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Comment by dyingkneepad | Hacker News Reader

As a non-American person living in the US, I fail to understand one thing about its society. When I walk around town I see tons and tons of places advertising jobs, for simple stuff like kitchen, moving stuff around, etc. I even recently saw a store with a "talk to the manager and start working right now" sign. And then I walk around the streets and see all these homeless. It seems like a paradox to me, but I am obviously missing some important detail here.

Of course I understand some drug addicts may not want a job or simply know they can't last more than a few days in one, but I would imagine a lot of these homeless people I see on the streets would actually like to have an income and be able to live anywhere that's not the streets. How do you reconcile that with the fact that there are so many simple jobs with open positions everywhere?

This is not supposed to be a sarcastic or politically loaded question. Where I come from, jobs are simply unavailable and at the moment you advertise it, even if it's just flipping burgers, there are lines and lines of people competing for it. I fail to understand why the US is so different. Anybody would please be able to point me at what I'm missing?

Edit: also, people who can't afford housing usually live with their families for a long time (or the whole life). Tiny houses with entire generations of families living in it are common. I guess this is still miles better than living in the streets.

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First please note that America has fewer homeless people than many European nations or Canada. Per 10K:

    Germany......79
    UK...........46
    Sweden.......36
    Canada.......36
    Netherlands..23
    France.......21
    USA..........17

(via Wikipedia, stats for differing years unfortunately but gives a sense of magnitude)

It's mostly that the US homeless population concentrates in very few areas.

> How do you reconcile that with the fact that there are so many simple jobs with open positions everywhere?

I have friends who have tried to hire homeless for help with moving because her movers did not show up. The experience did not go well. She basically had to babysit them to the effect of "Ok, pack up that box. Now take it and come with me. [he follows without box] No, lets go back and get the box..." But for everything.

Even among the set of homeless who want to do jobs, many need extraordinary supervision, and most places are not staffed well enough to handle that.

> First please note that America has fewer homeless people than many European nations or Canada

Wow that's a real reality check right there. I would have never guessed that Sweden had 2x the homeless of the US. Thank you.

Same with France. Lived there for most of my life and the US is a culture shock when it comes to homelessness. I’m confused by these numbers.

In some cities there are large concentrations of homeless people while in other parts of the country they are rare to encounter. Those large concentrations are regularly talked about by activists and the news media.

I think this is probably correct. The last time I've even seen an obviously homeless person was in SF, and I haven't been there in 2 years.

I live in a purplish city in a reddish state that never makes national news for homelessness, and something's gotten way, way worse about homelessness in this city over the last decade. Even out in the 'burbs, where you never used to see homeless people. All over. I hear there are some long-term tent camps in parts of the city, too, which are new in the last couple years.

There have long been migrant camps around Calais filled with people trying to reach the UK. I don't know if they've ever been accurately counted.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-calais-id...

I don't know how valid those stats are but those are per capita numbers not absolute numbers, so not twice as many total homeless:

Sweden: 10,230,000/10,000*36 = 36,828 homeless

US: 328,200,000/10,000*17 = 649,740 homeless

> those are per capita numbers not absolute numbers

Of course they are. Why would you use anything else to compare countries?

I think the comment was in response to your phrasing:

> 2x the homeless of the US.

to me that reads as total homeless population, not a function of population.

Your comment as written was unclear. I was trying to provide clarity.

For comparison: there are single neighbourhoods in California with >36k homeless. Congregation is the real issue.

We can flip that around and say US has much more housed people when you use absolute numbers.

Are you sure those stats are right? It does not seem plausible to me that Germany has 4-5 times as many homeless as the US.

I looked a bit, and the numbers really don't match my expectations, I'm pretty sure they're not counting the same things. I found one paper that compares the US and Germany and they got a lifetime prevalence of homelesness of 6.2% in the US and 2.4% in Germany (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.724).

I know it's dangerous to rely on my own expectations and biases here, but the numbers are too far off for me. And I think it is very likely that the criteria for homelesness vary greatly between countries.

The OECD HC3.1. HOMELESS POPULATION has a note that says the German numbers also include people who inhabit temporary government-provided housing.

"Germany: Includes three main groups: i) Homeless refugees with an international protection status of more than one year (and eligible for job seeking allowance and renting regular housing in Germany, but still in temporary accommodation because they could notfind regular housing), ii) Homeless people without such a background who are provided with temporary accommodation by municipalities, and iii) Homeless people who are provided by NGOs with some type of temporary accommodation or are known as homeless users of their advice centres (without permanent housing and in contact with the advice centre at least once in the preceding months"

So it's "homeless" people that were "provided with temporary accommodation by municipalities", meaning it is a different type of homelessness than camping in LA.

They are misleading as they include hundreds of thousands of unsheltered refugees.

Anyone who has ever walked around SF or LA and Berlin knows this implicitly. The US cooks the books.

https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/germany241169298614...

>Anyone who has ever walked around SF or LA and Berlin knows this implicitly.

The easy explanation for that is the social programs that care for the homeless are stronger in Germany. You don't see Berlin's homeless as a problem because they don't have to result to literally sleeping on the street. The people living in shelters are no less homeless, they just aren't as visible.

If you're living in a shelter then you're not just less visble, you're also much better off. Obviously it's a problem to be solved too, but a less severe one than people who are literally living on the street.

>If you're living in a shelter then you're not just less visble, you're also much better off.

Usually, but not universally. Even when shelter space is available in a city like LA, it is not always easy to convince people to stay there. Lots of shelters have problems ranging from crime to forcing draconian rules onto the people staying there. In a place with a relatively comfortable climate like Los Angeles, some people legitimately prefer to be on the street. Their personal agency matters and we can't just round them up to throw them in a shelter. We need to improve the shelters until they are the obvious choice over the street.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Although social programs are better in Germany, that isn't the entire story. You'll see thousands of homeless strewn through the parks and along the banks of the Spree in the summer and U-Bahn stations in the winter. The major difference is the authorities dismantle and move any tent cities before they become endemic, unlike California. Belligerent behaviour is usually dealt with, meaning those that remain on the streets are predominantly harmless.

Neither LA nor SF nor even Washington, DC are representative of the US in this regard. Say, NYC does have homeless people, but you'll have hard time finding a tent camp with them. In many smaller towns they may be basically unheard of.

It takes a certain legal regime, law enforcement regime, economic situation, climate, etc to make a place attractive to the homeless. I suppose that neither Vermont nor Texas have a lot of homeless people.

I also heard of the practice of buying a Greyhound bus ticket to the homeless and luring them to go to warmer, more abundant places, thus physically removing the problem.

Also it's usually noted that many US homeless would be in a mental institution elsewhere; they are not homeless by conscious choice to be anti-social.

You should realize that California has the overwhelming majority of the homeless population in the US with almost a quarter of the entire homeless population living there[1][2]. You should also realize that SF and LA are two of most expensive cities in the US for housing - either renting or buying. As such Berlin is hardly a meaningful comparison. The homeless crisis in these two places is very well-known. Nobody is "cooking the books." Lastly California is not at all representative of the rest of the country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_California

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...

I'll point out that the situation is different too. I've lived in Australia and the USA. Australia has more homeless but you will never see 3 miles of tents on major roads or encampments under bridges.

Other countries count them as homeless but often they will be cared for and have shelter. The USA is lacking there.

These tent camps are quite new in the US. About 5 years ago, there started to be a tent camp in Seattle, but when I moved to LA there was not tents anywhere (except maybe a few on Skid Row), flash forward to about 2 years ago, and there are now literally miles and miles of tent camps all over Los Angeles. It is one of those things that once it is allowed at all, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

What part of LA are you in? I’ve lived on the west side for the last 13 years and tent camps have been an issue for at least the last 10. They started getting noticeably worse about 5 years ago in line with a rapid rise in the unsheltered population [1].

[1] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php

I was on the west side. Yea, there were a few tents on 3rd street in Venice, but I used to play golf at Penmar for like the least 8 years, and there were never tents there, and in the past couple years it became about 1.5 miles of tents along holes 1 and 3. It has just grown leaps and bounds.

> It is one of those things that once it is allowed at all, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

I believe this is mostly due to the effect of the ruling in the landmark "Martin v City of Boise" [1] case.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise

IIRC the tents started right after the occupy Wall Street movement. Often they’d camp next to homeless or homeless would join their camps and it morphed. There have also been drives to deliver tents to homeless…

I don't think wikipedia is a good source of data in this case. For one German homelessness includes Syrian refugees. Second, it appears as if the definition of homelessness varies wildly across countries, making these numbers not really useful for cross-country comparison. https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pd...

What ethic background can the United States subtract from its total homeless population ?

Because that reads _to_me_ like you are saying "homeless Syrians don't count".

