Neville Medhora lives off of Riverside. Earlier this month he made the decision to leave his home for five days to better understand what it’s like to be homeless in Austin. He chronicled the entire journey and not surprisingly it ends up being a fascinating story. Apparently, the bums over on Riverside are tame compared to those who reside downtown. One of the most salient points I gleaned from reading his experience was his struggle to find things to do – boredom became a problem for him. He goes on to comment…
On any given day a homeless person whose food/water/shelter are taken care of probably has about 10-12 free hours of the day. That’s a lot of time when you’re doing NOTHING….and doing nothing can be excruciating if you do NOTHING all day long, everyday.
Through the story you learn about Neville, including how he used to live in a loft above Paradise on 6th Street. I give Neville kudos for going through with this and telling the story along the way. From photos of the ARCH accommodations to under the bridge accommodations, you can find the details here.
-Jude
Thanks to Andrew Allemann for the heads up!
That’s great that he took the initiative to “go homeless” but I have a hard time believing he even scraped the surface in just 5 days. Maybe it was “excruciating” to do nothing in those days after living a life of constant activity but I would think one would need much more time to transition into such a life. But I guess that wasn’t the point.
to specify: I ride the bus every day and have noticed that a lot of the homeless ride the bus, have many friends, talk, bum cigerettes, fight etc… so I feel like there is a much larger culture and possibly ‘things to do’ that he wasn’t able to see.