Still less of an oddity than someone residing on the train in the conventional sense as most of us do in out dwellings.
Look at how many hoops you’re jumping through to justify the headline. Rationalizations are great (more important than sex, some say) but they are also not needed when the facts are clear.
I’d say her situation is more like an office rental than a living situation, but in reality it is just having a train pass and a lot of travel time. She’s hardly unique in sleeping through some of her commute, or doing work/homework on transit. Even her basic toilet isn’t far outside of the norm.
When poor people do this all the time, it’s just the filthy unwashed being filthy and unwashed. When a privileged person does it, they can write a paper about it for fun and profit.
Nothing against her (do what you gotta do, man) it’s the way society interprets this that is weirdly fucked up.
I have a close acquaintance who has done precisely this (the van thing). I knew them 4 years before before they divulged they didn’t have an address. It takes flexibility to do this, but ye gods, what you can do with an extra grand or more a month. Only works for single folks, tho. Two words: Gym membership.
Yup, before I realized that she was crashing at other people’s places as well as on the train, that was going to be the first thing I said she should do so she didn’t have to wash her hair in the sink.
Germany is working to control the cost of renting, and has introduced caps under certain conditions (it excludes new builds, for example). $450 sounds about right for a small/very small apartment where I live, although our own family house is quite a bit more expensive. you can share an apartment for cheaper, but that may not be suitable. I do know quite a lot of people who permanently couch surf, and we’ve hosted people for up to 10 weeks at a time. There seem to be an interesting number of jobs that our guests do to make money: photographers, translators, event workers, cooks, call centre workers, single mothers with some support, musicians, models, wwoofers… you also get people who just don’t have a home for different reasons: job seekers, backpackers, eastern Ukrainian students on “extended leave from studies”… Some are more or less homeless.
A hint I heard in China was that there are a lot of bath houses that are open 24/7. For a small price, you can stay as long as you like and use the lounging beds to sleep on. Presumably this is just a one night thing though.
