Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
Solution in two parts
1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)
2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside
There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.
Where do you build these dorms?
Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc?
We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all.
When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question.
> Where do you build these dorms?
Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities.
> Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc?
no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside.
> We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all.
There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.
Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it?
> Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities.
Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?
> no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside.
Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?
> There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.
Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. We have a long history of trying all kinds of approaches that didn't work for whatever reason. There's no simple answer.
> Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
This assumes they want to find a job though.
If the shelters are full, it's clear people are using them. If we start seeing vacancies in shelters, then we can worry about this.
So what is your proposed solution?
It is not acceptable that we have any number of people sleeping on the street. I realize we can't simply prohibit that. But if we are going to reclaim our public spaces we need solutions that work for everyone. There is never going to be one simple solution to that.
So yeah, build more housing. But what kind? Some of it should simply be affordable housing for gainfully employed people. Some should be dorm style for emergency stays. Some should have a focus on rehab. Some should have a focus on finding employment. There's probably a need for a mix. But we definitely need some places that are safe for vulnerable populations which have more restrictions and different resources than low-barrier-to-entry based shelters or housing.
Should we try to put addicts on a rehab path? Are we willing to ignore that problem to solve homelessness? I don't know. I think it's worth having a conversation.
It's complicated and messy and unclear.
Having been homeless, the needs are best served with a reliable friend network, an emergency place you can stay at that is a step above a shelter/church I never been to a woman’s only shelter, I heard they suck too though.
I prefer staying with friends but hidden spots are fine like hammock in a park, storage units, amenities like showers at the gym, or houses, and a feeling of purpose, growth and not failure. Brahmins take an oath of poverty and are respected, as are monks who beg for food. If you can, understand the needs from dogfooding.
"Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?"
Tell them to take a hike. The state needs to get more involved with objective rules so we don't have a game of each neighborhood screaming NIMBY.
> Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?
I don't know the answer to this. When we have enough shelters and people have a locked door to sleep behind this will probably be the next problem to solve.
> Actually providing public housing isn't simple though.
Shelters and public housing are different. Any kind of shelter has to be fully maintained with public funds because the people sleeping in them are broke.
There's a countries with large amounts of successful public housing. The theme is that it's well maintained so it's actually desirable for stable, normal people. Allowing a wider range of incomes to move in so that rent can cover operations and maintenance makes it less dependent on the whims of local pols.
Telling NIMBYs to take a hike isn’t simple. How do you actually achieve that?
The question is not if we have enough shelter space. The question is if there are homeless who do not want shelter space. In other words do we have another problem to focus on in parallel.
My ideal solution would be a state agency that funds and builds shelters, supportive housing, public housing etc. Each municipality gets a list of how many beds it needs and can pick the locations. BUT if they refuse to pick sites then the state does it for them. Then the state builds it without any more bottlenecks on local politicians.
imo the key is allowing local choice, but not to say no.
If we make shelters a realistic option and a large number of people won't take them we'll have another problem. But we haven't gotten to that bridge yet.
I'm not opposed to building more shelters. But it's not a complete solution. So what is the rest of the solution?
If it were not for the state promising heavy financial consequences for cities failing to plan appropriately for growth, the cities wouldn’t be doing squat about the problem, and things would continue to get worse. How do we know? Because that’s exactly how the last couple of cycles have gone.
To your point, CA's regional housing needs assessments are state level intervention to undo city level interventions (zoning, permitting) that prohibit housing.
The city built office space for more jobs and prohibits housing for those new workers. That's the problem to solve.
> Why build something if people won't use it?
We know some people will use it since the ones already built are full. If we look at other cities - eg. NYC we see the ratio sheltered to unsheltered are different from SF. The difference? Availability of shelter. SF has hundreds of beds and thousands of homeless. Surely a few hundred more beds would be used.
> Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?
The article illustrated that the majority of the growth was with people that are not drug users, so this is a big issue, but you can exclude drug users and still make a difference without dealing with this question. (but maybe you should find a way to help them too).
> This assumes they want to find a job though.
Surely some do. If not, they're still a person and we should help them.
I do not believe that we should ignore any group of homeless just because there is a simple solution for some of it.
Maybe there is an argument for building different types of shelters. Maybe some of them are not voluntary. Maybe some allow drugs and some do not.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. Pretending this is simple is doing a disservice to everyone involved.
This describes an incredibly miniscule number of people. There are a lot of problems with existing shelters (as mentioned quite a few times in thia thread) so currently it's hard to disentangle "wants to sleep on the streets" from "doesn't want the available alternatives." Yeah, there probably are a few folks like this. Having an oversupply of 1% isn't going to break the bank.
