Key We$t and the Florida Key$ God

Reader comments under the previous post at this blog,  Is the internal jihad humanity's only real chance to change and survive? , and my replies to those readers:

michael martinFebruary 20, 2019 at 12:40 PM

Damn!!!! As usual you keep living and sucking off your family and friends. At one time I thought you were a good person. I now realize you are a mooch, living off others.

1. 
   Sloan BashinskyFebruary 22, 2019 at 7:07 AM

   I hear that a lot, Michael, but not from everyone. Member in good standing of the Key West and Florida Keys RESISTANCE Tom Milone texted me this morning, saying my Gypsy life shows how much I'm loved outside of Key West. He'd heard there is life after Key West. When I was homeless, sleeping nights in the Key West police station front lobby, he helped me in other ways that made my rough life less rough than it otherwise would have been. He read my blog daily. We talked often about local political issues, and we nearly always were in agreement. Another person in Key West, Arnaud Girard, who co-published the local boat rocker Key West the (blue) Newspaper, with his wife Naja, for free, basically, called me "the house prophet", when I lived in their home, sometimes as a paying tenant, sometimes as a poor homeless man. You might wish to read my reply to Elizabeth Davis' comment posted before your comment.

Elizabeth DavisFebruary 20, 2019 at 9:22 PM

I'm grateful for your company, words.

Sloan BashinskyFebruary 22, 2019 at 6:58 AM

Thanks, Elizabeth. As you can see in Michael Martin's comment after yours, opinions are like noses, everybody has one.

If I had not given away so much money to people who needed it, or thought they needed it, more than I would come to need it, I would never have gone homeless. If I had never gone homeless, then my life would not have become nearly as interesting and rich, so to speak. It's hard for lots of people in this day and age to see quid pro quo passing back and forth between the person of mean$ and the person with no mean$. If people of mean$ lived in my skin a day, they would die, but not before going stark raving mad. From their perch in the afterlife, they then would see things a bit differently. They would see the quid pro quo. They would see those people and me in an entirely different light. They would see the love between us, that they really want me in their home and they miss me when I'm away. They would see everything in an entirely different light. For example, they would see the quid pro quo in all I did from late 2000 thru the fall of last year, 2018, in Key West and the Florida Keys, for which I was paid nothing in their currency: $$$

Here's something I wrote to my friend Hoodoo Witch yesterday, who struggles with having to make a living doing things that are wearing her out and breaking her down.

"I’m a full-bore mystic. If I don’t have money, for example, then I’m homeless. I don’t try to do work for money, which I know won’t work out me, nor I for it. I just do what is put in front of me each day, whatever it is, and it has not for a very long time been about me trying to earn money. I’d love for that to change. I’d love for the writing to make money. Your dreams indicated such would happen for both of us. I don’t have such dreams, however. I just get showed what topic to address and in what way.

"The way I got out of being homeless the last time was, in early 2016, I was told in a dream by a very good lawyer I once knew, that I was not being paid nearly enough for all the hard work I was doing. A few days later, I called him and told him about the dream. He said that was interesting, and that he had put me on his prayer list in 2010. That led to me doing something pretty radical in an arena I had steered well clear of for quite a while. After some stormy seas, I was receiving enough money each month to live comfortably, but not extravagantly."

Facebook private chat with Key West friend yesterday:

Friend

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/02/19/new-orleans-reducing-homeless-hurricane-katrina?fbclid=IwAR3AA_EXvo9RixUeRdVD7bnDqmUFDvrFbA3QVb2r8MMvOKxp92HemiY54CU

Sloan
Thanks. Maybe if Hurricane Irma had hit KW head on and created a couple of thousand new homeless people in the city, it would have made housing first its number 1 priority? Even so, where would such housing have been found? It's simply not there, unless you take over the transient rentals and lodging industry, say, like if martial law was declared by, say, the governor. That's still a problem for Key West, without such a hurricane disaster. The housing simply is not there, unless the help-homeless organizations have a lot of money to pay the high rents. And, then there are the many residents ever on the verge of going homeless in the city and nearby. What about subsidizing them instead, so they don't go homeless or move away? If they go homeless, they are harder to help get back on their feet, than if they are subsidized? Are they not a greater priority than long-term homeless people? Am I missing something?

Friend
we worship death and most our tax money goes to kill and make miserable in prison,s graves, and lawless lands that lead the poor and downtrodden with no choice but run. There is more than enough for everyone right now but we piss it away on vanity and the cult of death.

