The retired Air Force vet has "job offers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona, Iowa." Someone sent him $5,000. A woman reads through tears from a letter she's received: "In a couple of weeks I will be able to send you some money to help with expenses. I hope this letter raises your spirits and that you know I really do care. Most of all, you have a friend in me. You are going to be OK, and so are your children. I will be thinking of you, sweetie, and praying that lots of other people send you much-needed money."

She says, "It's really hard to believe that someone you've never met could actually care that much."  

The food pantry lady has gotten 500 phone calls and donations from Texas, California, Florida, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maine and Canada. She says, "I just can't even describe how good it feels to know that there are so many people out there that really do care."

This is absolutely par for the course, it's what happens every single time there is a sob story on the TV, but here's the thing: People don't care. They just respond to what's on television.

There are folks right down the street in Texas, California, Florida and Iowa who need food and basic supplies. There are good, capable people, some of them retired military, right down the street in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa who are looking for work. And, after NBC's report, those people still need the basics and are still looking for work. And those people who sent the heartfelt letters and the donations and the job offers likely never moved a muscle for those people down the street.

A guy who drove to the food pantry with a Hefty bag of donations tells the food pantry lady, "Cincinnati Ohio's thinkin' of ya," and she gives him a big hug. Really, guy who drove 170 miles to Lottridge to find someone to give your Hefty bag of stuff to? Because where were you and the rest of Cincinnati before NBC aired its report?

Curry, who is among the best in the business and whom I don't mean to beat up on, gets "a smile" out of this, as she should. She did a good piece about people who are struggling, her viewers responded in overwhelming fashion and the people she reported about are deeply moved by their good fortune.

If you focus in tightly enough, it really is a wonderful thing. That a relatively tiny group of people in Ohio actually did get a lot of help they weren't going to get without that TV report. It was like a little miracle, and you'd have to have a hard heart indeed not to be touched by the young mom reading the letter or the hardworking food pantry lady who is suddenly able to provide so much more help to so many more people. I love America too.

But back your view out to the larger picture and what you see is something much more depressing.

Obviously, the people who sent money and goods and job offers had both the means and willingness to help their neighbors in need, but instead they helped some people they saw on TV. Now, I suppose it's possible that every one of them, from the donor of $5,000 to the Hefty bag guy from Cincinnati to the job offerers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Arizona and Iowa, is doing just as much for lots of other people closer to home and not on the TV.

I would just be willing to bet a lot that they aren't.

What Curry's story suggests is that the generosity of the American people can solve the problems of a lot of folks who need help -- as long as they can get on TV. Getting on TV is a lottery ticket, and the depressing part of it is that if you're in trouble, your chances of getting on TV are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery.

What about all the desperate people who didn't have a TV network drop out of the sky into their local food pantry? How do we turn their story into "a smile"? Because there are clearly people out there willing to help. There just isn't enough TV to go around.

The guys chat and sip beers as they snip branches from the plants and carefully trim away excess leaves and stems. Later, Paul will hang the pruned buds up to dry in a nearby closet. The work is slow and tedious. Pretty soon, the small talk subsides. It's going to be a long night. It's barely nine o'clock in the evening, and no one expects to finish until well into the wee morning hours. Then comes the hard part. They have to figure out how to sell the stuff.

All in all, Paul and David hope to reap a little over a pound of dried, salable smoke from the crop. That's too miniscule a yield to interest the local medical marijuana dispensaries, so they plan to peddle their wares in smaller quantities on the black market, an ounce or less at a time. For all of their efforts, and the legal risks involved, Paul, David and a third partner who doesn't take part in the daily operation of the business each stand to clear about a thousand bucks after expenses. That's a thousand dollars in profit for several weeks worth of work. Not exactly a windfall. But in these tough times, Paul says he's happy to have any source of income.

"For me, I'm just looking for this to help me pay rent, utilities, basic things like that," the slender, bearded 27-year-old said. "Once this gets going, it requires minimal day-to-day maintenance. It's just starting it up that's hard, but I have time for that right now."

Like millions of his fellow Californians, Paul has a lot of extra time on his hands these days, because he can't find a decent job. A year ago, he never expected to be eking out a living as a small-time cannabis grower and dealer. He had just graduated from a local university with an advanced degree in one of the hard sciences. His goal was to teach. But he made the mistake of finishing his studies in the middle of an economic meltdown. He soon found himself sending out résumés to schools that were cutting their staffs, not looking to bring on new teachers just out of graduate school.

"The state took billions from public education, U.C., state and community colleges," he recalled. "Obviously, that doesn't go hand in hand with hiring new faculty."

After weeks of searching, the only job Paul could get was a part-time gig serving coffee and making sandwiches at a local cafe. It paid minimum wage. Then his third roommate decided to move out, opening up a spare bedroom in the apartment he shares with David. The two friends decided not to post the rental on Craigslist. Instead, they chose to make a more lucrative use of the space.

