There was an article in the Seattle PI yesterday about a couple local guys who decided to try being homeless for a week to try to get some idea of what it was like. I skimmed over the article, but a rather scathing followup editorial printed today reminded me about it, so I started reading about it again.
It turns out that one of the two guys is Scotty Weeks, who I’ve known off and on for years in Anchorage before he moved down here to Seattle a few years back. Small world, eh? In any case, he and his friend Derrick had set up a website to keep a journal of their days on the streets. After poking around on it, Scotty’s site, and the two PI articles — well, I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing.
It seems like it was a good idea — to get a better idea of what the people we see on the streets every day go through just trying to survive without homes, jobs, income, and many of the amenities that most of us take for granted.
However, there are two points about this particular experiment that bother me a bit.
First off — is a week really long enough to get more than the most general idea of what really living on the streets is like? Many of these people have been on the streets for years, with no end in sight. Scotty and Derick, meanwhile, knew every day that their time having to live like this was limited, and in just a few days they’d be able to walk out of the alleyways and back into their normal lives. For them, there not only was a light at the end of the tunnel, but their tunnel was a fairly short one. That’s got to affect the outlook — and from the number of times that looking forward to the end of the week was mentioned in their journals, it was a constant motivation. “If this was a dead end situation (like any real person out here) it would really start to feel bleek at this point,” says Derick at one point.
Secondly — I’m not entirely sure I’m convinced of all of Scotty’s motivations for this experiment. At the risk of offending him should he find this posting, after reading through his site for a while, I’m a little unsure whether his true motivation was wanting to really know what life on the streets was like — or whether there were more exploitative drives. It may just be that his particular sense of humor isn’t coming off too well (especially in light of the two PI articles), but past posts on his weblog (such as the pictures taken from his balcony of homeless people having sex or going to the bathroom, or the original name for Homeless Week being ‘Operation Enduring Stench’), raise questions for me.
In any case, it was an interesting idea. No matter their motivations, I think the two PI articles (and especially the editorial from today) were a bit harsher than they needed to be. Scotty and Derrick promise more thoughts and impressions from the week on their sites over the coming days — guess I’ll just have to check back in from time to time to see what they come up with.