Hacker News Reader

Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

It's a classic problem of mistaking the symptom of homelessness for the problem. If a person simply has a life event that wipes out their finances and they get evicted, okay sure - providing cheap housing just for people in their situation is great. But as much as we don't like stereotypes, a lot of homeless people do actually end up in that situation because of behavioral cycles that still need to be broken. What makes it worse is that homelessness changes a person - and sometimes they are unable to be a part of society right away for more reasons than money (and sometimes they don't even want to). My family operates a hotel that will sell off excess hotel rooms to various homeless groups in the winter - and many times the homeless don't want to be complete inside, so they open windows, etc. and only be as "inside" as they absolutely need to be to survive. That does cause problems if you share infrastructure with other people.

View on HN

No, what you're saying is a fallacy. After the housing bubble popped around 2008, millions of people around the world found themselves homeless. It can happen to anyone at any time for almost any reason, but often for things like healthcare costs or work accidents leading to unemployment and even bankruptcy. And it will happen again, and still nobody will remember, because of this mantra that homelessness is a lack of personal responsibility.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that your labelling of homelessness as a behavioral problem is the cause of homelessness. Repeated all around the world by countless people and politicians.

If we really want to solve poverty and homelessness, we need to start by separating the financial aspect from the behavioral aspect.

The financial aspect involves everything from vast wealth inequality, to lack of urban planning, to the divergence of wealth and automation, to regressive taxation and extortive healthcare programs. This is basically represented by 40 years of trickle down economics and complete disregard for externalities like environmental damage or displaced populations.

The behavior aspect centers mostly around mental health issues like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and yes addiction. Things which are all present in the wealthy but properly managed by therapy, medication and a large support network made possibly by the possession of money. There's absolutely no reason we can't offer treatment to the poor. And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US:

https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...

Personally, I vote to maintain the separation of church and state in the US, which means that the government shouldn't have a say in what appropriate personal behavior is. Which means as a culture, we have a responsibility to pay into a system which is concerned with the care of people who need it.

Churches can still feed and house the homeless, but they shouldn't be the only ones tasked with that responsibility.

For anyone reading this, if you haven't thought about how your personal moral and religious beliefs play into the problem of homelessness, now is the time.

>>And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US:

Social welfare spending has massively increased in the US since 1970. I would be willing to put money on taxpayer-funded spending on mental health seeing a similar increase.

Blaming de-institutionalization on a federal bill passed in the 1980s is a misleading simplification of the issue that ignores the larger trends in place.

Like I said, social spending has been steadily increasing in both inflation-adjusted terms, and in terms of percentage of the GDP expended on it. What changed is an opposition to institutionalization led by sociologists, who by way, are the most left-wing group of academics in the US according to surveys.

The article you linked to points out that the first law against institutionalization was passed by Califorinia, which is usually at the forefront of left-wing reforms. The move toward "community care", where drug addicts can optionally avail themselves to mental health resources, and are otherwise allowed to wander the city un-supervised, has allowed the most vulnerable segment of the population to be mercilessly preyed upon by drug dealers.

>>Personally, I vote to maintain the separation of church and state in the US, which means that the government shouldn't have a say in what appropriate personal behavior is. Which means as a culture, we have a responsibility to pay into a system which is concerned with the care of people who need it.

This assumes we as a culture has a say in how much people contribute to supporting those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, but no say in whether people actually take care of themselves, and do things like show up to their job and avoid substance-abuse. So you're not removing the government's role in saying what appropriate personal behaviour is at all. Taxation is enforcing a particular type of behaviour, and you're all for that. You just don't want to restrict self-destructive behaviour that encourages dependency on programs provided at the taxpayer's expense.

And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US

This is such a worn out trope.

No, Reagan did not single handily defund mental health.

Institutionalization became a dirty word - people held against their will. The thought was that these people could be more integrated in the community, hence institutions were defunded.

Reagan was just doing what everyone else was.

I think you're describing the distinction between chronic and transitional homelessness: https://endhomelessness.org/addressing-chronic-homelessness-...

> We now recognize that these patterns are indicators of chronic homelessness. Far from being the norm, only about 10 to 15 percent of people who experience homelessness are chronically homeless. But this relatively small group tends to be the most visible as well as the most vulnerable.

I would love to see a heat map of the chronically homeless. I'm very willing to bet that it is heavily clustered and this also goes into why people talking about homelessness often talk past each other; realizing that the problem is not "the homelessness problem" but rather geographically distinct subproblems would go a long way.

Yes, it's like comparing Cabrini-Green to most other public housing systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes

The people living in their cars/trailers are very different from those in large camps, which are very different from those on park/bus benches. Cold/rainy weather is also a huge selector that changes the group profile. So one person's experience with the homeless is highly impacted by exactly which group you see. The large Lord of the Flies camps are mostly hidden, but may house the majority of homeless depending on where you live.

and yet there's a large variation in homelessness per country, so somehow it can be affected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...

I suspect the estimates Wikipedia lists are quite off. I think they may be good enough to give you "an idea" regarding homelessness, but I think those are very rough numbers in many cases.

That's 20th century thinking tied into the scourge of fundamental religion that blames every lack of success in any avenue of life on a moral failing despite every bit of evidence to the contrary.

Addiction is a great indication of this, it's pretty conclusive these days that it's a medical and biological issue that can be treated successfully when treated as what it actually is.

But do we do that? Hell no! Our North American protestant roots pretty much insist that we treat it as a moral failing which radiates outwards as ripples of harm on every level of society all because we can't leave some primitive dark ages way of thinking in the dust bin of history like we should.

Housing unaffordable for young people? Of course it's a moral failing, they just didn't work hard enough...cue harm to society in general as it spirals and radiates outwards from that one completely wrong and ignorant thought until we reach the point where there are desperate people everywhere with nothing to lose.

It happens with so many problems and it's lazy thinking that hurts us all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com