First, Paul went out and paid $100 for a medical marijuana prescription from a local doctor, claiming he suffered from knee and back pain, as well as mild attention deficit disorder. In less than hour, he had his "215 Card," named after 1996's Proposition 215, which legalized medical pot. In Oakland, possessing a card allows one to grow up to two dozen plants at a time for personal use. Next, Paul went to a nearby cannabis dispensary and purchased 18 off-the-shelf, ready-to-grow clones, or cuttings. Add some potting soil, lights and some 3 mil plastic sheeting, and the boys were in business. Eventually, they plan to combine their personal use allotments into a medical cannabis "collective," allowing them to tend three times as many plants. But make no mistake, while the growers may sample their product from time to time, almost none of them will be for personal use.

"This is definitely a money-making operation," Paul confirmed. "At least, we hope it is."

It is an open secret that many Californians pay for medical cannabis prescriptions without necessarily needing them to treat serious conditions. But a lesser known fact is that a good number of small growers in the state use their scrips as cover to produce crops destined for the recreational market. Given the drug's current quasi-legal status in the state, particularly in Oakland, starting a modest operation is just too tempting to pass up for many unemployed young people like Paul or for others, like David, looking to make extra cash.

"It pretty much feels legal to me already here in Oakland," David said. "I mean, I don't want the landlord to find out, but other than that, I'm not scared."

Like his friend Paul, Adam is a 27-year-old with an advanced degree from a well-known university. Unlike Paul, Adam was lucky enough to land a decent job out of graduate school. But even with a steady salary, the tall, Nordic-looking blond struggles to pay his bills every month. He is a new father. His wife is in graduate school herself now. And he is trying to pay down tens of thousands of dollars in student loan and credit debt. For him, as for Paul and David, the state's less-than-stringent medical marijuana laws and the readily available supplies at local cannabis dispensaries made growing part time an easy choice. He is currently using a prescription for "joint pain" to tend 12 plants in his Berkeley home's garage.

"You can get your clones at any club for like 12 bucks," he explained. "It's amazing, high-yielding weed that basically grows itself. You don't have to do any of the traditional stuff like breeding the best strains. You don't have to do any hybridizing. I mean, I've never had to own a male plant."

At today's prices, each of those $12 clones can yield up to $400 worth of high-grade product. That's a serious rate of return, at least on paper. But as farmers have known for thousands of years, the three young growers have discovered that agriculture can be tricky. Paul and David's plants took a month longer to ripen than expected. Mold wiped out one of Adam's early crops. Then there is the even larger headache of bringing their harvests to market and getting a fair price for them, a process that could get even more complicated in the coming months.

Polls show about a 50-50 chance that California voters will opt to legalize the cultivation and sale of marijuana statewide this coming November. A recent Rand Study said that could drastically lower the price of cannabis. Looking to maximize the tax revenues that a yes vote on the legalization measure could bring, Oakland's City Council just moved to allow the city to issue permits for Walmart-size weed facilities that could flood the market with cheap, mass-produced bud, bringing prices down even more.

But even before these initiatives, industry insiders say the going rate for weed had been dropping steadily.

"Two years ago, I was selling pounds for $4,200. Now, I'm selling those exact strains for $3,600 and I'm hearing guys grumble at paying even that much," said "Henry," a 29-year-old broker for growers in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Henry regularly ferries large wholesale shipments of pot to medical cannabis dispensaries in Southern California.

"I don't know anybody in this business that's getting rich right now," he went on. "I mean, you've got electric bills, water bills, overhead. At the end of the day, a lot of these guys are busting their asses just to break even. Guys who are doing these small-time closet grows, I don't know how they're making it."

"Closet"-size growers like Paul, David and Adam answer that they're making it by keeping their expectations low.

"I have a lot of expenses. Student loans, rent, childcare, credit cards," Adam said. "Really, I'm just hoping that growing will help free me up a little bit."

Not surprisingly, Adam plans to vote no on the November legalization measure. For his part, Paul says he will vote yes, even if it does stand to wipe out his new business venture.

"There's no doubt that an operation like this benefits from the black market," he said. "I mean, it's still worth more than its weight in gold right now. But if anybody can suddenly grow it, it'll probably wind up worth about as much as tomatoes."

J.B. Powell is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. His first novel, "The Republic," is available from Livingston Press.

I entered this business purely by accident. A victim of the craptastic economy, I've done all sorts of things for money. I've cleaned maggots out of other people's kitchens. I've scraped cat poop off carpets. I've watched small screaming children for hours at a time. But doing college homework for cash? That one took me by surprise. It began innocently. Having tutored writing at a small private school, I decided to offer my services to the larger market via Craigslist. Soon, a prospect contacted me.

