If you are old enough and savvy enough to brave and survive the streets, you do not need to be molly-coddled by people who have never known how to take care of anyone but a child. Children are people who cannot make up their own mind, who require help to survive the basic tasks, and who would not survive without the help of an adult. SURVIVE.

I believe that the KEY THING to solving homelessness issues is to offer a person a form of living that they can accept with DIGNITY. This means that the shelter must be both modest enough so it doesn’t leave a person of dignity to a great debt that they will never be able to pay off, and, it must be private enough to not make a person of dignity feel… undignified.

I, personally, am not homeless, but I am surviving on the kindness and patience of others. Every month, I receive more help that I feel comfortable receiving. This is what I would like people to know: To a person who is not concerned about the grandiosity of their living circumstances, to someone who is willing to live through the lowest of means in order to avoid the rat race, the last thing you need to worry about is the size of their dwelling, or how “normal” it looks.

What a humble person, (humble in the most honorable of meanings, not “shamed” but proudly humble person,) needs, is a short list of basics:

• Privacy. One’s own access to their own home.
• Freedom to come and go as they please.
• Nobody to monitor who they entertain at their own home.
• Enough space to sit, sleep, cook, and shower. (That doesn’t take much space.)
• A good, sturdy door, with a lock and a mailslot. Not an indoor room door, but a proper apartment door.
• A chance to give back – not a requirement, but an option with no guilt or expectation attached. (Such as a chance to help to build another little house.)
• An insanely low rent (or a chance to buy the house) rather than completely free boarding to make it an actual home. Somewhere between $20-$50 dollars a week, paid as you can, when you can, with no hassle if your rent is due, but a record to keep count. (The house in the link cost $8000 to build. Design a kit to do something similar in bulk out of new materials, take away the truck, and you might keep the price around that mark or even drop it. At $20 a week, this home would be paid for in under 8 years. Will somebody please check my maths – could it be?!)

That’s all. What they do NOT need is:

• A requirement to see a shrink in return for the apartment, but an opportunity to do so would be good.
• A requirement to see a drug counselor, but an opportunity to do so would be good.
• A curfew. (These are not children.)
• A moral sermon about the kinds of people they need or need not to associate with (if you can’t tolerate these people and their associates, do not attempt to “help” them. They know more about true friendship than most of you care to dream about, or they know about true loneliness, so don’t even dare to tell them who to hang out with.)
• Bible showed down their throats. An opportunity to study would be nice.
• You telling them how to think. An opportunity to discuss your beliefs would be nice.

The attempt to force a person to conform to expectations laid out for them by someone else is the very reason why they took to the streets in the first place. Your inability to understand how these people think about freedom of choice is the reason why they chose such an extreme solution as to live on the streets.

Now, I understand that there are people who lost everything through an unforeseeable hardship in life, and these people are MORE THAN WILLING to gather the pieces of their lives and get back to society, but they are not the problem. The problem are the people who PREFER a life on the streets to your idiotic rules of getting up at 9 am and going to bed at 11 pm, for no other reason but “that’s what normal people do”. When someone doesn’t CARE about your opinion of them and their form of living, it is completely futile to attempt to force them to. (THIS problem stems from the Normal Person* trying to solve a Savants* thinking problem.)

All we need is to build a few basic apartment buildings or individual small homes on paid private property for people who are sick and tired of being told what to do.

Hell. I’d take a spot in one of those to avoid the bullshit I have to go through for my social security check.

Who should do this?

I could perhaps, start collecting money for this purpose and start some kind of a community project for it. However, my energy, at this stage is even better spent somewhere else. What I think this should be done by someone who is in the position of “making a few phone calls” set the ball running, someone, to whom this is not a great challenge of proving how much a little person can do to change things, but to whom, this is a snap of fingers.

We do not need to save the homeless for the purpose of little people feeling good about themselves for saving even smaller people, we need this problem fixed. It is nothing. It is a simple common sense to do it as quickly, as swiftly and with as little fuss as possible. This doesn’t need to be a great fight against homelessness when it could be just a common sense idea to end homelessness for good and perhaps to change the way we think about housing in general. (Renovate an old apartment building by dividing it to small cabin-sized apartments and make those apartments well designed and livable. Make enough of them in your area and you’ll drop the housing prices. Let the people whose ego hangs on the square footage of their dwelling pay the big bucks for their places.)

Perhaps a building company should do this. The freaking social media attention alone would make it a profitable idea. (No, do not give them away, it takes away from the possibility of OWNING a home, just give people an opportunity to live awesomely!) I’ve spent my entire life in apartments too big for me wondering what the hell am I using all this money for to pay for space I do not want nor need. (Granted. A workshop would be nice.)

There are plenty of people out there who are in the position of making a HUGE difference with a relatively small effort for them, all it requires is doing business with the great unwashed. 😉

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