Before this gets too big I'd like to say this kind of saccharine story, while nice for the person involved, does not give a realistic picture of homelessness. Homelessness is not caused by people not having a job. It is caused by peoples' jobs not paying a living wage, coupled with high housing prices, making them one unexpected expense from being on the street. It is caused by people developing mental health issues that make retaining employment extremely difficult; and what could be more ruinous for your mental health than not having a home, a safe place to retreat to & store your possessions? Think - many of us have been depressed. Do you think you could manage your depression at all if you didn't have a safe, warm place to just hang out alone and recover from the world? Of course, the worst mental health problem of all is addiction. If you are homeless and develop an addiction then there is very little hope of recovery.
The homeless also suffer at the hands of the criminal justice system. It's very easy to get arrested for petty crimes when unhoused; the cops really hate the homeless. Someone can't periodically destroy a bunch of peoples' meager shelter in completely unproductive "sweeps" without developing a view that they're less than human. Maybe you spend a couple days in jail, so you've lost what job you had. Or you have a record, so good luck getting a job and possibly escaping homelessness!
All of this is to say that this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story is just completely ridiculous, and if you see the world through the lens of this story then you'll have a ridiculous worldview.
The fundamental reason for homelessness is simple. As long as housing costs money, there will be those who cannot afford it. I encourage you to think about this simple sentence and its implications.
I think that this is the worst feedback loop in American society. You get the cycle of poverty, no healthcare, petty crime, criminal record or prison, round and round. Many Americans who are well off fail to realize that in the end they're paying for all of this. They're paying for the prisons, subsidies, etc. Many I know call the poor/homeless drains on society but do not want to do anything to help them become a positive on society. It's spiteful and not pragmatic.
Sadly I don't think this is only American. Details vary from country to country but this is what I've seen in all countries I have lived in (all in Europe).
What I don't fully understand is how prevalence of homelessness doesn't seem to correlate much with the general wealth of the society, at least in generally speaking 'rich' countries - say G20. Sure, wealth is a relative concept, but 'warm place to sleep and a bowl of soup' is a pretty absolute yardstick, one which many people sadly don't make.
??? Countries with more homeless per capita than USA: Canada, Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Israel, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
There might be a difference between colloquial terms and control theory/system modelling there. Negative isn't pejorative when referring to a loop, it's (mostly) stabilizing.
A negative feedback loop example is a nuclear reactor (goes down when it's too high, goes higher when it's too low). A positive feedback loop example is a nuclear bomb (goes higher when it's high).
I think you’re misunderstanding what I am suggesting. People can be homeless for very long periods, so there may be some threshold below which you see positive tendencies and above which you see negative tendencies.
I've tried to think about what you're saying and my (perhaps incorrect) take is that you're saying people homeless below certain thresholds (say, amount of time for example) might have benefited from the homelessness (negative feedback loop) whereas above a threshold things would get worse (positive feedback loop) ?
If I understood that correctly, that would bring in the assumption that homelessness can be to some extent a positive thing. Stretching my mind to include even a teenage runaway for a day perhaps I could see that, but otherwise I could hardly visualize anything about basic needs not being covered that doesn't automatically triggers a positive feedback loop (i.e. no access to sanitation makes you dirtier which makes you less likely to access sanitation, no access to food makes you less likely to have the energy and composure to heighten your chances to get food, not having a physical address to be in makes you less likely to kick-start any life since most parts of society such as renting/jobs/phones depend on each others - getting a job without a place can be harder, and getting a job without a place too, likewise to get a phone without an address or to get a job without a phone)
I was suggesting the equilibrium point as a homeless person.
To use an overly simplified example, an alcoholic homeless person would be less able to get money when drunk than sober.
I am not saying that specific example is accurate, but there does seem to be a balance point where homeless people can acquire money but not savings to eventually stop being homeless.
I mean, I suppose if you zoom in on the shitty parts of life and you want to debate whether there are zones of stability in crappiness, all the best to you. That there are local extrema doesn't really deal with the global analysis, which I suppose brings it back to the initial discussions, as I'm not sure anybody would give a passably livable or somewhat positive evaluation of "being homeless and just a bit drunk but not too drunk".
I not suggesting anyone is going to recommend being homeless. However, understanding issues is important when trying to address them. For example is it better to give 100$ to a homeless shelter, food kitchen, or a homeless person.
