craschworks

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305tulips_shorto.1.html?ei=5090&en=bb369c2505b1c24f&ex=12

You know that your grandmother paid $15,000 for her house in 1951, and it's now worth $250,000. That sounds grand, but most of the increase is simply matching inflation. An analysis Shiller made of home prices in the U.S. going back to 1890 showed an average annual increase of a meager 0.4 percent. By way of contrast, Jeremy J. Siegel of the Wharton School of Business has calculated that over a 200-year period, the stock market had an average annual real rate of return of 6.8 percent. It's only in recent years, Shiller says, that huge increases in real-estate prices have become the norm and that people have come to expect them.

March 5, 2006
Amsterdam House
This Very, Very Old House

By RUSSELL SHORTO
In 1625, a carpenter named Pieter Fransz built a house on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He was young, ambitious and lucky enough to belong to one of history's greatest generations: his life spanned the course of his country's golden age, when tiny Holland became an empire and Amsterdam grew into Europe's wealthiest city. Fransz walked the streets with Rembrandt; he saw a forest of masts grow in the harbor, as ships returned from the East Indies laden with pepper and nutmeg, a sack of which could make a man wealthy for life. He and his family prospered along with the city; 17 years after building his house, he was rich enough to buy the one next door, into which his daughter and her husband moved. In 1683 he was still listed as the owner of both properties. Happiness isn't registered in municipal archives, but the image of this one not terribly consequential human life that remains on the palimpsest of time speaks of contentment: a man who has lived beyond the normal life span of his era, surrounded by family, financially successful.

Most of us leave no lasting traces that recall our stay on the planet, but through accident and fate, Fransz left something that has endured the centuries. His house — an elegant redbrick step-gable, its facade ornamented with sandstone bands and wooden cross-framed windows, a building that has more of the Renaissance than the Baroque about it — still stands. Napoleon and Hitler conquered Amsterdam in their separate centuries; later, postmodern architects and the sex and soft-drug industries made their marks. Pieter Fransz's house withstood all.

The Dutch have always been meticulous recordkeepers, so it is possible to follow this house, and others nearby it on Amsterdam's famous Herengracht, or Gentlemen's Canal, as they make their way through the centuries: to watch the succession of doctors, diamond cutters, confectioners, merchants and politicians move in and out, to glimpse the births and deaths, to watch careers and families unfold. More to the point, it's possible to follow the successive property transactions in this area of Amsterdam from the time it was developed to the present.

In itself, this isn't exceptional: other European cities have land registers that date to the Middle Ages. What makes Pieter Fransz's neighborhood unique — and uniquely interesting to some economists who are studying today's global real-estate boom and wondering whether the bubble that has been expanding for the past decade and more is in the process of bursting — is what real-estate experts call a constant quality index. Cities change over time; neighborhoods fall out of favor, and new ones come into vogue. Comparing property values in Greenwich Village a century ago with those of today might be interesting as part of a study of a changing neighborhood — the transformation of a low-rent, working-class community into a tony and sophisticated enclave — but not as a way of understanding how real-estate value changes over time.

From the time the Herengracht was developed in the early 17th century, however, it has been Amsterdam's prime real estate, the place where power brokers — 17th-century merchants dealing in spices and slaves or 21st-century bankers and international consultants — have chosen to base themselves. Looking at real-estate transactions over four centuries on this canal on which Pieter Fransz built his home gives a quality constant of unparalleled duration.

This is what attracted Piet Eichholtz, a professor of real-estate finance at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, to study the Herengracht in the 1990's. Eichholtz's work — the so-called Herengracht index — has become a touchstone in recent discussions about real-estate prices. He began with a sense of frustration. “If you look at most research on real-estate markets,” he said, “papers will typically say they are taking 'a long-run look,' and then they go back 20 years. I wasn't impressed with that. I thought you had to go back further to get a really good picture of what a housing market performs like.”

Eichholtz's study of the Herengracht came to international attention when the Yale economist Robert J. Shiller relied on it in the second edition of his best-selling book “Irrational Exuberance,” which was published in 2005. After the first edition came out in 2000, Shiller became famous for predicting, correctly, that the stock market's explosive rise was about to end. The book's title — a phrase made famous by the former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan — referred to Shiller's argument that the market's rise of the 1990's was based more on herd mentality than on common sense.

In the new edition, Shiller applies the same thinking to global real-estate prices and argues that the phenomenal increases of recent years — especially in places like New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London and Paris, but also more broadly — amount to another instance of irrational exuberance. Taking the long-range view, he says, led him to conclude that real-estate prices are destined to fall. “The data just are not there to support the idea that housing prices will continue to soar out of sight,” he said.

Not everyone agrees with Shiller's irrational-exuberance thesis. “I just don't see it that way,” said Richard Peach, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an author of a study in 2005 that concluded that the sharp rise in home prices is in line with economic conditions — that it indicates not a skewed vision of reality but a strong economy. In fact, Peach says, in the past 20 years family buying power has grown faster than housing prices. “We sometimes wonder why home prices haven't increased much more, given the tremendous increase in the size of mortgage the average family can finance,” he said.

