Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis | Hacker News Reader

Los Angeles’ homelessness crisis

latimes.com

74 pointsmixmastamyk68 comments

I write software for a living, and have on more than one occasion had the opportunity to live and work in California.

Seeing the poverty and, how the poor are treated in San Fransisco, Los Angeles, and every other large US I've been to, is so degrading and offensive that the idea of participating in the financial system that sustains it is unacceptable.

Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better? It's a hard problem to solve, even by throwing a lot of money at the problem. Part of the problem is that some people want to be homeless (for a variety of reasons (or a combination of reasons) like not losing their independence, not trusting the system, wanting to continue a drug/alcohol habit, bad experiences with the system previously, mental illness, etc).

In a country that values individual rights, it's not clear how you help that person get off the streets without forcing them. In a city with relatively mild climate like LA or SF, it's even harder to get the homeless into shelters where social services can more effectively help them.

Granted, there are plenty of people that do want to get off the streets, but not everyone living on the streets is willing to make the sacrifices to do so.

> Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better?

In most countries with functional social security networks. Canada, Germany and Sweden.

So while the above are leaps and bounds better, they aren't flawless. Canada has lots of mentally ill people on the streets due to _very_ poor mental health care available to them. And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland.

> In a country that values individual rights..

If you want people off the streets, offer them free housing. There is even (and remarkably so) an example of this from Utah, where free housing was provided to the ones in need. And the city saved money doing it, since fewer other services were needed as a result.

Also, separately, I find this argument to be a bit of a straw man, since the treating homeless people decently and having strong individual rights aren't fundamentally opposed. In America some things are done well collectively, in the interest of everyone, like providing roads.

There's some debate over whether or not Utah really did solve their homeless problem:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solv...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles...

And even when a region does offer good homeless services, word gets out and more homeless move in:

https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/more-homeless-move-to...

As someone who lived in Canada, I wouldn't agree they are treated better. Every winter there is a mad rush to get people out of the cold.

Vancouver has about as severe a homeless problem as SF.

Can't speak to the other two countries.

> Also, separately, I find this argument to be a bit of a straw man, since the treating homeless people decently and having strong individual rights aren't fundamentally opposed. In America some things are done well collectively, in the interest of everyone, like providing roads.

I believe he was making the argument that, due to principles of individual liberty, the government cannot compel someone who wants to be homeless not to be.

Frankly, despite your caveats, I think this is a reckless and hurtful thing to think and say. Unless you have sources, it's just a dismissive logical extreme. Sure we can find some non-mentally ill people who want to be homeless. But let's focus on getting the 2.5 million children off the streets rather than even looking at framing this as an individual freedom issue.

I've been to a lot of places for a prolonged periods of time. The only place that has ever made me think of LA was Seoul. Every other city, no matter how poor, was in considerably better shape.

One difference that I feel is key, are housing regulations. You can put up 4 cement walls, with a cement floor and corrugated metal sheet roof, meet no safety standard, but still have a home. An address, a place of safety, where you can cook, clean clothes, and have access to electricity and water (possibly not legally, and certainly not reliably). Where your kids have light and can read and do their homework. Often housing 3 or 4 generations and forming their own community.

It was a significant reason I didn't continue working in San Jose, which is roughly 1000x worse.

San Jose, Costa Rica, that is.

Indeed. True story. I was drifting through the mountains of southern Mexico with some friends, in an old pickup. We encountered an old woman, carrying a large pot, and gave her a ride to a nearby town, maybe ~10 km away.

So it turns out that she had made the pot. Mined the clay. Fired it in charcoal from a wood fire. And she was intending to sell it for several pesos, with which she'd buy corn, beans and chillies. Walking both ways.

Getting over the guards with shotguns at the ATMs took a little time, but not much (I grew up in a bad urban area of a Midwestern city).

Getting over the theft and such, a little while still. But I started figuring out the usual scams and such. (Taxis still only cost $1 at the most, with no tipping expected, anyway.)

I even was able to mostly get over the fact that when you drove 5 km outside of the city that I'd see abject poverty that I hadn't even seen in the worst areas of my rust belt city - stuff that makes this article look like absolutely nothing.

It was a chronic thing: Ex-pats all living inside a literal walled garden, getting everything delivered. This was before Uber Eats and the like, so getting McDonalds and other fast food delivered to the complex was a new thing. Groceries, food, entertainment. And then the constant trips to Hotel del Rey and the Blue Marlin Bar so my co-workers could pick up prostitutes on the cheap with rooms available for rent by the hour...

