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Comment by mplewis | Hacker News Reader

absolutely not, especially in the bay – people of color are way more likely to be homeless

To put actual numbers to "way more likely". Using https://www.bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/experiencing-h... and the census.

The rate is 42/10k for non-Hispanic White and 56/10k for all others - a common definition for people of color. So about a third more likely.

To provide some intuition if the numbers aren't clear that increased risk is about the same as:

* driving while having slept 6-7 hours rather than 7+ hours[0] 1.3x

* being a teen driver with a teen friend in the car rather than alone[1] 1.49x

* the increased cardiovascular risk from being highly sedentary vs. being active[2] 1.3x

As a whole, though, 'person of color' seems to be a bad grouping unit here because Asian people are 'people of color' and have a 7/10k rate, while Black people are also 'people of color' and have a 214/10k rate. Therefore, if I were trying to understand if there are subpopulation differences this is not the aggregation unit I would use.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2017/national-police-week...

1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10735394/

2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38081421/

So let's say hypothetically we kept the number of homeless people stable in Oakland, but made them all white. You think all (most? many?) of the people currently complaining about homelessness would shut up?

No, Appalachia's sufficient to negate that hypothesis, but it doesn't mean the people currently complaining about homelessness aren't also making judgements on racial grounds. A large part of the illegibility of Oakland to outsiders is mistaking other people's cultures for urban decay.

The way you've stated this implies a structurally-enforced causality with regards to vagrancy in such a way that, wittingly or otherwise, wholly denies the possibility of individual agency in the very people you're ostensibly trying to defend.

I'm curious where you see the levers of individual agency here, and to what degree you think the affected people have tried to pull them. What's _your_ underlying thesis?

That is beyond my proverbial pay grade. But it's not beyond my proverbial pay grade to state that believing that, systemically, “[x demographic in y location] are way more likely to be [in undesirable situation]” is completely denying agency to the individuals in question by pretending that [x demographic in y location] ending up [in undesirable situation] is something of a weighted dice roll made by unseen forces, completely outside of individual agentic influence.

So you don’t believe in, like, history? Or what’s the argument here?

Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.

Oh, I see the confusion - in America, we use the word “free” to mean both “allowed to” and “doesn’t cost money,” which leads to the kinds of odd circumstances where one is “free” to do something, but that thing isn’t “free,” so if they lack the money or resources to do so, they’re not actually able to do it. It’s a confusing part of our language and our system.

Similarly, we’ve got a bunch of cases where the law says X, but actually conforming with the law, or proving what you’re doing is legal, also costs money, and is therefore not “free” either. That one catches a bunch of people.

Does anyone else here know what this guy is talking about? I think he completely misread my post. I was asking if a black American citizen moving to Oakland had some arbitrary percent chance of becoming homeless after living there for awhile, based on his ethnicity and whatever structural factors Oakland has going for it alone (as implied by the rhetoric elsewhere in the thread). He then turned it into some kind of tirade about the ambiguity of the English language, or something, rather than answering my question?

Pretty sure they’re just a verbose troll.

They're calling you out on asking why the homeless don't just move, ignoring that (a) even the homeless have roots and social networks in the areas they live in, (b) long-distance travel is not trivial for those without financial means, (c) they may not have a reason to move away (what good is it to still be homeless in another town that you don't know?) and possibly other points.

Clearly, there are systemic reasons for certain ethnicities to be at higher risk of becoming homeless (not just in the U.S.). There are also clear reasons why people who share an ethnicity like living near each other, regardless of financial means. I think you're looking for a causation between two phenomena that may be entirely independent from each other.

Edit: I think this may have started with a misinterpretation of the initial post here (which was by a user who hasn't replied any further). You may have interpreted it as "in the Bay area, PoC are more likely to be homeless" while the original wording also allows for the interpretation of "PoC are more likely to be homeless, which e.g. is noticeable in the Bay area" that doesn't imply causation and is how I read the comment.

> They're calling you out on asking why the homeless don't just move

Please try reading my posts again very carefully rather than assuming my intent. Thank you!

If multiple people are confused on what you're saying, you should probably clarify with better wording.

If someone reads “black American moving to Oakland” as “homeless person moving out of Oakland”, that is not my fault…!

No, I read your post, it was just asinine. There's nothing intrinsic about Oakland - the homeless racial makeup stats roughly persist across urban areas - but there is something intrinsic about the entire rest of the system we have, which is related to my post, and what seems to be your blind spot about the relative levers of action that various people have about how to effect change in their lives, how and when those might fail, and why they may wind up in worse situations despite the system ostensibly seeming to be "colorblind."

If people are systematically more likely to be in area X, that may be because they are systematically more likely to make the relevant choices - for example because they are under different constraints or have different preferences. Choice is part of social science.

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