To which I would ask you, "Why not ?"

What I believe he meant is that Syrians who live in a temporary refugee camp are counted as "homeless" by the German statistics office because they live in temporary housing and, hence, do not have a permanent place to live yet. And that statistic counted Germany in 2018, back when ~180000 refugees arrived.

That still leaves the same question, though. In the US, many municipalities designate certain areas as government-sanctioned camping grounds where "economic refugees" can stay while they don't have a permanent place to live. Does that count as "temporary housing" and can we exclude them from the homeless numbers as well?

Massaging the numbers seems silly to me. At it's core, we're talking about how to solve the issue of unhoused people that require government assistance. Syrian refugees were/are an unhoused population that required government assistance. US tent-livers are unhoused populations that require government assistance. It's perfectly acceptable to include them in the same conversation. If the strategies that were applied to helping Syrian refugees find housing can somehow be helpful when helping LA tent-livers find housing, then it should be part of the same conversation.

If I understand things correctly, the LA tent-livers are homeless and also unhoused, but the German syrian refuges are only homeless, but not unhoused. They have an apartment with shower, wifi, and a shared cooking area.

They are counted as homeless because they cannot afford to pay for their own home yet, which makes sense if you just ran away from a war. But they can apply for jobs online and they can shower for the job interview to nail that crucial first impression. The LA tent-livers can have internet and showers, too, but it requires a lot more effort.

I dunno the last time you went and visited a homeless encampment in the US, but many of them do indeed have showers and internet, too (sometimes provided by the government, other times just because these tent cities are legitimate cities).

I've seen a lot of tents with cooking areas too, and some even with portable generators, TVs, and fridges.

So can we exclude them from the homeless statistics yet?

Not yet. I'd add two more criteria:

1. Can they safely store valuables? If you have an apartment, it's reasonably easy to keep your laptop around. I'd wager that in a tent it'll get stolen eventually.

2. Is this temporary? The German government is expecting refuges to regularly visit the job center and to apply to job openings or to attend language school to improve their employability.

So if someone can shower, has internet access, can keep a work laptop without it getting stolen, and has been homeless for <5 years then yes, let's exclude them.

But my impression (based only on pictures in the newspaper) is that this won't include many tents in LA.

>1. Can they safely store valuables?

The camps in state's major cities notoriously have armed guards to prevent people from looting or moving the tents, and given that these tents already have all kinds of other furniture like couches, chairs, cabinets, etc, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they have lockable cabinets or drawers. One of the camps nearby has actually formed a "governing board" where they assign people jobs in the camp such as security, gathering more materials and food, etc.

>So if someone can shower, has internet access, can keep a work laptop without it getting stolen, and has been homeless for <5 years then yes, let's exclude them.

AFAIK the vast majority of homeless people in my state's major cities have only been homeless since last year.

So I guess we can remove at least 10k people from the US's homeless statistics now?

I do feel like immigrants (refugees, not citizens) living in official refugee camps should be accounted for differently than citizen homeless living in the streets of (say) Berlin.

Now perhaps this is not how the statistics were made, but I think some consideration or further investigation should be made.

For reference: Syria is the #1 source of people displaced due to violence, and Germany is the #5 host of such people. https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/

[I see a sibling comment makes the same point.]

If a person arrives at a country as a refugee of course they’re going to be homeless.

It would be more interesting to see stats on people who have been living in the country, because these are people who shouldn’t be homeless, but they are.

Normally when people talk about homelessness in the US, they mean people living on the street without any sort of shelter. Of course Syrian refugees count, it just seems like they are their own distinct case, as, for one thing, they are sheltered.

My grandparents on both sides, by the way, were refugees from Iraq under very similar conditions to today's refugees from Syria. I say that only because you seem to be very quick to judge others. A little bit of introspection might be in order.

How are "homeless" defined in different countries? There was an eye-opening 99pi series of podcasts around homelessness in USA where I learned that the definition is ridiculously strict.

Something like "If you slept anywhere other than the street last night, you do not qualify as homeless". I can't remember if tents count, but sleeping on a friend's couch, squatting a derelict building, or staying in your car disqualifies you from the definition of homeless.

You can find the legal definition at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/11302

Squatting in a derelict building counts as homeless per the US definition. It's not just people living on the street.

That definition is not necessarily applicable to actual research studies, homeless counts, or even government programs. You have to look to the actual study or program details. Unfortunately, the applied definition is rarely reported in the media.

One study I saw of the local schools that breathlessly reported huge homeless rates of schoolchildren counted every child that didn't have a dedicated bedroom. Sleeping on Dad's couch? Homeless.

The numbers being talked about earlier (17 per 10k people) come from HUD. The US legal definitions matter to their reporting

See column 5 in table Table HC 3.1.1a, page 5, of the OECD report linked elsethread (https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pd...).

This seems counterintuitive but it actually does make sense. Most of the populated urban areas in the US are too cold or too politically hostile to have large homeless populations. It’s primarily an issue in a handful of regions and cities.

In the US 27% of the total homeless population are those who are chronically homeless. That's about .05% of the US population.

Those stats are misleading, e.g. Germany's figures include unsheltered refugees. Excluding refugees the number of homeless people in Germany sits at 335,000 to 420,000.

https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/

> unsheltered refugees

So... homeless people?

The path from refugee to homelessness is an obvious one and points to an over-admission by the German government.

The path from native born citizen to homelessness is less obvious and points to complete social dysfunction.

"I have friends who have tried to hire homeless for help with moving because her movers did not show up."

That....sounds terrible.

It sounds risky but what's so terrible about offering paying work to people who appear to need it? It's not like they were compelled to accept.

I think the outcome shows what's terrible about it.

You should compare US states with European countries.

California has around 161,000 homeless people, of 39.5 million people. That is about 161000/3950 = ~40 per 10k.

For germany, that number includes "around 375,000 asylum seekers and refugees in temporary accommodation", which is more than 50% of total homeless people (see wikipedia).

This is wildly incorrect. As of Dec 2019, there were 5,000 "unsheltered" / "sleeping rough" people in the UK, population ~65,000,000, according to The Economist (cite: https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/12/18/on-any-one-wint...) which was fewer than the number in San Francisco, population ~800,000 (cite: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ExecutiveSu... ).

You completely changed what is being talked about. GP said nothing about "unsheltered/sleeping rough". GP said "homeless", so I'm not sure why you're suggesting that your statistics disprove what GP said. A homeless person in a shelter is still homeless.

I have no idea if GP's statistics are accurate, but nothing you said proves they aren't.

? "And then I walk around the streets and see all these homeless" refers, clearly, to the homeless "living on the streets."

For UK the statistics is skewed.

Their definition of homeless people include people in temporary accommodations (like in council houses).

From wikipedia:

> The UK homeless charity Shelter estimated in 2019 that the number of people in the UK who were entirely homeless or in temporary accommodation was 280,000. Rough sleepers are only a small proportion of the homeless.

Note the last sentence.

280K / 66M gives roughly 46 per 10K.

So, don't just to conclusions too quickly when reading statistics.

I think presenting it like this is misleading since the definition of homelessness is different per country.

Breaking down the Swedish stats, of the reported 34000, the source says:

"4 500 people were in acute homelessness, of which 280 were sleeping rough. 5 600 people received institutional care or lived in different forms of category housing. 13 900 people lived in long-term housing solutions (the secondary housing market), provided by the social services in the municipalities. 6 800 persons lived in short-term insecure housing solutions that they had organized themselves."

Unfortunately the original source isn't archived so I haven't checked the exact definitions used here.

For the US numbers, we have:

"On a single night in 2018, roughly 553,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. About two-thirds (65%) were staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters or transitional housing programs—and about one-third (35%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street"

I'll assume you'll get similar discrepancies for all of the other countries.

One thing that people should consider is that CA, specifically has a massive homelessness problem. the worse in the US.

https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1300&fn[]=2...

No one really knows why, but the probable reason is a mix of people moving their while already homeless and that housing prices in CA are the worst in the country.

If you take the problem in good-faith. That is, that even if these people wanted to engage in pro-social behavior, it's essentially nihilist at this point to assume anyone in this position can achieve this without years of support. I think a lot of it comes from policies that have in America that have effectively destroyed the housing supply. This goes triple for California.

For folks living on the street, you absolutely cannot earn enough from a minimum wage to house yourself. At best, you could barely get by sharing housing with a few folks. Assuming you have addiction issues that lead to anti-social behavior, you will have difficulty maintaining relationships in share living spaces and maintaining your employment.

I think we would have a dramatically different situation with our homeless, if someone could reasonably afford a small one-bedroom or studio apartment at 25%-40% of the prevailing minimum wage. As it stands, in Los Angeles, median one-bedroom seems to be about $2,362/month, and a minimum wage job there, before taxes only pays $2,462 per month.

