9 ms·

I'm not trying to be rude when asking this but why would you choose to become homeless to prototype a business/product?? I've seen this come up several times on

I'm not trying to be rude when asking this but why would you choose to become homeless to prototype a business/product?? I've seen this come up several times on HN over the last few years and every time it blows my mind, especially when the person then goes on to talk about how difficult life is. I'm guessing you're in tech as you're on HN - why not keep your day job and work on your business from 7pm-3am every night. Save some money while you do this and then leave your job when you can afford to? It seems like a lot of tech folks have adopted the whole starving artist approach to starting a business when it is entirely unnecessary. I mean, even if you don't want to be an employee and want to focus on your product, move somewhere inexpensive, work freelance a few hours a day to support yourself. It just seems insane to me that anyone in this industry would choose to be homeless when they really don't have to. If a lot of people are making this choice voluntarily I'd say there's a major problem in the industry and how people view the path to a successful business.

lowglow 10y ago
For me I've noticed a huge difference in creativity and authenticity in my products when I've devoted 100% of myself to it. There is a major problem in the industry. There is no one path to a successful business. I find my time is more valuable than my comfort. To each their own.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  I can understand your point but you're not just giving up comfort - you're giving up something we all consider a basic necessity: shelter. I'm willing to bet the end result of your work, whether you do it your way, or do it part time, will be the same. I don't want to come off condescending but the attitude (and it's not unique to you, I've seen many other people with a similar attitude) seems like that of someone who has been brainwashed by the SF/SV startup culture mythology.
  - joslin01 10y ago
    His Dodge Caravan is shelter, which is pretty fancy shelter if you were from a poor village in Africa so I think he'll be alright. If he's not brainwashed by pain = gain, then I think what he's doing is really cool.
    - xyzzy4 10y ago
      That's not true, because in a poor village in Africa you'd have family to look after you and keep you well. You also won't have police harassing you all the time. Lastly, it is easier to find a legal and free place to use the bathroom in a poor African village.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- beachstartup 10y ago
  how can you devote 100% of yourself (or as much as is possible) to something when so much of your cognitive resources are devoted to surviving day to day? are you sure you've thought this through?
  - homero 10y ago
    Hacker squats are getting more popular and are extremely important. All I need is $5/month for digital ocean. No other bills is freeing. While the Facebook slaves think their $100k salary is a lot but go into debt with $7000/month condos.
    - kwikiel 10y ago
      It's actually possible to run a startup entirely on 5$ droplet. I would suggest switching to Vultr (still 5$ but 0.75 GB and block storage and they accept bitcoin) It's motivating to get that first paying clients quickly to pay for server. (ramen profitable)
      - randomgyatwork 10y ago
        I made the mistake of using a GoDaddy VPS costing around 600$ a year, recently found a VPS in my country for 60$ a year.
      - homero 10y ago
        Yes vultr is great
    - infinite8s 10y ago
      100k at Facebook is what you get straight out of undergraduate (and that's on the low end, if you don't negotiate).
    - sushid 10y ago
      This is a highly absurd comment. No one I know is paying anything more than $3000/month and they all make well over $100k as software developers. I love how when people come up with these numbers they cite salary-only/pre-negotiation/entry-level income and then they compare this to a small-family sized rent expense to justify your "typical" SV absurdity. The fact is, many people make well over that with stock options, raises, etc. And even while making that money, lots of my friends in their mid-20s opt to live with multiple roommates and flex their living rooms to reduce their rent cost further.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  At the same time, think of all the energy lost to the stress of not knowing where those basic things are coming from. Think of what could be done with that energy.
- T2_t2 10y ago
  Why not Thailand? For $8 a night or less you get a bed, WiFi and living costs for food run in the dollars a day. $10 a day is possible, $20 a day is good living. Even with the cost of a flight, that pays for itself in no time. A Van just seems like so much hassle!
- lighttower 10y ago
  What did you build during that time?
  - lowglow 10y ago
    I built a community crowdfunding platform to help inventors, makers, developers, etc to find the community, resources, and feedback needed to build and share quality products, and transparent companies. Check it: Baqqer - (https://baqqer.com https://baqqer.com) Our plans are to also turn this into equity crowdfunding, and eventually have a fund to contribute to and support popular/promising projects. I'm building this to build some other projects down the line like Playa (http://getplaya.com http://getplaya.com)
bjkahn 10y ago
