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Comment by mgummelt | Hacker News Reader

The author argues that housing prices are not a significant factor:

"Throughout it, they emphasized that the homeless were just like you and me, just poorer. Today, many of California’s leading homelessness advocates insist that the current crisis is due mostly to the housing shortage. Homelessness experts and advocates disagree.

'I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck,” L.A. street doctor Susan Partovi told me. “Of the thousands of people I’ve worked with over 16 years, it’s like one or two people a year. And they’re the easiest to deal with.'” [1]

[1] https://www.studentnewsdaily.com/editorials-for-students/why...

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> I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck

This right here. Nearly all homeless I've worked with were non-neuronormative and/or drug abusers. They're almost never just normal folks who have fallen on hard times. The reason they aren't rooming with a family member or friend is because their behavioral outbursts and/or stealing things to buy drugs has exhausted all the goodwill of those who would help them.

Author and journalist Sam Quinones hypotesizes in his book, The Least of Us, that a significant part of the increase in homelessness is due to a change in methamphetamine quality.

Prior to about 2010, meth was manufactured in Mexico using high quality precursors. The government cracked down on imports, and cartels started using a much more dirty P2P manufacturing methods, which is anecdotally associated with vastly higher levels of disruptive psychosis.

He talked about it in an episode of Econ Talk.

https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...

It’s an interesting theory but P2P meth was the standard meth prior to ephedrine being used in the 90’s.

Did we see the same level of homelessness back then?

In this telling, there's also a huge increase in supply since then- 1980s biker meth was relatively artisinal, but the current situation involves large and professional factories in Mexico.

True, but at least in the 60’s and 70’s most stimulants were legitimate medications. Amphetamine, dextroamphetamine and methamphetamine were widely prescribed and diverted into illegal channels.

There was a “scourge” of truckers taking uppers and driving all night. Stimulant use was really rampant across all social classes. Use decreased when prescriptions were cut off, then meth resurged in the 90’s.

And the other data point is methamphetamine use is the drug of choice in much of Asia. But you don’t see anywhere near the social problems you do in the US.

This is completely anecdotal, but contemporary accounts of the Haight Ashbury following the Summer of Love tell the story of a movement that started out on acid, moved on to speed, and became far more violent and filled with squalor because of it. Much like what is happening today.

“[1] Even among drug-using Haight-Ashbury subcultures, the high-dose methamphetamine abuser was marginalized, but became increasingly visible and unavoidable because of violence associated with dealing methamphetamine and because of the users' hyperactivity and paranoia.”

1.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2011.58...

Good question and frankly idk.

Could be that that biker meth was also as bad. Could be differences in recipes/precursors/equipment as p2p can be made from hundreds of different ingredients.

I wonder if there are data sets tracking drug impurities that could test the hypothesis.

Worked with in what capacity?

Became friends with a number of homeless, bought them meals, gave them money, gave them clothing, heard their life stories in their own words, etc. There used to be a lot near where I used to live.

How did you meet? On the street? At a shelter? Most homeless people are homeless under a year in the US. Many have jobs. Many sleep on couches not streets. Or in cars not shelters. And they try to avoid the stigma of homelessness.

> Most homeless people are homeless under a year in the US

Source?

> Many have jobs

Source?

> How did you meet? On the street?

Yes, and a few did indeed have cars and sleep in cars.

Agencies and researchers talk about 2 or 3 kinds of homelessness. Longer than 1 year is chronic.[1] 120,323 of 580,466 homeless people counted were chronically homeless in January 2020.[2]

I don't think the number with jobs is tracked nationally. 10% of unsheltered people in San Diego said they were currently employed or attending school.[3] Another 11% were unemployed under 6 months. In New York City 16% of single adults in shelters had jobs.[4] 28% of families had at least 1 working adult. And people with jobs spend less time in shelters or on the street of course. Maybe none if they can afford a cheap hotel room.

You meet who you meet on the street because people with somewhere else to be are somewhere else.

[1] https://guildservices.org/the-different-types-of-homelessnes...

[2] https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC_PopSub_...

[3] https://www.rtfhsd.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2018-WPoin...

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/nyregion/in-new-york-havi...

> They're almost never just normal folks who have fallen on hard times

Why do those have to be two distinct types of people? It seems to me that normal people who fall on hard times might have a tendency to become "non-neuronormative and/or drug abusers"? I wonder how strong that conversion is.

Able bodied able minded homeless people prefer clinic doctors in my experience.

What if part of the reason they got hooked on drugs was they were down on their luck 8-15 years ago, and she's only seeing the end result of chronic drug abuse? There's a high correlation between low SES and ice use. I know of three ice users in my broader circle and they're all very very poor but don't otherwise have mental health issues. Her impressions as a field doctor are useful but I am sceptical and this needs more rigorous study.

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