29 ms·

I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

137 points by DoreenMichele 5y ago

darig 5y ago
I believe Californians equating America's homeless with garbage is the problem, snowflake.
mullingitover 5y ago
This is a thinly sourced blog post that seems like pure flamebait and not really relevant for HN.
- deleted 5y ago
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- eplanit 5y ago
  The government website stats support the claim: ~29% of the entire US homeless population is in California, which is disproportional when compared to other state population densities.[1] That said, the piece doesn't offer much constructive advice on how to fix it. Californians have been witnessing the very real, large increase in tent cities, addicts, feces, ... for years now, but so far they still vote for the same people and policies that create the problem. In the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park. Even when Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Fran, he tried to enact a "Care not Cash" program to get people into mental health services instead of cash handouts; the people turned on him, and even set fire to his front lawn in protest. Californians are getting precisely the kind of world they've voted for. It's ugly, and it literally stinks. Yes, how to fix it is the question, but I'm not sure the people have had enough yet. The recall election of Newsom next month will be an indicator. If he's recalled, then a new day of hope begins. Hope, anyway.... [1] https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    The callous disregard for human life exhibited in this post is sickening. My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space, maybe from the automobile lanes and parks that infest our cities and spew far more stinky poison than people living rough.
    - s5300 5y ago
      A fair amount of those who frequent this site are purely concerned with how to squeeze the most profit out of the most people possible, no matter the collateral damage that may come from those goals. I'm not sure how you could be surprised.
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      > My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? San Francisco spends tens of millions of dollar a year cleaning its streets. https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-million-street-cleanup-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-milli... > Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space... The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes.
      - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        Unless you have a better idea as to where these people should go, just saying that they shouldn’t be there isn’t very useful.
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        That's not true, acknowledging the problem is the first step to coming up with a solution.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  The author and submitter has >35000 karma on HN. The blog post has more linked sources than most content marketing spam that appears on HN from page. There are already several comments on the post by HN users that are repeating statements from the post. This suggests it is HN material.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    This is an unconvincing example of appeal to (internet) accomplishment.
    - randallsquared 5y ago
      The case made upthread was that this blog post wasn't the sort of thing Hacker News readers want to see on Hacker News: > pure flamebait and not really relevant for HN. All three claims in what you respond to address that case head-on. It isn't as if they're talking about twitter, facebook, or discord stats.
tiahura 5y ago
When vagrancy was a crime there was much less vagrancy.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Fun fact in the 1700s the British transported large numbers of vagabonds to what would later become the states. This strategy it seems works great when you have somewhere else where you can make the parties assistance someone else's problem. It is inherently harder when the person remains your problem regardless.
trident5000 5y ago
1) How is this HN related? 2) Its popular for homeless because the weather is great and the surrounding community tolerates it.
wombatpm 5y ago
Lived in Chicago and Minneapolis. Hard winters naturally reduce the homeless. They either migrate, get jobs or die
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  This is unnecessarily darwinian in its conception. It also ignores that the major NE cities invest more into building shelters because they decided people freezing to death on the sidewalk was unacceptable.
  - yarky 5y ago
    I second the op, it's hard to just be homeless when it gets freezing cold. Put differently, if I had to choose a place to be homeless, I'd start by choosing a place with good weather, that's a (hypothetical) fact.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      People start where they are. Hitch hiking and train jumping are both very dangerous. It's no simple matter to "choose a place with good weather."
      - cyberbanjo 5y ago
        Free bus rides to wherever in the US based on someone else's word over phone call https://www.streetsheet.org/homeward-bound-program-offers-free-bus-ride-home/ https://www.streetsheet.org/homeward-bound-program-offers-fr...
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Do you know that it's true that per-capital NE cities invest more into shelters? View from Seattle, an enormous amount of money is spent on homeless outreach and shelters that I have never seen reflected in any other area (other than the Pacific rim).
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
jefftk 5y ago
"Dumping ground" implies other places did this to CA, which isn't substantiated by the article. As it says, the vast majority of CA homeless are from within the state. In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.
- s5300 5y ago
  There is some undeniable truth to this video though. https://youtu.be/6EHPt8eoSJI https://youtu.be/6EHPt8eoSJI
- rubicon33 5y ago
  I'm really not convinced that high housing costs accurately depict the source of the homelessness problem in CA. If it does, it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see. Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be benefited by lower housing prices. These people could not afford nor likely ever would afford, a house that cost literally anything. Most of these people suffer from a mental illness and/or a drug addiction which makes holding down a job unlikely to ever happen. What they need is publicly funded mental health hospitals, like the ones that were destroyed in the 80s. Of course high housing costs are a huge problem, but I just don't think they tell the whole story when it comes to CA homelessness. There's an elephant in the room that far too many people don't want to address. It's the aforementioned population of people who either can't or won't work and the solution we have for them right now is the street.
  - settrans 5y ago
    California already has a 1% income tax allocated just to mental health, and has collected $7.4 billion so far just from this tax[0]. How is that working? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Servi...
refulgentis 5y ago
This is a common myth and a misunderstanding I understand, I thought the same myself a decade ago. It looks like this thread is going nowhere good, so I'll just throw this over the fence quick and run away: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...
cortesoft 5y ago
I think the answer is pretty simple… there are more homeless people because housing is very expensive.
- irrational 5y ago
  So, if there really is an exodus from California, they will drive up housing prices elsewhere and the homeless problem will spread?
