[HN Gopher] Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the...
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Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.
Author : dynm
Score : 119 points
Date : 2021-11-11 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| cheriot wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hygiene service vans with showers for the rest
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Wasn't there a study that came out showing every single one of
| those things done by CA or Seattle failed?
| notJim wrote:
| > 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise
| sleep outside
|
| We used to allow SROs, like the classic YMCA you'd see where
| people down on their luck would live in old movies. These are
| now illegal to build in most places, and the existing ones are
| being closed down.
| mulmen wrote:
| What do you do if someone _wants_ to sleep on the street?
|
| Where do you build these dorms?
|
| Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety
| requirements, job searching, etc?
|
| We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is
| simple at all.
| klyrs wrote:
| > What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street?
|
| This describes an incredibly miniscule number of people.
| There are a lot of problems with existing shelters (as
| mentioned quite a few times in thia thread) so currently it's
| hard to disentangle "wants to sleep on the streets" from
| "doesn't want the available alternatives." Yeah, there
| probably are a few folks like this. Having an oversupply of
| 1% isn't going to break the bank.
| mulmen wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question. I'm not opposed to
| building more shelter space. But what do you do with the
| people who _don't_ want to stay there?
|
| Do you make it non-optional? Do you just accept that there
| will always be some people living on the street? At what
| point can a camping ban in public parks be reinstated and
| enforced? Can it ever be? Should it?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| You're on hacker news. The first rule of optimization is
| to /benchmark and profile first/ and then work on the
| part of the problem that will give you the biggest wins.
| Don't just work on the imagined problem, because you will
| usually be working on the wrong thing.
| mulmen wrote:
| I thought hackernews was a place for thoughtful
| conversation.
|
| How should we optimize solutions to homelessness? Is
| there some ideal amount of homelessness? Have we already
| reached it?
|
| Recall that this thread started with a comment offering a
| two part solution that does not address an unwillingness
| to stay in shelters.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think that camping should be legitimized and allowed.
|
| For example, I saw in LA camping areas being cleaned by
| city workers peacefully (with a token police car watching
| over) and it seemed like a nice middle ground.
| mulmen wrote:
| Do you mean dedicated camping areas or putting tents in
| existing public parks?
|
| Something like https://campsecondchance.rumblecrash.com/
| but for tents?
| xibalba wrote:
| > This describes an incredibly miniscule number of people
|
| Citation needed
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I would rather sleep outside than in any homeless
| "shelters" I've been told about by people who have stayed
| in them.
|
| They're horrible places designed only for one purpose:
| keeping the undesirables out of the public eye.
|
| It was that way ~100 years ago when Orwell wrote "Down and
| Out", and very little has changed since then.
| cheriot wrote:
| > What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street?
|
| When all of the available shelters are full this is not a
| relevant question.
|
| > Where do you build these dorms?
|
| Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get
| around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west
| coast cities.
|
| > Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety
| requirements, job searching, etc?
|
| no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone
| outside.
|
| > We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it
| is simple at all.
|
| There are complex problems in our society, but not having
| enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.
|
| Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if
| they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
| mulmen wrote:
| > When all of the available shelters are full this is not a
| relevant question.
|
| It is relevant when we are talking about building more
| housing. Why build something if people won't use it?
|
| > Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get
| around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in
| west coast cities.
|
| Underutilized land _near transit_? What do you do about the
| NIMBYs?
|
| > no, none of those situations are improved by leaving
| someone outside.
|
| Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people
| doing drugs? Should there be some that are drug friendly
| and some that aren't?
|
| > There are complex problems in our society, but not having
| enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.
|
| Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. We
| have a long history of trying all kinds of approaches that
| didn't work for whatever reason. There's no simple answer.
|
| > Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if
| they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
|
| This assumes they want to find a job though.
| jljljl wrote:
| > It is relevant when we are talking about building more
| housing. Why build something if people won't use it?
|
| If the shelters are full, it's clear people are using
| them. If we start seeing vacancies in shelters, then we
| can worry about this.
| mulmen wrote:
| I don't doubt we need more space now. Vacancies in
| shelters would suggest we created too much supply, which
| would be a waste of resources. I prefer to take the
| approach of understanding the current needs and working
| to address _all_ of those needs.
| cheriot wrote:
| All of the shelters where I live are full. The article
| describes increasing chronic unsheltered populations in
| west coast cities. Do any of these have empty shelter
| beds? SF and LA do not.
