What I Learned While Being Homeless

This article contains some actual advice on how to earn a bare survival income as a homeless person along with some biting sarcasm and a hint of suppressed anger.


Of course you'd probably want to start with jobs like real people have such as data entry, customer service, retail, sales, cleaning, manufacturing or other traditional jobs. However, you might need to aim for less agreeable occupations such as porta potty cleaner, road kill clean up specialist, or decomp crime scene cleaner. Even for these dirty jobs employers won't hire someone without an address, front teeth, or clean clothes. So, as a homeless person you may need to lower your standards a bit. Or you might just need to try a little bit different set of job hunting and money making strategies.
View more about how to survive being homeless »

The following editorial is dedicated to Justus, a lovely man who saved my life - after society had discarded him and given up on him, too.


For years, America has been working to further dehumanize people who for one reason or another have found themselves living on the street. The recently favored descriptive phrase chills me to the bone. "The Homeless" - they are no longer hobos, transients, children of the street, vagrants, bums, or street people - they have become "The Homeless." You may say it's only words but words speak of deeper feelings. That is what words are, feelings and concepts given life as sound.

Let's look at that phrase a moment. When we use words to name other types of people - daughter, hooker, dentist, criminal, lawyer - do we use "the" in front when we refer to them as a group? Homeless is a state of not having somewhere to live, not something that a person is like a profession. People speak of "The Homeless" situation or "The Homeless" problem. At the holidays, people sometimes think of donating to "The Homeless."

They are homeless PEOPLE. They are PEOPLE who have no place to sleep at night that is safe. They are PEOPLE who have fallen on hard luck. They are HUMAN BEINGS dying in your world. They are HUMAN BEINGS getting beaten by your policemen, your bored teenagers, and your reality show producers.

During my time as a homeless PERSON I learned that many homeless MEN end up on the street because of illness, loss of a job, or as with many WOMEN, they have run from horrifying abuses while still teens. During my time as a homeless PERSON I found that most homeless WOMEN become that way from abuse, sexual or otherwise. They run from situations that their families, their law enforcement agencies, their charities do or can do nothing about. They walk the razor edge between flight and suicide and for some reason, they choose to run rather than face another rape by their stepfather or another bone-breaking beating from their spouse. Once they run away, they discover that they've merely jumped into a more slowly burning fire rather than to true safety. By that point they are stuck. There's no hand up, there's no government assistance to save them, there's really nothing to save them but themselves and sometimes each other. While the rest of the country is shedding tears over the little girl molested by her Uncle on the Lifetime movie the real little girls and boys are sleeping in dumpster surrounds, too broken to understand what to do or how to function.

After my first rape, it was a homeless man who saved me. I was tucked into a bloodied ball behind a dumpster, deep in shock. Without his intervention, I would have died. He covered me and sang mumbled songs. He bathed me like a child in someone's motel room where he'd carried me. Fittingly, his name was Justus. My angel had Parkinson's and had suffered several strokes. His bladder control wasn't perfect so he smelled pretty bad, too. He talked to me of soldiers he'd seen shell-shocked in Vietnam. He prayed and sang "Amazing Grace" as I stared into space, trembling and waiting, hoping to die while he carefully dabbed my face with a washcloth. He showed me a very old picture of his daughter, a cute toddler in corn rows. He spoke of her with such love. It was then I unfroze and began to cry. If this gentle, lovely man could be discarded and dying out where no one cared what hope was there for anyone?

I regret that I was too deeply wounded, too deep in shock at the time he finally urged and convinced me to let him take me to the hospital - I regret I was too damaged at the time to think of how I'd find him again. I was hospitalized for several days while they pumped me full of antibiotics and wrestled to get my fever under control. I never found Justus again.

Of all the people I've ever met, Justus was perhaps the most humane person of them all. Justus was not "The Homeless," he was a man of substance and humanity.

For the sake of Justus, don't use that phrase, "The Homeless."

When I was homeless I was constantly tired. My thoughts were consumed by a burning need to sleep somewhere safe. I usually couldn't find any such a place.

Eventually, I learned how to avoid most dangerous and uncomfortable street-sleeping situations. I wrote this article both to share that information with others who might need it and to enlighten homed people as to the conditions homeless people suffer.

Maybe the homeless shelters are turning people away, you got beat up at the shelter too many times, or you just don't like getting scabies with your night's lodging. Whatever the reason, you need to find somewhere else to sleep. I am in no way representing these suggestions as either legal or even necessarily all that safe. I'd like to share some ways I learned to cope with the inconveniences and terrors of sleeping in the rough while homeless.

