Epitaph

The deer came to my funeral. 

The Best Response to "Thoughts & Prayers" for Homeless People

Like victims of school shootings, homeless people get a lot of "thoughts and prayers" from people, which roughly translates into a brief moment of concern, but not any real action or follow through. 

I love the response from a practical, down-to-earth poet: the late Tony Hoagland. A brief excerpt:

Full-length original version is in the Dec. 2018 issue of The Sun magazine.

Giving Money Directly to the Homeless is a Good Thing

There is an excellent article by Matt Broomfield in the British periodical New Statesman titled, "Why you should give money directly and unconditionally to the homeless" that's well worth a read. Excerpt:

"Don’t second-guess whether people are “really” homeless. Those who think begging is a shortcut to easy money should try humiliating themselves daily in front of thousands of total strangers who won’t even look at them or acknowledge their existence. It is gruelling, soul-destroying work. If people are desperate enough to beg, they need it."...

"Of course, it is true that your drinking habit and theirs are fundamentally different. Addiction is rooted in material circumstance – alcohol is the obvious example, but think how many skiing accidents end in courses of opiates far stronger than anything you’d find on the street without any long-term compulsion developing. It can only be tackled by raising people out of poverty, and a brute-force severing of cash flow is not going to starve people into seeking help from authorities they know will not, or cannot, help them."

Homelessness Is Expensive

Many people—particularly critics of the homeless—think that homeless people have no responsibilities such as mortgages, car payments, etc., so they can live for free on the streets, scrounging whatever they can to survive. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Housed or not, the day-to-day cost of living is expensive for everyone. It's even more difficult for the homeless, employed or not. Working homeless people have expenses like everyone else (food, clothing, transportation to/from work). The cost of living will vary based on their geographical area, and the size of their family, as well as whether or not there are public resources such as charities or social agencies in their communities.

Just the basic survival needs for living in a car, and to not look like a homeless person to avoid detection, are as follows:

These very basic expenses can eat up a part-time paycheck pretty quickly (on top of the logistical difficulties of working while homeless). In my case, for example, luxuries such as haircuts, hot meals, or clothes—which are hardly considered luxuries to housed people—are a non-starter for me. I trim the dead ends off my hair as best as I can, and for the last three years, I've worn whatever clothes I've found in various "free" boxes around town. Even when I had a roof over my head, my clothes were purchased BY THE POUND at a local Goodwill Outlet store, because it was all I could afford. Shopping in a mall or online is not even a remote reality for me anymore. 

Critics of homelessness also advise moving to a less expensive area to live, but moving costs money (particularly for gas) which poor people obviously don't have a lot of. It also costs money to live in the new location with no job or support or resources. So it's not as easy as the critics like to think, simply because poor people don't have the same resources as the critics who (conveniently) don't understand poverty. 

The solution is what it's always been: affordable housing and living wages. Sadly, neither are in danger of happening anytime soon, thanks to the plutocratic oligarchy we have been living in for a long time in the USA. 

Articles on the Neuropsych of Homelessness; and US Workers are Totally Screwed Compared to Other Nations

A couple of really good recent articles on homelessness of note:

Hanna Brooks Olson wrote a terrific piece on Medium about the neuropsychology of (unfounded) assumptions the average person makes about homeless people, and the causes of their poverty. An excerpt:

"There has, for more than 30 years, been a resounding refrain that poverty is the fault of the poor, and that if you are not poor, you are somehow better, stronger, more capable, and more deserving of food, housing, and peace of mind."

Of course, in the minds of average people with money, homelessness could never have any possible connection to working conditions, as this piece from Eric Levitz at New York Magazine shows. An excerpt:

"But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offers a more straightforward — and political— explanation: American policymakers have chosen to design an economic system that leaves workers desperate and disempowered, for the sake of directing a higher share of economic growth to bosses and shareholders.

The OECD doesn’t make this argument explicitly. But its report lays waste to the idea that the plight of the American worker can be chalked up to impersonal economic forces, instead of concrete political decisions. If the former were the case, then American laborers wouldn’t be getting a drastically worse deal than their peers in other developed nations. But we are."

