How America moves homeless people around the country | Hacker News Reader

How America moves homeless people around the country

theguardian.com

58 pointsgmays107 comments

It’s hard to find a more important moral, economic, and environmental cause these days more actionable than just building more housing.

There’s an increasing class of unhoused, transitory people. Not just in the US, but plenty of people around the world who are hard working decent people who have become refugees due to war, climate, or economic pressures. Not to mention the people who have to commute great distances for middle class jobs who would love to live nearby. Yet, we’re forced sadly, to hire teachers and essential personnel essentially as mercenaries with no connection to their community.

The upside to housing in terms of fewer commutes, connected communities, a healthier humanity, and supporting sustainable businesses can’t be overstated.

The best way to get people to build more housing? Tax the land that it's built on. Not the building, like we do now. The way our property taxes currently function, any development is disincentivized and increases your tax bill for daring to improve the world around you. If you instead tax the land, people who sit around and do nothing with $1 lots will actually have to do something, or sell it to someone who will.

That seems to make sense. Are there any cities or states that have tried that? If not, why not?

Detroit is considering it. Nobody else has tried it, so far as I know.

Why not? Well, it's a... let's call it a "heterodox" economic theory. It's not mainstream.

And, if a state were to do it, it would probably have negative effects on farming. (A city, not so much, unless there was significant farmland within the city limits.) Making most of the farms in your state less economically viable is probably not a formula for winning elections, so a state is probably not going to go for it.

> And, if a state were to do it, it would probably have negative effects on farming.

So create a different tax system for farmland, or exempt them from taxes. It's not like giving farmers subsidies and tax relief is unprecedented.

Sure. It just blows some of the "one simple trick" aura around a land tax. "One simple trick... except we have to exempt farmland from it... and there may be some other fiddles we need to keep it from ruining other groups by unintended consequences... and then everybody and their dog are going to claim that it's unfairly disadvantaging their group...." That's a much messier sell than "just tax land".

Anyone who tries to sell you a simple, cure-all solution is lying. Exemptions, incentives, edge cases, and more all have to be taken into account - ESPECIALLY when you are dealing with something as sensitive as people's money. The tax code is already super complicated as it is for a reason.

Well, to agree with you (am I allowed?) and say a word on your side of the question: A land use tax could have a number of exceptions and complications and still be far simpler than what we have now.

The best way to get housing built is to build it. The government could pay for it to get built directly. We have an aversion to that, so there's no political will to do so, but why bullshit around with weird taxes and hope "market forces" result in what we wish for, like a Republican that genuinely believes in trickle down economics?

Just build the damn housing.

This has been tried and has both worked and failed. Failed in some cases where governments built large clusters of apartment towers without much heed to community or spaces for urban renewal and local business. And succeeded when there were more comprehensive plans than "just build housing". See for example many European countries and Singapore.

It needs be an intelligent holistic approach or it can lead to fractured failed communities.

Most people do not want the US government to be their landlord.

If the choice is between sleeping on the sidewalk owned by Uncle Sam or the bed-under-a-roof owned by Uncle Sam, most people will take the latter.

There is a lot of housing in places like Buffalo and Detroit but it seems that humans are like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz and can't stand to live anywhere in that has water. Instead, rich and poor, they want to dogpile in places where water supply is problematic.

Certainly the carbon footprint of putting people into housing that exists has to be less than building whole new buildings.

It’s not quite that simple. A teacher for a Silicon Valley school can’t yet easily commute from Buffalo. And the limited housing in Silicon Valley will be consumed by techies.

Yet I agree that more tech businesses being in places with lower costs of living would help a ton. And I’d be up for anything that - in addition to housing in places that need it - tried to draw the highest paying businesses to places like Buffalo.

Yet, it’s not that simple still, given remote work. People still are going towards more attractive locations and buying up the housing. And that’s very hard to legislate against.

Lets put it this way. If "Big Tech" relocated 50,000 jobs into swing states it would be the end of the Trumpist Republican party. And it wouldn't cost billions of dollars, it would save billions of dollars.

If Apple, Google and such weren't near-monopolies that can afford to burn billion dollar bills they might well be forced to move their operations to somewhere cost competitive.