"Can you just write the paper for me? I'd pay $100," my new client wrote. She wanted a compare/contrast essay about Charles Dickens and had little interest in reading "Oliver Twist" or "Great Expectations." She moaned about her great-grandma's hunting accident/funeral and her busy weekend party schedule. I couldn't have cared less about her motivations. She had me at $100.

My next client, whom I actively solicited on Craigslist, wanted me to write an ethics paper. She had no idea this entailed irony of any kind. She had no idea what the word "irony" meant, until I used it in her essay and sent her a link to a dictionary definition.

The ad I used to land the ethics student promised custom work by Ivy League grads. (I went to an Eastern Seaboard safety school. Sorry, there's no honor among cheaters.) The work flooded in. I wrote about Dickens and Hawthorne, having to re-read the latter and discovering anew my hatred for his old-school misogynist claptrap. I wrote about poetry and literature and then branched out into chemistry, despite having no scientific background. I found that my ability to do research, a chore when I was a student in the 1990s, has greatly improved now that I can skip slogging to the library and find scholarly articles online from the comfort of my sofa. I did a paper on the geochemistry of the Gulf Coast oil spill for a student in Florida. He failed when it came to paying my fee, but he got an A on the paper.

Still, I marvel that the students who actually do pay will spend so much money on something they could do themselves. I realize that not all my clients shell out their own fees: Parents, spouses and siblings often provide the cash. Who knows if the folks at home footing the bill know what they're buying for Junior at the state university? At least one mother contacted me to do her son's high school geometry homework. Fortunately, I don't do math (rather, I can't do math), so I sidestepped that sad moral dilemma. While I'm happy to do college and grad school work, doing high school work — especially work contracted by a parent so unimpressed with her own child's intellect that she's trawling Craigslist — seems deeply wrong. Disturbingly wrong, like something akin to child abuse. My college students and grad students don't affect me that way. They're adults. They're ruined already.

Oh, I feel some guilt, but I don't kid myself about their squandered potential. Hey, I wish I could take out another student loan for a grad degree; meanwhile, these folks are going to college as some forced vocational exercise. But I know that I'm cheating instructors out of real a relationship with students — that I might be seducing those educators into thinking the students have real ideas, that the kid actually "gets it." Instead it's me who's benefiting from all these "studies": They've opened my mind to science and serious literature again. I realize now that I'd rather earn a living with my mind — even in a shady, dishonest way — than continue to do physically demanding unskilled work for wages that don't support me.

Some of these clients become real people to me, and they are the ones who haunt me. Many speak English as a second language. The private school where I tutor part-time for $9 an hour also has its share of ESL kids, and I can't help but think of my online clients whenever I tutor a real student. No matter how awkward my legitimate students' first drafts may be, I respect them — at least they do their own work. When I help an ESL student, I try to have more patience. I let them know that their English is better than my Mandarin or Swahili, and that speaking another language fluently — let alone taking the time to learn to write well in a foreign language — is an accomplishment few American college students even attempt. So I know I could help Thi (from Cambodia) and Ali (from Saudi Arabia) learn to write their own papers. Sadly, that's not what they want to pay me for.

I make jokes about this work, trying to rationalize it to friends and even to myself. I sell my services under the pseudonym "Charles Darwin," and not a single client seems to realize that's not my real name. I've also proofread and fixed papers (a lesser evil, I tell myself). I feel that sparing an instructor these sentences may redeem me:

"World War II happened hundreds of years ago."

"Hitler had some good ideas — in a business-y kind of way."

Will I continue this work long term? I hope not. The truth is, I feel sad and angry that I have so few options to use my education to make a living. Despite having published a book and written for national magazines, finding full-time work as a writer has been next to impossible. I love writing, but I also love writing for an audience that acknowledges the work and responds to it. Friends who know about this sideline ask what kind of grades the papers get. I usually respond flippantly: "I don't care as long as they pay." This isn't entirely true. When people tell me they got A's, I feel proud — and then, of course, ashamed. But also, $100 to $150 richer.

Will I give you a discount? No. Will I do your ethics homework? If you meet my quote, sure! Will I still respect myself in the morning? I have to. I'm all I've got, and I will do whatever it takes to avoid living in my car and eating cat food. (And to satisfy my middle-class aspirations: I still want cable television and a good cell plan, sadly.) I've learned that people will do almost anything to avoid work they don't enjoy, and if that includes paying me to do it for them, then I'll take advantage of that. I've tried manual labor, and the stress of living within a hair's breadth of homelessness at all times made me physically ill. I just want to make enough money to keep body and soul apart. Now that phrase I didn't write; I stole it from Dorothy Parker.

The doors weren't red when the crystal was freed from its bubble wrap and set, with all its symbolic promise, on the Mission-style cabinet with the fingerprint-free glass doors more than a decade ago. Back then, the house's vibrant Craftsman beauty was still shrouded in dowdy cracked beige. My husband, Mike, and I spent the first year with hammer and sander carving out our home from this blank and bland canvas. We liberated hardwood floors with inlaid borders from the bondage of dusty brown wall-to-wall carpet. In retrospect, we should have left the hallway carpet alone, but who knew that there would be only subfloor beneath? Who takes the flooring out of a hallway?

