[holycrapwhodat]

> In New York we have more homeless per capita...

At least based on latest 2018 numbers I found for both cities, that's not true.

NYC 78676 homeless with 8398748 residents.

SF 9784 homeless with 870877 residents.

106 residents per homeless individual in NYC.

Only 89 residents per homeless individual in SF.

> And for fuck's sake, it's not the weather. Our parks aren't by any means pristine but we don't suddenly sprout tent cities every summer.

I'm certainly not blaming it on the weather either. But this statement kind of misses the point on how exceptional our weather is. Our tent cities get to grow year round without interruption because it's mostly warm enough in the winter and cool enough in the summer to live outside full time.

The rest of your points stand without caveat. We don't build enough housing at all and we're incompetent at building shelters (at least ones that the homeless are willing and able to use)

[tpowell]

I’m listening to a collection of Malcolm Gladwell essays and was somewhat blown over by one about power-law distribution of homelessness[1]. Basically a small, stubborn minority of the homeless population are financially worth housing (by far). “That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an economic perspective the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it doesn’t seem fair.” [1] http://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/A%20MillionDollarMurray.pdf

[weeksie]

My bad, I was quoting from memory, you are correct about the numbers. That said, they're pretty close.

As for the weather I stand by my statement. While year around nice weather does make an encampment more hospitable, the reason why it's cruel to just bulldoze those settlements is because the people have nowhere to go. Still, I acknowledge your point, weather is surely a factor, I just don't believe it carries as much weight as it's frequently given credit for.

[jdavis703]

Can you cite the source? The data often uses differing definitions so you'll might be comparing apples to oranges.

[jgalt212]

That's an interesting stat. From visits to SF, it seems that a sizable % of the homeless in SF are really just vagrants, whereas in NYC they largely seem to destitute/mentally ill homeless.