Homeless Mortality Data | Hacker News Reader

Homeless Mortality Data

calmatters.org

61 pointsDoreenMichele58 comments

Garry Tan has a lot of X/Twitter posts on the subject. 68% of SF overdose deaths seem to happen inside shelters. Recently one of the shelter workers overdosed as well. There seems to be a massive disconnect between intention and consequences of policies. https://x.com/garrytan/status/1750566946201047218?s=46&t=bGA...

I still believe treatment centers would be preferable, I just dont think its reasonable to expect that to happen. Requiring sobriety tests helps, I would suppose, the people that are actually interested in getting better, though many homeless allegedly avoid shelters because of the requirements.

I can speculate on a few things that would reduce the rate of homelessness, economy, civil society, religion, but incarceration (where treatment is refused) seems like the only way to stop the cities from bleeding; open air drug use wouldnt be tolerated on private property (and where it is, fine, be my guest, I smoke, at home), it shouldnt be tolerated on public property either, dont be a menace.

I don't have the details behind these numbers, but I wonder if the conclusion is sound? Like, a lot of people who die of sickness die in a hospital. I don't think that means that they are doing a poor job.

We could legalize all drugs so people can have access to clean drugs of a known potency.

Aren't most opiods legal already?

Where is the money going?

Round down to ~ 3 Billion https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4808

181,399 round up to 250,000 https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/californ...

Simple math = 12000 USD per person - food, shelter, clothing, treatment, burial, etc

State actor and industry takes a slice of the profit: https://youtu.be/z6iW1poC-0c?si=EFrK07ew2vaX_yMD

Iterate across the country.

Almost like historical payback: https://youtu.be/u1dbOf63roI?si=q8fV1fya60abnceX

In californian cities, the cost of renting an apartment for an otherwise homeless person is a multiple of 12k/year.

The same anti-housing policies driving up homeless rates also makes helping them more expensive.

>> For many people, living on the streets of California is a death sentence.

Canada had few -40C nights this winter, homeless shelters were completely full.

Canada de-facto banned most type of homes/appointments due to regulations and zoning. Both in conjunction makes building housing expensive and slow. Canada is ways past of useful regulations. Over-regulation costs lives.

I just wonder in this data if people who are homeless have mental disorders or addiction problems that make them way more likely to die and the problem isn’t that they are homeless, but that they are addicts or have untreated mental illness. Correlation is not causation.

If I read that right, the mortality rate in the general population in 2020 (1027 per 100k); was higher than that found in the homeless community in 2011 (814 per 100k).

Who says the world is not becoming more dangerous (and not just among the homeless)?

That's weird! Did something happen during 2020???

In 2020, the two main sources of life-sustaining resources for people without housing -- public spaces and other people -- were almost entirely cut off.

What do you need other people for? As long as the economy is still running basic services, you can just look inwards for happiness!

imagine being a homeless person looking at the news everyone saying "just stay at home!"

Doesn't 1000 per 100k imply roughly average of 100 age span?

Which seems really good to me.

No, but I really gotta know how you drew that conclusion

Because if you had stable amount of population if people lived to be 100 years old then each year 1000 out of 100k would die.

In this case, I think the assumption that doesn't bear out is "stable amount of population". The relationship between death rate and expected lifespan is likely calculable, but only if you also have either age data or at least approximate change in birthrate data, preferably going back to living memory. We might have that available somewhere, but I don't think your estimate came from having it.

Like let's say there's a terrible war, and half of all people die. Can we conclude that most people are dying around 2? This example is extreme, but shows that we at least need some averages over time to start making a case for life expectancy being predicted well by the data

Yes, but also part of my point, that the above author based on these numbers implied that World is getting more dangerous, but firstly as you mentioned these numbers are meaningless if we don't know the exact demographics of the 100k and secondly for a stable 100k these would be really good numbers.

Makes sense from that perspective. Thanks for taking the time to clarify

No because the population skews younger.

