Tales of extreme poverty: Surviving on next to nothing





SardonicNihilist "Growing up my family had its moments of struggle. Our public transport system at the time had tickets which were simply hole-punched with the date and month, not the year. So we'd save them and store them neatly in envelopes marked by month and concession or full fare. After a few years of saving tickets we pretty much had free train and bus travel for the next 10 years... until they changed the ticketing system to electronically stamped tickets with bar codes."SardonicNihilist less "Growing up my family had its moments of struggle. Our public transport system at the time had tickets which were simply hole-punched with the date and month, not the year. So we'd save them and store them ... more Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close Tales of extreme poverty: Surviving on next to nothing 1 / 25 Back to Gallery

San Francisco has one of the nation's wealthiest populations, so it may surprise you to

learn that nearly one in four San Franciscans lives below the poverty line.

Some 184,000 people, 23 percent of the city, qualify as poor, according to the Public

Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty.

Moreover, the gap between rich and poor keeps getting wider. San Francisco has fastest

growing inequality spread in America, according to the Brookings Institution. The ratio is

high because the city's wealthy households have incomes higher than in any other major

city ($353,000 at the 95th percentile).

How do poor Americans survive as others enjoy a comfortable standard of living? Often by

desperate scrounging and self-sacrifice just to put food on the table.

A thread on the online forum Reddit recently explored the issue: "What do insanely poor

people buy that ordinary people know nothing about?"

Here are their stories (in above slideshow.) Some are heartbreaking.