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1. Due to the temperate weather, California has largely become the dumping ground for America's chronic homeless. This is rooted in longstanding housing policie

1. Due to the temperate weather, California has largely become the dumping ground for America's chronic homeless. This is rooted in longstanding housing policies causing a shortfall of affordable housing nationwide. 2. On top of that, California has additional broken tax policies and other policies that deepen the shortage of affordable housing. 3. Big cities are where the services are, such as soup kitchens. If you are homeless in the US and have nothing, going to the nearest big city is your best bet for trying to eat regularly. 4. California and big cities are both expensive. Once you go to California as a homeless person or the big city as a homeless person, it's quite hard to get off the street because housing is so expensive. 5. Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia. San Francisco has a reputation for being more LGBTQ-friendly than average even for a big city. So you have desperate people hearing high-minded nonsense that lures them into a bad situation and we aren't really dealing effectively with such issues generally, so we aren't giving people real solutions. Desperate, hopeless people with no options is not a good population type to foster the growth of if you value a civilized social climate. /2 cents

chockablock 4y ago
The narrative that most homeless people in SF come there from other places is contradicted by data. In annual surveys, ~70+% of people who are homeless in SF lived in SF when they became homeless. https://sfstandard.com/public-health/latino-homelessness-surged-in-sf-during-covid-according-to-new-data/ https://sfstandard.com/public-health/latino-homelessness-sur...
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  Well, I didn't say that. You inferred that. There are also lots of reasons to question exactly how such numbers are determined and what they really mean, which is a long discussion I don't care to have.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    No, you said SF was a "dumping ground" for the homeless.
    - DoreenMichele 4y ago
      Nope: Due to the temperate weather, California has largely become the dumping ground for America's chronic homeless. Not all homeless are chronic homeless. You don't need all your homeless to be chronic homeless to dramatically and negatively impact the scale of the issue for one state that has, iirc, 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I've gone back and forth on how I feel about self-reported data like that. If you're homeless and moved to a particular city because you believe you'll have a better time there, then you might feel incentivized to claim that you originally lived there before becoming homeless. Unfortunately there's no good way to confirm or refute this data.
- hechtoid 4y ago
  there's a lot of issues with the methodology in this cluster of surveys. for one it's entirely self-reported, and furthermore it only asks where they were staying immediately prior to becoming homeless. digging further into cases you see people who come here and live in an rv for a month or crash in their friend's garage, before ending up on the streets and counted here as a local resident. studies which take into account longer history and context tell the same story. if we didn't have such a huge issue with out of state people swelling our homeless population, we wouldn't have such programs as these to repatriate them: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/homeward-bound-relocation-program-dusted-off-in-sf/article_4c125096-cf33-11ed-876e-7fea469e625e.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/homeward-bound-reloc...
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Which still means that one third of homeless people are shipped in from somewhere else, which is an astonishingly high number
4gotunameagain 4y ago
> Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia. ...Or, being LGBTQ puts you in a higher risk of being homeless due to underlying mental issues. We can never know.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  No, we can know because we have data on homeless teens who aren't runaways but are, in fact, throwaways. There was also a recent article on HN about the Catholic church -- which expects all priests to be celibate -- investigating gay dating but not straight dating priests to get rid of them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088695
  - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - foldr 4y ago
      The point is that people go from places where they were kicked out of home for being gay to LGBTQ friendly places like San Fransisco. So though you're entirely wrong about homophobia in the coastal US, this is largely irrelevant in any case. Also, you yourself are expressing a number of homophobic ideas in this thread. Could you please stop? It sucks that every HN thread that mentions LGBTQ people even in passing seems always to have to attract homophobic comments. Finally, you should read the comment that DoreenMichele linked to to see what she was getting at.
      - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
        Screaming "homophobia" the very second someone opposes your mental model of the world, is deliberate victimisation. I have no phobia of homosexuality. And I did read the comment.
        4y ago
TrackerFF 4y ago
6. Treatment/care for mental illnesses is pretty much non-existent if you can't afford it. And if you're a violent homeless person, there's a pretty good chance you have some underlying psychological condition.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  Or, you know, maybe being homeless and routinely underfed and mistreated promotes bad behavior. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867
logicalmonster 4y ago
> Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia. The statistics might bear out that being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless, but homelessness being due to homophobia is an unclear and unproven assertion.

