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Creator of Chatbot that Beat 160K Parking Fines Now Tackling Homelessness (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The chatbot lawyer that overturned hundreds and thousands of parking tickets is now tackling another problem: homelessness. London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder created DoNotPay initially to help people appeal against fines for unpaid parking tickets. Dubbed "the world's first robot lawyer", Browder later programmed it to deal with a wider range of legal issues, such as claiming for delayed flights and trains and payment protection insurance (PPI). Now, Browder, 19, wants his chatbot to provide free legal aid to people facing homelessness. He said: "I never could have imagined a parking ticket bot would appeal so much to people. Then I realised: this issue is bigger than a few parking tickets." In an interview with the Washington Post, the 19-year-old said he decided to expand the bot's capabilities after DoNotPay began receiving messages about evictions and repossessions. In February this year tenant evictions reached the highest on record.
Non-paying tenants are the scum of the earth. They are literally taking food out of the mouths of their landlords. The landlord-tenant courts are absurdly pro-tenant as is and delay evictions for 6-12 months as a matter of course as is. Most landlords are not Donald Trumps. They are middle class people who own 1-3 units. A single non-paying tenant can and often does put them on the brink of bankruptcy. This isn't a good thing. People who cant afford their housing need to move and find cheaper housing. They shouldn't get 6-12 months at someone else's expense to do it.
disclaimer: I work to prosecute housing discrimination. im not your attorney though.
after the 1964 civil rights amendment landlords needed new tools to continue the systemic policy of redlined districs in light of things like equal housing policies and anti-discrimination ordinances. They largely found it in Reagans call for a "lawful" society and began instituting policies to reflect "lawfulness" in their rental applications. tenants could now be refused for prior criminal record, poor credit, no credit, lack of a drivers license, bank account, even washing their car outside or having expired tags on their car which would have it towed by a private company at a housing authorities discretion. the idea was to antagonize and outright shun poor people into a market created especially for them.
existing tenements apartments like cabrini green did not have much in the way of requirements for housing other than section 8. Cabrini was a repository for low income black renters and designed to continue a housing segregation policy into the 21st century, but it began to fail after systemic poverty gave rise to sectarian violence and outright block warfare that chewed up a dozen or more cops a year. the solution for Cabrini was to demolish it, renovate the space, and the tenants would then be allowed to return. but it did not work that way. new landlords began instituting the same policies in Cabrini that landlords from the sixties used to prevent access to middle class neighbourhoods for upwardly mobile black families. the result was displacement, and unaccountable gentrification at the expense of a community thats been largely ignored.
to fix the homeless crisis in america means we need to address things like systemic racism, the boom bust cycle of poverty and inequality in american capitalism, and the ability for landed gentry to impose arbitrary restriction on any number of free living conditions to police and enforce what essentially turn into their own mini cities and states. the bot proposed can help with things like overzealous prosecutors and cities that have an unwritten debtors prison policy, but it will do nothing to prevent unscrupulous lenders and collections agencies from hounding the poor and ruining credit scores required for upward mobility.
Good people go to bed earlier.