14 ms·

Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

239 points by chaostheory 8y ago

stevespang 8y ago
How big cities are just "backstabbing" each other, shifting the homeless problem around to each other, treachery. Seems to indicate that security in general and especially installing remotely operated electric gates with dobermans in Key West are a growing enterprise . . .
ianmcgowan 8y ago
An interesting, yet depressing story. Quite a nuanced look at a complex issue. The portaits of the homeless people involved helped humanize an otherwise abstract problem. The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story. The Guardian seems to be taking a page from The NY Times recently.
- trevyn 8y ago
  Weird, I experienced the interactivity as completely broken on iOS Chrome. I couldn’t even scroll properly to just read the article.
  - nitwit005 8y ago
    I also hit that issue on android. Had to keep scrolling on a text portion of the page until it skipped past the chart.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The Guardian has been doing this for many years. I don't know when it started, but there are some examples linked from this overview from 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/data-visualisation-tools-free https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/data-v...
- dylan604 8y ago
  > The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story. The web design is not intuitive. Why the need to break the browser's most basic functionality of vertical scrolling. The chart "visualizing" the data in 3 stages made me think the page was at the bottom. The animation finished, and then I tried to scroll past, except nothing happened. I had to continue "scrolling" to get the page to not move but have the next stage of animation start. Also, scrolling text over background text just looks confusing
everybodyknows 8y ago
Phoenix AZ was running a program like this decades ago. They'd tell the homeless about the great weather and services in San Diego, and put them on the bus -- no arrangements at all on the receiving end. Then they started getting phone calls from SD city hall...
ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
While they should definitely consider serving up a more static version for mobile (couldn't scroll on Firefox Android), the experience of reading this article on my desktop was truly awesome. I absolutely loved the graphics, cinemagraphs, and entire experience, and really do think it added immensely to the story itself. Is there a name for this style of article? Do they use some existing JS library or is it all hand crafted?
- alexbecker 8y ago
  Scrolling even on desktop was janky for me, and it was hard to center the paragraphs that were supposed to overlay the maps.
  - ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
    Goes to show just how broken the web is lately. I quit web dev after 20 years in the industry because it was frustrating me so much. I pretty much exclusively deal with hardware now and love that if I solder everything right, and put everything where it's supposed to, it works, and anything wrong with it is usually my fault or a broken component. Worked perfectly on Firefox Developer Edition / Windows 10. Was smooth and I didn't notice a single issue, FWIW.
- nickevershed 8y ago
  We call them "big scrollies" in my newsroom, I have also seen the format referred to as "Scrollytelling". There are a few libraries such as graph-scroll and scrolllama which work well with d3 specifically, but otherwise you can just make your own.
darawk 8y ago
IMO this is exactly what we ought to do. A big problem for the homeless is that they become poor in a place with no jobs for them, and then they get stuck. There are lots of places with shortages of the kind of labor they can offer, and making travel easier for them is a great thing to help fix that market failure.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise. Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc. Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see the homeless any longer.
  - spaceflunky 8y ago
    Yes, there are jobs in every city, but in major cities there is difficulty in finding housing and transportation. The cost of living is also high, so it's easy to get into debt. Whereas in smaller cities, it's typically easier to get on your feet because housing is more accessible, transportation is better, and the general CoL is a lot lower.
    - yayana 8y ago
      True, but this combined with brain drain creates a lot of perverse incentives and drives a further wealth divide. For example, many low tax base areas accumulate a population with more problems that have higher tax rates, insurance rates, etc (and a more strained social net) than a rich city. It is important to make sure rich areas are at least paying some of the costs they create in selectively pushing people out or creating bottlenecks to set a minimum CoL on who comes in.
      - darawk 8y ago
joeblau 8y ago
I lived in San Francisco from 2011 - 2016 then moved to Pittsburgh, PA for a job opportunity. This past August, I went back to SF for a team building activity and I was blown away by how many fewer homeless people there were on the streets (excluding Tenderloin). When I lived in SF, there were blocks that I would place money on being a homeless person there, and it seemed like most of them were relocated. Tons of familiar streets in SOMA were at or near zero homeless people. The interesting part is that my co-workers, who never lived in SF, remarked about how many homeless people were still out in the streets. To them, there were tons of homeless people and to me there were hardly any. I was so shocked that I even called one of my friends who is from the Bay Area and asked him what was going on?
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  They seem to just be relocating to other parts of the city as formerly homeless-heavy areas like parts of SOMA and the mission "gentrify." I walk through the loin twice a day on my way to my office on market st near the post-apocalyptic parts of SOMA and see a higher concentration of homeless in those areas than I used to. Perhaps you're revisiting the parts they've left or my un-scientific observations are wrong.
