Checklist before providing mutual aid by hosting someone you don't know:
1) *Know your regional regulations regarding tenancy. Really.
2) *Carefully* consider and communicate what you can and can't offer, and what you expect from them. Make records of those understandings.
3) Deeply understand that people's ethics are different in survival mode vs. just getting by.
*We could have simultaneously helped her and protected ourselves, if we had done something simple we didn't know about.
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I'm sharing this partly as a cautionary tale, and partly to get it out of my head.
Mid-September, my spouse asked if it was OK with me if he offered crash space to someone in desperate need. He framed it as saving a life.
I had major reservations. Both of us were beyond burnt out. There are two other adults in our home needing intensive support; each of us is a primary care giver to one of them, and we provide secondary support to each other's primary responsibility as needed. We've been doing this for over a year.
So. Major reservations vs. saving a life. I was unhappy about it, but agreed, because hey, what's more burnout compared to saving someone's life, right? Burnout won't kill me.. soon.
Within two weeks, it became untenable. At six weeks, it's unbearable. We've seen a lawyer, who was fantastic, and drafted a couple of documents for us, including the first step in eviction, which would put her at the front of the line for houselessness-prevention services.
My spouse spent all day yesterday finding a place we could afford to put her up for two months. She thanked him, and declined that location as unsuitable, asking him to find someplace else.
By this point, we were at the point of having the conversation via text from different areas in the house, and I told him, "Hell, no. Everything you come up with will be unacceptable. She gets to do the legwork."
Cue several hours of back and forth negotiations, with her pressing hard for a) direct payment to her instead of the accommodations; b) a refundable reservation; and c) immediate payment in full to the site she found. Her reasons for each demand were plausible, and it was utterly exhausting.
We won't pay her directly. We won't pay more than the cost of that first (non-refundable) two-month reservation my spouse found. We paid for the site she found, and she said she'd be out Sunday. A couple of hours later, she said that site wouldn't do, because it wasn't COVID-safe, and that she'd start looking again this morning.
I told my spouse I expect she's going to keep doing this, and if she does we need to use the same time pressure tactic on her that she used on us, saying the offer to pay for her stay has an expiration date. He prefers a less direct approach, but will use one, if there's a repeat, and is open to the expiration date idea if needed.
