I’ve been homeless 3 times. The problem isn’t drugs or mental illness — it’s poverty.
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/8/11173304/homeless-in-america
I was born into a middle-class family, but I've hovered near poverty level all of my adult life because my line of work doesn't pay much. My career consisted of administrative roles in high-tech offices and government agencies, with most of it contract work because it paid more and provided more flexibility and mobility than permanent secretarial work.
I attended college pay-as-you-go for a couple years while working, then left because I couldn't afford to continue and knew better than to take on student debt. My moderate savings was destroyed in my 30s by health care costs that insurance wouldn't cover. Within the past several years, full-time work that pays a subsistence wage has been hard to come by. Now I'm pushing 50, and am aging out of a workforce that for the most part gave me a subsistence-level existence at best.
Three times within the past four years I've lived in my 36-year-old car that has more than 400,000 miles on it, because I could not find affordable rental housing or a job that paid a living wage. Though I reside in the Pacific Northwest, the situation is the same all across the country. Impoverished, working single women without children do not get top priority on long waitlists for subsidized housing, rapid rehousing, or other government services or benefits. I don't have family or a spouse to turn to for help or support. Friends can't or won't help for their own various reasons and circumstances. I am totally on my own.
I never dreamed that homelessness would ever happen to me, let alone multiple times. The first time I was homeless in the winter of 2012, I lost my job and had to live in my car with my cat, spending one month in the middle of winter with $230 to my name. My car heater broke years ago. I remember waking up at 2 am one mid-December morning and discovering my cat's water dish next to my head had frozen solid in the 27-degree weather — inside the car.
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