, several of which are caused in part by being homeless.

[lilithism1848]

[mysharona1987]

[nando161mando]

This is almost too on the nose.

[typhlonectes]

[reasonsforhope]

Paywall-free version

On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, what began as a fringe experiment has quickly become central to the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness. To Justin Tyler Jr., it is home.

Mr. Tyler, 41, lives in Community First! Village, which aims to be a model of permanent affordable housing for people who are chronically homeless. In the fall of 2022, he joined nearly 400 residents of the village, moving into one of its typical digs: a 200-square-foot, one-room tiny house furnished with a kitchenette, a bed and a recliner.

The village is a self-contained, 51-acre community in a sparsely populated area just outside Austin. Stepping onto its grounds feels like entering another realm.

Eclectic tiny homes are clustered around shared outdoor kitchens, and neat rows of recreational vehicles and manufactured homes line looping cul-de-sacs.

There are chicken coops, two vegetable gardens, a convenience store, art and jewelry studios, a medical clinic and a chapel.

Roads run throughout, but residents mainly get around on foot or on an eight-passenger golf cart that makes regular stops around the property.

Mr. Tyler chose a home with a cobalt-blue door and a small patio in the oldest part of the village, where residents’ cactus and rock gardens created a “funky, hippie vibe” that appealed to him. He arrived in rough shape, struggling with alcoholism, his feet inflamed by gout, with severe back pain from nearly 10 years of sleeping in public parks, in vehicles and on street benches.

At first, he kept to himself. He locked his door and slept. He visited the clinic and started taking medication. After a month or so, he ventured out to meet his neighbors.

“For a while there, I just didn’t want to be seen and known,” he said. “Now I prefer it.”

Between communal meals and movie screenings, Mr. Tyler also works at the village, preparing homes for the dozen or more people who move there each month.

In the next few years, Community First is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes across three locations, which would make it by far the nation’s largest project of this kind, big enough to permanently house about half of Austin’s chronically homeless population.

Tiny-home villages for people who have been homeless have existed on a small scale for several decades, but have recently become a popular approach to addressing surging homelessness. Since 2019, the number of these villages across the country has nearly quadrupled, to 124 from 34, with dozens more coming, according to a census by Yetimoni Kpeebi, a researcher at Missouri State University.

Mandy Chapman Semple, a consultant who has helped cities like Houston transform their homelessness systems, said the growth of these villages reflects a need to replace inexpensive housing that was once widely available in the form of mobile home parks and single room occupancy units, and is rapidly being lost. But she said they are a highly imperfect solution.

“I think where we’re challenged is that ‘tiny home’ has taken on a spectrum of definitions,” said Chapman Semple. Many of those definitions fall short of housing standards, often lacking basic amenities like heat and indoor plumbing, which she said limits their ability to meet the needs of the population they intend to serve.

But Community First is pushing the tiny home model to a much larger scale. While most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens, its leaders see that as a necessary trade-off to be able to creatively and affordably house the growing number of people living on Austin’s streets. And unlike most other villages, many of which provide temporary emergency shelter in structures that can resemble tool sheds, Community First has been thoughtfully designed with homey spaces where people with some of the highest needs can stay for good. No other tiny home village has attempted to permanently house as many people.

Austin’s homelessness rate has been rapidly worsening, and the city’s response has whipped back and forth... In October [2023], the official estimate put the number of people living without shelter at 5,530, a 125 percent increase from two years earlier. Some of that rise is the result of better outreach, but officials acknowledged that more people have become homeless. City leaders vowed to build more housing, but that effort has been slowed by construction delays and resistance from residents.

Meanwhile, outside the city limits, Community First has been building fast. [Note from below the read more: It's outside city limits because the lack of zoning laws keeps more well-off Austin residents from blocking the project, as they did earlier attempts to build inside the city.] In a mere eight years, this once-modest project has grown into a sprawling community that the city is turning to as a desperately needed source of affordable housing. The village has now drawn hundreds of millions of dollars from public and private sources and given rise to similar initiatives across the country.

This rapid growth has come despite significant challenges. And some question whether a community on the outskirts of town with relaxed housing standards is a suitable way to meet the needs of people coming out of chronic homelessness. The next few years will be a test of whether these issues will be addressed or amplified as the village expands to five times its current size.

-via New York Times, January 8, 2024. Article continues below (at length!)

