Food is pretty easy - the application for food stamps if you’re not working and have no assets is pretty easy, and if you are truly in that state you can get emergency funds before you leave the “public assistance” office.
Housing is the hard part. Even if you DO have assets you’re unlikely to get permanent housing quickly. There is some emergency assistance that might get you into a hotel room briefly but it’s not guaranteed. Shelters are overcrowded and can be unsafe (one reason people sleep on the streets and/or camp is because of that).
In my state, if you are an adult with no children you ONLY get food stamps. You get zero “housing assistance” and zero dollars for anything other than food. If you truly have no income you are screwed. You had better have friends and relatives or you are really, really screwed.
If you are deemed able-bodied and fail to find work in three months you can loose your food assistance (I won’t get into the mechanics of that here, but it is a real possibility). At which point you are reduced to begging, shoplifting, and trying to sleep wherever you can. Then you acquire a police record which makes it even harder to pull out of the hole.
If you are in imminent danger of death the ER can’t refuse you, but you have no access to follow up care unless you can find a charitable institution.
Of course, not everyone is a Social Darwinist. I spent way too much time in the ER when my husband was dying (we did have state insurance) and when the weather was bad they would open up a “consultation room” and let the homeless shelter there, sleep, they’d see about scrounging some food from the cafeteria for them, etc. There are charities in the area (when I moved from my old place I had enough excess furniture and household goods to help outfit two small apartments for people transitioning from homeless to home, as an example). It’s not hopeless, but it is very, very hard.
And even the food stamps have limitations put on them in many states. For some it’s three months per year max unless you were able to get a job. If you get a job the amount you are eligible for can get reduced.
This is untrue. Yes, they do ask you for that when you first apply because most people on food stamps do have a place to live and have a job of some sort. If you don’t have any of that, though, there is a separate track for you. You don’t need a residence or any income whatsoever to get food stamps. You’ll spend time at the public assistance office picking things up there if you don’t have an address to send stuff to.
The one category of people who can’t get food stamps are people with a drug conviction. That is permanently disqualifying (or at least it was back when I was dealing with the bureaucracy). 'Cause I guess former addicts don’t need to eat or something.
As I said, if you have no income there is a process for that. If you have to prove a negative (no income) there’s an affidavit involved and some additional hoops to jump through, but when we first applied we were assured that if we needed immediate, emergency assistance we’d get it before we left the public assistance office. And it’s not like I live in some liberal paradise, my state is pretty Red.
Yep. I didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole on the details for that, which vary from state tot state anyway. The longer you’re on them the more conditions can be imposed.
For someone functional and just down on their luck it’s doable, and in fact my state did help me up my job hunting skills which has me back at a sustainable standard of living. The problem is when someone is disabled either mentally or physically, or is burdened with a criminal record, or has some other liability that I didn’t.
You see, I did pull myself back up out of poverty but I am very aware that not everyone is as capable as I am, or has my resources, and that is not necessarily a character flaw on their part. Sure, I did it - that doesn’t mean everyone else is able to do so.
There may be a problem with something as basic as knowing where to look. I’ll use myself as an example. Let’s say some catastrophe hit me and I was out on the street with no place to live and no money.
I live in New York. My understanding is this state has a reasonably good social services network. But I have no idea on what the specific programs are and more importantly I have no idea who I would talk to to apply for assistance from these programs.
According to a CBC Radio documentary I heard some time ago, the answer is “very easy indeed – and it could happen to anybody”. And they were talking about Canada, with free public health care and relatively robust social services.
One example they have which may hit close to home (no pun intended) for a lot of people is the case of someone older who is laid off and because of age is effectively retired. Let’s be optimistic and say that this person owns their own home and even has the mortgage paid off. But if they don’t have significant savings or any kind of decent private retirement fund, the public pension system is not really enough to live on, let alone support the expenses of maintaining a home. One such scenario they talked about is the person opting to stay in the home but, unable to properly maintain it, the place deteriorates. Eventually they have to sell but can’t get much for it. Furthermore, when trying to rent, even though they now have a bit of cash, they have little income and so find rentals very hard to qualify for, and even if they can, the proceeds from the house sale might soon be exhausted. It’s a scary scenario that illustrates how an ordinary suburban homeowner can eventually join the ranks of the homeless. Throw in any kind of drug or alcohol problem on top of that, and it only accelerates the process.