Thus, a minimum wage job, even if the person magically paid nothing in taxes cannot even come close to covering the median unit, by a factor of 2-4. In addition, that median unit likely requires further assets like a vehicle in order for a person to be able to access employment.

Because of this American development pattern, it is nearly impossible for people to even begin to earn enough money to maintain any sense of private living space.

> As it stands, in Los Angeles, median one-bedroom seems to be about $2,362/month, and a minimum wage job there, before taxes only pays $2,462 per month.

Never been to Los Angeles so correct me if I'm wrong but is Los Angeles a small town or is a massive, sought-after city with a ~4 million population and ~18 million greater-area population?

In the US, that job may not offer the person any net quality-of-life improvements. Flipping that burger for 30 hours a week does not give them enough money to find housing. Now they're still broke but they're also tired, smelly, and angry.

>Flipping that burger for 30 hours a week does not give them enough money to find housing. Now they're still broke but they're also tired, smelly, and angry.

But now they still have $420 (based on CA's minimum wage of $14) more in their pocket?

Panhandling can earn more than minimum wage, and you have no boss or responsibilities.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066652

Yeah, but they're still homeless, and unless you can find a place eventually you'll get fired. It may also be that you can get more than 400$/week panhandling. That's only 57$/day.

>It may also be that you can get more than 400$/week panhandling. That's only 57$/day.

Are we comparing the upper end of what you can earn via pan-handling with the lower end of what you can earn via a minimum wage job here? That might be responsible for the apparent disparity. Apparently LA has around 65k homeless people. I'm skeptical that even half of that (32.5k) can all earn an average income of $400/week panhandling.

Good luck getting and keeping a job when you have nowhere to shower and may be forced to relocate at any time. Oh, and the cops may come and smash or steal all of your belongings.

Gym memberships can be had for $20/month or less, and provide a full bathroom facility for showering and grooming.

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just pointing this out for anybody reading this who may find themself in a situation like this in the future.

good luck getting a gym membership without an address, cell phone, credit card or sizeable deposit - forget about the fact that you look & smell terrible.

I did it in Boulder , CO for a few months. I didn’t have an address but I did have a cell phone and debit (not credit) card. I did look and smell like a campfire. I’ve never heard of a deposit for a gym- those must be some fancy gymnasiums.

which gym was it? the cheapness gym I know of (Planet Fitness - $10/month) requires a bank account.

I just checked because it’s been a few years. The building is now occupied by 24 Hour Fitness, but I don’t think that was the name of it when I used it.

If gyms are cracking down on this use case then that is a shame.

I wonder if you could retro-fit a 53’ tractor trailer into shower(s) + laundry stall(s) on wheels and bring it close to the “customer”? I wonder how that could work.

When I was 21, our house of 4 was evicted because 1 didn’t pay rent and lied about it until we got notice to vacate. Luckily it was summer in Colorado so we decided to camp for a while. Unfortunately, I had just gotten a new (awesome) job and couldn’t go into the office smelling like campfires so I got a membership at the gym and showered there every morning. Never ended up exercising there though, ha.

> Gym memberships can be had for $20/month or less, and provide a full bathroom facility for showering and grooming.

The gyms near me in NYC all require a permanent address, NY state ID, and a credit card.

even ones like YMCA?

I'm not sure offhand. Looking at the local YMCA site it's $66/mo for a single location, asks for an address to sign up, and can do credit/debit as well as drafts from checking/savings account, so it appears you have to be "banked".

I suspect the strict dress code requirements at mine are secretly an anti-homeless measure.

talk to a homeless person. see the depression. imagine?

it is v sad

"net quality-of-life improvements" from the parent. You are counting Gross. IE: its not worth it.

There's a lot of quality-of-life improvements you can buy with $420. food, access to a gym, a better tent, PO box/locker to store your stuff, etc. Multiply that by 4 weeks, and you get $1680, which seems almost enough to rent a unit with roommates.

Closer to $280 once tax and social security is taken out.

At $420/week, federal FICA taxes are about $45. Federal income tax would be zero at this level. (Actually probably negative once you add back in the EITC)

That all depends on how you fill out that w2. While you might get that money back, more if you qualify for the EITC, most people are still going to have their taxes removed from their paycheck.

> depends on how you fill out that w2.

W-4 is the payroll withholding form (from employee to employer). W-2 is provided by an employer to the employee (and the IRS) at the end of the year.

If you're sleeping in the street or in a homeless shelter, the only thing that amount of money is going to do for you (in California at least) is make you a target for thieves.

Good thing that many employers (typically the ones that employ minimum wage workers) allow you to take your paycheck on a prepaid debit card.

Which, of course, is predicated on having the appropriate documentation for opening and maintaining a bank account. In most states (although not NY), that means a federally valid ID.

I’ve also reviewed some of these accounts and payroll apps, and many are downright predatory: extraordinary fees for a no-frills debit account, tie-ins to payday loan companies, and connections to “micro investing” (read: gambling) are rampant.

Have the near usurious transaction fees typically associated with those cards been regulated away, or are they still yet another way for financial conglomerates to nickel and dime more profits from the most vulnerable, while masquerading as a better option?

I last had my pay deposited onto a prepaid card in 2009, so the laws may indeed have changed. Back then those fees were overly restrictive and quickly ate into my meagre take home (unless, ironically, I withdrew as much as I could with my single allotted fee-less cash withdrawal per pay period)

> Have the near usurious transaction fees typically associated with those cards been regulated away, or are they still yet another way for financial conglomerates to nickel and dime more profits from the most vulnerable, while masquerading as a better option?

I'm having trouble finding the source, but my recollection from a planet money podcast is that they're free to withdraw if you use their network of ATMs, but otherwise charge you a few dollars per transaction. As for whether it's better, maybe? It's certainly worse than a no-fee banking account at a local credit union (but with limited ATM access) or a big bank (but with a fee and/or minimum deposit requirements), but it's better than holding a wad of cash on your body.

>it's better than holding a wad of cash on your body.

I can't argue with that!

California requires that whatever an employer pays you with be convertible to cash without paying a fee, but it doesn't appear to require that you be able to do so incrementally. As such it appears that you could still be forced to choose between transaction fees and cashing it all in one shot.

A further problem I found was being limited by the denominations the ATM gave out. Sure 20's only works in most cases, but when I'm trying to stretch my check and have to leave $17 of my $217 in there, it hurts.

Getting to a teller window when they were open, or searching down an ATM that gave out 10's just wasn't in the cards considering my schedule at the time.

It's still something that can be stolen

it significantly cuts down on the incentive, though.

I feel like at this point people are just trying to come up with problems for the sake of it.

Debit cards have pins. You can't just steal someone's debit card and go drain all the money. Sure there are other really hard issues to solve with homelessness. But their debit card getting stolen isn't one of them.

My debit card has a contactless pad. I think there’s a transaction limit on it of a few hundred dollars, but someone could very easily tap it and drain my account if that was all I had.

But even that misses the point: not everybody has the means to wait 5-7 days for their bank to mail them a replacement card, even if no money is actually taken from the account. This is compounded when you consider that most of the companies that offer cheap banking accounts don’t have great branch service.

What kind of life you can get by just flipping burger for 30 hours a week in Europe? Honest question.

The typical student lifestyle, I'd say. 20m^2 room 5-10km from the city center with combined toilet+shower and internet flatrate.

I don't know about flipping burgers or all of Europe, but entry-level pay at Aldi in Switzerland is around $65k USD.

In Poland you could rent a studio apartment for 1/3 of McDonalds fulltime initial salary. The other 1/3 should be sufficient for food if you cook yourself.

How do you cash a paycheck if you are without an address or a bank account?

How do you establish that you are a citizen and are legally able to take a job if you are unable to safely store your documents?

How do you get health care, inclusive of mental health care, if you are unable to pay for it?

If you are without a secure residence, how do you know when to wake up, how do you clean up, put on fresh clothing, and get to work?

If you rely on public transit, how do you reliably get to work?

How do you establish residence if you have no reasonable credit or references?

How do you save your deposit, first month's rent, and last month's rent, if you are unable to even get a bank account?

For any complex problem there is an obvious, simple, and totally incorrect answer.

"The homeless should just get a job and get a place to live"

You're right, their situation does prevent them from jumping into a white collar, professional life with a good credit score and personal references. But I don't think that's what anyone is suggesting.

Most of the problems you stated are not problems for the type of labor that is offered to homeless people. Jobs for construction, landscaping, moving etc. with a truck that picks you up and drops you off. Usually done by illegal immigrants so cash pay is not a problem. From the business owners I know who have tried to hire homeless people to do daily labor, none of them are interested.

