Features Apr 25, 2018 at 4:00 am

The city's public housing authority leaves little wiggle room for struggling residents.

rob dobi

Comments

1
Great article, Heidi.

2
I have seen successful people, become ill, go through divorce, get cancer, lose a child and then lose it all in seattle. They have become homeless.

I know a pediatrician, he is is going through a nasty divorce. He is living in his car.

When 20% of the country owns 80 % of everthing, this happens. It happened during the last great depression. It is like monopoly. One person gets all the property, and the prices are so hi, no one can afford rent or to buy anymore. When 1/2 of seattle is homeless, maybe something will happen.
People should read The Grapes Of Wrath. Poverty, desperation, broken faith, reality. Especially in the ending, where the pregnant young gal, who thought god would help her, starves to death-homeless.
And in this terrible time in murican history we get fuko the clown and this. Ben carson wants peopples rents trimpled while he buys a 31,000 china shelf at taxpayers expense. What a wonderful, compassionate christian, this fuk is. His college, paid for by us his wealth in medicare payments from us. Never more evil, greed, warmongering, lying in america before.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/ben-car…

Thanks for these stories Heidie
4
Excellent reporting. It is such a service for reporters to go find out what is happening in legal clinics. Advocates like Edmund Witter, Rory O'Sullivan, Mark Chattin and many others belong in the conversation about the housing crisis. Bravo to The Stranger and to Heidi Groover.
7
If I get behind on my $1250 rent or don’t pay I get evicted! Don’t pay your rent get evicted! Don’t pay light bill power off. These people got in good in most cases they also get free utilities! Why should they not get evicted just because they can’t pay their $100 rent. Give someone else a chance.
8
I have had 5 friends go homeless in the last year. One has two little kids. She was an Lpn. I have lost touch with her. Another worked for amazon. He Could not keep up. Another works, but has a bad leg. Masters degree. Living In a car now. A friend working at a hospital. She has a masters, lost her job. She is homeless now. It was after a divorce, custody battle. She is very nice too. Probably moving.

It is awful. None of us are gulpers. All vegans or vegetarians. 2 have no cars. We are not shoppers. There are many homeless in small towns too. I have never seen anything like this, in my life!

I have a relative who owns 100 slummy apartments in shithole Texas, . Always bragging, about how she has doubled the rents in the past two years from 500 to 1100. Just a goddamned opportunist and slumlord. She says market values and demand keep going up. Most people who rent from her are working poor. People and young people, who have to work more than one job and pay 2/3 their wages in bills and rent. A slum property with shitty maintenance.

It is like that all over the us now. Many people cannot afford to anyway. I would go to any grocer but, never walmart. There is a walmart up north that is almost all autmated now. Who needs that shit!

Trump has cut transportation for the disabled , blind, poor, kids.

All the frikin morons who voted for trump, are getting screwed now. The mind fucking propaganda they use on the inet and tv is unbelievable. I hate hillrys guts too.

Many sliding-scale health and dental are clinics closing.

Trump will start shutting down VA hospitals soon for us veterans. What an evil, ugly nightmare and mess.
How stupid can people be to keep voting for fuko the clown, repuklicans, and corporate war monger demoquacks?
9
@5:

Yes, it makes perfect sense to house them in Seattle for one very simple reason: this is where the vast majority of social and support services are. What's the point of hauling them all out to Moses Lake (seriously?), Spokane, or Walla Walla if there isn't sufficient infrastructure - besides just hospitals - in those places? That's just foisting the problem off on some other municipality, which frankly, is what a lot of other cities do already by giving their homeless a one-way bus ticket to here.
11
Now to rid this community of the wretches who will go apeshit on anyone who says “the only way I escaped homelessness was personal accountability”.

Everyone understands that eviction over $49 is one hell of a rough out.

Does everyone understand the state of utter shit and decay that much of this country is in?

