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November 21, 2007
by Paul Kemp
I saw something yesterday that keeps coming back to haunt me. Perhaps it was made more striking because I had just come from a large public library where I perused the out-of-town newspapers and national magazines for what clues they might hold as to where we're headed, as the American Empire tops the rollercoaster and begins its downward plunge.
One of the magazines was Vanity Fair, not one of my usual reads, but it had an article on the Kennedy royal family and another about Bob Dylan. As I thumbed through the magazine, I was struck by the number of full-page ads for fancy liquors and diamond encrusted watches, always featuring some extraoridinarily-beautiful teenaged model painted up to convey the sense that she will never work a day in her life and only need to show a particularly coveted luxury item to her beau(a New York hedge fund broker, no doubt) for it to be made available to her.
A modern-day Marie Antoinette, to be sure, whose date with the mobs of reality is not far in the future, if my reading of how big our financial fall will be is accurate.
Cue Dylan soundtrack: "Princess on the steeple with all the pretty people, they are drinking, thinkin' that they got it made. Exchanging all precious gifts and things - You better take your diamond ring, you better pawn it babe!"
Putting the magazine back on the rack and running for the bus, I had only a few moments before boarding in the growing cold of the Oregon Coast evening.
The usual crowd of working poor filed on and sat down, followed by a homeless woman with all her possessions including a thin sleeping bag bungied to a luggage cart wrapped in a cardboard box. She hand-carried a kitten in a carry-cage. She took a seat while the bus driver labored to secure her luggage dolly in the cargo area of the bus.
She sat behind me and seemed to be quietly recounting what was going on to her kitten. There was no smell of alcohol about her. I imagined she had come up from her encampment to the county seat to visit the welfare office perhaps. She had been on the bus I rode in on, as I recalled.
What sank in as we rode to the outskirts of town was that here was an apparently fairly normal middle-aged woman in the richest country in the world, who by some turn of fate lost her footing on the American Dream ladder and was about to spend another cold night alone in the woods on the Oregon Coast.
It is usually raining in November on the coast, but not tonight. Tonight it was merely a damp cold. Soon, another winter storm would blow through with howling winds of 100 or more miles per hour and the sideways rain that comes with it. And this poor woman would be living in the midst of it.
I believe it was the sharp juxtaposition of my Vanity Fair perusal in the comfortable warm library to experiencing vicariously a glimpse of what this homeless woman's life must be like that burned her image into my memory. Now, waking up in my cold writer's garret, I am still thinking of her.
Something my favorite candidate for the GOP nomination said brings this experience into focus. I don't recall his exact words, but he was pointing out how charity hospitals used to be the safety valve that allowed every member of our society to receive medical care at affordable prices - or free - back in the days before Medicaid/Medicare. Now the charity hospitals are gone, run out of business as our government took over all the burdens of our healthcare system and made them so much better. Or so we were told before the truth sank in.
Well, it's obvious (to me, anyway) that our growing reliance on government has done a similarly clumsy job of helping those whom, for whatever reason, can't afford to maintain a roof over their heads.
When I was a child, my mother used to take me along after church to visit poor people she had met through our church in downtown Miami. There were a variety of low-cost living options for people then, before slum clearance and gentrification leveled them, perhaps to make room for the empty luxury condos that were so recently the investment vehicle du jour for international real estate speculators.
Some of these cheap accomodations were termed "flophouses" and others were just inexpensive hotels where a person could pay by the week from the day-labor they could find or live frugally on a pension. But, I'm sure they're gone now in every town I've passed through - perhaps demolished so we could build another expansive cloverleaf for the new freeway that promises temporary relief for traffic gridlock.
My point in these recollections from the 1950s and early '60s is that even the poor then had someplace to live with a roof over their heads and modest modern conveniences. They weren't expected to live outdoors, exposed to the elements like animals.
Another memory from childhood was talk of "poor farms" in the rural South, though more properly called County Farms in other parts of the country. They were a working solution for those who, due to age/poverty/misfortune/bad planning would today find themselves homeless and/or impoverished.
For a quick glimpse of what these Poor Farms and County Farms were, visit www.poorhousestory.com/ They weren't a perfect solution, but they were far better than what we have now, which is no solution.