But then their taxes would go up. They are happy to give to both political parties, but they ultimately don't want to pay much of anything to support any kind of social progress.

If you really believe the story that there is something uniquely productive about SV then it is really the land and community that are valuable and that community would be justified in raising taxes drastically until “Big Tech” started to move away.

Maybe 35 years ago read an article about a study of the reasons corporations move their head quarters. The biggest reason was to be close to where the CEO and VP's want to live. That sticks with me more and more. Because if true we're spending an enormous amount of resources on that.

My snide comment about unaffordable housing in San Francisco has been, maybe those VC's can point their fire hose of money somewhere else for a while.

So it's a universal thing. I lived in a historical city near Rio de Janeiro, called Petrópolis. It has always impressed me how they do not had any homeless people or stray dogs around the city. Later on I discovered that the city would rent a bus and send them all to Rio de Janeiro, making it their problem.

not a universal thing. in the EU such an action would be considered against the right to freedom of movement. there are places that offer help to those homeless that want to go back home. but they are not forced out of the city that they are staying in.

Yes, but the EU does crazy things like offer, their citizens, free, healthcare, or low-cost healthcare.

cries in American

healthcare is neither free nor low-cost. but insurance is pretty much mandatory. if you don't have insurance however an emergency room visit for a minor injury can set you back $300 at least in one case that i saw. (because the injury was minor they left and found a cheaper hospital that only charged about $100)

I just want to share that a similar ER visit in the US for a minor injury basically isn't possible / reasonable.

If your injury is minor and you're uninsured, you're going to be dumping potentially thousands of dollars just to receive some gauze and time, or an IV and being ignored for a couple hours. It's seriously unimaginable for most Americans to even consider an ER visit for something that's not life threatening or extremely severe.

$300 is unimaginably cheap for any level of care. $100 is less than the cost of a 20 minute scheduled visit to an in-network doctor (before/without insurance, which tends to bring it down to about 10-30 dollars). It's so absurdly cheap that, while I get the spirit of suggesting it's not free, that's absolute, absurdly low-cost compared to America.

I know several people in the US who get free healthcare via the ER. I'm sure they get bills, but they just don't pay them. It's like the dumbest and most expensive free healthcare system in the world.

The American government spends more on public healthcare per capita than any other nation.

https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

Cities will do anything to 'solve' the problem of homelessness except building enough housing for everyone.

The only housing that works for a dude that's cracked out on meth and smearing human excrement on the walls is a cement room. Until we can figure out what to do with people who refuse to live in the rest of society we'll be limited on any possible solution to assist people in need.

Overdoses and tweakers exist just about everywhere, you just don't see them because... they are housed.

Having been homeless before - fuck that mentality.

The majority of homelessness is brought about as a result of circumstances, not drugs.

Domestic Violence, lack of affordable housing, lack of social safety nets, LGBTQ individuals ousted from their families, mental illness with lack of support.

I was homeless for 3 years, because I was LGBT and my parents cut me off from support. Rent in Seattle doubled when Amazon moved in, and the roommates I was living with were unreliable. I ended up homeless and moved to a small town that had even less amenities and had the mentality that if I was homeless I must have been on drugs.

I was treated with disdain by most of the people I was trying to get help from, finding a job was much harder without a permanent address. Housing assistance programs had 3 year waitlists. I was told if I wanted more assistance I should have a baby because it would push me to the front of the list.

The "cracked out methhead smearing human excrement on the walls" is someone that needs psychiatric help, not jail. And they are a relatively small portion of the homeless population.

Such cases are a very tiny minority of homeless people. The vast majority go unnoticed because they don't "look" homeless. 74% of homeless people aren't drug addicts. 43% of homeless people are employed. Most sleep temporarily at friends homes, or in their cars, or in shelters. Homeless youth especially tend to blend in. Most people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity do so because of economic reasons like high housing prices, poor employment opportunities, and low wages, often coupled with medical disability. The next leading cause is people escaping abuse. And homelessness is merely the most extreme case of housing insecurity, which affects around 12% of Americans.

The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd.