So anyone with a snarky attitude towards the homeless and regarding it as the result of laziness, stupidity, or the degeneracy of drug addiction would be better served by saying to themselves, “there, but for the grace of God, go I”. It can happen to anyone. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I highly recommend the movie God Bless the Child if you ever have a chance to see it. It’s a fictionalized but very realistic and heartbreaking story revolving around poverty in America.
To answer your question about knowing a homeless person, my mother was homeless for at least a year and during that period of time I wasn’t even aware of it. I knew things weren’t going great for her when she sustained a back injury, couldn’t find work and started living out of a motel, but I was not aware how dire her situation became. She eventually told me she had to live out of her vehicle. And if I had known, I’m not sure I would have done anything differently because I have a really complicated relationship with her.
Eventually she reconnected with an old flame, moved in with him and applied for disability. She seems happier this way.
Food assistance is easy; it’s hard to starve in the USA. The food stamps program took a few days to process but the food pantry was immediate and they flat out told me they were always overflowing with food and to please take some. Some of it was edible uncooked but others would’ve probably required a camp stove of some sort.
But housing is very difficult unless you’re with children. Women have it slightly easier but it’s still not a shoe-in, and shelters can be dangerous in their own ways. One lady I knew was so PTSD’ed from them she would choose to hide out on the streets instead of in shelters, even when they occasionally had space for her. And if you have a pet – who might be your only reliable friend while you’re homeless – it’s even harder.
Contrary to popular belief, there just isn’t really reliable, long-term homeless housing assistance. There’s section 8, but that’s more for low-income than no-income, and requires life stability that people often don’t have while still affected by the immediate circumstances that made them homeless to begin with. There are also long waits and limited opportunities.
As for other types of welfare, like what? We can’t even get people on unemployment or healthcare in this country, when it’s most needed. Homelessness has a huge stigma to it and a lot of NIMBYism.
I think health care is a factor in homelessness in America that people outside the United States can’t appreciate.
You can be in a fairly stable situation; you have a steady job and income, you’re paying your rent and keeping on top of the rest of your bills.
Then you get sick with some serious illness. A lot of Americans do not have adequate insurance for dealing with a serious illness so the treatment can cost you everything you have. A year of chemotherapy, for example, costs around fifty thousand dollars, which is a sum large enough to put a lot of people out on the street.
Its not just the health insurance, even though that is big. Its also the support system. When someone has suffered a major medical event, they usually aren’t able to work for weeks and months afterwards. For the most part, short term disability is at the whim of the employer (while being paid by the employee) and isn’t very generous. Bills don’t get paid and things snowball.
As an ex-food stamp worker, I will agree that food is easy to come by in the US. Rent and utility money? Not so much. Getting cash “Temporary Aid for Needy Families” requires minor children in the house and is so complicated that most families are disqualified for various stupid reasons.
There are many reasons that people end up homeless, the slide doesn’t always start with drugs or lack of motivation.
I blame a lot of it on ignorance and lack of long term planning. Which is probably the ignorance part, because if they had known better, they might not have made the decisions that put them in their current bad situation.
I know of one woman who ended up homeless once her children were over 18. She was working at times but could only afford to pay rent from the child support money. I assume her utilities went unpaid, they wouldn’t be shut off while minor children lived with her.
When my friend lost his job 3 years ago, he qualified for only $40/month in food stamps, here in the fairly progressive state of Washington. He was a single man (with a child half-time, who didn’t figure into the calculations). Luckily there were food banks around and he was able to find work pretty quickly.
And if they aren’t directly due to medical bills, they’re due to OTHER things that go along with serious illness or injuries, like lost wages, travel expenses, child care, restaurant meals, etc.
Our family came very close to being homeless. After 3 years of our landlord talking about how he loved us as long-term renters and please give him plenty of notice if we ever decide to move, he gave us 30 days notice that he was not renewing our lease. We had to scramble and with three dogs (including an akita) it was impossible to find a place to rent to us - mostly because everyone used the same rental-management company that refused to rent to dog owners. We found a place with less than a week left.