But even then you can hardly determine that it is a bad or unexpected number, as you would get that number if each year same amount of people were born and died and everyone lived to 100.

It's a really unfortunate year for comparison. There was that one advantage to being outside...

For those not reading the article,

> The death rate across all 22 localities increased from 814 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2011, to 2,752 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2020.

> Among the general population, the nationwide mortality rate was much lower: 1,027 deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It might "just" be the homeless population is ageing. We really need a model prediction of how we expected the homeless population death rate to change over time. I doubt it is in a steady state.

"The number of Californians 55 and older who sought homelessness services soared 84% between 2017 and 2021" (from the article), so something demographic is changing. It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.

> It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.

What happened to what retirement savings?

45% percent of households with members ages 55 to 64 have no savings at all. The median retirement account balance is about $100,000; most middle-class people need $600,000. There are 39 million workers 55 and older in the U.S. Workers 75 and older are the fastest-growing age segment of the workforce.

https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20231028173718/https://www.nirso...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39448800

Housing is also wildly unaffordable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39550922 (citations)

A disturbing number of people in the US don't have much retirement savings to speak of. Or any retirement savings at all.

> It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.

Multi-year medical problems leading to bankruptcy and divorce.

I'm a little confused why you chose those two not-particlarly-comparable data points.

More notable -- and horrifying -- is the large rise in the homeless mortality rate between 2011 and 202.

It was in the article. I am more interested in knowing why the author of the article chose those two particular years. Was 2011 the lowest number out of the last 25? Was 2020 the highest?

If they were chosen to cherry-pick the data in order to better support a predetermined conclusion, then the whole study is suspect. Too many people do that on a wide variety of topics and then wonder why readers are so skeptical.

When we look back at the history of the US, the one practice that stands out is slavery. Today, we can only shake our heads and wonder how so-called civilized people allowed that abomination to continue for as long as it did. How can so many people have looked upon so much human suffering for so long, without lifting a finger?

Today, we are forcing people out into the street through low wages and callous layoffs to increase corporate profits. All the while, condoning skyrocketing rents due to the commoditization of housing. Meanwhile, we provide virtually no support for homeless people. We literally leave them out to die in the street, as the article states. This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.

Spoken like someone who has never actually encountered a real homeless person, and only has an abstract, idealistic image of what a homeless person might hypothetically be like.

I am not the commenter to whom you’re replying. But for what it’s worth, I regularly “actually encounter[]” homeless people, and personally interact with at least a few of them multiple times per week. My image of them is neither abstract nor idealistic. I agree with what deepspace wrote.

When participating in a conversation it is more helpful to first test what you are going to say before saying it. In this case what you have said applies equally to your own statement, and doesn't progress the conversation intellectually.

Often if a statement looks like rhetoric, it's because it is.

Having worked with, been, and always at the risk of homelessness, OP is half correct. Not everyone is there because they want to get out, but even when you do you're there in the first place because the systems of society are beyond broken.

I've volunteered with the homeless for years. Someone doesn't get laid off from a corporate job and go live on the street. These are folks who exhausted the social safety nets, ran out of family members to impose on, ran out of friends' couches -- they're alcohol and drug addicts who burned all their bridges. Many of them have never held jobs at all.

And therefore they do not deserve to live.

No, but unfortunately they're much harder to help than the former ones.

You're trying to put these words in the mouth of a person that has volunteered with the homeless. Isn't there a contradiction somewhere?

What are you trying to say? It's their own fault?

I also volunteered working with the homeless. There is nobody who chooses to live on the streets. Those who do have mental health issues.

I am 100% sure it is a society problem, not an individual problem.

Yes, there absolutely are individuals whose homelessness is their own fault - every case is unique, some definitely did it to themselves and the majority did not. But placing all homeless on some sort of pedestal of morality is a really bizarre opinion from my view.

> This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.

A fun (when done right, for some people at least) activity is contemplating various strategies one could execute to accelerate this process, and thousands of other much needed cognitive optimizations.

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