I Told You So...

From the 3/30/18 issue of the magazine "The Week":

Why Poor People Are Poor

Bad public policy that is pro-plutocrat and anti-worker contributes heavily to poverty in the richest country in the world.

See for yourself:

I spent most of my adult life missing one of the three legs of the stool of stability: Food, Shelter, and Medical Care. 

Most of my life I was missing medical care, but I compensated for it by not drinking, doing drugs, and becoming a vegetarian at the age of 20. Still, I had medical bills for things that insurance companies denied when I did have insurance. (Most women know how hard it is to get "women's health" medication and therapies covered by insurance, and end up paying for expensive but necessary medication out of pocket. It's easier to buy a gun in the USA than it is to get hormone replacement therapy (HRT).)

These days, at middle age in abject poverty, I have food stamps and Medicaid covering those two legs of the stool, but no shelter/housing. Many people, like me, spend our entire lives just trying to survive. We work twice as hard for half as much, and are then blamed for our poverty. We never get to fulfill our potential in life because we're always trying to scrape together first, last, and deposit, or cover the latest car repair, on low wages. Spending time in college we can't afford, or taking trips or other luxuries, are absolute non-starters for us. Things most middle-class and rich people take for granted--like having a washer and dryer to do laundry instead of trekking to laundromats; or not having to cut your own hair because you can't afford $25-$50 to have a pro do it; or eating out, (even at an inexpensive restaurant), or even enough money for a full tank of gas--are luxuries we rarely attain. 

Article at https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/bold-versus-old/

One thing people who hate homeless people conveniently forget is that most people have someone or something that supports them: a job, family, a government subsidy, a tax break, or friends who will help when they get into trouble. 

Homeless people don't have a support system like that. Most of us have been completely on our own all of our lives, and remain that way because society hates the poor, and hates the homeless even more, blaming them for their plight. 

It doesn't have to be that way, but change toward a fairer society in the USA isn't even remotely on the horizon.

And then there's this: 

So anyone at this point who hasn't figured out the system is rigged against working people is deliberately sticking their head in the sand. 

The Sickness of Society

The mystic and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." I just finished Rolling Stone investigative reporter Matt Taibbi's latest book, "I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street," about how the NYPD cops who murdered Eric Garner got away with it because of a severely broken judicial system and a corrupt, byzantine, city bureaucracy designed to delay in order to eventually deny anything even remotely resembling justice.

This page from the book is totally profound, and though it describes Garner and his situation, it is something that could easily describe any powerless or homeless person's situation of where America stands in 2018:

The plutocratic nightmare that we have been living in for quite some time is not in danger of ending anytime soon. I am almost wholeheartedly in agreement with George Orwell these days, when he stated, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." I have no idea when, how, or even if this type of "some people are more equal than others" strata in American society can ever be permanently, or even partially, rooted out, but my guess is that if any progress is going to be made, it's not going to be soon, and it's is most certainly not going to be peaceful. True societal change never is.

Those Who Have the Least Are the Most Generous

Years ago, a Moroccan friend of mine told me that when he was a car valet, the people with the ordinary cars tipped the most, while those with the luxury and exotic cars tipped the least. As a journalist and scientific data lover, I'm not a big fan of anecdotal evidence at all, but that doesn't mean I don't find it interesting at times. 

Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer-winning journalist who you may remember from a few years ago for publishing the Edward Snowden material, resides in Brazil. This recent tweet by Greenwald is an interesting anecdote that reminded me of my Moroccan friend's experience:

In this social experiment, a shirtless Brazilian boy, cold on the street in an upscale area, asks numerous passers-by to borrow a shirt to enter a store to buy a shirt. Everyone refuses all forms of help. He then asks the first homeless man he sees, who immediately gives a shirt. https://t.co/TjYteGmTOc

