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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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).

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…

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 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."

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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