[squeeze]

This post seems a little naive to me, and certainly couldn't apply to every single person who no longer has a home in California. We've developed technology and built homes so that we didn't have to deal with living in the outside world - to keep the outside from coming in, so to speak - and it gives us choice and stability, if we are able to maintain our possession of it without too much stress and trouble. That it is still hard to keep a home in a lot of places should be a real concern - things like that are not good for anybody. Homelessness can hurt people and hurt communities. I'd want to see some real investigation rather than conjecture about whether these specific people are doing it out of choice, or whether they are capably dealing with the extremely difficult and unpredictable circumstances that often accompany homelessness. The perspective you are arguing from kind of seems sheltered to me. There have been many more people protesting across the U.S. in the last few years than have been living the idyllic and romantic hobo life, free from stress and want.

Your mother does not seem like much of an unassailable source of wisdom when it comes to the realities of poverty - maybe you should argue from a more personal or sourced perspective about what it is like to be poor or homeless and what kind of conditions folks in such a position experience?