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 11, 2018

Greenwald, along with his partner, David Miranda, has established an animal shelter run by homeless people in Rio de Janiero. As many of you know from my writings about my cat, Scooter, pets and homeless people have bonds that run far deeper than those of ordinary pet owners. That's because your pet still loves you when society has turned its back on you, and prefers that you don't exist. From Greenwald's guest column in The Dodo:

"The compassion, empathy and self-sacrifice defining the relationship between those who are homeless and their pets is extraordinary. It is difficult to explain how affecting it is to watch a hungry, homeless person receive a desperately needed meal and, without a second thought, instantly divide it in half to share it with their hungry dog or cat. Leslie Irvine, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado, has devoted much of her academic career to studying this unique relationship, and even named her book on the topic, 'My Dog Always Eats First.' "

Irvine's book is scholarly and tedious to read, but I'm glad I did slog through it. She traveled around the San Francisco Bay Area with a veterinarian on wheels who provided free vet services for the pets of homeless people. The book documents those experiences.

Finally, the true causes of homelessness are starting to dawn on the mainstream media. I was pleasantly surprised to find a quote of mine extracted from my Vox article in the national magazine The Week. The article very succinctly sums up the problem--and the lamentable solution: more affordable housing is needed now, but won't be built for years, if ever. Still, the article does wonders in changing the stereotypical narrative about homeless people to one that is accurate--and obvious--to anyone on the West Coast witnessing the problem right in front of them. Without living wages and affordable housing, homelessness will only increase. 

Poverty is Policy-Based

Everyone knows the standard narrative about poor people in the U.S. is that they are lazy, uneducated, and either have a mental illness or substance abuse problems, so that's why they are in their desperate situation, and they probably deserve it.

It's a tired and untrue cliche, but it persists because it's the comfortable and convenient narrative that allows the bad public policy that is the true cause of poverty and homelessness to continue unexamined--and therefore, unabated.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights isn't fooled by the American narrative. Take a look at this excellent report by professor Phillip Ralston. Here's some of what he found:

"10. I have been struck by the extent to which caricatured narratives about the purported innate differences between rich and poor have been sold to the electorate by some politicians and media, and have been allowed to define the debate.  The rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic, and the drivers of economic success.  The poor are wasters, losers, and scammers.  As a result, money spent on welfare is money down the drain.  To complete the picture we are also told that the poor who want to make it in America can easily do so: they really can achieve the American dream if only they work hard enough. 

11. The reality that I have seen, however, is very different.  It is a fact that many of the wealthiest citizens do not pay taxes at the rates that others do, hoard much of their wealth off-shore, and often make their profits purely from speculation rather than contributing to the overall wealth of the American community. Who then are the poor?  Racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface.  The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants’.  The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks.  Similarly, large numbers of welfare recipients are assumed to be living high on the hog.  Some politicians and political appointees with whom I spoke were completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smart phones, all paid for by welfare.  I wonder how many of these politicians have ever visited poor areas, let alone spoken to those who dwell there. There are anecdotes aplenty, but evidence is nowhere to be seen.  In every society, there are those who abuse the system, as much in the upper income levels, as in the lower.  But the poor people I met from among the 40 million living in poverty were overwhelmingly either persons who had been born into poverty, or those who had been thrust there by circumstances largely beyond their control such as physical or mental disabilities, divorce, family breakdown, illness, old age, unlivable wages, or discrimination in the job market.

12. The face of poverty in America is not only Black, or Hispanic, but also White, Asian, and many other colors.  Nor is it confined to a particular age group.  Automation and robotization are already throwing many middle-aged workers out of jobs in which they once believed themselves to be secure.  In the economy of the twenty-first century, only a tiny percentage of the population is immune from the possibility that they could fall into poverty as a result of bad breaks beyond their own control.  The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion as the US since the US now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries."

It's Going to Get a WHOLE Lot Worse Long Before it Gets Better

Just take a look at this Associated Press link that tracks homelessness stories:

https://apnews.com/tag/HomelessCrisis

This excerpt sums it up rather well:

"Homeless advocates and city officials say it’s outrageous that in the shadow of a booming tech economy - where young millionaires dine on $15 wood-grilled avocado and think nothing of paying $1,000 for an iPhone X - thousands of families can’t afford a home. Many of the homeless work regular jobs, in some cases serving the very people whose sky-high net worth is the reason housing has become unaffordable for so many."