Do you make it non-optional? Do you just accept that there will always be some people living on the street? At what point can a camping ban in public parks be reinstated and enforced? Can it ever be? Should it?
How should we optimize solutions to homelessness? Is there some ideal amount of homelessness? Have we already reached it?
Recall that this thread started with a comment offering a two part solution that does not address an unwillingness to stay in shelters.
For example, I saw in LA camping areas being cleaned by city workers peacefully (with a token police car watching over) and it seemed like a nice middle ground.
Something like https://campsecondchance.rumblecrash.com/ but for tents?
I just think that living without being involved with a building and such is valid, and I'd like to see it recognized.
I believe in harmonious co-existence, so I guess I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way", which is what I've practiced for lack of a better option, though I usually don't use a tent in the city.
I think it is legitimate and valid for an individual to exist and live without being involved in paperwork, joining some kind of program, etc.
And I support anyone going that way.
I think that's a reasonable take.
I don't think that living in a public park is a valid lifestyle choice. Those places can't serve their purpose as public areas for recreation if they are also someone's home. I understand that people do it now because they are desperate. We should provide them with better options. Or at least acceptable options that allow the rest of the citizens of the city to also live their lives.
I am not opposed to dedicated property or areas for tent living, but it can't be in existing parks or other public spaces like sidewalks and transit facilities. And there have to be amenities such as showers, bathrooms and trash service. Essentially a state campground in the city.
I’m not opposed to sleeping in parks. Like, sure, take a nap. But no, you can’t live there.
Take a look at the homeless camps in Seattle parks and greenbelts. That’s not staying out of anyone’s way. There’s nothing harmonious about it.
Basic services are mandatory in camping areas. Without bathrooms we get human waste accumulation and runoff. Without trash service we get fires. This isn’t hypothetical. Go look around Seattle.
Dictating what is done with public spaces is absolutely valid. That is how civilization works. It’s why we even have public spaces.
Without rules on what’s allowed in parks they’d be developed into something else.
What do you think gives you the right to make that call?
There's a city in the Vancouver area which has a radically different approach, that I'd describe as YIMFY. Food bank, needle exchange, shelters, etc are in an otherwise affluent part of town (not coincidentally, there's a police precinct right there too). They don't want to hide the homeless, they want to keep an eye on the problem. And by keeping it in the public view, voters consistently fund the programs to get people help.
Citation needed
They're horrible places designed only for one purpose: keeping the undesirables out of the public eye.
It was that way ~100 years ago when Orwell wrote "Down and Out", and very little has changed since then.
_Where do we build them?_ I bet there are choices we can make that house 100+ people for every 1 person who is mildly inconvenienced.
_Are there barriers to living in these dorms?_ No.
Why should recovering addicts be forced to live in a setting where they are tempted by drugs? Why shouldn't they be given a chance to live in a drug-free setting?
Why should victims of abuse be forced to live near potential abusers? Shouldn't we consider their needs?
Clearly we need shelters suited to the needs of individuals.
But what are those needs, and what do we do if someone refuses the opportunity? I don't think "ignore them" is a satisfactory answer.
The shelters are full so the obvious problem is not people refusing to sleep in them.
At the same time, many of the "offers" of going inside are disingenuous. People giving up all of their belongings (specifically tent and camping stove), leaving loved ones, and the promised shelter is only guaranteed for a couple weeks.
When I say dorm style shelters I specifically mean each person has a door to lock and feel safe behind. Most current shelters are dozens of cots in a large room. I wouldn't feel safe there either.
Here's a primer: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-...
And the solution should be to increase the desirability of other areas, rather than making homelessness the new norm. As a nice side effect, this will solve the general housing availability issues as well.
Except, the public opinion is that we should somehow all stick to a handful of coastal megacities and join the race to the bottom in terms of square feet per person, noise and cleanliness. This certainly benefits big property developers, big vendors and big employers that wouldn't be economically viable in a much sparser area, but I genuinely don't understand why so many people are happy to voluntarily move into a hamster wheel.
if more people have housing homelessness would be less of a norm
Can’t be seen to be implicitly supporting drug use, so you have to deprive your residents of privacy, protection, and freedoms.
There are also huge problems with treating the many different problems the same way. For example, California would probably benefit a lot more from building a mental health crisis center and Georgia might benefit more from temporary housing that actually gives you your own address (so that you can list it on job applications, cell service, etc).
But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.
