Inside the life of an Instacart shopper
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It is the life that he chooses, because he wants to be his own boss, and to keep his living expenses very low. Could he earn more, with benefits, in a stable full time job? Yes. But he would not be his own boss.
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Have to say I don’t feel much sympathy for the guy. Yes, he works his tail off and lives in his car. It is his choice, the choice he made to retain his freedom from being tied to an employer and even to his kids he owed child support to because he is busy working. He is clearly not dumb (can quickly do the mental math to figure out his pay from an order and is writing a game app in spare time!) and has no disability that prevents him from working elsewhere.
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no more gift links, sorry!
Don’t have a subscription. Can you please summarize the point you wanted to make to me?
I had two coworkers who chose to live in their cars. Research scientists, well compensated. They could easily afford the rent in the area but thought it was ridiculous to pay more than they used to pay at their previous location after relocating for the job. They slept in the cars or in their cubes when the bosses weren’t around on the weekends. The facility had a shower, so that’s where they showered. A young person we knew started working for a big tech in SV and chose to live in the car because $3,000 a month for a studio was not their cup of tea.
Not everyone choosing to live in their vehicle does that out of necessity. Just saying.
Are there any nonprofits working to expand this idea of safe parking lots with bathroom facilities as temporary locations for people living out of their cars?
I recently traveled with an Uber driver in San Francisco who lived in his car 4 days / week so he could provide for his wife and four kids in Sacramento. Cars provide a semblance of privacy and security as they allow people to keep their possessions close while also allowing them to work. There are empty parking lots all over the country and re-purposing them, even temporarily, would be a great help to the unhoused.
Here’s some text:
Chrystal Audet tried to get comfortable in what she called her “bedroom” — the back seat of her eight-year-old Ford Fusion. To stretch her legs, she had to leave a passenger door ajar, but September nights are raw in the Pacific Northwest, with sheets of rain that cut to the bone.
From her own “bedroom” in the front seat, her 26-year-old daughter Cierra Audet asked her to close it.
“We have to get out of this,” Ms. Audet said to herself as she pulled a comforter against the cold and struggled to fall asleep in a parking lot in Kirkland, Wash.
Ms. Audet, 49, earns over $72,000 a year as a social worker for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. But a combination of bad luck, bad debt and a bad credit score priced her out of her apartment in Bellevue, another suburb of Seattle, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. With an eviction looming, she put her furniture in storage this spring and began parking the sedan in a U-shaped parking lot outside a church in Kirkland.
The car, her biggest investment, became her home — the roof turned into a dining table, the trunk a closet. And a weathered stretch of blacktop provided by a Methodist church became her yard, her neighborhood and her safe place.
Around the country, real estate is being set aside for people like Ms. Audet in the form of parking lots. Dozens of such lots have opened in the last five years, with new ones being announced every few months, including as far east as Pennsylvania and North Carolina. They are sprinkled across the Midwest in Green Bay, Wis., and Duluth, Minn. And they dot the spine of the Pacific Northwest, providing a safe harbor for a growing cohort of working Americans who are wedged in the unforgiving middle. They earn too little to afford rent but too much to receive government assistance and have turned their cars into a form of affordable housing.
Long complicated story, but someone who did some work for me lost her apartment and lived in my backyard for a few months. She did have a storage unit for possessions. Her animals which she refused to rehome made a shelter stay impossible.
Fortunately for her, my old minivan, which was running but funky became an option and I gave it to her and her animals. Perfect for the unhoused, it got her through a few more years.
It was an interesting lesson for me as to how refusal to follow a few essential societal rules led to this situation. She was pleasant, kept my yard up during that time, and had a part time job.
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