Haves and Have Nots

The gap between the Haves and Have Nots has never been as wide and binary as it is today. It’s all Haves and Have Nots, and hardly any “Have Little”s. There is a harsh and razor-edged dividing line between people in society who fall below the line of “being able to sustain”, and those on the other side whose basic Maslow’s needs are met.

Much of the country (and honestly much of the world’s population) are very much gripped in the lifestyle of desperation, fighting to be on the surviving side of that razor divide every day.

Berkely, CA refactoring

By choosing to live out of a car, eating at only the cheapest taquerias, and doing mostly only free activities with your spare time, you are going to be much closer to the world of the Have Nots whether or not you are actually one yourself.

You may even find yourself from time to time in scenarios that put you fully in the shoes of a Have Not, when the simplest thing like trying to locate a decent public bathroom or a safe place to park and sleep can turn into a big episodic struggle.

fig. 1

I am comfortable without even looking at the national data (Los Angeles sample data fig. 1) to make the claim for certain that it has gotten worse for the Have Nots, everywhere in this country in just the last decade. This was confirmed with my own eyes by revisiting many of the same places several years apart over a span of two decades.

Year over year, there seems to be more desperate people whose basic needs are not being met, with no clear path of how to get them met. As someone who largely grew up on the street (skateboarding) and has seen lots of crazy street shit go down, I honestly couldn’t believe the state of a lot of America I saw this year.

Austin, Texas

Humanitarian conditions are declining. Drastically and notably, not just a little. Places that I visited in 2008 that had small bum camps under every overpass now had entire block-length shanty encampments on public sidewalks, constructed of shopping carts, tarps, and tents.

In these hot spots for the displaced people that live there there is constant drug abuse, violence, filthy trash and human waste engulfing some entire streets. Basically every town over 20 thousand or so seems to have a street life problem to various extents, and in most cities over 200 thousand population or so, I can find for you places where the conditions exceed UN crisis zones from the third world.

I am a homeless rights advocate but I’m not using this platform to say I have any proposed solutions to these problems. I only mean to share the realities I have seen: that more and more people are getting pushed into the ranks of desperation, year over year.

I saw approximately 100 people a week living on the street in RVs, pickup trucks, vans, and even compact cars. A decade before in some of these same places I had visited on band tours I was on, I’d estimate it was half that amount.