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Comment by zhte415 | Hacker News Reader

> I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians!

Source?

Because this seems to be banded around in comments without anyone sourcing.

I dropped this actual source [1] in another comment, that measures 13% of unsheltered homeless as coming from out of state for LA.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jun/28/dispelling-my...

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I didn’t state any numbers. I don’t know. All I have is anecdotes from myself and others who work in this space.

That said, you don’t think even 1 in 9 people being out of staters puts pressure on programs? That as more people see how you can migrate and live far more easily than in Midwestern/East Coast cities, that those numbers won’t increase? That there isn’t a negative psychic impact to homeless people who are actually trying to get out of the system having to live around many others who are content to collect their scrip?

I’m skeptical the number is that low but even if it is, I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is. I think it reveals quite a lot about the preferences of the homeless who both originate from within, and outside, California.

Homeless people will always gravitate towards where sleeping rough is easier - no one wants to risk freezing to death.

> I don’t think it is the non-issue you think it is.

Those words, phrases, and thoughts were never shared by the user. This is you inventing a person in your head, and you are arguing with that imaginary person.

On my street in the Mission there were mostly illegal immigrants living on the sidewalk in tents, they told me as much.

Yeah you can just go talk to them to find out where your local homeless are coming from.

I'm glad HN has decided anecdotal evidence is more powerful than data. This is exactly what the tech sector needs to thrive.

It is more powerful. Data is often meaningless without interpretation, missing many dimensions, easily and often manipulated, funded by unknown desires and forces, and generally unreliable. Outside of the hardest of sciences it’s worse than worthless.

Meanwhile a single sharp person who lives in a city and interacts with the right intersection of people will tell you closer to the truth than even the better quality studies or media outlets. To think otherwise is imo foolish.

You're right it's much better to rely on information that is expected to be meaningless, has zero dimensions, is guaranteed to be biased, has no backing, and is scientifically proven to be unreliable.

Exactly what I expect from HN's crowd.

If your trust for first hand accounts from people you trust is meaningless, I feel sorry for you. And if you aren’t able to intuit their biases based on your history with them and take that into account, more so.

That you seemingly missed the caveat that I mentioned about “hard sciences” also not a good sign.

I do not trust you, no, because we know as a scientific fact that your perceptions are warped. That's why we do science.

Good, I said people you trust, not me. You shouldn't trust me, but I trust me and my friends.

I don’t care about homelessness in an academic sense. I care about the crackheads on my street. Anecdata is fine.

Even supposing that is true, which seems very unlikely, it is clearly untrue of the SF homeless population in general and of the East Bay homeless population.

I speak Spanish, my real name is in my profile, I talked to a few of them pretty often. I’ll try not to baselessly insult you back.

More likely you don’t want it to be true.

OK, I don't go to the Mission much. What I was trying to say was that putting that anecdote out there risks being a bit misleading, since obviously the vast majority of homeless people on Market St / Tenderloin, and in the East Bay, are not Mexican immigrants, illegal or otherwise. Unless you concede that point, readers of this thread are going to conclude that it is you that is trying to shoehorn reality into a form that you find palatable. If you genuinely think that the majority of homeless people in SF / East Bay are illegal immigrants, then I don't know which adjective to choose -- deranged, deluded, absurd?

Don’t be an asshole. The person you are accusing of being deranged and/or a liar just said something about their own street.

They are implying that illegal immigration is relevant to the grotesque problem with hundreds of drug-addicted, mentally ill Americans living in squalor in SF in a way that makes America look like a third-world country. That sort of shameless and self-serving lying has become very familiar in recent years due to political trends in the USA but we do not want it on HN.

If you had a point to make you could have made that one to begin with, you’ve made it obvious you’re just here to pick fights.

Have you talked to them?

That source quotes a study from LA county (not SF) in 2018, which discloses no methodology. So not a bullet-proof statistic by any means.

If I recall correctly, this source was criticized because their measurement for being "out of state" was that you haven't been in CA for 2 years or so. So if someone had come in 2+ years ago for the CA homeless benefits then they would be considered not out of state.

EDIT: I might be thinking of a different study, because going to that link shows that 65% were in LA county for 20 years supposedly: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...

I say supposedly because it doesn't mention how they got that information. If they used county records, it's a very different trust paradigm than if they just asked.

This is politics masquerading as facts.

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