How are you going to sustain that schedule? I could do that perhaps for a week, not longer.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  If you're dedicated and it's something you really want I don't think that's an impossible schedule to follow. 5 hours sleep, 8 hours in the office, dinner, 6 hours personal project. Do that Mon-Fri and relax on the recuperate on the weekend or do fewer hours in the evening and make up for that on the weekend.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    [taps on forehead] "It's so... lifelike! At first I couldn't tell it was a robot."
- tcoppi 10y ago
  It is possible with good motivation and caffeine. It is not sustainable long-term but you should be able to get a good 4-8 years out of it while you are young and in good health. See: college students at high-workload universities.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    Depends on how long your day job will accept you getting there in a state of stupor all morning until the caffeine catches up with you.
    - abalashov 10y ago
      In my case, it wasn't very long. I had a tendency to stay up till 4-5 AM working on my side project, and would tend to get in 1-2 hours late. I was fired after two months of this. It wasn't the only reason I was fired, of course; there were some other reasons, ultimately coming down to political-cultural clashes. But it was by far the lowest-hanging pretext. I seldom made it in before 10:30 - 11 AM.
homero 10y ago
Because it drives you. You must succeed. I'm preparing to do this myself. In Russia too. Succeed or die by ice, wild dogs and military police. This is authentic. Homeless in San Francisco hanging by coffee shops, getting change is like a mansion. In Russia, homeless people disappear. This is why my mvp will be superb.
- calcsam 10y ago
  Dude, I'm not sure if you're trolling or serious. If you're serious...it's not worth it. Life is long. Find other ways of motivating yourself. Commit publicly to shipping something awesome. Find a community of badasses to support you. Don't do this.
  - homero 10y ago
    Idk. A van with a Wi-Fi antenna sounds fun. I'm excited. Getting some cases of vodka and a gun.
    - dang 10y ago
      Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.
downandout 10y ago
Many people believe in the mistaken "no pain, no gain" philosophy. People seem to believe that somehow the universe will recognize their sacrifice and reward them accordingly. John Oliver did an excellent piece on a new crop of so-called "seed faith" televangelists that have popped up to fleece poor people that believe in this philosophy [1]. The reality, of course, is the opposite. The most successful people I have known have all started their businesses while their lives were relatively stable. That doesn't mean they started off rich, but it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from. These days, it is wholly unnecessary to quit your job or move to SV to make a startup happen, and doing so is counterproductive in almost all cases. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg&t=4m31s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg&t=4m31s
- fuzzywalrus 10y ago
  I wholly agree with this, often it takes some sacrifice; while others play, you're working or living frugally to fund your dreams but this isn't the same as forgoing basic amenities. Also, I don't know the backstory but anyone looking to do this by choice may want to consider the ramifications of the outside looking in if you're looking for investment. To most looking to invest, I'd imagine going to this extreme raises red flags regardless if they're warranted or not.
- melvinmt 10y ago
  > it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from. This is also a crucial concept in understanding why the poor stay poor: they simply can't afford to spend time and resources on the long term if they need to worry about meeting basic needs on a daily basis. If you're interested in learning more about this, I would recommend to read Scarcity, a wonderful book that explores this in more detail: http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/...
- galfarragem 10y ago
  Change careers like tarzan: https://sivers.org/tarzan https://sivers.org/tarzan
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tryitnow 10y ago
Work on your business from 7pm to 3am every night? Let's say you work 9am to 6pm. Let's assume you have to get up at 8am, that gives you, very optimistically, 5 hours of sleep. Some people can survive on that. Even more people think they can survive on that and just end up becoming crazy people who nobody wants to be around. The vast majority of are simply not physically equipped to do that.
- jacalata 10y ago
  That's probably at least as true for voluntary homelessness.
lexhaynes 10y ago
My father has been homeless at times. I'm not sure why anyone would CHOOSE that path. Having a home, even if that means a bed in a shared room, or a small sublet in an apartment, is pretty crucial to one's sense of well-being and safety. It's hard for me to understand how someone can get productive work done when they don't have a comfortable, safe place to rest their mind for a few hours.
- Mz 10y ago
  It's hard for me to understand how someone can get productive work done when they don't have a comfortable, safe place to rest their mind for a few hours. It's called a library.
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    It's difficult to sleep in a public library (especially if you look homeless).
    - Mz 10y ago
      I think you misunderstood my remark. I don't sleep in the library. I get most of my work done at a library. I am medically handicapped and this substantially interferes with my ability to be productive. But finding a place to work mostly boils down to making sure I have access to a decent public library. I sleep in a tent. I blog about that.
