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?
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.
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).
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.
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"
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.
And who should pay for it? If we can pay $1300 a month for someone to survive in a cheaper area, why should we pay for her to live in Seattle? If I had decided to stay in small town USA, should my taxes pay for her to stay in Seattle? If her family was that concerned about her well being and lived near her, why is she sleeping in a car?
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.
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.
Also, given that she’d be living on the edge of affordability for the area, she could never put her feet down and build a lasting social/support network - she’d be forced out again in under a decade.
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.
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.
Would she have made that choice if she had more money or housing was cheaper? If she is making the best of a bad situation, maybe that's a failing on our part not on hers.
It's completely a failing on her part. If she is on disability, why should the government give her more money to live in an expensive place. $1300 a month isn't a lot, but it is enough to live in many parts of the US.
Why is it the taxpayers responsibility to make sure that she doesn't have to move from Seattle?
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.
I'm suggesting that she moves so that she won't be homeless. If she were to move, she wouldn't need a dense concentration of microwaves and bathrooms.
She doesn't work, so opportunities to work are irrelevant, though, I wonder why a well educated person with a Masters degree couldn't possibly figure out how to make a few dollars here and there with online or remote work.
And several people in this thread have already explained how she could afford an apartment on her income, so pretending that doing so would be difficult doesn't make any sense.
Finally, I don't see the argument that living in an apartment in the suburbs would be a "worse quality of life" than living in an SUV in a Walmart parking lot and surfing the neighborhood for free microwaves and bathrooms.
> 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.
So we should subsidize people because they want to live near friends and family? I believe in the safety net and don't believe that the richest country in the world should let anyone go hungry or be without medical care, but I draw the line at subsidizing someone to allow them to live in one of the most expensive cities in the US.
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."
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.
For argument’s sake, I just visited craigslist rental section for the city of Olympia, a WA state capital which is about 1 hr drive from Seattle. You can totally find a decent looking 1bedroom for $600-700, and I’m pretty sure that studios and/or a room in a shared house will be considerably less.
Olympia is only an hour drive from Seattle during the middle of the night, or sometimes on weekends. Most of the time, it's at least a 2 hour drive, and can be a 4 hour drive in the right conditions - heavy rain, collisions on I-5, construction reducing lanes, Ft Lewis traffic, and Capitol traffic. That length of trip greatly increases the number of probable delays encountered. It also increases the probability of being involved in one, especially in those "right" conditions.
Olympia's a smaller city, but still a city. Exurbs like Snoqualmie or North Bend are likely to be even more inexpensive (edit: although, less likely to have apartments — your cheap option is the less desirable trailer park). Or Bremerton / Peninsula.
To the north there's Everett and that area.
Lots of options within 1hr of Seattle, if you don't have to commute it regularly.
Did you actually look through those rental listings? A lot of them are super vague, some are probably scams, some list their rates per week not per month. Show me one with full details and maybe I'll believe it. Also, it says something that it's non-trivial to hunt down rental listings in that price range, not everyone has the tools or the ability to scour through listings to find the few legit ones. Also, show me a listing where moving in doesn't cost near $1k for the first month.
A two to three hour drive every day is subjectively worse than sleeping in an SUV. Not to mention the health effects of hours of driving, pollution - and about $18-27 a day in fuel[0] that could be saved or used for food.
[0] 60mph/20mpg (generous for SUV) = 3 gallons/hour * [2 to 3] hours = [6 to 9 gallons] * (ballpark)$3 gallon = [$18-$27]. For 20 days of commuting that would be [$360-$540] per month.
I’m going to assume that, being a human being, and having a daughter, she has a social life in the city she lives in. To tell her she’s forcibly (by means of economic coercion with potential state violence to back it up) no longer to live near her social and support network is completely unethical, in my eyes - otherwise is to suggest that only the rich are allowed a stable life. No man is actually an island, as much as that is the American ideal. Replace “housing instability” with “being kicked out of their homes and told to live somewhere multiple hours away where they don’t know anybody”, and you get the actual problem.
So you're going to tell all of the people who live in a cheaper part of the US that their tax money should subsidize her so she can live in one of the most expensive cities in the US?
This reply[1] to your initial comment asked if the person would still be receiving $1300/month if she moved. To which the replies were "to commute". And so we're replying to those.
Would she still be making $1300/month in disability if she moved to Olympia? Or would it drop to near $1000? That extra $10 per day is a lot.
Not just to relocate. But to relocate into a permanent situation with no hope of change. Firstly, none of those cheaper rental options fit that bill very well, those aren't places that can be relied upon for years and years. Additionally, moving away from one's support network and from the best opportunities is a hell of a thing and not something to be taken lightly. People here are pretending that this woman can simply guarantee herself a future that is more comfortable than the one she has right now by finding some cheaper apartment somewhere, and that's a proposition that is questionable at best.
Especially in this case where the end result was that she ended up just crashing on her daughter's couch, moving down to Olympia or whatever to rent out some questionable super cheap room somewhere seems like it would have been a much worse decision. Perhaps she was just waiting long enough to justify "giving up" and having to rely fully on her daughter.
It seems like the only two people she had in her life are in the Seattle area, and she had relied on them for financial support in the past. If she has car trouble or additional health problems, then that's going to be very difficult to handle
Why are you so defensive about the mere existence of a homeless person?
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".
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.
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?