“That shithole over there does this” does not a strong argument make.
12
Stick yo personal responsibility up yo stupid psychopathic lyin ass, till yu get cancer and die from it. Demented sack of shit at 11. Always same nonsense.
14
You have to draw the kine somewhere. It sucks but, you can't just keep floating someone behind on bills, forever.
15
Yo, I'd pay for Heidi's reporting if I could.
17
SHA does seem to be quick on the draw when it comes to evicting over a few dollars in unpaid rent. I get it. I've done landlord work and plaintiffed in evictions. Not my idea of a good time. And I understand why landlords don't want to rent to problem children.
But we are talking about subsidized housing here. Why do we do it? Because we are willing to admit that there is something fundamentally unreasonable about expecting low income people, disabled people, and destroyed by the divorce industry people to pay over $1,000 per month to rent an Apodment that makes a McMahon Hall dorm room look spacious and capacious.
So we create a Seattle Housing Authority and expect people to pay 30% of their income in rent. But gosh! Sometimes a paycheck is late. Or the hours are shorted. Or a garnishment comes in and surprises the tenant. So they fall behind by a mere $49 and SHA isn't willing to WORK with them?
Instead we hit them with an eviction action and tack on service fees, filing fees, lawyer fees and all the rest because of course! Someone who falls behind by $49 can afford to pay $2000 in tack on costs.
Right.
Thus we get another cardboard box resident camping under the freeway and sleeping under extra scratchy purple blankets. That is a burden upon us taxpayers too.
Perhaps a blanket prohibition on imposing court costs and lawyer fees on subsidized tenants who are not being evicted for drugs or criminal behavior is in order. Put that in the RCW's. For kicking a man when he's down has its disadvantages.
18
@8- looks like you're the common denominator in all your various friend's tragedies.
19
My friends have hard luck. We are all older. The cost of living is way out of proportion, in this place to affordablity. They live in different places than me. Vashon, Lynwood, Closer to town, West Seattle.

I am not so lucky. Bad divorce myself. I live by Everett. I thinks seattle is getting very rough. I think a lot of cities are.

I have friends and family. Some of them really like it in the Puget Sound.

These friends are not doing so well. I wanna get out of the puget sound. So do some of these. That is the common thing, we have. Cost of living and quality of life in cities, does not make it worthwhile anymore.

Hard to find good jobs outside cities, but it is probably worth it...
20
Infuriating and heartbreaking story, wonderfully reported. Thank you for telling it.
21
@16, It's fair because I'm sure if you broke it down you'd find that apartment turn over (even if you have a long waiting list) is expensive. It surely costs more than $49 dollars to turn an apartment over (and that's counting the cost of the eviction). So in that case, it seems irresponsible to have so itchy a trigger finger.

