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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

There's a homeless guy outside of the shopping center where I get most of my groceries. I think he's been conditioned to conform to our society's standards of what a "good" homeless person should be: he never stops people walking by, he never asks for straight-up cash, and he never asks for alcohol or other things that society feels homeless people don't "deserve" (like junk food). Of the dozen times I've asked if he needs anything, it's always been very sensible: some fresh fruit, body wash, or ten dollars to get a haircut (because he had a job interview).

It bums me the hell out that a year later after I first bumped into him, he's still homeless. As I said, he's basically the "model" of how we think homeless people should act when asking for help, and yet for all that, at best it's probably just kept him out of jail.

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That is sad. It is similar to mental illness and a problem that we place blame on the person who is sick. We can easily solve homelessness but it requires political will. The issue is that it is a hard sell to say we should give free money to people who don't work when others in near poverty work two jobs just trying to make ends meet. We need to find more ways to distribute just a tiny bit of those with so much to those with almost nothing.

No. Homeless is not an easy problem to solve which simply requires political will. A) It is not a small amount of money to provide shelters to homeless people. B) Money doesn't solve the homeless problem. Most homeless people have behavior or mental problems. C) Free money giving to healthy homeless people creates bad incentives.

I spent some time working on a psych ward for a very low SES hospital. I can’t tell you how often we established a place of residence and continuity of care for patients before discharging them, only to have them more or less openly tell us they’d bail and go homeless as soon as they got out because they don’t like the rules (eg, no drugs) or resources (roommate or community dwelling situations, rather than private apartments).

Just throwing more money at the problem would have helped, but certainly wouldn’t have solved the problem.

"SES" in this context is socio-economic status? I hadn't seen it used to classify hospitals before.

I worked at an emergency homeless shelter for a while, long ago, and saw the same kind of thing you talk about. I'm not sure it was quite as deliberate, but you can absolutely set someone up in a perfectly nice free apartment and they'll still somehow find themselves back on the street in short order.

Now, that's not everyone! Not by a long shot. You're absolutely right that throwing money by itself is not going to eliminate homelessness, but throwing some money would probably take a good-sized chunk out of it.

> “SES" in this context is socio-economic status? I hadn't seen it used to classify hospitals before.

Yeah, we were a safety-net hospital across the street from a prison. We got a lot of inmates, had a locked wing on most floors for prisoner patients, many many uninsured illegal immigrants, etc. We had quite a few patients that should have gone home, but we couldn’t safely discharge them, so we were just their free hotel while they hung in social support limbo - we were owned by the county, so taxes paid for their stay, and they were in no rush to leave.

It was very much a case of seeing how most failed social policy ultimately ends up in the hospitals.

Working in wealthier hospitals is way more fun. Treating disease is much more satisfying than “treating” poverty.

Question. Or maybe a statement

Given how expensive medical care can be, doesn't this indicate that perhaps our current system is more expensive to society as a whole? (I mean, there are other factors, but given that the cost of health care is something that even more 'well off' people care about, perhaps it is a better angle to push for discussion and reform?)

Well, I agree that if we take an approach of "you have to get off drugs and have 3 roommates", it will continue to be a dismal failure. It does take a different approach (private rooms, no conditions, safe haven, etc.) and this will tend to cost more. People need stability and autonomy first and that will allow some to get back to normal society. Yes, there are some that just want to drink but having a home base in a building with food and other resources is the only way they even have a chance. I think this is key as they need to start to feel human again and having people there every day honestly trying to help (not "fix" or "correct") is empowering.

To validate this and one of the above comments, you could give some people a free apartment with electricity etc. and they'd still screw it up badly. And it's often not even an obvious issue of mental illness, it's more described as just completely unsocialized, wild, a sociopathic level of disagreeability.

To be clear I'm not implying this is everyone, or that money wouldn't help, but it's complicated.

