8 ms·

I hope my comment doesn't sound tone-deaf or ignorant but this is something I have thought about for a while. As I was watching @lisper's movie "grace of god"[

by vecinu 6y ago

I hope my comment doesn't sound tone-deaf or ignorant but this is something I have thought about for a while. As I was watching @lisper's movie "grace of god"[1] and heard the phrase "convince myself that it could never happen to me" (becoming homeless), I started thinking, is this a more American-centric problem? What I mean by that is, can the lack of a social safety net in the US cause a much higher rate of homelessness than in other countries? Or at least, it seems the experience of homelessness in the US is worse than in other countries. I wonder how much culture also plays a part in that. In Romania for example, the idea of becoming homeless in the same way as in the US seems so remote and unlikely that most people don't ever think about it and I'm sure you would have a hard time finding people who ever think they would get into that situation. Is the government just doing a great job at hiding these people or exporting them? Is the culture of having a close family saving people from ever hitting rock bottom? I have a lot of questions with few answers and I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on the culture/US-centric view on this type of homeless. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25312081

baby 6y ago
I personally have never witnessed homelessness like the US anywhere else in the world. I’m not sure what’s the cause but lack of social safety net must be up there.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>can the lack of a social safety net in the US cause a much higher rate of homelessness than in other countries? I thought that was widely understood as a contributing factor, yes. other contributing factors: poor minimum wage laws, at will employment, lack of regulation around housing. health system problems I put in the social safety net category. These things mean that there is more of a chance that something goes wrong, and you need the social safety net, which isn't there.
- vecinu 6y ago
  I recently read Anu Partanen's book "The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life" that discusses a number of these factors and how they're different in her native country of Finland. My thoughts on the matter, after living in the SF Bay Area for a decade, conclude that for the average person and those that have limited earning potential, Western European or Scandinavian countries can offer a better life to those people, on average. If you have a high earning potential, then the US is a great place to grow your wealth, pay for your children's expensive education and purchase all the consumerist-centric things your family desires, at a fairly low price.
eat_veggies 6y ago
That's exactly right. The existence of homelessness is a policy decision, not a law of nature. We have enough space to house everyone, and we have enough money to run social programs to help people with addictions or mental illnesses. But our cult of individualism says that your successes belong to your boss, and your failures are your own damn fault. So you can die in the gutter and you'll deserve it.
- jlawson 6y ago
  San Francisco spends over $40,000 per year on each homeless person in the city.
  - timeeater 6y ago
    I think it could be an aspect that homeless people flock to places where there is spare money and climate that is easier to survive.
  - pksebben 6y ago
    if this is true, why on earth wouldn't they just use that money to, I dunno, rent them an apartment?
    - andi999 6y ago
      Probably the money is spend on admin. So if you take that to the homeless, admin would be unenployed. Unsolvable.
    - nrp 6y ago
      They do. The majority of San Francisco’s budget around homelessness actually goes into keeping people housed, not to services for people who are unhoused. Mission Local has consistently interesting (though highly opinionated) reporting around this: https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/prop-c-in-liberal-san-francisco-government-leaders-fight-a-measure-to-fund-homeless-services-by-assailing-voters-confidence-in-the-very-concept-of-government/ https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/prop-c-in-liberal-san-franc...
timeeater 6y ago
Here in Germany we have homeless people, and Romania wouldn't come to mind as a place where they don't. More likely I would expect people from Romania to be homeless in Germany. I think some homeless here are (possibly illegal) immigrants who don't have access to the same social security measures. But there are also homeless Germans, despite of safety nets existing in theory. I think it is often associated with mental illness and addiction, making it difficult for people to master the bureaucracy to get access to social services.
- andi999 6y ago
  At least the homelessness you see on the street in Romania is much much less. I went a few times for business there and I saw zero. (More old people peddling stuff at the street though than germany)
- jacobush 6y ago
  In Sweden the homeless increased when a lot of dedicated mental health institutions were closed.
- nicbou 6y ago
  I vaguely remember a police report that said that a very large number of Berlin's homeless are Polish. I vividly remember that just across the Romanian border, there are numerous Roma villages that look quite like Skid Row. I can't compare European homelessness to its American variant, but I can say it certainly exists. Safety nets have holes in them, particularly for those who aren't in the system. Freelancers are not that well-protected either.
