Chat

      Every senior in Esteban's class had to have a chat with the college counselor before graduation, and Esteban's was that morning right at 9:00. It started at 9:15, and Mrs. Sweeney was waiting with that weird little smile, like she was holding back a torrent of things she actually had to saw behind it she dared not say, or was having trouble how she would approach.

     "Esteban. You have no applied to any four-year colleges."
     "No."
     "Will you be taking community college in the fall?"
     "Yes."
     "Have you already registered?"
     "No."
     "What do you plan to do with your life. I mean, in an ideal world. What will you do?"
     Get high? he thought to say, but that would not be received well.

     "I don't know, ma'am. I have some things to figure out, but I'll take a couple classes. I was thinking, I might do aircraft technician. A cousin of mine did that he's making good money now."
     "You know, Esteban, I see quite a bit more potential for you than aircraft technician. I look at your grades and your scores. You could have applied to State, at least. Heck, you could have gotten into several schools, I think, if you had tried."
     "Maybe. But, you know, my family needs me here."
     "State is out by the mall."

     "I know that."
     "You telling me you can't get to Stonestown."
     "I could get there."
     "It's okay. You want to take your time. But you ought to know, sometimes you think in your head, well, I could do that tomorrow, and I could do that tomorrow, and then sometimes many years pass by that way, and you're your father's age now and you realize, I never did it, and now I can't do it."

    "But what would change?" Esteban said. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Sweeney."
    "Why should you be sorry, young man? What can change? Well, I want to tell you about some changes that have happened to society, just since I started being a college counselor here. Computers. When I first got here, everything we did was typewritten and filed away by hand. Now we have computers and the internet, and you know, I don't think any of that is going away."
    "No, I guess not."
    "Things can change, and they can change rapidly, and if you are not a part of the society that is adaptable, well, guess what, society is going to change without you."

    She leaned in while she said this, hoping for more of a reaction, but instead Esteban shrugged.

    "Well, anyway," Mrs. Sweeney said.

In the Still of Night

     The Excelsior District of San Francisco is piled high. It is loaded with cars, it is loaded with trash, it is loaded with dogs, it is loaded with people. People are sometimes passed out on the street. Sometimes they are dead. Sometimes they have been murdered. Competition is fierce, for parking, for space, and, more than anything, for quiet, which it can never perfectly produce.

     But in a city where it is difficult to own a home, being able to rent a place that a whole family can live in requires making some sacrifices, and the biggest and most important sacrifice is being thrown on the pile of things and dogs and people.

     This morning, when Rafael walked to his car, there was an eerie calm of cold night. The steady hum of the freeway not far off and thunk thunk even at a distance of car after car going over the joining piece between the overpass and the regular roadway. He closed and locked the door behind him, thinking of his wife and two small girls left by themselves in the morning and the crackheads sure to be prowling just behind and under the veneer of suburban-style calm.

     But work required leaving that world behind, and hoping things could survive until morning, or that his son could protect them if someone came to their door.

     And then, as he drove down Alemany to 19th Ave, the dense compacted neighborhoods fell away and were replaced by Parkside and the Sunset, with their nicely spaced streets and quiet homes. Some homeless people slept in parks or ambled down the street on their way back into Golden Gate Park, but they lacked the menace of their Excelsior counterparts. They were out, but they were not dangerous.

     Just then the dawn started to break and the perfect calm of morning in the Richmond District was at hand, with its deep chill in the shadows and intense warmness of sun.

     He walked briskly from parking to the market, where a truck was unloading already and Santos was standing in front with Mr. Drummel, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

     "Good morning," he said cheerfully.

     "Rafael," Santos said gruffly. "How are you today?"

     He walked in the back door and up the stairs to the office, where he punched his time card and threw on the green apron and grabbed a handtruck.

     What a wonderful little ritual they had crafted together, of coming to that serene calm of morning and having a mountain of things to go through to make a perfect little store.

