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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Homelessness is rooted in two things: very serious personal problems that have no easy answer combined with a dire shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US.*

We need to dramatically improve availability of affordable housing. That would get a lot of retirees and the like off the street.

But the ones who would, say, burn the house down while you weren't looking need a lot more than a free place to live.

If you care deeply about this issue, work on affordable housing. But please stop acting like homeless people are all puppies that need to be adopted by some well-meaning stranger. It's incredibly dehumanizing and tends to compound the problem.

* https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...

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I've been reading you on here for a while and I respect your experience and deep thoughtfulness on these issues so I'm really interested in your opinion on this: what about the other half of the problem? How can we navigate the balance of providing mental health services vs. forced incarceration? I want this to be government funded, but our government has a track record on mental health that literally includes long periods in which "put them on an island" was the official policy for "treating" wide varieties of mentally ill people. What things could we do that would actually make a difference here? Is there any meaningful way to make progress without reducing the freedom of the mentally ill?

Better nutrition would help a whole lot. It is more effective and more humane than the drugs we prefer. If psychoactive drugs help a mental health issue, you can assume it has medical roots for at least a portion of the problem. Treating the medical roots, which can include various infections, is a good path forward.

There used to be an article online called "Diseases of the mind." One thing it talked about: When antibiotics were invented, thousands of people in asylums were successfully treated for syphilis and then set free. Another point it made: Mental illness tends to occur in demographic clusters exactly like infectious disease, which implies it might actually be due to infectious disease.

Let me suggest this for a little related reading:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140867

Edit: This is what I am working on:

http://pocketputer.com

Being homeless and helpless is crazy-making. I want to help people start making money, setting goals, etc while still homeless, like I did.

Video from The Loneliness Project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYc85A8f2CM

It's aimed at the issue if isolation in the elderly. Homeless people also suffer from social isolation.

It's late. I'm tired. I will add that not all personal problems are about being crazy. Some people have learning disabilities or other barriers to regular employment.

I feel like this answer really sucks because of the framing of the problem in this subthread. I have tried to answer your actual question, which is a legitimate question, but I think the problem is more complicated than that.

It seems that affordable housing as such isn't a problem in USA, the problem is with affordable housing in certain areas where the jobs are. Housing a jobless, homeless person can be very affordable, there is a lot of empty, cheap housing available in areas where population has decreased due to lack of jobs. If we accept that we're going to subsidize these people anyway, then the lack of jobs at those locations isn't an issue.

This seems like an enormously cynical way to argue to me. Yes, I'm sure there is still a lot of affordable living space available in the desert.

It's not just about availability of work, it's also about the availability of infrastructure, opportunities to make connections, in short, ensuring a decent quality if life.

If the current trend continues, this will probably push larger parts of the population to increasingly low-quality living spaces. This isn't even a problem restricted to homelessness.

But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource; whatever you do, not everyone can have it. Living in the best locations is a luxury - the average person can't live in Hollywood Hills or NY SoHo, and yes, they have to to live in a lower quality living space that they can afford.

A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar; it's a luxury good that they're not going to realistically get because so many others want it as well.

If you want better availability of infrastructure, better opportunities to make connections, and a better quality of life, then the question is how to improve the quality of life at locations which currently have low cost real estate - and decoupling income from jobs is one way that can happen; for many of these places the living environment actually is quite good (mainly because you can afford much more space), but the main (only?) problem is the lack of local jobs; if the local people wouldn't be forced to move to where the jobs are, there's nothing wrong with the infrastructure.

A homeless person wanting to live only in SF is just like a starving person wanting only caviar

Homeless people gravitate towards big cities because that's where the concentration of services tend to be. It is why I went to San Diego: there are enough soup kitchens there to eat every day, even if you have no money or benefits at all. I left San Diego after I got food stamps and had dealt with a few things where I felt I could cope without daily access to homeless services.

It's inhumane to suggest shipping people elsewhere and actively evicting them from a particular city because they are poor. This is a mentality similar to the one that was behind removing Native kids from their families, sending them to boarding schools, forbidding them from speaking their own language, etc.

I have a collection of websites I run. I actively encourage people to do things like develop portable income and move someplace cheaper. That is exactly how I got back into housing.

But one woman I spoke with couldn't move because she was currently a college student. She had huge student loans that would immediately come due if she dropped out of her program. She needed to complete her degree in order to have any hope of making her life work.

Other people have children and shared custody with the other parent, or they can't leave because they are on parole and are required to remain in the area or any number of other reasons.

Homeless people are still people. They still have many things going on in their lives that can give them ties to a particular place.

Homelessness arises out of complex, multifaceted problems. One-size-fits-all solutions do not work and tend to make things worse, not better.

> But that's kind of the point - no matter what "should" be, it's an unavoidable fact that desirable real estate / desirable location of living is an inherently scarce, limited, exclusive resource;

Yes, but the scarcity of real estate hasn't changed - there haven't been any holes suddenly opening up in the ground and decreasing the amount if available space. Nevertheless, housing prices have skyrocketed (and so have the number of homeless from what I've read).

So to stay in your frame of discussion, it seems the definition of what is "non-luxury" living space has shifted considerably.

You aren't the first person to say something like this to me.

I am willing to actively encourage poor people to develop portable income and move someplace cheaper.

I am not willing to agree that we should ship people with boatloads of problems to the middle of fuck nowhere with no services, no shopping etc because burned out hell holes have nominally cheap housing.

That's potentially an even emptier life than they currently have.

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