[CydeWeys]

You're not seeing all the other homeless people though who were displaced by high housing prices and who aren't spending all their time drugged out in highly visible urban areas. There are many homeless people living out of cars or shelters, or in tents. Many of them even still have jobs, they just can't afford housing.

See: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-anderson-forecast...

[baddox]

I'm not in Seattle (I live and work on some of the most conspicuous blocks in San Francisco for homeless drug users), but I'm sure that both groups exist in both cities. I think what's important is for policy proposals to treat the groups differently, rather than bundling them together into a proposal to "solve homelessness." In my experience in SF these proposals usually only focuses on one set of issues, like minimum wage and rent prices, which are unlikely to significantly help both groups of homeless people.

[old-gregg]

> to treat the groups differently, rather than bundling them together into a proposal to "solve homelessness."

I agree. Add the absence of a healthcare system to that too. Personal anecdote: a homeless man offered to wash my car for money. He seemed intelligent and nice, so I agreed. He told me the story of him becoming homeless. Both he and his wife worked and rented an OK place in OK part of SF. His wife got into a car accident and their crappy insurance couldn't handle it, the deductibles were astronomical because, as usual, some of the "independent businessmen" who "provided care" were out of network, as if the unconscious victim had any control over who touched her.

So they had to drop their income below certain level to qualify for free healthcare. Now he didn't have enough for rent and moved to under a highway bridge and was visibly embarrassed by it.

[tim333]

That's a bit of a shocker really.

[ithilglin909]

I agree that both are problems worth solving, but one is pretty obviously a more urgent public health problem, and unfortunately, the more difficult one to solve.

When people are talking about Seattle's worsening homeless problem, they're talking about the presence of needles and fecal material on the sidewalks, and being harassed, and sometimes even attacked, by clearly mentally ill people, not about people living in trailers in non-urban areas.

[blablabla123]

Maybe people also get mentally ill from being homeless. Then one gets physically ill from living in a physically hostile environment...

[chongli]

I don't think the original cause matters so much. It's the cause that sustains their homelessness which needs to be addressed. People with strong support networks can bounce back from a lot of difficulties. It's the unlucky few who end up on the sidewalk in abject despair.

[WalterSear]

I know I'd use lots of drugs.

[ryandrake]

Maybe the people peacefully living in tents outside of town should instead start being more visible and getting in people’s faces, if that’s what it takes to be a priority.

[ithilglin909]

We’re not talking about “getting in people faces”, we’re talking about a situation that is extremely unsafe, for everyone, homeless and non-homeless alike. If you’re suggesting more of that, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

[ryandrake]

Wow, slow down on the insults, cowboy. All I’m saying is if you’re considering group A a more urgent priority for providing help to than group B, then you’re incintivizing group B to be more like group A.

Officials need to address the whole problem, not just the visible problem.

[ithilglin909]

That's cowgirl to you.

So, if we prioritize, say, addiction treatment, more people will want to be addicts. Right.

[softawre]

Agreed. See also, on reddit:

/r/almosthomeless /r/homeless

even subs like /r/povertyfinance contain some people that live in their car at times.

[Veelox]

I find it really interesting the difference in views on money between /r/povertyfinance, /r/personalfinance and /r/financialindependence.

[barrow-rider]

What is the difference? I'm not going to read multiple posts in multiple subreddits that aren't esp. related to me while at work; elaborate on your point.

[fjsolwmv]

Living in a car is homeless.

[ecnahc515]

I don't think they disagree. I think the person your replying to is writing it that way because the parent commenter are using that as anecdotal evidence for saying all the homeless they see have mental issues, without necessarily understanding a lot of homeless aren't necessarily people with mental issues living on street corners with the rest, as they imply.

[clort]

What is it about the car, that it doesn't actually have living accomodation or that it is not a house and has no address? For example, does living in an RV mean you are homeless?

[pmiller2]

Under HUD’s definition, a car is not a place suitable for human habitation, so that’s clearly someone who’s homeless. An RV dweller may be considered homeless if they are in an “unstable” living situation (moved twice or more within the past 60 days), or if the RV is in such disrepair to not be suitable for habitation.

Edit: see https://www.urban-initiatives.org/reports/are-all-persons-sl...

[woodrowbarlow]

speaking from experience, even a short gap during which you do not have an official address can create tremendous hurtles to getting housing, insurance, and employment.

[ryandrake]

There seem to be a lot of things like that in the USA, where if it happens even once or briefly, it screws up your life long term. Homelessness, poverty, seeking mental health help, arrest, prison, bankruptcy, a medical emergency. Every application form with a checkbox that says “Have you ever...” perpetuates this “gotcha” long-term punishment. Why does society insist on setting these traps for people?

[projektir]

Because everyone just cares about covering their ass and washing their hands. See all the comments above in the venue of "well, they're following the law, what else do you expect them to do?":

[paulddraper]

Cars, underpasses, camping tents, and cardboard boxes are not properly "homes".

Apartments, houses, yurts, and RVs are "homes".

