[magna7]

Serious question. Why don't homeless people in SF and NYC go look for work in cheaper cities across America? It seems like these people with degrees and work experience can find work elsewhere and affordable housing, so I don't understand why they would continue to live in the most expensive cities in the world... I'm not American, so maybe I'm missing something.

[stevenwoo]

At least on the coast in California, the climate is much milder than anywhere else in the USA, and it's easier to have enough clothes for the cold (for the area) spells even when rough sleeping in a cardboard box or your vehicle. I live 50 miles south of San Francisco and do not have air conditioning or use the heater in the winter - most places I have visited or lived in the central USA require both to make it liveable in a house.

[mirimir]

That seems kinda obvious for coastal California.

But why NYC?

[bobthepanda]

A lot of low income people in NYC are immigrants; for many groups of immigrants, NYC is one of if not the largest concentration of their ethnic group in the country. Being around people from your homeland gives you familiarity and comfort, access to cultural items that may not be readily available elsewhere, and a social support network. One example of this is that New York's Chinatown has developed a completely independent farm network to grow Asian vegetables that are not available normally: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt20d89sd

An immigrant leaving New York for a cheaper COL metro is leaving all this behind for the great unknown.

One other important factor is that in New York City it is very easy to live without a car. For poor people, a car is easily an expense just as large as housing. New York City has housing cost of $1.6K a month but transportation cost of $6k a year [0]; St Louis has housing cost of $960 a month but transportation cost of $11k a year.[1]

[0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/#?focus=place&gid=16861 [1]https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?focus=place&gid=14098

[Majromax]

> but transportation cost of $6k a month

Per year, as per your link.

[bobthepanda]

whoops, my bad. I blame a lack of morning coffee.

[DoreenMichele]

LGBTQ individuals are at an inordinately high risk of homelessness. Big cities tend to be more LGBTQ friendly. San Francisco is quite famous for being LGBTQ friendly.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/lgbtq-indiv...

Big cities also tend to be where you find sufficient soup kitchens and the like to not starve to death if you have absolutely nothing. Not all homeless have absolutely nothing. Many have some kind of an income, it's just not enough to support a middle class life (or even a lower class life that includes housing). But it can still be helpful to be in a big city where not everyone will know you and there are resources, etc.

There are substantial challenges to traveling while homeless. You may lack ID and this is a barrier to buying tickets on long distance travel options like buses or trains. You certainly lack money and bus tickets cost money. Many routes in the US are de facto closed to foot traffic. If you have no car, no driver's license, no money for tickets or no ID, going anywhere else is hugely challenging.

Most people who are homeless are disabled in some manner. They have health issues or they are mentally ill or they are ADHD, etc. This makes getting any kind of job hard. It can make just getting through the day hard.

I walked and caught rides while homeless and traveled from Georgia to California. Previous comment by me about some of the challenges of trying to walk anywhere in the US:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21309036

I run several blogs about homelessness or related resources aimed at trying to help the homeless survive and get their lives back. You should be able to find all of them via Street Life Solutions (linked above).

[pipework]

Imagine you have nothing and must depend on services and resources of others to get along. You start with nothing, how are you going to make the journey? You get there, you have not created the relationships that keep you fed daily.

I don't know if you've never faced homelessness, but it gets worse the longer you're homeless in many ways. There are no creative solutions from outsiders that wouldn't occur to the homeless, just resources the haves will not share with the have-nots. Homeless people don't need ideas, they need free money, liberty, and agency. All of which aren't offered at the tip of the tongue, but with the offering of funding.

[dehrmann]

The bit the piece touched on was that the couple it followed came to SF because it has a support system for drug addicts and the homeless. What it didn't say is that any local solution will just improve the conditions in SF, attracting more homeless and drug addicts.

SF and NYC would be better off finding those cheaper cities that need workers and showing them how to run services for the homeless. They might also want to connect the marginally homeless with these cities early.

That said, I doubt there's much work for the SF homeless. Between addiction and mental health problems, most aren't employable.

[epistasis]

This is not a significant source of homeless people in SF. The vast majority have been living in the area, just struggling to get by. There are so many people that are one financial crisis (eg car repair) away from being evicted. It's no surprise that 1% of the population is homeless in a city where rents are not covered by entry level jobs, and where cheap rental options like SROs are being eliminated.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Is that true? Both the top people profiled in this article moved from out of state into SF and appear to have immediately become homeless.

[throwawaysea]

It’s not true. Many homeless are coached to respond to surveys (like the annual point in time count) with a claim that they’re long time locals, since it garners more political sympathy and support. But if you talk to homeless in SF or Seattle or view news clips interviewing people in camps, it seems the majority have moved in from elsewhere due to laws that permit permanent nomadic lifestyles and open drug abuse. It is just “induced demand” in action. Incentives and disincentives have effects on behaviors.

