How We Found New Patterns in LA’s Homeless Arrest Data

Some of the ways it goes bad places:

1. Defining the help based on their status as homeless. This means they need to be on the street to get help. Getting off the street can disqualify them for ongoing services.

2. Many programs to help people with serious problems come with a lot of strings attached. They are often highly controlling. Jumping through the hoops involved can be a huge burden in its own right.

3. Terrible, terrible "concentration of poverty" effects.

One of the problems with living in, for example, public housing projects is that everyone you know is poor. You lack access to human capital, to people in the know, to people with connections and power.

Homeless programs take that issue and cube it. You are standing in line with addicts and people who are seriously ill, who are smoking while you wait or who smell strongly of cigarette smoke or of marijuana and who are very germy, coughing and sniffling constantly. It's a great way to make sure you stay sick and get sicker. It's also a very challenging social environment to crowd together a bunch of people who are very stressed out and who typically lack good coping mechanisms for dealing with social friction.

4. Some of the worst programs charge money to participants and/or use them as free labor to help sustain the service. These services typically have a very poor track record of actually helping people solve their personal problems.

Anyone's personal problems are always a combination of two factors: Them and the rest of the world. If you are the wrong gender in a sexist environment or the wrong color in a racist environment or the wrong socioeconomic class in a classist environment, other people can be an active barrier to you being able to solve your problems.

I have about six years of college. I was homeless because I have an incurable medical condition and I was clear that working a corporate job and living in a mold filled apartment were barriers to me being healthy and solving my problems. I'm not mentally ill and I don't take drugs. I chose to go sleep in a tent while figuring out how to make money online so I could get myself healthier.

The one thing I consistently asked in various online forums was for help figuring out how to make money online. I mostly didn't get any such help. I got pissed all over and told I was "panhandling the internet" and just a charity case.

I did eventually figure out how to make a little money online. That plus paying off my student loan helped me get off the street. My income is still incredibly low. I still have an incurable medical condition. I still deal with sexism and classism as barriers to my income goals.

If I had been treated with the same respect as anyone else on Hacker News who is trying to figure out how to create a profitable online business and taken seriously in my goal of developing an earned income, I believe I would have developed that income much quicker and would be making a lot more money. Having to figure it all out myself with no one willing to toss me a clue and people actively pissing on my efforts has been quite the uphill battle.

So when I hear you say that things going what I describe as "a bad place" may be the right place if lack of a home is not their biggest problem, what I hear is justification for intentionally keeping people's problems alive out of prejudice. What I hear is the assumption that people who are currently very poor or who have mental health issues or an addiction don't really deserve the kind of help that would give them a shot at getting a good life.

Because that's how I got treated and it actively made it harder to resolve my issues.

We don't need to create cheap housing near homeless services. We just need to a) create a lot more housing and b) make sure some of it is affordable. It doesn't necessarily have to be in a particular area.

If we create enough housing, it increases affordability. If people don't wind up homeless to begin with because astronomical housing prices are no longer one of the issues complicating their lives, they don't need homeless services.

To some extent yes, but barely.

Basing the budget on real estate value makes two incorrect assumptions:

1. city employees and contractors spend 100% of their money on real estate

2. city employees and contractors are immediately affected -- for example, by paying rent that instantly rises

These assumptions are so far from reality that it is better to assume that the revenue need not increase when real estate value increases.

Tenderloin / Skid Row may be special cases where people with mental issues are most concentrated, but in LA it’s not hard to look around many areas (like Santa Monica) and see smaller homeless encampments in parks or people living out of their vehicles, etc.

In Los Angeles or the Bay Area the more affordable places get gentrified (Boyle Heights) and then the people living there who were just getting by financially may have nowhere to go, depending on their living and work circumstances, and the price of renting in other areas (which can be extreme).

My imho / two-cents theory.

One of the most depressing moments I've experienced was when I was still in school and we did a charity thing for a month where we'd go to the local homeless shelter and help out with various tasks and interact with the homeless people who would come by the shelter.

The reason it was depressing wasn't what you'd expect, I had expected to feel sorry for them but in turned out that the vast vast majority of them were perfectly happy to be homeless they had no want for a better life, they just wanted handouts and felt entitled to them, it was really a strange experience that stuck with me.

