Homeless Lose a Longtime Last Resort: Living in a Car

<i>Officials say these bans aim to prevent nuisances that can be created by those living in cars, and most are enforced only on a complaint basis.</i><p>Nothing scares me more than comments like that from government officials. A law that is selectively enforced is effectively an invitation for police harrasment. Either the law makes sense, or it doesn&#x27;t. If individual civil servants get to decide when to apply a law, you&#x27;ve got a big problem.

I hate to be that guy, and I&#x27;m going to sound like an ass, but this is 100% his doing. Software worker in Palo Alto for 30 years making as much as 150k has no excuse. Save some money stupid. Also, when you get fired and can&#x27;t find another job, perhaps you should move out of your $2150 a month rental. That&#x27;s enough for 4-5 months or more in other places. $1700 a month SS isn&#x27;t much, but it&#x27;s enough to not be homeless in other places in America. It&#x27;s not enough to live in Palo Alto. MOVE.<p>All that being said, I&#x27;m not sure what the point of making criminals out of homeless people is. No reason to kick people when they are down.

It&#x27;s very unfortunate, but the main character also an interesting study in skill set relevance and retirement planning (or lack thereof).<p>He&#x27;s a software engineer in SV... By all the common stereotypes, he should be in the winner circle and living the life. Agism is definitely an issue in tech, but it&#x27;s likely that he is not up to date with some of the more modern languages or techniques, resulting in lack of employment.<p>If he lived there since the 70&#x27;s, he could have had a paid off place. (Typical mortgage is 30 years term.) If not save by paying off the mortgage, he could have also saved via 401k or something similar. It probably never really occurred to him that employment might be so hard to come by or that things would get so pricey. Coming from an eastern european background, I was conditioned that if you have a paid off place, you can withstand a lot of up and down swings in the economy and the world.<p>As a society, we should really be focusing on helping people properly market themselves and acquire&#x2F;update skills needed AND re-enforcing the need to plan for the future. Not really sure how we&#x27;d go about implementing the latter without annoying people though...

Well if Palo Alto is willing to spend $250,000 they could pave a bit of parking lot and put in a bathroom&#x2F;shower unit like exists in campgrounds. But that seems a bit extreme.<p>The guy profiled was tech worker for 30 years, but allegedly &quot;not good with money.&quot; If you&#x27;re in your 20&#x27;s don&#x27;t be that guy. Live within your means, save for those future days.

Seems to be largely a means of pushing the problem elsewhere.<p>&quot;Um, could you please be poor some place else? This is Palo Alto - we have a prosperous reputation to uphold.&quot;

At the risk of sounding (or even outright being) cruel, Mr. Smith&#x27;s real problem is that of terrible financial management skills. Keep in mind that when he moved out there in the 70&#x27;s, the Valley was not nearly as expensive as it is today. And, with a software engineer&#x27;s salary during its heyday, he could have very easily purchased -- and paid off -- a place for him to live. As he, himself, said, he made a choice to stay in the area even after he lost his job. He could have made a choice to move somewhere cheaper.<p>At the age of 70, after a long -- and I&#x27;m assuming successful, based on his highest salary -- career, having only a &quot;meager&quot; savings is no one&#x27;s fault but his own.

&quot;The neighbors in the community, I think, wanted to be reasonable, but they didn&#x27;t feel safe having their kids go to the center&quot;<p>Making laws to make the neighbors feel safer! Fantastic! &quot;Don&#x27;t be poor around me, I don&#x27;t feel safe.&quot;<p>This is one of the worst forms of NIMBYism. And treating the disadvantaged as dangerous is a form of prejudice. How unfortunate that people only seem to care about racial prejudice.

Hard to fathom that a 30-year seasoned veteran of software engineering can&#x27;t find a shred of work in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the article, Mr. Smith hasn&#x27;t worked since 2006? Something is terribly amiss here.

I find the overwhelming perspective of comments approaching this article to be, fascinating. I also think that Diogenes of Sinope would have a great deal to say concerning the matter.<p>I would say that it&#x27;s a fallacy to dwell on why Mr. Smith is living in an RV or what he could have done to prevent himself from landing there. After all, it doesn&#x27;t answer the question of why the state thinks it ought to so finely dictate the comings and goes of a person or where it is that one should choose to sleep. To seek shelter is as much a natural right as any of the others and to deny someone easy access to readily available public shelter should come with the same level of concern as restricting speech.<p>I think it&#x27;s more interesting that we choose to allow those who do own or can afford to rent property to dictate and bully others for the convenience of their avoiding a &quot;nuisance.&quot; Since apparently choosing to reside in a house grants you greater worth than choosing to reside in a car.

&quot;An ordinance passed by Palo Alto last year would punish people cited for living in a vehicle with as much as a $1,000 fine or six months in jail.&quot;<p>Yep, that&#x27;s exactly the incentive they need to not be homeless. &#x2F;s

Only 15 emergency shelter beds in all of Palo Alto?! And an estimated 150 men, women, and children competing for those spots every night? That&#x27;s disgusting.<p>Companies who have HQ&#x27;s in Palo Alto: <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Companies_based_in_Palo_Alto,_California" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:Companies_based_in_P...</a><p>Not one of those companies, some of which are valued in the billions, could pick up the cost of sponsoring another ten emergency beds? Another five, even?

I don&#x27;t see why they needed to make this law specifically against living in a vehicle. Most places already have some sort of limit on how long a vehicle can be parked on the street. Usually around 72 hours and you have to relocate to another street (it doesn&#x27;t count to just move it a few feet). Let them sleep in their car... as long as they move it to another street every few days.

Let&#x27;s assume started in 1978 with 30k. Pay increases of 5.75%&#x2F;yr which gets him to 151K in 2007. assuming saving 10% and a 8% return per yr that&#x27;s 628k in 401k. Let&#x27;s assume market takes 40% and losses job with 2-3 years before SSN. Out there you could easily blow through any kind of retirement savings pretty quickly.

Serious question: Are there trailer parks in the area? A place where you can rent land for parking a mobile-home long term?<p>I am not at all familiar with the SF&#x2F;Valley rental market, other than hearing how it&#x27;s exorbitantly expensive and rents keep growing. I&#x27;d have to think there would be somewhere where rents are not so expensive. I have a hard time believing a standard suburban studio or one-bedroom apartment would cost $2800.<p>As for the article, it sounds like the man profiled here isn&#x27;t really making rationale decisions, so it&#x27;s difficult to tell how bad the situation, outside of this anecdote, actually is.

Does Palo Alto have regulations regarding minimum apartment size? If not, lower-cost microapartment complexes might make a good long-term investment.