In Europe there are some people who buy lands for which you cannot have a building permit: they're way, way, way cheaper that lands on which you can build a house. As in: they can be 20x or 30x cheaper or maybe even more.
Then they park their own car / RV / caravan/trailer on it. This way it's extremely hard for authorities to kick them out.
Bonus if you can get a family member or someone from your community buy the land for you: that way even if you own money to the state, the land cannot be seized.
It's extremely common in the gypsy community, for example (now that nomadism is getting more and more complicated).
FWIW my father (who wasn't a gypsy but who was totally broke) used to live, for years, in a caravan on a plot of land owned by someone he knew. It was bad, but not hobo-bad. He had an old totally beaten up and ultra high-mileage Mercedes car, gypsy style (gypsies love old Mercedes cars).
His friend was renting, for pennies and illegally, the rest of his plot of land to actual gypsies.
P.S: nowadays my brothers and I are helping our father, who now lives in an apartment
You forget to mention that such land also is not connected to the electrical grid, sewage or running water. And you can't force utilities to provide the connection because the land is not meant to be used for buildings so they don't have to provide such connections. And in many situations you can't officially live there, so can't provide the address of that land as your home address in a bank, to your employer etc. In fact, it's quite common that such a piece of land doesn't even have an address to begin with so no mail or Amazon delivery for you
> it's quite common that such a piece of land doesn't even have an address to begin with so no mail or Amazon delivery for you
In europe we currently have a lot of automatic package boxes/deliveromats, where you can actually provide ANY nearby address and receive the package when you want. Only valid phone number is required to get notifications when your package has arrived. It's typically the cheapest delivery option. As for utilities - you can get some solar panels, water pump and some large tank for rainwater and self-contained bio-degrading sewage tank, which will only need some cheap bacterial pellets to work without any need for sewage truck. I don't know how it's professionally called, but I've seen it installed and working for several years without any problem. The trees and grass on discharge pipes were pretty fast growing, so you could probably plant some nice vegetables there after several years. But such installations probably cross the threshold for "oficially living there".
None of that seems like an issue to me, all of them can be worked around. Especially the Amazon delivery, which I think wouldn't be in keeping with the type of need that someone who wants to do this would have.
You're worried about the deliveries?! ;D That's actually the easiest to sort out, at least in the Netherlands. You just get it delivered to one of the delivery lockers.
More hassle is the water situation, but like I said you can work around these things if you have time and patience — and living off grid like this will allow for that.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I suspect you're coming at this thinking of the land being in some baron backwater. We don't have the luxury of being able to live in the middle of nowhere here. Even "nowhere" is a few kilometres away from "somewhere".
I don't know about Europe, but in the United States there are private mail centers that you can use for both letters and package deliveries.
UPS Stores (a private company, not USPS, which is quasi-governmental) are one among several. They give you (what looks like) a normal street address, so Amazon or whoever has no way of telling.
I can assert that car / RV / caravan/trailer doesn't work out on lands only allowed for farming in Portugal.
If the autorithies happen to leave the persons there, it is only because they happen to have bigger stuff to worry about, or someone knows someone that knows someone that allows them to not care that much about it.
Not op, but mercedes used to be known for reliability and ample inside space. It could do 1 million km without issue. Probably the reason it was popular among people that would travel a lot (ie traveler gypsies).
I think the problem would be more manageable if the government had a full employment program. Basically act as an employer of last resort, hire everyone who wants a job and allocate them to something useful, possibly at cost. With good management such a program could probably pay for itself, and remove a lot of economic anxiety people are feeling now.
People are focusing on housing, but a country of subsidized housing and scarce jobs would still be a pretty sad place. Jobs seem like the real issue to me.
In America we've got these things called temp agencies. You walk in from the street and tell them "I have no experience and no skills, I haven't worked in many years and I'm on drugs but I need a job". Then they say "Certainly sir, here is a list of positions we have. Here, let me highlight the ones that don't require a drug test."
Within a week they'll have you at one of these jobs and your new boss will be genuinely surprised when you actually show up, "you have no idea how many people just never show up and only apply because somebody forces them to. If you can consistently come into work we'll hire you full time."