As for the people on the waiting list, they aren't the responsibility of some poor person who gets an unexpected bill. With a scarce public resource like that no one "deserves" it. That's not how we should work. Said people on the wait list are also likely to have unexpected bills come up. They're likely to need help from time to time.
22
@8-what does being vegan or vegetarian have to do with any of this? Are you suggesting that those who eat meat are less worthy of housing?
23
I am one of the people in the story, so I can personally speak to this. No, I am not sitting around eating bonbons & expecting a free ride, despite what people may want to claim. I support myself financially by working & receive no other benefits. In my 25 years in the Seattle area, I've also volunteered extensively & given back to the community in many ways. I am well-educated & worked in the healthcare field for years, so when I became sick with a chronic progressive/degenerative illness (of which there is no prevention & no cure), I could see the writing on the wall. Serious illness/injury is financially catastrophic for the vast majority, unless you are the 1%. And frankly, even if you are fully able-bodied, to be able to afford an apt in the Seattle area you would need to make "$24 an hour or about 87 hours of work per week at the current minimum wage." https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/06… Think of how many minimum wage jobs there are in the city...so essentially, it means all those workers can't afford to live here...which means more commuters, & the transit system just isn't up to par...& so on, & so on. It's a snowballing issue.
Anyway, back to the story. Seattle Housing Authority is a huge & varied topic, & Heidi has only so much space with which to write an article. (She has written many excellent pieces!) What on the surface may appear to be an inability to pay rent, is actually much more complex. SHA is deeply flawed, irretrievably broken, & needs a major cleaning house. Here's a little more information to give you an idea....
I signed a lease at SHA at the beginning of June 2016. I found rather quickly that SHA exploits the vulnerable & marginalized populations they serve. They also break various regulations from city to federal, & when I would bring one up, they would simply tell me they didn't have to follow it. (I won’t even go into all the Tenant-Landlord regs they break.) One of them regarded how they calculated rent. Because of my health issues, I work "intermittent" positions since they allow me the flexibility I need. There are federal labor laws regarding temporary, intermittent work which limit employees to a certain number of hours a year. SHA consistently projected my yearly salary beyond that cap, thus making my rent higher than what I should be paying, sometimes significantly higher. Whenever faced with a tenant complaint, SHA either blames the tenant or ignores them (or both), which makes it virtually impossible to remedy anything. When I started contacting politicians & agencies to see who had jurisdiction over SHA to try & resolve the issues, I found that they essentially had no oversight or system of checks & balances. The more I looked into it, the more I found that others ran into the same problems as myself. My activism made me a huge target at SHA, but I stayed & continued to stand up b/c I knew giving a voice to others who didn't have one was the right thing to do. Before my eviction, I had been experiencing months of retaliation from them. SHA's legal team was doing everything they could to try & shut me down to the point where they were specifically trying to infringe on my civil liberties & make my existence there as difficult & onerous as possible. For the SHA attorney I was dealing with, she was out for a personal vendetta b/c I had reported her unethical conduct to the WA State Bar Association. SHA knows they can get away with all this since it's a civil matter & their tenants can't afford attorneys to fight back. (And SHA's legal team lies- a lot. In legal documents. To the Court. To everyone. Sadly, people believe them.) There is far more to this than simply being unable to afford rent. It's about SHA specifically exploiting the marginalized, knowing that they will put up with it b/c they don't want to end up on the street. If Seattle is serious about it's commitment to affordable housing & the prevention of homelessness, then it needs to focus on systems in place, like SHA, that are irretrievably broken.
(The housing court & eviction process are other things that need an overhaul, but that's another topic as well. Washington CAN is working on policies right now to help change some of that.)
24
Thank you for another great article, Heidi. One would think that the SHA and Seattle property owners would wake the hell up. This clearly isn't the Seattle I once knew as a child and later as a renter way back when.
@23 inchoruspluviam: I am really sorry to learn this. I hope it gets better for you and so many others struggling.
25
I get so sick of the boorish "I have to pay my rent..." mouthbreaths who are compelled to comment here. They clearly didn't anything but the headline (if that) and so they have to overcompensate for their inadequacy by sticking their ignorant opinions in.