"The idea that we can't do anything for 4 people because 1 of them has a drug problems is absurd." I've noticed this with almost all social issues especially social services for a long time. People I am close to would argue how they don't support food stamps for example because there was corruption or some people would be taking advantage of it. I always argued back that they were completely ignoring the unspoken majority of beneficiaries that it dramatically helped. As you can probably see by so many of the comments in this thread there is a lot of that thinking that the problem is intractable due to the minority being seen as the majority. My concern is how can we change the narrative? How do we communicate the unseen majorities plight in a way that doesn't get ignored or overlooked? It seems that using statistics like those provided would be enough but in my experience it rarely convinces those that solely think that the homeless should "get a job" or be put in jail as the OP of this specific thread stated. They seem to have a negative visceral reaction to this and really any of the social ills that are affecting so many people. What is driving that visceral reaction? How can we create solidarity between these disparate groups and organize people in a way that real change can occur?

I always felt that DeFi is the obvious solution to these problems. These people need ways to get paid or take out loans so they can get back on their feet, but it’s difficult with America’s draconian regulations. More succinctly, we need to bank the unbanked.

The obvious solution is for the banking industry to partner with the post office and offer basic services through them. It's win-win - the post office gets a new revenue stream, and the banks get to close branches. Nowhereville doesn't need a Bank of America, but it'll always have a post office.

Example: afaik, Japan essentially does this

Example 2: France

Example 3: The USA.

It was subsequently shut down because it couldn't compete with private banks.

Why does a public service need to be competitive with private banks? I think much of the point is to collectively pay for a safety-net service. That service is: minimal banking functionality for all citizens, so that they can contribute to society.

(Edited for tone. Sorry about that!)

It cost money to run and the customer base pulled its funds in favor of better choices.

The goal of a postal bank is often framed in terms of a source of revenue for the USPS. Examples include in this very thread. If there's no expectation of net-positive revenue, then there needs to be a different justification for why the post office should spend money to offer everyone banking service inevitably inferior to the private sector. Plus, now you have all the politics that come with a subsidized service and paying for it. If it can pay for itself, it's much simpler.

Postal banking is often advanced as an idea for a public service that will eat Wall Street's lunch to the benefit of all. We should be at least a bit skeptical of the unvarnished optimism of that. Further, I think that if we're going to seriously discuss the topic we need to grapple seriously with why the US doesn't have one anymore.

>It cost money to run and the customer base pulled its funds in favor of better choices.

Again, you're presenting things in commercial terms, but this was never meant to be a commercial enterprise.

>Postal banking is often advanced as an idea for a public service that will eat Wall Street's lunch to the benefit of all.

That is a silly idea, but it seems you're ignoring the good idea. Again, this idea is: pay for a service that ensures Americans always have minimum viable banking. Upshots include: poor people can participate in the economy and in some cases, pull themselves out of poverty.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but the United States Postal Service is self-funding. My understanding is that they are required to be. They do not receive a yearly budget from Congress.

This means questions like "How will this be paid for?" are not idle distractions to derail good ideas with impossible perfection. They are key obstacles to be overcome. To have USPS run a bank as a non-self-funding public service would mean they would have to go to Congress to raise prices to subsidize it. This is always a political process, and I imagine the cost of things like stamps falls more on the poor than on the rich.

Alternatively, you could find a way to rework the entire legal and financial infrastructure of the USPS so that it does run on direct federal funding. This is, to put it mildly, a lot of work.

Whether or not it's a good idea depends in no small part on what your precise goals are and how you expect to achieve them. If your goal is for poor people to have access to basic banking services, then the Bank On program and local credit unions might be better options for many people. If your goal is for poor people to have access to credit, then a postal bank is probably not a good choice unless you want lots of poor people having their credit wrecked by a public service.

Generally the idea is to have a public bank with the postal system being a convenient vehicle for that, rather than some deep and fundamental ties between post offices and banks in the modern world. The postal service in the US might not be as ideal a vehicle as it is in some other places.

In summary, a postal bank that can pay for itself is far more likely to get set up and deployed widely. This is an important point because of how USPS is regulated.

