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Comment by edderly | Hacker News Reader

Who came up with the hypothesis that California is the dumping ground for the nation's homeless? I'd like to know if it stands up to scrutiny.

California itself has a population which is the size of a medium sized European country. It is large enough to have a sizable homeless population. If you are homeless are your chances of getting food and services better in the central valley or in SF? Also, are there significantly less homeless people on the East coast by comparison?

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CA has 1/2 the population of homeless in the US but only 1/8 of total population. The eastern seaboard has close to half the US population but obviously cannot have nearly the same rate of homeless.

Something is at play, though it need not be anything too complicated. Good weather and significant resources dedicated to making the homeless comfortable make California the obvious destination.

There are possibly network effects within homeless communities that are hard for outsiders to understand as well.

Thank you, is there a link where I could cite that information?

I need to write that I was slightly mistaken, CA houses half of the “unsheltered” in the United States and only a quarter of the “homeless.” The unsheltered are highly visible and make up 70% of the total homeless in CA, the highest rate in the nation.

Here is a detailed link from CA: https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...

The economy of California is pretty good vs other states.

People from all over the USA travel to places like California for better economic opportunities.

Misfortunes happen and people become homeless.

Thus you end up with people from "out of state" that are homeless.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/21/nevada...

There's multi-billion dollar lawsuits going on because it's been documented as a policy of nevada hospitals.

That is interesting and very concerning but that is 10 people when the homeless population in CA is 151,278 https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...

The thinking is that it's not an isolated incident and lots of PD's & hospitals did this. It's hard to prove because no one will admit to it, and the people being sent aren't always the most reliable witnesses.

I too would like to see some real numbers behind this. But I will say that I took greyhounds and amtrak in / out of CA a lot growing up in the bay area and I had numerous experiences talking to homeless folks who had been put on the train or bus by law enforcement in counties outside CA for destinations including SF and San Diego. I never experienced the inverse of homeless folks getting shipped out of CA. Always stuck with me for whatever a personal anecdote is worth.

This article is fascinating, and surprising:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

So that appears to imply that in largely more wealthy cities are sending homeless people to less expensive cities and SF has an active program which is doing this too.

This was surprising to me, in that SF is such a large participant.

Excellent article, thank you for sharing it!

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