Thousands of people are experiencing housing instability in Seattle

But you aren't in her shoes, and she's not in yours. It's reasonable to expect that some people would want and need to live near their families.

Would she have made that choice if she had more money or housing was cheaper? If she is making the best of a bad situation, maybe that's a failing on our part not on hers.

You're right about her probably having options, but I think the important part here is the risk.

For homeless people living in the middle of a city, there's a higher density of essential services. In her case, that would be things like the microwaves or the bathrooms that she absolutely needs without an even greater inconvenience to her lifestyle. These are unreliable. They can fail from overuse or they can get taken away or locked behind paywalls because store owners don't like the fact that they attract homeless people. In a city, the density of these services makes it so that she probably knows where the next nearest one is if one of them is unavailable. It's risky, sure, but to her, it's a known risk she's adapted to live with.

She could move to somewhere cheaper, but "somewhere cheaper" is inevitably somewhere with either a lower density of people and money (and therefore fewer microwaves/bathrooms/whatever else she needs... I'm just going to refer to these as microwaves/bathrooms from here on), has less opportunity for work (not as much of a factor in her case, as you pointed out), or has some social/political aspect that makes it undesirable (like a higher rate of crime, which translates into less money or a much lower quality of life). Plus, you have to factor in the immediate cost of buying the microwaves or affording the apartment with a bathroom which she was avoiding previously. She could try and save or otherwise micromanage her money to cover the cost somehow, but when you're living paycheck to paycheck (as is usually the case), this means a few months, or even years of a worse quality of life for a life that isn't necessarily or apparently much better in the long run.

Then you have to consider intangibles like the support network, the knowledge of the area, or the environment. All of these can have a positive effect on a person's mental state, and if it's not the reason for staying in the area itself, giving it up for the unknown can easily be a reason not to leave.

The cost vs benefit is a total mystery and varies per person, and it's even harder to figure out when you're dealing with stress from your living condition.

People have a psychological need for a stable home. You would prefer she behave as an economically rational actor, but people are human. She is struggling to avoid becoming an economic refugee and we should try and feel some compassion towards those in that position.

I already replied to this, clearly you haven't actually looked at these listings.

I’m going to assume that, being a human being, and having a daughter, she has a social life in the city she lives in. To tell her she’s forcibly (by means of economic coercion with potential state violence to back it up) no longer to live near her social and support network is completely unethical, in my eyes - otherwise is to suggest that only the rich are allowed a stable life. No man is actually an island, as much as that is the American ideal. Replace “housing instability” with “being kicked out of their homes and told to live somewhere multiple hours away where they don’t know anybody”, and you get the actual problem.

This reply[1] to your initial comment asked if the person would still be receiving $1300/month if she moved. To which the replies were "to commute". And so we're replying to those.

Would she still be making $1300/month in disability if she moved to Olympia? Or would it drop to near $1000? That extra $10 per day is a lot.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16873680

Not just to relocate. But to relocate into a permanent situation with no hope of change. Firstly, none of those cheaper rental options fit that bill very well, those aren't places that can be relied upon for years and years. Additionally, moving away from one's support network and from the best opportunities is a hell of a thing and not something to be taken lightly. People here are pretending that this woman can simply guarantee herself a future that is more comfortable than the one she has right now by finding some cheaper apartment somewhere, and that's a proposition that is questionable at best.

Especially in this case where the end result was that she ended up just crashing on her daughter's couch, moving down to Olympia or whatever to rent out some questionable super cheap room somewhere seems like it would have been a much worse decision. Perhaps she was just waiting long enough to justify "giving up" and having to rely fully on her daughter.

It seems like the only two people she had in her life are in the Seattle area, and she had relied on them for financial support in the past. If she has car trouble or additional health problems, then that's going to be very difficult to handle

Why are you so defensive about the mere existence of a homeless person?

Unfortunately she's not here to tell us. Maybe someone could send her a link to sign up and do an AMA on HN?

Her life has situations we cannot see from this perspective and we have not lived through. It's unhelpful to discount her situation with a smug "She could be doing XYZ better".