Don’t feel so smug, you with your mortgage 4 or 5 times your annual income: the way the housing economy’s going it could happen to you, too.
Blogger ddjango:
I am homeless. This is the second time in a year that I’ve been so. It ain’t easy.
Just about a year ago, I was laid off from a job I had held for four years. It was a pretty good job, doing research, geographic information systems, and data analysis for an institute at a local university. The layoff was unexpected. I drew unemployment for awhile, had an apartment.
Not long after the layoff, however, I went into a deep clinical depression, was hospitalized for awhile and have needed to spend a time recovering. Financially, however, I was a mess, lost my apartment, and spent several weeks in a local homeless shelter. Boy, did I learn a lot.
I got back on my feet, started looking for a job, got an apartment. I was doing all right, then got hit with another bout of depression and had to be hospitalized again.
Hospital bills, other unforeseen expenses, etc. I lost my apartment again about two months ago. So I’m homeless again, living in a shelter program.
I’m pretty lucky. (What?!! . . . “lucky”?!)
Yeah, lucky. Because the county I live in has a shelter which also provides a lot of services: substance abuse/alcoholism counseling, 12 step meetings, mental health care, including a psychiatrist, a case manager, job-hunting assistance, money management counseling, transitional housing, and connections to other services, like medical care. For free. It’s not a great place, of course: dormitory living with people in a very wide range of situations, like real street bums, active alcoholics, junkies, crackheads, mentally ill folks, folks in crisis like me, folks who lost their jobs and can’t find new ones, folks who lost relationships and/or got divorced and really screwed because of it, disabled veterans, released prisoners, and just damn unlucky, confused, and lonely folks.
But the place is fairly safe and the staff work hard. It got really fucking cold last week and the shelter crammed in as many folks as would fit. Food, clothing, shelter in a life-threatening situation.
This isn’t true in a lot of areas in this country. But you probably know that. I read an article yesterday about a homeless man who was beaten to death by a gang of suburban kids. This has happened often in the past few years. It seems it’s a brutal sport.
Yeah. Just ask Rachel Moran and her bar buddies.
On a personal note, we’re doing a fundraiser here at P!to keep me alive (and in cigarettes and bus fare) as I look for a job. My finances are trashed and I can use whatever help I can get. Please. Just donate what you can, if you can – I’ll be more grateful than you can imagine.
Thank you.
Be at peace.
Despite my qualifications and experience I’ve been homeless with my children, this in a country with a welfare state, and if it hadn’t been for the help of good friends, socialist friends, I don’t know what I would’ve done. So many people have been or are homeless or underhoused, sleeping on friends sofas or their car or a series of cheap and nasty B&B’s, and it’s not from laziness, or fecklessness, its from what seems an unstoppable and insupportable series of shitty, shitty co-incidences and bureaucratixc indifference and incompetence.
It really could happen to anyone.
If you want to chip in and help ddjango click here. He also has a list of organisations helping the homeless, all of which could use support.