The hallway provided the first clue that our views of homeownership and renovation were comically naive. Mike realized this before I did, but he didn't stand a chance. I'm the planner, the dreamer, the one with the improbably grand schemes and lists. In the 16 years since he was first foolish enough to ask me to coffee, my husband has learned to dread the words "I was thinking ..." "I was thinking" led us to purchase a century-old house marginally beyond our budget on two more acres of land than either of us (city brats, both) was prepared to handle in a town 30 miles from anywhere. "I was thinking" has resulted in extravagant birthday parties with days spent on hand-painted murals, themed food, cakes with marzipan palm trees, pyramids and pirate ships. "I was thinking" caused me to begin the first major attempt at renovation by celebrating my homecoming from a work trip by tearing the 1970s-era ersatz wainscoting from the walls of the hall bedroom. Mike's eyebrow hit a new apex at the sight of me surrounded by fragments of laminate, wallpaper and -- to his dismay -- sheetrock when he got home that evening. "We were going to get rid of this anyway," I chirped. "I decided to get started." (Three children and 12 years later, that room is still unfinished.)

When the foreclosure crisis first began to spread its tentacles two years ago, I nodded and tsk'd along with everyone else. We had seen the property values climb like Jack's beanstalk, wondered where on earth people were coming up with the money to pay these outlandish mortgages, and solemnly shook our heads at the irresponsibility of some people. We knew then that it couldn't last forever; someone would come along with an ax, and Jack, the harp and the golden goose would all tumble down. I never thought that I would be one of the villagers squished beneath the giant.

All things may be interconnected on a spiritual/cosmic level; that's not for me to know. However, I have learned, with a clarity never presented in high school civics, that all things are most definitely interconnected on an economic level. It turns out that veterinarians -- large animal vets, at least -- are not recession-proof. As the real estate market collapsed and California began to slide into the ocean of red ink, my clients -- both the affluent and the perpetually struggling -- started cutting back. Horses with lamenesses were no longer treated to expensive diagnostics and therapies; they were "kicked out to pasture for a while." New horse purchases, and with them the lucrative pre-purchase exam, became almost nonexistent. Beef prices rode the roller coaster of uncertainty and milk prices plunged even as the costs of feed and diesel soared. Envelopes arrived every other week revealing an income, based on a percentage of my gross revenues, sinking below that of a fast food employee. I began to ponder giving up my latte habit. I thought about applying for a barista job. I still think it might be the wise choice.

The 75-mile one-way commute grew more painful. There were days when I spent more money on gas to get to work than I earned once there. Debt has shadowed us since my maternity leave following the birth of our oldest daughter. The debt spread during an ill-conceived year of stay-at-home motherhood, and even once I returned to work, each subsequent maternity leave piled digits onto credit card balances. But we had always beaten the dragon back into the cave wielding the arrows of occasional prosperity and the broadsword of refinancing.

Was it the refi that tipped us over the summit? The paint job for the house? The new heater/air conditioner? The washer? The dryer? The water heater? Truck repairs? School tuition? It's still hard to say; it's almost impossible to trace the disaster to any one thing. Yes, the debt has been high, too high for prudence for years, but this year, things changed. We stopped answering the house phone, especially in the evenings. We told the kids that we didn't want to talk to "salespeople." What was there to say? Debt collectors don't care that the last paycheck had only three digits before the decimal point. They are unmoved by the transmission on the 2000 F150. We would pay the bills when we could -- we hoped.

And, eventually, like so many others, we couldn't.

That's it, really. Someone loses a job, takes out a bad loan, falls ill, whatever. They can't pay their debts. They lose their house, their home. The government loses property taxes. The government furloughs people. Those people stop paying their bills. And it comes around. And five people in an old house with red doors stop worrying about the weeds and cobwebs and begin to bubble-wrap their lives and look for a rental house.

We are the lucky ones. Income reduction notwithstanding, Mike and I both have jobs, are educated, and have a solid marriage. We will move closer to our workplaces, closer to the kids' school and closer to the lives that have crept upon us over the years. Our medical expenses limit themselves to annual exams or the occasional minor injury or fever. We have been blessed with three tough, funny, brilliant children whose only special requirement is for love. Love we can provide: in a house, with a mouse, in a tent, completely spent. Love we were given in spades, and it is the one surplus we have to pass along.

