Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasz | Hacker News Reader

That list is a great example on how you have to treat wikipedia with a healthy dose of scepticism. It's original research of the worst case: A list of figures from different decades(!), extracted from random news sites, without any trace of even trying to explain that there is no globally accepted definition of homelessness and that those numbers likely measure very different phenomena.

Furthermore, most of these figures includes people that are insufficiently housed like on a friends couch, in a windowless room, in temporary shelters and such, and do not tell you much about the population of people "on the streets".

View on HN

Fair enough, but you literally gave zero evidence for your claim that "Other countries, those with a somewhat decent social safety net, do not have such a big problem with homelessness".

You should at least consider the possibility that what you said isn't really true and just fits your preconceived notion of a heartless US society versus a supposedly more social environment in Europe.

Heartlessness isn’t a factor here. At least individually I’d say that people over here are way more indifferent towards the homeless. There is very little enthusiasm in terms of volunteering and such.

Where is over here?

The US leads the world in volunteering. https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO4.1-Participation-voluntar...

You can also look at BLS info: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/volun.pdf

Most cities have programs with volunteering with the homeless, just visit a nearby church and ask. Clothes, food and resumes are pretty popular things to help with.

Thats my point. There is an abundance of compassion, but a dearth of effective social security. The welfare states or Europe are a form of institutionalized compassion, but they are eroding fast.

You seem to have shifted the burden of proof to others to disprove your unsubstantiated claim, and then criticized the quality of the evidence offered.

Please raise the level of discourse here by offering new information to support your claim.

It appears to be compatible with numbers from the OECD.

http://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pdf

If you look closely, you’ll find that this data has exactly the same problems. Japan has 0.0% homelessness, because they are only counting people sleeping on the street. The millions of people living in trailer parks would likely be counted as homeless in a lot of the countries on that list. Some of these figures are official, some come from advocacy groups. It is not possible to use this data for international comparisons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com