Who's been homeless?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Never been there. But I have come really close. And I’ve had a few friends who’ve been there for extended periods of time.

When I was 18, I had to leave home. Frankly, my life was in danger there. So I ran away to Vancouver and moved in with my sister.

Neither of us had much money. After I lost my first job, I couldn’t get welfare because of a technicality. For a few months, I was eating out of garbage cans and asking for change. I consider myself very lucky I still had a roof over my head, but I very nearly lost that as well.

I spent a week technically homeless in Montreal. I arrived Christmas Day 1995 here, and didn’t have an apartment until New Year’s Eve.

Never experienced the real thing, though. I’ve come close enough to know that all the rhetoric about “it being their own fault” is a bunch of bull. And since I have the experience of begging for change, I have a lot of sympathy for people who are out there, and usually give them whatever change I can spare – and if I can’t spare anything, I at least acknowledge their humanity by smiling and explaining things.

Montreal’s homeless rate doubled in a decade. Toronto’s tripled. I wrote an article on this back in my journalism-school days. My professor docked marks for “not showing the other side – the people who are homeless because they’re too lazy to get a job.” I felt like crying :frowning:

42

This thread makes me cry. I think the comment from Annie about never forgetting the guy who bought her two sandwiches and a breakfast special. God, such a small thing, yet something most people wouldn’t even do.

43

If I didn’t have such kind and understanding parents (although they get on my nerves often and I on theirs) I would be homless now at 28. I love them for how much they help me, but yet I can’t tell them that.

44

I will never complain when we have to repair something in my house again.

45

When I was about 16 my father had to leave town for an extended period of time. I moved in with my mother.

That didn’t go so hot. She was having some really tough times and took most of it out on me.

I ended up on the streets for the sole reason of getting away from her.

I spend most of my time in the University area of Seattle. At least half the people I knew were all in the same boat so there was plenty of support. The other half had homes and I spent what time I could sleeping on their floors.

If there wasn’t a floor handy, I’d sleep on the roof of a building I knew that was quite secure. Only one way up and it wasn’t easy.

There were also a handful of good parks prime for summer sleeping.

I got food several ways. There was a pizza place that used to sell by the slice. If the slice sat around for too long they’d take it from the warmer and put it in a to-go box. At the end of the night when they closed they set this box outside in the back ally for the homeless. They were a real life saver.

We used to dumpster out of McDonnalds. They would throw away a huge number of perfectly good hamburgers. Then one day someone took a bite of one and got a mouthful of bleach. They started saving all the old burgers and fries and giving them a sprinke of bleach or some cleaner so we couldn’t eat them.

There was also a store that used to get their bakery delivery around 3am. Everything was placed in an unlocked outside bin. That was pretty popular.

I got money several ways. “Spare change” was popular. At the time punk rock was just getting it’s hold on Seattle so here we were a bunch of dirty homeless punks that the rich girls who attended the Private Catholic school couldn’t resist. They were always offering out cash donations to us. 5 bucks here, 10 there. Also, their parents seemed to leave town alot, which allowed us to crash at their homes, eat food, shower, soak in their hot tubs, get a little nookie, whatever.

We also discovered paper boxes. We found if you tipped this one kind of paper box backwards and flipped it up real quick, quaters fell from the coin return slot. Two or three tips of a paper box would empty it. The city was covered in these boxes and we’d walk for miles tipping every paper box we’d come across. We could get 15-20 bucks in quarters an hour on a good night.

I lived this way on and off for 2 years. Sometimes I go home and try to deal with my mother and brother, but that only lasted for a few days. I had managed to collect a number of musical items and I stored those at my mothers. So normally returning included playing music.

Then my dad came back to town and rescused me. Not long after I managed to get a job (you can’t get or keep a job very well when you don’t have a regular home) and score my own place. Well, a room in the basement of a house right next to the furnace.

50% of those days were fine, and dare I say alot of fun. It was like a vacation from life. We always managed to find something to eat. But then the other 50% was cold and wet and hungry. The nights when I was alone and it was cold were the worse. You kind of hope someone kills you in your sleep so you don’t have another day like that again.

I couldn’t have made it without all my friends who were in the same boat.