  - losteric 8y ago
    They also seasonally relocate, heading south in the winter and spreading out in the summer. Seattle's transient homeless population is largely gone by mid-December
    - marmshallow 8y ago
      Well now it barely seems like we are talking about human people.
      - have_faith 8y ago
        How would you prefer that sentence be written?
jakelarkin 8y ago
this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  There would need to be some form of accountability, and some sort of standard way of "getting people back on their feet". Neither exists, so it still doesn't make much sense for any municipality to pay into fixing people's lives in other locales.
- PhantomGremlin 8y ago
  It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing. I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet". But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High. IMO solving this problem is by no means "simple". How expensive is it to do "focused care"? Has it been tried, and what's its track record?
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    From what I understand there have been several successful pilot projects that are variously shut down or are considered inappropriate for other cities (politically unpopular). Utah just straight up housed people to great success. NYC has a massive homeless population but they also put a ton of money into housing their homeless- also to fairly decent success. For drug addiction, there have been successful needle providing clinics in Canada and America currently has methodone clinics to great success. There are various police programs just for connecting homeless people to resources to get clean and start working, and otherwise providing them what they need to survive until they’re ready, and we know these have had success also. None of them are politically popular and there’s a lot of opposition to implementing any of them.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Having to download HD videos an many MB of other stuff to read few pages of text on poverty. Oh the sad irony :(
RickJWagner 8y ago
The guy from Key West is bummed because he can't go back to the shelter he was living at. His plan was to return there, even as a fallback. He was COUNTING on it being there for him. I think that's part of the problem.
jimnotgym 8y ago
Does anyone else find that it especially easy to accidentally click ads on The Guardian whilst browsing on mobile? I don't get it with other sites. If so, I wonder what they have done to make that the case? I'm generally less annoyed by the Guardian site than many, so don't bother with 'Reader View'
habosa 8y ago
Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt. It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem. [0]: http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...
- conanbatt 8y ago
  The article even turns it around: if no bussing were included, the homeless population might be double what it is. SF is a net homeless exporter (with the huge caveat of impartial data).
- pound 8y ago
  Just a little nit: while article says they lived in SF and !had homes! survey linked says they were just SF residents prior to becoming homeless (though it mentions that 49% of them were living in SF at least 10 years, but don't forget that ~65% of SF residents are renters). Residency usually just based on any bill with city address within last 30 days. I can easy imagine case when someone moved to SF with hope that things will work out in big city, spent savings on few months of rent and with nowhere else to go and no established income ended up on the streets. While it's a sad situation it fits that previous SF residency narrative and in the same time not exactly part of some native san franciscans ending up on streets due to yet another gentrification cycle everybody so keen to bring up whenever homeless origin is being mentioned.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    There's an even bigger problem. There was no validation at all. It was based on self reporting which, in turn, was based on asking [ideally] random homeless individuals, and then extrapolating that outward. There is an incentive for individuals to lie here if they believe that 'native' homeless might be subject to preferential treatment, or if reporting 'native' homeless increases could result in more favorable incentives for the homeless. And given how big of news homelessness and home price issues are in San Francisco, I think this motivation is a major concern. I am curious about the baselines here for other areas though. Even given the incentive to lie, the reported numbers given still seem quite high to me. The most liberal metric is living in the city for at least 10 years, which applied to just below 50% of the homeless. Even if we take the most conservative metric of 'migratory' patterns, with 30% of individuals having moved to San Francisco after becoming homeless, that still seems very high. But I don't really have a baseline for comparison in other major cities and search is not turning up any particularly great sources.
mcnichol 8y ago
I really appreciate the amount of data and what felt like an objective view on both sides of the issue, some folks greatly benefited whereas it was problematic for others. Ultimately it landed in needing more data, immense respect for that type of data driven journalism. Really love the visuals added as well!
jorblumesea 8y ago
The US lacks a true mental healthcare system, and not even a healthcare system available to the poor. Not a surprise that cities just move the problem around, what can they do? It's a national problem with zero national coordination or resources.
- briandear 8y ago
  That isn’t true at all. Just a quick google search reveals a plethora of indigent care along with Medicaid as well as faith-based organizations. We should be more outraged at the VA system.
brownbat 8y ago