  - mjevans 5y ago
    It has been doing this for decades already. North up the coast. Across the wastes of Phoenix which built outward into the desert, and also to Texas which I hear has similar sprawl.
  - arodgers_la 5y ago
    So we have established that housing and homelessness need to be solved at the national level. As such, the influx of people to California to begin with stemmed from within California along with other parts of the country—it has always been a national issue but only visible at the local level.
Schnitz 5y ago
> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?" Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic! Truly solving the housing crisis would mean for housing costs to go down a lot, which means house values would go down and the 55% will keep fighting that. If you want to stay long term in California and disconnect yourself from the madness that is California housing costs, you have to buy at some point and accept it as the price of entry.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  Nobody talks about the harder truth: even with its exclusionary housing policies, California is increasingly not capable of supporting the population it has. The 2021 fires and worsening drought conditions are just a taste of things to come.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    California is extremely capable of supporting its current population, and easily 50% more. The only thing stopping this is proper distribution of land and water. We let wealthy people hoard land and water (Prop 13 and our land rights system), rather than allocating them based on market systems or even more fair systems. We have feudalism baked too deeply into our laws.
    - mc32 5y ago
      California was a semi desert before we built the canals and aqueducts -which is why it was a backwater with few people till that was done and its fertile soil was able to sustain life. People (city dwellers) came _after_ the farmers. So, it might be in need of an update, but I think you're mischaracterizing how this happened.
      - 5y ago
betwixthewires 5y ago
I agree with the premise of the article, that a large proportion of California's homeless move there because it's easier to he homeless for all the reasons listed, but that's about the substance of the article. It blames the problem on detached housing and demands solutions without an inkling of a hint at any. Our homeless problem is the result of 2 things: a mental health problem and to a much lesser extent the pervasiveness of the speculative real estate market driving up costs (a market largely driven by equity in the California housing market I might mention). The solution to this problem is not less detached housing, it is more of any housing anywhere that it has been artificially suppressed, and raising interest rates to a market dictated level rather than artificially suppressing them to hold up the house of cards, and more importantly, helping people address their mental health problems.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I'm the author. It's really not mostly mental health problems. I've studied this issue for years. I write about homelessness on Street Life Solutions. I try to write about housing and community development stuff elsewhere, like Eclogiselle.com and https://projectsro.blogspot.com/ https://projectsro.blogspot.com/. This post wasn't intended to be some opus solving everything. I wanted to make one point: California's extreme homeless problem is not somehow entirely the fault of California government, though that is a factor. There are other factors, like weather and a national shortage of housing that has been ongoing for a lot of years and isn't remotely peculiar to California. California has 12 percent of the nation's entire population and 27 percent (or more -- different sources vary) of the nation's homeless population. That's not just a "California problem." That's a national problem disproportionately impacting California. There's a lore more to the issue than can be contained in a single post. I tried to make one point and only one point. Addressing how to resolve the nation's housing problems will take more than a single blog post. But thank you for commenting.
  - AdrianB1 5y ago
    California is a honey pot for homeless people, that is not a national problem but a local reality.
cm2187 5y ago
More of a magnet than a dumping ground, it’s not like the homeless were sent to California. Local incentives are more likely to blame.
- tjalfi 5y ago
  > More of a magnet than a dumping ground, it’s not like the homeless were sent to California. Local incentives are more likely to blame. Nevada used to give homeless mental patients bus tickets to California [0][1]. [0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-busing-homeless-lawsuit-san-francisco/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-b... [1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-busing/article2577189.html http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-bus...
iJohnDoe 5y ago
Of course it is. Does no one remember when other states were paying for bus fares to California to get the homeless out of their state? Does no one remember states paying to fly the homeless to Hawaii? The above might sound ridiculous, but what sounds cheaper? Solving California’s massive homeless problem or simply getting the homeless out of the state on the next plane or bus?
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I’ve posted detailed numbers here before, but the overwhelming numbers of homeless people in the Bay Area came from the Bay Area. Source: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ExecutiveSummary_SanFrancisco2019.pdf https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ExecutiveSu...
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    There’s some nuance to that. 70% were already in SF when they became homeless, but the vast majority of San Franciscans aren’t from here. Only a third we’re even born in California. So it seems like people move here, become homeless, and stay. And 30% coming here after becoming homeless isn’t peanuts.
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      Many of those people from outside SF came from neighboring counties or within California. It’s a tiny minority coming from out of state.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  Every place does this. I was homeless in San Francisco & applied for assistance. They made sure to let everyone know they'd buy you a one way ticket to pretty much any place you wanted to go.
  - addicted 5y ago
    The difference is that they will return to places like SF, LA and NYC, because they are treated much worse in other places. Basically, take your one way bus ride to Dallas, where you then take a 1 way ride back to SF, from where you’re unlikely to go back to Dallas.
proc0 5y ago
How can it be housing when there are so many vacancies? I honestly don't understand this. Obviously they can't afford it, but that's how markets work. When there is high demand, prices go up. It seems to me the solution is just for people to go elsewhere... again, the housing is there, plenty of rentals everywhere, except too expensive for someone who is living on the streets to, all of a sudden, start paying for, yet they can't live anywhere else? Also politicians where talking about an exit tax for people who leave, or something like that. You can't have it both ways: be the most popular destination and also have affordable housing. It's either/or, and people who can't afford simply need to go elsewhere that they can afford. How can that not be an option for people? It seems to me everyone just ignores individual incentives when talking about this problem. What are these people on the street motivated by? What do they want? And why can't they decide to go to a less popular, and cheaper place to live and work? I honestly would not stay in CA if I couldn't afford it, and would at least find a cheaper place to be homeless in, just to have a better chance to afford a place. When are we going to start factoring in these people's agency and incentives? They are people with desires, motivations, and plans.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  Author here. The short version: We used to build small homes in walkable neighborhoods where you could live without a car and have reasonable rent. That's mostly gone. You not only need to cover the cost of a large home, cars are mostly not optional for most Americans. This is a huge additional expense. The combination is killer.
