Lessons Learned from Writing the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide
streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com
streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com
The police -- for the most part -- don't care. As long as you're not causing trouble (e.g trespassing and getting complaints against you), they just want you to go away and not cause them any problems either. Maybe it was because I was white, well-spoken, and generally pleasent, but I've never had issues with the police during that period in my life.
I was going to write more on how the biggest danger you face homeless is other homeless (and tweakers!) and very poor sleep, but I don't have the time.
The poor sleep sneaks up on you and slowly erodes your decision-making and risk-assessment skills and consistantly compromised my ability to make good decisions, i.e get myself out of that mess. I believe the author experienced the same, because his belief in the impending danger he felt does not match the reality of my experiences, but does match a mindset I would fall into while sleep-deprived.
If you're a big fat nobody, your online activities will fly under the radar and you don't need to worry too much. But being the most prominent woman on HN sometimes goes weird places and I have a very long history of attracting problematic attention for things that aren't a problem for other people.
It's okay if you think I was being paranoid. I've already allowed as I was being paranoid. But I had my reasons.
For example, a local business owner or homeowner could start their own private campaign of harrassment by making a series of reports to the police. This can even be done anonymously.
Edit: Also, people who live far away, and know her only as someone on HN, can find ways make her life difficult.
Did the tent have a huge leak? Was there baseball-sized hail? Were you on concrete or something else, and did that make the difference somehow?
For example, I am from South Africa and one of the biggest problems here is the terrible quality of some government schools. However, I don't really know how to do anything about this, despite having an MSc in pure mathematics and being a somewhat capable programmer.
We do have some recycling programs that seem to be quite effective—the recyclers are quite prominent when you put out your trash and are strikingly serene people (for the most part).
You could get involved any number of ways in trying to offer educational options or improve the existing schools.
I run r/citizenplanners. You might want to check that out.
As a young (housed) person I once called the cops on a person sleeping soundly in the exterior stairwell of my apartment complex - a thoughtless decision on my part that I now regret. The cops who responded were unnecessarily brutal: kicking him awake, then demanding he stand against a wall and spread his legs to be frisked (when there wasn't any reason to suspect a weapon). The trespasser was compliant and meek throughout, but the cops nonetheless spoke roughly to him. I later asked myself why I had been so naive as to expect any other outcome. Since then I've learned better.
And this was in Seattle, where cops are reputedly much gentler than many other places.
SPD are not gentler than many other places. They've been absolutely blasted for police brutality in a 2011 DOJ investigation. [1]
Now, to SPD's credit, it has been taking steps to improve since then. [2]
What you can count on, though, is them usually ignoring homelessness - if nobody complains. There's just too many homeless people in Seattle for them to do anything proactive about it.
If somebody does, and it's a slow day, the homeless person in question will get ran off by them. Law enforcement against the homeless is incredibly selective, which is one of the reasons why being homeless is so hard - you always live in fear of being the target of essentially random violence.
You never know if you're actually going to get 8 hours of sleep, or if you're going to be kicked (Or shouted) awake half-way through it.
[1] https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Feds-findings-in-Sea...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/in-major-ste...
Two years ago there was a homeless woman in my neighborhood who began screaming in the middle of the night as though she were being murdered. I called 911, obviously. An hour later she was still screaming and there were no police in sight. The next night she was still screaming. A week later she was still screaming. Thankfully she wasn't being murdered, not that the police would know, because they never came.
Incidentally this experience gave me a new perspective on the bystander effect. After I stopped calling 911 because it was accomplishing nothing, what if one night she really was being murdered? But what is somebody meant to do, call 911 every night until they stop taking your calls?
I regularly called the police department and talk to the narcotics detective. He'd always say he'd look into it. Neighbors told me it was useless to call the police. The detective was obviously getting annoyed by my calls.
One day the drug dealer knocks on my door. Tells me no use in calling Steve (name of narcotics detective) because they have an arrangement and Steve is getting annoyed by my calls.
