[ripberge]

Here's a recent statistic from San Francisco:

"City officials said that 40% of the unhoused population surveyed in San Francisco came from another California city or even from out of state, increasing from 28% in 2019." Source: https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-requ...

This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%.

A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.

The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use.

The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services. Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136

[AxiomaticSpace]

I live in LA and my girlfriend worked for a long time in homeless services and in her experience you have the causality wrong. Often people either start drug habits or their existing drug habits become worse in response to homelessness. As an example, she's met half a dozen people who live on the street and smoke meth specifically to stay awake so their stuff doesn't get stolen. And I agree on your point about LAHSA being way over budgeted, much of what they're doing is a complete waste of money.

[lostmsu]

> smoke meth specifically to stay awake so their stuff doesn't get stolen

And you seriously believe that?

[Supermancho]

It also sucks to be homeless. paired with self medication, yes. this is one of the reasons. survival mode will cause extreme behaviors for anyone.

[Auracle]

It just doesn’t make sense.

Meth can keep you up longer but you’ll still need to sleep eventually.

People like to justify “bad” behavior. We all do it all the time. I just ate some potato chips even though I knew I had enough food today because I have a long day tomorrow and told myself it’d help me sleep.

[Supermancho]

Who said all the time? Thats a strawman you construct just to knock down. Obviously that isnt practical. This is a bad faith assertion.

We could take a moment to think abiut how it starts and why. Lets suppose you get into an altercation or proximity of a known bad actor and have concerns. Someone offers you a small bump so you can take shifts. happens everyday to the homeless. Day to day problems are highly contextual (eg students taking adderall to cram similarly). Addictions evolve from innocent actions.

[lostmsu]

Yes, I'm sure it went like:

- Oh jeez, I need to stay awake so people don't steal my stuff. Does anybody here have coffee? No? Only meth? Oh well.

And no other way.

[Supermancho]

> And no other way.

This was never mentioned.

Let's remember:

Homeless person. Coffee on the street at 3am every night, or hauling your...we'll say cart of stuff for simplicity; to some coffee shop, is not realistic.

[loco5niner]

So instant coffee is less obtainable than meth?

[Teever]

I often see comments like this on HN and my first thought is if the person writing them has any sort experience with drug use.

Have you ever taken any sort of hard drug ever in your life? Or been around the people who do?

What is your experience with drugs and how does it shape your perception of the people who do them and the reasons why they do them?

[lostmsu]

Is the addiction much different from severe alcoholism? If not different, than my comment relatively accurately describes the logic. I've seen many hopeless alcoholics.

What's your take?

[vineyardmike]

It's funny, because every homeless person I've seen carries a coffee pot with them.... but I've never once seen someone able to buy meth on a city street corner at night.

[snapplebobapple]

There's room for both your gf and the op to be right and wrong because the system isn't a one way path of causality, it's a repeated game with lots of feedback loops. I would say of course higher housing costs increase homelessness, of course a drug problem gets worse or gets started when one becomes homeless, of course drug addicted homeless go to where it's the easiest to be drug addicted homeless, of course increasing homeless spending will increase a certain subset of homeless,etc.

[UncleMeat]

> A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

It is true that a lot of people complaining about "homelessness" are actually complaining about personally seeing a homeless person. But homeless people are also people. Our society owes them dignity too. I believe that what you describe is not a problem with the discussion, but a problem of empathy among people who would just as happily have a homeless person die as house them, since both do the job of keeping that homeless person away from their walk to work equally well.

[plantwallshoe]

That would imply drug addiction rates have increased with unhoused rates, but AFAIK they haven’t.

The big difference is the loss of cheap SRO housing. It used to be easy to find a flop house to stay in for $50 a month. Very unglamorous but at least it’s off the street and even people with a serious habit could afford it.

