::raises hand also::
Homeless in the most complete sense during fall of 1984. I had emigrated to New York City and failed to land a job, an unfurnished room (for which I initially had the money in traveler’s checks), had my backpack with most of my possessions stolen from me, and only managed to link up with the contact people I’d figured on being able to turn to after I had been on the streets for several days and lost my stuff.
Spent my days scouting around for a place to sleep at nights plus seeking food. I’m not an effective beggar and I’m unable to sleep in a situation where I’m out in the open in a public place. Churches were good (by virtue of having lots of windows and doors and often being older buildings, therefore easy to slip into when deserted). Once I hovered in the offices of a small independent drug rehab org and managed to be in the bathroom and forgotten when they closed up, and got to sleep on their rather nice couch. More often than not, though, sleep took place at the top level of 4, 5, or 6-floor walk-ups, on the landing below the locked opening to the rooftop.
Lots of small eating places existed where paying customers would leave their plates on the table when they left, and often would leave behind morsels worth snarfing up. Some chain establishments had policies dictating that they had to throw away take-out orders not picked up within a certain interval, or a certain number of hours after initial preparation. Some of them deliberately destroyed what they threw away (dumping coffee grounds or other icky stuff on it) but others tossed it in inside the box the customers would have received it in, and this was often recoverable.
Eventually I got sick (throat infection) and the free clinic doctor I found pointed me towards the NYC shelter system for homeless people, which was quite a zoo with noisy yelling zookeepers, but it was a cot for the night and food the next morning, and the yelling was impersonal because they didn’t know us as individuals. (Fort Washington Shelter for Homeless Men, 168 Street Manhattan, 1984). That ended the “most complete sense” of being homeless, but I was in Ft. Washington for a couple months before negotiating placement in a permanent-bed shelter for the “homeless mentally ill”, which in turn became reorganized as the “Residential Care Center for Adults”, where I lived for over a year, commuting to college via bus (for which they grudgingly supplied tokens) and dealing with their condescending overly-familiar and insulting ways of providing “help”.
Moved into the dorms Fall 1996 and was only homeless subsequently in the summer between terms when the dorms were closed.