Resolving Poverty

Sources 99-117:

BUILDING A MOVEMENT TO END HOMELESSNESS

HOUSING: Housing represents the fundamental base-solution to the problem of homelessness, with the lack of affordable housing and the limited scale of housing assistance programs contributing to the current housing crisis and to homelessness.

EMPLOYMENT & INCOME: Forty-four percent of un-housed American residents, of working age and condition, performed some type of work for pay in any given month; most do not make enough to obtain and retain afford permanent housing. Additionally, many people experiencing homelessness are unable to earn an income due to a permanent or temporary disabling condition.

HEALTH: Poor health is both a cause and a result of homelessness. As a result, the National Coalition for the Homeless believes that everyone should have access to adequate and affordable health care.

FAMILY HOMELESSNESS: Homelessness is not simply an issue that pertains to single men and women, but is experienced by thousands of families a year, and one of the fastest growing homeless populations is families with children.

ELDER HOMELESSNESS: When thinking about homelessness, elderly individuals do not immediately come to our mind. However, elders, although increasing in numbers, continue to be a forgotten population.

Source: https://nationalhomeless.org/issues/

YOUTH HOMELESSNESS: Homeless youth are individuals under the age of eighteen who lack parental, foster, or institutional care. Causes of homelessness among youth fall into three inter-related categories: family problems, economic problems, and residential instability.

VETERAN HOMELESSNESS: Far too many veterans are homeless in America representing between one-fourth and one-fifth of all homeless people. Three times that many veterans are struggling with excessive rent burdens and thus at increased risk of homelessness.

CRIMINALIZATION OF HOMELESSNESS: In cities with an admitted lack of available shelters and few jobs that pay a living wage, people who do not have housing sometimes rest at bus stops or on sidewalks or in public spaces, or are forced to carry their worldly goods with them wherever they go. But instead of responding with added housing resources, some cities have increased criminalization of life-sustaining activities.

LGBT HOMELESSNESS: Homeless LGBT persons often have great difficulty finding shelters that accept and respect them. As a result, LGBT persons experiencing homelessness are often at a heightened risk of violence, abuse, and exploitation compared with their heterosexual peers.

TRAUMA INFORMED CARE: Trauma Informed Care creates a safe and healing culture in programmatic settings in order to sustain housing for people who have experienced trauma. A trauma informed staff, community, or society can make housing more accessible and sustainable.

Current state of homelessness: 2018

How The 3 Nobel Winners For Economics Upended The Fight Against Poverty (2019)

• This year's Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three scholars who revolutionized the effort to end global poverty, who are credited with applying the scientific method to an enterprise that, until recently, was largely based on gut instincts.

• For decades, programs and policies to help the poor have largely been designed around what seemed like reasonable assumptions:

Kids in poor areas can't afford new textbooks — so surely giving them free ones will improve their test scores.
Impoverished women have a hard time finding jobs – so surely giving them a "microloan" of a few hundred dollars to start a small business will boost their incomes.

• Assumptions are just that. Without evidence you can't be sure they are true. The only way to find out is to put your assumptions to the test.

• The Nobel winners helped develop and popularize the application to poverty research: the randomized controlled trial – or RCT.

• To see if a particular aid program works for a given population, you compare its impact to the results for an otherwise identical "control" group of people to whom you did not give the aid.

• A raft of RCTs (including some by members of this year's Nobel team) have disproved the once popular notion that microloans can substantially boost the incomes of poor people.

It's not that microloans are never useful for poor people. They can be. It's just that the evidence suggests their broader impact is muted.

• RCTs by members of the Nobel team and others have shown that when it comes to education, there's a limit to the effect of intuitively reasonable measures such as reducing the student-teacher ratio, providing free lunches and ... you guessed it, distributing textbooks.

Source: www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/10/15/770346240/how-the-3-nobel-winners-for-economics-upended-the-fight-against-poverty

• Instead, some of the biggest boosts to student educational outcomes come from less obvious fixes such as providing kids with cheap de-worming pills that dramatically reduce the number of days they have to miss school due to tummy trouble.

• Also in the most impactful category: targeting assistance to the lowest performing students and making teacher contracts contingent on their students' performance.

• Over the last two decades there's been an explosion in the use of RCTs. Some are aimed at uncovering the underlying factors that keep people trapped in poverty. Others are effectively "impact evaluations" – as they're called in the movement — of specific policies and programs for the poor.

• J-PAL, less than 15 years ago it was running about 70 RCTs worldwide. Today the total completed or currently underway is just under 1,000.

• Meanwhile, there's also debate among economists as to whether the focus on RCTs obscures deeper, more fundamental drivers of poverty – such as systemic inequality – that must be addressed if there's any hope of truly improving lives on a mass scale.

• Duflo, Banerjee, and Kremer’s studies have found that:

installing cameras in Indian schools reduces teacher absenteeism and leads to higher student test scores,
that some types of fertilizer can boost the incomes of farmers in Western Kenya, and that deworming children causes them to miss less school.

• They’ve also shown that not all well-intentioned development strategies make a measurable difference:
They’ve found that entrepreneurship education doesn’t have a big effect on the profits of Peruvian small-business owners, and that providing sex education training to teachers in Kenya didn’t lower teen pregnancy or STI transmission rates.

HOMELESSNESS IN AMERICA

• A lack of affordable housing and the limited scale of housing assistance programs have contributed to the current housing crisis and to homelessness.

• Homelessness and poverty are inextricably linked. Poor people are frequently unable to pay for housing, food, childcare, health care, and education.

• While the poverty rate has been slowly declining since 2014, a couple of factors account for continuing poverty:

Lack of Employment Opportunities – With unemployment rates remaining high, jobs are hard to find in the current economy. Even if people can find work, this does not automatically provide an escape from poverty.

Decline in Available Public Assistance – The declining value and availability of public assistance is another source of increasing poverty and homelessness and many families leaving welfare struggle to get medical care, food, and housing as a result of loss of benefits, low wages, and unstable employment.

Source: https://nationalhomeless.org/about-homelessness/

• Other major factors, which can contribute to homelessness, include:

Lack of Affordable Health Care – For families and individuals struggling to pay the rent, a serious illness or disability can start a downward spiral into homelessness, beginning with a lost job, depletion of savings to pay for care, and eventual eviction.

Domestic Violence – Battered women who live in poverty are often forced to choose between abusive relationships and homelessness. In addition, 50% of the cities surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors identified domestic violence as a primary cause of homelessness.

