Families in cars, driving all night with the heat on to keep kids warm

March 25, 2024 8:48 AM

A new report on on rural homelessness Finding Home: A True Story of Life Outside (full report) and press release. Of the hundreds of homeless Oregonians interviewed for the report, roughly 60% are employed but cannot earn enough money to meet income requirements, credit scores, and security deposits necessary to re-enter the rental housing market. Interview with report author and former mayor of Ashland Oregon Julie Akins: At what point do we accept that? That you can be a working person and still homeless? That you can be a retiree who worked your entire life — and now you’re unhoused because your wife died, and only one Social Security benefit is not enough?

From the interview:

I met this young man, very smart. Halfway through college, he started having seizures; he discovered he had epilepsy. So he had to quit school, he couldn’t drive anymore. (He and his mother) were living in an RV. He wound up working at Taco Bell, but he can only work a certain number of hours. Because if he gets over a threshold, then he no longer is qualified for Medicaid. And without Medicaid, he couldn’t afford his anti-seizure medicine. The way we have it set up, you kind of have to stay in poverty if you have an illness.

posted by spamandkimchi (46 comments total)

At what point do we accept that?

Every time you vote for lower taxes.
posted by mhoye at 9:00 AM on March 25 [86 favorites]

now you’re unhoused because your wife died, and only one Social Security benefit is not enough?

this isn't the point of the post but I thought this specific problem was what social security survivor's benefits were supposed to solve
posted by BungaDunga at 9:01 AM on March 25 [7 favorites]

Is there anyone right now who is working on either raising the amount of disability that people receive based on COL increases or raising the threshold for savings/assets wages they can obtain before putting their payment in jeopardy?
posted by Selena777 at 9:08 AM on March 25 [5 favorites]

"Only one Social Security benefit" implies that both spouses were receiving benefits. In general, if a one spouse dies, the surviving spouse receives only the higher of the two benefits (subject to potential adjustments). So if both people were getting similar benefit amounts, when one dies, the household income is cut in half.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:09 AM on March 25 [23 favorites]

raising the threshold for savings

The Case for Updating SSI Asset Limits
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:10 AM on March 25 [9 favorites]

Wow, holy shit, $2K? I thought Ontario's $40K was bad. That's the work of the devil right there.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:26 AM on March 25 [11 favorites]

Yeah, we "accepted" this years ago. 25+ years ago, when I was a reporter in Hawai'i, I interviewed people who were working full-time as teachers -- recruited from the Mainland with the promise of what must have looked like a good salary and, y'know, tropical paradise -- but who were homeless, living in a tent on the beach. We've known for decades that it's possibly to be employed full-time and yet unable to afford the bare minimums of a decent life, it's just gotten worse, with housing inventory lost to short-term rentals and investment properties. On Maui right now it's hitting a crisis (well, it's always been a crisis... it's crisis-er?) with an entire town's worth of housing lost overnight.

I live in Oregon now, and I'm not gettin' any younger, so this sort of thing terrifies me.
posted by kikaider01 at 9:30 AM on March 25 [25 favorites]

It used to be that the surviving spouse got the deceased spouse's social security in addition to their own. I had to track down some paperwork about this for my mom – her accountant didn't deal with many people her age and did not know this was once a thing.
posted by rednikki at 9:30 AM on March 25 [6 favorites]

Yeah, as they say, "the law in its grand fairness prohibits the rich as well as the poor from sleeping under bridges."
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:18 AM on March 25 [26 favorites]

Breaking through the concept that if you don’t have enough money, you’re somehow a failure and don’t deserve a hand up is really the hardest point to drive home, right? Because those stereotypes exist.

That is the fundamental rot at the core of the American self-image.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:27 AM on March 25 [26 favorites]

We could just require landlords to carry insurance against tenant default.

