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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> In brief, our city has a housing shortage and a homelessness problem

I've never understood why people try to connect these issues. They're wholely unrelated. No one's like "oh, I can't find a house in my city, guess I'll just live on the street". In reality it is "oh, I can't find a house in the city. I'll move where it's reasonable". If I can afford a very reasonable rent, I can afford a ride out of town.

The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap.

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There is a lot of data indicating that you are dead wrong.

This is one of many studies that took less than a minute to find if you need a citation: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

Here's one from California explaining the causal relationship between rising rents and homelessness: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-...

There's also a more direct logical connection, solely due to the definition of the words "housing shortage" and the word "homeless".

Sort of like the connection people who never leave their house and never seem to meet someone.

People try to connect these issues because they are connected. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...

There are many homeless people who are not living on the streets: those living in shelters, or cars, or who are frequently moving between temporary living situations with friends or family. And they may even be holding down a job, and/or relying on local support systems for, say, child care, which could make ‘move where it’s cheaper’ an untenable or very risky option.

"homeless" is a larger category of which visible street people are but one subset. others are living in their cars or couch-surfing or what-have-you

Two of my coworkers are homeless and in just that situation. I'm somewhat astounded that you can't see any reasons why people don't want to just pick up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else.

My grandparents picked up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else. It was hard but they were better off for it. I have little sympathy for those who are unwilling to take similar steps to improve their own lives.

Nice, taking credit for an extraordinarily difficult decision your grandparents made to trivialize the difficulty. Do you hear yourself?

Perhaps it needs to be made easier.

What would you need to ease the transition?

I would like a trial job and a trial house for 6-12 months. Ill find something myself. It should probably involve a schedule with social interactions and someone to monitor the progress. Other people who just relocated are probably interesting to talk with.

> The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap.

This is about as disconnected from reality as it gets.

We beat out >50 applicants for our current rental by offering 6mos up front. That ad was up for less than 2 hours. Other landlords we talked to were working through 400 applications per day.

We're paying just over double for the same sq ft, in the next county out. We beat long odds for the privilege.

People all around the region - with steady gov jobs and money in the bank - moved into dodgy hotels or their cars because they had nowhere to go.

Yes. People are flooding desirable areas, and developers (and some politicians) would like to keep trying to fight the locals to get a piece of that pie, even if it means harming those areas, rather than developing outward and stopping foreign buying. Then the resulting house-price crisis is pointed to as the reason they should be given free reign, but that's circular reasoning. That's "negotiating with terrorists".

After that, the next thing blamed is the issue of wealthy Americans using housing as an investment in high-profile areas, which takes up the public consciousness despite being such a small part of the problem.

The homelessness crisis is mostly unrelated, and the subset of it that is related is not related in the ways for which people use it as an argument. Again: Build outward. Get businesses to spread out.

Building outward causes many serious harms.

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