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Comment by edude03 | Hacker News Reader

I think anyone who has actually been hands on trying to improve the lives of the unhomed know that 1) it’s a gradient between “I get kicked out of x everyday and go back at night” and “I’m sleeping under a bridge” and 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem. Often it’s mental health / substance abuse / lack of a support system. Heck I think there is enough movies/shows about how people fall through the cracks that if you really cared you could learn about the problems in a fun night at home watching Netflix.

So no hate to the author but this feels like pointless political posturing

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I’ve been closely involved with one of the largest shelter providers in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of years and I can say this is not true for the vast majority of people we serve. The primary causes of homelessness for those people are getting evicted because of a temporary financial crunch (health issue, lost a job, etc), domestic issues (leaving a domestic violence situation) or legal issues (refugees, etc). I had a similar belief (that substance and mental instability) prior to working with this organization because the visibly homeless people I saw seemed to fall into that category so I fell into this bias. However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.

It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas

> However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

Sure, this is what I'm talking about when I say there is a gradient. But for argument sake/illustrative purposes though - what would housing have to cost to end homeless? And bonus question - what would zoning laws have to look like to get to this price?

I imagine the answer would have to be "free" but we know for a fact that wouldn't end homelessness because homeless shelters exist that cost $0 and homelessness still exists (yes, even where there isn't overcrowding).

And sure yes, I'm sure there are people that are hanging on by their finger nails - if rent goes up $100/m they'd have to live in their cars but I'm skeptical that zoning law reform is the thing that's going to save them (or end homelessness as the OP suggests)

Having a roof above one's head should be a right, not a privilege. It becomes even more of a privilege when people view real estate as investment. They want to profit. For example, in Toronto, there are lots of apartments that are 'unrentable' because they were so badly designed that it's awful. They were built for investors to sell. Think of a studio costing 600k. Who wants to pay 600k for a studio? Like, where would someone be in life that they can spend 600k? I'd assume the majority would be married. They won't want a studio. Values are reversed. It's profit over welfare, unfortunately.

Lots of people that went to shelters prefer the streets because of several issues with people in the shelter. Violence, substance abuse, theft, etc. It's not like they prefer to be on the streets but sometimes that's the best option.

I'm not saying that this is the case for everyone on the streets; I'm saying that it is a fact that it happens and some people prefer the streets over shelters because of that.

It's one thing to just say something nice ought to be a right, and it's another to put it into a rigorous law that will last us indefinitely and have sprawling effects on a lot of different areas while we make sure it doesn't ruin or break anything.

At the extreme end, with absolutely zero zoning restrictions, you could build capsule hotels for people to live in, driving the price for a tiny tiny room to, say $300/month. With a minimum wage of $15, you'd need to only work 20 hours a month to afford that. Double it to account for taxes. Figure they have EBT for food. Assume they're able to use a platform like Reflex to pick up retail shifts (like driving for Uber but for retail).

With zero zoning, there's no telling how bad the capsule to bathroom ratio would be, which would make them unlivable, but as a thought experiment, it says that there is some price point where it's possible, so the real question is to find what's practical. If the choice is between a plastic tent exposed to the elements with no water, sewage or heating/AC, electricity, and an uncomfortably small hotel room with a shared bathroom, I'd rather the hotel room.

In practice, these hotels become full of mentally ill, drug-dependent, and sometimes violent people, to the point where most people actually do feel safer in a tent.

You can police things, but it’s not an easy problem. Where do you draw the line? Zero tolerance? As soon as someone has an angry outburst, or is caught with drugs, they’re back on the streets? Then you get back where you started pretty quickly.

College dorms seem to be able to solve this problem, so it should be doable for adults as well.

College dorms aren't full of mentally ill drug addicts. The population that lives on the streets has very little in common with students living in college dorms.

Law enforcement gaps are a different issue altogether

I see this take a lot but it's a very static take on homelessness.

Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.

Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.

> Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless

I think a more common situation is that they are on the street because they are unstable, but being on the street makes it much worse.

Yeah I buy that to some extent. But according to the studies I've read, the primary driver of homelessness is rising rent, not mental health issues.

See e.g. https://www.statista.com/chart/32585/change-in-median-rent-a...

Having actually built, planned, and done all the paperwork for a house myself most the extra costs that can't be worked around (you can DIY everything if you want) is permitting, inspection, and codes. I just didn't get my house inspected nor did I submit engineered plans, so saved tons of money, but most people don't have the option to bypass 'safety' inspections and they get gutted like a pig following all those rules.

The actual materials cost of a house, you can build one for $60k no problem and absolute shit-tons of cheap land near jobs (ex: unemployment extremely low in the Dakotas, cheap land, high demand for homeless-tier labor in the fields in bumfucklandia as ICE deports illegals making farmers desperate for anybody).

They may be desperate to hire anybody, but not everyone is willing, with good reason, to work 16 hour days with no overtime pay and sub-minimum wage no benefits and work for only part of the year and get paid under the table. only reason it make since for migrants is the low cost/standard of living back home and currency arbitrage where us dollar are worth so much more than their own currency.

You can enter Mexico, and they have only checked I had paperwork/passport about one times of ten. No reason why you can't do the same thing if you want to do currency arbitrage. Paraguay will give you a residence permit pretty much just for showing up if you can get ahold of a USA passport, or you can avail yourself of the compact of free association and live in Micronesia without a visa. The arbitrage game is for everybody.

Yep, there's plenty of awful jobs with no requirements but a pulse. The problem is that they'll grind your spirit and take all of your dignity and time, if not outright scam you themselves (see: MLM).

I have trouble with a worldview that does not include "the Dakotas" in "bumfucklandia"

I mean, I hate to be cliched, but correlation does not imply causation. There are many possible confounding factors that could be at play here.

Correlation may not imply causation, but where there is causation there usually is correlation. So, if there is a rise in homelessness there is likely some factor contributing to that and if a factor is correlated there is a good chance that it's causal. Homelessness may caused by multiple factors but if it's increasing and those factors are mostly remaining static then looking for the one that is also increasing seems like a good bet.

Sure. But that's surely better than your "I think" above that is just based in a hunch.

Keep in mind these are the same economists who said that Milei's reforms would not alleviate Argentina's inflation

Yes, a big chunk of the homeless are referred to as "invisible" because they seem normal and may even have jobs.

That works as long as they don't strip out all the copper wiring, appliances, doors, windows, and anything else of value either because of drugs or some other unmet real need or other issues that come up when inevitably they can't be monitored 24/7. Which probably will only happen sometimes, but it only takes a few to destroy the whole program due to the sky high cost of construction in the US.

You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.

Maybe for some, but how do you see it playing out?

Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?

I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.

This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.

I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.

Not all of them, no, but if you give someone keys to a home the problem of them not having a home is solved. We may not be equipped to solve their other problems, but that does actually solve that problem.

As far as going somewhere else, the problem is accessibility of resources for the unhoused. Many municipalities don't like the idea of random people going to their town and using the benefits from that town, you have to have lived in that town for many years and ostensibly contributed taxes while you were able to work. So if you were previously housed in LA/NYC, your best bet to getting services is to stay there because having been housed there previously gets you moved up on the list for housing.

> but if you give someone keys to a home the problem of them not having a home is solved.

I guess this is the heart of the debate though - is homelessness caused literally by not having a home? And bonus question - would changing zoning laws as OP suggest solve this?

I'm arguing no - more often than not there are contributing factors other than mental health/abuse/drugs that cause homelessness to be your only option that wouldn't be solved by someone giving you keys. Most obviously - food, utilities, is the house close enough to work that you can walk there, who is paying for maintenance of the house, will you be housed with people that are actually homeless because of mental health issues - and will they do things that cause your own mental health to be impacted etc.