If you can actually show up you can get a job. It won't be your dream job but it will be a job and they'll be thankful to have you. So why do we need the government involved in this?
(BTW before anybody tells me I'm wrong, the above is from my personal experience.)
People apply for the jobs they want, when they should be applying for any jobs they could conceivably do. When I went through this the job I landed was pulling boxes off the back of trucks onto pallets. That OP wants a job in food services and for some reason can't get one. He should try applying to the kind of jobs he doesn't want. If he can establish himself as a reliable worker at a shitty job, he'll have a much easier time applying for the jobs he does want.
From my personal experience, all of the people who say they can't get a job actually have terrible work ethics and a fatal lack of self-awareness. Also, people who type like in your post, with all caps, emojis, poor punctuation even more so. Lack of professionalism and lack of good work ethic are strongly correlated.
Many people have a warped perception of what it is to be "homeless" or, more generally, "housing insecure". There are stages.
The first stage is where you're staying with friends and family for variable periods. Couchsurfing, attics, garages that sort of thing. You probably still work but can't afford the security deposit and first and last months rent. Maybe you can't even afford rent. You probably lost your house because of a relationship breakup, an eviction from income disruption, etc.
Stage two is where those options are exhausted and you're living in your car. You are probably still employed. Sometimes you may park that car with someone you know but as time goes on you'll be parking in parking lots and on the streets. You may suffer break ins, run-ins with the law, etc. At some point that car will break down and you will lose your job because of it. The car is staying where it is until the city impounds it.
Stage three is the first stage people notice. You're living on the street because you've lost your car. In places like NYC the homeless may seek shelter at night on the Subway. This leads to a lot of "homelessness crimes" like loitering, turnstile jumping and traspassing.
Stage four is where this life has taken its toll. You probably have mental health issues, drug dependency issues (initially from self-medication), etc.
So stage three is where many think homelessness starts. They may still be able to work but this becomees increasingly difficult without access to a car and a permanent address. You might even use a Planet Fitness or YMCA to keep clean still. But housing security began long before someone gets to this point.
And in all but the last stage, simply giving someone housing will solve their problems most of the time. As time goes on you may require other intervention such as mental health treatment, social work and treatment for substance abuse.
But unfortunately a lot of this gets criminalized, which both costs money and makes it more difficult for someone to recover, having a criminal record.
We live in a world where we'd rather spend a lot of money militarizing people to harass homeless people and on prisons to house them when we can spend a whole lot less just giving people somewhere to live.
There are also plenty of people that go straight to stage 4 after burning their family/friend support network with a bad substance abuse problem, or time out of prison with no where to go, so they never go properly through the other stages. It isn’t as simple as one path to homelessness.
By stage 4 it is pretty much over, we failed as a society and that person is probably never going to be a productive member of society again. We should be throwing all of our resources at the previous stages, rather than sinking 99% of them into stage 4 ensuring that we just let more people slip into it because we didn’t devote enough resources to the earlier stages.
> if the US government had a full employment program.
Like the US Military? Do you mean we should get some of the old anti-black laws on the books outlawing being unemployed?
> allocate them to something useful, possibly at cost.
I don't think the average person is ok with the government spending $5 to has a task done that will immediately require spending $20 to undo it and another $25 for somebody to do it correctly. People can do negative work. There's often a reason the private sector has passed over people for employment.
> a country of subsidized housing and scarce jobs would still be a pretty sad place
I don't think that would happen. There's a reason Amazon wanted to build HQ2 at NYC & NOVA; there's a ton of people here that could work for them. While people move for jobs; people also build factories/office parks where they can employ people.
Although it could be the case that people taking subsidized housing don't have the skill set Amazon is looking for so there may be a limit to what job opportunities they have in the nearby area. And of course Amazon isn't interested in running a training program into SWE when they can just hire people who paid for it themselves (college).
> There's often a reason the private sector has passed over people for employment.
Yes: because they could hire someone overseas for cheaper, or because the work in question would benefit society but the benefit would be hard for the business to capture, and other such good reasons.
> I don't think the average person is ok with the government spending $5
The average person would be so happy to not be under threat of unemployment anymore that they'd be ok with the government spending $5. The rich person, on the other hand.
