I got evicted from an apartment in Columbus, Georgia. I decided to try to return to the western US because I had lived here previously and I knew from firsthand experience that my respiratory problems are more manageable out here.
So me and my sons left out on foot nominally heading for Wyoming. We ultimately abandoned that plan and returned to California.
Arizona was a really bad experience. We were going through northern Arizona and large parts of it are Indian Reservations, which means it's basically a dead end. You can't just drive through there. You only go down that road if you have reason to go to the reservation, from what I gather.
It's illegal to walk on the highway, it's illegal to hitch hike and there are no other roads through there in some parts of Arizona. If you don't have a car yourself and can't afford a bus ticket and didn't know any of this before going, you are trapped. There is no legal path forward if you are dirt poor and on foot.
While trapped in some part of Arizona, having learned the above information the hard way -- by going there on foot while homeless -- a law enforcement officer gave us a ride to a shelter because a snow storm was coming. That's how we got out of that mess.
We ended up not staying at the shelter. We found a small cave on the face of the bluffs to camp in, basically, a tip from a Navajo man who had given us a ride in New Mexico. We were toasty warm while the snow came down and we were fine for the night.
If you don't go through northern Arizona, you have to go through southern Arizona. This brings you close enough to the Mexican border you may have to deal with border patrols.
My sons had no ID at the time. I couldn't prove they were American citizens. I didn't want to deal with the border patrol. That was potentially a very big problem for us.
A lot of people on the street have little or no ID. If you don't have ID, you don't want to travel to close to the border. Worst case scenario: You get deported from your own country because you can't prove you are American and now your problems get vastly worse.
We desperately need an internal amnesty program that helps homeless people get ID so they aren't "illegal aliens" in their own country.
My sons and I eventually caught a ride in Arizona that got us to San Diego County, where we had decided we wished to go. The eastern part of southern California is extreme desert with features like sand dunes. I had not realized this prior to getting a ride into San Diego, a city I had been to briefly only once before for a GIS conference while I was in GIS school in Riverside years ago.
So you can't walk north to get out of San Diego because there is a military base. You can't go west because that's the Pacific Ocean. You can't go south because that's Mexico. You can't go east because you will probably die walking through the desert.
If you don't have either a car or some means to access transportation, there are parts of the west that are traps that you may not be able to readily escape.
I don't really think that's true of San Francisco. I think you could probably walk south to get back to mainland California on foot and there are various transit options that shouldn't be too pricey. But maybe it's worse than I realize and maybe San Francisco is as bad as San Diego in terms of "Good luck with getting the hell out of here if you are dirt poor and traveling on foot!!!!!"
If that's true, your original comment may be a far larger part of the problem than anyone suspects. I have no idea how I would research that.
Where I grew up, in Georgia, there are plenty of roads between cities that are two lane roads that you absolutely could also walk on. It's not the case that the only way to get there is some limited access freeway that it's not legal to be on if you aren't in a vehicle.
When you need both money and paperwork -- like ID -- to go anywhere, being homeless can mean being trapped where you are currently with little to no hope of getting out of there. That's definitely something that needs to be looked at a whole lot more based on my firsthand experience. And it definitely seems to be a bigger issue in the western US due to the high mountains and the desert landscapes of so much of the west.
We were traveling through Arizona and the like because we were traveling in January, February and March. I got to San Diego County in late March, having ended up on the street on December 31st.
We were in sandals and we spent a month on the beach in Port Aransas from January 15th to mid-February because I didn't want to lose any toes to frost bite or die from hypothermia while traveling in winter. Even with continuing on west after a month safely ensconced on the balmy Gulf Coast, we were traveling through snowy conditions at times.
I ended up with open wounds on my feet from the cold making my skin brittle and the sandal straps cutting into my brittle skin. I have health issues and the circulation to my feet wasn't so good at that time. My sons didn't have this problem, but I did.
A lot of people who are homeless have serious health issues. that's basically one of the risk factors for homelessness in the US because of our shitty healthcare policies.
If you want to avoid Arizona because the northern part cannot be traversed on foot and the southern part takes you too close to the Mexico border and you have no ID, when the next state above you is Colorado. In winter, that seemed like a death sentence. I also imagine it is as challenging to traverse as Arizona because it's so mountainous. This means that you have natural geographic bottlenecks to travel and you can only get from point A to point B by going through a mountain pass and you may not be able to legally walk through there. The only path through there may be a federal highway and it's illegal to walk on it.
When we were heading from San Diego to Fresno, we got dropped in some town in the High Desert and ran into exactly that kind of situation where we couldn't get to Barstow because we were on foot and the only road through the pass was a highway and it was illegal to walk on it. We ended up taking a commuter bus.
It's straight up Verboten to walk to some parts of the US because the only path through there is a highway it's illegal to walk on the highway and it's usually illegal to hitch hike. So you literally have no legal means to travel if you are poor enough. Our travel routes are designed for vehicles and no one thinks it is necessary to make sure that walking or biking or similar are still viable if you don't drive or whatever.
There are many parts of the west where you simply "can't get there from here" if you are on foot. Even if you have tons of stamina and energy and so forth, it's against the law.
And our travel routes are often designed in a manner that is actively hostile to foot traffic even when it isn't illegal. We do not have pedestrian-friendly policies in the US. We are an insanely car-centric nation and it's quite challenging to make your life work without a car here.