Can you help me understand how distributed financial systems enable people in dire need of housing and supportive social services, who often with poor to zero access to legal infrastructure, get back on their feet when they are often struggling with mental health or substance abuse problems? Bonus points for an explanation that helps in the context of high housing costs, housing supply shortages, and the people in question experiencing low incomes.

We also need to add serious mental health care as many are suffering from mental health issues self remedied by addiction to intoxicants. I have a family member who's been addicted for decades and even holding their hand by driving them to detox (a huge fucking scam) or therapy and putting a roof over them with food is not enough. They're so mentally fried from years of doing nothing but being high: no job, no social life, no hobbies - they just get high to pass the time day after day after day for over two decades. The only reality they know is a stupor. Sure, they might make a little progress from the weekly visits to a shrink but any stressor sends them right back to cloud city. From my experience they need daily if not 24/7 companionship with some kind of mental health life coach or whatever to keep them focused and anchored. Any opportunity to get high they will take so they need continuous supervision. Even family members don't have that kind of time to invest. It's such a stupid hard problem to solve.

The solution to bank the unbanked doesn't need a technological solution, it needs a motivation solution - banks can already "bank" everyone if they want to, but they don't. The EU approach to that is establishing a right to a basic bank account that banks can't refuse, often with a combination of ID laws that try to ensure that everyone has a gov't issued ID - and the outcome (at least local to me) is that even homeless drug/alcohol addicts begging on the street do generally have a bank account and payment card, and that is the mechanism they use, for example, for accessing any government benefits (such as social security) they may receive.

But that being said, while banking the unbanked is IMHO a good thing, I'm not convinced that it would be a meaningful change to reducing homelessness - if they get a job, they can get paid in various other ways, and the problem with loans is not with executing the loan payment, but with someone willing to lend them money and accept the risk of default.

Building housing can address the housing-prices problem, but the homeless problem is actually a drug problem, which is actually a mental health problem, which is actually a deep social problem.

You can't solve fentanyl with housing.

It's both! There is a subset of homeless who are addicted to drugs and a subset that isn't. It is oversimplifying to reduce homelessness to a drug problem. Lower housing prices would help most homeless (and everyone else who pays for housing).

I thought you were wrong but in Vancouver BC for instance, “only” two thirds said they were addicted to one or more substances.

https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-homeless-count-2019...

> Of those who reported an addiction, 38% identified an addiction to cigarettes ... alcohol (22%), marijuana (21%)

> followed by opioids (33%), methamphetamine (29%), alcohol (22%)

If this was true, you would expect to see high rates of homelessness correlate with high rates of drug and alcohol use, no? It seems like in the US, states with high rates of overdose deaths [0] don't seem to have correspondingly high rates of homelessness [1], but do have much cheaper housing [2]. It's obviously a contributor, but I really don't think it's a silver bullet - you could 'solve' drug addiction today and you'd still have a homelessness crisis.

Obviously both are problems - but I think there are many people who would remain housed in spite of their addictions if housing was, on the whole, much cheaper.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...

[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-...

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#medi...

I suspect some confounding variables there. States with high homeless and drug use are more likely to have better ability to respond to a crisis like overdose no? It's likely that states with cheaper housing, such as the state I live in, have less options for drug addiction treatment and overdose response.

I don't know, I am just a skeptical person when it comes to making decisive causal inference from statistical data. That is very difficult.

Isn’t it possible that if you’re ODing in the middle of a city someone will notice you, vs you ODing in your trailer all alone?

How do you expect addicts and mentally ill people that can’t hold a job to hold housing? How do you reinsert them into the society?

I think it would be easier to create incentives for people to find work, support and housing in cheaper areas so they can get on their feet. It’s unrealistic in todays reality to expect new affordable housing in the most expensive cities in the country.

I also want to live cheap in SF or manhattan, unfortunately it’s not possible. So if I want that, I have to go to a Kansas, central Florida, etc. what is lacking in those places is accessibility, support and how to get there.

If that’s expected of me as a rational solution, should also be an option for a homeless person. What I cannot expect of a homeless person is for them to make it there and find something to do, secure a house, etc.