I should include my mother is much better now. She got over whatever she was going through and we have a pretty good relationship now. Not super close, but not weird and dysfunctional either.

46

I hope this question doesn’t come across as being insensitive, but how can one tell the difference? Just to be clear, I am willing to help – and have helped – those in need, but most recently I encountered a case that wasn’t so clear-cut, and ended up turning the person away.

47

You can’t tell the difference.

For all you know, the homeless person is panhandling because he likes being filthy, cold, lonely, and hungry. He might even be as totally insane as I was, all those years ago.

Some people gave me money, in those dreadful days. It didn’t cure me, or get me a home, or a job. It got me food. It got me a subway ticket so I could spend the day out of the freezing cold. I wasn’t all that grateful, either. I barely remember them, or any other specific thing that happened for those horrible fourteen months.

It isn’t unlikely that an alcoholic homeless person is going to take your spare change and the spare change of a few other suckers and buy bottle of wine. He probably won’t even get a good price on it, since he isn’t allowed to go into stores that have reasonable prices.

Deal with your need to know what your money is going to do. Buy a few sandwiches, and give those away, if it matters to you. It might well not matter to him. But it isn’t true that all homeless people are addicted to anything at all. Some just got downsized, and their lease expired. Suddenly they had no address, and no way to get a job. A week later, someone stole the stuff they had in their car, and two months later, the car was towed away for having expired tags. And now they have to sleep in parks, and they get arrested for it.

I recently went to The DC Lunch Bunch (a doper gathering) meeting. Across the street from the sandwich shop where we ate is Mcphereson Square. I lived there once. It’s a much nicer neighborhood, now, so I wouldn’t be allowed to live there anymore. I would get chased away to live in a neighborhood with fewer rich people.

Tris

48

Looking for a Good Spot
By Michael Kadel

I will sit here, for a bit, and rest.
No one seems to be about.
I wish for a soft spot out of the wind.
The best places are taken, or the cops keep you away.

I will sit here for a bit, and rest.
Although I cannot sleep now,
I have to wait until it’s warmer,
And I won’t die before I wake, with no one for my soul to take.

As I rest, I will make plans,
To find a good spot for later.
Near a fancy restaurant,
Where they throw a lot of food away, before it spoils.

I miss the baby most of all.
But I have nothing for her.
I think she will be all right.
People take care of babies, just because they need it.

Here comes a cop.
He’s not looking at me.
I think I will move, anyway.
They always notice if you are still in the same place, later.

I can find another place.
This one was too open.
I should find a place to sleep.
In case I die before I wake, with no one for my soul to take.

49

I’m pretty muched awed by many of the posts here. Probably the most humbling thread i’ve read in the SDMB. Under the most of the conditions described here, i probably would’ve ran to mommy. For many of you, it probably wasn’t an option.

How do you react when you meet a homeless person now? Do you take an extra step to help them?

People have said this in previous posts, but i’ve gained a new respect for those who have endured and escaped from vagrancy.

50

Well, I don’t spend a lot of time in the places where homeless people go, really. This is not a coincidence. I need to not be in those places, even now, twenty some years later. Of course, I do meet homeless people, sometimes. I end up with some of them in my home, once in a great while. Not usually, though.

I will get a meal, for a homeless person, if they tell me that they want money for food. I mean buy a meal, now, to go, if they want, or need it to be to go. During the meal I generally try to find out what their situation is. Not what their story is, I remember the story, and the story was not about getting off the street, in my case.

I said above that you can’t tell. The folks here who have lived on the street probably can tell. For some, the meal is all I can do. For some, I still have (or can get) the same information I used to trade for food and coffee from hookers, and runaways. Real steps, starting this afternoon, or tomorrow morning, with addresses and names of people to talk to. That information is tough to keep current. If you don’t have the real facts, in simple steps, that are current, and still funded, you can’t help much. Homeless people can’t make thirty phone calls looking for the right bureaucrat. They can’t call back for an appointment. They can’t take a cab to the office.

Taking in homeless people? I don’t recommend it. It might help them; it might not. They might do you harm, they probably won’t. The chance of someone stealing something is pretty high. Since I don’t own that much, I can do it a little safer than most. But I do it very seldom and mostly only after I know the person pretty well. That is the key. Homeless people have a lot of trouble keeping friends. They may not want to. But they need friends more than a lot of obvious needs. So, the big question comes up, aside from spare change, do you have any spare friendship?