The CBC followed this one homeless man for a while in Toronto, he was given a $1200/month basement apartment for free. After a few months, he walked out, choosing to live on the street (in wintertime no less!). He complained that the carpets were 'dingy and musty and disgusting'. Now it wasn't really apparent if they were or not, but literally as he's saying this, the camera pans to the shelf where there are about 40 empty 'tall boy' beer cans.

I could only think that since he's not really doing anything all day, he could probably work out a deal with the landlord to remove the carpets if they were really that bad, or else, file a material complaint if they were, but it honestly didn't seem like it was an especially negative situation to begin with.

Also, it seemed that the homeless man was very cantankerous and antagonistic.

So just consider that nugget: 'carpets not nice enough for me so Ima rough it' is the logic employed here.

I mean, possibly the carpets were toxic, but I doubt it, moreover, any other reasonable person would find a way to fix the problem considering the 'glorious' opportunity of having quite a nice little flat in one of the more expensive parts of the country for free. But it ends up in argumentation, aggression, complications, and literally 'back on the street', by choice.

I wonder to what the degree of anti-social behavior is learned or is an adaption of 'street life' or if these types were always like that, and if som, does an excessive degree of anti-social behavior count as 'mental illness'. There's a really interesting degree of hyper-libertarianism going on there as well, that 'street life' at least implies a kind of 'absolute freedom' with no rules, no clocks, no responsibilities of any kind, no concept of social order etc..

There are some studies that delineate between the 'temporary and long-term homeless', it might be that it's really important to nab people as they are just descending into this darkness before all of those ugly social features start to encroach upon someone's identity and they don't come back from the mouth of madness.

Wow. Got lots of downvotes on the above comment. Not complaining, but curious what is going on here.

I haven't downvoted you myself, but I suspect that it may be related to your statement that most homeless people have mental problems. (This is only a wild guess and may be completely wrong.)

It is not at all clear that "most homeless people have mental problems" because it is not at all clear how many people are homeless. There are many people who are couch surfing around friends places with no actual home of their own. They are homeless, but they don't necessarily count amongst the homeless figures. They are also completely mentally competent. They may also outnumber the official homeless, but we don't really know.

I said "behavior or mental problems". This is very different.

The vastly different homelessness rates between countries suggests otherwise.

How does different homelessness rates between countries suggest homelessness can be solved by throwing money?

I learned a fairly valuable lesson from a local homeless guy I'd seen for years one day. He always hung out a few blocks up the road from where I lived, walked with a fairly extreme limp and always seemed like he had some pretty bad health problems. Was a pretty nice dude, never hassled anybody or anything.

Then one day I was up the road near where he hangs out, I watched him limp and stumble down to the end of the block, someone was even nice enough to give him a hand as he stumbled, then he got down to the crosswalk and started limping across the street, hit about halfway across, then straightened up, put on a big grin and strided triumphantly the rest of the way across, met up with his buddy i'd seen him with sometimes who hung out across the street, high five and disappear around the corner together. He still hangs out there begging, pretending to be crippled as far as I know.

Some people don't want to stop being 'homeless', for them it makes a pretty.good career

Whats sad to me is, if we knew that homeless people could get help and be taken care of, we'd know not to give things to people like this. But since society has decided to not put resources towards it, we can't make assumptions like that.

Yeah, I don't like it and I don't like that experience (and others) guiding my judgement when it comes to helping people like that, because not everyone who gets stuck on the streets is like that, but people like that take resources and help from people that do really need it and make it harder for people to care. Which altogether just kinda sucks and there really isn't an easy solution to these problems.

The fallacy is that a direct personal experience of one person's dishonest behaviour trumps a financial and economic system which relies on similar actions on an industrial scale.

One dude pretending to be crippled is much less socially destructive than an asset-stripping hedge fund which loads up multiple viable businesses with debt and then kills them.

The difference is the former is still relatively powerless, while the latter can be responsible for multiple instances of homelessness.