My grandparents move with me from room to room as I tape boxes and write "fragile" with frantic red Sharpie. They are all gone now: the paternal grandparents who helped us rewire the bedroom, the maternal grandparents whose money helped with my education and with the down payment for our home, my husband's grandmother whose wedding gift -- a crystal bowl carried from her internment days as a Japanese American during WWII -- is now packed away. Of all of the losses, it is their deaths that I mourn most as we say goodbye to our home. My renewed grief comes not from the sense that they would be disappointed in our failures, but because they, more than anyone left alive, would have understood and helped me to understand this twist in life's road.

Our grandparents belonged to the last generation to witness an economic cataclysm. We used to laugh at my paternal grandmother's tendency to save everything; even the last forlorn leaves of a salad went into a container in the refrigerator. But they knew, despite the virtues of hard work and education that they pounded into their baby boomer children and by extension even into my notoriously apathetic Generation X, how blurry is the line between success and failure, how narrow the fulcrum beneath the balance of fortune. They had their own stories: of poverty, war, death, internment, loss, loss, loss. And -- and this is the part I try to remember as we wait for the verdict on our rental application, as we tape boxes with no idea of where our belongings are going -- they persevered.

We will persevere as well. We will find a place to live, somehow. If not, well, as my grandmother once said, "I'll have the nicest bag on the street." I make those jokes these days. The jokes are not politically correct, not sensitive; they are my way of laughing at the darkness. I am not belittling those who have no home; on the contrary, I have seen how little separates our fates.

So, when you drive down a country road in Northern California, past the new subdivision with its preponderance of vacant homes and unfinished lots and the field of garlic waving tasseled heads, and you see an old yellow house with green and white trim and paint peeling from the red side door, use care when you ask yourself what sort of people could let a beautiful old place like that go to hell. Be careful, because this is the answer: people like you; people who painted the doors red as a sign of hospitality; people who learned not to use the lawn tractor along the edge of the gravel drive but who never got around to repairing the cracked window pane; people who threw a Dr. Seuss-themed first birthday party for their first child on the lawn that once lay where you see weeds; people who buried and mourned and now leave in the earth three cats, three dogs and one horse; people who had plans and dreams for the house they never intended to leave; people who created gardens and gravel walkways in their minds but never found the time or money for the reality; people who, when they close that dilapidated red door behind them for the final time, will have learned that the bold black line between success and failure is really just a series of dots and moving one of those dots can destroy the entire illusion.

Christy Corp-Minamiji is a writer and practicing veterinarian living "somewhere" in Northern California with her husband and three children. 

This narrative largely neglected the Americans best equipped to speak to the simple life: the people who have always lived frugally. In his new book, "The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means," author Jeff Yeager gives voice to the sensible folks who spent the boom years quietly paying down their mortgages and making their kids earn their allowances (if they got one at all). Yeager surveyed and interviewed more than 300 fellow cheapskates -- traveling the country on his bicycle and crashing on the couches of his thrifty brethren. He quickly discovered a group of people who bore little resemblance to the stereotypical tightwad. Not only do Yeager's cheapskates donate more money to charity than the general population, they also have lower divorce rates and higher education levels. Although their politics and religious views span the spectrum -- from Christian conservative to hippie freegan -- they're united in their rejection of consumer culture, excessive borrowing and waste. They also believe the cheap life is the happiest.

I talked to Yeager on the eve of his second bicycle/couch-surfing book tour about the joys of thrift, the sorrows of spending and why your grandmother is greener than you are.

How do you define a cheapskate?

A cheapskate is someone who lives almost exclusively debt-free with the possible exception of a home mortgage, and even then about 85 percent of the people I polled said they had paid off their mortgage early or planned to. These were the folks that during the heyday of the economy and real estate boom were doing the absolute unsexiest thing: paying down their mortgage. Which meant they could lose a job but not lose everything else. But it goes deeper than that: These were people who never relied on money to make them happy.

What does make them happy?

Cheapskates value experiences more than material objects. They are very self-confident and are not only unconcerned about keeping up with the Joneses but sort of thumbing their noses at the Jones.

Are cheapskates bargain hunters?

No, most of us don't like to shop. I wanted to show there is a class of people who don't view shopping as sport or therapy and who are living a more pre-1980s lifestyle. In the 1980s, three-quarters of household items were purchased to replace something that was broken or worn out. Today that's less than 25 percent.

What's the reason for the other 75 percent?

It's either something new that we never had before but we have to have one, or we have one that works just fine but it's last year's color. The 1980s were not that long ago, so that's been a huge shift in consumption.

What's the relationship between cheapness and environmentalism?

As an environmentalist, I find this very compelling. These folks are the greenest people I've ever known, even though about half of them said they have no real interest in environmental issues. But arguably, the greenest thing that most Americans can do is simply consume less. It's not about buying expensive green products. It's about buying less.

Do you think the green movement has been hijacked by advertising and consumerism -- that it's become just another gimmick to sell us, say, eco-friendly running shoes?