  - proc0 5y ago
    Ok, yeah the lack of walkable cities does make sense. Almost all cities require cars even with cheap housing, and large cities provide better job opportunities. I still feel we're not factoring in people's motivation for living on the streets, and authorities seem to provide incentives which encourage it. I'm sure there is a percentage of people that could find alternatives like living with a friend or relative, if they really had to, but CA feels forcing people is somehow not being empathetic or something, when really you are enabling them and perhaps setting them up for a lifetime of being on the streets. I think we should factor in incentives, and also the diverse reasons and motives each person has, as oppose to blaming it all on lack of housing.
shaunxcode 5y ago
So let’s rise to the challenge
j8hn 5y ago
I don't have any experience with the housing issue in California, but got involved a while back trying to find pragmatic solutions in Seattle. The situation is a mess and there is an entire "homeless industrial complex" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism. Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse. At first I was in the "Housing First" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in "Rehab First". A local news station released a great documentary called "Seattle is Dying". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago. https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw The sequel is "The Fight For the Soul of Seattle". https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw
- AngryData 5y ago
  How about rehab and housing at the same time? Many people didn't become serious addicts until after they became homeless.
  - j8hn 5y ago
    In regards to those living on the streets, the main cause of them being homeless is substance abuse and mental illness.
    - Johnythree 5y ago
      And the main reason for substance abuse is the lack of jobs and the lack of hope. The reason that most people stay clean is the need to get up and go to work the next day. And the reason they go to work is because it will give them a better standard of living. Take away permanent jobs, reasonable wages, affordable housing, and many people will simply give up hope.
      - j8hn 5y ago
        Is the main reason for substance abuse really lack of jobs and lack of hope? I'm curious where you got your data from.
sershe 5y ago
The only reason I don't laugh quite out loud is that I have a misfortune of living in Seattle and my wife refuses to move until something "actually happens" to us, as opposed to stuff going on 15 blocks away. California is not suffering from others' "broken" policy, but only from its own. It's an unpopular opinion, but I think it's great that there are people out there who concentrate the entire problem around themselves and spare the rest of us. They should suffer the consequences of their very willful and insistent stupidity. We should make fun of them, from safe distance.
- beanjuice 5y ago
  Would you mind elaborating on what you are afraid of happening, and what you think the cause is?
  - kory 5y ago
    Rampant property crime with no legal repercussions is common here. People shoot up in parks (and now on school property!) and the city is now denying permits for kids to use parks because of the camps. The problem is a learned helplessness of the electorate combined with reasonable voters leaving, resulting in people who want to double down on the status quo replacing them. There is zero political will to enforce vagrancy, open air drug use, and private property law if someone is living in a tent. No standards == these people feel empowered to do whatever they want, while contributors to the tax base are treated poorly. I still get a ticket 30 mins after parking too far from the curb, and the city council does not like that I make a good income and own a single family home.
    - 838812052807016 5y ago
      It should be socially acceptable to live in a tent. There shouldn't be a big jump between renting a room and living in a tent. People who live in tents shouldn't be seen as some kind of underclass with the label "homeless". There should be a continuum with painless mobility between a tent, a room, an apartment, a house. Everyone should be expected to follow the law. The system should work for all people, all the way from 0 to infinity.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
California population = 39.51M = 161,548 homeless [1] (0.41% of total population) 72% = 116315 people 1. https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/ https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/ Somehow, I thought that figure is significantly larger, when I visited SF, CA - walking around town I could see homeless people everywhere.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  Many years ago, I took a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy. My recollection: New York was ten times the overall population as San Francisco and the two cities had about the same number of homeless. The problem in San Francisco is pretty bad. It's not equally bad across the state. I ran some numbers at one time and concluded that per capita, homelessness was twice as bad in San Diego as in Fresno, for example. So it's not evenly distributed across the entire state. San Francisco is especially badly impacted from what I gather.
rodarmor 5y ago
The post doesn't seem to offer any evidence for its claim.
- kyleee 5y ago
  You've also failed to provide evidence of your claim, so there isn't any utility in your comment unfortunately. Add an example or two of claims lacking evidence and perhaps some discussion can take place
quantified 5y ago
Having lived in small towns and big cities, hot/cold Northeast/Midwest and sunny CA, I have thought for years that CA cities are the ideal destination for homeless. If you need to beg, you need a city with moneyed or generous people, preferably both. You don’t want to freeze or soak too much. It’s really simple. And drifting to CA has been done for a long time.
archibaldJ 5y ago
I've spent my life mostly in the East (in places where housing is expensive (e.g. Singapore, Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai), as well as places with low cost of living in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia ). I have not been to CA so this may be a silly question: What if there are joint initiatives/collaborations between US and its Eastnern allies to sponsor and help people who are struggling on the street due to homelessness to start afresh with a job and a house in say, Canggu, Bali (where things are quite chill & they'll enjoy a much higher quality of life), etc, work there a few years, save up and do some rehab, etc, and then they can decide to come back to the States or continue their life there? I'm a school drop-out. In my early twenties there were times when I was really broke. So I would move to places with a low cost of living, charge up, and go back to the (relatively high-burn-rate) city life again when it makes sense.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  The US has a history of sending waste to other countries[1]. Obviously, homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking: take something that is seen as a scourge and send it to other countries so that it's out of sight and the largest costs of dealing with it are borne by others (usually poor people). Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems, take in homeless Americans, a good number of whom have severe mental illness and/or substance abuse issues? What's the benefit to the Indonesian people? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
