Sacramento Homeless blog

The set of graphs, above, are startling.  Being unemployed is daunting and damning, and is ever more-so disheartening the longer you are daunted and damned! The spiraling downward road to homelessness grows wider and slippier, and homelessness, itself, more achingly difficult to escape. [Graphic of graphs was kiped from yesterday's New York Times article " Unemployed, and Likely to Stay That Way ."]

Somewhere out there is an unusual star, covered over by the gloss of a forgotten galaxy. It may seem dim, and less than ordinary, but in the homeless community of Sacramento there are more than a few candidates for a kind of stardom. They go unnoticed.  They have been fully overlooked.  You have to pay keen attention.  They have been lost — you could say.  Like a gem covered in the sand.  But they are not just unusual, but the best of their sort.

The Panic of 1893 Redux (that follows the Gilded Age of Bush, Jr.) that we're in is the fundamental, structural economic problem in America. We need to move more of the prosperity that comes from our economy (which is highly efficient in boom times) to the middle class and poor, and away from the obscenely-rich rich.

The entrance to Loaves & Fishes' Friendship Park as seen from the north side of the North C St. cul-de-sac that abutts 12th Street. As I’ve written frequently previously, contrary to the stereotype, a great great many homeless people are scrappy. They are not work avoidant; they are work (and pay!) accepting and seeking. This optimism that ‘something can be made to happen,’ to break the waves of despondency, is what is most admirable (and constantly refreshing!) about those struggling in Homeless World Sacramento. It’s sparkling hope in a tightly bounded universe that too much tries to crush hope . The lure of ‘escape’ from the circumstance of homelessness, for this very big subset of Sacramento homeless people, is to find meaning and happiness that isn’t available ‘out here.’ 1 The effort to find a more-normal life begins by sparking opportunities to make things different than just spinning around the turnstile of always just subsisting (and for many, doing the usua...

The block of text, below, is from philosopher Matthew B. Crawford's thoughtful book on the topic of 'work,'  Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work .  While the quote, here, concerns young people, I think that it can easily concern people more broadly, very much including homeless men seeking to rejoin the workforce in an occupation that will fully absorb their interest, turn them away from their addictions, and provide a sound basis for meaning in their lives [Emphases in the quote are mine.]: The basic antagonism of economic life: work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests. That’s why you get paid. Thus chastened, we may ask the proper question: what is it that we really want for a young person when we give them vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. What I ha...

"We … need a program of tax credits for companies for employing low-wage workers. That may seem counterintuitive at a time when the Obama administration is pressing education and high-paying jobs, but we need to create jobs at all levels. Early last year, Singapore began giving such credits — worth several billion dollars — and staved off a recession. Unemployment there is around 3 percent." — From an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled " The Economy Needs a Bit of Ingenuity ," by Edmund Phelps , the 2006 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences .

I cannot, ever ever, blame scrappy, needy homeless people for taking whatever job they might. They do this all the time, yet suffer from the popular, terrible misconception that homeless people in Sacramento are lazy bums. Some homeless people are lazy, of course, as are some plumbers, dentists, candlemakers and Indian chiefs. Make no mistake: There's a little of everything in Homeless World, just as there's a little of everything in every subgroup of human beings. But it is largely the case that the Sacramento homeless are scrappy! Hooray for that. We take jobs waving furniture-store-liquidation signs on street corners for less than minimum wage, and suffer the frustration, sometimes, of never getting paid for some of the work we do. There are jobs paid under-the-counter, and wages paid months late. This morning, homeless people, perhaps all of whom were part of the C Street encampment – they all wore dark-green Safe Ground T-shirts – were paid minimum wage to picket for...