Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

The data doesn't really seem to support this, and my personal experience doesn't either. Most homeless people in my Californian town were living nearby when they became homeless. And though I didn't go to high school here, friends who did recognize people they grew up among the homeless.

There's a far bigger difference between California and its neighbors: housing costs and availability of housing even for those with money. I have known many well employed people in my town that have not been able to get an apartment even after applying for upwards of 20 apartments. When paired with application fees, that means that these people spend $500-$1000 merely on application fees before they finally get into an apartment.

That awful situation doesn't happen in Montana or Nevada, as far as I know.

View on HN

Yikes, application fees are illegal where I live. That's some pretty absurd rent-seeking. Is there a limit, or could an unscrupulous "landlord" post an ad with very low rent for a room, and live off the application fees without ever accepting an application?

Seattle had to pass a law requiring landlords to accept the first qualified applicant in part due to this occurring.

https://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/civil-rights/fair-housin...

There is never going to be official data on this by design, but there is evidence of it happening all over the country, and "friendly" places like California being on the receiving end of it (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...).

Statistical anomalies are a proven way of identifying cheating in a wide variety of scenarios like elections, standardized tests and sports. It isn't conclusive evidence, sure, but still a good place to start looking.

There is official data and it's these reunification programs. Plenty of rich cities will give you a bus ticket to live with friends and family. Most of the time it works out. Sometimes it doesn't and that unsheltered person is right back in the same place they left. But the person has to agree to house them before a bus ticket is purchased. They simply don't put them on the bus and let them figure it out.

These bus tickets would presumably come out of municipal budgets, right? So not only would such data exist, it would also have to be publicly accessible.

San Francisco absolutely has this data, and most people that were homeless were in SF already before. Unfortunately their most recent report is 404ing on their website, but I posted it to HN just about a month ago.

How long were they in California before they became homeless? If they were living in a center for transients or were on a couch for a year before being homeless (but were relatively destitute in Nevada prior to this), then the data absolutely supports it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com