Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

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> Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue).

I already have in my prior comment:

>> You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.

In other words, your logic is:

Assume rent should be this amount -> subtract last paycheck to arrive at difference -> assume hourly wages should be this amount -> divide paycheck difference by hourly wage -> assume the result is the number of hours unavailable for work -> assume lack of hours is the cause for inability to live in a home

Note how many assumptions there are. Some questions that may disqualify any chain of this reasoning:

* How much is the median rent in places where a majority of this population lives? Is it potentially higher where they were living?

* Has the rent to income ratio changed at all, especially in their location?

* Were the majority of these individuals making minimum wage before? Could they have been working gigs for less or more?

* Are the lack of “hours” worked really due to lack of work and not another factor (e.g. ability to work, transportation, skill, etc.)?

* How much is this population spending on other costs that have taken precedence over living in a house? Has that changed at all?

With all that said, a stretch is not implausible. In reality, there is no smoking gun, only a myriad of contributing factors, different for each individual.

Okay I think I understand what happened. A couple posts ago you listed to an executive summary for CASPEH. I don't believe you've ever read the complete report, which is around 96 pages.

If you dig into the details, you'll actually find out that all of your assumptions are spoken about in terms of coming out with a reasonable amount of hours worth inside a California based upon the survey data from this research. The detailed report includes the following:

Median monthly household income in the six months before homelessness: $960 (all participants), $950 for non‑leaseholders, $1,400 for leaseholders. State the obvious if the weighted average is 960 and you have two groups, you can run the math to show that the non-lease holders were 98% of the sample.

Why we do want to think about Least Holders in reality is the renters where 98% of the problems exist. This is a clear application of the Pareto Principle, and so we should look at renters as the core of the homeless issue.

Median monthly housing cost: $200 for non‑leaseholders (0 for many), $700 for leaseholders. Of non-leaseholders, 43% were not paying any rent; among those who reported paying anything, the median monthly rent was $450.

In essence, if you look at the details you'll see where you're assuming are a lot of assumptions are actually somewhat addressed by the detailed report. Unfortunately, I'm going to suggest the detailed report is pretty shabby in terms of forcing somebody to dig out a lot of information which they should offer in some sort of a downloadable table for analysis.

Computationally, we can therefore figure out the minimal amount of hours these people must have been working based on the fact that they must have made at least minimum wage in the state of California.

There's not a lot of assumptions in this. It's based upon the detailed survey data and utilizing California minimal wage, which is where the survey was taken. The issue is digging into the details and computationally extracting information and assumptions that is not blinded by our own biases walking into something.

Again, there is excellent work out of University of Washington to suggest that higher housing costs lends itself toward greater rates of homelessness. That's not under debate here. The issue is from the survey data, it's very reasonable to do some basic computation to put some parameters around the data. It's not assumption, it's critical thinking.

You may be confusing jameslk with me - I'm actually the one who linked the CASPEH exec summary. Your underemployment math is interesting, but I'd note the study also reports 34% have limitations in daily activities, 22% mobility limitations, 70% haven't worked 20+ hours weekly in 2+ years. When asked why, participants cited disability, age, transportation, and lack of housing itself as barriers. So the causation may be more circular than "fix jobs first" as the same factors driving underemployment are driving housing instability, and being unsheltered makes holding a job harder.

Yep sorry about that lost track of who did what.

But thank you for actually some very insightful comments and actually digging into the details. And I do agree with your contention that there is some sort of circular system issue going on here (ala Jay Forrester out of MIT).

It is pretty interesting. While you reported everything perfectly, I'll just paste in the detailed section at the bottom as it does add a little more detail and really does give us something to think about. FDR in 1944 suggested that there should be a second bill of rights. In many ways I am attracted to his framework. In his second bill of rights, the very first one was "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation."

It strikes me that having gainful employment in which you feel like you are contributing in some method to a society is incredibly foundational to good mental health. I think FDR recognized this and I don't think he was thinking about communism. I think he was indicating that we need to find worth for individuals. Of course, with World War II and his health issues, the somehow seemed to go by the side.

This is not somebody telling somebody on the street to get a job. It's a question of how do we enable people to get a job? And I believe if there is an opportunity for the government to spend tax dollars, it may be in incentivizing employers to take these individuals and be creative in how they employ them for direct benefits. It's hard for me to imagine that there isn't some economic way of incentivizing business to show entrepreneurship if we incentivize them correctly.

This doesn't mean that you don't figure out how to solve housing. It simply means that we think about things systemically.

"Participants noted substantial disconnection from labor markets, but many were looking for work.

Some of the disconnection may have been related to the lack of job opportunities during the pandemic, although participants did report that their age, disability, lack of transportation, and lack of housing interfered with their ability to work. Only 18% reported income from jobs (8% reported any income from formal employment and 11% from informal employment). Seventy percent reported at least a two-year gap since working 20 hours or more weekly. Of all participants, 44% were looking for employment; among those younger than 62 and without a disability, 55% were."

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