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Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

185 points by dynm 5y ago

paulpauper 5y ago
A lot of people through no fault of their own just cannot 'get it together'. Either they lack the skills to be employable, do not make or save enough money to afford a permanent residence, or cannot hold down a job for a variety of reason.
chrsig 5y ago
Yes. Yes there is.
- dang 5y ago
  Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for higher-quality discussion, to the extent that that's possible on the internet. This is particularly important when a thread is fresh because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    So you'll allow a title that ask a question.. and then someone answers it and you have an issue with their answer? How do you pretend to claim to know that there isn't a homeless criss?
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      You realize there's a whole article attached to the title, right? Is there an article associated to the unsubstansive response that I missed?
    - dang 5y ago
      Of course they didn't answer the question—that would require relevant information. A substanceless oneliner (and in the form of an internet trope, even) is not that. Surely it isn't hard to understand that "Yes. Yes there is." is an unsubstantive comment. This is not a borderline call.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      dang does not "pretend to claim to know that there isn't a homeless criss". Don't put words in his mouth; that is very much not cool. What dang does know is that, by HN standards, chrsig's answer was pretty useless. He's asking chrsig to do better, not to have a different answer.
  - chrsig 5y ago
    Given that the title was changed after my comment, I'd say that the comment was substantive, and contributed to the conversation. Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation. That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that would be astoundingly privileged.
    - dang 5y ago
      You posted your comment and I posted my reply before we changed the title. It was clearly a snarky and informationless comment, which you shouldn't have posted. A title change doesn't retroactively reverse that. Of course, if you had posted a substantive comment about homelessness in response to specific things in the article, that would have been fine. That's very much not what you posted. As for "there is no conversation to be had"—this is the sort of categorical putdown that tends to go along with unsubstantive posts in the first place. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? We're looking for curious conversation here, not position-hammering. There's a big difference between those, even if all of your views are 100% correct. Launching straight into a flamewar when the thread is brand new is definitely not the intended use of this site.
- mokarma 5y ago
  Betteridge's law of headlines says there isn't.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    And of course, the law holds true here. There is a crisis in some parts of the US but overall, the homeless rate has been relatively stable.
    - cheriot 5y ago
      Is there a reason for the richest country in history to have homelessness anywhere?
    - mc32 5y ago
      Even so it’d be nice to know if this number is acceptable at a given level of economic maturity as well as level of employable skills. If there is a skills gap or a mental health gap, are those comparable to similar economies or worse or maybe better?
jseliger 5y ago
There is mostly a housing crisis, with homelessness downstream of housing. I originally left this comment a few months ago, but: CA especially has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build. Before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes concomitantly up. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs, and they're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs. The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere. Homelessness is mostly a housing problem: https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing. We can and should remove barriers to building new housing, and, until we do that, we're going to keep seeing these problems. CA SB-9 and SB-10 are steps in the right direction but they're very small steps. Tokyo's approach would be better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501. Even places like New York are proposing density reductions, insanely: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/2020/03/18/cuomo-outlines-mandatory-statewide-density-reduction--other-measures-to-combat-spread-of-covid-19- https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/202....
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago
cheriot 5y ago
We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.
- zz865 5y ago
  > Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.
  - xvedejas 5y ago
    If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.
  - cheriot 5y ago
    Housing needs to be where the economic opportunity is. That's why there's empty homes in Detroit and a rent burdened population in coastal cities.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      There’s empty houses in SF. Your point? The rent controlled 5 bedroom that has the same price in 1999 for the single renter doesn’t feel burdened, if they could use the existing housing and rent at market value, more people will have housing and the government will save money. You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work. Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.
tonymet 5y ago
Another attempt to convince you that your personal observations must be incorrect because someone found a stat from a study somewhere. LA, Portland & SF– are obviously measurably worse over the past decade. Portland is a case of going from beautiful downtown to cesspool in that timeframe. There are a lot of reasons that stats are misleading. Noise in the data, biases, trivial statistics, incorrect measurement, poor geographic approaches. Please don't sit at your desk and tell me what I see out my window doesn't exist.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Add Seattle to the list as well. It has been years since I felt safe taking my family downtown but now I don't even feel safe in most parks.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  How much geographic diversity does your window look out to? I don’t doubt what you’re seeing. But that only tells a very specific story in the bigger picture.
- strstr 5y ago
  Seems like you didn’t read the article to the end. It discusses the spike in unsheltered chronic homelessness on the west coast, which is the most visible type.
- cheriot 5y ago
  Did you read the article? It's saying chronic unsheltered poopulations are increasing on the west coast, which also seems to be your observation.
- epistasis 5y ago
  You seem to be saying that the data is biased, but your personal anecdata is not. Do I understand that correctly? Or is it that when you say "homeless" you only mean the people you see, and not all the rest of the people that would typically fit the description of homeless? What you see out your window certainly exists, but there is a whole lot of the world that you cannot see from your window. Claiming that your window provides the best view should at least come with some sort of argument about why it's a superior view.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Excellent breakdown of data on homeless populations across the US. It could use a better title. This is worth looking at. It is not your usual opinion piece on the topic. It's all data and it's very good.