Like-minded experts include Christopher Mayer of Columbia University and Joseph Gyourko and Todd Sinai of the Wharton School, who focus on what they call “superstar cities,” places so desirable that they not only are not headed for a correction but they also can sustain “ever-increasing” prices compared with less-sought-after cities.

What such optimists are missing, Shiller says, is a long historical perspective. “The fundamentals that they cite in support of their reassuring assessments are surprisingly weak at explaining historical prices,” he writes in a recent paper. Reading the data as an economist leads Shiller to conclude that the market will go south. In addition, he says that studying the erratic but rhythmic rising and falling of prices over time — in other words, acting more like a historian than an economist — reinforces this conclusion. “Looking at the Herengracht data is very instructive,” he said to me, “because you can see 50-year intervals of growth, then it turns around. That's more realistic than the superstar-cities argument.”

Piet Eichholtz says he doesn't think the long-term data alone necessarily suggest that a collapse is coming. But at the same time, like Shiller, he is skeptical of those who claim that property values can continue to increase ad infinitum. “Some people say economies in the past were very volatile and didn't have safeguards that we have now, so we aren't likely to experience any major crises that will causes prices to crash,” he said. “I'm doubtful.” Looking through the history of the Herengracht, he says, you can see similarly rosy assessments made over and over, which are then quashed by circumstances.

Eichholtz's Herengracht index turns on one of the basic questions of the discipline of history: how applicable is the past to the present? What can a study of one small part of the world centuries ago say about actions in a 21st-century global economy? Or, put another way, just how special are we today?

The Herengracht index begins with one of history's great building booms. In the 1620's, the Dutch Republic was in the first stage of its rise to global power. The Dutch had become the middlemen of commerce between European nations and had a monopoly on trade with Japan and the East Indies. The world's first major stock exchange came into being around this time in Amsterdam, and the Dutch developed or perfected the commodities and futures markets. With money pouring in and the population doubling in 20 years, the city leaders finally broke an old taboo against building outside the medieval city walls and authorized one of the earliest and most far-reaching urban-planning schemes in history. They mapped out three concentric canals that would arc around the city and divided the land along them into housing lots. It was a massive undertaking that would more than double the size of the city and involved diverting the river, digging miles of canals, driving tens of thousands of piles dozens of feet below the shifting soil and building scores of bridges, not to mention thousands of brick houses. It took 50 years to complete.

From the beginning, the master plan earmarked the Herengracht, the new canal closest to the city center, as the choicest; lots there were larger than others, and the practice of noisy, smelly or otherwise “intolerable and dangerous” trades was prohibited. Wealthy burghers and upwardly mobile tradesmen like Pieter Fransz snapped up the lots, built their little mansions, each with a garden in back, and settled in with their families. In the five-year period between 1628 and 1633, as the economy soared, the real, inflation-adjusted prices of houses on the Herengracht doubled. (By comparison, for the period 2000 to 2005, real home prices increased nationally in the U.S. by 38 percent, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. For a city-to-city comparison, between 1997 and 2005 real home prices in Boston rose 93 percent.)

Then two things happened almost simultaneously: tulip mania and the plague. As their country became the center of international finance, the Dutch had taken to speculating on everything from tobacco and spices to tulip bulbs, and it wasn't only professional traders who gambled on the prices of goods but ordinary citizens, with much of the trading taking place outside government regulations. After a one-month period of manic speculation in tulip bulbs, in which the price for one variety —Witte Croonen or White Crowns — shot from 64 guilders per half-pound in January 1637 to 1,668 guilders (the price of some houses in Amsterdam) in February, the bottom dropped out of the market; White Crowns later stabilized at about 38 guilders.

The collapse of the tulip market was not in itself the cause of a wider financial collapse, but more likely a component. The plague had begun to sweep through the country in 1635; in Amsterdam alone more than 17,000 people — 14 percent of the population — died of the plague in the year 1636. Peter M. Garber, an economist at Deutsche Bank, in his book “Famous First Bubbles,” speculates that this “death threat” may have resulted in a “gambling binge” on tulip futures.

In the wake of these twin calamities, house prices dropped 36 percent. Piet Eichholtz says that this sort of episode — in which unpredictable disasters combine unpredictably — has relevance for today. “It's true that economic and social conditions were different back then,” he said. “But major crises do happen, and we can't necessarily predict them. Will bird flu be a major disaster? Will there be more hurricanes? I don't know. Nobody knows.”

To this, Richard Peach of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York counters, quite reasonably, “I'm not in the business of forecasting the next international calamity or outbreak of the plague.” Economists look at economic data and create economic models. And not all calamities are followed by a drop in real-estate prices, at least not in the short term; home prices have soared in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001, for instance. But if there is one clear lesson that emerges from history, it's that life can be messy.

Another lesson is that the word “bubble” may be a misnomer. If the housing market in Amsterdam plummeted in the late 1630's, it quickly stabilized: by the early 1640's prices had surpassed their previous heights. “The bursting of a bubble is the wrong metaphor for what housing prices do over time,” Eichholtz says. “What you see is rising and falling, sometimes dramatically, depending on whether the city had a stable economy or became hostage to outside forces. That's not a bubble bursting — it's volatility.”