Most people who cannot hold down a job are that way for basically psychological reasons, they can't bring themselves to consistently show up and quit any job you give them within days/weeks. What would help them the most is creating a new class of labor which works on a day-to-day basis with no paperwork/bureaucracy setup to hire them and fire them. I'm talking about legalized and legitimized unorganized untaxed day-labor, so people who can't hold down a regular job can at least easily earn irregular money whenever they find themselves able. If it requires applying for one day then showing up the next, that disqualifies most chronically unemployed people.
Unfortunately well-meaning people will insist on creating bureaucratic roadblocks in this program ostensibly for the benifit of the workers, to make sure the workers are getting benefits, safety training, etc, that have the end result of making it a job you have to apply for in advance and show up for later. And once this is done, it will be no different from the normal sort of job that some people can't hold onto because they can't bring themselves to show up reliably.
> I'm talking about legalized and legitimized unorganized untaxed day-labor, so people who can't hold down a regular job can at least easily earn irregular money whenever they find themselves able.
Doing what exactly? How would the labor discovery process work here? The only people I know who do this kind of "untaxed day labor" are semi-legal immigrants in front of home improvement stores.
> end result of making it a job you have to apply for in advance and show up for later. And once this is done, it will be no different from the normal sort of job that some people can't hold onto because they can't bring themselves to show up reliably.
Has it ever crossed your mind that reliability is a big component of gainful employment? In your example of this word salad arrangement (legalized and legitimized unorganized untaxed, whatever that means) what's stopping from a more reliable company to swoop in with their employees and starting taking this type of labor from "people who can't show up on time" ?
When I think "gig work" I think jobs that require you to use a smartphone app and your car, usually in a major urban area. It's work that requires you to interact with lots of strangers and travel around town all day and without supervision to keep you on task. These are daunting propositions to a lot of people.
The sort of jobs I'm talking about are ones where you just have to get yourself to one place, a guy hands you a shovel and points at where you dig, then pays you cash at the end of the day. These jobs do exist but they aren't legal or legitimate, or if they are then you have to do paperwork and commit to a schedule to get into the tax system and compliance with government regulations. This friction keeps people who are struggling with the basics of life from working, this kind of irregular work would be much easier for people if the government removed their bureaucratic restrictions on it. Does this clarify the "word salad" for you? (BTW I don't appreciate your implication that I'm mentally ill. If you don't understand what I'm saying, it's not because I'm schizophrenic. More likely it's because you're misconstruing disagreement with confusion.)
The bureaucratic roadblocks would be created because the employers would immediately exploit such a loophole in the employment law to treat their normal employees as just 'day-to-day' ones
And so there will continue to be people who are unemployable because they're unreliable. We need both kinds of jobs; it shouldn't be impossible to have an economy where both exist...
In fact we already do but the day-labor is done illegally under the table which makes it harder for low-motivation/ability people to get into. Besides, companies don't want unskilled day labor for most semi-skilled work anyway because the workers would do more damage than good, so regular jobs will still exist if irregular day labor is legalized and legitimized. For safe measure, make it illegal to refuse a day worker in Wednesday because he didn't show up on Tuesday, no implied fulltime contracts for day laborers, so companies will have to hire people on for regular jobs for work that requires training and regularity. Violations can be investigated at the government's expense, as is already the case with Department of Labor investigations.
> And so there will continue to be people who are unemployable because they're unreliable. We need both kinds of jobs; it shouldn't be impossible to have an economy where both exist...
I think I would rather these unreliable people be paid basic income to just live than to try and invent some convoluted employment scheme for them, that will ultimately 90% benefit the bureaucrats and 10% to those people and that will also inevitably balloon to 5x its intended original size.
The idea is to create the least convoluted employment scheme conceivable. Convoluted employment schemes are exactly the problem that keeps people who can't handle their shit from working at all.
But they are not convoluted purposely to make employment difficult. They are just the result of bad actors cheating the system. A lot of time it's the general population who insist to add all these complications. Like with Uber where at first anybody could be a driver, but some bad things happened and people demanded that a driver has to have a clean criminal record. Same thing would happen to your simple 'day-to-day' employee scheme. It would get abused and the people would demand the abuse to be curbed
> The average person would be so happy to not be under threat of unemployment anymore that they'd be ok with the government spending $5.
