NY trash... I saw one of my "positive" clients from the infamous Hotel Malibu on the street yesterday selling chatchkes and tapes in front of the Chase Bank. His rent is paid by the City... $2490 a month for a 9 X 6 room without its own bathroom or kitchen. They throw in a small refrigerator for his medication. Meanwhile, he gets a small amount of walking around money for food and everything else. I was looking at all this stuff laid down by him and the other two venders. Little carved statues and ceramic ware, clay pots, pewter ware, pictures and picture frames, ornate woven straw place mats, baby clothing, strange kitchen implements and pots, small boxes with drawers, tapes, and used books. The gleanings from New York City trash. I flashed on this idea - nothing sells on the street for more than $5.00 here, but most of this stuff would fetch better prices on ebay, and would not be confiscated by the New York City Police Department. What we need is a homeless ebay network to redistribute the gleanings from New York City trash to the rest of the country! Homeless guys with wifi laptops could skim off the good stuff out of the trash and go on line at Bryant Park, or one of the other free access sites in the city, and sell their stuff on the web for better money than they could get on the street. Paypal would deposit the money directly into their bank account. Although most people don't like to admit it many of the homeless, or marginally housed persons like my clients, are not any crazier than the rest of the population- they are just people who fell out their support network of job , friends and apartment. Some of them have substance abuse problems, but a lot of employed people with jobs have the same type of problem, but have never had the bad luck of getting sick for a while, losing in housing court, or being arrested. Many of the housed people I know are just about three paychecks away from homelessness. Give them a serious illness, or even a flu that goes on for a couple of months, and they could be homeless.