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We've seen hints of Heywood, wich is where V lives in the 48minute demo, a low-med to low income area.
I think the conversation that V has with the corpo bitch was in Santa Domingo, as it is a purely industrial district and that area fit the description.
Then there's Watson, where half the population of NC lives in cramped spaces, very asian themed.
And finally Westbrook, the top class, 1%, hyper-excluse rich people area.
Various sources of art for the game will show you how different income people live and are portrayed. The stylistic choices are part of the lore, mainly explained in the timeline provided in the pen and paper rpg (although some of it is being retconned in Cyberpunk Red, the next edition, coming out in August).
I see it as you see poor people basicly homeless using iphones that worth 1000 dollars some how or laptops so maybe the game idea behind this is in future tech will be extremly common where low end tech is just norm for poor people and clean cloths and such just goes with the tech of the world making it easyer for personal hygin for poor and homeless people like.
Any ways just my thoughts on it and how i see it. =)
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()(")(") Thanks for taking time and reading my post <3
US poverty line in 2015 was $11,770/year for a single person. So if you live on $950/month you are below the poverty line. Doesn't mean you are starving, are homeless or run around in rags.
It's part of the genre really. If your curious about how it all works there is a Cyberpunk wiki (I linked to it not long ago when someone was questioning the existence of feral children in the setting) and it comes directly from the RPG that defined it and in there you can probably find some run downs on the "cyberpunk lifestyle" and all of that.
A very basic (but still long for message forums) explanation is that the world is ecologically devestated due to corporate excess and yet the population continued to boom, so you have a tremendous number of people crammed into the cities. There is simply not a place for all of them to live, even with money, so most of them wind up living on the streets. Many "successful" sorts like PCs will be able to sleep in "coffin hotels" which are basically wall niches with security doors allowing them to rest safely, others have to literally "squat" outside. Of course the minority of people employed by the major corporations can live pretty well as "wage slaves" and the CEOs and executives make guys like Caligula or Nero look austere. The Nomad Tribes who roam the wastes outside the cities in vehicles can oftentimes have access to vans and RVs and such, while a situation like "V" who is "on the street" but has an apartment is crazy unusual, I imagine CDR just wants the PC to have a base, and isn't bothering to think about how that would be maintained or defended in the scope of the game.
At any rate to answer your question directly, as most people cannot afford property, and even when they have money sometimes a lot of things they want (property, or even food) cannot be bought people tend to invest what they want into themselves. Rather than having say an apartment or a car (where do you park it? how do you protect it when your not inside... or heck even when you are inside?) these guys invest everything into their clothes, hair, or perhaps most famously by the name of the setting their cyberware. Self-improvement this way is one way they can try and get ahead, and if nothing else it helps them survive. Consider most of those who DO survive are some level of criminal (there are not really any "normal people" except maybe among the corporate wageslaves, or out in the few farming areas that still exist or whatever) and as they oftentimes victimize others to survive, they themselves rig themselves to be harder to victimize. So yeah, you can wind up with someone who looks like the physical ideal, dressed in incredible clothes, expensive cyberware, and packing a pretty decent gun, and that person will be a degenerate street person. Remember in this setting reaching the ideal of physical attractiveness is supposed to be fairly easy, so many people become ugly, or weird, in order to stand out. Being some "street angel" along traditional lines isn't much of a gimmick anymore.
In the fiction this can go to some rather disturbing places, in one story I read (I can't remember the name) there was a girl who had extensive custom neural-work done so she could experience all of her pain inputs as pleasure. She did this specifically to get off the streets, and wanted to do this by giving herself as a gift/sex slave to a powerful crime lord who was also a corporate middle manager (ran warehouses) who was deeply into S&M on a level that made Desade himself seem sane and well adjusted. The way she saw it was that even when he eventually killed her, she would have gotten to know what it was like to sleep in a real bed for a while. In another book, I think it might have been "Neuromancer" one of the girls works as a "meat puppet" which is to say she has her brain turned off and "works" in a sex cubicle where her body is used for sex, using pre-programmed patterns for anyone who wants to get off (and I believe pay any resulting medical fees). This is seen as unusally desirable employment if I remember because the cubicle is off the street, and unlike normal hookers she doesn't have to be aware of all the sick stuff she's used for. Plotwise I remember she gets into trouble because she's gradually investing in "combat cyber ware" in hopes of becoming a mercenary and bodyguard, and she's just doing the sex thing to raise money (and be fairly safe), her idealized body being a means towards that end. At any rate some particularly nasty john triggers her combat implants and she kills him, and comes to consciousness with the body of a client, which of course upset her employer for obvious reasons. It's been a while but that was a major sub plot in the novel I remember it from.... at any rate the point here is that this should give you some ideas of what this world is like. People invest in their bodies and cyberware the way real people would invest in cars, or pay rent on an apartment, or whatever, since normal trappings of living that we have now simply are not there.... basically the problem with having an apartment like "V" does in the game should be that there simply aren't any for sale, and due to overpopulation and demand, the prices for even a crappy one should be insane, and then as I pointed out you have to worry about people robbing it constantly (or squatters moving in or whatever). It's actually easier to live out of a duffel bag, hide in a mall when it rains, and if you can afford it rent a secure niche in the wall to sleep in (otherwise you have to risk not shutting down in the wrong alley.... a common cause of death).