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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing this. Do you have any citations for "America's dumping ground". How many homeless are migrating to California?

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.

> Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

Everytime this argument has been brought up, instead of owning to the responsibility of causing homelessness, Californians love to point out how kind they are to homeless and how they're a "dumping ground" for homelessness. It is a cop out.

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I would love to see data as well, but I don't consider self-reported origins to be all that convincing. If I were homeless and moved to a city where it's "easier" to be homeless, I would probably claim that I was previously housed there if asked.

It's crucial to dig into the criteria for what studies consider living in the state at the time of becoming homeless. Plenty of studies consider prison to be "housing" so someone who was homeless before moving to California, then commits a crime and spends a month behind bars, and is homeless after release becomes categorized as living in California when they become homeless.

My problem with these assertions is that there is no data supporting it, but these stories and anecdotes keep circulating. I could make up 100 reasons to hypothesize how homeless could possible end up in California, but without data this is just thinly supported.

More robust question is to ask where they were living 10 years ago. It turns out half of the homeless weren't living in San Francisco ten years ago. Or put differently, they moved to the city within the last ten years.

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

Ancestor’s source was about California, yours is San Francisco. Perhaps many of them lived in Oakland, some in Daly City, maybe some were going to the Humboldt State University 10 years ago and are now unhoused because of an overwhelming student dept, and some were agricultural workers in the Valley and weren’t able to gather enough savings to keep them selves housed.

You're linking an article lacking in data.

I'd expect the claimant to provide the data to support their assertion.

You were the one disputing the claim, it's on you to bring the actual data. So no, you can't pass the buck.

That's the opposite of how the burden of proof works.

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