So it's not a question of "help" - it's about making sure that homelessness is an absolutely exceptional situation, not the systemic default for anyone who finds themselves on the wrong end of the value creation process. As well as the mentally ill.

“Asset stripping hedge fund”?

purchasing a corporation with the intention to liquidate it's assets for profit, often found seated next to "leveraged buy out" & "pharmaceuticals price hike" in the American Lexicon Association.

Hedge funds don't typically do leveraged buy outs.

Yep, in Finland its customary to nearly look down on those begging on the street, as most likely this is related to human trafficking or black market crime. We can do this because we know that a normal citizen would never need to do something like this.

> its customary to nearly look down on those begging on the street, as most likely this is related to human trafficking

> we know that a normal citizen would never

That took a dark turn quickly.

It's poorly phrased such that it sounds disconnected from the GP (about the lack of care in the US leading to both the needy and scammers on the street), but your quote leaves off the key word:

> we know that a normal citizen would never need

In other words, when you can trust your society to take care of its residents, you can be almost certain the beggars are scam artists.

Finland is a country with a pretty dang good social safety net. They even have things like Government Subsidized recording studios.

The stipulations for receiving aid are fairly light, so I think the viewpoint may be that if you aren't receiving assistance, you aren't willing to play by the simple rules they have.

Of course, this is someone from the US speaking, and basing this on my conversations with people from Finland from 10-20 years ago...

As in enabling human trafficking, not an innocent victim of it. Sorry for the tone :D

I've lived in a neighborhood with a high homeless population for 7 years, and I've never been asked for change in my own neighbourhood. I'm frequently asked if I can spare a smoke, but never money.

The panhandlers who beg in areas where there are more middle class people around are almost all phony.

My favorite was a “nun” in NY Penn Station collecting alot of cash in a bucket at the bottom of an escalator.

I later saw “her” pull off the nun garb, pull out his Mets hat, buy a beer and get on the Amtrak to head upstate.

Just because a homeless person uses some trickery to enhance their chances at $5, doesn't imply that they want to be homeless or that they enjoy it.

The real answer to the OP's point is that a homeless person who is assertive in terms of asking for money may find himself on the wrong side of someone with some kind of authority. Also, certain verbiage works better than others for panhandling.

The anecdote implies the person may not even be homeless, they just appear homeless and crippled as a means of earning income, it's literally their career.

When I worked in "the loop" of downtown Chicago I'd walk a mile or so from where I parked my motorcycle to the office @ 1 N. State.

Every day I walked past the same people pan-handling on the same corners. Many had signs with invented stories to try garner pity from suckers, stuff that was obviously fictional to anyone who had been walking past these people every business day for years, like "Stranded traveler, need money for bus fare" kind of stuff.

One day it became clear why some stuck with the stranded traveler story; it enabled them to wear normal, even classy high-end clothing, and not even have to be dirty-looking. On that day as I walked past a woman doing this I noticed she was wearing a new pair of some exceptionally fancy shoes, and the price tag sticker was still visible on the sole: $499.

On another occasion, I recognized one of these people but off-duty, crouched against the exterior wall of Sears trying to light a cigarette with a match, with their wheeled suitcase parked between themself and the wall. It was windy (Chicago) and I had a lighter, so I went over to help them with a light and as I got close enough to reach their cigarette I saw inside their "stranded traveler" prop suitcase they had left open: it appeared to be full of cash. Another pro for the stranded traveler gimmick: it gives you reason to have a suitcase to hide the sizable stash.

These folks probably weren't homeless, they just earned an easy living by acting like they were in a relatable bind of a situation to fellow tourists in a busy city.

I got to know someone who lived homelessly for a few years on the streets of Chicago, and he said real homeless people in Chicago are easily identified by their clothes and possessions being bleach-stained. Apparently the municipal crews would spray down the encampments on lower wacker where they'd stay warm through winter, without warning. So people who slept down there would have all their possessions/clothing ruined by the bleach. This was decades ago, I don't know if it's still applicable.

