I love seeing this creativity, but I hate the system that causes people to have to live this way.
I was homeless off and on for years, blending in. Crashing in college campus common areas, or living in my car. Bumming showers from friends once in a while or paper towel baths in gas station bathrooms. Would sometimes sleep in the trunk when it got cold enough. I was normally employed, had friends, and most knew nothing of my living situation. I knew how to hide. Part of that invisible homeless population. Thankfully I had my youth, my health, and the will to find many types of work, save, find my way out. Most are not so lucky.
Later, on my feet, I would often try to help visible homeless I had developed some empathy for. One day handing out 50 sandwiches at Lake Eola Park in Orlando, like I did every month, I was given a warning by a police officer to stop. I tore it up in front of him and dared him to arrest me. I was already out of food for the day so he walked away. Dozens of others who doing a larger scale regular feedings with Food Not Bombs were actually arrested over a few months.
Feeding 25 people was the limit, and cops went in undercover plain clothes to catch who would commit the crime of feeding the 26th hungry person at Lake Eola park.
They would often arrest the homeless too, for loitering and other such nonsense. Friend of mine had been arrested for this, and then repeatedly arrested over a dozen times for failing to pay the fines, jail costs, and court costs related to the previous arrests and so on burning endless taxpayer time and money. At least he got a hot meal and a bed in jail some nights.
Once in a local court myself for a traffic citation, I saw a man in front of me issued a $200 fine by a judge for holding up a sign asking for money in a public place.
The homeless are not helped in most of America. They are not seen as human, but as vermin to be removed, along with anyone that gives them too much unsanctioned help.
You can hardly blame them for breaking a few laws to survive, when it is against the law for them to even exist.
The reason is not “humanitarian and the right thing to do” it’s to send tax payer dollars to the enormous war companies in the US. There’s even leaked voice memos of these CEOs assuring investors “there is still plenty of instability” to prop up profits. It’s a disgrace.
I don’t think words can state how angry this makes me. Wtf is wrong with those police and judge. How can this be socially acceptable? Those people should be behind bars for cruelty against humanity.
Couldn’t imagine something like this in Europe. Certainly we have our systematic problems towards homelessness but what’s going on in the states is intensionaly beating down.
Maybe instead of going full-feels, you should pause and contemplate why those sorts of regulations and laws exist. I would imagine it relates to the premise that public spaces are supposed to be a benefit to all, which doesn't happen if they mostly serve as an encampment for a minority of a population.
Well-intentioned actions like the ones in the parent post can actually come with negative externalities that entirely outweigh them; places like San Francisco are learning that particular lesson as we speak.
OK, I contemplated it. They’re band-aids, tools of oppression, and the worst possible response to “the problems” they profess to address. We can fix poverty and homelessness as a society. We choose not to do so. That’s a shitty excuse for criminalizing a person’s right to exist and survive.
I see a lot of San Franciscans online complain about homeless people leaving their feces and used needles in the streets and harassing people going about their lives, I don't see so many complaints about them eating food. Surely an approach that maximises the freedom for all would be one that criminalizes the actually harmful behaviour, rather than going after the segment of society whose existence correlates strongly with that behaviour. It just seems like going after Tony Soprano by putting italians into internment camps, rather than devoting police activity to capturing mafia criminals
The society is (arguably?) working for the benefit of all its citizens. So no user of a public space should be prioritized over another. If the homeless takes a dump in the park it's because he doesn't have a better place to do it, so dear society please go fix that. PS: leftists are often called "snowflakes" but I see the others whining waaaay more.
The article suggests he got sand from the "sandy carpark". While it is true that there are parts of Hampstead Heath with a lot of natural "bagshot sand"[0], it is a bit further away from the bunker, and is fairly compacted and difficult to access. On the other hand, about 2 minutes from the bunker, there is a children's playground with a sandpit, and that year I did notice the sand disappearing from the sandpit more rapidly than other years (I used to joke that it was all coming home in my children's shoes). It's a minor point, but makes you wonder if there are any other minor points that might not be quite right.
> Van Allen had budgeted £100 for the job, and come in under.
I have a question to people in charge of politics everywhere:
Given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build simple, but quality and stable shelter for people?