  - archibaldJ 5y ago
    > ...homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking... Nope. No similiarity here. We can only solve the problem when we treat people with dignity. We shouldn't alienate them. They are people just like you and me. The idea is to lower the cost while improving living standard for them. > Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems... GDP is irrelevant here. Indonesia, Thailand, etc have many cities popular with backpackers and westerners living a nomadic lifestyle. Fresh fruits and fish. Great outdoor. Nice beach. Cheap motorbike. Great landscape and nature. Low-stress. It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab (eg cooking), or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.
aazaa 5y ago
Maybe a shift of perspective is in order. What if the homeless "problem" is merely the most visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years? You expect a homeless problem in a depression. You expect drug use to cripple large segments of society in a depression. You don't expect the problems that come with a depression to be fixable. And you expect those with means to jealously guard them from expropriation during a depression. The thing that separates a modern depression from those that came before is that central banks have pulled out the stops to try to prevent the slide into depression. Their toolbox is limited, so many problems (such as housing) become worse as prices spiral higher out of range of working people, and as jobs continue to flood overseas on cargo ships. Wealth inequality blossoms as the haves keep it (thanks to QE and stock market machinations) and the have-nots lose it. Certain sectors (technology) continue to thrive while everything else (manufacturing, services) spiral downwards. It's easy to blame yourself if the depression is so unevenly distributed. In following this path, central banks have obliterated cues (massive unemployment, bread lines, collective action) that would otherwise make it obvious that a depression was underway. Kind of like what might happen if you could not smell rot or feces, but could still smell food. Things might seem just fine, but only if you willfully ignored certain non-olfactory clues.
- Comevius 5y ago
  This kind of shift in perspective will never happen, people can no longer look into the eye of this massive crisis. We live in frozen calm of the normalcy bias and it will be our collective downfall.
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  >visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years? There's never been more prosperity. The visibly homeless are mentally ill or on drugs. It's due to our lack of healthcare access and ability to exist on the fringes of society if one so chooses. More people in foster care end up homeless than graduate high school.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  What is also not recognised is that there is a growing percentage of people who is unable to perform any job available in a modern society. Because of mental/IQ/education/soft skill problems. The result is a growing underclass of people that the rest of society try to ignore or (especially in the US) punish for “being lazy”.
iammisc 5y ago
Every state believes they are America's dumping ground. That doesn't change the fact that the overall rate of homelessness pre covid had been declining for years in america yet increasing only on the west coast. That alone contradicts the premise.
- ecf 5y ago
  > had been declining for years in America yet increasing only on the west coast > That alone contradicts the premise Other states throw their homeless on busses bound for CA so they can have declining numbers while only the west is growing. That’s literally the exact premise.
  - swiley 5y ago
    From what Ive heard only 25% or so of the homeless came to CA from somewhere else.
    - ecf 5y ago
      Even 1% would result in West coast numbers increasing while statisticians from other areas can proclaim theirs are decreasing.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Sure. Why not. They (government and citizens who elect the government) are all stupid patsies who willing allow themselves to be abused in this way. They get what they deserve! If they had spines, they prevent it and/or reverse it. But they "think with emotions" so they are incapable of doing the right thing for the state and its citizens. BTW NYC did the same thing during the 1970s/1980s to clean up homelessness and criminality of NYC: folks were bused to upstate cities of Albany, Rochester and Buffalo to "get them out of the problem space" of NYC. That was key to how NYC recovered from the 1970s hell-hole it has become. Now it's returning to the same and current leadership is again spineless.
etempleton 5y ago
It is true, California, namely SF, has the highest density of homeless people I have ever seen. Climate, as the author points out is a huge factor, but it is really a confluence of climate, housing costs, and lenient policies toward vagrancy. A. It is possible to be homeless in much of California’s coastal cities and towns and not die of exposure. In DC and NY you could easily die of heat stroke in the summer, hypothermia in the winter, or a hurricane or tropical storm if living in a tent or on the sidewalk, so eventually everyone needs to find shelter. B. Housing is so incredibly expensive on the west coast that you can effectively be working a full-time job and still not be able to afford basic housing. This is not really true of anywhere on the east coast. Sure, cities like DC and NY are expensive, but you don’t have to go too far from the city center to find moderately priced housing. In other east coast cities on the east coast homes and rent can be downright cheap and you could live with a roof over your head, albeit not well, working full time at minimum wage. C. SF is very lenient and tolerant of homelessness. NY and almost every east coast city, is much less so. Police will clear streets and not allow encampments or people to loiter or sleep in certain areas. These street clearing policies certainly do not solve homelessness, but it does reduce visibility of homelessness. During my last visit to SF homeless people were pretty much everywhere, in every neighborhood and every park.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
Homelessness? We may have seen nothing yet. With the end of the housing payment moratorium, we may have millions more on the streets. Will those of you who hate the homeless hate them, too? All the millions that are going to be camping everywhere? You think it's bad now....just wait.
tamaharbor 5y ago
Couldn’t the homeless relocate to less expensive places, perhaps get a job, and then be able to afford rent (even if it means having a roommate or two)? What is the reluctance? Roommates? A job? I am confused.
GaryTang 5y ago
I believe California is the cause of America’s homeless problem
kaminar 5y ago
YouTube Kensington street in Philadelphia...real time videos of unreal homelessness, open drug abuse and all that comes with it...in the midst of a busy commercial area...it's mentally crushing