The community versus Community First

For Alan Graham, the expansion of Community First is just the latest stage in a long-evolving project. In the late 1990s, Mr. Graham, then a real estate developer, attended a Catholic men’s retreat that deepened his faith and inspired him to get more involved with his church. Soon after, he began delivering meals as a church volunteer to people living on Austin’s streets.

In 1998, Mr. Graham, now 67, became a founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that has since amassed a fleet of vehicles that make daily rounds to deliver food and clothing to Austin’s homeless...

Talking to people like Mr. Johnston [a homeless Austin resident who Graham had befriended], Mr. Graham came to feel that housing alone was not enough for people who had been chronically homeless, the official term for those who have been homeless for years or repeatedly and have physical or mental disabilities, including substance-use disorders. About a third of the homeless population fits this description, and they are often estranged from family and other networks.

In 2006, Mr. Graham pitched an idea to Austin’s mayor: Create an R.V. park for people coming out of chronic homelessness. It would have about 150 homes, supportive services and easy access to public transportation. Most importantly, it would help to replace the “profound, catastrophic loss of family” he believed was at the root of the problem with a close-knit and supportive community.

The City Council voted unanimously in 2008 to lease Mr. Graham a 17-acre plot of city-owned land to make his vision a reality. Getting the council members on board, he said, turned out to be the easy part.

When residents near the intended site learned of the plan, they were outraged. They feared the development would reduce their property values and invite crime. One meeting to discuss the plan with the neighborhood grew so heated that Mr. Graham was escorted to his car by the police. Not a single one of the 52 community members in attendance voted in favor of the project.

After plans for the city-owned lot fell apart and other proposed locations faced similar resistance, Mr. Graham gave up on trying to build the development within city limits.

In 2012, he instead acquired a plot of land in a part of Travis County just northeast of Austin. It was far from public transportation and other services, but it had one big advantage: The county’s lack of zoning laws limited the power of neighbors to stop it.

Mr. Graham raised $20 million and began to build. In late 2015, Mr. Johnston left the R.V. park he had been living in and became the second person to move into the new village. It grew rapidly. In just two years, Mr. Graham bought an adjacent property, nearly doubling the village’s size to 51 acres and making room for hundreds more residents.

And then in the fall of 2022, he broke ground on the largest expansion yet: Adding two more sites to the village, expanding it by 127 acres to include nearly 2,000 homes.

“No one ever really did what they first did, and no one’s ever done what they’re about to do,” said Mark Hilbelink, the director of Sunrise Navigation Center, Austin’s largest homeless-services provider. “So there’s a little bit of excitement but also probably a little bit of trepidation about, ‘How do we do this right?’”

What it takes to make a village

Since he moved into Community First eight years ago, Mr. Johnston has found the stability that eluded him for so long. Most mornings, he wakes up early in his R.V., feeds his scruffy adopted terrier, Amos, and walks a few minutes down a quiet road to the village garden, where neat rows of carrots, leeks, beets and arugula await his attention.

Mr. Johnston worked in fast-food restaurants for most of his life, but he learned how to garden at the village. He now works full time cultivating produce for a weekly market that is free to residents.

“Once I got here, I said, This is where I’m going to spend pretty much my entire life now,” Mr. Johnston said.

Everyone at the village pays rent, which averages about $385 a month. The tiny homes that make up two-thirds of the dwellings go for slightly lower, but have no indoor plumbing; their residents use communal bathhouses and kitchens. The rest of the units are R.V.s and manufactured homes with their own bathrooms and kitchens.

Like Mr. Johnston, many residents have jobs in the village, created to offer residents flexible opportunities to earn some income. Last year, they earned a combined $1.5 million working as gardeners, landscapers, custodians, artists, jewelry makers and more, paid out by Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

Ute Dittemer, 66, faced a daily struggle for survival during a decade on the streets before moving into Community First five years ago with her husband. Now she supports herself by painting and molding figures out of clay at the village art house, augmented by her husband’s $800 monthly retirement income. A few years ago, a clay chess set she made sold for $10,000 at an auction. She used the money to buy her first car.

“I’m glad that we are not in a low-income-housing apartment complex,” she said. “We’ve got all this green out here, air to breathe.”

A small number of residents have jobs off-site, and a city bus makes hourly stops at the village 13 times a day to help people commute into town.