"The booming economy, fueled by the tech sector, and decades of under-building have led to an historic shortage of affordable housing. It has upended the stereotypical view of people out on the streets as unemployed: They are retail clerks, plumbers, janitors - even teachers - who go to work, sleep where they can and buy gym memberships for a place to shower."

And yet it's often the very tech bros causing the problem who call homeless people lazy, and want them out of sight.

The photos at the link are every bit as heartbreaking as the stories. And it's going to get much worse when the government passes its tax bill this month, and destroys Social Security and Medicare through "entitlement reform" in 2018, which has been their plan all along. Unless people unite and go on strike nationwide for living wages, things are going to go back to Great Depression-era desperation.

Vox.com Revisits Homelessness

Vox.com producer Carlos Waters has a video on YouTube about how city planners design spaces that deter people experiencing homeless from using public space.

Also, I have a small legal matter I could use some help with--it's a win-win situation if you choose to participate. Check out the details here.

Thank you for your support--it's deeply and tremendously appreciated!

Everyone's a Critic -- Responses to the Vox Article from March 2016

It never fails.

No matter *WHAT* a person's homelessness is due to, there is always a large subset of people who are absolutely certain that ending up in that situation is 110% your fault. Somewhere in life, you morally failed, or didn't do something you were supposed to do, so your homeless plight is all on you.

For that crowd, homelessness can never, ever, EVER can be caused by lack of affordable housing and lack of a living wage. To them, this recent story in the Associated Press is a profile in how many people over the last several years have increasingly "failed at life" through their "poor life choices," and became homeless. To them, it's never this:

“I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up.”

Take his word for it. The new term for these conditions is "working homeless."  And the picture is exceedingly bleak:  

I think people who blame the homeless for their plight do so because if they actually looked into it with any depth, they'd have to do something about it, and people don't like to be responsible for things that don't personally affect them. Look at what's happening with the sexual harassment victims lately--they are rarely believed, and almost always blamed.

My own critics usually fall into one of two categories: 1) Women who blame me for not getting married, and 2) Men who are over a year's salary in credit card or other debt, counseling me about an imaginary inability to handle finances properly. Then, there are the usual jerks who are convinced that people who don't even have boots can just pull themselves up by their (non-existent) bootstraps.

So here's my responses to some of these geniuses, who commented on my Vox article from last year:

In the article, I wrote: "My moderate savings was destroyed in my 30s by health care costs that insurance wouldn't cover."

So one critic who clearly didn't read the article said, "Sounds like she choose [sic] not to have health insurance at a time when it wasn't mandatory." 

Got that? I had insurance, and that insurer denied my claims, but the reader goes straight into their blame-the-victim bias.

Another critic wrote: "I think I have less sympathy for the writer of this article. I'm willing to bet she made some pretty piss poor choices to be in her situation at 50. Keep in mind she didn't go to college so she has no loans."

Well, I did go to college, but went pay-as-you-go, and had to leave school when my hours were cut at work so I couldn't afford both school and rent. With people like this, it's considered a "poor choice" to not go into debt because I didn't qualify for loans or credit cards. Institutions don't lend money to poor people--that's why rapacious payday lenders exist. And when poor people can get a loan, it's often at usury rates that will keep them trapped in debt and poverty forever.

Another critic opines: "I don't feel pity for homeless people...To me, all it takes is a little resourcefulness to dig yourself out of a bad spot. Why didn't she move to a better place? She wanted the immediate gratification that contract work affords. Why didn't she accept permanent work so she could prove her value?...Why didn't she get a second job? Ask a friend to let her crash on the couch? Offer to house sit? Pet sit? The possibilities seem endless in this world." 