The County Farm was just what the name implied, a farm owned by the county that produced more than enough for the needs of its impoverished inhabitants. It was largely self-sufficient, once it was established! Those who could work, were expected to. Those too old or infirm were cared for. The surplus crops were sold to pay for necessities that couldn't be grown, like lantern fuel or medical items and care.
The key thing is that those who needed help had a place to live, meaningful work to do, nourishing food to eat, human social contacts, and medical care when it was required - all at minimal cost to society.
[It wasn't like today, where people stake out busy intersections or freeway on-ramps with a large sign detailing their plight, collecting money to be spent who knows how. At the County Farm, there was a degree of social accountability.]
In view of the fact that our modern wealthy society is not dealing effectively with the structural problems resulting from the off-shoring of so many high-paying American blue-collar jobs - only two or three generations after rural workers were lured off the farms by these same industrial jobs - I propose that we need to get busy bringing back something like the County Farm.
Whether it is placed on a foreclosed farm and staffed with the social workers who are already on the payroll, needs to be decided locally or at the state level. It may be something that the Salvation Army or church charities might want to take on, I don't know. I just know something needs to be done and merely throwing good money after bad is not solving the problem.
Although I haven't thoroughly researched the literature on homelessness, I have never heard anyone propose a partial solution like this for the growing problem. Perhaps it's because few homeless people vote.
(Article Continues Below)
Because there are several main subgroupings of homeless people, I expect there would need to be several differing types of "New County Farm" living situations. Those organized by entrepreneurs might cherry-pick the best workers or vets, with no major psychological problems. One the other end of the spectrum might be the charities and public agencies that are more qualified to work with those who have more need for supervision. There might be groups of friends that pool their resources to buy or lease a farm, then work together to make it profitable.
I follow the growth of the organic food business, where demand is growing at 17-20% per year, so I know that less than an acre of land can feed a family of four and provide some extra income. I'm talking about a small-scale, intensively cultivated boutique farm growing high-value items which are in demand in the local market and restaurants, in addition to what the residents need.
I have a hunch we're going to be seeing a lot more homeless as subprime mortgages, a souring economy, and returning traumatized Iraq/Afghan war vets all contibute to the number of Americans living on the streets. So, I'm just saying let's return to an approach of filling the needs of the homeless by using a system we know will work, instead of continuing to pay our tax money for a system that plainly is NOT working.
Our current system of extracting tax money from a declining work force to pay unemployed and homeless people to live, while they search for non-existent jobs in a shrinking labor market is a non-solution. It doesn't address the human need to make a useful contribution to sociey in return for the services they receive.
For the public to pay government agencies to catalog these homeless individuals in a jobless limbo is crazy when there are simple farm tasks they could perform that would turn a profit to pay for all their needs. More than simply feeding and housing them, a new improved County Farm would be a career that would never become obsolete, yielding meaning that is sorely lacking in modern urban life of the poor.
There may be an opportunity for entrepreneurs to create working farms, employing sound of mind, capable working men and women, left unemployed and homeless by the offshoring of their previous careers - or unemmployed construction workers in the wake of the collapse of the housing bubble. Perhaps the county could be persuaded to donate some rural land, provide some services, to make the arrangement pencil out. There is a need for more study on this; a need for a well-thought-out business plan that can be presented by non-profits and entepreneurs to county councils all over the country.
With the sponsorhip of local agencies, I believe a grant could be obtained from a regional or local foundation that would provide seed money, if necessary, to carry a demonstration project from concept to selling its crops to the public. Profits, after expenses and medical savings accounts for participants, could be shared among the workers of the new County Farms.
Perhaps residents of the farm could save a downpayment over time to be used in purchasing their own farms.
Two intersecting facts lend credence to the feasibility of using the county farm model to solve much of the current and predicted avalanche of homelessness. One is the current success of the "community supported agriculture" or market garden business model, in which people with no special talents can learn to grow and market organic produce on a quarter acre plot, sufficient to feed 85% of their family of four's needs and still generate an extra $10,000/year income in their spare time.
