It's very well written, but feels a little like it doesn't quite make the point it set out to make. It's a good read from the perspective of a richness of language and insight into a lifestyle many here will not have familiarity with. But, I don't know, when I was homeless, a hotel stay was a brief foray back into civilization. It was a chance to get a proper shower in a proper bathroom facility, unlike the homeless showers back in downtown San Diego that I was all too happy to leave behind. It was a chance to watch a TV like normal people do.
It sits a bit uncomfortably with me that the meaning (of hotel stays) for those living precariously is cast in such negative terms. Perhaps that seems necessary to motivate people to try to do something about the problem, but I am not so sure that works. The pity with which other people clearly saw me when I was on the street rarely motivated anyone to help me, though I was only asking for help with figuring out how to effectively make money online. The pity itself seemed to be a barrier to the connections and useful information I desired. The pity seemed rather corrosive to my finances and not some means to channel assistance my way.
While I can understand the strong feelings people have about how galling our high rates of homelessness are, I am not so convinced that this framing is particularly helpful to some cause of trying to make headway against such things.
This recent story in the Atlantic does a good job of capturing the quiet desperation of motel-homeless life.
They thought it would be a brief stay, but they ended up staying in various hotels like the Red Roof Inn and the GuestHouse Inn for the next two and a half years. All six of them would pile into one room, with two of the boys sleeping on the floor and everyone vying for bathroom time. They could rarely stay at a hotel longer than 28 days—many establishments have time limits—and so would have to pack up their bags every few weeks and find a new place to live. “I think the worst part of it was not having your privacy, your own room, we all had to share one big room,” Karina told me. “And not having a place to call home during Christmas.” ...
Moving into a place where they had a kitchen and some privacy was an almost indescribable relief. Karina posted pictures of scrambled eggs she made on Facebook, puzzling friends who didn’t know that the family had been homeless for two and a half years, because being able to cook in her own kitchen again filled her with joy.
I slept in a usually 7x7 tent for 5.7 years with my two adult special needs sons.
I am not asserting that their quiet desperation is invalid. But please don't dismiss my experience as invalid.
I do a lot of writing on things like homelessness and housing issues. I wish tech giants would abandon their advocacy of UBI and replace it with trying to solve affordable housing for this country. But I cannot begin to tell you what a kick in the stomach it feels like for you to try to "educate" me on the issue of homelessness here, like I have no clue whereof I speak.
Whoah there, you're completely misreading my comment. The single sentence I wrote, "This recent story in the Atlantic does a good job of capturing the quiet desperation of motel-homeless life" isn't even directed at you personally, but at HN readers who want to understand more about the topic.
So: of course staying in motels is far preferable to life on the streets, and it sounds like you had it far worse than the family profiled in the Atlantic. My sole point was that precarious living in a string of motels is still homelessness and -- as the article explains -- far more challenging than the average HNer (like me) might think.
"Startup nerd" (LOL) here. I linked to the article because I thought it was an insightful illustration of the life of the "motel homeless". No more, no less, no disagreement (with what, exactly?) intended or implied.
We're on Y Combinator's news aggregator and anything said in this environment is being read, voted on, and replied to by a bunch of startup nerds. That's largely what we are. It's not an insult, and it applies to me too. Along with the positive things about this cohort, this means that the easiest things to say around here are a combination of CS/engineering social cluelessness and startup founder "hey, look at this useless but trendy/interesting thing."
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Parent is posting about how there's something missing in the article -- a sense of normalcy in a motel room that comes from being able to do regular things for a moment.
The passage you quoted takes a contradictory tack, indicating that motels have a sad side as well for many homeless folks. You describe the sentiment as "quiet desperation," without really taking the time to say anything about the parent comment.
Neither is right, neither is wrong, both are simply vantage points on an experience.
However....
It's bizarre, to me at least, that one person shares thoughts from a deeply difficult personal experience and the response simply quotes a block of text from a magazine (...owned by Steve Jobs' billionaire widow, no less. Welcome to HN, where even the commentary about homelessness comes from the mouthpiece for a tech billionaire in Palo Alto.)
It's like there's a human element missing, a nonfunctioning ligand that would make it a bit easier to connect.
It's pretty obvious from the parent comment that you're talking to someone who has seen some rough times, but you literally just quoted a passage from an article that's contradictory to the parent's message without cribbing it in any sort of meaningful way.
I mean, this isn't even my thread. I've never been homeless and I like reading magazines too. But I see why the parent commenter reacted defensively, and I am trying to tell you what I see.
