This seems to be something people don’t always give second thought to. When people talk about the homeless, the first things thought about are images of people on busy city streets in rusty clothes waiting around near allies. In there, the answer is quite static, because it can be I guess. But if that’s the case, change the setting and that changes too. In the places where I’ve lived, people often needed that mapped out. Where are they known in your rural locales?
They don’t. Winter takes care of that.
On a serious note, there aren’t really any in my area. There are some romas during the warmer months, and they live temporarily wherever they can. Usually a small camp in a forest.
If you’re a homeless citizen without the means to find housing, you will have housing provided by the local government.
I was about to type this exact thing. We have some homeless of course, people always fall through the cracks - but for the most part, the local government provides for basic needs, shelter, food, money and (in due time) housing. Winter is harsh, you don’t really survive living “in the nature” in rural areas.
Summer months often see homeless in the form of “Roma traveling beggars” or the “Irish asphalt/garden workers” who live out of caravans, tents or just back of their cars, but they migrate to southern Europe when winter comes.
But yeah, we pay a fuckton of taxes to have a social security network that catches people who are down on their luck. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. People don’t have to live without food or roof over their heads.
There are homeless shelters here too, but it’s not as easy as just making it clear you’re homeless. For us, there are so many hoops to jump through that many will feign mental illness to get a “free” stay at the psych ward because it’s actually easier.
In a van down by the river.
I should’ve seen that coming.
Yeah, glibness aside though I really don’t know of any particular spaces. There’s a couple farmlands I’ve seen around that welcome ‘vanners’ but I get the impression those are more by choice folks that essentially camp here and there. Kind of the commune thing where they travel the country and live anywhere they want for a month or two.
I have no idea where he slept, but there was one former millionaire homeless dude who setup shop on the side of the highway for over a decade. He sold honey, pine seeds and some other stuff like that that he managed to forage around the area (probably getting into people’s property too).
Nobody offered a former millionaire a roof to stay under for ten years?
There’s not many where I live because homeless people usually need to beg and there’s no point begging in the countryside where you’ll see three people a day.
I’ve never been to a rural area where there weren’t at least a few places with a higher passerby frequency than that.
In tents on the riverbanks in my friends town
There are small hunting cottages out here that people squat in. Owners were constantly contacted in the past about it but nothing ever got done.
The owners sound like they were being covertly generous.
There’s a shelter a town over, and you rarely but occasionally see makeshift shelters by the power lines up the mountain a few minutes