“Volatility” is indeed the watchword as the buying and selling of homes on the canal unfurls against the backdrop of modern history. In the 1650's and 1660's, the Dutch Republic reached the height of its golden age, and prices rose sharply. With money came changes in architectural fashion: new gable types and, on the Herengracht, larger houses built along classical Italian lines. The Fransz family still lived at the oldest end of the canal, but now the mansions farther along, with their clean facades, made the blocky, busy Renaissance style of their home look dated. Where houses sold in the 4,000-guilder range in earlier decades, they were now fetching 9,000 to 15,000.

Then, once again, the bottom falls out. In 1672, France and England declared war on the Dutch Republic. The English strangled Dutch shipping; Louis XIV invaded by land. From 1670 to 1677, houses on the Herengracht lost 56 percent of their value.

Then the cycle begins all over again: from that low point, prices head back up.

But what does “up” mean? The most surprising thing about Eichholtz's study is that it contradicts a maxim of the real-estate profession. “There is a myth which says that real-estate values go up significantly over time, and that this is especially true for central city locations,” Eichholtz said. “When I began to study the Herengracht, I didn't know what I would find, but the data ended up challenging that myth.”

That is to say, where everyone from your wise old uncle to the broker who sold you your house holds it as gospel that real estate is one of the best long-term investments, this longest of long-term indices suggests that, on the contrary, it sort of stinks. Between 1628 and 1973 (the period of Eichholtz's original study), real property values on the Herengracht — adjusted for inflation — went up a mere 0.2 percent per year, worse than the stingiest bank savings account. As Shiller wrote in his analysis of the Herengracht index, “Real home prices did roughly double, but took nearly 350 years to do so.”

The house that Pieter Fransz built is a case in point. In 1855, an estate agent named Robertus van Zoelen bought the house for 6,850 guilders. In 1881, his children sold it to a carpenter, Johann Diederich Brinkmann, for 12,100 guilders — an increase of 93 percent in real terms. But when Brinkmann sold it in 1888, it was for 10,000 guilders: a net loss. The next sale, in 1899, at 9,600 guilders, was also at a loss. Fifteen years later, with World War I looming, a real-estate agent named Georges Jean Josef Salen bought it for 10,000 guilders: again, a loss in real terms. And when, in 1955, a woman named Grietje Uitentuis bought the house, the 15,000 guilders she paid was, after adjusting for inflation, less than what the house sold for in 1855. Over the course of a century, Pieter Fransz's house actually lost 30 percent of its value.

This sort of thing isn't surprising to Shiller, who says he believes that the notion that real estate is a terrific investment comes in part from the long-term nature of most purchases. You know that your grandmother paid $15,000 for her house in 1951, and it's now worth $250,000. That sounds grand, but most of the increase is simply matching inflation. An analysis Shiller made of home prices in the U.S. going back to 1890 showed an average annual increase of a meager 0.4 percent. By way of contrast, Jeremy J. Siegel of the Wharton School of Business has calculated that over a 200-year period, the stock market had an average annual real rate of return of 6.8 percent. It's only in recent years, Shiller says, that huge increases in real-estate prices have become the norm and that people have come to expect them.

It's worth noting, however, that rocketing prices aren't everything. The word “value” has many meanings. Buying a home gets you tax deductions that you wouldn't get from renting. And no economic analysis can diminish the other kind of value that comes with homeownership: the fuzzy kind, the sense of place and rootedness.

Beyond that, probably few homeowners in 2006 are worrying about how much the value of their homes will have increased by 2206 or 2406. It's 2 or 5 or 10 years down the road that matters, and neither Shiller nor Eichholtz is willing to go out on the limb of making definitive short-term predictions. The value of studying a really long term housing market would seem to be less in revealing the how and when of downturns as in underscoring their inevitability. Really bad stuff happens, and when it does, there is often a collapse in real estate.

On the face of it, Amsterdam doesn't seem the most apt model to apply to other cities, particularly American cities. For one thing, the Dutch have a turbulent history. The Low Countries were invaded or occupied many times by foreign powers, with subsequent collapses in the housing market. Also, notes Shiller, “Amsterdam — with tulip mania and the birth of the stock market — is the home of speculation. If you look at, say, Milwaukee, you don't see the same degree of volatility. In a place like that, price is driven by land availability and construction costs, which is the tradition.”

But then, volatility is more prevalent in world history than stability, which, as far as Eichholtz is concerned, makes the Herengracht data more, rather than less, widely applicable. “The financial literature has been dominated by America,” he said. “And most models are created using post-1950 U.S. data, which give a biased picture of reality. There has been no other country like America, and there has been no other period like that in terms of stability. So I would say that in global terms, Milwaukee is the exception, not Amsterdam.”

