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A new ‘solution’ to student homelessness: a parking lot where students can sleep safely in their cars
(hechingerreport.org)
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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A beater car is still probably cheaper than an apartment. Also, you can't drive your slummy apartment away if you don't like the scene wherever it is, nor can it transport you to work. It's also some modicum of space wherein you can lock up what stuff you do own.
If I were placed under the terms of some very specific curse where I had to choose explicitly between a car and a house, I'm sorry to say I would be forced to choose my car. Actually, if I had my druthers I would probably pick my truck over my car, because despite its impracticality for daily transportation it's big enough to live in semi-comfortably as kind of a mini RV and would also allow me to store and transport some tools and stuff. (It'd also be much easier to use my truck to make money than a car, in some manner of hypothetical sudden destitution scenario.)
Ok, yea, it makes sense. I guess I just never heard of a homeless person having a car before
The vast majority of homeless people are not visible, and they are not the stereotype of the drunken incoherent bum sleeping under a newspaper on a park bench like the guy in Back to the Future.
It's startlingly easy to become homeless simply by having a minor upset in your income, which can get you evicted quickly if you're renting and especially so if you live in an area which has weak or nonexistent tenant protections. Lots of homeless people were doing just fine or at least close to okay before something happened. They got injured and thus lost their job. A spouse divorced them and took most of the income with them. Their house burned down but they didn't have enough insurance to cover it. They had to escape from an abusive domestic partner. Etc.
These are just ordinary people who had their home pulled out from under them for some reason. Now they're temporarily living on a friend's couch, or in their car, or in a motel room, or whatever. But the barrier for entry for obtaining housing is so damn high in many places that it's impossible for them to work up the capital to make it over that hump and either make rent plus a security deposit, or magically cough up the down payment on a mortgage.
Many of these people probably already owned a car before whatever it was happened to them and thus they still do. Even if they're still paying off the loan on that car, that monthly payment is almost guaranteed to be less than rent or a mortgage.
Cheers, it makes a lot more sense this way. Appreciate the explanation
Where do you live? Here there's homeless people sleeping in cars and RVs on the side of the road all over the place
It's also possible that I have seen/known homeless people living in their car, without knowing that they were homeless. I live in overseas France (Mayotte), am from mainland France (Marseille)