Helplessly (Homelessly) Hoping

Hat tip to ol’ David Crosby of CSN who died this week and sung the tune Helplessly Hoping with his bandmates. 

(Interesting sidebar, back in the day, Croz lived up in Marin and was buddies with one Jerry Garcia. In the spring of ‘69, the Grateful Dead, recording their classic album American Beauty, and CSN recording their classic album Deja Vu found themselves in next door sound booths. Looking to spice up their tune Teach Your Children Well, Croz went next door and asked Jerry if he’d like to play pedal steel guitar on the track. Despite only having played the instrument for a few months, Jerry said yes, and in one take, improvised that classic opening that you can’t imagine the song without) 

#nowyouknowtherestofthestory

***

This is a reflection on Home. Who gets to call it that, who gets to keep it, and who doesn't have one. Now, and in the nearing future. 

I was on a call a little while back with a bunch of interesting academics and business leaders, including Whole Foods founder John Mackey. At the time, Austin, like many progressive cities was in the throes of a homeless crisis run amok. Folks sleeping (and peeing) in downtown business stoops. Tent shanties under every overpass. Needles on the sidewalks. Tweakers in the bushes.

An increasingly familiar story, from Seattle, Washington to Burlington, Vermont. 

John (as he often does) had a strong opinion on how to cure this problem. He suggested that all we needed were some economic deregulation zones. Loosen overly demanding building codes, taxes and zoning to allow truly affordable housing and let the power of the market fix the issue. He even cited the good old days in the 60's when he lived for $40/month in rickety flophouses, 8 to a bunkroom as an example of what we'd lost, but needed to bring back.

I respect John and his thinking, so my first thought was to search for real world examples where we could compare over/under-regulated urban areas and see if the under-regulated ones had in fact, fixed homelessness.

Now, these were just my first thoughts mind you, so careful readers, feel free to respond with better examples. But I immediately thought of the super slums of Sao Paulo in Brazil, or Bangalore India. Or Lagos, or Cape Town or...any other totally unregulated shitshow megalopolis.

And really, none of them leapt to mind as paragons of public housing. So I remain under-convinced that it's simply the tax man and the permit office that are the root of this issue.

Interestingly, in that conversation, I noticed something else. When we were talking about homelessness, the placeholder term of "the homeless" remained remarkably un-interrogated.

In some basic way, "the homeless" still seemed to refer to a shorthand for “junkies, crazy bag ladies and Vietnam vets.” It was folks with substance abuse issues, mental health issues, PTSD or all three. However you sliced it, the phrase "the homeless" implied folks on the far fringes of society, all crippled by their inability to integrate into working society.

That struck me as increasingly out of touch with what's actually going on these days. 

More and more, "the homeless'' might include a single mother with kids and no child support, or retirees forced out of their homes by insane medical bills. Or veterans from more recent wars struggling with battle scars and skill sets the civilian world doesn't recognize.

In other words, formerly upstanding members of the working classes, kicked to the curb by an increasingly heartless system and patchy social safety net.

And it's reaching even higher up the socioeconomic ladder than that.

Go visit the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, only miles from the Googleplex, and you'll see rows upon rows of beater motorhomes, leveled on blocks, clearly intending to stay a while. Some of the residents fall into the categories we've just discussed, but a whole bunch don't. 

In fact, many of those RVs are now the "homes" of Silicon Valley's finest engineers. Graduate degrees, mid six-figure incomes, who simply got tired of spending 5-10K/month in rent to endure a three hour daily commute from Oakland. Who couldn't afford a $7M ranch house closer by.

When the winners of the meritocratic Hunger Games are getting bounced off the back of the bus, it should give the rest of us notice.

Move a little further up the coast to the famous houseboats of Sausalito, where Alan Watts, Gary Snyder and an epic roster of countercultural icons held court, and we see the same thing. Increasingly bougie town councils of Marin deciding that the eye sores, pollution and riff raff of those floating communities have to go. Police boats going as far as forcing evictions and sinking derelict boats all in the name of Public Safety. 

#propertyvaluesbeatcommunityvalues

Even Millennials and hipsters aren't immune. 

The rash of Instagram influencer #vanlife culture has thoroughly fucked up free camping across the American West for thousands of dedicated climbers, skiers and mountain bikers. What used to be a secret society with hard earned knowledge on the best spots to post up, has been overrun with Instagram geotags, and camping apps that create traffic jams the same way Waze does. 

Now, after being deluged by noisy, disrespectful van lifers crowding into suburban neighborhoods, or jamming up campgrounds and trailheads with their selfie sticks, mountain towns from Squamish in British Columbia to Joshua Tree in California are all locking their gates to keep the outsiders outside. 

It's like the Romany Gypsies and Celtic Travelers of Europe, with their horse drawn caravans replaced by Sprinter vans. Forever on the move, nowhere entirely welcome. What’s gonna happen when their Venmo and Starlink break down?

It’s a razor’s edge between Home Free and HomeLess.

The American dream isn't working for Americans anymore, nevermind those on its outskirts looking in.

Rise of the Displaced 📈 

A couple of weeks ago, the presidents of North America, Canada, US and Mexico all got together for a leadership summit. 

And the number one topic on their agenda? Migration. Caravans of 'em. Specifically from the South to the North, running straight through Mexico, over, under and around our little walls.

Same thing is happening in Western Europe, especially Germany and the Nordic states. Afghanis, Iraqis and Syrians, displaced by decades of violence, are making their way by land and sea into urban ghettos and enclaves wherever they can find a foothold. Mediterranean states like Greece and Italy are getting overrun by "boat people'' from North Africa and the Levant.