- dang 5y ago
  I've replaced the title with your description. Thanks! Hopefully it will help the thread be more substantive. (Submitted title was "Is there a homelessness crisis?")
- dynm 5y ago
  I went ahead and changed the title of the article itself, too. Thanks for the feedback.
paxys 5y ago
> There are some exceptions. For one thing, despite being close to California, Nevada and some of the Montana-esque states saw big decreases in certain categories. Someone people would look at this and go wow, Nevada and the rest did a great job providing shelters and help to their homeless. I think a more realistic answer is that they just shipped them to California.
- whakim 5y ago
  I don't think this is true because it is non-chronic homelessness which decreased in Nevada. Is there any evidence for this theory?
- csee 5y ago
  Evidence? I've read articles talking about homeless being shipped both out of CA and into CA, but no solid reporting that quantifies the gap between those two flows.
- epistasis 5y ago
  The data doesn't really seem to support this, and my personal experience doesn't either. Most homeless people in my Californian town were living nearby when they became homeless. And though I didn't go to high school here, friends who did recognize people they grew up among the homeless. There's a far bigger difference between California and its neighbors: housing costs and availability of housing even for those with money. I have known many well employed people in my town that have not been able to get an apartment even after applying for upwards of 20 apartments. When paired with application fees, that means that these people spend $500-$1000 merely on application fees before they finally get into an apartment. That awful situation doesn't happen in Montana or Nevada, as far as I know.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Yikes, application fees are illegal where I live. That's some pretty absurd rent-seeking. Is there a limit, or could an unscrupulous "landlord" post an ad with very low rent for a room, and live off the application fees without ever accepting an application?
rp1 5y ago
This data is interesting because it illustrates how few chronic homeless people there are, and yet people who live in cities with large homeless populations will tell you how disruptive they can be. In NYC, a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire ride. This tiny portion of the population has an outsized impact on everyone else. For this reason, among others, society should find some help for these people.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  > In NYC, a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire ride I've ridden with homeless in the same car as me plenty of times and only occasionally will they be disruptive. I'm far more irked with showtime than with the occasional sleeping down-on-his-luck guy.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Not sure what your meaning of disruptive is but I would define "ruins the entire ride" as making the entire car smell like urine and feces. I've also gotten on buses where it is plainly apparent someone peed on the bus floor.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      I'm sure you can find a few anecdotal counter examples but generally speaking people don't behave that way on the east coast, homeless or not. And when they do it's more likely to be a drunk on game day than a homeless person.
      - b9a2cab5 5y ago
        Sounds like I need to move to the East Coast because that's the experience I get half the time I get on a bus or BART in the Bay.
        vanilla_nut 5y ago
lostinquebec 5y ago
I think the articles problem is the lack of a definition of "crisis", and that leads to a bad mismatch between the headline and what is a reasonable look at the data. My issues with the article are: It starts from a too high aggregation level - almost no one is homeless in California, they are homeless usually in a very narrow area e.g. within 500 metres of bridge X. Percentage change in raw numbers are not a good way to measure "crisis", and especially not at a state or city aggregated level. It seems more like traffic to me. Even in peak hour traffic, many roads are free of traffic, and the worst affected roads are those where the level of cars exceeds the roads ability to cope. That happens in a thin range of total cars per minute for specific roads, not due to X% increase overall. The same is true of homelessness in a city vs ... let's call them "hotspots". Perhaps even more important than numbers in specific areas is the actual conditions homelessness creates in those areas. "Bad conditions" could be everything from human faeces on the street increasing, to murders, over doses, disease and unsanitary conditions, and it is possible for "bad conditions" to decrease and homeless numbers go up, or visa versa. That is harder to measure for sure, but probably closer to what most people mean by crisis.
spatley 5y ago
It would be interesting to see these rates alongside housing costs. Here in Seattle the median house price has tripled in the last 10 years and homelessness has shot up along with it.
stillbourne 5y ago
I live in Denver, like any other metropolitan area there has always been a homeless population. What has been different is since 2016 there has been a staggering growth in the number of tents and so called tent cities. This isn't a problem just downtown either even if it is most visible there. The issue has expanded outside downtown and is filling in vacant properties in suburbia as well. Places like Aurora, almost every open space park, bike paths, bridges, everywhere you can fit a tent is turning into a homeless encampment. The worse part is I feel helpless, I'm making good money and barley able to pay rent. I feel powerless to help even if I could.
- chii 5y ago
  > I'm making good money and barley able to pay rent. How can this be both true? If you can barely make rent, it must be that you're not making good money. Surely good money means you have excess after paying all necessities. If you mistakenly believe you're making good money, but is in actual fact struggling, you must start looking for a higher paying job, lest you end up homeless due to a sudden economic shock or accident causing you to lose your income.
  - tristor 5y ago
    It's possible because pay rates in Colorado haven't risen in line with housing costs going up. Colorado has suffered more than most states with an absolute influx of people moving there from California and driving up housing costs. Often not discussed when talking about homelessness is that the alternative for many people who can no longer afford to live in a particular area isn't to end up on the street, but to go elsewhere which if done in large enough scales can displace residents there in a cyclical path. California has had net outflows of US citizen residents for many years, but net inflows overall due to high levels of immigration. As the housing shortage becomes even more of a crisis in California, it's driving many people out to other states, and this mostly people who are fully employed, not at risk of living on the street, but also not able to afford housing at a reasonable percentage of their income in California. Colorado housing costs now average roughly half what Bay Area housing costs, when a decade ago it was closer to 1/6th. Some cities in Texas like Austin are experiencing this as well. The population between 2010 and 2020 in Austin QUADRUPLED, and the vast majority of new residents came from California. Housing prices also have nearly quadrupled at the same time, but not quite thanks to it being very easy to build in Austin and lots of new housing being constructed. What you could buy for $250k in 2010 now costs closer to $650k in Austin. What you could buy in the Denver metro for $400k in 2010 now costs around $1M. So it is absolutely true that in raw dollars, compared to median household income in the US, you could be "making good money" and now be barely able to pay rent if you live in a place that's had a mass influx of Californians over the last decade causing housing costs to skyrocket.