In the US the state of Utah decided that the cure for homelessness is housing homeless people. They stop asking if the person was worthy or will be responsible and just started to house them. Turns out that the vast majority of homeless, mental health issues or not, prefer to live in a safe environment.
“In terms of preventing homelessness, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s housing.”
Preston Cochrane, former executive director of Shelter the Homeless.
There are still homeless in Utah, but the government priority is House them first then figure out why they became homeless after.
I read about a few places doing it, but never any discussion on the following: are the houses well looked-after? And in particular, do they last?
Stereotypes and needs aside, isn't this a common issue with e.g. social housing? I guess perhaps because people who need this kind of help often have severe mental issues alongside.
I'm wondering about the sustainability of such approaches, rather than any kind of 'worthy/not worthy' arguments.
Also, how does one avoid creating ghettos? This is already an issue with low cost / subsidised housing, this sounds related.
They should be solid houses, yes. They aren't always, obviously, but that's the goal.
The term of art for this is permanent supportive housing, which is handy if you want to look for more research and documentation. Seattle currently has 1,900 units (building more this year) and we have a 99%+ success rate at keeping people from re-entering homelessness. Our homeless problem is still awful, but that's because a) pandemic and b) we've been hanging around 10,000 people living on the streets, so the units are a pretty small percentage of what we need.
We're not putting all our housing in one place, which alleviates the stigma problem. There is not a ton of research on the effect supportive housing has on the crime rate nearby, but the research we do have suggests that it's a relatively minor problem that can be solved:
Yeah, I wish this was the norm nation-wide. There’s a homeless crisis in my city (as in many cities) and too many people think the solution is to harass them into leaving or to jail them. Counterproductive and morally reprehensible. There seems to be a premise in Puritan America that punishing people is more important than solving problems.
I remember volunteering once to serve lunch in a soup kitchen. One of the people that came in for a meal was someone whom I’d seen working in a local bagel shop.
I’d known mentally that having a job didn’t automatically mean you weren’t homeless or struggling, but seeing someone who worked in my neighborhood right in front of me like that really hammered it home.
“Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” is fantastic, really. It was by far the most recommended book by guests on my favourite podcast and so I has high expectations, but it exceeded them.
I’d also recommend “Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell. It’s a travel-log where Orwell actually becomes a “tramp” in order to best document the experience of homelessness and to meet people experiencing homelessness. Orwell recognised the basic truth about homelessness almost a century ago, and unfortunately nothing really has changed.
Seconded on recommendation for "Evicted". Mathew Desmond provides a clear description of the interactions of racism, poverty and homelessness. He has both the stats and real stories of people he profiles. The book deeply affected how I think about those topics.
I don't think there's really a single thing I read that led me to this. I'll list off life experiences that come to mind, though:
(1) I guess it probably started off back in 2015 when I read about Utah's "Housing First" approach to ending homelessness which got quite a bit of national news coverage at the time[0].
(2) I started talking to some of the people experiencing homelessness who hung around the grocery stores I went to in Seattle, seeing them as a person and not an unsightly problem to be swept under a rug. Ask them what food they want then buy it for them sometime, you might get a good conversation out of it; if they're not up to talking, well, someone got a meal out of it at least - and they shouldn't really owe you anything.
(3) Then one year I went on a business trip to Copenhagen, and saw their hybrid system of both privately-owned & socialized housing; went to a BBQ at a coworker's place at one of the socialized housing complexes, which was very nice.
(4) I bought a condo myself, and cheered as the price went up on Zillow. Then was struck with the somehow extremely obvious yet little-noticed contradiction that house prices appreciating in value, which is more-or-less the driving thesis of investment the largest asset class in the world, is diametrically opposed to the goal of making housing affordable - as in, cost less & thus be worth less!
(5) I met my current partner, who is a medical resident in combined internal medicine & psychiatry. Their patient population is almost all homeless. I heard many of their patients' stories and the misery they experience.
(6) I started watching some urban planning videos by donoteat01 on youtube[1], who is an entertaining presenter that uses Cities: Skylines to illustrate common concepts. I especially liked their video on gentrification[2].
(6) Somehow I heard about the Tax Amazon movement in Seattle[3], which aims to put a payroll tax on workers at large corps & use the proceeds to fund the creation of public housing. I thought - that sounds great! Even though I work at a large tech corp myself, I'll participate. Speaking with people at the various planning meetings (who were almost all outside the bubble of friends-who-work-in-tech I had) was really educating and solidified my views on all this.