What's a west coast city with empty shelters? The ones in my town are full.
We don't need to put off the simple solutions because there are harder ones after that.
I know people who got section 8 housing and just lazed around, I remember one guy said he moved out to pay himself and I didn’t understand why someone would rationally do that, it’s similar to moving out of your parent’s home. It feels good to work for what you get, our struggles and pain are what drives our personal growth, rather than subsidizing symptoms and masking the problems like being beaten by your husband but the antidepressants and opiates are soothing enough to stay.
1. the article data doesn't back that up. it showed most of the growth was not mentally ill drug users.
2. Being homeless might make you mentally ill, drug using anti-social person.
And the complicating factor is the percentage of people like this depends on the city! Eg Utah’s approach to homelessness probably won’t work for Oregon.
> A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.
No. What they don’t want is to be corralled like livestock into shared living spaces, with no privacy or protection for their property. That’s not because they’re mentally ill; it’s because it’s degrading. Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.
The one's flashing their genitals and screaming at strangers?
The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely nuanced and varied, by this archetype is certainly what a lot of people are going to think of when they hear the term. It's hard for me to imagine degradation is relevant to them.
These aren't the "severely mentally ill" that the comment intended imo.
The people with any amount of thought delegated to dignity are not the part of the severely mentally ill being asked about.
"Many homeless people do not want shelter because they are mentally ill."
Here's how I responded: first, there just aren't that many mentally unwell homeless people in the "naked and screaming" sense. Second, that those who are mentally unwell, to whatever degree, do not accept forms of shelter not because of that illness but because those forms of shelter are, by normal standards, extremely degrading. We would never dream of asking someone who hasn't otherwise been dehumanized to willingly subject themselves to constant surveillance, a living space shared with desperate strangers, and the complete absence of any guarantees around the security of their private property.
Put another way: being homeless doesn't make you lose your sense of dignity. Being mentally ill doesn't either, except in the worse cases. Treating the overwhelming majority like they're criminal timebombs is dehumanizing and just doesn't match the facts on the ground.
So again: what's being missed here? I'm interested in the 99% case, which includes a very large number of mentally ill homeless people. I'm not engaging in the 1% case, because I think it's a frivolous diversion from the needs of a great many suffering people.
> The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely nuanced and varied,
but in the rest of the post you appear to be discussing this strawman as if it is the primary concern.
The question was about the "severely mentally ill".
If the counterpoint is that it's rude to acknowledge the people who seem to be utterly insane, well I think that's kind of shit. If it's that these aren't the people we're referring to when we say "severely mentally ill", then I think that's just disingenuous.
In my view it would solve homelessness in a few years, housing people between SROs (99%?) and jails (1%?). That is if entire billion-dollars-combined homeless budgets could be redirected to SRO construction.
There's a lot hiding in that "etc". Some other reasons people refuse to use (some) shelters:
- shelter is / feels unsafe due to a subset of the sheltered population
- shelter has a curfew that does not allow you to maintain your work schedule
- shelter won't let you bring your child or pet or stuff
A substantially different world if we had friendly AI to do that monitoring and maybe individual tiny-houses or apartments rather than a bunkhouse free-for-all like Squid Games.
for me the real issue is that some of these people - users and not, are quite messed up, and can really end up doing horrible things to the staff and the other residents.
policing that seems pretty impossible
The problem is that the rich people who give money to the shelter have moral stipulations along with their money, since they want to feel like they are “rehabilitating” people with the money they throw st the problem.
If I had to operate under the same requirements as the shelter to keep my apartment, I would be on the streets too.
The worst one was also the largest. They had a waitlist (effectively). You had to sign up in the beginning of winter, arrive between 7pm and 8pm, and mandatory breathalyzer. If they suspected you of using, urinalysis was also mandatory. There was a 3 strike policy but generally they would give you the boot after 1 infraction.
The majority of the people I interacted with there were chronic homeless, owing to the bureaucracy around being at that particular shelter.
That, and the egos associated with most directors of homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
The real solution is to legalize massive housing construction, so everyone can sleep in a home, however simple.
IMHO the impulse to keep people out of their city and their neighborhood results in encampments and generally worse conditions both for those with and without houses.
If you mean that it's possible except for the voters then that may be true but it's kind of irrelevant.
> IMHO the impulse to keep people out of their city and their neighborhood results in encampments and generally worse conditions both for those with and without houses.
It's entirely sensible to oppose encampments in my neighborhood.
Fires, crimes, and assaults are regular occurrences at encampments and homeless people in Seattle are effectively immune from prosecution.
