I'm guessing you're in tech as you're on HN - why not keep your day job and work on your business from 7pm-3am every night. Save some money while you do this and then leave your job when you can afford to?
It seems like a lot of tech folks have adopted the whole starving artist approach to starting a business when it is entirely unnecessary. I mean, even if you don't want to be an employee and want to focus on your product, move somewhere inexpensive, work freelance a few hours a day to support yourself. It just seems insane to me that anyone in this industry would choose to be homeless when they really don't have to.
If a lot of people are making this choice voluntarily I'd say there's a major problem in the industry and how people view the path to a successful business.
The reality, of course, is the opposite. The most successful people I have known have all started their businesses while their lives were relatively stable. That doesn't mean they started off rich, but it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from. These days, it is wholly unnecessary to quit your job or move to SV to make a startup happen, and doing so is counterproductive in almost all cases.
This is also a crucial concept in understanding why the poor stay poor: they simply can't afford to spend time and resources on the long term if they need to worry about meeting basic needs on a daily basis.
If you're interested in learning more about this, I would recommend to read Scarcity, a wonderful book that explores this in more detail: http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/...
There is a major problem in the industry. There is no one path to a successful business.
I find my time is more valuable than my comfort. To each their own.
Even with the cost of a flight, that pays for itself in no time.
A Van just seems like so much hassle!
are you sure you've thought this through?
No other bills is freeing. While the Facebook slaves think their $100k salary is a lot but go into debt with $7000/month condos.
It's motivating to get that first paying clients quickly to pay for server. (ramen profitable)
I love how when people come up with these numbers they cite salary-only/pre-negotiation/entry-level income and then they compare this to a small-family sized rent expense to justify your "typical" SV absurdity.
The fact is, many people make well over that with stock options, raises, etc. And even while making that money, lots of my friends in their mid-20s opt to live with multiple roommates and flex their living rooms to reduce their rent cost further.
Not always, only if you have positive equity. Its quite possible to have a mortgage without that.
Negative equity is usually something that happens after you take a mortgage. And whenever you take a mortgage, there is a risk of getting into a negative equity situation (though the degree of risk varies.)
Our plans are to also turn this into equity crowdfunding, and eventually have a fund to contribute to and support popular/promising projects.
I'm building this to build some other projects down the line like Playa (http://getplaya.com)
Most people don't function on 3 hours of sleep, for one thing. And if 5-7 PM is your between-jobs time, that's all you have to do errands and chores.
Personally, I have a little capacity (2 hours, maybe?) left over before burn-out starts to set in, and I am using it to fix up my house. I could cut that out and live in what I have, but there's no way I have 8 hours available.
I'm not saying that schedule would work for everyone but I seriously doubt someone has more capacity and is less likely to burn out by voluntarily deciding to be homeless. That's going to introduce a lot of complexity into your life that will end up being very time consuming. If you don't have the physical capacity to work late at night and sleep less then move somewhere with a lower cost of living and do some freelance work part time while you work on your business. The problem here seems to be that the OP finds it necessary to be in SF. Considering great businesses are created all over the world it seems like he's buying into a myth.
It's hard for me to understand how someone can get productive work done when they don't have a comfortable, safe place to rest their mind for a few hours.
It's called a library.
I sleep in a tent. I blog about that.
in fact... it's probably one of the best ways to launch a bootstrapped company. it's both the motivation and the sustenance to do something meaningful with your career.
most people just surreptitiously look for a new job while on the clock, or dick around until the gravy train stops, but you can also just do your easy-ass dayjob and work on your startup at night until it's time to switch.
It sounds extremely distracting from your career.
It wasn't the only reason I was fired, of course; there were some other reasons, ultimately coming down to political-cultural clashes. But it was by far the lowest-hanging pretext. I seldom made it in before 10:30 - 11 AM.
> The social stigma associated with the word alone is hard for people to get beyond [..] I have been harassed by cops, you feel extremely transient and embarrassed just to be alive at times. [..] After this entire experience my heart breaks every time I see a fellow human having to resort to sleeping in the cold, wet, outdoors with no shelter and nothing but some cardboard and discarded newspapers to cover up with. [.. ] In the end it has helped me understand that we must all care more for one another, no matter what.
which you might also call an attempt to give a small voice to the voiceless.
