US homelessness up 12% from 2022, hits highest level since 2007

> It seems like they chose that lifestyle

By that definition me not living in a mansion overlooking the ocean is also a lifestyle choice. I doubt that many people in cities would live in vans if housing wasn't so unaffordable.

> There is definitely a lot of van life/stealth campers going on here in Seattle, it isn’t hard to notice. But judging by their social media videos, is it fair to call them homeless? It seems like they chose that lifestyle rather than having it forced on them (or maybe it’s a mixture of both?).

This isn't referring to the ones who make social media videos about their lifestyle choices. This is people living in a van because while they've lost housing, they still have a vehicle. The people sleeping in a car at the back of a Walmart parking lot, with a laundry basket beside them on the passenger seat.

My city has many trust funds kids living like the poors in a fantasy world (and in >$100k built out vans), but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about with these stats.

Remove zoning restrictions and community review processes and watch new construction shoot up.

> We really need a nationwide push to fix this.

"Four states accounted for more than half of the nation’s homeless population" (California, New York, Florida and Washington) https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/states-with...

When said housing is being bought by VCs and companies, then to be rented back to people in the community for 50% more than purchase, yeah it's not going to do much at all.

I've watched my 2 local communities go through this right now. House 10y ago was under 100k. Now is bought by rental firm, and only rented at $2000/mo

And it's also more terrible, that things like the student loan crisis also hits credit, therefore also affecting home ownership. And regardless of paying rental stabily for 5y doesn't matter to a bank and mortgage.

The boomers and older never had to deal with "credit". They did have to prove income. Now, we suffer under 10x worse.

There's so many problems, and they're all tightly intertwined. The result is that simple supply isn't the only fix. Punishing companies for making homes into rentals with exponentiating taxes would help. Requiring banks to accept proof of rental as proof of payment burden would also help. So would reducing/eliminating zoning.

But none of these are palatable to 'The American People' (aka the rich).

Ready Player One talked about 'The Stacks'. And more and more, that seems like what our country is turning towards with our decline.

some of the largest financial scandals in Federal government are around HUD Housing and Urban Development. Here in California the State urban development funds were literally slush funds for the local rulers. People need to see the dark sides of public funding for themselves, saying it here is not enough.

The biggest issues are zoning and NIMBYs, and these are local. Hard to make a national push, or even a statewide push. I could write 5000 words on how that’s going in California right now (better than expected, but slow).

What is absurd is the new ability for a landlord to each morning see a list of notifications that open to the financial dossiers of those of tenants that were flagged by an overnight AI analysis as being factually insolvent, based solely upon realtime "permission based access" to those tenants personal financial accounts. The "AI model estimating a person's insolvency" is not itself evidence, but the dossiers that were flagged by the AI is direct evidence because it is composed of actual financial statements created directly by the tenants own banks, along with a credit reports showing the tenant's trade-line performance.

Not sure what your point is, but if you are renting to parties who don't have sufficient income or liquid assets to pay their bills WHEN DUE, then even if they are paying you, you still have recourse to end your contract with them. The question is, how would you know (and be able to prove) with a level of certainty sufficient to justify reclaiming possession of your property on such grounds without being successfully sued? Why not just wait for them to default on their rent? Well, if your tenants gave "permission based access" to their financial accounts over to a third-party service that you subscribed to, that third-party service could tell you and produce copies of the tenant's financial statements issued directly by the tenant's bank. The point of my original post is only that this new technology will result in increased homelessness.

> upper middle class and upwards non-religious folks, and mostly those living in or near cities

Well, you describe pretty much everyone I associate with, so I guess I can't counter your assertion. ;-)

In my anecdotal experience the religious folks are even harsher and more hostile toward the unhoused than secular people, but that's often because they run "programs" for unhoused people which require religious participation to receive aid, and I think they're chuffed people don't take advantage despite the religious coercion.

You're just confirming exactly what I wrote. There is nothing wrong with the libraries, its the social policies that are the issue.

Interesting, Europeans don’t typically say “coming from Europe” as countries in Europe are quite different. Where are you from originally and where are you in Europe?

There are tons of people doing hard drugs in Seattle that aren't being a menace to society. I'm not sure why you can't just criminalize the actual problem.

I don't think we should be locking people up for years because they were minding their own business and being productive members of society and happened to run into the police at the wrong time.

At the same time, it would be nice to do something with people who are fine to beg for money on the street, do nothing productive, and be high on drugs until they die.

Most cities with these problems have resources for people who are willing to get help. Yet we let people refuse that because they'd rather continue doing drugs and not being productive and at the same time ruining all public spaces.