[thehappypm]

It would be hidden in the noise because the homeless population is still a very small fraction of the total

[seanmcdirmid]

There is a huge problem with conflating homeless and drug abuse problems, with the latter drawing empathy and funding away from the former. These are two very different problems with very different solutions. These former you just need housing, maybe job assistance, the latter you need millions of dollars in treatment and related assistance per case that has a very high chance of failing.

[potato3732842]

There is a huge problem with people portraying the problems as not connected.

A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody.

And drug addiction will prevent anyone who's homeless from getting out because it sucks up any income that could be used to level up in any way.

[nonameiguess]

This seems to be a common belief on Hacker News but why? I don't claim to be an expert on these matters, but I've lived in downtown Dallas for about a decade now and spend a lot of time on the street, encountering many unsheltered, chronic homeless. I've also known a fair number of people with drug problems. My first wife was addicted to opioid pills. My brother-in-law has had serious heroin problems, OD'd twice, spent time in prison. My two best friends from high school include one guy who was addicted to speed and did a lot of ecstasy and hallucinogens on top of that, the other was a bad enough alcoholic that it killed her at 36. My wife is an alcoholic who has been hospitalized twice with acute liver failure and vitamin deficiencies.

Not a single one of these people was ever homeless. My wife is a 20+ year engineer with a top secret clearance.

The homeless people I meet, on the other hand, completely run the gamut. I met married couple in their early 20s a few weeks back that stopped to talk to me about skateboarding and showed me pictures of their dogs. I showed them pictures of my cats. They lost their jobs, had no family support, and didn't want to go to a shelter because they've have to give up the dogs, so they lived in a tent down by the cargo rail. Another guy I met the week before that was obviously completely insane. He emptied a bottle of hot sauce on me and threatened to stab me for making noise on a public bridge at 8 AM an hour past sunrise and waking him up. I had at least 8 inches and 80 pounds on him and he was trying to fight me anyway.

I don't think the reasons boil down to something as simple as they're all drug addicts and drug addiction is a guaranteed path to homelessness. Even for the openly crazy, antisocial people that are obviously who the San Francisco tech crowd are actually bothered by, I don't understand what the proposed solutions from the anti-housing crowd are. If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

[seanmcdirmid]

> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

Morally we should house and treat them. That is a huge resource draw, since if you just throw them into low barrier housing, you just get a bunch of bad crap happening in whatever unfortunate neighborhood you choose for that. So we need millions of dollar in treatment per case, and maybe we can fix them? Like a 20% chance. Those are a high amount of resources for a low chance of success, ideally we should spend the money anyways but practically we can’t afford it. We could just house them with a social worker like Finland does, but 1 social worker per 4 residents is going to cost about the same and doesn’t even try to fix their problem.

So morally you are right. Maybe in the future when we achieve a post scarcity society we could do that. Today we could focus money instead on helping people before they become addicted to drugs, we would get much better bang for buck of limited resources. I think it is a bit dangerous to teach our kids that we can and will be able to save them even if they try fent (or something unknowingly laced with fent), because that likely isn’t true ATM.

[pookha]

You're downplaying a catastrophic loss of family. All of these people you're rattling off are connected to you and are part of your social graph, which is something humans thrive on. You disconnect people from a community (death loss of job) and you're likely to see homeless. It's one of the reasons people give up and succumb to living on the streets outside of mental illness (which is another major factor that goes into this). A clear means of treating this problem is to put people BACK into a community that has expectations and guidelines.

[sagarm]

> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

Making it someone else's problem is what most of the country has chosen. As this thread notes, SF's homeless population is increasingly from outside the city. Trying to resolve this at the city level is not sustainable.

[riehwvfbk]

And so we stigmatize wanting a solution for this problem, and as for the answer to "where?" just say "downtown!" For some reason those with positive contributions to society have to pay a lot of money to stay there, but the insane drug addicts can do whatever they want, and opposing this is somehow not OK.