I think to some extent the popularity of the green movement is being fueled by the very thing it should be against: overconsumption. Environmentalism has become popular because now there is cool, expensive green stuff that we can buy. Take the example of a hybrid vehicle for $35,000. It's good for the environment, but it's not as good as if you took your gas guzzler and carpooled to work. Don't get me wrong -- it would be best to carpool in your Prius, but I don't see many people doing that.

Do you see more people starting to examine their behavior and lower their consumption, for both economic and environmental reasons?

I've been writing about frugality long enough to have seen it go from something that no one really talked about to now everyone is writing about saving money. I give a lot of money-saving tips, but in this economy we're missing the golden takeaway: It shouldn't be "how do we afford it?" but "do we even need it?"

When it comes to the prospect of living a greener life, I fear that just the opposite is happening. I've seen statistics that say that as the economy has gotten worse people's lip service to living green has actually decreased. They are saying, "Boy that green stuff costs more and money is tight right now." They didn't take the final step to say the greenest thing I can clean with is the cheapest: baking soda and vinegar. Fixing things, recycling, doing without -- those things don't cost any money.

What about food? The conventional wisdom is that the healthiest foods -- organic, free-range, etc. -- are also the most expensive.

I found that cheapskates had almost the same likelihood of being a vegetarian or buying organic as the general population, about 5 percent. The people in my book believe that you don't have to spend a lot of money to have a healthy diet and in fact some of the most unhealthy foods cost a lot -- processed food, red meat and so on. They weren't vegetarians but they ate lower on the food chain, and a lot of them said they had one or two meatless days a week at their house. They do that to save money, but it also makes them healthier. Similarly, they don't belong to gyms but they did things like decide to not have a car and bicycle and walk places instead.

You're painting a very different portrait from the stereotype of a cheapskate as someone who is obsessed with money.

Well, we all know people like that, but that wasn't the type of person I set out to profile. About half the people I surveyed had very strong religious reasons for their frugality: They just didn't feel right about using more than their share. The other half of the people hardly had any religious beliefs, including many who said they were atheists, but they cited things like environmentalism, social justice and quality-of-life issues as their reason for living more frugally.

Were there common denominators in terms of their politics?

The cheapskates I surveyed are all over the board, from conservative Republican to very, very liberal Democrat to socialist.

So if these people have fewer economic demands, are they able to work less than the rest of us?

Some of them actually carry around an index card that says, based on my current salary if this costs $100 that means I would have to work five hours of my life. I think that's what separates them from the bargain hunter or the yard-sale enthusiast. Maybe it's not worth running around to several different yard sales in the hope that you'll find a pair of Size 7 boots.

As far as their ability to work fewer hours, I wasn't able to draw any real conclusion on that. I think the reality is most jobs are 40 hours a week. But one thing that came across pretty strong was that about 40 percent are involved in jobs that they enjoyed and were very passionate about -- many worked professionally for churches and other nonprofit organizations. For the cheapskates who didn't like their jobs, about 20 to 25 percent, most said their frugality was part of what allowed them to retire early.

So what would be your advice for avoiding education debt?

It's true that college costs more in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did 20 or 30 years ago but it doesn't cost that much more. What has changed is our idea of what a college education should look like. Plain tuition costs are only slightly higher than inflation. My point is, consider taking an old-school approach to college education. Living at home with parents will save most college students $30,000. There is also the option of attending a community college and paying a fraction for those credit hours and then transferring to a four-year school for that final degree. There is this mind-set that education is important so don't even think about the financial part. The cheapskate says education is very important, but they don't take the next step to say borrow as much as you want.

What is the single most important thing that the rest of us can learn from cheapskates?

Less can be more. You need to do yourself the favor of deciding what is enough for you. We're so conditioned to think that if we have more money, more stuff we'll be happier, and I think that's the overarching bond between all of these people. They have answered this question and decided, sure, we could afford to spend more, but why would we? It wouldn't make us any happier.

It seems old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, but there is also something radical about it.

It's as radical as the way most of our grandparents lived.

My grandmother is 103, and when I asked her about the Depression she said they didn't have any money but it wasn't that bad because there was nothing to buy.

It's almost like the stuff we can buy is driving our unhappiness.

Sara Eckel is a freelance writer whose work frequently appears in the New York Times, Working Mother, Time Out New York, Forbes.com and many other publications.

 

The three-story brownstone was as empty as they had left it early the previous morning -- dusty pale wooden floors, and wires poking out where electricity sockets should be. In the third floor bathroom, where no fixtures remained, a 2-foot-high black bucket in the center of the room would serve as the toilet.

"This is definitely one of the nicest places I've squatted," said Pete, a baby-faced 25-year-old who declined to give his last name because he faces charges for civil disobedience. His fellow squatter, Rob Freeman, 34, a former anthropology professor at the University of Florida with thick black-rimmed glasses and elfin features, agreed. "This place is a real find," he said.