Homes need to (1) provide adequate shelter, (2) have sufficient space, and (3) have access to water and waste facilities.

[WalterSear]

It's that they don't have a choice.

[88372162]

"Homeless" is a qualification metric that has a far darker history than being relevant at all to shelter or habitation. Metrics, even if not quantified, are always goal-oriented in providing an explanation or use. Even for something as "physically objective" as measuring time there is always an inherent question the metric is designed to answer, a problem to solve, or an ideology to support.

Do we define time as an anthropocentric artifact such as linking it to average modern human chronobiology markers or quirky orbital parameters of our homeworld, as a political artifact such as dividing the surface of the Earth into regions with artificial offsets to accommodate national or supranational policies such as industrial energy consumption management in resource crises or supporting coordination efforts of governance and military structures that have specific information-flow rate characteristics dependent on the availability of logistics mastery and locus diameter of projected force and interventional reach, as a capability artifact such as atomic clocks and the networking thereof with global navigation satellites and the Internet that require readily sourced technology supply chains for inexpensive manufacturing of electronics, refined knowledge of controlling engineering precision tolerances, and worldwide negotiation of protocol adoption, adherence, and upkeep in an effort for a singular master goal of providing location services at a scale relevant for the size and velocities of current weaponry?

That's just getting started on some of the ways we intend to measure the difference between one specific aspect of often fuzzy conformational states and the ever-present linguistic and cultural conflations of many competing metrics in different scenarios being erroneously regarded as the same thing.

So now, what does "homeless" mean? A better question is asking _why_ is such a metric required.

In _any_ large-scale society, the regulation of basic supplies such as shelter or food is designed (whether unconsciously emergent or not) to be artificially restricted as to maintain and stabilize certain systems through meeting goals of riot control, surveillance, profit, and inducing dependency and learned helplessness. This is a _universal_ property of any large-scale social structure although the terms I used are somewhat anachronistic and culturally-specific. If you're a competent spin doctor, you might say the goals to be met are respectively harmonization of inclusive diversity, identifying and personalizing the accommodation of individual needs in a vibrant community, allocating resources efficiently to maximize the full benefit of society, providing stability and reducing uncertainty by supporting people through difficult times and ensuring their mental health through wellness initiatives, holistic education, and self-actualizing opportunities.

Some purposes and scenarios a specific definition of "homeless" could help address:

- Criterion for administering supplies to highly specific, purposefully carved out population demographics as gerrymandered token aid in placating increasingly unruly members when systemic defects start to shine through where resources are unavailable or unwilling to be used and a cheap patch is preferred over rehauling a design that would inevitably converge back to the same problems anyways but also ensues a risk or requirement that even in a non-zero-sum outcome the standards of living for certain individuals would go down just by changing things up since an important aspect of perceived well-being in most humans is completely due to relative posturing and takes time for hedonic adaptation to kick-in while also presenting a predicted future cost and stressor to avoid in calculations of whether to allow change or persecute it.

- Identifying and targeting threats to the status quo. This could be either the traditional fear of resistive violence, but far more likely and subtle is control of members exiting from the current system into perpetual self-reliance which is far more subversive and damaging than a mob a rioters destroying some infrastructure. Opting out of debt and dependency by living far below your means without a permanent address outside of social expectations and control places a huge burden on the sustainability of traditional ways when people start to realize there are alternatives to the living plan laid out for you by someone else.

- Ensuring a proper scapegoat for "bad things". A fundamental mode of human conflict resolution is avoidance of responsibility and instead mutual externalized blame on a concept that is ill-defined, irrefutable, and circular-causative or a marginalized outsider that has no capability for either refutation, redress, retaliation, nor rehabilitation.

- Unavoidable persuasive rhetoric deficiencies in logos, ethos, or kairos that requires the pathos of either compassion or spite to be anywhere near convincing when the argument for various policies are not only self-damaging to the audience but also infeasible, intractable, ill-conceived, ineffective, irrational, irrelevant, and ironic.

[village-idiot]

Homeless, but not shelterless. Worse than apartment, better than a tent.

[CydeWeys]

I'd rather live in a tent than in a car. Fortunately tents are relatively cheap, so if you have a car you can probably also afford a tent to sleep in.

[village-idiot]

I dunno. Tents have a better form factor, but cars provide better weather isolation, durability, and physical security.

They are much more expensive though.

[ithilglin909]

I'm not against programs to help people who can't afford normal housing. However, that's not the specific, hugely obvious problem in Seattle.

[zapita]

Maybe there’s more than one problem worth addressing in Seattle?

[ithilglin909]

Agreed, there are many problems worth solving in Seattle, but some are more clearly urgent public health problems than others.

[stephengillie]

The world's largest drill keeps getting stuck in the cars buried beneath the city.

Northwest Harvest's food bank lost their lease on Cherry Street, but there's still a soup kitchen under the overpass, supporting the unofficial Cherry Street Tent City.

[baddox]

Almost certainly, and they almost certainly need very different solutions.

[smilekzs]

These people don't tend to cause problems, much unlike the homeless population in say Pioneer Square.