I want 5,000 of them to start for folks here in Nashville and I want them yesterday.
My client "Ron" was flooded out in the latest rainstorm we had here this week. He called me at 5am yesterday, since he knows I'm usually up by that time, clacking away on this damned blog. He had a half foot of water in his tent and every single thing he owned was wet. He hadn't slept at all, and the temperature was dropping.
This isn't anything new to Ron, since he's been on the street for decades. He's a stalwart kind of guy, who takes the vagaries of weather with the a level of stoicism most of us can only dream about. But Ron's health is lousy lately; he's battling emphysema from even more decades of smoking tobacco, weed, crack and who knows what else. When his breathing isn't bringing him down, his diabetes is.
I could tell he was in trouble while he was on the phone because he could only get about six words out between breaths, and with each inhalation I could hear the wheezes loud and clear over the din of activity at the local MickyDs he was at trying to stay warm.
I got him squared away yesterday and let him spend the day in my car with me so he'd have a dry, warm place to rest. He doesn't get along well with crowds of strangers, so he avoids most places typically frequented by the homeless here in Nashville when they need to dry out, regroup and recover from a particularly hard and/or cold and or rainy and/or lousy night.
We even managed to get some of his stuff dried out at a local business I have access to washers and dryers at, but I could tell if he spent another night out in the cold in his tent, which was still wet, he'd be in the hospital by midnight.
Ron is safe, warm and dry this morning, unless he's already up and gone from his room at a local motel. But I could only afford one night. My friend Laurie is going to pick him up a new tent today and we're going to help him get his remaining stuff dried out and in order, but we can't do much to warm up the area he's staying in, other than by providing him a propane space heater. It's better than nothing, but it's a far cry from having a roof over your head and a thermostat on the wall....
But what if Ron didn't have us to depend on? There's at least 2,000 more in the downtown Nashville area that don't. The rain fell just as hard and heavy on them as it did on Ron, and there's a helluva lotta folks out there with health conditions similar to and worse than Ron's, believe it.
Many of them don't even have the luxury of having a tent to crawl into and I don't know when the last time was that you had to pick up wet cardboard, but when you did you realized quickly that it has the consistency of cooked celery.
Having a unit like the one in the story below would be not only welcome to many of the folks on the street, it would quite probably save lives, as well.
You'd think that if Nashville was truly serious about helping the homeless here shelters like this one would be near the top of their priority list, especially considering that the availability of affordable and - here's the key: accessible - housing is slim to none and the Mission, along with Room in the Inn, is turning away hundreds each night.
I wonder whether, if the EDAR or something like it becomes readily available for a nominal price, anyone here in a position to actually allocate funds towards the purchase of a few hundred (or a couple of thousand) would be willing to do so?
Pop-up mini-shelter for homeless people
The EDAR is like a miniature pop-up camper designed as a portable shelter for homeless people. Hollywood movie producer Peter Samuelson (Revenge of the Nerds) came up with the idea and sponsored a prototype contest at the Art Center College of Design. Eric Lindeman and Jason Zasa won with a shopping cart-inspired version. Now, the non-profit EDAR Foundation is starting to distribute the shelters in the Los Angeles area and looking for donations to manufacture more of them. From the Los Angeles Times:
With a donation from former EBay President Jeff Skoll, he took the design to Precision Wire Products, a manufacturer of shopping carts in Commerce. Precision produced a succession of prototypes, at least nine, to address critiques of the device: too big, too small, too flimsy, not readily collapsible. The units have been thrown down flights of stairs (they're sturdy) and left in the rain (they don't leak)."Upgrading from a cardboard box for the homeless"
Three months ago, Samuelson decided to distribute 60 EDARs for testing. With the help of churches, missions and shelters, he and his assistants identified chronically homeless people who could benefit from an EDAR in the short term and might be willing to develop a lasting relationship with service providers...
Does the EDAR enable homelessness by making it more bearable? No, he insists.
"Why is the EDAR not regressive?" he said. "Because it is not nearly as good as a shelter bed. There's no pretense it's as good as permanent or temporary brick-and-mortar housing." But it is, he says, "infinitely better than a damp cardboard box."