      - jdminhbg 10y ago
        I think you misunderstood the original comment, not the other way around. It's about a place to "rest your mind," not exercise it. The comment is about how it'd be hard to be productive without consistent sleep.
        Mz 10y ago
        It is difficult to be productive when you aren't sleeping well, regardless of your socioeconomic status. There are homeless people who typically sleep well. I am far from the only one.
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
Because working a day job takes approximately 100% of the work capacity (not to mention overall time) most people have available? Most people don't function on 3 hours of sleep, for one thing. And if 5-7 PM is your between-jobs time, that's all you have to do errands and chores. Personally, I have a little capacity (2 hours, maybe?) left over before burn-out starts to set in, and I am using it to fix up my house. I could cut that out and live in what I have, but there's no way I have 8 hours available.
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> "Because working a day job takes approximately 100% of the work capacity (not to mention overall time) most people have available?" I'm not saying that schedule would work for everyone but I seriously doubt someone has more capacity and is less likely to burn out by voluntarily deciding to be homeless. That's going to introduce a lot of complexity into your life that will end up being very time consuming. If you don't have the physical capacity to work late at night and sleep less then move somewhere with a lower cost of living and do some freelance work part time while you work on your business. The problem here seems to be that the OP finds it necessary to be in SF. Considering great businesses are created all over the world it seems like he's buying into a myth.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
For me, the heart of the comment is this > The social stigma associated with the word alone is hard for people to get beyond [..] I have been harassed by cops, you feel extremely transient and embarrassed just to be alive at times. [..] After this entire experience my heart breaks every time I see a fellow human having to resort to sleeping in the cold, wet, outdoors with no shelter and nothing but some cardboard and discarded newspapers to cover up with. [.. ] In the end it has helped me understand that we must all care more for one another, no matter what. which you might also call an attempt to give a small voice to the voiceless. How many comments are essentially glossing over that, the ratio between posts responding to the gist of this comment to those that don't, is incredible, and to describe the main point you're all mostly ignoring as > especially when the person then goes on to talk about how difficult life is. is beyond tone deaf. The comment is not at all about life being oh so hard for OP, ultimately. It's not about "the industry" either, nor is the original article. The things described in this comment, the article, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646078 ought to be enough to give a person PTSD after a while. Part of that is simply caused by social stigma, which is something everybody is complicit in and nobody can directly be blamed for. And when cops have power trips and abuse the defenseless -- not saying they do that all the time, but when they do -- any remotely decent society would come down on them like furies. Not just some of them, every last person. None such societies exist as of now, instead we numb ourselves to being numb to it, and that is the major problem I see. "The industry" is but a speck of dust in that river, and the hellish ocean it leads to.
fencepost 10y ago
I know of at least one person (Lenny Flank [1]) who's living in a covertly converted cargo van possibly for some financial reasons but also to be able to travel cheaply and see the USA. He's writing mostly about places he stays, but there are also some articles about how he's doing it, the van and its conversions, etc. Lenny's been crossposting to Daily Kos as well as on his site, and "What's it All Cost?" [2] has a list of links to all the relevant articles there. This is a better place to go if you're just wanting the meat of it. I also know of at least one other person who's more legitimately "homeless" rather than "camping," she's been posting about her experiences with PADS (homeless assistance group, runs shelters particularly during the colder months) and some job search related items, also on Daily Kos [3]. TL;DR Lenny bought a used windowless extended cargo van with a security grid across the front of the back compartment (which can be covered to block light from inside at night). He mounted a decent-sized solar panel on the roof, has a battery setup inside that he can use for lighting, a fan, and recharging his laptop and other devices. He added a small sink, etc. and sleeps in the van overnight while taking public transit to various sights in each area he stops in. He works via laptop from various public libraries, coffee shops, and restaurant wifi. [1] https://lennyflank.wordpress.com/ https://lennyflank.wordpress.com/ [2] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/09/1420740/-Living-in-a-Van-What-s-It-All-Cost http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/09/1420740/-Living-in-... [3] http://www.dailykos.com/user/sheddhead http://www.dailykos.com/user/sheddhead

