The Media Loves Business Class Homelessness

by Josie Raymond · 2010-03-12 13:42:00 UTC
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UPDATE 5/14/2010: With just a few weeks of frequent flier miles left, Jim Kennedy got a job. He's the new CEO of an internet advertising company, Netword.

Whether or not you believe that homeless can happen to anybody, it does occasionally strike someone who had previously been raking in six figures. The media loves this. A person may not be able to find a new job or keep his home, but he can become a minor celebrity.

The latest example is 46-year-old Jim Kennedy, who lives in Irvine, California (and its surroundings). He lost his job in the corporate world a year and a half ago, then lost his condo to foreclosure and now hops from hotel to hotel, using the massive collection of hotel reward points and frequent flier miles he acquiring during his career. In a storage unit, he keeps his golf clubs, his HDTV and his wine collection.

Kennedy started a Twitter account under the pseudonym HomelessThomOC and was featured on the local news and then Good Morning America, where he asked that they not show his face. But he allowed himself to be unmasked in the newspaper. (That's not him in the photo above, but he looks something like that.)

The article about Kennedy's day-to-day life in the Orange County Register was seemingly written to make him look unsympathetic. I wonder if he felt betrayed by writer Peggy Rowe when he read it. Rowe makes sure to mention his subscription to a golf magazine and his dry clean-only shirt from the Four Seasons. Aren't homeless people allowed creature comforts?

As much flak as the average homeless person gets ("it's her fault," "he's just going to go buy booze," you know -- the usual), I imagine that once-wealthy people are attacked even more, if that's possible. Why doesn't he just return that leased BMW?, someone could ask. Or sell his 375-bottle wine collection?

Who's to judge? People do what they have to to get by. I don't begrudge him for choosing to subsist on $5 a day meal money than sell the painstakingly-assembled wine collection. We should actually appreciate these formerly wealthy, now homeless individuals for busting wide open the stereotypes of the homeless and for getting the issue on TV networks that would rather go blank than show more stock footage of a soup kitchen.

Photo credit: Jo Jakeman

Josie Raymond is a Change.org editor who has reported from the streets of the South Bronx, written for several magazines that folded (not her fault) and fixed thousands of typos.
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