137 points by DoreenMichele 5y ago

darig 5y ago

I believe Californians equating America's homeless with garbage is the problem, snowflake.

mullingitover 5y ago

This is a thinly sourced blog post that seems like pure flamebait and not really relevant for HN.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eplanit 5y ago
The government website stats support the claim: ~29% of the entire US homeless population is in California, which is disproportional when compared to other state population densities.[1] That said, the piece doesn't offer much constructive advice on how to fix it. Californians have been witnessing the very real, large increase in tent cities, addicts, feces, ... for years now, but so far they still vote for the same people and policies that create the problem. In the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park. Even when Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Fran, he tried to enact a "Care not Cash" program to get people into mental health services instead of cash handouts; the people turned on him, and even set fire to his front lawn in protest. Californians are getting precisely the kind of world they've voted for. It's ugly, and it literally stinks. Yes, how to fix it is the question, but I'm not sure the people have had enough yet. The recall election of Newsom next month will be an indicator. If he's recalled, then a new day of hope begins. Hope, anyway.... [1] https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca
- deleted 5y ago
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- alisonkisk 5y ago
  The callous disregard for human life exhibited in this post is sickening. My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space, maybe from the automobile lanes and parks that infest our cities and spew far more stinky poison than people living rough.
  - s5300 5y ago
    A fair amount of those who frequent this site are purely concerned with how to squeeze the most profit out of the most people possible, no matter the collateral damage that may come from those goals. I'm not sure how you could be surprised.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    > My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? San Francisco spends tens of millions of dollar a year cleaning its streets. https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-million-street-cleanup-2018-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-milli... > Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space... The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Unless you have a better idea as to where these people should go, just saying that they shouldn’t be there isn’t very useful.
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        That's not true, acknowledging the problem is the first step to coming up with a solution.
alisonkisk 5y ago
The author and submitter has >35000 karma on HN. The blog post has more linked sources than most content marketing spam that appears on HN from page. There are already several comments on the post by HN users that are repeating statements from the post. This suggests it is HN material.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  This is an unconvincing example of appeal to (internet) accomplishment.
  - randallsquared 5y ago
    The case made upthread was that this blog post wasn't the sort of thing Hacker News readers want to see on Hacker News: > pure flamebait and not really relevant for HN. All three claims in what you respond to address that case head-on. It isn't as if they're talking about twitter, facebook, or discord stats.

tiahura 5y ago

When vagrancy was a crime there was much less vagrancy.

michaelmrose 5y ago
Fun fact in the 1700s the British transported large numbers of vagabonds to what would later become the states. This strategy it seems works great when you have somewhere else where you can make the parties assistance someone else's problem. It is inherently harder when the person remains your problem regardless.

trident5000 5y ago

1) How is this HN related? 2) Its popular for homeless because the weather is great and the surrounding community tolerates it.

wombatpm 5y ago

Lived in Chicago and Minneapolis. Hard winters naturally reduce the homeless. They either migrate, get jobs or die

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
This is unnecessarily darwinian in its conception. It also ignores that the major NE cities invest more into building shelters because they decided people freezing to death on the sidewalk was unacceptable.
- yarky 5y ago
  I second the op, it's hard to just be homeless when it gets freezing cold. Put differently, if I had to choose a place to be homeless, I'd start by choosing a place with good weather, that's a (hypothetical) fact.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    People start where they are. Hitch hiking and train jumping are both very dangerous. It's no simple matter to "choose a place with good weather."
    - cyberbanjo 5y ago
      Free bus rides to wherever in the US based on someone else's word over phone call https://www.streetsheet.org/homeward-bound-program-offers-free-bus-ride-home/ https://www.streetsheet.org/homeward-bound-program-offers-fr...
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Do you know that it's true that per-capital NE cities invest more into shelters? View from Seattle, an enormous amount of money is spent on homeless outreach and shelters that I have never seen reflected in any other area (other than the Pacific rim).
- colinmhayes 5y ago

jefftk 5y ago

"Dumping ground" implies other places did this to CA, which isn't substantiated by the article. As it says, the vast majority of CA homeless are from within the state. In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.

s5300 5y ago
There is some undeniable truth to this video though. https://youtu.be/6EHPt8eoSJI https://youtu.be/6EHPt8eoSJI
rubicon33 5y ago
I'm really not convinced that high housing costs accurately depict the source of the homelessness problem in CA. If it does, it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see. Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be benefited by lower housing prices. These people could not afford nor likely ever would afford, a house that cost literally anything. Most of these people suffer from a mental illness and/or a drug addiction which makes holding down a job unlikely to ever happen. What they need is publicly funded mental health hospitals, like the ones that were destroyed in the 80s. Of course high housing costs are a huge problem, but I just don't think they tell the whole story when it comes to CA homelessness. There's an elephant in the room that far too many people don't want to address. It's the aforementioned population of people who either can't or won't work and the solution we have for them right now is the street.
- settrans 5y ago
  California already has a 1% income tax allocated just to mental health, and has collected $7.4 billion so far just from this tax[0]. How is that working? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Servi...

refulgentis 5y ago

This is a common myth and a misunderstanding I understand, I thought the same myself a decade ago. It looks like this thread is going nowhere good, so I'll just throw this over the fence quick and run away: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

cortesoft 5y ago

I think the answer is pretty simple… there are more homeless people because housing is very expensive.

irrational 5y ago
So, if there really is an exodus from California, they will drive up housing prices elsewhere and the homeless problem will spread?
- mjevans 5y ago
  It has been doing this for decades already. North up the coast. Across the wastes of Phoenix which built outward into the desert, and also to Texas which I hear has similar sprawl.
- arodgers_la 5y ago
  So we have established that housing and homelessness need to be solved at the national level. As such, the influx of people to California to begin with stemmed from within California along with other parts of the country—it has always been a national issue but only visible at the local level.

