Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmode | Hacker News Reader

Finally someone realizes that there is a problem. There is no justification in the biggest economy of the world to have this much poverty and homelessness. I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US. And it is inherently a solvable problem with adequate resources. We have $1 trillion for the military. Surely, we can spare a few billions and house the downtrodden and provide mental care for those who can't take care of themselves.

View on HN

Agreed 100%. I live in California which has the same massive homelessness issues as Seattle. I also travel to Europe frequently and have noticed the same stark contrast where they seem to do much better at this.

To try to understand why homelessness feels so much worse an California than in Europe, I did some very basic research (which I also posted on a similar thread once before). The numbers are shocking:

San Francisco population: 884,363 (2017/Wikipedia)

San Francisco unsheltered population (conservative): 6,600 (7,499 SF self-reported homeless count * 88.2% HUD estimated unsheltered rate)

Unsheltered population rate (conservative): ~0.75% of residents (my calculation) - nearly 1 in 100!

Compare that with London, a city also experiencing a homelessness epidemic due to explosively rising housing costs:

London population: 8,825,000 (2017/Wikipedia)

London unsheltered population: 1,137 (homeless.org.uk)

Unsheltered rate: ~0.01% of residents (my calculation)

Homelessness rates in SF are absurdly high. In fact, there are more unsheltered homeless people in SF than the entire country of England(!):

San Francisco unsheltered population: 6,600 (2017)

England unsheltered population: 4,751 (2017)

They are not equivalent situations obviously, but somehow a country with a population greater than the state of California manages to have fewer homeless people than one relatively tiny city in California. Something is very wrong.

Homelessness is a complex issue with lots of intertwined causes and no single solution. Not only is affordable housing an issue, but mental health treatment is an equally important problem. I don't have the answers. But I do know that it is a public health crisis and we are currently completely failing to solve it. We need big changes if we actually care about addressing it and we as a country definitely have the resources to do it.

There is no political will to fix homelessness in San Francisco and it’s actually a big business and money maker for certain people. It’s just a way to funnel tax payers money to those groups. As usual, follow the money.

You really can't compare.

London is a large city.

SF is just a tiny part of a larger metro area.

Do you know what the 'homeless' rate in 'The City of Foster City' is? Probably near 0.

I think a better comparison would be Bay Area to London.

He gave figures for the city of San Francisco and the entire country of England.

He compared SF to London. Then threw in some national numbers.

SF to London is not a good comparison because SF is a small part of the greater city.

No matter how you slice the numbers (SF, Oakland, San Jose, all of them combined, etc), the homelessness numbers for the bay area are terrible and way beyond London.

I'm wondering why homelessness is not as large in NYC? The prices here are as high as in SF. Is it due to the slower rate of a price increase? Colder weather?

NYC has a homeless problem that's actually worse than San Francisco [0]: Their homeless population in 2017 was upwards of 76,000 people.

Where are you getting the information that New York's problem isn't as bad?

[0]: https://www.wnyc.org/story/more-homeless-people-live-new-yor...

This is very misleading and doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.

NYC has a homeless population of 76,501, but according to HUD, only 5.1% of NYC homeless are unsheltered. In SF, the unsheltered rate according to HUD is almost 90% - nearly the worst in the country. That means NYC actually has fewer unsheltered people than SF on the streets despite a much larger homeless population.

So while NYC has a big issue with housing affordability and homelessness, they are actually doing a much more effective job of keeping people off the streets and reducing the rate of the kinds of severe public health issues you will see everyday in downtown SF.

> Where are you getting the information that New York's problem isn't as bad?

He must have visited the city and walked around. The population might be larger, but the problem is less egregious in NYC; we don't just let them camp out in the streets and rule the city.

Places that get cold usually have less homelessness.

Or they just have a less visible homeless problem because more of the homeless are sleeping in shelters instead of on the streets.

NYC shelters nearly 95% of it's homeless population. SF only manages to shelter about 11% of it's homeless population (about the worst rate in the country). Thus there are more homeless people on SF's streets despite a much smaller total homeless population than NYC (and NYC is of course also a much more populous city).

My recollection: when I took a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU, the number of homeless in San Francisco was similar to the number in New York in spite of it being a much smaller city.

The most current stats I have indicate that California has about 25 percent of the nation's homeless:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...?

Yes, exactly. The point is that in a warm climate there may not be more homeless people, just more visible homeless people.

NYC now shelters most of its homeless mainly because state law requires it. We’re spending a ridiculous amount of money putting homeless people up in hotel rooms because the process to get new shelters built is stalled and we can’t even build enough market-rate housing to account for population growth, let alone affordable housing.

Curious if you've accounted for issues like metro area vs. city limits. It could very well be the case that the London contains more of it's metro area within city limits than San Francisco, thus increasing the divisor vs. the numerator.

SF has more unsheltered homeless people than the entire country of England according to these numbers. So even if SF's per-capita homeless rate is lower when you include some surrounding SF suburbs, it's still absolutely terrible and far worse than London.

And if you consider the whole Bay Area (which is closer to London in size), the homelessness rate remains very bad overall because homelessness is also very severe in Oakland and San Jose. Some of the smaller cities of course fair a lot better than others, but the total numbers of unsheltered homeless is very high across the whole Bay Area region.

Even Palo Alto has a high homelessness-per-capita rate when you count people living in vehicles as homeless. It's not nearly as bad as SF, but it's not good either.

> I am amazed every time I travel to Europe, how few homeless people there are, despite their economic growth lagging the US.

This. I grew up in Eastern Europe where middle-class people would make and eat every single meal at home, but I have never seen such level of poverty as I saw in the streets of the US.

Do you really think the problem is at the realization phase?

I'd say we all know this to be true, but whether we care enough is another question. There's a fair amount of people in this country that see homelessness as "lazy".

To those afflicted by the Just World Fallacy, the agony of the homeless is a pleasing reminder of one's own moral superiority: they suffer because they're terrible people, while I'm successful because I am virtuous.

I'd say that's part of the realization phase.

I'll say "finally" if he doubles the salary of his workers and give them a decent work conditions with a lot less stress.

He can keep his charity.

Military spending is only 16% of Government spending, you'd think we could cover the homeless somehwere in that other 84%.

If you include all DoD spend include VA, it is well over 20%. Why this portion ? Because it is mostly unnecessary and just needed to foster faux nationalism

Its not like we needed bezo's to come down from the mountain and tell us all what a terrible scourge homelessness is.

You are fooling yourself if you think this 2 billion comes anywhere close to correcting the level of homelessness amazon generates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com