I have seen people develop mental issues because they became homeless with the stress that incurs, and also due to or exacerbated by the alcoholism and drug abuse that affects a lot of homeless people, often only after they become homeless.

As for moving some place else: if you're for some reason financially in ruins, that option might not be really available to you. You cannot buy a home with bad credit, and landlords will more often than not check your credit scores and not take you on as a renter. Just moving to a cheaper area won't help.

Granted, you need the mental and physical capacity to earn money from the get go to even have a chance. I have seen people who had bad injuries, others who were extremely grief-stricken after losing a loved one, who at first could not hold a job. Once they recovered, they'd been homeless for "too long" (even if it had been just a few months) to get back into society, essentially, with nobody wanting to hire the "tramp" and nobody wanting to rent to that "tramp"; and you will only find a place if you're employed, and you'll only find employment if you have an address.

Yes because it makes fixing the homeless issue prohibitively expensive both for public and private funds. San Francisco spends 20k a year per homeless person: they must waste most of what they do but it is clear that the two most expensive things for a homeless person is housing and health. Health is a national issue but housing is a local one.

If you look it up you’ll find various reports that strongly link home prices with homelessness. First hit on google, for instance: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/amp/As-rents-rise-so-does-Cal...

To reinforce this with my own life experience, I lived in Houston for five years, and it was possible for me to buy a two bedroom condo in the core urban area for 100k. There were run down neighborhoods in some of the more industrial areas where you could buy a house for less than that, in some cases as low as 30-40k for run down housing. These neighborhoods had transit access and basic public services. There was essentially zero homelessness.

Those neighborhoods aren’t glamorous, and I’m not trying to idealize them. People got out when they could. Crime was not extreme but it was higher than the rest of the city.

But it turns out that even most people with mental problems could find a way to live with a roof over their head when the cost may be in the low hundreds per month. And just having a home makes the rest of the problems you’re struggling with a lot easier to tackle.

Houston isn’t a beautiful city, I moved there not because I wanted to but when the recession hit because it was the only place I had a job offer. But it gets an unfair bad wrap. It turned out to be quite a nice place to live, with tons of diversity and arts and culture, and the best food scene you can imagine.

It’s not the unregulated Wild West that people like to pretend it is, but in general the building codes are very simple and predictable, and for whatever reason the culture there is strongly anti-nimby (relative to the rest of the US). An extremely common pattern while I lived there was for old bungalows from the 1930’s to be bought up, demolished, and replaced by two modern townhomes.

People complained that they really liked the bungalows and that the townhomes weren’t as pretty. That was probably true. But the people buying those homes were ordinary folks, teachers and firefighters and mechanics and whatnot who could afford to raise a family in the nicer more walkable parts of the city without praying for a public housing assistance lottery or anything like that.

It’s bittersweet, but Houston being willing to let the cute old neighborhoods incrementally turns over into denser more modern neighborhoods is what made it a place that anyone could afford to live, and I think not coinicidentally there was a huge culture of entrepreneurship and loads of opportunity and upward mobility in the local economy.

Every city does it so until someone comes up with relevant numbers I have to assume it's a wash. The only time it comes up is when people want to justify treating people inhumanely because "they're not from here".

As I’ve mentioned in other posts above, part of my experience is that the homeless are frequently harassing people and businesses on a daily basis to the level that I can believe the arrest rate should / could be higher. Whether it’s the woman who walked up to me, spit in my face, and then started screaming at me, or the countless guys who have followed my wife aggressively while walking home, it’s a major safety issue. I can imagine that in many situations, the police make whatever arrest they can in the moment, but lack the supporting evidence for more major charges, leading to situations where the “fines” look like the “cause” for arrest, but it’s not really.

I say all this, but again reiterate that I hurt every day I have to walk four blocks to get groceries, and pass a dozen people in a remarkable state of sadness and disrepair. I want each and every one of them to get the help they deserve as human beings (regardless of why they got there, what their race or country of origin, just don’t care... they are human beings who deserve our support). But, i know it’s a collective action issue, and potentially a national issue, and so we have to find a way to make elect officials at a local and national level who are capable of addressing this challenge.

From self reported surveys based on basically nothing. I don’t believe it. It also doesn’t say in what way they were living here and for how long. When you talk to homeless people in San Francisco, a lot of them traveled here from out of town.