Where are these cheap cost of living and high job availability places? How do you rent a place in a city you've likely never been, without a job already lined up, presumedly no money for a deposit? What do you do when you realize this cheap cost of living place pretty much demands a car to be livable?

Pretty much anything is better than sleeping on the street. Why would you choose to let your last money run out and then you're stuck somewhere where if you have no reasonable way to afford rent on a low paying job.

For instance, move to Cleveland Ohio. Median home price is $173k. Rent is also cheap.

I don't know, make it work. Whats the alternative? Stay in a city and sleep on the street because you don't want to figure out a bus schedule?

Just make it work! As if the only hard part of this is figuring out the bus schedule.

The rich cities that are too expensive to live in are often the ones that provide the most benefits to the homeless, both legal and illegal. Anything from free or discounted food, medical care, laundry, charitable organizations, people who give money to panhandlers, lenient law enforcement, less violent crime, better weather, and easier targets to steal from.

Not to mention your entire support network and your friends are still there.

I think the whole point is to not be homeless. Sure, if you want to be homeless, big expensive cities might be your best bet. And a lot of people that want this lifestyle migrate to these cities for this reason.

I think you're vastly over simplifying the "not be homeless" part. Very highly doubt the majority of homeless people want to be homeless.

> I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.

If you've already been evicted then getting anybody to rent to you is extremely difficult. You are going to need not only the first month of rent but also a deposit at this rental in some other city. And it is going to be hard to get a job right away in your new city. Oh, and maybe you have kids who need to be fed.

Where is this bridge money coming from to make this move work? And what happens if it doesn't work?

bko in the sibling comment said nearly exactly what I was going to say. While I do agree that you can "fall into" this start and it's very difficult to get out of - I'm very skeptical that with no other contributing preexisting factors you wouldn't be able to figure something out. You'd have to be extremely unlikely to

- not have any family

- not have any friends

- not have any savings

- not have anything they could sell

- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)

- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper

- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)

And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?

> - not have any family / friends

This is largely true [0].

> - not have any savings

Americans basically don't have savings; median is $8k [1]. People of color save less, as do people in urban areas, as do poorer people [2], all of which is in line with who is more likely to be homeless.

> - not have anything they could sell

If you think about what one might go through on the path to foreclosure or eviction, you probably sell/lose a lot of things trying to keep your home. Maybe selling your car bought you a few months, maybe you needed it for your job(s) and it got repossessed. There are a lot of circumstances where this can happen: a partner dying, moving out to avoid intimate partner violence, health care costs, etc. This is a "slowly and then all at once" type of thing.

> - not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)

Most of the time they're already working; 53% of homeless and 40% of unsheltered homeless are employed [3].

> - Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper

Moving is very expensive in both a time and money sense:

- find time to pack

- find a new place

- maybe find a new job(s)

- put down deposits on everything

- purchase packing supplies

- either hire movers or do it yourself (if you're able)

- find time to move

- find time to unpack

This might seem like a ridiculous and petty list, but when you have very little time and money you think like this. It's also super stressful to think like this.

> - Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)

US/US State social programs have huge paperwork burdens, onerous anti-fraud requirements, and don't even give you enough money to make rent after all that (the frenzied shouts of "housing subsidies?! do you want housing prices to get even higher?!" are responsible here, also--as always--a healthy amount of racism).

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#:~:text=Most%2...

[1]: https://archive.ph/pOOk1 (MarketWatch)

[2]: https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/how-where-you-l...

[3]: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...

I've housed two sibling that were labeled as "mentally unstable"(raised by mentally abusive narcissists) and "lazy"(has narcolepsy), respectively. Both situations were pretty bad before they landed in our home, but everyone in their lives called us "angels" for taking them in.

Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).

Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.

The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.

Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.

