In California you can apply for General Assistance, which pays $336 per month. Of this $178 is sent directly to your landlord, leaving you $158 in food vouchers and enough bus tokens to get to and from your monthly meetings with your social worker.
GA is intended to provide just enough support so that your fellow citizens are spared the inconvenience of having to step over your dead body on the street. It is, of course, not enough to live on. You will have to make up the difference between bare survival and the lifestyle to which you would like to become accustomed by begging, dumpster diving, drug dealing, prostitution, or working under the table for whatever you can get.
Your social worker knows you can’t live on what the state provides, so they are aggressively inquisitive about your hidden sources of income. Any money you tell them about is deducted directly from your grant.