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You can't put your children in self-storage: That's the message being given Prince and Charlomane Leonard by Texas's Child Protective Services.
The northeast Houston storage unit that the Leonards call home has 10,000 square feet—plenty of room for the parents and their six kids to roam around. It has air conditioning, beds, a bath tub, a microwave oven and two computers--among other amenities. But it lacks running water. And partly on that basis, CPS has taken custody of the couple's offspring.
The Leonards believe they are guilty not of breaking a law, only of having fallen on hard times. "We have access to running water," insists the soft-spoken Charlomane. "We get it right here at the storage facility, in a five-gallon drum."
She and her husband have worked hard, she says, to transform the storage space into a home—one far safer, she says, than the crime- and rat-ridden apartment buildings and motels where the family had lived before. Safer, too, in her opinion, than a homeless shelter. The family had been living happily in storage until a CPS investigator, responding to a tip, discovered the Leonards' solution to weathering the recession and determined it to be bad for kids. Mrs. Leonard quotes the investigator as having said, "My supervisor isn't going to like this at all."
Originally posted by Q:1984A:1776
reply to post by NuroSlam
That would have been a cool story if it weren't for the intervention of CPS. Which by the way, has nothing to do with voting. If we were to vote someone like Ron Paul into office, and he accomplished his goals of downsizing or decommissioning organizations like CPS, then wouldn't voting be a good thing? The only other option we might have is rooftop voting, and I know I don't want to see things come to that. Really, I don't.