The SHA is a public organization which, by changing it's policies and being more flexible, could reduce the homeless churn and the perpetuation of misery. It doesn't require huge investments, changes to law, or anything but a few government bureaucrats acting like something closer to humans. But the grunters in the audience have such a little conception of decent human beings that that's pretty much beyond their comprehension.
26
I am an Anarchist, so, yeah: adversely possess or squat!!! --- https://www.npr.org/2014/03/12/287349831…
27
I could not stand to read much of this article. It reminded me that bad decisions build up over time and lead to disaster. Being 20 years old with two kids is the result of very bad decisions. Bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. How do you protect people from their own ignorance? Pay more taxes, I guess. (I was a homeless teen who chose to avoid pregnancy, thank God.)
28
A story from the other side: I am of the dreaded and evil Seattle property owner / landlord class. I just finished an eviction of some SHA Section 8 tenants. Despite a monthly subsidy of almost $1900 !!! from SHA, they still did not pay their minor portion of the rent or utilities, smoked heavily inside a non-smoking apartment and trashed the place. Eviction is a last resort that is very expensive and time consuming. But sometimes it is the only lever a manager has to cut loss. I will be about $10,000 in the hole from this outing. I find that a bit painful, being a basic middle class type. But, whatever. It is a business, so no whining is allowed.
Given all that, I do think the social welfare system is inadequate in this country. But, have the people in these stories availed themselves of all the benefits they are eligible for? We do have SS payments, SSDI, food stamps, public housing and Section 8 housing subsidies. If your income is low enough Medicare takes pretty good care of your healthcare needs.
So, from someone interested in good journalism, why not expend a bit of effort and look at the sad stories from an income and expenses side? With income, food, housing, healthcare and other subsidies, can they really not scrape together a meager living? What does thier monthly budget look like? Have they availed themselves of all available assistance? If no, why not? How much goes to alcohol, tobacco or addictions? Have they sought addiction treatment?
Maybe I am full of beans here, but I would like to see a bit deeper dive from the reporter.
How about it, Heidi?
29
As an added note, and to further throw gasoline on the fire, my impression is that the Seattle Tenants Union is more interested in idieologically driven class warfare than actually assisting struggling low income tenants. But WTF do I know.
30
@29: As if the two processes are mutually exclusive? Methinks you doth bullshit too much . . . .
31

@30:Not necessarily mutually exclusive, but certainly not necessarily synonymous either. But that is probably too hard for you to think about, so resorting to childish insult is easier, correct?

32
@30: Let me back up. To respond to your dickish comment with my only slightly less dickish comment does nothing to further reasoned discussion. Sorry, I withdraw the last sentence.
Let me explain. The efforts of the Seattle Tenants Union in this unpleasant series of events appeared to me to be directed so as to cause me the greatest cost and loss, and to assist the tenants not at all. The tenants still got evicted with all the baggage that carries for them, and I lost a bunch of money. There could easily have been a less confrontational and expensive solution to the problem. As a result, I will look at future Section 8 applicants with a much more skeptical eye, and hasten my exit from the lower / moderate end of the market. Please explain how that works to the benefit of lower income renters. And a very polite "thanks".
33
@28 Dirt Bag; If you read comment #23, you will see that I am one of the people in the story, & yeah, you are full of beans. First off, my SHA apt was pretty gross (understatement) when I moved in, & a handful of things were broken. It took SHA several months to fix the broken items, & I used so many cleaning products trying to clean the place & get rid of the sticky grime, mold, & nasty smells, that I'm somewhat surprised I didn't spontaneously combust from all the fumes.
As for your apparent assumption that social services are easy to get, that is incorrect as well. All the arcane regulations around them can disqualify those who seem to need it the most. As for Social Security Disability, they have a massive backlog & thousands have died before they were able to receive it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-secu… People are also typically denied several times before they finally get it. It's an exhausting drawn out process, so it's not uncommon for people to end up homeless before they get on disability.
I find you're view of the tenants very similar to SHA- we're all crazy, liars or addicts. Not that it should matter, but I don't have addiction issues or mental health issues, nor do I smoke. I am well-educated, & worked my way through college where I graduated in the top 10% of my class at a state university. I was an exceptional athlete who was on specialty wildland firefighting crews during the summers & worked in healthcare during the rest of the year before I got sick. The degenerative illness I have has no prevention & no cure- It's simply one of those crappy things that happens to people in life. I am intelligent & quite resourceful, yet I still ended up homeless, b/c one can only do so much against a highly exploitative landlord such as SHA. There are others out there like me (& yes, I've met them)- I'm not some anomaly- but like with the color of one's skin, religion, gender, or what-have-you, people have preconceived notions, & only look for what supports what they believe. I hope this will "expand" your outlook a bit more. Cheers.
34
@33: “WHEN YOU THROW A STONE AMONG A PACK OF DOGS THE ONE WHO YELPS LOUDEST IS THE ONE WHO HAS BEEN HIT!!”
35
The comment thread here has been most informative. You see, the media paints private landlords as nefarious and evil, but subsidized housing systems are not much better, and are bureaucratic nightmares on top of it. The comments here have clarified for me that government doesn't provide much of a solution to housing either. Any young person on the margins reading these comments would do well to take heed and make sure they have their own resources, and to cultivate a network of friends that can assist during hard times.
36
Thank you, Heidi. This article is especially timely for me. I spent Thursday listening to the stories of two residents of Sand Point Housing (in Magnuson Park, near my home) who are facing possible eviction due to nonpayment. Given that this housing is specifically for people who are emerging from homelessness, I was shocked to learn that standard eviction procedures do apply to them and are in fact pursued. Sand Point Housing is owned by the city and operated jointly by Solid Ground and Mercy Housing. I am still trying to figure out the roles of the various organizations; SHA is also involved somehow. But the experiences of folks who have fallen behind on rent at Sand Point Housing are the same as those described in this article.