A shower, a load of clothes washed and dried, and a night in a warm safe place, followed by breakfast is a gift beyond the riches of kings. It can change the way life looks. Or, it can be just a single comfortable night among a thousand nights of hell. That part isn’t up to you.

It isn’t about giving someone a lot of stuff, or money. It’s about finding out what useful help you can give them. Yeah, here is the address and bus route to get to place where they hirer casual labor. (And you better know for damned sure that they are, in fact hiring tomorrow!) Sure, here is a bus schedule. You know what, my watch only cost me six bucks, why don’t you take that, and set it for tomorrow morning at seven. Then you can catch the number 15 bus, and be there at Eight, when they open.

That was one guy’s answer. It was a bad answer for anyone other than that guy. For him, it was a single first step, which he could not make on his own, without prompts. I don’t know what happened to him. I didn’t see him again, though, so I hope that means he made a few more steps on his own. But I can’t hold him responsible for making good on my prompts. The decent thing to do is help our brother. The hard part is that it isn’t always possible to give the help that works.

Tris

51

I go back and forth on how I feel about homeless people. My best friend growing up wound up being a homeless runaway. He stayed with me for a while but didn’t like that he had to do chores in order to stay for free so he left. I would visit him, get him food, have him over to wash his clothes, set him up with interviews, and all sorts of things to help him get off the street.

He was homeless for a little over a year and extremely depressed. I can’t count how many times he told me he was going to kill himself (or other people) if he could just figure out a quick way. I know that his depression was the main reason that he was homeless since it kept him from doing any kind of work. Eventually he flipped out totally and was taken into the state hospital where they doped him up enough to get out of his funk and then set him on his way.

That was the point when he got off the streets. Although he isn’t doing great now, he is still off the streets to my knowledge. I also know now that no amount of help I could send his way would get him off the street until he was better and could help himself. I know not all homeless people are like him but since then he has influenced most of my dealings with the homeless.

A while back I came across a man who told me he was homeless because he couldn’t get a job after he got busted for selling pot and just got out of jail. That was roughly a year ago. He tells me he is hungry. Luckily for him I knew where the local travelling soup kitchen stopped and when. I don’t really tend to carry cash on me for more than one reason but I can always be a source of information. I told him that the soup kitchen stops roughly a block away (not like giving him money would have gotten him anything that late since everything was closed) from where he is at and will arrive at roughly midnight (which was about an hour from the current time). He thanked me but then went on panhandling. Roughly a year later this same guy comes up to me and starts his spiel. I stop him and tell him his story back to him and he says that it was him. This time I also told him where the local day laborors get picked up in addition to where the local soup kitchen meets. This was also around midnight. I thoroughly expect to see him again telling me about how he just got out of jail for selling pot.

I am sure my attitude at helping rather than giving money is better. Like Triskadecamas said, you can’t tell who will go around and just buy a load of liquor. I could always give them something but I think that masks the problem. I would rather give them a way to exist for days when people aren’t around to give them money than fix their immediate problem of hunger temporarily.

52

I’ve been homeless too. Unfortunately, more than once, though it seemed much worse when it was with my family.

You have not lived broke, until you have lived with your mother and sibs in the back of a car on the side of the road, or in a tent at a campground, or…well you get the idea. The times we had a trailer of our own, or rented a room in someone’s house seemed fairly luxurious.

There is nothing I can tell you to explain the feeling of getting your clothing from the church’s free box, and going to school with the people who used to own those clothes.

I was homeless for the first time on my own at 15, living as a statistic on the streets of LA. It was scary, and I would wish that life on no one.

It’s taken a long time and a hell of a lot of work to come to where I am now (educated and employed), and I would not care to repeat the experiences, but they have taught me a lot about life and the people around me. I am a serious cynic, but I do appreciate the little things very much (running water!!), and the kindness of a stranger means the world to me.

53

I wanted to post on this (despite it being very old) because these stories really hit me. I am hoping that by doing this, more people will read the thread and absorb these fascinating stories.