Black doctor in Miami handcuffed for testing the homeless for Covid-19

As one of the homeless people in Los Angleles county, I can say we've been left out to die as Covid-19 struck.  Most businesses and buildings we homeless people depended on for basic thing like bathrooms (fairly important!), places to hang out, power, wifi, etc, have been closed.  Yes, this is for a bigger purpose, we get that, but the closures were a huge hit to the already highly vulnerable homeless populations across the country. 

The silver lining is that places like homeless shelters, where many people are living in tight quarters, have become literal death traps.  Going into a homeless shelter right now (mid-April 2020), ANYWHERE, there's nearly 100% chance of coming in contact with someone who has the virus.  This is made worse by the fact that virtually no one seems to be testing the homeless populations for the virus.  Hell, 34,000+ people have died, roughly 675,000 Americans are are were sick with Covid-19, and the U.S. has only tested 1% of the national population.  The catastrophic failure of the Trump administration in this pandemic is an epic fail for the ages. 

Into this context, we have this report, of a doctor in Miami being handcuffed for testing homeless people for Covid-19.  Strange days indeed...

Affordibility Crisis: A major underlying reason for the huge rise in homelessness

A tarp-covered homeless person's camp in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles, with luxury towers being built in the background, in downtown L.A..  I shot this photo from the Blue Line train, which runs from downtown Long Beach, through Compton, Watts, and South Central L.A., to downtown Los Angeles.  Steve Emig photo.

The Atlantic has a new article, "The Great Affordability Crisis," which chronicles the financial elephant in the room in today's "soaring" economy.  The vast majority of people can barely afford to live a "normal" life.  When catastrophic medical bills, or some other unplanned event, hits them financially, many people go quickly into a crisis mode.  If they can't quickly recover, some wind up homeless. 

While the stock market may be hitting new highs, the financial markets have detached from the everyday, "real world" economy, in our current world.  They even mention this divergence in the business media, like CNBC, from time to time.  This can best be termed a fragility in most people's "personal economy."  The vast majority of people deal with historically high levels of housing costs, enormous student loan debt, historically high medical expenses, historically high child care expenses, and then, car loan debt, credit card debt, and maybe mortgage debt.  The vast majority of us know this because of our own struggles, but as this article points out, this goes unmentioned in most written and televised talk about the "economy." 

This struggle to afford basic life expenses is one of the biggest underlying causes for today's huge growth in the amount of homeless people in major cities.  We can't "solve the homeless crisis" long term, without dealing with this underlying issue: the majority of our population can barely afford to live.

L.A. County Supervisors looking at the $400 million a year agency overseeing the homeless issue

In this February 12th, 2020  news report, the L.A. County Supervisors are looking to rethink, and possibly restructure the organization developed to deal with homelessness.  The agency, LAHSA, over sees $400 million a year, was created in 1993, and yet homelessness continues to increase. 

In today's world, homelessness is a major demographic problem, huge numbers of people in our society gets into situations where they can no longer afford to live a "normal life."  Once you're in any type of homeless situation, and there are many different levels of homelessness, it's hard to get back on track.  I know, I've struggled with it for years. 

Homeless shelters themselves are an idea from 80-90 years ago, when only a tiny percentage of people became homeless, and largely for personal issues.  In today's world, it's a completely different situation, our society is getting harder and harder to survive in for people working low or medium wage jobs.  There are a whole series of large scale, long term trends involved.  Traditional homeless shelters aren't not a serious way to really address today's huge number of people struggling financially.  The underlying issue is how to help tens of thousands of people make some kind of decent living again, so they can afford housing, or how to care for the huge number of older people with serious health issues, who can't work anymore.  Homeless shelters don't really address either of these underlying issues. 

Panhandling signs as humor and folk art

My all time favorite panhandling sign is the guy with the "checks no longer accepted from these people" sign.  But the guy with no legs and the sign saying "I'll kick you in the head" is pretty close. 

What can a homeless person give to all of you in normal society?  As a homeless panhandler back in 2007, I realized there is one thing.  Sometimes, as a panhandler, you can give a complete stranger a laugh.  When I used to panhandle with different funny signs every day, years ago, I actually had regular commuters who would pull up and thank me.  "Dude, I don't have a dollar today, but you make me laugh every freakin' day on the way home, thanks."  I got that kind of comment regularly.  Have you ever tried to make complete strangers laugh with a few words on a cardboard sign?  It's not as easy as you think.  

Talk smack all you want, but what pathetic little annoyance were you complaining about before you watched this video, of people who sleep outside, and still took the time to try to make someone laugh?  Stop whining.  It could be worse. 

Just when you lose faith in humanity, a strip club comes to the rescue...

Tents are one of the many things homeless people need to survive, day to day.  I don't so an issue with the logo when you're helping the homeless with no strings attached.  Most "help" to homeless people has all kinds of strings attached, and often a slew of ulterior motives.  Like many have said, this is a complex issue. 

The Return of the World's #1 Blogger on Homelessness and Panhandling

Homeless person sleeping on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, near Hollywood and Highland, in late 2019, Hollywood, California.  Photo by Steve Emig.