If there are 100.000 homeless in a community, and 2 people manage to build that sort of shelter, with what they could get in tools and materials for <100 Pounds, why can't we say "Okay, let's budget 200 per shelter, but do it with professional builders, better tools and materials, and no requirement to hide it."?
1,000,000 // 200 = 5000 Shelters. Oh, and that shelter served 2 people. So to house 100,000 people, this would need 10 Million pounds. And that's before we factor in economics of scale.
Let's acknowledge what a difference the existence of even a simple shelter makes in the life of a person: They have a stable base of operations to sleep, keep their posessions, a postal address, a place to wash up and prepare food. They know that place is there at the end of a day, eliminating some anxiety. They have a place they can heal when they get mildly sick. They won't be sick as often, be in better physical and mental shape. As a result they have an easier time finding jobs. So building these shelters doesn't even have to be a charity...it's literally an investment into a societies economic power that pays dividend over dividend.
So WHY AREN'T WE DOING THAT ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE?!?
It’s even worse than that. In the US, at least, city governments are spending their money destroying the tents and tarpaulins that homeless people have set up for themselves on public land, and on fighting in court for the right to do so (see Martin v Boise and Johnson v Grants Pass). Then when someone uses their own land to allow tents or structures, the cities spend time passing unenforceable laws to ban it (see First Lutheran v St Paul). And they won’t even take money offered to them to do anything better! (See Burien city in WA currently: not only are they threatening fines on a church that shelters homeless people, they’re refusing to do anything with $1million offered by the county to help people in a local homeless camp. I am directly aware of a nonprofit group in Seattle that has over 100 preconstructed tiny houses and will install them anywhere for free, but is running out of storage space because no city in King County will allow them to do so, even on private land).
Again, capitalist countries NEED the homeless people as a ultimate threat to everyone, that if you aren't rich or make someone else rich, you will end up living on the streets, homeless, destitute, hungry, and die.
Removing that ultimate threat is NOT in the interests of the government, which greatly utilizes that threat. How else do you force people to work in an open-air gulag 3.8m mi^2, where 1% live comfortably, and 99% dont?
And it's a double-fuckyou with US citizenship renunciation fees at $2350. Like, having a US citizenship is a 3 grand hole in my pocket. And I didn't even fucking choose it. Still, no choice.
Because a) he "stole" the land he used (land is really expensive in the UK and especially London) to build the shelter, and b) if the shelters were built officially there are of course rules to follow that I guarantee you this guy did not follow - e.g. fire safety. If the government built shelters out of some off cuts of wood and tarpaulin and then loads of homeless people burnt to death one day in them, who do you think will get the blame?
Hampstead Heath is actually one of the rare examples of the public successfully fighting private developers to keep land in public ownership[0], culminating in the 1871 Hampstead Heath Act which ensured the land was "always kept uninclosed and unbuilt on"[1].
Bollocks it was! Hampstead Heath was in private ownership from before 986, before the Doomsday Book even. Then it was purchased for public use in 1870 odd.
The name Van Allen implies Dutch ancestry and, according to the article, he has a Yorkshire accent, so it sounds very implausible that a public park in London was "stolen" from his ancestors.
He has no more right to deprive other people of the use of this land, by building a private residence, than anybody else.
The solution to homelessness in London is through government building public housing to replace all housing stock they sold into private ownership not from individuals nabbing their own bit of a public park.
We could back that up with better provision of the mental health services that have been de-funded over time.
I'll tell you what mate, if you can point to evidence of the specific ancestor of his that was disposed from Hampstead Heath and when that happened I'll concede the point.
Otherwise this just looks like an individual trying to take something from public ownership into private ownership on the sly. Like a land owner trying to fence off a public footpath.
Sorry, but a last name and an accent isn't enough to shift any burden of proof, mate. My last name is English, but my ancestors have lived in the US for 400 years.
1. Where are you going to build these? The neighbours will vote against you. Or you can build them in the middle of nowhere, meaning that they’re nowhere near any jobs.
2. This is appalling accommodation: no mains electricity, no heating, no running water, no sewerage. It is cheap, yes. People will assume that it’s part of a plan to _replace_ existing social housing, punish the working poor and generate tax cuts for the rich. (This is not your aim. But people are used to being misled by politicians and special interest groups. So many people assume the worst these days.)