Reactionary right wing governments promising to beat back the unwashed hordes are on the rise everywhere that political and climate refugees show up.

Things are only going to intensify.

I was reading an ecology paper recently that mentioned for every additional 1 deg Celsius in temperature rise we should expect one billion displaced people!  

"In 2022, the # of forcibly displaced people exceeded 100 million, with climate change displacing more people than conflicts. For every deg of temp rise, a billion people will be displaced. Over the coming decade you will either be among them or receiving them." – Gaia Vince

That means we're all on the hook for this one. We'll either be knocking on someone else's door, asking for charity and hospitality, or we'll have others knocking on ours. 

Either way, we'd better get the kettle on for those three cups of tea. (the traditional welcome to strangers across most of the Middle East and Asia). They’re likely gonna stay a while.

As We’ve Always Done ♻️

This isn't in any way new.

Up until eleven thousand years the climate fluctuated by as much as ten degrees celsius every decade! That's utterly nuts. (for perspective, we're totally freaking out about two degrees change over this century)

And for the last ten thousand years, temp's completely flatlined, varying by only one degree over a hundred centuries. Even the "Little Ice Ages" of the 16th-18th century, complete with pictures of ice skating on the Thames of London, were barely blips on the long term thermometer. That utterly abnormal stability allowed us to try agriculture and stay put long enough to build cities, and invent things, like accountants, and taxes. And Twitter.

So how'd we survive before that Happy Holocene era kicked off? How did we actually do this monkeys-with-clothes thing for over 90% of our existence as anatomically modern humans?

We moved.

All the time.

Remember: 

No A/C.

No heating.

No puffy Canada Goose or MonTek down jackets.

So we went where the climate suited our clothes. We followed the herds and the seasons.  

As Jimmy Buffet used to croon, changes in latitude, changes in attitude.

So at least we've (still) got that going for us.

Worldly Citizens on the Run 🌍

The prospect of existential migration might freak out house-proud suburbanites, but Mexican farm workers already have their mobility game wired tight.

Starting spring picking season in Southern California and making their way northwards to the apple and berry orchards of the Pacific Northwest by the fall. Theirs is a highly attuned dance through the latitudes.

And really, it’s not so foreign as we might first think.

"Snow geese" retirees dodge Minnesota and Chicago winters and flock to Florida in their RVs, returning north when the beaches get too hot and muggy. 

Surfers, skiers and kiters, chase storms and swells from spot to spot around this spinning globe. It’s nice work if you can get it.

Migration of these sorts will only continue to pick up the pace. Voluntary, and not.

Just this week, insurance companies started pulling out of Louisiana, Florida (hurricanes and floods) and California (floods and fires). Once there's no easy money to be made on policies and FEMA and the federal government cease to backstop the enterprise, entire swaths of this country will become uninsurable/uninhabitable. Except by the very rich and extremely poor (see the above riff on the expanding demographics of American homelessness). 

But international migration will explode too. That's the stuff of "blood and soil" ethno-nationalist backlash, as well as complex humanitarian relief efforts, if we can manage them.

Kim Stanley Robinson, in his breakout book The Ministry for the Future envisioned a world where all displaced peoples had universal IDs and wealthy countries agreed to shoulder the burden proportionally. The recent book Nomad Century makes the non-fiction case for the same. So does London School of Economics Parag Khana’s Move: The Forces Uprooting Us . 

Neither climate nor weather respect lines penciled on maps. The steeper the pressure gradient between haves and have-nots, between food and famine, between war and peace, and the stronger the forces of movement become.

21st Century Migration is having a serious moment. And it’s not likely to fade away anytime soon. Better put the kettle on.

The Golden Rule 🤝

But to return to our initial examples in the beginning–the domestic homeless crisis in avowedly progressive cities like Seattle, Burlington, and Austin. 

After all, those homeless folks are "our people.” Fellow citizens, who speak the same language, who pray (or curse) to the same gods. People who had childhoods and lives, hopes and dreams, remarkably similar to ours, save for a few deeply unlucky breaks.

Even (especially?) in cities with liberal policies and voters who consider themselves compassionate and inclusive, it's incredibly hard to figure this out. And that’s with no cultural, religious or political barriers between us!

But figure it out, we absolutely must. Because "the homeless" no longer means those tragic folks too damaged to ever properly integrate into mainstream society. A group that we could conveniently marginalize and not think of too much, or too often.

Instead, it's going to require a deeper and more profound reckoning with citizenship, identity, and responsibility.  

As we saw at COP27, the international conversation has shifted dramatically from "if we all act now, we can still avoid the worst!" to "it's too late, so (Global North) you better damn-well stump up and pay us (Global South) for the oil soaked mess you've made." 

So this really is a moment to revive some sense of humility and sacred hospitality. The kind where if a stranger knocked on your door, no matter how poor you might have been, how hungry your own children were, you welcomed them in from the storm. You offered them shelter and sustenance. Three cups of tea.

Not because you wanted to. Not because you had enough yourself. But because it was a sacred burden to treat the stranger as you would wish to be treated.

Our myths echo this. How many faerie tales or spiritual fables begin with a wise wizard or saint, disguised as a beggar, testing the seekers to see if they still honored their duty to welcome the stranger? 

Checking to see if the hero was pure enough of heart to recognize in the least of their brothers and sisters the same spark of humanity in themselves.

"If you do not see God in the eyes of the next person you meet," suggested Gandhi, "look no further."

So while during this Nomad Century to come, more and more of us may be wandering far and wide, none of us need look any further to find home. It’s right here, on this third stone from the sun.

It’s right here, in the eyes of the next person we meet.

J