I would ask you to think through the logistics of managing any of your proposed solutions when you don't have a safe place to sleep or store your stuff.

Instructions like

1) leave your stuff some place out of your control

2) somehow get to a parking lot where people pick up day workers

3) hang out with day laborers hoping to get a job

4) get in a random truck on the promise that someone will pay you

5) get driven some place to do a job

6) do the job

7) assume they'll take you back where they got you

8) assume they'll pay you what they promised in cash

9) get back to my stuff, hope it is still there

10) hope that I can store my cash some place safe

11) of course, don't forget you're doing this with basically no sleep, unhealthy food, no good place to poop, no reliable place to wash, etc. For months at a time.

And of course do that for a couple months or years without having anything terrible happen to you until you save up enough to rent a place?

That doesn't seem like a realistic plan.

I can only speak to the situations I've encountered, but:

(1) There's churches nearby that offer lockers for the homeless

(2) They don't need to go anywhere, these jobs drive around looking for them

(3) See #2

(4) Illegal immigrants do this every day, and they often don't even speak the same language

(5) Seems OK.

(6) Seems OK.

(7) Seems reasonable the business operator will want to continue the arrangement if they did a good job, so this seems very likely.

(8) See #7

(9) See #1

(10) This is probably the most difficult part

(11) Shelters in my city are underutilized almost all of the year except during inclement weather. They offer showers, cot beds, and basic food.

I'm not saying that it's easy being homeless, or that making the transition into suburban homeowner is easy or even practical for them. But the problem is not a lack of available jobs (the jobs are there) or shelter (homeless shelters are underutilized). I'm fine with spending money on a compassionate solution, but only if we're solving the right problem.

Illegal immigrants have the mental resilience required to power through. They usually have a support network (family, relatives, maybe in the worst case some criminal organization that made a deal with them to exploit their labor).

Homeless folks on the other hand don't have this (and that's why they homeless, and usually they burned all their bridges before they ended up on the street because the aforementioned mental health problems).

You can cash a paycheck at the bank listed on the paycheck, without any account. You can save up the cash without a bank account. Lots of people do that.

There are plenty of people who will hire you without asking for proof of citizenship.

In CA, you get Medi-Cal. And food stamps.

Waking up, I guess you're on your own.

Not trying to say it's easy, but those obstacles you mentioned are of the convenience variety.

You can cash paychecks at the issuing bank.

Plenty of people use public transit to get to work. (If public transit can’t reliably move people, that’s much more than a homeless problem.)

The answer is you address each of those issues in order of dependencies. Pragmatically speaking, since these persons have a demonstrated incapacity for participating in our society in the usual way, that will have to happen in some kind of institutional setting or it won’t happen at all.

>How do you cash a paycheck if you are without an address or a bank account?

You simply sign the back and take it to the bank and they will give you cash.

>How do you establish that you are a citizen and are legally able to take a job if you are unable to safely store your documents?

I honestly have no idea.

>How do you get health care, inclusive of mental health care, if you are unable to pay for it?

The answer is to get a job which is an obvious catch 22.

>If you are without a secure residence, how do you know when to wake up, how do you clean up, put on fresh clothing, and get to work?

I think there are a variety of viable answers here ranging from family, church, charity, shelters and gyms that this is a challenge but not insurmountable for a motivated individual.

> If you rely on public transit, how do you reliably get to work?

By using public transit? I don't understand the question.

> How do you establish residence if you have no reasonable credit or references?

This is a huge issue, imo. The only real option is paying in advance but that is obviously much more difficult.

> How do you save your deposit, first month's rent, and last month's rent, if you are unable to even get a bank account?

The answer is cash but the next question is how does a homeless person keep thousands of dollars in cash safe.

I think you've gone out of your way to add solvable problems to your list to make the issue seem insurmountable but you've definitely included two issues which I think are massive and one that's less difficult but also easily solved.

Starting with the solvable problem, banking, add basic banking services to post offices. It makes a lot of sense, imo.

The healthcare problem is a big one and I think the most popular answer to that question would be socialized medicine, which I support, but I'd also be open to hearing other solutions.

The biggest problem, I think, is housing. Not just because of cost but, as you mentioned, credit and rental history are going to be a major problem. Perhaps some sort of temporary (but long term enough to allow a history of payments to be shown, like 12 months or so) housing that could be offered to those in need to get back on their feet. Possibly even a requirement that apartment buildings make a unit available for this kind of renter.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but there are a couple of things you may not have considered.

> You simply sign the back and take it to the bank and they will give you cash.

If you do not have an account there, they will charge you a fee to cash a check. The amount of the fee is typically ~$8, but it varies by bank. Some checks are issued by banks that don't have local branches, this is more common with larger companies. Government checks are also a tricky situation. It's really not as easy as 'go to the bank and they will give you cash'.

>...Documents... >I honestly have no idea.

You don't need to. You don't need to present a social security card to an employer, as long as they know their SSN. The SSA will help them verify for free: https://www.ssa.gov/employer/SSNcard.htm Otherwise, it's storing a plastic card for ID. It's likely they have one, as state ID cards are permanent. If they don't that is a problem that can be solved.

>...Health care... >The answer is to get a job which is an obvious catch 22.

In the US, they qualify for Medicaid. Medicaid includes mental health services.

>...public transit... >By using public transit? I don't understand the question.

Public transit costs money. Where I live, 1/2 off or ~ $31/month for a Medicaid recipient.

>The biggest problem, I think, is housing.

The biggest problem is getting people into the system so they can get assistance. Once they get a case worker and start getting aid, they can more easily get back on their feet. People are homeless for different reasons, some are more easily solved than others.

They shouldn't be that tired working only 30 hours per week. Lots of people work 50-60 hours a week. I would even say, if you could only get 30 hours that frees you up for a second job, assuming the commute is reasonable (which I'm aware it might not be, except it seems these jobs are everywhere.)

You do need to be a person who views working productively to better themselves, as net positive quality of life.

And to be fair, they need a place to shower and wash clothes. Those services should be provided, and certainly in LA and SF plenty of money has been set aside to provide that.

As I understand it, there are multiple factors:

1. Places like San Francisco have temperate climates, and cops not under orders to actively chase homeless people out. A good place to move if you're homeless, right? But San Francisco also has ruinously expensive housing, so the money one can make in an entry-level job won't go very far.

(American cities have a long tradition of "solving" homelessness by putting homeless people on buses to other cities. Officially, this is to "help them reunite with their families" but we all know what's really going on)

2. A bunch of things when you're poor are self-compounding. Lost your access to a stove and a fridge? You're going to be spending more on food. When you lost your home, probably you fucked up your credit rating too. Now the landlord wants a bigger deposit, and the electricity company wants you on their prepaid tariff which happens to be the most expensive one - and so on.

3. I've heard it said you don't become a rough sleeper when you spend your last dollar; you become a rough sleeper when you exhaust your last social connection. If you've lost your home but you still have sympathetic friends and family members you can become part of the 'hidden homeless' sleeping on a couch.

If factors like drug addiction or untreated mental illness, have exhausted the hospitality of friends and family, those same factors will also make employers reluctant to hire you.

The base issue is usually mental illness worsened by substance abuse, without a strong social net and with readily available street drugs these people are pretty much unfit for any kind of work.

This has been what I've seen personally volunteering at a homeless outreach. Mental illness seems to be the major factor.

AFAIK the homeless problem exploded when the US shut down its institutional mental health system in the 1980s.

The shutdown wasn't just to cut costs. Many institutions had terrible records that included abusive treatment of patients. But we pulled the plug on that system with no replacement, so major cities became open air psychiatric wards.

Yeah the system was terrible at the time, what they did however is sort of like seeing a bad performing school and closing it down permanently and then just leaving people completely uneducated. And then people complaining about how many illiterate people we got running around.

"Without readily available street drugs"? I suspect that wasn't about medication?

Without net. And easy access to drugs.

There's a difference between chronic homelessness (which is probably caused by mental illness or drug abuse), and "typical" homelessness.

"Typical" people are homeless for only a few days before someone in their social circle rescues them (and its not a happy story either: it could be that they tried living on the streets but ultimately decided that living with their alcoholic and abusive husband is superior to living on the streets). A lot of effort should probably be made at helping these individuals and providing support here.

We shouldn't give up on Chronic homelessness either. Not everyone is mentally sick or a druggie. But a substantial number of them are clearly sick. And even if they are mentally sick, a pathway should be figured out to try to find a way to make them productive members of society.

> a pathway should be figured out to try to find a way to make them productive members of society.

I think this attitude is a major component of the fundamental problem.

Why not just accept that some proportion of society is unproductive for whatever reason, and spend tax dollars to keep them minimally housed, bathed, and clothed. Period. It's not extravagant, it's not spacious, it's just a cramped SRO any citizen can get a room in.