Let's unpack that shitshow: 1) You can't move to a "better" place if you are poor. You need thousands of dollars for moving expenses and deposits and rent; you need to find a new job in the new location and live off meager savings until you do, and all of that costs money a homeless or working poor person doesn't have. 2) Contract work wasn't "immediate gratification" --it was all that was available. 3) I did have permanent work periodically, but left for better-paying opportunities that resulted in layoffs (e.g., dot com bubble, downsizing) or other dead ends. 4) I worked a full-time job, a part-time job, and went to trade school part-time. Then, 9-11 hit, and my area of the country went into a deep recession. 5) Most friends were struggling themselves, and their leases don't allow long-term guests or people not on the lease to stay with them. 6) People with money don't want to hire homeless people to house-sit, pet-sit, or do odd jobs for them--get real. 

And then there's age discrimination:

"Older workers are at a particular disadvantage," says Joseph Carbone, president and CEO of the Bridgeport, Conn., jobs development group The WorkPlace. “If you’re 50 or older, you face an almost impenetrable wall of discrimination,” he says. “Companies have a very narrow view of what they want. When you walk into an interview with a lot of gray hair, it’s usually over very quickly.”  -- Time Magazine

So to my critics, taking contract jobs that paid better, not going into debt, not doing drugs or alcohol, living in an area that wasn't expensive when I first moved there, and then not having enough money to leave when it did get pricey, on top of aging out of the workforce, are all my personal failings, and why I deserve to be homeless.

But it's not just people like me they blame. Homeless families are on the rise, and those rugged individualist critics are the first to ask, "Why did you have kids if you can't afford them?" Answer: No one had a crystal ball when the kids were born years ago to foresee that the bankers would destroy the economy, and the government would abet their crime by letting thousands lose their homes to foreclosure. 

This is now the brutal reality:

“Americans raised at the top and bottom of the income ladder are likely to remain there themselves as adults. Forty-three percent of those who start in the bottom are stuck there as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle quintile. Only 4 percent of adults raised in the bottom make it all the way to the top, showing that the “rags-to-riches” story is more often found in Hollywood than in reality.”

 -- Forbes Magazine

Some people just need you to draw a picture. Here's the graph of the relationship of employee wages to after-tax corporate profits:

Source: https://twitter.com/rortybomb/status/930928492992221184

And finally, there's 34Justice's detailed account of how policymakers (such as Paul Ryan) use a structured playbook to justify dunking on the poor to serve the rich. Here's an excerpt:

3) Imply that poor people’s personal failings are what’s holding them back. You can’t pull off the enlightened nice-guy routine if you’re blaming poor people for their problems outright. So you need to do it subtly: say that what we really need is worker training and programs that encourage people to work (again, who’s going to be against that?). Never mind that there’s little actual evidence of a “skills gap” and that most people who can work already do. People are predisposed to believe that our success relative to those less fortunate is a result of our superior work ethic and talents (rather than a product of race, class, gender, and/or other forms of privilege and sheer dumb luck). The more you tap into that predisposition, the more people will oppose downward redistribution and support imposing burdensome requirements on the Have Nots instead.

And there you have it: blame the victim for their plight, so you don't have to actually do anything to address their legitimate grievances.

Fourth Time's a Charm -- Status Update & Vox article

Thanks for visiting!

Vox.com has published an article of mine that updates many things since I wrote the book back in Spring, 2013. 

For the ONPA award-winning article about me and the book from 2013, visit here: 
http://www.dailytidings.com/article/20130201/NEWS02/302010303 

--VH

PS--I've gotten so many emails and messages of support from so many wonderful people--THANK YOU! It may take awhile, but I promise I will reply to every single person who wrote as soon as I can. I'm packing to get ready to move out, so my time (and internet connection) is limited. Thanks for your understanding. :)

Staggering Numbers About San Francisco's Homeless Population

71% of San Francisco's homeless population used to be housed residents in the city.

• http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php
• http://www.sfexaminer.com/despite-help-homeless-population-increases/
• https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San%20Francisco%20Homeless%20Count%20%20Report_0.pdf
• http://www.48hills.org/2016/02/16/five-myths-about-the-homeless-problem-in-san-francisco/

That's nothing short of unbelievable.