Mental Illness – Approximately 16% of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness.

Addiction – The relationship between addiction and homelessness is complex and controversial. Many people who are addicted to alcohol and drugs never become homeless, but people who are poor and addicted are clearly at increased risk of homelessness.

Homelessness: The Crisis on Our Doorstep | Full Panel Discussion | Oxford Union (2018)

In February, the death of a homeless man just yards from the Houses of Parliament caused outrage and brought national attention to a growing crisis. Despite Government targets to halve homelessness by 2022, the number of rough sleepers has risen for seven consecutive years. How must the system change in order to prevent homelessness, and how can we avert a moral crisis happening right on our doorstep?

•I think the real issue is about the incredibly entrenched problems leading to the wider homeless problem.

•The government has marked homeless folks too difficult, because it's about welfare, and reforms; and it's about building more properties, and they've got be built with public money because the property market isn't going to house the homeless who literally cannot afford anywhere to live.

•Can the government get people off the street? Yes. But nothing the government are thinking of doing currently, would mean that any of the issues facing the homeless would be resolved.

•The largest cause of homelessness used to be relationship breakdown, and now it's the ending of a tenancy. We have to address the housing issue, but we have to realize that with people who are experiencing homelessness, it's not just bricks and mortar, it's the support that goes in to enable those people to learn how to live independently.

•There's some really long-standing structural issues here. That not enough social housing is going to be affordable for people, so therefore the only option they have is to go the Private landlord rental sector. Then you've got the welfare changes and reform, and benefits are going down, therefore people cannot afford to pay the rent that's in the private rental sector; so then they find themselves with really no alternative. Families end up in bread and breakfasts, they're deemed as homeless; there is insufficient accommodation for these people.

•We have people who are just totally disconnected from society; and that's quite easy to do in modern society. Now you've got a legion of people on the streets who do not believe they belong to modern society. And you could give them a roof, you can give them a job, but actually unless they feel that they belong to something, that is not enough.

•A sense of purpose and a sense of belonging is much deeper than just a roof over your head; and it's what we would all want. They get a sense of purpose from the fact that they are asked to work and fend for themselves, and they get a sense of belonging from actually living communally. And there is even a community on the streets, so when you take people off the street and you put them in accommodation, they quite often gravitate back on to the street because that's where they feel they belong and there are people there who know them and understand them.

•The biggest challenges to homelessness charities includes just the sheer volume of demands, and the need for volunteers to keep coming in and coming in at key times (beyond Christmas time). So please do volunteer, and be consistent volunteers.

•The biggest thing that needs to happen in the longer term, is just to build more homes, and those need to be social housing or counsel houses. Currently, we are not building houses for people who need them most could live in. The market only delivers for people who have spending power ("Oh, i can't make enough profit on this development, if i have to build all those social homes, so i can't build them now so I'm not going to".). Private companies are there to make a profit, and that's absolutely fine, but we need to take that motive out of the provision of social housing, because it is absolutely fatal.

•If people have been on the streets for a number of years, you don't undue that very profound damage in five minutes - and when you have those restrictions by the government; every single person is a different person with different issues and they're not all going to be dealt with in the same way; the need to be able to access the systems that are there.

•We were founded to speak out for the people we help. That's the point of shelter. The point of us, is yes, to help people that are homeless, but then also take that knowledge and understanding and try to make policy better. If charities are totally dependent on public funding, the opportunity for them to speak out (about policy) is really severely limited at the moment.

•What people want is they want to see the streets clear. They don't want to be embarrassed and made to feel uncomfortable because there are people sleeping on the street. And there's an awful amount of people who would just be comfortable if they were made to go away. As a police officer, what we would do is put them in the back of the van and take them to another area and drop them off there. That was nonsense. The fact is we have people here with serious problems and we have to address those problems. Don't demonize them. They are on the margins of society. We have to accept that. We have to find some modern, humane, decent ways to deal with those people who cannot cope and do not have the resilience to be able to deal with mainstream society.

•The issue of stigmatization actually goes much broader than street homelessness. I think we are losing touch with compassion for people who, for whatever reason, are not part of this sort-of fantastic property-owning democracy, that we supposedly are all a part of. I think we stigmatize social housing tenants, we stigmatize people who receive benefits, we stigmatize people with mental health issues, we stigmatize fat people, we blame people for all of their problems.

We've got a very individualized view now of what it is to be a decent person and a decent human being. I do think all of this actually impacts very heavily on the homeless people; stigmatized, marginalized, and are unwilling to think of what life is like for them. There is no right to a decent home; once you're homeless, you're no one, there is nothing for you.

Homelessness is a real issue for the whole of society. If we want to resolve the housing crises, we also need to think what sort of communities we all want to be a part of; we need think of the role of housing in the society we live in.

Is the apathy of the public against the homeless, a structural problem itself (in the same light that homelessness is a structural problem), which in turn causes the indifference associated with a lack of political inertia for policy change?

• We need to have a conversation about the legitimacy of folks who are using homelessness as an economy of it's own (as a means of making profit), thereby eliminating folks from assisting those who have distrusting intentions, based on the funding of a drug or alcohol habit of abuse.

• Giving, is not always helping, but encourages people to remain on the streets. If folks want to help, volunteer! Come and work in our kitchen; we have one chef we pay and then are staffed by volunteers. Even just talking about homelessness, it cascades positively.

• Lots of people feel downright uncomfortable speaking with the homeless; the most valuable thing you can do is just acknowledge that person's existence. Everyone on the streets is in survival mode, so what you see is a mask of survival - and generally what you will find is an incredibly vulnerable person behind that mask. It is the sense of disconnection which has been one of the principal drivers for them being (homeless) to begin with, so just connecting with them is great.

• We need people to help us influence government. We need people to help in all kinds of ways, beyond volunteering - if that's not comfortable for you. Visit the shelter website(s) and see the different ways you can help.

How do you improve the environments of shelters and places to stay, to make them safe and comfortable - as opposed to toxic, which can set back mental health individuals by months?

•We've become reliant on philanthropy and charity, rather than the state take it's full role on these issues.

•As a society, we need to see every single individual as an asset, and not as a problem. And if we can come at it from that approach, and be prepared to invest in people, and knowing that would work, then that would be so much more positive than trying to deal with the symptoms.

•The amount of money we spend on dealing with people as "problems", is enormous.

•A huge number of people, with the right support, they could responsibly care for their children in poverty conditions.

