Earlier quoted context omitted.
$70k is a living wage in Los Angeles; he his homeless by choice. To be clear, I’m not saying he is not underpaid. He might need a roommate and to live in a crappy apartment and not in Westwood to make it workable, which does not seem fair for a PhD teaching physics. But it’s not homeless level.
People seem to think it is easy to have roommates. My roommates were horrible, they wouldn't clean anything, blast music and always a privacy risks.
For some years I lived in a group house in a close-in suburb of Washington, DC. Some roommates were horrible, for a while I was a horrible roommate. But somehow I got by nine years.