Going Offline

Going offline. That was the norm until wi-fi was born. Now, going offline is a digital detox, an Amish adventure, a noble struggle. The real world is offline. A minority of the humans are online. For many of them, the real world is abstract and academic. I prefer to live in the real world and visit the other. Some have no choice.

As usual, I didn’t intend to write about this. The way I write these posts is to set a wobbly deadline of ‘sometime Friday, preferably the afternoon, but over the weekend is fine’. I have a file of pages of ideas, and rarely open it because something usually inspires – no, not inspires – usually is what I’ve been thinking about. Today, I’m helping organize a podcast about finding housing for humans. For a variety of reasons, I’m sitting in an almost-enclosed outdoor pavilion at a Cidery. (FinnriverCidery.com)

It is January. There’s snow in the hills. The pavilion has power, but that’s for the lights and the sound system. (There will be dancing to a jazz jam session later.) There’s propane pumping out heat. That’s not the only civilization. The floor is concrete. The ceiling and posts seem strong enough to house a house. The walls are heavy sheets of clear plastic and beige canvas. They keep out the wind, but don’t have much insulating value. All of those things are civilized.

It is comfortably rustic for this guy who was raised with blue-collar frugality.

As I type this, I realize this would be luxury for the homeless that are living and sleeping outdoors in tents, or under tarps, or huddled up to trees. And I know it wouldn’t be considered prudent to make the space available to them for insurance reasons, and also for the practical reason that someone using the facility would prove why, while most folks would be respectful, some would prove why we can’t have nice things.

It looks like it takes so little, and it does, but this building and its land probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and few governments can blithely build something like this. The public debate over building it would be contentious, take months or years, or may never finish. Other things are easier to fund.

In the meantime, every night, people fight to stay warm and dry. Healthy and fed comes later. 

In the meantime, housing humans is considered secondary to ‘maintaining rural character’ and ‘preserving cultural norms’.

Ask a homeless person how they’d be willing to be housed and find that most have a fairly frugal solution in mind, but permitting processes don’t permit them to house themselves. Land costs money. Utilities, even just the basics like water and sanitation, must be managed to keep from negatively impacting the neighbors. Even if all of that is provided, they may not be allowed to live in a van, or a permanent tent, or a yurt, or aboard a boat, or in a cobb house, or… They aren’t permitted to be allowed to live within their means.

I haven’t been homeless, but my situation was dire enough that it was days away at one time. I made it through. Thank you to everyone who helped. I’m doing much better now. (See Muddling By for details.)

I sold my house, then bought a tiny house in a county that doesn’t fight tiny houses. I think they gave up because the fight costs time and money and made very little sense when compared to roads, schools, sewer districts, etc. Being mortgage-less makes life easier. I miss being able to have parties, but my cash reserves are estimated at lasting years instead of months.

Affordable housing has been hitting the news for long enough that we can celebrate every shared housing, protected apartment complex, and alternative to a mobile home park. Note the word: affordable. A multi-million dollar mansion is affordable to someone. We could use a better word. 

I’m a fan of housing humans who want to be housed. What do we have to do to do that?

Politicians and pundits easily fall into the sound-bitey phrases that lead to real estate deals, permits, construction projects, more real estate deals, and how to manage the Not-In-My-BackYard rebukes. Corporations can build bigger profits with bigger projects, especially to people who can readily afford them.

It is harder to build that story from the other side, from the side of the folks who can’t afford those affordable houses. Does that mean as a society we’ve implicitly decided that they can’t afford to live? Is there no value to their life? If you lost your home would you suddenly be valueless?

My apologies for not having the links to the various articles, experiments, and projects that proved it is cheaper to house the homeless than it is to continually manage the homeless. It is easier to justify a budget that pays for police than it is to truly protect people. Power sells better than compassion. We have nice churches, though. Nice stadiums. Nice luxuries that we decide to afford to buy before we’ve managed all of everyone’s necessities. 

And even if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t know how to build a sustainable and defendable housing solution. Solving housing isn’t easy. The successes we’ve created are worth celebrating. Sadly, I suspect the answer is fundamental. Why do we need to convince so much of society that we are all responsible for all of us, and that managing that responsibility should be resolved before we allow the luxuries of extreme wealth?

I ramble. The folks here lit one of the heaters by me. I can still see my breath, but I can at least feel my fingers typing. Maybe the (hot-now-cold) tea helps. 

Roughing it? Everything is relative. I have the time to type, the laptop to type on, a place to do the typing, and a warm and dry house to return to. Maybe the podcast will happen, maybe not. The issue won’t go away. But imagine what we can do as a society for all of us, and then build the stadiums and the malls and the mansions and the unapologetic joy of having more than enough, and not just for those who can afford it and hoard it.