lowglow 10y ago

For me I've noticed a huge difference in creativity and authenticity in my products when I've devoted 100% of myself to it. There is a major problem in the industry. There is no one path to a successful business. I find my time is more valuable than my comfort. To each their own.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
I can understand your point but you're not just giving up comfort - you're giving up something we all consider a basic necessity: shelter. I'm willing to bet the end result of your work, whether you do it your way, or do it part time, will be the same. I don't want to come off condescending but the attitude (and it's not unique to you, I've seen many other people with a similar attitude) seems like that of someone who has been brainwashed by the SF/SV startup culture mythology.
- joslin01 10y ago
  His Dodge Caravan is shelter, which is pretty fancy shelter if you were from a poor village in Africa so I think he'll be alright. If he's not brainwashed by pain = gain, then I think what he's doing is really cool.
  - xyzzy4 10y ago
    That's not true, because in a poor village in Africa you'd have family to look after you and keep you well. You also won't have police harassing you all the time. Lastly, it is easier to find a legal and free place to use the bathroom in a poor African village.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
beachstartup 10y ago
how can you devote 100% of yourself (or as much as is possible) to something when so much of your cognitive resources are devoted to surviving day to day? are you sure you've thought this through?
- homero 10y ago
  Hacker squats are getting more popular and are extremely important. All I need is $5/month for digital ocean. No other bills is freeing. While the Facebook slaves think their $100k salary is a lot but go into debt with $7000/month condos.
  - kwikiel 10y ago
    It's actually possible to run a startup entirely on 5$ droplet. I would suggest switching to Vultr (still 5$ but 0.75 GB and block storage and they accept bitcoin) It's motivating to get that first paying clients quickly to pay for server. (ramen profitable)
    - randomgyatwork 10y ago
      I made the mistake of using a GoDaddy VPS costing around 600$ a year, recently found a VPS in my country for 60$ a year.
    - homero 10y ago
      Yes vultr is great
  - infinite8s 10y ago
    100k at Facebook is what you get straight out of undergraduate (and that's on the low end, if you don't negotiate).
  - sushid 10y ago
    This is a highly absurd comment. No one I know is paying anything more than $3000/month and they all make well over $100k as software developers. I love how when people come up with these numbers they cite salary-only/pre-negotiation/entry-level income and then they compare this to a small-family sized rent expense to justify your "typical" SV absurdity. The fact is, many people make well over that with stock options, raises, etc. And even while making that money, lots of my friends in their mid-20s opt to live with multiple roommates and flex their living rooms to reduce their rent cost further.
st3v3r 10y ago
At the same time, think of all the energy lost to the stress of not knowing where those basic things are coming from. Think of what could be done with that energy.
T2_t2 10y ago
Why not Thailand? For $8 a night or less you get a bed, WiFi and living costs for food run in the dollars a day. $10 a day is possible, $20 a day is good living. Even with the cost of a flight, that pays for itself in no time. A Van just seems like so much hassle!
lighttower 10y ago
What did you build during that time?
- lowglow 10y ago
  I built a community crowdfunding platform to help inventors, makers, developers, etc to find the community, resources, and feedback needed to build and share quality products, and transparent companies. Check it: Baqqer - (https://baqqer.com https://baqqer.com) Our plans are to also turn this into equity crowdfunding, and eventually have a fund to contribute to and support popular/promising projects. I'm building this to build some other projects down the line like Playa (http://getplaya.com http://getplaya.com)