What I realized slowly over a period of a few months is that it wasn't the insane poverty - and relatively low violent crime rate! - that got to me. It was what we were doing to "gentrify" the area. It felt like, and was, pure exploitation and taking advantage of massive economic gradients. That we worked in tech and could sling some code made us masters of our domain, being paid well-above-average wages for Silicon Valley - and literally unheard of sums in Costa Rica.

We've met the enemy, and it was us.

Yeah, you see the walled compound thing in Mexico too. In hard neighborhoods, there's broken glass set in concrete at the top. With heavy metal-reinforced wooden doors/gates. And no windows (obviously) in the outer wall. In downtowns, you do typically see heavily barred windows on the front.

And damn, ex-pats! In heavily ex-pat areas, prices are pretty much at US level. I recall paying $20 to park for a few hours in downtown Cuernavaca! Stuff is very inexpensive outside those areas, but then you're the only gringos around.

Up in the mountains, you get hard looks from some of the male indigente. Who often speak Mexican as a second language. Their ancestors fled the Spanish way back when, and they're still there. And they don't trust outsiders. If they decide that you're up to no good, a mob may hurt or kill you. Even if you're an official of the Mexican government.

> ... I grew up in a bad urban area of a Midwestern city ...

I recall one trip, going through the Amtrak section of Penn Station in NYC. There were at least four kinds of armed folk wandering around: 1) National Guard with AR15s; 2) NYC police with AR15s; 3) NYC K9 teams; and 4) Amtrack police. But at least no shotguns :)

I get what you say. And there's a lot more poverty in the US than what you see in large cities. I recall being very disturbed by my first Amtrak from NYC to DC. North Philly. Somewhere further south, north of Baltimore. And damn, you can see some sad areas from the Northeast Extension of the PA Turnpike. And on back roads in the Southeast generally.

Housing policy in the US is a very large part of the problem. Tax incentives, financing mechanisms, zoning codes and myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent. Our default expectation in the US is that young single people rent a multi bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and share it with roommates, who may be total strangers. If for any reason whatsoever that doesn't work for you, well, fuck you. Enjoy sleeping under a bridge while cops harass you.

We really need to stop talking about The Homeless in this country and start talking about the housing crisis. No one can get a handle on how you fix homelessness when we focus on the people who are homeless. But we could make a lot of headway on the problem if we tackled the housing piece of it.

It would not get everyone off the street. But it would, for example, get retirees off the street whose income will not cover rent because we simply do not have housing at the price point they need.

> myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent

That's quite a blanket statement for the entire US. Can we confidently claim that no affordable housing whatsoever exists in Detroit, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, non-metropolitan Texas, or Midwestern states, where in some places http://freelandks.com/ one can still get free land?

The problem seems to arise when everybody is vying for roughly the same space - large coastal cities with mild weather, proximity to public transportation, beaches, decent restaurants, some entertainment scene, job growth and economic prospects.

Same coastal cities also seem to be earthquake-prone and therefore require more expensive (than aforementioned Midwestern states) building codes and safety regulations. As the cities are dense, there's a set of regulations in regards to mandatory parking, green zones and other stuff that's just peculiar to large cities. Combined with higher than average cost of labor, the construction and compliance costs alone command a premium, and that's before we get into land prices.

That's a blanket statement rooted in more than 3 years of researching where in hell I could move to get myself off the street. It is also rooted in formal education and other research because I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way.

In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and held about 3.5 people. Today, it is over 2400 sqft and contains about 2.5 people. Meanwhile, we tore down something like 80 percent of our Single Room Occupancy units over the course of a couple of decades.

The lack of affordable housing has been severe and growing worse for decades. This is why waiting lists for Section 8 housing is routinely measured in multiple years or even more than a decade in some cases.

I will add that these comments about "It is just big cities that have expensive housing" are a red herring. That's where the jobs are. If you have no job, you can't afford a place to live. Jobs in small towns typically pay less. Moving someplace cheaper works for the privileged few with portable income and/or passive income. People who still need to work for a living cannot magically solve their problems by moving someplace cheaper.

If just 10,000 more minimal housing units ( think a barebones efficiency suitable for a single adult ) had been built in the Bay Area in each of the past ten year there would be no housing crisis as such.

This would have been easily doable. Hell if the political will were there building that many units in a year would be feasible.

