Not a statistical analysis, but my intuition is homelessness in general correlates with how easy it is to go someplace better. From Orlando, $100 gas money provides a lot of options. From Vegas, not so many. From San Francisco, $100 of gas might not even get you to the state line. Even if it does, there's not anything better there and not anything better on the way.
San Francisco is a local minima/maxima. Vegas has more diversity of options within 600 miles. Orlando is just another place in the east. Consistent with my intuition/hypothesis, the report says Hawaii has a much higher than predicted unhoused homeless population. Objectively you can't get anywhere better/different with $100.
Just off the top of my head, factors would likely include:
- Temperature. Highs, lows, daily range. Most especially lethal highs/lows, which either discourage or kill those who are exposed.
- Precipitation. More is worse, predictable is better. Most west-coast precip outside coastal WA/OR falls in a few major winter storm events. In much of the rest of the country, rain or other precip can happen at any time and frequently.
- Humidity. Excessive is worse, though in otherwise moderate climates, tolerable.
- Proximity to services.
- Precipitating causes. Locales which chew up and spit out people, especially w/o community / family / social bonds, are likely worse.
- Land values. Higher is generally worse, both in terms of overall affordability, and in the tendency toward NIMBY exclusionism.
- Culture. This cuts both ways, but a tendency to look after people probably tends to reduce risks, while a tendency to provide some level of institutional support or cover may help. Pronounced opposition may discourage lingering.
- Economy. A thriving economy raises living costs, but can also increase either casual/gig labour, or handouts.
- Avenues out. If there are ways to get back on track after falling through the safety net / cracks, peope may not remain homeless for long.
- "Nontraditional" housing and living arrangements. Options outside detached single-family dwellings, opportunities for the noncredentialed / intermittantly employed.
- Family, addiction, and mental health services.
I'm still far more ignorant of this area than I'd like to be, and most of this is impressions rather than substantive and evidence based, but as a first-order set of factors seems likely.
My operational heuristic is poor people want the same good things as rich people. San Francisco's unsheltered choose it because it is a good place to live. The wealthy choose it for the same reason. For both, the cost of housing isn't the determining factor and there are enough other people like them to create a sense of normalcy.
Normalcy is perhaps more important to the unsheltered. It's generally acceptable to pathologize their necessary behaviors. It's less acceptable to pathologize behaviors enabled by wealth. Indeed it is common to idolize them.
$100 of gas gets you about 24 gallons at california average prices, even at 20mpg that's 2x what you need to get to reno (218mi), on the way to reno you travel through sacramento. there are alternately many other central valley options at less distance from SF (from which many uber/lyft drivers commute to SF for their day -- for example stockton, modesto). redding is also 217mi from SF if you want to go north instead. eureka is only 271mi. grants pass OR, and los angeles are both in the 380mi ballpark, still within the $100 budget.
i'm not sure why you think vegas has a wider diversity of options -- it could be i don't understand your criteria for options. vegas is central in a vast amount of desert. it's 271mi to LA, 286mi to bakersfield, 302mi to phoenix and 421mi to salt lake city. a massive amount of NV north/northwest of vegas is off-limits military test range -- population density is extremely thin in most directions from vegas.
sources: gmaps for distances, and AAA for gas price (https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=CA) i rounded up to $4.20/gal. 20mpg i picked semi-arbitrarily because i didn't find a good hit in the first search i did.
I agree that all those places are options. I need some convincing that they are better options than San Francisco. Your gas cost and mileage are about what I used
I used $4 for California. But nobody in Orlando is saying "3.89 what a deal".[1] California's high gas prices exacerbate the problem of distance. In the east $100 provides more range in addition to go along with more options. Even $2.00/gallon wouldn't get you across the all deserts and mountains between SF and Denver. It wouldn't even get you to El Paso where there's nearly 1000 miles of Texas still left.
The "whys" of this are interesting, though I suspect much of this revolves around water and transport. How much it affects homeless populations is an interesting question as well.
