Fun With Ideas

I'm an idea-lover. I love all kinds of ideas, even stupid ones. These days that means I am perpetually giddy. There are exciting new ideas everywhere I look.

It happened in Australia, but there's no reason it can't happen here, too: A landlord successfully sued a man's family to collect rent remaining on his lease after he died. In the landlord's own words, "A tenant has died. Is that my problem?"

Why isn't anyone doing this here in the United States? I'm seeing a trans-oceanic heartlessness gap! What's great about this idea, apart from the inherent meanness, is that, in principle it shouldn't matter much how the tenant dies or what the landlord may have reasonably expected. Say a landlord allows a 97 year-old man breathing from an oxygen tank, lesions all over his face and hands, and an organ-donor card glued to his forehead, to sign a twenty year lease. Well, that's twenty year's rent guaranteed, isn't it? It's better than predatory lending, you don't just squeeze the mark, you squeeze their offspring to the umpteenth generation. "A daughter of the son of the tenant has died. Is that my problem?"

Here in America, USA Today reports that many schools are experimenting with programs that pay kids to learn. For example a pilot program in a couple of suburban Atlanta schools pays students $8 an hour to study with tutors. This is the sort of idea that's fun not so much in and of itself but for what it inspires.

Let's face it, school kids are smarter than the rest of us. They can learn anything, even things we don't want them to learn. When I was only 15 I knew a dozen things my parents didn't want me to know, and I didn't even have the internet. Kids are even smarter than tutors. So I say, let's take this idea a step further. Let's not just pay them the $8 an hour to learn, let's throw in the $5.85 or whatever we were going to pay the dumb-ass tutor, and let the kids learn whatever they want, however they want, so long as they pass the WASL. If they don't pass the WASL they have to pay it all back, plus interest. If they run away to Australia, their parents have to pay it back. "A high-school student has run away to Australia. Is that the tax-payers' problem?"

[Above Right: Without the internet, I was forced to learn from whatever print materials were available.]

In Ohio we are seeing a Brave New World of creative punishment. A non-homeless salvation Army worker, I'll call him Mr. Smith, stole a Salvation Army kettle containing $250 meant for the homeless. Painesville Judge Michael A. Cicconetti, who has done this sort of thing before, gave Mr. Smith a choice between 90 days in jail or 24 hours being homeless with a GPS tracker to prevent cheating. He opted for the day and night of homelessness. He did it last week, and 7 hours into it was reported as saying "It's not that bad, but I'd hate to have to do this every day, especially in this weather. It's too cold to do it in this." I don't know what he had to say 17 hours later.

Nearly everyone who has written about this thinks it's great. How creative! Now Mr. Smith will know what it's like to be homeless and he won't be so quick to steal from them.

I can think of a lot of other great ways to apply this brilliant creative new idea.

We could force George Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al, to go live in Tehran, and THEN bomb the bejeezus out of it, so in the future they won't be so quick to bomb the bejeezus out of people.

If a man committed murder, we could murder that man back, so that next time he would know what being murdered was like and not be so quick to do it. If a man poked another man's eye out, etc.

Maybe these ideas aren't that new.

While Men Walked On The Moon

Personal confession: For 2 years, over 35 years ago, I was a flack for a slum landlord. I got a job as a clerk at a motel on Aurora. For $50 per week I worked weeknights, got Saturdays off, then pulled a straight 22-hour Sunday shift .

If the job were just about the motel I wouldn't mention it here. But besides the motel, there was also slum housing. It was a bunch of dilapidated wooden structures behind the motel all painted lead-pink with anywhere from two to five or six small apartments per building. I don't recall the total number of units but it was somewhere in the 50-100 range.

The walls housed rats and occasionally cats who sometimes got lost in them, died, and reeked. In some of the rooms floorboards were broken and you had to avoid walk around them. Some buildings were built in the way of drainage and were constantly at risk of flooding, so there had to be sump pumps in crawl spaces under them. The pumps regularly failed, but were never replaced. All repairs were done by an old part-time worker who was never given the funds to do them right. The central steam heater was on a timer, so there was no heat from midnight to dawn every night.

The landlord was one of the cheapest, meanest people I have ever met. Apart from that she was a nice old Norwegian lady. She had a charming Norwegian accent and was somebody's beloved great-grandmother. I'll call her Mrs. Skyldig. After a childhood of abject poverty in Norway she came to the United States with her Norwegian husband. Her husband had built the apartments and motel back in the 20s and 30s and made a good enough living from them to buy a nice house in Ballard. Then he died in the 60s, leaving it all to her. Rather than sell the business she decided to continue it. She needed to develop managerial skills, but they never came. Because, however good a wife she had been, she was basically a mean, rotten, petty, selfish human being.

Now, as a general rule the sort of people who live in slums are the poorer people. Although Mrs. Skyldig grew up poor, she was convinced that the reason she was not poor by then was because of her superior character, and could not be persuaded that it was because she exploited people for profit. So she despised her own tenants and would evict people for the slightest infractions.

One tenant though was her example for all the others. "Why can't you be like Mr. Jones?" she would say, "He's such a good man." Jones had lived there trouble-free for a decade.

Then, Mrs. Skyldig found out Mr. Jones had long ago served time for a felony. She said, "I can't believe it! He has been all this time a criminal! People always betray me! There's no one I can trust!" She padlocked him out. Then she went home for the weekend.

That Sunday the remaining tenants came demanding that I join them in revolt. They presented me with a letter to sign that was addressed to Mrs. Skyldig and told her how wrong she was.

None of the tenants had signed the letter. I was willing to quit my job for them, but not if all that could come of it was my unemployment. I urged them to all sign it, and I promised I'd be the second signer. But no one stepped forward to be the first. They were all afraid to be the next one evicted, and wanted me to take all the heat. I said, "Well then, you don't really care as much as you say you do."

About 4 in 5 of them moved out within a month. They proved me wrong.

Now, I'm saying the supporters of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness don't care whether it really ends homelessness or not. Let's see them risk speaking out about the plan's failings, and prove me wrong.