Challenge #02937-H014: Let the Trash Be Treasured
Can you imagine a world where there are more, empty, livable, homes and apartments than there are homeless individuals, and yet the wealthy allow those homes and apartments to fall into disrepair and ruin rather than allow the homeless live there and maintain it? Can you imagine a time, a place, a world... where people build small homes for the homeless, a 'tiny home' with a bed, a roof, basic toilet facilities, and tiny kitchen, just enough to be comfortable and survive without being out in the elements, and those safe shelters being confiscated by the governments, torn down, burned down, and the homeless individuals being homeless once more? And yet, those same governments wanting to claim "We are trying to help the homeless but they don't want help. They want to have and refuse our aid." And then criminalize the very act of being able to sit for a few moments to sleep so they can throw these people into prison? A world where a massive number of the workforce are working long, exhausting, hours, yet cannot afford so much as a tiny apartment in the worst area of town and are forced to sleep in run-down shelters, in tents, or in their vehicles?
This happened in the world of humans in the past. This was a common, cruel, thing in the world of the Dereggers. A helpless workforce of homeless. And yet.. what happens to that Deregger world, when the homeless start disappearing off the streets and from their world altogether? -- Anon Guest
[AN: Honestly, Habitat For Humanity could probably prove a point by buying/fixing up abandoned and foreclosed homes in the USA and then giving them to people with no-interest loans]
Welcome to Greater Deregulation Lower South West. We do the things that were illegal by the end of the twenty-first century, but we will never admit to that. The graffiti only ever stays up on the Galactic's side of the one customs and trade station, and there's continuing debate about making it an official sign.
The Galactic Alliance agrees that every citizen had the right to health, shelter, and reliable means to support themselves. Greater Deregulations refused to join the Alliance because giving their citizens any rights were against their moral superiority. The dissonance in that statement fails to land on Greater Deregulations owing to the fact that education for the common populace was also against their "moral superiority".
Which lead to problems that the Dereggers refused to consider on their planets. Especially within Greater Deregulation Lower South West. Where there is money in building homes, but none in keeping them occupied. Houses sprang up like a rash, but people didn't live in them. They couldn't afford to. There was more to be made in criminalising the poverty they manufactured. It was a permanent workforce of people desperate enough to do anything for food, water, and shelter. No matter how bad any of those were.
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