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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

As unpopular as it may sound, the reason we have so many homeless is that the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. Slowly more people slip through the cracks into homelessness and lose all their power, and fewer people are left to care about them and vote in their interest.

That's the perverse thing about this, the moment you get hit by homelessness you lose basically even the most basic power you had to fight against it, your power to vote.

The only way to realistically fix this is if homelessness becomes at the very least a very sizable minority, if not a majority. And while that may be the push needed to address it, it would also be a humanitarian catastrophe.

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>" As unpopular as it may sound, the reason we have so many homeless is that the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. Slowly more people slip through the cracks into homelessness and lose all their power, and fewer people are left to care about them and vote in their interest."

I think your points are actually the popular ones. The less-popular view is that the current homeless crisis is highly correlated with drug-addiction, and it's not clear that just providing housing to fentanyl addicts will solve it.

The question is what came first. The drug addiction or homelessness? I think a lot of people see that even if they work hard they won't go anywhere so they give up.

When I grew up in Germany we had neighbors where the dad had no education, worked in a warehouse, had a house, 3 children and the mom stayed at home. In the same area now they can barely scrape by if both parents work full time. Add some mental problems to this and you quickly drop out because there is no safetey margin left these days.

No Safety margin makes it much more unlikely for the same person to make sacrifices for the future as well. There are variations of the 'marshmallow test' in which the person introducing the test lies to the child before presenting them with the choice of delaying gratification. The number of children holding out for a second marshmallow in those instances drops noticeably, and it's not hard to imagine why. Delaying gratification presupposes that the future is somewhat predictable.

When I say unpopular I mean in the way in which very few people vote to focus on fixing homelessness rather than something that personally benefits them, yet almost nobody would ever accept this is at least partly their failure and their will to have it like this.

You'll always hear people priding themselves in living in a democracy, having the power to decide, and yet when any such failure of the majority to care for the minority is pointed out it conspicuously always falls on someone else's shoulders. It's the fentanyl, they're all lazy, it's their lifestyle. People will not waste a second bragging about the good things they did with their power to vote but will always implicitly support leaving hundreds of thousands of their own people in the dirt just so the price of their real-estate is maintained, or ravaging entire nations on the other side of the world to have a cheaper tank of gas.

It solves it as much as a family taking in a family member with addiction problems. A family can’t be sure they can cure a person, but it’s an alternative to (and possibly a precursor to living on the street. Many people don’t have that alternative.

SF doesn't rank anywhere near the top in terms of drug use/overdoses, a title merited by some Midwest cities such as Omaha. This would clearly invalidate the drug-addiction -> homelessness cause and effect.

The data I've seen points in the other direction: A majority of homeless drug addicts started using AFTER they became addicts. I imagine once you're at the bottom and have little hope to improve, it's easy to give in to abandon.

In other words: In cities with cheap housing, even the drug addicts can afford a home, which is a GOOD thing IMO. For everybody, homeless and housed.

Agreed! It’s not like none of the homeowners or folks in luxury apartments in SF are using recreational drugs, they are just doing it in private because they can.

Yep, this is what I saw when I moved from the worst schooling filter district in GA to the best in the state. AFAICT wealthy people use drugs more than poor people, as drugs cost nontrivial amounts of money. Wealthy people just have safety nets that allow them to take greater risks.

Wealthy people can also avoid the cheap crappy fentanyl that is in mass circulation right now. Fentanyl is a huge problem for the unhoused here in Seattle, many of them are probably beyond rehabilitation and will require lots of help for the rest of their lives, it is really sad.

To some degree. More and more coke is being cut with fent. The dealers cutting coke with some other upper still want it to numb your nose, so they add something like lidocaine or increasingly fent as well.

Rich people are abusing opioids, Ritalin, Aderall, ecstasy. They are more likely to avoid meth and fent, and pay for quality (though you are right, they can be cheated). The homeless are much more vulnerable to bad drugs that have worse long term effects, especially conditions that are often associated with mental illness.

I've actually seen rich people go out of their way to get fent more than poor people. Once they know what it is, they appreciate the purity of the opioid. Additionally more and more MDMA sold actually isn't but is instead some analog that happens to pass reagent tests with unknown long term effects, which hits rich people as well.

Spokane used to be like that, it still is to some extent. My grandfather used to own/run what would be called a flop house (we called it "the empty arms"). Definitely this makes some neighborhoods very sketchy, but not that many homeless around (the ones that can't get housing get on the bus to Seattle or Portland since you can't really live outside in Spokane in the winter).

