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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

but homelessness is not caused by high house prices.

I have had an actual college class on homelessness and public policy. There is no single cause of homelessness, but sky high housing costs definitely contribute to homelessness. There has been a serious and growing lack of affordable housing in the U.S. going back decades, about 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s at a time when they weren't really needed for demographic reasons but they were never replaced, and average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped. Meanwhile, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for years.

No, high housing costs do not single handedly and directly cause homelessness. But that's because there is no single cause of homelessness. But high housing costs are absolutely a contributing factor.

Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

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It's nice that you've took an actual college class on homelessness. I've logged about 10 years in volunteering for programs to feed the homeless, and have shared my home with homeless people for almost 7 years (until I stopped). I've talked to many, many homeless people and every single one of them could have stayed in a shelter but chose not to because of the restrictions on personal freedom. Every single one had some sort of serious mental issue, often compounded by physical disabilities, and was simply unable to care for themselves. Every single one had serious attitude problems to where they basically gave up on trying to make it in this society.

Here, I am talking about the chronic homeless, which are the root of the problem. Not families that may need to sleep in the car because they are in between housing or people crashing on couches while they straighten themselves out. I mean people with tents.

The one person I knew the longest was basically camping out around Palo Alto. The reason why you don't see so many homeless in the suburbs is because the Police are fairly effective at driving them out with beatdowns and destroying their property. This is the reality of not forcing them into group living situations -- let them live on the streets creating a lot of quality of life issues or have an unspoken policy of police brutality. So I would say that what we have now is dystopian.

The last homeless man I let live with me I ended up asking to leave, because he was unable to keep steady work. I just asked him to do something, anything -- it didn't have to be full time -- and he could keep the money himself. But he was able bodied and needed to work. I drove him to his job. At the end of the day, he was pretty blunt in telling me that at his age -- he was in his 50s -- he couldn't stand doing menial work and being ordered around by some kid. For him, it was either a high paying job or camping out. So I finally asked him to leave and he's been camping out (assuming he's still alive at this point -- it's been a while).

I think it's cute you took a college class and now understand the issue. But housing costs have nothing to do it. You can today find a place to live in the U.S. for a few hundred a month. No, not in San Francisco or Manhattan or Monaco, but most of the country is incredibly cheap.

Look at rent prices in the middle of the country. For example, in Phoenix, real rental costs have not increased for 30 years. They've been basically flat. But in Phoenix, the homeless don't have the same access to city services as in San Francisco, or NYC.

FYI, Mz also claims a certain level of direct and personal experience with the problem.

You might focus more on what you're sure you know, and not what you think someone else does, doesn't, or ought.

It's true. Homeless people have no money. The difference between 200 and 2000 a month doesn't matter, they can't afford either.

This is not true. Some homeless people have no money. Others have a social security check and nothing else or a military retirement check and nothing else. Some even have jobs. For people like me, if we could find a decent (not hell hole) place for $200, that would absolutely get us off the street.

I could afford about $400 a month in the near future. I am trying to find a way to get off the street now that my student loan is paid off and that frees up enough money where I could afford that much for shelter in the near future.

Not trying to be critical or anything just curious. Why not get like a Van with a 300 dollar note? At least you have shelter and can park near city services.

I'm sure you mean well, but one-off comments from internet strangers are not going to solve my problems. I am solving them. It is just much slower than I would like. I did not comment on my situation in order to solicit advice. I did so in order to make it clear what the basis of my opinions are.

No man I hear you about the homeless who have potential like yourself. Homelessness is a huge trap. I mean I feel like simply providing showers and some sort of basic amenities to help the homeless who are trying to work their way out of it would help enourmously.

But these homeless programs that just keep the homeless subsisting are better than nothing but sill aren't helping the ones who could escape.

I only went to homeless services when I was truly destitute for basically the first six months. If I can find another solution, I do. Most homeless services are incredibly crappy and often counterproductive.

I'm with you. I've been homeless before. I would never use a shelter. But if there had been free showers I would have used them lol. I had to use the shower bus riding around SF. Also, if there had been free toothpaste and soap that would have been nice.

Sorry, I mistook your original query. It was amongst a bunch of such comments and some seemed to not be getting made in good faith.

The super short version is that I don't want to live in a van because I no longer drive due to my medical condition. There are other factors, but that's a big one.

What percentage of homeless adults spend less than $200/month on drugs? (including alcohol and tobacco, excluding prescription meds)

Your knowledge, persoective, and experience are valuable. Overall I appreciate this comment. But condescending to someone who disagreed with you is uncalled for and detracts from the rest of what you're saying.

It's not that simple to move. People are more comfortable with the devil they know than the devil they don't know.

I have been homeless 5.5 years. I have a chronic illness and two special needs sons that are on the street with me.

We are getting healthier and I have been paying down debt. My student loan was paid off just days ago and things will start getting better for me in July because of that. In fact, they have been getting gradually, slowly better the entire time I have been on the street.

