[dsfyu404ed]

Homelessness and the problems that go along with it is only a serious problem in certain cities on the west coast.

Don't get me wrong, every city has some homeless but cities in the rest of the country seem to be able to keep the problem at bay without increased "wealth redistribution", many of those cities even exist in states with far less "wealth redistribution" than the cities that have the biggest homeless problems. I see no indication that increased wealth distribution will fix the problem. There does not seem to be any substantial correlation.

I think the problem lies elsewhere. Problems like this don't tend to have single sources and single solutions anyway.

[jdavis703]

So the big difference in east coast vs west coast is the percent of unsheltered people. If you disregard whether people have shelter, the homeless rates are pretty similar between coasts.

One of the main problems is CA local governments are severely restricted from raising revenue. Property taxes are capped at 1% of assessed value, and assessed value is capped from raising faster than inflation. Other taxes require a 2/3 vote in order to pass. This means city governments are unable to capture a lot of the wealth increases that are leading to displacement among low income people.

This is a tough problem to fix, but it requires both money and a will to tolerate low income people in our neighborhoods.

[WillPostForFood]

Yet California has the highest overall taxation in the country (income, property, sales, capital gains, gas). So there is plenty of money being collected by the government. If the homelessness requires money as a solution, then the money is already there. It is an allocation problem.

[ceejayoz]

> Don't get me wrong, every city has some homeless but cities in the rest of the country seem to be able to keep the problem at bay without increased wealth distribution.

I'd imagine part of that is the weather; you can't live outdoors year-round in, say, Maine. Sometimes they're just shipping the problem elsewhere, too.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

[dsfyu404ed]

Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0. When your homeless your biggest asset is your local knowledge, where you can sleep, where you can work as a day laborer for a few bucks, etc, etc. and you'd be giving that up by relocating. Hence most homeless people do not relocate. The homeless guy in Bangor is going to find somewhere he can sleep inside.

[ceejayoz]

> Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0.

Read the article I linked. Quite a few cities are happy to subsidize such a bus ticket, as you become someone else's problem.

[dsfyu404ed]

The number of people being subsidized is not that large. I'd wager that it's aproximatly made up for by non-homeless people who leave the destination states and then advocate for public policy that exacerbates the homelessness problem in their new cities/states. The spread of severe homelessness problems (i.e. the difference between homelessness in Baltimore and homelessness in SF) northward up the west coast but lagging CA's level of homelessness by a couple years seems to support my hypothesis.

[UI_at_80x24]

Yes because it's the regions fault people don't want to freeze to death on a sidewalk in Minnesota.

The first thing I would do if it looked like sleeping on the street was my only option is start walking south.

The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'. These "certain cities" on the West coast are prime examples of the wealth gap, people are homeless because they can't afford to live there. Nothing more. The wealth-gap is CAUSING the problem.

The wealth gap was less at the start of the French Revolution then it is now.

[bluGill]

Most homeless have mental issues. Minnesota has a good welfare system. However the cold in MN means that those who generally don't trust government (meaning that they will run away from any help the government tries to give unless restrained in an often inhuman way) either freeze to death or make their way south. Thus the poor in MN have a house of some sort. There are a few who migrate north for the summer and back south for winter.

No amount of safety net helps when your mental illness makes escaping the notice of the safety net a priority. It is a hard problem and I don't think anyone has a good solution.

[macspoofing]

>The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'.

I just don't think so. Anybody can get a bad break and end up homeless, I agree. But for long-term multi-year/multi-decade homelessness, mental illness and alcohol+drug abuse has to be a key component. Having lived in a big city with a major homeless problem, you can't ignore those factors because you see it right in front of you every day. It feels like gas-lighting to claim otherwise.

[Mc_Big_G]

East coast cities don't have as many homeless as West coast for a single reason. Weather. Pretending like there's something inherently wrong with West coast cities is disingenuous. You even have cities bussing them out to SF. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

[macspoofing]

Even on the west coast there is plenty money allocated for fighting homelessness. The problem is that long-term chronic homelessness almost always results from either mental illness and/or drug abuse.

Forcible eviction or institutionalization always leads to legal battles with activists leading to municipal governments simply doing nothing.