I didn’t interpret your post as advice, just as an honest claim of what you’d do - perhaps because I imagine it’s what I might do as well. Being jobless and without a mailing address and secure sleeping accommodations would be such a far fall from where I am now that I would probably just fold.
Lately videos from the Invisible People channel have been popping up on my YouTube feed. Many of the videos on this channel have someone holding a cell phone camera while a homeless person tells their own story. This one showed up a couple of days ago:
He kind of glosses over the first step where he and his wife suddenly lost connection with family in LA while they were headed out there - but the challenges of clawing your way up out of homelessness are what got my attention. How do you get a job without a permanent address? How do you keep your shit from getting stolen? How do you stay safe? How do you maintain cell phone service and keep your phone charged (and not stolen)?
As @pkbites points out, a single step-change from “homed, food-secure and financially secure” to “absolutely homeless, friendless, and without financial resources” isn’t really a thing. But even supposing that you’ve somehow made that long terrible slide to become the guy in that video, how do you get yourself off the streets again in any sort of permanent way?
I do recall hearing that the lack of any kind of enduring living space - a place where you are your belongings can be physically secure, and where you can receive mail - is a major impediment for anyone trying to end their own homelessness - even the ones who aren’t seriously mentally ill and/or drug-addicted. There’s a lot of opposition to providing that level of assistance for “dirty selfish homeless bums who have given up on themselves so why should I help them with a free handout.” And indeed, there are any number of homeless whose mental illness and/or addiction means that a secure dwelling won’t be any sort of step to total recovery. But for a lot of folks who are motivated and capable of moving up, it might help.
A secure place where you can sleep without having to keep an eye out, or a place where you can be confident your belongings will remain while you go to work, and a place where you can practice good hygiene so that it is easier to be accepted in society.
For the sake of the OP, I assume the Duke brothers have pulled a “Trading Places” on me in the name of science. In reality, it would be nearly impossible for me to “suddenly” become homeless.
A lot depends on do I have any assets? Any cash or credit cards? My car? My phone? Is it just me or is my wife and kids homeless to (or am I homeless because she kicked me out and took all my stuff in a divorce)?
I suppose in the short term, I would need a place to stay. During the day I suppose there are plenty of coffee shops, libraries and bars I can chill at. Plenty of homeless at the Port Authority and Penn Station. Over on the Jersey side where I live, there are a couple of shelters. I even see a few encampments in the strip of forest along the Palisades cliffs between the Jersey City Heights, Hoboken and Weehawken.
Longer term, obviously want to start generating some income so as to not stay homeless.
To be honest, for someone like me, it probably requires a very different sort of thinking. I’m not really used to living paycheck to paycheck and making every penny count. I’m more used to having a relatively massive income with lots of longer-term contingencies to prevent from going homeless in first place.
I’ll go with the idea that all my possessions & assets magically disappear, leaving me with my current health (pretty good) and a few clothes. No friends or family to call on.
First step would be a basic job. Where I live (and in most of the places I’ve recently been) it’s hard to find a restaurant or fast-food joint that isn’t begging for employees. Ditto for car-repair shops, and I expect for many others. It’s inconceivable I couldn’t quickly get hired at minimum wage (many places advertise starting offers well above that), without a check on home address.
This should make it possible to find temporary housing, perhaps in a homeless shelter. Having a steady job would make me look like someone who’s a good short-term risk.
At the job, I’d make a point of showing up early every day, and being the hardest worker. Having been disconnected from my hobbies, I’d be asking for all the overtime I could get - should be plenty available, in view of all the “We’re understaffed - please be patient” signs currently evident. I think I’d be clearing $500 per (50- to 60-hour) week pretty soon - maybe more. That should allow me to find some low-end place to rent a room, and to afford a phone (my current plan costs $25/month).
After a month of making myself look essential - and having spent some time looking around - I’d either be hitting the boss up for a meaningful raise or headed to that better job I’d scouted. I think $750 per week (for long hours) is possible during the second month. This would put a cheap computer within the budget - maybe next month a clunker car.
I think the short answer here is, “I wouldn’t be able to do any better than those who are currently homeless.” None of us would. To answer otherwise is to buy into the myths that the homeless could quit being homeless if they were only willing to work hard and use a little initiative. True, we may not suffer from addiction or mental illness, but a fairly large segment of the homeless population have jobs and are still homeless.
I wasn’t abusing(or even using) drugs, and my mental health was fairly stable(as far as I know) when I became homeless. All it took was a low-paying job with a constantly changing schedule at a nursing home, getting a bad case of flu, missing too many shifts because of that flu, and at the same time married roomies got a wonderful job opportunity and moved out of state. No room, no job, piss-poor health, and it is late fall/early winter in Bremerton. At that time there was absolutely no support for the homeless in that town, so I took the ferry to Seattle to walk the streets, and occasionally stand in line for hours for a chance to sleep on a mat on the floor until 7 am, then go back on the streets. If you owned anything more than what you could put in a small backpack, the shelter wouldn’t allow you to take it in with you, and if you happened to latch onto a temp job that didn’t end at 3 pm you wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting shelter space-it filled fast.
There is no way to keep 2 humans, 3 dogs, 16 cats, 4 goats, 1 horse, and 2 tanks of fish when your only shelter is a Mazda2 hatchback. That’s the vehicle that would garner the smallest return if sold, and uses the least fuel. Truck and horse trailer would have to go.
And yes, my animals are my family (NOT KIDS!) and friends. Finding my elderlies and difficult personalities a safe place to land would be very hard and heartbreaking.
After further thought, the first thing I’d do is get in touch with HART, a local organization that works with the homeless, and ask for help.