> without really taking the time to say anything about the parent comment.
I see this a lot on HN, including the whole "but my intentions" dance. "Contributing to the discussion[sic]" by talking past a comment, and then going "just saying" when asked what that's supposed to mean in the context it's posted in, or being offended when it's being interpreted as cold or dismissive. And people who put some of their own thoughts, or even life experiences, into a comment, deserve more than something that makes anyone trying to find a connection to what it's posted as reply to go "yes, and?". Why is it a reply and not a top-level comment? No good reason, but even pointing out it doesn't make sense as reply got downvoted.
It's perfectly cool to be cold towards the powerless, especially the absent powerless. But don't call anyone a "startup nerd", that gets you flagged dead. Stay classy, everybody. And keep the proof where it will keep eluding you -- right in the pudding.
If it is mere contribution to the discussion, it is quite badly handled. If they did not intend to rebut me, they could have posted it as a top level comment instead of as a reply. If they wished to engage me without coming across as dismissive, the framing of it needs a lot of work.
Your comment also comes across as subtly dismissive and accusatory due to what you choose to comment on here. If you only wish to engage in discussion, why feel the need to criticize my reply? Why not say something constructive in response to my top level comment above?
Women, people of color, the poor and other disenfranchised groups face this sort of thing a great deal. It is rather maddening as it puts people in a no win situation. Such groups get no respect. When they complain of it, it is yet another thing to criticise them for.
It would be nice if the world stopped such insidious patterns.
No offense, but I think you're misinterpreting a normal pattern of discussion on this site. jpatokal's comment was pretty clearly not trying to dismiss your experience as invalid but simply contributed a similar story.
You seem to be reading a lot into some very innocuous responses.
I read jpatokal's response as simple addressing your point that the original author didn't make his point. There was no explicit criticism in the post. Several of us now have tried to point out that we didn't detect any implicit criticism either, but you've take all of these very friendly responses as further attacks.
As far as I can tell, nobody is being hostile or making assumptions here except for you.
And yet the pile on of criticism continues while I get downvoted for calmly replying.
I was asked a question. I answered. That has been downvoted and more and more people pile on to explain to me the error of my ways for answering the question in good faith, yet no one seems to see how that pattern is inherently dismissive of me.
I see UBI as a means to make life more affordable. Assuming price stasis across introduction of UBI, can't a family just use the extra money to help pay rent/mortgage costs?
Ultimately, cost of living is one of the big differences between first-world society and the rest of the world. UBI is a way to share the fruits of productivity of the first world among its common classes, effectively reducing their net monthly expenses.
There are a number of problems with UBI. The largest issue is that tech giants say they want to create a UBI because many jobs are going away permanently. These jobs pay like $20k to $50k annually. Proposed UBI is usually $10k. The most generous figure I have seen (from Sam Altman) is $18k.
Then the rest of the article talks in glowing terms about how lovely it will be for underpaid workers to have this extra money. These articles never actually explore what life would be like if your $50k job disappears, you are doomed to only get $10k UBI and have no hope of getting another job.
Another issue is that we have a serious, long standing shortage of affordable housing. We tore down about 80% of SROs in a couple of decades and never replaced them. Average size of new housing has more than doubled since the 1950s. If you do nothing to address the issue of affordable housing, then UBI solves nothing.
My fear is that tech giants focusing on UBI means that restructuring work to better distribute it, addressing the need to fix health care and affordable housing will all get ignored because UBI is supposed to be some panacea. But it's not. It is basically rich people imagining they can solve this by cutting a check. They can't. That doesn't work. If there simply isn't affordable, basic housing, UBI won't get you off the street.
Is UBI anything but a pipe dream in the US?
(I'm sure it's possible in some European countries in a few years)
But maybe the US should just try fix mental health, regressive taxes, low minimum wages, high housing costs, cruel prisons, and health care.
Then move on to decent unemployment benefits, day care, maternity leave and maybe in some far fetched future you can talk about UBI.
Today UBI in the US seems like wishful thinking. You have lots of low hanging fruit you could fix first. The idea of helping people who needs help isn't controversial, maybe try that first?
The trouble is that in the US, it is controversial.
It is entirely possible UBI could leapfrog a lot of the profit-taking industries that have built up around the US social safety net the way cell towers leapfrogged telephone lines in the developing world.
Single payer is _ludicrously_ more efficient at buying everyone healthcare because it can buy in bulk and it can be hard-headed about cost-benefit decisions.