Schnitz 5y ago

> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?" Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic! Truly solving the housing crisis would mean for housing costs to go down a lot, which means house values would go down and the 55% will keep fighting that. If you want to stay long term in California and disconnect yourself from the madness that is California housing costs, you have to buy at some point and accept it as the price of entry.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
Nobody talks about the harder truth: even with its exclusionary housing policies, California is increasingly not capable of supporting the population it has. The 2021 fires and worsening drought conditions are just a taste of things to come.
- epistasis 5y ago
  California is extremely capable of supporting its current population, and easily 50% more. The only thing stopping this is proper distribution of land and water. We let wealthy people hoard land and water (Prop 13 and our land rights system), rather than allocating them based on market systems or even more fair systems. We have feudalism baked too deeply into our laws.
  - mc32 5y ago
    California was a semi desert before we built the canals and aqueducts -which is why it was a backwater with few people till that was done and its fertile soil was able to sustain life. People (city dwellers) came _after_ the farmers. So, it might be in need of an update, but I think you're mischaracterizing how this happened.
    - 5y ago

betwixthewires 5y ago

I agree with the premise of the article, that a large proportion of California's homeless move there because it's easier to he homeless for all the reasons listed, but that's about the substance of the article. It blames the problem on detached housing and demands solutions without an inkling of a hint at any. Our homeless problem is the result of 2 things: a mental health problem and to a much lesser extent the pervasiveness of the speculative real estate market driving up costs (a market largely driven by equity in the California housing market I might mention). The solution to this problem is not less detached housing, it is more of any housing anywhere that it has been artificially suppressed, and raising interest rates to a market dictated level rather than artificially suppressing them to hold up the house of cards, and more importantly, helping people address their mental health problems.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
I'm the author. It's really not mostly mental health problems. I've studied this issue for years. I write about homelessness on Street Life Solutions. I try to write about housing and community development stuff elsewhere, like Eclogiselle.com and https://projectsro.blogspot.com/ https://projectsro.blogspot.com/. This post wasn't intended to be some opus solving everything. I wanted to make one point: California's extreme homeless problem is not somehow entirely the fault of California government, though that is a factor. There are other factors, like weather and a national shortage of housing that has been ongoing for a lot of years and isn't remotely peculiar to California. California has 12 percent of the nation's entire population and 27 percent (or more -- different sources vary) of the nation's homeless population. That's not just a "California problem." That's a national problem disproportionately impacting California. There's a lore more to the issue than can be contained in a single post. I tried to make one point and only one point. Addressing how to resolve the nation's housing problems will take more than a single blog post. But thank you for commenting.
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  California is a honey pot for homeless people, that is not a national problem but a local reality.

cm2187 5y ago

More of a magnet than a dumping ground, it’s not like the homeless were sent to California. Local incentives are more likely to blame.

tjalfi 5y ago
> More of a magnet than a dumping ground, it’s not like the homeless were sent to California. Local incentives are more likely to blame. Nevada used to give homeless mental patients bus tickets to California [0][1]. [0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-busing-homeless-lawsuit-san-francisco/ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-b... [1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-busing/article2577189.html http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-bus...

iJohnDoe 5y ago

Of course it is. Does no one remember when other states were paying for bus fares to California to get the homeless out of their state? Does no one remember states paying to fly the homeless to Hawaii? The above might sound ridiculous, but what sounds cheaper? Solving California’s massive homeless problem or simply getting the homeless out of the state on the next plane or bus?

jdavis703 5y ago
I’ve posted detailed numbers here before, but the overwhelming numbers of homeless people in the Bay Area came from the Bay Area. Source: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ExecutiveSummary_SanFrancisco2019.pdf https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ExecutiveSu...
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  There’s some nuance to that. 70% were already in SF when they became homeless, but the vast majority of San Franciscans aren’t from here. Only a third we’re even born in California. So it seems like people move here, become homeless, and stay. And 30% coming here after becoming homeless isn’t peanuts.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Many of those people from outside SF came from neighboring counties or within California. It’s a tiny minority coming from out of state.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
Every place does this. I was homeless in San Francisco & applied for assistance. They made sure to let everyone know they'd buy you a one way ticket to pretty much any place you wanted to go.
- addicted 5y ago
  The difference is that they will return to places like SF, LA and NYC, because they are treated much worse in other places. Basically, take your one way bus ride to Dallas, where you then take a 1 way ride back to SF, from where you’re unlikely to go back to Dallas.

proc0 5y ago

How can it be housing when there are so many vacancies? I honestly don't understand this. Obviously they can't afford it, but that's how markets work. When there is high demand, prices go up. It seems to me the solution is just for people to go elsewhere... again, the housing is there, plenty of rentals everywhere, except too expensive for someone who is living on the streets to, all of a sudden, start paying for, yet they can't live anywhere else? Also politicians where talking about an exit tax for people who leave, or something like that. You can't have it both ways: be the most popular destination and also have affordable housing. It's either/or, and people who can't afford simply need to go elsewhere that they can afford. How can that not be an option for people? It seems to me everyone just ignores individual incentives when talking about this problem. What are these people on the street motivated by? What do they want? And why can't they decide to go to a less popular, and cheaper place to live and work? I honestly would not stay in CA if I couldn't afford it, and would at least find a cheaper place to be homeless in, just to have a better chance to afford a place. When are we going to start factoring in these people's agency and incentives? They are people with desires, motivations, and plans.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
Author here. The short version: We used to build small homes in walkable neighborhoods where you could live without a car and have reasonable rent. That's mostly gone. You not only need to cover the cost of a large home, cars are mostly not optional for most Americans. This is a huge additional expense. The combination is killer.
- proc0 5y ago
  Ok, yeah the lack of walkable cities does make sense. Almost all cities require cars even with cheap housing, and large cities provide better job opportunities. I still feel we're not factoring in people's motivation for living on the streets, and authorities seem to provide incentives which encourage it. I'm sure there is a percentage of people that could find alternatives like living with a friend or relative, if they really had to, but CA feels forcing people is somehow not being empathetic or something, when really you are enabling them and perhaps setting them up for a lifetime of being on the streets. I think we should factor in incentives, and also the diverse reasons and motives each person has, as oppose to blaming it all on lack of housing.