As I understand it, the two broad categories of homelessness are “chronically homeless” and “situationally homeless”. The former category would include the people who are homeless due to mental illness or drug addiction, and are what we typically think of when we picture a homeless person, but is actually a relatively small percentage of the overall homeless population. The latter category would include people who got evicted and were simply unable to find another place they can afford right away. And add to that the fact that many landlords will reject an application simply because a person has an eviction in your credit history, making it much harder to find housing once you’ve been evicted. Those people may indeed have jobs already. You might not even realize they were homeless unless they told you.
Real life has “work arounds” and I think most of us are trying to work on the actual premises, since much of the OP is at least somewhat vague or doesn’t specify all the hypotheticals. At least IMHO, we aren’t all starting from the same place ever, and I don’t think this question says that we must. For example, someone with no criminal record and a lot of the basics of mainstream employed adult society (401k, health coverage, perhaps already on a pension/SS, social capital, transportation, credit) would most likely only be temporarily inconvenienced by un-employment and eviction.
Also, I think it’s important to understand that a lot of the worries expressed by people in mainstream society are pointless when you are homeless or close to it. Millions of people live with no on the books employment, no leases, etc. If you are in survival mode, why worry about having a permanent address (there are plenty of cash “employers,” gigs, etc), what your "rental resume’ looks like and so on. If this is about what I would do personally, then I’m assuming I have access to the things (or at least my personal traits) unique to me or else or state in the assumptions that I have no credit, no car, a lower IQ, or what have you.
I volunteer with a homeless mission. We serve food and give out clothing to homeless people in a couple of cities. Been doing this for many years. Our “clients” almost all have drug, alcohol and/or mental health issues. Most of them two out of three.
I also served on our town’s Community Housing Trust board for many years. We managed transitional housing for mostly families who had lost their housing, either in motels or short term housing. Most commonly these folks moved in with relatives or friends eventually, some end up getting their own place. Many of these people have jobs, but sometimes had a hard time keeping them because commuting from the suburbs reliably is difficult. Public transportation such as it is, is pretty much going from suburb into the city and back out. So if you need to go from one suburb to another ten miles away you might be traveling 40 miles on buses and trains at a cost of $30 a day. And no trains after 7pm, which is a bummer if you have a second or third shift job, or worse a rotating schedule. And child care outside an area where they have friends and relatives is near impossible. I think these folks are included in the “homeless” population but many people do not think of them as homeless as they aren’t sleeping outside or even in a shelter.
Recently a restaurant screwed up the date of an event they were supposed to cater. They prepared food for 120 people a week early. They took the food to the housing authority and the motel and gave it to the residents. One of the residents posted this on Facebook thanking the restaurant. Fire rained down on the restaurant owners, for giving food to these underserving folks instead of to the Police, Fire or School staff who are our “heroes”.
I’ve never been homeless, but I did couch surf for a few months and I didn’t like that at all. I’m not playing the game here because in the decades since my couch surfing days, I have worked and saved and invested. I will not be homeless unless society collapses or something like that in which case I would die as soon as my medications run out.
HOWEVER, I have worked with chronically homeless people, I have helped deliver food to homeless camps and I have witnessed the misery and defeat. As a food stamp worker, I heard their often heartbreaking stories daily. I know a little about the issue.
I’m very good at fund raising. I know how to write successful grants. I am not shy about standing a stage and asking strangers for money or asking single strangers for money face to face. I have raised money for homeless and food banks, animal rescue, library repairs after a flood and the Wounded Warrior barracks in San Diego.
Getting funding for animal rescue is fairly easy, usually a lot of small amounts on a regular basis. Large amounts of money just rained down on me for the library repairs, Veterans’ groups call me and ask me to show up at their events so they can give me money.
Getting anything for the homeless is like taking money from a lawyer. I spent almost a year getting enough money to replace a failing food bank freezer and I worked my ass off.
I don’t have a very high opinion of most of humanity.
Problem is that many people on this board are older and well established, having spent much of there lives making sure they would never be homeless.
I was close to homeless a few times when younger and would have been able to cope with it during those days. But to be faced with it when you are older having lived a comfortable life (even with health issues) would be a death sentence to many here.
Can’t recall who said it but you can be young without money but you dare not be old without money.
Yes, this is the thing. The only way I could become “suddenly homeless” at this point in my life is if something catastrophic happened to my house, like a fire or the like. So, what I’d do is use my credit card to book a hotel room, and call my insurance company. Life would suck for a while, but I’d end up okay once the money showed up. Even if the insurance screwed me, I could sell the land for enough to pay off the mortgage and still pocket about $200K.
In the “suddenly lost my job” scenario, I’ve got the option to skip at least one payment on my mortgage, which gives me a full month to sell the house. In the current market, I could extract enough equity even with an emergency sale to live for at least a few years, with careful planning. So, I might end up homeless two or three years from now, but that’s hardly “sudden”.
The only way neither of those plans work is if there’s a general disaster that makes a lot of other local people homeless at the same time. At that point, the plan would be “Walk to the Red Cross shelters”, or whoever is doing the disaster relief.
For me, the nightmare scenario is being accused of a terrible crime, with enough plausibility that my family and friends abandon me, I lose my job and license, and I’m sued for all my worth–but I’m not sentenced to prison time. Other than that–and perhaps not even then–I can’t imagine that I’d be homeless.
If that happened, it would wreck me emotionally, and it’s difficult for me to predict how, or if, I’d survive.
If that didn’t happen, I have a skill set and credentials in very high demand right now and could pick up a job in my field this afternoon that would be enough for me to survive; my credit’s good enough that I could take out a short-term loan; and homelessness wouldn’t be an issue for more than a few hours.
So: homelessness accompanied by such devastating personal loss that I can’t imagine being able to cope; or homelessness caused by such societal collapse that I don’t know which skills would be helpful; or it’s not much of a scenario.
