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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Tent living is something like the middle class of homelessness. You have a private space, you can can acquire things, you can choose where you live and who you live around, and you don't have to jump through hoops to maintain your status.

Even for the "long-term" housing programs you have a lot of rules you have to follow and can easily fall out if you commit a minor crime.

If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.

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That is not true? Tent it a place super easy to steal from which is something homeless deal with constantly. They can not choose where they live all that much, because they get kicked from most places.

> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.

Humans build permanent houses pretty much the moment they could. The nomads were nomads because they had to.

It's pretty common to see tents in small groups together so that one person can stay there and protect their stuff.

Obviously crime is constantly a worry in a tent, but theft is rampant in shelters.

Which makes it obviously impossible for all of them to be employed.

I mean, yes, shelters have issues and being away of them is often the reasonable choice. But, calling homeless in tents "middle class" is beyond absurd.

So your point is that some homeless (surely we agree it's not all homeless people) would rather live in a tent free from restrictions bound to housing programs than to take part in those housing programs and submit themselves to the restrictions?

I'm absolutely not arguing that people enjoy being homeless, but life is full of tradeoffs and for enough Americans homelessness beats some of the alternatives.

So I'd argue we need to provide better alternatives.

> For the homeless, tent living is something like middle class.

WTF are you even talking about.

If you ever work with the homeless, it's a common trope. People seek out tent camping as a form of long-term security.

There's a great Conversations with Tyler where he interviews a prominent homeless person in the DC era and one of the topics he brings up is specifically stratification amongst these groups:

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-gr...

They are talking a lot of bullshit

> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.

100% of the land was not owned by people with the ability to enforce it constantly then.

The people who own the land cannot enforce it because the state will put them in a cage if they do. They have to "ask nicely".

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