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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> We really need a nationwide push to fix this.

"Four states accounted for more than half of the nation’s homeless population" (California, New York, Florida and Washington) https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/states-with...

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Those four states are where 90m of the 330m people live, so it's not really all that surprising.

To be fair, that alone doesn't account for it, since 90m only ~25% of the total population, so it's still skewed. Probably attributable to density and cost of living etc though.

Florida/Washington/California are more hospitable to surviving while homeless. New York has New York City, which has a law requiring it to provide shelter from the elements for all homeless.

Not much of a surprise that there are more homeless where a person is more likely to survive winters and summers without shelter.

Thank you for useful link. It has a dynamic chart and I played with it by adding cold-weather states and desert states.

Excluding people who choose not to sink money into housing, if we consider the demographic where homelessness is not a choice (e.g. mental illness, drug addiction, poverty), what do CA, NY, FL, and WA offer that favours homelessness?

Some factors could be: favourable climate, large cities with more "survival opportunities", food banks, injection sites, and other social services.

Oregon scores high as well.

>" These are the 10 states with the most homeless people, according to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report:

    California (171,521)
    New York (74,178)
    Florida (25,959)
    Washington (25,211)
    Texas (24,432)
    Oregon (17,959)
    Massachusetts (15,507)
    Arizona (13,553)
    Pennsylvania (12,691)
    Georgia (10,689)

This is a strange take. Homeless people generally can't afford to travel cross-country and "shop around" for a "home". These states — more accurately, some cities in these states — create homelessless, due to the high costs of living in those cities.

New York City doesn't have a favorable climate.

I think you've reversed cause and effect. The cities with high homeless populations tend to have, indeed need, more services for the homeless.

> some cities in these states — create homelessless

I agree and I understand that it is complex. People may have ties to a city and in a tough economy may not have means and/or opportunities for work elsewhere. Shelters may close or be unable to take more people. But cities also draw people from the surrounding population.

About NYC... the climate isn't comparable to others in this list --

https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-in-the-us-have-th...

-- but NYC isn't as harsh as Minneapolis, for example.

> But cities also draw people from the surrounding population.

Yes, cities draw people from the surrounding population, but the question is whether they draw homeless people from the surrounding population. Which surrounding areas do you think all the NYC homeless are coming from?

> NYC isn't as harsh as Minneapolis, for example.

So? Minneapolis is colder than most cities in the United States.

I met a homeless guy in Seattle from Great Falls Montana once. He made his way to Spokane first, which has a similar historic skid row but doesn’t have the weather and social resources if Seattle. Then he just gradually came to Seattle. I always use great falls as an example now, you aren’t surviving unhoused there, so if you burn your bridges with your friends and family, you will go west to survive. The same is true in Vancouver to our north: it’s mild weather and social resources attract homeless from all around western Canada, it’s much easier to survive in Vancouver than Calgary or Edmonton.

There was a study once that said most of Seattle’s homeless were local, but it was self reported and they all reported having been born and raised in pioneer square, so something was off there. I wouldn’t put much faith I those studies.

I know nothing about how it works on the east coast though.

Here's the thing: cities don't provide social services in order to attract the homeless from surrounding areas. That would be nuts. Who wants to be a homeless magnet? Cities provide services for the homeless because they already have a critical mass of "homegrown" homelessness. This may attract some from surrounding areas, but the critical mass would exist regardless, due to economic conditions in the cities.

Both Canada and the USA have freedom of movement without a residency system. It doesn’t matter what social services the city provides, the cities can’t discriminate who they provide services to based on residency.

None of this is new. The trope of a hobo jumping a train to San Francisco is as old as movies are. Seattle has always been a destination for those without means looking to survive. The original skid row was in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, or Spokane depending on who you ask, and that goes back to the late 19th century.

Seattle does not want to be a homeless magnet, but it always has been, and the city is too progressive to cut off its generous social services, and can’t discriminate with them, and they can’t do anything about the weather anyways, so what the heck else can they do?

It has a lot to do with economic conditions: a well funded city (comparatively), plenty of things to steal, and a reluctant acceptance of property crime are all important in making freattle a destination, the same with the other west coast American and Canadian cities.

It's definitely worse in those states, but home prices are increasingly unaffordable all over the country.

an individual real estate agent in Nashville posted this month that "the median price of a single family home here has risen from $178k to $380k in the last five years"

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