I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I have been interviewed by reporters on 3 different occasions because of it, though, so far, none of that has resulted in a published article promoting my work.

The class I took involved an internship in a homeless shelter in Vacaville and I continued to do volunteer work there after the class ended. I was instrumental in getting them a proper website set up.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-effec...

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I am sorry you are bitter and were never able to figure out how to effectively help people solve the root causes of homelessness in their lives. That is not evidence that I am clueless.

I am not bitter, but I have come to some realizations over the years, one of which is that society, in order to provide us with benefits such as division of labor and higher density living, also comes with obligations, such as paying taxes, obeying zoning laws, not being loud after a certain time, and yes, not sleeping on the street. I knew a woman who had problems with screaming and she ultimately got evicted and became homeless because she couldn't stop shrieking at night. She never understood why "being loud" -- such a simple and benign thing -- was enough to ruin her life. And yet it did, because people need to be able to sleep at night, and there are rules for high density living. People will call the cops, landlords will send notices and ultimately evict you for quality of life issues like shouting at night, if you do it all the time and refuse to get the help needed in order to stop.

There is a very small percentage -- basically 0.03% of the population are chronically homeless -- that are unable or unwilling to meet their obligations. There will always be some Bartlebys with us, who when presented with their obligations as members of a community respond with "I prefer not to". I prefer not to live in the shelter because it's unpleasant. I prefer not to move to where housing is cheaper because this is my home. I prefer not to live in a supervised environment because I like being in control of my life. I prefer not to take this medication that will stop me from screaming because I don't like how tired it makes me feel. And with these Bartlebys the choices are prison, banishment, and forced compliance -- institutionalization. Because a society is not a collection of isolated individuals, it's a web of obligations that are, at heart, mandatory. Some people view this as a dystopian nightmare. They are naive. It is living in a rooted world. From the beginning of civilization if you did not meet the obligations placed on you, the society expelled you, whether by death or banishment. What I don't understand is why people who have no problem enforcing laws banning camping in national parks or forcing people to pay taxes under threat of jail are unwilling to ban camping on the street in a high density city. If you want a nature preserve or other area outside of society in which all the individuals who are unable to comply with our rules can do whatever they want, that's fine. But you will find that with enough people filling up that area, a government will form, a society will form, and you will be back in trouble if you start violating the new expectations placed on you in that new society.

If you aren't bitter, then why the ugly comments like saying "It's cute" that I have taken a class on homelessness and public policy? (That's a rhetorical question. Given your lack of apology, I am not expecting a meaningful answer to it. Consider it food for thought.)

I don't disagree that we shouldn't allow people who are homeless to camp openly on city streets and generally be a public nuisance. I don't do either of those things, so I don't believe it is a given that being homeless must equate to such behavior.

Historically, the more desperately that governments try to control people, the more people find ways around it. This is the origin of Martial Arts. Governments denied the peasants access to weapons, so they learned to use their hands and feet and farming tools as lethal weapons. You couldn't reasonably deny them those things. They needed them in order to produce food for the nation.

I don't agree that imprisoning all homeless people merely for being poor is at all a humane solution. I also don't agree with general trends towards criminalizing behaviors in such a way as to be a kind of Jim Crow law for homeless people. You don't solve this problem by trying to get them to just leave your city and go elsewhere. All that does is shift it around. It doesn't get people off the street.

There is a tremendous housing crisis going on in the U.S. today. Evictions are at very high rates and young people are basically expected to live with roommates because there are almost no spaces suitable for a single, young person to live alone, like there once were. Returning to historical practices of making market rate housing available that single young people can afford on an entry level salary will not solve homelessness, but it will take some of the pressure off.

Homelessness occurs when someone has more problems than solutions. The more solutions we can make available, the more feasible it is for people to make their lives work, even if they have serious personal problems for which there are no ready solutions.

I was born with my medical condition. For many years, I was a full time wife and mom. This gave me a middle class role in society, even though I was actually too sick to hold down a paid position. At some point, I expect to return to a more conventional life. My condition is not curable, but that doesn't mean my life cannot be made to work. It did in the past. It will again in the future, at some point. As the number of problems I have shrinks and the number of solutions I have grows, at some point, it will cross some tipping point.

Let me stop here and thank you for being so generous for a decade of your life. I am sorry it has made you so very cynical. But I don't think your cynicism is actual evidence that more affordable housing cannot play a role in helping get this problem under control.

Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

There's a Star Trek episode that explores this idea. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District

It's difficult to think of ways of combating homelessness. To get them on their feet, you might need to redefine what a job is. A normal job requires some common elements: a shower, the ability to be there on a regular schedule, some productive task to do. But homeless people don't really have the ability to do any of those, except perhaps show up during regular hours.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the only solution is to give them money, and that most of them will just spend it on drugs or alcohol. But that's too heartless of an outlook. Some people who fall into homelessness are just like you or me. When your family connections fail and you have a debilitating illness, homelessness tends to result. And those kinds of people could be pulled out, if only we could figure out how.

