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This story makes very little sense to me. It tries to claim that the mom is just in this impossible situation and there’s no possible way to get out... that li

This story makes very little sense to me. It tries to claim that the mom is just in this impossible situation and there’s no possible way to get out... that living in an SUV in the Walmart parking lot is the only option. But it also says she’s making $1300 a month [edit: from social security disability]. Honestly, why can’t she drive that expensive SUV for an hour in literally any direction to reach a place where you can get a one bedroom apartment for like $500 a month? This is what I don’t understand about homelessness: why do people insist that they have to live in a very high cost city?

oddity 9y ago
Would she still be making $1300 a month if she moved?
- todd3834 9y ago
  I think they are suggesting that they could commute
- colordrops 9y ago
  I think the suggestion is to commute.
- jeremyt 9y ago
  The story says she’s making $1300 a month from Social Security disability. She doesn’t need to commute, she gets the money even if she stays home all day and doesn’t do anything.
  - oddity 9y ago
    Fair enough, but I think my broader point was that you also need to factor in things like the support network that would need to be rebuilt and the cost of whatever services happen to be cheaper because of location. Moving is an inherently costly proposition both from a financial and mental perspective, and people who aren't in the best state for any of those things will probably not. Living in a Walmart parking lot, as bad as it is, is stable and predictable. Moving isn't.
    - jeremyt 9y ago
      I don’t know. It still seems to me that there are options here, and this woman has chosen not to pursue them, for whatever reason. I would also take issue with your assertion that living in a car in a Walmart parking lot is stable or predictable. This looks less like involuntary homelessness and more like a lifestyle choice.
      - oddity 9y ago
        You're right about her probably having options, but I think the important part here is the risk. For homeless people living in the middle of a city, there's a higher density of essential services. In her case, that would be things like the microwaves or the bathrooms that she absolutely needs without an even greater inconvenience to her lifestyle. These are unreliable. They can fail from overuse or they can get taken away or locked behind paywalls because store owners don't like the fact that they attract homeless people. In a city, the density of these services makes it so that she probably knows where the next nearest one is if one of them is unavailable. It's risky, sure, but to her, it's a known risk she's adapted to live with. She could move to somewhere cheaper, but "somewhere cheaper" is inevitably somewhere with either a lower density of people and money (and therefore fewer microwaves/bathrooms/whatever else she needs... I'm just going to refer to these as microwaves/bathrooms from here on), has less opportunity for work (not as much of a factor in her case, as you pointed out), or has some social/political aspect that makes it undesirable (like a higher rate of crime, which translates into less money or a much lower quality of life). Plus, you have to factor in the immediate cost of buying the microwaves or affording the apartment with a bathroom which she was avoiding previously. She could try and save or otherwise micromanage her money to cover the cost somehow, but when you're living paycheck to paycheck (as is usually the case), this means a few months, or even years of a worse quality of life for a life that isn't necessarily or apparently much better in the long run. Then you have to consider intangibles like the support network, the knowledge of the area, or the environment. All of these can have a positive effect on a person's mental state, and if it's not the reason for staying in the area itself, giving it up for the unknown can easily be a reason not to leave. The cost vs benefit is a total mystery and varies per person, and it's even harder to figure out when you're dealing with stress from your living condition.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
xtalx 9y ago
You’d have to drive a lot longer than an hour.
- jeremyt 9y ago
  Two hours then, or three. What difference does it make? The goal here is to find something that’s better than staying in your SUV in a Walmart parking lot.
  - Arbitrary456456 9y ago
    Gas costs are significant expenses when you only make $1300 a month.
    - civilian 9y ago
      Right. But what transportation costs does she have when she doesn't have to work?
      - stephengillie 9y ago
        Unfortunately she's not here to tell us. Maybe someone could send her a link to sign up and do an AMA on HN? Her life has situations we cannot see from this perspective and we have not lived through. It's unhelpful to discount her situation with a smug "She could be doing XYZ better".
        jeremyt 9y ago
        I’m open to hearing about what special situations she has that has made it impossible to pursue the obvious options. Those things should’ve been included in the article, but they were not. In the absence of such details, the article is basically just vaguely pulling at heartstrings.
        civilian 9y ago
        I wasn't being smug, I was being curious.
bitexploder 9y ago
That is a confusing aspect to this story. The mother is now staying with her daughter as well. And this seems to have unfolded over ten years. Our safety nets suck, and I deeply appreciate the point the author is making about homelessness. Still, I think the real priority with any homelessness is the mental health aspect of it. I can't remember the numbers now, but some shockingly large percentage of homeless are (1) military vets and (2) mentally ill. Any one of us can end up homeless and life is hard, random, and unfair, but if you are reading HN, the chances are very high homelessness will be temporary for you.