The climactic factors Doreen mentions are undoubtedly a factor, though I suspect the ease/difficulty in finding nontraditional means of support (odd jobs, busking, panhandling, gig work) likely matter. The options for other than traditional single-family and long-term apartment dwelling, and the relative costs of mortgages and rent also undoubtedly matter, as does the ability to get too and from residence, work, and/or services.
My experiences travelling through the US are:
1. The changes in density are hugely apparent, with the almost wholly unpopulated region between California's central valley and the eastern front of the Rockies being most pronounced. There are marked transitions at, say, SF, the 9 bay counties region, Sacramento, Reno, excepting Salt Lake / Wasastch next Denver / Front Range, Omaha, Chicago, and then points east. The density of development along the East Coast, from Boston well into Virginia is hard to appreciate for those who are only familiar with California. And even more rural regions east of the Mississippi and well through the South are far more developed than most of California is. The stretch of CA-99 from Roseville to Bakersfield being only slighly comparable -- it's a linear belt whereas through the Eastern US you'll find comparable or higher densities in all directions.
From San Francisco, for two hours' travel, you have ... more or less two destinations: Sacramento or Stockton. Going north or south, there's nothing until Portland, OR, or Los Angeles. And once you pass Sacramento, there's very slim pickings until you cross the Rockies, or better, the Missouri or Mississippi rivers, which is at best days travel by car or bus. And once you arrive, options may be few and attitudes not particularly welcoming.
2. Density alone isn't vitality. There are relatively habited regions which offer little economic opportunity. That's pointedly obvious as you travel through the Mississippi Delta region, much of Arkansas, and old rust-belt regions of Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Even with density and clement weather, and despite low costs, support is scarce.
The feel of regions that do have some level of wealth or at least money flows is palpable. Aspen, CO, Seattle, WA, and Menlo Park, CA have tremendously different feels than Clinton, IA, St. Louis, MO, or Gallup, NM. Even attractive tourist-based regions often seem to have an edge of concern based on a mix of past indigenous sources of wealth (often mining and timber) now gone and a fear for what happens when the travel fad fades. What passes for generally vibrant in most of the US would be considered strongly depressed in much of California, where the distinctions between even thriving core and outlying regions of the SF Bay Area are severe.
3. Local attitudes matter. Homeless, housing-challenged, car- or van-dwellers, and the like, are more evident where support and services exist, all else being equal. Over the past few decades, I'd say they're more evident generally, and aren't strictly limited to the west or even coastal regions generally.
4. Much of coastal California, as well as the central valley, has and has long had its homeless or transient populations. I strongly recommend Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath as a backgrounder.
The question of why homelessness suddenly emerged in the late 1970s / early 1980s is one that's interested me. I've had an occasional correspondence with Doreen since replying to a comment of hers on HN about a year ago based on some research I'd done on the question at the time. How much of the phenomenon is simply nomenclature and semantics, and how much is an increase in the number / visibility of the unhoused, is something I still don't have a good handle on myself, though I do strongly suspect the problem is getting worse. Failing to offer options other than detached single-family dwellings or rabbit-hutch apartments or housing tower blocks seems another. There really ought be a sensible middle range. There isn't.
Doreen has been advocating for SROs as at least a partial solution. She may be right on this, though I see it as at best only a partial element. Co-housing, intentional communities, boarding, and other options may also be useful. As well as a widely implemented land value tax.
Treating housing and real estate as financial assets rather than essential societal services seems to me a very strong component.
That last element turns up in another item I've found fascinating, a 1937 analysis of resistances to technological innovations which includes among other sectors housing, by Berhnard J. Stern:
My attention had been first brought to that by Stern's research assistant for the project, a young Columbia University graduate student named Isaac Asimov.
There are a whole slew of valuable lessons from that piece. I've submitted it a few times to HN though discussion's been light to date.
All told, though, this is a problem that's proved stubbornly resistant to technological (or any other) solutions attempted to date, and for which awareness and understanding are at best limited. Doreen has direct experience (I really don't), and her criticism of what I'd seen as a generally sensible and surprisingly sympathetic White House white paper is cogent.