I see you neglected to address the US Military comment. Which person are you thinking of that is so suited for a job that isn't employable by the military?
You also neglected to read the second half the sentence; it's not about the government spending $5; it's about the government spending $50 of which $25 is literal wasted spending. It's literally better to just give the person $5 to do nothing over having them work.
> I see you neglected to address the US Military comment. Which person are you thinking of that is so suited for a job that isn't employable by the military?
Such government program could provide different jobs, not only one. People have different expectations and different abilities. Military is not for everyone.
> It's literally better to just give the person $5 to do nothing over having them work.
Don't do negative works then. There's a lot of jobs that are not profitable, but still provide utility to society. If you pay $50 for nothing, or pay $50 for $10 worth job, in second case it's actually only $40 paid so much better.
Military is probably the most diverse employer you can find. Honestly besides C-suite / lobbyists / factory-work there's probably not a single private sector job that doesn't exist in the military. Plus the military will train you; good luck getting Boeing to shell out the money so you can get a pilot's license.
> Don't do negative works then. There's a lot of jobs that are not profitable, but still provide utility to society.
Not doing negative work isn't an option here. How will you handle people that nobody literally wants to work with? How will you handle people that literally cannot understand instruction? Wish I could find the blog posts people have done on Universal Jobs where they can outline people who cannot work.
What are the goal posts here? I'm going off the initial comment of providing literally every single person that wants it a job so that they're able to afford to live. There are no points for only getting to 99% as those remaining 1% will be the RV-ers living in the parking lot.
If we're ok with the goal posts being 99.9% than yeah sure things such as WPA [1] or CETA [2] are great. Probably even expand them to handle the national parks or develop more land into national parks would be neat.
> If you pay $50 for nothing, or pay $50 for $10 worth job, in second case it's actually only $40 paid so much better.
This isn't the option here. It's you have say $50 and can pay somebody (in need) $5 to do something and then pay somebody (not in need) $45 to fix up the mess. Or you could just give $5 to 10 people in need to do nothing. If your goal is to make sure everybody is housed then the second option is way cheaper.
> What are the goal posts here? I'm going off the initial comment of providing literally every single person that wants it a job so that they're able to afford to live.
Yes, so are for it or against it? I can't tell. Arguments like this:
> Not doing negative work isn't an option here. How will you handle people that nobody literally wants to work with?
Are matched with arguments like this:
> If we're ok with the goal posts being 99.9% than yeah sure things such as WPA [1] or CETA [2] are great.
99.9% would be a really great result. I don't believe you can actually have a solution which covers exactly 100% percent of people. People "who can't be worked with" in machining shop can be worked with for example in cleaning services. My wife manages such people. It's very hard and a lot of drama and missed spots and occasional non-showings but everyone who actually wants to work earns enough money to provide for himself. This is subsidized by Polish government, because most of those people have some form of disability which prevents them from holding "normal" jobs. And cleaning is a little cheaper. It's still better than just giving them money for sitting on their ass all day watching tv.
>There's a reason Amazon wanted to build HQ2 at NYC & NOVA
To quote Contact: "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" They were likely given so much in tax incentives from local local and state governments that building 2 HQ2s was less than what one would have cost Amazon on its own. Furthermore, it makes sense to want to have HQs in both the Financial and Federal Government centers of the US.
This is a great question, and really highlights why my proposal would work or not. The surface-level answer is that unemployment increases homelessness, so fixing unemployment would go a long way in fixing homelessness as well.
But the deeper answer is that I don't believe housing is actually scarce. It's just scarce in places that have jobs. Whereas in "job deserts", which might be most of the territory, housing can be quite cheap. So if the government made jobs spring up in more places, maybe housing wouldn't be a problem.
People complain about housing mostly where jobs are abundant (which stokes demand for housing), and they complain about jobs in places where housing is not a problem.