3. If the state can get planning permission for this, why can’t the private sector get planning permission for higher quality housing?
> This is appalling accommodation: no mains electricity, no heating, no running water, no sewerage. It is cheap,
Exactly. You can save a lot of money upfront by demanding cities allow shanty towns and slums but they'll only bring heavy costs and problems down the road that are far reaching and hard to clean up. The richest nations on Earth can more than afford to do better. Real, safe, sanitary housing is not impossible, it just requires investment.
We should also be giving consideration to where we build that housing so that we're not hurting the local environment by pushing biocapacity too far. We need to quit hurting ourselves with stupid shortsighted cheap temporary workarounds that just cause more problems and focus on long term sustainable solutions.
It also requires decent morality Living in close quarters is impossible if someone insists on smoking fentanyl and using their Bluetooth speaker at 11.
Just "adequate" by modern but still simple standard would do. Think tiny home, 1-bedroom apartment, or Japan style capsule hotel with some shared amenities. But you know what? Even that isn't built.
In the NL, around ~1960, many families had like 4, 5 children. Yet managed to live in 1- or 2-bedroom apartments.
Fast forward to today: Many people live single, pairs, or 1-child families. And population has grown. Building on average more compact housing would seem appropiate. But what happens?
In small town where I lived before, there were 5 recent home construction sites. Only one of those is modest sized social housing. How many? Around 30 apartments, in a ~80k municipality.
The other 4 sites (several dozen homes each) are all large, freestanding or 2-under-1-roof homes with like 4 or 5 bedroom, large yard, garage/carport etc. You can be very sure that if you'd check a random house, chances are you'd find a single well-earning person, or a couple living there. Not rarely elderly & retired. Perhaps a 1-child family if lucky.
Not big families with 4, 5 kids that you'd think is a logical match for homes like that.
It's like that almost everywhere. What's built is not what's needed to house a growing population of singles or small families. Instead, what's built is built to serve the well-off, use home (or 2nd, or 3rd) as investment part of the population.
Never mind professional landlords & real estate investment funds that drive up the price of housing for everyone.
This is a political problem first & foremost. Solutions exist if the political will were there. But political establishment won't fix it until things get untennable for a large enough % of the population that it threatens their re-election.
I'd add, as soon as you start doing it at some scale, it becomes harder. Because, sad but true, among homeless people you will find an over representation of people using drugs, with mental health problems, aggressive. I'm not painting everyone with the same brush! But as soon as you build a few 10s of those, you will have these issues.
They will then affect other people in the area, both home owners and temporary tenants.
Cambridge, UK is doing an experiment, where they put up little shelters, not totally dissimilar to this, but in homeopathic quantities: 3-4 at a time. It seems to be going well, but (a) that's still tiny number, and (b) I get the impression neighbours still don't like it.
You are probably reinventing slums. However the UK used to be good at building well built council housing at scale. I think that is the solution. It has a great legacy as long lasting but perhaps ugly brutalist housing (Goldfinger was mentioned in the article funnily enough)
> A peasant village perched on a hillside in a third world country can be aesthetically beautiful, but a shantytown of former peasants on the edge of a large modern urban area (even if the peasants are now better off) is aesthetically ugly.
> I was reminded of this while watching a recent video of Ulaanbaatar, which is attracting mass migration from the Mongolian countryside. There are few more picturesque scenes of rural poverty that a bunch of yurts set up on Mongolia’s vast plains, under a cerulean blue sky:
> [photograph]
> Fortunately, a mining boom has made Mongolia rich, and the peasants are flocking to the cities, and put up their yurts in shanty towns on the edge of Ulaanbaatar—which now has a majority of Mongolia’s population.
> The lady who narrated the show was a Westerner. And she couldn’t quite get past the idea that this urbanization didn’t look very attractive:
>> It’s so funny because in the countryside it seems natural and it seems clean and it seems lovely, and here this is just poverty-struck, and so not natural.
