In St. Petersburg, Florida, police used knives to cut up tents at a homeless camp. They were caught doing this on video. Many people, including (after the fact) the mayor and police chief, were horrified by police making life more miserable for people already living in misery on the bottom fringe of society. The reality is that homeless camps are the wave of the future. We are going to have more of them, so we might as well have clean, decent ones with toilets, showers, and electricity.

I’ve written before about how minimum wage will no longer rent an apartment in most parts of the country, let alone buy food or pay for clothing, transportation, and medical care. I’m not the only person who has noticed that U.S. housing costs have gone up far faster than wages over the last three decades. One factor in this increase that is not commonly noted, though, is the way housing subsidies that are pegged to “fair market rents” have contributed to this problem. I remember looking at one point for a place to live and finding that the federal “Section 8″ rent subsidy program made it possible for non-working or marginally-working people to pay more money in rent than my wife and I felt we could afford to pay even though we had comparatively decent jobs.

At the same time rents have gone up, up, up, partially helped by government subsidies (which, you must note, go to the builders and landlords, not to “the poor” themselves), virtually every personal budget expert in the country talks about how the best ways to get out of poverty are through savings and education. Few budget experts talk about how to do this when you are busting ass to pay minimal living expenses and have neither money you can save nor time you can devote to attending class. Down in the world of “Work Today — Get Paid Today” labor contracting, where you show up at 4 a.m. hoping (there are no guarantees) to earn $40 or $50 today, and if you don’t get work almost every day you get tossed out of your $200-a-week room, who can think about signing up for a full semester’s worth of school?

Time for the sanctimonious to chip in

This is where all the experts on how other people should live tend to speak up about how those poor people are poor because of their own mistakes; how they should stop spending money on cigarettes or beer or drugs; how it was their own fault they didn’t sock lots of money away when (if) they had decent jobs. How, dag gum it, them poor people wouldn’t be poor if only they had (fill in here). Uh huh. and if I’d chosen Paris Hilton’s parents instead of my own, I’d be really rich — and I wouldn’t be flashing my crotch in public, either. What’s done is done. We can’t undo anyone’s past mistakes. All we can do is go forward from where we are now, and try to learn from our previous errors so we don’t make them again.

Are you sanctimonious ones done yet? Or do you have more to say about how not taxing rich heirs and those who get their incomes through investments instead of work will cure all our problems? Or how Jesus said there’d always be poor people no matter what we did?

I’ll give you a little space to rant, then back to the actual thought train:

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Now, about those homeless camps…

Homeless shelters are chronically underfunded and almost always overcrowded, especially in the winter. Remember, shelters aren’t just there for the “visible homeless” — the booze-smelling panhandlers who bother us in the supermarket parking lot — but also for families and non-boozing singles who have been hit with high medical bills or lost their jobs, and because they had no money (or on a landlord’s whim) got evicted from their homes and couldn’t find someplace else they could afford to rent.

Some municipalities rent hotel or motel rooms to house homeless when their shelters are full. This is a hugely expensive short-term solution to a long-term (and growing) problem.

My solution is simpler and cheaper: Licensed, legal homeless camps.

Except they don’t need to be “homeless” camps, just campgrounds where anyone is free to stay as long as they pay minimal rent and/or help maintain the place.

Campgrounds are far cheaper to run than indoor shelters. The same $10,000 that might only help a dozen people stay in a homeless shelter for a month might help 100 or more “live rough” in tents, but with water, electricity, and showers available, along with simple firepits and lanais where they could cook without burning down their tents.

A $25/week, $100/month tent campground would be the perfect place to live for someone who is truly serious about going to school or saving up for a monthly (instead of weekly) apartment or who wants to set aside enough money to eventually buy a house. It could be a haven for a poet who wants to devote full-time to her writing and is willing to put up with crude living conditions in exchange for a chance to live for six months on a few thousand dollars.

Naturally, this kind of living situation wouldn’t work well in Maine or Michigan. People would die there in the winter. But I live in Florida, where simple, outdoor-based living is feasible (if not necessarily comfortable) year-round.

A modern tent is nearly as comfortable as many of the shacks early settlers here built. And what about trailers? As in all those Katrina-surplus FEMA trailers? Wouldn’t they be good enough for rock-bottom housing? I could live in one and get by. Even my wife could, if she really had to. We’ve discussed all this, and have decided that while we really like our comfortable house and two cars, we could survive life in a camp trailer or tent — and still find many moments of joy.

The thing is, this level of living is now illegal almost everywhere. A woman down south of us on Florida’s west coast was running a non-subsidized homeless shelter that was really just a fenced lot with some tents and junk trailers on it, and she got shut down over building code violations even though her beneficiaries were undoubtedly living better on her property than they had lived elsewhere.

So change the laws!

I suspect that many churches and social service groups would happily fund and run simple “homeless” campgrounds if such things were legal. I’m sure many church-run campgrounds would prohibit drinking and drugs on the property. Some might require attendance at religious services. As long as they weren’t receiving government money, why shouldn’t they set up whatever rules they like?

And if laws allowed, I’m sure some private operators might even open for-profit campgrounds — and make a go of them. 20 camping spaces per acre, each bringing in $100 per month or more, could pay a considerable mortgage. Even with a two-acre campground only half-full, that’s still $2000 per month, which is more than enough to build and maintain a simple place, especially if residents are required to pitch in a certain number of hours every month to keep the place tidy and secure.

The thing is, we have this dichotomy in our society: There is (duh) more money in building expensive houses than in building cheap ones. Ditto apartments. Hardly anyone is building new apartments that auto parts store clerks can afford to rent. And even as “regular” housing gets further out of reach for low-income workers almost every year, we are unwilling — as a society — to consider simple, low-cost alternative housing. Indeed, in many areas building codes have made it illegal to even try to build something bottom-rungers can afford.

We are going to have homeless people camping out, like it or not, and current real estate and employment trends mean we’ll have more of them doing it 10 years from now than today. The least we can do is make the “homeless” experience as clean and safe as we can, for as many people as possible.

And that means legal camping, with rules and regulations designed to keep campsites clean and safe, instead of consigning our “homeless” to lives of filth and misery the way we do today.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Bradenton/local, Business, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.