Besides which, speculation has now gone global — and with speculation comes instability. “Today we see bubblelike activity even in places where there is no land constraint, such as Phoenix,” Shiller said. “They have miles of available land, so there's no justifiable reason for the kinds of increases you see there.” So while it may have been true in the past that the ups and downs of the Herengracht index would make it a less-than-perfect model for American cities, that's not necessarily the case anymore. As Shiller says, “It's plausible that the sort of volatility we see now will make the rest of the world look more like the Herengracht index.”

Amsterdam also turns out to be a pretty good model of recent history. After it had its 17th-century heyday, it settled into a poky, second-tier status among European cities. It was slow to hitch onto the Industrial Revolution, and of course the world wars hit hard. Real-estate prices lagged far behind those in larger and jazzier cities — until recently. The last time that Pieter Fransz's house changed hands was in 1983, when a Hungarian financial adviser and his wife, an English actress, sold it to a pair of doctors for 440,000 guilders. Today, prices on the Herengracht run from one million euros for family houses to three million or more for mansions (the Dutch currency was converted in 2002 at a rate of 2.2 guilders per euro). Even assuming that the house would sell at the low end, and accounting for inflation, this means that after taking three and a half centuries to double its real value, the house has tripled in value in the last 22 years.

The reason, of course, is that Amsterdam is part of the global housing boom. To get an idea of recent history, I asked Babs Persoons, owner of Babs Persoons BV, one of the premier real-estate agencies in Amsterdam's center city, to reminisce for me. “It started in 1998 — prices just went up amazingly,” she said as she sat in her office on the Prinsengracht, another of Amsterdam's three grand canals. “For a while, every agent had a queue in front of their houses, and many were selling for more than the asking price. We didn't know that phenomenon in Holland before.”

But if this description of the past few years typifies the brave new world we live in, putting it into the perspective of time — rise, fall, rise, fall — leads us back to what may be the oldest history lesson of all: it tends to repeat.

Russell Shorto is a contributing writer and the author of “The Island at the Center of the World,” a book about New York's Dutch beginnings.

Motion picture cameraman John Roy Hunt had a long career in the film business starting in 1904 at the St. Louis World’s Fair where he was a film operator. He opened a theater in Fresno, California, in 1905 and then worked as a cameraman. Some of the feature films he photographed were A Daughter of the Gods (1916), Beau Geste (1926), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). His last film was The Juggler (1953) with Kirk Douglas. A consummate tinkerer (he invented several camera improvements and was a ham radio operator), Hunt built this vehicle in the late 1940s with the hope of manufacturing many more. That dream never came to pass, but many of his innovations were later incorporated by other manufacturers when motorhomes emerged from one-of-a-kind vehicles to mainstream transportation. The main deficiency of the Hunt Hollywood house car was its woefully inadequate power plant, a 1939 Mercury V8 95-horsepower engine (modern motorhomes have at least 300 horsepower). Those 95 ponies were hard pressed to push the 18-foot, 2-1/2-ton house car up any significant grade. A major restoration of the exterior skin of the Hunt was undertaken in 2005 by Monty Osborn, who spent over three hundred hours sanding and polishing the Hunt to achieve a lustrous shine. Courtesy Vince Martinico collection.

If you have an interest in unusual mobile homes, Doug Keister's site is a treasure trove.

All-enameled steel, WWII-issue, knockdown, Lustron homes. Free* to those who can best demonstrate their ability to take them down and move them.

* “Free” modulo $80 – $100 K disassembly and reconstruction costs.

Via :

Beautiful photographs by Fan Ho.

I don't play video games. Not because I don't like video games, mind you. I like them too much, in fact. When I was a kid, I pestered my mom for quarters so I could play Defender or Star Castle at the local arcade. In college, I sometimes stayed up all night playing Tetris and Doom. Since I had trouble moderating my gameplay, I decided it was easier just to avoid them altogether. So I haven't played any new games since about 1994.

However, I may have to make an exception for Will Wright's new game, Spore. If the video presentation is any indication, that game looks totally awesome.

Most people know very little about how their car works. Therefore, they can't readily judge what repairs are needed, how much those repairs should cost, nor how well a repair was done. They have to trust that their mechanic will “do the right thing”. Some mechanics take advantage of that trust to make unnecessary repairs, make repairs incompetently, or pad the time it takes to make the repair.

I would love to be able to take my car to a mechanic who offered, for a fee, to film the repair and give me a DVD afterward. They could use “helmet cams“, like those used by adventure sportsmen. Then I could see what was done, what parts were used, etc. They could also explain why they were doing what they were doing as they did the repair. Making the DVD would be good for the mechanic too, because they could demonstrate that the repair was justified, and that they did it correctly.

Of course, it might increase their risk of lawsuit if they did it incorrectly. But hopefully, the number of lawsuits prevented would be greater than the number of lawsuits instigated.