A lot of the people living on the streets can’t get jobs even when they are abundant because they have mental illness or substance abuse problems that prevent them from working at all. Sure, Seattle has a minimum wage of almost $20/hour, and plenty of jobs still go unfilled, but the guy having a fent crisis naked in front of the library isn’t going to help much (for example from my personal experience).
I think UBI will get a lot of people trapped in death spirals by preventing them from hitting rock bottom and then snapping out of their funk and turning their life around. UBI makes the government an enabler of people in self destructive loops.
Instead, we need to streamline the process of getting people back to work in whatever capacity they can manage, so people can decide to go back to work on a whim in their moment of lucidity and immediately see real progress and improvement. Legitimizing day labor paid in cash at the end of the day, the same day you decide to show up. If you make people apply one day the say "you start next week" a lot of people won't make it to next week and will be back in their death spiral the next day.
That hasn't been the case with the very limited trials of UBI in other countries, so what makes you think that?
Surely the biggest trap that prevents people from seeking work is poverty. You can hardly even apply for most jobs if you have no fixed abode and no access to bathing facilities or clean clothes.
Poverty is a strong motivation to seek work. The forces working against this which prevent people from finding work are mostly depression and feelings of helplessness. When people hit their rock bottom (which is generally weeks to days before homelessness) they're faced with a choice to either bounce off it and turn their life around, or to die (e.g. the streets.) Many people choose death because the alternative seems too hard for them, they're scared of what it will take and think that trying to turn around will just prolong their suffering so they choose the "easy" way out and give up on life.
UBI might keep people alive but I don't believe it's a path to recovery. It'll keep people suspended right above rock bottom, not working and on drugs and booze, permanently depressed with no future ahead of them. The longer somebody stays like this, the worse off they become mentally and physically. Enabling people like this is very cruel.
More beneficial reform involves removing the friction and barriers to recovery. Make it easier for people to find work that they can cope with and grow with. Make it easier for people to get back into the cycle of fixing their own problems by removing all the bureaucratic roadblocks that make getting back to work seem like a daunting impossibility. Anything that makes it easier to work is good, anything that makes it easier to not work (including UBI) is bad. And its not all about removing bureaucracy; building out better public transit so people feel that it's easy to get themselves to a job is very important. Government initiatives that reduce the availability of used cars or raise the price of new cars (same thing) should also be eliminated. More bike lanes should be built between residential and industrial/commercial areas and ebikes should be permitted on these routes. The penalties of traffic violations should be made progressive so that rich people have to pay however much is enough to make them regret it. Across the board, the stress of transportation should be reduced to make it easier for people to turn their lives around. The stress of finding entry level jobs should be reduced, but not the importance of working because getting people back to work is how you get them on a path of recovery and growth.
Technically it would be indentured servitude. Which is far more likely (along with debtors' prisons) to come back in the US than any useful form of UBI.
The ruthlessness of American capitalism intersecting with the callous self-righteousness of the Protestant work ethic has bred into American culture an ideology that would rather see the poor starve and die in the street like dogs than suffer the indignity of a system that takes so much as a penny from them to help another.
Hell, the US will simply normalize and commoditize homelessness before taking UBI seriously. Some brilliant startup will disrupt cardboard boxes and sell them as hyper-economy "nomad chic" living units. They'll do great with SV nerds who want to feel like they're really grinding it hard-core.
Serious question, do you think women should be in the workplace? Wouldn’t they be “better off” in your view as a wife of a man who works, rather than earn their own living?
To me, this is just like hearing about the gender pay gap and responding by saying they should just get married and become a housewife instead.
The trouble with the charitable mission of Christian churches and ecclesial communities is that they've been largely supplanted by entitlement programs. Many people in these United States felt significant shame if they needed to rely on charity for their basic needs, and so the State deemed it expedient to pick up the slack by using taxpayer money to provide for them instead.
As a result, fewer and fewer modern Americans see any need to donate or support faith-based charities. Why should we, when the government is doing all the heavy lifting? Christian charities are practically redundant now. Of course, we are seeing some things come full-circle, as the government supports faith-based charities with subsidies, in order to reduce the size and burden of actual government-run programs and put them back into the hands of entities which have capably run them for thousands of years.