From the article in the last bullet point above:

The vast majority of the people who are homeless today used to be housed – in San Francisco. According to the city’s 2015 homeless count, 71 percent of the people on the streets were living in San Francisco when they lost their housing. That means seven out of ten homeless people used to be your neighbors – before the tech boom and the eviction epidemic. Those are, to a significant extent, people who are homeless not because they did anything wrong but because they aren’t rich enough to live in Ed Lee’s San Francisco.

Let the Fast Food CEO's Try to Survive on Their Worker's Wages!

A truly depressing story from PBS thoroughly illustrates the absolute struggle of one fast-food working mother of seven who tries to get by on $8 an hour. An excerpt:

"Over the past several months, activists and some fast-food workers, including Shenita, have been organizing for higher wages. They point out that, like Shenita, almost 40 percent of all fast-food workers are 25 or older, and more than 25 percent are raising children. It's not just teenagers flipping burgers part-time."

And what is the response of many commenters on the story? Generally one of two things:

• It is not the responsibility of companies to pay a living wage.
• Don't have kids if you can't afford them.

So there you have it. The ideas that the whole reason people work is so they can afford to live unassisted is lost on many people, as is the idea that it's wrong-headed that only rich people should have kids. Any wonder the problems aren't being addressed, let alone solved?

Voltaire got it right: "The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."

Happy Labor Day! American Wages Are Flatter & Lower Than a Decade Ago in Spite of Increased Productivity!

The International Business Times has noted that American workers' wages are flat and in some cases, lower over the last 13 years, in spite of increased productivity. Not to mention that more than 1 in 5 Americans have zero or negative net worth.  

It's not like the reasons are a secret. The cause of the problem is articulated perfectly by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute:

"Policy makers should be viewing broad-based wage growth and the quality of jobs as the lens through which they view economic policy. Right now, economic policy is focused on promoting high consumption and low prices, which lead economic growth to be dependent on cyclical asset bubbles and precipitous accumulation of personal debt."

Critics argue that higher wages for workers means inflation and a higher cost of living, but as you can see from the Times article:

"Groups like the CATO Institute say that the key to economic prosperity is to freeze or eliminate the federal minimum wage rather than increase it -- because they claim higher wages leads poorer people to lose their jobs as companies seek to offset payroll rises. But if stagnant and lower wages are the key to economic prosperity, then the U.S. economy has had more than a decade to prove that.

It hasn’t."

So on this Labor Day, take a look at the short animation fact presentation from the EPI, and understand why all those fast-food workers are striking. And think about what YOU will do this upcoming year to improve your economic standing in a system completely rigged against you.

Hopeful Farm Part 2: Organic Produce Donated to Local Food Banks

In 2012 when I moved back to Oregon, I lived on a farm and had grown organic produce and donated most of it to local food banks. Then, due to job loss, I had to leave the farm and live in my car. 

Back in December, 2012, when it was 22 degrees outside (and inside my car, since I had no heat), the last thing I was thinking about was farming. But time and circumstances were fortunate to me, and the place I moved to after I secured a job was...on a farm!

My generous Kickstarter backers had given me enough of a boost to make it happen; you can read about the preliminaries here: http://www.carliving.org/2013/01/hopeful-farm-2013-all-produce-to-be.html

People come to look at the vegetable garden and are amazed. It was a lot of work only in the sense of the setup/layout--once you have everything structured and arranged, it's easy to maintain each year thereafter if you keep the same setup. I do not have any agricultural training or any kind of green thumb. You literally mulch and compost, put the plants in the ground and water them, and Nature takes over without your help.

Here are some before and after photos:

From the start, expenses HAD to be kept to a shoestring. I could not afford fertilizer, and refused to use bug spray, so I mulched and composted weekly. I was lucky, because the property owner is a landscaper by trade, so he always brought in an endless supply of leaves and grass clippings. This eliminated the need for weeding, as I would never garden if I had to spend any serious amount of time weeding. I think I maybe pulled one weed a week out of the garden, and that was because I was bored. Usually I just dumped more mulch on top of the very few weeds I did see, and that took care of the problem.

