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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

Another attempt to convince you that your personal observations must be incorrect because someone found a stat from a study somewhere.

LA, Portland & SF– are obviously measurably worse over the past decade. Portland is a case of going from beautiful downtown to cesspool in that timeframe.

There are a lot of reasons that stats are misleading. Noise in the data, biases, trivial statistics, incorrect measurement, poor geographic approaches.

Please don't sit at your desk and tell me what I see out my window doesn't exist.

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Did you even read the article? The last two sentences are: "Still, I think we can see why people in Seattle might feel there’s a crisis. Maybe anecdotal knowledge ain’t so bad."

The whole point of the article is that things vary widely across different locales. In some places homelessness is increasing by a little bit; in other places homelessness is increasing by a lot; in other places it's decreasing. The article also makes the useful point that perceptions of "crisis" are often related to whether unhoused folks are sheltered or unsheltered. We don't hear a lot about the homelessness crisis in New York even though its homelessness rate is statistically the highest in the nation.

Add Seattle to the list as well. It has been years since I felt safe taking my family downtown but now I don't even feel safe in most parks.

Seems like you didn’t read the article to the end. It discusses the spike in unsheltered chronic homelessness on the west coast, which is the most visible type.

You seem to be saying that the data is biased, but your personal anecdata is not.

Do I understand that correctly?

Or is it that when you say "homeless" you only mean the people you see, and not all the rest of the people that would typically fit the description of homeless?

What you see out your window certainly exists, but there is a whole lot of the world that you cannot see from your window. Claiming that your window provides the best view should at least come with some sort of argument about why it's a superior view.

Did you read the article? It's saying chronic unsheltered poopulations are increasing on the west coast, which also seems to be your observation.

How much geographic diversity does your window look out to?

I don’t doubt what you’re seeing. But that only tells a very specific story in the bigger picture.

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