I have occasionally grimly considered if I’d have to live in my car.
Grateful to have a car.
Don’t worry about it much now that my kids are mostly grown. I know they’ll take care of me if necessary. What a blessing.
I find this really sad. Nobody always makes perfect life choices, and life throws curveballs. I have my hardworking late father to thank for protecting me from such a fate.
And in this state almost all the food banks, charities, and Ebt cards / welfare go to people WHO DONT BELONG IN THIS COUNTRY. Imagine how we could care for Americans to give them a temporary handout, or even come to some wonderful solutions for the homeless. All we would have to do is STOP PAYING ILLEGALS.
Every day I’m asked to pay for Thanksgiving bags of food to be delivered to the food pantry. They don’t ask for ID so I know a lot of that food is to feed illegals. I hate that I don’t just donate, but isn’t it self destructive to set out cheese and crackers for the mice in your walls?.
Once upon a time there were boarding houses where for a few dollars per week you can get a room and meals. Often these houses were run by a widow or other elderly person supplementing their income. These homes have been zoned out of existence.
Sure, people still rent rooms, but it has become much riskier. More often than not, offering a room for rent will put you in violation of a plethora of laws: zoning, fire codes, food safety, business license, municipal taxes. And running an out and out boarding house would be a legal nightmare.
And this doesn't take into account the way society has changed. Once society's marginal people were just economically wanting but otherwise normal. In today's world of sexual freaks, drug addled wastrels, habitual drunkards, and violence prone mental cases, renting a room out could be a terrible risky proposition. And depending on the community, running a full blown boarding house could be as dangerous as Russian roulette.
Jessica Bruder Goodreads Author...
Jessica Bruder is a journalist who writes about subcultures and economic justice.
For her most recent book, “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” (W.W. Norton & Co.), she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in our precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving—from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.
Jessica has been teaching at Columbia Journalism School since 2008. She has written for publications including Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, WIRED, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, T ...more
Yes there are people in that life out of desperation but the majority have chosen it, selling houses and possessions, intentionally following mild weather, north in summer south in winter, and finding seasonal work. Many just volunteer at parks and campgrounds in exchange for free camping. I’ve considered it myself since my current work doesn’t tie me to one place, it can all occur via text, email, FTP and online. Rather than painting them as pitiful desperadoes, maybe a little applause at their ingenuity and determination to remain self-supporting in sometimes difficult circumstances would be in order.
Has any research been done to discover how many of them CHOOSE that lifestyle? Like the hobos of the 1930s, some people don’t like to be tied down.
There was a good book called “Nickel and Dimed” around 15 years ago that explained how low wage jobs were paying far less than they had a generation before, creating a new class of employed people who were extremely poor in America. Jobs that would have allowed a person to rent a small apartment and be self sufficient in the 70’s or 80’s were by 2000 paying so little that the people with those jobs were effectively homeless even if they worked more than 40 hours a week.
Older conservatives foolishly mocked the author and ignored the factual information in the book. Young conservatives like me who were still in school and working low wage jobs could see that these jobs paid far less in terms of purchasing power than similar jobs our parents had. It’s universal experience of my generation that our boomer parents assumed our first jobs paid far more than they did. They would be surprised that we couldn’t pay even half our tuition with a full time job. Minimum wage in the 1960’s and 70’s was around 15-25 dollars an hour in today’s money depending on which economist’s calculations you uses. Now many people in that generation have lost their middle class jobs and are living hand to mouth on wages that are half of what they made in their first jobs.
The election of Obama, the passing of Obamacare and the rise of Trump and Sanders are directly related to the decline in wages for low paid workers since the end of the Cold War. Populism is going to keep growing until this reverses. Trump is an incredibly lucky break for conservatives. If Trump fails, we will likely have a hardline Bernie Sanders style socialist in the White House no later than 2024.