- kstenerud 6y ago
  I've lived and worked in many different countries (including America and Germany), and there seem to be two main causes of homelessness: economic hardship and mental illness. In Germany, I've only seen homelessness due to mental illness, because the bureaucracy in the social programs causes too much friction for them to use it with decent success. There are organizations that help people navigate the mazes and paperwork, but it's still too much friction. In America, it's both, but primarily economic. The levels of economic inequality in America is something I'd only seen in third world countries before. TBH I'm surprised at how low the corruption level in government jobs is given how dire peoples circumstances have become. It is much worse than in other first world countries, but not as bad as in places like Mexico or India. The higher the inequality, the more the proportion pushed towards mental illness in the homeless people living there. San Francisco was particularly bleak... In Japan, it's also primarily economic, but I suspect that's mainly due to their tendency to hide mental illness away since it's a source of shame. The "tent cities" in the parks were a sight to behold...
pea 6y ago
I have been told that it's also due to the fact that in Europe, people generally travel through a unified medical and social system from birth; if they exhibit problems they are directed to the necessary interventions (mental health services, addiction, etc.) Providing these services earlier on with a full picture has a higher ROI than intervening later without all information about that person's journey. Additionally, I believe that for people who are seriously mentally ill, it's more difficult to section them in the US. In the UK, it takes a GP and social worker to section someone; I believe in the US it's not that simple.
dakial1 6y ago
This is exactly my thought while I was reading the text. I live in Brazil and while we certainly have homeless and poverty here, this specific situation of someone with skill and education becoming homeless is something ultra rare, to te point that I never saw, hears or read of anyone in this situation. Even very modest people earning little money are able to get a roof over their heads. The usual case of homelessness here is caused by addiction and mental problems. In contrast I've seen lots of stories in the US about capable, healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness (in this text the writer mentions his study loans). Is the average american more in debt than the citizens in the rest of the world? If so, isn't this situation a economic risk for the US? As something like COVID crisis could easily throw people.withouy any savings to the streets in a heartbeat?
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  The problem with student loans is that they are rooted in "need-based" formulas which define how much a student should pay in terms of their parents' wealth. And for upper-class students the gap between what their parents are willing to pay and what the formula says they can pay often is substantial and is made up with loans. This ends up being something resembling a real hardship for upper-middle-class families, since tuition for two kids can easily be 50% of your household income. If someone is paying off a mortgage on a house, it's easy to imagine their only option to pay the tuition without loans is to downsize the house, which is a huge investment of time and money on top of getting a child ready for college.
- jswrenn 6y ago
  > Is the average american more in debt than the citizens in the rest of the world? Sorta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... However, I don't know how good of an indicator debt is for one's circumstances, or for the consequences of indebtedness. I suspect not very.
- smallnamespace 6y ago
  > healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience. I volunteered at a soup kitchen in SF a number of years ago. At the orientation meeting, the director said nearly all homeless fit into one of these categories: 1. Mentally ill 2. Addicted to drugs 3. Veterans (Gulf War, Vietnam) 4. Down-on-their-luck families (debt, sudden medical bills, lost job, eviction, etc.) He said #4 category was the smallest, and these families typically got out of the situation within a year or two at most. A 'Pursuit of Happyness' type situation. The other problems are much less tractable. The distribution of time spent on the streets was strongly bimodal: people were either on the streets for <2 years, or for decades.
biztos 6y ago
There’s a lot of homelessness in Budapest, just to pick a place not so far from Romania. And it’s visible enough that I’m sure you think about it if you’re a low-wage worker without a strong network of family or friends. While it’s not as crazy as in SF or LA, the problem is quite visible throughout the city, as are the homeless people themselves.
noisy_boy 6y ago
Beyond the government provided safety net, there is also the factor of social and cultural structures. E.g. in south asian cultures, if you belong to middle class and above, short of calamity, you will not be homeless because it is quite normal for folks to live with parents anyway. Worst case, you can just move back in anytime (bit of that has happened in US as well recently). Of course, cost of living is a big factor anyway. In asian countries, government provided safety nets are rare but since everything is so cheap, at worst you can still manage to eke out a living and find, say, a single room in not-so-great locality.