Would you want a habitual offender like Francisco Calderon (https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/warrant-issued-for...) or Travis Berge (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/meth-mental-illness-murder-...) as a neighbor?
This is not correct. In most places, there is a wild shortage of shelters. For example King County has ~4000 shelter beds and ~12,000 people who need shelter.
AFAIK the only place where there are enough shelter beds is NYC where they are legally required to provide anyone with shelter.
> Are their jobs concentrated elsewhere? Knowledge worker jobs are concentrated downtown, and jobs that are likely to look favorably upon someone homeless are probably not concentrated in any one area.
It sounds like it would be more difficult for homeless people to travel from or to anywhere else on average.
San Francisco did a breakdown on their homeless.
Almost 75% have some chronic health problem. 15% have a traumatic brain injury.
That requires facilities for long term medical care. And it basically means universal healthcare.
Unfortunately this puts us back to "You know all those facilities that we closed back in the 70s? Yeah, closing them was a stupid idea and we needed to fix them instead."
[0] spitballing here
The problem is that even if we did re-open them today, staffing them would be a nightmare. There is a nearby mental health facility run by my state. They simply do not have enough employees and cannot fill positions and it’s an issue that has existed since before the pandemic.
It needs to happen, but it won’t be easy, so it probably won’t happen.
It's not about fixing every problem, but we can make the problem less bad. The instability and insecurity of sleeping outside makes everything else worse.
There are also a lot of people that are functional, but end up homeless because housing is too expensive. Texas doesn't have better healthcare than California, but Houston has fewer homeless because housing is cheaper.
Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.
You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work.
Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.
My point is that we need housing where the housing shortage is.
Everybody moved at some point, whether it was when they were born and they stayed in the same house their entire life, or when they moved out from their parents house, or when they moved out of the studio apartment after getting married and settled down.
If people want to keep others away, they need to pay for that privilege. Otherwise they are just leaches on society.
We used to allow SROs, like the classic YMCA you'd see where people down on their luck would live in old movies. These are now illegal to build in most places, and the existing ones are being closed down.
Of course only a few of these units get built in any development, after much wrangling from the city, and then the city and the developers pat themselves on the back while the lack of housing is hardly budged and the affordable housing advocates are unappeased. I think SRO-style housing is the only realistic way to make affordable housing widely enough available that people well below the median income for an area can be guaranteed housing.
The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. It's probably part of our inherent "human nature" sense of ethics.
The SRO landlord is seen as exploiting poor people by taking their money in exchange for pretty terrible housing. So we ban the SROs, and now these people have to sleep in the streets.
But that actually feels OK, because NOW THERE IS NO ONE EXPLOITING THEM!
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
Anyone who can’t afford housing where they’re at and wants to have housing moves, it’s often ignored that homeless people might be fine being homeless and prefer it to being housed in another area they can afford. I agree there should be housing for people who want it, but I don’t decide I want to live in Beverly Hills and demand affordable for me housing and refuse to leave. If only I could enjoy Echo Park or the Bay Area without paying for housing somehow...
Neither is improved by giving them housing. Housing should be modest, and it should be preceded by forced rehab. Instead, in Seattle, for example, they're giving the homeless hotel-style housing without requiring them to get addiction treatment and without a requirement to do anything job-wise. Seattle's King county projects that such valiant (and extremely expensive!) efforts will triple the already sizable homeless population in 10 years, yet they are continuing down this path anyway, just like SF did many years ago. Why? Because it's already a billion dollar industry in the state, and as such it'll continue to metastasize, just like any other government "service".
So solution needs to have 3 parts at least, and part zero should be "forced rehab". Without that no other part will ever work. There needs to be a part about employment in there somewhere for people who are able to work. I don't care that they don't wanna.
People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match.
SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to.
“Build it and they will come”
Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US
"Induced demand" is a fallacy. The demand isn't induced, it was there the whole time and being suppressed by high prices (or, in case of highways, congestion). If there is very high demand, the amount of supply needed to satisfy it is equally high, but that is by no means the same as being infinite and impossible to do.
There are also ways to satisfy the demand for "highways" other than building more highways. Like building more housing closer to where jobs are so people don't have to drive such long distances.
Often these alternatives are better, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your problem is actually that your highway doesn't have enough lanes. This isn't a question you can answer in the general case without looking at the specifics.
> Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US
Because that's where a lot of the homeless are because they can't afford the price of housing there. There are literally people in San Francisco who are homeless despite having a full-time job.