BrianOnHN 5y ago
In addition to what's mentioned here[1], I like that "unhoused" implies that this is more of a societal problem, opposed to "home-less" which implies a deficit in certain individuals. [1] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/homeless-unhoused/amp https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/homeless-unhoused/...
GaryTang 5y ago
I still have a difficult time understanding how increased homelessness is not a direct result of increased taxes and regulations. The data presented corroborates as much and though correlation doesn’t mean causation, correlation certainly doesn’t indicate a lack of causation either. We go to great lengths to justify the results when the simplest explanation is staring right at you.
- oblaff 5y ago
  I still have a difficult time understanding how increased homelessness is not a direct result of the number of comedy clubs per capita. The data presented corroborates as much and though correlation doesn’t mean causation, correlation certainly doesn’t indicate a lack of causation either. We go to great lengths to justify the results when the simplest explanation is staring right at you.
  - GaryTang 5y ago
    Yikes, to equivocate the impact of taxes and regulations to that of comedy clubs, I can’t imagine being so naive.
zwieback 5y ago
This is great work, data I've been very interested in. It would be really fascinating to get to county and city level, where I live there's been a crazy increase in people living in tents with severe mental and/or substance abuse problems. It does reflect at the state (Oregon) level but I think it's a bit misleading because it feels like there are magnet areas where all the increase happens in one spot.
- dynm 5y ago
  Hey, I do have plots at the city and county level, 387 of them! Go to https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#all-plots https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#all-plots and click on the second triangle thing.
  - zwieback 5y ago
    Wow, thanks, fantastic!
r00fus 5y ago
What about red states bussing homeless to the west coast? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattle-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl... Until it's not possible to simply ship your problems away (kind of like how we handle recycling), governments are incentivized to do the wrong things.
- whakim 5y ago
  The article you cited literally states that only 5 percent of Washington state's unhoused population became homeless out of the state.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > only 5 percent of Washington state's unhoused population became homeless out of the state. homeless is an incredibly broad term. i would be curious in the numbers split across different subsets, like homeless with schizophrenia.
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    If we want to know the magnitude of states shipping homeless people away, we need to start measuring how many had been supporting themselves. I’ve seen studies about California homelessness where a participant was counted as in-state if they bussed here and crashed on a friend’s couch for a little while.
    - whakim 5y ago
      Look, I don't know the actual numbers, but the GP cited "red states busing their homeless population" and then cited a NYT article about this very issue where the numbers presented contradicted that claim. If you do know of studies which have more actual data on this issue, please link to them so we can all learn more - this seems to be one of those issues where there's a lot of emotion but far less actual data!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zwieback 5y ago
It's really good to see the breakdown into the four broad classes. The big question: should we as a society be allowed to force permanently unsheltered people with substance abuse and mental illness into some kind of facility for treatment? Most people who even want to do anything about these problems would probably say no but I think it's at least worth asking.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I would say no, absolutely not. You should build optional facilities and if people don’t go maybe it’s because your facility sucks. For example lots of places require you to be in at a certain time every night and vacate early in the morning. This may seem fine but it leads to problems for anyone who wants to work a night job or socialize with friends after a day shift. It seems that housing-first is the way to go. Give someone keys to their own place they can come and go from any time. Offer medical and mental health services nearby. This gives people the time and space to get well and stabilize their life. Using cops to throw someone in to a facility is just one more difficult and disruptive challenge that makes people’s lives worse, not better.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    Addicts (homeless or not) frequently make decisions that are not in their best interests. Decisions they would not make if they were not sick, including actively resisting help. I'm not saying that help should be forced upon huge swaths of people (there are reasons to be against that in principle) or that they don't deserve a bed. I am just skeptical that housing-first would lead to much change in the mental health of that population. Addiction recovery rates are really not good even when looking at a much more financially comfortable population or people with family members that are trying their best to keep on top of them. For many addicts, it is also difficult to recover and remain sober unless they stop spending time with others that are using. If only a minority of a dorm-style housing unit were serious about wanting to get clean this could make it even harder for them.
crateless 5y ago
I wish that there was a breakdown by gender as well. It seems somewhat incomplete as is.
- azinman2 5y ago
  SF has that data, but their report is 404ing at the moment.. I recall it being near equal?
tgbugs 5y ago
One piece of analysis I'd be interested to see is whether the transition probabilities among the 4 categories along with the implied 5th category of "not homeless" have changed. This is harder to get good data for because it would require tracking individuals across time. The payoff is that it would likely reveal evidence of structural changes if such changes exist. At the population level it is hard to tell whether and where changes are happening. Getting the transition probabilities would allow for more effective targeting of interventions (though most of the folks who work on this already know which transitions are the hardest to recover from).
antognini 5y ago