Reminded me of this story about Puerto Rico's practice of sending those with addictions to Chicago: http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/ http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/
flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
>But he maintained the policy was justified to discourage abuse – a point echoed by his former deputy, Mike Tolbert, who said it was the only way to prevent the shelter from being used as a “travel agency”. Why not simply restrict the free travel ticket a second time? Instead of the basic necessities like food and shelter? Writing that out makes even less sense once you think it through, however. If the goal of the city is to relieve itself of homeless people, they should offer as many free bus tickets out of town as homeless people can ask for... Even multiple tickets in a row... Becoming that dreaded "travel agency" that Mike Tolbert warns about. Surely it would be less expensive to pay for a second free bus ticket than to pay two police officers to arrest the same person 3+ times in a row for sleeping on the beach... And eventually the person might find a city or town that caters to their needs better than their first destination might have and end up staying.
- briandear 8y ago
  So taxpayers just keep paying for tickets until the person figures things out? If they know it’s a one way ticket and returning could result in an arrest for vagrancy, that seems to be a pretty strong incentive to stay away. The Key West man in the story admitted that he didn’t think they were serious. Well, they were. I am not arguing other points of the story, only saying that as a taxpayer, unlimited free bus tickets to anywhere doesn’t sound like a fair deal for the people who pay taxes. Homelessness is a tragedy for some and a lifestyle for others, that’s just a fact. Being homeless doesn’t somehow make you free of accountability for your actions: you sign an agreement, that should mean something.
  - nambit 8y ago
    Compared to the millions big cities spend trying to combat homelessness, free bus tickets seem like a bargain.
  - flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
    A lot of "homeless" people are actually "people suffering mental illness who haven't had adequate treatment". It seems crazy to you to think that somebody giving you a free bus ticket out of town isn't serious about your not being able to return... but to a mentally ill human being it's not so cut and dry.
Spooky23 8y ago
Cities with services often attract homeless and people looking for a better deal. My dad ran a section 8 program, and his backlog plunged when NYC started accepting more people... you could wait months upstate or show up in Brooklyn and be in a free temporary placement in hours or days. Other places will mention this to clients. South Carolina was pretty notorious for giving sick Medicaid patients to northeast states with enhanced Medicaid in the past, for example.
mncharity 8y ago
I wonder to what extent poor non-homeless populations are similarly shifted around the country, albeit more slowly? A city in New Hampshire used federal funds to build low-income housing. Which attracted low-income people. Who disproportionately used city services. Which cost more than the added taxes and federal funds which came with them. So the city bought low-income housing. And tore it down. Which seems analogous to buying bus tickets out of town?
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  Erm, which city? I just moved here.
  - tomcam 8y ago
    Not in the low income housing section, I hope
- abfan1127 8y ago
  do you have a link to this?
  - mncharity 8y ago
    No, sorry, conversation with principals. Many years ago.
burlesona 8y ago
I’d vaguely heard of this before, a lot of friends and coworkers here in SF have said things like “you know that _____ just puts homeless on a one-way bus to San Francisco, that’s why it’s so bad here.” I thought it was an urban legend. I was surprised and honestly amused to discover that this is real, but that it goes in the other direction, with SF bussing out ~10k homeless people in the last decade. Wow.
blondie9x 8y ago
Homelessness and lack of sufficient housing supply which drives the affordability problem is a national crisis. We need national solutions. We need to build more transit and more housing near that transit. We need to build denser and more towards the core. We need to not neglect the inner cities. America has the power to build better cities and solve this problem together. Affordability and skyrocketing rent costs will improve if we work harder to increase the supply of housing near transit points. We need to act on this issue quickly.
- abricot 8y ago
  Lack of housing is one reason, but don't think it is the only one. In Denmark there is no reason for anyone to be homeless by purely economic reasons, but we still have about 6500 out of a pop. of 5.77M
- dantheman 8y ago
  It's not a national problem, in fact it is extremely regional. It has to due with unnecessary restriction on building in those regions -- primarily to benefit current property owners.
em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
How much of homelessness is a result of laws hampering construction, such as zoning laws, building restrictions, rent control, which lead to housing costs significantly higher than what a free market would provide?
- evanlivingston 8y ago
  I think not a lot.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    Some portion of the people experiencing homelessness is due to their being unable to afford housing in the city of their choice. Certainly, being unable to afford housing isn't helping anyone. But, as you so correctly note, it's almost certainly not the dominant factor. With that said, there's some room for subtlety around land-use questions. For instance, land-use regulation can make it very difficult to build a shelter or a mental health treatment center. When the infrastructure to get people off the streets cannot be built, the most vulnerable among us will tend to stay where they are.