Sorry that isn't a link, but more a story of how I arrived here. Hopefully it helps you in some way.
It is caused by peoples' jobs not paying a living wage, coupled with high housing prices, making them one unexpected expense from being on the street.
My wife is a social worker, and something I've since learned from her is that the "poverty level" is solely for the cost of food and has utterly nothing to do with the cost of housing. It is utterly bananas that you can "not be impoverished" yet be homeless. Fixing that number to account for local cost of living for housing would be a really good step in helping fix the underlying problem (and the govt giving a crap about their citizens!)
>It is caused by peoples' jobs not paying a living wage
I thought this is the whole point of minimum wage laws. I see this word often but i don't understand the difference between 'living wage' and 'minimum wage' .
Can 'living wage' be clearly defined so the number can be derived using logic ?
This seems to take into account number of children and adults working in the family.Minimum wage doesn't take that into account.
Not sure if it would be possible to make employers pay different minimum wage based on number of children and working adults in a employees family. So I think this the idea behind paying living wage, pay based on employee's circumstances.
Many minimum wage laws have not kept up with the inflation in living costs, which is why people now use the term living wage. It likely was the original point, but very few are/were indexed to inflation. Add in the unwillingness of a large portion of politicians to raising the minimum wage, and drift has occurred.
Looking at the calculator posted in the sister comment, living wage isn't simply minimum wage adjusted up to inflation. It has to do with employers taking personal circumstances of employees into consideration when setting the minimum wage for that particular employee. Living wage for a single person is very different from living wage for a single parent with two children.
> It is caused by people developing mental health issues that make retaining employment extremely difficult.
Sadly, there are many other reasons, too. I met a family of immigrants. I learned through their eight-year old son his parents lost their jobs, couldn't find legal employment, did not speak english. As they were at a shelter, I imagine they were decent candidates to be picked up by ICE.
Nonetheless, I agree with your post. This is a solvable problem but it is only solvable at the housing level.
Maybe I am wrong but at least two points mentioned in your comment are US specific :
"It is caused by peoples' jobs not paying a living wage"
Where I come from minimum wage is enough to pay for a rent.
"the cops really hate the homeless. Someone can't periodically destroy a bunch of peoples' meager shelter in completely unproductive "sweeps" without developing a view that they're less than human."
Again I may be wrong but where I live there are no 'homeless villages' like there are in the US.
Minimum wage in the US is $5.15/hour iirc. At 40 hours per week (which many jobs won’t reliably get), that’s ~$824/month BEFORE taxes, food, and so on. Even in the rural south where I used to live, where the cost of living is very low, many one person apartments would be $400–$500/month. That leaves maybe $400 for everything else BEFORE taxes on a GOOD month. Combine this with the fact that employers aren’t required to, and pretty much never do, provide medical benefits to this sort of employee.
Maybe you can squeak by if you’re lucky… but you have to be consistently lucky. One bad month and the whole thing can fall apart. It’s basically impossible to build wealth or savings in this situation (not to mention care for your own fucking health).
I'm sure there are cops that live for this, but I'd be willing to wager money that the sweeps, etc. come as the result of some external pressure from local governments, citizens, and the like.
> without developing a view that they're less than human.
OP is talking about coping with what they are tasked to do. You can't treat them the way that "local governments, citizens, and the like" require you too, without hardening your heart, or it will really tear you up inside.
These may not apply to where you live but that does not mean that they only apply to the US. These qualities describe most human societies now and throughout history. This kind of ignorance is a side effect of living a life of privilege.
There is one problem though. That happens a lot (I have homeless Syrian people in mind) but the government does not allow them the right to work so they can't get out of poverty.
They're not even US specific. They're "a handful of cities with insane local economic conditions" specific.
Homelessness is not a rampant problem except on the west coast. Yes big cities have homeless populations but they mostly cycle into various shelters (often church run) where the ones that don't have serious mental issues get their lives back on track. It's not rampant like it is on the west coast.
Spend a few years riding the MTA, T or Metro and then compare to BART if you don't believe me.
California can kind of make the "hospitable climate" excuse but even rainy Seattle is just carped bombed with tents. Places like DC and Miami are not exactly known for exemplifying effective social services yet somehow they manage to have much less of a problem than the west coast.
When I checked the box to view percentages, homelessness seems pretty consistent with the major outliers being CA and NY. CA says 26% and NY says 16%, with most everyone else on low single digits. I'm not entirely sure what those numbers mean, though.