For those of us who are comfortable financially, it can be hard to understand how anyone could fall behind on rent when rent is less than $100. But when your income is very low, any emergency can put your finances to zero: a car breakdown, a health crisis. And then it all snowballs with late fees and parking tickets and missed work. Folks generally are taking advantage of all available resources but when they aren't, it's because it takes a great deal of effort to learn about them and jump through all the hoops necessary to take advantage. Poor people have to jump through more hoops because poor people don't have the social capital to demand efficient service. And it's even harder when you are chronically ill and/or work long hours at a job that doesn't let you make phone calls from work.

Regarding moving poor people to other parts of the state: one person I talked to had to move 30 miles from her friends and family in order to get low-income housing. Now her life is harder in many ways; she doesn't have the help with her kids that she used to get from her mom, and her older child is missing their friends.

@23, thank you for taking the trouble to share your story here. @28, I am a landlord, too, and I don't question or envy your distasteful experience with section 8 tenants. And kudos to you for giving it a try. Likely, under similar circumstances, I would have pursued eviction as well. But, I wish that you and everyone who's financially comfortable could have the opportunity, as I did, to listen directly to stories of people facing eviction. When you hear it directly, it begins to make more sense.
37
@33 Dirt Bag. Your response simply shows your complete unwillingness to accept any information outside what you want to be true about low-income tenants. Meanwhile, I will continue to fight for housing reform & spend my time actually trying to make a difference. Cheers.
38
@36 Heidi. One of the big issues I ran into when I was trying to find out who SHA was accountable to was some of the confusion you mentioned. Much of public housing is an amalgamation of resources who can receive funding from local to federal. Then some are tax credit properties, while others aren't, which supposedly effects how rent is calculated. Some may even be "mixed" properties as well (market value & subsidized). It makes it very difficult to get any straight answers, & frankly, I found the employees don't really understand it either. When I was able to get an answer now & again, it would be a different one every time.
You're also absolutely correct in how difficult it is to get resources. For example, there are some orgs who will help with the rent if you are going to be evicted. The problem? They typically will have a call-in line once a month (1st Tues, 2nd Thursday, or what-have-you), & if you can't get through (they only have so much available each month), then you have to wait a whole month to call again. There was one org I called for months & still never got through. The times I was able to get into the phone cue, the last "spot" was always given out when I was the next one in line. Some months you just can't call b/c, as you said, you have to work or some other pertinent issue. Some orgs are meant for specific demographics (families with children, seniors, veterans, etc), so you won't qualify unless you meet their criteria. When you call 211, they will ask demographic questions to weed out what you will qualify for from the beginning. Some programs will not always be available every month b/c they depend on funding- not enough funding, no program that month. It is a lot of hoop jumping- again & again & again- in a pit of nebulousness.
It does irk me when people talk about why don't low-income folks make better decisions. Well, it's because they don't have the breadth of choices others have. Sometimes, your choice is between crummy & crummier- neither is good, but it's all ya' got. There is an article on "privilege" that I particularly like, b/c it is one of the only ones I've seen that goes into something called "intersectionality". "Intersectionality allows us to examine...varying dimensions and degrees of discrimination while raising awareness of the results of multiple systems of oppression at work." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-cros…
Thank you, Heidi, for taking the time to listen to our stories.
39
@36 There is no SHA housing at Sand Point. Solid Ground built and owns most of it. Mercy Housing is rehabbing the block-long brick building on Sand Point Way. There are three group homes for youth. The confusion may be that there may be Sec. 8 vouchers involved that are administered by SHA, but they don't own the buildings, which means they are newer and better maintained.