by vecinu 6y ago

baby 6y ago

I personally have never witnessed homelessness like the US anywhere else in the world. I’m not sure what’s the cause but lack of social safety net must be up there.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>can the lack of a social safety net in the US cause a much higher rate of homelessness than in other countries? I thought that was widely understood as a contributing factor, yes. other contributing factors: poor minimum wage laws, at will employment, lack of regulation around housing. health system problems I put in the social safety net category. These things mean that there is more of a chance that something goes wrong, and you need the social safety net, which isn't there.

vecinu 6y ago
I recently read Anu Partanen's book "The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life" that discusses a number of these factors and how they're different in her native country of Finland. My thoughts on the matter, after living in the SF Bay Area for a decade, conclude that for the average person and those that have limited earning potential, Western European or Scandinavian countries can offer a better life to those people, on average. If you have a high earning potential, then the US is a great place to grow your wealth, pay for your children's expensive education and purchase all the consumerist-centric things your family desires, at a fairly low price.

eat_veggies 6y ago

That's exactly right. The existence of homelessness is a policy decision, not a law of nature. We have enough space to house everyone, and we have enough money to run social programs to help people with addictions or mental illnesses. But our cult of individualism says that your successes belong to your boss, and your failures are your own damn fault. So you can die in the gutter and you'll deserve it.

jlawson 6y ago
San Francisco spends over $40,000 per year on each homeless person in the city.
- timeeater 6y ago
  I think it could be an aspect that homeless people flock to places where there is spare money and climate that is easier to survive.
- pksebben 6y ago
  if this is true, why on earth wouldn't they just use that money to, I dunno, rent them an apartment?
  - andi999 6y ago
    Probably the money is spend on admin. So if you take that to the homeless, admin would be unenployed. Unsolvable.
  - nrp 6y ago
    They do. The majority of San Francisco’s budget around homelessness actually goes into keeping people housed, not to services for people who are unhoused. Mission Local has consistently interesting (though highly opinionated) reporting around this: https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/prop-c-in-liberal-san-francisco-government-leaders-fight-a-measure-to-fund-homeless-services-by-assailing-voters-confidence-in-the-very-concept-of-government/ https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/prop-c-in-liberal-san-franc...

timeeater 6y ago

Here in Germany we have homeless people, and Romania wouldn't come to mind as a place where they don't. More likely I would expect people from Romania to be homeless in Germany. I think some homeless here are (possibly illegal) immigrants who don't have access to the same social security measures. But there are also homeless Germans, despite of safety nets existing in theory. I think it is often associated with mental illness and addiction, making it difficult for people to master the bureaucracy to get access to social services.

andi999 6y ago
At least the homelessness you see on the street in Romania is much much less. I went a few times for business there and I saw zero. (More old people peddling stuff at the street though than germany)
jacobush 6y ago
In Sweden the homeless increased when a lot of dedicated mental health institutions were closed.
nicbou 6y ago
I vaguely remember a police report that said that a very large number of Berlin's homeless are Polish. I vividly remember that just across the Romanian border, there are numerous Roma villages that look quite like Skid Row. I can't compare European homelessness to its American variant, but I can say it certainly exists. Safety nets have holes in them, particularly for those who aren't in the system. Freelancers are not that well-protected either.
kstenerud 6y ago
I've lived and worked in many different countries (including America and Germany), and there seem to be two main causes of homelessness: economic hardship and mental illness. In Germany, I've only seen homelessness due to mental illness, because the bureaucracy in the social programs causes too much friction for them to use it with decent success. There are organizations that help people navigate the mazes and paperwork, but it's still too much friction. In America, it's both, but primarily economic. The levels of economic inequality in America is something I'd only seen in third world countries before. TBH I'm surprised at how low the corruption level in government jobs is given how dire peoples circumstances have become. It is much worse than in other first world countries, but not as bad as in places like Mexico or India. The higher the inequality, the more the proportion pushed towards mental illness in the homeless people living there. San Francisco was particularly bleak... In Japan, it's also primarily economic, but I suspect that's mainly due to their tendency to hide mental illness away since it's a source of shame. The "tent cities" in the parks were a sight to behold...

