I wasn't completely broke but I couldn't keep affording rent as expensive as it was. I was able to shower at a gym, and worked out of Tech Shop on what I was trying to build. But it's hard -- like super hard to just be homeless. The social stigma associated with the word alone is hard for people to get beyond. I would often hear, "But you don't seem like the type to be homeless" and then they would slowly just distance themselves from talking to me. Super weird.
I've been in such a position following an abusive employment/housing situation. What you say completely rings true. I think there's a partially neurologically wired category of "other" in our brains that is meant to make us super cautious of rootless individuals. Even in our nomadic hunter-gatherer days, we had good reason to be suspect of individuals who didn't have group membership. (Effectively a "home.")
That, and I think a lot of it is also pattern matching. When we hear that someone is homeless, we compare that person to the mental image we have of the homeless people we've encountered on the streets.
One of the great tragedies of our society is that we've allowed our mentally ill to slip through the cracks. Untreated schizophrenics and PTSD-suffering Vietnam veterans may or may not make up a significant percentage of the homeless we see -- but they're certainly the most memorable. They stand out. They ingrain, in passersby, a mental map of homeless people as "crazy," or "violent," or "dangerous." And so we start to believe that homeless people are broken somehow. Many people go a step further; they start to regard the homeless as less than human.
These pattern matches are powerful blocks on empathy for many, many people.
I've been in such a position following an abusive employment/housing situation. What you say completely rings true. I think there's a partially neurologically wired category of "other" in our brains that is meant to make us super cautious of rootless individuals. Even in our nomadic hunter-gatherer days, we had good reason to be suspect of individuals who didn't have group membership. (Effectively a "home.")