How many comments are essentially glossing over that, the ratio between posts responding to the gist of this comment to those that don't, is incredible, and to describe the main point you're all mostly ignoring as
> especially when the person then goes on to talk about how difficult life is.
is beyond tone deaf. The comment is not at all about life being oh so hard for OP, ultimately. It's not about "the industry" either, nor is the original article.
The things described in this comment, the article, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646078 ought to be enough to give a person PTSD after a while. Part of that is simply caused by social stigma, which is something everybody is complicit in and nobody can directly be blamed for. And when cops have power trips and abuse the defenseless -- not saying they do that all the time, but when they do -- any remotely decent society would come down on them like furies. Not just some of them, every last person. None such societies exist as of now, instead we numb ourselves to being numb to it, and that is the major problem I see. "The industry" is but a speck of dust in that river, and the hellish ocean it leads to.
Lenny's been crossposting to Daily Kos as well as on his site, and "What's it All Cost?" [2] has a list of links to all the relevant articles there. This is a better place to go if you're just wanting the meat of it.
I also know of at least one other person who's more legitimately "homeless" rather than "camping," she's been posting about her experiences with PADS (homeless assistance group, runs shelters particularly during the colder months) and some job search related items, also on Daily Kos [3].
TL;DR Lenny bought a used windowless extended cargo van with a security grid across the front of the back compartment (which can be covered to block light from inside at night). He mounted a decent-sized solar panel on the roof, has a battery setup inside that he can use for lighting, a fan, and recharging his laptop and other devices. He added a small sink, etc. and sleeps in the van overnight while taking public transit to various sights in each area he stops in. He works via laptop from various public libraries, coffee shops, and restaurant wifi.
[1] https://lennyflank.wordpress.com/ [2] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/03/09/1420740/-Living-in-... [3] http://www.dailykos.com/user/sheddhead
Homeless in San Francisco hanging by coffee shops, getting change is like a mansion. In Russia, homeless people disappear. This is why my mvp will be superb.
If you're serious...it's not worth it. Life is long. Find other ways of motivating yourself. Commit publicly to shipping something awesome. Find a community of badasses to support you. Don't do this.
My brother's startup wasn't bring in much money and there was always the near promise it would. He went through all his savings and retirement funds and went close to $100k into CC debt. This was a swing of +$1m to -$70k. Yes, he had a problem (unacknowledged, btw) that was more dire than yours. Just be aware that this stuff can get out of control, if you let it.
After getting to the -$70k state, he asked me and my parents for money to continue. We all refused because we knew that our money would be like the $1m+ he had already gone through. We told him to get a job. He refused. He couch surfed for a while. After 6+ months doing that he realized, because his family had abandoned him, he would have to get a job. He did ($155k/yr). He started a month ago. He's angry at the family and won't talk with us now. Ironically, he admitted that he wouldn't have the job now, which he needs, if we had given him money last year. However, that doesn't matter. He still maintains he did the right thing and we didn't support him.
It's been a sad year for my parents and me. Actually, sad few years, since we all saw this coming (and tried to prevent it, but he only got angry at us for being "negative").
It was personally hard for me to let him go right to the brink of being on the street. I did it because giving him money would have drained my resources, and for no reason. His reality distortion field was so strong, he would not listen to anyone.
The crazy thing is that at a 3% withdrawal rate $1m would have been $30k a year for personal expenses for the rest of your brother's life.
Hang in there, I'm sorry you all had to go through this.
https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/scal...
"Joe and I both had ~$30K in credit card debt and this is what we were using to fund the company."
There is no comprehensive stats on this, but the big question is, of the people who went in to serious CC debt, how many of them became massive unicorn companies, or at least mildly successful?
CC debt is probably a poor indicator of the quality of an idea.
I hope things will get better.
I wonder why more people don't choose to move to places like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo where housing is dirt cheap. There aren't many jobs there, but if you are working for yourself it shouldn't really matter.
The Bay is very kind to Homo sapiens, in terms of climate.
This is not "I've lost everything and am homeless with no way out" it's "I wanna build a startup so I'm going to go live in a van".
Landlords very often just won't take you on at all if you don't show evidence of preëxisting stability. No proof of stable income? No housing—you can even offer to pay up-front or whatever, and they just won't bother dealing with you as a special case, because why would they deal with the special case when there's a dozen other safe, predictable, normal people in line behind you?
