Say just that. You wake up with only the clothes on your back. How would you go about:
Getting an immediate place to stay? Or where would you be forced to stay in the beginning (abandoned buildings, public park, etc. ?
How would you get food?
How would you get a job?
And then how would you slowly rebuild your life?
Now you don’t have any friends or family to fall back on, and I would like to leave the government out of this as much as possible. Let’s say you have a decent high-school education. Of course, you speak the local language. The clothes you have are not great, but they are not rags (if they were, what would you do?). I do not know if this would make a difference, but assume that this takes place in a large American city.
Basically, how would you build yourself up from absolutely nothing. Be as detailed as possible.
I was thinking about this the other day when I saw some bum sleeping in front of the library (people from Sacramento can attest to this) and I realized that I did not really know what I would do if I were in any of there places and wanted to turn my life around. Where on Earth do you begin?
I’ve thought about this before. This is assuming I either have no family or have amnesia.
The first thing I would do is go to a soup kitchen. If none were available, I would go to a fast food restuarant and ask for some food from the side door, food that is “too old” to sell.
I would then go to a hotel, ask them for a razor and go to a bathroom and clean myself as best I could. I would then go and try to find any menial job I could.
Next, I would either hang around a homeless shelter and find a couple of people who really wanted to do something about their life. Everybody who was willing to get any job like mine could get an apartment to split. Granted, it would be a pretty crappy apartment that doesn’t require much in the way of a down payment or a credit check, but there are such places.
From there it gets easier. After you have a place to sleep and shower you can start taking care of yourself better and can get better jobs until you can get an apartment of your own.
That’s really lacking in detail but fleshed out enough, I think.
Been there, though I didn’t wake up in the gutter, but I was homeless for a while.
Go to a daily work daily pay place and get paid, ask several of the people you work with if they have or know of a place to stay. Many of them are or have been in the same boat.
After a week of saving up as much as you can buy some more clothes at a thrift shop or salvation army store.
This may be a good time to check the theory about panhandlers making hundreds in a day.
I would hook up with the Chronicle. They pay homeless folks to sell newspapers. I think they get a number of papers to sell for 100% profit. I would want to get some pocket money for bus fare and a set of clothes from a thrift store. I would begin looking for some kind of job that provided housing, maybe summer camps, cruise ships, storage / rental facilities, nanny, elderly care. I would then try and put together enough money to get my own place.
There’s a place in suburban Chicago that will let homeless women (I think the only qualifier is you need kids) stay at their place. They have a bus nearby. They have clothes for you to wear. They teach you how to budget your money that you would earn from whatever job you find (you have to hand over 80% of your money each payday). They save for you and then help you get re-established in the world. I give money and work clothes to them all the time.
Ex-Homeless doper checking in here. Ejected from the family in spectacular fashion, so I had no one to rely on. I was at uni at the time so I’ll tell you what I did then and what I would do now.
Back then I would use the uni gym showers to bathe and keep relatively clean and do a little bit of laundry.
sleep in a squat, no rent, no power, no worries!
plastic bottles to hold water and or urine.
Dumpster diving at the uni canteen or a fast food restaraunts.
Took a cleaners job to make some money to get some clothes, (occasionally took other cleaning items, loo roll, soap, detergent)
Waking hours were in the Gym or library or class to keep occupied.
Got a second job and saved up enough to make a deposit for rent on a cheap nasty flat.
All in all took about 9 months to get back on my feet, from absolutely nothing to semi-human
If it happened now?
Evaluate the climate / environment to find out what the basic needs are, can I get water? do I need shelter? Food?
Go back to dumpster diving food,
Squats or an abandoned work site building.
Beg a day to get some money to buys some clothes from Oxfam.
Hit a builders line for paid manual labour.
Save a bit and try to get back in a hovel and work my way back up to decent standard.
Driving through one of the richer areas of Columbus yesterday I saw, on several stret corners, guys holding signs that said something to the effect of “Mannys Close Out Sale! Last Day” blah, blah, blah.
Whan I asked my friends about it, they said it was against the law to post signs on street corners, so they paid guys to just stand there in the blazing sun holding signs all day. Odd. Anyway…
Although you did say leave out the government, I assume you meant in terms of welfare or other aid programs. Because if you’re relatively young, there seems to always be the armed forces to fall back on, at least in America.
What Welby said. My best friend growing up went homeless because of a serious depression. He basically got kicked out of every place he stayed because he wouldn’t work or pay rent. Eventually he ran out of places to stay and squatted in an abandoned house for about a year. He usually “bathed” very late at night under a neighbor’s hose. Luckily for him it was a warm climate. He ate every meal at a local soup kitchen.
During this time, he had done some serious evalutating about his life and started working day labor jobs doing all sorts of backbreaking work. He only worked 2 or 3 days a week but in 6 months with virtually no bills he ended up buying a trailer (no furniture) at a place that had a very little land rental. He paid cash for the trailer and only had to pay for the land lease. He did day labor for another year or two 2 or 3 days a week. He didn’t always have electricity but he always had water. He had decent clothes from the local thrift stores.