     

      

A Typical Day

     The alarm went off at 5:55 AM every morning, and boy, it never got any easier to meet it with anything other than disdain. Candy would struggle to get up, and most days see that it was 6:15 or even 6:20 and have to bolt out of bed. She had to put some clothes on and make sure she didn't look like a total mess before being out the door at 6:40, even though she really had to be out the door by 6:35 to catch the 6:42 bus. That 6:42 bus she almost always, then, ended up missing. The next bus was supposed to come at 6:50 but it usually came at 6:55 instead, or even sometimes after 7:00. That gave Candy literally three minutes to get to run from the bus stop to her class, which started at 8.

     She had classes most morning from 8 until 2, though some days she only had class from 8 to 10 or sometimes 11. Those days she would have to rush to get back on the bus to make her shift at the restaurant, where she was a hostess. She was always, always, always late. Habitually terribly, horribly late. She'd been told at least a dozen times that she was going to stop being scheduled unless she could show up on time, but it was literally impossible with public transport to be on time.

     She usually worked either 12-4 or 4-10 or even 11 sometimes. She'd been told about a hundred times that eventually she'd made it to the tables. Eventually she'd be a waitress, but she was starting to suspect she was being tricked. She made minimum wage plus a tipout from the wait staff and bartender, but it was very little, sometimes as little as $7, and never more than $25. She knew full well that the waitresses could walk away with over $100 on a similar shift, and, if they worked all day, would walk away with several hundred dollars, plus the minimum wage.

     She'd been told that it would be her turn, eventually, she had to stick with it, but she got the feeling her lateness was going to be used as an excuse why she couldn't be move to the tables. They were going to punish her for being broke and not being able to call a cab when she really, really had to call one to be on time.

     And so, after all of that, she'd get back home sometimes as late as midnight, depending on things, and lie awake, too caffeinated, waiting desperately to get what little sleep she could, so much homework she never had to time to do somehow needing to be accomplished, and, dear God, the utter broke-ness. The terrible lack of a few dollars to be able to just, eat.

     And somehow she was supposed to keep going, keep doing this day in and day out, and let people live on her labor, and treat her like nobody and not pay her, and if she lashed out, if they stopped for a second, well that would be her fault.

     You know, it would be wonderful if Candy could isolate what was keeping her down. She was being kept down by an educational system that did not allow her to focus on school, and a restaurant industry that inequitably distributed the benefits of working, and individuals that made the inequities worse through their selfishness, but she blamed Hispanic people. It shouldn't be like that, but, sometimes, that just how people assign blame for the whole system. They blame non-White people, and when she looked around, at the people she saw as in her way, they all appeared to her to be Hispanic. The kids who got a free ride at school, the kids who made good tip money instead of just wages, got the best shifts, got the best days off, were treated as valuable despite less work.

     But an inequitable system and timing were the blame only, for those Hispanic people were simply in the jobs which went unwanted in previous times, in times before White people had to work those jobs, in times when Candy was still in high school or even before, when she was a child. They had been toiling in those jobs, living as Candy had lived, or really even worse, for many years, before being treated as human, and they had gotten into supervisory or even management positions, not by merit, but, at the time, for lack of anyone else to do it. And once they became entrenched, well, they had come to be seen as indispensable.

     Candy was not interested in all those details. All she knew was that she could not eat, and she thought the reason she could not eat was because Hispanic people were in the way of her eating, so, the more she could not eat, the more racist she became. And, well, it wasn't hard to find other racist people to connect with, who reinforced her view that if not for Hispanic people, people like her would get a better deal.

     And every time that alarm went off, well, that added more evidence to the necessity of something being done. She began to think, something really, really needed to be done, and it did not involve politely asking for what she needed.

     

     

Being on the Street

     Morning is a godsend, but it is so hard to earn when you are on the street. So much of life is the stretched out fever dream of night, when being out is forbidden.

