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Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

Maybe instead of creating a police state to "remove people forever", we should make sure people don't become homeless drug addicts in the first place?

The US has a dearth of psychiatric beds available, with 14 beds per 100k population. The EU for comparison has 69. Experts say you need at least 50. [0] [1].

You have all these people that need help, but have no way of getting it. Add to that the rampant inequality and the high cost of housing and it's no surprise things got this bad.

We need to fix the systemic issues, not just lock up some poor souls that were failed by the system.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

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this is a naive view of the world. not all homelessness is involuntary. the issue is much more complex than "why don't we just do more to help these people?"

I'm from Austria and homelessness is a non-issue here. There's 15k homeless in the entire country. [0]

I can't even remember the last time I saw a homeless person in Vienna, a city of two million people. The reason it's like that is because we fixed the systemic issues that plague the US. [1]

It's not my view of the world that's naive. It's yours that's overly cynical and that cynicism is holding your country back.

[0] https://www.feantsa.org/download/austria-2017859919493467368...

[1] https://crosscut.com/2017/06/homelessness-housing-crisis-sea...

Factoring for population that's almost identical.

0.16% for Austria and 0.17% for the US, given my back of the envelope math and a quick Google search.

You sure those systemic issues are fixed?

edit: Numbers I used.

Austria 8933346[0]/15000[1] - 0.16%

US: 330000000[2]/580466[3] - 0.17%

[0]https://www.migration.gv.at/en/living-and-working-in-austria...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596289

[2]https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[3]https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

Very interesting, I can't argue with your math, props to you!

I have however lived in cities in both the US and Austria extensively and can anecdotally tell you the homelessness doesn't even compare.

If all those numbers are correct, I would assume it's a distribution issue? Maybe there's a small percentage of homeless folks all over Austria, while they're a lot more segregated into certain cities in the US?

Yes these are called sanctuary cities - liberal-ran cities where bosses just seem to love bums.

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