A couple years later Detective Steve was arrested in a federal sting. His entire house was full of drugs and cash.
The drug dealer eventually died of a disease he contracted from needles.
Some squatters moved into that house for a while. Sometimes I'd hear screaming and gunfire. The property is overgrown now and the last car parked in the yard has four flat tires. Maybe there's corpses inside the house. Who knows. At least I don't smell meth cooks anymore. And theft has gone down on the street now that we don't have customers coming to buy drugs.
So, yeah I no longer call police for anything, they won't do anything and if you keep calling they consider you a nuisance caller and can create problems for you. It would be better to stop public funding of police all together and replace it with either private security contractors hired on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, or citizen's patrols like the Guardian Angels, Black Panthers, or a version of Neighborhood Watch.
This is a bad take, in my opinion. For the most part, all types of crime have been steadily declining since the 1990's [0][1][2]. You can't say policing is ineffective as a whole. There are certainly things to be improved upon, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_t...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_ge...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burglaries_per_1,000_pop....
Alternatively look at places where police does function properly and consider what's different.
Because what you can describe like your police compared to the police in some African hellhole or the police where I live can vary between unaccountable mercenaries perpetuating class imbalances, ghettoisation, etc or a well functioning local guardperson or a mob offering "protection"
Gentler is a relative term. That fact doesn't refute the assertion that others are worse.
The cops came, nudged him awake, and then waited calmly while his drunk ass gathered his crap and yelled at them as they escorted him down the stairs and away from our building.
LAPD may be brutal to suspected gangbangers and minority drivers but they're overly polite to the homeless to the point of being fairly useless at preventing the homeless from committing crimes (that affect others, like theft or property damage).
Region specific policies and culture can play a role, but ultimately the behavior of the police can depend highly on the specific individual or even the type of day they are having.
There's also the matter of the broken glass bottles he left in the stairwell, which created health and safety risks to everyone using the parking structure.
And there's also the distinct possibility he was the focker who broke into a bunch of cars over the holidays trying to find things to steal.
https://mynorthwest.com/1445501/seattle-homeless-sweeps-2019...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/We-don-t-want-to...
A common theme in sweeps is also intentional destruction of property including personal belongings and medicine: https://www.courthousenews.com/homeless-residents-rip-la-ove...
"If you are doing things that you wouldn't do if you weren't homeless, you are probably entrenching your situation. If you are pursuing solutions that you would use even if you weren't homeless, you are potentially building a future."
I do have a few questions though:
>The other reason this website does not list homeless services is because I became increasingly concerned about creating a website that could serve as an attractive nuisance. In other words, I didn't want to cause problems for a particular area by advertising all the free meal sites and the like in that area and potentially having homeless people from elsewhere flock to that area and overwhelm their services.
1) How common was this attitude among your fellow homeless? My experience is that people in American cities rarely feel a sense of "ownership" for keeping things nice around them, much less homeless people who are probably focused on survival.
2) Have you been accused of "pulling the ladder up behind you" for not sharing whatever info you had, and how would you respond to that?
I have a serious medical condition. As best I can tell, this is a much more common root cause of homelessness than the addiction and mental health issues that get so much more attention.
1) How common was this attitude among your fellow homeless? My experience is that people in American cities rarely feel a sense of "ownership" for keeping things nice around them, much less homeless people who are probably focused on survival.
I can't really answer that.
I didn't interact that much with other homeless individuals. I did my best to stay away from both other homeless individuals and homeless services.
I'm a woman. Most street homeless are male and they were pretty quick to sexually harass me as one of the few females in their perceived "price range" so to speak
I also avoided other homeless people for germ control reasons due to the aforementioned medical condition.
2) Have you been accused of "pulling the ladder up behind you" for not sharing whatever info you had, and how would you respond to that?
Nope. The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide remains online. Whatever info it had is still accessible. Everyone who talks to me about such things seems to see me as a valued homeless advocate.