|
| "Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about
| the NIMBYs?"
|
| Tell them to take a hike. The state needs to get more
| involved with objective rules so we don't have a game of
| each neighborhood screaming NIMBY.
|
| > Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with
| people doing drugs? Should there some that are drug
| friendly and some that aren't?
|
| I don't know the answer to this. When we have enough
| shelters and people have a locked door to sleep behind
| this will probably be the next problem to solve.
|
| > Actually providing public housing isn't simple though.
|
| Shelters and public housing are different. Any kind of
| shelter has to be fully maintained with public funds
| because the people sleeping in them are broke.
|
| There's a countries with large amounts of successful
| public housing. The theme is that it's well maintained so
| it's actually desirable for stable, normal people.
| Allowing a wider range of incomes to move in so that rent
| can cover operations and maintenance makes it less
| dependent on the whims of local pols.
| mulmen wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response.
|
| Telling NIMBYs to take a hike isn't simple. How do you
| actually achieve that?
|
| The question is not if we have enough shelter space. The
| question is if there are homeless who _do not want_
| shelter space. In other words do we have another problem
| to focus on _in parallel_.
| coryrc wrote:
| #2 people won't let you build shelters where it's affordable to
| do so. Seattle's homeless shelters should be built outside
| Moses Lake, not where a studio costs $300k+. For the amount we
| already spend, every single chronically homeless person could
| be housed in dorms built out there and pay for the social
| workers. Since they aren't doing that, it's clear the real
| motivation is not to help the homeless.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Outside Moses Lake is far outside Seattle's jurisdiction.
| mjevans wrote:
| It's also far too far away from jobs jobs jobs.
| nradov wrote:
| We absolutely should build more homeless shelters. However many
| homeless people refuse to stay in current dorm style shelters
| because they don't allow drug use, or pets, or the other
| residents are dangerous.
| cheriot wrote:
| This is a debate that comes up and I'm only familiar with the
| specifics in San Francisco. I won't claim it's the same
| anywhere else.
|
| The shelters are full so the obvious problem is not people
| refusing to sleep in them.
|
| At the same time, many of the "offers" of going inside are
| disingenuous. People giving up all of their belongings
| (specifically tent and camping stove), leaving loved ones,
| and the promised shelter is only guaranteed for a couple
| weeks.
|
| When I say dorm style shelters I specifically mean each
| person has a door to lock and feel safe behind. Most current
| shelters are dozens of cots in a large room. I wouldn't feel
| safe there either.
| boc wrote:
| You're describing SROs and they've been disappearing from
| cities like SF, despite being a decent option (on paper)
| for transition housing.
|
| Here's a primer: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-
| s-vanishing-single-...
| cheriot wrote:
| Yes, SROs are great and it's extremely difficult to build
| new ones even where they're zoning compliant. We need a
| lot more of them.
| john_moscow wrote:
| I can bet, the shelter utilization is highly correlated
| with the cost of square foot in the area, which is a proxy
| for general desirability.
|
| And the solution should be to increase the desirability of
| other areas, rather than making homelessness the new norm.
| As a nice side effect, this will solve the general housing
| availability issues as well.
|
| Except, the public opinion is that we should somehow all
| stick to a handful of coastal megacities and join the race
| to the bottom in terms of square feet per person, noise and
| cleanliness. This certainly benefits big property
| developers, big vendors and big employers that wouldn't be
| economically viable in a much sparser area, but I genuinely
| don't understand why so many people are happy to
| voluntarily move into a hamster wheel.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| The drug free thing is frustrating because it seems like it's
| mostly optics.
|
| Can't be seen to be implicitly supporting drug use, so you
| have to deprive your residents of privacy, protection, and
| freedoms.
| nostrebored wrote:
| The problem is that people in the U.S. so often only see
| homelessness through the lens of where they live. Homelessness
| is a unique problem in each city. For example, the west coast
| has favorable weather and a history of being a destination for
| people after they are released from prisons or mental
| facilities. In cities on the east coast there is more leftist-
| narrative style homelessness: people who were depending on
| family and their family died, missing a check and sleeping
| rough for a bit, etc.