Or use a third party like a bail bondsman, where the tenant puts up only a fraction of the deposit.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:35 AM on March 25 [3 favorites]

we don't really have a homeless problem

we have a deeply ableist, racist, and classist society and homelessness is a natural product of that system

I'm also reminded of a book that came out a while ago about how mental illness rates in homeless populations is largely misattributed - it's not mental illness that leads to homelessness but, in a no-duh sort of conclusion, it's homelessness that 1) exacerbates formerly manageable mental illnesses and 2) introduces multiple exposures to traumatic events to which it is very difficult to develop good coping mechanisms when unhoused
posted by paimapi at 10:44 AM on March 25 [68 favorites]

We've known for decades that it's possibly to be employed full-time and yet unable to afford the bare minimums of a decent life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty is coming up on its own sesquincentennial : )
posted by torokunai at 11:31 AM on March 25 [2 favorites]

Ashland Oregon, like Maui, is in a region that recently lost entire towns to a wildfire that destroyed 2,400 homes. The median home price is approaching $550k. The rental vacancy rate is under 2%. And yet the city council just voted to close its emergency shelter.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 11:41 AM on March 25 [7 favorites]

At what point do we accept that?

Every time you vote for lower taxes.

We'd have to vote in hella taxes to provide for the homeless. It seems like every time taxes are raised, the only beneficiaries are politicians voting themselves another raise and the military. Go, 'murkia!
posted by BlueHorse at 12:04 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

US military spending is at a nearly all-time low (under 4 percent of GDP, down from 5.5 percent in 2010 and around 8 percent in the '80s). Politicians' salaries are basically zero percent of spending; they generally don't get rich from their salaries. Rather, they either have to be rich to get into politics, and/or get rich(er) when they leave and become lobbyists.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:15 PM on March 25 [19 favorites]

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this. I'll have questions etc. later - after the dentist is done with me.
posted by Euphorbia at 12:24 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

US military spending is at a nearly all-time low (under 4 percent of GDP, down from 5.5 percent in 2010 and around 8 percent in the '80s).

I'd be intrigued by analyses that determined whether all of the military-industrial-complex spending these days is on "National Defense" as used in the graph linked above.

I'm guessing, "no" - but I have no idea if this particular metric is cooked in a manner that makes that graph's trend shallower or not.
posted by lalochezia at 1:03 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

The credit scores are only half of it, though a real problem. Also the issue is that landlords can do illegal shit and then illegally blackball tenants from further rentals and there’s very little you can do about it even when you know your rights.

I’m dealing with this right now - because renting requires references from your last landlord, and they can absolutely blackball you based on being “troublesome”, which can mean “standing on your rights”.

Like, I even have the money to rent for my last year of school but may genuinely find myself unstably housed simply because landlords can choose to be fuckers.
posted by corb at 1:05 PM on March 25 [14 favorites]

US military spending is

I read this headline recently;

Joe Biden Pledges $1.7 Billion to End Hunger Across U.S.

And I was kinda floored by the number. Because that's two and a half B-21 bombers, of which they plan to build 100.

I don't think 'ending hunger' is a 1.7 billion dollar problem though. There's enough food, but capitalism is in the way. There are some things capitalism is always terrible at, like healthcare or prison systems. No matter how you run the numbers, the free market doesn't seem to account for the value of human life.

But fixing that is a way bigger project. I just wanted to point out, Biden's big announcement of 1.7 billion... it reminds me of when Doctor Evil named his price of ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!! and everyone laughs at him, but in this case it's the DoD laughing while they design bombers worth entire hospitals.
posted by adept256 at 1:26 PM on March 25 [19 favorites]

Every time you vote for lower taxes.

True. Also every time we vote against new housing.

An example from NYC:

Bronx Community Board 10 held an in-person meeting so people who bought their homes decades ago could come and scream, “We don’t need affordable housing.”

Thread by Aaron Carr.

San Francisco’s poverty rate is 10%; Detroit’s is 33%.

San Francisco’s unemployment rate is 3%; Detroit’s is 20%.

Yet, San Francisco’s homelessness rate is a whopping 3 times higher than Detroit’s.

Why?

If you want to understand homelessness, follow the rent.

posted by russilwvong at 1:51 PM on March 25 [16 favorites]

And I was kinda floored by the number. Because that's two and a half B-21 bombers, of which they plan to build 100.

