What Helps The Homeless

These are awesome. They aren't very expensive. They are safe and environmentally friendly. They do not require electricity and cannot burn you. They don't seem to give off any odor or fumes when activated, something I am extremely sensitive to. If you are worried about homeless people in your area in winter, in addition to a hot meal, jacket or similar, give them a ten pack of Little Hotties. These have really made a difference for me on cold nights.

Most people on the street have medical problems of some sort. A lot of them also have mental health problems. Even if you didn't start with them, life on the street can make you a little loony, due to social isolation and other stressors. I have a serious medical condition. I have been getting healthier for a lot of years. This started well before I went homeless, but has continued while on the street. Eating healthy and avoiding exposure to more germs is a big part of how I am doing that. Most soup kitchens are unclean, crowd together people who are unclean and unwell, serve food that isn't all that good and are just uncivilized environments. My first six weeks in downtown San Diego, when I was especially destitute, I went to soup kitchens very regularly. As soon as I had food stamps, I mostly stopped. I did keep getting a free breakfast at a women's center that was really good and I did sometimes have lunch there, when I was really flat broke late in the month. My s...

I was walking along today carrying a couple of bags of recyclables. A very obviously homeless guy pushing a shopping cart asked if I wanted more bottles. I said sure, though I couldn't take much more unless he could also give me a bag because my bags were nearly full. He gave me a 10 cent beer can. I crushed it and stuck it in one of my bags. He said with surprise "Where do you go that takes CRUSHED cans??!" I named the three closest places of the five I use. One was about a 10 or 15 minute walk behind him -- it was, in fact, where I was headed -- and another was about a 10 minute walk in the direction he was going. I repeated myself a time or two and gestured at the one I was going to. He said "I'm not going back down the hill." But then you could see by his face something clicked. I guess he realized how close he was to the one behind me. He got excited and asked a bunch of questions about where exactly he needed to go and what exactly he needed ...

Most people on the street have some kind of health issue, either medical or mental health or both. Free meals and other homeless services tend to attract the most desperate and destitute. Unsurprisingly, the average quality of health and ability to interact well socially for groups of homeless folks at meal sites and other services trends pretty poor. This means that if you have a serious health problem, getting the help you urgently need today in order to not starve can expose you to all kinds of other illnesses and even things like the threat of violence. It's an extremely stressful and sometimes downright counterproductive way to muddle through. It also tends to be hugely time consuming. There are typically long lines and if you want to be guaranteed to get something, that sometimes means showing up an hour or two early. They can also be incredibly hard to track down and hugely difficult to physically get to, in addition to sometimes requiring a lot of paperwork and so on. Unl...

One of the things which makes homeless individuals stick out like a sore thumb is the fact that many of them live without a car. So they walk a lot -- and/or use a bike and/or public transit, but for purposes of this post, I want to focus specifically on the fact that homeless individuals walk a lot more than most Americans. I have literally had the cops called on me for walking in a neighborhood where no one ever walks anywhere. So simply walking in some places is such weird behavior that it makes you very suspicious, and there can be serious consequences merely for walking. There is an excellent essay called Walking While Black (PDF) which is about a black man's experience of walking in his own neighborhood after his car broke down and getting stopped by the police for it. I am a white woman who rarely had anything to do with the police prior to being homeless, yet the piece resonates with me because of my experiences since becoming homeless. So one thing you can do to hel...

In California, you can do small scale recycling of cans and bottles at a lot of grocery stores. This actually includes Walmart and Target (at least some of them -- I have no idea if every single location participates). While on the street, I began doing small scale recycling at a particular store on a daily basis. I was typically there twice a day, every day with a small amount of recycling. Over time, my average increased to something above $2/day. Over the course of a month, that adds up to over $60 a month. If you are on the street, extra money like that can really make a difference. This particular store has you sign a log book indicating how much you brought and how much money it was. When I first began going, most days of the week, my name was the only name there -- twice a day, every day. On weekends, there were sometimes other names but not very many. On more than one occasion, someone either asked me a question or commented about the fact that they had not known y...