Read more about some of the places where homeless people sleep to avoid attracting attention from passersby, police, and others who might harass or harm them.

My prospects were pretty dim; I had little work experience and nowhere to shower regularly. I walked funny and talked with a slurred voice after the brutal beating that had hospitalized me.

I couldn't get a regular job so I walked from door to door in suburban neighborhoods, scouting out homes where older folks lived. I knocked on doors asking to mow and rake lawns, scrub toilets, clean out homes and garages, and clean up dog poop. I also picked up bottles and cans for their deposit. I managed not to starve to death. Just barely.

One day I had a particularly bad day after almost a week of bad days. I'd been beaten up the night before and I hadn't convinced anyone to hire me to do any odd jobs in almost a week. No one seemed to appreciate the bargain at which my services could be had - not even poop scooping a really nasty yard for $2. I hadn't eaten in several days and was feeling pretty down. I thought about suicide.

As I walked along the freeway picking up trash and cans I found a number of cigarette boxes that day. When I picked the last one up I saw the edge of a paper bill sticking from the package. This was pretty common; often people would put a few dollars in their cigarette pack and forget about it. My hands were shaking and I was tearing up. I was going to get something to eat! As I pulled the bill out I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was a folded hundred dollar bill! I looked at it in disbelief, thinking that somehow it must be a fake.

This was a turning point for me. I was able to rent a Post Office Box, buy a tarp to sleep on, buy showers at the truck stop, and clothes from a thrift store. I had an address to put on job applications and I could stay clean and well-dressed. I was then able to get a regular job, ten days after finding the money.

It wasn't really that simple but the money got the ball rolling. You can read more about what I bought with it here. The page also includes some new ideas and items that didn't yet exist when I was homeless.

Many homeless people are terrified of police and there's a good reason for this. It is because some policemen use their position of power to harass or even actually harm homeless people. Now that many citizens have video recording equipment on them in the form of cell phones and digital cameras, more of this behavior is being exposed. If you just search for "police beating homeless" on any search engine you will find many shocking results.

Being homeless is considered a crime in some cities, adding to the fears of homeless people. In cities where being homeless itself is a crime there is an increased likelihood of arrest. Increased exposure to police increases the likelihood of encountering a dangerous police officer.

When homeless, I was wakened many times by non-too-gentle kicks by police "checking on my welfare." I was also treated dismissively when I tried to report crimes. I was once even accused of prostitution and threatened with arrest.

I know most police do not behave this way but there are enough around that if a person stays homeless long enough, they are pretty likely to encounter policemen of this type. Many people see homeless people as worthless, lazy criminals and it becomes dangerous when those people are law enforcement officers.

Homelessness does not have a new face. A lot more people are becoming homeless but they are not "a better class of people." People who were homeless before have similar stories, the economy has just made those stories a lot more common.

In America, health related issues and medical bankruptcy have been major causes of homelessness for decades. Any human being can become sick or get injured and if he loses his insurance he has a pretty high chance of becoming homeless.

The lack of affordable housing and lack of a living wage have also created homelessness issues for a long, long time. Job loss is another long-time culprit.

Decent, hard working people have never been immune to homelessness. Yet every other article out there on homelessness stresses this concept of "the new homeless" or "the new face of the homeless" - as if something has changed about homeless people rather than the economy.

People have this very limited idea of homelessness and homeless people. They think of the bums and panhandlers who can be found in any given American city as the "old face of homelessness" when, in fact, those people have never been representative of the majority of homeless people. You could see about 15-30 panhandlers or obviously homeless people in the streets of Chicago, even ten years ago. It sounds like a lot but if you consider that, at the time, there were about 6,000 homeless people in Chicago it wasn't even one percent of them behaving like the stereotypes people associated with the homeless. Less than one percent of a population is not its face. The real face of homelessness has not changed. No one ever noticed the majority of homeless people because they looked just like anyone else.

What people are labeling as "the new face of homelessness" and "the new homeless" are really just the real face of homelessness and the reality of homeless people. Homeless people are just what they describe, people who are down on their luck, people just like you and me in lousy circumstances- and that is how it has been for a long time now.

A few people have asked me "if homelessness has affected you so deeply, why don't you donate your lens earnings to charities that fight homelessness?"

I would love to donate the proceeds of this lens and all of my others to help homeless people. Unfortunately, I'm on the very edge of homelessness myself due to illness and disability.

You can read about why I'm in financial difficulty here.

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