Right to Shelter

The Los Angeles Times this week reported on a competition to create a portable homeless shelter:

"Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa took the honors, with a mobile shopping cart-like apparatus. The cart features bins to hold cans, bottles and other recyclables collected by day. It folds out to create a sleeping platform, topped by a canvas cover with zippers and windows."

The idea is to mass produce shopping-cart shelters for homeless people, and goes as far as to lobby cities to set aside vacant land for tent encampments with running water and special telephones.... Sound like something out of bad movie? Not surprising, since the creator of EDAR is a B-movie producer and philanthropist based in Los Angeles. In reality, however, these fold-up devices would do more harm than good to anyone involved in the process.

They have less storage room than a real shopping cart ( are much heavier and less mobile (key critique) than a tent, and cost ten times as much than a sturdy tent and duffel bag. The immobility issue would weigh heavy on the mind of anyone whose daily existence depends on motion- walking, shifting in and out of sight/participation, escaping threats, looking for items.

EDAR even expects the end-users of its product to call a toll-free number and update staff on the function and even location of their unit. While I don't believe this is an effort to relegate homeless people into permanent, docile, visible can collectors happily shuffling our streets as underclass by day, returning to their tent camps at night- it sure looks like that's what will be accomplished. While the full-scale implementation of the EDAR vision faces a host of legal issues (ordinances, privacy versus enforcement, NIMBYism), it faces one much more obvious one-- a $400 price tag.

A sturdy duffel bag and a dome tent would provide the "upgrade" in living conditions at a fraction of the cost, without the social and legal question marks of EDAR. Upgrading from a cardboard box doesn't need to be so complicated.

K. Drain