In another thread about sleeping in strange places, a few people mentioned having been homeless. It struck my curiosity.
Who has been homeless? How did it happen? How did your homelessness end?
I think that a lot of us bypass the homeless panhandlers on the street without much thought – I know I have. But it would be meaningful to know the perspective of people who have experienced being without a place to live. Anyone?
I was homeless because of my demented mother.
I was homeless for three months. I slept under bushes and on hills.
I managed to get a job and got my grandmother to take me in.
Hmmm…seems Hastur and I have a few things in common.
I was homeless because of my demented mother.
I was homeless for about 5 months. I slept under bushes, in backs of abandoned cars, on top of buildings, on strangers living room floors and various other places.
I managed to get my Grandmother to send me a plane ticket to California so I could continue my education and get a life. (Thank You Grandma )
::bump::
I think this is an interesting thread idea, and I know there’s quite a few former homeless hanging around. Maybe a few of them will see it this time around. 
bella
Maybe a more descriptive title would help. I had no idea what this thread was about.
I thought the OP was soliciting travel advice.
brainychick,
If you ask nicely, a moderator might be persuaded to change the thread title to something that might generate more responses.
A moderator might, at that.
“Ever Been Homeless?”, maybe?
That’d be great, Czarcasm, how 'bout it?
Haj
This has been asked before - Similar Thread
I guess I was. Family problems, stupid social workers, and limited options. It sucked.
I was homeless for about 2 weeks once. I moved to Portland from a smallish town because my best friend moved from there to here to live with her mom. I decided to fly up to surprise friend for her birthday, but I knew that I’d probably stay for good. (There was some stuff going on in hometown that I didn’t want to stick around for.) I told her after I bought the tix that she had to go to the airport on August 3rd. She was overly happy that I was moving here. Anyway, we got an apartment together with our boyfriends a few weeks after I arrived. She has a daughter who was a year old at that time. Her bf ended up being a prejudice obscenity, and my bf was black and bi. Nobody was getting along. One day when I went to the bank while my bf was at work, friend and f’s bf had the locks on the apt changed. I didn’t know this, so I went to classes that night as usual. When I got back, I found bf waiting on the front porch and saw a note attached to the door. It said, if you are not part of the <last name of f’s bf> family, then you do not live here. It seems they had the lease changed without our permission while we were out. This (according to bf’s lawyer) was perfectly legal because friend’s name was the first on the lease. (Next time I’m going to tell those idiot managers to go in reverse alphabetical order, dag nabbit!) bf and I went to his friend’s house that night. The next night we stayed up all night hanging out at his job place. The night after, we slept under a bridge for a couple of hours. I believe that the following night we slept in a park and got kicked out the next morning. (Those last two might be reversed; I really don’t remember.) I finally called my mother and begged for help. She bought my jeep back from me for the thousand bucks I paid for it. I got a hotel room and the scummiest place I’ve ever been in my life. Roaches everywhere, etc. etc. I let bf stay there with me. We broke up a few days later and he kicked me out of my own hotel room! I didn’t have the balls or the backbone to tell him to go to hell, so I stayed with another friend for a few nights. Yet another friend and his girlfriend saw me a couple days later and told me that they were meeting their friend for dinner. They invited me to go along, and their friend had no problem with it. We stayed in a nice hotel with him for 2 nights. When we finally decided to part ways, their friend asked me to go home with him. A week later I decided that it was official; we were boyfriend and girlfriend. I’ve been with freesok ever since, bless his little heart. Quite a story, I know. I could go on more about 1st friend, but that would turn into quite the rant.
Twice, that I recall, I’ve lived for periods that were both about three months long with no fixed address.
The first was a hitchhiking odyssey that a friend and I made when we decided to go off to California to be hippies. While I’d done a couple of month cartrip along the same general route with a friend before, that had been done when I was still in high school and I had every intention of returning to finish HS, so I considered it more of a summer vacation from my home at my parents’ place.