239 points by chaostheory 8y ago

How big cities are just "backstabbing" each other, shifting the homeless problem around to each other, treachery. Seems to indicate that security in general and especially installing remotely operated electric gates with dobermans in Key West are a growing enterprise . . .

ianmcgowan 8y ago

An interesting, yet depressing story. Quite a nuanced look at a complex issue. The portaits of the homeless people involved helped humanize an otherwise abstract problem. The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story. The Guardian seems to be taking a page from The NY Times recently.

trevyn 8y ago
Weird, I experienced the interactivity as completely broken on iOS Chrome. I couldn’t even scroll properly to just read the article.
- nitwit005 8y ago
  I also hit that issue on android. Had to keep scrolling on a text portion of the page until it skipped past the chart.
Symbiote 8y ago
The Guardian has been doing this for many years. I don't know when it started, but there are some examples linked from this overview from 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/data-visualisation-tools-free https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/data-v...
dylan604 8y ago
> The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story. The web design is not intuitive. Why the need to break the browser's most basic functionality of vertical scrolling. The chart "visualizing" the data in 3 stages made me think the page was at the bottom. The animation finished, and then I tried to scroll past, except nothing happened. I had to continue "scrolling" to get the page to not move but have the next stage of animation start. Also, scrolling text over background text just looks confusing

everybodyknows 8y ago

Phoenix AZ was running a program like this decades ago. They'd tell the homeless about the great weather and services in San Diego, and put them on the bus -- no arrangements at all on the receiving end. Then they started getting phone calls from SD city hall...