Gas money smells relateable to broad spectral segments. Cars are how Americans usually get places. Most people know the price of gas. But I'm not assuming that the population in the article own cars. It's the unsheltered. They sleep rough. A car would be a step up in terms of shelter.
On the street, gas money is still more than a proxy. For the carless, gas money is an ordinary way to get a ride in someone else's car.
Just now, the lowest fair on the Greyhound website for San Francisco to Atlanta six months (4/20/20) from today was $186 and 62 hours. I used six months because that seems like a reasonable lead time for a planned relocation. I used Atlanta because it is a lower cost metro with a lot of opportunity and moderate weather.
The lowest cost ticket to Atlanta tomorrow (10/21/19) is $217. Denver is $156 and leaves at 11pm. Chicago is also $217 at 11pm. I'd need convincing that Denver or Chicago is a better unsheltered living option than San Francisco.
On the one hand, even a Prius is unlikely to get you to Atlanta for $217. On the other hand, you can't take a lot of worldly possessions on the bus and two or more people can't share the cost of transportation.
That's something of an oversimplification, but I resisted leaving a reply earlier because I felt what I wanted to say would sound like a dismissal or rebuttal and that's not what I want.
You can get out of California for $100 or less by train if you buy your tickets in advance for a mid-week date. That's how I left and got back into housing (I'm the author of the piece under discussion).
That can get you to parts of Oregon, Washington or Reno, Nevada. You might also be able to get to Arizona, but I didn't research that because I had no desire to go to Arizona while homeless in California and looking for a path out, so I can't say for sure.
But giving that bit of information sounds like your point is irrelevant and I don't think that's the case.
When I was in San Diego County, I was having trouble figuring out how to get the hell out because there is a large military base occupying much of the far northern part of the county, so you can't just walk through there. With limited funds, paying for Greyhound tickets or the like was a barrier to leaving. I also did not want to go through Los Angeles and most or all long distance transit routes through that area. I have serious health issues, including respiratory problems, and the LA basin is horribly polluted. I didn't want to pass through that on my way out.
I found it challenging enough to find a viable route out of San Diego County on a budget that didn't pass through LA that when I finally left, I documented how I did it for the benefit of other homeless people in San Diego who might want out but think there is no viable way out on their budget, in their circumstances:
Homeless individuals typically come from the general population and when they don't have the funds (or necessary papers) to do things the "usual" way, they may have trouble thinking up alternate methods. Commuter busses are a non intuitive way to travel that work especially well for homeless individuals because they don't require ID, advance purchase of tickets etc and they don't cost much. I spent a lot less on commuter busses than Greyhound would have cost to cover the same route.
I'm trying to figure out how to effectively publicize that fact, as well as help homeless people find other ways to overcome their myriad barriers to relocating so as to take advantage of opportunities to try to make their lives work. I think the degree to which homeless people end up trapped in homelessness because homelessness itself is a barrier to relocation is a significant part of the problem.
The logistical barriers to relocation once you are homeless are quite substantial. But you are correct that barriers to ready solutions for the general population contribute to a slide into homelessness and then help make it hard to escape. This is an element of the problem overlooked by most people: that factors that make it hard for "normal" (housed) people with problems to address their problems fosters a slide into intractable poverty and ultimately homelessness. The homeless are not a separate population. They are drawn from the general population and policies help create situations where they get behind the right ball and then can't get out. We need to find policies and practices that regerse that trend rather than help to entrench it.
Thank you for leaving the comment. I'm disinclined to agree with the implicit assumption that this metric is the entire explanation, but it does resonate with some of my experiences and highlights an aspect of the issue I'm aware of but haven't explicitly focused on.