I guess I’m of the “it’s good to have a plan to end hunger, and we should celebrate it instead of mocking it, and we should heal the world more broadly in all of the ways it is broken, pity about that global geopolitical reality and all, though” school of thought. I mean, how MetaFilter is it that I hear of something that sounds like a stab in the right direction (social justice, truly!), and it’s framed as the action of a cartoon villain because they aren’t also ending war? Dang.
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:54 PM on March 25 [7 favorites]

San Francisco’s homelessness rate is a whopping 3 times higher than Detroit’s

Not that SFO isn't a real estate hellscape, but I think there might be something about the difference between the experiences of being homeless in a climate like SFO vs DET that could be at play.
posted by kjs3 at 2:09 PM on March 25 [12 favorites]

Thank you for the post, spamandkimchi, I really appreciate it. The homelessness situation where I live in Virginia is so not like the PNW situation. ~500 people in my metro area, vs. the ~14,000 I see when I go home to visit folks in Seattle. Encountering the change in intervals has made it stand out much more starkly to me, but I don’t tend to spend time in rural areas when visiting, so this was eye-opening to read.
posted by cupcakeninja at 2:18 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

That Newsweek article reminds me of a lot of other articles I've read about the US government doing something to address hunger. You can tell they're taking this problem seriously, because the announcement was made by First Gentleman Doug Emhoff.

As of 2022, around 17 million households experienced food insecurity nationwide, and more than 44 million people across the U.S. faced hunger, including one in five children, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even if you just gave the food-insecure households the money, $1.7 billion divided among 17 million households is a hundred bucks apiece. This is not the kind of problem you can solve by throwing money at it, and, simultaneously, $1.7b isn't nearly enough money to do it with.

It will provide for a public awareness campaign by the Harlem Globetrotters in partnership with charity KABOOM!, which will also build at least 30 playgrounds over the next three years in communities with less access to play areas.

Wasn't that a Parks & Recreation episode?

Meanwhile, the USDA tries to give more money to existing summer supplemental feeding programs, and lots of red-state governors turn down the money.

Pledging more than a billion dollars to end hunger, and then spending a fraction of that on playgrounds and adding SNAP information to Uber Eats?

If that's really the best we can do, well, I can see why there's a lot of burnout in people who work around hunger, why a lot of left-leaning people don't bother voting, and why a lot of right-leaning people think government is wasting their money.
posted by box at 2:25 PM on March 25 [12 favorites]

There's a global shortage of construction materials, leading to record high prices.

1.6 billion people lack adequate housing; over 100 million are homeless.

I don't think we can afford to build affordable housing anymore. As a species, we are having difficulty providing ourselves with one of the basic elements of our survival.

This is the collapse of civilization in progress.
posted by MrVisible at 5:55 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

We are already paying for our homeless. We are paying for it in police services ,jails, medical hospitalizations, mental health hospitalizations, substance use hospitalizations, ER visits, funding for soup kitchens and food pantries, trash pick up and other sanitation, code enforcement and of course shelter space.

Homelessness is ridiculously expensive. We are paying for it already even if the taxes are not earmarked for people who are homeless. The costs don't go away. It is well known it is cheaper to house people who are homeless than it is to serve them in homelessness and yet here we are.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:52 PM on March 25 [23 favorites]

The thing is, even if we have the money, I'm not sure we have the materials anymore to build enough housing for the people who currently have inadequate housing, let alone the two billion more people we're expecting to join us by the end of the century.
posted by MrVisible at 7:20 PM on March 25

Do you know how they calculate the cost of and define supportive housing?
posted by Selena777 at 7:22 PM on March 25

Sure, here's the full report. You're looking for Section III.
posted by MrVisible at 7:30 PM on March 25

Do you know how they calculate the cost of and define supportive housing?

According to HUD: "Affordable housing is generally defined as housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities."

What is "affordable" is thus dependent on the finances of any given household.
posted by NotLost at 7:33 PM on March 25 [2 favorites]

I recently read the book "Homelessness is a Housing Problem," based on a recommendation by MeFite straw.

The book's research shows that the regional variation in homelessness is tied to the housing market, not a myriad of other factors such as poverty, drug abuse, mental problems, weather, social services, etc.