The big picture is that HUD housing has been defunded by 90% since Reagan. No new HUD housing, so that has shifted to nonprofits, who rely on tax credits, a public/private partnership with very stringent income accountability. HUD is starving SHA (and all public housing) for maintenance and it's falling apart.

Sec. 8 is a poorly executed public/private partnership strategy to shift public housing to the private market. The result has been discrimination, severe underfunding of supposed "fair market rents," poor maintenance--a litany of complaints. Bottom line: housing is expensive. We need a lot more low-income housing, and we need to support the Large Employer Tax. I'm proud of Seattle's efforts to step up to fill some of the gap in 40,000 low-income units that will never be filled by building more market-rate units.
40
@39 Sarajane46th. SHA is not a part of HUD. SHA is it's own entity with a board of commissioners & states on their webpage that they are an "independent public corporation." I have contacted multiple agencies & politicians about it. SHA has no agency oversight- just like private owners. SHA themselves say they are more landlords than public housing, & they exploit their tenants accordingly.
As far as their "stringent income accountability", that doesn't happen either. They were breaking federal labor laws in how they were projecting an annual income for me, & I complained to both HUD & the WA State Housing Finance Commission. They both said that they do not dictate how SHA comes up with tenants' annual income, just that they're adding the numbers correctly & taking the right percentage. SHA knows how to work all the systems to their advantage, & there's no one stopping them. Hopefully, that will now change.
41
And the whole situation is about to get worse, since "Dr". Ben Carson(the "Christian" Secretary of Housing and Urban Developments,is planning to propose INCREASES in rent on public housing units https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk…

How did so MANY people decide they are entitled to decide that large numbers of their fellow human beings should simply be left to die? That's what evictions and rent increases mean...slow motion mass executions.

God forbid luck should ever turn against any of YOU. God forbid any of your good fortune ever slip away. With one or two bad breaks, ANY OF US could end up in the situation these people are trying to survive. None of the people who think they have the right to treat other people as if they are nothing but two-legged vermin can claim to be so intrinsically superior that you can be sure it will never be you. Or me.

Shame on you for losing your humanity.
42

The city has a load of people to observe their buildings and post notice after notice the moment a payment is late. Small landlords are not able to be as efficient yet the City piles more and more restrictions on their ability to run their businesses as best they can.

Totally unfair.

43

42 the problem is NOT that it's too difficult for small landlords to evict people. The problem is that there are still those who believe that food, shelter, and clothing...the Holy Trinity of Daily Survival...should be luxuries available only to those lucky enough to be able to "afford" them. It sets up a horrible "we deserve to live-you DON'T" values system that should simply not exist in a society that claims to be in any way decent or civilized. And it's a values system that harms most of us, while enriching a tiny few who've done little to deserve it(in a rentier economy, an economy driven mainly by financial services, with next to no domestic production of anything), GREAT wealth no longer has any connection to the effort or "merit" of the greatly wealthy. It's all about a combination of good information, insider connections, and luck. Upward mobility has existed since the early Eighties for the vast majority, and what we've got now as a very small group of freakishly wealthy people holding power over the rest of us by inducing the many to shame everyone who is slightly lower on the ladder than they are.