I'm aware enough of the connection between physical mobility and upward economic mobility that it influenced the grouping of information on my first homeless site:
Thanks. That makes sense. Last Thursday morning I was out with my dog going past the Marina Walmart. Gordon came across Reservation Road. He's from Grant's Pass. His wife is hungry. They spent last night in the bushes and he felt it was disgusting. She's on the bus bench with a clean suitcase and a toy sized dog. I don't have any cash. His family is tapped. They're waiting for the Airbus to get to San Jose. I'd give him the twenty in my wallet. Except I don't carry when I'm out with a dog. Gordon tells me he's not a bum. I know he isn't. The story is so dull it has to be true and his hands feel like they've been chainsawing when we shake. Many blessings as he walks back to the bus bench. I head home, through some food and dog treats in a bag. The bag in my backpack. Me on my bicycle and I'm back in twenty minutes. Gordon and his wife and her suitcase and the toy dog are gone. The bus bench is empty. I figure maybe their at the transportation hub. Peddle over. Nope. I change out my twenty for 19 dollar coins and four quarters. I've started keeping some Sacagawea and Susan B. in my pocket. And some in my backpack. I Google Airbus. It's mostly about planes. But there's a link to the Monterey Airbus. $30 from Monterey to San Jose airport. Still a long way to Grant's Pass. But a little closer.
$60 in gas would have got them closer. I started thinking about how hard it is to get away from California back in January. I was heading back to Auburn from Mojave. I got a brake related warning light on I8 in Arizona and pulled into an Advanced Autoparts to get an OBD code. It's close to 10pm The store's reader doesn't do brake codes. But one of the guys has his in his car. He's from...I don't remember...but not a California city I'd go out of my way to visit. He tells me had to get out. Bad environment. His car is something small. Twenty + years old. And was cheap when it was new. Tuscon is a long way across a lot of Mojave and basins and ranges from where he left. Far enough that he doesn't go back to visit mom. He didn't half to check my code. He gets bored with nothing to do. ADHD diagnosis. I get the sense his coworker feels there's more dignity in boredom. Probably helps him cope with the other guy's ADHD on the dark winter nights. He's read the codes. I express my gratitude and crash for the night in the Walmart parking lot...staying at the W.
Sometime in the next 600 miles I realize how far California mostly is from everyplace except somewhere else in California. Six hundred miles gets me to Odessa Texas. The last 100 of it smells like motor oil. Lights twinkling in the night like the edge of a city that never comes. Permian Basin full tilt. The hotels have shed houses in their parking lot. The RV parks aren't recreational. Neither are the vehicles. Roughnecks are living in the biggest tent Walmart sells at the state park campground. It's full. I sleep next to an abandoned truck scale along a stretch of US80 now routed on I20. I'd miss it all if I flew. I wouldn't have time to think.
Since June 2017 I've made five road trips in the American west. The most recent was the shortest at 3000 miles over 12 nights. Unless my move to California counts in the van with a little furniture and the two dogs. That was 2400 miles in 72 hours and there are six trips. The longest 9600 miles in 28 days out to the end of the Olympic Peninsula with Victoria across the Straight of Jaun de Fuca.
There are only four significant routes from the great plains to the Pacific (plus a few variations). The Great Northern Railroad route from Minneapolis to Portland now I90. The Union Pacific from Omaha to Oakland ends up being I80. The ATSF through Flagstaff and across the Mojave into Barstow is now I40. It used to be Route 66. And the Southern Pacific is now I10. It's still the only all weather route to the West Coast and was only made possible by the Gasden Purchase despite all that Mexico ceded following the war. Time hasn't changed the geography. The only road over the Sierra Nevada between Barstow (access to LA) and Donner's Pass (access to Oakland) runs through Yosemite National Park over Tioga Pass. Two lanes. No commercial traffic.
Living on the road isn't being homeless and it's elements of poverty are the poverty of choice. But it exposes the challenge that geography. There's no conspiracy behind Amtrak terminating all those east west lines in Los Angeles. Geography is why I40 turns south at Barstow toward LA. Going around the Sierras is viable. Going over them isn't.