Also, it's not "housing for the homeless," it's just housing. Build enough and the price comes down. Then people can afford it instead of being homeless. There is obviously also a benefit to be had for the person who isn't homeless but is spending 60% of their income on an apartment the size of a parking space.
And we’re not building housing here we’re building shelters.
Induced demand for highways definitely is not a fallacy. People can go from needing zero highway miles a day, up to 60-90 highway miles a day, depending on where they live. This sort of range is an order of magnitude higher than what could potentially be induced by having access to, say, cheaper construction methods.
In fact, for housing, the opposite seems to occur. When there are more people in an area, people tend to take up less individual space. It's only when people live far away from anything that they seems to expand to 1000+ square feet/person.
And of course you can induce demand with housing. If suddenly you could find $1,000/month 1 bed apartments in SF how many people you think would move there?
It is a fallacy. The demand is there either way. It's just a regular supply and demand curve, where there is more demand at a lower price (and "price" includes the time cost of sitting in traffic congestion).
The heart of the fallacy is the assumption that the demand is infinite and it's impossible to ever satisfy it. It's not. It's just non-linear.
> And we’re not building housing here we’re building shelters.
Shelters are housing. But also, why aren't we building housing? Build a lot more housing and fewer people will be homeless or need "shelters" because housing will cost less.
Trickle down economics is a Republican justification for cutting taxes for the rich. Building new homes under Prop 13 increases the taxes paid by rich people.
Between 2015 and 2019 SF built 19,000 new homes and added 60,000 new jobs. In what world does that not drive up prices? This obsession with developer profits is convenient rhetoric to justify a hunger games like housing market.
Even SRO rooms were going for $1,200 pre-pandemic. This is how struggling people become homeless. Houston doesn't have less homeless because Texas has a better safety net. It's because housing is cheaper.
Here's a simple fact: we need to have enough homes for everyone that works here, retired in place, and that's growing up here. We do not have that right now. Luckily building large residential buildings is something humanity has known how to do for the last 100 years. We "just" need the political will to do it.
If all you're doing is giving money to Zuckerberg so he can buy more yachts and mansions, that money is not going to end up in the hands of regular people, and now he's bidding against them for scarce real estate.
If you give tax cuts to small business owners so they have more money to expand their businesses and make it easier to go into competition with incumbents so that consumers have more choices and competition drives down consume prices, that money is going to end up in the pockets of regular people.
> SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019.
In areas with a massive housing shortage, alleviating it would require building a massive amount of housing. So... build a massive amount of housing. There is no law against it, once you get rid of the law against it.
Its obviously not true. Its a working theory - the more housing available, the lower the cost - is true. But SF has such a high demand you can probably double housing in SF and demand would not satiate. That said, seattle has built tons of housing, and stalled some of the exploding costs of housing.
There is probably no good solution to SF's issue - its so out of hand and so expensive that even if you doubled the city you wouldn't solve the issue. Like you said - 6 blocks just to homeless shelters is a lot (doable, but a lot). Especially for a city so geographically constrained.
I ballparked the housing gap a while back by comparing the ratio of employment/residents with 30 years ago and came up with ~80,000 missing homes. That's in a city of 400,000 homes right now.
An imperfect measure for sure, but I think affordability is achievable if we stop prohibiting the solutions.
Fracking has leveled off for the past few years and many of the workers have moved back to other oil fields so homelessness has decreased dramatically.
(Submitted title was "Is there a homelessness crisis?")
I've ridden with homeless in the same car as me plenty of times and only occasionally will they be disruptive.
I'm far more irked with showtime than with the occasional sleeping down-on-his-luck guy.
And unfortunately, in west coast cities, it’s not even that isolated. If there is a camp near-ish your neighborhood for some time, there will be a lot of instances. And as you go into the city, the more dense “downtown” parts are areas where people might not live all the time, but a lot of different people do experience them frequently, and a lot of homeless people may be there too. So thousands of people might get a subconscious feeling of being unsafe, just from a small number of people who might not even be acting in unsafe ways.
That’s why people see it as a crisis: a lot of people in west coast cities feel increasingly unsafe. That’s partly founded (because violent crimes are increasing), and partly unfounded (just someone’s impression of a different person they aren’t comfortable around). So there is a huge emotional response.
For example - the greater LA metro area has roughly 19 million people (as of 2019 believe it's higher now)
19 million people is the equivalent of the populations of the 13 lowest population states. Including for example, South Dakota.
The last time I looked into this, roughly a year ago (and at 2019 numbers) the entire state of South Dakota has the same amount of crime as Los Angeles. However, the entire state of South Dakota is roughly 1/20th the population of Los Angeles.