The huge decrease in homelessness in North Dakota is probably due to the end of the fracking boom. The map compares the homelessness rate from 2015 to 2020, and 2015 was just a few years after the height of the boom. During the early 2010s rents in North Dakota shot up enormously as tens of thousands of workers poured into the state to support the industry. There wasn't enough existing housing to support the newcomers so there was a lot of crowding into trailers etc. and it's no surprise that a lot of people ended up homeless. Fracking has leveled off for the past few years and many of the workers have moved back to other oil fields so homelessness has decreased dramatically.
PaulHoule 5y ago
Wow. I've talked with people who "lived outside" and realized that they were in very different situations. This article does a good job of breaking it down with a simple analysis. It makes me think of the book that inspired this musical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_Are_for_Sleeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_Are_for_Sleeping which described quite a few different situations people were in.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Great article, but I didn't see (maybe I missed it) a notice of the fact that homelessness can be correlated with meth, mental illness, etc. with the causation working in either direction. Homelessness could be caused by, or increase the chances of, any of those other factors (or both).
vmception 5y ago
Great piece! One thing to add is to look into why the anecdotes are pervasive. This data does a great job at distinguishing between the unhoused population and the sheltered homeless population. Where the unhoused are visible drives the perception. In California, the same is true, with unhoused being just the tip of the iceberg in the homeless population, the difference is where the unhoused are. In favelas and bazaars in the middle of very expensive areas. Strolling through highly trafficked areas of NYC you wouldnt make the broad reductive assumption that “New York has more homeless people”, whereas strolling through highly trafficked areas of SF/LA would be a complete culture shock. It is an interesting topic as it’s not clear how much people know everytime the topic comes up. Is a prologue about distinguishing between unhoused/sheltered before engaging further really useful? Hard to say
GhettoComputers 5y ago
The article like most people that haven’t been homeless don’t know anything about homelessness aside from inferring from statistics and knowing what is the problem without actually talking to homeless people. #Vanlife people enjoying parking at the beach are chronically homeless and unsheltered. It’s a great way to dehumanize people’s desires and motivations with wrong assumptions by lying with statistics.
SeattleAltruist 5y ago
Homelessness expert here. This data set is garbage. HUD data only includes those in the federally mandated HMIS (Homeless Information Management System). This data excludes 1) people who don't access services; 2) people who access services from private, non-federally funded programs (like faith-based groups); and 3) typically undercounts those with SUD, mental-health issues, and especially people of color. A recent BGC study estimates that, in Seattle, for example, HMIS data doesn't include up to 40% of people in encampments. Garbage In -> Garbage Out. Pretty sweet effort, though. Wish the feds were smart like this.
- dynm 5y ago
  Do you have a reference for that study? Also, what's your impression of how correlated this data is with the true numbers? Does a rise in the counts indicate the true numbers are also probably going up, or could it just be an artifact of more people being in the HMIC system or something?
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  Since the reports main premises is that the number of homeless hasn't changed, does it matter that the groups you mention are left out? Is there reason to believe the groups that are under counted experienced a larger increase the the groups that were included? It seems the data collection has been consistent, so the conclusion of the article seems correct.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zakm 5y ago
  The unsheltered count is a thing and does include people who don't access services.
_zfxr 5y ago
This article is completely ignorant of the actual situation. These comments by most of you really show your true colors. If you truly believe "mental issues" are "causing homelessness" You are blinded by privilege, deaf by choice, and dumb by default. Greed is causing homlessness and these numbers are ridiculous. We're at 16% homelessness here in Atlanta. There are solutions, but not a one of you has the intellectual capacity, balls or creativity to execute. I am in awe at how out of touch these comments are.
- cman1444 5y ago
  Care to share any of your solutions then?
  - Iefthandrule 5y ago
    Our uncreative brains would not be able to understand!
France_is_bacon 5y ago
There's a pecking order in most species and humans are no different. At the bottom of the pecking order are the lowest and not only do they get less, but are actively hated by everyone in a higher position. Homeless basically get nothing, but look what has happened over the last two years for everyone else - money galore for those who have not been working because of covid. Four trillion dollars so far for unemployment. The USA has always had enough to help the homeless. But the people - that's you - hate them and not only do you want them not to have money and resources, you want them to be ground down and make things worse for them, if possible.
999900000999 5y ago
Another great reason to not live in LA, homelessness exploded there since rent shot up. Rent effectively doubled from 2009 to 2019. You can ether stay in Mayor Garcetti's fun house or leave. Factor in even if your able to starve off homelessness yourself, your still wasting money that's better saved. I'm happy to know America is full of functional cities where it's still possible to make it. No this doesn't mean you can afford a 2 bdrm on minimum wage, but you can find a room.
gverrilla 5y ago
"To eliminate poverty it was necessary to conceive of an industrial system more productive than our own. Such will be universal harmony which will produce at least triple — yes, without exaggeration — at least triple the yield of the civilised system in a well-cultivated empire. Accordingly, while Harmony will greatly increase the wealth of the well-to-do, it will bring about an excessive increase in that of the people, to whom it will guarantee a salary or in old age a decent minimum below which they cannot fall. This beneficence will be all the more simple in that humanity will reproduce much less in Harmony than in civilisation. This is far removed from the theories of the philosophers, some of whom, the Demagogues, seek to rob the rich to provide for the poor. The others, who are called the Economists, do not have the welfare of the people in mind. They think only of enriching empires without worrying themselves about the fate of the individual. Thus the theories of the Economists have greatly enriched England without enriching the English. According to the Tableau de Londres you can find 115,000 paupers, prostitutes, thieves, beggars and unemployed in the city of London alone; the workers of Scotland live in a frightful state of misery. This is nonetheless the consequence of the modern systems which claim to alleviate the suffering of the people." Charles Fourier, December 1803