When it's your baby, the idea of paying $50 000 for a 1% chance of not needing to amputate her arm is a snap - of course you'll pay. But the single payer says hold on, that means we're paying an average of $5M per arm saved, arms aren't worth $5M, our tax payers say they're not willing to give us more than $2M per arm, offer the treatment for $20 000 or no deal.
Making people invest in their healthcare _can_ help with some personal care decisions, like whether to take exercise, eat better, maybe give up smoking, people who feel like it costs them money when they're sick are a little more careful in some ways. But a LOT of healthcare spending is unpredictable, so isn't affected by this at all, including very expensive urgent and emergency care. Overall single payer wins out in terms of both how much you spend and outcomes.
A UBI does leave open the question of what you do with the small handful of people studies suggest will not spend their UBI wisely. If you give everybody $300 per week, 999 out of 1000 of them will spend it mostly on food, and shelter, and other useful things. Their priorities might not be my priorities maybe they eat a Big Mac instead of making a healthy salad, but they are behaving wisely by their own standards. But one person out of a thousand will spend it all on lottery tickets, booze or heroin, and then what do we do about that? Leave them to die? Really?
> But one person out of a thousand will spend it all on lottery tickets, booze or heroin, and then what do we do about that? Leave them to die? Really?
What do we with people that sell their food stamps and/or use their existing means tested cash benefits that way?
Is this a problem? Sure, but it's not a new problem with UBI compared to the status quo.
I'm actually not sure. As a matter of fact, I often pay for medicine out of pocket, dentistry especially. It's kind of nice, I can choose the place, be sure that they're interested in me as a client.
I have a coverage from employer, but chose not to use it because I don't trust the institutions enrolled in the program, and they're further from my home. It's all about having more choices. I have also bought coverage for my child, and I'm pretty sure it's much better than anything that comes already paid.
If you have cancer, of course you would want to be taken care of. But if you live a routine life, I don't see how you are benefitting from throwing money at healthcare.
WRT "one of thousands". Water from drink fountains is free. Dumpster diving is free. You won't starve in a week, and by the time next BI payment arrives, they will probably learn something.
Single payer does not mean single provider. In fact, with capitation, incentivizing wellness, providers earn more while improving outcomes while reducing costs (per capita).
It’s all about the incentives. A small detail that gets ignored by the Freedom Market™ zealots.
Still, single payer plans are usually all-you-can-eat buffets. Quality of the produce is not terribly high. And not chosen for your specific needs. And selection is worse than a la carte.
Reno Nevada is a little infamous for it's strips of shabby motels leftover from the 50s and 60s when it was a Mecca for people to get a quick marriage or divorce. The matrimony industry is gone but the motels are still here. People in town hate them because they are old and run down and ugly and occupied by our seedier citizens. They attract drugs and prostitution, as you might imagine. Everyone wants to get rid of them, and indeed three or four were razed this last summer.
But as the story points out, shitty old motels are an important rung on the ladder between homelessness or living in a shelter, and being able to afford one or two thousand dollars to move into an apartment.
This year our little "angel tree" that exclusively services those old motels has over 160 kids on it. I hate to think where those kids would be without the old motels.
Tearing them down does not make the problem go away. It makes it worse.
> Tearing them down does not make the problem go away. It makes it worse.
The problem these people are trying to solve is not that those children are trying to solve is not that those people are living in a crap situation, it is that those people are living near them. See NIMBY, banning Single Room Occupancy hotels, minimum lot sizes, maximum occupancy, minimum square footage, etc.
Middle class people ban choices they wouldn’t make, news at 11.
It isn't just the middle class. The wealthy don't want anyone (relatively) worse off living next to them either.
One of the points I think a home (or apartment, etc) should make is keeping unwanted noises on one side of it's walls. Outside noises out, inside noises in.
It very much annoys me how easy it is for the un-thoughtful to make the lives of those around them hell.
No, it isn’t just the middle class. The rich don’t make other people’s preferred choices illegal though because they can afford to live somewhere they don’t have to deal with them. The middle class make those choices illegal, the rich buy their way out of dealing with them.
> The rich don’t make other people’s preferred choices illegal though because they can afford to live somewhere they don’t have to deal with them.
While they can afford to do that, they can also often afford to buy the laws in the place they prefer to live for reasons other than the pre-existing laws, and they often do so instead of relocating.
One of the things I (probably incorrectly, but) happily spent money on over the last couple years was putting soundproof windows.
