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by bsder 564 days ago
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.

2 comments

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).
> 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

there are ways to support yourself without supporting a corporation
> > 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?

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.