[ericmcer]

I have always wondered about that, there was this phrase that floated around in the Bay Area of "it can happen to anyone" so I always thought about the steps it would take for me to become homeless. I would have to:

Lose my job

Lose the ability to get a new job

Burn all my savings and assets

Burn all my familial relationships

Burn all my friendships

Get rejected by all social welfare programs

It feels like barring mental illness or drug addiction it would be a real challenge to end up homeless if you are trying not to be. I definitely sympathize with drug addicts because we had doctors liberally prescribing one of the most addictive chemicals on earth to people for 25 years, but I am also suspicious of the narrative that you just stumble into homelessness despite your best efforts.

[Avicebron]

I think you aren't thinking about the cascade. So for one, losing the job, that depends on the job but let's say that it's a crappy low paid job where corporate has figured out how to make everyone replaceable. You're out, say your like many and you've spent most of your money on rent and have maybe like a grand in the bank, you go out looking for a job and can't get another one (any reason let's just assume it's not a "moral failing problem" which gives people peace of mind because "they're homeless because they're an addict and therefore they only have themselves to blame"). So now you can't pay rent (it's month to month because it's all you could get in El cerrito), you eventually get kicked out, the cascade starts, no money = no cell phone or email to apply to jobs, no place to live means no showering = hard to interview, spin up some trauma from seeing shit happen on the street that freaks you out, boom it just snowballs. (In this scenario I'm assuming that they don't just have a family to fall back on who can support their needs while they try and get another job)

[vineyardmike]

I think you're significantly overplaying your hand here, and over-assuming the ability of others too.

I'm sure you're very successful and a hard worker with great skills, but plenty of people are pretty mediocre. And plenty of people don't have great high-paying corporate jobs, even if they are hardworking. Personally, my family's savings could sustain us for years without a job, but that wasn't true when we were (single and) young.

Losing a job is easy, even if you did nothing wrong and plenty of people really struggle to find a new job with a similar pay. I had a friend who was laid off from a Stanford medical researcher position (~80k/yr), and he worked retail for 12 months (~30k/yr) before finding a true replacement job. He could barely pay his (pre-existing) SF-bay-area rents on that salary. His groceries were paid out of savings or generous friends. If anything actually went wrong (medically, car accident, etc), he'd actually have run out of money to live. None of his family lived in the US (or had USD savings), so he'd have to uproot his life to live with them. He had friends, but living with a friend is a huge ask - you can only stay on a couch for so long. It's easy to say you'll help a friend, but when their budget is $1k/mo short, you'll burn through a friend or family's generosity fast.

I don't know if most people on HN have looked, but finding a place to rent in SF Bay Area for <2k/mo is hard. If you make minimum wage, it's really hard to find a place to live. If you go from a higher salary, where you can afford 2k/mo, to a lower one where you can't, you're really screwed, because moving is not cheap either, and selling all your stuff (to eventually re-buy later) or hiring movers will certainly deplete the savings of people who can least afford it.

Certainly drugs or mental illness speeds up this downward spiral, but it should be noted that "living with friends or family" usually qualifies as homeless for most of these statistics, not when you start living in a box under the freeway... so "it can happen to everyone" is more true even for you when you realize that you only need to pass 3/6 of your listed steps.

[mrsilencedogood]

Suppose you're living paycheck to paycheck and your car breaks down.

Lose my job - yep

Lose the ability to get a new job - no car

Burn all my savings and assets - you couldn't pay to fix your car, so you have no savings or liquid assets

Burn all my familial relationships - hope you didn't turn to (or increase preexisting) drug use due to ^

Burn all my friendships - ^

Get rejected by all social welfare programs - easy, be male and addicted to drugs

There you have it

[reverendsteveii]

>Burn all my savings and assets

For about 25% of Americans this would take less than a month (https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2024/08/survey-one-in-four-am...)

[specialist]

A disabling chronic life threatening illness could do it.

Escaping a bad domestic situation too. Gay kid kicked out by parents, violence, rape, etc.

Brain injury would do it. Maybe caused by an accident or military service.

Ditto PTSD.

In other words, there's no shortage of ways to lose everything.

> Get rejected by all social welfare programs

Disabled people are the least able to fight for their own care. To say nothing of learning how to ask for help to begin with.

[creer]

Yes. Watch out though that many "social welfare programs" are remarkably perverse and difficult to obtain, use or keep.

[thewebguyd]

True for almost any average-to-well paid white collar work, but it's surprisingly easy to end up homeless for anyone already below the poverty level, or even just not making 6+ figures in a high cost of living area.

I've known several folks - generally minimum wage adjacent jobs, retail, food service, etc. Landlord decides not to renew their lease, rental housing availability is next to none in a lot of my locality, and family lives out of state. Never made enough money to even have a savings.

Suddenly they are without housing. Maybe they can crash at a friend's house, maybe not. If they can't, they're going to be spending time and effort trying to get assistance, maybe have to take a few days off work, because of the nature of those jobs, maybe they get fired. Now they are both homeless and unemployed.

I've also know people in similar situations that ended up on a downward drug spiral as well, but only after the fact. I think it's a chicken or the egg problem for some homeless folks. Were they addicts first, leading to a downward spiral that lead to chronic homelessness, or were they just someone living in poverty, trying to scrape by, screwed by the system and turned to drugs later on?

Add to it that public transportation sucks in most of the USA outside of urban areas (and even in some urban areas as well), so anyone already without a car has limited job prospects in the event of layoffs or an economic downturn in their local area.

So yeah, I don't necessarily abide by the "it can happen to anyone" but there is absolutely a significant subset of the USA's population that is essentially one unfortunate event away from homelessness.