And this is the problem with homelessness. There are two drastically different “classes” of homeless people. There’s the working single mother waitress or nurse who fell behind on bills due to medical debt, maybe rent went up and is just bad at managing spending, saving, etc. Now she’s living in a car.

Then there’s the batshit crazy dude who’s living under the bridge who’s staring off into the trees and can’t hold a coherent conversation. This poor soul is not homeless because his landlord raised his rent from $2000 to $2200 and he just can’t eke by.

However the mother in case 1, could absolutely benefit from:

1. Better health insurance 2. Better financial education 3. A credit on housing or whatever.

This is why no one can agree on homelessness because half the population imagines the “noble” woman scenario and the other half imagines the bat shit dude with his pants around his ankle.

The solutions to each are drastically different. So you sound like an idiot when you say “we just need more homes” when you’re picturing scenario 2. But equally people sound like idiots when you say “we just need more mental institutions” but the listener is picturing scenario 1.

We’re talking in circles and English needs more words to describe these two drastically different types of people.

There's also scenario 3, which you can see pushed throughout this thread - that scenario 2 doesn't really exist, because "that bat shit crazy person smoking fent and screaming at passerbys" was once just a regular, down-on-their luck mother (scenario 1), who was driven insane / driven to drugs by being homeless".

We don't really need more words to describe the scenarios. It's all politics, we know what the game is. Whether you see homeless as primarily category 1(/3) or primarily category 2, seems to align overwhelmingly with your preferred brand of politics. And as such, in the current social milieu, there's effectively no constructive conversation that can happen. It's just political extremists being handed their moral justification for their position, refusing to accept any other version of reality that conflicts with it.

There are two groups of homeless: the financially homeless, which can be helped by providing housing, and the unstable homeless (addicts or mentally ill) for whom housing will do nothing.

The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.

The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)

My whole point is that there are not just these two groups. There is instead a pipeline of your group 1 into 2. Give people homes, cut off that pipeline.

> rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem.

It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.

Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.

https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...

As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).

https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...

Now, this is a whole other philosophical debate - but why does anyone need to live in LA? I really doubt that people of sound mind are living their homes willingly to be homeless in LA. Sure - there is the crowd that think LA is where they need to be to make it - and I'm sure more than 0 of them believe in the grind so much that they do decide to be homeless on purpose HOWEVER (with no data to back it up) I'm confident that's not the majority of homeless people in LA.

I'm saying of sound mind not as pejorative to be clear but I think for most people of "sound mind" they could figure something out that's not living on the streets (getting roommates, moving somewhere cheaper etc)

The weather is nice, and there are public services. No-one wants to be homeless in Bakersfield. It is expensive for people with money.

Remember that 25% of unauthorized immigrants live in California, mostly in the south. Last year, California made them eligible for Medicaid for health care (MediCal). It probably is attractive that people there can get health care and providers can get reimbursed.

https://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php

I think that's the wrong angle to look at this from.

People do live in LA, and they expect to be able to do things like shop at a grocery store and buy their coffee at a Starbucks.

Therefore, there's a need for people to work at such jobs.

If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA, that means there's a structural problem that needs to be solved, one way or another, and individual choices (like "I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.

> If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA, that means there's a structural problem that needs to be solved, one way or another

This is one of the key underlying problems that doesn't get enough attention. And the current Admin's policies are only making it worse.

> If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA

There's a huge gap between "I can't afford to buy a $700,000 house" and "I live on the streets" though. Renting is an option, renting (or buying) and having room mates is an option. Not living in Beverly Hills is an option etc.

> I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.

I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is. People want to be a hair stylist in LA instead of North Dakota because of the high population density and general wealthiness of the population. During covid, we saw an exodus of people out of the HCoL areas *because* the "non essential" jobs they relied on also moved out (not clear which came first, but the point remains). So generally yeah, if you can't get your hair cut in LA because all the stylists moved out of the city, you'll either commute, or move where everyone else did (which I guess is gentrification in a nutshell)

Either way. I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here

> There's a huge gap between "I can't afford to buy a $700,000 house" and "I live on the streets" though.