The most fortunate part of all was that the property is not only on a well, but it also has flood irrigation rights. This project would have been IMPOSSIBLE if I had to rely on city water, as the cost would have been prohibitive.

The seed had been saved from the farm the previous year, or had been bought years prior, and stored in my storage unit over the dreadful, homeless winter. A little (such as the corn) was purchased from Territorial Seed Company here in Oregon. A neighbor gave me a lot of year-old seed packets as well, for things such as spinach and cilantro. I also raided his chicken coop over the winter for chicken manure as well. I did have to purchase a couple of sprinklers and nozzles, as the ones on site were broken or slated for other use.

Most of the farm equipment such as hoses and hand tools were already on site, or had been given to the property owner over the season. At one point, he scored an extra wheelbarrow and metal cart for hauling! A new home was built down the street from the farm, so there was lots of fill dirt for compost, plastic sheeting, buckets and cardboard (weed barrier) free for the hauling. New home construction waste is a gardener's best friend!

So far, over 125 pounds of organic produce from the farm has been donated to local food banks such as ACCESS Medford, Talent Food Bank, and Ashland Emergency Food Bank. Donations included cucumbers, corn, beans, hot peppers, swiss chard, parsley, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, celery, basil, green onions and a few bell peppers. The bulk of the winter squash, giant heirloom tomatoes, regular tomatoes, more hot peppers and most of the bell peppers have not ripened yet, so there's plenty more on the way when they do.

Box of produce and bag of lettuce being prepped for delivery to the Ashland Food Bank

Almost 50 pounds of produce donated to AEFB in a single week! That's prolific!

Everything wasn't a total success though. The bok choy and cauliflower bolted from the July 100+ degree weather, and the Brussels sprouts never happened. I still have some January King cabbage waiting for the first frost in about a month and a half.

Right now, the ground is being prepared with tillage/cover crop radishes for next season. A limited amount of lettuce, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and snow peas will be grown for fall/winter donation until the weather kills them. I would like to work on a coldframe or greenouse to grow for the food banks overwinter, when demand for fresh, organic vegetables is highest.

But even though I'm not homeless anymore, any day I could have to leave again due to a volatile employment situation just like last year, and start all over somewhere else. That's the very real risk when you don't own the place you live. You don't want to invest in greenhouses and infrastructure, only to have to abandon it. 

So for now, I'll see what the fall and winter brings, and work with what I have.

Meanwhile, check out the Plant a Row for the Hungry program from the Garden Writers Association. They were the inspiration behind my first-ever garden in 2005--when the program was little-known and barely 3 years old--and still are today. From their website:

"Since 1995, over 16 million pounds of produce providing over 60 million meals have been donated by American gardeners. All this has been achieved without government subsidy or bureaucratic red tape — just people helping people.

Launched in 1995, Plant A Row is a public service program of the Garden Writers Association and the GWA Foundation. Garden writers are asked to encourage their readers/listeners to plant an extra row of produce each year and donate their surplus to local food banks, soup kitchens and service organizations to help feed America’s hungry.

There are over 84 million households with a yard or garden in the U.S. If every gardener plants one extra row of vegetables and donates their surplus to local food agencies and soup kitchens, a significant impact can be made on reducing hunger."

Top 5 Car Living Expenses That Will Rapidly Deplete Your Savings

The fact that you're living in your car means you're already on thin ice and on the brink financially. One major financial blow and you're practically done for. These are the top 5 expenses that can push you over the edge. If you're fortunate enough to be able to plan for them before you begin car living, it's to your considerable advantage.