But about four out of five residents live on government benefits like disability or Social Security. Their incomes average $900 a month, making even tiny homes impossible to afford without help, Mr. Graham said.

“Essentially 100 percent of the people that move into this village will have to be subsidized for the rest of their lives,” he said.

For about $25,000 a year, Mr. Graham’s organization subsidizes one person’s housing at the village. (Services like primary health care and addiction counseling are provided by other organizations.) So far, that has been paid for entirely by private donations and in small part from collecting rent.

This would not be possible, Mr. Graham said, without a highly successful fund-raising operation that taps big Austin philanthropists. To build the next two expansions, Mr. Graham set a $225 million fund-raising goal, about $150 million of which has already been obtained from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the founder of the Patrón Spirits Company, Hill Country Bible Church and others.

Support goes beyond monetary donations. A large land grant came from the philanthropic arm of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, and Alamo Drafthouse, an Austin-based cinema chain, donated an outdoor amphitheater for movie screenings. Top architectural firms competed for the chance to design energy-efficient tiny homes free of charge. And every week, hundreds of volunteers come to help with landscaping and gardening or to serve free meals.

Around 55 residents, including 15 children, live in the village as “missionals” — unpaid neighbors generally motivated by their Christian faith to be part of the community.

All missionals undergo a monthslong “discernment process” before they can move in. They pay to live in R.V.s and manufactured homes distinguished by an “M” in the front window. Their presence in the community is meant to guard against the pitfalls of concentrated poverty and trauma.

“Missionals are our guardian angels,” said Blair Racine, a 69-year-old resident with a white beard that hangs to his chest. “They’re people we can always call. They’re always there for us.”

After moving into the village in 2018, Mr. Racine spent two years isolated in his R.V. because of a painful eye condition. But after an effective treatment, he became so social that he was nicknamed the Mayor. Missional residents drive him to get his medication once a week, he said. To their children he is Uncle Blair.

Though the village is open to people of any religious background, it is run by Christians, and public spaces are adorned with paintings of Jesus on the cross and other biblical scenes. The application to live in the community outlines a set of ���core values” that refer to God and the Bible. But Mr. Graham said there is no proselytizing and people do not have to be sober or seek treatment to live there.

Mr. Graham lives in a 399-square-foot manufactured home in the middle of the village with his wife, Tricia Graham, who works as the community’s “head of neighbor care.” He said they do not have any illusions about solving the underlying mental-health and substance-use problems many residents live with, and that is not their goal.

“This is absolutely not nirvana,” Mr. Graham said. “And we want people to understand the beauty and the complexity of what we do. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else on the face of the planet than right here in the middle of this, but you’re not fixing these things.” ...

From an experiment to a model

Community First has already inspired spinoffs, with some tweaks. In 2018, Nate Schlueter, who previously worked with the village’s jobs program, opened Eden Village in his hometown, Springfield, Mo. Unlike in Community First, every home in Eden Village is identical and has its own bathroom and kitchen. Mr. Schlueter’s model has spread to 12 different cities with every village limited to 50 homes or fewer.

“Not every city is Austin, Texas,” Mr. Schlueter said. “We don’t want to build a large-scale village. And if the root cause of homelessness is a loss of family, and community is something that can duplicate that safety net to some extent, to have smaller villages to me seemed like a stronger community safety net. Everybody would know each other.”

The rapid growth of Community First has challenged that ideal. In recent years, some of the original missional residents and staff members have left, finding it harder to support the number of people moving into the village. Steven Hebbard, who lived and worked at the village since its inception, left in 2019 when he said it shifted from a “tiny-town dynamic” where he knew everyone’s name to something that felt more like a city, straining the supportive culture that helped people succeed.

Mobile Loaves and Fishes said more staff members had recently been hired to help new residents adjust, but Mr. Graham noted that there was a limit to what any housing provider could do without violating people’s privacy and autonomy.

Despite these concerns, the organization, which had been run entirely on private money, has recently drawn public support. In January 2023, Travis County gave Mobile Loaves and Fishes $35 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to build 640 units as part of its expansion.

Then four months later came a significant surprise: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approved the use of federal housing vouchers, which subsidize part or all of a low-income resident’s rent, for the village’s tiny homes. This will make running the village much more financially sustainable, Mr. Graham said, and may make it a more replicable blueprint for other places.