For those of us of the many, it's time to ask:

Why keep doing this to each other?

Why keep doing this to ourselves?

44

Isn't there a way to donate to an organization that will directly help these people? I myself would be very willing to help someone pay their $55 rent, if it will stop them from getting evicted. Sometimes things happen, bad luck strikes, and all of a sudden you can't even afford your $55 rent. I've been there, so I sympathize.
I'd like to know if there is any way to help these people from becoming homeless.

45

@44 Scarlett.Syn That is very kind of you, but unfortunately, there are some more ominous issues at play. Many landlords & attorneys make money off the current system in WA which is why they are quick to go through with evictions. For example, in NY & CA, if you owe $10 before your eviction, you owe $10 after your eviction. Here, landlords & attorneys can charge whatever fees they want in the process- which is how $10 quickly becomes $1500- & then the landlord can raise the rent after they've evicted the tenant b/c we have no rent protection in our state. This is part of why a landlord won't accept the money even if the tenant is able to raise it.
If you'd like to donate for rent assistance, I'd recommend the organization that was formerly known as Centerstone; it now goes by Byrd Barr Place. https://byrdbarrplace.org/ I spent untold amounts of time contacting orgs for assistance, & I found them to be the easiest to contact, & to get assistance from. There were several I either couldn't get through to, or qualify for.
{I'd also like to thank the "good" landlords out there. I had several of them over the years until I got to SHA. They "made up" for it in spades- lol!}

46

We should just make housing for the poor free. People in low-income housing are there because they are poor-usually DESPERATELY poor-they need whatever resources they can accumulate to have any chance to get out of poverty.

All making the poor pay rent they can't afford achieves, all evicting people who can't PAY their current rent achieves, all that INCREASING rent achieves, is to punish the poor for being poor. And in doing that, we reduce our own morality and the basic decency of the society in which we live.

47

If one can get all of the monkeys off one's back, one can live pretty easily in Seatown on very little monthly income.
Sorry, the $50+ cell bill has to go.. the cheap $10 voice only is your friend now.
Drink?Drug?Shoppaholic?.. ok. Once a month you get $25 to splurge away. I suggest the dollar stores, Ross, and for the boozers and drugsters, whatever you can cop for the 25. And make it count. Celebrate 'something' once a month.
NEVER EVER EVER BORROW MONEY FROM ANYONE. Gambling, including those silly scratchers is completely out. Zero. Nee nee. No no on the wagering. (you're poor afterall.)
Ok, so now let's get you housed.
If you can't or won't get a valid driver's license, stop reading and go back to your cardboard tv.
Nevermind for you. You're done.
If you can get or do have a valid DL, go to your nearest UPS (not Usps) mail store and buy 3 months of the small mailbox for $90. Register your geico insurance to that address using your pmb# as an apartment number, or just #.
It will work 100% of the time with Geico.
Next, craigslist the hell out of your next 3 months.
You're looking for a late model passenger/cargo van that has pop-out windows all the way around. You're gonna need this for about 3 months of the year in Seattle.
Next, pick your favorite neighborhood in Seattle, and park there after 6pm overnight and leave at around 8am in the morning.
24 Hour fitness is your new shit/shower/shave facility at $49 per month.
Stay away from clusters of bad people who waste their checks in 10 days, and you'll be doing better than most.
Food?
Your choice.
None of my biz.
🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

48

@31: Dirt Bag: First: your username checks out!; Second: I have reported you to The Stranger's office for engaging in trollish misbehavior; by the by: your KKKONfirmation BiaSS is showing . . . .--- https://www.justia.com/real-estate/docs/adverse-possession/

49

@ 48: I'm gonna lose a lot of sleep over this...

50

@47 Cheese Burger. Your prejudice is showing. One of the biggest obstacles to finding ways to help change the homeless issue is people's rampant stereotyping. Ironic that a troll should make this comment b/c trolls do live under bridges after all. ;)


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