So much of "productive" employed society is just inefficient borderline pointless busy work anyways, and automation will be increasingly decimating these jobs, it's not something we can continue ignoring and treating as a "homeless problem".

Admit it, most of modern society already isn't productive, get over it. I can't honestly say all my colleagues in the tech industry were net productive. There was a whole lot of pissing money down the drain on insignificant contributions, aka warm chairs, aka plants. If tech companies can afford to pay tech salaries for nothing in return, they can pay more taxes to keep the streets, parks, sidewalks, and beaches clean and those down on their luck bathed and groomed enough to interview for a fake job.

I think your view of "productive" is too narrow. It doesn't just have to mean "produced tax revenue".

The mental illness factor is a part of it, but what's different about the US is that there seems to be less will to "put away" the homeless. You don't see them in more authoritarian societies where the powers that be are less cavalier about grabbing them off the street and depositing who knows where (even if it does end up being some nice universal-healthcare provided institution).

One factor is that employers don't want some scruffy, stinking homeless person anywhere near their business.

Basically, it's a problem of hygiene and grooming. To apply for just about any job, a given homeless person would have to take several baths, get a haircut, shave, and get into clean clothes.

Somehow, that is an insoluble problem.

Secondly, some of these jobs pay so shitty that if you've figured out how to live homeless, they are not worth your time. Your life won't be any better.

Can you imagine the hassle? Okay, now you have a job and have to come clean there everyday, and stay there for hours. Where do you clean up if you don't have a home? Who will guard your unsecured belongings while you are away from them? Suppose you get a home: oops, there goes all the pay. So now you live in some shitty home that sucks up most of your pay just so you have a place to take a shower to go to your shitty job. Man things were so much better with no boss, no landlord, under the fresh, open sky! The streets are calling your name, ...

I would urge you to do some volunteer work with homeless people. Most aren’t scruffy and stinky. I think what’s happening is the scruffy and stinky people are the ones that get your attention while the homeless security guard or homeless Uber driver escapes your attention.

Even if they aren't scruffy and stinky, if someone finds out you are homeless many of them will judge you like you are scruffy and stinky regardless. Which unless you are very charismatic is going to be a hard social situation to overcome at work and could easily get you fired.

They could come in one day with a bit greasy hair and get fired on the spot because co-workers or boss will assume 'unshowered bum" rather than "woke up a little late this morning"

I'm not of the Left. So you know where I'm come from.

That said people who are living on the street are frequently deeply alone in way that can be hard to understand. Substance abuse problems. Mental problems. Sure all of that. No place to live too.

All of that's a huge burden. On top of that the jobs that get listed are frequently not going to be offering 30 hours or less a week.

So the way to think of people in that place is that they've got a job. - getting alcohol or drugs. They might have another job - having an incomplete view of reality. On top of that and I would say this most of all, they are frequently alienated from any friend or family.

It's hard in that place to say find 20 or 30 hours (if you're lucky) a week to bring in extra cash. It's doubly hard when your expenses are basically everything you have and everything you can get your hands on.

As I said earlier I'm not on the Left. I think there's an established view that says the problem here is mental problems of one sort or another leading to homelessness and unemployment. It's not that I think that's untrue but that the description is incomplete. It looks at a profound loss and describes a physical situation - even when talking about substance abuse and mental problems there's a clinical view that will help no one. In my opinion at least. Certainly I'm out of step.

It's only like a third of homeless people with mental illness, so while it's a major contributor it cannot totally explain the problem.

45% have mental illness.

25% have "serious" mental illness. https://www.bbrfoundation.org/blog/homelessness-and-mental-i...

38% are alcoholic.

26% abuse drugs. https://www.banyantreatmentcenter.com/2020/07/01/a-look-at-h...

I suspect they tend to be the more visible ones, as opposed to the ones in shelters or assistance programs.

I imagine there are multiple methodologies to measure this because it's hard to even get a handle on how many people are homeless. The point still stands: "they're all just so mentally ill they like to live on the streets" won't wash as an explanation.

The people you're talking about are usually referred to as the "chronically" homeless and are a minority (but highly visible) section of the overall homeless population. We know that the best way to help these people that's been found so far are the so called "housing first" policies, which save taxpayer money in law enforcement and medical bills by finding permanent supportive housing for the people that need it.

A majority of people who are homeless are not drug addicts or mentally ill. They're just fucked over by an economy that has no floor with too few places for too many people to stay. Most people who find themselves homeless are only homeless for short stretches, and often have jobs and pay their taxes while they live out of tents, cars, and RVs.

I don't want to discount the challenges and pain associated with being homeless but your observations don't really explain the explosion of homelessness in some places.

Something else has changed in the last 4-5 years to make this problem much worse.

If you mean the West Coast, it was the 9th Circuit court ruling in Martin v. Boise that brought about the visible camping. That ruling states that a city can’t penalize someone for sleeping in public if they can’t provide a meaningful alternative. Most West Coast cities don’t have nearly enough shelter space available, and they have interpreted the ruling to mean that they cannot enforce camping bans at all - presumably to reduce the risk of being sued.

You are missing all the things you need to have to get that job.

First that guy offering the job is choosy, so he wants someone showered, with clean clothes, who doesn't look like they have major health problems or drug habits, they need to have an address, and transportation to get to work.

So for the homeless, they need: a place to stay, an address, access to a shower and laundry, they need clothes in good condition, they need some money to buy their first uniform, they need someplace safe to store their belongings, and access to enough food to get through their shifts.

That's a good question, and I'm born and raised in the US!

Perhaps it's due to the difference between CoL and working wages in a given city. Even if someone who is homeless does start working, that doesn't mean they can afford rent in the city. That also doesn't mean they'll get healthcare or other necessary benefits for their continued survival. You also have close to no protections in the US, so you don't really have stable employment in the same way other countries do. So at the end of the day, they may think "whats the point?".

I've also seen a fair number of homeless people who are disabled, mentally or physically. Perhaps that bars them from some jobs. (The ADA disallows barring people from jobs if their disability does not impair them from doing essential work, but I'm unsure about what is considered essential and what isn't.)

These are just my 2 cents. I imagine there's at least some research on the topic.

You should look into this more because although you have some info, you're misinformed too. For example when you are severely mentally ill you often have 2 choices:

1. Take daily medication that makes you so lethargic or nauseated (or both) that you certainly can't work.

2. Don't take medication and deal with delusions or hallucinations, or both, which again prevents you from working. When you're talking out loud to voices only you can hear, no one wants to work with you.

Mental health is a large part of the issue, but sometimes cause and effect can be murky.

It's important to note that even the very large visible encampments in cities like SF and LA are the tip of the homelessness iceberg, there's a much larger group of people who are living on friends/relatives couches, in their cars, or in shelters. A lot of these people have some level of employment, but housing affordability (a result of ~50 years of very restrictive land-use policies making it hard to build new housing) means that this level of employment can't afford them their own permanent home. For example, prior to 1970 it was much more common to see "boarding houses" where you'd share a room or share a bathroom, and especially unmarried low-wage workers would live there, but these are illegal to build in most cities these days.

Most of this homeless-but-not-on-the-street population is transient - it is common eg to be temporarily living in your car after a job disruption or sudden emergency expense, then to find another job and find a place to live after some time. In other words, they will do exactly what you are suggesting and lock down a new job quickly. And this group is a majority of the group of people who spend any time homeless in a given year.

But a portion of of this transiently-homeless population doesn't solve their job situation quickly, will wear out their welcome with friends, or will lose their car for a variety of reasons -- and end up falling into street homelessness. Once you are homeless and living on the street, you are at extremely high risk for developing a mental health and/or substance abuse problem even if you didn't start out with one. It also becomes much harder for you to get one of those available jobs, for a number of reasons, some as basic as not having transportation to work or not being able to present yourself well for an interview.

In short: land-use policies cause homelessness, the majority of the people who experience any amount of homelessness do get a job quickly, the street-homeless you see are the small fraction (of the frighteningly-large homeless population) that got stuck for some reason, and their situation is a feedback loop making them even more stuck.

(also: the 'we will hire you on the spot!' thing is a weird 2021 artifact of the pandemic, it taking time to ramp back up, and the super-generous unemployment benefits program that will be expiring very soon. the hiring market won't be like that next year)

Having been in this hidden group of homeless myself, I will let you in one one little secret. The land-use restriction argument might apply if you consider all homeless people needing housing, but on an individual level there are vacancies in every region... but they are unavailable for other reasons.
Once you strip out the (very visible) addicts and mentally ill, the real reasons for homelessness are: credit score/report, 2-3x income to rent cost requirement, and to a much lesser extent, criminal background checks.
I understand the reasoning for all of these. It's valid. It's also the cause of most non-addict, non-mentally-ill homelessness.
tl:dr; The vacancies often exist, but the credit system prejudges and denies.