•People will live down to other people's expectations of them; young people in particular. If you have high expectations, they will tend to live up to that, and if you have low expectations, they will live down to that.

•Some women would rather be in fear of their life and abuse, than be homeless.

•If you create the right environment, I have been privileged to see a number of people turn their lives around. It can happen, but it's about the amount of time, and effort, that you're prepared to put into people.

To reduce poverty, support marriage and increase birth control access, experts say (2015)

Most Americans agree that on a moral level it's important that we help the poor, but how we do so has become one of the most divisive issues in politics. Social psychologist and professor at New York University Jonathan Haidt joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss a plan political experts agree on to reduce poverty and restore the American Dream.

•Rising inequality, and declining stability (in marriage) increases poverty - and everybody cares about poverty and child poverty - both the left and right, conservatives and liberals alike.

•Family stability is absolutely crucial for kids' outcomes.

•Marriage is important; birth control is actually really important.

•The evidence shows that Making birth control readily available, to everyone, can push back that first child by a number of years, and that greatly increases odds that the mother will go to college and will at least get married.

•Poverty will never be solved. We will never get rid of it, so in a sense, we'll always have poverty. But, one of the first points is that poverty for the elderly goes from high to very low, all because of social security - so we know that we can end poverty for certain segments of the population.

•We've got government programs that do work, and we've got these social trends that push against (being a single parent increases the odds of one experiencing poverty, for instance).

•The way to think about poverty is, we have to help people develop the skills, and virtues, and abilities they need to become self supporting and then to become good parents, and if you do all that, you break the cycle.

Pilot program aimed at alleviating poverty: Mayor Of Stockton, Calif., Discusses Universal Basic Income Program Results (2019)

•About 23% of residents are in Poverty.

•The most radical ways to get rid of poverty? Basic universal income.

•Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the need for a guaranteed minimum income, and this formulated the inspiration, helped funded by the economic security project that philanthropically funded the pilot in Stockton.

•The money given was spent on things like food, merchandise, utilities. . . One lady used it to buy dentures to improve her smile.

-- 40% on food. 24% on merchandise from Wal-mart and similar stores. 12% on utility bills. 9% on car repairs.

•One of the arguments people have made against this universal income idea, for years, is that people will blow the money away.

Source: https://one.npr.org/i/771599494:771599498

•One individual used the money to improve his job opportunity.

•The money was distributed on debit cards. Could folks withdraw the money? Some of the money was withdrawn for cash purposes (some barbers require cash, etc.).

•If some people are blowing it - does that matter? No, because there is no 100% success rate in programs like these.

-- Somebody may spend the $500 in ways that may different than how others would spend it, but we're put on earth not just to work but to enjoy; so if someone wants to take their kids to Disney Land, I don't see that as a bad purchase.

•The issue is not one of math, but of political will.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos To Spend Nearly $100 Million To Address Homelessness (2018)

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Amazon's Jeff Bezos To Spend Nearly $100 Million To Address Homelessness

• Jeff Bezos, is giving nearly $100 million to address homelessness in America in what amounts to his biggest publicly-announced charitable donation yet.

• $97.5 million to two dozen nonprofits around the country that are providing services to the homeless.

• This is the first round of giving that Bezos will conduct as part of his Day One Fund, announced in September, in which he pledged $2 billion to help homeless families and create Montessori-inspired preschools. (Bezos himself attended a Montessori school.)

• The nonprofits that will receive funding are located in places like San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Omaha, where they operate emergency and short-term shelters and also help families move into permanent housing.

• Each organization will receive $2.5 million or $5 million from the Day 1 Families Fund. The money will be used to help the organizations “expand the scope and impact of their efforts,”

Source: www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2018/11/20/amazon-jeff-bezos-day-one-families-fund-homelessness/#56e1bf2260c5

• One recipient is the Urban Resource Institute in New York, which plans to use its $5 million grant to bolster the job training and placement it can provide to homeless families, with a focus on jobs that pay more than minimum wage or are increasingly in demand, in areas like coding.

• Another recipient is Northern Virginia Family Service, based in Oakton, Virginia, which will receive $2.5 million.

•Other recipients include the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans, the Salvation Army of Greater Houston and Community Rebuilders in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

• The biggest gift was previously the $33 million he donated to fund college scholarships for 1,000 undocumented immigrant high school students who live in the U.S. with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, status.

• In a statement, Bezos said he worked with a dozen experts across the nonprofit and government sectors to decide which organizations to fund.

Homelessness/Poverty Fact Sheet

• The three most cited reasons for family homelessness are:

1) Lack of affordable housing
2) unemployment
3) poverty

• 1 in 30 children in the United States experience homelessness annually.

• 35% of all homeless persons nationwide are families with children.

• Nearly 40 million people (1 in 8) in the U.S. live below the poverty line.

• The official poverty line for a family of four with two children is $25,465 per year.

•The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour. It has not been raised since 2009.

•A worker needs to earn $12.73/hour to reach the poverty level for a family of four.

Source: https://familypromise.org/homelessness-fact-sheet/

•A renter needs to earn $22.96/hour to afford a two-bedroom rental in the U.S.

•Median rent in the U.S. rose 61% between 1960 to 2016, while median renter income rose only 5%.

•Only 25% of those considered eligible for federal housing assistance receive help, due to lack of funding.

• For every 100 extremely low-income households, there are only 37 affordable rentals available on the market.

• The U.S. has a shortage of more than 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to extremely low-income rental households.

Explainer: The link between poverty and homelessness (2017)

• Homelessness is one of the most extreme manifestation of poverty. There is both national and international evidence that highlights the link between poverty and homelessness.

•Not having enough money makes it extremely difficult to be able to participate as a member of the community, whether in education or training, in paid work or socially.

• The decline in affordable housing means that access to secure housing is increasingly difficult for low income households.

• To end homelessness requires government to develop policies that strengthen the social safety net and to expand the supply of social and affordable housing.

• It is critical to invest in prevention and early intervention strategies, to break the inter-generational cycle of poverty to ensure that children are given every opportunity to grow up to be productive and participating members of the community.

Source: www.launchhousing.org.au/explainer-link-poverty-homelessness/

How We Punish People for Being Poor (2014)

• Low-income individuals are being sold auto loans at twice the actual value of the car, with interest rates as high as 29 percent. They can end up with monthly payments of $500—more than most of the borrowers spend on food in a month, and certainly more than most can realistically afford.