185 points by dynm 5y ago

A lot of people through no fault of their own just cannot 'get it together'. Either they lack the skills to be employable, do not make or save enough money to afford a permanent residence, or cannot hold down a job for a variety of reason.

chrsig 5y ago

Yes. Yes there is.

dang 5y ago
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for higher-quality discussion, to the extent that that's possible on the internet. This is particularly important when a thread is fresh because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  So you'll allow a title that ask a question.. and then someone answers it and you have an issue with their answer? How do you pretend to claim to know that there isn't a homeless criss?
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    You realize there's a whole article attached to the title, right? Is there an article associated to the unsubstansive response that I missed?
  - dang 5y ago
    Of course they didn't answer the question—that would require relevant information. A substanceless oneliner (and in the form of an internet trope, even) is not that. Surely it isn't hard to understand that "Yes. Yes there is." is an unsubstantive comment. This is not a borderline call.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    dang does not "pretend to claim to know that there isn't a homeless criss". Don't put words in his mouth; that is very much not cool. What dang does know is that, by HN standards, chrsig's answer was pretty useless. He's asking chrsig to do better, not to have a different answer.
- chrsig 5y ago
  Given that the title was changed after my comment, I'd say that the comment was substantive, and contributed to the conversation. Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation. That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that would be astoundingly privileged.
  - dang 5y ago
    You posted your comment and I posted my reply before we changed the title. It was clearly a snarky and informationless comment, which you shouldn't have posted. A title change doesn't retroactively reverse that. Of course, if you had posted a substantive comment about homelessness in response to specific things in the article, that would have been fine. That's very much not what you posted. As for "there is no conversation to be had"—this is the sort of categorical putdown that tends to go along with unsubstantive posts in the first place. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? We're looking for curious conversation here, not position-hammering. There's a big difference between those, even if all of your views are 100% correct. Launching straight into a flamewar when the thread is brand new is definitely not the intended use of this site.
mokarma 5y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines says there isn't.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  And of course, the law holds true here. There is a crisis in some parts of the US but overall, the homeless rate has been relatively stable.
  - cheriot 5y ago
    Is there a reason for the richest country in history to have homelessness anywhere?
  - mc32 5y ago
    Even so it’d be nice to know if this number is acceptable at a given level of economic maturity as well as level of employable skills. If there is a skills gap or a mental health gap, are those comparable to similar economies or worse or maybe better?

jseliger 5y ago

There is mostly a housing crisis, with homelessness downstream of housing. I originally left this comment a few months ago, but: CA especially has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build. Before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes concomitantly up. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs, and they're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs. The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere. Homelessness is mostly a housing problem: https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing. We can and should remove barriers to building new housing, and, until we do that, we're going to keep seeing these problems. CA SB-9 and SB-10 are steps in the right direction but they're very small steps. Tokyo's approach would be better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501. Even places like New York are proposing density reductions, insanely: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/2020/03/18/cuomo-outlines-mandatory-statewide-density-reduction--other-measures-to-combat-spread-of-covid-19- https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/202....

aaronbrethorst 5y ago

cheriot 5y ago

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.

zz865 5y ago
> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.
- xvedejas 5y ago
  If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.
- cheriot 5y ago
  Housing needs to be where the economic opportunity is. That's why there's empty homes in Detroit and a rent burdened population in coastal cities.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    There’s empty houses in SF. Your point? The rent controlled 5 bedroom that has the same price in 1999 for the single renter doesn’t feel burdened, if they could use the existing housing and rent at market value, more people will have housing and the government will save money. You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work. Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.

tonymet 5y ago

Another attempt to convince you that your personal observations must be incorrect because someone found a stat from a study somewhere. LA, Portland & SF– are obviously measurably worse over the past decade. Portland is a case of going from beautiful downtown to cesspool in that timeframe. There are a lot of reasons that stats are misleading. Noise in the data, biases, trivial statistics, incorrect measurement, poor geographic approaches. Please don't sit at your desk and tell me what I see out my window doesn't exist.

mulmen 5y ago
Add Seattle to the list as well. It has been years since I felt safe taking my family downtown but now I don't even feel safe in most parks.
Waterluvian 5y ago
How much geographic diversity does your window look out to? I don’t doubt what you’re seeing. But that only tells a very specific story in the bigger picture.
strstr 5y ago
Seems like you didn’t read the article to the end. It discusses the spike in unsheltered chronic homelessness on the west coast, which is the most visible type.
cheriot 5y ago
Did you read the article? It's saying chronic unsheltered poopulations are increasing on the west coast, which also seems to be your observation.
epistasis 5y ago
You seem to be saying that the data is biased, but your personal anecdata is not. Do I understand that correctly? Or is it that when you say "homeless" you only mean the people you see, and not all the rest of the people that would typically fit the description of homeless? What you see out your window certainly exists, but there is a whole lot of the world that you cannot see from your window. Claiming that your window provides the best view should at least come with some sort of argument about why it's a superior view.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Excellent breakdown of data on homeless populations across the US. It could use a better title. This is worth looking at. It is not your usual opinion piece on the topic. It's all data and it's very good.

dang 5y ago
I've replaced the title with your description. Thanks! Hopefully it will help the thread be more substantive. (Submitted title was "Is there a homelessness crisis?")
dynm 5y ago
I went ahead and changed the title of the article itself, too. Thanks for the feedback.

