For a whole lot of homeless people the answer is nothing. Nothing happened. They just slowly slid into homelessness as they were slowly priced out of society.
About a month ago I was at the gas station filling up my 24 year old clunker when a homeless guy came up and asked if I would give him enough money for a coffee. I was going to lie and say I didn’t have cash on me, but it occurred to me that I’m one bad day from being in his shoes every moment, so I checked the emergency stash I kept in my car and on impulse just gave him the whole pile of it. Idk how much it was, not a ton, but a handful of ones and maybe a $5 or a $10. And yeah, a week ago, that bad day happened. My husband dumped me via text message, and now I’m very, very close to homelessness in the next few weeks or months if I can’t find a place to go soon. It’s not always drugs, or addiction, or laziness. Sometimes it’s making what look like good decisions and just getting fucked over.
100%, I am someone who is very strict with my finances because I’m usually the one to help others out of a bind. This past month I had would have ruined most people and I only scraped by because of my over preparedness. 9K in one month and another 3K this month. Car blew a head gasket, insurance wouldn’t rent me a car so I had to out of pocket, then failed inspection for tires and had to replace those, city said they were changing some code and the cost to upgrade fell on me. Etc. Life can come out of nowhere and easily make someone homeless even if they were doing reasonably okay. And that’s usually how it happens too.