mschuster91 9y ago
> This is what I don’t understand about homelessness: why do people insist that they have to live in a very high cost city? Because they often have friends and family in the city. It is inhumane to force people to drop their entire social networks simply because they are too poor.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  More or less humane than sleeping on the streets?
  - MikeTheGreat 9y ago
    I agree that it's inhumane to force people to either drop their social safety net or to sleep on the streets. I think I might have phrased it as "it's impractical to force people to drop their social safety nets", or maybe "it's unrealistic to force..." People need help. Not all the time, but at least sometimes for sure. If you can't afford to buy help then you either suffer or else lean on someone else. Asking people (who can't afford assistance) to move away from their friends and family isn't a realistic ask. It's like they said in that episode of Firefly - "When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl - when you can't do that... You find someone to carry you."
    - jeremyt 9y ago
      What social safety net? She’s homeless. Whatever social safety net existed has either been exhausted or is no longer present.
      - DataWorker 9y ago
        People have a psychological need for a stable home. You would prefer she behave as an economically rational actor, but people are human. She is struggling to avoid becoming an economic refugee and we should try and feel some compassion towards those in that position.
        9y ago
Johnny555 9y ago
This is what I don’t understand about homelessness: why do people insist that they have to live in a very high cost city? Probably because people are not inert sacks of potatoes, and they have reasons for living where they do, some rational, some not as rational, yet still valid. This is why I also support strong renter protection laws -- rental housing is not like any other investment, it's someone's home. (note that I'm a landlord myself and still support strong tenant protection laws).
- scarface74 9y ago
  What tenant protection laws should allow a person to stay somewhere when they can't afford the rent? I can't seem to muster up sympathy for her. She gets $1300 a month from disability. There is nothing stopping her from going some place where the rent is cheaper. There is nothing "valid" about trying to live somewhere you can't afford.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Yes, you can't muster up sympathy because you can afford to live where you want to. Take away most of your income, put your family and friends in an expensive place, and then see if you can find at least a little inkling of sympathy when society tells you "Too bad you're disabled, you should be more rich if you want to live close to your family"
    - scarface74 9y ago
      I moved four hours away from my family when I was 22 years old. I moved from a small town where I had lived all of my life, to a larger city with better opportunities. Military families move constantly. I have a friend who was constantly being relocated for his job. It happens. If the job market dried up where I live now, I would pick up and move with no second thoughts.
      - ttonkytonk 9y ago
        But you aren't in her shoes, and she's not in yours. It's reasonable to expect that some people would want and need to live near their families.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Show me the rental listings and I'll believe you. Secondly, it does not cost $500 to move into a $500 a month apartment. You need the deposit, you need good credit, you need last month's rent, etc.
- rand0oman 9y ago
  They're everywhere. This isn't the bay area, there are many areas within reach of Seattle that have rooms for <$500/mo and without any sort of deposit/credit/last month's rent. https://seattle.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500 https://seattle.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Did you actually look at these listings? Show me specific ones where you can move into an apartment by paying less than $700 for the first month where no credit is required and where the actual monthly rent is under $500. A lot of these listings are scams or deceptions, with the rent being per week or just made up out of the blue. For example, this is the 2nd listing in that search, dig into it and you get this: RATES: Weekly @ $350.00 Biweekly @ $550.00 Monthly @ $960.00 Deposit $250-350 So that's $1200 to move in on the first month. That's a bust. The next two other rentals aren't a fit for the person in the article, one is for men only, one is for tagalog speaking women only. The next possible rental is 170/week with a 120 deposit, so that's 800 bucks in the first month. The third possibility is "200" (per week I assume) with a 450 deposit (non-refundable), so that's $1250 in the first month. The next one would be $1143 for the first month to move in. The next after that is actually $700/mo including utilities. There do seem to be a few legit rentals out there in that price range, but none of them have sufficient details to know if you can truly trust them, and who knows if they'll still be available when you have the time to call and arrange a visit, etc. This stuff is not as easy as a lot of people make it out to be. Sure, if you are savvy and put in enough hustle you might be able to find a sufficiently cheap place to live but it's far from a trivial task, and the signal to noise ratio on listings is such that it's going to waste a lot of your time, time you might not have.

