A link in the OPs article that supposedly supports the conclusions derived from the data says:
...from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Homeless population in the city of LA is up 48% just since 2013. The reporters data shows a 31% increase in the amount of arrests of homeless people. So, per-capita arrests have gone down. That's basic statistics.
That would indicate that the headline of the article supported by the data...
Huge increase in arrests of homeless in L.A. — but mostly for minor offenses
..is misleading.
I lived in Santa Monica during the same time period. The homeless population has skyrocketed along with homeless crime. We moved further south because of the problem. The LA Times is a joke.
The LAPD are not the best police department in the country, but I do believe they're doing their best with a complex problem the rest of our society has chosen to ignore since the 1980s.
The homeless problem is not due to the police, but they are the ones we unfairly expect to deal with it.
I was having dinner with a buddy last week, and we were discussing the issue, as he lives in Mar Vista and I live in Beverly Grove (just recently having moved from Santa Monica). It's become a remarkable problem for the city, and it's hard to convey the impact if you don't live here.
One thing I wondered was how we properly incentivize the city to take steps to manage the situation. Right now, the city brings in $6B in annual revenue (almost 25% of its budget) in property taxes. Despite the remarkable climb in homelessness, property tax revenue continues to climb, because property values are seemingly skyrocketing despite the issue.
As an example, I live on a street where one half of a 100 year old duplex would run > $1M, with dozens of homeless people living within a hundred yards of my house. It's not uncommon for one to walk up and down the street, ringing doorbells asking for assistance, or harassing you as you walk down the street. Never mind the piles of trash & excrement left on the street. I've learned not to drive down the alleyway that runs perpendicular to my street, as it's not uncommon to have people sleep in the middle of the road.
If property values were sinking because of the issue (which in a normal housing market would happen because of safety concerns), the city would be more well incentivized to come up with solutions. But, outside of just citizen complaints, city hall doesn't really have any skin in the game.
Now, you could say, "You're part of the problem. If people like you are willing to move there, you cause the property values to rise." Well, yep, you're right. However, I WANT the city to solve this problem responsibly, and moving away doesn't help me be a part of this solution. I'm hopeful that the sales tax we self-imposed to raise funds to address the issue begin to help, but I'm mostly unimpressed with the changes thus far.
One of the problems is people get interested in "helping the homeless" which often goes bad places, instead of reducing incidence of homelessness. One of the things we need to solve the latter issue is more housing being built, especially entry level housing.
If we talk california, the core issue is housing. Housing is a state-wide policy problem: the most onerous building codes in the country, hardest NIMBYism, and uneven taxation: income taxes and sale taxes that hit the renters and not the landlords.
The solution is Land Value Tax. Just that will jettison the NYMBY attitude into anti-regulation, as opposed to pro-regulation, and then buildings will lower rents, which are the main cause and cost of homelessness.
The problem is that a city lacks the resources to manage a country-wide problem. A lack of social support, especially mental healthcare means that you have more than half a million schizophrenics aloe on the streets. The war on drugs creates yet another class of “untouchables” and the crossover between drug use and mental illness muddies the issue. This is something the federal government and states need to consider from the ground up, but instead they just shunt money to private sector cronies, prisons, and cops.
> If property values were sinking because of the issue ..., the city would be more well incentivized to come up with solutions. But, outside of just citizen complaints, city hall doesn't really have any skin in the game.
There's something missing here. Politicians are vote-seekers by selection; whereas city tax revenues are not theirs to enjoy personally. So why do you think there is an incentive to make (public) money rather than keep voters happy?
It's not that you are necessarily wrong. I can imagine various ways governance can get twisted to produce an incentive to maximise revenue. But how do you think it happened in LA specifically.
There's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Imagine you had practically unlimited funds. In other words some large number, but not millions of dollars per homeless individual. How would you solve homelessness?
