6 ms·

Why can't we stop homelessness? why there's no end in sight

20 points by ikbdsk 3y ago

derelicta 3y ago
We won't stop homelessness until the current economic and ownership system is replaced by a non capitalistic one
NetworkPerson 3y ago
Our economy has taken a hit and made things worse for sure. I’d be in rough shape if I didn’t have my pre inflation house mortgage. But it seems like a decent subset of people simply don’t want help if it means needing to take any responsibility themselves. Mental illness plays a role in some, others I’m not sure. It’s almost a shift of thinking leading towards entitlement. Offered someone a bottle of water around here and he refused it saying he only wanted money or soda. If mental illness was part of that picture, it wasn’t obvious in speaking with the individual. How do you help that kind of attitude?
- zkirby 3y ago
  It rarely is - only 1/4th of homeless adults in LA suffer from a severe mental illness [1]. The sad reality is that the difference between the folks you pass by on the street and you is often just a little bit of bad luck and no support system. Go listen to interviews with the folks that live in the sewers in Vegas, most of them want to work but can't get a government ID because they've had their old Ids and birth certificates stolen a long time ago. I met a woman in her 60s in Oakland who was homeless and worked three (part-time) jobs. Couldn't afford to rent even the cheapest of apartments, couldn't work her way out of debt, was unmarried and had no living relatives. Ol' Uncle Sam tends to not take kindly to those that can't pay to play. 1. https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homelessness-california-causes-and-policy-considerations#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20about%2025%20percent,severe%20mental%20illness%2C%20or%20both https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homeles....
  - jschveibinz 3y ago
    To clarify, roughly 46% suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, and 25% from severe mental illness alone. - SAMHSA, 2019
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Listen to people in prison, all of them innocent. Listen to men who beat their wives, all of them had it coming. People say what they think you want to hear. Don't take it at face value. Specifically for this case: Whenever someone tells you how many jobs they work vs how many hours it's because it isn't that many hours.
    - netsharc 3y ago
      To reply to your last line: if you believe that "just work hard and you'll be successful", then you have to believe that the opposite is true, "if you are not successful, that must be because you're lazy". Someone else said, "if hard work correlates to success, there'd be many millionaire African women.". But many successful people discount that they've had luck, e.g. the luck of being born in a rich country/to rich parents.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- FreshStart 3y ago
  The physical economy and the gamble economy are almost decoupled. Some Wallstreet scam artist running a cryptoshedd in the Cambodian djungle producing virtual wealth is not helping some unlearned sod living under a bridge in any meaningful way. He might produce some more in the long run though. Its a miracle anyone of the libertarian priest caste is still alive to discuss this. Back in French king times, when a system failed it's people thoroughly, the mob roughing it in the streets would put the upper echelons on a wagon to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_de_la_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_de_la_Nation. The American citoyens are extremely docile, even going through the proper democratic channels with righteous anger.
BMc2020 3y ago
Overturning O'Connor v Donaldson would be a start.
- n6h6 3y ago
  how so?
WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
Aside from drugs and mental issues, it seems like letting people live in the streets invites others to the lifestyle. Locally we had a man build a home on the sidewalk and brag about what a great job he had done. He thought that the public sidewalk was a place where he could build as he pleased. Some people believe that it's ok to do whatever they want in the common areas of out cities. There's also the constant problems that are associated with sharing a space with others. We, as a society, have made it unpopular for large families to live in one place. So, the less one lives with others the less likely you will ever want to live with someone in general. It's much better to live on your own even if it means living on the street for some. It's next to impossible to give everyone their own home in large cities so we have to think about building homes in the outskirts of cities and ban people from living in the common areas of our cities. Los Angeles is spending millions to house people in hotels. Spending that much tax money can't continue forever not to mention the fact that it's not fixing the problem. Living alone in your own home where ever you want is not something the taxpayers can or will fund forever. We need to make some hard decisions and it's not providing a forever home for everyone that wants to live alone.
- decremental 3y ago
  [dead]
- ttonkytonk 3y ago
  You sure do seem anxious to make "hard decisions" for people used to them. How about some "hard decisions" for people who aren't, e.g. people who can, all by themselves, afford thousands of private homes forever?
  - WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
    Anxious? Time has passes for patience. We needs to get something done. This has been a decades old issue that's only getting worse. We need to try different solutions.
  - JoeyBananas 3y ago
    What are you even implying? That nobody deserves to own a home? Or people with homes are the real problem? I don't see any reasonable way to interpret this comment
diogenescynic 3y ago
Lack of universal healthcare and lack of laws requiring drug users and mentally ill to get treatment or go to jail. Most democratic run states have just given up enforcing drug laws or decriminalized drugs. If you are mentally ill or addicted to a substance, no one can really force you to get treatment. As a result, most never get better and just get worse and worse. There is also just less housing overall, so if someone is going to get displaced first--it's going to be the folks on heroin and meth first.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  What about families? What about husbands and wives who stay together? What about extended family knowing one another beyond Thanksgiving dinners? Why can't families find a place in their homes for their own kin? Why do family members abuse their children until they run away, get abortions, commit suicide?
