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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

The city of Austin, TX could be a case study of what not to do. I was remotely employed to company with offices in Austin in 2014-2015 and it was awesome to visit and walk around down town. I always had a blast.

I visited Austin in 2019 and there were homeless people EVERYWHERE. Every green space and nearly every street corner seemed to be littered with homeless people. The difference crystal clear. Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

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> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

Or, the homeless are recent migrants from other areas? At least where i live, the homeless all congregate in biggest wealthiest cities, because it's easier to beg, their presence blends in more and also local communities are more atomized so they don't fight off the homeless as hard as in smaller places. I've heard a story of one homeless guy who have recently been sleeping on a bus stop near my home - he's basically travelling from one big city center to another, and stays as long as the police doesn't chase him off the area.

Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. You mostly hear about the homeless population in places like San Francisco, Oahu, Austin, etc. If you're homeless, you might as well go to a place where you're less likely to freeze to death. Although there are some homeless in places likes Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc.

Not to mention some cities will give them money if they take a bus to another city. Just shuffle the people around so it's no longer that current city's problem.

> Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities.

As a trucker, my view is mostly from the interstate.

The most homeless I see in my travels all over the country is I-5 in California, Oregon and Washington, and CA 99.

It's pretty cold in Washington and Oregon right now. Even California at night.

Tents, tarps, sleeping bags, on both sides of the freeway fence, or inside interchange cloverleafs.

Not judging their condition or their person, I don't know them. It looks pretty rough.

That's certainly cold. I was just saying from a relative position. For example, it's relatively warmer than the midwest.

In other parts of the country you will freeze to death sleeping outside at night, so west coast cold is definitely relative.

You do hear about it more in warmer cities, but the city with the largest homeless population is actually NYC by quite a large margin.

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-th...

I wonder if they have an aggregate comparison of warm vs cold cities. I'd still consider NYC on the warmer side (with the gulf stream on the coast) when comparing it to the midwest or even Albany. For example, even going from Pittsburgh to Connecticut can be an increase of 20 degrees due to the gulf stream even though you are going slightly north.

Per capita? NYC is 2x larger than any other city.

LA/Los Angeles county (what the prior link uses) is a little larger than NYC, 10 million vs 8 million respectively.

I would also be interested in per capita per city. Even more so for aggregates of cold vs warm cities overall.

There is no comparison. LA county is the majority of the LA metro, while NYC is the minority.

The most meaningful comparison is CSA:

NY is 22.5M

LA is 18.7M

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area

I think many people prefer the MSA definition over the CSA, CSA feels like a bit of a stretch in many of its definitions. Are San Jose and San Francisco one entity, or two? CSA says one, MSA says two.

Consider that someone who lives between them could have a 30 min. commute to a job in both. There's definitely a case to be made for some cases to use the concept that encompasses that.

Having lived and worked in the Bay Area I would definitely say they are one entity socially and economically. It was not unusual to have people live in San Jose and commute to SF, nor vice versa.

By contrast, Sacramento was clearly not part of that unit, even though it isn’t _that_ much further away. There’s a notable gap between the cities, and the cross-commute rate was near zero. (Emphatically NOT zero, there were some people who commuted in from Sacramento, but those were rare, and I never heard of anyone commuting the other way).

[...] but also warmer cities [...] like San Francisco [...]

Err...?

Seems fair to me in comparison to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia

Is there any data that homeless people "select" expensive cities?

There's a lot of evidence that expensive cities create homeless people [1, 2, 3].

[1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessne...

[2] https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-e...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho...

Anecdata from long-term-homeless youth in particular suggest they're moderately mobile, and that they maintain three criteria: Liveable climate, how abusive the city is or isn't towards homeless people, and the presence of upper middle class residents & tourists to panhandle

People, particularly families, who are briefly homeless until they get the next apartment or who are on the short-list for assistance, are less mobile. There are a lot of homeless people who have a job, have a car, but just can't make it work at the moment as far as housing.

Austin is becoming what LA used to be (and in the winter, still is) for the Midwest: the place for cities to send their homeless to so they don't have to spend money on them.

To add some missing details on this, in 2018/19 the city council passed some ordinances that removed the criminality of some homeless activities. Specifically, they made it explicitly legal to camp in most public spaces (excluding parks) and they permit panhandling, sitting and sleeping on public sidewalks.