The only statistics that should be trusted are ones that have verifiable records proving the historical residency of homeless populations. Everything else is easily manipulable and not trustworthy.

[epistasis]

> It’s not true. Many homeless are coached to respond to surveys (like the annual point in time count) with a claim that they’re long time locals, since it garners more political sympathy and support.

This is at the very best a conspiracy theory. Poll takers intentionally trying to get the wrong answers to garner political support? And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?

Such claims require at least some substantiation. Is there anybody who is willing to put their real name out there that has observed this?

My personal experience, in Santa Cruz, does not match what you claim. There was a recent vicious attack by a homeless person, and the police found the attacker hiding in his mother's house in town.

[techsupporter]

> And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?

At least where I live, I've heard a lot of conspiracy theories, many now openly discussed and not just in whispers, of a "homeless-industrial complex" where people are supposedly making bank on faux solutions to homelessness and non-profit providers are just funneling money off to the wealthy people who run the non-profits and leaving clients and volunteers hung out to dry.

As an occasional volunteer for some of those groups, I do not see this. Granted, I may not be anywhere as involved in Deep Homelessness as I might need to be in order to pull back the veil and expose the bitter truth. From my point of view, I see a shitload of people who have been dealt a terrible hand. a lot of them were people who were doing just fine before, maybe not great but were getting by and then a life event happened that, sure, from our perspectives on HN of most of us making in the low six figures to start, would have seen coming and could have planned for. But, for whatever reason, these people didn't and damn, once you fall out of "normal society," climbing back in is hard. as. fuck.

One person I helped was technically literate--we set up Yubikey auth for his Google account, for goodness sake--and had no vices besides posting up at the library to play Clash of Clans on his aging Android phone. But it still took an inordinate amount of time to get together all of the identity and proofing documents he needed to get an ID to go onto a military base to take a specialty job. In one case, he only got one of the documents because he knew a notary (me) and could have a form sworn to and stamped in under a day at no cost.

I don't think people truly appreciate just how fragile modern life is if they've never fallen out of it.

[throwawaysea]

> And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically?

That has garnered budgets in the hundreds of millions a year in several cities as well as allowance to have permanent camps, open drug abuse, littering, and environmental damage. That is, it has got them protection from the laws everyone else (such as law abiding taxpayers) are subject to.

As for substantiation - many people have had the anecdotal experience of running into homeless and discovering that they moved to SF, Portland, or Seattle with no plan and no means to support themselves. When the claimed data consistently disagrees with anecdotal experience, it points to something wrong with the process. I’m not the only one to speculate they are being coached.

In Seattle for example, they are organized enough to attend every relevant city council meeting and shout down any opposing views to expanding funding for various organizations that supposedly provide services to the homeless but have largely achieved nothing except spreading blight across the city. These organizations and their staff is what people refer to as the homeless-industrial complex. Their entire careers and livelihoods are based on drawing salaries from this process.

Obvious I don’t have strong evidence of such coaching (like on a video tape). But it is unreasonable to expect that I would, and it doesn’t invalidate my perspective. Clearly having no strong verification of identity is a major gap in these surveys. There is no reason for anyone to take that data at face value. We should assume everyone is not a long time local resident unless they can prove otherwise. Right now, taxpayers are being fleeced and are subsidizing the nomadic lifestyles of these populations in many cities.

[fortran77]

Maybe, but we're discussing this article, where two people moved to SF just because of its enhanced services.

[techsupporter]

> SF and NYC would be better off finding those cheaper cities that need workers and showing them how to run services for the homeless.

Politically, this is almost impossible to do. When programs have provided funding to help people move to areas where they have support from friends or family, or to match up with jobs they could do but can't get to, the outcry is near-universal: "You're shoving your problems off onto the rest of the country! We don't want your cast-offs!" For good measure, they'll throw in using "liberal" or "freeloader" or "welfare" as an expletive.

The reverse--providing transportation to cities like San Francisco or Portland or Seattle, where the local community has decided to provide more services--is seen as far less politically unpopular, though doesn't happen very often but when it does, is seen as a good thing by the sending communities. "Well, they have the money to deal with it; we don't." "They like being 'Freeattle' so let them." As if there is some political motivation to being good humans to other humans.

Of course it's not anywhere near as stark contrast as my words seem like they imply; there's a whole lot of nuance and general bickering about what should/could/can be done. But if trying to be an advocate for housing and helping people out of these kinds of situations has taught me anything, people can be extremely petty about outcomes that seem like someone "undeserving" is "getting something" for "free."

[danShumway]

I'm hesitant to comment on a city that I'm not familiar with, but if what the article is saying is true -- if there are people who are already working and they're still homeless -- then that is concretely a problem with housing costs and wages.