[seanmcdirmid]

Drug addicts on the street has become people's impression of homelessness, but it is a completely dishonest one. Yes, that's a problem, no, homes aren't going to help solve it. Low barrier housing (where drug addicts can live without curtailing their lifestyles) is a quick way to lose support for all homeless programs in your region (no one wants to live near low barrier housing), and that adversely effects the larger problem that is actually solvable (housing affordability for functioning people).

Yes, ideally we have infinite resources and we can solve the drug addiction problem without becoming China or Singapore and just stigmatizing the problem to death. But we don't, and dumping in 95% of our funds allocated to homelessness to what is really a drug addiction problem, and barely seeing any progress in either problem, is eventually going to wear the public out.

[scotty79]

> A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody

Also homelessness is a fast track to addiction problems for many people. If you feel that bad you are prone to do anything to make it less bad even briefly.

[ericmcer]

I have always wondered about that, there was this phrase that floated around in the Bay Area of "it can happen to anyone" so I always thought about the steps it would take for me to become homeless. I would have to:

Lose my job

Lose the ability to get a new job

Burn all my savings and assets

Burn all my familial relationships

Burn all my friendships

Get rejected by all social welfare programs

It feels like barring mental illness or drug addiction it would be a real challenge to end up homeless if you are trying not to be. I definitely sympathize with drug addicts because we had doctors liberally prescribing one of the most addictive chemicals on earth to people for 25 years, but I am also suspicious of the narrative that you just stumble into homelessness despite your best efforts.

[Avicebron]

I think you aren't thinking about the cascade. So for one, losing the job, that depends on the job but let's say that it's a crappy low paid job where corporate has figured out how to make everyone replaceable. You're out, say your like many and you've spent most of your money on rent and have maybe like a grand in the bank, you go out looking for a job and can't get another one (any reason let's just assume it's not a "moral failing problem" which gives people peace of mind because "they're homeless because they're an addict and therefore they only have themselves to blame"). So now you can't pay rent (it's month to month because it's all you could get in El cerrito), you eventually get kicked out, the cascade starts, no money = no cell phone or email to apply to jobs, no place to live means no showering = hard to interview, spin up some trauma from seeing shit happen on the street that freaks you out, boom it just snowballs. (In this scenario I'm assuming that they don't just have a family to fall back on who can support their needs while they try and get another job)

[vineyardmike]

I think you're significantly overplaying your hand here, and over-assuming the ability of others too.

I'm sure you're very successful and a hard worker with great skills, but plenty of people are pretty mediocre. And plenty of people don't have great high-paying corporate jobs, even if they are hardworking. Personally, my family's savings could sustain us for years without a job, but that wasn't true when we were (single and) young.

Losing a job is easy, even if you did nothing wrong and plenty of people really struggle to find a new job with a similar pay. I had a friend who was laid off from a Stanford medical researcher position (~80k/yr), and he worked retail for 12 months (~30k/yr) before finding a true replacement job. He could barely pay his (pre-existing) SF-bay-area rents on that salary. His groceries were paid out of savings or generous friends. If anything actually went wrong (medically, car accident, etc), he'd actually have run out of money to live. None of his family lived in the US (or had USD savings), so he'd have to uproot his life to live with them. He had friends, but living with a friend is a huge ask - you can only stay on a couch for so long. It's easy to say you'll help a friend, but when their budget is $1k/mo short, you'll burn through a friend or family's generosity fast.

I don't know if most people on HN have looked, but finding a place to rent in SF Bay Area for <2k/mo is hard. If you make minimum wage, it's really hard to find a place to live. If you go from a higher salary, where you can afford 2k/mo, to a lower one where you can't, you're really screwed, because moving is not cheap either, and selling all your stuff (to eventually re-buy later) or hiring movers will certainly deplete the savings of people who can least afford it.

Certainly drugs or mental illness speeds up this downward spiral, but it should be noted that "living with friends or family" usually qualifies as homeless for most of these statistics, not when you start living in a box under the freeway... so "it can happen to everyone" is more true even for you when you realize that you only need to pass 3/6 of your listed steps.