     Josh could hear the birds, could smell the grass, and despite his terrible headache and overall body ache, he felt the calmness of having survived another night. No matter how many times he did it, survival never seemed completely assured.

     After a time to get himself together, he made the trek as he always did outside the 16th and Geary Market to beg for his breakfast. There wasn't much panhandling business that early, but if he got his spot, he was unlikely to be challenged for it when the begging got better in the afternoon and evening.

     The owner of the business was a terror, but he seemed to give up on controlling Josh as long as he was a small distance away from the storefront. Like all trash, he gave up away from the property line.

     Josh thought a lot these days about the family he had left behind in Kansas. It has been some years, and most of the wounds, he thought, had probably healed. He'd need to get a job, sure, but he could get a job anytime he wanted it at the mill, and, well, he was resigned to the work by now.

     But it was hard to make that call, to tell his parents where he had been and what he had done, and to tell them that he was sorry he had run off in the first place, stealing all their cash and some jewelry to make his escape. Of course, they could possibly have a warrant out for his arrest, and he could be returning to a state that would put him in prison/

     That thought really stopped him, but that seemed kind of unlikely to him.

     Days passed by like that, and weeks, and soon years, perhaps decades, he'd pass by thinking to himself, I'm going to make that call today. I'm going to make that call and escape this merry-go-round of alcohol and begging and finding a place to sleep.

     But, he never could, go ahead and do it.

     

Mr. D'Antoni

      Many years ago, when Mr. D'Antoni's grandfather was a very poor immigrant, he'd thought only of his business, which was the family delicatessen. But to get control of their business, they had to own the building it was in, and once they owned that building, the family began to snap up other properties on the block. It just made sense, at a certain point, to own the entire block, and no longer be in business of serving cold cuts and making sandwiches with them. His father learned the real estate business instead of the delicatessen business, and his son, the current Mr. D'Antoni, was now in charge of it.

     The sprawling real estate business covered quite a bit of the city, and owned directly or partially some $50 million worth of property. Not that any of that wealth was directly turned into ready cash. No, quite a bit of it was in under-performing commercial and residential properties, properties which sometimes cost more to operate than they brought in in rent. But, at the end of the day, making money from other people making money beat making money yourself, any day.

     Mr. D'Antoni liked to walk down the block a say, "hello" to everybody in his fine suits. Everybody liked him, just like they had liked his father. It was because he came from business owners, from renters. His family was not a family of landlords or aristocrats in the Old Country.

     He knew their struggles and the softness which was sometimes necessary to keep a good tenant in their home or their business from going under. He was probably too soft for his own good, but what could he do about that either? Being liked was good for his peace of mind. He didn't want to end an Ebenezer Scrooge.

     Politics, well, he'd thought about it, but the times had changed too quickly in the late sixties and early seventies. He was already too old, and not progressive enough for the city at that time. The people he knew in politics were being put out of office, and the people going in didn't want anything to do with people like him.

     So, now getting up into years, he took solace in what he still had. Property, money, comfort, homes in Napa and Hawaii. Money for nice cars and fine wines and black tie events. And that was good enough for him.

Mr. Drummel

     Felix Drummel had worked hard in his life. He'd come to America with about a hundred dollars, and parlayed that into a million dollar business. He'd worked for a lot of other people in that time, making them many times that.

     But he was always wary. He knew that it could all be taken from him in an instant. He'd been bankrupt before. He'd made bad decisions. He couldn't afford at this point in his life to be there again. He was too tired to build it all back up again from scratch this time around.

     Retirement. He and Alice talked about it a lot, but he didn't think he could get much for the business, certainly not enough to live on for thirty years or so, and then there was Damien's college to think about, plus what about if he found somebody? What if they had children? Where would be money to get Damien's life off the ground come from?
     When he thought about it, it just didn't seem possible. How was Damien going to start his life just as his parents were retiring? But Damien was kind of an afterthought. They'd done everything they intended to do before they had him.

