H.O.M.E.

The increasingly dappled light as Norman Garner walked down the hall towards the release office was one of the first things he noticed that afternoon. The past week had been a whirlwind of trials, meetings, visitations, and other apathetically mindless minutia that wrongfully-convicted men of his nature might be concerning themselves with. Norm’s brother had been strangled two years ago by a drunken man who suffered from psychosis. Norm spent the following four months tracking down his brother’s killer, when the manhunt ended with a police standoff in an affluent housing development on the East side of the city.

“Do you have someone you can stay with Mr. Garner?” The question filled his head with memories of friends and family that were all comfortably part of some new system. As a convict, Norman was unsure of his options.

“My brother is dead. Is that part not in my record?” At 70, Norm was still amusingly sarcastic at least, he thought so.

“I’ll make a call to the social security office. They’ll set you up with a housing program. You can take the Red Line to get there.” Los Angeles was hardly the city in which he remembered growing up. Twenty years ago, downtown wasn’t a place a person like him would find himself. Now there’s a new bar or coffee shop or boutique rotating out of every corner in the city. Norman felt it was fitting for a city with so much cultural identity that it was hard to narrow it down to one or two.

“Okay Mr. Garner, you’re all set. All you need to do is input how long you’ll need to stay, and the app will find a place within your price range.” Norman hadn’t worked in fifteen years, and his prison salary certainly wouldn’t amount to rent – especially in this part of town.

“I don’t think I have enough money to get to an affordable part of town, let alone be able to pay rent to someone. I’ll just go by the Mission and see if they have space for me.”

“You haven’t been paying attention lately, have you Mr. Garner?” He thought she was cute in a provincial kind of way, the social worker. Norm was wondering what she could have meant. He had heard that a lot more of the city was changing – much faster than any urban studies could have predicted. Something about this app? Norm knew his way around a computer, but was hardly savvy in the ways of apps and iPhones and Lyfts. “H.O.M.E. has changed all of our lives. I’ve lived in five cities in the past year! Through your SSI benefits, you are entitled to one month of free housing with a government subsidized discounted rate thereafter. I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

“Hey, we got a notification. Looks like we’re moving for a month.” Edgar Osuguera is a thirty-four year old software engineer from Mexico City. He and his wife Jessica had been in Los Angeles for about eight months when Edgar’s phone vibrated. “Where are you thinking we should go next?”

“How about Bordeaux? We haven’t spent much time there.” Jessica Osuguera is a successful fashion blogger. Teens and tweens the world over treated her input and YouTube interviews as a social bible. Given her line of work, she was free to work anywhere in the world. In fact, most people are free to work anywhere in the world. The advances in cloud computing and telecommunications virtually separates the worker from the cubicle.

“Maybe we should go to Isfahan. Spend some time with your Mother? She’s getting up there in age and I’d hate for you to miss an opportunity to see her.” Jessica came to California before the tech-driven nomadic revolution of today. Her parents returned to Iran after Jessica graduated college. Once she met Edgar, Jessica’s parents felt she was well taken care of, in the traditional sense. Ever introspective, Jessica couldn’t help but think about this particular situation. H.O.M.E. had allowed her and Edgar to travel the world over. She felt privileged to have grown up in a world where vacation and travel was a special thing; something to work towards and be savored. Now it didn’t feel like travel at all, this is just the way things are now. ‘It’s so easy though,’ she thought, to just pick up and move. ‘There’s nothing in this world that I am so attached to that I feel compelled to lug it around the planet with me, maybe except Ed. And it’s not like we’re really doing anything differently than anyone else. Almost everyone I know absolutely values experiences over possessions. I don’t know what I’m trying to convince myself of, this is great!’

“I love that idea. Is it in our zone, or do we have to pay extra?” H.O.M.E is a distance based temporary housing app that allows users to go anywhere within their payment zone. Expanding on the semi-permanent housing platform put forth by AirBNB, H.O.M.E. leverages the current generation’s desire for inexpensive world-wide travel. Rather than pay rent, Edgar and Jessica pay $2,500 per month for their H.O.M.E. membership. This allows them to travel and live anywhere within a 2,500 mile radius for up to a month at a time. These variables, distance and duration, are the keys to H.O.M.E.’s algorithms. They could also stay somewhere half as far for twice as long and so on. Since this application is distance based, users can leap-frog their way across the world given their individual membership level.