[mrsilencedogood]

Suppose you're living paycheck to paycheck and your car breaks down.

Lose my job - yep

Lose the ability to get a new job - no car

Burn all my savings and assets - you couldn't pay to fix your car, so you have no savings or liquid assets

Burn all my familial relationships - hope you didn't turn to (or increase preexisting) drug use due to ^

Burn all my friendships - ^

Get rejected by all social welfare programs - easy, be male and addicted to drugs

There you have it

[reverendsteveii]

>Burn all my savings and assets

For about 25% of Americans this would take less than a month (https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2024/08/survey-one-in-four-am...)

[specialist]

A disabling chronic life threatening illness could do it.

Escaping a bad domestic situation too. Gay kid kicked out by parents, violence, rape, etc.

Brain injury would do it. Maybe caused by an accident or military service.

Ditto PTSD.

In other words, there's no shortage of ways to lose everything.

> Get rejected by all social welfare programs

Disabled people are the least able to fight for their own care. To say nothing of learning how to ask for help to begin with.

[creer]

Yes. Watch out though that many "social welfare programs" are remarkably perverse and difficult to obtain, use or keep.

[thewebguyd]

True for almost any average-to-well paid white collar work, but it's surprisingly easy to end up homeless for anyone already below the poverty level, or even just not making 6+ figures in a high cost of living area.

I've known several folks - generally minimum wage adjacent jobs, retail, food service, etc. Landlord decides not to renew their lease, rental housing availability is next to none in a lot of my locality, and family lives out of state. Never made enough money to even have a savings.

Suddenly they are without housing. Maybe they can crash at a friend's house, maybe not. If they can't, they're going to be spending time and effort trying to get assistance, maybe have to take a few days off work, because of the nature of those jobs, maybe they get fired. Now they are both homeless and unemployed.

I've also know people in similar situations that ended up on a downward drug spiral as well, but only after the fact. I think it's a chicken or the egg problem for some homeless folks. Were they addicts first, leading to a downward spiral that lead to chronic homelessness, or were they just someone living in poverty, trying to scrape by, screwed by the system and turned to drugs later on?

Add to it that public transportation sucks in most of the USA outside of urban areas (and even in some urban areas as well), so anyone already without a car has limited job prospects in the event of layoffs or an economic downturn in their local area.

So yeah, I don't necessarily abide by the "it can happen to anyone" but there is absolutely a significant subset of the USA's population that is essentially one unfortunate event away from homelessness.

[danaris]

> All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem.

a) "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote." Your personal experience, as valid as it may be, does not define the totality of the problem.

b) Did you ever stop to think that maybe people who end up homeless for any of the countless reasons people do might turn to alcohol and other drugs to cope with the stress and hopelessness of, y'know, being homeless?

c) Even of those who became homeless because of a substance abuse problem, what makes them any less deserving of basic human rights and dignity?

d) Countless studies have now shown that giving unsheltered people, including those with substance abuse problems, unconditional housing not only keeps them off the street, in the vast majority of cases they're able to get clean and work normal jobs again.

[Tiktaalik]

I’m not sure why the statistic should be considered interesting.

Like what is the amount of housed population that come to sf from another California city or out of state?

SF is an economic driver of the USA. It will attract people from all over. Sometimes those people will become homeless.

In fact we should expect people in a poor economic situation to move to where the jobs are (ie, sf). That’s the system working. It would be weird that someone struggling with lack of work should stay put and just suffer.

[janalsncm]

This means that 60% did not come from another city or state and were SF residents. In other words, the majority of homeless in SF became homeless in SF.

SF has a huge homelessness problem and even after reducing it by 40% the problem would still be huge.

Now we can argue about why they became homeless but it seems pretty obvious that exorbitant housing costs mean that some people can’t afford it. City officials saying 40% come from other places shouldn’t distract us from the mismanagement that got us the 60%.