     But Felix let himself get into magical thinking. We can pay for Damien's education. I have my business. We can pay for Damien to start something when he is older. I have my business. We can retire. I have my business. Everything would be solved by having his business. Never mind that Felix was approaching the age at which he physically was unable to do a good percentage of the job himself. Without Santos and Rafael, he was nothing. If they wanted more money, if they wanted a piece of his business, what could he realistically do? Damien was in no ways able to take everything over from him. He had a tough enough job just showing up every so often and sitting in the office playing video games on the computer.

     There was only one saving grace, and that was the obvious tenuous legal status of his employees. Of course, that put Felix himself in a tenuous legal situation, because he couldn't say, at this point, that he didn't know his employees didn't have legal status to work in the United States of America. I mean, he paid them in envelopes of cash, for God's sake. But he'd never been called on it. No, he'd never once ever had anybody say anything about it.

     So, there it all was. It made him tired to think about, because it was a damn house of cards. But it kept chugging along, somehow. People wanted to get their goodies and employees wanted to get their money, and somehow it all worked. No one was unhappy, except the cashier girls that worked underneath his wife. They would never last more than a couple of months.

     But, wow, Felix was tired. He was sixty-two years old now, and he felt every minute of that age. Could he really do this when he was seventy? Seventy-five? No, he would either quit it or he would die from it.

     And the way his ticker felt, he thought it could go either way.   

Damien

     When your dad is the boss, things are a bit different for you. Like you don't have to work nearly as hard to get into a position of power over people. Your dad says you are, therefore you are. Also, you can get paid what you ought to, immediately, not when someone else says so, but right away.

     But that's his right. It's his business. Damien thought it was only right for the business to benefit the family. And if there were grumblings, which he knew there were, hey, they could get another job somewhere else. No one was holding them hostage. Damien had a right to a piece of his father's business, more so than the Mexicans working for him did. They probably didn't have any real right to be working in America in the first place.

     But then, it wasn't as if even Santos was perfect, despite how he presented himself. He had gotten lazy with age; he could leave on a lunch break and come back two hours later as if nothing happened. If you looked at the punch cards, someone, probably Rafael, had punched him back in right at the 30-minute mark. Daniel had never caught him red-handed, but just knowing that opened up a window to him. There was probably a million other things he was doing he ought not to be.

     And then there was Rafael. My God. That guy was a mess. Daniel's friend who worked at Whole Foods was working on a way higher level than that guy, and his friend made some $12 an hour, while Rafael made $15! Daniel wanted to tell his dad, tell him how he was being taken advantage of, but he knew what his dad would say.

     Santos has been with me for a long time. Rafael has been with me for a long time. And if Daniel said anything more, his father would get angry, and go outside and smoke his cigarettes to show his anger at being confronted over anything having to do with the running of his business.

     But hey, even Daniel could admit he didn't want to run the store full time anytime soon. No, he wanted to go to a four-year college and play soccer collegiately. Join a fraternity and maybe get an MBA after school. He wanted to go to a school like Arizona. Get a good degree but also have a good time doing it. He wasn't into birkenstocked women and poetry circles.

     And yeah, Daniel did think of his dad as being a little bit of a simpleton. A guy that needed someone to tell him what to do. The reality was, he'd done well for himself. Daniel had everything he ever wanted. Maybe his dad knew what he was doing, and Daniel should just leave well enough alone.

Santos

     To say Santos struggled when he got to America would be incredibly kind to his situation. He didn't have more than eight or nine dollars in his pocket in 1985 when he came to San Francisco at the age of 17. A friend in America fronted the $800 necessary to get him to America and get him a place to stay, which was a crowded hotel in the Tenderloin.

