If a person doesn’t want to/can’t live in a traditional apartment or house, what other options are there for a living space that is insulated against the weather, has protection from trespassers, is legal (or at the very least, not something the po-po go looking for) and has protection from bugs.
I was listening to NPR about a family who were living on the run. They used to live in a house they built out in the woods, and when the authorities started chasing them (they grew a few pot plants) they moved to a nearby city and started living on a boat for a few years.
I’ve heard of hippies, poor people, retirees and bohemians living in cars, tents, campers, vans, cabins in the woods, but living in a boat was a new one.
Setting up permanent residence in an RV at a campground that allows people to stay there full-time. You can get a good-sized clean, used travel trailer for a song these days and it’s amazing how little those places charge. Some have 6-month stay limits…find two of them and move back and forth. You get power and water and most have washers and dryers available for use.
I gather that Florida had a problem with people using houseboats as residences since they don’t have to pay property and other taxes. There is now a law that all houseboats have to pass periodic inspections for being seaworthy and having working engines.
If you don’t mind the Florida heat and you have a car, there’s always camping. There are so many campgrounds down there because of the snowbirds that you can stay the maximum length at one and then rotate to another just a few miles away. The bugs could be a problem, though. And when it’s hot, it’s HOT.
There’s also staying at motels. They aren’t necessarily cheap or safe (there’s a tradeoff between the two, of course), but they’re an option.
Storage spaces are another option. I don’t know how many homeless people do this, but I once saw a documentary that showed a number of people living out of these places. Somehow one of them even had electricity. They looked like they were the size of a basic one-person prison cell. But I’m pretty sure residing in one is illegal, which would disqualify it.
How about living in one of those rather large storage sheds that you can buy at Home Depot for a 1000 dollars? If you have a friend who has a backyard or you are able to buy a small plot of land, you could install it there. I have to admit daydreaming about living in something like that or a tumbleweed home.
There are also communes still around, believe it or not. That place down in south Georgia where Habitat for Humanity sprang from (sorry, don’t feel like googling the name) is one. You live in a communal setting, eat meals communally, and work for the benefit of the commune. If I weren’t such an individual and didn’t like city life, I wouldn’t mind living such a lifestyle. There’s something to be said for a life of simplicity, hard work, and being around like-minded people. But I think I would get tired seeing the same people day after day. And I’d be highly suspicious of any purple fruit-flavored drink they might serve at supper.
I looked into communes in the bay area. For about $400 you got shelter, food and utilities. Of course you had to share a house with 15 other people, but if you can handle that it would be cool.
As far as camping, I don’t mind the cold but heat is bothersome. I don’t know how people who live in campsites or in cars can handle the heat when it is 90 or more. If it is cold you can just use a sleeping bag. If it is hot you are SOL unless you have an electric hookup with air conditioning and live in a well insulated domicile (which a car or tent are not).
I’ve heard of people living in storage spaces but like you said, it seems hard to get away with. If so many people like it I never figured out why nobody just built them as living spaces (rather than storage spaces, so more insulation w/running water & electric) and there seems to be no market for them (a collection of 100 sq ft boxes to live in). I guess because such low cost living spaces would attract too many of the wrong kinds of people, tons of hard partying musicians and homeless. Probably a variety of safety laws too. Plus there wouldn’t be much property tax to pay on something like that, so the city wouldn’t look kindly on it.
There does seem to be a growing market for <200sq ft homes though.
After the Northridge earthquake, I was homeless for almost five months and lived rather well stumbling around the various offices and classrooms of a university. Granted, this was almost 18 years ago and there is no doubt that security is much more stringent now, but with a student’s I.D., I could shower and clean up in the physical ed shower areas (as well as the art department because the clay department had a full shower) and sleep in various psych and math departments (they had couches).
Amazing how much comfortable room and private space I could find wandering around the university…
My friend in college used to do that sometimes, he would sleep on the couch in the math lab. The problem is the janitors worked at night so it was hard to get away with.
The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee has offered successful communal living since sometime around the late 1960s. They have a good reputation with the locals. I think that National Geographic had done an article or two about the place.
Lately the idea of “living small” has appealed to me. I see that Sage Rat has mentioned Tumbleweed Houses. That’s the idea. The Small House Society. My husband scoffs at the idea of my being able to scale down enough to do that.
If I were running things, I would allow for communal type “living grounds” (as opposed to temporary campgrounds). I would find cheap, affordable pre-manufactured housing, such as storage containers (the kind you find in shipyards) and convert them into fully functioning domicles, with running water, electricity, windows, small bathrooms, and some type of heating system. Then have a communal area where people would share kitchen space and perhaps gather for meetings and whatnot. You could stay in the community as long as you contributed to its upkeep (providing security, doing maintenance of the grounds, cleaning the communal areas, etc.) and of course maintaining your domicile up to standards. Activists would be welcome to come to the grounds and help organize such things as community gardens, alternative energies so that the community could be “off the grid”, and help people get GEDs or enrolled in training programs. They could have such communities for homeless people, ex-cons (especially sex offenders), or people who just want to live simply or in a novel way.
It would be both hippy-ish and bound to fail somehow. But it certainly seems it would be an improvement over the status quo, with the long-lines of people waiting for shelter cots or section 8 vouchers, or people living under the bridge like those former sex cons in Miami. It seems like we have so much land in this country, and yet so many rules making it hard for people to live on their own subsistenence. In other places in the world, the poor can build up shanty towns (on someone else’s land) and at least have some independence and dignity. We could adopt the “shanty town” approach here but make the shanties more substantial, the quality of life safer and better, and help remove the blight of homelessness from urban life.
My law school roommate and I did this when we decided at the last minute to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans for the weekend. We drove out and rented the truck in town. $10/person/day. We parked near Tulane and showered there.
There is a cult that runs a couple of bookstores on Castrol Street in Mountain View, I think they live in Palo Alto off of El Camino. You could check there.
OT: The last time I visited a few weeks ago, I noticed the Scientology recruiting Center next door was closed. Anyone know what happened there?
I think there was a case jsut a few years ago where a supposed grad student in physics at Stanford was outed after living the same way for what IIRC was about 20 years (!) without ever being enrolled. I htink she (!) got a little stalker-ish and the thing came undone.