Also, you've got to differentiate between the goals and mission of a State-based entitlement vs. the goals and mission of a faith-based charity. They're worlds apart.
It is, but there are plenty of parts of Christianity that Americans tend to forsake, like the part about forgiving debts (see the recent debates over student loan forgiveness) or turning swords into plowshares (see the entire history of the US.) Americans will give a thousand dollars to a charitable organization for the tax write-off but not a dime to the homeless vet on the streetcorner, because "he'll probably just use it for drugs." Americans took a religion whose prophet said "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" and created the prosperity gospel, which claimed that wealth was instead a sign of God loving you more.
If America were truly a Christian nation it would be far too "socialist" for many Americans to stomach.
We are seeing the re-emergence of a form of persistent nomadism, as cost-of-living crisis forces people to abandon (or escape from) the liabilities which come from sedentary living. The cost to kit out and maintain a vehicle is not trivial but almost certainly less than keeping up monthly rental or mortgage payments.
This is not without precedent - DNA analysis of the Irish Traveller community traces genealogy back to the displacement of previously sedentary Irish nobility who refused to bend the knee to the English in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and were forced from their properties to become permanent itinerants in their own land
You think if there was a society of 90 millionaires and 10 billionaires, people would be complaining about inequality? Of course not, because the real problem is what people can afford, and what the base standard of living is. That has nothing to do with inequality (unless those at the top are putting their thumb on the scale somehow, by buying up real estate and not using it, for instance).
You're still going to need a street address somewhere for tax and other legal purposes, including registering and titling that car or RV.
Before anyone says "just use a PO box for that", those need a street address too (and also proof of residing in the city or county the PO box is located in). Plenty of services also refuse PO boxes too, including vehicle titles/registrations and a driver's license.
Yes, you could try convincing a very good friend or family member to lend you their street address if you really can't or won't pay for a place of residence yourself, but that's literally leeching off their generosity and good will which doesn't sound like a nice way of living if you ask me.
iPostal1 has you covered there. You get a real address (not a PO Box) that is accepted by just about everyone. The postage company behind that address can scan documents for you and even forward your packages somewhere else. You can even get a phone # with them. $9.99/mo excluding package pickups and other operations.
I have been using them for three years now and really like them.
Friend of mine has a po box. For services that dont accept it he lists the address of the post office with an apartment number. They dont like it but he still gets his mail.
>You may not use the PO Box “street address” option as your physical residence or place of business in Legal documents. Misuse of Street Addressing Service may violate civil and criminal laws and may result in USPS closing your PO Box.
So that service is strictly for receiving non-USPS shipments at the PO box, and either way the PO box needs to be rooted in a street address (your place of residence) anyway.
Of course, whether someone will actually check is anyone's guess. Probably not, if we're being realistic. But you will be in trouble if it's brought to someone's attention.
> Yes, you could try convincing a very good friend or family member to lend you their street address if you really can't or won't pay for a place of residence yourself.
In what way is that leeching? I would have no problem letting a family member do that.
If I had a family member or friend facing homelessness or this kind of nomadic lifestyle, I certainly wouldn't consider them leeches for asking for help.
If it was a friend/family asking for a place while they get back on their feet, by all means. We all have our tragedies.
But if it's for an entire lifestyle? Unless it's a very good friend or a family member I really like regardless of blood, I'm going to either refuse or ask they compensate me somehow; it won't be cheap, and I'll bring in lawyers and CPAs as necessary with notarized documents to cover my ass.
And were the shoes reversed, I wouldn't ask someone of this. It's leeching and a Damocles sword.
I don’t understand what you mean by entire lifestyle. The article and discussion is about semi-homeless people living in their car. Are you imagining your family and friends doing this specifically to be leeches and you’re worried about subsidising their fun, no-responsibility lifestyle, like they are on an vacation or something?
I am perfectly happy lending a hand to friends and family for whom the sky decided now was their turn to get dropped on. Shit happens to the best of us.
But that's a different story to enabling someone's lifestyle. My hospitality doesn't extend that far, let alone generosity.
Unless you're somehow insinuating that being homeless is a lifestyle, which I would vehemently disagree with. Even if there was (and there probably is) a lifestyle that doesn't involve a home, it's most certainly not called being homeless.