paxys 5y ago

> There are some exceptions. For one thing, despite being close to California, Nevada and some of the Montana-esque states saw big decreases in certain categories. Someone people would look at this and go wow, Nevada and the rest did a great job providing shelters and help to their homeless. I think a more realistic answer is that they just shipped them to California.

whakim 5y ago
I don't think this is true because it is non-chronic homelessness which decreased in Nevada. Is there any evidence for this theory?
csee 5y ago
Evidence? I've read articles talking about homeless being shipped both out of CA and into CA, but no solid reporting that quantifies the gap between those two flows.
epistasis 5y ago
The data doesn't really seem to support this, and my personal experience doesn't either. Most homeless people in my Californian town were living nearby when they became homeless. And though I didn't go to high school here, friends who did recognize people they grew up among the homeless. There's a far bigger difference between California and its neighbors: housing costs and availability of housing even for those with money. I have known many well employed people in my town that have not been able to get an apartment even after applying for upwards of 20 apartments. When paired with application fees, that means that these people spend $500-$1000 merely on application fees before they finally get into an apartment. That awful situation doesn't happen in Montana or Nevada, as far as I know.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- klyrs 5y ago
  Yikes, application fees are illegal where I live. That's some pretty absurd rent-seeking. Is there a limit, or could an unscrupulous "landlord" post an ad with very low rent for a room, and live off the application fees without ever accepting an application?

rp1 5y ago

This data is interesting because it illustrates how few chronic homeless people there are, and yet people who live in cities with large homeless populations will tell you how disruptive they can be. In NYC, a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire ride. This tiny portion of the population has an outsized impact on everyone else. For this reason, among others, society should find some help for these people.

crowbahr 5y ago
> In NYC, a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire ride I've ridden with homeless in the same car as me plenty of times and only occasionally will they be disruptive. I'm far more irked with showtime than with the occasional sleeping down-on-his-luck guy.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Not sure what your meaning of disruptive is but I would define "ruins the entire ride" as making the entire car smell like urine and feces. I've also gotten on buses where it is plainly apparent someone peed on the bus floor.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    I'm sure you can find a few anecdotal counter examples but generally speaking people don't behave that way on the east coast, homeless or not. And when they do it's more likely to be a drunk on game day than a homeless person.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      Sounds like I need to move to the East Coast because that's the experience I get half the time I get on a bus or BART in the Bay.
      - vanilla_nut 5y ago

lostinquebec 5y ago

I think the articles problem is the lack of a definition of "crisis", and that leads to a bad mismatch between the headline and what is a reasonable look at the data. My issues with the article are: It starts from a too high aggregation level - almost no one is homeless in California, they are homeless usually in a very narrow area e.g. within 500 metres of bridge X. Percentage change in raw numbers are not a good way to measure "crisis", and especially not at a state or city aggregated level. It seems more like traffic to me. Even in peak hour traffic, many roads are free of traffic, and the worst affected roads are those where the level of cars exceeds the roads ability to cope. That happens in a thin range of total cars per minute for specific roads, not due to X% increase overall. The same is true of homelessness in a city vs ... let's call them "hotspots". Perhaps even more important than numbers in specific areas is the actual conditions homelessness creates in those areas. "Bad conditions" could be everything from human faeces on the street increasing, to murders, over doses, disease and unsanitary conditions, and it is possible for "bad conditions" to decrease and homeless numbers go up, or visa versa. That is harder to measure for sure, but probably closer to what most people mean by crisis.

spatley 5y ago

It would be interesting to see these rates alongside housing costs. Here in Seattle the median house price has tripled in the last 10 years and homelessness has shot up along with it.

stillbourne 5y ago

I live in Denver, like any other metropolitan area there has always been a homeless population. What has been different is since 2016 there has been a staggering growth in the number of tents and so called tent cities. This isn't a problem just downtown either even if it is most visible there. The issue has expanded outside downtown and is filling in vacant properties in suburbia as well. Places like Aurora, almost every open space park, bike paths, bridges, everywhere you can fit a tent is turning into a homeless encampment. The worse part is I feel helpless, I'm making good money and barley able to pay rent. I feel powerless to help even if I could.

chii 5y ago
> I'm making good money and barley able to pay rent. How can this be both true? If you can barely make rent, it must be that you're not making good money. Surely good money means you have excess after paying all necessities. If you mistakenly believe you're making good money, but is in actual fact struggling, you must start looking for a higher paying job, lest you end up homeless due to a sudden economic shock or accident causing you to lose your income.
- tristor 5y ago
  It's possible because pay rates in Colorado haven't risen in line with housing costs going up. Colorado has suffered more than most states with an absolute influx of people moving there from California and driving up housing costs. Often not discussed when talking about homelessness is that the alternative for many people who can no longer afford to live in a particular area isn't to end up on the street, but to go elsewhere which if done in large enough scales can displace residents there in a cyclical path. California has had net outflows of US citizen residents for many years, but net inflows overall due to high levels of immigration. As the housing shortage becomes even more of a crisis in California, it's driving many people out to other states, and this mostly people who are fully employed, not at risk of living on the street, but also not able to afford housing at a reasonable percentage of their income in California. Colorado housing costs now average roughly half what Bay Area housing costs, when a decade ago it was closer to 1/6th. Some cities in Texas like Austin are experiencing this as well. The population between 2010 and 2020 in Austin QUADRUPLED, and the vast majority of new residents came from California. Housing prices also have nearly quadrupled at the same time, but not quite thanks to it being very easy to build in Austin and lots of new housing being constructed. What you could buy for $250k in 2010 now costs closer to $650k in Austin. What you could buy in the Denver metro for $400k in 2010 now costs around $1M. So it is absolutely true that in raw dollars, compared to median household income in the US, you could be "making good money" and now be barely able to pay rent if you live in a place that's had a mass influx of Californians over the last decade causing housing costs to skyrocket.

