What is homeless?

Ever since the TED video came out I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about what they think homelessness really is. For those who have always lived in a house or apartment, living in a car or van DEFINITELY qualifies as homeless. But for those who have lived on the streets, sleeping under bushes or in shelters I wasn’t really homeless. I had a car.

Being intelligent, having resources, friends who are not homeless or being white makes one not homeless apparently. When I did start looking for help from social service agencies I wasn’t eligible for most of them because I was NOT a sex worker. I wasn’t being abused by a boy or girl friend. I wasn’t a teenager. I wasn’t pregnant. I didn’t have kids. I hadn’t been raped or beaten or arrested in the last 72-hours. I wasn’t an alcoholic. I wasn’t on drugs. I wasn’t a schizophrenic or so mentally ill I couldn’t function. Being depressed, suicidal and having PTSD doesn’t qualify as a mental illness. I had a van, a job and while I couldn’t afford an apartment, and I was illegal (sleeping in a vehicle), I was the kind of person who fell through the cracks in the system.

A few phone calls, someone talking to a landlord, or running interference for me would have helped me immensely. But the fact is, the world expects us to bootstrap our way out of a bad situation if we don’t have some overbearing traumatic story. And to be honest, I tend to agree. I had more resources than most. All I didn’t have was a permanent place to sleep. Rather than letting me park, work and get myself out of my situation however, I was treated like a criminal. That one thing - housing, made all the difference in my life and it’s why I think that housing, allowing people to sleep in their cars unhassled by the police, would allow many people to change their circumstances.

Not having to spend $150 a week for gas, driving around Denver looking for a different place to park every night would have made a difference. Having a place to shower regularly would have made a difference as well. If I hadn’t had a job where there were employee showers I could utilize, I would have been hard pressed to have kept my job.

By the end of the year I learned some things about how to survive on the streets and to get around the obstacles society places in the way of the homeless. (look in the “How-To” section for more tips). That knowledge (and the lack of depression this time around), is what makes this time around easier.

But the question is still unanswered. What is homelessness? Is the college student living in his car to save money on housing homeless? Is the woman who has fled from an abusive boyfriend and is sleeping in her car for a few days until he cools off - homeless? Is the run-away teen-ager who wants to escape her molesting step-father homeless?

The fact is, the government considers those without a set domicile, some permanent place to sleep and store our stuff, homeless. Those entertainers, musicians, actors and entrepreneurs who lived on the streets but later became millionaires - were they just poor? Or were they homeless? Ask them and they remember “rough times,” when they had to sleep on the street, but they don’t dwell on the periods of “homelessness,” they experienced.

I keep going back to attitude and perception. How do we see ourselves? Is homelessness really just being without a permanent structure to call home? Or is an attitude - one of feeling helpless, victimized, alone? The fact that I could live as I did then, and say now that I’m a van dweller, not homeless, is a huge point in my argument that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle - if you let it be. Soldiers are “homeless” - without a house or permanent structure. But they are not homeless. Salesmen, truck drivers, RV’ers, don’t have houses, but are not homeless. So is it attitude? I picked the photo of the house on wheels to illustrate the concept. It’s a house, but it’s on wheels. So, are the people living in it “homeless,” or not?

If you have an opinion, please share it!