oddity 9y ago

Would she still be making $1300 a month if she moved?

todd3834 9y ago
I think they are suggesting that they could commute
colordrops 9y ago
I think the suggestion is to commute.
jeremyt 9y ago
The story says she’s making $1300 a month from Social Security disability. She doesn’t need to commute, she gets the money even if she stays home all day and doesn’t do anything.
- oddity 9y ago
  Fair enough, but I think my broader point was that you also need to factor in things like the support network that would need to be rebuilt and the cost of whatever services happen to be cheaper because of location. Moving is an inherently costly proposition both from a financial and mental perspective, and people who aren't in the best state for any of those things will probably not. Living in a Walmart parking lot, as bad as it is, is stable and predictable. Moving isn't.
  - jeremyt 9y ago
    I don’t know. It still seems to me that there are options here, and this woman has chosen not to pursue them, for whatever reason. I would also take issue with your assertion that living in a car in a Walmart parking lot is stable or predictable. This looks less like involuntary homelessness and more like a lifestyle choice.
    - oddity 9y ago
      You're right about her probably having options, but I think the important part here is the risk. For homeless people living in the middle of a city, there's a higher density of essential services. In her case, that would be things like the microwaves or the bathrooms that she absolutely needs without an even greater inconvenience to her lifestyle. These are unreliable. They can fail from overuse or they can get taken away or locked behind paywalls because store owners don't like the fact that they attract homeless people. In a city, the density of these services makes it so that she probably knows where the next nearest one is if one of them is unavailable. It's risky, sure, but to her, it's a known risk she's adapted to live with. She could move to somewhere cheaper, but "somewhere cheaper" is inevitably somewhere with either a lower density of people and money (and therefore fewer microwaves/bathrooms/whatever else she needs... I'm just going to refer to these as microwaves/bathrooms from here on), has less opportunity for work (not as much of a factor in her case, as you pointed out), or has some social/political aspect that makes it undesirable (like a higher rate of crime, which translates into less money or a much lower quality of life). Plus, you have to factor in the immediate cost of buying the microwaves or affording the apartment with a bathroom which she was avoiding previously. She could try and save or otherwise micromanage her money to cover the cost somehow, but when you're living paycheck to paycheck (as is usually the case), this means a few months, or even years of a worse quality of life for a life that isn't necessarily or apparently much better in the long run. Then you have to consider intangibles like the support network, the knowledge of the area, or the environment. All of these can have a positive effect on a person's mental state, and if it's not the reason for staying in the area itself, giving it up for the unknown can easily be a reason not to leave. The cost vs benefit is a total mystery and varies per person, and it's even harder to figure out when you're dealing with stress from your living condition.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

xtalx 9y ago

You’d have to drive a lot longer than an hour.

jeremyt 9y ago
Two hours then, or three. What difference does it make? The goal here is to find something that’s better than staying in your SUV in a Walmart parking lot.
- Arbitrary456456 9y ago
  Gas costs are significant expenses when you only make $1300 a month.
  - civilian 9y ago
    Right. But what transportation costs does she have when she doesn't have to work?
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      Unfortunately she's not here to tell us. Maybe someone could send her a link to sign up and do an AMA on HN? Her life has situations we cannot see from this perspective and we have not lived through. It's unhelpful to discount her situation with a smug "She could be doing XYZ better".
      - jeremyt 9y ago
        I’m open to hearing about what special situations she has that has made it impossible to pursue the obvious options. Those things should’ve been included in the article, but they were not. In the absence of such details, the article is basically just vaguely pulling at heartstrings.
      - civilian 9y ago
        I wasn't being smug, I was being curious.

bitexploder 9y ago

That is a confusing aspect to this story. The mother is now staying with her daughter as well. And this seems to have unfolded over ten years. Our safety nets suck, and I deeply appreciate the point the author is making about homelessness. Still, I think the real priority with any homelessness is the mental health aspect of it. I can't remember the numbers now, but some shockingly large percentage of homeless are (1) military vets and (2) mentally ill. Any one of us can end up homeless and life is hard, random, and unfair, but if you are reading HN, the chances are very high homelessness will be temporary for you.