The other factor contributing to the success of what I call "Common Wealth Farms," (not Poor Farms) is the apparent reality of Peak Oil and the catastrophic changes it will wreak on our fossil fuel dependent society. Acording to author James Kunstler in his book "The Long Emergency", not only will the cost of transporting farm goods to our neighborhood markets become unsupportable as diesel prices rise due to growing worldwide demand and declining oil production, but - more importantly to agriculture - we will run out of natural gas sooner than we will run out of oil. Natural gas is the raw material for the fertilizers and pesticides that allow our present system of industrialized agriculture to function, while employing a mere 2% of our population. Reduced natural gas = very high prices for food. No natural gas will mean Americans will need to return to more labor-intensive ORGANIC farming methods, such as those used in the 1800s.
Kunstler's point is that Americans had better get ready for shortages of food and much higher prices in the stores. We are already seeing evidence that his analyis is accurate. Thanks once again to our all-seeing, beneficent federal government, which - in trying to throw a bone to voters in the corn belt - and show the general public they are doing something about cutting our dependence on imported oil (now that the Bush/Cheney administration has so ably sown chaos in the Middle East, raising prices at the pump in six years by more than 200%), the Feds are subsidizing the inefficient production of ethanol, while raising prices of many food items by 20% or more, so far. Brilliant!
Kunstler's conclusion is that the answer is for foresighted Americans to begin cutting their dependence on a predictably incompetent federal government and begin making provisions for their own families to be fed by a return to localized agriculture, using organic soil amendments and human or draft animal labor to make up for the loss of fossil fuels. From what I see, reading between the lines of tidbits of news the mass media feeds us, I believe Kunstler is only slightly ahead of the curve when he predicts that, "Farming will be the career of the future."
Weaving all these disparate elements and factoids together lends support to my hunch that there is both a solution to the homeless people's plight, as well as a rewarding and honorable mission for these displaced workers. All that is required is for the idea to take hold with entrepreneurs and non-profits across the country to demonstrate the concept's viability.
Small backyard farmers are making profits equivalent to $50 per hour worked NOW, according the Brett Markham, author of "Mini Farming for Self-Sufficiency." I contend that the demand for local organic (without fossil-fuel-based additives) food production will grow exponentially, as we see oil move beyond $100/barrel and increased cost of natural gas which is CRITICAL for our present massive agricultural productivity.
There is an opportunity to solve a part of the homeless problem, employ many of the unemployed, and fill the market's hunger for healthy organic foods grown locally.
It is apparent that our government at all levels doesn't offer a complete solution to the problem of homelessness, for all the money we give them. It is doubtful that, left to the government, all the homeless will ever be housed, much less employed productively.
The New County Farm model is a way to solve both problems (homelessness and unemployment/marginal employment), while providing needed food in the face of cost challenges for the oil-dependent agricultural industry.
What I envision here would be a modernized, more enlightened compact between workers and entrepreneurs who might set up one of these farms. The details would need to be hashed out with lawyers and business planners to create a format that would be beneficial for all involved in the transaction.
Perhaps it's time for us to return to the approach that worked so well before Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid seemed to render it obsolete: the County Farm. It could be that, enlightened by what we have learned about the superiority of free-market solutions, entrepreneurs will lead the way in showing the path back to a humanistic and sustainable way of living that will save a lot of Americans from the pitiful waste of talents that is the fate of our unemployed homeless population. We can hope and work for that end.
I'll let Dylan have the last chorus: "How does it feel? To be on your own, with no direction HOME, like a complete UNKNOWN, like a rolling stone?"
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I realize that homelessness is a complex problem, and not all caused by a dearth of job opportunities. Many of the homeless are dealing with mental illness and substance abuse issues that the average entrepreneur is not qualified to help. I suspect, though, that some of the situational discontent is a factor in driving those individuals to drink - the lack of a safe place to call one's own, the absence of a worthwhile purpose, an occupation that is well-rewarded and appreciated by your peers, can't help.
I have been kicking around the idea of a new, improved County Farm for a couple of years now. I've heard of no one doing anything like this, so if you know someone who is, please put them in touch with me. I'd like to hear about it. I'm planning a test of the model soon.
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Paul Kemp awoke to the realities of American politics as a Conscientious Objector and war resister during the Vietnam era. He is an entrepreneur and writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He welcomes feedback through his website, www.defending-your-retirement.com/
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