One Reddit user writes about living in their car and running out of money for gas. Another says they’re going to be evicted in 48 hours and will have to give up their dog. Many are waiting on federal disability insurance payments that seem as if they will never come. Somebody asks if Richmond, Virginia, has any decent homeless shelters. And everyone agrees that social welfare services have been stretched to the limit—where they still exist at all.

These are the posts you’ll read on Reddit’s r/almosthomeless, where people trade tips and moral support as they face the prospect of living on the street. With a subscriber base that has swelled from 69,000 to 85,000 in the past year, according to third-party analytics tools, it’s one of various online communities for those pushed to the brink by financial struggles, whether due to a poor job market, illness, injury, addiction, or the need to escape domestic violence. Here, they can share their experiences without judgment and come away knowing how many others are in the same boat.

“The ground can give way beneath any of us,” reads the subreddit’s description. “Here, we build bridges, share maps, and steady each other’s steps.”

At a moment when economic inequality is skyrocketing in the US (as Elon Musk, the richest man in history, at least temporarily became a trillionaire), it seems that such distressing and dangerous situations are more common than ever. As of 2025, the wealthiest 1 percent in the US control $55 trillion in assets, roughly equivalent to the net worth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans combined—with those households continuing to fall further behind.

Shaun, 41, tells WIRED that he’s currently “cowboy camping,” or sleeping in the open, in Payson, Arizona. He says that he completed a detox program there but was involuntarily discharged from a sober residency. He visits r/almosthomeless because it helps to put his difficulties in perspective. “Seeing there are people that have it harder than me allows me to be grateful for the help I do receive,” he says. “I can’t believe the amount of people in similar circumstances. It breaks my heart.” (Shaun, like everyone interviewed for this article, agreed to be identified by their first name while withholding their last name so as not to preclude future employment prospects.)

While users of the subreddit are not permitted to make financial requests or share crowdfunding links, moderators encourage them to share actionable solutions and focus on what they can do to survive. Based on where an individual is, they may be pointed toward local resources or warned to avoid certain areas.

Scotty, 39, lives in a decommissioned ambulance he got from a friend who was formerly homeless. He uses it to travel around New England, occasionally picking up seasonal work on farms.

He says he fled an abusive long-term relationship in 2024 with almost nothing, then spent weeks unable to claim a bed in a domestic violence shelter. “Eventually I gave up and figured it out myself,” he explains. Scotty says that the volume of activity on r/almosthomeless—14,000 visitors and 700 posts a week—matches the reality of homelessness as he sees it from day to day. “It wasn't this common a year ago,” he says, noting that he sees more people living in their cars these days. The forum, Scotty says, helps members realize that losing housing is not a result of something “intrinsically wrong” with them.

Dana, 46, and Calista, 43, are two women in Florida who turned to the subreddit as they reckoned with the possibility of being evicted due to prolonged unemployment.

Calista tells WIRED that she has applied to more than a thousand full-time positions since losing her remote job in February 2024 but can’t seem to land an interview. She says she's three months behind on rent. “I've never been close to homelessness like this before. It's a new experience,” she says. “It’s very helpful to see the stories from other people, see the things they've tried, just that solidarity.”

Dana, who has extensive work experience in software development, says she has been laid off four times since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, most recently in November, in part due to the AI boom. A single mother, she has discussed the possibility of living in a tent with her son, who recently graduated from high school. “So many people are in similar situations,” Dana says of the stories she’s read online. “It's honestly been the most helpful from a mental perspective. I don't feel so alone.” This is contrary, she says, to the stigmatization of poverty that she feels in her own city.

Politicians and commentators who demonize the homeless population as mentally ill drug addicts—such as former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, who ran a failed mayoral campaign in Los Angeles that characterized them as “zombies” on “super meth”—are distorting the issues at play, says Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco.

“What we're seeing in the numbers of people experiencing homelessness isn't that we suddenly have this increase in people with mental health or substance use problems,” she says. “What we have is that the rent is too damn high.”

The cruel ways unhoused people are depicted in the media add “to the already very heavy burden of homelessness,” Kushel continues, with groups like r/almosthomeless countering those narratives and making people feel seen.

Keith, 35, in South Carolina, says he attempted suicide in 2023 after a long battle with alcoholism. He recounts how he survived jumping off a bridge but broke his back. After he received a spinal fusion, he found it difficult to work or do much of anything physical because of his injury, and finally he wound up homeless. He took to sleeping in the woods outside a hospital where he says he regularly sought assistance. “I was just staying there, like trying to get into the mental health department or something like that,” Keith says. “They would just turn you away.”

Later, Keith says, he secured a spot at a local Salvation Army shelter, found a job at a gas station, and in January made the transition into a studio apartment, staying sober and “building something that resembled a normal life,” he says. Yet lately he has started to worry that he’s “watching years of progress disappear in slow motion.” A succession of restaurant jobs, including dishwashing and prep work, have proven impossible with his back problem, and he has avoided further medical treatment for fear of the cost. Now he expects to be evicted, and he’s dreading a return to an unhoused existence.

Kushel says that over recent years there has been a documented spike in older adults experiencing homelessness for the first time (a 6 percent jump from 2023 to 2024 alone). Meanwhile, younger Americans are trying to enter an especially challenging labor market. “We hear about it all the time,” she says. As for the apparently dwindling local aid services, she points to H.R. 1, President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” as one obvious culprit. “Its impact, let's say on Medicaid, is actually having this ripple effect of causing huge holes in local budgets, state budgets,” she explains. “We've always been short of services, and it's just getting worse now, and I fear that it's going to continue to get worse.” (The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.)

For his part, Keith says the r/almosthomeless subreddit is valuable in terms of managing expectations and disseminating cautionary tales—he mentions that he was once taken in by a scammer who contacted him via a GoFundMe he had set up and that the desperation of being homeless makes one particularly susceptible to exploitation. “There's a lot of young people that are becoming homeless now, and I know that a lot of their first reactions are going to be to go to the internet, and a lot of them are pretty naive,” he says. “So I worry that a lot of people are just going to get taken advantage of pretty quickly.”

“Of course, there's definitely a lot of positives, too,” Keith says. “I've had tons of people, everyday people, reach out just to have a chat. All kinds of people giving advice. People can help in all different kinds of ways, and I've gotten all kinds of help.”