     He was terribly abused as he worked to pay off his debt, and several times prayed to get enough money in his hands to return him, but he didn't. He worked and somehow he persevered through those times to get to the other side. He got a girlfriend, and his girlfriend become his wife, and his wife got pregnant and had his children, and they kept moving up, from a cramped studio to a one bedroom, to a two-bedroom, to a three-bedroom and now, their dream, they were going to move into a whole house of their own.

     He didn't talk about his past much. To talk about it was to make it real, was to make all the villains who had sought to destroy him for a little bit more money real, all the people that had spit on him because he was Guatemalan. He was an American now. He had a house and two and a half kids. One of them was starting college in the fall and had a job. Working with him in a grocery store, but still, work. He was working.

     And Santos had wandered into a dream situation. He had come to Mr. Drummel as an out-of-work guy with a one-bedroom he could barely afford and two small children. Now he was Mr. Drummel's right-hand man, running the store alongside of him and making almost $20 an hour. Yeah, Mr. Drummel could be alright, but Santos had made it happen, had made himself indispensable, and had made the store money.

     In the meantime, Santos' wife, Lili, had gotten a degree as a medical assistant and was working full-time herself. They'd done well for themselves. The only thing they hadn't accomplished was to have a business of their own, but Santos was sure that would come, too. As long as he kept his head down and worked hard, he would be rewarded, in time.

Esteban

      The first day of work is always kind of a scary thing. You learn from the outset just how much effort is required to be thought well of so that you can earn money. Physically, it hurts. But, ultimately, it's doable, and it takes only a couple short weeks to be earning real money, money you can use to buy real things.

     Santos made absolutely sure that his son started on the bottom, working the load in the morning during breaks from school; on weekends facing and stocking into the night. He didn't want anybody to say that his son hadn't earned the right to be respected.

     But of course, people were kind to Esteban from the start. They wanted to like him because they respected his dad.

     Esteban was going to graduate from high school soon, and he was going to go to State in the fall. In the meantime, he had to earn some money because his dad was about to buy a house in the suburbs, and he wanted to move into a place with his friends. His dad told him to stay close to home, to help the family out and maybe, one day have that house for his own family, but he wasn't that hard on his son because he wanted his son to have what his friends had.

     And then, his family closed the deal on the house and Esteban was literally without a home in the city for a couple months. He had to stay with his tia Berenisa in Bernal Heights so he could finish school, promising to move out in July. They told him, no rush, but the space was kind of tight and his tio seemed perpetually annoyed at Esteban's presence.

     So he just kept plugging away at work, trying to keep his head down like his father. Work, forget the years, and hope you wake up one day with all your dreams having come true. It had worked for his father, assuming that his father wanted to work until he was seventy.

     And he tried not to have any needs.   

The Moreno Family

      Rafael Moreno just did his job, nothing else. Well, he wasn't all that good at his job, but he showed up on time, he did just enough, he was respectful enough about his shortcomings to survive them, and goofed off at just the right times and just the right ways to not suffer the consequences of it.

     His wife was good with the family money, and always made sure there was something left over after every month. Their savings was growing, even as their family expanded. In five or six years, well, they might have enough to think about owning a home, though Rafael wasn't really sure he wanted to live outside the city bubble, with its work aplenty and public childcare options.

    The neighborhood was dangerous, yes, that was the thing they couldn't change, the kids had to stay home most of the time, yes, they could go out only when they could all go out, and that's why probably, when they time came, they would leave the city bubble, and go out into the suburbs, where the children could run free.

    Rafael just did his job, nothing else.

    He had worked for 16th and Geary Market for Mr. Drummel for many years now, had gotten himself a more than full-time job with reasonable pay and even a decent schedule, getting Sundays and most holidays off. He had never asked for it, Mr. Drummel had just given him more and more of what he wanted the longer he had worked there without any hiccups in his employment.