In the east distance is lesser, mountains lower, routes more. It impacts our mental maps. Americans think about the West based on the geography of the East. Based on Europe. It isn't. Most of the coast between San Francisco and LA is sparsely inhabited. There's Monterey. All the coast North of San Francisco is. Portland and Seattle and Vancouver are a mountain range inland. They're relatively near the Pacific coast. But not nearly on it.
We need to invest in proper public housing, pay for its upkeep, and avoid the massive public skyrises that are so expensive to maintain.
We need to allow up zoning and get rid of detached single family only zones.
Heck, I'm all for fully decomodifying housing - which I recognize is radical - but the incentives for buying and building housing today don't align with housing the most people in the best conditions possible.
> Heck, I'm all for fully decomodifying housing - which I recognize is radical - but the incentives for buying and building housing today don't align with housing the most people in the best conditions possible.
100% on board with this. Having a place to live is too important to leave to the whims of the market. It's arguably more important than having our publicly-funded military—there's no point in defending land if people aren't able to live on it.
> fully decomodifying housing - which I recognize is radical - but the incentives for buying and building housing today don't align
The incentives for commodity housing are to build more if the price is high. There aren't a lot of incentive structures that improve on that.
The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing. I'd bet that turns out to be worse in practice, but if it has ever worked out anywhere ever I'd be interested in the case study.
It would be a much better idea to stick to non-radical things like tweaking the zoning so developers aren't banned from building things.
If housing is an asset and its amount is constrained, then its value goes up. If I'm wealthy, I can use the leverage I have on existing properties to buy more properties, to earn a multiplier on whatever the market does. Have 10x properties? You get 10x the returns when the market rises. (And 10x the leverage to buy more property.) Not to mention you can charge more rent.
Once you reach a certain point, it might not be in your best interest for the housing supply to increase, as your existing investments won't be as valuable.
> The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing -- we can change the incentives in various ways. For example, tax on land value not property value. (Encouraging housing to be built rather than parking lots). Allow tenants the right of first offer on property they are renting, so an apartment complex can become a coop rather than owned by a private entity. Increase taxes on non-owner occupied properties, to encourage folks not to just buy and hold vacant property. Improve protections for tenants -- increase penalties for landlords who do not maintain their properties. There's probably a lot more ways we could incentivize increasing the number of people housed rather than maximizing the revenue for the landlord.
Build distributed public housing, in smaller, more manageable buildings. Don't require that public housing revenue covers all maintenance for the property -- if we agree that we should build some, why would we let it fall into disrepair? We should adequately fund its care.
Actually, there's considerable evidence to suggest that for financialised assets, there's an extraordinarily strong incentive to block new production in order to inflate asset prices.
We see this in, for example, housing, diamonds, law degrees, and doctors licences. Until Uber and Lyft came along, in taxi medallions.
> The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing. I'd bet that turns out to be worse in practice, but if it has ever worked out anywhere ever I'd be interested in the case study.
This is how Singapore works. It has been working great there.
Hope VI eliminated a significant fraction of the US's public housing stock. You could shave the last twenty five years of the housing market with Occam's Razor and a supply demand curve.
HOPE VI is a program of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is intended to revitalize the worst public housing projects in the United States into mixed-income developments. Its philosophy is largely based on New Urbanism and the concept of defensible space.
Yeah, that's basically the same as what I'm saying -- housing shouldn't be a commodity that we speculate on financially. The incentive shouldn't be about how much money it can extract, but rather how many people it can comfortably house.
We should be focusing on getting mental health treatment for many of these homeless people instead of focusing on the fact that they have no home.
Mental health is usually the root of the problem. Many homeless people had jobs, homes, families that would take care of them and now that's all gone because they can no longer hold down a job, are usually on drugs, and family can't or won't deal with their behavior any longer.
No, mental health issues really are not a direct cause of homelessness per se. That narrative is popular because it's a convenient way to paint homelessness as a personal problem that is the fault of the homeless individual. It's a convenient means to wash our collective hands of the responsibility of addressing societal factors, such as national housing policy and how that strangles the availability of low cost housing that works without owning a car.
