Comment by mikemotherwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikemotherwell | Hacker News Reader

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If you look at this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... - the US has quite low homelessness rates. The problem is the USA is a massive country in area and population. The opportunities vary greatly, as do the resources. REALLY low macro homelessness (think nationally) can still lead to very high rates at a micro level (think Tenderloin).

Where can the USA look for similarities? Singapore is one city state, as is Hong Kong. Australia's cities are 600 miles apart. The EU has a language issue moving from city to city, despite London to Paris being 1/10th as far than SF is to NYC. The USA is pretty unique here.

The one similar country is China. The GDP per capita by Chinese prefecture makes the US look positively egalitarian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prefecture-level_citie...

China solves their issues by essentially banning movement between areas. The US could never solve their issues that way, for a variety of reasons.

So I'm not sure what the solution is to micro level high homelessness, but macro level low homelessness.

We've found one partial solution to homelessness that works extremely effectively. It was enacted during the George W. Bush Administration, and continued + expanded under the Obama Administration, called the housing first program. We put homeless people into permanent housing, taking care of their shelter needs first, and then focus on treating them for things like addiction. It reduced chronic homelessness by 30% in just three years 2005-2007.

We added to it with the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, as part of the stimulus program in 2009. It helped a million homeless people in two years.

That the US homelessness rate looks relatively good now, owes a lot to this chain of programs.

Seriously this. What a lot of people don't grasp is that the sort of things that 'housing first' can (fairly expensively) help with are things that are even more expensive if the situations wind up being treated by mechanisms like hospitals, the mental health system or the police or jail/prison systems as crises.

Getting people into houses and then helping them clean up their acts, rather than setting a high moral bar (we won't house you until you clean up your alcohol/drug addiction and take treatment for your mental health issues) is just plain good sense.

Getting people into houses and then helping them clean up their acts, rather than setting a high moral bar (we won't house you until you clean up your alcohol/drug addiction and take treatment for your mental health issues) is just plain good sense.

I've always thought the "clean up then get help" seemed cruel and from a position of ignorance. I couldn't imagine being homeless and having to clean up to get a dry place to sleep or food to eat. Sobriety would just add another layer of misery: Withdrawal from any substance would add even more layers.

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