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Comment by prolikewh0a | Hacker News Reader

With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise. Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc.

Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see the homeless any longer.

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> With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise.

If that were actually true, then there wouldn't be a homeless problem. The unemployment rate doesn't count these people. The unemployment rate only counts people who are 'actively looking' for a new job. People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics.

> Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc.

Let's be careful about the conjugation of that verb. The city is not bussing them anywhere. The city is offering them free bus tickets, if they believe they will be happier elsewhere. If they want to stay, they stay. If they want to leave, they leave.

> Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see the homeless any longer.

It's really not. They're not being forced out. They're just being given free tickets if they want them.

> The unemployment rate only counts people who are 'actively looking' for a new job. People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics.

That's entirely incorrect. We track all of these layers in fact.

We have the labor force participation rate, which is available further separated out into groups, such as by age or race. We track the employment to population ratio.

We have the U3, U5, U6 unemployment statistics, which track labor based on various conditions, whether full-time, part-time, discouraged, etc.

We track how many people total are employed full-time or part-time. We know how many hours they're working.

We track multiple job holders.

We track how many people are not in the labor force.

We track the flow of labor in and out of the labor force.

And we track all of these statistics for different age groups, men & women, races, etc.

For one big example, the prime working age 25-54 civilian labor force participation rate. Considered a critical measure of labor force health. It bottomed out at 80.6% in 2015 and has since climbed back to 82.3% as of October, slightly below where it was in 2004-05.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

> That's entirely incorrect. We track all of these layers in fact.

No....it is entirely correct. The unemployment rate that was quoted was exactly as I described. I didn't say the other statistics weren't tracked, I said the statistic quoted above, and the thing commonly referred to as "the unemployment rate" does not count it.

Stop being obtuse, it's not like the first guy specifically said "The U3 unemployment rate".

The point he was making though can be made even if the OP was referencing U3 which is if the fundamentals are looking better for employees (Which can be inferred from improving U3 numbers) then why are we seeing higher homelessness?

> Stop being obtuse, it's not like the first guy specifically said "The U3 unemployment rate".

Are you seriously trying to insist that he could possibly have meant anything other than U3? The common meaning of 'unemployment rate' is U3. Google 'current unemployment rate' right now, and Google will tell you 3.7. Aka U3.

> The point he was making though can be made even if the OP was referencing U3 which is if the fundamentals are looking better for employees (Which can be inferred from improving U3 numbers) then why are we seeing higher homelessness?

Because the population looking for work and the population falling into homelessness are not the same population! Which is exactly the point I was making about U3. There is a massive population that has left the workforce completely, many of them are subsisting on disability or some other unknown way. It is highly likely that those people are the ones primarily falling into homelessness.

You said "People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics."

Why would a reasonable reader assume that "statistics" means "specifically U3 unemployment"?

Because the standard meaning of 'unemployment rate' is 'U3 unemployment rate'. I and many other people believe that it shouldn't be that way, but it is. When people quote 'the unemployment rate', they mean 'U3', without exception.

Having a home is frequently a prerequisite to be able to

A: show up to work on time

B: be groomed

C: establish a pattern of living

It’s hard to go to work not knowing if your car will be towed. Granted, where people COULD afford to live isn’t the city centers, where the services are and where people congregate. And the suburbs don’t want them either. Pretty sad state of affairs - we need to provide a real safety net so people aren’t stuck below the line of employability.

D: Get a job in the first place.

Putting a homeless shelter or no address at all on your work application is a great way to get it sent straight to the circular file.

Even living in public housing can be a job killer if the addresses are well known enough. People at Cabrini Green had to hope they had a relative that would allow them to use their address to apply for jobs with, and hope on top of that the public housing officials wouldn't find out about it.

Yes, there are jobs in every city, but in major cities there is difficulty in finding housing and transportation. The cost of living is also high, so it's easy to get into debt. Whereas in smaller cities, it's typically easier to get on your feet because housing is more accessible, transportation is better, and the general CoL is a lot lower.

True, but this combined with brain drain creates a lot of perverse incentives and drives a further wealth divide.

For example, many low tax base areas accumulate a population with more problems that have higher tax rates, insurance rates, etc (and a more strained social net) than a rich city.

It is important to make sure rich areas are at least paying some of the costs they create in selectively pushing people out or creating bottlenecks to set a minimum CoL on who comes in.

You recognize that given this bus ticket opportunity, the homeless will actually converge on rich coastal cities, right? This problem is actually worse for the rich people that live in places like LA and SF.

The rule of having a place to stay in most of the programs causes the counter examples in the article.

Yep, but that still doesn't support the grandparent's point.

Then I'm not sure we are talking about the same things.

Everything in the article and this thread seems consistent with these programs actively running for rich coastal cities to return people or send them to places where their friends have space to spare.. That doesn't sound like Manhattan.

A convergence on rich cities getting more people is a possibility.. But the richer cities are setting precedents, have actual budgets for these things and regulations tend only to increase.

> Everything in the article and this thread seems consistent with these programs actively running for rich coastal cities to return people or send them to places where their friends have space to spare.. That doesn't sound like Manhattan.

It seems just as likely to be a rich coastal city as anywhere else, tbh. The article makes a point of saying that they only do the most cursory of checks anyway, so we can basically assume they're meaningless.

> A convergence on rich cities getting more people is a possibility.. But the richer cities are setting precedents, have actual budgets for these things and regulations tend only to increase.

It's certainly a possibility. But I don't know if you live in a rich coastal city, but I do, and the homeless problem here is out of control. The homeless population in rich coastal cities is empirically growing very quickly, and it is not growing in the same way in other places, consistent with net migration of homeless into rich coastal areas, not the other way around.

These bussing policies have been in place for a while, and there is no epidemic of homeless leaving SF and setting up shop in Des Moines. So while it may theoretically be possible for this to increase flow in the way you describe, despite the policies being in place for a good while, that is empirically not what is happening.

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