• Predatory subprime auto loans are just the latest in a long line of policies and practices that make it expensive to be poor—something I saw every day representing low-income clients as a legal aid attorney.

• Low-income individuals are much more likely to be hit by bank fees, such as monthly maintenance fees if their checking account falls below a required minimum balance—balances as high as $1,500 at leading banks such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo—not to mention steep overdraft fees.

• For the more than 10 million U.S. households who lack a bank account, check cashiers charge fees as high as 5 percent. This may not sound like much, but consider a low-income worker who takes home around $1,500 per month: She’d pay $75 just to cash her paychecks.

• Whether or not they have a bank account, very few low-income families have emergency savings, and more than two-thirds report that they’d be unable to come up with $2,000 in 30 days in the event of an emergency expense such as a broken water heater or unexpected medical bill.

• Out of options, many turn to payday loans for needed cash; families who turn to predatory payday loans can end up trapped in an inescapable cycle of debt at 400 percent annual interest.

• Low-income families with bad credit or no credit can end up paying as much as two and a half times the actual cost of household basics like a washer and dryer set, or a laptop for their teen to do his homework.

• Grocery shopping can bring added costs too. For families who can’t afford to buy in bulk, the savings Costco offers are out of reach.

• And for those without a car, living in low-income neighborhoods without a convenient supermarket, it’s either cab or bus fare to haul groceries back, or swallowing the markup at the neighborhood corner store.

• And then there’s the issue of time. Something I heard about frequently from my clients when I was in legal aid was how much extra time everything takes when you’re poor. Many told of taking three buses to work and back, and spending as many as five hours in transit to get to and from their jobs every day.

Source: https://talkpoverty.org/2014/10/07/punished-for-being-poor/

• Those who needed to turn to public assistance to make ends meet would describe waiting at the welfare office all day long simply to report a change in their income.

• Also worth noting is the criminalization of poverty and the high costs that result. A growing number of states and cities have laws on the books that may seem neutral—prohibiting activities such as sidewalk-sitting, public urination, and “aggressive panhandling”—but which really target the homeless.

• Arresting a homeless person for public urination when there are no public bathroom facilities is not only a poor use of law enforcement resources, it also sets in motion a vicious cycle: The arrested individual will be unable to afford bail, as well as any fees levied as punishment, and nonpayment of those fees may then land him back in jail.

• In an extreme example, in the state of Arkansas, missing a rent payment is a criminal offense. If a tenant is even one day late with the rent, his landlord can legally evict him—and if the tenant isn’t out in 10 days, he can wind up in jail.

• States and localities are increasingly relying on enforcement of traffic violations—as well as fines and fees levied on individuals involved with the criminal justice system—as sources of revenue.

• In Ferguson, Missouri, the city relied on rising municipal court fines to make up a whopping 20 percent of its $12.75 million budget in 2013.

• Ability to pay is often ignored when it comes to these types of fines and fees, leaving individuals stuck in a cycle of debt long after they’ve paid their debt to society.

• While debtor’s prison was long ago declared unconstitutional, failure to pay can be a path back to jail in many states.

If we are truly interested in building an America that is defined by opportunity, we must commit to enacting public policies that support rather than impede upward mobility.

Homelessness: It’s About Race, Not Just Poverty (2012)

• Black Americans are greatly over-represented in homeless shelters across the United States.

• In 2010, one out of every 141 black family members sought refuge in a homeless shelter, a rate seven times higher than members of white families.

• Black persons in families make up 12.1 percent of the U.S. family population, but represented 38.8 percent of sheltered persons in families in 2010.

• In comparison, 65.8 percent of persons in families in the general population are white, while white family members only occupied 28.6 percent of family shelter beds in 2010.

•This disparity exists in city after city throughout the country. The next question, of course, is why?

• Homelessness is primarily a poverty issue.

In 2010, nearly one-quarter (23.3 percent) of black families lived in poverty, three times the rate of white families (7.1 percent).

• But there is more to it than that. Understanding why blacks are over-represented in homeless shelters requires an examination of the longstanding and interrelated social and structural issues facing the black community.

• Throughout U.S. history, housing discrimination has been ever-present, both in the form of official government policies and societal attitudes.

• Federal policies that reduced the stock of affordable housing through urban renewal projects displaced a disproportionate number of poor blacks living concentrated in cities to other substandard urban neighborhoods.

• Residential segregation, which affects black households to a greater extent than other minorities, perpetuates poverty patterns by isolating blacks in areas that lack employment opportunities and services, and experience higher crime and poverty rates.

Source: https://citylimits.org/2012/03/05/homelessness-its-about-race-not-just-poverty/

• Blacks are also over-represented in the criminal justice system, which increases the risk of homelessness and developmental delays among affected children.

• Lower educational attainment among blacks, in particular black males, is a barrier to gaining any employment and especially to qualifying for jobs in well-compensated sectors.

Black males earn bachelor’s degrees or higher at half the rate of white males (15.6 percent compared to 32 percent).

Employment disparities rooted in subtle forms of discrimination persist even with educational advancement.

A male black employee with a bachelor’s degree or higher was paid one-quarter (25.4 percent) less on average in weekly full-time salary ($1,010) in 2010 compared to a male white worker ($1,354) with the same level of education.

This report raises the question of why family homelessness is a racial issue. This phenomenon is not new, but is rarely discussed. Although government-sanctioned racial discrimination may be a relic of the past, the finding that blacks are over-represented in shelter when compared to whites demonstrates that blacks continue to face prejudice and substantial access barriers to decent employment, education, health care, and housing not experienced by whites.

It will take all of us as a nation to voice our intolerance of policies that make it difficult for some to ever rise out of poverty.

Poverty and Homelessness are Human and Civil Rights Issues (2014)

• I feel that we need a paradigm shift in how we perceive the problems of poverty and homelessness and that it is time, right now, for an intellectually violent revolution.

• We can start by no longer calling efforts to address poverty a ‘War on Poverty’. A war on poverty now implies that poverty, and the poor, are enemies we must overcome as a society.

• ..Our society blithely exploits the poor. There are also news reports every day depicting how we harass, fine, incarcerate and abuse people for the ‘crime’ of being poor.

• But these articles and reports do not address the underlying issue of why our society feels it has the right to punish people for being poor.

• We need a paradigm shift away from the attitudes and beliefs that allow these kinds of abuses to take place as a matter of course. So how do we do this?