How much housing would you have to build in NYC, SF, Oakland, Seattle, Portland, Boston for it to be affordable? Doesn’t make sense to expect “housing” to pop up at levels that bring rent down from 4k to welfare levels in todays reality. We can talk about utopia all you want, but it’s not happening.

You also can't effectively treat a homeless person for drug addiction, they need somewhere to live consistently.

It's also a problem with the housing system. Discrimination against people who have a rental debt is leveraged as a business practice, and is horribly abused.

There's an unregulated credit bureau where apartment buildings report rental debts to enforce collection. If you have a record in that database, you can't get housing at most residential apartment buildings. This, of course, puts way too much power in the hands of apartment building owners and management companies.

They can set ridiculous terms in their leases, inflate prices, and otherwise do as they please. If you disagree, your only option is court. If you can't afford that, your only option is to comply. If you can't afford to comply, you're out of luck. Your next housing is likely to be an extended stay hotel for two or three times a typical rental for much shoddier housing without any kind of rental protection or eviction protection.

It's not just people on drugs or with mental health issues who are homeless. Those are the _visible_ homeless. The ones on the street without jobs. Not the person in a cubicle nearby who never tells you about their housing problem out of fear that it will negatively affect their professional prospects.

You’re right. Most homeless people, about 80%, do not have mental issues. These people tend to fully recover within 6-12 months. Unfortunately, the chronically homeless all have mental issues.

As far as I am aware this is mostly BS and numerous analyses have found that housing prices have far more of an effect than drug use. This podcast episode covers the common arguments about homelessness, drug abuse, and mental illness. Feel free to check the sources and see if everything adds up.

If Books Could Kill: https://podcasts.apple.com/lv/podcast/san-fransicko/id165187...

Googling causes of the recent homeless boom, you’ll see housing costs pushing people over the brink from transitory housing to no housing is the major factor[1]

Even building luxury housing removes pressure from the lower end of the market, as if there’s no luxury housing people buy up distressed properties. It’s musical chairs and those who can’t afford the fixed number of chairs end up on the street.

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...

You can't solve fentanyl with just housing, but you can't solve it (or some other addiction, or mental illness) at all when you're living in a tent by the overpass, and no human being is willing to make eye contact with you, either.

Most homelessness is not drug addicts who can't live in society. The vast majority of homeless people are those who can't afford a house, usually due to draconian and unfair zoning restrictions artificially limiting supply and pushing prices past what people can afford.

The people who are drugged out and can't live in society peacefully are more visible, but they are by far the minority.

But it is the drugged out visible long term homeless that this article is about and the problem everyone wants to solve. It is also the problem that hasn't been solved at all. In my city (LA) we have successful programs for the person who lost his job and then his apartment and ended up sleeping in his car.

Grouping the majority of homeless, who are short term, with the people living in tents on the sidewalk, smoking meth freely, is a rhetorical trick

The thing is there is little political interest in the "quiet" homeless problem. When people talk about the homeless they're referring to the drugged out people who can't live in society peacefully. They don't care about the homeless they don't see.

I haven't seen any data showing if people became addicted to drugs first and then became homeless due to that or if it was the other way around. I can totally see people becoming homeless first and then getting addicted to drugs because being homeless sucks. Again, haven't seen any data to show which way happens more often but the data showing rates of homelessness are lower in areas with lower housing costs is pretty telling.

74% of homeless people aren't addicted to drugs. And homelessness is merely the most extreme form of housing insecurity which affects 12% of all Americans. It's not actually a drug problem, it's a housing problem.

... and mental health and the actual desire to move in under a roof.

Ithaca, NY is struggling with a large homeless colony. Ithaca has built enough new housing in the last few years that the skyline is transformed, there are cranes in the air like I've rarely seen in a city in the US. Ithaca also has robust public services, shelters, etc.

For the most part homeless people in Ithaca could get into a shelter and then get into some kind of permanent housing with public assistance but most of the people in "the Jungle" won't go through the process to get that for various reasons. This is a different situation from out west where public services are completely overwhelmed.

Which cities are building houses? Traditionally, owners of private property do that. Chicago once built housing. It became so crime infested they had to tear it all down.