Here's a presentation on the research.
posted by NotLost at 7:40 PM on March 25 [4 favorites]

Sure, here's the full report. You're looking for Section III.
That's a bad link.
posted by NotLost at 7:42 PM on March 25

Do you know how they calculate the cost of and define supportive housing?
Duh, I misread. Scratch my comment.
posted by NotLost at 7:47 PM on March 25

Sorry about the link. Please try this one.
posted by MrVisible at 7:59 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]

I don't know what an economist would say about this, but it seems to me that the conversation about taxes and spending on social programs always misses the full picture.

If we had a truly progressive tax structure with top marginal rates in the 90% range (along with redefining most capital gains as income), yeah, it would raise revenue, but more importantly, it disincentivizes the kind of obscene wealth hoarding that we see today.

That means less incentive to squeeze workers to hit those earnings targets (and get the big stock options packages), which in turn means workers have more money, which reduces the need for social spending.

Get a wealth tax in there as well, and you reduce the amount of capital floating around that goes into literal rent seeking, which also translates to reduced need for social spending.

The reason the problem of homelessness (and most of our other social problems) is so intractable is because we have so many billionaires. Without addressing that issue, we can only apply band-aids.
posted by Ickster at 8:24 PM on March 25 [13 favorites]

Over the weekend I was driving through a major US city and there was a sign breathlessly advertising for a job with a starting wage of-- gasp!-- $18 an hour ($37K per annum.) I looked it up and the average cost for an apartment in this metro is $1300/month. After taxes, SS, etc rent chews up half of that immediately. And that doesn't even mention health insurance, the cost of buying and keeping a car (a necessity in this city), etc. And the truly terrifying thing is that there are still tons of people making minimum wage out there with exactly the same expenses to deal with. No wonder people are living out of their cars.
posted by drstrangelove at 4:30 AM on March 26 [6 favorites]

even if we have the money, I'm not sure we have the materials anymore to build enough housing for the people who currently have inadequate housing

We would if we let multigenerational families live life as they see fit, without laws preventing them from existing just because of their zoning or because one member in that family may have committed a felony.
posted by corb at 7:00 AM on March 26 [4 favorites]

Here's hoping we can find about three billion couches and spare rooms, then.
posted by MrVisible at 7:53 AM on March 26

Here's a pretty good chart that illustrates the policy changes to increase the price of housing as the result of downzoning done in the 1970s and 1980s in high demand areas, bad Federal Policy changes, and increasing income inequality.

In 2000, US housing prices were all clustered at less than $250k. In case you think something wild happened to income that made these states diverge, the answer is 'no'. There are metros where income is very high, but the state income of the top states isn't particularly different than the low-end states. Not the ones with the highest net migration either, not even close.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:56 PM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Here's hoping we can find about three billion couches and spare rooms, then.

I think that it would be possible to design housing in more multigenerationally friendly ways than we currently do in America, but not under capitalism. I've talked about it in some other threads, but the current trend (which may contribute to material shortages) is for large open spaces that are largely unnecessary for living and are more a marker of conspicuous consumption than anything else: which could have been divided fairly trivially, except that capitalism makes it impossible.

For example: I "own" a two-story home elsewhere that my kid lives in and uses about one-half of. Both of us would be perfectly happy to create a kitchen on the second floor and make it into a duplex, and let another portion of family live in the other one. There are bedrooms and bathrooms on both floors. Except actually, it's both owned by the bank, and by an HOA, both of which have interest in maximizing home resale value in a non-commercial neighborhood, not in housing the most people who can live comfortably in the house. The HOA would fight rezoning or division tooth and nail, as would the bank, because the amount of people who want to buy a non-commercial multi-family home is lower than the amount of people who want to buy a McMansion.