Let's imagine with the most straight forward solution. You simply make them not homeless by giving them a home. Now you've suddenly set this city to face a massive increase of migration of homeless individuals who'd also like a free home. You're also going to face antagonism from the general population who end up spending huge chunks of their income just to get a small space to call their own. Free public housing, if remotely tolerable, is something many regular people would also be attracted to. And if you kick the homeless out of this free housing once they start earning money, you've created quite the broken incentive system!
And then you have to consider the reason for homelessness. There are absolutely some individuals that end up homeless because of unfortunate circumstance outside of their control. Though for these individuals homelessness is often a brief affair before they get back on their feet anyhow. Among the other reasons for homelessness are mental health issues, substance abuse problems, and even choice where some individuals would rather be 'free' than participate in society.
I think when we look at solutions we often consider all homeless as the group of unfortunate circumstance. And they're indeed relatively easy to solve. Even just giving them a low interest loan would often be sufficient to get them back on their feet. But I'm not sure how large a chunk of all homeless these individuals are. And for the other individuals, homelessness may not even be their most significant obstacle to overcome.
In a way I see this like education. We constantly argue that lack of money is the reason America's educational results are slipping. And we ignore the fact that places like Vietnam outperform us on math and science with educational spending that's a tiny fraction of ours per student, even when parity adjusted. The point there is that money may just be a red herring. You can always claim the problem is not enough of it, when the real problem may be something much more fundamental with no easy solution.
It is absurd that general change in the real estate market should change the tax revenue of the city. It doesn't naturally relate to the income of residents, the need for city services, or the cost to supply city services.
When the tax revenue goes up, the city gets addicted to it. When tax revenue goes down, the cuts are painful. This is part of what led to the various tax caps put in place in many states, which in turn causes problems like people who can't afford to move closer to where they work due to a tax rate reset.
Those tax caps should have been on the per-person revenue. That would tie revenue to population. It would prevent short-sighted politicians from expanding the budget during a real estate bubble, and would eliminate the need to make cuts when real estate crashes. Instead of having the budget be a function of property value and a tax rate, the tax rate would be a function of the population and the property value.
I lived just east of SM for a few years, in the Sawtelle. As such I voted in LA, not SM, so I may be a bit off base.
One thing to remember is that LA is not very 'votey'. When the mayoral elections were going on, I actually did vote. When I looked up the percentages later, my single vote for the mayor was effectively the voice of 60,000 Los Angelenos. The participation rate in LA City is very low.
That's kind of a weird system. Here they normalize your home's value against the average home value, so there's no change in tax owed if everyone's homes increased equally. Is there some reason they don't do that in LA?
The police aren't the problem. They're just the enforcers. The problem is that nobody wants to deal with homelessness. They just want the homeless to go somewhere else. And one mechanism is harassment by the courts.
I'm not sure that's fair on the voters of LA. We passed a $1.2B sales tax to specifically try to go after the problem here (and not just push them somewhere else).
As for the police, I honestly don't think I've ever seen one police officer harass a homeless person (or anyone really harass them, for that matter). Santa Monica police were always remarkably respectful when dealing with the homeless population there, and I don't believe I've ever witnessed an interaction between LAPD and any of the homeless near my current home.
I remember reading something a while back on how a large portion of the homeless in LA were being bussed here from other cities and states. Las Vegas has been doing it for a while. Other nearby cities used to send their homeless to Santa Monica as they let them camp out in the city parks. It'd be interesting to see how many of the homeless are natives or not.
A group of my neighbors spoke with several residents in an unauthorized encampment that setup near I-5. We learned that a few of them were from Houston, TX. They had been given one-way tickets, paid for by the State of Texas, to one of any number of cities. They signed forms that said they promised not to return to Texas, otherwise they would be arrested.
A recent local study here in Seattle found that a significant percentage (maybe 30%) of our homeless are from outside the state of Washington.