He eventually sold the trailer for a tiny profit and got married to a woman who was a little better off than him but both work minimally. They own a 2 bedroom condo in a lower middle class part of town and are pretty happy together.
I wouldn’t be content with stopping where my friend did. If I was homeless right here and now, I would do the day labor gig (or work the corner as a street musician if I had an instrument) long enough to pay for applications to colleges and universities (set up with a PO Box). I would apply for Master’s work in music most likely and live on campus during the year.
Assuming I get accepted at some place, I would continue working and saving until the semester starts living in a squat and eating at a soup kitchen. After getting into campus housing I would decide if I want to finish the degree or not but would definately stay long enough to get a job somewhere off campus and either set myself up roomate style or in a modest place of my own.
I was always able to find food without dedicating much planning time to it. Sleeping places were harder. Hardest of all is plotting a way out of the situation for keeps. My strategy at the time was to document my place of residence long enough to qualify for student grants based on income, and then go to college on grant money.
This is excellent advice. It is hard to apply for work where they have to be able to call you back after reading through applications, or to work at all when you have to work for weeks before the first paycheck shows up. Working on a day-to-day / immediate pay basis is ever so convenient!
I think selling drugs and stealing would be the quickest way to get set up with a nice lifestyle. If you didn’t get caught, then you could afford some clothes and get a job rather quickly I would think. How about prostitution? Malaka is right, there is always work, just depends on how desperate you are.
Um, actually, not so much. Sorry to hijack, but people thinking that the military is some sort of last resort for people who have nothing else is one of my pet peeves.
The military is much harder to get into than most jobs out there, especially now with limited force numbers authorized. In the first place, in most cases (there are some exceptions) you must have at least a high school diploma. Then you must meet the cut-off score for your chosen service on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. You must then have no medical problems, either mental or physical (for instance, if you have ever taken Ritalin at any point after age 7 you are pretty much disqualified), and, other than things like minor traffic violations, you cannot have any sort of criminal record, or any history of drug or alcohol abuse.
All that is not so easy for your average Joe to accomplish, and I would imagine doubly hard for someone who’s circumstances led them to homelessness.
Well, here in Topeka, I’d hike over to the Topeka Rescue Mission. They are a faith(Christian) based help group. They serve meals and have a homeless shelter. They have clothes and toiletries, give job training, and help folks get set up in new places. I’d stay with them for a couple of weeks, helping out, until I got a job and a place. Then I’d start building up and saving, spending on nothing I didn’t absolutely have to have, until I had some cash in the bank. Clothing from thrift stores, no fast food, no pets(sad), no car(I’d use the bus), and so on.
The most efficient way I’ve ever seen it done is this:
wake up under arches/get menial job/persuade middle-aged man to take topless photos of you / become low-grade glamour model / lose leg in motorbike accident / take up inspirational public speaking / marry a Beatle.
Been homeless in Phoenix a couple times. Best way to go about this is as follows:
There’s a ton of labor jobs (as mentioned above) that pay cash daily, usually under the table. You can show up for work in whatever the Hell nasty clothes you woke up in, no need to shower, shave, none of that. Of course, I was just about the cleanest crusty in Central Phoenix (used to wash my clothes in the park I slept in, or in a nearby mall, same with bathing), I used the cash I scraped up hunting coins in closed drive-throughs (people drop their change and don’t bother to pick it up) to buy soap and shampoo and razors and tobacco (gotta smoke, man. Gotta smoke). I got to know people in a Denny’s that would feed me for vacuuming the joint and doing their sidework, etc. Of course, I was homeless because I wanted to be, so I didn’t really look at getting a place to stay until I got pneumonia. But here’s a breakdown, 'cuz I got off on this tangent…
Work in the aforementioned job. Use some of that cash to get a place at the YMCA, and a couple changes of clothes from the thrift store. You can live on next to nothing for food, both in expenses and actual volume of food. Once you get a halfway presentable wardrobe (nothing fancy, just don’t look like a crusty), you can scale up to a better job, 'cuz now you have a fixed address. From there, use the money to become steadily more presentable, and get steadily better jobs, to get a steadily better place to live, and before you know it, you’re back to the middle class.
Few and far between. In 1980, Rangely Colorado was an oil-boom town and you could legitimately sit in front of the town’s single deli at the crack of dawn and folks would drive up in pickups and ask if you wanted to work, and would pay you at the end of the day if you did. (No guarantee of the next day’s work, but for awhile it really was a labor-supply-side economics kind of town. There was more need of workers than there were workers available to do the work).
If you’re homeless, and you hear of such a place, head for it. But when the economy is akin to today’s there won’t be many such places.
Day work remains a constant here. There are several places in my part of town where, at 7:00 or so in the morning, you’ll see anywhere from 5-20 guys in work clothes standing around at, say, a closed liquor store parking lot, in work clothes (a lot of painters’ pants in attendance), some drinking coffee, waiting for the van or crewcab to show up.
A lot of these guys live in the neighborhood and do this for long stretches of time, while also keeping an eye out for better work. They’re regular folks, with wives, kids, apartments, etc.