BrianOnHN 5y ago

In addition to what's mentioned here[1], I like that "unhoused" implies that this is more of a societal problem, opposed to "home-less" which implies a deficit in certain individuals. [1] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/homeless-unhoused/amp https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/homeless-unhoused/...

GaryTang 5y ago

I still have a difficult time understanding how increased homelessness is not a direct result of increased taxes and regulations. The data presented corroborates as much and though correlation doesn’t mean causation, correlation certainly doesn’t indicate a lack of causation either. We go to great lengths to justify the results when the simplest explanation is staring right at you.

oblaff 5y ago
I still have a difficult time understanding how increased homelessness is not a direct result of the number of comedy clubs per capita. The data presented corroborates as much and though correlation doesn’t mean causation, correlation certainly doesn’t indicate a lack of causation either. We go to great lengths to justify the results when the simplest explanation is staring right at you.
- GaryTang 5y ago
  Yikes, to equivocate the impact of taxes and regulations to that of comedy clubs, I can’t imagine being so naive.

zwieback 5y ago

This is great work, data I've been very interested in. It would be really fascinating to get to county and city level, where I live there's been a crazy increase in people living in tents with severe mental and/or substance abuse problems. It does reflect at the state (Oregon) level but I think it's a bit misleading because it feels like there are magnet areas where all the increase happens in one spot.

dynm 5y ago
Hey, I do have plots at the city and county level, 387 of them! Go to https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#all-plots https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#all-plots and click on the second triangle thing.
- zwieback 5y ago
  Wow, thanks, fantastic!

r00fus 5y ago

What about red states bussing homeless to the west coast? https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattle-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl... Until it's not possible to simply ship your problems away (kind of like how we handle recycling), governments are incentivized to do the wrong things.

whakim 5y ago
The article you cited literally states that only 5 percent of Washington state's unhoused population became homeless out of the state.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > only 5 percent of Washington state's unhoused population became homeless out of the state. homeless is an incredibly broad term. i would be curious in the numbers split across different subsets, like homeless with schizophrenia.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  If we want to know the magnitude of states shipping homeless people away, we need to start measuring how many had been supporting themselves. I’ve seen studies about California homelessness where a participant was counted as in-state if they bussed here and crashed on a friend’s couch for a little while.
  - whakim 5y ago
    Look, I don't know the actual numbers, but the GP cited "red states busing their homeless population" and then cited a NYT article about this very issue where the numbers presented contradicted that claim. If you do know of studies which have more actual data on this issue, please link to them so we can all learn more - this seems to be one of those issues where there's a lot of emotion but far less actual data!
deleted 5y ago
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zwieback 5y ago

It's really good to see the breakdown into the four broad classes. The big question: should we as a society be allowed to force permanently unsheltered people with substance abuse and mental illness into some kind of facility for treatment? Most people who even want to do anything about these problems would probably say no but I think it's at least worth asking.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I would say no, absolutely not. You should build optional facilities and if people don’t go maybe it’s because your facility sucks. For example lots of places require you to be in at a certain time every night and vacate early in the morning. This may seem fine but it leads to problems for anyone who wants to work a night job or socialize with friends after a day shift. It seems that housing-first is the way to go. Give someone keys to their own place they can come and go from any time. Offer medical and mental health services nearby. This gives people the time and space to get well and stabilize their life. Using cops to throw someone in to a facility is just one more difficult and disruptive challenge that makes people’s lives worse, not better.
- caddemon 5y ago
  Addicts (homeless or not) frequently make decisions that are not in their best interests. Decisions they would not make if they were not sick, including actively resisting help. I'm not saying that help should be forced upon huge swaths of people (there are reasons to be against that in principle) or that they don't deserve a bed. I am just skeptical that housing-first would lead to much change in the mental health of that population. Addiction recovery rates are really not good even when looking at a much more financially comfortable population or people with family members that are trying their best to keep on top of them. For many addicts, it is also difficult to recover and remain sober unless they stop spending time with others that are using. If only a minority of a dorm-style housing unit were serious about wanting to get clean this could make it even harder for them.

crateless 5y ago

I wish that there was a breakdown by gender as well. It seems somewhat incomplete as is.

azinman2 5y ago
SF has that data, but their report is 404ing at the moment.. I recall it being near equal?

tgbugs 5y ago

One piece of analysis I'd be interested to see is whether the transition probabilities among the 4 categories along with the implied 5th category of "not homeless" have changed. This is harder to get good data for because it would require tracking individuals across time. The payoff is that it would likely reveal evidence of structural changes if such changes exist. At the population level it is hard to tell whether and where changes are happening. Getting the transition probabilities would allow for more effective targeting of interventions (though most of the folks who work on this already know which transitions are the hardest to recover from).

