Street Life Solutions

Patreon Venmo: @Doreen-Traylor PayPal

Search This Blog

Home
Archive
About

Showing posts from December, 2018

View all

Posts

The Missing Middle

on December 01, 2018

Shelter

+

Get link
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps

Labels

A Future
Food
Headspace
Hygiene
Papers
Shelter
Stats
Utilities

Independently Poor: A Twist on FU Money -- a.k.a. "FU, Money"

While I was homeless, I had a descriptor in my profile on some forum that I was "Independently Poor." That was more than just tongue-in-cheek humor. Although I was homeless, I had alimony and I was doing freelance work and I had a degree of agency that you rarely see among poor people. I was able to arrange my life to prioritize taking care of my health in part by doing gig work (and this post is being written expressly for r/GigWorks , a forum I run). In other words, I had a degree of independence and agency that you normally only see in the Jet Set -- people who get called independently wealthy -- or comfortably well-off retirees. I had more control over my time and my life than your typical working stiff. I was able to get to that point in part because I'm pretty financially savvy. I think anyone can get to that same place mentally and logistically, even if you don't currently have much money. A lot of it has to do with feeding your mind the right stuff in

When The Family Safety Net Fails.

(This is a piece about homelessness and how people end up on the street. If you are the type who needs Trigger Warnings , you might want to skip this article.) She's a good girl, loves her mama Loves Jesus and America too Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there was a teenaged girl with a seemingly bright future. She graduated at the top of her class. She didn't sleep around. She didn't drink or use drugs. She won a prestigious scholarship. She traveled. She pursued her dreams. She was a very serious and responsible young woman. Friends of the family sometimes asked "Did X, Y or Z make her so serious?" The answer given was "No, she was always like that." She was the proverbial All American Girl living some variation of the American Dream. Or so it probably seemed to acquaintances who didn't know her well. I'm a bad boy, cause I don't even miss her Once upon a time, even longer ago and farther away, a bouncing baby boy was b

Climate and Unsheltered Homeless in the Continental United States

I got news for all the chronically housed people in the US, who have apparently never even gone camping, yet are making policy and trying to understand factors that influence where you find unsheltered homeless people: Daytime January Temperature isn't remotely synonymous with Climate . There are many other factors involved in actual weather, not just daytime temps (much less daytime January temps ). When you spend most of your time outside -- instead of just visiting it for five minutes on your way to your car -- these other factors are huge issues in terms of tolerableness of the climate. I am in the process of reading The State of Homelessness in America (PDF) . This is a report from The Council of Economic Advisers dated September 2019. From page 17: ...rates of unsheltered homelessness are uniformly low in cold places. In other words, the difficulty of sleeping on the streets is so high during the winter in places like Minneapolis that unsheltered homelessness is

Powered by Blogger

Website by Doreen Traylor