But you can't zone that, you can't mandate it. You can't grant easements; you can't even used condemned public property.

Because our political system has been captured by greedy bastards like Vhinod Khosla and Donald Trump.

> This would have been easily doable.

I dunno.

The city of Los Angeles had access to land and planning resources and they still arrived at optimal cost of $350,000 per barebones unit http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-prop-hhh-qa...

As the linked article politely notes, those costs are likely to overrun once the construction starts "A Times analysis of projects funded by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, which includes most permanent supportive housing projects, shows that recent projects have usually cost more, averaging about $420,000 per unit in 2016."

Even if land is semi-free or government-owned, the zoning has been taken care of and the architectural designs are obtained pro bono, it still costs money to get building materials, hire labor, provide parking spaces, develop infrastructure and build the residences on a code-compliant way.

And let's just say that $420,000 a head goes a long way in many non-coastal areas of the United States.

> If for any reason whatsoever that doesn't work for you

What category of young person, wanting to live in an expensive city, cannot have roommates?

I have a genetic disorder that was not diagnosed until my mid thirties. Living with people I nearly know who are not invested in keeping me healthy would be disastrous for me. I never wanted roommates ever. In my twenties, prior to my diagnosis, I could not have proven that I had special need of retaining a high degree of control over my environment.

My opinion is that rich and privileged people get to routinely exercise their preferences and predilections without having to justify them. Everyone else needs to jump through hoops and fill out paperwork and prove to some authority that their preferences are a valid need. I think we could do away with a lot of expensive programs designed to accommodate special needs if we started from a baseline assumption that you should be allowed to get your preferences so long as they aren't hurting anyone else.

Most of the design of our world is extremely accommodating of the privileged few. Everyone else is default shat upon. I would like to live in a better world than that.

> Living with people I nearly know who are not invested in keeping me healthy would be disastrous for me

Would it have been better if your roommates shared the same (or similar, from a compassionate perspective) disorder? I have a friend who suffers from migraines. She found having similarly-afflicted roommates to be tremendously comforting and, in one case, potentially life saving.

No. In my case, that is a recipe for disaster. I have a form of cystic fibrosis. It involves a compromised immune system and predisposition to develop deadly antibiotic resistant infections. People who have CF and want to attend related medical conferences are often asked to show they do not test positive for certain infections that are not a big problem for the general population but can be a serious problem for people with CF.

Furthermore, you are ignoring my point that I did not have a diagnosis until shortly before my 36th birthday. Even without a diagnosis, I was well aware that my health was delicate, though other people viewed me as a hypochondriac and neurotic.

My argument is that people should be able to find a small cheap place they can afford to live in on their own if they strongly prefer living alone. They should not need to justify such a preference. A desire to have your own place and willingness to accept something small and bare bones should not make you a freak that society cannot accommodate. It was a completely normal arrangement in this country for quite a long time. Then we tore down most of our SROs and such accommodations these days are no longer a normal living arrangement for a young person just starting out. They are a program for hardcore junkies who would otherwise be chronically homeless and they have a terrible public image.

But if you watch old movies, or movies set in a previous era, just having a room with a sink and hot plate was completely normal for ordinary people. You see this in movies like A walk in the clouds. It was not Section 8 housing. It was not The Projects. It was a market rate rental commonly available.

There is no reason we can't bring that back.

You're not alone.

I've lived in two major cities of the world, spent time in many others; However, I've never seen anything as bad as San Francisco and surrounding areas. Some of my colleagues are from Europe and felt so shocked and uneasy about what we saw.

I hate to say it, but it definitely left a bad impression of the USA on my friends and I. It certainly made me question a lot of the things the US claims to stand for.

Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...

When I was homeless and collecting recyclables for the money, thus picking up after housed people with zero respect for the land who just threw stuff on the ground everywhere, I often called it land of the sleeze, home of the depraved.

> Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...

Yeah as in, people are free to be homeless if they didn't work hard enough. It's the Trump argument, he's a self-made man who kicked off with a small loan of just one million. A lot of Republican, anti-socialist voters are poor, but don't see themselves as poor but "temporarily underfinanced". And the truly destitute / homeless apparently lose their right to vote.

His father was a multi-millionaire [1], Donald Trump has never had to work hard for his wealth, he inherited it.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump

Oh, definitely. America's hatred of poor people is ingrained into it's culture. The prevailing attitude is that if you're poor, it probably your fault. Many evangelical christians go so far as to say that if you're poor, it's because god is punishing you for being a bad person. People love getting mad when they see a homeless person with a cellphone, or a mother buying a steak with food stamps, because poor people are seen as "leeches on society".