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago

While they should definitely consider serving up a more static version for mobile (couldn't scroll on Firefox Android), the experience of reading this article on my desktop was truly awesome. I absolutely loved the graphics, cinemagraphs, and entire experience, and really do think it added immensely to the story itself. Is there a name for this style of article? Do they use some existing JS library or is it all hand crafted?

alexbecker 8y ago
Scrolling even on desktop was janky for me, and it was hard to center the paragraphs that were supposed to overlay the maps.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  Goes to show just how broken the web is lately. I quit web dev after 20 years in the industry because it was frustrating me so much. I pretty much exclusively deal with hardware now and love that if I solder everything right, and put everything where it's supposed to, it works, and anything wrong with it is usually my fault or a broken component. Worked perfectly on Firefox Developer Edition / Windows 10. Was smooth and I didn't notice a single issue, FWIW.
nickevershed 8y ago
We call them "big scrollies" in my newsroom, I have also seen the format referred to as "Scrollytelling". There are a few libraries such as graph-scroll and scrolllama which work well with d3 specifically, but otherwise you can just make your own.

darawk 8y ago

IMO this is exactly what we ought to do. A big problem for the homeless is that they become poor in a place with no jobs for them, and then they get stuck. There are lots of places with shortages of the kind of labor they can offer, and making travel easier for them is a great thing to help fix that market failure.

prolikewh0a 8y ago
With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise. Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc. Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see the homeless any longer.
- spaceflunky 8y ago
  Yes, there are jobs in every city, but in major cities there is difficulty in finding housing and transportation. The cost of living is also high, so it's easy to get into debt. Whereas in smaller cities, it's typically easier to get on your feet because housing is more accessible, transportation is better, and the general CoL is a lot lower.
  - yayana 8y ago
    True, but this combined with brain drain creates a lot of perverse incentives and drives a further wealth divide. For example, many low tax base areas accumulate a population with more problems that have higher tax rates, insurance rates, etc (and a more strained social net) than a rich city. It is important to make sure rich areas are at least paying some of the costs they create in selectively pushing people out or creating bottlenecks to set a minimum CoL on who comes in.
    - darawk 8y ago

joeblau 8y ago

I lived in San Francisco from 2011 - 2016 then moved to Pittsburgh, PA for a job opportunity. This past August, I went back to SF for a team building activity and I was blown away by how many fewer homeless people there were on the streets (excluding Tenderloin). When I lived in SF, there were blocks that I would place money on being a homeless person there, and it seemed like most of them were relocated. Tons of familiar streets in SOMA were at or near zero homeless people. The interesting part is that my co-workers, who never lived in SF, remarked about how many homeless people were still out in the streets. To them, there were tons of homeless people and to me there were hardly any. I was so shocked that I even called one of my friends who is from the Bay Area and asked him what was going on?

staticautomatic 8y ago
They seem to just be relocating to other parts of the city as formerly homeless-heavy areas like parts of SOMA and the mission "gentrify." I walk through the loin twice a day on my way to my office on market st near the post-apocalyptic parts of SOMA and see a higher concentration of homeless in those areas than I used to. Perhaps you're revisiting the parts they've left or my un-scientific observations are wrong.
- losteric 8y ago
  They also seasonally relocate, heading south in the winter and spreading out in the summer. Seattle's transient homeless population is largely gone by mid-December
  - marmshallow 8y ago
    Well now it barely seems like we are talking about human people.
    - have_faith 8y ago
      How would you prefer that sentence be written?

jakelarkin 8y ago

this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing.

microcolonel 8y ago
There would need to be some form of accountability, and some sort of standard way of "getting people back on their feet". Neither exists, so it still doesn't make much sense for any municipality to pay into fixing people's lives in other locales.
PhantomGremlin 8y ago
It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing. I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet". But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High. IMO solving this problem is by no means "simple". How expensive is it to do "focused care"? Has it been tried, and what's its track record?
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  From what I understand there have been several successful pilot projects that are variously shut down or are considered inappropriate for other cities (politically unpopular). Utah just straight up housed people to great success. NYC has a massive homeless population but they also put a ton of money into housing their homeless- also to fairly decent success. For drug addiction, there have been successful needle providing clinics in Canada and America currently has methodone clinics to great success. There are various police programs just for connecting homeless people to resources to get clean and start working, and otherwise providing them what they need to survive until they’re ready, and we know these have had success also. None of them are politically popular and there’s a lot of opposition to implementing any of them.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