We also have decades of data showing that people who grew up in or have lived large metropolises are at roughly 20%-25% greater disposition to severe mental illness such as schizophrenia. Simply for living in that environment.
So, that being said - I think somewhere like Los Angeles is doing pretty damn good for itself. It's an undeniably slightly crazy place to be living or growing up in, and their general crime levels are only at the level of a place with 1/20th of it's population, that is much less dense. In my eyes, it seems like a place with less population density would be less prone to crime.
Most people don't take any amount of time to become aware of information like this though... thus we get nowhere in solving issues.
It's certainly not just west coast cities where this is happening.
>So thousands of people might get a subconscious feeling of being unsafe, just from a small number of people who might not even be acting in unsafe ways.
In large part, it is a small number of people who make the masses feel unsafe. The issue recently has been the unwillingness or inability of authorities on every level of government to deal effectively with the small number of people causing the problems. Here in New York a series of actions have worked to make these problems far worse. Among other things, "bail reform" was passed, which eliminates holds on all but the most violent of criminals. This means that instead of removing the relatively small number of people on the street engaging in violent, anti-social and predatory behavior, they are able to roam free and remain a menace. You can't have a functional society if violent and/or mentally ill people are free to roam the streets and assault random passersby. You can't have a safe society when people caught possessing and using illegal firearms are simply released back onto the street. You can't have a decent society when street gangs are battling on the corners to control the open-air drug markets that have sprung up all over the city. And instead of dealing with, or even acknowledging these problems, officials in Albany and city hall spew rhetoric about mass incarceration and white supremacy.
The most basic and important job for any government is so maintain a basic, minimum level of public safety. Without that, nothing else they do much matters.
Look, I agree that this is a problem - but I think it is laughable to suggest our current government doesn't provide this basic, minimum level.
i think it's more a person with one of a specific subset of mental illnesses that can ruin the whole ride.
not sure what the solution to that is.
I dunno man.
I've ridden Boston and DC light rail systems pretty extensively (and NYC to a small extent) and never had an obviously homeless person ruin my ride. Heck, I can't even think of a specific instance where one did anything of note.
My coworkers on the West coast however...
“Excuse me everyone. I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Mark and I’m homeless. I’m between jobs right now and I have two kids. If anyone could spare a few cents or even a dollar, then I would really appreciate it. God bless you.”
Happened multiple times a day on my commute.
Try someone shouting in your face about how they're going to kill you and your family and that is closer to the experiences I've had with BART and homelessness.
C'mon.
I grew up in DC and a classmate of mine murdered somebody on the Metro, so it is certainly not all smiles and roses.
I agree it is much worse on the West coast.
Someone people would look at this and go wow, Nevada and the rest did a great job providing shelters and help to their homeless.
I think a more realistic answer is that they just shipped them to California.
There's a far bigger difference between California and its neighbors: housing costs and availability of housing even for those with money. I have known many well employed people in my town that have not been able to get an apartment even after applying for upwards of 20 apartments. When paired with application fees, that means that these people spend $500-$1000 merely on application fees before they finally get into an apartment.
That awful situation doesn't happen in Montana or Nevada, as far as I know.
https://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/civil-rights/fair-housin...
Statistical anomalies are a proven way of identifying cheating in a wide variety of scenarios like elections, standardized tests and sports. It isn't conclusive evidence, sure, but still a good place to start looking.
More money in panhandling too I bet.
More like they'll take the path of least resistance and go to the next town.
I'd love to see the data to back this up. Sounds like you're coming from some idea that most homeless want to be lazy and not work and stay homeless, and if jail were threatened, that all of the sudden they'd get a job and re-integrate into society. That's extremely disconnected from reality.
How can this be both true? If you can barely make rent, it must be that you're not making good money. Surely good money means you have excess after paying all necessities.
If you mistakenly believe you're making good money, but is in actual fact struggling, you must start looking for a higher paying job, lest you end up homeless due to a sudden economic shock or accident causing you to lose your income.
California has had net outflows of US citizen residents for many years, but net inflows overall due to high levels of immigration. As the housing shortage becomes even more of a crisis in California, it's driving many people out to other states, and this mostly people who are fully employed, not at risk of living on the street, but also not able to afford housing at a reasonable percentage of their income in California. Colorado housing costs now average roughly half what Bay Area housing costs, when a decade ago it was closer to 1/6th. Some cities in Texas like Austin are experiencing this as well. The population between 2010 and 2020 in Austin QUADRUPLED, and the vast majority of new residents came from California. Housing prices also have nearly quadrupled at the same time, but not quite thanks to it being very easy to build in Austin and lots of new housing being constructed. What you could buy for $250k in 2010 now costs closer to $650k in Austin. What you could buy in the Denver metro for $400k in 2010 now costs around $1M.