mschuster91 9y ago

> This is what I don’t understand about homelessness: why do people insist that they have to live in a very high cost city? Because they often have friends and family in the city. It is inhumane to force people to drop their entire social networks simply because they are too poor.

oh_sigh 9y ago
More or less humane than sleeping on the streets?
- MikeTheGreat 9y ago
  I agree that it's inhumane to force people to either drop their social safety net or to sleep on the streets. I think I might have phrased it as "it's impractical to force people to drop their social safety nets", or maybe "it's unrealistic to force..." People need help. Not all the time, but at least sometimes for sure. If you can't afford to buy help then you either suffer or else lean on someone else. Asking people (who can't afford assistance) to move away from their friends and family isn't a realistic ask. It's like they said in that episode of Firefly - "When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl - when you can't do that... You find someone to carry you."
  - jeremyt 9y ago
    What social safety net? She’s homeless. Whatever social safety net existed has either been exhausted or is no longer present.
    - DataWorker 9y ago
      People have a psychological need for a stable home. You would prefer she behave as an economically rational actor, but people are human. She is struggling to avoid becoming an economic refugee and we should try and feel some compassion towards those in that position.
      - 9y ago

Johnny555 9y ago

This is what I don’t understand about homelessness: why do people insist that they have to live in a very high cost city? Probably because people are not inert sacks of potatoes, and they have reasons for living where they do, some rational, some not as rational, yet still valid. This is why I also support strong renter protection laws -- rental housing is not like any other investment, it's someone's home. (note that I'm a landlord myself and still support strong tenant protection laws).

scarface74 9y ago
What tenant protection laws should allow a person to stay somewhere when they can't afford the rent? I can't seem to muster up sympathy for her. She gets $1300 a month from disability. There is nothing stopping her from going some place where the rent is cheaper. There is nothing "valid" about trying to live somewhere you can't afford.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  Yes, you can't muster up sympathy because you can afford to live where you want to. Take away most of your income, put your family and friends in an expensive place, and then see if you can find at least a little inkling of sympathy when society tells you "Too bad you're disabled, you should be more rich if you want to live close to your family"
  - scarface74 9y ago
    I moved four hours away from my family when I was 22 years old. I moved from a small town where I had lived all of my life, to a larger city with better opportunities. Military families move constantly. I have a friend who was constantly being relocated for his job. It happens. If the job market dried up where I live now, I would pick up and move with no second thoughts.
    - ttonkytonk 9y ago
      But you aren't in her shoes, and she's not in yours. It's reasonable to expect that some people would want and need to live near their families.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Show me the rental listings and I'll believe you. Secondly, it does not cost $500 to move into a $500 a month apartment. You need the deposit, you need good credit, you need last month's rent, etc.

rand0oman 9y ago
They're everywhere. This isn't the bay area, there are many areas within reach of Seattle that have rooms for <$500/mo and without any sort of deposit/credit/last month's rent. https://seattle.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500 https://seattle.craigslist.org/search/roo?max_price=500
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Did you actually look at these listings? Show me specific ones where you can move into an apartment by paying less than $700 for the first month where no credit is required and where the actual monthly rent is under $500. A lot of these listings are scams or deceptions, with the rent being per week or just made up out of the blue. For example, this is the 2nd listing in that search, dig into it and you get this: RATES: Weekly @ $350.00 Biweekly @ $550.00 Monthly @ $960.00 Deposit $250-350 So that's $1200 to move in on the first month. That's a bust. The next two other rentals aren't a fit for the person in the article, one is for men only, one is for tagalog speaking women only. The next possible rental is 170/week with a 120 deposit, so that's 800 bucks in the first month. The third possibility is "200" (per week I assume) with a 450 deposit (non-refundable), so that's $1250 in the first month. The next one would be $1143 for the first month to move in. The next after that is actually $700/mo including utilities. There do seem to be a few legit rentals out there in that price range, but none of them have sufficient details to know if you can truly trust them, and who knows if they'll still be available when you have the time to call and arrange a visit, etc. This stuff is not as easy as a lot of people make it out to be. Sure, if you are savvy and put in enough hustle you might be able to find a sufficiently cheap place to live but it's far from a trivial task, and the signal to noise ratio on listings is such that it's going to waste a lot of your time, time you might not have.