ogou 3y ago
This is an important topic, but why post it here on HN? More and more posts are general news now. There are so many places for these discussions other than a technology oriented message board.
- ttonkytonk 3y ago
  Please name a relevant board that takes as little data, and I'm there!
- dang 3y ago
  HN is explicitly not just about technology - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It is, however, very much against too much repetition of the same few topics, and this is probably one of those.
  - ogou 3y ago
    I've been reading for 10+ years and it seems to come in waves. Usually it clears up after a few posters push back. I rarely complain about it, but the past few months seemed to be especially high volume. I posted a few comments to signal that awareness. To me, that's participating in my community. I've read the guidelines many times. The second paragraph seems to indicate this post would be off-topic. "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
    - dang 3y ago
      I appreciate your caring about the quality of HN! With users who care, we can hopefully survive. There's a fat but fuzzy area in the Venn diagram where these things overlap - for example some stories are both intellectually interesting and have a political dimension. Those stories, or at least some of them, can still be on topic for HN. Opinions inevitably differ about which ones belong vs. which ones should be excluded. Lots of past explanation about how we think about this, if you or anyone is interested, can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The feeling that HN has changed significantly in recent months or even recent years is often due to random (or maybe seasonal) fluctuations. It usually reverts back. For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
jowdones 3y ago
What I find strange is how someone doesn't have a mother, father, brother, grandparents, aunts, cousins to help a little when in need. I mean they must have been born somewhere, doesn't anyone in the family tree own a place to live?
- crote 3y ago
  Orphans are a thing, you know. Not everyone has family members able and willing to let them live with them.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  They have experienced a family member with addiction and know that "helping" them in any way (money, food, even housing) just helps them get high and makes the problem worse.
- n6h6 3y ago
  someone who became homeless because they don't make enough money is likely to come from a family that doesn't make much money. someone who becomes homeless due to addiction is not likely to be supported by their family because people, in general, hate addicts. even well-off families often can't or won't afford to pay for the help the addict needs, or the addict needs more help than can be afforded, and eventually the family is likely to get sick of it and the addict is again homeless. you might believe that these aren't the case, and I can't convince you, but the traditional family support network barely exists now and usually doesn't accomplish much when it does exist.
ttonkytonk 3y ago
But again, the overriding problem, they say, is the dire lack of places low-income people can afford to live. "There's really no way to solve homelessness without seriously addressing this," says Kushel, the UCSF researcher. "Otherwise, we're going to be compelled to continue to spend huge amounts of money managing an increasingly out of control crisis." Judging from the comments so far, there seems to be a lot of emotion involved in them. I haven't read the first work by Marx, but my sense is his work had a thread of anger running through it. In Plato's Republic, the tripartite soul(Greek "psyche") consists of the appetitive part (compared to a multi-headed beast), a spirited, honor-loving part associated with the emotion of anger (compared to a lion), and the rational part (compared to a human being). It depicts the soul dominated by the appetitive part being like an ape or monkey. To use the same line of thought, I think Marx's soul may have been dominated by the spirited part, which could be compared to a manticore (a beast with the body of a lion and the face of a human). Capitalism, on the other hand, is dominated by the appetitive part. Also it's pointed out in the Republic that unlimited acquisition of wealth results in wars (due to needing more land/resources) and health problems (due to overindulgence). I could say more, and I know my comment is somewhat unfocused, but if you keep ignoring the foundations of these issues, you're not going to be able to fix the problem. Remember in A Christmas Carol (yes, I know Charles Dickens didn't "walk on water"), how the Spirit of Christmas Present showed Scrooge the two children, Want and Ignorance? I see a generation of un- or under-educated children coming up that has been given a bill they never could have or would have agreed to. How do you think they must feel? What should they do?
- ttonkytonk 3y ago
  To clarify, in the Republic the spirited part of the soul that is dominated by the appetitive part is compared to an ape or monkey (perhaps in allusion to a sort of buffoon). Similarly I was comparing the spirited part of Marx's (or Marxism's) soul to a manticore.
radicalace 3y ago
in the old days labour was valuable and people were allowed to live in reasonable places. everyone would pile into a village and everyone did something to help out. a loner guy would be sitting around sharpening spears or digging a ditch and at night he would sleep in a barn. nowadays that guy, not being able to get a corporate job and not being able to afford a corporate apartment, simply has nowhere else to go but the sidewalk. we dont utilize people's labor if they dont meet this corporate quantum. theres no in-between. or its so small it barely exists. in the 50s it was huge and people could live in a tiny little shitty apartment. back then even the unfortunate had some stake in society. society is sick. the mind virus of college degrees has taken over. i was watching 48 hours and they actually used the fact that someone didnt have a college degree as a point of concern regarding his character. the plain and simple fact is that as automation and outsourcing continue, jobs will move toward being completely managerial in nature, and only a small group of people at the top will have jobs. the space between now and UBI will be tons of homeless and disenfranchised.