Fortunately it is easy to see where LA collects its funds and how it spends them at http://cao.lacity.org/budget/ Nine billion dollars per year with about 133m for homelessness? Though I was surprised at the nearly 2.5 billion for pensions and retirement programs. Depending on where you are in the document 42 cents of each dollar is accounted for in Police and Fire. You could presumably associate money with Home/Community environment services as part of the homelessness issue as it does do the cleanup
Why exactly did you move? I live in Venice and while I won't dispute that homelessness is our #1 problem, I'd say it comes with the territory and it certainly isn't enough to make me consider leaving this amazing place.
I worked in entertainment, so I had much incentive to stay.
The main factor was stress, which was causing me health issues. I transitioned to tech, and now my wife and I both work remotely, so we searched a bunch of cities with airports nearby on the West Coast, and chose an arean north of San Diego.
Our blood tests both show a marked improvement in health, and my issues (gout mainly) have gone away completely.
I would interpret the headline as indicating a huge increase in absolute numbers, and I don't find it misleading. I've seen much more misleading interpretations and explanations of statistics (not necessarily intentional).
"An XLSX file is just a zip of xml files" is definitely a useful tidbit I will keep in my toolbox. I have clients at my day-job who send us Excel files all the time, even after explicitly cautioning them that the software only works with CSV.
You'd be surprised how many proprietary-seeming formats are similar. I frequently work with one that's just a gzipped tarball of JSON files, but people freak out when I'm able to see what's inside it without the proprietary tooling it's used by.
I believe one can also embed images and possibly other content that end up in the embedded files. However, if you ever need to perform basic manipulation then all you need to care about is ZIP + XML.
This was a result of microsoft's settlement with the DOJ over the anti-trust case. Since then all microsoft docs end in .*x and are simply zipped xml files with an open format.
Reading this, I wondered whether this database maintained by the LA Times would be illegal anywhere that fell under the new EU GDPR regulations. It doesn't look anonymised.
Not a surprise, but the story is a good small example of the problem, written out with enough detail for non-experts to follow. Answering a very simple question necessitated the use of a mix of skills like interviewing the homeless, persuading a government agency to release data and hacking the structure of Excel documents.
"getting the data, ingesting the data, using deep domain knowledge". My point is/was that the super duper ML and visualisation is secondary (initially). What I've seen is that the above list is table stakes, after which (quite a long time after) someone realises that they can do something interesting with analysis. The next step is that we realise that. everything. we. thought. about. this. is. wrong.. Then much interesting thing!
Local police departments are using that Broken Window theory to harass the Homeless so they leave, or end up in jail.
In my county, we don't have much crime, but Homlessness was inching up there.
Hell, I live in Marin County. The enclave to the successful Founders. They make their wad, and many end up here. They like to "act" liberal.
Well, the cops basically harass the homeless. I have an aqqaintance who lives basically in a Scotch Broom thicket.
He told me the how the Coos are ticketing for everything. If you claim you didn't do one of these alleged crimes, they just come down on you harder. He said, I live in fear. I used to worry about dying on the streets with pneumonia; now I worry I will end up in San Quentin. 'Hell--maybe, I'd be better off?'
Marin County dosen's have a big crime problem, but Homlessness was inching up.
I recently saw a middle aged women commit the crime of sitting on a sidewalk. She just sat down. I thought she must be tired.
Well five cops came raining down on her.
A big female cop, picked her up, threw her against a wall, and frisked her aggressively. The cop appeared to enjoy treating this women terribly? Yes--the cop seemingly enjoyed her job too much?
Cops, "I don't recognize her? She must be homeless?"
They then emptied her purse on the sidewalk. A tampon, and a stick of Chapstick rolled into the wet gutter. Her well worn journal/phone book was face down getting wet. It was a depressing scene.
It seemed like they were all asking her questions at the same time. They warned her to, "just get on that bus!"
They took digital pictures of her.
The whole ugly incident was out of a Spielberg picture.
I couldn't believe the way she was being treated. Most of us would be taliking to a lawyer after an incident like that?
This is America's new way of dealing with Homlessness.
My county has basically one homeless shelter. It's usually filled up, and has a arms list of rules.