bjkahn 10y ago

How are you going to sustain that schedule? I could do that perhaps for a week, not longer.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
If you're dedicated and it's something you really want I don't think that's an impossible schedule to follow. 5 hours sleep, 8 hours in the office, dinner, 6 hours personal project. Do that Mon-Fri and relax on the recuperate on the weekend or do fewer hours in the evening and make up for that on the weekend.
- abalashov 10y ago
  [taps on forehead] "It's so... lifelike! At first I couldn't tell it was a robot."
tcoppi 10y ago
It is possible with good motivation and caffeine. It is not sustainable long-term but you should be able to get a good 4-8 years out of it while you are young and in good health. See: college students at high-workload universities.
- lfowles 10y ago
  Depends on how long your day job will accept you getting there in a state of stupor all morning until the caffeine catches up with you.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    In my case, it wasn't very long. I had a tendency to stay up till 4-5 AM working on my side project, and would tend to get in 1-2 hours late. I was fired after two months of this. It wasn't the only reason I was fired, of course; there were some other reasons, ultimately coming down to political-cultural clashes. But it was by far the lowest-hanging pretext. I seldom made it in before 10:30 - 11 AM.

homero 10y ago

Because it drives you. You must succeed. I'm preparing to do this myself. In Russia too. Succeed or die by ice, wild dogs and military police. This is authentic. Homeless in San Francisco hanging by coffee shops, getting change is like a mansion. In Russia, homeless people disappear. This is why my mvp will be superb.

calcsam 10y ago
Dude, I'm not sure if you're trolling or serious. If you're serious...it's not worth it. Life is long. Find other ways of motivating yourself. Commit publicly to shipping something awesome. Find a community of badasses to support you. Don't do this.
- homero 10y ago
  Idk. A van with a Wi-Fi antenna sounds fun. I'm excited. Getting some cases of vodka and a gun.
  - dang 10y ago
    Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN.

downandout 10y ago

Many people believe in the mistaken "no pain, no gain" philosophy. People seem to believe that somehow the universe will recognize their sacrifice and reward them accordingly. John Oliver did an excellent piece on a new crop of so-called "seed faith" televangelists that have popped up to fleece poor people that believe in this philosophy [1]. The reality, of course, is the opposite. The most successful people I have known have all started their businesses while their lives were relatively stable. That doesn't mean they started off rich, but it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from. These days, it is wholly unnecessary to quit your job or move to SV to make a startup happen, and doing so is counterproductive in almost all cases. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg&t=4m31s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg&t=4m31s

fuzzywalrus 10y ago
I wholly agree with this, often it takes some sacrifice; while others play, you're working or living frugally to fund your dreams but this isn't the same as forgoing basic amenities. Also, I don't know the backstory but anyone looking to do this by choice may want to consider the ramifications of the outside looking in if you're looking for investment. To most looking to invest, I'd imagine going to this extreme raises red flags regardless if they're warranted or not.
melvinmt 10y ago
> it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from. This is also a crucial concept in understanding why the poor stay poor: they simply can't afford to spend time and resources on the long term if they need to worry about meeting basic needs on a daily basis. If you're interested in learning more about this, I would recommend to read Scarcity, a wonderful book that explores this in more detail: http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/dp/125005611X http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/...
galfarragem 10y ago
Change careers like tarzan: https://sivers.org/tarzan https://sivers.org/tarzan

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tryitnow 10y ago

Work on your business from 7pm to 3am every night? Let's say you work 9am to 6pm. Let's assume you have to get up at 8am, that gives you, very optimistically, 5 hours of sleep. Some people can survive on that. Even more people think they can survive on that and just end up becoming crazy people who nobody wants to be around. The vast majority of are simply not physically equipped to do that.

jacalata 10y ago
That's probably at least as true for voluntary homelessness.

lexhaynes 10y ago

My father has been homeless at times. I'm not sure why anyone would CHOOSE that path. Having a home, even if that means a bed in a shared room, or a small sublet in an apartment, is pretty crucial to one's sense of well-being and safety. It's hard for me to understand how someone can get productive work done when they don't have a comfortable, safe place to rest their mind for a few hours.

Mz 10y ago
It's hard for me to understand how someone can get productive work done when they don't have a comfortable, safe place to rest their mind for a few hours. It's called a library.
- infinite8s 10y ago
  It's difficult to sleep in a public library (especially if you look homeless).
  - Mz 10y ago
    I think you misunderstood my remark. I don't sleep in the library. I get most of my work done at a library. I am medically handicapped and this substantially interferes with my ability to be productive. But finding a place to work mostly boils down to making sure I have access to a decent public library. I sleep in a tent. I blog about that.
    - jdminhbg 10y ago
      I think you misunderstood the original comment, not the other way around. It's about a place to "rest your mind," not exercise it. The comment is about how it'd be hard to be productive without consistent sleep.
      - Mz 10y ago
        It is difficult to be productive when you aren't sleeping well, regardless of your socioeconomic status. There are homeless people who typically sleep well. I am far from the only one.

