NASHVILLE—Around the time that Vanderbilt University released the results of a large-scale study outlining the most effective solutions to homelessness, Pastor Jeff Obafemi Carr was moving into a 60-square-foot house with no bathroom, kitchen, or even a sink. Carr’s idea was to temporarily leave behind his wife and five kids to live in the tiny house, which looks like a tool shed, to raise $50,000 to build more such homes for the homeless.
After two months living in the home, Carr had raised $66,967—enough to build six. The buildings are now set up, on wheels, in the backyard of the Green Street Church on Nashville’s east side, part of a sanctuary that also houses homeless people living in tents who moved from an encampment in one of Nashville’s parks that recently closed.
The homes are brightly painted yellow, blue, orange, and purple, with red doors and white trim. They cost about $7,000 each to build, and measure 5-by-12 on the inside. Residents use bathrooms in the church, and shower outside with a hose. They eat donated food and drink coffee set up under a tent in the yard.
Peter Regan lives in one of the homes. He hangs his jacket on a bar above his bed, and folds his clothes in tiny cube containers at the foot of it. Batteries power a fan in the window, and many days, he’ll sit on a camping chair on his front porch and talk to his neighbors, other people without permanent homes.
“It’s a lot better than living in a tent, and if you’ve got some Yankee ingenuity in you, you can figure stuff out,” he told me from his porch, gesturing to the jury-rigged lights he’s set up (the homes are not yet connected to a power grid or generator).
Alana Semuels
Tiny homes for the homeless may not be the solution policy wonks dream of. Indeed, the Vanderbilt study found that housing-choice vouchers, which allow families to live in market-rate apartments, are among the best solutions for homelessness. But in many booming cities, including Nashville, where rents are rising and vouchers can be hard to come by, and there’s little city money for anti-homelessness programming, short-term solutions such as Carr’s may make sense. Regan, for instance, says he’s been on the waitlist for a Section 8 voucher for months.
“This model provides a stepping stone to homefulness,” Carr told me. “If you set the goal as homefulness, you have to think, ‘How do we get to that?’ So many times, people think they have to get a Ph.D. so they can get grant money to do a study to find out that the number-one thing to do to fight homelessness is to give someone a home.”
This DIY model to solving social problems is common in Nashville, a Bible Belt city where faith-based organizations play an especially important role in anti-poverty programs. Just consider where these homes are set up: the backyard of the Green Street Church, which welcomed in tents and tiny houses once homeless people were evicted from Fort Negley, a city park. “Sanctuary,” a sign reads on the fence surrounding the lot, the “T” in the word designed to double as a cross.
The city may be spearheading the programs, but it’s the people who are spiritually compelled to do so, such as Carr, who provide much of the support, financial and otherwise. Sometimes that support comes coupled with its own obligations, such as requiring participants to attend church to receive services. That may feel stringent, but Nashville’s anti-homelessness programs would be a shadow of what they are now without the help of faith-based organizations.
“The way I have interpreted the city’s role is the structure and the leadership, not the money,” Rachel Hester, the executive director at Room In the Inn, told me.
Room In The Inn is a robust agency that provides year-round job training and support programs to the homeless, but is perhaps best known on the streets because every winter it offers up places to sleep in dozens of congregations throughout the region. It started in 1986 when four congregations committed to sheltering people through the winter, and now encompasses 180 congregations that can house 1,400 people.
The sanctuary in the backyard of the Green Hills church (Alana Semuels)
How’s Nashville, an extensive campaign spearheaded by the Metropolitan Homelessness Coalition, also relies on faith-based organizations for funding and resources.
Kirby Davis, a landlord who manages 10,000 units in the region, got involved with How’s Nashville when he donated housing units to homeless people. For little to no money, homeless people in Nashville were able to rent luxury private buildings, with access to fitness centers, computers, and pools.
“I’m a Christian, and I feel like it’s part of my calling to help my fellow man where I can,” Davis told me.
Over time, he said, as he realized that landlords weren’t accepting housing vouchers because they could get more rent on the open market, he stopped trying to convince fellow landlords to donate units, and instead started lobbying them to merely accept vouchers. It is, slowly, working.
“The vouchers don’t pay as much as the landlords could get on the open market, so you have to appeal to their better angels,” he told me.