> It’s easy for Westerners and/or upper class people to think they know what’s best for the poor. But unless they’ve actually lived that life, they may end up substituting aesthetic judgments for utilitarian criteria. The Mongolians had to decide whether their country was going to be a place of yurts, or a place full of large open pit mines and cities with high-rise apartment buildings. They chose the latter. The Mongolian she interviewed pointed out that Mongolians wanted to live in these modern apartment buildings because “they don’t have to make fire anymore, they don’t have to carry water anymore.”
The Mongols in the slums outside Ulaanbaatar are richer than the Mongols living a traditional lifestyle off on the steppe, but they are aesthetically offensive to people with power, who would prefer them to be more picturesque and impoverished. Is the situation in London different?
I think something between slums and housing would be better. Something like pods in Tokyo, which can provide shelter,
security, sleep and that all important mailing address. The pods could be installed in otherwise useless properties. Of course building to high safety/fire standards.
> Overwhelmingly, such people do not want to live in a city with slums.
They'll vote that way, but they won't take any action more concrete than that. Look at San Francisco. Its center is surrounded by slums. Its outlying region to the east, Oakland, was traditionally one big slum. And the reason Oakland became a little less slumlike is that San Francisco was attracting too many residents.
> I have a question to people in charge of politics...
IANAP (...Not A Politician) - but you seem unfamiliar with NIMBY's, gentrification, voter behavior, the perverse incentives created by both property-tax-funded government and real-estate-as-an-invesment, and the various problems which are generally associated (rightly and wrongly) with very poor residents.
Assuming that you live in a country both large and "advanced" enough to have a serious problem with homelessness, your country also has lots of advocates for housing the homeless - with thoughts and feelings similar to yours, but (sadly) much more experience with how those things play out locally, to fill you in on the all the details.
Those local-to-you advocates for housing the homeless are doubtless also eager for donors, volunteers, voters who'll support their efforts, or any other contribution which you might be able to make...
> "Given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build simple, but quality and stable shelter for people?"
The "Homes for All" council house building was a key part of Britain's post-war reconstruction. Unfortunately all of that came to an end with Thatcher's Right to Buy[0] in 1980, with long-term public assets sold off for short-term private gains (sometimes in direct exchange for votes[1]), thereby creating the country's current shortage of affordable housing.
Edit: One anecdote to illustrate - Just a few streets away from the bunker in the article, a council home was sold for £775K to someone who immediately flipped it to overseas developers for around £1.5M and moved overseas himself, and the developers then applied to tear it down and build a much larger house with an "iceberg basement" to sell for £5M[2]. Now if all of that >£4M profit went to the council to build replacement homes it might not have been so bad, but it didn't (and in this case the money didn't even stay within the country).
>Given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build simple, but quality and stable shelter for people?
A better question is, given how much money governments spend on nonsense, why can't we take some money, and build actual housing for people? Surely a society that can produce semiconductors and fighter jets etc. is capable of assembling few thousand bricks/wood/whatever and build homes.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. If we had thousands of homeless shelters we might end up seeing people moving to shelters from actual houses that they can ill afford. Some could argue that evictions should be easier because worst case there would be shelters to go to. You will degrade housing for poor people instead of helping the destitute.
That’s my take on your reasons for not allowing basic shelters, FWIW. We shouldn’t let “but it could have future negative effects!” be justification for having people dying of cancer sleep in doorways, or occasionally actually freeze to death on the literal street.
Also: we don’t even need to spend money on building the housing. We need to spend money to undo the thicket of NIMBY laws that ban increased density in many forms; ban cheap single rooming houses or even the modern “apodment” equivalent because people found it disgustingly poor to live in tiny units; ban the existence of rehabs or homeless shelters or supported housing for the mentally ill in residential areas, or the existence of sex offenders in any housing, because nobody wants those people near them…
Councils used to have building teams that could cheaply make decent housing. It all got cut over time, to increase profits.
The main way that is achieved is by disciplining workers as a class. Having a reserve army of labour pushes down wages by increasing the risks of striking or industrial action in general.
> So WHY AREN'T WE DOING THAT ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE?!?
It's really quite simple. Governments and corporations want to push the idea of living in a large house as an investment so that people work like crazy to create things we don't need.
In reality, we have more than enough resources to live in tiny homes much more sustainably. Many people who don't want to take on 30-year mortgage would benefit from this and they could retire earlier and live a more simple life.