Cities often have policies that prevent private developers from building more housing.

cities and nimbys use zoning to prevent it

Owners of private property want to build housing, but cities create laws that prevent anything from being built.

I'm not familiar with the event you are talking about, could you provide a little more context? Purely for my own edification.

I am not sure which housing they are referring to, but I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes.

That looks like a match, thank you!

Wow, looks like it was a pretty complicated situation. I don't think OPs reference to it made any sense. Might make sense for a checklist of what not to do with regards to public housing.

> except building enough housing for everyone.

More specifically, except to allow the building of enough housing, through removing onerous regulation.

This has sort of been said, but this really isn't true. The type of homelessness solved by building more housing is people living out of weekly rentals, hotels, couch-surfing with their friends, or staying with their parents forever. They're not the kind of people cities are trying to bus away. The kind of people cities are trying to bus away are walking the streets screaming at imagined ghosts. Some small number may have jobs and money but just not enough to afford housing and no friends or family to turn to, but some are functionally incapable of operating in normal society. A humane community needs some solution to what to do with these people as well, aside from send them somewhere else, put them in prison, and/or hope they die.

> They're not the kind of people cities are trying to bus away.

But they easily can become them if few more things will go wrong.

Not banning housing construction and lowering its prices helps people on border (and if someone has larger house/flat or has own one - they can help their family/friends)

Pretty much every American solution is to bandaid over or do expensive fixes instead of actually addressing root causes.

See the giant thread around homeschooling we had yesterday.

“ expensive fixes instead of actually addressing root causes.”

There is the old quote “the Americans will always do the right thing. Right after they have tried everything else”. It feels like this in a lot of social issues like health care.

I think the underlying problem is that US does not believe in community or society.

Every solution has to be at the level of the individual or the business. This places a lot of constraint over what would be common-sense solutions in rest of the world. There are trade-offs between being part of the society and being alone. If Japan were to be an example of an extreme societal compliance, US is in extreme in "me for myself, screw the rest" approach.

Homelessness is a housing problem: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-pro...:

There’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.

The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.”

It is true that housing is too expensive and this is a primary cause of homelessness, but I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here. Sure, adding a bunch of empty houses to an area will create a downward pressure on prices, but at best this is temporary. When I look around, the densest cities are also the most expensive to live in so making places denser will only hurt low income earners who want to live there even more. The reality is if we want low income families to be able to live in desirable places the only solution is public subsidization. Just handing this problem to the land developers and removing all zoning restrictions is not going to fix anything in the long run.

I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here

Read the book, and look at the evidence rather than trying to reason from random feelings.

Thanks, I will read the book, and I have looked at a lot of evidence. However, keep in mind that books are written by people and people make mistakes. There is nothing wrong with using your brain to reason from first principles.

Sure if we can indefinitely add huge amounts of housing everywhere year over year we will have "solved" this problem, as the evidence shows! However, I can't imagine this is the best use of our time and resources. I'd rather look for more sustainable solutions.

The only way to arrive at this conclusion is to group the short term and long term homeless together. I concede it might have changed since I last read up on the topic, but the short term homeless are the great majority and these are regular people who have lost their jobs or roommate situation and end up living in cars or shelters short term.

The article is clearly about the minority of homeless who are long term drug abusing street dwellers. Different problem, different solution.

Very high profile efforts to put the latter in free housing have failed.

On the other hand I have a friend (who is incidentally also a drug user but not so far gone that she couldn't stop when forced to wear a drug detecting patch to get her kid back) who became homeless. She immediately got into a shelter and now months later is moving into an apartment with her rent (I think) paid at least partly by the city. So anecdotally (and from some reading) the former group already has working solutions

Cities don't have to build housing for people. They just have to make it legal for developers to build it and actually participate in the market. That solves the biggest group of homeless people, those who are down on their luck & couch surfing because they literally cannot afford a house.

The second, more visible group, is a completely different story. But just allowing people to build housing instead of creating archaic and backwards rules that prevent any building will solve a huge part of it.

> except building enough housing for everyone.

lets go for simpler one, not banning building housing

This is plainly wrong.

