Solving the Shower Problem, Among Other Things

I spent nearly six years homeless and I've been back in housing for more than two years. I still have trouble accepting how hard it is to solve the shower issue for homeless individuals.

I don't like most homeless services. They tend to suck.

If you can find a homeless service with showers, they may be open bays with zero privacy where you are stripping down in front of strangers. Or they may have serious mold problems and other cleanliness issues.

They also tend to be of very limited availability. Often, there is a two hour window during the day in which you can try to get access to the showers.

If you are a homeless person with a job, this two-hour window may be completely inaccessible to you. You may be at work during that time.

Although I paid for showers at truck stops a few times while crossing the country while homeless, truck stop showers are both too expensive and too far from other things to be a practical solution for most homeless individuals most of the time. It's a handy tip to know when traveling. It's probably not useful most of the time.

In Port Aransas, I had access to beach showers for as little as a dollar, but I never found anything like that in the three years or so that I spent in San Diego County -- in spite of making every effort to find such.

I searched online. I walked the beaches for hours on days when the library was closed or when relocating to another city within the county.

I never found the kind of showers I had access to in Port Aransas, even though I was in a densely populated county with multiple coastal cities and miles of beaches.

I currently live in a small town with a big homeless problem and I have done things like search for truck stop showers in the region or beach showers. Either they mostly don't exist or they aren't readily found via internet.

Like California, Washington state gets most of its rain during the winter months. But it's a lot colder up here than down there and it gets a whole lot more rain.

Although they open an emergency shelter here when it is below freezing, they don't open the shelter for storms per se. This means that storms that come up from Hawaii do not trigger the opening of the emergency shelter.

There are also too few hotels in Aberdeen. We have both a hotel and housing shortage here. Our hotels are about 97 percent full most of the time and aren't cheap.

But you can get to other cities in the region by bus for between one and three dollars, the local library system is a five county regional system and there are a variety of campgrounds in the region.

What I have thought is that if I were homeless up here, I would use the regional library system and bus system to float around a bit and not be stuck in any one place for too long. And I would go to a paid campground during winter storms and spend a night in their version of a hotel.

The winter storms occur during their off season. Rooms at such places seem to go for as little as $50 per night in the off season for a weekday night (no doubt with hotel tax -- it's probably closer to $60 in reality).

They do not provide bedding and they sleep up to five. So if up to five homeless individuals got together and showed up with their backpacks and bedding and stuff and didn't loudly announce that they were homeless, they wouldn't look too out of place and they could all have a room for the night for potentially as little as ten or twelve dollars apiece.

This would get them out of the storm, give them access to a shower, electricity and wi-fi and let them generally take a short vacation from the hardship of homelessness. If they behaved themselves and didn't go to the same one too often, the campground would likely be perfectly happy to have the extra money for filling the rooms on nights when some of those rooms tend to be empty.

At the same time, homeless folks around here could start to improve their hygiene, overall health and overall quality of life. It looks like a win-win solution to me.

That was basically what I did my last two years on the street: I tried to periodically arrange a hotel stay to get a shower. I also tried to schedule it for a night when it was storming to get me shelter from the storm.

The first year that I did this, I had to take a bath to soak the dead skin off. But the second year, I was able to go to a hotel overnight more consistently and then a shower was sufficient to get me clean.

After I was able to shower once a month, I also stayed cleaner the entire rest of the month. My feet stopped turning black and I was just generally much more comfortable and much more able to pass for normal.

If you are homeless, you can work towards arranging this for yourself by establishing an earned income online. If you are a well-heeled individual looking for creative solutions, you can gift a hotel stay to a homeless individual periodically.

I have written some about this idea previously: Pretty much everyone is against letting a homeless shelter go up in their neighborhood. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They tend to be pretty awful from what I have seen, so I'm not really for creating more shelters myself.

Helping homeless individuals get access to periodic hotel stays for hygiene purposes and as shelter in inclement weather is not only a much more civilized and middle class solution than the shelter system, it actually helps solve the problem of empty hotel rooms as well. You are supporting a local business rather than creating another homeless service that will need homeless individuals to continue to exist in order to justify its existence and insure its own survival.

The idea seems to be unusually well-suited to the area I'm in precisely because the inclement weather tends to coincide with the off-season for hotels and campgrounds around here. There are empty, low-cost rooms available during exactly the time that local homeless individuals most desperately need shelter from inclement weather.

Although some of the details here are specific to the area I am in, this solution generalizes. It should work just about anywhere and I have first-hand experience with it working in Fresno, California and other places when I was homeless.