> Finding a job, as a classroom aide for special-needs students, was easy. But she struggled to find an affordable apartment. When I met D., her days began at 6 A.M., on a mat on a shelter floor. She dropped her son off at fifth grade, then went to her classroom to teach.

I just don't see a way to blame a story like that on "we attract more homeless people than other cities." The problem is your houses cost too much. Whatever the policy solution for that ends up being -- building more apartments and reforming zoning laws, or de-gentrifying neighborhoods, or rent control, or minimum wage increases, or whatever economic theories people come up with -- the individual strategy doesn't change the core problem.

The core problem is that if teaching assistants can't afford apartments, the economic math is never going to work out for SF. You are always going to have a high population of homeless people if low-income essential workers can't afford a place to live. No other fix is ever going to change that.

> D., the special-needs instructor, also college-educated and fully employed, told me, “Someone housed today, unless they’re making eighty thousand dollars a year, could be homeless tomorrow. That’s the bottom line.”

Again, I'm an outside observer here, I don't know what I'm talking about. But as an outside observer, that quote doesn't sound to me like "our social services are too good, so we get too many freeloaders." It sounds like, "we #$%!@ed up our economy and we don't know how to fix it."

[slowmovintarget]

The main problem seemed to be that the rich there demand that the homeless be housed, but they're unwilling to have low-cost, high-density dwellings in "their neighborhood" because that might lower their property value. The net result is as you see, programs upon programs "for the homeless". Ever increasing taxes. But no affordable housing anywhere, because no one is willing to allow a vote for it to be built.

[danShumway]

> because that might lower their property value

:) In related news, Nintendo Switch scalpers really do want everybody to be able to get a Switch, just as long as increasing production doesn't affect any of the prices they can charge in Ebay auctions.

[Gibbon1]

Because once you move you lose residency. Since access to public services and support are tied to residency you won't qualify for anything. The other thing is most homeless have some social support networks. Once they more they lose that too.

[gnopgnip]

There is much more economic opportunity in SF or NYC than in places with a low cost of living

[seemslegit]

The vast majority of the homeless are not such because the rent went up just above what they could previously afford but because they're unemployable and no one will rent a place to them usually due to a comibnation of substance abuse and mental illness, so they panhandle or do odd jobs and need to be in a place where there is a strong foot traffic of relatively well-off people and a thriving street economy, between those cities SF and NYC fit the bill the most and also have the most homeless-friendly laws and also most shelters, charities etc.

[carapace]

Yeah, people who become homeless aren't a homogeneous group. I was homeless for about ~4.5 years back in the late 90's.

In my experience from that time, mostly spent around Seattle, that roughly 2/3's of the people you see on the streets have some kind of physical, mental or emotional problems that prevent them from navigating modern civilization.

(As an aside I don't think most folks in it have a good idea just how challenging modern society can be. The street is sort of like a time machine in that living there is like going back in time two or three centuries. There are a lot of inconveniences but life is fundamentally simpler if all you have to worry about each day is that day's food and a place to crash that night. That's why I support a safety net. Not welfare in the sense of ongoing payments forever but a way to catch and support people when they stumble, to help them back to a normal life. Related to that, there's a guy who has sat in front of University district Safeway for twenty years selling "Street Sheet". To me selling Streetsheet isn't meant to be a lifetime job. If dude had put a dollar a day in a saving account with compound interest he would be ready to retire soon. That's the kind of thing I mean about helping people use civilization's API.)

Of the remaining 1/3 or so you have a mix of e.g. punk rock anti-society types, hippies, nomads, runaway kids(!), and drifters. In other words, folks who either want to be there or have no better option.

There are very few people who have their act together and live on the street because it's actually pretty easy to get off the street if you have a good attitude and are willing to work.

The answer to the OP's question is simply that people who can move to another city and get a job do that and so aren't homeless anymore.

[wikibob]

> If dude had put a dollar a day in a saving account with compound interest he would be ready to retire soon.

This is plainly wrong. Saving $1 per day, at 7% interest, would net about $15,000 after 20 years.

See for yourself: https://financialmentor.com/calculator/compound-interest-cal...

[carapace]

Ok, yes, but you know what I mean.

[heavyset_go]

The vast majority of homeless in NYC and SF are homeless for economic reasons, like insufficient income, lack of affordable housing or the loss of income.

[seemslegit]

That's true, but pretty tautological as far as being an explanation for homelessness goes, it is also true for every other place.

[heavyset_go]

The studies I'm thinking of explicitly measure homelessness due to relationship issues and divorce, violence, mental illness and drug addiction, as well as economic issues. Over the last 15 years, people, and specifically families, have become homeless increasingly because of economic issues.