(yes, I know private landlords exist who can "work with you" - they aren't the ones with hundreds of units.)

Good lord, yes. I just helped a relative of with poor credit find a place to live and it was only the luck of finding an understanding small time landlord that he isn’t homeless right now. I fear this is only going to get much worse in the future. Lots of places we applied to already automatically rejected him due to his credit score even though I offered to co-sign. Once the whole industry starts using these mechanisms to choose tenants, people with bad credit are screwed.

There isn’t a social safety net for men, by design.

If you’re not a custodial parent, you get food benefits and Medicaid potentially, but are effectively locked out of housing and long term benefits.

If you have a child, you’ll get a subsistence level of living. If not, you hang in for awhile until you get hurt, and eventually fall off the path.

Many jobs require an address. Without a mailing address getting the job becomes MUCH harder.

People keep saying this.

It’s trivially easy to get a mailing address for a relatively small amount of money (less than an hour of panhandling).

If someone is committed to getting a job, “mailing address” is not getting in the way.

You're seeing second and third order effects of our poor healthcare system. Especially the complete lack of appropriate mental health.

There are many different reasons, some articulated already by other replies. There are also some practical/pragmatic barriers.

One is that if you are living on the street, any possessions are likely with you at all times. What do you do with them while working?

Another is that if you are living on the street you may have involuntary hygiene issues relating to lack of access to water, clothes washing etc which may make you unhireable.

There are real phase changes between "couch surfing", "living in your car" and "utterly homeless" and hysteretic effects that often mean that if you cross a threshold "downstream" it becomes almost impossible in many cases to move back.

There are other issues in the US as well, e.g.: unlike countries like Japan or most EU countries, a lot of people with psychiatric issues are homeless (converse isn't true -- most homeless people do not have psychiatric issues, but the ones that do exacerbate the problem). Also because of weather and services, the homeless population is concentrated in a few discrete areas. Ironically that makes it harder to get support for them as most people don't actually encounter truely homeless people except in the movies.

> Ironically that makes it harder to get support for them as most people don't actually encounter truely homeless people except in the movies.

I can't think of any major city I've been to that doesn't have homeless panhandlers all over, though the large camps you see in LA are extreme.

> What do you do with them while working?

Well, someone did try building better-than-tents shelters, but LA shut him down for violating code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE

These jobs almost certainly also want someone who is clean and reliable.

If you are homeless, you might not have access to a shower or laundry facilities. You might have to rely on public transit (which is unreliable in many American cities), or you might not be able to afford public transit, so it might be hard to arrive on time. All of which will put you at a strong disadvantage compared to any other applicant.

If you do go to a job interview you might have to leave all your positions in the street where without you watching over them, they could be stolen. If you have a pet or a child, there might not be anyone trustworthy willing to take care of them while you are away.

If you pass the first round of interviews, you might need a phone number where they can call you for a follow up. But what happens if you can't afford a phone plan? Or if you have a phone, but don't have easy access to a location where you can charge it?

Finally day after day of living on the street, having very poor nutrition, not getting enough quality sleep, dealing with extreme stress, can all cause mental health issues.

There are lots of obstacles to getting a job when you are homeless. And the longer you go without a job, the harder it is to get a new job.

If you talk to people hiring for very bottom-of-the-market workers, you'll find their #1 problem is finding people who actually show up, and also aren't (bluntly) crazy, dangerous, or frequently drunk/high. There's no shortage of candidates for $12/hr jobs who are not worth $12/hr of labor, since they don't show up half the time and are space-cases when they do.

The "actually show up" part is a combination of the fact that people who, as a personality trait, have trouble showing up to work, tend to cluster at the bottom of the employment market, and people without steady, fairly high income have a lot more challenges securing reliable transportation and otherwise arranging their lives so they can get to work on time and consistently (childcare, for example, or unexpected, sudden needs to care for or assist other relatives, or illness of their own) even if they have the best intentions and are reasonably responsible.

Part of this is probably that minimum wage needs to go up quite a bit and/or these employers just need to pay more, but I don't think that would entirely solve the problem.

[EDIT] source: I once worked on an app in this space, and had some visibility into the feedback & concerns of employers of this sort (not with the app, but generally with hiring in that market) and that was consistently something they talked about, at length, usually with tons of sad or amusing/surprising anecdotes—hire someone, then they just never, ever show up, or they come for their first shift then ghost after that, or you call them 30 minutes after their shift is supposed to start and they're like "oh yeah, that, I'm not coming in today, I might be in tomorrow, I dunno yet", or their car's always broken, obviously-high candidates in interviews, all that sort of thing.

>[EDIT] source: I once worked on an app in this space, and had some visibility into the feedback & concerns of employers of this sort (not with the app, but generally with hiring in that market) and that was consistently something they talked about, at length, usually with tons of sad or amusing/surprising anecdotes—hire someone, then they just never, ever show up, or they come for their first shift then ghost after that, or you call them 30 minutes after their shift is supposed to start and they're like "oh yeah, that, I'm not coming in today, I might be in tomorrow, I dunno yet", or their car's always broken, obviously-high candidates in interviews, all that sort of thing.

This was a big problem in Newfoundland during WW2. The term "Newfies" began as a slur, created by Canadians who found that workers they hired to build military bases would show up to work long enough to collect the money they needed to live in their home coastal villages, then immediately leave.

Because those jobs don't pay enough for the people to afford housing and all the other necessities. And if the ONLY thing it affords you is housing, then you just sleep, wakeup, work, eat plain rice, sleep, repeat, without progressing anywhere. Whoops got sick for 3 days with some terrible shit, fired, lost apartment, car repoed, back to being homeless. Why spend the effort in moving nowhere?

And the hiring processes themselves are usually absolute shit. "Give us your resume, then type your entire resume into these boxes, then randomly 6 months later after you have done that to 100 different places you get a call to interview the next day on short notice, come in with a paper copy and looking clean and fresh, pass a drug test since you certainly wouldn't have dared smoke some weed while being poor or homeless, "Okay thanks we might call you but probably not because we are interviewing 60 people for this position", ect.

Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t also have a job. There’s a long way from first paycheck to actually getting an apartment.

Employers will never post it publicly but basically everywhere screens for the homeless.

Landlords also screen for the homeless so even if you have money you’ll have trouble finding a place.

Most of these people are mentally ill, in addition to most likely being addicted to drugs. They can probably never hold down a steady job.

Just not true.

I suspect what's happening here is that you two are conflating different groups.

If you include the invisible homeless in the group, you can probably say that the majority of the homeless don't have mental health issues. It takes functional mental skill to not be a visible homeless person.

The highly visible homeless probably have significant mental health issues. Mental health issues have a nasty way of completely destroying your social network. If someone doesn't get medical help before they hit bottom, they're in real trouble.

The biggest problem is that the "homeless" aren't a monolithic bloc. So, Amdahl's Law is at work--even if you completely eliminate one class of homelessness--you still have 80% of the problem left, it looks like you didn't do anything and everybody gets angry at the waste of money.

I like the reach for Amdahl's Law, but it's about how fast you can speed something up by doing it in parallel, isn't it? What's to say someone else can't be eliminating the other classes of homelessness in parallel, making the problem effectively embarrassingly parallelizable?

> What's to say someone else can't be eliminating the other classes of homelessness in parallel

You both can and must address everything in parallel to actually dent the "homeless problem".

That's the point.

Let's say there are 5 primary classes of homeless. Even if you take one of them and reduce it to zero (and you will never accomplish this)--you're still left with 80% of the problem.

Only now the people approving the checks are angry because the "homeless problem" doesn't really look any better.

Hmm. My takeaway from Amdahl's Law is that if one has a parallelizable problem, one can keep throwing processors at it, but eventually there is a slice of overall work that cannot be parallelized. Stepping back and refreshing myself on Amdahl's Law, I can see how this relates to Amdahl's Law. I like it.

Anyway, I agree with your general sentiment, and it tickles my mind. Thank you!

I have thought about this a bit as one of the parks I walk through has a few homeless people and a lot of litter. And I don’t like litter.

Picking up litter in a park isn’t a steady job, but it’s something they can do because they’re already there, and paying them to do it seems better than handouts of equivalent value. It’s a win-win in terms of value exchange, and it doesn’t push the recipient into the mental role of panhandler or beggar or unworthy-person. They did something, they got something for it.

When I've thought through this, some of the scenarios and questions that come up are interesting and I'm not sure how things would play out. Would homeless people litter more, in order to be paid more? Would everyday people litter more because they know the homeless will get paid to pick it up? Is there any net gain for society? Would I be exposed to liability if I were the one paying these people? Should the public be the one paying?