20 points by ikbdsk 3y ago

We won't stop homelessness until the current economic and ownership system is replaced by a non capitalistic one

Our economy has taken a hit and made things worse for sure. I’d be in rough shape if I didn’t have my pre inflation house mortgage. But it seems like a decent subset of people simply don’t want help if it means needing to take any responsibility themselves. Mental illness plays a role in some, others I’m not sure. It’s almost a shift of thinking leading towards entitlement. Offered someone a bottle of water around here and he refused it saying he only wanted money or soda. If mental illness was part of that picture, it wasn’t obvious in speaking with the individual. How do you help that kind of attitude?

zkirby 3y ago
It rarely is - only 1/4th of homeless adults in LA suffer from a severe mental illness [1]. The sad reality is that the difference between the folks you pass by on the street and you is often just a little bit of bad luck and no support system. Go listen to interviews with the folks that live in the sewers in Vegas, most of them want to work but can't get a government ID because they've had their old Ids and birth certificates stolen a long time ago. I met a woman in her 60s in Oakland who was homeless and worked three (part-time) jobs. Couldn't afford to rent even the cheapest of apartments, couldn't work her way out of debt, was unmarried and had no living relatives. Ol' Uncle Sam tends to not take kindly to those that can't pay to play. 1. https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homelessness-california-causes-and-policy-considerations#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20about%2025%20percent,severe%20mental%20illness%2C%20or%20both https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/homeles....
- jschveibinz 3y ago
  To clarify, roughly 46% suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, and 25% from severe mental illness alone. - SAMHSA, 2019
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Listen to people in prison, all of them innocent. Listen to men who beat their wives, all of them had it coming. People say what they think you want to hear. Don't take it at face value. Specifically for this case: Whenever someone tells you how many jobs they work vs how many hours it's because it isn't that many hours.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    To reply to your last line: if you believe that "just work hard and you'll be successful", then you have to believe that the opposite is true, "if you are not successful, that must be because you're lazy". Someone else said, "if hard work correlates to success, there'd be many millionaire African women.". But many successful people discount that they've had luck, e.g. the luck of being born in a rich country/to rich parents.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
FreshStart 3y ago
The physical economy and the gamble economy are almost decoupled. Some Wallstreet scam artist running a cryptoshedd in the Cambodian djungle producing virtual wealth is not helping some unlearned sod living under a bridge in any meaningful way. He might produce some more in the long run though. Its a miracle anyone of the libertarian priest caste is still alive to discuss this. Back in French king times, when a system failed it's people thoroughly, the mob roughing it in the streets would put the upper echelons on a wagon to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_de_la_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_de_la_Nation. The American citoyens are extremely docile, even going through the proper democratic channels with righteous anger.