• We need to start by viewing and treating poverty and homelessness as what they are: human and civil rights issues.

• We’ve seen this happen before: Blacks characterized as inferior to Whites (and treated that way); women thought of as window dressing for men’s lives (and treated that way); and LGBT people dismissed as abnormal (and treated that way).

Nothing fundamentally changed in how we viewed these groups of persons until we started recognizing them as fully human, entitled to the same human and constitutional rights as anyone else.

The same has to happen now with the poor.

Source: https://talkpoverty.org/2014/10/09/poverty-and-homelessness/

• Decriminalize homelessness. But don’t stop there; let’s make it a criminal offense, a hate crime, for anyone caught abusing the poor and homeless just for being poor or homeless.

• A national Housing First mandate. Housing is the humane and dignified solution to homelessness, not isolating, abusing, fining and imprisoning.

• Do whatever it takes to force every state to accept Medicaid expansion. Basic healthcare is a human right; not something that should be denied for short-sighted political reasons.

One of the problems of trying to address poverty and homelessness is there are so many sub-issues one can get lost in them all and end up accomplishing nothing.

Friday, October 10th, marks World Homeless Action Day.

Let’s observe it by beginning to recognize poverty and homelessness as conditions of human existence—protected by moral and civil law—and not as social abnormalities that need to be warred against psychologically, emotionally and physically.

Perceptions about Poverty and Homelessness (2014)

• The vast majority of Americans (74 percent) agreed that poverty is an “extremely/very important” issue.

• Though Americans broadly support programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, most oppose “welfare” as a concept.

• Today, roughly a quarter of TANF dollars spent are spent on basic assistance, with the remainder going to job training, child care, and even programs that combat teen pregnancy.

• Data from 2011, 2013, and 2016 suggest that the public’s concern about homelessness is on the rise.

• Sixty-three percent agree that the government spends “too little” on helping homeless people find housing.

• Americans are more evenly split in their opinions about the causes of poverty (with notions of personal responsibility gaining ground), but in times of economic downturn, structural explanations gain traction.

• data also suggest that Americans in general are beginning to embrace structural explanations for poverty, even in times of relative economic stability.

• In a January 2015 Gallup Poll, 60 percent of people surveyed expressed that they are “very/somewhat satisfied” with the state of the economy.

• Yet a large portion of Americans continue to embrace a more structural explanation for poverty.

• in May 2015, when asked if poverty is caused by “society’s inequality” or a “lack of individual effort,” nearly 6 in 10 (58 percent) agreed that poverty is caused by society’s inequality, while 42 percent agreed with the lack of individual effort statement.

• Scientists surveyed low-income mothers residing in the Midwest in an effort to examine how women living in poverty perceive the causes of their own poverty.

Participants were presented with a survey which contained 37 possible reasons for their own poverty or low-income status, within five subgroups:

structural (e.g., “failure of society to provide good schools/education,” “insufficient support from government in times of need”).
individualistic (e.g., “no desire to make effort to improve self,” “not enough education”).
fatalistic (e.g., “God’s will”, “nothing I can do to change my situation”).
romantic relationships (e.g., “divorce/separation/widow,” “domestic violence”).
children (e.g., “having children too young,” “having too many children that I cannot support”).

When the women were asked to rate the extent to which each of these reasons contributed to their current status, (5) having children and (4) romantic relationships were the most endorsed reasons.

Source: www.opportunityagenda.org/explore/resources-publications/window-opportunity-ii/perceptions-poverty-homelessness

Service industry employers increasingly use dynamic scheduling software to decide how many employees are needed for any given shift. While, on first blush, this may sound like a smart use of technology, it has a profoundly negative impact on people working in low-wage jobs.

Inconsistent work schedules make it nearly impossible to predict income month-to-month, much less to plan around kids’ school schedules or a partner or family member’s work schedule.

Add in long commutes resulting from chronic under-investment in public transportation and the high cost of child care, and it becomes clear that parenting while living in poverty is a high-wire act.

Craft a shared narrative and uplift each other’s voices and concerns.

Anti-poverty voices are relatively prominent in the public discourse, but they are diffuse, lacking a coherent narrative that can persuade undecided audiences or counter the disciplined narrative of their most frequent opponents.

We recommend that while anti-poverty leaders and groups maintain their individual perspectives and priorities, they also craft a shared narrative in which they:

Emphasize the values of equal opportunity and community.
Highlight systemic causes.
Describe a path from poverty to economic participation.
Promote effective solutions and successes.
Invoke a positive role for government.

Shared messaging should build on public concerns about growing inequality, low wages, and long-term unemployment while educating audiences about less visible forces like racial and gender bias, globalization, and tax and labor policies.

Researchers have amply documented the disparate obstacles that contribute to higher poverty rates among communities of color, women, immigrants, and other demographic groups. Yet there is still a dearth of reporting on those dynamics—and for that reason, among others, many audiences are skeptical that such obstacles still exist.

Moreover, research and experience show unchallenged subconscious stereotypes will infect attitudes about poverty generally and erode support for positive solutions.

Our communications need to both explore and explain this evidence, as well as tell the human stories behind it.

A focus on unequal obstacles—not only unequal outcomes or disparities—is an important part of that formula.

Include perspective of overlooked communities
Current data is lagging behind the reality of the racial and ethnic makeup of America, and public opinion polling needs to focus more on the opinions of Asian Americans, Native Americans, biracial/multiracial Americans, and other communities of color.

10 Strategies to End Chronic Homelessness (2016)

We can end homelessness for people with the most complex needs in our communities. We know the solution — supportive housing—and have seen it work across the country.

However, ending chronic homelessness takes political will, leadership, collaboration, and coordination among multiple state and local programs to align resources for housing and supportive services.

To help you do this challenging work, we’ve compiled 10 strategies you can use to drive progress in your community:

1. Start at the Top: Get State and Local Leaders to Publicly Commit to and Coordinate Efforts on Ending Chronic Homelessness

Governors, mayors, and county leaders can convene the appropriate partners and drive accountability. And they can ensure that strategic planning is coordinated and that health, behavioral health, reentry, and housing policies and resources are available and aligned to scale and deliver supportive housing to achieve this goal.

2. Identify and Be Accountable to All People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness, including People Cycling through Institutional Settings

Solving chronic homelessness is only possible if every individual experiencing or at risk of it is located and identified across a variety of settings, and their progress in engagement and housing placement is tracked in real time.

