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Comment by bvcvbuiy | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am wrong but at least two points mentioned in your comment are US specific :

"It is caused by peoples' jobs not paying a living wage" Where I come from minimum wage is enough to pay for a rent.

"the cops really hate the homeless. Someone can't periodically destroy a bunch of peoples' meager shelter in completely unproductive "sweeps" without developing a view that they're less than human." Again I may be wrong but where I live there are no 'homeless villages' like there are in the US.

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Minimum wage in the US is $5.15/hour iirc. At 40 hours per week (which many jobs won’t reliably get), that’s ~$824/month BEFORE taxes, food, and so on. Even in the rural south where I used to live, where the cost of living is very low, many one person apartments would be $400–$500/month. That leaves maybe $400 for everything else BEFORE taxes on a GOOD month. Combine this with the fact that employers aren’t required to, and pretty much never do, provide medical benefits to this sort of employee.

Maybe you can squeak by if you’re lucky… but you have to be consistently lucky. One bad month and the whole thing can fall apart. It’s basically impossible to build wealth or savings in this situation (not to mention care for your own fucking health).

Each state has a different min wage. In Maryland it's $10, in CA it's $12.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Most Americans (by number of people) live in a state/county/city with a higher local minimum wage than the federal.

Edit:

https://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-tracker/

This is a comprehensive tracker of state and local minimum wages across the US.

"the cops really hate the homeless"

I'm sure there are cops that live for this, but I'd be willing to wager money that the sweeps, etc. come as the result of some external pressure from local governments, citizens, and the like.

> without developing a view that they're less than human.

OP is talking about coping with what they are tasked to do. You can't treat them the way that "local governments, citizens, and the like" require you too, without hardening your heart, or it will really tear you up inside.

These may not apply to where you live but that does not mean that they only apply to the US. These qualities describe most human societies now and throughout history. This kind of ignorance is a side effect of living a life of privilege.

If you say where you live maybe some homeless folks can be relocated and be happy :)

There is one problem though. That happens a lot (I have homeless Syrian people in mind) but the government does not allow them the right to work so they can't get out of poverty.

They're not even US specific. They're "a handful of cities with insane local economic conditions" specific.

Homelessness is not a rampant problem except on the west coast. Yes big cities have homeless populations but they mostly cycle into various shelters (often church run) where the ones that don't have serious mental issues get their lives back on track. It's not rampant like it is on the west coast.

Spend a few years riding the MTA, T or Metro and then compare to BART if you don't believe me.

California can kind of make the "hospitable climate" excuse but even rainy Seattle is just carped bombed with tents. Places like DC and Miami are not exactly known for exemplifying effective social services yet somehow they manage to have much less of a problem than the west coast.

My dude I saw homeless people in towns with a population of 4000 in Mississippi. This is just false.

I don't think you realize just how much more pervasive it is on the west coast.

Your anecdote is just an anecdote.

If you're going to talk about homelessness on the West Coast, at least give us statistics on what percentage are native to the West Coast, what percentage came from out of state and became homeless later on, and what percentage were literally homeless in another state and given a bus ticket to the West Coast because this is a fairly rampant thing.

Your anecdote is also just an anecdote. You're making sweeping claims without evidence and are adding nothing of substance to the discussion.

I don't know much about homelessness, but I searched and found this map.

https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1400&fn[]=2...

When I checked the box to view percentages, homelessness seems pretty consistent with the major outliers being CA and NY. CA says 26% and NY says 16%, with most everyone else on low single digits. I'm not entirely sure what those numbers mean, though.

> Homelessness is not a rampant problem except on the west coast

Not that this source is anything close to a comprehensive view into national homelessness patterns, but it's clearly an issue throughout the country [1].

[1] https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1400&fn[]=2...

You are wrong.

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