“There’s a conference in New York that I’d like to attend, so maybe we’ll leap frog our way there.” If any user wishes to stay in their current location for longer than their personal property is being used, they can post their home for any length of time. Given this user distance-based platform, the very urban fabric of cities has begun to re-orient itself based on paths of travel. While Edgar and Jessica pay a premium for their membership, another user just a few blocks away may have access to their home while they are away.

Norman walked into the lobby and was immediately taken aback by its grandeur. The perfectly chamfered white columns stood in stark contrast to the unfinished teak walls. The fifteen-foot high glass and aluminum envelope acted as a climatic barrier between the lobby and the colorful streets outside. As he approached the front desk, Norm felt as if he had cheated the system. Surely someone of his background didn’t belong in a place like this.

“How may I help you sir?” The secretary seemed to look past Norman’s unshaven and disheveled look. Perhaps he knew of the arrangement made by the social worker just a few hours prior.

“Umm, yes. I have a reservation.” Norman was unsure if reservation was the right word to use in this situation. He had stayed in plenty of hotels in his life, and that was the only situation he could equate to this one.

“Ah yes, Mr. Garner. I see that you have a rehabilitation voucher through Social Security.” The secretary turned to a file cabinet just behind the desk and retrieved a key card. “Here you are Mr. Garner. Enjoy your stay. Let me know if you need any help finding anything in the neighborhood. When the time comes, I’d be happy to help you find your next residence.” Norman took the elevator to the fifth floor and walked halfway down the hall to apartment 512. As he opened the door, he found the apartment to be sparingly yet comfortable furnished. He halfway expected a cot to be placed haphazardly in a corner. To his surprise, the bathroom was clean and well stocked with soaps, creams, and fragrances; much different than the shared bathrooms to which he had recently grown accustomed. Just as he had felt abstracted from the beginning of the day during his prison release, Norm found himself equally at odds with connecting with this particular moment. ‘This is beautiful,’ he thought. ‘I’m sure I could get used to this, but it’s certainly different from other placed I’ve lived.’

Before prison, Norman had moved around senior housing developments in the suburbs of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, only to find himself on the other end of a Glock just a year and a half prior. Norm had followed his brother’s killer to a neighborhood in the San Jose Hills. Given the suspect’s home and social status, it was easy for the police to arrest Norman rather than the man that was guilty of killing his brother. Norm spent the next eighteen months at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility awaiting a hearing to prove his innocence. Norman wasn’t able to exact vengeance on the man who killed his brother; the police arrived before Norm could do anything. The only thing Norman was guilty of was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortuitously, this man had been caught stalking a woman more than a year later. During the murderer’s trials, the prosecution found that he had killed several times before, including Norman Garner’s brother.

Three and a half weeks later, Norman was nearing the end of his stay. He went down to the building’s lobby to speak with the man that had offered him help with the H.O.M.E. app upon his arrival.

“How long do you need your next stay to be? And what level of membership can you afford?” Norman had started driving with Lyft. He had rented a car through another car sharing app and was well on his way for saving for a down payment for a car of his own. He thought in combination with this ‘new’ living paradigm, driving for a living was a great way for him to see the country – something he had always wanted to do.

“Well I still qualify for a government subsidy, perhaps I can afford about $500 per month. Let’s see how far I can get for a two-month stay.” Two months seemed like enough time to learn a new city and be able to work and make money for his next leap frog.

“With your discount, you’ve got a pretty good radius for two months. You can go as far as Denver for that.

Edgar and Jessica made it to Isfahan and spent two years with Jessica’s mother until she passed in 2020. The couple continued to travel the world and finally settled in Korea for the rest of their lives. Norman Garner leap frogged his way across the Southern United States, staying anywhere from two to eight months at any given location. Norman died peacefully in the Spring of 2032 in Norfolk, Virginia.

Relative paths of travel taken by Edgar and Jessica, and Norman. Each circle represents the approximate radius of each person’s travel distance based on individual membership levels. At $2500 per month, Edgar and Jessica are able to travel much further between moves as compared to Norman’s subsidized rate.

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