Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I had a tacit agreement with a homeless guy I discovered one day sleeping in my car. I'll keep the doors unlocked and you don't mess it up and by 7 am you're gone. He was by far the best tenant I ever had, we did this for close to two years and then I moved. The area where I lived was an older industrial zone in the East of Amsterdam, there wasn't a whole lot around there other than a salvation army post and I figured he liked the backseat of my Citroen DS better than the cots and 4-to-a-room arrangement that they had there.

View on HN

That's so compassionate of you. I don't know that I would think of doing that.

Well, if you take into consideration how crappy the locks are on those old cars then maybe I had a very cheap security guard ;) He really was a nice old man and super embarrassed about the whole thing.

The funniest bit about this is how I discovered he did this, one day I got up too early thinking I was late, rushed out and drove off without my usual morning routine and when I heard a voice behind me asking if he could please get out of the car, my heart nearly stopped :)

Maybe it's the pandemic heightening my senses, but it's strange to me that you wouldn't notice the smell. I can immediately tell if someone new has been in an unventilated room for, oh say a few hours afterward. There's no way I wouldn't notice someone sleeping in my car overnight, unless they went out of their way to air it out.

You clearly have never set foot in an elderly Citroen. They are so full of holes that when it rains outside it is only marginally better inside. Ok, you have a nice fiberglass roof over you. But the bottoms of the doors are rusted out, the front vents end up directly in the engine bay (because: paper tubing, which is eaten up by insects), the wind sills don't line up with the windows and the doors close poorly.

On the plus side: plenty of ventilation ;)

You are correct, I have not :) Thank you for the contextual flavor.

That's hilarious. How did the rest of the conversation go?

I just dropped him off at the nearest light. He would leave a small bag in the car from then on so he didn't have to lug all his stuff around.

This was around 1989, the location is Veemarkt in Amsterdam ('Veemarkt' is dutch for cattle market).

Back then homeless people in Amsterdam were fairly rare, now there are 100's of them.

I'm surprised that he chose to continue using your car then, because I would have thought being found out once would permanently turn him off and have him find another place. I guess you might have communicated to him that it was okay for him to use your car is a stronger way than you recall; or maybe the 80s just had a different vibe.

I don't think he had a whole lot of options in his life. Primarily I think he did it because he felt safe there, that area was at the time very much out of the way of traffic and apart from the occasional burglary there wasn't much crime.

One funny angle is that I was living there illegally myself, I didn't have a kitchen or a place to shower there and it being so quiet is why I got away with that. The people from other companies in that building knew that I was staying there overnight, but they in turn also didn't mind because they saw me as their 'free nightwatch', so there is some recurring element in there.

Anyway, it's ages ago, and if it happened today I'm not sure how I would respond, and I always wondered what happened to him but I did not see him after I moved (I went all the way to Poland).

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3679788,4.9392218,3a,75y,187...

My unit was the one one from the corner on top (the entrance was at the back), about 60 square meters, an early version of a hackerspace I guess, and the bike path on the left wasn't there at the time, that's where there was parking space.

Now there are a few thousand people living on the other side of the street so you would never get away with it today anyway, someone would spot you there before the first day was out.

I did a similar thing in San Francisco when working at the ballpark.

Someone smashed my window, and someone stole my radio. (I knew the cops wouldn't do anything besides laugh.)

Didn't care about the radio, but that window bothered me.

I decided to keep the doors unlocked, and carried a portable radio to work. (Too cheap to pay for parking.)

I put a sign on the rear window, "Please go ahead and sit in the truck, or sleep in the bed, but Don't Break Anything. Everything is unlocked."

It was an old Toyota, and it had a kill switch hidden.

Never had a problem again.

There were days when I would find cash in the glove box. I don't think it was tip. I think my truck was being used as a drug drop, but didn't care.

> I think my truck was being used as a drug drop,

That could actually end up getting you in legal trouble, and at the least get your car seized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com