[nis0s]

I am not saying it’s okay that anyone should be homeless, but it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S.

The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people.

https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year,

https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/

[sethammons]

> it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S

Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.

An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.

[FireBeyond]

> the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

No - the word there is severe. Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, often. When you look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.

[pandaman]

> So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.

[sethammons]

Obesity is an excess of something. If we flip it, you can say that "too skinny is a problem" and there is a difference between someone someone with an eating disorder that makes them avoid food vs those who simply don't eat enough.

The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough.

Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."

[pandaman]

Perhaps having a severe mental illness is somehow important for you but I still don't see how is it relevant in this context other than it shows that the fraction of homeless with it is ~4x bigger than in regular population so it's likely the rest of them are suffering with less than severe mental illness (not even taking drug addiction into account).

[onlyrealcuzzo]

There's 8300+ homeless people in San Francisco.

That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.

There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.

That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.

Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.

[Broken_Hippo]

Even if you end homelessness, you'll still be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times everywhere you go.

People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous.

Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Is your argument that, because x% of the population is desperate, we shouldn't care or do anything about x%+y% being like that?

y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.

[nis0s]

Please note that someone giving you a quantitative context isn’t necessarily saying don’t care. But it’s important to be mindful of how people use words in the media to describe certain issues because it benefits them politically or financially.

The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.

[UncleMeat]

Is it dangerous? I agree that people with means feel unsafe when encountering poverty but the "it is unsafe to ride the subway because there are poor people there" stuff doesn't appear to be proportionate with actual risk.

I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.

[devmor]

I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does.

While property crime is more likely to be committed by people the lower their income level is, the majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.

In fact, the homeless are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than any other income demographic.

Furthermore, the unstable and dangerous people you see behaving erratically on the street are not necessarily sleeping there - and the homeless in the area probably feel much more unsafe about their presence than you do.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.

Gee, I wonder why, they make up 99% of the population.

How could they ever make up more than 50% of crime?

> I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does

[devmor]

No, you just missed the point I made.

Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.

Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.

[sroussey]

People drugged out screaming on the street in SF are not necessarily homeless. Just that they may have rules about drugs in their room.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Is this an argument that a homeless person per block isn't a problem?

Or are you just what-about-ing?

Homeless people can be a problem independent of housed-drug addicts being a problem.

[ThrowMeAway1618]

Yeah! A big problem. We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] them all, right?

They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!

But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!

USA! USA! USA!

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-involuntary-letha...

[ThrowMeAway1618]

I'm getting a little worried about you HNers.

Granted, this is pretty obvious satire, but upvoting it?

If you did, is it because you support murdering poor and disadvantaged people?

I hope not. But some folks around here make me wonder.

Maybe I'll just stop, as I certainly don't want to encourage murderous pieces of shit.

[0_____0]

771K people isn't a small number. 0.23% isn't a small number when it comes to homelessness. This also doesn't consider people who are housed but are overcrowded or living in otherwise very poor environments.

You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.

Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

[nis0s]

Disagree that it’s a growing problem, there are lots of states dealing with it correctly. Look at the article, for example.

[brewdad]

And there are plenty of states that put their homeless on a bus to some other state to deal with.

That's not doing anything about the root causes.

[nis0s]

I agree, and I want humane solutions for people who go through this.

[captainclam]

I've always been surprised by the official homeless population count, but it turns out there's a lot more to it.

The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.

It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).

Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...

And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.

It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."

[saghm]

It's kind of wild that they pick maybe the coldest month of the year to do this. You'd think that would be when people are most likely to try to find some sort way of avoiding direct exposure to the open air even if it's extremely short term.

[HankStallone]

A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis."

But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.

We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.

[nis0s]

Different US states have implemented useful measures for helping homeless people, but states which are struggling with their implementation have other issues as well. Border states in particular have illegal immigrants to contend with as well, so a housing-first policy for homelessness gets taken off the table right away. California has the means and resources for dealing with its homelessness problem, but the political will is murky.

[watwut]

Why are you comparing amount of homeless people to DUI?

[superxpro12]

Scale of the issue relative to the risk, I think.

[harpiaharpyja]

It's another public health issue that could also be receiving attention which causes harm to people.

[bdcravens]

Whether it's homelessness, DUIs, or fentanyl deaths (only 75k per year!), measuring the impact of something by ignoring the blast radius is disingenuous. All who are touched are part of it. In the case of homelessness, it's a burden on emergency services, creates unsafe environments, impacts businesses, etc.

[nis0s]

I think the article points out some useful ways to deal with the problem at hand.

[pessimizer]

What is supposed to be the relationship between those two things? Will you be comparing it to the number of ham sandwiches next?

[nis0s]

You would think that since DUI operators present a greater social problem, both in numbers and potential to cause harm, there would be all sorts of active campaigns against such an issue. But the present reality is that some issues have great political forces behind them, and the media takes care to paint such issues as “crises”. Maybe it is a crisis, for a certain locality, and that reflects on the governance of that place. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say your local problem is a problem at large, even if that means you get less federal monies to deal with it. Maybe what that means is that people need to reflect on how their localities are spending their budget, or sorting their priorities.