Sure. But that's not what I was talking about. I'm saying if it is very difficult or impossible for an average grocery store clerk to find an apartment in LA where they can live what most people would consider a fairly normal life—ie, living alone or with a small number of roommates, each with their own bedroom or sharing one with an actual partner—then that's a systemic failure, not an individual one.

> I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is.

Right. That's part of the system that we're working within.

What I'm saying is that individual choices, like "LA is too expensive; I'll move somewhere else" do not solve the problem. As in, yes, that individual is no longer dealing with the unaffordability of housing in LA, but housing in LA is still unaffordable.

> I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here

I mean, the author is clearly satirizing the position of an upper-middle-class person, but the problem they're highlighting is absolutely one that Starbucks workers in high-cost-of-living areas face.

You'll get mental issues if you sleep under a bridge for a while. You see, homelessness is a very low-status existence. Hormone levels mirror it and make your mind to be low-status. It changes your behavior in perceptible ways. Like a position of leadership changes a personality of people by adjusting their hormone levels, so a position of low-status omega do.

It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.

Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.

In my experience among young people sometimes homelessness is also just living with some friends, moving between friends places or some random locations, with most of your stuff being stored somewhere, without having permanent place to stay for long periods of time (like a year), and that’s usually because of affordability and availability.

That works for a bit but eventually friends get sick of it, and if they don't a baby is born and it suddenly becomes real weird and very obvious you are intruding on the baby. There is a timer ticking in this scenario. By the time all your friends have kids the chance you can stay anywhere reaches ~zero.

It's mostly the cost of housing. The rate of homelessness goes up and down in direct relation to the cost of housing as a fraction of median income. What you also see is places with high rates of drug addiction and mental illness, but low rates of homelessness like West Virginia. Because housing costs are low there. Even a drug addict can scrape together enough to stay dry.

What you are seeing is that when the cost of housing goes up it's the people on the margins of society who are pushed onto the streets first and have the hardest time getting back into stable housing. That doesn't mean the cost of housing wasn't the driving force.

It probably doesn’t help that landlords (and sometimes even flatmates) basically want you to get a security clearance, proof that you could afford to buy the house outright, and a commitment to rent for at least a year.

Putting in a plug for a great book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. https://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0...

This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.

For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.

The concept of humanizing homelessness fascinates me. It really does seem that the cultural default in the US is to view homeless people as subhumans who deserve to lead miserable lives. I’m not saying that this is what you yourself consciously believe(d), but it seems to be the implicit belief underlying much of the discourse around homelessness on HN and in the US more broadly.

Normally when we talk about “humanizing” a problem it’s one that doesn’t have a directly visible human element. But everyone has seen actual homeless people. It’s not something that we are just aware of as an abstract problem.

What exactly is the cultural barrier to seeing what ought to be very obvious? I.e. that homeless people are regular people who are down on their luck, or who are victims of broader societal failings.

The US has a very strong thread of Calvinist/Puritan/Protestant theology and thought running through its cultural foundations. One of the effects of this is a cultural predisposition to believe in something approximating the Just World theory—that is, that if someone is rich, it is because they are a better person (or blessed by God, or destined to be rich), while if they are poor it is because they are inferior people who deserve to be so.

This cultural background makes it very easy for people to look at their own lives and see their successes as their own work, and their failures as bad luck—but then look at other people's lives and see both success and failure as being 100% a product of their own deserving. (When in reality, everyone's successes and failures are a blend of luck and merit, with a pretty heavy emphasis on the luck, especially the luck of what family you were born into.)

This is correct. It goes deeper than this, too. Capitalist economies rely on a myth of meritocracy for labor.