|
| There are also huge problems with treating the many different
| problems the same way. For example, California would probably
| benefit a lot more from building a mental health crisis center
| and Georgia might benefit more from temporary housing that
| actually gives you your own address (so that you can list it on
| job applications, cell service, etc).
|
| But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of
| homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to
| restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it's a tough problem.
| cheriot wrote:
| "But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of
| homeless shelters that people refuse to use"
|
| What's a west coast city with empty shelters? The ones in my
| town are full.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I will repeat this every time someone uses "favorable
| weather" to explain California's barbaric treatment of its
| homeless: _nobody_ wants to die of exposure. You can die of
| expose at temperatures _well_ above what housed people
| consider "comfortable." The number of homeless people who
| would rather stay outside in your "favorable climate" versus
| being afforded the basic dignity of a roof and room is a
| rounding error.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Honestly spoken like someone who hasn't been homeless or is
| close to anyone who has been homeless. A lot of people are
| severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.
|
| And the complicating factor is the percentage of people
| like this depends on the city! Eg Utah's approach to
| homelessness probably won't work for Oregon.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I have spent my entire life around the homeless, in a
| city that has a universal shelter mandate. I've also
| spent the better part of a decade volunteering in food
| pantries and community kitchens.
|
| > A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not
| want shelter.
|
| No. What they don't want is to be corralled like
| livestock into shared living spaces, with no privacy or
| protection for their property. That's not because they're
| mentally ill; it's because it's _degrading._ Give
| mentally ill people the choice of _dignity_ and they will
| overwhelmingly choose it.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they
| will overwhelmingly choose it.
|
| The one's flashing their genitals and screaming at
| strangers?
|
| The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely
| nuanced and varied, by this archetype is certainly what a
| lot of people are going to think of when they hear the
| term. It's hard for me to imagine degradation is relevant
| to them.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Emphasis on "overwhelmingly." One of the most pernicious
| problems in homeless advocacy is that the average person
| only remembers their _worst_ encounters with mentally ill
| homeless people, not the tens of thousands of people who
| they 've silently passed on the street.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Contrary to leftist belief just giving people a roof over
| their head doesn't magically fix things. Where it that
| easy. A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or
| antisocial. You can't just drop these people in a
| neighbourhood and everyone lived happily ever after.
| cheriot wrote:
| Nobody claims housing fixes those things, but it is an
| improvement over the same people sleeping on the
| sidewalk.
|
| We don't need to put off the simple solutions because
| there are harder ones after that.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I didn't say it "fixes" things, whatever that can
| possibly mean. All I've done is counter the normal excuse
| for the barbaric practice of not providing _basic_
| amenities to the most needy.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I don't know a single leftist who wants to just drop the
| homeless in housing and forget about them. Usually, when
| people talk about housing-first policies, they're
| advocating for flipping the script: don't make treatment,
| abstinence or work a prerequisite for housing; give them
| a permanent address, a climate-controlled shelter, and a
| secure place to store their belongings. And then,
| concurrent to that, you can help them get a job and
| treatment for illness or addiction.
| [deleted]
| throwaway19937 wrote:
| The west coast also has the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise
| decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). It
| prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter
| space for everyone. This is impossible given the number of
| homeless people so we're stuck with encampments everywhere.
| 1986 wrote:
| > an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to
| use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.)
|
| There's a lot hiding in that "etc". Some other reasons people
| refuse to use (some) shelters:
|
| - shelter is / feels unsafe due to a subset of the sheltered
| population
|
| - shelter has a curfew that does not allow you to maintain
| your work schedule
|
| - shelter won't let you bring your child or pet or stuff
| agumonkey wrote:
| I've seen this first hand and its difficult to comprehend.
| Some people would rather sleep in dead cold winter than to
| be in shelters. That's worth investigating...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Shelter won't let you drink, even in moderation.
| mjevans wrote:
| I get the reasons for that, even ignoring the moral
| mission ones; it's too much effort to monitor for abuse
| and just easier to issue an outright ban.
|
| A substantially different world if we had friendly AI to
| do that monitoring and maybe individual tiny-houses or
| apartments rather than a bunkhouse free-for-all like
| Squid Games.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The shelters _are_ unsafe and I wouldn't blame the average
| person for choosing a tucked away park over a hive of
| mentally ill and violent people. The solution is difficult
| though. I'm thinking we need some way to provide secure
| shelter. Something like those pod hotels where you get a
| private, lockable pod so you don't have your phone stolen
| or get raped in the middle of the night.