Homelessness is a game theory problem. The first city that "builds enough homes to house everyone" get to house everyone in the country. Why would Los Angeles ever build housing, if San Francisco is doing it for them?

The first city to solve this is punished mercilessly. Why would any city subject themselves to that, when they can anticipate that it would happen? Doesn't matter what your politics are. Left and right both know that it will happen, and will refuse to do it because of the punishment.

Because this is a game theory problem, the solution is (surprising, to me at least) very bureaucratic. It doesn't involve people "just loving enough". You won't solve it by showing the world how charitable and compassionate you are. Some dislike that. Why was love not enough? Why was charity and compassion not enough?

Because it's a math problem, and love, charity, and compassion have never solved math problems. Similarly, accusations that greed or callousness interfere are just plainly wrong too.

What's needed is a system that allocates the homeless across all the tends of thousands of municipal and local governments, such that small towns aren't overwhelmed with thousands, and large cities don't somehow cheat and solve their fair share of the homelessness issue by buying bus tickets for them. Such a system can be achieved via policy alone from the ground-up, no need for state or federal government to be involved (except possibly to pick up some small part of the tab for the few who would inevitably fall between the cracks).

Stop doing scrollytelling. It's horrible.

Especially because half of the visualizations had a large portion of the middle blocked off by the text with the white background. I could scroll it to be at the top and block less but it's still just an annoyingly flawed way to relay information.

Haha, nice term. I disagree, I think it's nice in small doses. Moving graphics can be nice for pieces like this

I get a sense of extreme survivorship bias (in reverse) here. The failed cases of busing get much more airtime than the successes. As someone who is admittedly very sick of the homeless problem in the Bay Area, it sounds good to me. If the solution is more housing, which won't happen here due to the legislative detritus, moving people to places with more housing makes sense.

Housing doesn't fix the problem of homelessness. You can give someone a free house and if they're not capable of the basics of self care, due to mental health, drug usage, etc. Then the houses get destroyed/misused, becomes a problem for neighbors, etc. There's been a plethora of housing projects, charities, programs, etc. I supported my local one then realized it was making the problem worse. These programs don't talk about the failures, just the few success stories, because they need funding, and they think its worth it if you can save a few, but its not like there aren't other effects of giving someone a house whose not going to use it to make their lives objectively better.

People have this naive notion that the solution is there and just no one has tried it. For every success story there's 9 other failures or worse unintended consequences and the waste of resources that come with it.

The only thing that seems to "work" is temporary housing for those in a drug treatment program, but even that has its high degree of failures or relapses, but at least then its not giving housing to those who aren't frankly interested in getting out of their current situation. Think about it, they've chosen the addiction, even if the consequences were job loss, addiction, etc. In other cases, its a mental illness, often exacerbated by addiction.

There are people who are "homeless" because of reasons outside their control and these programs work for them, but the majority of the homeless problem is not the people who are victim of circumstances and abuse. I support these programs because they save the 1 in 10 or whatever, until it becomes a draw for those that aren't looking for help to get out of the situation they're in and they conglomerate or stick around when bussed in.

The bussing is annoying cause my city often ends up with them, and it overwhelms the resources we have to deal with it for a city our size, but we do the same in turn.

> Housing doesn't fix the problem of homelessness

It reduces border. It is much harder to become stereotypical homeless if rental prices are lower.

If you outlaw housing space for poorer people, then they are at much higher risk of becoming hopelessly homeless.

It also doesn't help adding close to 3 million people in a year to the domestic population (not through births or official visa process), during a time of rising construction costs, and not expecting that to cause an affordability and availability crisis on the lower ends of the market. It's not a problem for wine/microbrew drinking political commentators who aren't competing for finite low skill employment opportunities and lower cost housing, but their feigned altruism has an obvious second order effect for working class.

At least people in the Bay Area or San Francisco live with the consequences of their own ideology. You cannot say the same about the Martha's Vineyard residents, they deported all the migrants within 72 hours. Even the people with the "in this house we believe no human is illegal" did everything in their power to get them out of there.

