The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

References? It's rather simple and obvious math.

If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of homeless people on the streets doubled.

We like to focus on per-capita figures/%ages because they can make us feel good about ourselves. Except the problems you see on the street are not constant when their incidence %age stays constant, as the population grows. For them to stay constant, the %age must shrink in proportion to the growth, which is practically impossible.

Growth applies to everything, including your problems.

I believe a key fact that's ignored is that the cities where this is happening are the most hospitable. Above freezing all year, plenty of areas to setup camp that are protected by the city, and poor enforcement for street crimes (there's no money in jailing a homeless person unless they're committing a felony). Homelessness in Seattle is much worse than New York for a number of reasons, but the fact that camping outside in New York during winter would kill you helps work the numbers a bit too. If it's too cold to be outside, you'll opt for a homeless shelter where you're required to follow rules that inevitably help you to get back on your feet.

School financing flows through property taxes, and they’re the same whether the property is occupied by a family, childless couple, an absentee out-of-town owner or an investor.

Schools currently enjoy 100% of the money with nowhere near 100% of load, which in theory should result in smaller classes and excellent teacher-to-student ratios.

In reality though LA Unified School District has been cutting so many sweet pension deals to the previous employees (and current retirees) that most of that money is appropriated by pension funds long before the current employees (or kids) see any of it.

Combined with decreased enrollment across the board (people intent on having kids and large families tend to move out of LA more than they move into LA) and increased life expectancy of most retirees, things are not exactly looking bright for parents considering LA Unified for their education needs.

Homeless hacker chiming in. Throw away acct for pseudo anonymity. I been homeless in LA for 2 years now. Previously, I worked as a developer for 15 years. The closest I ever got to touching "success" was that one time standing before the porcelain King in the Men's Room right next to Bezos at Amazon. It's rather surreal to see where I am now and think that I once pissed into the same hole in the ground as the Richest Man on Earth. c'est la vie.

This whole article is just Liberal hand wringing bullshit. Every reply in this thread is just more Liberal Do-Gooder handing wringing bullshit. Not a single one of you here understand what it's really like to be ejected from the Economy and forced to live as a leper underneath Metropolis among the Morlocks in Tent City, and not a single one of you have a realistic idea to "solve" the problem of homelessness in society. But you'll think you know it all, and that if only your dumb idea XYZ was adopted, it would be the silver bullet to solve a pathologically non-linear societal system of thousands and millions of discontinuous variables.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

"Homelessness" isn't a "problem" that can be solved and wrapped up with a pretty red bow because you all are Sinclair's man in the street. You all are the problem. The phenomenon of homelessness is not an effect--it's a consequence. It is not a disease in itself, it is the symptom of a much greater syndrome. How can you begin to solve a "problem" when you haven't even identified the root of the problem?

Look around you. What's happening isn't rocket brain surgery. This shit is just Malcolm X's proverbial "chickens coming home to roost." America is sick. It's dying. Your society is decaying. Your cities are slums, your economy is fake, fewer and fewer fat cat asshole thieves scheme to take bigger and bigger slices of the diminishing pie for themselves, all the while inviting in every illiterate 3rd World "Shitholer" peasant illegal immigrant to take the resources of your Native Born neighbor. Your Govt is literally being run by elderly senile cartoon characters who are too busy squabbling over WWF wrestling plot minutia while the real power--the Deep State and the Military Industrial Complex continues business as usual and is radar phased locked onto expanding more and more Wars fighting for Israel and for Tyrants of Oil Fiefdoms, damn the consequences, and damn the American boys dying for it. Your Financial Industry of empty suits only care about kicking the can and off-shoring and out sourcing every last warm body that can be replaced by a Drone in order to shave operating costs to earn their myopic bonus for inflating their revenue by .0001% and priming the pump of their stock price through even more corporate buy backs. Your economy was blown the fuck up 10 years ago, and the Federal Reserve inflated the money supply by printing tens of trillions of fiat to soak up housing and all property to prop up already outrageous astronomical prices.

Why am I and 500,000 Americans homeless while 500,000 houses sit empty across America? Oh yeah, that's right, those houses are "investment vehicles" which must be protected because muh Free Markets, and because God forbid any policies resembling a Nationalized Socialism take root in America and blow away the illusion that a self-coherent Capitalism even exists. Meanwhile, We The People are depreciating assets and "not economically viable."

Here's why. If you hate Trump, just wait until you see the next cartoon character we meme into the Presidency. You may be baffled "why is the Alt-Right smarter than us and why do they keep winning against all fake odds?" The answer has been staring you in the face the whole time. Next time, there's going to be a guy running for President and he's going to hit all of notes and promise the right things to fix everything and punish everyone who deserves it, and his name will be something like "Adolf" and me and 70 million voters are going to elect him and then maybe you'll sit down and seriously challenge your whole reality and everything you thought you knew and ask yourself "how did we end up here?"

It might make you feel better to just ignore what I'm saying by discounting it as "oh that guy is mentally ill, that's why he's homeless to begin with, just ignore the crazy man and keep being apathetic and don't try to do anything and leave it for the Govt to Do Something About It."

But don't feel bad for me. I feel bad for you. Because I have enjoyed a head start prepping for the coming systemic collapse that is going to rip America apart to its foundations and shovel dirt over the grave of our little 242 year long "Grand Experiement." I know how Extended Involuntary Urban Camping, I know how to live off canned food and the bare minimum of resources, I know how to steal water and electricity and whatever else I need, I know how to live little better than an animal with no consciousness about "next week" or "next month", because I live in the day-to-day. I have learned it's survival of the fittest. You have not. One day soon you'll wake up and your Soylent fridge will be empty, your Googley Bus won't be there, your Googleplex will be empty and picked apart by tweakers for scrap metal and everything you thought was a permanent fixture of Civilization will be gone. I'll be fine. I didn't need the majority of that shit anyways. Your mind will be blown when you see how little you truly Need to get by just to survive.

As for my future, I don't waste my time with such a luxury. Chop wood, carry water--that's Zen. I hate the entire Computing Industry by the way. Yes, you too. Why would I want to get back into the Hamster Wheel? Why would I want to rejoing being part of the problem again? Programming Blinken Light bullshit for bullshitters does not interest me in the slightest anymore. This industry has changed since I remember it in the Dotcom era. I no longer recognize it. The only "fun" I find these days in programming is in leveling up in Reverse Engineering to break as much software as I can and attack it as broadly and as devestating as possible with the explicit goal of dumping 0days to put as many of you out of business as I can and try real hard to roll Computing Inc as far back into the pre-Internet Dark Ages of the 1960's and 1970's as I can.

Why can't something like this work?

https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...