[gopher_space]

So you're saying I should mentally divide homeless people into two "camps", and that one of those camps will be full of guys wearing dirty Keds whom I should scorn?

I don't know if ranting at the people with the least amount of power will accomplish much. I'm also not stoked about the dehumanization that goes along with thinking about people in terms like this.

[foldr]

>A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

This point is addressed in the article:

> The stories and data in this essay show the missing link between homelessness and housing costs: people without money who avoid becoming homeless do so mostly by staying with others, usually their own parents. This happens outside the formal housing market. But parents’ and others’ ability to offer space is limited by what they can afford in the market. Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.

[abhiyerra]

The book San Fransicko covers this. Apparently, housing doesn’t really reduce the drug dependence and makes it worst because of isolation.

[aaomidi]

Have you heard of the game musical chairs?

Anyway let’s say 10 kids are playing musical chairs. There are 9 chairs available. One of these kids had broken their leg a few days ago.

Let me ask you this, after the first round which one of the kids is likely going to be the kid without a chair?

So yeah, substance abuse is in fact a problem. However even if you remove all drugs from society, you’ll still have people left without chairs. Just the profile of those people will change.

[bsder]

Quoting the SF link:

> Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years.

Granted, that report is almost 5 years old and seems to be prior to Covid (which scrambled a hell of a lot). However, it does seem like the vast majority of homeless are local.

> All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.

Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals.

Something like 3/5 of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. Those people need a medical facility first and foremost.

Universal healthcare would go a long way to helping with the homeless problem. However, Americans aren't smart enough to see benefit. Shrug.

[seanmcdirmid]

Those are self reported numbers, and the questions are often loaded. We did a similar survey here in Seattle and we had most of the unhoused community saying they were from the pioneer square area of Seattle, which is a bit ridiculous when you think about it. I’d take any of these surveys with a grain of salt, and it is more reliable to go by criminal records (but only works for people who are arrested a lot).

[gosub100]

> Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals.

Those deprived people of freedom simply for not being of the proper mindset to hold down a job. It completes the circuit "support corporations or get arrested". I'm not convinced about your TBI statistic either. I would guess schizophrenia would be the majority

[JohnPrine]

there are ways to support yourself without supporting a corporation

[creer]

> > Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals. > > Those deprived people of freedom

Are you actually arguing that closing most mental health facilities was the only way to fight for individual freedom?

[gosub100]

I'm arguing against locking someone up because they aren't willing or fit to be a cog in a wheel (aka function in the confines of a job to pay rent and "stay off the streets"). Not-being-a-wage-slave isn't an illness.

[scotty79]

Aren't unsheltered just the peak of the iceberg? Yes, that's the part you crash into, but it exists only because it's supported by much larger mass of homeless people who are one random spat away from becoming unsheltered.

[kazinator]

> plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing

Well, it kind of is; almost any nonzero cost. If they had to come up with a hundred bucks rent, it would be a problem. At that level, it's unconnected to any housing crisis.

[creer]

> quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

Quality of life issues for others are not caused by "homelessness". They are caused by mental illness, or crime, or very aggressive lack of care for others. Being homeless is not what causes someone to spread garbage everywhere, to poop on the sidewalk, to break car windows.

Blaming homelessness is a political act. By someone who has a political axe to grind - and who doesn't give a crap about quality of life issues.

In the same line, see the fight against people living in RVs. Many of them cause no problem, others do.

In the same line, see San Francisco "street cleaning" parking hassles. Is it about street cleaning? What street cleaning?

[afpx]

Why would you think drug abuse and mental illness cause people to become unsheltered rather than the other way around?

I feel like a lot of commenters here have never experienced poverty and chronic stress.

[atomly]

Question: Were you born in SF?

[antonyt]

You seem to be asserting that these people are homeless because of their addiction. Why are you so sure the causality doesn't flow the other way?