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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> There are some exceptions. For one thing, despite being close to California, Nevada and some of the Montana-esque states saw big decreases in certain categories.

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.

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The data doesn't really seem to support this, and my personal experience doesn't either. Most homeless people in my Californian town were living nearby when they became homeless. And though I didn't go to high school here, friends who did recognize people they grew up among the homeless.

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.

Yikes, application fees are illegal where I live. That's some pretty absurd rent-seeking. Is there a limit, or could an unscrupulous "landlord" post an ad with very low rent for a room, and live off the application fees without ever accepting an application?

Seattle had to pass a law requiring landlords to accept the first qualified applicant in part due to this occurring.

https://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/civil-rights/fair-housin...

How long were they in California before they became homeless? If they were living in a center for transients or were on a couch for a year before being homeless (but were relatively destitute in Nevada prior to this), then the data absolutely supports it.

There is never going to be official data on this by design, but there is evidence of it happening all over the country, and "friendly" places like California being on the receiving end of it (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...).

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.

There is official data and it's these reunification programs. Plenty of rich cities will give you a bus ticket to live with friends and family. Most of the time it works out. Sometimes it doesn't and that unsheltered person is right back in the same place they left. But the person has to agree to house them before a bus ticket is purchased. They simply don't put them on the bus and let them figure it out.

These bus tickets would presumably come out of municipal budgets, right? So not only would such data exist, it would also have to be publicly accessible.

San Francisco absolutely has this data, and most people that were homeless were in SF already before. Unfortunately their most recent report is 404ing on their website, but I posted it to HN just about a month ago.

Homeless people aren't stupid. They go where they can live. Nobody wants to winter in North Dakota lol.

More money in panhandling too I bet.

I thought that too about the weather but what about New York?

if you read the article you would know that the majority of the homeless population in nyc are sheltered as a 1979 class action lawsuit found that it was a constitutional right for the homeless to be sheltered.

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." —- hn guidelines

You're right. that came off as condescending. I'm sorry.

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/Socratic%20irony

I don’t really know what was meant by this link, but I can say someone I work with does this and it is infuriating. I never know if he is pretending or not when he asks for help. I can’t trust him.

NYC is probably a local maxima, where everywhere around it is more expensive to live with less opportunity for panhandling / social services, and it is a long uncertain hike from there to somewhere that has weather as mild as the San Francisco bay. I also imagine that the social services in the south east are less desirable because of their politics around taxing less / spending less

Plenty of homeless resources in New York.

From what I've seen, it's more likely that it's because it's easier and cheaper to building housing in Nevada than in California. The states where homelessness has improved are generally business-friendly and low-regulation states.

And also make homelessness a crime. But conveniently they push you toward places that help with people on the verge of homelessness. All things combined with yours that these coastal places do not. If people are threatened with jail for being a vagrant, they'll eventually take the path of least resistance and get a job.

> If people are threatened with jail for being a vagrant, they'll eventually take the path of least resistance and get a job.

More like they'll take the path of least resistance and go to the next town.

Solves the problem of the people who wanted to minimize homelessness in their area didn't it?

> If people are threatened with jail for being a vagrant, they'll eventually take the path of least resistance and get a job.

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.

I've never met a homeless person that actually wanted to get out of homelessness to not do so. Almost all homeless people I've ever run into are the severely mentally ill and drug addicts. It's awful to say this, but they are not worth devoting resources to if they can't fix themselves. They are lost causes until they decide themselves that they are not. It'd be great if we could help them, but it's an utter waste of time to devote resources to these people who just don't want to change. If they want to prove us wrong, they need to show us they want to change. We're not gonna be some sort of saviors to them to foster an enabling environment for them to just abuse.

Evidence? I've read articles talking about homeless being shipped both out of CA and into CA, but no solid reporting that quantifies the gap between those two flows.

I don't think this is true because it is non-chronic homelessness which decreased in Nevada. Is there any evidence for this theory?

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