So there's a lot of "campsites" downtown. A lot of tents, or just people in sleeping bags on the sidewalk. A lot of people peeing against the buildings.

It's hard to score the upsides and downsides without starting an argument, but it feels like much of Austin has soured on the "decriminalization of homelessness".

Worth noting, before the city council legalized homeless camping there were literally zero tents.

Did you have no homeless people, or were they still sleeping rough, just without a tarp to keep the wind and the rain off their heads?

There was always a homeless population but they would stay in shelters or camp deep in the woods and keep to themselves. Now homeless are leaving the shelters and choosing to live in the streets.

since 2019 (when the camping ordinance was passed):

* homelessness has increased 11%

* Un-sheltered homelessness is up 45%

* Numbers in shelters and transitional housing is down 20%

https://www.statesman.com/news/20200519/austin-sees-11-incre...

Why do you think homeless people are choosing to sleep rough, rather than stay in shelters?

I live in a completely different area of the country, but around here the shelters are all very strict about drugs and alcohol. You can't bring them in, and you also can't be drunk when you arrive. That's one reason why folks here choose to not be in a shelter if they have another option.

Consider that millions of well-adjusted, middle and upper-class people, with jobs, children, access to doctors, therapists, friends, support networks, and, really everything they could ever wish for... Struggle with, and die from drug and alcohol addiction.

If those people can't stop using drugs, it's hard to expect someone lacking all of those resources to be able to do so.

If you make shelter conditional on sobriety, you're unlikely to get more sobriety.

Sorry, to be clear, I wasn't making a judgement either way. Simply that for many homeless people (I volunteered with homelessness organizations for many years), being intoxicated and sleeping on the sidewalk is their favored option over being in a bed and sober.

Whether or not this is the best situation, this was (and likely still is) the reality.

I imagine numerous cities have been spending countless millions on studies and consultants to figure out an answer to that one.

Personally, it's the lifestyle they choose. They make little micro houses out of rubbish and tarps equipped with couches and mattresses. They make comical signs such as "need money for booze" for laughs and get free food from charities or shelters. There are some that have no where else to go but a non-trivial number are there because it's cool these days to live a nomad hipster life.

Downtown Austin is/was somewhat of a party area with numerous bars and clubs and it gets so popular on weekends that the police shut down some of the streets for pedestrians only. It was a festive place to hang out -- which is part of the attraction.

In most cities areas that get taken over by the homeless become blighted places regular people never venture to (i.e. skid row in LA). The reason that people are so freaked out in Austin is that downtown is full of residential and commercially office buildings which results in people having to walk through these areas trying to get to/from work.

I doubt the mentally ill or addiction-riddled choose to be homeless because it's a "hip trendy easy going lifestyle"

There's many reasons why the homeless may choose not to sleep in shelters or certain types of low income housing.

People may be forced to give up property or pets, may be separated from companions. The indoor housing could be unhealthy and vermin filled. It could be an unhealthy environment and den of drug use that the person is trying to avoid.

In Vancouver reporting on the homeless that have chosen to live in Strathcona Park (some 200+) a park resident noted that they were offered a spot at a Single Room Occupancy hotel, but he left because there were "crazy people with machetes" running around.

It's incredible but many of these options for the homeless are so substandard that sleeping outside is a better, healthier and safer option.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903468 for another good reason.

It's more homeless people [1]. I mean, it's really a lot of people. It's pretty unmistakable.

The tent cities do make them more noticeable, though. Also, the police used to be able to roust people illegally camping, so if you had somewhere else to go, you'd have to go, or else go to the shelter.

Now people have the option to refuse the alternatives. So maybe visible homelessness has climbed more than actual homelessness.

[1] https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2020/05/austin-sees-10...

> if you had somewhere else to go, you'd have to go, or else go to the shelter.

You left out the dominant reality - people who have no shelter option and nowhere else to go. Given that likely realty, what does one do?

Any ideas why it seems like tech hotspots start passing laws like this? I'm thinking of San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin. I feel like there is some correlation, but I do not know what it is. My perspective is that maybe it seems more compassionate to not outlaw street camping, but I do not see how it is helpful to anyone including the ones on the street to allow this to continue.

Probably has something to do with much of the tech scene leaning left politically, so more lax homeless restrictions.