If you're going to talk about homelessness on the West Coast, at least give us statistics on what percentage are native to the West Coast, what percentage came from out of state and became homeless later on, and what percentage were literally homeless in another state and given a bus ticket to the West Coast because this is a fairly rampant thing.
> Homelessness is not a rampant problem except on the west coast
Not that this source is anything close to a comprehensive view into national homelessness patterns, but it's clearly an issue throughout the country [1].
> It is caused by peoples' jobs not paying a living wage, coupled with high housing prices, making them one unexpected expense from being on the street.
I agree with much of your post but let’s be clear, leading with this can be misleading.
Fundamentally, homelessness centers around being unable, for whatever reason, to work.
Not around specific wages and rents, which I think makes this part a red herring.
We can’t solve homelessness by attacking several ‘root causes’ at once. The key here is to be absolutely candid about what the root cause actually is right now.
Edit:
Your comment is using homelessness to critique capitalism, and is not actually about homelessness at all.
> Fundamentally, homelessness centers around being unable, for whatever reason, to work.
No, as the parent said, homelessness centers around the fact that homes cost money. There are all kinds of people in this country who have homes, sometimes many homes, and they don't do any work at all. Conversely, are you aware that many homeless people have jobs and they do actually work? “about 30% of … homeless people have a job” https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-do-about-30-of-h...
As a society, we have the resources to say "Everyone should have a home, no matter what." We have enough homes. There are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless. So it's not even a case that we don't have the resources to end homelessness. We, as a society, choose not to.
There will always be reasons, often outside of peoples' control, why they cannot make enough money to afford housing. Your solution to this is - what?
I believe that the fundamental necessities of life - shelter, healthcare, education (food, sure, but it is still relatively inexpensive) - should all be socialized to some degree. This can easily coexist with capitalism. Denmark has these things and is still a fervently capitalist country.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the is some ‘socialization’ of housing, whatever that means ... but somehow everyone always has a place to live no matter what.
In that situation should we still be angry about minimum wage?
See, we are conflating things here.
Some people really can’t work and need help. At that point, as I said above, specific rent amounts and wage amounts become irrelevant.
You need to focus on: what will genuinely help them? Drug treatment? Mental Health treatment. A lifetime of free food and housing etc and the removal of any obligation to contribute to society forever?
I say none of this ironically. When someone simply can’t work, and no one else voluntarily want to take care of them, we have to figure out what to do. And how to distinguish between fakers and real. And between temporary and permanent. Partial and complete.
At that point there are so many issues, putting high rents and low wages in is literally a distraction.
Why care so much about fakers vs. real? Just provide a solid base for living for everybody, regardless of economic standing. Stop making people jump through all these hoops to prove they really need help. This is the same animating principle underlying UBI, but I think UBI fundamentally won't be effective as long as it can be eaten up by rent, healthcare, and education costs which will rise to meet what is available.
I think you and the others in this thread disagree on the actual problem, and as long as that is the case this will just be a debate of people talking past each other.
The problem you see is: something prevents some people from contributing enough to society to afford housing.
The problem others see is: some people do not have housing.
I am with the second group. In an era of unparalleled abundance, is it so crazy to provide for everyone’s basic needs without expecting anything in return? What is even the point of “society”, and our contributions to it, if not to make life better for everyone?
We agree on the problem: some people don’t have housing.
Second point: if some subset, which I say is the majority, of people who can’t afford housing are in this situation because they literally can’t work ...
Decreasing rent or raising wages does nothing to address this.
Since these are the most vulnerable people, I feel that bringing concepts like the imbalance between rents and wages actually muddies the waters.
That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t discuss a socioeconomic problem without also critiquing the society and economic system within which it exists. Any discussion about homelessness within a capitalist society is necessarily also a discussion about capitalism.
No. It’s not. Because homelessness is primarily a health problem not a monetary one.
And also, every were the problem primary economic, it doesn’t necessarily follow that capitalism is the problem, it could be bad or corrupt policy that is straightforward to change without diving in on reforming capitalism.
> A lifetime of free food and housing etc and the removal of any obligation to contribute to society forever?
I don't understand this point you made? Are you saying that if someone was receiving food and housing they would no longer be obligated to contribute to society? I think that would make them more obligated to contribute, seeing as they are getting food and housing out of the deal.
This link is from 2015, and all the "buy" or "donate" links on his site seem dead. I wonder how long his moment in the international news kept his charity running.
