Hacker News Reader

Comment by opencl | Hacker News Reader

The overwhelming majority of homeless people in California lived in the same county they currently do before they became homeless. Climate is clearly not the main factor.

71% in SF homeless already lived in SF, 90% already lived in California: https://socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/san-franciscos-homel...

the cite link in that article is dead but refers to http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015-San-Fra...

75% of LA homeless already lived in LA: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...

View on HN

That is really ignoring the fact that people move to these cities with dreams and no plans, come from great falls Montana with money for a place to stay for one month, and then are homeless afterwards. Also, collecting statistics on homeless is notoriously noisy; eg in Seattle they did a survey that found most of the homeless lived in Seattle before they were homeless, but when asked where they lived, most put down pioneer square....

In the LA survey 65% had lived in LA for at least 20 years, 80% had lived there for at least 5 years. Half the people in SF who had already been there had been for at least 10 years when they became homeless, 89% had been there at least a year.

I think it's fair to say that people move to NYC in the same way, which is the city being compared here.

There is an issue with SF report (idk about LA one)

1) It was self-reported

2) "Lived in SF" in report meant they were SF residents and this is requires just any bill with city address within 30 days (consider cases like: moved to SF with hopes of better opportunities, out on the streets in couple of months - but sf resident for a short term prior).

From the report: "Eleven percent (11%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year."

I found that fact surprising so I looked at that socketsite but their link to the original source is a dead link.

It got moved to a new URL: http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015-San-Fra...

Thanks. 51% reported living in SF for less than 10 years, so Newsom's point that more than half of the homeless were sent from other places could still hold.

11% were less than one year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com