In the end, it doesn't solve the root cause of homelessness (probably makes the situation worse locally since it attracts homeless from elsewhere), but it's not like anyone in the US has some serious plans to tackle the issue at scale.

I don't know, but San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin are all pretty similar politically, falling to the left of the democratic mainstream. I don't think that's a new development since they became tech hotspots.

As for whether it's compassionate, I'd just note that at the extreme, compassion stops being a virtue.

I'm not sure about the "tech hotspot" angle, but https://www.econlib.org/homeless-camping-in-austin-a-modest-... while somewhat satirical may well have a point about the "why"...

Most American cities will do absolutely anything to reduce homelessness except build more housing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...

California cities are probably the worst offenders: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but even Austin is underbuilding relative to demand.

One of the very liberal reporters at the LA Times did a series of articles on the homeless crisis in LA a year or two ago.

He actually had difficulty finding a homeless person who was from Southern California. Nearly all of the homeless were from other states or other countries.

It's not California's failure so much as it is that the rest of the nation is using California to warehouse their homeless so they can feel smug about not caring for their own citizens.

Remember that only 40% of Californians are from California. Most people in California aren't from there.

Someone moves to California and later becomes homeless - is evidence of what?

No, it's not "someone moves to CA and later becomes homeless."

It's someone becomes homeless and their home city doesn't want to pay to deal with it, so they buy them a $5 bus ticket to LA.

Steve Lopez, the journalist I was referring to, interviewed a group of homeless living in Hollywood in one of his articles. All of the individuals were homeless prior to coming to LA, and almost all of them had been sent here.

I'm guessing it's in fear of tanking existing property values, and therefore stepping on existing property owners?

> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

Austin city council removed a ban on camping in public in 2019. The pitch was that it "decriminalized homelessness".

Austin is still a liberal city, but revocation of the ban is now widely reviled given the tents and trash that have grown everywhere, without doing anything really to help homeless people. There is an initiative on the ballot for an election in May to reinstate the camping ban, and I'd take a 100-to-1 bet it will pass.

San Francisco has passed many bans like this, and the results speak for themselves. Legal prohibitions are quite separate from what will be enforced.

2019 levels would be an improvement given what’s gone on in 2020, the pandemic has made everything much, much worse.

A progression of one of the camps from Jan 2020 to Aug 2020 https://youtu.be/xbsXgU6PO6U

Downtown Austin a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/aDvqut1zLso

>Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city

I'd wager that they made the problem worse by importing rich people with a high tolerance for bad public policy and homelessness.

Austin story is simple: housing is overpriced, they are only slightly behind the same process as the SF Bay Area. In the time frame you mentioned Austin housing prices increased by 50%, which is ridiculous. There's not another mysterious cause of homelessness.

I think that must be an oversimplification. Fort Worth just to the north is growing at the same speed as Austin. My house has doubled in value in the last 11 years. Yet, Fort Worth is extremely anti-homeless in its city ordinances and we don't have a visible homeless problem. As Fort Worth is a giant city in a warm climate I am sure there is a homeless problem, but we residents don't have to see it.

Even so, housing costs in Ft. Worth are still much cheaper than in Austin, and the difference is widening. In the last 30 years housing in Austin has gone from 30% cheaper than Ft. Worth to 30% more expensive. It's easy to see why: Ft. Worth enjoys liberal-marketarian zoning policies and Austin suffers increasingly from left-NIMBY potectionism, meanwhile population pressure is actually higher in Austin due to job growth. That is why the Austin situation seems to me to be quite similar to the SF Bay Area.

Not discounting that Ft. Worth local policies may do a better job of hiding homelessness, only I don't think it is the root cause.

It's because the city council a while back decriminalized homeless camping, so it's become much more obvious and prevalent in high traffic areas. I can see this for myself if I walk a handful of blocks from where I live and see the new tent city which wasn't there a year ago. They're likely going to reverse this rule since it's not really fixing problem.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/25/austin-texas...

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/21/homelessness...

What do the jails look like?

How awesome is it that anyone who becomes homeless in Ft Worth gets forced out of the city?

Just another city run by Democrats. Seriously I'm a blue voter myself but its beyond parody how Democrats screw up their own cities like this.

Im not american but looking at your poll numbers isn’t every major city democrat-leaning?

Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Nothing good can come of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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