In the spirit of the reporting I want to point out a perspective shift that comes after with the language used.
In my native tounge some groups started to frown upon using "homeless man/woman" and suggest to use "person in a crisis of homelessness" underlining that the state is temporal and not intrinsic to the person. When you start talking and hearing it like that it makes it more humane, it can be treated to be kind of xenophobic to say "homeless" about such individual.
Similar thing can be applied to people who are generally said to be "disabled" and there are good causes advocating for saying "people with disabilites" to shift the perspective we look them.
Americans have developed a survival strategy of turning horror stories into heartwarming tales.
"Homeless person turns to crowdfunding to get themselves a home!"
Americans: Aww how cute!
Rest of the world: What the actual fuck?
"Family turns to internet for insulin supplies because they can't afford them, man drives 1000 miles to give them some."
Americans: Amazing heroism!
Rest of the world: How the hell does a diabetic not get their life-saving medicine?
"96 year old woman flies 200 miles to queue for 6 hours to vote!"
Americans: Wonderful determination!
Rest of the world: Why couldn't she vote where she already was?
Dang, I'm.. a bit confused. The comment did not strike me as either flamebait nor nationalism (and I also didn't see any replies, either here or on the original, that took this "bait" and made a flamewar).
I posted it in good faith because I found it a witty highlight of the misery that a reader must ignore to be able to consider a story like this a feel-good tearjerker.
Obviously the comment is a commentary on a specific aspect of American culture, and obviously it takes some poetic liberties (such as suggesting that American culture is a singular thing at all, or that this is only an American thing, or using swear words). But it's not an attack. The way I read it, it neither idealizes nor rejects any country, and wouldn't at least one of those be required for it to be nationalistic flamebait?
For what it's worth, I have no beef with America and I strongly doubt the author has (I do not know them personally). HN is a US-dominated site run by an American organization. America exports a lot of a culture that I want a piece of (notably, SV/startup culture, which HN is a fantastic conduit for). That's what I'm here for.
Either way, I'll refrain from reproducing this particular comment in the future. But we clearly have different frames of reference, and I might take some time to fully understand yours. I believed I was well in the clear wrt HN guidelines and norms with this one.
It seems to me obviously an attack. One side is presented as ridiculous and reprehensible, the other side as sensible and decent. Also, it feeds directly into repetitive flamewar tropes about the US vs. the rest of the world. I'm not saying you meant it that way!
HN has a good culture of taking threads off topic, so I'll take that chance to plug my city a bit.
Eindhoven has all the good parts of the south of NL, such as the relaxed culture, the good food, the deep aversion to bullshit, etc. Yet I find that the people here have way less of the shitty parts of Southern Dutch culture, such as the chauvinism, that weird inferiority complex, and the distrust/paranoia towards outsiders.
(My theory is that this is due to there being so many expats here for the big (hardware) tech sector. They came from Drenthe 100 years ago to work at Philips, and now they come from India to work at ASML. It takes only one generation for them to mix with the locals, yet they keep an opener mind than eg the inbreds from Den Bosch)
Also the usual "medium size city" perks: the place is big enough for lots of stuff to do, nice bars and cafes etc, yet small enough to be able to randomly bump into people you know. As someone who grew up on the countryside, I find that a nice balance. That said, there's an exceptionally large amount of stuff to do per capita. Eg neighbouring Tilburg is almost the same size but significantly less vibrant.
Finally, it's super well connected. Notably, the direct train to Utrecht/Amsterdam goes every 10 minutes, almost like a subway.
Haha, you put Eindhoven on the map in my mind. You make it sound like a better Haarlem. I'm living in a quieter side in the Amsterdam area. Also, 75 minutes doesn't seem so bad, knowing you have a train every 10 minutes.
The homeless also suffer at the hands of the criminal justice system. It's very easy to get arrested for petty crimes when unhoused; the cops really hate the homeless. Someone can't periodically destroy a bunch of peoples' meager shelter in completely unproductive "sweeps" without developing a view that they're less than human. Maybe you spend a couple days in jail, so you've lost what job you had. Or you have a record, so good luck getting a job and possibly escaping homelessness!
All of this is to say that this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story is just completely ridiculous, and if you see the world through the lens of this story then you'll have a ridiculous worldview.
The fundamental reason for homelessness is simple. As long as housing costs money, there will be those who cannot afford it. I encourage you to think about this simple sentence and its implications.