But even Spokane has been changing...the flop houses of old are mostly being redeveloped, housing is becoming not so cheap anymore.

San Francisco has the second highest overdose rate in the US behind Harris County. Please be more careful when sharing information.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/san-francisco-drug...

That article only looks at 10 counties: "Of the 10 places we examined, San Francisco had the second highest overdose rate in 2020 after Harris County, which contains the city of Houston."

If you look at more data, you see that even in California (https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/california/2021/mea...), SF is not at the top (Lake, Mendocino and Inyo rank higher). I'm not saying drug use is not a problem in SF. I'm just saying it's not the primary reason why we have a big homeless problem.

That said, compare with Ohio (https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/ohio/2021/measure/f...) where there are dozens of counties that more than double SF's overdose rate. And still, their homelessness rate is a fraction of California's.

looks like there must be some serious differences in methodology between these 2 sources.

sfchronicle has the overdose death rate for:

SF at 61 per 100k

Humboldt at 31 per 100k

Cited from Cali Dept of public health

CountryHealthRankings has:

SF at 23 per 100k

Humboldt at 32 per 100k

It's possible, I haven't looked into the details. But so far I'm yet to see a national study that puts SF anywhere near the top. It's just more visible because addicts are on the street, compared to other metros.

It would help to make a distinction between those who become homeless because they're addicts and those who became addicts because they were homeless. Providing housing to the later group would slow the growth of long-term homelessness by not letting people fall so far that they get stuck on the addict path.

This is trope that reinforces itself here. It gets repeated without evidence quite often.

"the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. "

I think that's becoming an ever bigger problem. The decision makers are completely disconnected from the concerns of people with low incomes. They live in different areas, go to different schools, have different entertainment and work at different workplaces.

I remember chatting with a waitress last year on a hike. She told me about reduced working hours during COVID, worries about paying rent, car insurance and health care bills. She was really close to losing everything because she had no parents or relatives she could move to. And I thought about how I personally barely noticed COVID other than a few minor inconveniences like mask wearing or reduced socializing.

I don't know how to fix this but this complete disconnect between people who are in a position to make decisions vs the people who are most affected by these decisions is pretty scary.

Most of us who read HN, even in low CoL areas, make good money. But 10 or so years from now, I don't think even the money we make will keep us from feeling the pinch of the next COVID. We'll be house poor and our other bills will have gone up so much faster than even switching jobs every 2.25 years will keep up with. We'll stop having kids because even we won't be able to afford the HC for them.

In which country do you loose the power to vote when you become homeless? I suspect that was not a democratic country in the first place.

It is difficult to register to vote when you don't have a home address.

Please don’t take it personally if you live there, but I find it so absurd all the bullshit you need to go through to vote in the US.

Why on earth is a home address needed to vote? Of course you need to vote where you are registered, I cannot vote in another city beside mine too, but even if I lose my house today I can keep voting in my city until I have a document that proves my identity, eventually for all my life.

Pardon my rant, it is not towards you or your comment, but some policies in the US are simply crazy.

Americans also consider using id to vote racist / discriminatory so usually these discussions end up in circles. AFAIK only anglo countries don't use id in the developed world to vote.

My reading of the poster's comment was that you don't literally lose your right to vote but may *effectively* lose your right to vote simply through bureaucratic requirements. In the US, you can still vote as a homeless person, however you are required to list where you reside. A quick google led me to the instructions "mark your residence as a homeless shelter" which still could be prohibitive to those who chose not to live in a shelter, those experiencing homelessness in areas without shelters, etc.

It may seem trivial to some -- "just vote somewhere with a shelter" but it's worth noting that homelessness as a state is an extreme burden and these kind of options simply may not exist depending on an individual.

Voting alone gives you very little meaningful power in most liberal democracies. In order to have a meaningful influence on policy, you need to have either a lot of money (the easier way) or a lot of time and focused energy to organize constituencies (the hard way).

Very poor people tend to have neither. Obviously they don't have money, but they also tend to be overwhelmed with the daily struggle to stay alive, or emotionally beaten down by dealing with various kinds of trauma.

That means even when homeless people manage to vote individually, they aren't likely to find politicians who cater to their needs directly. Instead the best they can hope for is a politician who caters to middle-class and wealthy people who care about the abstract concept of homelessness and have their own ideas about how to address it.

There is more than one solution and multiple solutions simpler than what you propose. Plurality voting would allow for representation of even the smallest minorities and allow for allocation of resources proportional to the severity and number of people affected by a particular social issue.

we fuck people over left and right to a degree that it almost feels like it's for sport

we built this meatgrinder and I forget why and for who

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