Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population?

It doesn't. It has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless. It has 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless -- i.e. people camped outside.

It has so many unsheltered homeless in part because parts of the state are temperate and dry. Much of the time, it's not a hardship to sleep outside in some parts of California.

View on HN

Similar to what I've seen in HI. I imagine there would be more in HI if it didn't cost an expensive plane ticket.

There are. And they're vastly undercounted. Au contraire, the HI govt often deports the homeless off the island

SF and further north are hardly nice weather locations.

SF isn’t a tropical paradise, but temperature extremes that cause death aren’t very common.

Definitely, the winter I visited Mountain View it was 2C (35F) and ground frost.

I think above freezing in winter might generally be considered nice weather.

Define nice weather. If we are talking winters with temperatures consistently over 0C (32F), little to no snow, seattle and portland are great for winter.

Nice weather for homeless people basically means not strong shelter required to survive, unlike the midwest and east coast which consistently freeze in winter.

But relative to a lot of the US-- Chicago, New York.. it is very survivable.

I found this chart[1] and I do wonder how Oregon and Washington have such a high unsheltered population; I'm not familiar with the PNW, are parts of the states mild? The rest of that chart is pretty much in line with how I perceive winters to be.

1: https://www.thecentersquare.com/florida/article_67aeebc1-e7b...

The coast is relatively mild compared to inline Oregon or Washington, but winters are still wet and cold (especially in Washington).

> inline

"inland," sorry.

I'm not first-hand familiar with Oregon, but some parts of Washington have moderate temps. Coastal Washington gets a lot of rain but rarely freezes and -- anecdotally -- at least one city in Coastal Washington has vastly worse rates of homelessness on a per capita basis than some of the cities infamous for it, like Seattle and SF. And, yes, they are mostly camped outside, not in shelters.

Which city? I was in Spokane recently (obviously not the coastal city you are speaking about) and was surprised by how full of homeless people downtown was.

Olympia?

The PNW has interesting geography: the Cascades run North/South right near the Western shore, and they catch most of the rain that the Pacific hurls at the area.

West of the mountains, it's temperate and damp. The Olympic peninsula is technically a rainforest, but the populous areas tend to get a lot of drizzle rather than heavy rain. Snow is rare at low elevations, even in winter.

East of the mountains, it's temperate and arid. Lots of power generation and agriculture on former tribal lands.

In the mountains, large national forests which allow dispersed camping.

It's not always "mild", but wherever you end up, it's usually not inhospitable. The summers have gotten much worse lately though, Seattle was a city where nobody felt the need for air conditioners as recently as 10-20 years ago. Now they sell out in the first heat wave of the summers, and new apartment buildings are starting to include them.

Portland OR - cold and wet winters (occasionally the temps drop low enough that the rain becomes snow and/or ice). Hot and dry summers. Very dry summers. Not a lick of rain. Spring and Fall are a mix between the two. Gradually the rains taper off in the spring. Gradually the rains pick up in the fall.

West coast winters are very mild, and there is very little humidity. We had a few days that got below freezing last year, most days were over 40.

If you need to live in a tent, or a broken RV with no AC or heat, would you rather live in Chicago (super cold), Houston (super hot and humid) or Sacrament to Portland (super mild year round, low humidity)

The coastal Pacific Northwest where most people live has mild weather all year, better than many parts of California. It rarely freezes in winter and rarely gets hot enough that you need an air conditioner in summer. Contrary to reputation, it has relatively few days of meaningful precipitation, especially in cities like Seattle that sit in a rain shadow.

If you are going to live unsheltered in the US, the cities in the PNW are definitely among the better locales to do so in terms of amenable weather.

West of the Cascades, it's mild. To the east of them the climate is decidedly less mild, though, so I'd be interested to see how the numbers would compare between the two regions.

Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.

I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.

Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.

And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.

I don't personally mind the idea of not being able to buy a house. That's not a thing I'm interested in anyway.

But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's nightmare fuel right there.

The two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?

Yes, absolutely true. I wasn't really saying that not being able to buy a house is a good thing, but I did speak before thinking here.

There are things besides individual citizens and corporations that could, in theory, own and rent housing.

There are a lot of individuals who buy investment properties. I have friends who use this as their primary retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties. They are just successful small-business owners and the properties are their private property, unrelated to the business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most rental units were still owned by small landlords.

Yes quite. But we were contemplating a future where small scale landlords were extinct.

Why would they go extinct though? This makes no sense.

I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com