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Comment by whybroke | Hacker News Reader

I too lived overseas for several years and returned to the Bay Area recently to be astonished in the same ways.

Another surprise that the article does not reveal was that in speaking to long standing friends who remained in the Bay Area, I have commonly heard them say homeless people choose to be homeless. These are normal bay area professional class people who read the Atlantic and the NYT. But to hear repeatedly such notions form well education otherwise forward thing people is something I still can not remotely comprehend. And how they would develop such views is even more incomprehensible.

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It's an instinctive and defensive response. The problem has to be explained away somehow and victim blaming is the simplest tactic for explaining away inconvenient and complicated truths.

I've caught myself imagining what it would be like to be homeless and how I'd go about things. I always think the first thing I'd try to do is sign up for some kind of social welfare program and work my way out of whatever rut I was in but this is clearly the wrong perspective. It becomes much harder to plan for things when you are socially ostracized and malnourished. Your IQ takes a huge hit and mental capacities start to slowly and consistently wither away. Then it becomes clear that it is definitely not a choice when you end up in such a situation. Making good choices that compound becomes exponentially harder. So the usual agency that regular people take for granted and the perspective they analyze the problem from simply does not exist for the homeless person and saying "it's a choice" in the words of a famous physicist is "not even wrong".

I know people who have been homeless and got off the street that say many homeless people want to be homeless. Perhaps in a high pressure, individualistic society people seeing themselves at the bottom of the chart express themselves by refusing to conform. A homeless ex-teacher I spoke with said she had no interest in leaving the streets. Perhaps the arrogance is in believing that the way of life we choose should be desired by all others in an individualistic society.

I highly doubt that the majority of homeless people in San Francisco (at least where I lived, Tenth and Market) fit into the category of non-conformist hippies that want to live outside of the System (neoliberal capitalism, really).

Many of them suffer from mental illnesses like schizophrenia, so their entire view of reality is distorted, like a broken prism that takes in light and reflects color all over the place. Addiction is also prevalent among the homeless, usually to help them cope with an underlying mental illness, for which they don't have the means nor the will to receive treatment for.

I don't think it is arrogant to want to help someone who might be a danger to themselves and/or others.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.

My experience of San Francisco is that a lot of the homeless people I saw had addiction or other forms of mental illness. In this context, it clearly is not a 'choice' in the meaningful sense of the word. Having experience with an alcoholic who was incapable of escaping her situation alone, I think you make a very valid point.

Well, given you have money, where does choice end and mental illness begin?

I talked to a few army vets who are homeless and stayed near the building where I lived. They still had income but chose to not be a part of the system. They were cogent and fairly convincing.

I think the problem is largely cultural. People see it as an acceptable thing to do if you fall on hard times or if your philosophy changes.

This is in contrast with Japan where people wouldn't see it as an option and even Russia where income/expense ratios are even smaller.

Japan has plenty of homeless people and people who live outside the system, they are just much tidier than those in other countries, but extremely visible if you just look around a bit.

If you look at the official figures:

San Francisco - 7,539 homeless out of population of 837k[0]

Tokyo - 1500 - 5000 homeless out of 13.62 million [1]

It is orders of magnitude difference.

[0]http://abc7news.com/news/data-shows-sf-has-2nd-highest-homel... [1]http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/10/17/homelessness-i...

Japanese statistics are hardly reliable, many people hide their homelessness quite well. Anyways, it isn't socially unacceptable to be homeless, after encountering a few homeless encampments in Osaka parks, it doesn't feel that unusual.

How do you explain this? Are Japanese homeless less mentally ill, or less anti-social?

Social pressure is still there. They can crash in the park, even setup tents, as long as they are discrete and clean about it...the police/society just have a contract with them of sorts to let them be if they aren't too bothersome. Their are definitely those who are mentally ill, anti social, or just down on their luck...Japan doesn't have a very strong welfare system, which is a bit surprising.

> I have commonly heard them say homeless people choose to be homeless.

I believe that's an old meme. I first experienced it among middle class Mexicans. I heard them say "the poor stay poor because they choose to" more times than I remember.

It boggles the mind.

There are definitely people who choose to be homeless! This is not the same as saying that people in poverty want to remain that way, or the nasty ideologies that say the poor deserve to be poor.

For various reasons a small amount of the population does seek out the vagrant lifestyle. Check out https://squattheplanet.com

One the other hand, I've run into people who live out of an old van or are otherwise either homeless or close to it. Some have substance abuse problems or mental illness ( or both ) but many are just sort of hoboes.

I'm somewhat of a musician, and that's the nominal career most of these guys (It's almost always guys ) have had.

It's complicated.

That is because they have a religious belief in the tenets of capitalism and cannot doubt the proposition that there's a correlation between work and compensation.

When you see that 'wage theft' (nonpayment of earned wages) is well in excess of all criminal theft combined, when you see a class of people compensated in millions or billions for doing nothing, when you try to get entrepreneurial and find it's basically a lottery for trying to attract the money of (a) money, or (b) an underclass of people who simply don't have money to spend on your goods or services, that's when you lose faith in not only the Western implementation of capitalism but even the concept itself.

Which is a shame as it's a darn fine pachinko machine for distributing resources without much human oversight. It's not a social system, but it's a handy mechanism in its place.

Just remember 'the poor choose to be poor' is essentially a religious tenet.

> But to hear repeatedly such notions form well education otherwise forward thing people is something I still can not remotely comprehend. And how they would develop such views is even more incomprehensible.

Do they say all homeless people choose to be homeless? Some people certainly do choose it. Hell, you come across posts on HN all the time of people who have real jobs or work at a startup and choose to live in their car (which counts as homeless for statistics).

I want to say that being homeless can be really bad for your mental health in its own right. I spent two months homeless and living around hostels a few years ago. The feeling of having nowhere to go home to starts to gnaw at you. You feel vulnerable and insecure, all the time. I got really paranoid, and had an emotional crisis before finding a permanent place.

Homelessness seems to be something anyone can get trapped in, like alcoholism. If you ended up long term homeless, nobody would think of employing you.

I'll second that. I was homeless about twenty years ago. It doesn't help you be an effective person in any sense.

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