It doesn't have to be a slum or a low-income housing thing either. If people are educated on how to live simply, they could live in fairly high-end communities but more simply.
The problem is, the top brass fear this idea because it would bring down the ultra-rich, because they would have nothing to profit from.
I agree governments often inefficiently spend money, but
> Professional builders
In a high cost of living area the cost of labour is the main cost of building. If you spend £200 on materials but it takes you a week to build, then you're at £1000 labour minimum.
> but do it with professional builders, better tools and materials
Maybe a couple of professional builders could train and supervise the future owners, who'd do the building themselves (and learn new skills in the process). This would cut the cost down a lot more.
Came to the comments to see if anything was known about him post-escape.
My google-fu fails me in finding any info regarding capture. Maybe his is still at large?
He apparently escaped on Oct 15 2020 [0], smack dab into the middle of the pandemic. A national lockdown came into effect in early November 2020 [1] - how the hell would that work for him?
- The "criminal" was a kinda-disabled, middle-aged homeless man - who dug himself a hidden little cave, to live in, in a public park. Zzz...
- The law enforcement response (time, manpower, escalation up the counter-terrorism command chain) was massive, idiotic, and a huge waste of public resources.
In capitalist societies, homeless is a required thing. Even if it didn't exist, it would have to created.
What, what? Why?
Homelessness is the ultimate threat in capitalist societies. "If you are not independently wealthy, or make money for someone who is wealthy, this is your threat". That threat goes alongside destitution, hunger, low/no healthcare, and other threats. Even being is illegal.
Just yesterday, my SO forgot their wallet. They had $3 in their car. Went to a gas station, and the attendant said "The homeless shelter is that way. We dont want your kind here. LEAVE." This is also the societal part of the capitalist threat made good on by even members of society. Lest to say, they're a masters graduate of a highly prestigious university, and work a high paying job.
Homelessness is a government-created phenomenon. We could solve it, but we choose to use it as the ultimate threat if you do not behave and aren't wealthy. (The wealthy have their own legal system, and are roughly immune to most problems. But that's a different post.)
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When capitalists review socialism and communism, they talk of "how many millions of dead people they caused".
However when capitalists review their own policies leading to homelessness, destitution, starvation, etc; it's ALWAYS the individual's fault. And those millions affected/dead are just 'individual failures of bad choices from (insert vice of choice here)'.
Sadly this is the state of capitalism, we are currently in. Not everything should be done for profitability in the name of capitalism.
There should be some legal guarantees to a citizen by the state and not leaving them homeless, hungry, uneducated, ill are quite basic.
I was homeless off and on for years, blending in. Crashing in college campus common areas, or living in my car. Bumming showers from friends once in a while or paper towel baths in gas station bathrooms. Would sometimes sleep in the trunk when it got cold enough. I was normally employed, had friends, and most knew nothing of my living situation. I knew how to hide. Part of that invisible homeless population. Thankfully I had my youth, my health, and the will to find many types of work, save, find my way out. Most are not so lucky.
Later, on my feet, I would often try to help visible homeless I had developed some empathy for. One day handing out 50 sandwiches at Lake Eola Park in Orlando, like I did every month, I was given a warning by a police officer to stop. I tore it up in front of him and dared him to arrest me. I was already out of food for the day so he walked away. Dozens of others who doing a larger scale regular feedings with Food Not Bombs were actually arrested over a few months.
Feeding 25 people was the limit, and cops went in undercover plain clothes to catch who would commit the crime of feeding the 26th hungry person at Lake Eola park.
They would often arrest the homeless too, for loitering and other such nonsense. Friend of mine had been arrested for this, and then repeatedly arrested over a dozen times for failing to pay the fines, jail costs, and court costs related to the previous arrests and so on burning endless taxpayer time and money. At least he got a hot meal and a bed in jail some nights.
Once in a local court myself for a traffic citation, I saw a man in front of me issued a $200 fine by a judge for holding up a sign asking for money in a public place.
The homeless are not helped in most of America. They are not seen as human, but as vermin to be removed, along with anyone that gives them too much unsanctioned help.
You can hardly blame them for breaking a few laws to survive, when it is against the law for them to even exist.