[devoutsalsa]

There are a lot of reasons to be homeless and not want to stay in a homeless shelter. A big one is security. When I was homeless and learning to code, I couldn’t afford to replace my laptop. People told me that if I stayed in a homeless shelter, there was a good chance my laptop would be stolen. I chose not to stay in one for that reason alone.

A few years later, I offered to let a homeless coding student stay with me for a couple weeks while she got housing lined up. She didn’t have one of her own, so I gave her my old MacBook Air. She made arrangements to stay in a shelter, left my place, and her laptop was stolen within a week.

Safety & security matter, and any solution that is going to effectively address homelessness needs to take this into account.