L.A. to declare 'state of emergency' on homelessness

> Homelessness is a lifestyle for majority of homeless people

Can you please elaborate on that? Can you back that assertion that the majority of homeless people sees/chooses homelessness as a lifestyle?

It's interesting (and appaling) how a lot of people think along the lines of "if it was me I'd be hustling to get out of it, so homeless people are either lazy or like it", not being able to empathize or understand the severe emotional hit you suffer when you're out of food and shelter, two very basic needs. Even more so because a lot of accounts describe formerly successful people getting sucked down a vortex of hunger, poverty and exclusion...

I used to know a lot of people who for example had houses in another cities and were coming to tourist towns in season pretending to be homeless. They were making enough money to just sit on the couch off season. Also there is plenty of ways those people can stop being homeless if they don't want to. And you appear as someone who would like to force that change on them.

Firstly, sorry to hear of your loss. Fortunately it's not something I've had to deal with on a personal level and I hope it stays that way.

There may be some misinterpretation going on but I certainly didn't mean to imply that I was judging anything about omniusaspirer based on privilege or otherwise.

My point was that a comment like "homeless are shameless opportunists who go wherever they can most leech off society" is incredibly hateful talk to apply to a broad group of people. It's an ugly narrative, and if you attach those labels to a group of people you don't even know it's hard to imagine how you're going to help them.

I wasn't suggesting compassion and understanding as any form of solution.

Partially, this sort of narrative is one I'm particularly aware of at the moment. Over the last few months the British press have been using similar sorts of narratives to create an "us and them" gulf between humans and refugees.

I do stand by my comment. If you treat people as a lower class of being (as I would argue "homeless are shameless opportunists who go wherever they can most leech off society" suggests) then you'll struggle to solve these issues at a social level.

Aside from all that – I'd like to hope that we all want to help solve this issue. I've been doing a little googling around but haven't managed to find very good information on homeless causes. There must be bucketloads of research into it. I'd love to understand a little more about it.

So when http://www.adn.com/article/20100401/study-homeless-teens-she... report about the number of homeless rural teens in Alaska, who go to the city to find a job but don't have high school diploma or equivalency.

Vicious cold? Check. Impoverished? Check. Rural? Check. And yet there is homelessness.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stat... is titled "States Struggle With 'Hidden' Rural Homelessness"

> But in Fredericksburg, as in other small towns, suburbs and rural corners of the country, the homeless are often hidden, out of sight and mind, hard to reach and hard to help, say people who work with the homeless. ...

> But rural areas are more likely to be poor, with limited transportation, making it that much harder for the homeless to get to a center that can provide counseling, a housing voucher or medical care.

http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/rural says :

> Many people think of homelessness as strictly an urban phenomenon because homeless people are greater in number and more visible in urban areas, but homelessness is also pervasive in rural areas.

> Rates of homelessness among rural areas vary widely. According to the Alliance’s Geography of Homelessness report, there are approximately 14 homeless people on average for every 10,000 people in rural areas, compared with 29 homeless people out of every 10,000 in urban areas.

All this suggests that you simply didn't see the homelessness that was there when you were a child.

For a bit of background, here's a link to an sfgate column:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...

"The annual $167 million price tag is $20 million more than the operations budget for the Children, Youth and Family Services department, $6.3 million more than for Public Works and $3.8 million more than for Recreation and Park."

My guess is that in such a politically charged issue, people play games with the numbers, which you can always do with budgets (how do you allocate the fixed cost of maintaining a fleet of ambulances, does an ambulance trip to the ER count as a "homelessness" cost in the first place simply because the person is homeless, should it only show up as a cost if it is related to the condition of being homeless, how would you measure this…).

But however you measure it, SF does spend a tremendous amount of money on homelessness.

My personal feeling is that this problem is unsolvable at a local level, because homeless people come from all over the US (and beyond). SF has a large budget for such a small city, but SF just can't solve this problem for the nation at large. People who are frustrated with these efforts argue that our services will never make things better because we simply attract more homeless people by offering them. I've read that overwhelming majority of the homeless population in SF did not grow up in SF, but then again, you could say the same for the non-homeless residents.

I do see this as a national scale problem. Maybe a state of emergency, qualifying for federal funds, will be a good strategy...