The end result is that we’re forced to view the homeless as lesser. We typically throw around words like addict, because we have to. If we admit that there’s homeless people out there who got so based purely on bad luck, that destroys the promise of America.

It's not just a US thing, though.

I believe that some form of this is pretty common in general simply because that's how people cope with the very fact that homelessness exists in the first place. Like, it's either a massive injustice that pretty much demands that you, personally do something significant about it... or it's "just the way it is", and you can look away. But this latter outlook requires some amount of dehumanization, so people rationalize that the best they can.

100%. This is called the Fundamental Attribution Error, and to my knowledge, it is not at all unique to the US.

I get that you are judging me for my perspective or past perspective, and that's your right (please don't deny it, just own it, it's fine).

I don't think it's a cultural barrier. It's how many humans are generally wired. There are so many problems in the world that if you concern yourself with all of them, you'll be mired in inaction anyway. When you don't have time to help homeless people, you ignore them because to do otherwise would make you feel like a bad person. Pretty simple?

Besides, I don't think it's so simple. Yes, there is an element of luck and society, but there's is also an element of personal responsibility. And only one of those is in the control of the "victim", so I still believe it's harmful to encourage that victim mentality, even when there is truth to it.

What is your personal view on the homeless? What do you do when you see homeless people in the streets?

I’m not talking about ignoring homelessness. Of course people ignore all kinds of instances of human suffering. What I don’t understand is how homelessness could need to be “humanized” when it’s already rather obviously tied to the suffering of individual humans visible to the public.

My view is that we need more housing and cheaper housing. This would do more to help than encouraging homeless people to take “personal responsibility”, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. Is housing only for responsible people? If so, should I be required to leave my apartment and live on the street as due punishment for the irresponsible things that I do on a daily basis? Is there some kind of moral bar you have to pass before you can have a roof over your head? This is nuts. Everyone should have somewhere to live.

And yet not everyone does. And even if you have everyone free housing, not everyone would take it. So now what?

When you ignore a homeless person, you are depersonalizing them on some level. If you saw every homeless person as a some or a daughter, a mother or a father, a best friend, a laughing child, a person doing their best, could you really walk by? Probably not. And they were all these things at one point, perhaps not too long ago.

> And even if you have everyone free housing, not everyone would take it. So now what?

Possibly nothing? If you have free housing for anyone who wants it then you'll have some residue of homeless people, but not nearly as many as there are now.

> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.

While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.

The housing first initiative proved definitively that all secondary factors are much more treatable when the subject is housed. The societal cost of housing is way less than dealing with all the problems caused by people being unhoused.

A huge number of people end up on the street by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore. We tell ourselves it’s substance abuse, so we can pretend it’s their own fault and couldn’t happen to us

> We tell ourselves it’s substance abuse, so we can pretend it’s their own fault and couldn’t happen to us

I don't disagree that many people disregard the problems of the homeless however I want to be abundantly clear that that I'm arguing against

> by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore.

It's not simply that, things have to be going wrong in your life (not necessarily your fault) that losing your income puts you on the streets. Which goes back to the gradient - for some people losing their income will have no visible impact, for some they'll be under a bridge but which one it ends up being will depend on other factors in your life (having savings, friends, etc)

That was my reaction. Nimbyism is an easy scapegoat, and is a factor, but the problem is much more complex.

For example, there is a rental cartel operating in the USA.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

AirBnB is a factor.

I'm not sure what your experience is. To your 2nd point, I googled "homelessness studies" and here's some stuff I found:

The bulk of homelessness is a housing problem [0]. Per-capita rates are the highest in the most expensive places to live. This isn't because homeless people migrate to the places w/ the best homelessness programs either: they're largely long-term residents of their cities [1]. Homelessness is increasing because incomes are not keeping up with housing costs [2]. Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%. While severe illness can lead to homelessness, it also works the other way around [3]. There are many homeless families, often headed by women but many are also "intact" families [4]. People of color are also dramatically overrepresented: Black Americans are 13% of the population but 40% of the homeless [5]. It's hard to imagine Black Americans are 3x more likely to have severe mental illness or addiction problems.

