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Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

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Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#141

Post by azinman2 »

trinovantes wrote: post #84
AlexandrB wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy it. In Toronto, there are new condo buildings going up seemingly on every block, but there are still 10,000 homeless[1]. The inconvenient truth is that building low-income housing is not very profitable and no entity driven by the profit motive wants to do it. The margins on luxury condos are much better. [1] https://www.fredvictor.org/facts-about-homelessness-in-toron...

When you're severely constrained by where you can build thanks to NIMBY, you always build whatever has the highest margins i.e. luxury 1bd condos

That's actually perfectly fine. The more you build for the top end, the more you pressure release on the lower end.

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#144

Post by lukeschlather »

nostrebored wrote: post #24
cheriot wrote: post #9

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facili…

The problem is that people in the U.S. so often only see homelessness through the lens of where they live. Homelessness is a unique problem in each city. For example, the west coast has favorable weather and a history of being a destination for people after they are released from prisons or mental facilities. In cities on the east coast there is more leftist-narrative style homelessness: people who were depending on…

> But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.

This is not correct. In most places, there is a wild shortage of shelters. For example King County has ~4000 shelter beds and ~12,000 people who need shelter.

AFAIK the only place where there are enough shelter beds is NYC where they are legally required to provide anyone with shelter.

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#145

Post by woodruffw »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #133
woodruffw wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emphasis on "overwhelmingly." One of the most pernicious problems in homeless advocacy is that the average person only remembers their worst encounters with mentally ill homeless people, not the tens of thousands of people who they've silently passed on the street.

That feels intentionally misleading though. If I ask you about the severely mentally unwell, and you refer to a guy with heavy depression while there's observable examples of people in literal states of lunacy, you may be technically correct, but obviously you will be misunderstood. These aren't the "severely mentally ill" that the comment intended imo.

Where do you feel intentionally misled? The overwhelming majority of homeless people are not raving lunatics.

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#146

Post by m0zg »

cheriot wrote: post #9

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facili…

> neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.

Neither is improved by giving them housing. Housing should be modest, and it should be preceded by forced rehab. Instead, in Seattle, for example, they're giving the homeless hotel-style housing without requiring them to get addiction treatment and without a requirement to do anything job-wise. Seattle's King county projects that such valiant (and extremely expensive!) efforts will triple the already sizable homeless population in 10 years, yet they are continuing down this path anyway, just like SF did many years ago. Why? Because it's already a billion dollar industry in the state, and as such it'll continue to metastasize, just like any other government "service".

So solution needs to have 3 parts at least, and part zero should be "forced rehab". Without that no other part will ever work. There needs to be a part about employment in there somewhere for people who are able to work. I don't care that they don't wanna.

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#147

Post by khazhoux »

cheriot wrote: post #9

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facili…

> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)

People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match.

SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to.

https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#148

Post by xvedejas »

zz865 wrote: post #100
cheriot wrote: post #9

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facili…

> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.

If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#149

Post by dang »

chrsig wrote: post #30
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for higher-quality discussion, to the extent that that's possible on the internet. This is particularly important when a thread is fresh because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given that the title was changed after my comment, I'd say that the comment was substantive, and contributed to the conversation. Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation. That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that woul…

You posted your comment and I posted my reply before we changed the title. It was clearly a snarky and informationless comment, which you shouldn't have posted. A title change doesn't retroactively reverse that.

Of course, if you had posted a substantive comment about homelessness in response to specific things in the article, that would have been fine. That's very much not what you posted.

As for "there is no conversation to be had"—this is the sort of categorical putdown that tends to go along with unsubstantive posts in the first place. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? We're looking for curious conversation here, not position-hammering. There's a big difference between those, even if all of your views are 100% correct. Launching straight into a flamewar when the thread is brand new is definitely not the intended use of this site.

Re: Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

#150

Post by GhettoComputers »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #63
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to leftist belief just giving people a roof over their head doesn't magically fix things. Where it that easy. A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or antisocial. You can't just drop these people in a neighbourhood and everyone lived happily ever after.

I don't know a single leftist who wants to just drop the homeless in housing and forget about them. Usually, when people talk about housing-first policies, they're advocating for flipping the script: don't make treatment, abstinence or work a prerequisite for housing; give them a permanent address, a climate-controlled shelter, and a secure place to store their belongings. And then, concurrent to that, you can help t…

Most people regardless of politics are simply NIMBY and assume because they haven’t been in the same situation but think they know better, it’s just like Emma/Clueless.

I know people who got section 8 housing and just lazed around, I remember one guy said he moved out to pay himself and I didn’t understand why someone would rationally do that, it’s similar to moving out of your parent’s home. It feels good to work for what you get, our struggles and pain are what drives our personal growth, rather than subsidizing symptoms and masking the problems like being beaten by your husband but the antidepressants and opiates are soothing enough to stay.

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