The stages of homelessness, two years in. (YMMV)

Just after my rent went up by more than my food and cat budget, I rehomed Clovis and bought a van.

I'd done quite a fair amount of research, having been dabbling in tiny-home living for seven years, so building out an off-grid system wasn't the issue it could have been.

I was not prepared for how things would transpire.

I selected my van based on the Cummins engine and Allison transmission, both of which are famous for longevity. Thing is, that covers nothing else, so when the starter motor dies, well, that's a replacement. Serpentine belt breaks on your way back from a build day? That's a $400 tow for five miles.

The electrical system was a high point early on. Everything just worked, and my laptop was happy to work with my 5G hotspot while the fridge actually kept ice cream cold.

Moving forward two years, my fridge has failed so many times that I don't even bother putting anything other than beverages in it. It's a cooler after having to throw out hundreds of dollars of food over several rounds of trusting it again.

The electrical system? Well ... you sign up for certain things when putting your batteries in series, and one is sudden imbalance. Which means the whole system is dead. This is fine when you can crash with a friend and charge there, but when he's down on the coast, this becomes a very expensive hotel adventure.

One other thing that made me feel good about this decision was my ex-boss was fine with me using the dumpsters (I park a few hundred feet away from those), but that lease ran out a year ago, and everyone else nearby locks theirs.

There is a lot of trash in here.

It's not all doom and gloom, but some days, it feels that way. For example, I never waste food anymore unless the fridge fucks me.

But slowly, normal human conditions change. I had a gym membership to shower daily and perform other bodily functions. Sadly, things did not go well at work, and now that was a $20 expense I couldn't justify.

I'm not a naturally stinky person, and I still had the nearby brewery to go to for indoor plumbing; so far, so good.

Obviously, I was still peeing in bottles when leaving the van wasn't really an option. There's a fair amount of grass here where I could dump them, so I wasn't being a bad neighbour.

Then, you have the first time you get sick. Even the 24-hour 7-Eleven an eight-minute walk away is not going to be a solution to shitting the bed. This is where a bucket comes into play, if you hadn't donated the bucket to the makerspace for an event and not retrieved it.

So, now I'm not regularly bathing, and that's the least of my hygiene concerns.

I share this not for sympathy, but because there's a strong sense overall that people become homeless and everything goes wrong at once -- and we just become degenerates. That isn't the case; many would like to bounce back, but as things continue to deteriorate, that simply becomes harder.

My dad dying means I'll have the funds sometime to file for bankruptcy and hopefully be able to get back on track, but that still looks like a long road.

I'm lucky that I have an exit ramp. Once one starts going down this rabbit hole, things just get more and more complex. When people talk about social services in standard media, this is all but ignored.

It's not just housing or jobs; it's literally needing to jumpstart your life with a dead battery. Bootstraps!

Throw in the increasing cruelty of services for the indigent, and you're creating the problem you're trying to scare people with.

Balance housing costs and wages, and I think you might be surprised how the homeless problem solves itself.

Maybe a few hippies want to be here, but the rest of us do not.