    Hey, no one was giving Rafael employee of the month. He never sought to learn enough English to help many customers. When you got right down to it, he was pretty lazy. If Mr. Drummel or his buddy Santos didn't tell him to, he'd leave the old stock and just stock the new delivery, right on top of the old product, too, if no one was checking. Yeah, if the store was left to him, it wouldn't function, but, if someone was watching him and directing him, well, he could do enough to be useful.

    And, over the course of time, he learned enough commands to be directed to do the whole job, even though he could never self-direct to do the job himself. But then, he never aspired to run things himself. If this job didn't last, well, then he'd go find another one, and if that didn't last, well, he'd go find another one, and he'd learn to do enough to survive for a good while, and may survive long enough to get treated better just by default, and that was the most he worried about his professional life.

     And not worrying made the rest of his life kind of wonderful.

 

Samuel and Candy

     Why do you wake up every morning, and how can you go to sleep at night? That was a question for the ages, and one for Samuel and Candy more than a lot of other people.

     They had a place, yes, a small place, a place that was not big enough to weather their constant struggles to get along. Their rent was $1,235 a month, but they were lucky to to make that sum as they did working part-time jobs which required full-time commuting. Samuel's checks averaged $450 for two weeks and Candy's about $400. So, yes, there was technically a little more than $500 a month to spend on other things.

     And yes, either of them could have gotten another part-time job, though they were more interested in finding other jobs that might pay more and give them full-time hours, or else pursue their hobbies and turn them into paying gigs someday, which, honestly, made a lot more sense than doubling down on jobs that were working for their employers but not really so much for them.

     And yes, some couples don't mind the struggle, in fact they get stronger for it. They find ways to bond and connect that don't involve spending money, and they take their small jollies in what they can. But that was not Samuel and Candy. Both of them liked to spend money, and they fought over who got to spend their money, and the more they felt cheated by each other they more they hated each other, but neither one made enough to live without the other, nor would they have been able to agree who should get to keep their place and who should have to move out.

     Things were not all bad. Every other Friday, flush with cash, they would have a merry time. Saturday, still will some money in their pockets, they would have peace. But already by Sunday, that would be wearing thin, considered the week and a half ahead of them with nothing much to offer in the way of excitement, only hungry drudgery.

     And, you know, working alongside Candy and Samuel was not much fun, because of how little joy life gave to them. No, working alongside of them was terrible for all their coworkers. Riding alongside of them was terrible for everyone around them. They were balls of hatred, and also racism, for they directed their hatred more and more against Blacks and Latinos, who, they thought, were getting free money and were stealing from folks like them. 

     The longer and more pronounced the couple's growing debts, the stronger their hatred and prejudice grew: the credit card and college loan debt, their debts to each other, both real and imagined, and the debt of a life devoted to working to not getting enough to survive and even that little being taken by having lived in the first place.

     Both of them would lie awake at night, usually not in a loving embrace, wondering what to do. How to improve things or, mostly, how to get rid of the other. Whether that other was people that weren't like them, or people at work that wanted to hours they wanted, or each other, they stewed with hatred hoping for the day when they could get what seemed rather simple to give them: forty hours a week at reasonable pay--and rent that was more reasonably in line with what they earned. Just that, and most of their hatreds would have fallen away.

     Perhaps, even, their hatred for each other.

     And, it was funny for Candy to note, homeless people thought they had it good! Thought they were doing well! Just because they had the privilege of worrying about making rent. One more to throw on the pile of grievances!

Josh

     Josh had graduated high school with only one interest, and that was playing the guitar. Knowing in his heart that somehow there would be a path for him if he left his hometown in Kansas, he departed for San Francisco.

     He tried to do things the normal way. He got a job. He had a place. He paid his rent on time, and mostly in full, but he could never get along with the work-a-day world. In his heart, he just never felt like he belonged. And everything he was doing just never meshed with who he thought he'd be when he left his hometown.