“That’s a big deal for us, and it’s a big deal on a national basis,” Mr. Graham said. “It’s a recognition that this model, managed the way that this model is, has a role in the system.”

Usually, the government considers homes without indoor plumbing to be substandard, but, in this case, it made an exception by applying the housing standards it uses for single-room-occupancy units. The village still did not meet the required ratio of bathrooms per person, but at the request of Travis County and the City of Austin’s housing officials, who cited Austin’s “severe lack of affordable housing” that made it impossible for some homeless people with vouchers to find anywhere else to live, HUD waived its usual requirements.

In the waiver, a HUD staffer wrote that Mr. Graham told HUD officials over the phone that the proportion of in-unit bathrooms “has not been an issue.” But in conversations with The Times, other homeless-service providers in Austin and some village residents said the lack of in-unit bathrooms is one of the biggest problems people have with living there. It also makes the villages less accessible to people with certain disabilities and health issues that are relatively common among the chronically homeless....

Mr. Graham said that with a doctor’s note, people could secure an R.V. or manufactured home at the village, although those are in short supply and have a long waiting list. He said the village’s use of tiny homes allowed them to build at a fraction of the usual cost when few other options existed, and helps ensure residents aren’t isolated in their units, reinforcing the village’s communal ethos.

“If somebody wants to live in a tiny home they ought to have the choice,” Mr. Graham said, “and if they are poor we ought to respect their civil right to live in that place and be subsidized to live there.” But he conceded that for some people, “this might not be the model.”

“Nobody can be everything for everyone,” he said.

By the spring of 2025, Mr. Graham hopes to begin moving people into the next phase of the village, across the street from the current property. The darker visions some once predicted of an impoverished community on the outskirts of town overtaken by drugs and violence have not come to pass. Instead, the village has permanently housed hundreds of people and earned the approval and financial backing of the city, the county and the federal government. But for the model to truly meet the scale of the challenge in Austin and beyond, Chapman Semple said, the compromises that led to Community First in its current incarnation will have to be reckoned with.

“We can build smaller villages that can be fully integrated into the community, that can have access to amenities within the community that we all need to live, including jobs and groceries,” Chapman Semple said. “If it’s a wonderful model then we should be embracing and fighting for its inclusion within our community.”

-via New York Times, January 8, 2024

[spaceoracle]

My name is Austin. My family is homeless and has been since 2-2-22. My disabled, bed bound, immunocompromised father who is on oxygen 24/7, mom with a very painful disabled leg, cute as can be dog, wonderful and beautiful cat, and myself are in urgent need of support to keep us off the streets and in a motel room. We were evicted from our home after the passing of my aunt. She had a reverse mortgage and the bank took possession. We've been busting our butts to find a place ever since, with no luck finding housing whatsoever. Our daily motel fees eat up all of the money we manage to raise or save up, but crowded shelters are simply not an option because of my dad’s medical conditions. Catching COVID in a congregate shelter with his weak lungs and immunocompromised system would possibly kill him. We have been waiting for another Emergency Housing voucher as we were unable to find a place in the few days we were given to find one when approved previously. We are on countless low income housing waiting lists who have also told us to just wait. We have paid to apply for apartments and are rejected because of our low or non existent credit and low income. We are working with some new resources at the moment and hoping something comes of it. Basically, our issue is this: If we don’t have enough money for motel fees, we will have to sleep in our car which is super difficult for my parents and our pets, not even mentioning myself. There's honestly not enough room in our car for all of us to sit, let alone sleep comfortably. My dad’s oxygen machine needs electricity to run, and spare tanks only last a few hours each. The days are scorching and the nights get cold in California, especially this time of year, and we’re trying our best to stay together as a family and stay sheltered, healthy, and safe, and out of the triple digit summer heat. We would appreciate any donations you could spare to keep our motel room while we attempt to get on our feet during this awful experience. Thanks for your consideration, it means the world to us all. -Austin

The USA Today story featuring my family was published today. Apparently they have a policy that they can't link our fundraiser directly. So please help me spread it here.

[comrade-onion]

[homucifer-ryotan]

If anyone can, please help those affected by Hurricane Helene. North Coralina is need all the help they can get and more.