>Apparently the municipal crews would spray down the encampments on lower wacker where they'd stay warm through winter, without warning

The craziest part about this is that the people doing the spraying were probably way fewer emergencies away from being homeless than the people deciding to spray bleach in that area.

I wonder what it would have been like to be one of those city workers - Did they just see it as trying to make a living? I mean, they definitely know where saying "no" might get them...

I really dislike it when some antecdote of an (apparently) fake homeless scammer is taken as a substantial point in these discussions on homelessness.

No doubt some small portion of scammers have an effective scam around homelessness. Other scammers do better on other things. My guess is that most people become homeless through lack of skill and knowing the best scams is likely one more skill that most homeless people don't have. Obviously, income stream available for people to "make a career" out of fake homelessness is so small that only a small number of people can be doing it. And, of course, that a given person might be lying in a way that seems like they imagine will get them money doesn't mean they get much more or that they aren't on the streets through general dysfunction (homeless people aren't angels, people in general aren't angels but people face the demand to be angels much more strongly when homeless).

When I lived in the Bay Area is that 90s, honestly, the scamming skills were far higher than they are now and as naive student, I'd have people scam me for a few bucks, which I generally could afford to lose, (with the worse thing being a person invited over who stole from my roommates). The beggars of today lack such skills (just pick pocketing has faded, etc).

The lessen for an average here is, imo, is give to homeless people but don't give more on a sob story, don't give only to a sob story. Just giving money to portion of people really more efficient than giving to agency X. If you're not selecting for scammers, it should work well.

> The lessen for an average here is, imo, is give to homeless people but don't give more on a sob story, don't give only to a sob story.

My solution has become to give food if I want to give something.

Unless they are honestly trying to sell something legally or perform music or something (I really have a soft spot for anyone actually trying to work):

- If someone plays music I might once in a while give something along the lines of $5-10 if it isn't too bad. It actually brightens my day to walk by someone playing.

- Recently I also bought a magazine from a friendly old chap. I don't know how common this is elsewhere but in Oslo severely disadvantaged people can apply for jobs as salespeople for "=Oslo" which is a monthly magazine that is only sold by people like them. Based on my first impression (this months edition) I might very well buy again. The price is 100NOK which translates to just above $10 and for that price I got some actual journalism and I get to support a person who is in a rough spot but actually want to work.

My solution has become to give food if I want to give something.

Being on the streets can mess-up a person's digestion. A lot of homeless people won't take random food because they don't know if they can keep that food down - and, here in the US, you don't know if someone who hates the homeless might be trying to poison you.

In Chicago USA there’s a magazine called StreetWise that homeless can apply to sell for $2 a copy. StreetWise has been sold in this manner for as long as I’ve lived here (20 years).

Yeah, it's tough. But I think there are answers if we get creative.

I'd happily donate to a homeless person who was actively cleaning the street, for example. But for some reason people seem to prefer deciding who to blame rather than proposing solutions.

Sure, the answer is easy: 1) ban homelessness (specifically, living on the streets), 2) ensure adequate, subsidized housing (e.g. 1 clean bedroom, clean bathroom, regular social worker visits), 3) civilly commit anyone who persists living on the streets or otherwise refuses or is unable to maintain a healthy living environment.

We refuse to do this out of nebulous concern for individual freedom (political left, libertarian) and economic incentives (political right, libertarian), no matter that persistent homeless have mental health problems (acute or non-clinical) that are contradictory to simplistic notions of individual liberty and individual accountability. (Because the real concern is the hypothetical liberty and accountability of people who otherwise would never have trouble staying housed, not those rotting on the street.)

So, incarcerate the uncooperative?

Incarcerating the uncooperative is how we enforce most laws.

Saying "Either take your free room, or get your own room, or leave the city, or as a last resort get committed." doesn't strike me as particularly bad as far as freedom goes.

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