There are homeless people that are essentially unsalvageable, though, and it's hard to know what to do with them. No family, no home, but most critically no willingness to help themselves even when given a small opportunity. But they still have friends, and if we focus on helping their friends out of homelessness, they might want to follow.

Just because you can't imagine a solution does not mean there is none. Steve Jobs was homeless for a time. Richard Stallman was sometimes 'between apartments' while working on his open source stuff and had trouble getting a voter registration card because of it until some big publication listed his maker space as his address and then the registrar of voters was finally willing to accept that answer.

I am homeless and have had a class on homelessness and these are two of my websites:

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I also started a Reddit recently called Housing Works and I have various related little blogs, like Project SRO. I am still kind of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, but the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide is a thing I started for myself in order to keep track of useful info I needed while homeless in downtown San Diego and I abandoned it after I left downtown. It was not updated at all for six months and then I realized it had organic traffic. It has the most organic traffic of any site I run because there is need for the info.

A lot of people who have spent time homeless are ashamed of that fact and don't volunteer that information normally. Even those who are not ashamed and not actively hiding it, well, you don't know just from looking at someone that they used to be homeless. Lots of people do get off the street. It is not a permanent situation for everyone.

However, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for some years now and it does concern me that there are larger forces at play here that are causing it to be more of an uphill battle than it used to be.

Certainly. I only meant to add to the conversation.

Your endeavors seem promising.

I realize it is complicated and has many moving parts. Perhaps it would help to think of it this way: We don't actually need comprehensive solutions like so many people are looking for. We just need a thread to pull to start unraveling it and begin to shrink the problem. And because there are many moving parts, there are many threads to pull. People can work on various parts of it, to good effect.

Best.

Just wanted to thank you, Mz, for continually expressing patience in the face of arrogance and condescension whenever the conversation on HN turns to homelessness. Your experience and perspective are hugely valuable, all the more so because you are able to use it to educate folks about the complexities/challenges of the homeless.

Thank you. I do my best. Some times are easier than others.

The issue is chronic homelessness, not people "in between jobs" or couch crashing. Those aren't the ones defecating on city streets and aggressively panhandling. We have data on this, so let's not conflate the issue with non-issues.

2/3 of the chronic homeless have mental or physical disabilities. 1/3 have drug problems. You are talking about 83,000 people in a population of 320 million, but these 83,000 people are creating huge quality of life problems in all of our major cities. In San Francisco, you have 300 million dollars spent fighting a problem created by 2,000 people. The non-profit and social services mafia employs more people to "care" for the homeless -- or more cynically exploit them -- than the actual number of chronically homeless.

I have a chronic illness and I am getting healthier and more productive while on the street. I have been homeless for 5.5 years. My father drank heavily for years and I have another close relative who used to snort $10k a year in cocaine up their nose back when $10k was real money.

First, we can go after the low hanging fruit of helping people who are more easily helped. More availability of actual affordable housing would help with this issue. Some people who are homeless do have income, just not enough to pay for a middle class American lifestyle.

Second there are things that work to help rehabilitate people with serious, entrenched personal issues. I raised and homeschooled my two gifted learning disabled sons, one of whom has the same medical condition I have.

I know quite a lot about this problem space and I see it as solvable. It will take time, but it can be done. Writing people off as hopeless does not help the problem at all. It just compounds it.

>average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped

I've read this many times, bigger houses have contributed a great deal to rising housing costs. But do we have any data on the cost of materials and labor now vs. then as well as the cost of land and regulations now vs. then?

I've always had an inkling that materials/labor costs haven't actually risen that much even as houses grew larger.

In addition to being larger, houses today are more lavish. In the 1950s, houses were around 1200 square feet, they had a kitchen and a bathroom but did not necessarily have a washer and dryer or air conditioner. They certainly did not have a microwave and probably did not have a dishwasher. They tended to have less insulation, less electrical wiring, etc.

Yes, there is data on such things. There are a number of reasons that housing has gone up in cost, but size inflation is absolutely a contributing factor.

The appliances you're describing are a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each. Maybe we could expect the full package to contribute $30k, or even $50k, of increased costs.

This could explain a jump from $200k to $250k. Not from $50k to $200k.

Average housing size has also more than doubled, plus there is inflation. Average new housing is above 2400 sq ft, nearly 2500, iirc.

> Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

I actually think his solution makes sense.

For the really impoverished people who are willing and capable to work their way up, this would be exactly what they want; for those who really don't want a roof over their heads, they should really be put into some sort of institution with restricted freedom and mental illness help.

If we have $300mil budget to help 10 thousand homeless, that's $30k per person, enough to support a decent standards of living in a cheap part of the country.

They tried that in Victorian England (workhouses) and we no quite rightly regard it as utterly barbaric.

Workhouses were for debtors who could not repay debts. That's a very different situation from say, Reagan kicking the mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets of our cities.

It's only 2000 chronic homeless in San Francisco. It's crazy how such a small number of people can make a such a huge impact on the city.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-new-count-shows-h...

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