Got an income, but can't prove it to be consistently enough? Congratulations, no housing for you. And thus begins the downward spiral.
I doubt most of the folk we dealt with would have taken us on even if I had offered to pay a full year's rent up front. It's just not worth the bother when there's a dual-income, no-kids couple with good credit next in line.
I had to get my parents to co-sign on a lease... at 27, with a PhD, proof of employment, and "excellent" credit. It's pretty insane.
I so want to do it again, but now I have kids.
I would definitely move back there instead of living in a van in SF. It would probably even be cheaper.
Other initiatives like urban farming could be done as well. I think detroit is super fertile.
Imagine what just a billion dollar fund could do for tech in that region.
That said, I'm in on the concept. For a few months a year (at most), I just need a small, private, quiet room with net, electric, and heat. Other amenities can be shared.
With a good plan and some solid leadership, I'd put money into it. But, there'd have to be some sort of contractual way to slow gentrification, if it took off.
Alameda naval station chose to just try to build a big metal wall in the ground to capture the leakage as opposed to spending the money to clean up the toxicity...
Lots of good for tech.
Should we send buses or just have some people go through and chase the current residents away on foot?
I think you don't qualify as a homeless. You 're living in a van. There's a reason people prefer homes to a van. I can't fathom what is so pressing that makes you sleep in a van instead of moving to a much cheaper area.
I have never once slept on a sidewalk. I hike out to a patch of wilderness every single night. Where I currently sleep, there are deer and coyotes (a few minutes walk from a paved road).
I blog about my experiences in part because I feel strongly that homelessness does not need to be as rough as it obviously is for so many people. Humans are food and got sleep well before modern housing was invented. I feel strongly that putting out information can go a long way towards lowering artificial barriers for homeless Americans and helping them maintain ties to society in a way that can make it easier for them to get back off the street.
Whoops!
What would such a system look like?
EDIT: Totally serious question. To build something, you must first architect it.
As Utah found, just giving homeless people a home, without demanding any substantial money or qualification or whatever from them for it, reduced the number of long-time homeless by a huge percentage and in the process saved net money for the state because of reduced medical and policing costs.
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...
This is one step, but it's not a silver bullet. New York City has had a similar program for a long time, and it's actually come under fire from homeless advocacy groups for being ineffective (while simultaneously expensive).
New York City also poses a greater challenge than Salt Lake City for a number of reasons, but so does San Francisco, so solving SF's homelessness problem will require more than just building more housing and giving it to homeless people, even if that's ultimately one step of the solution.
From the perspective of wanting to do the most good with our limited resources, paying for housing in SF or NYC, let alone SLC, is probably pretty stupid.
There's a guy I know who runs a business employing homeless. His rule is he never fires anyone. He understands that without a home/transportation, it can be impossible to make it to work. That gives them one stable leg to try and build the rest of their life from.
Just out of curiosity: what about reasons unrelated to absenteeism, like some sort of gross misconduct, drug or alcohol abuse on the job, untenable behavioural or psychiatric issues stemming from that, etc?
For example, one guy had HUGE anger management issues. When it came to blows for the xth time, the manager pulled him aside, and said "I'm not going to fire you. I don't fire people. But you can only come back here when I've gotten a call from a counseling professional (he gave a number of one) and they tell me you've been through a successful treatment." It took six months, but he got the call and the guy came back to working. Apparently been one of the best employees ever since.
I have no idea where to start if one accepts the current political, legal, and cultural environment as-is. Assuming you did just accept the status quo as a given, I can better appreciate why the idea of 'just giving homeless people housing' is so enticing. [And there is evidence that it works well. I'm skeptical about the long-run costs and skewed incentives, especially in places in which lots of people want to live.]
This. Outlawing "flophouses" throughout the United States exacerbated homelessness, made it much harder for people on the margins to improve their material circumstances, and grossly distorted the housing and rental market by removing the lower end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_hotels_in_the_U...
Here's a great post about this by a blogger I really like on this topic:
- [Spring In The Silicon Favela – Granola Shotgun](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/02/08/spring-in-the-silicon-...)
But on the plus side, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do once you stop playing by the rules!
