(Question inspired by robert_columbia’s nearby thread, asking who can get a library card.)
Here is CA, and I assume everywhere, a drivers license application requires you to give a “true, correct, and existing” address of residence.
Can a homeless person get a drivers licence? If so, how?
(According to one web site I read, with advice on how to get by homelessly, you have to learn to lie a lot.)
The homeless person can simply use the address of a friend or relative…
And if homeless person has no relative or friend? (Not an implausible situation.) Invent one?
Couldn’t they just use an address of a homeless shelter? Or a General Delivery address?
Oregon allows you to put “no fixed address” on your driver’s license application, and that is what it will say on your license until you change it. Somewhat ironically, this was originally implemented to stop the practice of registering your RV in some other state to save on DMV fees; if someone lives in their RV full-time and moves around the country, what their address actually is is a good question.
Most states won’t let you get a driver’s license without providing an actual address, but they don’t verify that you do, in fact, live there. However, records will be cross-checked (either right there at the counter or later in the process).
I believe that states that are part of the federal REAL ID system require proof of address.
-D/a
I can only speak for Texas but I believe even before REAL ID you had to provide proof of address if you were over 18 like a utility bill.
They also were very surprised that someone aged 19 had never had a DL, so I can only imagine how suspicious they would be of someone older.
In NJ you have to have six points of ID.
I think it would be rather difficult to have the necessary documents if you are homeless.
In my state you need insurance to get a drivers license. Even if you don’t have a car, you still need to get a non-owners policy. I imagine a homeless person would have a hard time paying for coverage.
Homeless shelters provide proof of address to its residents - and most communities have day shelters that clients don’t need to be “living” in in order to do so. It’s an extremely common practice, especially now with voter-ID laws in many states.
Even so, one questions how a homeless person, even with a license, can then go on to buy a car. Without a credit card, rental is surely out of the question. So is this then really about how to get an ID card?
Really? You’ve never heard of a homeless person living out of their car?
In this country anyways, it is a hell of a lot easier to afford a cheap beater than a regular place to live. Even beyond people who had cars and then fell on hard times, you can buy a functional car for less than one month’s rent in most US cities, to say nothing of first and last months’ rent and a security deposit. Plus there’s no credit check, income verification, rental references, etc for buying a car.
The homeless living out of a car that I’ve run across, already owned the car (and the license) when they became homeless.
From the OP’s question, I presumed this not to be the case - and it seems to me that you are building an elaborate “what if” that would cover relatively few instances: e.g. a license-less homeless person who does not own a car but somehow, despite being homeless, has enough cash to buy one (to live in) and now wants to be able to legally drive it.
Far more common is the case where someone with a car and license loses their home and ends up living in the car they used to drive to work in.
This is not an elaborate hypothetical, this is something that happens quite frequently.
I think you’re confusing being homeless with being destitute. Most homeless people aren’t completely penniless and many of them aren’t even unemployed. There is a fairly wide range of incomes between starving to death and being able to afford an apartment, especially in places with pricier rental markets. Plus like I mentioned before finding a rental isn’t always just a financial challenge. In a city without public transportation, a car is pretty much a necessity if you want to be able to get and keep a job, so a car is usually going to be a higher priority than a place to live. It’s not that homeless people buy cars specifically to live in them, it’s that they need a car anyways and live in it because they don’t have anywhere else to go.
Of course, a lot of jobs also explicitly require a driver’s license, so you don’t necessarily need to own a car to need a license.
This is troubling. Property ownership should not be a requirement for driving.
Keep in mind, this isn’t permission to own a car or to even rent a car, it’s permission to drive a car if the situation comes up. That’s a pretty basic need/desire/right. You should have a requirement to prove you are who you say you are, but that proof should be able to come from somewhere other than property ownership.
It’s not. Shelters provide a permanent address for all identification requirements. Which has already been mentioned several times in this thread.
Twenty five years working with the California courts left me confused at times, but not about the difference between being homeless and being destitute.
My perception of this is clearly different from yours and may originate from a having a different take on it, based upon what I saw during my career years.
Most of the homeless I ran across in those years were what you might call the “traditional” homeless most are familiar with: (often dysfunctional) people who are (and sometimes elect to be) homeless due to their lack of job, social or intellectual skills. Some had been homeless for many years and were long out of the job market - if they were ever working at all. Think “city panhandler.” Few of these folk have either ID or DL.
There was a second variety of homeless who were mostly middle class or working class people, rendered economically homeless due to financial hardship, job loss, layoff, spousal abuse, etc - families with children often fell victim to this. They often ended up in public family shelters, at least for a while. Many already had ID’s or DL.
A third variety of homeless was single middle class or working people, mostly men, who had lost their jobs and had no emergency place to live, other than on the streets. Again, mostly with ID or DL prior to their financial reversal.
Some of these homeless middle class and working people, at some point ended up living in their cars, if they happened to own one before their financial misfortune happened. Clearly the adults had a DL most of the time.
What I defined as “destitute”, which you may disagree with or not, were people as yet not homeless, but without much day-to-day cash due to low, or no, income. These people sometimes owned their homes or were living in places where they were allowed to stay for free or very little cost. These people were often well into adulthood and were sometimes elderly people: couples and some families as well as a few single people made up this category. Most of them were former workers or middle class folks and often had cars, though not always, and generally could provide an ID or DL.
So my point is, what category was the OP describing? Answer: the OP’s question was about homeless people. My response is based upon what I’ve seen the homeless community to be mostly about. Of the homeless I’m familiar with, most of the homeless that might not yet have a license were either in the first category (“traditional homeless”) or were children of the second category (unemployed middle/working class families), who were as yet unlicensed but now of the age where they could apply to have one.
I’ve seen no hard figures to support this, but my best estimate is that the “traditional homeless” people out there, well outnumber the “grown children of homeless families” category…at least they did when I was working (1972-84 and 1994-2008) in a field that gave me some contact with these communities. Given those probable numbers, I figured that the OP was as much talking about the need for ID for the chronically homeless, as he might have been talking about getting drivers licenses for the relatively fewer middle/working class homeless.
(Bold added.) This is the scenario I was mostly thinking of, with this additional twist: Existing car owner and licensed driver loses home, but still has car and license. (And gets all mail at a P. O. Box.) But must renew car registration every year, and renew drivers license once every several years. So the primary question is about the renewal process, for both car registration and license. Must one simply lie and hope to never get caught?
ETA: No, don’t need answer fast, just yet.
Sounds like a king-size scam by the insurance companies and/or the government mandarin who collects a pocketful of little miracles from the insurance industry. “Hey, Mr. Capone! Here’s how we can collect big time from people who don’t even own cars!”
It gives new meaning to the term “protection racket.”
So what? There are thousands of more tortured hypotheticals posed here. If you’re not interested in the OP as stated, there are are more straightforward queries in other threads.