LeifCarrotson 10y ago

Because working a day job takes approximately 100% of the work capacity (not to mention overall time) most people have available? Most people don't function on 3 hours of sleep, for one thing. And if 5-7 PM is your between-jobs time, that's all you have to do errands and chores. Personally, I have a little capacity (2 hours, maybe?) left over before burn-out starts to set in, and I am using it to fix up my house. I could cut that out and live in what I have, but there's no way I have 8 hours available.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> "Because working a day job takes approximately 100% of the work capacity (not to mention overall time) most people have available?" I'm not saying that schedule would work for everyone but I seriously doubt someone has more capacity and is less likely to burn out by voluntarily deciding to be homeless. That's going to introduce a lot of complexity into your life that will end up being very time consuming. If you don't have the physical capacity to work late at night and sleep less then move somewhere with a lower cost of living and do some freelance work part time while you work on your business. The problem here seems to be that the OP finds it necessary to be in SF. Considering great businesses are created all over the world it seems like he's buying into a myth.

PavlovsCat 10y ago

For me, the heart of the comment is this > The social stigma associated with the word alone is hard for people to get beyond [..] I have been harassed by cops, you feel extremely transient and embarrassed just to be alive at times. [..] After this entire experience my heart breaks every time I see a fellow human having to resort to sleeping in the cold, wet, outdoors with no shelter and nothing but some cardboard and discarded newspapers to cover up with. [.. ] In the end it has helped me understand that we must all care more for one another, no matter what. which you might also call an attempt to give a small voice to the voiceless. How many comments are essentially glossing over that, the ratio between posts responding to the gist of this comment to those that don't, is incredible, and to describe the main point you're all mostly ignoring as > especially when the person then goes on to talk about how difficult life is. is beyond tone deaf. The comment is not at all about life being oh so hard for OP, ultimately. It's not about "the industry" either, nor is the original article. The things described in this comment, the article, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646078 ought to be enough to give a person PTSD after a while. Part of that is simply caused by social stigma, which is something everybody is complicit in and nobody can directly be blamed for. And when cops have power trips and abuse the defenseless -- not saying they do that all the time, but when they do -- any remotely decent society would come down on them like furies. Not just some of them, every last person. None such societies exist as of now, instead we numb ourselves to being numb to it, and that is the major problem I see. "The industry" is but a speck of dust in that river, and the hellish ocean it leads to.

fencepost 10y ago

I know of at least one person (Lenny Flank [1]) who's living in a covertly converted cargo van possibly for some financial reasons but also to be able to travel cheaply and see the USA. He's writing mostly about places he stays, but there are also some articles about how he's doing it, the van and its conversions, etc. Lenny's been crossposting to Daily Kos as well as on his site, and "What's it All Cost?" [2] has a list of links to all the relevant articles there. This is a better place to go if you're just wanting the meat of it. I also know of at least one other person who's more legitimately "homeless" rather than "camping," she's been posting about her experiences with PADS (homeless assistance group, runs shelters particularly during the colder months) and some job search related items, also on Daily Kos [3]. TL;DR Lenny bought a used windowless extended cargo van with a security grid across the front of the back compartment (which can be covered to block light from inside at night). He mounted a decent-sized solar panel on the roof, has a battery setup inside that he can use for lighting, a fan, and recharging his laptop and other devices. He added a small sink, etc. and sleeps in the van overnight while taking public transit to various sights in each area he stops in. He works via laptop from various public libraries, coffee shops, and restaurant wifi. [1] https://lennyflank.wordpress.com/ https://lennyflank.wordpress.com/ [2] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/09/1420740/-Living-in-a-Van-What-s-It-All-Cost http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/09/1420740/-Living-in-... [3] http://www.dailykos.com/user/sheddhead http://www.dailykos.com/user/sheddhead