Who said anything about homelessness? Begging is a desperation move whether you have a roof over your head or not. I wouldn't even assume the pressure was related to rent. Maybe his wife is pregnant. Maybe the car or mortgage payment is due. Maybe his wife requires special medical care.
My former roommate got kicked out in January after turning in his 2 week notice (landlords were his employers). As long as I've known him he hasn't had phone service... just uses his iPhone 6S and mooches WiFi to communicate by Facebook Messenger. He has no personal transportation in a city without public transportation. He was just a minimum-wage dish-washer who spent all his spare money on Nintendo Switch games.
It seems he was finally ready to move on and turned in his notice when his prospective employer told him he was a shoe-in. Of course, they told him that because he said he had reliable transportation... for a field-service job that was on-call (repairing arcade machines). Definitely not the kind of job you'd want to Uber around for, and Uber doesn't even work on WiFi unless you have cellular service. If he needed it, my brother had offered him the use of his car while he was in Thailand for the month of January... so this guy took the plunge and resolved to buy someone's beat-up Chrysler by the end of the month with the check from the new higher-paying job.
Needless to say, his finances were very precarious, so when his former employer withheld money from his last check to cover utilities that he had never been liable for in the past, he wasn't able to pay his half of the rent at the place he was moving to. Because his next check had to catch him up on rent he couldn't get the car. Next, I find out he didn't even get that check (or that job) and he's now working as a dishwasher at a place right next to the one he just left! It's a town square with non-chain hipster places all around.
But it gets worse. In February his new roommate moved back to Florida because it was his mom's property and she suddenly wanted the house back to rent to her own tenant. I guess that explains the Florida plates I saw on his roommate's car. So my former roommate was left looking for another place to live... now with no transportation, no phone, and no money for rent. Only way he could ever afford to stay with me is because we were splitting the rent four ways, so there's no way he'd be able to fight and stay at the new place and pay all the rent himself.
I can't offer him a couch because he's literally not allowed here per the landlords. Only thing I could offer was a ride every now and then, but he couldn't even ask for one most of the time since, again, no phone or Internet. From the times I did give him a ride it seems most of his shifts were ~6 hours, so he couldn't have been getting many hours per week. Since I heard about some local restaurants on the square firing everyone a week ago I've been wondering what the heck he could do if the same thing happened to him... and then it did.
Of course, everyone else on Facebook reads that and assumes he's staying at Ashley Park (outdoor mall/shopping center) because he's suddenly homeless but he's not kicked out yet. He's there because the loser has no car, no phone, no home internet (or computer), and no water, so it's the only place he can even get an Internet connection for his Switch or WiFi-only iPhone. That's what he means by "other complications." Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that his water has been cut off for over a week. His roommate was behind on the bill before he ran off to Florida. Ashley Park is also a 25 minute drive from the place he'll have to be moved out of in the next couple weeks.
Point is, I saw that backpack and I didn't even think it could be him until after I posted this. This dude had it MADE when he was living here back in January... walking distance to work, rent so cheap even he could handle it, other roommates who handled most utilities, free access to a huge gaming library with thousands of retro games (right up his alley), movies, and streaming services... no one even asking him to help with chores or yardwork. A couple weeks ago he walked over four hours to get to work at his minimum wage job that he doesn't even have anymore, so I can just see him getting dropped off at Ashley Park with that backpack and then clumsily forgetting it when someone offered help.
He really did lose his job and need help. My hours were drastically cut at the start of the week so I'm in no shape to help right now. Again, I can't even offer him a couch or a shower since the landlord's forbid him from the property (they are super-vindictive... did it to the last tenants too). He can't drive stick so he can't even make use of my car that I had no real use for since Tuesday (out of work sick). Dude's a lost cause.
Yes, a lot of this is his fault for not having savings, a phone, transportation, etc before burning his bridges with the landlords, and I've been complaining about what a loser he is ever since... but no one saw this coming when he started trying to turn things around back in December. He thought he'd be making quadruple what he was making and have a car and everything by now but instead he's worse off than he or I ever could have imagined at the time.