How’s Nashville is much larger than just the landlord program. It’s a group of organizations, spearheaded by the city, that seeks to find people on the streets and get them help via “housing navigators.” But it is very dependent on the kindness of strangers. It recently launched a “2016 by 2016” campaign to get people to post videos of themselves on Facebook supporting ending homelessness or to donate.
Nashville’s successes are testament to what can happen when faith-based organizations get heavily involved in social problems. But it can help to have access to robust government resources, too.
John Noel lived in Nashville all of his life until he moved to New York three years ago. He found that New York City offered a wealth of opportunities to the homeless: job-training programs, food stamps, health insurance. Indeed, there are dozens of government-run programs in New York that seek to help employed families in shelters get up to four months of rent, reconnect with friends and family, and apply for various programs to get individuals and families into permanent homes. Of course, some of these programs depend on community-based organizations for help, but the city has its own Department of Homeless Services, which can partner with other city departments on issues related to homelessness. Working with the city’s human-resources department, for instance, it helped find job placements for 7,000 New Yorkers in shelters in 2013.
Pastor Jeff Carr, in front of one of the tiny homes he helped build (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)
They may have included Noel. Through the city, he eventually got a job cleaning up New York City’s subways. He returned to Nashville this spring when his father died, but he’s planning to head back north.
“New York has so many more options than Nashville does,” he told me, outside Room In The Inn’s headquarters near downtown Nashville.
While that may be the case, Nashville’s approach has distinct advantages: For example, depending on the community to address the problem of homelessness might eventually stir the political will to fund citywide programs, Hester said.
When members of congregations host the homeless, they get to know them as individuals, and are more motivated to try and help them.
“When a volunteer sits down and breaks bread with the homeless, they become an informed citizenry,” she told me.
That’s what happened with Pastor Jeff Carr, too. When he started his ministry, Infinity Fellowship, a year ago, members did a service mission serving food. Members were so galvanized by the experience that they started thinking about what more they could do, and came across the idea of building the tiny homes. Now, they’re thinking about building a tiny-home village somewhere in Nashville.
“If you set a goal that’s unreachable, people get frustrated,” he told me. “But if you set a goal that’s reasonable and that you can accomplish, people get motivated to do bigger and better things.”
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Activists were cleared from a building by officials who claimed that they were making university employees feel scared.
At Ohio State last week, a sit-in and protest inside a university building was cut short when students were warned that they would be forcibly removed by police, arrested, and possibly expelled if they did not vacate the premises within a few hours, by 5 a.m.
Here’s video of an administrative messenger relaying the warning to the protesters:
I’m usually skeptical of any decision to call the police on peaceful protesters or to expel students. The video itself doesn’t display any evidence that such actions were justified in this case, although the full facts of the incident are still emerging. And there’s a chance the administrators were bluffing.
Regardless, this video is noteworthy for two reasons. The first is the manner adopted by the main messenger, which is a common one for real-world authority figures—he is respectful, blunt, and not particularly apologetic or deferential—but I do not recall seeing other college administrators adopt it. His words:
Even as the militant group loses ground in Iraq, many Sunnis say they have no hope for peace. One family’s story shows why.
Falah Sabar heard a knock at the door. It was just before midnight in western Baghdad last April and Falah was already in bed, so he sent his son Wissam to answer. Standing in the doorway was a tall young man in jeans who neither shook Wissam’s hand nor offered a greeting. “We don’t want you here,” he said. “Your family should be gone by noon tomorrow.” For weeks, Wissam, who was 23, had been expecting something like this, as he’d noticed a dark mood taking hold of the neighborhood. He went to get his father, but when they returned, the stranger was gone.
Falah is tall and broad-shouldered, with salt-and-pepper hair. At 48, he was the patriarch of a brood of sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. He sat down with Wissam to talk things through. They had been in Baghdad for just three months, but that was long enough for the abiding principle of refugee life to imprint itself on Falah’s psyche: Avoid trouble. When Wissam had managed to find a job at a construction firm, Falah had told him to be courteous, not to mix with strangers, and not to ask too many questions. If providence had granted them a new life in this unfamiliar city, it could snatch that life away just as easily.
When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and public-spirited.
