It's Got "Bad Idea" Written All Over It

Once upon a time someone emailed me and asked for some advice on how to best cope with having taken some random homeless person into their home to try to help them get back on their feet. I did my best to answer the questions they had, but it was an enormously uncomfortable discussion for me.

Please don't email me and ask me that. Just don't do that to begin with because it's got "Bad Idea" written all over it.

I recently watched Black Butterfly for free on YouTube. It kind of presents a worst case scenario where some guy takes in a drifter and is soon being terrorized by the guy (though it's a movie and there are plot twists).

The idea that taking in a homeless person can go really bad places is not merely some kind of crazy talk to serve as a convenient plot device in a fictional story. There have been some real life cases where someone took in a homeless person and things went badly sideways, such as this story about a homeless guy who murdered some of the members of the family that took him in.

If you want to help the homeless, that's cool but don't be foolish about it.

First, focusing on "helping the homeless" can help entrench the problem a la The Shirky Principle. If you have to be homeless to get help for your problems and can't get help for them without being homeless, that's a situation where successfully getting off the street is nigh impossible.

Second, you need to also keep your own welfare in mind while trying to be helpful. While most homeless people are victims of circumstances beyond their control to at least some degree, that doesn't mean they are, themselves, deeply trustworthy individuals who would never harm a fly.

I am not against individuals helping the homeless directly. I've done a fair amount of writing about how to do that effectively and some of that is gathered together in this comment.

In short: Cash, gift cards, paying their tab for groceries or a meal, or gifting them a hotel stay are some great ways to directly help the homeless. But please don't take some random stranger (or even mere acquaintance) into your home thinking you will help them that way.

(Obviously it's a more complicated question if you have a friend or relative in need. That scenario is outside of the scope of this piece.)

First, it's always inherently problematic to let some total stranger move in with you. This is true even if they supposedly have their act together and you vet them beforehand.

This is why we have horror movies about getting roommates, such as Single White Female. It's also why you can find questions about how to deal with "the roommate from hell" scenarios all over the internet.

Second, helping someone who can't pay you rent to get on their feet takes a LOT of resources, starting with money but not ending there. It takes so much that it will probably strain your budget even if you are fairly comfortably well off.

In a way, it's worse than adopting a baby. It's more like doing foster care for troubled teenagers with substance abuse problems (only minus the support of the foster care system).

That doesn't mean you, personally, cannot help a homeless person to get back into housing. There is a movie done by an independent filmmaker where the filmmaker set out to help a homeless person get back into housing and succeeded (yes, without inviting a homeless person to live with him).

It's an excellent movie and I highly recommend it: GraceOfGodMovie.com

The other thing you could consider doing is becoming a landlord and providing affordable housing. For example, if you have spare rooms in your house, you could rent out a room for cheap.

Do not illegally sublet. If you are a renter yourself, read your rental agreement and maybe also talk to the manager of your apartment complex (though I would frame it as "I am considering getting a roommate -- is that legal? What do I need to know?" and not "I am considering taking in a homeless person"). Whether you own or rent, look up any applicable laws and educate yourself about what is involved in being a landlord.

Other than trying to intentionally keep it on the cheap side, you should treat this mostly like a normal business arrangement and do background checks, credit checks, etc. Of course, if it is just you, you can run those checks and decide to rent to someone in spite of some defects in their credit rating or something like that, but it's not wise to throw common sense out the window entirely in the name of compassion.

Everything I have read indicates it's pretty hard to find a place in most parts of US for under $500/month, even if you go in as a roommate on an apartment. My opinion: If you can make a place available for $400/month or less, you will almost certainly be renting the place to someone who would most likely be otherwise homeless.

That doesn't mean they will want to say that to you. They may prefer to downplay how needy and vulnerable they are because advertising vulnerability is a good way to get hurt, so don't expect them to openly gush at you about how grateful they are.

They may not even fully realize themselves that "Without this unusually cheap room, I would be on the street." It can be hard to get perspective on your own life and people sometimes turn a blind eye to uncomfortable truths that scare them too much. It's a form of psychological survival mechanism.

It's pretty common for people to like being able to see firsthand that what they are doing is making a difference, so it's pretty common for people to want to help directly rather than just cutting a check to some charity that may not really be accomplishing much. But it's not really healthy to expect homeless people to grovel because you did a nice thing for them when most of the rest of the world won't.

If you want them to get back on their feet and get their life back, treating them with dignity and like they deserve a decent life is an important part of that. Treating them like losers who need to kowtow to you makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution, so please don't do that.

If enough people decided to rent out a room as "normal, market rate housing" for $400/month or less, maybe homelessness would largely disappear in the US and no one would think groveling was appropriate because it would now be normal to be able to find a cheap room. And then our world would be a better world and we could stop complaining about our downtowns being ruined by high rates of homelessness.

(The theme of this post is mostly "getting a homeless person back into housing" but that's not the only thing that can help. Helping homeless people or those at risk to connect with earned income or helping people access affordable health care are other excellent ways to try to help people get off the street and/or stay off the street.)