antognini 5y ago

The huge decrease in homelessness in North Dakota is probably due to the end of the fracking boom. The map compares the homelessness rate from 2015 to 2020, and 2015 was just a few years after the height of the boom. During the early 2010s rents in North Dakota shot up enormously as tens of thousands of workers poured into the state to support the industry. There wasn't enough existing housing to support the newcomers so there was a lot of crowding into trailers etc. and it's no surprise that a lot of people ended up homeless. Fracking has leveled off for the past few years and many of the workers have moved back to other oil fields so homelessness has decreased dramatically.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Wow. I've talked with people who "lived outside" and realized that they were in very different situations. This article does a good job of breaking it down with a simple analysis. It makes me think of the book that inspired this musical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_Are_for_Sleeping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_Are_for_Sleeping which described quite a few different situations people were in.

rossdavidh 5y ago

Great article, but I didn't see (maybe I missed it) a notice of the fact that homelessness can be correlated with meth, mental illness, etc. with the causation working in either direction. Homelessness could be caused by, or increase the chances of, any of those other factors (or both).

vmception 5y ago

Great piece! One thing to add is to look into why the anecdotes are pervasive. This data does a great job at distinguishing between the unhoused population and the sheltered homeless population. Where the unhoused are visible drives the perception. In California, the same is true, with unhoused being just the tip of the iceberg in the homeless population, the difference is where the unhoused are. In favelas and bazaars in the middle of very expensive areas. Strolling through highly trafficked areas of NYC you wouldnt make the broad reductive assumption that “New York has more homeless people”, whereas strolling through highly trafficked areas of SF/LA would be a complete culture shock. It is an interesting topic as it’s not clear how much people know everytime the topic comes up. Is a prologue about distinguishing between unhoused/sheltered before engaging further really useful? Hard to say

GhettoComputers 5y ago

The article like most people that haven’t been homeless don’t know anything about homelessness aside from inferring from statistics and knowing what is the problem without actually talking to homeless people. #Vanlife people enjoying parking at the beach are chronically homeless and unsheltered. It’s a great way to dehumanize people’s desires and motivations with wrong assumptions by lying with statistics.

SeattleAltruist 5y ago

Homelessness expert here. This data set is garbage. HUD data only includes those in the federally mandated HMIS (Homeless Information Management System). This data excludes 1) people who don't access services; 2) people who access services from private, non-federally funded programs (like faith-based groups); and 3) typically undercounts those with SUD, mental-health issues, and especially people of color. A recent BGC study estimates that, in Seattle, for example, HMIS data doesn't include up to 40% of people in encampments. Garbage In -> Garbage Out. Pretty sweet effort, though. Wish the feds were smart like this.

dynm 5y ago
Do you have a reference for that study? Also, what's your impression of how correlated this data is with the true numbers? Does a rise in the counts indicate the true numbers are also probably going up, or could it just be an artifact of more people being in the HMIC system or something?
frankbreetz 5y ago
Since the reports main premises is that the number of homeless hasn't changed, does it matter that the groups you mention are left out? Is there reason to believe the groups that are under counted experienced a larger increase the the groups that were included? It seems the data collection has been consistent, so the conclusion of the article seems correct.
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zakm 5y ago
The unsheltered count is a thing and does include people who don't access services.

_zfxr 5y ago

This article is completely ignorant of the actual situation. These comments by most of you really show your true colors. If you truly believe "mental issues" are "causing homelessness" You are blinded by privilege, deaf by choice, and dumb by default. Greed is causing homlessness and these numbers are ridiculous. We're at 16% homelessness here in Atlanta. There are solutions, but not a one of you has the intellectual capacity, balls or creativity to execute. I am in awe at how out of touch these comments are.

cman1444 5y ago
Care to share any of your solutions then?
- Iefthandrule 5y ago
  Our uncreative brains would not be able to understand!

France_is_bacon 5y ago

There's a pecking order in most species and humans are no different. At the bottom of the pecking order are the lowest and not only do they get less, but are actively hated by everyone in a higher position. Homeless basically get nothing, but look what has happened over the last two years for everyone else - money galore for those who have not been working because of covid. Four trillion dollars so far for unemployment. The USA has always had enough to help the homeless. But the people - that's you - hate them and not only do you want them not to have money and resources, you want them to be ground down and make things worse for them, if possible.

999900000999 5y ago

Another great reason to not live in LA, homelessness exploded there since rent shot up. Rent effectively doubled from 2009 to 2019. You can ether stay in Mayor Garcetti's fun house or leave. Factor in even if your able to starve off homelessness yourself, your still wasting money that's better saved. I'm happy to know America is full of functional cities where it's still possible to make it. No this doesn't mean you can afford a 2 bdrm on minimum wage, but you can find a room.

gverrilla 5y ago

"To eliminate poverty it was necessary to conceive of an industrial system more productive than our own. Such will be universal harmony which will produce at least triple — yes, without exaggeration — at least triple the yield of the civilised system in a well-cultivated empire. Accordingly, while Harmony will greatly increase the wealth of the well-to-do, it will bring about an excessive increase in that of the people, to whom it will guarantee a salary or in old age a decent minimum below which they cannot fall. This beneficence will be all the more simple in that humanity will reproduce much less in Harmony than in civilisation. This is far removed from the theories of the philosophers, some of whom, the Demagogues, seek to rob the rich to provide for the poor. The others, who are called the Economists, do not have the welfare of the people in mind. They think only of enriching empires without worrying themselves about the fate of the individual. Thus the theories of the Economists have greatly enriched England without enriching the English. According to the Tableau de Londres you can find 115,000 paupers, prostitutes, thieves, beggars and unemployed in the city of London alone; the workers of Scotland live in a frightful state of misery. This is nonetheless the consequence of the modern systems which claim to alleviate the suffering of the people." Charles Fourier, December 1803