7 Things No One Tells You About Being Homeless - Cracked.com

[Ace Acme]

35. Car dwelling is quite practical, but increasingly is being outlawed

Of course in the days of the skid row flophouses and SROs, homelessness was less of a problem.

The urban renewal programs demolishing "urban blight" wholesale were predicated on the idea that housing projects would be built for the people who had lived there. But of course the political will for that ran out after a few years.

I've never seen one, but I've heard of flophouses in Hong Kong and Chicago and the Bowery in NYC where a room is filled with oversized bunk beds walled off from each other with wire screening to make sleeping cages. You can lock up your stuff in your cage when you go out, it's warm and dry, there's communal toilets and showers (and sometimes a kitchen) and it doesn't cost very much.

But the PTB don't like to allow easy, practical solutions. They like the homeless on the street to cause fear.