On the Road to Pimpin' Rich

Recently, for no discernible reason, I became a mean-spirited conservative. Or maybe the reason was discernible. You decide.

It started late last fall. I was living down the street in my barren room in the basement of 2005 Sucky Nuts Avenue, a couple of cold doors north of the intersection of Sucky Nuts and Bush Street. I was chilling -- the radiator didn’t work. I had a bad dose of the post-WTO anarchistic clap, and a liberal itch between my toes, too.

Then a letter came. It was in a plain white envelope. Inside, it said, “Dear former math professor Dr. Wes Browning: We at Chuck Schtab and Cohorts have been trying to find you for 25 years. We believe we have finally succeeded. If we are in error and you are not the Dr. Wes Browning we’ve been seeking please let us know. Otherwise we will begin sending you quarterly reports detailing the holdings and value of your Chuck Schtab College Professional Retirement Account.”

In the past 25 years I had been homeless three times, and through it all I had completely forgotten the retirement fund I had when I was a math professor! I had untapped wealth, earned by itself during two and a half decades of market ups and downs! The reports showed my wildest dreams were true: I was set for life, if by “set” you mean I would always have bus fare and change for the laundry, or if by “life” you mean to say I have a very short life-expectancy.

Anyway, what matters is, I had experienced my first rush of seeing an investment reach maturity, take her clothes off, and show me her privates. What matters is, now I knew how it was done. You lock your money up in solid investments, you don’t spend it on booze or women, and 25 years later you’re 25-years-sober, unloved, and pimping rich. I wanted more of that.

But I wasn’t a mean-spirited conservative yet. Then I got my latest quarterly report. The first ones had reported positive earnings for my Schtab account. But the most recent report showed a drop in value of $300! I was losing money! I had to find out why.

It wasn’t hard to figure out. All the news about High Gas Prices, Global Warming, Cutting and Running from Vast Oil Reserves, Higher Gas Prices, and worst of all, Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, was battering the stock market. Investors were getting skittish because the public sector was shifting priorities away from constant high-end investment growth. Sure, my Schtab account includes a hedge fund, but all that could ever pay for is my first month at the Home. I need the security that only ridiculously high earnings can provide.

So I looked into moving my money into real estate. I didn’t want a house; I wanted to partner with others on houses that could appreciate quickly. I read the trends and did the math and realized it would work. I could be truly set for life in the traditional sense within just one more decade. The papers said South Park/Georgetown was a high growth area, so my investment group loaded up on properties in those neighborhoods.

Just then we learned that new supportive housing for recently homeless people was planned right in the middle of our holdings. Now I’ve got nothing against the recently homeless, but those are my houses they want to live next to. I know about the studies that say supportive housing doesn’t lower property values, but I don’t invest according to studies, I invest according to my gut. What investor resembling me is going to want to buy my vacant houses in ten years for three times what I paid for them this year, if formerly homeless people are living next door?

The only solution I see is Three Strikes laws for vagrancy. We need to lock them all up in the state penitentiaries, where they can’t muck up my investments.

Pimp and Circumstance

My goal this week is to wade into a pool of homeless activists and see what bites me. I want to discuss certain deep questions, such as “What is a poverty pimp?” “Who’s calling whom a poverty pimp?” “I’m not a poverty pimp, you are,” and “Whatever I am, you’re double that,” inspired by a couple of minor controversies which have swirled recently.

One has to do with charges out there that Real Change exploits the poor and homeless to keep our director and a few privileged others in the lower middle-class lifestyle that they were born into. I don’t have the space here to get into the details, but I’d like to offer some thoughts of mine regarding those charges.

Our director Tim “Perfess’r” Harris, stands accused of being a greedy, privileged, white, middle-aged, middle-class, Classics-loving, kitsch-collecting, testosterone-driven, quiche-eating, carbs-forsaking, couscous-hating, male. OK, I can live with that. He even has a car, and kids. How dare he afford kids! But when someone says the remaining ten or eleven of us are greedy, privileged, white, middle-aged, middle-class, males, they are wrong in every single case. That’s not the kind of sweatshop we operate around here.

I for one have been homeless four times, and am dirt poor now. Yet even though I am on the board and a white male I’ve never been paid one single potato for the writing I do here. Some greed.

There’s also been a charge that we DO pay some of our writers. These people can’t make up their minds: so is paying good or bad? In the case of our two staff writers, paying is supposedly bad because they are *privileged*, more than, say, the whiner who came up with these charges. I guess so; they can write, if that’s a privilege. I thought it was a talent. But other than that, the charge is a crock.

Truth is, we pay staff when they have to do more than what a volunteer can bear. For the long workweeks we get out of our director we should pay him $52,000 per year. We don’t actually pay him quite that much. Please don’t anyone tell him.

The other controversy concerns “bumvertising” and one of my favorite activists, Michael Stoops of the National Coalition of the Homeless.

Mr. Stoops, like Tim Harris, has his share of detractors. It doesn’t help that at street paper conferences the two of them invariably leave us peons to go party all night at some catered penthouse somewhere, or whatever they do. They could be playing mumbly-peg for all the rest of us know. But I’m kidding; Michael isn’t a poverty pimp.

On the other hand, Ben Rogovy is proof that poverty pimping is alive and well. Mr. Rogovy has recently started an on-line poker service and begun using what he calls “bumvertising” to call attention to it. He pays panhandlers cash, food, and other goods, to advertise Rogovy’s business while they panhandle.

So homeless activists everywhere are outraged, charging Mr. Rogovy with exploiting the homeless. Michael Stoops mainly objects to the term “bumvertising” which perpetuates stereotypes, and I can agree with that, but he goes too far when he also says, "Homeless people are desperate, but they're not so desperate that they are going to be exploited by some avant-garde company that wants to sell their product."

If that were true that would mean homeless people were less desperate than all the other people who work for avant-garde companies that want to sell their products.

No, I would rather Rogovy stopped calling people bums and derelicts, especially now that he has them working, and I’d like to see him stick to paying cash, in order to empower his contractors to choose the goods they want, rather than have their goods chosen for them by the Man. But he’s not exploiting panhandlers any more than Starbucks exploits baristas.

Capitalism exploits, period. Don’t select homeless people out for this special stigma of victimhood.