     It was a woman that caused the final break with most polite society. This girl named Leslie he was seeing moved in with him after her housing situation had fallen apart. She made a lot of trouble with his roommates and then with him, before the rest of the house had decided to kick both of them out. For some reason, in the heat of the moment Josh had decided to leave, to go be with her, to crash at various places of friends they knew, and then ultimately to be on the street together. But for Leslie, it was different. She found places to stay. Josh just stayed on the street.

     And yeah, Josh had drank a lot, and continued to drink, but the drinking was caused by the being on the street more than the being on the street was caused by the drinking. Ultimately, he just didn't have the will to re-enter the world as he'd been living it before. There was too much struggle and heartache in working and putting together rent and having money leftover to eat. You could eat for free if you worked at it. But no one was offering a space to sleep for free. That was the whole trouble with things.

     The places that there were to sleep--shelters--well, they weren't safe. And even if they were safe, they were full of pests and disease. The street was honestly safer, excepting the threat of exposure, which was low but not non-existent in San Francisco.

     As the years went by, Josh grew to accept his fate: panhandle during the day and get what food he could, then turn the money into drink and find somewhere a little bit contained from the weather to drink himself to sleep so he could wake up and do it all over again. The only thing that complicated matters was, he was almost constantly in poor health, and he was constantly being chased by police, private security and store owners.

     What could have changed the outcome? Well, our society can't change, can it? We can't stop valuing the places in which we sleep. We can't allow for the places in which some people choose to sleep. For good reasons and bad, we do not accept the base need to people to have a little corner of the world that they can own without payment, which we demand be paid without equity given in many instances. 

     And, well, we've convinced a good amount of society to maintain this farce by working their entire lives to finally own a place of their own, so we can't just tell them, in the end, is was all a scam to bully up the value of the most of the land that is owned by very few, very well-connected type people. We can't just say, well, now that you've given your every effort and energy to a lie, and in some cases gone without food so you can pay for a roof over your head, well, as it turns out, it's just our decision about which society to have, a society where housing is a right, or a society where housing is a luxury.

     Some people will say, well, there would be nowhere to put everyone if housing was free, but there is open space practically everywhere, even close to cities and towns, and lots of it in rural areas. There is no plain necessity to declaring that housing must be what is strictly approved by city planning commissions and built by large housing conglomerates. That is a choice. A choice to have perfectly lined streets with selfsame two to three bedroom houses with yards and backyards and perfectly spaced schools and parks and other public buildings.

     This choice well, Josh didn't get to participate in it. Only people that own get to participate in the discussion about how space is used to house people, and that's why we always end up with spaces that are planned to retain the value of property and always end up reducing the amount of affordable, available housing. Even when new housing is created, somehow it always ends up bullying up the value of property, even though, by necessity, creating more housing must reduce the price of it. Is that not how supply and demand works?

     And, yeah, Josh isn't worth worrying about. If he had a place to call his own, would he "do much" with the opportunity? No. He'd trash that space just like he trashed everything else in his life. May even hasten his death by drinking. But what has protecting the value of property done, for most people? All these perfectly lined streets with everything perfectly coiffed is about equally useful to me as a person like Josh having some small space that's his own. And, there is at least a small possibility that, when given a little space, and little time to himself to not worry about being pushed around by police or private security he may begin to ponder why things have happened to him the way they have in life.

     And, you know, having some time to think about things, while it can't always change the outcome of things, is definitely necessary to change them at all, and that's what is robbed of people that are homeless or semi-homeless: the chance even it change their lives at all. Not by furthering their rent servitude, but by furthering their free time to think about things and think about how the future might be different than the present or the past.

     Josh had better just sleep on the street, since that was a better and more rational way of planning a city than accepting that some people who can't afford to live in them do. And, well, what can be said to all those people scammed out of the juiciest part of their working lives by landlords and banks? I wouldn't want to be the one to tell them that all along, that was just a decision about how to arrange things, a feeling about how a city should look, not a decision based on any actual necessity of running a city that way.