Think you might want to build a model rocket? Make your own fireworks? Mess around with a chemistry kit? If the CPSC (Consumer Product's Safety Commission) has it's way, you won't be able to do any of those things without a BATF “Explosives Manufacturing License. The CPSC is suing Firefox, a chemical supplier, seeking an injunction to require them to abide by the following restrictions:

““Not sell, give away, or otherwise distribute any chlorate compound, magnesium metal, permanganate compound, peroxide compound, zirconium metal, or any chemical listed at 16 C.F.R. § 1507.2 to any recipient who does not possess a valid manufacturing license for explosives issued by the ATF;

Not sell, give away or otherwise distribute any of the following chemicals for which the particle size is finer than 100 mesh (or particles less than 150 microns in size) to any recipient who does not possess a valid manufacturing license for explosives issued by the ATF: aluminum and aluminum alloys, magnalium metal, magnesium/aluminum alloys, titanium and titanium alloys, or zinc metal;

Not sell, give away or otherwise distribute any of the following chemicals in an amount greater than one pound per year per recipient to any recipient who does not possess a valid manufacturing license for explosives issued by the ATF: antimony and antimony compounds, benzoate compounds, nitrate compounds, perchlorate compounds, salicylate compounds or sulfur;

Not sell, give away or otherwise distribute any fuse in an amount greater than 25 feet per year per recipient who does not possess a valid manufacturing license for explosives issued by the ATF.”

In addition, the injunction requires extensive record keeping (photocopies of drivers licenses and, if applicable, ATF licenses for all recipients, as well as detailed invoices maintained for at least seven years) and requires Firefox’s agreement to provide those records to CPSC at any time on demand. “

More details here:

http://www.skylighter.com/skylighter_info_pages/article.asp?Item=72

If you want to support the continued existence of amateur chemistry, you may want to donate to support Fireworks Foundation's fight against the CPSC.

Talking Cats

Take the weight off with Ayds

Check out this Malcolm Gladwell article on homelessness:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060213fa_fact

And NPR interview:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5223068

MILLION-DOLLAR MURRAY
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.
Issue of 2006-02-13 and 20
Posted 2006-02-06

Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-marine, six feet tall and heavyset, and when he fell down—which he did nearly every day—it coul take two or three grown men to pick him up. He had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they called him Smokey. He was missin most of his teeth. He had a wonderful smile. People loved Murray
His chosen drink was vodka. Beer he called “horse piss.” On the streets of downtown Reno, where he lived, he could buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle of cheap vodka for a dollar-fifty. If he was flush, he could go for the seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle, and if he was broke he could always do what many of the other homeless people of Reno did, which is to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables.
“If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day,” Patrick O’Bryan, who is a bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. “And he’s gone on some amazing runners. He would get picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and start up again. A lot of the guys on the streets who’ve been drinking, they get so angry. They are so incredibly abrasive, so violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great sense of humor that we somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we’d say, ‘Murray, you know you love us,’ and he’d say, ‘I know’—and go back to swearing at us.”

“I’ve been a police officer for fifteen years,” O’Bryan’s partner, Steve Johns, said. “I picked up Murray my whole career. Literally.”
Johns and O’Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years ago, he was assigned to a treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house arrest, and he thrived. He got a job and worked hard. But then the program ended. “Once he graduated out, he had no one to report to, and he needed that,” O’Bryan said. “I don’t know whether it was his military background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he accumulated savings of over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did everything he was supposed to do. They said, ‘Congratulations,’ and put him back on the street. He spent that six thousand in a week or so.”
Often, he was too intoxicated for the drunk tank at the jail, and he’d get sent to the emergency room at either Saint Mary’s or Washoe Medical Center. Marla Johns, who was a social worker in the emergency room at Saint Mary’s, saw him several times a week. “The ambulance would bring him in. We would sober him up, so he would be sober enough to go to jail. And we would call the police to pick him up. In fact, that’s how I met my husband.” Marla Johns is married to Steve Johns.
“He was like the one constant in an environment that was ever changing,” she went on. “In he would come. He would grin that half-toothless grin. He called me ‘my angel.’ I would walk in the room, and he would smile and say, ‘Oh, my angel, I’m so happy to see you.’ We would joke back and forth, and I would beg him to quit drinking and he would laugh it off. And when time went by and he didn’t come in I would get worried and call the coroner’s office. When he was sober, we would find out, oh, he’s working someplace, and my husband and I would go and have dinner where he was working. When my husband and I were dating, and we were going to get married, he said, ‘Can I come to the wedding?’ And I almost felt like he should. My joke was ‘If you are sober you can come, because I can’t afford your bar bill.’ When we started a family, he would lay a hand on my pregnant belly and bless the child. He really was this kind of light.”
In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the newspapers, and the police department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The crackdown on panhandling amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren’t an imposition on the city; they were just trying to get by. “One morning, I’m listening to one of the talk shows, and they’re just trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is,” O’Bryan said. “And I thought, Wow, I’ve never seen any of these critics in one of the alleyways in the middle of the winter looking for bodies.” O’Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald’s fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was anything but harmless. He and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like Murray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren’t the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a “One down” call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap.
O’Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. “We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often,” O’Bryan said. “We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he’d only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars—and that’s at the smaller of the two hospitals near downtown Reno. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger bill. Another individual came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand.”
The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totted up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.
“It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,” O’Bryan said.

Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles Police Department was in crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and il discipline and violence, and the assumption was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and file. In the language o statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.’s troubles had a “normal” distribution—that if you graphed them the result would look like a bell curve with a small number of officers at one end of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the problem situated in the middle. Th bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental architecture that we tend to use it to organize experience automatically
But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed by Warren Christopher, a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations of excessive force or improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five hundred officers in the L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything. Furthermore, more than fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against them—and bear in mind that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year period, and that allegations of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work. (The N.Y.P.D. receives about three thousand such complaints a year.) A hundred and eighty-three officers, however, had four or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more complaints, sixteen had eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph the troubles of the L.A.P.D., it wouldn’t look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey stick. It would follow what statisticians call a “power law” distribution—where all the activity is not in the middle but at one extreme.
The Christopher Commission’s report repeatedly comes back to what it describes as the extreme concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the subject of thirteen allegations of excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight “use of force reports” (that is, documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one shooting. Another had six excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten use-of-force reports, and three shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth had thirty-five. Another had a file full of complaints for doing things like “striking an arrestee on the back of the neck with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee was kneeling and handcuffed,” beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an arrestee from his chair and kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed and lying on his stomach.
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren’t working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department’s troubles fell into a normal distribution, you’d propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle—like better training or better hiring—when the middle didn’t need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn’t be nearly strong enough.
In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them? Then, fifteen years ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation. A few months later he went back, and was surprised to discover that he couldn’t find any of the people he had recently spent so much time with. “It made me realize that most of these people were getting on with their own lives,” he said.
Culhane then put together a database—the first of its kind—to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”
The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.
It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless. “It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of these shelter beds,” Culhane said. “We’re talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next cot.” Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, a leading service group for the homeless in Boston, recently tracked the medical expenses of a hundred and nineteen chronically homeless people. In the course of five years, thirty-three people died and seven more were sent to nursing homes, and the group still accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits—at a minimum cost of a thousand dollars a visit. The University of California, San Diego Medical Center followed fifteen chronically homeless inebriates and found that over eighteen months those fifteen people were treated at the hospital’s emergency room four hundred and seventeen times, and ran up bills that averaged a hundred thousand dollars each. One person—San Diego’s counterpart to Murray Barr—came to the emergency room eighty-seven times.
“If it’s a medical admission, it’s likely to be the guys with the really complex pneumonia,” James Dunford, the city of San Diego’s emergency medical director and the author of the observational study, said. “They are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their lungs and develop a lung abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they’re out in the rain. They end up in the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical infections. These are the guys who typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a neurosurgical catastrophe as well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their head and getting a subdural hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them, and it’s the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars. Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit, because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we’re doing is making them capable of walking down the block.”
The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.
The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is Philip Mangano, who, since he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the programs of twenty federal agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a magnetic presence, who got his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. In the past two years, he has crisscrossed the United States, educating local mayors and city councils about the real shape of the homelessness curve. Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he argues, allows the chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a shelter and a soup kitchen if you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable middle. But if it’s a problem at the fringe it can be solved. So far, Mangano has convinced more than two hundred cities to radically reëvaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless.
“I was in St. Louis recently,” Mangano said, back in June, when he dropped by New York on his way to Boise, Idaho. “I spoke with people doing services there. They had a very difficult group of people they couldn’t reach no matter what they offered. So I said, Take some of your money and rent some apartments and go out to those people, and literally go out there with the key and say to them, ‘This is the key to an apartment. If you come with me right now I am going to give it to you, and you are going to have that apartment.’ And so they did. And one by one those people were coming in. Our intent is to take homeless policy from the old idea of funding programs that serve homeless people endlessly and invest in results that actually end homelessness.”
Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening to old Malcolm X speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the civil-rights movement and the Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. “I am an abolitionist,” he says. “My office in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common, up the street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison called for immediate abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave that famous speech at the Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”

