[corwinstephen]

It's very possible I'm off base here. I'm going purely on observation and anecdotal things. Do you happen to have any hard stats off hand?

Edit:

I looked it up. You're right in that Latinos hold the second highest percentage of homelessness at 33%, but when you consider population size, it sort of becomes irrelevant. Latinos make up 47% of the total population in LA. Blacks make up only 9% however they're a full 50% of the homeless population. This means that per capita, Latinos are 5 times less likely to be homeless than blacks.

[geebee]

The SF Chron (check the earlier links) distinguishes between "chronic homeless" and "hardcore homeless". Chronic homelessness appears to be more of an economic condition related to poverty. "Hardcore homelessness" is more severe condition, a permanent and very harsh life on the street, often related to addiction and mental illness. You might not even notice the chronic homeless in your day to day life.

Apparently, San Francisco does stand out in the high incidence of hardcore homelessness. Supposedly SF and NY have the same number of "hardcore homeless", even though SF has about 1/10 the population (though any time you get into these ratios, you have to remember that SF is a small geographic region and population within much larger bay area - if you drew a 48 square mile border around an urban core in NY or LA, the numbers probably wouldn't look so dramatically different - my guess is that SF would still look bad, but not by anywhere near this order of magnitude).

[acchow]

> Blacks make up only 9% however they're a full 50% of the homeless population.

What brought us here, and how do we fix this?

[corwinstephen]

I would venture to guess it has something to do with blacks having historically been isolated from the opportunities that other races have had, and that even though things have improved, we're still seeing the lasting effects of centuries of prohibitive behavior.