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Comment by harlanji | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been in SF for about 7 years and became homeless in June. The #1 thing that helps me is cash in my pocket, from day labor (odd jobs) and boosters from family and friends who know I’m not a drug addict/alcoholic. Obviously the latter can’t be offered by a gov because it would be abused, but work for cash saved my life. IME cash in hand is the biggest help.

#2 by far is bathroom access... followed by water and food. Anything beyond that feels too permanent for a healthy able bodied person.

The way people treat me when showered is night and day. And then going to places with opportunity/wealthy people and away from homeless populations is essential.

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I have a truly genuine question and I swear on my prized and treasured EdgeRouter that I have no ulterior motive except for having a real answer to give to people whenever they also ask this question (often, in my opinion, in bad faith). So, with that, here goes:

Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?

(I won't reply and debate your answer; I'm simply curious and looking to educate myself.)

Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?

Relocating to a place where you don't have a job makes you even more homeless.

Remember that a significant percentage of the homeless are also employed. Many full time. Some as developers.

It's easy to relocate to an unfamiliar place with no family or safety net if you have a job and savings. But if you're just going in the hopes that maybe there's a job, and maybe you'll find a place to live in that requires no deposit, and maybe there's a market for your skills in that place, you're just going to end up on the streets again.

I can appreciate that but, to be honest, that's why I'm asking someone who says he or she is currently homeless. I want to know if that position is theoretically true (that is, people who are housed think it is true) or if it really does have bearing on the day-to-day life of someone who is homeless.

Put another way, I want to know what someone who's actually going through this would say because the question is sarcastically asked so often but I rarely read replies from people who are actually in this situation.

I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person.

1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere.

There are parts of the US where the only road through there is a highway and it is illegal to walk on it. If you leave on foot, you are trekking into territory you aren't familiar with where there may be no readily available bathrooms or eateries etc. Think about how awful it is to travel by car into unknown territory, be in need of a bathroom and have no idea how long until you find one. Then multiply that by at least 100.

You can also die of exposure or run into other seriously scary stuff when traveling by foot. People can wind up homeless with zero prior experience with camping, hiking, etc. Being suddenly without housing in no way guarantees that you are prepared for hiking long distances to go elsewhere.

2. It's vastly easier to find food, bathrooms, support etc in familiar territory.

Being destitute and homeless is scary and problematic enough in familiar territory. Being destitute and homeless in unfamiliar territory is just mind bogglingly more challenging.

3. It's hard to get a job elsewhere first before moving under the best of circumstances.

Going someplace new while homeless to then look for work looks about as fun as jumping off a cliff not knowing what will be at the bottom. Maybe it's a river and you will be okay. Maybe it's jagged rocks.

4. Some homeless people are in the city they have lived in their entire life. They would find it intimidating to go elsewhere under good circumstances. It's too much to contemplate while destitute.

5. Adjusting to a new city is hard under the best of circumstances. It's unthinkable for some homeless individuals who are not only destitute, they may also be physically or mentally ill.

6. The OP seems to have some friends and family helping out. Moving may mean losing what remains of their support network.

7. They can have ties to the local community that are a barrier to leaving, such as having a child with an estranged partner and leaving would mean not seeing their kid again, or they have a job or they are on probation and forbidden from leaving, as just a sampling of issues that can be a barrier to leaving.

I managed to pull off relocating to get back into housing someplace cheaper because I have portable unearned income, I intentionally sought to develop portable earned income on top of that, I'm a former military wife who is no stranger to moving around, and I spent like three years researching where I could go to try to put my life back together. And that's just some of the obvious factors I can list.

I try to encourage homeless people to move someplace cheaper if they can. I try to provide useful information to support such moves and support other solutions.

But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Suggesting it for someone who is destitute utterly strips them of their humanity and completely ignores that they are a complex person with more facets to their life than their income and it really just does not work. Doing that tends to just make problems worse.

(This comment is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination.)

thanks for this post, very helpful!

>>But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute.

Like the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers.

Economic necessity has forced me to do very difficult things in my life. That's what people do, because becoming a burden on your family and the rest of society is a failing in every way.

Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm.

Life is tough. It doesn't get less tough when you redistribute the pain to make it more levelled. It just makes it less fair, by severing the link between responsibility and consequences, while creating unsustainable dependencies that will turn out badly for everyone involved in the long run.

We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever.

> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."

I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)

Our families chose to have us. In the vast majority of families, children are biological progeny of the parents, and so carry their parents genes into the future.

The fact that you're trying to compare disjointed people within a nation to a family where parents support their own children really shows the amount of non-voluntary collectivism you want to impose on society.

>>I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF?

I realize that not all homeless are loitering drug addicts, but they form a significant percentage of the chronically homeless, and a situation where no-strings-attached aid is provided to them at the expense of the taxpayer, while others make the sacrifices to be independent through back-breaking work, is unjust.

It's not just a matter of competence. It's also a matter of choice. Some people choose to take responsibility. Some don't.

Your idea that these laborers are victims of "homeless crack addicts manipulatively employing the victim narrative" is such an extreme miscalculation that I wonder if you even looking at the data honestly.

The amount of money that actually goes to homeless people is extremely low, and most of those meager funds are used to give them food and temporary shelter so they don't literally die outside. And even then, the amount of taxes that "low wage laborers" earn is slim. Why can't those with vast excessive wealth give some of it to services that can rehabilitate the homeless, or create unskilled or low skill jobs that pay enough to keep people indoors?

If a homeless addict is smoking crack outside, what he needs is a shelter that can rehabilitate him, get him off drugs and get him employed somewhere where he can make meaningful contributions and connections to his society. Services like these barely exist, and are in desperate need of the money that we for some reason insist on giving to the wealthiest mega billionaires who keep it in offshore accounts and refuse to give to the people they are directly responsible for putting on the streets via critically unsustainable low wages.

To assume that the homeless are homeless because of "responsibility and consequence" is to totally ignore any systemic circumstance outside of their control that may have led them to become homeless or jobless in the first place.

Thanks for this comment. It's not too usual to see a perspective this clear and well thought out.

Some other points:

"Moving" without a car is not so simple. You can hitchhike, with the success of that depending on how you're able to present yourself and the culture of the local area. You can walk, but only so long as the nearest places are spaced in small distances, and if not you would need overnight gear. The weather is also a major factor here.

Knowing where to go is also another factor. Even for someone with a phone and internet it can be a challenge. First there's so many places. But how would you know that where you're going is any better than the place you're at? It represents a gamble that could result in you depleting already limited resources without any gain. Even if your current area is expensive at least you already know where the community food pantries are located, where and from who to get free/inexpensive clothing, good places to stealth camp... Moving to a completely new area puts you in a place of zero knowledge in exchange for only the possibility of finding work.

There is a hump you have to crest to acquire long-term housing. You need (depending on where you live) at least several hundred dollars to put in a security deposit. You need several hundred more to cover the next few months of rent. You need a job. You need to feel secure that you'll still have that job in a few months or at least have a replacement ready. You probably need a vehicle. You need for it to be dependable. You need to be presentable before being able to acquire that job. You might need references for either the job or apartment. You might need some sort of rental history.

Not to mention if you've been living on the edge for years it might have changed you. For some people it puts on them a character of supreme humbleness, for others it makes them very outwardly resentful against those who apparently have so much. Sometimes those changes are too visible to hide and in a way frames you to people living in normal and casual society as "other."

Getting over that hump when you have next to nothing is difficult.

To add to the list, you're not going to move north in the winter. Maybe go back to the town you are from in the summer.

Why are you still in SF? There are day jobs available pretty much everywhere.

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