People in the cities also to have to live with the consequences of the ideologies of the suburbs, who don't build affordable housing, don't allow shelters, don't want to provide the resources people need, and would rather just bus them into the city (And then loudly complain about how the city is a failed cesspit).

Somehow, it falls on the ~800,000 people of a city to solve all the social and economic problems of the ~4,000,000 metro area surrounding them.

I don't know about that. The sub-urbs don't produce the same kind of urban decay. The same pattern of drug use, dealers, and petty crime for small paydays resulting in the next high. You don't have the sub-urbs legalizing shop lifting up to 900$ so that you incentivize a permanent criminal class. The sub urbs to a lesser degree and rural to a greater degree just don't have enough population density to support the same level of drug dealers and subsequent drug users. Not to say rural areas don't have drug consumption, it's just prescription drugs from a pill mill and liquor from a liquor store, not cocaine or crystal meth from a street dealer. There's not enough storefronts to steal from, and outside of cities you don't have legalized shoplifting up to a certain $ amount.

And yes, it is expensive to buy rural or sub-urban property, but it is still less expensive than Urban property, and rents are cheaper in the sub-urbs, while many rural jobs offer room and board to workers. Meaning if they get a job they will not be homeless and be able to save money.

>which won't happen here due to the legislative detritus

This is the problem then! You've identified what the actual problem is.

Identifying the problem and fixing the problem aren't the same thing. Sometimes the problem is obvious but the fix is impractical, in this case for political reasons.

> Smaller schemes had mixed results: Portland found that around 70% of 416 travelers were still housed three months after traveling, and of those leaving Santa Monica, 60% remained housed six months later.

I mean 60% isn't bad for the cost of a bus ticket.

After the pandemic I noticed a lot more homeless people traveling through our area. The actual town I live in is about 5 miles from the I-29 interstate but I saw a lot more people trying to panhandle/thumb rides. I've seen people trying to go north for oil field work...walking from North Carolina. I-29 goes basically to the Canada border.

An hour south is Saint Joseph, and there were always people panhandling around Walmart. Last time I went, I saw they had put up "Don't support panhandling" signs all around that area.

"Go die somewhere else" seems to be the solution most places take to homelessness.

Yea generally... Unfortunately? (Who am I to say, I am not doing anything to help).

This has always been the case, I remember many years ago(30+) east coast/central cities shipping the homeless on 1 way greyhound to the west coast.... Maybe that explains Washington state(Portland/seattle), San Francisco, Vancouver BC etc

I was just talking with a coworker about this issue, where even if someone wants to break the cycle of homelessness the deck is completely stacked against them. People tell them to "get a job" when nobody is going to hire an unwashed homeless person for anything. They need to come back clean, have money to commute, and be reliable -- all of which are very difficult for a homeless person to struggle against.

The obvious issue is that people tend to be homeless for a reason, and people always assume it's because they are drug addicted, so finding someone willing to hire the homeless in the first place (smelly or not) is a miracle.

There is no easy solution but the "solution" most places take is throwing the baby out with the bathwater and burying it so no one has to see anything that hints at society being imperfect.

It's easier to blame the homeless for failing society than it is to acknowledge that society has failed many homeless people who were willing to contribute to society, but were unwanted and ignored rather than helped.

Regardless of your take on this, the animated graphics here are really nice.

No its not. Its horribly broken. I was wondering why scrolling was so goddamn weird, and realized the animations were broken and was fucking with me.

Title needs to be updated with (2017) appended.

This is not America moving homeless, it's California.

One of the case studies inside the linked article concerns southern Florida.

I'm sure there are case studies all over, but the overwhelming problem is California. Any solution (and articles) regarding US homeless problems should begin and end there.

They certainly try to give that impression in the article but if you look at the animation showing where all the homeless are being sent it sure looks like the bubble around LA and SF grew a lot during the time frame.

Where these bubbles net flows or totals? Can't tell.

I do strongly suspect and have read some (inconclusive) evidence that a large number of the drugged out long term homeless in LA and SF were shipped here from elsewhere. I don't believe that anyone has a special right to move to a nice city and adopt a street camping meth smoking lifestyle and expect the new city to not only tolerate it but subsidize it.

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