In a way, this thought pattern is akin to finding a way to gig-economize homeless people. idk. Just things on my mind, about my community that I would like to improve.

Do those jobs pay enough for housing + commute?

Do those jobs pay so little that it is better to not have a job at all?

What's the incentive to get a job if you're still going to be homeless? If you stay homeless you're eventually going to get fired too.

I don't know, maybe being able to buy food is an incentive?

Generally, no. Buying whatever one wants to eat may be an incentive, but in most US cities soup kitchens and/or access to the SNAP program are available. Malnutrition can be a real problem. and 10% of the US experiences food insecurity each year, but starvation is extremely rare.

In the US at least, hunger / food insecurity is a cross-cutting issue; people who own homes also run into it.

But food is so abundant and cheap here that even pocket change can get you enough calories to live on. Yeah eventually you might develop deficiencies, but that is likely years down the road, cheap food is fortified to prevent common deficiencies. That discounted day old box of donuts costs almost nothing and that cheap cereal lasts near forever if it is kept dry.

Homeless in the US are not really struggling for food.

Most homeless folks can find a way to get food, even if it's not great food, via a network of public and private support organizations. So having enough food not to starve isn't necessarily an incentive to work, and that's a good thing because if they were literally starving we'd have even bigger problems.

> “She [Simone Weil] intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up... A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)

Not being cynical at all. Getting food to just get by is very easy in a city. There is sooo much perfectly good food being thrown away even with packaging every day everywhere that it would be difficult not find food.

Yes.

Panhandling can be decently lucrative. The homeless in my area have told me they make $10/hr+ panhandling which isn't much worse than any job they can get.

Indeed. Reporter goes "undercover" to investigate how much you can make.

https://youtu.be/IHoiVnID8vY

Some of them probably do. But if you're a homeless person who has lived without "housing + commute", the equation may seem different. Why the fuck do I want to spend most of my day in some shitty job, so that I can cover "housing + commute", whose main purpose is to uphold this identity built around the shitty job?

In America, welfare is designed in such a way in which it actually prevents the jobless from wanting to enter the workforce. They actually make more by panhandling and collecting welfare than simply getting an entry level job. The jobless understand this basic economic tactic well, so they end up permanently living off welfare and not trying to get a job. The government does not want to fix welfare to actually work (for example, with a negative income tax instead) because it would result in the firing and unemployment of many government welfare office workers.

The idea that the government not wanting to fix welfare in order to protect the jobs of the welfare workers seems like a tad bit of a stretch

This is a good book: https://www.amazon.ca/2-00-Day-Living-Nothing-America/dp/054...

From my spending time with homeless people in the US (I lived on the streets for a while) it's a combination of mental health/checked out/drugs, or more often, a feeling that being on the bottom of the social totem pole is no better/actually worse than taking part in "the system" (per the book I recommended).

> How do you reconcile that with the fact that there are so many simple jobs with open positions everywhere?

A lot of people simply don't want to work.

Would rather spend the day on the sidewalk than have obligations.

A lot of homeless have mental illness (bipolar, depression, drug addiction, etc.).

This isn't necessarily more common in the US than any other country; the US in general provides fewer public services. So you'll see more of them on the street.

(And of course SoCal has excellent weather; there's more homeless there than in Maine. LA is kinda extreme.)

A lot of homeless are mentally ill or, as you mentioned, drug-addicted. There's a very small percentage who can keep a job once hired.

I don’t know, honestly. When I travel overseas and see people who don’t look down upon menial jobs but see them as a source of sustenance I have to admire them.

I’ll see people doing lots of things like picking up recyclables, selling drinks, handyman type jobs, knife sharpener, shoe repair, mobile tailor, etc. Very seldom see homeless in Asia or Mexico (I don’t stay in tourist areas). People there hustle one way or another (I mean the positive hustle, not the negative hustler type hustle). But we seem lazy in contrast.

Sadly, I saw this attitude in a relative. Out of a job, this one would refuse to take a job at the Home Depot or the like. No, that was not their kind of work. They would rather mooch off friends till one of the friends gave them an easy job they could drag their feet at all day. This relative is perfectly healthy and has no physical problems. But would actually rather sleep on the street on occasion rather than get up and show up to work on time on a schedule. Amazing!

> Very seldom see homeless in Asia or Mexico (I don’t stay in tourist areas).

What on earth are you talking about? Even in Japan, famous in the Western imagination for societal cohesion and lack of crime, you can easily spot homeless people sleeping rough in Tokyo. I suppose they do a better job than American cities of keeping the problem out of sight but the idea that there are no homeless people at all in Asia is simply risible.

Seldom doesn’t mean never. Yes, on occasion you come across a homeless person sleeping on the subway steps. But it’s not all urinated over and smelly. And, importantly many will engage in menial jobs, keep up appearances and try to be presentable.

But "seldom" isn't really true either. The subway being cleaner probably has more to do with much higher levels of investment in keeping it clean than with the superior character of their homeless people.

Likely the homeless people, for obvious reasons beyond their control, do not have the hygiene standards to work in basic service jobs.

In the U.S. there is a law that says if you want to hire government-subsidized indentured servants from overseas, you need to the advertise the job to U.S. citizens first. Just because there is a sign advertising the job doesn't mean they're actually going to hire an American.

I don't think people are sponsoring visas for dishwashers.

Actually they do. Seasonal resorts typically hire a lot of their kitchen staff on H-2B visas.

That's true, but if he's talking about walking around LA it's not really seasonal resorts that are in question.

> Where I come from, jobs are simply unavailable and at the moment you advertise it, even if it's just flipping burgers, there are lines and lines of people competing for it.

I can think of two reasons:

1. I doubt those people lining up to flip burgers fall under the same definition of homelessness. I don't doubt they need a job and might not have enough/any income, but that's not a "choice" as evidenced by the line up.

2. Homelessness in developed countries is not necessarily due to a lack of job opportunities but a lot more about a lack of basic job/communication skills sometimes associated with mental health issues.

At least that's what I've realized when comparing the poor/rich countries where I've lived.

The proximate cause of homelessness in California is lack of housing. The majority of homeless, when surveyed, say they were employed at the time they most recently became homeless. The main cause of homelessness is cost of housing.

They can survive without having a job (food, water, shelter) and either cannot hold down a job[0] or prefer not to.

[0]Either illness/addiction, or accumulation of factors e.g. car broke down, fired, then evicted, then no address, etc.

As others have said, I'm not sure this is a good forum to get a good answer on this subject. I have some ideas, but nothing I'd share without learning a lot more about the subject.

So, my suggestion would be to look up your local rescue mission, or homeless shelter, and ask there. While you're at it, take some time or money to support them.

I know my local rescue mission has some very effective programs that get people off the streets permanently. So I'm sure they'd know what they're talking about if you ask them.

> Anybody would please be able to point me at what I'm missing? Wages well below a living wage, untreated mental illness and substance addiction, and general villainization of the homeless. There's a good chance that homeless people couldn't even get many (or most) of those jobs if they tried because the owners/managers wouldn't give them the time of day.

Some do, but I'd expect the majority are in the "don't want to work" category. A lot of people are under the impression that these are people that, if only given a chance, would want to get back on their feet and re-integrate with the rest of society. I'd say that the evidence, such as what you've observed, argues against that.

Do you think if a visibly homeless person walks in and asks for a job the average business owner is going to hire them?

Here is one take by the Economist:

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/12/10/...

As far as I know this is mainly because most 'jobs' aren't really jobs in the sense that you can support yourself with it. In the US there isn't much of a requirement to pay people enough to survive.

Another thing you have to understand about the us are weak family ties.

If you are unemployed in another country you could easily stay with some family member - cousin, uncle etc

This is not the case in the U.S

It's a campaign of gaslighting that makes you think so.

First, the name "homeless" or even "people experiencing homelessness" implies that the lack of housing is the only problem with these individuals, who are, otherwise, perfectly normal and functional human beings.

Then, there is a motte-and-bailey game with "Look at Pedro, he has a wife and children but lives with his in-laws because he lost his job and is looking for a new one, Pedro is homeless, do you want to put him in a mental institution just for losing his job, you heartless bigot?" and "Yeeep, people doing drugs in the open and harassing the passersby are homeless, just like Pedro, you have any problem with Pedro, bigot?".

Then, there is a "solution", always involving real-estate ("abolish zoning!", "build affordable housing" etc.), which is as sane to me as if they'd called the meth-using vagrants "toothless" or "people experiencing toothlessness" and proposed to build more dental clinics to fix the issue.

In my opinion, nobody has problem with people who don't own property as long as they do not impose on the society. For all I care Elon Musk is homeless at the moment as he sold all his properties in CA and lives in a company house. I have absolutely no issues with this. On the other hand, I have a problem with people who shit on the street, scream, and go through my garbage every night regardless of their property ownership. For all I care they are all retired Hollywood producers who own 100s of millions worth of RE in Malibu, still they should be taken to jail for vagrancy.