Again, my county has very little crime. We just have people who were inched out of the game. Some had mental breakdowns. Some were screwed over by family members--"loved ones". Sone just lost their job.
Many were former Programmers, or at least the one's I'm familiar with. Yes--it seems like a lot of Programmers end up homless?
It makes sence in a way. You turn forty/fifty, and you're expendable. No unions. Usually--far from family. No options? And no real skills. You spent your best days thinking everything will be o.k., until that day. You show up to interviews, but no call backs. Your skills get rusty. The bank account dwindles.
I'm really appalled at how cites are taking care of the Homeless problem. All I can do is write about what I see.
And yes--I'm very close to being harassed by some cop too. Great feeling?
Let me repeat, my county has very little crime. So little, newspapers use police logs as humor. For instance,"Woman reported ugly man picking lemons off the ground. We couldn't find perpetrator after a lengthy search of the neighborhood."
I guess Rudy's way of cleaning up New York is the new norm? Harass, and use the system to get them to move?
The problem is my county has virtually no crime? We just can't afford another rate increase, and many if us have no social network to fall back upon.
> Again, my county has very little crime. We just have people who were inched out of the game. Some had mental breakdowns. Some were screwed over by family members--"loved ones". So[m]e just lost their job.
I'm sure that many homeless "were inched out of the game". Homelessness was a huge problem in the 1930s. And many homeless do have mental problems. Also substance abuse, which is partly self-medication for mental problems. All exacerbated by being "inched out of the game".
Back in the 80s, homelessness exploded after funding for psychiatric institutions got cut during the Reagan administration. Many people hit the street, with virtually no support. But which is worse, really? Being stuck in a ward, over-medicated into passivity? Or dumped on the street?
Although you are right that the Republican - Democratic struggle about which level of government should be responsible for the patients did play a part, it was not just not about defunding. There was a growing public opposition against institutionalization. The 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is just one example of criticism against the contemporary pshycatric care model.
Also, in the 60-70s there was (and there still is?) an over-belief in how medication could solve the problem.
I couldn't believe the way she was being treated. Most of us would be taliking to a lawyer after an incident like that?
This is America's new way of dealing with Homlessness
The internet tells me [1] that California does allow recording the police in public. I don't suppose you know of any civil rights groups doing "sting" type actions against this sort of thing?
Readit News
...from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Homeless population in the city of LA is up 48% just since 2013. The reporters data shows a 31% increase in the amount of arrests of homeless people. So, per-capita arrests have gone down. That's basic statistics.
That would indicate that the headline of the article supported by the data...
Huge increase in arrests of homeless in L.A. — but mostly for minor offenses
..is misleading.
I lived in Santa Monica during the same time period. The homeless population has skyrocketed along with homeless crime. We moved further south because of the problem. The LA Times is a joke.
The LAPD are not the best police department in the country, but I do believe they're doing their best with a complex problem the rest of our society has chosen to ignore since the 1980s.
The homeless problem is not due to the police, but they are the ones we unfairly expect to deal with it.
One thing I wondered was how we properly incentivize the city to take steps to manage the situation. Right now, the city brings in $6B in annual revenue (almost 25% of its budget) in property taxes. Despite the remarkable climb in homelessness, property tax revenue continues to climb, because property values are seemingly skyrocketing despite the issue.
As an example, I live on a street where one half of a 100 year old duplex would run > $1M, with dozens of homeless people living within a hundred yards of my house. It's not uncommon for one to walk up and down the street, ringing doorbells asking for assistance, or harassing you as you walk down the street. Never mind the piles of trash & excrement left on the street. I've learned not to drive down the alleyway that runs perpendicular to my street, as it's not uncommon to have people sleep in the middle of the road.
If property values were sinking because of the issue (which in a normal housing market would happen because of safety concerns), the city would be more well incentivized to come up with solutions. But, outside of just citizen complaints, city hall doesn't really have any skin in the game.
