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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

We should be clear that we force people onto the street, it's a collective choice. Need proof? Simply pass a constitutional amendment that no elected official shall be eligible for re-election if the annual count of homeless individuals exceeds 100 people statewide. We would have emergency shelters built for every homeless person within a month, street teams sweeping back alleys 24/7, and hotlines for reporting encampments.

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No, they'd simply redefine what the word homeless means.

There are shelters for every homeless person already. The homeless prefer the street.

Yes because the shelter is disproportionately (vs on any random street) full of mentally ill, illness (hepatitis, TB, you name it), parasites (bed bugs. etc), and unreasonable rules. I used to do day labor while homeless in places like North Dakota during the oil boom; homelessness sleeping in a ditch under a tarp is 1000x better than listening to someone tell me I can't have a beer with my snack before sleeping or droning on about jesus.

For a person of sane mind without drug addiction setting up your own shelter (tent, whatever) is trivially easy to do and vastly superior to organized shelter. It doesn't take much ingenuity to find a secluded spot no one will find; for instance even in crowded in chicago I'd just climb onto an abandoned building and sleep on the roof.

This is simply false. For example in Los Angeles[1]:

> There are currently 435 sites countywide with 11,499 beds available.

Meanwhile there are 48,041 unsheltered homeless people in LA county at last count[2].

With that being said, some people do not want to use shelters, and because the shelter beds are wildly outnumbered by the homeless population the government is not allowed to penalize anyone for camping on the street. Only when the government has provided adequate shelter for everyone can any ordinances against street camping be enforced, per the Supreme Court ruling in Martin v. Boise.

[1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/400d7b75f18747c4ae1ad22...

[2] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php

Comparing the number of available beds with the number of unsheltered homeless people does not disprove parent's argument that there is a bed for everyone who wants a bed.

A better question would be -- what the average shelter utilization?

> Comparing the number of available beds with the number of unsheltered homeless people does not disprove parent's argument that there is a bed for everyone who wants a bed.

It does, because the claim was not that there's a bed for everyone who wants one. The claim was exactly this:

> There are shelters for every homeless person already. The homeless prefer the street.

Which is a plainly incorrect statement, if for no other reason than the fact that 'the homeless' aren't a monolithic group with the identical goals.

> 'the homeless' aren't a monolithic group with the identical goals.

I didn't say that they were a monolithic group. I said the homeless prefer the street. Considering there is space for them in shelters this is obviously true. Obviously there are many reasons why they prefer the street, but they are monolithic in their choice to not utilize the shelters.

> I didn't say that they were a monolithic group. I said the homeless prefer the street.

If you're not making any distinctions within the population you're just spouting meaningless statements. You can also say 'the homeless prefer permanent housing,' or 'the homeless have never used drugs in their life' and it's equally true, because it's true in some cases.

> Obviously there are many reasons why they prefer the street, but they are monolithic in their choice to not utilize the shelters.

Considering the fact that there are in fact homeless people in shelters, saying they're 'monolithic' in their choice not to utilize shelters is incorrect on its face.

If you believe this, you've never spoken with an unhoused person in your life.

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