Something needs to change.

Hoping that those people will just change is a bad strategy. Leaving them be is an option - but it's growing less popular.

Putting people that need help in jail is the dumbest solution one can think of. You’re not solving ANYTHING. You’re just swiping what looks bad under the rug. The US prison system has already imploded.

In CA you can literally build a house in a backyard now with a max wait of 60 days for approval. No one can literally stop it.

Seattle has a lot more construction than LA and SF, and it’s zoning is a lot more flexible (no parking minimums), yet we have an outsized share of the unhoused problem (on a per capita basis, larger than LA or SF). I’m not saying housing policy isn’t a blocker, but it can’t be the only one, we can’t seem to build our way privately out of the problem at least here.

More drug addiction services are needed before we can really treat this problem. Even putting them up in hotels is incredibly expensive because the damage that has to be repaired.

The big elephant in the room, is those who have homes aren't ever going to let go of their homes for anything else than 100+% profit, it's in their best interest to not allow any other competition. Neighborhoods that argue over inches of fences and HOA colors, routinely come together to block apartments and other housing.

This holiday season, family members will be openly bragging about how their home is worth 1.7 million, which they purchased for 300k. The room full of apartment/roommate living student debt loaded will get very quiet.

This theory is always posted in these threads but there is no answer how come the places with the most expensive real estate have no homeless. Aspen, Hamptons, Malibu, Beverly Hills, Martha's Vineyard etc. etc. do not have homeless encampments, which should have been huge according to this theory.

The trick it uses is introducing a continuity with the "easier" term. There is no such thing in reality. If you have no income you won't be renting either $1000 nor $10000 apartment despite the former being "easier" to afford. And if you have income you will move to the housing you can afford and won't be hanging under an overpass just to piss off the landlords.

If you remove real estate as a form of investment, no new apartment buildings will be built.

Guess what happens next.

The rate of empty apartments is extremely low. This means that we have a supply shortage, not a pricing problem.

There is not a 100% one size fits all system. There are too many cultures and beliefs, and different people to think that one system is going to get 100% of the people. 0.2% isn't horrible. Could be better and with advancements hopefully we get better but we need to allocate our resources in priority and there are a lot of issues that are going to get priority above this issue.

Don’t frame it as if we have been experimenting like dispassionate scientists. Wannabe socialist upstarts have been meddled with to stop the “contagion” and to benefit the corporations of whatever country (banana republics) instead of the natives.

Population has also increased from 300 million to about 340 million, or more than 10%. Nothing else changing, we'd expect the number of homeless to be 10% larger than in 2007.

I think you’re making two assumptions that I doubt.

1) That people with mental illness cannot keep themselves housed assuming housing is available and affordable.

2) That the seemingly high prevalence of mental illness is a cause of homelessness, rather than a symptom.

I don’t think either of those is entirely true.

so it's a [dupe] then, what is going on here

To be fair, it behooves local governments to solve it. However, the moment a community does do something good, like UBI or small apartments, they get flooded with every other community exporting their homeless there.

Same goes for states as well. Any state gets inundated, and quality of help goes down.

And a national level plan has no traction. Capitalism itself implicates these people are just lazy and should help themselves. So there's no good (or any) national level plan.

And the business part of the economy (rich people) just want them to be 'away'. The term "Greyhound therapy" is precisely that - rich people/local govts will buy you a ticket to go somewhere else.

In the end, having these people with a home and stable living would ABSOLUTELY help local areas, and reduce massive burdens on services. But again, political will says these failures of the capitalist machine is somehow 100% their fault, and shouldn't be helped.

Yeah no, Bezos net worth alone is more than all the money the US goverment has given to Ukraine, and the money given to Ukraine and for financial and humanitary is a complex and subjetive issue because many believe it helps the US itself in the long term due helping mantain stability in Europe, some belive otherwise of course, its a complex issue for sure but nowhere similar to billionaires which are just citizens and money hoarders.

How much was sent to Ukraine in cash, exactly? And how much of that was taken away from housing budgets?

From what I heard, the vast majority of what was sent to Ukraine was military surplus.

(That's of course ignoring some pretty serious points you're making more or less implicitly, eg that Americans are suffering in a way comparable to "being shelled by Russians" or that the help is send to encourage their "being crooked" and not, you know, fight back against invading Russians. And you're also basically brushing off the part where the help came in with strings attached in terms of fighting corruption.)

> It's unbelievable how much we've sent Ukraine while Americans are suffering at dire rates.

Indeed, it's unbelievable how little we actually sent via pallets (compared to past US wars) v. how much we sent in the form of gift cards for Ukraine to buy US surplus military hardware.