I think it's pretty conclusively a housing cost problem. Maybe not entirely, maybe not everywhere, but it does seem like we'd take care of most of the problem in most places by bringing down housing costs.

(n.b. the NIH book source is from 1988, but I found most of its basic findings were corroborated by more recent sources)

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex....

[2]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

[3]: https://community.solutions/research-posts/the-costs-and-har...

[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex...

[5]: https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/raci...

Homelessness studies is a useless field because it conflates those temporarily without a permanent home with those living on the streets.

Which is to say a family who lost their home and is living with a friend while supportive housing services is getting them accomodations is considered as 'homeless' as the crazy man who sleeps under the bridge and exposed himself to young girls.

Everyone is supportive of the former and by and large this group is helped and gets housed.

The latter... No one needs that

No it doesn't, there's the term "unsheltered homeless" for the group you're talking about.

>Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%.

Horrible, but despite those increases, there are not rental units going unoccupied in any large number. Cutting prices will not house more people, if all the rentals are already full.

What is supposed to happen is that as rental prices go up, supply is increased to capitalize on it. But that's not happening, in most areas, for various reasons.

The core problem is the curve of population growth versus the curve of housing units. Prices are an consequence of that, not the cause.

> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

There is a well demonstrated and strong correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. There are absolutely cases where the root cause is pre-existing mental health issues or substance abuse but it is simply not true to say that housing costs are rarely the problem.

Further, homelessness can cause substance abuse and mental health issues. So even if you can look at somebody today and say "wow that person has a massive addiction to meth and clearly just giving them a roof won't solve everything" this does not mean that the reason they became homeless in the first place was a substance addiction.

Building more housing will not solve all homelessness. Frankly, so what? Almost no problem on the planet is solved by a single thing. It'll solve a substantial portion of homelessness. That's still good.

For some homeless taking drugs is done to not die of other homelessness associated cause of death. When your on the street with no where safe and warm to sleep at night you may turn to drugs to keep you up and moving so you dont fall asleep and freeze to death or fall asleep and get mugged/raped/stabbed.

I very much agree. This is how I feel too in regards to this "abundance liberalism": some people think they can fix the whole country by deregulating zoning laws and tweaking a few numbers. It seems foolish to me. Whatever the solution is, I am convinced it requires (re)building actual social nets and welfare.

The post is from 2018, but it's very topical because of "abundance", as you point out.

You might be interested in this podcast Bad Faith: Episode 478 - The Abundance Conspiracy (w/ Sandeep Vaheesan, Isabella Weber, & Aaron Regunberg)

Episode webpage: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130189560

Thanks, I'll take a look!

And yet milei did basically exactly that in Argentina.

Sometimes the need to overcomplicate is itself irrational.

Why must the solution involve more than that?

Can you seriously claim that Milei improved the material conditions of Argentinians? At best, he sold the country for a quick buck to make a few numbers look good, but ultimately doomed the country. I can't think of a single place where austerity was met with positive long-term outcomes.

According to this outlet [1], Argentina seems to have experienced a recent spike in homelessness.

As I said, it's foolish thinking you can fix everything with this "one simple trick". Housing is expensive because the market is gamed, deregulating it further won't fix shit. Those who make it expensive will always succeed in keeping it this way, if we don't take away their power and try to make the game fairer.

[1] https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/quarter-of-rough-s...

While there's some things that's can be done in the political and legislation spheres, there's a lot more need for just basic human relationships. Talking to those people and making friendships with those who different than you, and might be a little scary or uncomfortable. I suspect a lot of out social and political problems could be solved were we to get off of these shiny screens and spend time being in our bodies, building relationships with real people who don't fit all of our lofty ideals

These problems existed before phones

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