Having to download HD videos an many MB of other stuff to read few pages of text on poverty. Oh the sad irony :(

RickJWagner 8y ago

The guy from Key West is bummed because he can't go back to the shelter he was living at. His plan was to return there, even as a fallback. He was COUNTING on it being there for him. I think that's part of the problem.

jimnotgym 8y ago

Does anyone else find that it especially easy to accidentally click ads on The Guardian whilst browsing on mobile? I don't get it with other sites. If so, I wonder what they have done to make that the case? I'm generally less annoyed by the Guardian site than many, so don't bother with 'Reader View'

habosa 8y ago

Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt. It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem. [0]: http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...

conanbatt 8y ago
The article even turns it around: if no bussing were included, the homeless population might be double what it is. SF is a net homeless exporter (with the huge caveat of impartial data).
pound 8y ago
Just a little nit: while article says they lived in SF and !had homes! survey linked says they were just SF residents prior to becoming homeless (though it mentions that 49% of them were living in SF at least 10 years, but don't forget that ~65% of SF residents are renters). Residency usually just based on any bill with city address within last 30 days. I can easy imagine case when someone moved to SF with hope that things will work out in big city, spent savings on few months of rent and with nowhere else to go and no established income ended up on the streets. While it's a sad situation it fits that previous SF residency narrative and in the same time not exactly part of some native san franciscans ending up on streets due to yet another gentrification cycle everybody so keen to bring up whenever homeless origin is being mentioned.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  There's an even bigger problem. There was no validation at all. It was based on self reporting which, in turn, was based on asking [ideally] random homeless individuals, and then extrapolating that outward. There is an incentive for individuals to lie here if they believe that 'native' homeless might be subject to preferential treatment, or if reporting 'native' homeless increases could result in more favorable incentives for the homeless. And given how big of news homelessness and home price issues are in San Francisco, I think this motivation is a major concern. I am curious about the baselines here for other areas though. Even given the incentive to lie, the reported numbers given still seem quite high to me. The most liberal metric is living in the city for at least 10 years, which applied to just below 50% of the homeless. Even if we take the most conservative metric of 'migratory' patterns, with 30% of individuals having moved to San Francisco after becoming homeless, that still seems very high. But I don't really have a baseline for comparison in other major cities and search is not turning up any particularly great sources.

mcnichol 8y ago

I really appreciate the amount of data and what felt like an objective view on both sides of the issue, some folks greatly benefited whereas it was problematic for others. Ultimately it landed in needing more data, immense respect for that type of data driven journalism. Really love the visuals added as well!

jorblumesea 8y ago

The US lacks a true mental healthcare system, and not even a healthcare system available to the poor. Not a surprise that cities just move the problem around, what can they do? It's a national problem with zero national coordination or resources.

briandear 8y ago
That isn’t true at all. Just a quick google search reveals a plethora of indigent care along with Medicaid as well as faith-based organizations. We should be more outraged at the VA system.

brownbat 8y ago

Reminded me of this story about Puerto Rico's practice of sending those with addictions to Chicago: http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/ http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/

flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago

>But he maintained the policy was justified to discourage abuse – a point echoed by his former deputy, Mike Tolbert, who said it was the only way to prevent the shelter from being used as a “travel agency”. Why not simply restrict the free travel ticket a second time? Instead of the basic necessities like food and shelter? Writing that out makes even less sense once you think it through, however. If the goal of the city is to relieve itself of homeless people, they should offer as many free bus tickets out of town as homeless people can ask for... Even multiple tickets in a row... Becoming that dreaded "travel agency" that Mike Tolbert warns about. Surely it would be less expensive to pay for a second free bus ticket than to pay two police officers to arrest the same person 3+ times in a row for sleeping on the beach... And eventually the person might find a city or town that caters to their needs better than their first destination might have and end up staying.