pea 6y ago

I have been told that it's also due to the fact that in Europe, people generally travel through a unified medical and social system from birth; if they exhibit problems they are directed to the necessary interventions (mental health services, addiction, etc.) Providing these services earlier on with a full picture has a higher ROI than intervening later without all information about that person's journey. Additionally, I believe that for people who are seriously mentally ill, it's more difficult to section them in the US. In the UK, it takes a GP and social worker to section someone; I believe in the US it's not that simple.

dakial1 6y ago

This is exactly my thought while I was reading the text. I live in Brazil and while we certainly have homeless and poverty here, this specific situation of someone with skill and education becoming homeless is something ultra rare, to te point that I never saw, hears or read of anyone in this situation. Even very modest people earning little money are able to get a roof over their heads. The usual case of homelessness here is caused by addiction and mental problems. In contrast I've seen lots of stories in the US about capable, healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness (in this text the writer mentions his study loans). Is the average american more in debt than the citizens in the rest of the world? If so, isn't this situation a economic risk for the US? As something like COVID crisis could easily throw people.withouy any savings to the streets in a heartbeat?

lukeschlather 6y ago
The problem with student loans is that they are rooted in "need-based" formulas which define how much a student should pay in terms of their parents' wealth. And for upper-class students the gap between what their parents are willing to pay and what the formula says they can pay often is substantial and is made up with loans. This ends up being something resembling a real hardship for upper-middle-class families, since tuition for two kids can easily be 50% of your household income. If someone is paying off a mortgage on a house, it's easy to imagine their only option to pay the tuition without loans is to downsize the house, which is a huge investment of time and money on top of getting a child ready for college.
jswrenn 6y ago
> Is the average american more in debt than the citizens in the rest of the world? Sorta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... However, I don't know how good of an indicator debt is for one's circumstances, or for the consequences of indebtedness. I suspect not very.
smallnamespace 6y ago
> healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience. I volunteered at a soup kitchen in SF a number of years ago. At the orientation meeting, the director said nearly all homeless fit into one of these categories: 1. Mentally ill 2. Addicted to drugs 3. Veterans (Gulf War, Vietnam) 4. Down-on-their-luck families (debt, sudden medical bills, lost job, eviction, etc.) He said #4 category was the smallest, and these families typically got out of the situation within a year or two at most. A 'Pursuit of Happyness' type situation. The other problems are much less tractable. The distribution of time spent on the streets was strongly bimodal: people were either on the streets for <2 years, or for decades.

biztos 6y ago

There’s a lot of homelessness in Budapest, just to pick a place not so far from Romania. And it’s visible enough that I’m sure you think about it if you’re a low-wage worker without a strong network of family or friends. While it’s not as crazy as in SF or LA, the problem is quite visible throughout the city, as are the homeless people themselves.

noisy_boy 6y ago

Beyond the government provided safety net, there is also the factor of social and cultural structures. E.g. in south asian cultures, if you belong to middle class and above, short of calamity, you will not be homeless because it is quite normal for folks to live with parents anyway. Worst case, you can just move back in anytime (bit of that has happened in US as well recently). Of course, cost of living is a big factor anyway. In asian countries, government provided safety nets are rare but since everything is so cheap, at worst you can still manage to eke out a living and find, say, a single room in not-so-great locality.