By Stephanie L. Weippert @stephanieweippert.bsky.social
Let’s begin a story with two endings. A friend of yours, imagine them however you
want, gets hurt in a car accident bad enough they can’t work and whatever income
replacement insurance your friend may have had ends before they’re completely
cleared to work1. You had a smart friend, of course, with assets and savings to help,
but it wasn’t enough. Your dear friend can’t afford their rent and loses their
apartment.
Possible Ending One:
They can couch surf for a while, but eventually your poor friend wears out their
welcome with everyone they knew and now lives in their car. Living in their car
means missed appointments and poor sleep which is detrimental to their recovery
and your friend ends up permanently disabled. While your suffering friend jumps
through all the legal hoops to get approved for SSD, the local police impound their
car for expired license plates, i.e. complaints of a homeless person living in car in
the neighborhood. Your friend is now completely homeless.
Possible Ending Two:
Your friend drives to the local tiny home village and fills out an application for
shelter, and after processing time of less than a day, a tiny home is assigned to
them. There is a communal kitchen and bathroom and the price for the tiny home is
X many hours of “work” per month. What the assignment is, and the number of
hours depends on the person, i.e. an alcoholic might be assigned 4 AA meetings. If
someone doesn’t do their assigned hours, a psychologist will evaluate the situation
to recommend the next step, from increasing therapy to full mental incarceration if
needed. A trained government employee manages the village of 10-15 tiny homes.
Various social workers, religious organizations, and counselors visit daily.
Residents can get a hot meal once per day made by fellow residents and are given
bags with non-perishable food to keep in their cabin when reporting hours worked
each day. The bags come from local food banks.
Your sad friend in this ending not only keeps all his other friends by not having to
couch surf finds out that meeting with the social worker for help in what to do next
counts as his first month’s “rent.” Your friend doesn’t miss a single PT appointment
1 For simplicity, I’m setting aside all the medical treatment issues that would happen in the U.S.
because we haven’t completely fixed our screwed up medical system yet. Europe has socialized
medicine, so we’ll go with that. Sometimes phrasing for a large international audience saves work.
and while not perfect, six months later gets cleared to work and finds a different
job.
Deviling Details:
Yes, someone could do nothing and get room and board. However, those people
usually have reasons, such as illness, disability, mental issues or addiction and I
prefer taking care of those people instead of letting them die of exposure. Even if
that means the rare freeloader gets away with it because it’s better for a person like
that to scam the government in this small way than scam other people in a larger
way.
I expect crime to reduce slightly because it removes the desperate people from our
current crime rates. Possibly more drug use, but maybe not. Addiction treatment
can be just one of the groups that come to the village regularly. Also, some homeless
people turn to drugs because of the awful situation they’re living. All laws would
still be enforced, so trying to deal drugs and/or get violent in the village only gets
you arrested and moved to a jail cell.
The big scary part is how to pay for this. First, we in the United States pay a
considerable amount of money already trying to improve homelessness rates. The
2023-24 federal budget allocated $3.7 BILLION2 for homelessness as part of the
HUD funding. Where I live, the governor proposed $140 million3 for homelessness
in the state budget for 2024.
Add in the amounts spent by county governments, city governments and nonprofits
of various types and I think most of what I propose here is covered. Add the
reduction of policing costs by ending the necessity for people to do things in public
that shouldn’t be done, and we come even closer to full funding.
Should we still need more funding to care for all citizens, it’s time to raise taxes. As
I write this, the current administration estimates that a 7% increase of corporate
2
HUD releases Fiscal Year 2024 Budget in brief. (2023, March 13). HUD.gov / U.S. Department of
Housing And Urban Development (HUD).
%20and%20reduce%20homelessness,domestic%20violence%20and%20homeless%20youth
3 Demkovich, L. (2023, December 9). Inslee warns that state effort to move people out of
encampments is getting short on cash. Washington State Standard.
Biggest Expected Objection:
There will be at least one of you reading this who balks at the very idea of your tax dollars
going to a “Lazy Bum.” Let me reassure you that most of the homeless in this amazing
country of ours don’t want to be homeless. Many want to work but can’t. Mental health
issues often make it difficult to work even day-labor jobs. Physically hard jobs, like
construction or moving wear out backs and bodies leaving people in too much pain to do
that work anymore. The rare self-centered person who chooses to live in this situation
would be asked to work in the kitchen or elsewhere around the complex. Residents don’t get
any money, only food and a roof over their head. If someone chooses to clean the complex
bathrooms for room and board, so what?
Tiny Home Villages are far from luxurious. The homes I’ve thinking of have just enough
room for a single bed and a cupboard with enough floor space to get from door to bed. They
have electricity for light and heat, but no running water or cable internet. A tiny home is a
warm safe shelter to ensure no citizen of this great nation dies from exposure. We as a
society can choose to ‘raise’ the lowest point that anyone could fall to, and all we have to do
is decide to do this instead of what we do now.
For the Christians5, I repeat the truth that we are all precious in God’s sight. Jesus gave of
his miracles equally to rich and poor. He shared the miracle of the loaves and fishes so that
all were fed who followed him. Can we really call ourselves followers of Christ when
allowing fellow humans to suffer and die without shelter?
For the non-religious, I remind you that one of humanity’s greatest strengths is our
compassion. If we take care of all of us, the world gets better for all of us. Society will
benefit from less suffering in its members because that lowers the odds of social unrest, i.e.
happier people are less likely to come for those in power with torches and pitchforks.Conclusion:
As it stands today, any one of us could become homeless from events we have no control
over. Fires break out every day. Companies close or move, leaving their employees without
income. The average American is three months away from losing their living situation.
Even with friends and relatives’ help, anyone can find themselves homeless through no
fault of their own. All I want to do is ensure the fall doesn’t permanently break real human
beings.
4 $2 trillion divided by 15 years from this source: Marr, C., Jacoby, S., Fenton, G., & Washington, S.
(2021). Corporate rate increase would make taxes fairer, help fund equitable recovery. Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities. https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/corporate-rate-increase-
would-make-taxes-fairer-help-fund-equitable-recovery
5 I don’t mention other faiths mostly because I lack the knowledge to speak of them accurately. This
is not intended as a slight, but as giving offense prevention. May you have a blessed day.
Extremely well written and thought provoking. What do you guys think? Drop your comments and let's get a discussion going.