Now, you could say, "You're part of the problem. If people like you are willing to move there, you cause the property values to rise." Well, yep, you're right. However, I WANT the city to solve this problem responsibly, and moving away doesn't help me be a part of this solution. I'm hopeful that the sales tax we self-imposed to raise funds to address the issue begin to help, but I'm mostly unimpressed with the changes thus far.
Some stats:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-sta...
The solution is Land Value Tax. Just that will jettison the NYMBY attitude into anti-regulation, as opposed to pro-regulation, and then buildings will lower rents, which are the main cause and cost of homelessness.
There's something missing here. Politicians are vote-seekers by selection; whereas city tax revenues are not theirs to enjoy personally. So why do you think there is an incentive to make (public) money rather than keep voters happy?
It's not that you are necessarily wrong. I can imagine various ways governance can get twisted to produce an incentive to maximise revenue. But how do you think it happened in LA specifically.
Let's imagine with the most straight forward solution. You simply make them not homeless by giving them a home. Now you've suddenly set this city to face a massive increase of migration of homeless individuals who'd also like a free home. You're also going to face antagonism from the general population who end up spending huge chunks of their income just to get a small space to call their own. Free public housing, if remotely tolerable, is something many regular people would also be attracted to. And if you kick the homeless out of this free housing once they start earning money, you've created quite the broken incentive system!
And then you have to consider the reason for homelessness. There are absolutely some individuals that end up homeless because of unfortunate circumstance outside of their control. Though for these individuals homelessness is often a brief affair before they get back on their feet anyhow. Among the other reasons for homelessness are mental health issues, substance abuse problems, and even choice where some individuals would rather be 'free' than participate in society.
I think when we look at solutions we often consider all homeless as the group of unfortunate circumstance. And they're indeed relatively easy to solve. Even just giving them a low interest loan would often be sufficient to get them back on their feet. But I'm not sure how large a chunk of all homeless these individuals are. And for the other individuals, homelessness may not even be their most significant obstacle to overcome.
In a way I see this like education. We constantly argue that lack of money is the reason America's educational results are slipping. And we ignore the fact that places like Vietnam outperform us on math and science with educational spending that's a tiny fraction of ours per student, even when parity adjusted. The point there is that money may just be a red herring. You can always claim the problem is not enough of it, when the real problem may be something much more fundamental with no easy solution.
When the tax revenue goes up, the city gets addicted to it. When tax revenue goes down, the cuts are painful. This is part of what led to the various tax caps put in place in many states, which in turn causes problems like people who can't afford to move closer to where they work due to a tax rate reset.
Those tax caps should have been on the per-person revenue. That would tie revenue to population. It would prevent short-sighted politicians from expanding the budget during a real estate bubble, and would eliminate the need to make cuts when real estate crashes. Instead of having the budget be a function of property value and a tax rate, the tax rate would be a function of the population and the property value.
One thing to remember is that LA is not very 'votey'. When the mayoral elections were going on, I actually did vote. When I looked up the percentages later, my single vote for the mayor was effectively the voice of 60,000 Los Angelenos. The participation rate in LA City is very low.
Something to factor in.
If you’re homeless, why wouldn’t you come to California?
As for the police, I honestly don't think I've ever seen one police officer harass a homeless person (or anyone really harass them, for that matter). Santa Monica police were always remarkably respectful when dealing with the homeless population there, and I don't believe I've ever witnessed an interaction between LAPD and any of the homeless near my current home.
A group of my neighbors spoke with several residents in an unauthorized encampment that setup near I-5. We learned that a few of them were from Houston, TX. They had been given one-way tickets, paid for by the State of Texas, to one of any number of cities. They signed forms that said they promised not to return to Texas, otherwise they would be arrested.
A recent local study here in Seattle found that a significant percentage (maybe 30%) of our homeless are from outside the state of Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Homeless
https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/27/o-c-supervisors-rescin...
The main factor was stress, which was causing me health issues. I transitioned to tech, and now my wife and I both work remotely, so we searched a bunch of cities with airports nearby on the West Coast, and chose an arean north of San Diego.
Our blood tests both show a marked improvement in health, and my issues (gout mainly) have gone away completely.
