"A woman living under the crawl space of an Airbnb that she cleaned... At what point can we say the American dream has become a nightmare?"
"It’s mathematically impossible to pull yourself out of homelessness without help... It’s not the moral failing of the people who are unhoused; it’s the moral failing of this country."
Julie Akins, senior housing director at AllCare Health, journalist, and former mayor of Ashland, #Oregon
@Toastie "He wound up working at Taco Bell, but he can only work a certain number of hours. Because if he gets over a threshold, then he no longer is qualified for Medicaid. And without Medicaid, he couldn’t afford his anti-seizure medicine. The way we have it set up, you kind of have to stay in poverty if you have an illness." Sigh.
@Toastie This is a valid concern. But we've always had homeless. Even in the era of the Great Depression, amid all that poverty, you didn't have homeless defecating in the sidewalks or performing lewd acts on street corners. Why have the homeless also become institutional cases?
@caffetiel@Toastie I'm not convinced you're actually asking in good faith nor am I going to doxx myself by going into detail. The jist of it is that I started by selling candy bars, saved up enough money to obtain and rent a storage unit, slept in that shithole for months on end while I worked shitty fast food and telemarketing jobs, and built enough work experience to get a quote-unquote "real" job, wherein I was able to rent a room. It is possible, depending on where you are.
@me_valentijn@pinkdrunkenelephants@caffetiel Or maybe it shows the system's working as intended? It opens another pathway to prison labor. Unpaid labor keeps the empire churning, and fear keeps the human capital laboring.
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