The old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver is on Sixteenth Street, just east of the central business district. The main building is a handsome six-stor stone structure that was erected in 1906, and next door is an annex that was added in the nineteen-fifties. On the ground floor there is a gym an exercise rooms. On the upper floors there are several hundred apartments—brightly painted one-bedrooms, efficiencies, and S.R.O.-style room with microwaves and refrigerators and central airconditioning—and for the past several years those apartments have been owned and managed b the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
Even by big-city standards, Denver has a serious homelessness problem. The winters are relatively mild, and the summers aren’t nearly as hot as those of neighboring New Mexico or Utah, which has made the city a magnet for the indigent. By the city’s estimates, it has roughly a thousand chronically homeless people, of whom three hundred spend their time downtown, along the central Sixteenth Street shopping corridor or in nearby Civic Center Park. Many of the merchants downtown worry that the presence of the homeless is scaring away customers. A few blocks north, near the hospital, a modest, low-slung detox center handles twenty-eight thousand admissions a year, many of them homeless people who have passed out on the streets, either from liquor or—as is increasingly the case—from mouthwash. “Dr. Tichenor’s—Dr. Tich, they call it—is the brand of mouthwash they use,” says Roxane White, the manager of the city’s social services. “You can imagine what that does to your gut.”
Eighteen months ago, the city signed up with Mangano. With a mixture of federal and local funds, the C.C.H. inaugurated a new program that has so far enrolled a hundred and six people. It is aimed at the Murray Barrs of Denver, the people costing the system the most. C.C.H. went after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a criminal record, who had a problem with substance abuse or mental illness. “We have one individual in her early sixties, but looking at her you’d think she’s eighty,” Rachel Post, the director of substance treatment at the C.C.H., said. (Post changed some details about her clients in order to protect their identity.) “She’s a chronic alcoholic. A typical day for her is she gets up and tries to find whatever she’s going to drink that day. She falls down a lot. There’s another person who came in during the first week. He was on methadone maintenance. He’d had psychiatric treatment. He was incarcerated for eleven years, and lived on the streets for three years after that, and, if that’s not enough, he had a hole in his heart.”
The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had laid out in St. Louis: Would you like a free apartment? The enrollees got either an efficiency at the Y.M.C.A. or an apartment rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided they agreed to work within the rules of the program. In the basement of the Y, where the racquetball courts used to be, the coalition built a command center, staffed with ten caseworkers. Five days a week, between eight-thirty and ten in the morning, the caseworkers meet and painstakingly review the status of everyone in the program. On the wall around the conference table are several large white boards, with lists of doctor’s appointments and court dates and medication schedules. “We need a staffing ratio of one to ten to make it work,” Post said. “You go out there and you find people and assess how they’re doing in their residence. Sometimes we’re in contact with someone every day. Ideally, we want to be in contact every couple of days. We’ve got about fifteen people we’re really worried about now.”
The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street. The idea is that once the people in the program get stabilized they will find jobs, and start to pick up more and more of their own rent, which would bring someone’s annual cost to the program closer to six thousand dollars. As of today, seventy-five supportive housing slots have already been added, and the city’s homeless plan calls for eight hundred more over the next ten years.
The reality, of course, is hardly that neat and tidy. The idea that the very sickest and most troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is only a hope. Some of them plainly won’t be able to get there: these are, after all, hard cases. “We’ve got one man, he’s in his twenties,” Post said. “Already, he has cirrhosis of the liver. One time he blew a blood alcohol of .49, which is enough to kill most people. The first place we had he brought over all his friends, and they partied and trashed the place and broke a window. Then we gave him another apartment, and he did the same thing.”
Post said that the man had been sober for several months. But he could relapse at some point and perhaps trash another apartment, and they’d have to figure out what to do with him next. Post had just been on a conference call with some people in New York City who run a similar program, and they talked about whether giving clients so many chances simply encourages them to behave irresponsibly. For some people, it probably does. But what was the alternative? If this young man was put back on the streets, he would cost the system even more money. The current philosophy of welfare holds that government assistance should be temporary and conditional, to avoid creating dependency. But someone who blows .49 on a Breathalyzer and has cirrhosis of the liver at the age of twenty-seven doesn’t respond to incentives and sanctions in the usual way. “The most complicated people to work with are those who have been homeless for so long that going back to the streets just isn’t scary to them,” Post said. “The summer comes along and they say, ‘I don’t need to follow your rules.’ ” Power-law homelessness policy has to do the opposite of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you want people who have been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under the supervision of those ten caseworkers in the basement of the Y.M.C.A.
That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair. Thousands of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or three jobs, and are eminently deserving of a helping hand—and no one offers them the key to a new apartment. Yet that’s just what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When the welfare mom’s time on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless man trashes his apartment we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It’s simply about efficiency.
We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be arbitrary. We don’t give only to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We give to everyone who meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government assistance derives, in part, from this universality. But the Denver homelessness program doesn’t help every chronically homeless person in Denver. There is a waiting list of six hundred for the supportive-housing program; it will be years before all those people get apartments, and some may never get one. There isn’t enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit—to observe the principle of universality—isn’t as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot. Being fair, in this case, means providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens don’t solve the problem of homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it comes to a few hard cases. Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