So it is absolutely true that in raw dollars, compared to median household income in the US, you could be "making good money" and now be barely able to pay rent if you live in a place that's had a mass influx of Californians over the last decade causing housing costs to skyrocket.
So diagnosing a problem early, and making corrections early, before the problem becomes insurmountable, is the right way to fix it.
Life is hard and things aren't fair.
True. But that has nothing to do with responsibility.
A recent BGC study estimates that, in Seattle, for example, HMIS data doesn't include up to 40% of people in encampments.
Garbage In -> Garbage Out. Pretty sweet effort, though. Wish the feds were smart like this.
Is there reason to believe the groups that are under counted experienced a larger increase the the groups that were included?
It seems the data collection has been consistent, so the conclusion of the article seems correct.
This is harder to get good data for because it would require tracking individuals across time. The payoff is that it would likely reveal evidence of structural changes if such changes exist.
At the population level it is hard to tell whether and where changes are happening. Getting the transition probabilities would allow for more effective targeting of interventions (though most of the folks who work on this already know which transitions are the hardest to recover from).
My issues with the article are:
It starts from a too high aggregation level - almost no one is homeless in California, they are homeless usually in a very narrow area e.g. within 500 metres of bridge X.
Percentage change in raw numbers are not a good way to measure "crisis", and especially not at a state or city aggregated level. It seems more like traffic to me. Even in peak hour traffic, many roads are free of traffic, and the worst affected roads are those where the level of cars exceeds the roads ability to cope. That happens in a thin range of total cars per minute for specific roads, not due to X% increase overall. The same is true of homelessness in a city vs ... let's call them "hotspots".
Perhaps even more important than numbers in specific areas is the actual conditions homelessness creates in those areas. "Bad conditions" could be everything from human faeces on the street increasing, to murders, over doses, disease and unsanitary conditions, and it is possible for "bad conditions" to decrease and homeless numbers go up, or visa versa. That is harder to measure for sure, but probably closer to what most people mean by crisis.
It seems that housing-first is the way to go. Give someone keys to their own place they can come and go from any time. Offer medical and mental health services nearby. This gives people the time and space to get well and stabilize their life. Using cops to throw someone in to a facility is just one more difficult and disruptive challenge that makes people’s lives worse, not better.
I'm not saying that help should be forced upon huge swaths of people (there are reasons to be against that in principle) or that they don't deserve a bed. I am just skeptical that housing-first would lead to much change in the mental health of that population. Addiction recovery rates are really not good even when looking at a much more financially comfortable population or people with family members that are trying their best to keep on top of them.
For many addicts, it is also difficult to recover and remain sober unless they stop spending time with others that are using. If only a minority of a dorm-style housing unit were serious about wanting to get clean this could make it even harder for them.
I originally left this comment a few months ago, but: CA especially has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one.
I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build.
Before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes concomitantly up. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs, and they're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.
The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.
Homelessness is mostly a housing problem: https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing. We can and should remove barriers to building new housing, and, until we do that, we're going to keep seeing these problems. CA SB-9 and SB-10 are steps in the right direction but they're very small steps. Tokyo's approach would be better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501. Even places like New York are proposing density reductions, insanely: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/202....
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/lack-housing-mental...
https://www.kalw.org/show/crosscurrents/2016-12-07/mental-he...
The inconvenient truth is that building low-income housing is not very profitable and no entity driven by the profit motive wants to do it. The margins on luxury condos are much better.
[1] https://www.fredvictor.org/facts-about-homelessness-in-toron...
Second, if they're buying a condo versus paying rent, that's still good because it leaves less price elastic renters in the market. You can to get those who are willing to pay much more into something higher end versus them taking the bottom and increasing its price (which is what's happened in SF).
"Filtering" has always been a housing phenomenon: https://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/ and https://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-affor....
The issue I have with this analysis is where does it end? For example, if you assume most people eventually want to live in a townhome or similar, packing people in like sardines in the name of housing affordability is a kick-the-can solution. The unstated assumption of these researchers is it’s perfectly fine for every major urban area to morph into Hong Kong given a long enough time frame.