From FlaKeysNews:

Key West once wanted the homeless shelter moved to a new site. Things are different now

BY GWEN FILOSA

FEBRUARY 20, 2019 12:22 PM

For several years, Key West city leaders have been saying they would move their overnight homeless shelter from county property on Stock Island to another site.

At first, it was to appease nearby condo owners who sued the city and then to appease the sheriff, whose complex and jail abut the shelter.

Now, the city’s plan is to keep the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter — built hastily in 2004 to ward off civil lawsuits concerning the treatment of the homeless — right where it is. Key West officials hope they can strike a deal with the county to make it stay permanently.

The reason: Key West plans to build 104 one-bedroom apartments for low-income workers on the Stock Island spot where at one point the City Commission vowed to place the homeless shelter.

The apartments are meant to be temporary housing for the residents, Assistant City Manager Greg Veliz told the Monroe County Commission on Wednesday.

“One bedroom won’t accommodate someone throughout their lifetime,” Veliz said. “It’s a temporary fix before someone can move on.”

Stock Island, once the scruffy fishing village just north of Key West, is morphing from a service island — it’s home to a hospital, sheriff’s office, “Mount Trashmore” landfill — and ramshackle homes and trailers mixed in with newer multifamily complexes. Two luxury hotels recently opened. Developers plan to turn three trailer parks into housing complexes.

Led by former Mayor Craig Cates, a past city commission said affordable housing is more important than the homeless shelter as Monroe Sheriff Rick Ramsay publicly fumed he has tired of having the shelter next-door to his headquarters.

To compromise, the city has offered to reserve 30 of the new units for his employees. The problem is whether his employees would qualify for low to very low income housing due to some of the grant funding requirements.

“Because of the income restrictions, I’m a little surprised you would deal with a funding source you knew had those restrictions,” County Commissioner David Rice told Veliz.

One county leader said she wasn’t happy that the sheriff’s search for affordable housing for his staff was “taking a backseat” to the homeless shelter. 

“You’re better off to take [the shelter] and find a place to put it,” County Mayor Sylvia Murphy told Veliz.

Murphy said she would bet the city never builds low-income housing on Stock Island.

“I wouldn’t take that bet,” Veliz replied.

“If we close and lock the doors of KOTS those people are going to go out in the community,” Commissioner Danny Kolhage said. ”Yes, they have the right to live and exist but they don’t have a right to trespass. They’ll wind up in our jail.”

GWEN FILOSA

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.

Sloan Bashinsky

Commissioner Kolhage, if you spend a night at KOTS, just to learn what it actually is, you will be told to leave by 7:30 a.m., I think is the required departure time. You will head down the road from KOTS and the Sheriff's HQ and Detention Center with all the homeless people leaving KOTS. You will see them dispersing onto Stock Island and Key West, where, unless they are the few who have jobs, they will hang out all day in public parks, shopping centers, etc. for the most part. If KOTS is closed, they will still hang out in the same places all day. But at night, under the Pottinger ruling, they will be allowed to sleep on public land (city or county), because they have no where else to sleep at night, now that KOTS is gone. Therefore, I imagine the trespass arrests of homeless people by Key West police and Sheriff Ramsay's deputies now going on would remain about the same in number. I tried at the county-city homeless summit several years ago to persuade the county and the city officials that what needed to happen was Key West build its own drunk tank into which its police put wasted homeless people, instead of in the Sheriff's jail. Your brother county commissioner David Rice said he really liked my suggestion, but that was not reported in the Keynoter, nor in the Key West Citizen, and nothing came of it. I bet if the County Commission gives Sheriff Ramsay the nod to close KOTS, and he does it, the Key West City Commission will hasten to build a new KOTS on city land, because the very last thing I see the City Commission doing is letting homeless people go back to camping in tents on city and county land in the city, like what happened in 2004. I was one of those tent campers on the bridle path across from Smathers Beach. In fact, I was why the city built KOTS, because I was going to be now Key West City Commissioner Attorney Sam Kaufman's class action plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the City of Key West under the Pottinger case, if the city did not stop using its police to prevent homeless people from sleeping at night in the city.