I thought in this thread we were discussing homelessness and a persistent nomadic lifestyle as a result of a cost of living crisis? It sounds like you must be referring to something people are choosing to do for fun or specifically because they want to take your hard earned stuff from you. In which case.. sure? Don’t give them your stuff then? But nobody said the magic word “lifestyle” before you called them leeches.
> We are seeing the re-emergence of a form of persistent nomadism, as cost-of-living crisis forces people to abandon (or escape from) the liabilities which come from sedentary living. The cost to kit out and maintain a vehicle is not trivial but almost certainly less than keeping up monthly rental or mortgage payments.
The problem here is they could try to claim residency and sue you for illegally evicting them and then they move in for free and stay as long as legally possible.
Also debt collectors could also show up and just take your shit because the assumption would be that since it's at the debtor address, then it is his, unless you can prove otherwise, but I'm sure you keep invoices with your name for all your stuff, should such a need araised. People are really naïve if they think that providing their address to others is without any risks.
That's a shame as I can't think of a phrase that sums up late stage Capitalism quite so well. Here in the UK there has been an increase in young people living in vans/caravans in order to escape hefty bills and the extremely high cost of housing.
Once you realize that suppressing wages and extracting every last ounce of wealth from workers is an explicit policy goal, it's impossible not to see it everywhere.
Increasing housing costs is wealth extraction. Moreso, it's state violence to deny a basic human need such as shelter for profit. Homelessness kills people. Yet we've been successfully propagandized into thinking homelessness is some personal moral failure.
And then we have the deacdes-long (successful) effort to suppress real wages. Restrictive immigration policies intentionally create a permanent underclass to erode wages. States are now relaxing child labor laws for the same reason. Even tying wage gains to "productivity increases" is a form of wage suppression in an inflationary environment.
Under the category of "private equity ruins everything", we have large companies buying up land where mobile homes sit and jacking up the land fees as another form of wealth extraction. This is a problem because this was a more affordable housing option for many, almost housing of last resort. It's predatory and should be illegal.
What kind of society are we that we have to depend on the largesse of Walmart to provide refuge parking lots for those just one step above living on the street?
I just saw a couple of mobile homes asking half a million (although those inland appear to be going for only a few hundred thousand), so it may be significantly cheaper.
They are all over the place. While a mobile home isn’t the most people’s first choice, and the value won’t go up like a home on a foundation, it certainly seems better than living in a car. Lot rent still needs to be paid, but that is going to be much cheaper than apartment rent. I glanced at a couple lot rents when looking around and it was around $500/month.
These were just some around $30k that looked pretty decent where most people wouldn’t mind moving in. I saw some as low as $1,500, but they looked like they needed some love.
I think new models are around $70k or so, but I think they lose a lot of value the first few years, kind of like a car.
While it may not be someone’s forever home, using it as a way to have an address, stay off the streets, and save money to afford something else, seems like a decent option.
It would be worth driving around the park at various times of the day before buying one to see what the vibe is like. They can vary a lot. Some can be pretty bad, but I stayed in one for several months when I was young with a friend of the family. It was really nice inside and the park it was in seemed safe.
Trailer parks, aka campgrounds are crazy expensive compared to "free", and some people are just living in cars.
Trailer parks are also rare, in the downtown of large cities. Also, don't confuse trailer parks with mobile home parks. RVs aren't allowed in mobile home parks.
Then they park their own car / RV / caravan/trailer on it. This way it's extremely hard for authorities to kick them out.
Bonus if you can get a family member or someone from your community buy the land for you: that way even if you own money to the state, the land cannot be seized.
It's extremely common in the gypsy community, for example (now that nomadism is getting more and more complicated).
FWIW my father (who wasn't a gypsy but who was totally broke) used to live, for years, in a caravan on a plot of land owned by someone he knew. It was bad, but not hobo-bad. He had an old totally beaten up and ultra high-mileage Mercedes car, gypsy style (gypsies love old Mercedes cars).
His friend was renting, for pennies and illegally, the rest of his plot of land to actual gypsies.
P.S: nowadays my brothers and I are helping our father, who now lives in an apartment