chockablock 4y ago

The narrative that most homeless people in SF come there from other places is contradicted by data. In annual surveys, ~70+% of people who are homeless in SF lived in SF when they became homeless. https://sfstandard.com/public-health/latino-homelessness-surged-in-sf-during-covid-according-to-new-data/ https://sfstandard.com/public-health/latino-homelessness-sur...

DoreenMichele 4y ago
Well, I didn't say that. You inferred that. There are also lots of reasons to question exactly how such numbers are determined and what they really mean, which is a long discussion I don't care to have.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  No, you said SF was a "dumping ground" for the homeless.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    Nope: Due to the temperate weather, California has largely become the dumping ground for America's chronic homeless. Not all homeless are chronic homeless. You don't need all your homeless to be chronic homeless to dramatically and negatively impact the scale of the issue for one state that has, iirc, 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population.
kelnos 4y ago
I've gone back and forth on how I feel about self-reported data like that. If you're homeless and moved to a particular city because you believe you'll have a better time there, then you might feel incentivized to claim that you originally lived there before becoming homeless. Unfortunately there's no good way to confirm or refute this data.
hechtoid 4y ago
there's a lot of issues with the methodology in this cluster of surveys. for one it's entirely self-reported, and furthermore it only asks where they were staying immediately prior to becoming homeless. digging further into cases you see people who come here and live in an rv for a month or crash in their friend's garage, before ending up on the streets and counted here as a local resident. studies which take into account longer history and context tell the same story. if we didn't have such a huge issue with out of state people swelling our homeless population, we wouldn't have such programs as these to repatriate them: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/homeward-bound-relocation-program-dusted-off-in-sf/article_4c125096-cf33-11ed-876e-7fea469e625e.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/homeward-bound-reloc...
selfmodruntime 4y ago
Which still means that one third of homeless people are shipped in from somewhere else, which is an astonishingly high number

4gotunameagain 4y ago

> Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia. ...Or, being LGBTQ puts you in a higher risk of being homeless due to underlying mental issues. We can never know.

DoreenMichele 4y ago
No, we can know because we have data on homeless teens who aren't runaways but are, in fact, throwaways. There was also a recent article on HN about the Catholic church -- which expects all priests to be celibate -- investigating gay dating but not straight dating priests to get rid of them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35088695
- 4gotunameagain 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - foldr 4y ago
    The point is that people go from places where they were kicked out of home for being gay to LGBTQ friendly places like San Fransisco. So though you're entirely wrong about homophobia in the coastal US, this is largely irrelevant in any case. Also, you yourself are expressing a number of homophobic ideas in this thread. Could you please stop? It sucks that every HN thread that mentions LGBTQ people even in passing seems always to have to attract homophobic comments. Finally, you should read the comment that DoreenMichele linked to to see what she was getting at.
    - 4gotunameagain 4y ago
      Screaming "homophobia" the very second someone opposes your mental model of the world, is deliberate victimisation. I have no phobia of homosexuality. And I did read the comment.
      - 4y ago

TrackerFF 4y ago

6. Treatment/care for mental illnesses is pretty much non-existent if you can't afford it. And if you're a violent homeless person, there's a pretty good chance you have some underlying psychological condition.

DoreenMichele 4y ago
Or, you know, maybe being homeless and routinely underfed and mistreated promotes bad behavior. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867

logicalmonster 4y ago

> Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia. The statistics might bear out that being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless, but homelessness being due to homophobia is an unclear and unproven assertion.