BMc2020 3y ago

Overturning O'Connor v Donaldson would be a start.

n6h6 3y ago
how so?

WheelsAtLarge 3y ago

Aside from drugs and mental issues, it seems like letting people live in the streets invites others to the lifestyle. Locally we had a man build a home on the sidewalk and brag about what a great job he had done. He thought that the public sidewalk was a place where he could build as he pleased. Some people believe that it's ok to do whatever they want in the common areas of out cities. There's also the constant problems that are associated with sharing a space with others. We, as a society, have made it unpopular for large families to live in one place. So, the less one lives with others the less likely you will ever want to live with someone in general. It's much better to live on your own even if it means living on the street for some. It's next to impossible to give everyone their own home in large cities so we have to think about building homes in the outskirts of cities and ban people from living in the common areas of our cities. Los Angeles is spending millions to house people in hotels. Spending that much tax money can't continue forever not to mention the fact that it's not fixing the problem. Living alone in your own home where ever you want is not something the taxpayers can or will fund forever. We need to make some hard decisions and it's not providing a forever home for everyone that wants to live alone.

decremental 3y ago
[dead]
ttonkytonk 3y ago
You sure do seem anxious to make "hard decisions" for people used to them. How about some "hard decisions" for people who aren't, e.g. people who can, all by themselves, afford thousands of private homes forever?
- WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
  Anxious? Time has passes for patience. We needs to get something done. This has been a decades old issue that's only getting worse. We need to try different solutions.
- JoeyBananas 3y ago
  What are you even implying? That nobody deserves to own a home? Or people with homes are the real problem? I don't see any reasonable way to interpret this comment

diogenescynic 3y ago

Lack of universal healthcare and lack of laws requiring drug users and mentally ill to get treatment or go to jail. Most democratic run states have just given up enforcing drug laws or decriminalized drugs. If you are mentally ill or addicted to a substance, no one can really force you to get treatment. As a result, most never get better and just get worse and worse. There is also just less housing overall, so if someone is going to get displaced first--it's going to be the folks on heroin and meth first.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
What about families? What about husbands and wives who stay together? What about extended family knowing one another beyond Thanksgiving dinners? Why can't families find a place in their homes for their own kin? Why do family members abuse their children until they run away, get abortions, commit suicide?

ogou 3y ago

This is an important topic, but why post it here on HN? More and more posts are general news now. There are so many places for these discussions other than a technology oriented message board.

ttonkytonk 3y ago
Please name a relevant board that takes as little data, and I'm there!
dang 3y ago
HN is explicitly not just about technology - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It is, however, very much against too much repetition of the same few topics, and this is probably one of those.
- ogou 3y ago
  I've been reading for 10+ years and it seems to come in waves. Usually it clears up after a few posters push back. I rarely complain about it, but the past few months seemed to be especially high volume. I posted a few comments to signal that awareness. To me, that's participating in my community. I've read the guidelines many times. The second paragraph seems to indicate this post would be off-topic. "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
  - dang 3y ago
    I appreciate your caring about the quality of HN! With users who care, we can hopefully survive. There's a fat but fuzzy area in the Venn diagram where these things overlap - for example some stories are both intellectually interesting and have a political dimension. Those stories, or at least some of them, can still be on topic for HN. Opinions inevitably differ about which ones belong vs. which ones should be excluded. Lots of past explanation about how we think about this, if you or anyone is interested, can be found here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The feeling that HN has changed significantly in recent months or even recent years is often due to random (or maybe seasonal) fluctuations. It usually reverts back. For example, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

jowdones 3y ago

What I find strange is how someone doesn't have a mother, father, brother, grandparents, aunts, cousins to help a little when in need. I mean they must have been born somewhere, doesn't anyone in the family tree own a place to live?

