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Comment by dakial1 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly my thought while I was reading the text. I live in Brazil and while we certainly have homeless and poverty here, this specific situation of someone with skill and education becoming homeless is something ultra rare, to te point that I never saw, hears or read of anyone in this situation. Even very modest people earning little money are able to get a roof over their heads. The usual case of homelessness here is caused by addiction and mental problems. In contrast I've seen lots of stories in the US about capable, healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness (in this text the writer mentions his study loans). Is the average american more in debt than the citizens in the rest of the world? If so, isn't this situation a economic risk for the US? As something like COVID crisis could easily throw people.withouy any savings to the streets in a heartbeat?

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> healthy and sane people living in the streets for some time and most of the time the justification is indebtness

There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience.

I volunteered at a soup kitchen in SF a number of years ago. At the orientation meeting, the director said nearly all homeless fit into one of these categories:

1. Mentally ill

2. Addicted to drugs

3. Veterans (Gulf War, Vietnam)

4. Down-on-their-luck families (debt, sudden medical bills, lost job, eviction, etc.)

He said #4 category was the smallest, and these families typically got out of the situation within a year or two at most. A 'Pursuit of Happyness' type situation.

The other problems are much less tractable. The distribution of time spent on the streets was strongly bimodal: people were either on the streets for <2 years, or for decades.

Homelessness in my area seems to correspond to physical disabilities as often as mental ones sadly.

  >There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are  significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience.

Good point. But shouldn't we see those kinds of articles in other countries as well? Maybe #4 (down-on-their-luck) might be proportionally smaller in the US but bigger in comparison to the same group in other countries?

One interesting thing also is #3, why are veterans homeless? PTSD?

One thing I notice about developing countries that is basically non-existent in the US is tenement housing. In a lot of counties you can get a tiny “apartment” where it’s enough to sleep out of the rain and lock up your possessions. The “minimum housing” is actually not that expensive.

These places are long gone in the US, because of fire code reasons, local regulations, etc. The minimum housing in many areas that have the hardest hit homeless populations is probably closer to $1500 a month.

What’s more cruel, having people live in tenement housing our having none available at all?

I also live in Brazil. Here the government builds entire neighborhoods of 10.000 to 30.000 houses (basic building, with two bedrooms, living room, bathroom and kitchen) and sells those houses for very cheap installments, sometimes even as low as 50 USD/month. There are some conditions to be met before buying such houses, but usually even people working in the worst types of jobs (say, bagging groceries or sweeping the streets) can meet them. These sorts of programs used to be more popular in the past (when we had a more left-leaning government), but just today I passed by 15.000 houses being built on a city of half a million inhabitants.

The problem with student loans is that they are rooted in "need-based" formulas which define how much a student should pay in terms of their parents' wealth. And for upper-class students the gap between what their parents are willing to pay and what the formula says they can pay often is substantial and is made up with loans. This ends up being something resembling a real hardship for upper-middle-class families, since tuition for two kids can easily be 50% of your household income. If someone is paying off a mortgage on a house, it's easy to imagine their only option to pay the tuition without loans is to downsize the house, which is a huge investment of time and money on top of getting a child ready for college.

> Is the average american more in debt than the citizens in the rest of the world?

Sorta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

However, I don't know how good of an indicator debt is for one's circumstances, or for the consequences of indebtedness. I suspect not very.

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