briandear 8y ago
So taxpayers just keep paying for tickets until the person figures things out? If they know it’s a one way ticket and returning could result in an arrest for vagrancy, that seems to be a pretty strong incentive to stay away. The Key West man in the story admitted that he didn’t think they were serious. Well, they were. I am not arguing other points of the story, only saying that as a taxpayer, unlimited free bus tickets to anywhere doesn’t sound like a fair deal for the people who pay taxes. Homelessness is a tragedy for some and a lifestyle for others, that’s just a fact. Being homeless doesn’t somehow make you free of accountability for your actions: you sign an agreement, that should mean something.
- nambit 8y ago
  Compared to the millions big cities spend trying to combat homelessness, free bus tickets seem like a bargain.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
  A lot of "homeless" people are actually "people suffering mental illness who haven't had adequate treatment". It seems crazy to you to think that somebody giving you a free bus ticket out of town isn't serious about your not being able to return... but to a mentally ill human being it's not so cut and dry.

Spooky23 8y ago

Cities with services often attract homeless and people looking for a better deal. My dad ran a section 8 program, and his backlog plunged when NYC started accepting more people... you could wait months upstate or show up in Brooklyn and be in a free temporary placement in hours or days. Other places will mention this to clients. South Carolina was pretty notorious for giving sick Medicaid patients to northeast states with enhanced Medicaid in the past, for example.

mncharity 8y ago

I wonder to what extent poor non-homeless populations are similarly shifted around the country, albeit more slowly? A city in New Hampshire used federal funds to build low-income housing. Which attracted low-income people. Who disproportionately used city services. Which cost more than the added taxes and federal funds which came with them. So the city bought low-income housing. And tore it down. Which seems analogous to buying bus tickets out of town?

scottlocklin 8y ago
Erm, which city? I just moved here.
- tomcam 8y ago
  Not in the low income housing section, I hope
abfan1127 8y ago
do you have a link to this?
- mncharity 8y ago
  No, sorry, conversation with principals. Many years ago.

burlesona 8y ago

I’d vaguely heard of this before, a lot of friends and coworkers here in SF have said things like “you know that _____ just puts homeless on a one-way bus to San Francisco, that’s why it’s so bad here.” I thought it was an urban legend. I was surprised and honestly amused to discover that this is real, but that it goes in the other direction, with SF bussing out ~10k homeless people in the last decade. Wow.

blondie9x 8y ago

Homelessness and lack of sufficient housing supply which drives the affordability problem is a national crisis. We need national solutions. We need to build more transit and more housing near that transit. We need to build denser and more towards the core. We need to not neglect the inner cities. America has the power to build better cities and solve this problem together. Affordability and skyrocketing rent costs will improve if we work harder to increase the supply of housing near transit points. We need to act on this issue quickly.

abricot 8y ago
Lack of housing is one reason, but don't think it is the only one. In Denmark there is no reason for anyone to be homeless by purely economic reasons, but we still have about 6500 out of a pop. of 5.77M
dantheman 8y ago
It's not a national problem, in fact it is extremely regional. It has to due with unnecessary restriction on building in those regions -- primarily to benefit current property owners.

em3rgent0rdr 8y ago

How much of homelessness is a result of laws hampering construction, such as zoning laws, building restrictions, rent control, which lead to housing costs significantly higher than what a free market would provide?

evanlivingston 8y ago
I think not a lot.
- Kalium 8y ago
  Some portion of the people experiencing homelessness is due to their being unable to afford housing in the city of their choice. Certainly, being unable to afford housing isn't helping anyone. But, as you so correctly note, it's almost certainly not the dominant factor. With that said, there's some room for subtlety around land-use questions. For instance, land-use regulation can make it very difficult to build a shelter or a mental health treatment center. When the infrastructure to get people off the streets cannot be built, the most vulnerable among us will tend to stay where they are.