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Comment by metalforever | Hacker News Reader

I live in the Bay Area and I have multiple friends that are homeless so let me comment here. A lot of the homeless are on disability due to some physical issue that prevents working , or are seniors. The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks. The section 8 waitlist is years long and you have to “scam” yourself in by saying you are a drug addict when you aren’t. There’s another large category of working class people in the bay that have a job but can’t afford to rent a room in a house . Or they had a job, lost it, and didn’t immediately find a new job. This comment above is extremely ignorant to the situation. Did you know that a lot of these tent camps have a months long waitlist ?

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> A lot of the homeless are on disability due to some physical issue that prevents working , or are seniors. The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks.

Naive follow-up question: why does such a person need to live in the bay area? If you're living off disability, why would you try to do it in the most expensive place in the country? Is community that important?

The explanation I got was that you can't live outside in many other locales and that the cheaper places cut the social security low enough that it's hard to live there too. The social services and weather situation here is such that from a healthcare and social security check perspective it works out better and is less risky to the tenuously housed.

If you're homeless, what else do you have?

I think the literal answer is that if you move somewhere else, you can have a home? There's something about the circular logic of "I don't have a home, but I have friends" --> "I can never leave this place with friends" --> "I don't have a home ..." that requires the person to either lack any kind of long-term planning or place a really high weight on their current friend circle. Or maybe I'm just clueless about how hard it is to save social security/disability income in that situation.

I realize this line of inquiry sounds callous ("why can't they just save some money?"), but I genuinely don't follow why somebody with a regular income who's not tied to the bay area by a) drug addiction, or b) a job would put up with homelessness to stay there.

The interesting thing about your comment is it doesn't actually contradict what I said unless you are claiming your friends represent the majority of those experiencing homelessness. Is that what you're claiming?

It actually does in several respects. You didn't capture the homeless working class, the homeless social security / retirees, and the folks with physical disabilities (you only brought up mental illness). The comment you have made in my opinion vastly overstates the drugs and mental illness aspects and vastly understates the number of people that (1) work at regular jobs and are still homeless, (2) the number of seniors that are homeless, and (3) The folks with physical disabilities, for example chronic physical conditions.

> The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks.

I find this confusing because you seem to imply that having an income makes you ineligible for social security retirement benefits. But as long as you are 65, you're eligible without income caps. There's no requirement that you're not working.

Social security disability checks do require that you're not working. Is that what you're talking about?

In a lot of cases they are social security disability checks and the side hustles I see most frequently are table vendors or musicians

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