A new ‘solution’ to student homelessness: a parking lot where students can sleep safely in their cars

One of the most humane solutions is also the most economically efficient. Early intervention programs like rent/utility assistance are significantly cheaper in the long run than trying to rehabilitate people who have already lost everything and have a litany of health issues because of it. If conservatives really want to save money, they should be embracing "an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure." Instead, they're stuck in wanting to SEE the desperation before even considering helping. Safety nets are major economic stimulus in the long run because it's much easier to attempt entrepeneurship if you aren't making a life and death gamble. But something tells me the currently wealthy know this and don't want competition popping up.

Then of course we also need to fix affordability issues, because unaffordable necessities put everyone at risk.

My point is that even if you mostly just care about efficient government and economic growth, you should still come to similar conclusions as "bleeding heart liberals." Conservatives don't come to those conclusions not by economic arguments, but because they fail to see the merit of collective problem solving. They want to have their own little castle with all their stuff that they can defend under penalty of death. We pretend the argument is about feasability and cost effectiveness, but the real issue is that they don't think that any proposal that would take anything from them or require giving is an option. That's why you see the economically destitute and ultra wealthy in an unholy alliance. Both of those groups are prone to wanting to circle the wagons and consider only the wellbeing of people in their little circle -- the poor out of desperation, and the wealthy out of possessiveness. Everyone not in their little circle is someone else's problem.

It's not a solution, but as someone who slept in her car in a college parking lot because her father got pissed at her being around his house while queer, it's better than we'd had. I was afraid I would get in trouble for sleeping like that. Mind you, the main reason I couldn't sleep that night was that it was really fucking cold and it's really hard to sleep in a car.

Housing first is the best solution, but we also need humane solutions for short term homelessness. The "I left in the middle of the night and need a few days to get my bearings because things could go any humber of ways" type stuff. Shelters are so intimidating and have a reputation for being hostile to those that need them.

My college had a food bank, and as I think of this, they really could've had a shelter for students as well. Just a few dorm rooms done simple with literature on resources where if you need to stay there a few days you can. Instead I wasn't allowed to sleep on a student's couch for more than two consecutive nights.

That last paragraph hits really close to home for me. I'm like super privileged currently, but have been homeless while I was going to college. Sleeping in my car or any friend who would let me crash on their couch or closet floor. It really sucks and it's taxing physically & mentally.

Like a small jail cell would've been preferable to my car on cold nights. And yet I see so many people that have never experienced it properly claim that people need to earn it to feel better about themselves. Like fucking no they don't Trevor! Tell you what, you go try and sleep in the cold for a few nights and tell me how productive you are the next day!

You are totally correct, but there is something else: There are limits to everybodies agency. If you're somewhere in a college administration, you can't reroute those AI billions into housing for students. That's not going to happen. But you can try to help struggling students with the tools and powers you have and if it's a parking lot where they can sleep without fear that robbers or police will harass them, that's good! If you find a way to give leftover food from the cafeteria to hungry students, that's also great - even if there shouldn't be hungry students at all.

This college doesn’t have the power to fix homelessness at the societal level, but they did have the power to do this. It’s a pretty awesome story.

10 homes that are each 100 times larger than the average home.

FTFY

Maybe they can finally pay off their school lunch dept

You don't even have to abolish rent. There are giant predatory companies, small local landlords that got lucky with their timing, and everything in between. They're getting money for doing nothing, and aren't going to start contributing to society just because they have to be less wealthy for no effort! Slash rents now to get people homes, and implement rent control and price ceilings.

College costs are ridiculous.

Student loans are extortionate.

The ROI on the investment is shitty. IOW you get an expensive degree for a job field that doesn’t pay enough to pay for the degree and living expenses.

There’s a big social media anti-college push. Don’t know whether that’s politically motivated/propaganda, just get rich being a tiktokker or something, or a combination of that and all of the above.

they can't afford it and a college education no longer guarantees you a good wage outside of very specialized and difficult fields of study.

in the 1990s you could major in English and walk off to a 40K job. You maybe had 5-10K in college debt. in the 2020s you major in English and you're lucky to get a job that pays you 30K a year, if you can find one at all. Your debt is more like 20-40K. This is pretty much true of other majors as well, even basic technical ones.

Meanwhile the COL from the 90s has tripled or quadrupled. So your purchasing power is even effectively been dropped to like 1/6 of what it was in the 90s.

Boys are being fed that college degrees are useless, and women are starting to attend college at slightly higher rates. From a realistic perspective, the costs are just crazy.

If I were a kid today, I’d totally go to vet school in Europe.

The millennial generation was called the echo boom generation because it is significantly larger than Gens X & Z. There was also a massive expansion in the percentage of millennials going to college over previous generations.

So millennials were the largest generation and had high college rates that Gen Z can't match.

Because in earlier schooling they never learned the difference between “fewer” (used with a noun that can be counted) and “less” (used with noun treated as a mass or volume or level)

Don't call it a crisis, sell it as a new hip lifestyle on social media! #vanlife

We have sunk to the point where living in your car is an acceptable living option, and the government would rather have that, than address the basic problem of housing affordability.

To exacerbate the issue, many communities and states are "banning" and criminalizing homelessness, arresting people for the crime of being so poor you can't afford any sort of roof.

The beatings will continue until we learn to enjoy it.

Paraphrasing a quote I head years ago: Americans will always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities.

Rofl send money to jungle Mexicans or prevent students being homeless.....

Well put. It's in no way the solution, but any progress at the local level, given the little funding they're provided, is better than waiting for foundational changes that aren't close to being implemented. These programs are clearly helping at-need students and are at least attempting to give them a better chance of succeeding in their goals.

time to organize. be a revolutionary optimist, and NOT give in to counterrevolutionary doom and gloom. seriously!

yeah this is their solution. not the 'least worst stopgap while we build student affordable housing', this is it.

