Homelessness for Berger is a combination of personal circumstances and government policy. As the story unfolds, we see the Berger struggling with the day to day realities of both homelessness and poverty. The family is able to get by because they are supported by state and federal programs:

They live mostly on Bessie's $375 monthly Social Security check, Charlie's $637 disability payments, Larry's $300 food stamp allocation and cash from bottles and cans they collect and recycle.

However, the meager amounts are not enough to provide stability. I wondered what the deal was with Berger's two grown sons - why were they all in the same position as their mother? The article explains that both sons have their own issues:

Charlie worked in construction and as a painter before becoming disabled by degenerative arthritis. Larry was a cook before compressed discs in the back and a damaged neck nerve put an end to it. Twenty-six years ago, he began working as a full-time caregiver for his mother through the state's In-Home Supportive Services program.

That ended about four years ago, when the owner of a Palm Springs home where they lived had to sell the place. At the same time, the state dropped Larry and his mother from the support program, he said.

The three have tried at various times since to get government-subsidized housing. But they have failed, in part because they insist on living together.

They say they have driven the Suburban around the state looking for a housing program that will accommodate them. They have been in Los Angeles about eight months, following a stint in the Concord area.

The story hints at other personal issues that are not covered. After all, if Larry is a home health aide, why is he not able to find employment in that sector to help with expenses? And what about Berger's other six children?

Bessie spent her young adulthood in Northern California and worked as a packer for the National Biscuit Co. until she was in her 60s. She gave birth to 11 children, eight of whom are still living. She remains in contact only with Charlie and Larry, who were both born in San Francisco, grew up in Santa Rosa and have high school educations.

Questions aside, this article is new take on policy issues of state support and how it is applied. For example, take the issue with receiving Section 8 housing:

They thought Bessie had finally qualified for federal Section 8 housing — she had been promised a rental voucher, they say. But then she needed surgery to replace a pacemaker and spent three months in a recovery center. Housing authorities in Northern California awarded the voucher to someone else during her absence, according to her sons.

Living in the front seat is miserable, she said. Still, she is glad to at least have that.

The Berger's have a complicated story. Clearly, there where times in which the state has dropped the ball on providing needed services. The Bergers may be entitled to more benefits than they currently receive, and it was the closure of another state program that thrust them into homelessness.

However, there are many parts of the story that still remain a mystery. What happened between Bessie Mae and her other six children? Why are they no longer in contact? And why would her sons not want their mother to at least have a place to rest, even if they cannot share the space with her?

Unfortunately, in situations like this, there are no easy answers.

Woman, 97, Has A Front Seat To Homelessness [LA Times]

Then, also yesterday, after work on a crowded subway, a woman reached over to tap me on the shoulder and say confidentially, "You have mascara under your eyes."

Now. No one wants spinach in her teeth. No one wants her dress tucked into the waistband of her tights. No one wants icing on her cheek. Very few want a long piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. I appreciate being alerted to these things. Mascara flaking onto my cheeks? I think I can handle it.

I'm not quite sure what about my 1950s ski sweater, boy's pants and filthy Chucks, or my armful of grocery bags, made her think that I was someone who would be bothered by this. If I'd stopped to think about it, I probably would have assumed that my ten-hour-old drugstore makeup job was a little the worse for wear. After she told me, I thanked her, and felt like I needed to make some pretense of having standards about these things, so I juggled my bags and took a half-hearted swipe at my begrimed cheeks.

Which ladymag is it who does that feature where women go out on the street in some state of humiliation - an enormous fake period stain on white pants, for instance - and see if passers-by come to their aid? ['Glamour'. -Ed.] I've never really understood the rationale behind this particular column, but I guess it's some kind of study of human nature, a mini "what would you do?" The rationale for alerting other people to this sort of thing is, generally, that the embarrassment of telling them is vastly outweighed by that which it will save. You do it because you would want someone to do it for you. And this is one of the many reasons that I've always preferred the somewhat more circumspect Analects interpretation of the Golden Rule, "Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you," as it seems a hedge against craziness. Because obviously this woman (whose grooming, it should be said, was flawless) would have wanted someone to tell her if her mascara was flaking - which it wouldn't be.

When you think about it, there's a pretty limited range of things that our society considers so unilaterally unacceptable that we can know with assurance that no one in her right mind could mindfully tolerate. Food on face and teeth. Open zippers. Popped buttons. All of them, really, the tiny things that keep civilization in check - keeping us just a few zipper teeth and buttonhole stitches from a Roussea-esque wildness of gobbled food and naked, Edenic prancing. When we see these things, our sense of personal and societal responsibility is such that we must act, we cannot sit by idly and watch someone commit the sin of obliviousness. By the same token, we'd never tell a bum on the subway that his fly was open - we assume he's opted out of these niceties of civilization, and wouldn't feel the appropriate wave of scalding shame. If we saw an old lady with lipstick on her teeth, we'd hardly make an issue of it; to do so might imply a larger failure. No, in a way it's a measure of respect to remind someone of these things - it implies shared standards, values, understanding. Which is why a communication breakdown like the mascara incident is so weird - was she wrong, or was I? Anyway, I made a stop at Sephora.

At a recent dinner function, I was seated next to a stranger who told me about her divorce, abortion, gynaecological troubles, abusive childhood and teenage sexual experimentation all before the main course was served. I responded with polite interest and sympathy but cheerfully declined to reciprocate with confessions of my own. Later, I learnt that this woman had found me "uptight" and "secretive".

Maguire is not the first to talk about this phenomenon, of course, but her perspective, that of a writer who's tipped her toe in overshare, is an interesting one. She mentions a Variety piece in which the author excoriated Matt Damon for keeping his family life private, an act of unfairness that seems to Maguire emblematic of our sense of public entitlement.

But chronic oversharing is not just a celebrity disease. Producers of reality and lifestyle television shows have no trouble finding people desperate to talk about their sex lives or air their overeating issues on camera and those who can't get a television gig can simply start a blog or YouTube channel....And then there's Facebook, where relationships are announced, questioned and destroyed in tiny, instantly published snippets.

We can debate the implications of society's lack of boundaries till the cows come home and, whatever our thoughts on TMZ, maudlin personal essays or uncomfy interviews - when it's ok, when it's not, whether money figures in or it devalues personal relationships and true sharing - at the end of the day we're forced to agree that it comes down to personal choice. Maguire's point is that choice is the operative word: people can spill their guts, but it shouldn't be mandatory. More to the point, someone shouldn't be considered 'uptight' or somehow disconnected from their emotions because they don't share this openness. As Maguire puts it, "Today we all live with the expectation that we must happily spill our guts for whoever cares to slosh through them. Once considered a virtue, discretion is now viewed as either a character flaw or a sign that you're hiding one." What I think most people will agree is that we've all gotten unreasonable: we may judge people for overspilling, but we still read it, and indeed, expect it. And then feel comfy airing our own thoughts about their behaviors in public forums.

But at the same time, when we, and Maguire, talk about these issues, we're still using the moral language of previous eras, much of which is simply anachronistic. Any celeb can tell you that the face the public sees and knows bears little resemblance to their real selves. The 'selves' every high-schooler might show the world nowadays is probably not the essential soul his parent imagines (and this, is, of course, part of the worry.) Perhaps unconsciously, most people now have a kind of public face that was simply not necessary in previous times, and while this is probably no palliative to a social critic, it's also true. If we feel an entitlement to celeb lives, I wonder if part of the reason isn't that we've had to adopt some of their guises and wiles, the art of sharing and keeping, of exposing and staying yourself. And if we can do it, why shouldn't they? Too much information [Sydney Morning Herald]