This is assuming wrongly all people want to live in homes. #Vanlife, digital nomads, couch surfers can afford it and don’t want to. You’re ignoring that there’s a beautiful freedom people like, have you ever been homeless? Do you know what it’s like? It’s nice not to pay monthly utility bills, taxes if you own, do maintenance, and deal with neighbors, HOAs (the worst) and being able to leave somewhere without worrying about your lease expiring stress between jobs and paying for the apartment or landlord not fixing problems. If people really wanted to live in homes, they can move to where they can afford it, but they choose to stay and not live in a home. That is not an irrational decision, they are not ignorant cheaper houses elsewhere exist.
You talk as if you haven’t been homeless. You are assuming a lot of inaccurate things and I encourage you to live it to see what the real problems are such as consistent showering (doable with a gym membership), heat (living in a warm place fixes it), theft of valuables (stashing with friends and family or storage units), parking if you drive (Walmart parking lots are free), and nice socks (for the walking you’ll be doing or warmth) off the top of my head. Then I got a girlfriend and she wanted those things.
This is far removed from the theories of the philosophers, some of whom, the Demagogues, seek to rob the rich to provide for the poor. The others, who are called the Economists, do not have the welfare of the people in mind. They think only of enriching empires without worrying themselves about the fate of the individual. Thus the theories of the Economists have greatly enriched England without enriching the English. According to the Tableau de Londres you can find 115,000 paupers, prostitutes, thieves, beggars and unemployed in the city of London alone; the workers of Scotland live in a frightful state of misery. This is nonetheless the consequence of the modern systems which claim to alleviate the suffering of the people."
Charles Fourier, December 1803
It’s a great way to dehumanize people’s desires and motivations with wrong assumptions by lying with statistics.
This data does a great job at distinguishing between the unhoused population and the sheltered homeless population.
Where the unhoused are visible drives the perception.
In California, the same is true, with unhoused being just the tip of the iceberg in the homeless population, the difference is where the unhoused are. In favelas and bazaars in the middle of very expensive areas.
Strolling through highly trafficked areas of NYC you wouldnt make the broad reductive assumption that “New York has more homeless people”, whereas strolling through highly trafficked areas of SF/LA would be a complete culture shock.
It is an interesting topic as it’s not clear how much people know everytime the topic comes up. Is a prologue about distinguishing between unhoused/sheltered before engaging further really useful? Hard to say
Rent effectively doubled from 2009 to 2019. You can ether stay in Mayor Garcetti's fun house or leave. Factor in even if your able to starve off homelessness yourself, your still wasting money that's better saved. I'm happy to know America is full of functional cities where it's still possible to make it. No this doesn't mean you can afford a 2 bdrm on minimum wage, but you can find a room.
[1] https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/homeless-unhoused/...
If you truly believe "mental issues" are "causing homelessness" You are blinded by privilege, deaf by choice, and dumb by default.
Greed is causing homlessness and these numbers are ridiculous. We're at 16% homelessness here in Atlanta.
There are solutions, but not a one of you has the intellectual capacity, balls or creativity to execute.
I am in awe at how out of touch these comments are.
This article does a good job of breaking it down with a simple analysis. It makes me think of the book that inspired this musical
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subways_Are_for_Sleeping
which described quite a few different situations people were in.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...
Until it's not possible to simply ship your problems away (kind of like how we handle recycling), governments are incentivized to do the wrong things.
homeless is an incredibly broad term. i would be curious in the numbers split across different subsets, like homeless with schizophrenia.
LA, Portland & SF– are obviously measurably worse over the past decade. Portland is a case of going from beautiful downtown to cesspool in that timeframe.
There are a lot of reasons that stats are misleading. Noise in the data, biases, trivial statistics, incorrect measurement, poor geographic approaches.
Please don't sit at your desk and tell me what I see out my window doesn't exist.
I don’t doubt what you’re seeing. But that only tells a very specific story in the bigger picture.
Do I understand that correctly?
Or is it that when you say "homeless" you only mean the people you see, and not all the rest of the people that would typically fit the description of homeless?
What you see out your window certainly exists, but there is a whole lot of the world that you cannot see from your window. Claiming that your window provides the best view should at least come with some sort of argument about why it's a superior view.
The whole point of the article is that things vary widely across different locales. In some places homelessness is increasing by a little bit; in other places homelessness is increasing by a lot; in other places it's decreasing. The article also makes the useful point that perceptions of "crisis" are often related to whether unhoused folks are sheltered or unsheltered. We don't hear a lot about the homelessness crisis in New York even though its homelessness rate is statistically the highest in the nation.