I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court.
He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.
Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.
The U.S. president talks through his hardest decisions about America’s role in the world.
Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a thundering speech given on Obama’s behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry’s uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
Newly intensifying anti-porn campaigns are mixing conservative and liberal principles, science, and ideology.
In 2010, Arkansas psychologist Ana Bridges and colleagues scrutinized 304 scenes that they would deem in a scientific journal to be “popular pornographic videos.” The researchers were looking for aggression. It was not rare; 88 percent of the scenes contained what the experts deemed physical aggression, defined in the academic journal as “principally spanking, gagging, and slapping.” Nearly half contained verbal aggression, usually from men toward women, who “most often showed pleasure or responded neutrally to the aggression.”
To sociologist Gail Dines, a self-identifying radical feminist and “anti-porn advocate,” these findings added to a body of evidence that she deemed conclusive. Dines believes that non-coercive pornography cannot exist in a capitalist society, where sex-based media will always lead to an industry that becomes a violent manifestation of structural inequalities. In The Washington Post this weekend, Dines wrote a column that spread widely: “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public-Health Crisis.”
The new CEO of AMC is threatening to allow cellphone use in cinemas to attract more Millennials.
It’s become a sadly common experience at this point: a night out at the movies, a fortune shelled out on tickets and snacks, suddenly ruined by someone in the audience taking out their phone. Some theater chains recognize how annoying this problem is for viewers: The Alamo Drafthouse has a zero-tolerance policy and will eject any patron distracting viewers with their light-up screen. But not every company is following suit—according to the new CEO of the theater chain AMC, the battle against moviegoers who use their phones has already been lost.
“When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie, they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow,” Adam Aron said in an interview with Variety. “You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life.” You heard him: The youngsters simply can’t sit still for two hours without checking their phones, so we might as well abandon hope. But one of the chief advantages of the theatrical experience is being removed from such distractions, and in a time when cinema chains are being threatened by expanded home-viewing options, they should try to promote that distinction, rather than abandon it.
A new report finds that some Americans are giving away nearly 25 percent of their refund for services they could get for free.
The Earned Income Tax Credit program has become one of the largest national anti-poverty programs in the country, distributing about $67 billion to around 28 million low-income workers and their families. By that measure, it may seem the EITC, implemented in 1975, is a success. But a recent study from Johns Hopkins finds that the dubious practices of some tax preparers mean that many families are losing a sizeable chunk of their annual credit to tax professionals who, aware of how much money was in play, didn't hesitate to charge qualifying families excessive amounts for help filing.
And this isn’t the first time the practices of tax preparers have come under fire when it comes to the handling of EITC filers. A study from the Brookings Institution and the Progressive Policy Institute also had similar conclusions nearly 15 years ago.
Only one trend is closely associated with their use.
A curious phenomenon is gripping public libraries in the United States.
On the one hand, Americans still adore their libraries. According to a new Pew Research study, 76 percent of Americans say that libraries well serve the needs of their community. And since 78 percent of Americans say they’ve been to a local public library ever, it seems that nearly everyone who’s been to a local library at least once in their lives approves of them.
Yet on the other hand, fewer and fewer Americans are using the institutions every year. In the 12 months before the most recent Pew survey was given, only 44 percent of Americans visited a local library or bookmobile. Three years earlier 53 percent of Americans had visited a library or bookmobile.
America’s largest corporations have been storing profits in offshore companies for decades.
World leaders, celebrities, and even soccer players, a leak from the law firm Mossack Fonseca recently revealed, are fond of using shell companies to avoid paying taxes. While as of yet, few high-profile American names have been linked to the Panama Papers, this sort of tax avoidance is a common practice among a number of well-known U.S. companies, according to a report released Thursday by Oxfam America. The country’s 50 largest corporations have stored more than a trillion dollars in offshore shell companies in recent years to lower their tax rate, the report says.
Large corporations such as Pfizer, Walmart, IBM, and Apple have stashed billions of dollars via more than 1,500 subsidiaries in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, according to the report, which analyzed the companies’ Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Though this practice isn’t illegal, keeping profits offshore lowers the taxes owed in the United States, and this ends up costing the U.S. government about $111 billion each year in lost revenue, by Oxfam’s calculations.