Tom Simpson

Poverty and economic unbalance is what happens when local Gov'ts (and yes...our own citizens) crave the fast, quick money from tourism and huge resort taxes. Just look at any other "tropical" island and see how the locals live while the rich use it as a playground and the Gov't officials take in the mass amounts of tax dollars. Look what has happened to Bimini since Bimini Bay, Hilton and the Casino went up. The locals in Alicetown are now living like trash because the Gov't subsidizes their pitiful life. Drugs are no rampant and it's basically a dump.
Look....when are people going to actually use their brain and understand economics in a tourist area. Paid housing or any other subsidized life does nothing in the long run because prices adjust and you can NEVER subsidize anyone out of poverty. It creates a sub class of workers because the resorts know and take advantage that people are willing to live in sub human standards in order to live in "paradise". Combine this lifestyle with our drinking history and other social bebauchary...well....does anybody actually expect something else?
As residents, we have got to decide whether we want an economy based on the fast tourism money (and take the destruction of our ecosystem and the poverty that comes with it) that artificially inflates housing prices or do we want to limit tourism and take the economic hit where no........we won't get as wealthy but at least can have a more balanced economy based on a balance of the fishing industry and tourism.

Sloan Bashinsky

Good points, Tom. In my years of experience with homeless people in Key West, most of them were from somewhere else, and they did not come there and get a job and rent a place to live. They were homeless when they got there. Most of them.

Key West and the rest of the Florida Keys sold out to tourism long ago. The only thing that I can see reversing that is a Category 5 hurricane hits Key West head on and then marches the entire length of the keys.

That's not said as observer. I ran 3 times for county commission and 6 times for mayor of Key West. I attended candidate forums up and down the keys. I attended and spoke during hundreds, combined, of city and county commission meetings, and other local government meetings.

I think its fair to say that without tourists and booze, Key West's economy would crash and end the affordable housing crisis there at least.

Tom Simpson

Sloan Bashinsky Yeah.....I'm sure you know the phrase "toilet flushing" the locals used to use referencing the natural cleanup that a hurricane does in the Keys. Of course...no one wants hardships for individuals.....it's just a saying that reflected on the truth.
In today's climate..I'm not so sure what can be done. Many people think that it will now take a "natural" global depression that hits every 70 years or so. Again...it's not a wish for anyone to experience hardship...it's simply stating the hard facts and the problem that comes with a depression is that the hard working people get hurt the most.
Again...just point to Bimini to see what unfettered tourism and the Gov'ts grab at quick cash does to a local population before and after an economic downturn. After the little recession of 2008, Alicetown became a travesty because no one stayed in the older hotels and no one dined at the local establishments. The younger generation started depending on social entitlements for existance which were generated from tourist income instead of the "natural" way of earning a living like decades before. Then 2008 happened and the tourism suffered. That mostly hurt only the locals because Bimini Bay, the Casino, etc... rode out the storm and bounced back. But the locals never recovered and now it is basically a slum that most avoid. Basically...the large foreign owned resorts have ultimately wiped out a community that had been around forever.
Now equate that to down here and how 2008 affected us. Sure some resorts went under but many recovered and we are now building huge resorts all the while our local leaders thwart the building of individual smaller homes that are PRIVATELY owned due to insanely expensive code restrictions. The normal blue collar worker cannot afford these type of homes...only the wealthy. The resorts are simply changing our culture by indentured servanthood and our leaders love the revenue generated while they build thier brand new office sites on Bay/Ocean front property with boat docks (just look at Murray Nelson Center) and those that work for the Gov't receive benefits that is unheard of by the very same workforce that pays their salary (paid leave for 2-3 weeks during Irma and 250% of pay if they decided to come in). Then they decide to "tackle the problem" by giving them affordable housing entitlements that has been proven time and time again to be ineffective (look at Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Monterey, etc..).

Sloan Bashinsky

Tom Simpson You paint it well. When I ran for county commission the first time, living on Little Torch Key, my campaign mantra was: "No more new development, period the end. The Florida Keys already are way over-developed and there is not a person living here that can look in a mirror and honestly argue otherwise." Running as an Independent, I got 1/3rd of the votes against incumbent Republican commissioner George Neugent in the general election. It was just him and me. Same in 2010, and I got 1/4th the votes. It would have been darn interesting, if I had gotten on the county commission. But I didn't, and it was interesting in other ways, which I bet did not please Mother Nature. What you have painted, regardless of hardship to poor working people, I see one way to turn it around: Cat 5 hurricane.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com