What would happen if, instead of spare change, you handed a person in need the means to shop for whatever they needed? What would they buy? Can you spare your credit card, sir?

[...]

Over the past two weeks, I wandered Toronto’s downtown core with five prepaid Visa and MasterCard gift cards, in $50 and $75 denominations, waiting for people to ask for money.

Q.How did you start photographing these homeless people?

A.I went to the International Center of Photography and enrolled in their photojournalism documentary photography program. I received an assignment called “New York Underground.” I went into several places like the subways — I actually even went into a sewer — and I went down into the train tunnel.

Does the lack of owning or a legal contract (ie, lease/rent) to the space you’re in remove all rights of personal property? It’s one thing to kick someone out of a space that isn’t theirs but another to confiscate belongings.

Had this happened in a suburban home, we’d demand to see the warrant, or else it’d be illegal search and seizure.

By MARY PEMBERTON (AP) – 1 day ago

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska is proceeding with a lawsuit to prevent further raids of homeless camps in Anchorage.

The ACLU had hoped to reach an agreement with the municipality over the destruction of the camps and disposal of property belonging to the homeless. But the ACLU’s Jeffrey Mittman says no agreement was reached protecting the constitutional rights of the homeless.

The class-action lawsuit was filed with the courts last week on behalf of Dale Engle, a disabled veteran whose camp has been raided numerous times. Police took Engle’s tent and sleeping bag, along with medals and ribbons he was awarded while serving in the Army and National Guard.

Source

So in 2008, Hoffman embarked on a five-month trip using modes of transportation that most leisure travelers would avoid at all costs but that many people around the planet board every day.

He flew on airlines with some of the worst safety records in the world, endured 28-hour trips on buses prone to plunging off cliffs in South America, took overcrowded ferries in the Amazon and Asia, and survived sweltering trains in Africa.

The goal: to experience travel not as a vacationer but as an ordinary person needing to get from one point to another as cheaply as possible.

Carl Hoffman does what others of us only think about doing: to get out there and see what the rest of the world is like. To see it from the perspective of those who live it every day.

CNN has a great interview with Hoffman that’s absolutely worth reading.  I’ve filed this under the “hitchhiking” section of the site because, while not exactly hitchhiking, it seems to me somehow true to the spirit of it.  This jumped out at me the most:

Hoffman: [...] But at the end of those journeys, I always was almost desperate to get to a hotel where I could have my own bed, be by myself and have a cold beer. We tend to think of affluence as the acquisition of objects, but I realized that what makes us so rich in much of the developed world is cleanliness and space.

World’s scariest airlines? Sign him up

The first time I heard anything about people living in the sewers in Colombia was back at the beginning of the ’90s. The sewage system running under Bogota’s streets was filled with packs of kids living waist-deep in human waste and taking in copious amounts of glue and crack in order to cope.
This was at the height of Colombia’s Dirty War, and the whole reason street kids had moved into the sewers in the first place was to get away from the violence above ground

Sewers home to vagrant Colombian kids