The Rich Trickle On Us

Everyone has their own way of relating how rich Bill Gates is. Bill Gates is so rich, he has half the money in Seattle. Bill Gates is so rich, he sleeps in a different room of his house every night of every decade. Bill Gates is so rich, when he wants something from the grocery store, he has it delivered. I mean, the store. Bill Gates is so rich he could buy most countries.

Bill Gates is so rich he won't buy a used country, preferring a new custom country built from scratch, somewhere between Lake Washington and Lanai. And, finally, Bill Gates is so rich that just his money alone would be all you'd need to end homelessness in America for what's left of the ten years before the great Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is finished and solves everything.

What would it look like if Bill Gates actually did use his wealth to relieve some homelessness around here, just in Seattle? We have fewer than 10,000 homeless people. Gates could get 10,000 cheap prefab homes. At wholesale prices they'd all put together cost him less than a billion. Another billion to buy the land to put them on, and Bill's ranking among the world's billionaires wouldn't slip by more than 1.

But all that assumes Bill would go about relieving homelessness the way ordinary humans would. It doesn't take into account the fact that, like all billionaires, Bill Gates is an alien from Horsehead Nebula.

To understand how Bill would try to relieve Seattle's homelessness, consider another billionaire, Genshiro Kawamoto, who is trying to relieve homelessness in Oahu.

Kawamoto, like Gates, likes to spend a lot of time in the Hawaiian Islands. In the 80s Kawamoto mixed business with pleasure and bought up a lot of property in Hawaii as investments, including a lot of mansions. Recently he got bit by the altruism bug and announced he was going to rent 8 of his pricey Kahala Avenue luxury homes to poor struggling Hawaiian native families, preferably homeless families, for $150 to $200 per month, utilities paid, for up to ten years.

Now that he's moving people in, he's saying he won't charge some of them rent at all. He's partially furnishing the places. To help you visualize the deal, we're talking about homes in the $2,000,000 to $10,000,000 range that either sit directly on a gorgeous tropical ocean beach or are at most a couple of hundred feet removed.

One of the recipients is a woman with five children who has been staying in a homeless shelter for the last four or five months. Her new home for the next ten years is worth $5,000,000. We can expect that altogether approximately 50 homeless or on-the-edge-of-homeless people will get luxury digs from Kawamoto, most of them children of single mothers. That's the bright side. Thank you, Genshiro K!

The dark side is that the sort of real estate speculation that made Genshiro Kawamoto rich enough to do all this is lies precisely at the root of nearly all the homelessness Hawaii and the rest of America has to bear. Kawamoto is infamous in Hawaii for evicting renters at short notice to make a quick profit, as well as buying properties and neglecting to rent them at all. In short, he's a slumlord to the rich. He may not create homelessness in the demographic he serves, but his practices reduce their housing options, which reduces the options of the next lower class, and the next. It's the real trickle-down. The end result is homelessness for a lot more than fifty people.

So, thank you also, Genshiro K, for being a prime example of how the rich and powerful screw us all and then do some token rescues to make up for it. Just like the government and the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which is really only a plan to reduce a fraction of it.