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Comment by quirmian | Hacker News Reader

Lack of strong family ties. People blame lack of public facilities and health care, but at the root of it all, it’s the missing safety net that family provides. This is the number one difference between some of those incredibly poor places and America.

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True story: in one of my neighborhood boards, a young woman claimed to be homeless. She and her 8 year old are living with her grandmother in a tony part of town. The city counts her as homeless because she doesn’t have utilities in her name and is living with a relative.

This is bizarre to me. I grew up with three generations under one roof. We were a family and none of us were considered ‘homeless’.

The definition has becoming so broad to include so many different kinds of people that the cynic in me feels like the homeless activists and non profits and govt bloat benefits from inflating the numbers somehow with their ‘census’ taking..

In many cases people on the streets had strongly family ties, up until their mental illness began to manifest and their family was no longer able or willing to continue supporting them. People get kicked out of their houses because of violence, financial hardship, or any of many other difficult reasons. It's not simply a matter of people lacking compassion.

Take the case of the late Terry Davis for instance. He was living with his parents for years, but their relationship deteriorated as his illness progressed and in the end he died homeless. I don't think you can rightly blame his parents for that.

Sorry, no The issue is the people who run the country you were born in are making all of the decisions.

If you're homeless because you came out of prison, you will have had your right to vote deprived of you.

Family has nothing to do with it.

We live in a country where the government is separating children from parents at the border for the "crime" of seeking asylum.

The government has a lot of capacity to undermine and outright destroy strong family ties. Or to support and nurture them with policies like maternity leave, as most of the world does.

The US is the only wealthy developed nation without a good maternity leave policy.

Family has a lot to do with it. You can't neatly and cleanly separate other social stuff from family. It all interacts.

You grow up in a particular kind of family/social fabric, so you think that matters. You take those values with you to your government job or position as an elected official and perpetuate those values, for good or for ill.

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