We say homeless people are all "junkies and crazies" and blame their lack of housing on them. Meanwhile, there are junkie millionaire musicians and actors. We don't use their existence as an excuse to conclude "drug addiction leads to wealth!"
I get told over and over again that housing costs aren't a factor in homelessness at all. In reality, it's a known and proven factor, but it's one that doesn't feed the narrative that homelessness is fundamentally an individual problem rather than a systemic societal problem.
"No, mental health issues really are not a direct cause of homelessness per se."
So how do you explain people that make a good living to living in a box by the railroad tracks if not some sort of mental illness? It has nothing to do with the cost or availability of housing. If the rent gets too high, a person not mentally ill would just move to a more affordable city/part of the city rather than live on the streets.
"We say homeless people are all "junkies and crazies" and blame their lack of housing on them"
Giving someone a house that can't even feed themselves won't fix the problem.
"Meanwhile, there are junkie millionaire musicians and actors. We don't use their existence as an excuse to conclude "drug addiction leads to wealth!"
Why would we? Most drug addicts aren't wealthy. Wealthy people are sometimes drug addicts. That's a ridiculous argument.
"it's a known and proven factor, but it's one that doesn't feed the narrative that homelessness is fundamentally an individual problem rather than a systemic societal problem."
It is a systemic problem. Cities like San Francisco won't address the problem with mental illness and they have laws in place that allow homeless people to shit and piss in the streets with impunity.
There are tons of shelters in and around the city (and most big cities), but most won't go because they won't be able to get drunk or high.
I'm not sure the two can be cleanly separated. At least in some cases, being housed seems to be a radically more effective "treatment" than anything a mental health professional can offer [1]. This shouldn't be entirely shocking, since chronic homelessness tends to come with a number of things that can exacerbate mental illness (disrupted sleep, irregular diet, chronic feelings of threat/insecurity, difficulty maintaining personal hygiene, etc.).
I doubt mental health is the real problem but there is no denying if these homeless were unnaturally happy, they could be working slaves anywhere and make enough to not be on the streets.
My assumption is finances being the real problem and the general homeless are an age where if you don't have the resources like your peers, well this is the outcome with the outlook of not caring.
Basically, I think getting them off the street will result in them getting back on the street because of their age and financial situation.
Why does it seem like the author has an oozing derision for the "chronically housed"? Presumably the goal of any homeless program is to make those people also into chronically housed?
I have oozing derision for incompetence and stupidity. This dates to my childhood when I was always one of the smarty pants kids in school.
It was heavily fostered by my high school drop-out father who had enormous derision for "overeducated" but incompetent fools and he wore it very aggressively on his sleeve. As my post-secondary education crept towards six years of college, I've actively worked at toning down my contempt for the "overeducated" as it was gradually turning into hypocrisy. ;)
I'm critiquing a paper basically coming out of the White House that can't get a simple and obvious fact right that "climate" is not remotely the same thing as "daytime January temps."
It's clear in my mind that part of why the paper gets this important detail wrong is that a high percentage of people with white collar jobs have spent precious little time outside. They don't do much if any manual labor out of doors. They don't walk anywhere as a form of transportation. They don't go camping.
The well off in developed countries are increasingly out of touch with how weather actually works and how it impacts people who need to walk in it and what not.
I didn't want to spend a lot of time getting into the psychology of that, but I did want to in a nutshell capture the fact that people of privilege who spend the vast majority of their lives either in a building or traveling between buildings in a vehicle are failing to grasp something fundamental that would have been far more obvious to anyone a hundred years ago. This new norm of people spending so little time out of doors came into being within my lifetime.
When I was young, people walked places. Middle class and upper class college students took summer construction jobs. People routinely slept with the windows open.
Etc.
All of that has largely gone away in recent decades. We now have people in the US who only ever visit the outdoors during pleasant weather as a form of recreation who have little experience dealing with weather for purposes of getting anything practical done.
