Homeless. Why not live in a warm city?

Now reaching the obligatory news stories about the homeless and surviving the winter.

A bus ticket from anywhere it’s freezing to San Diego or Miami can’t be more than $100. That’s two days of good begging at a traffic light.

If you’re going to be homeless, why not in a warm climate? The overhead is the damn same.

 

Not_Sure_If_Serious.jpg

 

According to one chart I found through Google, San Diego city and county are the fourth most homelessly populated places in America. LA is the second.

So, you might argue that some people have already had this idea. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to much of a pattern here. New York and Seattle are also in the top four.

Infographic: The U.S. Cities With The Most Homeless People

 

Did you ask him his size ahead of time or just guess?

 

It's not that they choose a warm city. They just wander around until they run out of land and are at the beach. There's nowhere else to go.

 

Don't visit NYC as much as I used to, but one buddy used to say something similar to the op. We would wonder how
people survived. Many would go to a subway station, but some would sleep on the sidewalk in brutal cold temperatures.

 

My cousin's husband is a minister in Orange County and he has done some work with the homeless in San Diego. I told him homelessness here in Toronto is an industry and as tough as sleeping rough would be in San Diego or Miami or anywhere warm, it is brutal here in Toronto in the winter. When I would work nights last winter I would leave the office at 1:15, 2:15 a.m. to walk to the bus terminal up the street and pass people freezing on the street and many others huddled up under a bridge and when we get cold-weather alerts like we had last week you wonder what happens to them. I would pass one older guy who would get his sleeping bag out, use his backpack for a pillow and appear to be fast asleep despite the racket of cars, buses, trucks and trains passing by. I see him sometimes during the day in the train station in line to get coffee at McDonald's.

 

In Boston there are outreach programs run on the coldest of nights. People go around in vans offering the homeless rides to shelters or anyplace else warm. Every time I hear a radio report on these programs, the reporter always mentions that people refuse the help. Some people don't want to go to shelters even in the most extreme circumstances. Mental health/addiction is awful.

 

Same thing here in Toronto. Walking to the bus on the way home on bitterly cold nights I would often see cops talking to those bundled up on the sidewalk, not rousting them but trying to see if they can help.

 

There was a two-week stretch here early last year where the high didn’t get over 30 (-1C for our Canadian friends). Those nights were brutally cold and I can only imagine the hell it was for those people who chose to stay outside.

The past couple years people (tourists/the heartless) have been upset that the homeless now spend all day on the Common. They used to panhandle downtown, but now that it’s been revived not so much. How dare these people be in a spot where everyone can see them.