A few miles northwest of the old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver, on the Speer Boulevard off-ramp from I-25, there is a big electronic sign b the side of the road, connected to a device that remotely measures the emissions of the vehicles driving past. When a car with properly functionin pollution-control equipment passes, the sign flashes “Good.” When a car passes that is well over the acceptable limits, the sign flashes “Poor.” I you stand at the Speer Boulevard exit and watch the sign for any length of time, you’ll find that virtually every car scores “Good.” An Audi A4 —“Good.” A Buick Century—“Good.” A Toyota Corolla—“Good.” A Ford Taurus—“Good.” A Saab 9-5—“Good,” and on and on, until afte twenty minutes or so, some beat-up old Ford Escort or tricked-out Porsche drives by and the sign flashes “Poor.” The picture of the smog proble you get from watching the Speer Boulevard sign and the picture of the homelessness problem you get from listening in on the morning staf meetings at the Y.M.C.A. are pretty much the same. Auto emissions follow a power-law distribution, and the air-pollution example offers anothe look at why we struggle so much with problems centered on a few hard cases
Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004 Subaru in good working order has an exhaust stream that’s just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which is negligible. But on almost any highway, for whatever reason—age, ill repair, deliberate tampering by the owner—a small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten per cent, which is almost two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on the road produce fifty-five per cent of the automobile pollution.
“Let’s say a car is fifteen years old,” Donald Stedman says. Stedman is a chemist and automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His laboratory put up the sign on Speer Avenue. “Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is to become broken. It’s the same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical malfunctions—the computer’s not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the catalyst died. It’s not unusual that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least one car in our database which was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that you could almost drive a Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It’s not just old cars. It’s new cars with high mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized control measures was done by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX and discovered that all of the Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its own weight of pollution every year.”
In Stedman’s view, the current system of smog checks makes little sense. A million motorists in Denver have to go to an emissions center every year—take time from work, wait in line, pay fifteen or twenty-five dollars—for a test that more than ninety per cent of them don’t need. “Not everybody gets tested for breast cancer,” Stedman says. “Not everybody takes an AIDS test.” On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and fixing the few outliers. Car enthusiasts—with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars—have been known to drop a clean engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register their car in a faraway town without emissions testing or arrive at the test site “hot”—having just come off hard driving on the freeway—which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be clean. Still others randomly pass the test when they shouldn’t, because dirty engines are highly variable and sometimes burn cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says, that the city’s regime of inspections makes any difference in air quality.
He proposes mobile testing instead. Twenty years ago, he invented a device the size of a suitcase that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the emissions of cars as they drive by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of Stedman’s devices. He says that cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them on freeway off-ramps around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who fails the test. A half-dozen vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same twenty-five million dollars that Denver’s motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city could identify and fix twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few years cut automobile emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between thirty-five and forty per cent. The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it.
Why don’t we all adopt the Stedman method? There’s no moral impediment here. We’re used to the police pulling people over for having a blown headlight or a broken side mirror, and it wouldn’t be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to their list. Yet it does run counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution as a problem to which we all contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move reassuringly quickly and forcefully on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little cleaner, and—presto—the air gets better. But Stedman doesn’t much care about what happens in Washington and Detroit. The challenge of controlling air pollution isn’t so much about the laws as it is about compliance with them. It’s a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there is something ultimately unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air pollution in Denver with a half-dozen vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can such a big problem have such a small-bore solution?
That’s what made the findings of the Christopher Commission so unsatisfying. We put together blue-ribbon panels when we’re faced with problems that seem too large for the normal mechanisms of bureaucratic repair. We want sweeping reforms. But what was the commission’s most memorable observation? It was the story of an officer with a known history of doing things like beating up handcuffed suspects who nonetheless received a performance review from his superior stating that he “usually conducts himself in a manner that inspires respect for the law and instills public confidence.” This is what you say about an officer when you haven’t actually read his file, and the implication of the Christopher Commission’s report was that the L.A.P.D. might help solve its problem simply by getting its police captains to read the files of their officers. The L.A.P.D.’s problem was a matter not of policy but of compliance. The department needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that’s not what a public hungry for institutional transformation wants to hear. Solving problems that have power-law distributions doesn’t just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political intuitions as well. It’s hard not to conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one hopeless undifferentiated group for so long is not simply that we didn’t know better. It’s that we didn’t want to know better. It was easier the old way.
Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in savings or cleaner air or better police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort. In Denver, John Hickenlooper, the city’s enormously popular mayor, has worked on the homelessness issue tirelessly during the past couple of years. He spent more time on the subject in his annual State of the City address this past summer than on any other topic. He gave the speech, with deliberate symbolism, in the city’s downtown Civic Center Park, where homeless people gather every day with their shopping carts and garbage bags. He has gone on local talk radio on many occasions to discuss what the city is doing about the issue. He has commissioned studies to show what a drain on the city’s resources the homeless population has become. But, he says, “there are still people who stop me going into the supermarket and say, ‘I can’t believe you’re going to help those homeless people, those bums.’ ”

Early one morning a year ago, Marla Johns got a call from her husband, Steve. He was at work. “He called and woke me up,” Johns remembers. “He was choked up and crying on the phone. And I thought that something had happened with another police officer. I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, wha happened?’ He said, ‘Murray died last night.’ ” He died of intestinal bleeding. At the police department that morning, some of the officers gav Murray a moment of silence
“There are not many days that go by that I don’t have a thought of him,” she went on. “Christmas comes— and I used to buy him a Christmas present. Make sure he had warm gloves and a blanket and a coat. There was this mutual respect. There was a time when another intoxicated patient jumped off the gurney and was coming at me, and Murray jumped off his gurney and shook his fist and said, ‘Don’t you touch my angel.’ You know, when he was monitored by the system he did fabulously. He would be on house arrest and he would get a job and he would save money and go to work every day, and he wouldn’t drink. He would do all the things he was supposed to do. There are some people who can be very successful members of society if someone monitors them. Murray needed someone to be in charge of him.”
But, of course, Reno didn’t have a place where Murray could be given the structure he needed. Someone must have decided that it cost too much.
“I told my husband that I would claim his body if no one else did,” she said. “I would not have him in an unmarked grave.”