Homeless people tend to gravitate to where there's more services and public transport.
Usually. I live in a semi-rural town (Katoomba) in Australia, about 100km from the biggest city, and we have a lot of homeless people from rural towns, people who have lived their lives in the country. Turns out my town is as close to Sydney as they're comfortable being, there's good services for them with a big hospital, accommodation, a train line etc.
>Homeless people tend to gravitate to where there's more services and public transport.
Exactly. In the USA, the downtown area of cities might have a van driving around with meals to distribute to homeless people on the sidewalks. The homeless don't even have to walk to a soup kitchen; the vans bring the food to them. Some downtowns also open a shelter of "last resort" when the winter temperatures drop to inhuman freezing conditions. In downtown Vancouver during a record-breaking winter, I saw a city van driving around asking the homeless if they needed a warm place to sleep for the night.
In contrast, the suburbs will not deliver meals nor will suburban residents open their homes to random homeless vagrants. The town councils of suburbs also don't usually vote to spend tax dollars and open up a soup kitchen and shelter in their neighborhood. They don't want their neighborhoods to be attractive to the homeless.
Being homeless is already a hard life but it would be an even harder existence in the suburbs.
For a start, in many American suburbs, just walking to get food can be a four hour round trip. And a four hour round trip to do absolutely anything else. Without a car, that's totally untenable. You may or may not have anything better to do with the time -- but there's definitely no way you can spare the calories.
This is explicitly a reason some people in the suburbs don't want public transit to expand out to them. Some'll tell you. No public transit effectively puts a floor on how bad things can get, crime-wise, school-wise and, therefore, property-value-wise (each feeds back into the others, of course). Provided the property starts out pretty expensive, anyway—obviously doesn't apply to the actual sticks.
We had a homeless person living in a car on our street (in a Portland Oregon suburb). Some neighbor called the cops and they would come around and tell him to move on. He would be gone for a few days and then come back. Rinse and Repeat for about a year until we took him dinner on Thanksgiving day. The next day he was gone and never returned. It was the strangest thing.
I unexpectedly became homeless a year ago in SF and I notice that I disappear from places as soon as I interact with someone beyond politeness, like tell them details of my situation. I avoid it but when they take interest my social programming kicks in and I feel kind of sick after. Grocery stores, cafes I go to for months never feel safe after a conversation. Sleeping without shelter is incredibly vulnurable.
Sadly its become real again. Cities were starting to pick themselves up. Now this new generation is doing exactly what their parents did, run away. It is not a 'woke' generation.
Ironically, if you can afford it, cities are better than suburbs for schools etc. You can have two layers of people in exactly the same place and never have them interact. The richest and poorest schools are just blocks apart.
We can't, that's why we're moving. It's not to get away from "elements", like prior generations. It's simply too expensive to raise a family in the city. Not to mention, if you moved into the city, your family support structure is likely to be back home.
Usually. I live in a semi-rural town (Katoomba) in Australia, about 100km from the biggest city, and we have a lot of homeless people from rural towns, people who have lived their lives in the country. Turns out my town is as close to Sydney as they're comfortable being, there's good services for them with a big hospital, accommodation, a train line etc.