crote 3y ago
Orphans are a thing, you know. Not everyone has family members able and willing to let them live with them.
willcipriano 3y ago
They have experienced a family member with addiction and know that "helping" them in any way (money, food, even housing) just helps them get high and makes the problem worse.
n6h6 3y ago
someone who became homeless because they don't make enough money is likely to come from a family that doesn't make much money. someone who becomes homeless due to addiction is not likely to be supported by their family because people, in general, hate addicts. even well-off families often can't or won't afford to pay for the help the addict needs, or the addict needs more help than can be afforded, and eventually the family is likely to get sick of it and the addict is again homeless. you might believe that these aren't the case, and I can't convince you, but the traditional family support network barely exists now and usually doesn't accomplish much when it does exist.

ttonkytonk 3y ago

But again, the overriding problem, they say, is the dire lack of places low-income people can afford to live. "There's really no way to solve homelessness without seriously addressing this," says Kushel, the UCSF researcher. "Otherwise, we're going to be compelled to continue to spend huge amounts of money managing an increasingly out of control crisis." Judging from the comments so far, there seems to be a lot of emotion involved in them. I haven't read the first work by Marx, but my sense is his work had a thread of anger running through it. In Plato's Republic, the tripartite soul(Greek "psyche") consists of the appetitive part (compared to a multi-headed beast), a spirited, honor-loving part associated with the emotion of anger (compared to a lion), and the rational part (compared to a human being). It depicts the soul dominated by the appetitive part being like an ape or monkey. To use the same line of thought, I think Marx's soul may have been dominated by the spirited part, which could be compared to a manticore (a beast with the body of a lion and the face of a human). Capitalism, on the other hand, is dominated by the appetitive part. Also it's pointed out in the Republic that unlimited acquisition of wealth results in wars (due to needing more land/resources) and health problems (due to overindulgence). I could say more, and I know my comment is somewhat unfocused, but if you keep ignoring the foundations of these issues, you're not going to be able to fix the problem. Remember in A Christmas Carol (yes, I know Charles Dickens didn't "walk on water"), how the Spirit of Christmas Present showed Scrooge the two children, Want and Ignorance? I see a generation of un- or under-educated children coming up that has been given a bill they never could have or would have agreed to. How do you think they must feel? What should they do?

ttonkytonk 3y ago
To clarify, in the Republic the spirited part of the soul that is dominated by the appetitive part is compared to an ape or monkey (perhaps in allusion to a sort of buffoon). Similarly I was comparing the spirited part of Marx's (or Marxism's) soul to a manticore.

radicalace 3y ago

in the old days labour was valuable and people were allowed to live in reasonable places. everyone would pile into a village and everyone did something to help out. a loner guy would be sitting around sharpening spears or digging a ditch and at night he would sleep in a barn. nowadays that guy, not being able to get a corporate job and not being able to afford a corporate apartment, simply has nowhere else to go but the sidewalk. we dont utilize people's labor if they dont meet this corporate quantum. theres no in-between. or its so small it barely exists. in the 50s it was huge and people could live in a tiny little shitty apartment. back then even the unfortunate had some stake in society. society is sick. the mind virus of college degrees has taken over. i was watching 48 hours and they actually used the fact that someone didnt have a college degree as a point of concern regarding his character. the plain and simple fact is that as automation and outsourcing continue, jobs will move toward being completely managerial in nature, and only a small group of people at the top will have jobs. the space between now and UBI will be tons of homeless and disenfranchised.