1. Gas and car insurance. Unfortunately, gas is creeping very close to $4 a gallon in the U.S. for the forseeable future. Car insurance, luckily, can be paid monthly in small amounts, or in advance for a discount. Remember, if your car gets towed because you don't have insurance, you're homeless and on the streets.
2. Laundromats. If you can find a friend or family member who is willing to let you do your laundry for free, you'll save the $5-$10 weekly cost of trying to keep things clean. Try to purchase laundry supplies from dollar stores, or buy them on sale in stores rather than at the laundromat, where the cost is excessive.
3. Medical bills or vet bills. Of course anyone can go to the emergency room for something dire, but if you are diabetic or have another chronic condition, medical expenses can eat you alive. Many cities have free clinics where medical needs can be addressed for free or nearly free. The catch is, you have to wait for the scheduled day they serve the public, or make an appointment, prolonging the time until your medical problem can be addressed. If your state has public health insurance, see if you can enroll prior to becoming homeless. Many of them have very long waiting lists, so the sooner you apply, the better.
4. Equipment. This includes items like heaters in the winter, and solar fans in the summer. Or a decent sleeping bag.
5. Unforeseen expenses. This is a huge category, that can include car repairs, money for a motel room during extreme weather, or police tickets for speeding, parking or vagrancy.

You'll have enough planned expenses to have to pay for (gym membership, storage), let alone have to scrape up the cash to handle emergencies. Thinking ahead helps a lot, but luck, unfortunately, which you can't control, will also play a major role.

The Right to a Living Wage - Follow This Washington D.C. vs. Wal-Mart Saga

Finally! Some city somewhere with the stones to stand up to Wal-Mart! According to the Washington Post, the Washington, D.C., city council has passed a living wage measure called the Large Retailer Accountability Act. 

"D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city. 

The retail giant had linked the future of at least three planned stores in the District to the proposal. But its ultimatum did not change any legislators’ minds. The 8 to 5 roll call matched the outcome of an earlier vote on the matter, taken before Wal-Mart’s warning.

'The question here is a living wage; it’s not whether Wal-Mart comes or stays,” said council member Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large), a lead backer of the legislation, who added that the city did not need to kowtow to threats. “We’re at a point where we don’t need retailers. Retailers need us.'” 

Details include:

"...Wage and benefit provisions represent a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage of $8.25 [to $12.50/hr]. The requirement would be applicable to retailers with yearly corporate sales of $1 billion or more operating out of spaces of 75,000 square feet or more, with an exception for companies with unionized workforces."

So naturally, the Mayor is being lobbied to veto it at the behest of:

"...Republican Party, the National Retail Federation and the American Antitrust Institute, all of which released letters or statements urging [Mayor] Gray to exercise his veto."

And Wal-Mart, of course, is painting itself as the victim. Doesn't everyone know by now that profits matter more than people being able to make ends meet?:

"Wal-Mart is adamant that it can’t pay a minimum wage of $12.50 but also says that it pays an average retail employee wage of $12.67 nationwide. Also, under the bill, it’s actually a wage rate, which means benefits would be included, and the wage would likely be lower. It seems Wal-Mart didn’t want to set a precedent for jurisdictions nationwide that might consider doing something similar. After all, if this thing metastasized, it could end up costing the company billions in profit."

And of course, the naysayers claim that minimum wage is better than unemployment. Of course, they ALWAYS say stupid things like that, because they don't have to live on minimum wage (like many people do) to survive. That race to the bottom is so complete these days it's sick. This opinion piece on the D.C. Wal-Mart matter shows how truly awful the race for the few crumbs available has become.

Ralph Nader, ever on the side of workers, wrote an excellent commentary on the matter for Huffington Post that demolishes the claims against paying the workers a living wage.

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UPDATE 7/16/13 - Lest anyone think I'm just bashing Wal-Mart, here's a sad-but-true article from the Atlantic about how "McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive On Minimum Wage." It shows a financial planning guide McDonald's made for its workers, in which the company accidentally illustrates precisely how impossible it is to scrape by making minimum wage. The final paragraph of the very brief article is most telling:

"Of course, minimum wage workers aren't really entirely on their own, especially if they have children. There are programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit to help them along. But that's sort of the point. When large companies make profits by paying their workers unlivable wages, we end up subsidizing their bottom lines."