OMG I'm going to be thrown into the street!

[daredtowork]

457. Her first request for money was in February?

I'm not sure it matters whether she's been a model or tenant or not before then -what is clear is she has been living in the same place for a decade, which makes it harder to move out. When her problems getting her landlord to fix things started are not the same as when she started to ask for help here (when the legal/eviction problems started).

In regard to TTW asking for money on a forum - and again I want to do this without vouching for this particular situation - I would like to underscore the chief problem for people in similar situations is rent. This is because rent is a regular expense, and you wouldn't believe how rapidly months pass by when you don't have money for rent.

"Welfare" does not take care of rent money. It differs from place to place, but in my area it will offer a fraction of rent money, which it subtracts if you get a job to earn the rest: in other words it drives you into homelessness if you can't get a job or you get nothing if you do get a job because you repay the State from your earnings. It's basically a test to see if you were kidding about not being able to get a job or you'd be homeless. Where I live, it's even more cruel because you can only get that "fractional" money for 3 months out of a year unless you are disabled.

The expectation is you will become homeless, and that fractional money will be paid to a shelter rather than a landlord. This is something people like TTW are desperately trying to avoid: they want to maintain their personal autonomy, their possessions, perhaps a pet they've held for a long time. If they've lived in the same place for a long time, that's their home - they will try to stay there. In this situation they are also beset by a barrage of bureaucracy and hassles, so they also don't have the "bandwidth" to deal with figuring out how to start over in a new place with no savings, no job, no friends, etc.

Most people who haven't been in this situation have casual notions that there are "programs" there to help (like "Catholic Charities&quot . But once you are in the situation, you find that such programs will only pay for one month of rent, or will only help you if you can prove you will have a job next month, or some other criteria you can't meet. Rent is a huge expense - therefore few programs assist with this on a regular basis. This is a disaster for people waiting for SSI. The GOP view of this is all people who get in a place who can't pay their rent should "return to their families" - but this is an unreasonable expectation in a day and age where many of us come from small and even broken families. We are supposed to be on our own, and we need a social safety net to fall back on, because the family safety net isn't there.

So how are people "on welfare" or who are "waiting for SSI" or are in similar situations dealing with rent? As I complained to my local county political establishment the quiet expectation seems to be that people will fall back on unreported or illegal activity: begging on street corners (this is also unimaginable for many people hitting the eviction wall as TTW seems to be), prostitution, petty criminal activity, joining gangs and dealing drugs, day labor. Most other things will be tax reported, and it will undermine social service programs you need, such as food stamps, because they are regular and you will be able to rely on them until you can get back into the mainstream world.

Many of the "alternatives" are demeaning, humiliating, dangerous, and could result in an arrest record. So people are looking for ways to get their needs met while preserving their privacy and dignity. Of course that does open the way for scammers, like the infamous cases of people who have lied about having cancer to raise money on GoFundMe accounts. But this may have led to people being overly harsh about what's a "scam", too. A few years ago, there was a guy who claimed to be Suddenly Homeless on Daily Kos. At first this guy annoyed me because I felt he had taken advantage of my own welfare posts to ask for money, and Daily Kos had especially developed a culture of certain people "working their corner" to absorb the generosity of the whole community and overshadowing other needy people: this guy seemed to be doing that by regularly posting diaries that got a zillion recs. Then someone caught him in some lies (including sockpuppets vouching for his own posts and doing his own social media boosting), and suddenly he was a scammer who had robbed the whole community. Looking over that story in the aftermath, it was probably a little more complicated than that: yes he lied and scammed, but he also probably did need rent money month after month, and this was a more dignified way of getting it than begging on the corner.

I've been in my own situation for three years, and though I haven't been reduced to begging and scamming, people certainly give me the stink eye about it. Three years is an INCREDIBLY LONG TIME!!!! But it's not my fault. It's because I have been caught in various bureaucratic delays, snafus, procedures, and processes that actually take that long - and there has been no appropriate safety net for me while I go through all that. People don't believe it unless they have actually been through it.

The simple truth is that the safety net is inadequate, and it forces people to do all sorts of things to try to avoid homelessness. And that fear of homelessness places an incredible burden of constant stress on people. Since rent is a monthly demand, those same people keep coming back until they either get some help or they are driven into homelessness.

That's just how it is until we collectively do something to fix the social services infrastructure in this country.