To do so, your community should conduct coordinated outreach, implement data-driven targeting by using and cross-referencing data sets (e.g., HMIS, Medicaid, jail/corrections), and other methods to identify people experiencing or at risk of experiencing chronic homelessness, including people cycling between homelessness, jails, and hospitals.

By tracking engagement efforts at the person-level, such as with an active list, communities can better monitor their progress and hold themselves accountable to quickly helping every individual experiencing chronic homelessness.

3. Ramp up Outreach, In-reach, and Engagement Efforts

Persistent, coordinated, and creative outreach efforts — and in-reach into institutional settings — are vitally important to the ability to not only identify, but engage, people experiencing chronic homelessness and link them to the housing and services interventions available in your community.

All outreach should be person-centered and emphasize building rapport and trust as a means of helping people obtain housing with appropriate services.

4. Implement a Housing-First System Orientation and Response

Communities must adopt a Housing First approach across their entire system to ensure that people with complex needs can exit homelessness as quickly as possible.

Source: www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/10_Strategies_to_End_Chronic_Homelessness.pdf

5. Set and Hold Partners Accountable to Ambitious Short-Term Housing Placement Goals

Break down the larger goal of ending chronic homelessness into focused blocks of time and effort, while pushing to perform with maximum efficiency and better outcomes.

6. Prioritize People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness in Existing Supportive Housing

Coordinated entry is a critically important approach for prioritizing and matching people experiencing homelessness to the most appropriate housing and services.

Within coordinated entry systems, communities can use data-driven approaches to prioritize people experiencing chronic homelessness who have the most significant needs for housing and services.

7. Project the Need for Additional Supportive Housing and Reallocate Funding to Take It to the Scale Needed

To end chronic homelessness, communities must have an adequate supply of supportive housing to assist individuals.

To expand the supply of supportive housing, communities can also monitor the performance and cost effectiveness of programs within their homelessness service system and reallocate funds to the programs with the best outcomes.

8. Engage and Support Public Housing Agencies and Multifamily Affordable Housing Operators to Increase Supportive Housing through Limited Preferences and Project Based Vouchers

By partnering with public housing agencies and operators of HUD-financed multifamily housing, communities can expand the supply of supportive housing, as well as create new housing opportunities for current residents of supportive housing.

9. Leverage Medicaid and Behavioral Health Funding to Pay for Services in Supportive Housing

10.Help People Increase Their Income through Employment Opportunities and Connections to Mainstream Benefits and Income Supports

A critical way to provide that stability is by connecting eligible people experiencing chronic homelessness to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, and by increasing income through connections to employment opportunities and workforce programs.

Health and behavioral health care services and supports, and other supportive services, are also essential for promoting health and long-term housing stability.

Additional details: www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/10_Strategies_to_End_Chronic_Homelessness.pdf

Street Doctor

For three decades, James O’Connell has cared for the homeless (2016)

• The homeless are a marginalized group facing complex medical problems that are often layered with mental illness and substance use.

• In spite of their hardships, O’Connell says, his patients display extraordinary resilience and dignity:

“It’s a blessing to get to know people who’ve been pushed to the edge,” he explains. “We take care of people who really appreciate having us around.

The work is more joyful than you might expect, despite the awful tragedy.”

• “Jim is angelic. He’s so pleasant and genuine,” Guarino says. “People trust him, and he knows everybody’s name.…His compassion is overwhelming. He’ll put his arms around [homeless] people. I always think about bedbugs, but not Jim. I think God watches over him.”

• Homelessness poses daunting challenges to health, including poor nutrition and hygiene; exposure to extreme weather, injury, violence, and communicable diseases; and the constant stress of being on the move.

• Homeless individuals, often suffering from multiple diseases, live sicker and die younger than the general population.

• “This is a very sick population, and this is heavy-duty, complicated medicine,” says O’Connell, editor of the widely used manual The Health Care of Homeless Persons.

Foot infections and pneumonia are common, and two people have subdural hemorrhages, meaning they fell down and had a bleed between the brain and skull,” he notes.

O’Connell and his team treat some “exotic” conditions like frostbite and scurvy (they’ve seen patients lose fingers and feet from frostbite),
“but the vast majority are things that any primary-care doctor would see [such as asthma, hypertension, or diabetes; what we see are the medical consequences of their poverty.”

• Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for adults seen by BHCHP, most of them linked to opioids such as prescription pain relievers or heroin.

Cancer and heart disease are close behind as the top killers of homeless adults in Boston, and the average age of death is 51, BHCHP’s research shows.

More than two-thirds of the program’s patients have a mental illness such as depression, 60 percent have a substance-use disorder, and almost half have both.

• On any given night in the United States, nearly 600,000 people experience homelessness and find themselves staying in shelters, motels, transitional housing, treatment facilities, cars, empty buildings, or on the streets; some 50,000 of them are veterans.

The number of homeless children in the country is at an all-time high.

In Boston, the city’s most recent census of homelessness, conducted one night in February 2015, found 7,663 homeless men, women, and children in various settings.

• A lack of affordable housing, unemployment, and poverty are the main causes of homelessness, according to a recent 25-city survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors

• For many people, homelessness is a short-term situation triggered by an unexpected event, such as a layoff or domestic violence.

• But there are other, chronic, contributing factors, including low wages (an estimated 18 percent of homeless adults have jobs) and too few services to treat addiction and mental illness.

• Meanwhile, many shelters are full and have to turn guests away.

Source: https://harvardmagazine.com/2016/01/street-doctor

• O’Connell describes homelessness as a prism that reveals shortcomings in society. “Refracted in vivid colors are the weaknesses in each sector, especially housing, education, welfare, labor, health, and justice.

• Homelessness will never truly be abolished until our society addresses persistent poverty as the most powerful social determinant of health,”

“It’s all about listening and patience….You can serve, but you can’t control.”

• McInnis (“The only true saint I’ve ever known”) imparted lessons that O’Connell has carried for three decades:

Take your time.
Listen to patients’ stories.
Respect their dignity.
Be consistent.
Offer care and hope, and never judge.
Address people by name.
Remember that the core of the healing art is the personal relationship.

• “I realized that everything I had been taught to do—go fast, be efficient—was counterproductive when you take care of homeless people,”

• When you see somebody outside, you get them a cup of coffee and sit with them. Sometimes it took six months or a year of offering a sandwich or coffee before someone would start to talk to me. But once they engage, they’ll come to you any time because they trust you.…

• O’Connell works on strategic planning and fundraising for the organization, and advocates at the local, state, and national levels on behalf of homeless people: discussing, for example, how new payment systems under healthcare reform will affect that population, or the urgent need to expand affordable housing and supportive services.

