3 ms·

> There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction You sure about that? The US homelessness rate has been long-term declin

> There are certainly some things getting worse such as homelessness and drug addiction You sure about that? The US homelessness rate has been long-term declining for a while now (and it absolutely collapsed during the pandemic, which is the only reason the short-term seems like an uptick), and I've never seen any evidence that the opioid crisis was "bigger" in any quantitative sense than the earlier heroin and cocaine crises; it just hit more politically sympathetic populations.

eastbound 3y ago
I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. It was supposed to be a dystopian future, where Westfield would close down because it were made illegal to lodge a complain on a member of the population that shoplifts.
- bandrami 3y ago
  > I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. Huh? Oh my God yes it did. Cities in the 1980s were dystopian nightmares compared to today.
MattGaiser 3y ago
The HUD data is a bit bulky and hard to share easily [0], but there has been a rise in unsheltered homelessness since 2015 from 173,000 to 234,000. You are right that overall homelessness is down over time (but not since 2015) and this is admittedly not indexed for population growth. The problem is particularly acute in California, which had 171K homeless in 2022 and bottomed out at 114K in 2014. But yes, long term trends are still down. [0] https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us/ https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-... And with drugs, I am admittedly not sure of the long term historical trend, but over the past decade or so, things have gotten substantially worse: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od-death-rates-1.jpeg https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od...

eastbound 3y ago

I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. It was supposed to be a dystopian future, where Westfield would close down because it were made illegal to lodge a complain on a member of the population that shoplifts.

bandrami 3y ago
> I’m sure SF didn’t look like a big homeless camp in the 1980ies. Huh? Oh my God yes it did. Cities in the 1980s were dystopian nightmares compared to today.

MattGaiser 3y ago

The HUD data is a bit bulky and hard to share easily [0], but there has been a rise in unsheltered homelessness since 2015 from 173,000 to 234,000. You are right that overall homelessness is down over time (but not since 2015) and this is admittedly not indexed for population growth. The problem is particularly acute in California, which had 171K homeless in 2022 and bottomed out at 114K in 2014. But yes, long term trends are still down. [0] https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us/ https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/6802/2022-ahar-part-1-... And with drugs, I am admittedly not sure of the long term historical trend, but over the past decade or so, things have gotten substantially worse: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od-death-rates-1.jpeg https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/images/2023-Drug-od...