It seems that rather than trying to fight the laws of economics with rent controls, special housing, and welfare programs, the focus should be relocation and job placement in less expensive areas.

It's unrealistic to try to get someone a low end job that will support them long term in one of the most expensive cities in America.

With the $1.2B bond measure, you could rent housing for every single homeless person in LA for a good 5 years in middle America. (less than $500 a month all in).

Given that about a third are mentally ill, that would not be adequate - the other states would undoubtedly object - so some sort of interstate pact or national program would be required for that sort of plan.

Isn’t the problem that republican controlled midwestern states chase all their homeless people out to democrat controlled big cities? They are not willing to pay anything to help the homeless. They are not even willing to look at them. They want it to be somebody else’s problem. I think that is a problem with having open borders between states but not equal social programs. It leads to a race to the bottom.

Not exactly - the bigger problem is that all the republicans controlled midwestern states are shitty economies and so people move to places where they hear that people can get jobs (functioning liberal states) and when that doesn't work out they end up homeless in the new city. (Various polls of homeless people in Seattle have found that most of them were already in the area immediately before they became homeless).

Not sure you made it a Republican/Democrat thing when I can think of several high unemployment/poverty Democrat states and low unemployment/poverty Republican states.

Not surprisingly, facts don’t back that up, at all...

https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

This is a very curious comment. Troubling, too.

The answer you’ve offered up for confirmation reflects a perspective that is as bad as the one you’re demonizing.

There areno jobs in these areas in middle America. And sometimes the water and air is poison where there is affordable housing anyway in these places. We need social programs that actually help and that actually are accessible. Some of the Medicaid forms I've seen were more difficult to complete than a dissertation and turn everyone away until they literally have nothing, i.e. when it's so too late for help to actually help in any lasting way that could be built upon.

You are beyond ill informed. The huge majority of middle American housing is located in areas with much better air quality than any of the big coastal cities like Los Angeles.

I thought we were talking places where people can work/live. Detroit came to mind: affordable housing, a few jobs- not many. But then I remembered: oh yeah! They have a giant trash incinerator blowing poison air on the whole Metro Area. It is at its worst where the housing is at its most affordable. Then I thought Indiana, Ohio- also having cities with some of the worst air quality in the country. Detroit's is worse than LA. Evansville is up there. Let's not even start with the water issues in the midwest, starting with Detroit.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/23/detroit-garb...

Detroit is one of the worst in America and being nearly on the Canadian border, I don't think many consider it "middle" America.

Middle America is more socioeconomic than physical. Chicago, south of Detroit (but mostly just further from the border with Canada), wouldn't be considered Middle America. North Dakota probably would. Detroit is a strange city, but I think many people would probably refer to it that way. The midwest in general can conjure some of the aesthetic pretty well, despite physical locations sometimes being quite north.

So, the thing that always bothers me about how Los Angeles is reported on is the lack of normalization for population. LA is really big with a lot of people. It will naturally have higher population of homelessness.

57k/10.2m is ~0.56% homelessness, which is about par with Seattle (11.6k/2.1m = ~0.55%), but significantly better than SF (7k/870k = ~0.80%) or NY (77k/8.5m = ~0.90%).

Given LA's unrelenting rapid gentrification, wealth, and income inequality, I think the situation can easily get much worse.

But at least we're trying, trying to make the situation better, or at least slow down its progression. I'd hate to see us give up and invest in anti-loitering securitybots instead. The wealthy here haven't become that out of touch and scornful yet, but keep writing articles like this and maybe they might.

> I'd hate to see us give up and invest in anti-loitering securitybots instead.

Why would you need securitybots? Orange County police departments already do it for free by dumping homeless people in Long Beach.

> The wealthy here haven't become that out of touch and scornful yet

I guess you’ve never interacted with people who live in Newport Beach. Or LA for that matter. Are you sure you’re from LA?

It's an example of major cities taking on what really is a federal problem. NYC and LA run welfare programs using local tax dollars. This is so obviously a federal-level problem that requires a massive federal project to solve. Putting this burden on the local residents of LA, SF, NYC etc is incredibly unfair. It's also inefficient to build homeless shelters in dense LA county when there is so much cheap land throughout the country (with people looking for work, too).