We need to allow homeless to sleep in their vechicles, if said parking allows overnight parking.
We need to build Kibbutz's. (Or just give them a field to pitch a tent? A outhouse? Anything?
We need to stop making homelessness a crime. Every homeless person I know is camping illegially. They get tickets. They can't pay tickets. Tickets turn into felonies. It's just wrong.
If Jesus appeared, he would be ticketed for a multitude of municipal/criminal violations in a matter of days?
I don't think it's necessary tho to allow free camping in government run (and government owned) parks necessarily. Maybe it would be sufficient to just allow, or not prohibit, someone from renting spots on their property for otherwise homeless people to pitch tents.
It'd also be amazing if someone could figure out how to do an end run around all the laws and regulations that make housing so expensive and time-consuming to build. Where's the 'Uber for housing'? Very likely there is none; housing is too easy to 'attack' as it's most useful when its stationary.
Or maybe that's it – maybe someone could offer 'Japanese coffin-style hotel rooms' in a bus that just slowly drives around a city.
I think a lot of barriers just come from the social stigma of actually being homeless. So thinking reasonably, showers, laundry, snacks or meals? A place where one could feel human and a part of the naturally accepted society again.
hot showers
books, movies, wifi that you can use while you're there
soup on tap
vending machines with healthy options
exercise machines
Sounds like a brilliant idea that would benefit homeless people, those in marginal situations where it's not always safe to go home, and so-called "normals" all at once, thus serving everyone so as to prevent a stigma caused by their use.
I do blog a bit in hopes of helping other homeless people find viable solutions and bootstrap themselves. http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
I have a second blog with very little content where I try to talk about What Helps The Homeless: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/
A far, far better approach is to work on a) providing more senior and student housing -- aka affordable housing, but aimed at single people and childless couples and not marketed as "affordable" because that means "Built for poor people!" and that is always a terrible idea b) promoting walkable communities and c) helping people who can't fit a "regular" job to find a means to support themselves with some kind of paid work (freelance, part time, whatever).
Homeless people are just people. Once they get off the street, they are again simply referred to as people. You wind up homeless when your problems outrun your ability to cope. The difference between a homeless person and person in housing can be as little as one more problem or one less resource. Some particular thread snaps, it all comes unraveled. Trying to reverse that after the fact is a lot harder than trying to prevent it from happening to begin with (aka "A stitch in time saves nine").
But most people don't really want to hear that. Building more affordable housing (or otherwise trying to make society work better for ordinary people) doesn't feel heroic enough. It doesn't have the same rush of adrenaline of talking about getting people off the street after their lives have gone to hell.
People do realize I am homeless if they see me often enough, but they don't realize it upon meeting me the first time. I am less open about it than I used to be, because fuck prejudice and what judgey, uncampassionate, unhelpful assholes the vast majority of people are.
Best of luck.
I grew up in a nice part of la so I didn't really have any exposure to homeless people until I moved to the bay almost a decade ago. One thing that shocked me then and still really bothers me is how many of my friends (even the ones that I know to be decent, considerate people) completely ignore the existence of anyone who looks or smells or seems "weird". This is presumably under the assumption that anyone who looks like that is probably just asking you for money.
I remember sitting at a SJ light rail station and having a guy in a parka (it was 90+ deg out) come up to us and mumble something while we were sitting at the platform. My friend pointedly refused to make eye contact and pretended he didn't exist. When I asked the guy to repeat what he said, it turns out he was asking for directions....
I'm not saying that everyone needs to empty out their wallet to every person on the sidewalk, and maybe 90% of the time this heuristic is successful (ie they are asking for money), but it seems so shitty to me to just size someone up like that and decide that whatever they're saying to you, you can ignore it. I can guarantee you that none of those friends would ignore a well dressed stranger addressing them on the street.
It's been pretty maddening. And I occasionally hope there is a special place in hell set aside for such people.
I am now well enough that getting back into housing would make sense. But it needs to be real estate I own and have control over, so I can rip out carpeting, or whatever, if necessary. It cannot be rental housing and it cannot be a trailer. So, it will be challenging to arrange.
How do you get by these days? How can we help?
If you want to help, there is a tip jar on the site. (You can click on $1 and then enter any number you like.) Money is always useful. Promoting my work in some way so I get more traffic would also be appreciated.