| zz865 wrote:
| > 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.
| spatley wrote:
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whakim wrote:
| Did you even read the article? The last two sentences are:
| "Still, I think we can see why people in Seattle might feel
| there's a crisis. Maybe anecdotal knowledge ain't so bad."
|
| The whole point of the article is that things vary widely
| across different locales. In some places homelessness is
| increasing by a little bit; in other places homelessness is
| increasing by a lot; in other places it's decreasing. The
| article also makes the useful point that perceptions of
| "crisis" are often related to whether unhoused folks are
| sheltered or unsheltered. We don't hear a lot about the
| homelessness crisis in New York even though its homelessness
| rate is statistically the highest in the nation.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've replaced the title with your description. Thanks!
| Hopefully it will help the thread be more substantive.
| dynm wrote:
| I went ahead and changed the title of the article itself, too.
| Thanks for the feedback.
| stillbourne wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| tgbugs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| notJim wrote:
| From what I've seen, it's more likely that it's because it's
| easier and cheaper to building housing in Nevada than in
| California. The states where homelessness has improved are
| generally business-friendly and low-regulation states.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| And also make homelessness a crime. But conveniently they
| push you toward places that help with people on the verge of
| homelessness. All things combined with yours that these
| coastal places do not. If people are threatened with jail for
| being a vagrant, they'll eventually take the path of least
| resistance and get a job.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Homeless people aren't stupid. They go where they can live.
| Nobody wants to winter in North Dakota lol.
|
| More money in panhandling too I bet.
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| I thought that too about the weather but what about New York?
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| Plenty of homeless resources in New York.
| mattnewton wrote:
| NYC is probably a local maxima, where everywhere around it
| is more expensive to live with less opportunity for
| panhandling / social services, and it is a long uncertain
| hike from there to somewhere that has weather as mild as
| the San Francisco bay. I also imagine that the social
| services in the south east are less desirable because of
| their politics around taxing less / spending less
| fc373745 wrote:
| if you read the article you would know that the majority of
| the homeless population in nyc are sheltered as a 1979
| class action lawsuit found that it was a constitutional
| right for the homeless to be sheltered.
| csee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| How long were they in California before they became homeless?
| If they were living in a center for transients or were on a
| couch for a year before being homeless (but were relatively
| destitute in Nevada prior to this), then the data absolutely
| supports it.
| paxys wrote:
| There is never going to be official data on this by design,
| but there is evidence of it happening all over the country,
| and "friendly" places like California being on the receiving
| end of it (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-
| helping-ho...).
|
| Statistical anomalies are a proven way of identifying
| cheating in a wide variety of scenarios like elections,
| standardized tests and sports. It isn't conclusive evidence,
| sure, but still a good place to start looking.
| yardie wrote:
| There is official data and it's these reunification
| programs. Plenty of rich cities will give you a bus ticket
| to live with friends and family. Most of the time it works
| out. Sometimes it doesn't and that unsheltered person is
| right back in the same place they left. But the person has
| to agree to house them before a bus ticket is purchased.
| They simply don't put them on the bus and let them figure
| it out.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| 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?
| profile53 wrote:
| Seattle had to pass a law requiring landlords to accept the
| first qualified applicant in part due to this occurring.
|
| https://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/civil-rights/fair-
| housin...
| whakim wrote:
| I don't think this is true because it is non-chronic
| homelessness which decreased in Nevada. Is there any evidence
| for this theory?
| chrsig wrote:
| Yes. Yes there is.
| dang wrote:
| 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
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mokarma wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines says there isn't.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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?
| cheriot wrote:
| Is there a reason for the richest country in history to
| have homelessness anywhere?
