[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.

[SpicyLemonZest]

But the point is that you don't see this. SF has a $364 million dollar homeless budget, double what it was a decade ago, so the programs you volunteer for should be swimming in cash to provide their services and make sure the homeless have opportunities. If they're not, then where'd all the money go?

[dehrmann]

SF spends $45k per homeless person?!

[epistasis]

No, not quite. The 'point in time' count of 8,000-9,000 people is a measurement of flux; people enter homelessness and leave it all the time. A huge chunk (most?) of SF's spending goes to emergency assistance to prevent people from falling into homelessness when they have a financial emergency, which is by far the cheapest time to stop homelessness.

[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.