Thanks!
There is absolutely no comparison between having to sleep on the street and having a vehicle to sleep in, especially during the fall/winter in seasonal areas. I would absolutely live in a converted van if it meant saving money. Sadly, I don't have a van to convert ;-)
I've been in such a position following an abusive employment/housing situation. What you say completely rings true. I think there's a partially neurologically wired category of "other" in our brains that is meant to make us super cautious of rootless individuals. Even in our nomadic hunter-gatherer days, we had good reason to be suspect of individuals who didn't have group membership. (Effectively a "home.")
One of the great tragedies of our society is that we've allowed our mentally ill to slip through the cracks. Untreated schizophrenics and PTSD-suffering Vietnam veterans may or may not make up a significant percentage of the homeless we see -- but they're certainly the most memorable. They stand out. They ingrain, in passersby, a mental map of homeless people as "crazy," or "violent," or "dangerous." And so we start to believe that homeless people are broken somehow. Many people go a step further; they start to regard the homeless as less than human.
These pattern matches are powerful blocks on empathy for many, many people.
Someone homeless hasn't!
edit: typo corrected!
That's why you call yourself a digital nomad. Instead of people distancing themselves, you get people asking "Wooow how do you do that? I would love to do that? What's it like?".
As a homeless person with a van, you probably have a more permanent base than most digital nomads. Or at least more than what I did when I was nomading more properly. (and yes, I do miss it)
I think it's reasonable to assume that anyone who has enough skills to "build things" has enough skills to get an average software job. So, just curious, did you choose to build things and be homeless instead of getting a mundane software job and not be homeless?
Show me an alley, show me a train
Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain
And I'll show you a young man with many reasons why
And there but for fortune, may go you or I
Seriously, once I rented someone's large closet in Phoenix for $100 a month when I needed to save money. I showered in the gym and stayed in my office all day. Even in the most expensive cities someone will take a "ghost roommate" for $500 a month; pennies compared to cost of a physical/mental health related disorder.
I don't even mean across the country. I mean just 4 hours north or south or east. There are cheaper places to be in California than SF, aren't there? It seems you could spend the year driving up and down the coast as cost/weather permits. And I don't mean daily. The fuel costs would get prohibitive at some point...
It might ultimately be more sustainable, especially if you're open to having a "roommate" or two (who probably wouldn't mind you being gone a lot!). I spent a year paying $233/month for an attic room in Atlanta (and I lived there), so the opportunities exist.
Would moving into the woods and "living off the land" have been an option? Is this even legally possible anymore in the United States?
* Assuming you had solar-generated electricity and internet access.
I believe national forests have a technical time limit on how long you can stay there. Maybe BLM land?
The only BLM land I personally know of is in Nevada/Arizona/New Mexico, and you can't really grow anything on it (it's desert). Looks like there's also land in eastern Oregon, Idaho, Utah, etc. so if you can tolerate cold winters...
http://www.blm.gov/or/about/images/landsmap-large.gif
Even on BLM land, someone is eventually going to stop by and pay a visit to see what you're up to.
Minutes ago
I wasn't completely broke but I couldn't keep affording rent as expensive as it was. I was able to shower at a gym, and worked out of Tech Shop on what I was trying to build. But it's hard -- like super hard to just be homeless. The social stigma associated with the word alone is hard for people to get beyond. I would often hear, "But you don't seem like the type to be homeless" and then they would slowly just distance themselves from talking to me. Super weird.
I have been harassed by cops, you feel extremely transient and embarrassed just to be alive at times. Sleeping in a van sucks too. Street noises keep you up, cramped for space, etc. On the up side there is a contingent of tech people that are doing the same thing, so I had the pleasure of meeting some others like myself.
I've never taken up the opportunity of food, shelter, or clothing offered by the city, because frankly I'm doing this on my own accord, so I can't speak to how that part of the system helps people get back on their feet.
After this entire experience my heart breaks every time I see a fellow human having to resort to sleeping in the cold, wet, outdoors with no shelter and nothing but some cardboard and discarded newspapers to cover up with. I often wonder how close I could have come to being completely broken by this decision, and what coincidences led someone down this path. In the end it has helped me understand that we must all care more for one another, no matter what.