shaunxcode 5y ago

So let’s rise to the challenge

j8hn 5y ago

I don't have any experience with the housing issue in California, but got involved a while back trying to find pragmatic solutions in Seattle. The situation is a mess and there is an entire "homeless industrial complex" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism. Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse. At first I was in the "Housing First" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in "Rehab First". A local news station released a great documentary called "Seattle is Dying". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago. https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw The sequel is "The Fight For the Soul of Seattle". https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw

AngryData 5y ago
How about rehab and housing at the same time? Many people didn't become serious addicts until after they became homeless.
- j8hn 5y ago
  In regards to those living on the streets, the main cause of them being homeless is substance abuse and mental illness.
  - Johnythree 5y ago
    And the main reason for substance abuse is the lack of jobs and the lack of hope. The reason that most people stay clean is the need to get up and go to work the next day. And the reason they go to work is because it will give them a better standard of living. Take away permanent jobs, reasonable wages, affordable housing, and many people will simply give up hope.
    - j8hn 5y ago
      Is the main reason for substance abuse really lack of jobs and lack of hope? I'm curious where you got your data from.

sershe 5y ago

The only reason I don't laugh quite out loud is that I have a misfortune of living in Seattle and my wife refuses to move until something "actually happens" to us, as opposed to stuff going on 15 blocks away. California is not suffering from others' "broken" policy, but only from its own. It's an unpopular opinion, but I think it's great that there are people out there who concentrate the entire problem around themselves and spare the rest of us. They should suffer the consequences of their very willful and insistent stupidity. We should make fun of them, from safe distance.

beanjuice 5y ago
Would you mind elaborating on what you are afraid of happening, and what you think the cause is?
- kory 5y ago
  Rampant property crime with no legal repercussions is common here. People shoot up in parks (and now on school property!) and the city is now denying permits for kids to use parks because of the camps. The problem is a learned helplessness of the electorate combined with reasonable voters leaving, resulting in people who want to double down on the status quo replacing them. There is zero political will to enforce vagrancy, open air drug use, and private property law if someone is living in a tent. No standards == these people feel empowered to do whatever they want, while contributors to the tax base are treated poorly. I still get a ticket 30 mins after parking too far from the curb, and the city council does not like that I make a good income and own a single family home.
  - 838812052807016 5y ago
    It should be socially acceptable to live in a tent. There shouldn't be a big jump between renting a room and living in a tent. People who live in tents shouldn't be seen as some kind of underclass with the label "homeless". There should be a continuum with painless mobility between a tent, a room, an apartment, a house. Everyone should be expected to follow the law. The system should work for all people, all the way from 0 to infinity.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

California population = 39.51M = 161,548 homeless [1] (0.41% of total population) 72% = 116315 people 1. https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/ https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/ Somehow, I thought that figure is significantly larger, when I visited SF, CA - walking around town I could see homeless people everywhere.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
Many years ago, I took a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy. My recollection: New York was ten times the overall population as San Francisco and the two cities had about the same number of homeless. The problem in San Francisco is pretty bad. It's not equally bad across the state. I ran some numbers at one time and concluded that per capita, homelessness was twice as bad in San Diego as in Fresno, for example. So it's not evenly distributed across the entire state. San Francisco is especially badly impacted from what I gather.

rodarmor 5y ago

The post doesn't seem to offer any evidence for its claim.

kyleee 5y ago
You've also failed to provide evidence of your claim, so there isn't any utility in your comment unfortunately. Add an example or two of claims lacking evidence and perhaps some discussion can take place

quantified 5y ago

Having lived in small towns and big cities, hot/cold Northeast/Midwest and sunny CA, I have thought for years that CA cities are the ideal destination for homeless. If you need to beg, you need a city with moneyed or generous people, preferably both. You don’t want to freeze or soak too much. It’s really simple. And drifting to CA has been done for a long time.

archibaldJ 5y ago

I've spent my life mostly in the East (in places where housing is expensive (e.g. Singapore, Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai), as well as places with low cost of living in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia ). I have not been to CA so this may be a silly question: What if there are joint initiatives/collaborations between US and its Eastnern allies to sponsor and help people who are struggling on the street due to homelessness to start afresh with a job and a house in say, Canggu, Bali (where things are quite chill & they'll enjoy a much higher quality of life), etc, work there a few years, save up and do some rehab, etc, and then they can decide to come back to the States or continue their life there? I'm a school drop-out. In my early twenties there were times when I was really broke. So I would move to places with a low cost of living, charge up, and go back to the (relatively high-burn-rate) city life again when it makes sense.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
The US has a history of sending waste to other countries[1]. Obviously, homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking: take something that is seen as a scourge and send it to other countries so that it's out of sight and the largest costs of dealing with it are borne by others (usually poor people). Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems, take in homeless Americans, a good number of whom have severe mental illness and/or substance abuse issues? What's the benefit to the Indonesian people? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
- archibaldJ 5y ago
  > ...homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking... Nope. No similiarity here. We can only solve the problem when we treat people with dignity. We shouldn't alienate them. They are people just like you and me. The idea is to lower the cost while improving living standard for them. > Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems... GDP is irrelevant here. Indonesia, Thailand, etc have many cities popular with backpackers and westerners living a nomadic lifestyle. Fresh fruits and fish. Great outdoor. Nice beach. Cheap motorbike. Great landscape and nature. Low-stress. It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab (eg cooking), or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.

