- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Ryan Donais started building the small modular homes this summer as he watched the city’s housing crisis becoming more dire. He said he didn’t want to go through another winter seeing people living on the streets, so he put his background in construction to use.
“I just don’t see any changes. It’s been many years with people outside and it’s not changing. I couldn’t imagine being outside for years, you know?”
Since then, Donais has built three homes at a cost of about $10,000 each, most of which has been paid for through donations to his GoFundMe page.
I don’t think he’s aiming at curing the disease as much as he’s trying to make people feel comfortable and safe while they live with the disease.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
OK, but if you’re suffering from a fatal illness, and you knew that I had the power to cure it, but I opted instead to simply make it easier for you to live with, you’d feel pretty upset about that, right?
It had been demonstrated that $10,000 will literally get someone off of the streets. This guy, instead, is opting to keep that person on the streets, but slightly more comfortably. His intentions are good, but those good intentions ended up being entirely subverted by the need to decide what’s best for people, rather than giving them the means to decide that for themselves.
This is the problem with so much of the conversation around homelessness. We’re still stuck in this Reaganesque mindset that homelessness is a choice, and that therefore homeless people cannot be trusted to make any choices for themselves. Our charity for the homeless is always constrained by the need to only ever give them things on our terms, never on theirs. We cannot bring ourselves to actually treat them like people.
What are your thoughts on this:
That $10,000 home isn’t a one time payment. It could theoretically be used for 3 months by the first person who needed it before they find stable housing, a week for the next person and a year and a half for the 3rd. We could either decide that eventually the house would be occupied by its final owner. Someone who needs more than a warm toolshed to pull themselves up, but in theory these houses could help dozens of people. Even more if a limit (a long one, a year or more) was put on them.
Don’t think I’m suggesting this is the answer, systematically we should be taking care of people. But if one dude can can build 3 “houses” that could help dozens, isn’t that better than “helping*” 3 people with a 1 time payment?
*Helping here meaning depending on who is selected that $10k could be very harmful, quite the opposite of what should be our goals.
Again, it comes back to the problem I mentioned in my original comment; these “homes” don’t come with addresses.
It’s a camper van. That’s a hell of a lot nicer than sleeping in the street or in a tent, no question of that, but without an actual address it is almost impossible to find work (not to mention how hard it is to access government services, or have legal ID, or a bank account). Employers know the addresses of shelters in their area, putting one of those down on an application sends it straight to the shredder. And you can’t exactly write “in the park.”
These “homes” do not help people out of homelessness, they only help them to survive it better. Surviving is better than not surviving, but it’s a poor use of the money compared to the alternatives.
I think you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If this man spend another $30 a month for a postal box address or mail forward service for each “camper van” , would that resolve your concern? Should he sell the houses to some hipsters to fulfill their vantasies and just offer mail forwarding instead?
You think no one ever thought of putting a PO box on their job application? That’s just as much of a death sentence as a homeless shelter address. And you can’t apply for ID or a bank account with a PO box. It solves literally nothing.
There might actually be something to setting up residential addresses that homeless people could claim they live at, but to do that you’d be engaging in large scale fraud. Probably not a very long lived plan.
What people need is the means to start fixing their own lives, and money is by far the best means because it buys all the other things people need. This insistence on giving people things and services instead of just giving them the money to make their own choices with always comes back to the problem of how we infantilize the homeless and refuse to ever treat them as adults capable of making their own decisions.
For example, there is literally nothing stopping this man from going to a homeless person and saying “I have ten thousand dollars. I can spend it on making you a small portable shelter. Or I can give it to you to do what you want with. What would you prefer?” If they choose the shelter, fair deal, that’s their choice.
I’m trying not to be too hard on this guy. Like I said, his heart is in a good place, and I respect the energy and hard work he’s put into this. It’s admirable, and he seems like a genuinely good person who truly cares about making a difference in the world, no matter how small. But he’s subconsciously operating within a paradigm that refuses to actually engage with homeless people as human beings, and that pollutes his entire attitude to the problem, rendering all his work far less effective than it could be. That’s not a choice he’s consciously making, but it’s there all the same.
I understand your concern, and the validity of it. On a microscale, I was personally involved with helping a Syrian refugee family get established as part of a group I am a member of. It was insulting to sit at the meeting while a few of the members basically played “house” with this family, trying to decide how to get them the cheapest beds and where to get them clothes, instead of just setting them up with the absolute basics and then handing over the rest of the cash and being available to help them with language training and familiarizing them with the city and its services and inviting them to social groups.
But you seem like you have a chip on your shoulder. This person is using his labour, which is twice as valuable as any of the materials he is using, to make something, to help someone. The cure to homelessness is homes, and until the government actually starts caring about people like that, this guy is providing the best homes he can.
If you want me to say “you are right, this isn’t optimized for peak efficiency, so why are we bothering.” Then I’m afraid that’s where we will have to disagree.
I think you’ve missed the fact that he’s crowdsourcing the $10,000/home cost through a GoFundMe. He has the money in hand, and that money could be applied in other ways than the one he’s chosen. That’s where my criticism comes from. He’s actively choosing to focus on his preferred solution when that money could easily be used in other, more effective ways, if he wasn’t blinkered by the paternalistic way that we talk about homelessness.
And I have absolutely bent over backwards to make it clear that I don’t hold any personal ill will towards this man for what he’s doing. I respect him as a person, my only argument is with his choice of solution, because it is emblematic of a much deeper societal problem that he is no way personally responsible for. I’m not going to go back and start quoting my own previous comments in this thread, because even the most cursory read of them would make it clear that this “chip on my shoulder” only exists in your imagination.
Ok.
Hey, have you actually read the article? I’d also highly suggest you watch the two videos included as well.