What you're seeing in this thread about how is a person by themselves supposed to be clean for an interview, have an address for a check, get housing on minimum wage in San Francisco, etc. is missing the point. 70%+ of people who are homeless climb out it, proving that it is possible (despite the aforementioned resource challenges -- that's almost tautological to what being poor is). Those who don't and remain chronically homeless have some combination of reduced functional ability, reduced physical or mental health (including stress from poverty contributing to drug use and vice versa), or other more fundamental issues. These people also exist in other countries.

What's more unique to the U.S. is that for large swathes of people, their family has totally washed their hands of their responsibility. Compared to poor authoritarian countries that's probably because in those countries, families know their loved ones will die if they are left out on their own with no help. Compared to Europe, it's because large segments of the population have broken family units (e.g. 72% of black babies are born to unmarried mothers, who by nature have much more difficulty providing resources / shelter to an adult child who moved away to another city and is homeless there. And this is definitely impacted by historic racism, and even modern-day racism, but is independently now a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and broken families and crime).

I'm going to be downvoted but I've worked in homeless shelters, for public outreach, for jobs programs, and the problem is incredibly challenging. The idea that society can replace family is inane. What you see on HN is some white liberal dude who grew up in an upper-middle-class family, makes $300K a year waving their fingers over a keyboard but thinks they're financially oppressed so votes for Bernie Sanders, and just repeats some stuff they read on reddit or some shitty NPR story, but who has never bothered to truly spend time doing public health outreach, has never truly interacted with the homeless for an entry-level job, has never really assessed their ability to complete even basic tasks. They think it should be an easy problem to solve with just a few more resources, which they vote for (obviously without getting themselves dirty in the process), and then see it as evidence of an unjust society while wondering why SF is getting shittier every year.

> What's more unique to the U.S. is that for large swathes of people, their family has totally washed their hands of their responsibility. Compared to poor authoritarian countries that's probably because in those countries, families know their loved ones will die if they are left out on their own with no help.

Or, if I take your comments to their invalid conclusion, other countries let their homeless die--thus solving their homeless problem.

And why should somebody's drug addled parent be the responsibility of the child? The child didn't make those choices--and probably has their own damage from the parent to boot.

Finally, if someone has dementia, God help you if you don't have money because no one else will. People with dementia often require 24/7 care--how are you supposed to go to your job if you are doing that?

How about instead of just shuffling the problem onto "family" that is horribly ill-equipped for dealing with most of these situations, we start as a society helping people to deal with these things.

There’s no single answer, but:

1.) A lot of the visibly homeless population suffers from either mental illness, drug addiction or both. The statistics I’ve seen for cities on the west coast put it at approximately 40% for mental illness and a similar percentage for addiction. These are self reported numbers, so they are probably under reported.

2.) Related to #1, good mental healthcare is very hard to come by in the United States, especially if you are poor. In the 80s the federal government cut funding drastically, leaving it up to individual states to cover the gap. Most didn’t and have continued to cut budgets even further in the ensuing years.

3.) Related to #2, the Deinstitutionalization movement successfully fought for the rights of the mentally ill, but there were unintended consequences. Right now it is extraordinarily difficult to convince a judge to commit someone to long term, in-patient psychiatric care unless they present an immediate threat to themselves or others. In practice, this turns out to be very difficult to prove. In most cases, if the person can’t be proven to about to commit murder or suicide in the next few hours, they won’t be committed against their will.

4.) Most states have closed all but a one or two state psychiatric hospitals, which is where people with severe mental illness used to be housed. The theory was that states would build community integrated outpatient care facilities, but many of them didn’t. As a result, many long term psychiatric patients were turned loose with nowhere to go, and became homeless. Also, now that those facilities are closed, when a judge does decide to commit someone, there’s often nowhere for them to go. In the state I live in, the only remaining state psychiatric hospital hasn’t had an available bed in years.

5.) Related to #3 and 4, jails have become our defacto mental health treatment facilities because there’s nowhere else available. As a result, a lot of people who should have been take into care end up with a rap sheet, which shows up on background checks, and makes it difficult to obtain housing or jobs. The same is true for people who are not mentally ill, but have drug addictions.

6.) There’s a lot more supporting infrastructure necessary to allow you to go to work than you’d think. At bare minimum, you need an alarm clock to wake you up in time, you need some basic hygiene and grooming capabilities, and you need to feel reasonably confident that when you walk away from your home to go to work, your things won’t be stolen. A person living in a tent has none of those things. A person living in a shelter might have some of them, but if they leave their stuff unattended it’s almost certain to get stolen. They may be able to take a shower or wash their clothes, but probably not on the same day, and not more than once a week. Regardless of when their shift starts, most shelters have strict curfews, which means that a person staying there can’t work non-traditional hours. Space in the shelters is often first come first served, so if you miss the bus and don’t make it back to the shelter on time, they’re likely to be full and you’re back on the street. It’s very difficult to establish stability using the shelter system.

Finally, you asked why people who don’t have jobs don’t live with their families. A lot of the time it’s because they have untreated or poorly treated mental illness that makes living with them incredibly difficult. Nobody likes to talk about it, but families who have severely mentally ill members in the United States are often forced to make the heartbreaking choice between their own sanity and the wellbeing of their family member. The same is true for people suffering from drug addiction. Sometimes you have to choose your own sanity, or you’ll be on the streets too.

Hopefully that helps you understand what you’re seeing better.

You're going to get a lot of replies indicating that the problem belongs squarely on society's shoulders (healthcare, capitalism, drugs).

One cause that you will probably not see highlighted is the devaluation of autonomy and personal responsibility, and it's absolutely devastating effect on the human spirit to progress.

I think that is the reason for very few homeless cases. Drugs and mental illness are the big two. And that says nothing about society.

I would argue that the US pushes autonomy and personal responsibility much much farther than most developed countries.

Yes it does, yet at the same time many people here do not follow that advice relative to many other countries. It seems to me lack of personal responsibility is almost a side effect instead of a root cause in of itself.

> One cause that you will probably not see highlighted is the devaluation of autonomy and personal responsibility

Besides the fact that not everyone agrees with this argument, it's not highlighted because it's not useful. Let's say your right, the reason people sleep under a highway underpass is because they have not taken so called "personal responsibility" for their situation. Done.

What's the plan now? Extending various forms of assistance is the both the moral as well as personal and social best option. Leaving these problems unchecked always exerts a cost on both society and individuals, and the use of solutions like violence and imprisonment have unwanted knock-on effects that are best avoided if possible.

First, when you can stop homelessness before it happens via widely available emergency rent assistance. It's a cheap no-brainer that would save tax dollars from the expensive work of helping (or jailing, if feel lack of personal responsibility warrants incarceration) people who have lost housing. Then, provide the already homeless who are willing and able to work with housing, life coaching and training to get back on track. Then, safe communities and residence programs for those who are physically or mentally incapable of supporting/taking care of themselves. I'm sure there will also be people who are a danger to others and may need to be imprisoned.

>What's the plan now?

If anyone had a good solution to the homeless problem, there wouldn't be a homeless problem. I'm not claiming to have a good solution either, but I do know that I see a culture that essentially says: "You're a drug addict, you can't help your situation, it's addiction's fault." Or "You're bipolar, you can't help your situation, it's our healthcare system's fault." Or "You lost your job, you can't help your situation, it's capitalism's fault." We're so focused on blaming externalities 100% that we are not helping enable people to solve their problems (to the extent that they can).

All that isn't to say that I don't believe society can and should help the homeless, but we can do so without saying "nothing that has happened to you is your responsibility."

>Anybody would please be able to point me at what I'm missing?

I strongly suspect that this is absolutely the wrong place to ask.

I do remember a time without homeless people however.

There were millions of unhoused during the great depression, and homelessness didn't magically disappear after that (and obviously existed before it, too), so I have no idea how you could possibly remember a 'time without homeless people'.

What you probably mean is a time when they were brutally beaten and forced to live in even worse conditions than now, which based on your other comment about "having to be mean to some of them" is probably the system working as you'd like.

tigertigerbb's other comments on this post, including the one referenced by Sebguer, for anyone who thinks, as I did at first, that they were coming from a position that was merely uninformed, rather than actively hostile to the homeless:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066347

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28066377

> I do remember a time without homeless people however.

It seems more likely that you remember a time in which you weren't aware of, or weren't exposed to the presence of, homeless people. Homelessness is a serious problem that gets worse as its handling is abysmally bungled, but it is not a new problem.

> I do remember a time without homeless people however.

Oh, you are a bold one.

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