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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Our city provides a room in a rooming-house to the stable homeless. So they can have a shower, sit in a common room, lock up their stuff and not worry about thieves (including city teams that clear out shantytowns/ steal from the homeless and create more homelessness. Yes they did that).

Changes everything. Having an address, a place to change, to keep clean clothes makes employment 1000X easier.

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Many cities do this, but of the people willing to go, they end up choosing not to for other reasons - usually due to the restrictions on the housing, like no pets or no alcohol.

However, the bigger issue is the population of homeless that refuse to go because they are not of sound mind and are not thinking rationally. Most jurisdictions do not allow them to be compelled or moved involuntarily. And so a large portion of the homeless population will remain until that particular hurdle is addressed.

Not advocating for them to be arrested or sectioned - just trying to highlight something that is often overlooked.

> the bigger issue is the population of homeless that refuse to go because they are not of sound mind and are not thinking rationally.

This is an emotionally appealing explanation for many - "we can't help them, they're just crazy" - but I've had a hard time finding evidence for it. Do you know of some study that supports this idea?

I don't have a study at hand to provide, but I've lived in a major US city for 17 years and when this topic inevitably comes up for debate in public forums, somebody asks why we can't just force these people to go into the shelters or housing that already exist. Most of the time, local governments have their hands tied.

Also, at least in my area, there isn't nearly enough shelter space to accommodate them. The number of beds available is less than 10% of the number of homeless people.

A local city did a more thorough than usual count of local homeless to better asses what the situation was and improve some resources. They expected about 50 homeless people, give or take.

They counted over 250.

I don't think the message is "we can't help them", I think the message is "those people need a different, additional kind of help".

I have no study that supports what I'm about to say, so anecdata and all that... but I've been working with the homeless on the street for years now. My observations with this particular area is that about 3/4ths of them have crippling psychological/emotional problems that are the primary cause of their homelessness.

There is a large population of "invisible" homeless who do not live on the street (so you wouldn't encounter them) but do not have stable housing.

They live in cars, on friend's couches, and sometimes in tents or abandoned buildings. They are the easiest to help, but helping them does not help a city's "homelessness problem", because they are not the homeless that people see. They are the "unproblematic" homeless.

Well, I do see and interact with the ones living in cars, tents, and abandoned buildings -- but you're right, the spectrum of homeless is wide, and I am limiting myself to a specific subset. I'm very well aware that the subset I'm not addressing do exist, though.

I can’t point you to it, but I have seen a survey that was done of homeless in one city. One third had untreated mental health problems. One third were substance addicted. I assume there was some overlap in those two groups but it wasn’t addressed in the numbers I saw.

Untreated mental illness and substance abuse problems could cause someone to be not of sound mind to the extent they irrationally refuse help, but they’re not synonymous with it.

To me the implausible claim is not that some homeless people are not of sound mind to the extent they refuse any and all help, but that there’s a significant number of them. It’s especially implausible given that homelessness varies so much by area and is linked to housing costs.

The study of me walking down the street and crossing paths with a homeless man throwing a brick into the street, chasing after it, and throwing it again, all while screaming obscenities to himself.

Watching dozens and dozens of hours of SWUB made me come to the sad conclusion that a sizeable portion of the homeless population (at least in LA), simply just prefer a life of getting high and living on the street.

Homelessness seems to be a perpetual problem of "You can bring a horse water, but you cannot make it drink".

Even if that's the case, it's still better to get the people who want to get off the street into housing. Then you can move onto specific solutions for other people.

Every single one of them wants to get off the street. Doing drugs in a house is way better than on the street.

That's the rub - society doesn't want the homeless dragging their vices into these homes. So the homeless just stay on the street where they can do whatever they want.

Which do you prefer: Living clean on the street where you get to experience the complete dehumanization afforded to you by millions of wealthy people blaming you for things completely out of control, harassed daily by cops, looked down upon by the majority of people, and generally treated worse than a wild dog, where any time you try to find a place out of anyone's hair enough to get a little privacy or silence or safety, cops come and steal your shit and tell you to get lost, and MAYBE have a SMALL chance of being helped by barebones social programs that are underfunded, under-cared for, and often straight up attacked for dumb political reasons, and take literally all day every day worth of effort to keep up with, and anytime you suffer a sweep you probably get set back in whatever process hell you were in the middle of, all so you can get a few sympathy bucks to not literally starve to death, or a cot in a big room full of much scarier people (I know formerly homeless people, american shelters are hell and can be just as dangerous as staying on the street)

Scrounging for a couple bucks today so you can get a fix and spend the day mostly zonked out of your mind, and not enduring literal psychological torture.

I have empathy for those who supposedly "don't want" to go clean. Maybe, we could give them some absolute minimum humanity and decency before asking them to give up the one thing that allows them to escape literal torture of a process and state that exists the way it does entirely to scare poor people into working themselves to death to at least have a legal residence and not be on the street.

I would suggest you actually watch the interviews with these people and the interviews with Mark (who makes the videos).

I will re-emphasize "You can bring a horse water, you cannot make it drink". To us it's unfathomable, drinking water is so good and important, so the problem seems simple. Just give them water. But it seems that there is some contingent of society who just does not like to drink water. Even if you give them pristine water and a safe place to drink it (as mark regularly does).

If you needed to fix homelessness, the way to do it would be to round everyone up and force them into a program. Like a nice camp with food, housing, recreation, counseling, and no drugs. No drugs.

The key word here is force. But you cannot do that. They are adults and ultimately they control what they do. So you give them the option, and inevitably they just chose to stay on the street. Mark has lamented endlessly about this.

Incorrect;

Only 30% of homeless are chronically homeless;

> Chronic homelessness is used to describe people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year — or repeatedly — while struggling with a disabling condition such as a serious mental illness, substance use disorder, or physical disability.

In 2019 this was down to 8%.

https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/who-expe...

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