It was only their second night in the newly claimed squat, the beginning of a project that aims to create a home for five more people -- including at least two currently living in New York City's shelter system.

"There are always squatters in New York," said Freeman. "But there hasn't been a squat movement -- an organized effort to claim property -- since the 1970s and 1980s."

And a squat movement is what Pete and Freeman believe they are continuing. Although they'd only occupied the Bedford Avenue squat for two days, throughout the year they had been attending meetings to plan the takeover, to learn tips and tricks to keep the authorities at bay, and to discuss which desperate New Yorkers would move in once the place was fixed up. The idea is to then repeat the process in another vacant property, and then another and another, and so on.

In the wake of the housing bubble's burst, vacant property has come to the forefront of public consciousness, and while tens of thousands of housing units sit empty in New York -- from foreclosed homes to abandoned construction sites -- squatters are trying to make their move.

They are not squatting for financial expediency. Indeed, were Pete and Freeman so inclined, their college and post-graduate educations, respectively, would stand them in good stead to join the money-earning, rent-paying masses. For them, squatting is about everyone's right to housing; they are anarchists who reject the idea that homes be treated as commodities to be speculated over for profit. "It's an old squatters' adage," said Freeman. "Don't just squat to live, but live to squat."

There are no official statistics for the number of vacant properties in New York, but three years ago, Bronx-based homeless advocacy group Picture the Homeless conducted a count of Manhattan's empty buildings. Twenty-four thousand apartments could come out of the vacant buildings and lots that were canvassed. On May 11, 2010, the Right to the City Coalition -- of which Picture the Homeless is a member -- repeated the canvass in six low-income areas around the city, including Bushwick and the South Bronx. 4,092 luxury units were found vacant in New York's poorest areas. "It's outrageous. Speculative property owners keep these buildings empty, when there are more than 35,000 people without homes in this city," said Rob Robinson, a Picture the Homeless leader who himself slept on the streets in Miami for eight years.

The practice of keeping properties vacant -- also known as "warehousing" -- when money could be made from renters seems to defy logic. However, foreclosures turned banks into reluctant landlords, with little interest in renovating and renting properties. Rather, whole apartment blocks are often warehoused until they can be sold when market prices improve.

Picture the Homeless wants the landlords to commit to turning the properties into permanent low-income housing (or to sell at a low price to someone who would). They work with other groups in New York -- such as Reclaim NYC and the Housing Not Warehousing Coalition, as well as organizations from further afield, like Miami's Take Back the Land, who also have connections with squat movements in Los Angeles and Detroit.

The groups combat warehousing by squatting but also through headline-grabbing stunts, aimed to highlight the injustice of vacant property and homelessness.

In late 2006, for example, Take Back the Land occupied a vacant lot in Miami and erected a makeshift village of 20 wood-framed structures to house 50 homeless locals. The village burned in April 2007 under what the organization described as "suspicious circumstances." And in July 2009, Picture the Homeless organized its first takeover in an empty lot in East Harlem. The organizers set up tents, hung large banners and were joined by around 100  supporters chanting, "They say gentrify, we say occupy!" Police closed down the demonstration and 10 participants were arrested.

"Takeovers, or showdowns, are publicity tactics," explained Robinson, adding that it is not the primary goal to keep the spaces occupied during such actions. "But squats have to be kept secret because the aim is to stay in the property for the long term."

The network of groups like Picture the Homeless are equally as dedicated to this tacit activity of moving people into spaces with a view toward squatting for the long term. They have been bringing together squatters and arranging meetings in which those interested in illegally occupying buildings could strategize. The Bedford Avenue squatters found each other through this network.

"I've never squatted in such a systematic way before. We've been watching this property and planning our movements for weeks," said Massachusetts-born Pete, who temps as an event planner but dedicates much of his time to working with Reclaim NYC, an advocacy group committed to the redistribution of vacant property.

Indeed, at the Bedford Avenue squat a systematic approach was evident. Although Pete and Freeman had only spent one night in the property, they had already boarded the windows with thick black cardboard to keep the outside from seeing in. This was all part of a system perfected by squatters in New York's Lower East Side in the 1980s.

At a meeting in a small, whitewashed gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Frank Morales -- an old-school squatter and self-proclaimed "unlawful entry expert" -- passed on his well-used tips to a group including Freeman, Pete and a poncho-clad activist named Jo with a tattoo of a clenched fist (a well-known anarchist symbol) etched on his neck. Morales, who heads Picture the Homeless' housing initiatives, has been living in a squatted apartment in lower Manhattan since the early 1980s.

Morales was an assistant pastor at St Mark's Church in the East Village from 1978 to 2008, and because of his public role often acted as the mouthpiece for the squat movement. He explained the steps squatters must take to successfully take a property.