The Yimby wiki lists multiple of my websites and the local police department has been handing out my flyers listing my websites for over a year.
https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/Homelessness
The fact that I've moved on to focusing on other types of info has not gotten me accused of abandoning the cause because I haven't.
Standard practice in most locales seems to be to share such info via paper handouts rather than putting it online. I think that's a best practice for helping local homeless individuals find the resources they need without creating an attractive nuisance.
>I have a serious medical condition. As best I can tell, this is a much more common root cause of homelessness than the addiction and mental health issues that get so much more attention.
I'm just now realizing that my (and possibly other's) unpleasant interactions with homeless people probably skewed my sense of how many homeless are mentally ill or drug addicted -- simply because those are the ones more likely to accost people on the street.
My comments in online forums were frequently riddled with typos when I was homeless and often sounded like gibberish.
No matter how smart or well educated you are, being extremely ill will hurt your ability to perform. This gets compounded by situational factors if you are also homeless.
That seems logical enough to me, I do the same online and don't have to worry about half as much but I guess my question is, was the paranoia justified? Was there any preceeding incidents to cause you to become more cautious?
Tbh I originally assumed the blogger's perspective was male and the caution maybe a bit over the top - but understandable - re-reading it now after seeing your HN username I totally get it. Hope your situation has changed for the better since your blogging days!
Suffice it say that I got concerning levels of unhealthy and/or negative attention online while homeless.
I'm back in housing and overall doing better, though I still struggle to make ends meet.
I know institutionalisation used to be more common, but also seems quite bad for some people. A friend of mine was once institutionalized and had horror stories about it. I can't help but feel like mental institutions are bad AND letting people with mental problems roam on their own is bad. Is the solution to have good institutions?
I've made a note of it in a draft. Perhaps I will find the words someday and address it, at least somewhat, in a post on Street Life Solutions.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2020/01/unraveling-...
The local businesses are quite aware of how it affects the bottom line. A nearby Starbucks was losing a few hundred dollars in revenue from the growing visible homeless presence, so they took out all the power outlets to keep people from charging their phones. It used to be a decent shopping center for the homeless people who were in the area; there were also often a bunch using wifi in the supermarket next door. But more unattractive people came into the area and the supermarket also changed their setup to deal with it.
> I don't think I stated online that I had been in Fresno until after I left California entirely and got back into housing.
> I have a serious medical condition. As best I can tell, this is a much more common root cause of homelessness than the addiction and mental health issues that get so much more attention.
I didn't think it would take nearly six years to return to conventional housing. I figured I would be homeless for a few months.
It's much, much easier to just walk away from a job and an apartment than to find your way back.
Edit: Homelessness often involves some degree of choice, but most homeless don't want to admit that because it just gets them more crap from people. That choice might be "I can stay with an abusive spouse or go be homeless. I'd rather be homeless."
Homelessness is frequently the lesser evil. If they had better options available, they would be thrilled to go with some other option. But they don't.
Point being: If you genuinely think homelessness is the absolute worst thing, you probably have other options. They may be less than optimal, but they likely exist.
My fears are based on whether I would have the enough resilience and mental strength to be able to bear with the situation without the drugs that I'm prescribed to or if the condition just get worst. Actually, if something happens, I don't have anybody to help me. Thanks for pointing to the decision process that I was underestimating.
It's not uncommon for people on the street with mental health issues to be homeless precisely because they don't want to take the prescription medication they are supposed to be on. They then self medicate with street drugs because they prefer that to the side effects of the drugs they are supposed to be on.
I knew a guy for a time who was on the street for that exact reason. He preferred marijuana and drugs of that ilk to the drugs he was supposed to be on for his mental health condition. But this meant he was unemployable.
Some people with mental health issues never find the right cocktail to make their lives work. If the meds you are on are keeping your condition under control such that you can function, hold a job, etc., you may not be at high risk of homelessness.
I've never really seen data on that detail. What I know is "anecdotal." But I'm skeptical that simply having a mental health issue is really a huge risk factor for homelessness.