Woman sues L.A. after being struck by car on a street where tents block sidewalk

There’s no single answer, but:

1.) A lot of the visibly homeless population suffers from either mental illness, drug addiction or both. The statistics I’ve seen for cities on the west coast put it at approximately 40% for mental illness and a similar percentage for addiction. These are self reported numbers, so they are probably under reported.

2.) Related to #1, good mental healthcare is very hard to come by in the United States, especially if you are poor. In the 80s the federal government cut funding drastically, leaving it up to individual states to cover the gap. Most didn’t and have continued to cut budgets even further in the ensuing years.

3.) Related to #2, the Deinstitutionalization movement successfully fought for the rights of the mentally ill, but there were unintended consequences. Right now it is extraordinarily difficult to convince a judge to commit someone to long term, in-patient psychiatric care unless they present an immediate threat to themselves or others. In practice, this turns out to be very difficult to prove. In most cases, if the person can’t be proven to about to commit murder or suicide in the next few hours, they won’t be committed against their will.

4.) Most states have closed all but a one or two state psychiatric hospitals, which is where people with severe mental illness used to be housed. The theory was that states would build community integrated outpatient care facilities, but many of them didn’t. As a result, many long term psychiatric patients were turned loose with nowhere to go, and became homeless. Also, now that those facilities are closed, when a judge does decide to commit someone, there’s often nowhere for them to go. In the state I live in, the only remaining state psychiatric hospital hasn’t had an available bed in years.

5.) Related to #3 and 4, jails have become our defacto mental health treatment facilities because there’s nowhere else available. As a result, a lot of people who should have been take into care end up with a rap sheet, which shows up on background checks, and makes it difficult to obtain housing or jobs. The same is true for people who are not mentally ill, but have drug addictions.

6.) There’s a lot more supporting infrastructure necessary to allow you to go to work than you’d think. At bare minimum, you need an alarm clock to wake you up in time, you need some basic hygiene and grooming capabilities, and you need to feel reasonably confident that when you walk away from your home to go to work, your things won’t be stolen. A person living in a tent has none of those things. A person living in a shelter might have some of them, but if they leave their stuff unattended it’s almost certain to get stolen. They may be able to take a shower or wash their clothes, but probably not on the same day, and not more than once a week. Regardless of when their shift starts, most shelters have strict curfews, which means that a person staying there can’t work non-traditional hours. Space in the shelters is often first come first served, so if you miss the bus and don’t make it back to the shelter on time, they’re likely to be full and you’re back on the street. It’s very difficult to establish stability using the shelter system.

Finally, you asked why people who don’t have jobs don’t live with their families. A lot of the time it’s because they have untreated or poorly treated mental illness that makes living with them incredibly difficult. Nobody likes to talk about it, but families who have severely mentally ill members in the United States are often forced to make the heartbreaking choice between their own sanity and the wellbeing of their family member. The same is true for people suffering from drug addiction. Sometimes you have to choose your own sanity, or you’ll be on the streets too.

Hopefully that helps you understand what you’re seeing better.

If you mean the West Coast, it was the 9th Circuit court ruling in Martin v. Boise that brought about the visible camping. That ruling states that a city can’t penalize someone for sleeping in public if they can’t provide a meaningful alternative. Most West Coast cities don’t have nearly enough shelter space available, and they have interpreted the ruling to mean that they cannot enforce camping bans at all - presumably to reduce the risk of being sued.

> What's more unique to the U.S. is that for large swathes of people, their family has totally washed their hands of their responsibility. Compared to poor authoritarian countries that's probably because in those countries, families know their loved ones will die if they are left out on their own with no help.

Or, if I take your comments to their invalid conclusion, other countries let their homeless die--thus solving their homeless problem.

And why should somebody's drug addled parent be the responsibility of the child? The child didn't make those choices--and probably has their own damage from the parent to boot.

Finally, if someone has dementia, God help you if you don't have money because no one else will. People with dementia often require 24/7 care--how are you supposed to go to your job if you are doing that?

How about instead of just shuffling the problem onto "family" that is horribly ill-equipped for dealing with most of these situations, we start as a society helping people to deal with these things.

> I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence

This is the equivalent of suggesting that there is irony in the position that one can support animal welfare but still be against the position of beating animals with a stick (rather than an iron bar).

Homeless shelters can be violent. They are certainly full of people with (often untreated) mental illnesses. They are also not a solution to homelessness, but rather a solution to the problem of people sleeping on the street.

Solutions to homelessness often require providing permanent housing to people whom you may not like and who you, personally, may believe do not deserve a "free" apartment or house. It involves giving people a permanent foundation on which they can start to build a post-homelessness life. This is why it is never a popular solution - what I find ironic is that voters who want to "solve" homelessness never actually start with the simplest solution, giving away secure and dignified housing.

A real solution involves notions of security, safety, etc and often requires homeless people, particularly those who have lived homeless for a long time, to unlearn those strategies they have employed in order to survive. Shelters do not provide this type of support.

Good lord, yes. I just helped a relative of with poor credit find a place to live and it was only the luck of finding an understanding small time landlord that he isn’t homeless right now. I fear this is only going to get much worse in the future. Lots of places we applied to already automatically rejected him due to his credit score even though I offered to co-sign. Once the whole industry starts using these mechanisms to choose tenants, people with bad credit are screwed.