"If you think a property might be vacant, because its windows are boarded up and so on, you have to stake it out for a while. You check out the address on the Department of Finance database to see who owns it. Ideally, it would be a bank or the city. You have to watch the building, especially at night, to make sure no one's going in and out. After a couple of weeks you can get a pretty good idea if it's empty or not," said Morales, whose thick black hair, slim, fashionable goatee and athletic figure far belie his 60 years.

He expounded on the further steps for successful squatting. Safety is paramount; Morales advises all potential squatters to check the structural stability of any building, to look for rot or drooping ceilings. Only when a building's structural integrity is verified should a group of squatters take the next steps and put their own locks on the doors and secure other possible entry points, like windows. Then, according to Morales, they should black out the windows.

"For the first month, at least, you want to stay under the radar -- go in late at night, leave early in the morning," said Morales, who also stressed the importance of having mail sent to the address with the squatters' names on it. "If you've had mail delivered there for a month, and the police turn up, you use it as proof that you've been living there for a while, that you're a valid resident. They usually leave you alone if you can show them that."

Equally important to the illusion of ownership, he said, was to make the house look like a home. Indeed, a large brownstone with no electricity and only a large bucket for a toilet does not give the impression of homeyness.

Morales explained that were the squatters able to procure the necessary personal property -- a toilet, a bathtub, light fittings and so on -- from dumpsters, a fellow seasoned squatter with the moniker "Midnight Mike" would be able to set up their electricity and water. "Often companies like Con Edison don't care who actually owns the property, so long as the bill is being paid," said Morales, highlighting what is a commonly believed myth -- that squatting is entirely free. All squat residents put what money they can toward utility bills, building materials and sometimes food. The difference between this and rent is that no property owner makes a profit.

The standoffs between the New York Police Department and Morales' generation of squatters have borne out countless urban legends. It was commonly believed that the squatters threw urine-filled balloons at police officers who confronted them. In fact, there was only one urine incident: The squatters threw buckets they'd used as toilets at the police during an attempted eviction raid.

Their tactics, dirty or otherwise, were largely successful -- 11 buildings taken in the early 1980s remain in the occupiers' hands to this day. However, five buildings on East 13th Street were lost in 1995 in what has come to be known as "the battle over 13th Street," during which hundreds of riot police with vacate orders met with barricades and around 60 protesters. Thirty-one arrests later, the evictions were complete.

Jessica Hall, 43, a friend of Morales' who raised her two teenage children in a squatted apartment on East Seventh Street, said that after the 13th Street evictions, the other Lower East Side buildings were no longer at risk, since the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had spent millions on evicting the five properties and could not afford to repeat the process.

"Things really came together after that," said Hall, who is currently studying for a master's in social work at Hunter College. "After long negotiations our buildings were turned over to UHAB -- the Urban Homesteaders Assistance Board -- for a price of $1 each. They helped us get loans to bring the buildings up to regulation so that we could stay in them," she said. The situation as it stands is that UHAB technically owns most of the buildings on behalf of the tenants, but decisions about the buildings remain in the hands of the residents.

The Bedford Avenue squatters have a long way to go before they can hope for any such legal recognition. The stripped Brooklyn house would also need a lot of work if it were to look anything like Hall's bohemian-chic dwellings. Aside from a fully fitted kitchen and bathroom, her two-bedroom apartment boasts heavy dark-wood furniture and lilac painted, exposed brick walls that would leave Manhattan's trendiest loft owners green with envy.

Hall stressed the importance of "sweat equity" in renovating a property. "It was all about construction and labor. Squatters have to be skilled workers," she said.

According to experts, however, it may take more than a supportive network and D.I.Y. know-how for vacant properties to stay in squatters' possession today. "Everybody knows there's a lot of potential for squatting now," said professor Tom Angotti of the Hunter College Department of Urban Affairs and Planning, "but the type of vacancies that there are today are very different to those that arose in the 1980s. A lot of them are due to unfinished construction, and will be occupied again when the economy picks up."

And where the squatters of yesteryear faced the Giuliani administration to stay in city-owned property, the current swath of vacancies belongs to banks and developers, and not the city, according to a representative from the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Indeed, the situation when Morales began squatting was markedly different. The proliferation of vacancies was due to mass abandonment when the urban middle classes left the city for the suburbs, and police raids on drug users emptied out buildings. Today, however, vacant properties are not abandoned, but warehoused by speculative landlords or awaiting completion by developers in financial difficulty. Squatters will likely not be left alone for long.

Yet, at least for now, Morales disciples are not dissuaded by the disheartening prospect of watchful landlords. "We might as well try," said Freeman with an impish grin. "We've even been watching another empty place in Brooklyn. It will need a lot of work. Apparently there isn't even a roof right now. But the old-school New York squatters fixed up worse."

Natasha Lennard, 23, is a British journalist based in New York, where she lives in an unsquatted apartment and is studying for a master's at the Columbia University Journalism School. She has written for the New York Times and the Economist's lifestyle magazine, Intelligent Life.