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.
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