I think having better sound isolation in apartments would make them substantially more liveable, and it's not comparatively expensive versus many other upgrades you can make to multi-family housing.
Oof. That bit about teachers pulling kids aside to see if they had a winter coat is 100% truth. When I was a kid, there were basically never any school cancellations due to snow. The reason? The calculus in Montana was that it was safer to risk traveling on terrifying roads than it was to risk kids being home, alone, with no heat, and maybe nothing to eat.
As a Canadian who's spent a few years in the southern states, I can say that the difference in infrastructure here does help reduce the risks of road accidents when there's snow. In the south the entire city shuts down because the people there don't have the snow plows, road salt, and winter tires to deal with it. However, in a really bad storm the reduced visibility and slippery roads can still make your drive very dangerous.
In the UK we don’t have motels as such. We tend to have Bed And Breakfast guest houses. Much smaller affairs. They can end up having the same use though as we have a growing precariat too.
There is some, perhaps better, provision for state funded emergency housing over here but claiming any kind of perfection would be very wide of the mark. It can still leave whole families in single rooms for long periods of time.
Edit: I missed out acknowledging the author’s talents as a writer, and the plight of those (on downward or maybe as another commenter points out, upwards trends). This was a very moving piece. The picture it paints is captivating and bleak.
Youth hostels serve this role in much of Europe. The Lausanne hostel would have a drunk homeless guy living there, the police would bring him in and pay for his stay. He reaked, it was difficult for me to share a dorm room with him. Good times.
Youth Hostels are a pretty good solution I think. They're designed to be simple and cheap from the start, but further I think they're designed to be durable and low maintenance too. This means you can fairly sure of a basic level of quality. Unlike numerous B&Bs or run down hotels.
I stayed in two separate youth hostels in Switzerland. One was amazing, the other was basically a camp for American students with speakers to wake you up each morning.
I wouldn’t say much of Europe. Switzerland is actually known for putting the ordinary homeless into youth hostels. Elsewhere in Europe, hostel owners are completely free to refuse to accept such people, and if you are working or volunteering in one, one of the first instructions given to you is about who to turn away, like the local homeless.
This is an especially hard read given what's happening right now to the tax system. I wish more people understood just how easy it is to end up in those kind of circumstances, but most seem either secure enough that they don't see it as a realistic outcome for them or too frightened to consider just how close to the razor's edge they themselves are to accept it.
The post below yours got flagged into oblivion, but I think it raises an important issue.
Nationwide, less than 30% of the money spent on welfare actually winds up as cash in the hands of the needy it's supposedly benefiting. Most of it is spent on other things (some of which are no doubt good, others of which may not be so good). Surely one can suggest taking a hard look at these other expenditures without being accused of taking bread out of the mouths of children?
In California (one of the better states) only about 45% of the money supposedly spent to help poor people actually winds up in their hands. Some states are much, much worse.
The guy who got flagged suggested (in a rather combative manner, true) that too much of the welfare budget is spent on the salaries of bureaucrats. I don't know about you, but
> 50% overhead seems like too much to me.
And yet I meet social workers and other bureaucrats in this space that are clearly not making the kind of money I would require to work such a hard job.
I feel like societal investments in combatting poverty are so low that the inefficiencies we see are because we’re paying just enough to keep the lights on.
Flipping things around, imagine a startup that was only making < 50% more in profit than its total costs. We wouldn’t be so critical. We’d say, “Wow, you’re profitable? Congratulations!”
Flipping things a little further, imagine how
much more quickly a startup could become profitable if employees were paid the same as social workers. I'd argue that the delta in pay is at least partly attributable to the delta in how much each class of worker truly believes in the mission of the organization. That’s a sobering thought.
The overhead is absurd yes. There is work to be done. My problem though is the Democrats just want to raise the budget, which technically works but means setting a good 70% of the money on fire, and the GOP just wants to cut the hell out of the budget, as they're doing now, as if this will make the bureaucrats take lower salaries in the name of helping people, despite having never had that happen before.
And all of this needs a solid, informed and rational discussion about how best to help people in need, which we cannot have because the narrative of this country seems to be locked in this mindset that the poor are the people who failed, the people who made dumb choices which apparently warrants a lifetime of check-to-check starvation, or in the most extreme cases people who have offended God or whatever and had their wealth taken from them. And that's not even going into the issues around everyone here being "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and not wanting to tax the rich, because when they get rich, they don't want to be taxed.