The next year, as per my dad’s rule, I moved out when I turned 18, which came a few days after finishing HS. As I had known this was the plan, I had made financial preparations and I knew I was good for about four months. And we did some pickup work along the way that garnered a few more bucks. Actually, I was able to live more cheaply than I’d foreseen.
Anyway, I never needed to panhandle. In fact, as the nation was quite polarized at that point, it often pained me to witness the shenanigans of my “brothers” that I met along the way, California Dreamin’…, whoops, fell into the wayback machine and hit the “ON” button. It would take a book to describe that journey, but I’ll try here to distill salient points.
For one thing, as opposed to the “down in Dallas” experience, I was largely on the move, only staying in one place for a day or two, with a few exceptions. The whole objective had been to possibly hookup with a band to play with, so I spent some time in San Francisco and Berkeley (I had tickets to the last night of the Filmore West, but something easier to get to in Berkeley came up), LA and, for unrelated reasons, in the hippie colony about three miles inland on the Navarro River, near Mendocino (and Albion - Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys anyone?).
Bunch a’ hippies livin’ in the trees. We found our place there and stayed a couple of weeks. I had a memorable experience there; early one morning I crawled down to the river to wash my face. Shards of sunlight pierced the foliage canopy enough to illuminate the naked, bearded and very caveman-appearing hippy fellow and his also nude hippy chick across the river when all three of us had to stop for the creaking sounds that drew us to the condor flying upstream. A Jurassic moment.
Also different from the “down in Dallas” experience, which is supposed to mean the contemporary homeless experience, we frequently crashed in peoples’ living rooms or backyards, although we also slept on highway rights-of-way, in parks, in abandoned buildings, whatever.
One morning we were awakened, as we slept on the desert floor outside of Amarillo, by a trainman telling us they were aout to pull out and if we wanted to go, we needed to hustle. Damn! I can’t get into the whole trip - I’ll wrap it up.
After two months of living (mostly) outdoors amongst our rip-off prone hippy “bretheren,” we got busted for a camp fire in Big Sur (which - you already knew this, right? - was not ours). Went to court in Salinas and got a week in the Monterey County Jail. Oh man, if the judge had only known how much our sun-toasted selves considered that R&R. Three hots and a cot, with multi-cultural ethnic studies thrown in for free! My buddy just barely talked me out of getting one of those ghastly green Zig-Zag Man prison tattoos. As soon as we got out, said buddy bugged out on me and, with only a few weeks of resources left, I decided to head back towards Houston, where I knew people, to get my fledgling music career off the ground.
A guitarist I barely knew picked me up hitchhiking in on the last leg, and the next year or two formed up.
The next no-address-of-record experience came the summer before my last semester at the University of Texas.
I worked for the University for small wages. I’d sold my cab and had just about exhausted my meager resources. And, I’ll add, I had determined that I was going to finish school without student loans.
So, while I had my job with the Chemistry Department come September, it went poof for the summer. I had my Fall semester roommate lined up, I had my job come September, I put all my stuff in storage and I gave up my apartment at the end of May.
And I decided to stay in Austin. I slept a few nights in the parks or on campus, but I was mostly able to rotate amongst several friends. I did a lot of dishes and laundry, housekeeping, cracking jokes, whatever.
It worked for me.
One thing I’ll add is that during my times without an address of record, which are thankfully many years in the past, one easy to spot parameter that made the difference between those of us who were just travelin’ and those who had found a home in homelessness was attention to personal hygene.
I never let that go - I found showers or bathed in streams, daily. I did my laundry even if that required doing so every three days.
Hmmmmmm…Interesting stuff.
Thanks for the responses, the title suggestions (by the way, I was trying to be creative with the “No Place to Go” thing. Guess it didn’t work), and the link to the old thread.
Thanks especially for the perspective. Got the old brain gears going.