aazaa 5y ago

Maybe a shift of perspective is in order. What if the homeless "problem" is merely the most visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years? You expect a homeless problem in a depression. You expect drug use to cripple large segments of society in a depression. You don't expect the problems that come with a depression to be fixable. And you expect those with means to jealously guard them from expropriation during a depression. The thing that separates a modern depression from those that came before is that central banks have pulled out the stops to try to prevent the slide into depression. Their toolbox is limited, so many problems (such as housing) become worse as prices spiral higher out of range of working people, and as jobs continue to flood overseas on cargo ships. Wealth inequality blossoms as the haves keep it (thanks to QE and stock market machinations) and the have-nots lose it. Certain sectors (technology) continue to thrive while everything else (manufacturing, services) spiral downwards. It's easy to blame yourself if the depression is so unevenly distributed. In following this path, central banks have obliterated cues (massive unemployment, bread lines, collective action) that would otherwise make it obvious that a depression was underway. Kind of like what might happen if you could not smell rot or feces, but could still smell food. Things might seem just fine, but only if you willfully ignored certain non-olfactory clues.

Comevius 5y ago
This kind of shift in perspective will never happen, people can no longer look into the eye of this massive crisis. We live in frozen calm of the normalcy bias and it will be our collective downfall.
diogenescynic 5y ago
>visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years? There's never been more prosperity. The visibly homeless are mentally ill or on drugs. It's due to our lack of healthcare access and ability to exist on the fringes of society if one so chooses. More people in foster care end up homeless than graduate high school.
mbrodersen 5y ago
What is also not recognised is that there is a growing percentage of people who is unable to perform any job available in a modern society. Because of mental/IQ/education/soft skill problems. The result is a growing underclass of people that the rest of society try to ignore or (especially in the US) punish for “being lazy”.

iammisc 5y ago

Every state believes they are America's dumping ground. That doesn't change the fact that the overall rate of homelessness pre covid had been declining for years in america yet increasing only on the west coast. That alone contradicts the premise.

ecf 5y ago
> had been declining for years in America yet increasing only on the west coast > That alone contradicts the premise Other states throw their homeless on busses bound for CA so they can have declining numbers while only the west is growing. That’s literally the exact premise.
- swiley 5y ago
  From what Ive heard only 25% or so of the homeless came to CA from somewhere else.
  - ecf 5y ago
    Even 1% would result in West coast numbers increasing while statisticians from other areas can proclaim theirs are decreasing.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Sure. Why not. They (government and citizens who elect the government) are all stupid patsies who willing allow themselves to be abused in this way. They get what they deserve! If they had spines, they prevent it and/or reverse it. But they "think with emotions" so they are incapable of doing the right thing for the state and its citizens. BTW NYC did the same thing during the 1970s/1980s to clean up homelessness and criminality of NYC: folks were bused to upstate cities of Albany, Rochester and Buffalo to "get them out of the problem space" of NYC. That was key to how NYC recovered from the 1970s hell-hole it has become. Now it's returning to the same and current leadership is again spineless.

etempleton 5y ago

It is true, California, namely SF, has the highest density of homeless people I have ever seen. Climate, as the author points out is a huge factor, but it is really a confluence of climate, housing costs, and lenient policies toward vagrancy. A. It is possible to be homeless in much of California’s coastal cities and towns and not die of exposure. In DC and NY you could easily die of heat stroke in the summer, hypothermia in the winter, or a hurricane or tropical storm if living in a tent or on the sidewalk, so eventually everyone needs to find shelter. B. Housing is so incredibly expensive on the west coast that you can effectively be working a full-time job and still not be able to afford basic housing. This is not really true of anywhere on the east coast. Sure, cities like DC and NY are expensive, but you don’t have to go too far from the city center to find moderately priced housing. In other east coast cities on the east coast homes and rent can be downright cheap and you could live with a roof over your head, albeit not well, working full time at minimum wage. C. SF is very lenient and tolerant of homelessness. NY and almost every east coast city, is much less so. Police will clear streets and not allow encampments or people to loiter or sleep in certain areas. These street clearing policies certainly do not solve homelessness, but it does reduce visibility of homelessness. During my last visit to SF homeless people were pretty much everywhere, in every neighborhood and every park.

France_is_bacon 5y ago

Homelessness? We may have seen nothing yet. With the end of the housing payment moratorium, we may have millions more on the streets. Will those of you who hate the homeless hate them, too? All the millions that are going to be camping everywhere? You think it's bad now....just wait.

tamaharbor 5y ago

Couldn’t the homeless relocate to less expensive places, perhaps get a job, and then be able to afford rent (even if it means having a roommate or two)? What is the reluctance? Roommates? A job? I am confused.

GaryTang 5y ago

I believe California is the cause of America’s homeless problem

kaminar 5y ago

YouTube Kensington street in Philadelphia...real time videos of unreal homelessness, open drug abuse and all that comes with it...in the midst of a busy commercial area...it's mentally crushing