• He considers policy issues with a critical eye, bringing to bear his experience as a physician and national leader in his field

• “You…can’t solve homelessness without housing, but you need much more than housing to solve it.”

• “Our experience has been that, now that they’re in housing, all the furies that pursued them on the street don’t go away—and in many ways become magnified—when they’re alone in their studio apartment.

The loneliness and desperation we can see wasn’t as visible when they were out on the streets—because they had a role there.

“When I started doing this job, there was no real professional career path to take care of homeless people and stay part of the academic community that I cherish,” O’Connell recalls. “I believe that what we’re doing is at the core of medicine and who we are as healers and providers.”

O’Connell remembers the rage he used to feel about homelessness and his sense that he should focus on eliminating it. “Then I started to realize, I’m only a doctor, and I can’t do that. Many folks who come and do this work want to fix homelessness, and when they can’t, they get disheartened. The ones who make it realize that our job as doctors is to ease suffering. Then it becomes about the stories. You realize, ‘These people have gotten under my skin, and I want to take care of them."

Why Hospitals Are Subsidizing Apartments For The Homeless (2018)

• Homelessness is often both a symptom and a cause of chronic heath issues–and it stands to reason that the health industry should support a solution.

• During harsh Chicago winters when he was homeless, Glenn Baker used to spend as many as 20 nights each month in local emergency rooms–both because of his chronic medical conditions and, at times, just to get out of the cold.

• But for the last year and a half, Baker has lived in his own apartment, paid for in part by the University of Illinois Hospital. His health has improved, and when he visits the hospital now, it’s usually just to say hello.

• In a pilot program, the hospital partnered with the nonprofit Center for Housing and Health to provide supportive housing for 26 ER “super users” like Baker.

In the current program, the U.S. Department of Housing and Human Development pays for part of the cost of housing, and the hospital pays $1,000 per month per person to cover the supportive services that go along with the apartment.

In comparison, a single day in the ER can cost $3,000. That cost usually isn’t borne by the hospital alone–it might be largely covered by Medicaid via managed care organizations, for example.

The hospital is currently in talks with those organizations to make the case that it makes financial sense for them to invest in housing as well.

• After seeing the program’s success–on average, healthcare costs per patient dropped 18% each month.

• The hospital now plans to pay to house 25 more people. It is also working with other hospitals to help them make the same investment.

• The impact that supportive housing could have for homeless people leaving hospitals in the past, [shows] benefits for patients as well as cost savings;

• The Affordable Care Act, which requires nonprofit hospitals to submit an assessment of community health every three years, shows the positive impact that factors like housing, transportation, and employment have on health.

• Being homeless, unsurprisingly, is terrible for health. People without a permanent place to live have a life expectancy that’s 26 years less than the average American’s.

• For some, a health crisis might be the reason that they lose a job and become homeless; once homeless, managing chronic diseases and taking medicine at the right time (or at all) becomes even more challenging.

Source: www.fastcompany.com/40516121/why-hospitals-are-subsidizing-apartments-for-the-homeless

• Among chronically homeless people, many suffer from mental illness and addiction. Living on the street increases the risk that someone will be assaulted.

• While homelessness is a serious health condition, it isn’t typically seen that way.

If someone came to the ER with symptoms of a brain tumor, “we would take extraordinary measures to extend that person’s life, knowing that they had a very high mortality rate,”

“Someone with equal mortality–just based on the condition of being homeless, it has very similar risk ratios to some of the more virulent forms of cancer–we discharge them. It’s just one of the weird things that happens in healthcare.”

• By helping someone stay healthier, providing housing can also save the healthcare system money.

• In other cities, hospitals and healthcare organizations are also investing in housing for the homeless.

In Portland, Oregon, five hospitals and a nonprofit health plan are donating $21.5 million to build three new housing developments for homeless and low-income people.

In Orlando, Florida Hospital donated money to help house the homeless and partnered with a local organization that provides permanent housing.

Others, like SBH Health System in the Bronx, are investing in affordable housing (a new development across from the hospital will include 133 affordable apartments, along with a yoga studio and rooftop farm, all meant to improve health).

For advocates for the homeless, the growing support from the healthcare industry is not only helping in a financial sense, but helping change the narrative about homelessness.

“The homeless community is strong and we’re loud, but the healthcare sector is much larger,”

“People listen to people who work in healthcare, whether they’re doctors or hospital administrators in a way that is different than people who are in the human services sector.”

In Chicago, as other hospitals also begin to help fund supportive housing in existing apartments throughout the city, the next step may be to invest in new housing.

Tenants band together amidst continuing DC housing crisis (2019)

• Renters from across the city got together on Saturday for a conference that aimed to confront D.C.'s growing housing crisis head-on.

• The lack of affordability is only getting worse. “I believe we're in the top five cities in the United States, with un-affordability,” Johana Shreve with the Office of the Tenant Advocate said.

• Rent control is the Rental Housing Act of 1985 and is the District’s affordable housing program.

DC council members are already working to extend the program through the Rental Housing Act Extension Amendment Act of 2019.

• Williams said that rent control helps keeps things a little bit more balanced for people, but if eliminated in the District, could create even larger problems.

Source: www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tenants-band-together-amidst-continuing-dc-housing-crisis/ar-AAHZpjF

Fewer homeless, a Bush legacy (2013)

• The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of the chronically homeless declined by 30% between 2005 and 2007.

• Since 2007, the number of chronic homeless has dropped another 19%.

• In very large part, we owe it to the president whose library opened in Dallas last week: George W. Bush.

• The Bush administration substituted a much simpler idea -- an idea that happened to work. Whatever the cause of homelessness, the solution is ... a home.

• In 2002, Bush appointed a new national homeless policy czar, Philip Mangano. Mangano was seized by an idea pioneered by New York University psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis: "housing first."

• The "housing first" concept urges authorities to concentrate resources on the hardest cases -- to move them into housing immediately -- and only to worry about the other problems of the homeless after they first have a roof over their heads.

Source: www-m.cnn.com/2013/04/29/opinion/frum-less-homelessness/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

• A 2004 profile in The Atlantic nicely summarized Tsemberis' ideas: "Offer them (the homeless) the apartment first, he believes, and you don't need to spend years, and service dollars, winning their trust."