Good example of how private charity doesn’t work. The US has gotten ever wealthier, or primarly the 1% the exact portion of the population who should have been most capable of funding charity. Yet this problem grows. Charity is able feed people but not turn around people’s lives. You need comperhensive government programs for that.

SF spends $150M on homeless and it's one of the worse cities for homelessness.

You really think money is the problem?

Am I alone in thinking that 150 million is not that much? When I was in SF i saw so much poverty and suffering I could not believe my eyes and I have seen homelessness plenty before. Build more affordable, high density homes and give them to the homeless for free for a few years with high amounts of care if you want to solve the problem.

I don't have the exact number, but if you divide $150M by the number of SF homeless it's more than $30,000 per person.

I would argue it's what we're doing with the money that's the issue, not how much money there is.

The economically disadvantaged are the easiest to help as they cling to every opportunity to get their life back in shape.

But then you have the mentally ill, mentally disturbed, drug addicts and the criminals to abet them. A coordinator for a local charity in Santa Ana had a post on a local NextDoor mentioning that their charity was running below capacity. Few reasons people would refuse any help and continue tenting by the river included:

* general requirement by the charities to have drug- (which includes alcohol-) free zones

* people didn't want to be "in the system" whatever that meant, many did not want to be tracked by government or agency of any sort

* some homeless objected to the religious nature of some charities

* for some easy access to drugs was paramount (and concentrated encampments enable this to great degree)

* other mental issues

Not sure these can all be solved by more money.

Reading this, I'm reminded of hobo life during the Great Depression. Hoovervilles. And in those days, you could at least get around on freight trains.

I'm also reminded of my own time living on the road. In my late teens through early 20s, as an illegal immigrant. And indeed, I spent some of that time in LA and SF. But mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Living in the forest, and squatting.

But it wasn't that bad, because I had many friends. And it was fun to drift aimlessly. But eventually, I went to college and grad school, so hey.

I was homeless for a year in my late teens. But I also felt it didn't hurt me because I was young enough to still feel that it was a choice of my own, and I did go to school.

As the article points out, only a third of homeless are addicted, so the problem is not really about the homelessness itself. It's about losing hope and being alienated by your own community. I always wondered why so many homeless people like to flock around where it's crowded.

I didn't actually feel "homeless" in a bad way. Someone we knew usually had a place where we could crash. And some source of food and money. Weed and LSD were always available, and sometimes psilocybe and peyote. But then, this was decades ago, before "homelessness" became a thing.

Every living being on this planet should have the basic right for a house. It's a primary need. Houses should not be part of the "free" economy and should not be allowed to be traded for profit. If this pyramid scheme continues the future will look very grim for billions of people.

But does that house need to be near the beach? Why not Kansas?

Perhaps if you said "home", I'd agree with you. Not everyone needs, or even should have a house. But everyone should have housing.

I strongly disagree with everything you just said. (Except the overall notion that all people should get to their rights.)

Can the house be mobile?

All of this reminds me of the modern version of the Great Depression. Economists have gotten smarter this time around and have covered up the unemployment rate and CPI, but it’s mostly the same.

Studs Terkel, probably the most famous interviewer / oral historian who’s ever lived, wrote a book containing hundreds of oral histories about the Depression. It sounds just like today:

Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression https://www.amazon.com/dp/1565846567/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Yh8K...

People at the top of our economy are generally oblivious to how bad things are for the bottom half. The top 0.1% commands the same wealth as the bottom 90%. Historically wealth inequality finds its outlet in political unrest, and there is probably more of that to come in the next decade. In the last election a socialist and a populist both got suprising amounts of support, even though the broader economy was supposed to be doing well. The next recession will hit the bottom 50% hard, and we could see truly strange things if that occurs near an election.

> People at the top of our economy are generally oblivious to how bad things are for the bottom half.

Generally oblivious or willfully ignorant with malice?

That's an easy statement to make, but I don't think it holds true for most wealthy people. Especially wealthy people in Silicon Valley. If anything, most wealthy people I know are extremely aware of how bad things are for the bottom half and regularly vote against their economic self-interest for progressive candidates.

Runaway inequality isn't due to some evil conspiracy by rich people to hoard money from everyone else. It's due to the leveraging nature of technology and the plummeting demand for unskilled labor

It's a really hard problem. Some people are down on their luck and can be helped. Some people are out of control, there is no way to babysit them to normalcy. Money won't solve it.

It's a bit paradoxical that homeless people can be a problem in a specific geographic area. By definition, it should be easy to relocate them.

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