It's been like that since they switched over to xslx in 2007 or whatever.
Deleted Comment
"getting the data, ingesting the data, using deep domain knowledge". My point is/was that the super duper ML and visualisation is secondary (initially). What I've seen is that the above list is table stakes, after which (quite a long time after) someone realises that they can do something interesting with analysis. The next step is that we realise that. everything. we. thought. about. this. is. wrong.. Then much interesting thing!
In my county, we don't have much crime, but Homlessness was inching up there.
Hell, I live in Marin County. The enclave to the successful Founders. They make their wad, and many end up here. They like to "act" liberal.
Well, the cops basically harass the homeless. I have an aqqaintance who lives basically in a Scotch Broom thicket.
He told me the how the Coos are ticketing for everything. If you claim you didn't do one of these alleged crimes, they just come down on you harder. He said, I live in fear. I used to worry about dying on the streets with pneumonia; now I worry I will end up in San Quentin. 'Hell--maybe, I'd be better off?'
Marin County dosen's have a big crime problem, but Homlessness was inching up.
I recently saw a middle aged women commit the crime of sitting on a sidewalk. She just sat down. I thought she must be tired.
Well five cops came raining down on her.
A big female cop, picked her up, threw her against a wall, and frisked her aggressively. The cop appeared to enjoy treating this women terribly? Yes--the cop seemingly enjoyed her job too much?
Cops, "I don't recognize her? She must be homeless?"
They then emptied her purse on the sidewalk. A tampon, and a stick of Chapstick rolled into the wet gutter. Her well worn journal/phone book was face down getting wet. It was a depressing scene.
It seemed like they were all asking her questions at the same time. They warned her to, "just get on that bus!"
They took digital pictures of her.
The whole ugly incident was out of a Spielberg picture.
I couldn't believe the way she was being treated. Most of us would be taliking to a lawyer after an incident like that?
This is America's new way of dealing with Homlessness.
My county has basically one homeless shelter. It's usually filled up, and has a arms list of rules.
Again, my county has very little crime. We just have people who were inched out of the game. Some had mental breakdowns. Some were screwed over by family members--"loved ones". Sone just lost their job.
Many were former Programmers, or at least the one's I'm familiar with. Yes--it seems like a lot of Programmers end up homless?
It makes sence in a way. You turn forty/fifty, and you're expendable. No unions. Usually--far from family. No options? And no real skills. You spent your best days thinking everything will be o.k., until that day. You show up to interviews, but no call backs. Your skills get rusty. The bank account dwindles.
I'm really appalled at how cites are taking care of the Homeless problem. All I can do is write about what I see.
And yes--I'm very close to being harassed by some cop too. Great feeling?
Let me repeat, my county has very little crime. So little, newspapers use police logs as humor. For instance,"Woman reported ugly man picking lemons off the ground. We couldn't find perpetrator after a lengthy search of the neighborhood."
I guess Rudy's way of cleaning up New York is the new norm? Harass, and use the system to get them to move?
The problem is my county has virtually no crime? We just can't afford another rate increase, and many if us have no social network to fall back upon.
I'm sure that many homeless "were inched out of the game". Homelessness was a huge problem in the 1930s. And many homeless do have mental problems. Also substance abuse, which is partly self-medication for mental problems. All exacerbated by being "inched out of the game".
Back in the 80s, homelessness exploded after funding for psychiatric institutions got cut during the Reagan administration. Many people hit the street, with virtually no support. But which is worse, really? Being stuck in a ward, over-medicated into passivity? Or dumped on the street?
It's a hard problem.
Also, in the 60-70s there was (and there still is?) an over-belief in how medication could solve the problem.
Being in the streets is worse. A lot worse.
This is America's new way of dealing with Homlessness
The internet tells me [1] that California does allow recording the police in public. I don't suppose you know of any civil rights groups doing "sting" type actions against this sort of thing?
[1] http://resources.uscannenbergmedia.com/2016/08/videotaping-a...