• There was only one counterargument to objections: "Housing first" worked. It worked from the start, and it worked fast.

• For the first time since the 1970s, the abolition of homelessness has become a real and near possibility.

Homeless people in Los Angeles: LA builds pricey Koreatown apartments (2019)

• Despite a booming national economy, homeless people have set up tents in makeshift encampments in major cities on the West Coast amid a housing shortage that has driven up rents to unaffordable levels.

• "It's still cheaper to put a person into a home than leave them on the streets," said Joel John Roberts, CEO of People Assisting the Homeless or PATH. There's the cost of police, ambulances and health care at emergency rooms.

• High costs are due to the realities of building in a city like Los Angeles, where land is more costly than ever and there are shortages of construction workers and materials amid a building boom in high-end apartments and condos in the rest of the city

Source: www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/homeless-people-in-los-angeles-la-builds-pricey-koreatown-apartments/ar-AAG44Kj?li=BBnb7Kz

• Critics, however, wonder if more people could be housed by less expensive means. The city's program is "not sustainable," raising questions about some homeless projects slated for the hip seaside enclave that's home to some of the city's priciest real estate.

• The pricey apartments are a product of the "homeless industrial complex," in which "they are buying Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs, when they should be buying Fiat 500s", when it comes to providing homeless housing.

• "I am not only shaking my head at the lack of progress over the last three years, but I am shaking my head over how much money has been spent and how little there is to show for it," he said.

How to Give Socks to Homeless People

• Socks are the #1 most requested item at homeless shelters

• The only style of sock you should buy is men’s white crew socks. Don’t buy the “no-shows.” Don’t buy tube socks. Don’t buy ankle socks. And don’t buy black socks. People prefer white socks over black socks.

• I guarantee when you’re giving other people the gift of brand new fresh socks, you’re going to get all kinds of amazing responses back .

• Hanes is a wonderful, comfortable sock at a fantastic price. There’s a lot of buy one give one brands out there. But for the cost of one sock from one of the buy one give one brands, you can buy 12 pairs of Hanes socks. That means you can give out six pairs of socks and keep six pairs if you wanted.

• My next tip is safety first — If you don’t feel safe, don’t engage with someone. We live in a really scary world. If you don’t feel comfortable, don’t go down that street. If you don’t feel comfortable when somebody tries to panhandle, don’t engage and give them socks. You have to feel safe and comfortable wherever you are.

• If the group is way too big, I may not even give socks at all, because when I went to school the teacher said, “If you don’t have enough gum to give to everybody in the class, don’t bring it out.” I go by that rule.

Jordan Peterson - Poverty causes crime? Wrong!

•What causes crime, especially aggressive crime, is relative poverty, and that is not the same as poverty at all; poverty is when you don't have enough to eat. Relative poverty is when the guy next door has a much better car than you.

•Even the absolute poverty in the United States is nothing like the poverty in India or Sub-Saharan Africa, where absolute poverty means you have nothing.

•If you go to places where everyone, roughly speaking, is poor, by national standards, there's almost no crime.

•If you go to places where everyone's rich, then there's almost no crime.

•If you go to places where there are poor people, and moderately well-off people, and rich people, then the rate of aggressive behavior among young men, and it's usually within their own ethnic group, starts to skyrocket out of control. The reason for that if the dominant hierarchy is too steep, then young men have no likelihood of climbing to a dominant position and while playing the standard social game, and so what they do is turn to aggression to make their mark on the world, and it works too - that's the other thing, make no mistake about it. If you're looking for status in a place where status is hard to achieve, and you're the meanest, toughest guy around then you're going to benefit from that status.

•The thing about masculine violence is that it only tends to emerge in situations where there doesn't seem to be any other reasonably viable means of advancing status, so it's not reasonable to say that men are aggressive. If you put men in positions where they can see status difference, but have no means of moving forward, that they're likely to turn to aggression as a way of establishing dominance.

•The people on top want to keep the people on bottom poor so they can achieve their relative attractiveness.

• The more unequal you let society get, the higher probability of death, roughly speaking, through violent causes.

• Polygamous societies are fond of more violence. When one guy has two wives and 50% of the population doesn't have one wife, then the men get ultra-violent. The question becomes, would you be willing of limiting yourself to one partner, or have more than one partner but a higher probability of dying? And some guys will take that high risk approach.

Jordan B Peterson: Equality of Outcome vs. Opportunity

•Intelligence and IQ - are the biggest predictors for success in the western world. And hard work - conscientiousness.

•Be what you will be, but be a good one. We need people to solve problems. Skill and ethics.

•The desire to help, or the desire to distance yourself from the poor; compassion, fear or disgust - based on your mood. And you have no idea what would happen if you simply did decide to react.

One Large reason for Poverty - Jordan Peterson

You want lots of responsibility. You don't want a life without responsibility.

“Two years ago, I got out of jail, I was homeless.” He said, “I own my own house. I have a six-figure income, I got married, and I have a daughter, thank you.” And that was the whole conversation. It’s like he decided he was going to put his life together. ... We are unbelievably resilient and able creatures. We do not have any conception of our upper limits.

Jordan Peterson: The awful truth behind economic inequality

Jordan Peterson - How to treat addiction effectively

Jordan Peterson talks about refusing to operate in the great lie

•We're lifting people out of poverty at a faster rate that's ever occurred in human history by a large margin. There's inequality developing in many places, and you hear lots of political agitation about that, but overall the tide is lifting everyone up, and that's a great thing. If people got their act together and really aimed for that, you have no idea how fast that would multiply.

• Human vulnerability and social judgment are both major causes of human suffering. And the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt.

• You're at the center of a network, you're the node in a network. The things you do move outward, and the things you do and don't do are far more important than you think. To live with no responsibility whatsoever means that nothing matters.

Jordan Peterson: How would life change with Universal Basic Income?

•What will a Universal Basic Income do is unanswered - we don't know.

•A Universal Basic Income may cause people to lack regulation of their life, and thus spiral them into a pool of meaninglessness.

•I think it's very difficult for people to regulate themselves, with a Universal Basic Income.

https://www.splcenter.org/one-year-after-charlottesville

Hate in America has become commonplace. What can we do to stop the hate?

1. Act
2. Join Forces
3. Support the Victims
4. Speak Up
5. Educate Yourself
6. Create An Alternative
7. Pressure Leaders
8. Stay Engaged
9. Teach Acceptance
10. Dig Deeper

Download the PDF.