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| 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/...
| rp1 wrote:
| 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.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| They should be punished for not taking the social service
| avenues intended to make them not homeless.
| noahtallen wrote:
| Definitely. As an example, say you walk in your neighborhood to
| the transit station. A single encounter with someone with a
| mental health issue will be enough to give you the impression
| that things are worse than they are. One isolated instance of
| feeling unsafe had an outsized impact on how you feel about the
| neighborhood in general. It's just human!
|
| And unfortunately, in west coast cities, it's not even that
| isolated. If there is a camp near-ish your neighborhood for
| some time, there will be a lot of instances. And as you go into
| the city, the more dense "downtown" parts are areas where
| people might not live all the time, but a lot of different
| people do experience them frequently, and a lot of homeless
| people may be there too. So thousands of people might get a
| subconscious feeling of being unsafe, just from a small number
| of people who might not even be acting in unsafe ways.
|
| That's why people see it as a crisis: a lot of people in west
| coast cities feel increasingly unsafe. That's partly founded
| (because violent crimes are increasing), and partly unfounded
| (just someone's impression of a different person they aren't
| comfortable around). So there is a huge emotional response.
| s5300 wrote:
| Personal anecdata is most definitely an issue, and a very
| hard one to solve.
|
| For example - the greater LA metro area has roughly 19
| million people (as of 2019 believe it's higher now)
|
| 19 million people is the equivalent of the populations of the
| 13 lowest population states. Including for example, South
| Dakota.
|
| The last time I looked into this, roughly a year ago (and at
| 2019 numbers) the entire state of South Dakota has the same
| amount of crime as Los Angeles. However, the entire state of
| South Dakota is roughly 1/20th the population of Los Angeles.
|
| We also have decades of data showing that people who grew up
| in or have lived large metropolises are at roughly 20%-25%
| greater disposition to severe mental illness such as
| schizophrenia. Simply for living in that environment.
|
| So, that being said - I think somewhere like Los Angeles is
| doing _pretty damn good_ for itself. It 's an undeniably
| slightly crazy place to be living or growing up in, and their
| general crime levels are only at the level of a place with
| 1/20th of it's population, that is much less dense. In my
| eyes, it seems like a place with less population density
| would be less prone to crime.
|
| Most people don't take any amount of time to become aware of
| information like this though... thus we get nowhere in
| solving issues.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire
| ride.
|
| i think it's more a person with one of a specific subset of
| mental illnesses that can ruin the whole ride.
|
| not sure what the solution to that is.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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.
|
| I dunno man.
|
| I've ridden Boston and DC light rail systems pretty extensively
| (and NYC to a small extent) and never had an obviously homeless
| person ruin my ride. Heck, I can't even think of a specific
| instance where one did anything of note.
|
| My coworkers on the West coast however...
| crowbahr wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| GaryTang wrote:
| 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.
| zwieback wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hey, I do have plots at the city and county level, 387 of them!
| Go to https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/#all-plots and
| click on the second triangle thing.
| crateless wrote:
| I wish that there was a breakdown by gender as well. It seems
| somewhat incomplete as is.
| r00fus wrote:
| What about red states bussing homeless to the west coast?
|
| 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 wrote:
| The article you cited literally states that only 5 percent of
| Washington state's unhoused population became homeless out of
| the state.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| 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 in and crashed on a friend's couch for a while.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| lostinquebec wrote:
| 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.
| zwieback wrote:
| 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.
| jseliger wrote:
| 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/) 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-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-...,
| 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. 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. Even places like
| New York are proposing density reductions, insanely:
| https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/202....
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't buy it. In Toronto, there are new condo buildings going
| up seemingly on every block, but there are still 10,000
| homeless[1].
|
| The inconvenient truth is that building low-income housing is
| not very profitable and no entity driven by the profit motive
| wants to do it. The margins on luxury condos are much better.
|
| [1] https://www.fredvictor.org/facts-about-homelessness-in-
| toron...
| trinovantes wrote:
| When you're severely constrained by where you can build
| thanks to NIMBY, you always build whatever has the highest
| margins i.e. luxury 1bd condos
| jseliger wrote:
| See https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-
| building... for the empirical research refuting that point
| and agreeing with the basic supply-demand issue. The issue in
| Toronto is not just the anecdotal "new condo buildings" but
| how much housing Toronto has built per capita for the last
| several decades, which is almost certainly "too little." See
| the link in my original post to data from Tokyo, which is one
| of the few cities to have done housing right.
|
| "Filtering" has always been a housing phenomenon:
| https://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/
| and https://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-
| affor....
| chii wrote:
| But the increased supply of the top would put pressure on the
| lower end as well. It's not isolated.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Also, being unhoused exacerbates mental illness and substance
| abuse.
|
| https://www.americanprogress.org/article/lack-housing-mental...
|
| https://www.kalw.org/show/crosscurrents/2016-12-07/mental-he...
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