From about 2009 to late 2012, I published a blog, jokingly titled Make Money Panhandling, that became the #1 blog in the world on the subjects of panhandling and homelessness.  In its life the blog got about 65,000 page views, and the highlight was being contacted by John Stossel's TV producer to aid in their research for one hour John Stossel show called "Freeloaders."   John Stossel himself dressed down as a homeless person and panhandled for the show.  According to his research, GE (aka General Electric) was the biggest "freeloader" in the U.S.. 

I began blogging seriously in late 2008, after begin forced out of Southern California, and moving in with my parents in the small town of Kernersville, California.  I was unable to get any job in Kernersville at that time when the economy was collapsing, or at any time in the ten years I was trapped in North Carolina.  The job market is that bad there, compounded by the tradition of Southern cronyism.  I was massively depressed, but for the first time in my life I had unfettered access to a computer with an internet connection.  I started "surfing the web" nightly, as we said back then.  Within a couple of weeks, I started blogging about my days riding and working in the BMX freestyle industry in the 1980's.  Much to my surprise, I soon gained a small following, and began to reconnect online to old friends from that world.  My blog soon became the #1 Old School BMX freestyle blog in the world, mostly by default. 

After about a year of blogging, just for something to do, while living in a place where there was nothing for me to do, I got an email from a friend.  "You know," they said, "Some people actually make a living blogging."  I honestly didn't know.  I had been a Luddite all through the 2000's, a time when I was mostly working as a taxi driver in Orange County, California.  My aversion to technology is part of why I became homeless in Orange County.  As a taxi driver, working 80+ hours every week, I still couldn't afford to rent a regular apartment.  So I lived in my taxi for about 4 1/2 years.  I took showers at a gym, and rented a "cheap" motel room one night a week, to catch up on sleep, and take a night off.  I worked 7 days a week, like that, as the taxi industry quickly went downhill.

It wasn't Uber and Lyft that put me out of business, it was the technological shift from CB radio-based dispatching to computer-based dispatching.  Much like the millions of factory workers laid off in the 1980's and 1990's due to new technology and outsourcing, I lost my living because I didn't pay attention to th emarch of new technology.  I became fully homeless in late 2007, lived on the streets for a year, and was forced to move to North Carolina, where my family wound up living at the time.

While I was busy blogging in the evenings, mostly as a creative outlet, I didn't pay much attention to the blogging subculture of the day.  Once tipped off that some bloggers made a living at it, I realized that I needed to learn how to be a professional writer in today's hyper-connected, tech heavy world.  Everything had changed since I was a BMX magazine writer 23 years earlier.  I began the long process of trying to weed through the B.S. of the "make money online" ideas, and see if there was a viable way to make a living without being a scammer or spammer.  That process ultimately led to using my blogs to help sell the unique Sharpie artwork I create, while working to add other new media income sources to the mix.  That process continues today.

Early on, in 2009, I learned of the concept of search engine optimization, or SEO, which is basically the techniques used to get your website, whatever kind of website it is, up to the top of the Google (and other) search results.  To learn that process, I needed a website to practice on.  I wanted to use a challenging title, something with the words "make money" in the title, because that was a hard niche to excel in.  I thought one night, "What it the absolute stupidest blog title I can think of with "make money" in it?  Having been homeless on and off for 5+ years at that point, the name "Make Money Panhandling" popped in my head.  So I started a blog with that title, just as a way to practice SEO techniques.  Within two weeks, my blog was near the top of Google search results.  More importantly, I realized that I had a lot of thoughts and ideas about homelessness and panhandling that I wanted to get out into the world.  I kept writing blog posts, I kept posting photos of funny panhandling signs, and the blog gained a decent readership.  Some readers were homeless people.  But most turned out to be people working with the homeless in some way, and the occasional media person doing research, like John Stossel's producer. 

In late 2012, shortly after my dad's death, I got really depressed.  It wasn't so much from him dying, he had diabetes for years, and eventually had a bad stroke, and died a few months later.  We knew he wouldn't be with us much longer.  But my own inability to find any job, literally I couldn't get hied for anything, except taxi driving, in North Carolina, that weighed on me heavily.  During that period of severe depression, I deleted all my blogs, BMX, panhandling, and other ideas I had tried, from the internet.  "Make Money Panhandling," by that time, had been solidly locked in the top spot in Google and Bing search results for 2 1/2 years, and was the leading blog on homelessness in the world during its whole lifetime. 

Lat night, I went to a meeting about the homeless problem in Newport Beach, California, where I'm living (for a short time, most likely).  In the years I was back East, in North Carolina, the number of homeless people in Southern California, and across the country, has exploded.  Sitting and listening at the meeting, and knowing what I know, both firsthand, and from researching and writing about homelessness years ago, I realized that ignorance of today's world of homelessness, and lack of understanding, is still one of the main issues in homelessness.  So I'm back, with another sarcastically titled blog, to shed some light, and share information, on this issue.  Sorry powers at be, you haven't killed me yet.  Heh, heh, heh.

-Steve Emig, January 9th, 2020

You can check out my personal blog at:
Steve Emig: The White Bear
And my blog about starting and promoting a creative-based small business in today's world, at:
WPOS Kreative Ideas