Similarly, I have a friend who would love to put a tiny home in his backyard and let a friend live there, except that he's not allowed to do so by his local city council, because the perception is that people will see the tiny houses and then think it's a low-class area and home values will overall go down.
posted by corb at 3:13 PM on March 26 [3 favorites]

Given the magnitude of 'implement a more ecologically friendly alternative to capitalism globally' as a to-do list item, you can see why I'm concerned about the future of civilization.
posted by MrVisible at 6:08 PM on March 26

corb: Similarly, I have a friend who would love to put a tiny home in his backyard and let a friend live there, except that he's not allowed to do so by his local city council, because the perception is that people will see the tiny houses and then think it's a low-class area and home values will overall go down.

If enough affordable housing is built to bring prices down generally, it will also bring down the prices of homes in these [cough] "high class" neighbourhoods.

Which gives those owners an incentive not just to fight against affordable housing in their neighbourhood, but to fight against it everywhere.

And because of the positive moral valence attached to homeownership, they can think of themselves as prospering as a result of their own hard work and moral virtue, rather than because of their vicious fighting to prevent other people from having affordable homes.
posted by clawsoon at 6:49 PM on March 26 [6 favorites]

If enough affordable housing is built to bring prices down generally, it will also bring down the prices of homes in these [cough] "high class" neighbourhoods.

Which gives those owners an incentive not just to fight against affordable housing in their neighbourhood, but to fight against it everywhere.

From what I can tell, opposition is typically hyperlocal, based on fear of change rather than fear of falling property values. There was a poll done in Toronto a year ago or so: do you think the city should be building more housing? (This would put downward pressure on property values.) Most people said yes. They asked the same people, do you think the city should be allowing more housing in your neighborhood? Most people said no.
posted by russilwvong at 10:15 PM on March 26 [4 favorites]

And then when you get to the community meeting about the emergency tiny shelters that the province is planning to temporarily install so that homeless people don’t die before the regular, permanent affordable housing can be built, those hyperlocal opponents who claim to want affordable housing somewhere else cheer and clap about homeless people dying, and threaten violence against the temporary emergency tiny shelters, their residents, and the support agencies trying to pull the whole project together. Possibly the affirmative response to the “do you want more affordable housing built (implied: somewhere else)?” question is less based in actual support for affordable housing and more based in the fact that wishing death on un- or insufficiently-housed people is not seen as socially acceptable for the most part, combined with the lack of personal impact from some hypothetical affordable housing somewhere outside of the respondent’s area. (Lots of people seem to support forced relocation of homeless people to some unspecified location where they don’t have to see or be aware of them, unfortunately.)
posted by eviemath at 5:06 AM on March 27 [7 favorites]

Oregonian living in a small red town outside Portland here. Culturally, crossing the county lines into the rest of Oregon from Portland is crossing into a different country. Out here, city governments are stocked with councils that don’t act on anything that isn’t a constitutional right they are legally forced to fund unless they are trying to raise money for funding the interests of the city. Poverty and Homelessness are not considered worthy of government funding. If you can’t make it here on your own, get out. It’s a hard line that politicians draw in the name of saving taxpayers money and protecting their “fundamental right” doctrine. Citizens are united to keep homeless out. Government here merely executing this using a clever political scheme. Help is not on their agenda and it won’t be unless the state or feds force their hand. Even then, they will ignore or lawyer up to fight it (often successfully). All this to say that the people out here are largely poor and this is their approach to protecting their way of life - to protect the ecosystem from influence of the outside world. Nobody with money wants to live here (thus prices stay almost affordable), homeless are not welcome (thus keeping tax burdens down), and progress is effectively halted (thus keeping regular people from showing up). This is the mindset of voters. I’m watching it collapse, however. As Portland sheds regular people who can’t afford to live there but can afford to live out here, the old protectionists and the poor they supposedly protected are leaving for Idaho, Tennessee, Wyoming, and other sparsely inhabited places they can barely afford - but are marginally cheaper than living here now. You’re only chance at avoiding this fate is to be one of the new gentrifying inhabitants. Even then, you’ll be at risk of living a mediocre life as nothing here is funded and there is no sense of community. It’s not worth preserving, but fear of change keeps it this way. The gentrification will only drive out impoverished and make way for bedroom communities of working class, high income earners who too will leave at some point and make way for a new wave of gentrification. It’s a putrid cycle.
posted by WorkshopGuyPNW at 5:56 AM on March 27 [3 favorites]