The whole thing is screwed, not even just in the Government but in the culture.
i've wondered the same thing about the overhead. the argument given to me by some friends in non-profits is that raising money is an art and they have to compete with profit companies for the same people. hence they offer high salaries for c-level positions who can bring in money. there are only so many people that are willing to do it for a under industry salary.
not sure i agree one way or another, but penny for your thoughts.
It's a hard read given what's happened with all the waste and excess in the social safety net. The social workers in my neighborhood live in nicer houses than me and lease vehicles that people purchase when intelligence isn't the limiting factor (e.g FCA products), and they leave for work after me and arrive home before I do. Yet I see stories about their clients needing winter coats and socks.
I look at how much of my paycheck goes to taxes and it seems like there should be enough to ensure that kids don't go hungry but apparently not.
But the solution remains the same as always. The bureaucrats bleat "we need more money" - I don't think I've ever heard one say "we need to do a better job with the budget".
I hear what you're saying, but the fact is the roles of poor being helped by these systems are ever growing, therefore them constantly needing more money makes perfect sense. Especially after the housing crash in '08, from which many many households never recovered.
The fact is though we spent something on the order of 13 trillion dollars on a plane for the USAF that's not yet flown a single mission since it was purchased in what, 2008? Until that type of stuff starts getting cut, I refuse to buy the argument that "we can't afford it." BS we can't. Right now we won't afford it but that's not the same thing.
We've spent less than a trillion on it so far. I don't know where you got your 13 trillion dollar expense, but I'd like to know more about the claim.
I don't argue that we don't have the money to take better care of the poor. I'm just reluctant to advocate for more money until our welfare system demonstrates its efficiency. If it kicked butt, I'd want much more money going into the welfare system. But it's awful that so many good intentioned people run a system so poorly and the most vulnerable take the hit.
Be careful judging others based on your quality of life standards.
You might get angry realizing everyone has it better than you; but perhaps debt, lost love, resentment and bitterness is funding those extravagant purchases.
In theory anyway, yes, it would be a much more efficient system that directly benefits the people under it. I'm sure you'd still need some staff but it would be drastically lower, and a fraud department wouldn't be required.
The next generation of this will be WeLive, the residential branch of WeWork. They're setting up dorms in old office buildings.[1] Once those become run down and are passed on to low rent operators, they'll be tomorrow's SRO hotels.
Yes. I purchased a home and turned it into a rental, bringing a few hundred dollars of profit each month. I have a Roth IRA that I invest in, and I work very hard to stay out of debt.
Billings, MT is a horrible shithole. I don't know of any other town along any major road between Colorado and any other place west, where I would have less liked to stop. Pollution, chemical industry, grim setting, run down downtown... The weather is awful too, summers too hot, winters too cold.
I've driven through there many times on my way from Denver to Bozeman, MT. Never wanted to stop there. It's really flat there, and there doesn't seem to be much to look at or experience there.
Could someone help a non-American to understand? I've read people can stay years in motels, how is that possible? is renting a house in the US that expensive? or, is renting a motel that cheap? maybe I'm missing another variable?
In perspective renting a cheap Motel in my city for one month would be the equivalent of renting a fairly big middle class house.
Motels in the US can be extremely cheap, maybe $30/night. This makes a month comparable to a low-end apartment - but the advantage is that they are highly transient - as long as you've got $30, you've got a bed for the night. No contract, no lease, etc.
Moving into an apartment usually requires a month (or more) deposit, potentially a credit check and employment verification. There's a growing precariat in the US who cannot provide this, so motels provide a solution in a society that operates on free-market principles and has little social safety net.
"The Florida Project" is a good film that dives into this part of American society a little bit. As an immigrant who started out in this country near that run down part of the US-192 in Florida, it's spot on.
It's not the cost, but the mobility that is necessary for jobs like the one described. He travels (several hours) to the next destination and rests before his shift.
It sits a bit uncomfortably with me that the meaning (of hotel stays) for those living precariously is cast in such negative terms. Perhaps that seems necessary to motivate people to try to do something about the problem, but I am not so sure that works. The pity with which other people clearly saw me when I was on the street rarely motivated anyone to help me, though I was only asking for help with figuring out how to effectively make money online. The pity itself seemed to be a barrier to the connections and useful information I desired. The pity seemed rather corrosive to my finances and not some means to channel assistance my way.
While I can understand the strong feelings people have about how galling our high rates of homelessness are, I am not so convinced that this framing is particularly helpful to some cause of trying to make headway against such things.