What a time to be alive.

They already do. Paid parking is a thing in pretty much every city in America. In many places, parking lots are wildly profitable. Each parking spot can often earn upwards of $50 per hour during surges.

Paid parking lots in Dallas average somewhere around $8 per hour. That’s with some people paying like $30 for three hours, or $60 for all-day parking. Assuming a ~50% occupancy (busy during the day, emptier overnight) will have a 100 spot lot taking home around $9600 per day.

That’s a number that many coffee shops and convenience stores could only dream of… And the lot doesn’t even need to worry about things like maintaining inventory or hiring cashiers. Their overhead costs are basically nonexistent. They just plop a sign with a QR code at the entrance for people with Apple/Google Pay, and have an automated card reader for the people who don’t have phones. A pair of minimum wage attendants can watch multiple lots in a few city blocks, golf carting between them every ~20 minutes as they make the rounds to scan license plates and make sure people are paid up. Maybe give the attendant who calls in the most tows an extra vacation day each quarter to keep them “motivated”.

Security cameras make limiting your security liability easy. Hell, in many cases tow truck companies will even pay the owner to be allowed to tow from their lots. Because the tow company makes money every single time they snag a car, so they’ll pay a percentage of that to be allowed to tow cars from their lots. So towing enforcement actually makes you money instead of being an expense.

They already do this? Where do you live with free parking?

A parking spot makes more than I do...

www.nbcboston.com/news/local/absolutely-ludicrous-beacon-hill-parking-space-selling-for-750k/3658162/

Honestly, a Japanese-style capsule hotel and net cafe would probably do very well in a university environment.

Granted, that's still charging people for homelessness, which doesn't help any of the underlying problems. It's just slightly less dystopian since it's cheap.

At least it's something. I had multiple friends in college 15 years ago that were homeless and lived out of their cars. They went to classes every day, did tutoring, hung out with other people in the student centers, and whatnot like everyone else. Pretty sure it's common for all colleges. People just don't talk about it so a lot of people have no idea.

The american dream is still alive: enterprising young men can pull themselves up by the bootstraps, purchase an abandoned lot with their inheritance, and turn it into an affordable housing lot for struggling college students!

And after a few years, they can have a flashy exit when they sell their lot to a private equity firm for big bucks!

And with close access to free paper printing to make such incredible decorations with.
Paper curtains, paper quilts, and my homework was used for those paper coasters.

Won't anybody think of the investors!

River access costs extra

I often sleep in my car while traveling for work. It doesn't make sense to pay $100 plus, when I'm only going to be in it for 6 hours.

I ALWAYS park in a rest area or a truck stop, and I've never had an issue.

I know many people who worked in the capital but lived outside of it and, since traffic makes it basically impossible to get into the city between 8 and 9am, they would arrive at ~7 and just nap for an hour or two in their cars. I can't, for the life of me, even fathom why that would be wrong in the eyes of a copper. Truly ACAB.

The difference here is choice. I have slept in my car on road trips. These people are sleeping in cars because they can't afford housing. If that doesn't concern you - it should.

I mean yeah, the poverty line is unrealistically low. It’s tied to the average annual price of food, even though food is not a major expense in most impoverished households. Truly broke people are spending like five dollars a day on food, with beans, rice, lentils, bouillon, spices, and whatever else they happen to have available/find on sale in a 20 year old crockpot. Food is a negligible expense when you take the time to prep, and truly impoverished people don’t have a choice. They’re forced to prep, or else they’ll starve.

The other costs, like rent, car payments, utilities, etc., have all massively ballooned in comparison to the price of food. Rent only used to account for ~20% of expenses, but now it often accounts for over 50%… But since the poverty line is tied directly to food, it hasn’t adjusted to maintain a realistic measure of expenses.

Not in the long term, because owning a house is not free. The houses would fall apart after a few years without money for maintenance, repairs or upgrades. Any expenses that come with house ownership are paid by rent. My parents own their house that was build maybe 120 years ago, and every 10 years or so there is some expensive bill because something needs modernisation or repairs like roof, windows, plumbing, power, facade, wet basement, heating, ...

A beater car is still probably cheaper than an apartment. Also, you can't drive your slummy apartment away if you don't like the scene wherever it is, nor can it transport you to work. It's also some modicum of space wherein you can lock up what stuff you do own.

If I were placed under the terms of some very specific curse where I had to choose explicitly between a car and a house, I'm sorry to say I would be forced to choose my car. Actually, if I had my druthers I would probably pick my truck over my car, because despite its impracticality for daily transportation it's big enough to live in semi-comfortably as kind of a mini RV and would also allow me to store and transport some tools and stuff. (It'd also be much easier to use my truck to make money than a car, in some manner of hypothetical sudden destitution scenario.)

If you aren't an American, it may be difficult to understand.

Many cities here are very sprawled out and designed for cars, and therefore they're necessary for economic survival, perhaps more so than a home.

You can easily buy a used car for less than two months rent around here. Less if you shop around for a deal. That car provides transportation, shelter, and does not need to be repurchased every month.

A lot of homeless in America are people who had a decent paying job and lost it. So, they had some material wealth before becoming homeless and this could have included a car. At that point, people may prioritize the car because it provides transportation and shelter while the home only provides shelter. It is also likely that the car is cheaper than an apartment.

There are also a growing class of people who live out of their car and migrate across country during the year. A lot of these people are retired or have some disability insurance, want to travel, and see being alone on BLM land as preferable to living in a dying rust belt town.

It's america. If you didn't have a car you couldn't go anywhere. In many places this is literally true in all but a very select and completely unaffordable zip codes