What it's like to leave homelessness...

One of the great songs of the 1990's, big favorite of mine long before homelessness was an issue in my life.  We all walk around judging other people, all kinds of other people, by sight.  But we don't know those people's stories.  We don't know where they've been and what they've done in their lives, or what they've endured or not endured.  We don't know what's it's like to be them.

Once again, I'm suddenly no longer homeless.  After a three day bus ride across the country, Rich Bartlett of Block Bikes has brought me on to do work for his online store, looking beyond my homeless situation in Richmond, to the person he knew me as 30 years ago, and to what I've done online blogging and promoting my art while I was homeless.  He saw enough to take a bet to help me get back going again.

So now I have a place to work, a room nearby to stay until I really get going again financially and can get an apartment, and a stable environment to heal and build on.  It's a whole new situation, there are a bunch of skills I need to learn, and, obviously, I need to keep up my end of the bargain.  But I'm out of homelessness.  Hopefully for the last time.  But I've learned how crazy life can get, and I know weird things happen sometimes.

How does it feel?  I'm pretty pragmatic.  I've had the rug pulled out form under me so many times, that I never get my hopes up.  When something good happens, I'm stoked, and look towards the next step.  Right now, it feels like moving into a new house a long ways from the old one.  There are a million things to do, and I need to make some lists, organize it all, and just plug away at the things that need done, one by one.  Sleeping without worrying about otters, rattlesnakes, and a wandering black bear, that's a good thing.  My body has been beat to hell the last nine months, and I need to begin healing it.  But mostly, there's just a huge list of things to do.  Kinda overwhelming, but I've done it before.  So that's how it feels.  Like, "OK, Let's get to work."

So let's start with how people escape homelessness.
The Three basic ways people leave homelessness:

1) People "plug back in" to a family or friend's household, sleep on the couch, in a spare room, and work to get back on their feet completely.  This is the way MOST people leave homelessness, and it doesn't cost the government a dime, and it doesn't rely or need any non-profit organizations.  This also happens over the course of a day or two when it happens.  Quick and easy.

2) People go into a homeless shelter or program, they get a caseworker, a social worker to help them enter and go through various programs.  They spend months in a shelter, living in their car or weekly motels, or on the streets, go to free meals mostly, sign up for every possible for of government assistance, and sign up for the local "rapid rehousing" program.  From what I've seen, most of those programs take 6 to 18 months to get housing, paid for by some combination of government and non-profit groups.  In the process, the homeless people have two basic tracks to follow, addiction and mental health.  In most cases, people fake mental health issues, and some physical issues, and many also have legit addiction issues and go through set programs for those.  The basic plan is to scam the Social Security Disability system, and qualify for a disability check for life.  These people wind up not working officially (because they'll lose their check), but often work under the table.  Meanwhile they're living in a cheap, ghetto apartment, all paid for mostly by your tax dollars.  There are now AT LEAST 7 to 10 MILLION working age people, living on disability and other handouts, that your tax dollars pay for, EVERY MONTH.  MOST of these people scammed the system.  Some are legit, and I get that.  But mot are scammers.  I've lived in that world.  In fact this system is propping up several states' economies.  This is an enormous financial and social cost for this country, and is also a main root cause of the opioid "epidemic."

3) People find GOOD PAYING work, stay at a shelter or live homeless for some time, while building up the resources to rent an apartment or room, get the clothes and household goods needed, and slowly rebuild their lives.  This is a tiny fraction of the total homeless population, because our society is heavily tilted against this type of recovery.  It simply costs too much for a motivated person to pull themselves out of deep poverty.  You can't do this on one or two part-time minimum wage jobs.  It takes at least $12 to $15 a hour, full time, MINIMUM, to even have a chance at making this happen.

Think of things this way, for every homeless panhandler the average person sees each day in a city, holding a cardboard sign, there AT LEAST A MILLION people who are on Disability, and most of them, (at least 60% I'd estimate) have scammed the system to get a free check for life.  And you're mad at the guy on the corner asking for a dollar.  But you ignore the 7 to 10 million people you're paying the rent and food for, because they're not obvious to you.

About 3 million Americans a year are homeless, BUT NOT ALL AT ONCE.  Most are temporarily homeless and you never see them, and they find a place to stay within 2 to 3 months.  No one knows exact numbers, but these are the best I've found online.  At any given time, there are an estimated 800,000 or so homeless people.  These are old numbers, from a huge PDF I found from around 2004, I think.  But that's the best numbers we have to go on now.

So most of the homeless people that you actually see have fallen so far down, that it takes a heroic effort to get back on their feet, or they are in the programs mentioned above, biding their time until they get free housing and a check, and you pay their rent and bills for the rest of their lives.  That's they system in place now.  It needs to change.  We have millions more homeless people coming in this next big recession, which isn't too far off.

One last thought:

There are more spare bedrooms and empty buildings in America than there are homeless people.