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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

There was a homeless guy living in the gym at Rutgers prior to the late 1990s and it's why you had to show ID to get into any of the gyms/dorms.

Very similar story of:

- he was older

- dressed normally

- everyone assumed he was an assistant coach, grad student etc

They mentioned it multiple times in safety briefings and even at "how to be a club officer" meetings to ensure that everyone participating/involved was actually a student.

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It's not uncommon. University buildings are pretty open even today. I worked with a homeless guy who was a university employee, so he had a legit staff ID card. He just didn't want to spend money on rent. He knew where the empty rooms were that nobody ever used, where the showers were.

I bet every major university has a few people living/sheltering in campus buildings.

RMS famously lived out of his office at MIT for a while.

RMS = Richard Stallman, responsible for the GNU project and the free software foundation.

He had a page dedicated to his housing situation:

https://stallman.org/seeking-housing.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20190928065654/https://stallman....

RMS could life couch surfing from conference to conference?

My somewhat anecdotal observation is that a lot of access has been tightened down. Some happened during COVID and was just never removed. It definitely varies. The campus I'm most familiar with, you could wander pretty freely and that's less the case today.

I feel really sad about this -- I was amazed as a child to learn that I was allowed to just... GO IN to buildings and lectures as long as I was quiet and respectful. I always took pride in my university's openness.

Then I took my boyfriend for a tour a couple years ago and found all the buildings had signs warning that access was only permitted with a University ID card. Nobody challenged us or kicked us out, but it was a sour demoralizing shock.

Things were very locked down at the peak of COVID and some of us even semi-officially grumbled a bit to people we knew.

The main public buildings are generally open again during the day at least. I don't go in as much as I used to. (And have ID in any case.) But definitely not as open as it used to be.

So if you are a modern homeless guy, you need a skimmer and cardcloner to get in now? Have there been cases of homeless people hacking hotels/motels?

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