It's a very cost-effective program we should continue not just to defend our allies against a dictator but to keep our own economy cranking as money circulates among US employees and US companies throughout the military supply chain.

You are very naive if you think any of that money would go into helping the people in need. Those huge sums were approved and spent for the benefit of the military complex who traditionally sponsor political campaigns and outright bribe the government and the Congress so that the war machine never stops.

Dropping our Cold War era bomb stockpiles on the NIMBYs would probably work, but that’s a tad excessive, don’t you think?

There's zero reason why the US can't both support Ukraine and help solve homelessness. Homelessness is a product of a restrictive construction policies (namely, many US cities forbid or highly restrict construction of high-density low-cost housing), not a lack of funds.

Don't buy the disinformation;not much of that money was actually sent to Ukraine, most of the money stays in the US. [0]

The US not funding school lunch programs, affordable housing, homeless programs is not a problem of lacking resources. It's an ideological decision. The help sent to Ukraine is actually negligible.[1]

There's more than enough money to go around; just look at the US's regular defense budget. This money being pushed to the MIC instead of to citizens in need is a conscious decision.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/29/ukraine-m...

[1] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

Ukraine money was to buy American guns and that will enrich a small group of Americans that have no problem with housing.

Sending money to foreign countries is a false problem.

Are you sure that if the US gov would not send help to Ukraine, that money will be used to help homeless people?

US homeowners made a decision to use their homes as their primary or secondary investment vehicles so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values.

There’s also a good bit of plain old racism involved but people are in denial about it and insist they’re implying something else.

For example, in a nearby community they were proposing some “starter townhomes” priced at $295K (median home price in the area is 350K). These were not rentals, low income, section 8a - they were new construction townhomes on the lower end of the pricing spectrum. People FREAKED out, and suggested they’d be bought up by gangs and junkies and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells and the project was killed. Someone stood up at a zoning meeting and said “Do you really want someone who lives in one of these as your neighbor? Do you want their kids going to our schools? I sure don’t!” To thunderous applause.

I personally can’t wrap my head around the logic. It’s not like these existing homeowners are rich - in fact the sort of person who scoops up a $300K townhome is probably a young professional with an office job who probably make the same or more as the residents complaining that they’ll bring poverty. It’s nuts!

> The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them.

Oh, actually I think the problem is that I would like temporary housing to be built for the homeless, just far away from me. But certain people insist that they let homeless people, with their many varied problems, live up the street from me instead.

One would think that being willing to have temporary housing built somewhat distant from any major cities is a compromise on my part, but my opponents insist on getting everything they want and having homeless people live on the exact same block as me. It's like every other topic where people have zero intention of compromising, e.g. no abortions even in the case of rape, no guns allowed period, etc. etc. The internal debate people use to arrive at a position becomes: How can I best poke my neighbor in the eye and force them to exist in a political reality that they despise, instead of compromising? That is the position I would like to take.

And instead of reaching any sort of compromise that could help solve the problem, we get nothing, a political stalemate where no one wins and everyone loses. Politics in the US is absolute trash.

I get that. But that’s probably not all of the cases, maybe a few. A lot of them had a support network and simply burned their bridges with them via drug use, and now they are in the streets. But we should definitely prioritize helping the non drug addicted homeless population, get them off the streets as fast as possible, since once they get into fent, helping them is a magnitude harder! And that’s why we should prioritize sober housing. Yes, it’s sad, but once they get addicted to fent, they are probably not recovering from that, so let’s throw our resources at not letting that happen, rather than burning them on people that are very very hard to help.

It really doesn’t matter in either case. Once they are addicted to fent, they probably aren’t coming back from it. So instead of throwing all our resources at drug addiction, we could instead throw it at getting newly unhoused off the street into safe and secure housing. If housing is their only need, that is a much easier problem than forcing an addict into treatment that probably won’t work.

In discussing this issue with the EMT and paramedic students I teach, absolutely this.

"If your life had descended to a point where you had to go to the bathroom in an alley and use scrap paper to wipe, or were eating your lunch that you fetched from a trash can on the street in the rain, there's a good chance you would use opioids to numb the pain of that existence, too."

And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.

Ya, we really shouldn’t forget about them. As an 18 year old, I slept in my car for a few days before so I can totally empathize.

It is really sad that we have equated drug addiction with homelessness. We should really treat them as separate problems, since one is much easier to solve with social resources than the other.

That HN comments don't always have a point. On the other hand, that observation is also a point in and of itself.

Just highlighting that we are constantly being fed propaganda for those that may not yet be aware.