Homelessness Is Expensive

Many people—particularly critics of the homeless—think that homeless people have no responsibilities such as mortgages, car payments, etc., so they can live for free on the streets, scrounging whatever they can to survive. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Housed or not, the day-to-day cost of living is expensive for everyone. It's even more difficult for the homeless, employed or not. Working homeless people have expenses like everyone else (food, clothing, transportation to/from work). The cost of living will vary based on their geographical area, and the size of their family, as well as whether or not there are public resources such as charities or social agencies in their communities.

Just the basic survival needs for living in a car, and to not look like a homeless person to avoid detection, are as follows:

These very basic expenses can eat up a part-time paycheck pretty quickly (on top of the logistical difficulties of working while homeless). In my case, for example, luxuries such as haircuts, hot meals, or clothes—which are hardly considered luxuries to housed people—are a non-starter for me. I trim the dead ends off my hair as best as I can, and for the last three years, I've worn whatever clothes I've found in various "free" boxes around town. Even when I had a roof over my head, my clothes were purchased BY THE POUND at a local Goodwill Outlet store, because it was all I could afford. Shopping in a mall or online is not even a remote reality for me anymore. 

Critics of homelessness also advise moving to a less expensive area to live, but moving costs money (particularly for gas) which poor people obviously don't have a lot of. It also costs money to live in the new location with no job or support or resources. So it's not as easy as the critics like to think, simply because poor people don't have the same resources as the critics who (conveniently) don't understand poverty. 

The solution is what it's always been: affordable housing and living wages. Sadly, neither are in danger of happening anytime soon, thanks to the plutocratic oligarchy we have been living in for a long time in the USA. 

Articles on the Neuropsych of Homelessness; and US Workers are Totally Screwed Compared to Other Nations

A couple of really good recent articles on homelessness of note:

Hanna Brooks Olson wrote a terrific piece on Medium about the neuropsychology of (unfounded) assumptions the average person makes about homeless people, and the causes of their poverty. An excerpt:

"There has, for more than 30 years, been a resounding refrain that poverty is the fault of the poor, and that if you are not poor, you are somehow better, stronger, more capable, and more deserving of food, housing, and peace of mind."

Of course, in the minds of average people with money, homelessness could never have any possible connection to working conditions, as this piece from Eric Levitz at New York Magazine shows. An excerpt:

"But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offers a more straightforward — and political— explanation: American policymakers have chosen to design an economic system that leaves workers desperate and disempowered, for the sake of directing a higher share of economic growth to bosses and shareholders.

The OECD doesn’t make this argument explicitly. But its report lays waste to the idea that the plight of the American worker can be chalked up to impersonal economic forces, instead of concrete political decisions. If the former were the case, then American laborers wouldn’t be getting a drastically worse deal than their peers in other developed nations. But we are."