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How do you define being homeless? Because when I think of being homeless, I think of someone who sleeps on the street, panhandles, and has some sort of debilitating disease or addiction that has forced them to live in a back alley or on the sidewalk.
I don’t know much about San Francisco other than that I frequently see people online complaining about how ridiculous the rent is there. If you’re not making money hand over fist as a tech entrepreneur, it seems that you’re doomed to live in cramped quarters with roommates well into your 30s. Having a roommate after age 30 sounds incredibly awful, but people really seem to love the Bay Area so I guess all I can say is “to each their own.” Kristin Hanes (who is in her mid-30s) was working full-time as a reporter for KGO Radio in San Francisco last year when she decided to become “intentionally homeless.”
We talk a lot about people “checking their privilege” and focusing on someone/something other than themselves, but the only thing I gathered from this article is that classifying what Kristin Hanes did for four months should not be referred to as becoming “intentionally homeless.” Homelessness is a huge issue in America and it’s just a bit insulting to say that what she was doing was in any way comparable to living on the street.
She joined a gym, put her stuff in storage or otherwise disposed of it, and moved into her car with her boyfriend where they drove to various campgrounds at night. She didn’t have a toilet or a kitchen or electricity or TV and cable, but “in the first 40 days alone, I paid off $3,700 in debt and saved $2,500 on rent,” she says. “We had a blast, roasting salmon in foil over campfires, playing guitar and drinking beer under the pinprick lights of a thousand stars.”
While I am impressed that Kristin was able to save a shit load of money and not be shackled by rent and living expenses, it’s an insult to actual homeless people to say that she was homeless. Living out of a car and sleeping at campgrounds does not qualify as being homeless. If you want to call yourself homeless, you need to live on the street with the rest of the masses, Kristin. You need to pick up a drug habit that will take precedence over everything else in your life. You need to ditch what I’m assuming was some craft beer under the stars and start drinking Steel Reserve under the unforgiving street lights of the city. Drinking beer with your boyfriend in the back of his Subaru while you cook salmon over a campfire is called camping. That’s not called being homeless.
Kristin lived in a car with her boyfriend for nearly four months before deciding that she had saved enough money to move onto a houseboat with roommates. If that isn’t the most San Francisco thing of all time, I don’t know what is. Like, of course, she lives on a houseboat channeling her inner Shane Falco and most definitely tells people at parties about the time she “went homeless.”
Would I want to live out of a car for four months to save a few thousand dollars? No, definitely not. I value a shower, my mattress, and a kitchen far too much to ever live out of a car. If we were talking about a Winnebago, I could probably be convinced. But living with your significant other out of a car sounds fucking miserable. I don’t know how she did this for four months but more power to her. Just clarify that you weren’t actually homeless, please.
In May, she got laid off from her job. So she moved onto her boyfriend’s sailboat, where they are both living full time.
“I haven’t found a job yet but am doing part-time voiceover work in the Bay area, which still isn’t enough to pay the rent anywhere, not even a room in Oakland. So, for now, I will continue living on my boyfriend’s boat until I find a full-time job,” she tells Business Insider.
Best of luck to Kristin and her boyfriend. If push comes to shove, they can probably just go back to living out of a car..
[via Yahoo]
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jduda@grandex.co
This will become the new hipster thing to do. I went vegan for 2016 and did a homeless cleanse during the summer, what an experience!
I feel like this couple may have just been “homeless” so they can tell a cool story about sticking it to the man at a used book store while drinking artisan coffee
It boggles my mind that people still feel like living in San Francisco is a right and not a privilege. If it’s too expensive for you, move out of the city and to the Bay Area. So many of my coworkers, including a bunch in upper management, live outside of the City because they either can’t afford to live here or don’t want to pay the insane rents or mortgage payments.
This chick sounds like a spoiled gold digger to me, living off her boyfriend. And I agree with you, Duda, that it’s pretty insulting to say that she was homeless. Unless you’ve lived in a makeshift tent city under a freeway overpass in SoMa, you haven’t been homeless in SF.
Living on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay sounds dooooooooope.
Especially if the boat’s name is Boaty McBoatface.
What if you live in other peoples’ cars that you break into on a nightly basis?
that just reminded me of the Dirty Mike and The Boys soup kitchen scene from the Other Guys.
“We’re about to have us a little screw party in this red Prius over here.”
Then those people should’ve known better than to leave their cars parked in the Tenderloin or the aforementioned parts of SoMa.
Or SF could just be less of a steaming pile of shit.
Hey man, don’t knock my city, even if some neighborhoods do have literal piles of shit on the ground. A lot of cities have this problem (ever been to Skid Row in LA?), but since SF is so tiny, it’s much more prominent.
Most of the neighborhoods in SF have shit everywhere, the only difference being the ratio of human shit to dog shit.
Completely agree, and the epitome of this is when the Muni driver’s strike because they don’t make a “San Francisco living wage” (they do). It takes a lot of work to afford living in the city, even with roommates, and it’s far from the end of the world if you have to move a few miles south. I’m sure this chick has seen the homeless in SoMa, and choosing to be homeless is far different than the circumstances that brought them there.
Sure, she “lives like a homeless person” and you call her out. But you dress like a homeless person and apparently that’s all fine and dandy.
Cultural appropriation if I’ve ever seen it.
PGHRProblems doesn’t understand fashion. Sad!
So, is there an official release for the Helen Keller Fall collection by Johnny D?
You’ve got some downvotes there Johnny, but my closet full of khakis and solid color button downs kinda lends credence to your point. I mean, you don’t understand fashion either, but I’m not gonna say I do.
The fact that he has a goddamn sailboat you can live in just invalidates her whole argument about being broke AF. Your boyfriend has sailboat money, not like pontoon or wakeboat money but sailboat money. GTFO.
Also JD not all homeless people are druggies. Some have genuine mental disorders or disabilities which thanks to our stigma of them go undiagnosed and untreated. Alot of homeless are vets who come back and are unable to adjust and dont get the proper treatment. Not all homeless people fit the narrow standard, take it from someone who was homeless for a time as kid sometimes its just shitty luck.
. http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/fact-sheet-veteran-homelessness
Glad to see you haven’t let being dealt a less than favorable hand hold you back (being serious). Good job my friend!
Thanks. Its no big deal a lot of people and kids had it worse. Plus if you don’t get a sense of humor about the rotten shit you’ve had to go through then it just bugs ya forever.
Its how you learn how many aluminum cans it takes to buy stuff and walmart or HEB will pay you for returning shopping carts that people walk away with or abandon far away from the store lol
That’s how you learn to hustle and grind. *insert high five emoji*
“I’m just like, soooo in touch with my whole world around me, like it was SUCH a struggle and I just totally understand the homeless perspective now.”
I always thought that having a sailboat and being homeless were two very different walks of life, but I guess not? What the actual fuck?
TGDAG: Become Homeless On Purpose
She’s terrible enough to do this but too spoiled to actually do this. “Ugh, being homeless on purpose is for poors”.