[bumblebeeappletree]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jasmine Sherman (@jasmineshermanforpresident)

In the face of extreme temperatures, summer brings life-threatening conditions just as winter does. It’s crucial that we provide housing for those without, to protect them from the elements and prevent unnecessary deaths. Housing is a basic right, not a privilege. This 2024 election, vote Sherman Blubear to ensure everyone’s needs are met. Your vote can make a difference in securing safe shelter for all. Vote Sherman Blubear 2024 for real change! Let’s make a change in 2024 by voting for Jasmine Sherman and Tanda Blubear. Together, we can create a future where peace and justice prevail.

[probablyasocialecologist]

In some cities, the homelessness crisis on transit systems is truly life and death. On May 2, a New York subway rider choked a man who had been seen panhandling and acting erratically, killing him. Between January and March, 22 people died on LA Metro, most from overdoses and in areas commonly known as homeless hangouts, according to the Los Angeles Times. Last year, a man who had been drifting in and out of hospitals, mental health facilities, and living on the streets for decades pushed Michelle Go in front of an oncoming train, killing her. Later that year, New York City mayor Eric Adams authorized the involuntary hospitalization of some people during homeless encampment sweeps and mulled a policy of increasing ticketing and summonses for homeless people—an obvious precursor to jailing them since they do not have the money to pay any fines. Many centrist and right-leaning commentators, such as Josh Barro, paint this issue as one that “exposes a key contradiction that leftists need to resolve. Do they care about the provision of high-quality public services? Or is their primary objective to ensure that the coercive force of the state is never used to enforce rules?” The creation and enforcement of stricter rules are increasingly popular policies nationwide, and fail to address the causes of homelessness.

Nevertheless, conservative activists and think-tankers have launched coordinated campaigns to make being homeless a felony, ensuring the homelessness-to-prison pipeline becomes even more streamlined. In April of last year, Tennessee state senator Frank Niceley, in discussing one such bill, made the argument that homeless people should find inspiration in a young man who, for a brief period early in life, “lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses and then went on to lead a life that’s got him into the history books”—evidence that life on the streets is not “a dead end.” He was referring, of course, to Adolf Hitler. Tennessee passed the bill, implicitly recognizing that, generally speaking, the U.S.’s answer to homelessness, inasmuch as it has one, is prison beds or shipping them out of town for someone else to deal with.

Amongst this mess, transit agencies are caught in the middle, tasked with doing something about a problem they had no role in creating and have no way of solving, which is often used as an excuse to dedicate little to no staff or budget to the problem.

[lemonbombsfjl]

Only twelve states have average rents below $1000 monthly, and they are the areas with the lowest population density. Affordable housing needs to exist where people live, and it goes hand in hand with a living wage and better quality of housing.

Any of these sites will help you register to vote, or check your registration.

Iwillvote.com

Vote.org

Vote.give

RockTheVote.org

usvotefoundation.org

Vote411.org

ballotpedia.org/Where_do_I_register_to_vote

voteamerica.org/register-to-vote/

More election information: LWV.org

YOUR VOTE COUNTS.

Your vote matters.

[agere-fics]

hello!! my family needs help!

unfortunately life is very unkind and we're getting evicted. if you'd like to donate to help us find appropriate housing, please visit my ko-fi !! it's under "littlefishblr".

my whole family, including myself, are disabled so lots of our money goes towards medical bills. and with rent increasing, we have nothing left over. please help if you are fortunate enough!

we don't want to surrender our animals (two cats) so we must find help somewhere that'll let us bring our pets. which is why the money would be incredibly helpful since most shelters don't allow pets but some hotels do!

thank you for your kindness.

[red-umbrella-811]

USAmericans without Stable Housing:

Here is a guide to voting while unhoused!

Some key takeaways:

- You don’t need a permanent address to vote, but you do need a mailing address to receive election-related mail

- Reach out to your local unhoused services organization for help with this. You can also just ask a friend with an address or PO Box to allow you to receive mail there, or a church or other community organization.

- Your local election office is going to want your permanent address if and when you do have one to update your registration (or register you in your new state)

- You can check state by state ID laws here

- Reach out to your local election office for information about what other programs are available to you, potentially including

Anyways, if you don’t have stable housing, I know you probably have a lot on your plate, but if it feels accessible, the steps to use your vote are easier than you might be picturing. Here’s to using your voice to change the future of our country!

[nando161mando]

The Supreme Court must love private prisons, making homelessness a crime will cost us more money than simply helping them. Senseless unnecessary and expensive cruelty

[typhlonectes]