If you think "chronically housed" is some kind of insult, I'm open to suggestions for better ways to succinctly express all of the above. I'm a freelance writer by trade. It's absolutely not a best practice to have a multi paragraph derail at the start of an article to try to explain a concept of that sort.
But I think it is essential to paint a picture that "you folks writing policy papers -- who hardly ever go outside -- have a giant hole in your experiences that is a de facto barrier to understanding the problem space and here is the reality on the ground."
Unsheltered, unclothed humans are pretty much limited to south of the Line of Palms. Living north of the Line of Palms requires either or both clothing and shelter. With effective clothing, minimal shelter is needed until conditions become quite severe. The military has experience with this, such as having men survive with rudimentary shelter outdoors through a Korean winter. Besides clothing and shelter, diet is important, and people who work outdoors in severe climates burn a lot of calories.
>> The military has experience with this, such as having men survive with rudimentary shelter outdoors through a Korean winter.
Soldiers are all young healthy men. Homeless people are not. There are both men and women, middle-aged and old, with chronic conditions etc.
Additionally, soldiers have access to good equipment, including water- and wind-proof clothing, and provisions. The homeless often don't have those.
It's one thing surviving the Korean winter with the kit provided by the US army and army rations (if not three proper meals a day), and quite another to survive it wrapped up in donated blankets and newspaper.
Finally, soldiers are trained to work together and support each other. The homeless often have no idea how to do this.
Your rebuttal seems to strengthen, not weaken, the original argument.
If the US Military, working with young, healthy, trained, and equipped troops cannot sustain prolonged outdoor living outside the Line of Palms, then any population less conditioned and adapted would fare worse.
The argument is that given an optimal population, equipment, support, organisation, and organisational structure, the US military can make outdoor survival possible slightly outside the LoP. Expecting a general, or disadvantaged, population without means and organisation is far less tractable.
Seattle has homeless, so does Vancouver BC. Meaningless term I think. In the separate comments about 43 degrees north, far north Seattle has moderate weather of course. Cute term but doesn't work.
The latitude varies with specific location, as temperature ranges vary considerably at different longitudes. It's much further north in Western Europe than in Eastern North America, for example.
Readit News
San Francisco is a local minima/maxima. Vegas has more diversity of options within 600 miles. Orlando is just another place in the east. Consistent with my intuition/hypothesis, the report says Hawaii has a much higher than predicted unhoused homeless population. Objectively you can't get anywhere better/different with $100.
- Temperature. Highs, lows, daily range. Most especially lethal highs/lows, which either discourage or kill those who are exposed.
- Precipitation. More is worse, predictable is better. Most west-coast precip outside coastal WA/OR falls in a few major winter storm events. In much of the rest of the country, rain or other precip can happen at any time and frequently.
- Humidity. Excessive is worse, though in otherwise moderate climates, tolerable.
- Proximity to services.
- Precipitating causes. Locales which chew up and spit out people, especially w/o community / family / social bonds, are likely worse.
- Land values. Higher is generally worse, both in terms of overall affordability, and in the tendency toward NIMBY exclusionism.
- Culture. This cuts both ways, but a tendency to look after people probably tends to reduce risks, while a tendency to provide some level of institutional support or cover may help. Pronounced opposition may discourage lingering.
- Economy. A thriving economy raises living costs, but can also increase either casual/gig labour, or handouts.
- Avenues out. If there are ways to get back on track after falling through the safety net / cracks, peope may not remain homeless for long.
- "Nontraditional" housing and living arrangements. Options outside detached single-family dwellings, opportunities for the noncredentialed / intermittantly employed.
- Family, addiction, and mental health services.
I'm still far more ignorant of this area than I'd like to be, and most of this is impressions rather than substantive and evidence based, but as a first-order set of factors seems likely.
Normalcy is perhaps more important to the unsheltered. It's generally acceptable to pathologize their necessary behaviors. It's less acceptable to pathologize behaviors enabled by wealth. Indeed it is common to idolize them.
$100 of gas gets you about 24 gallons at california average prices, even at 20mpg that's 2x what you need to get to reno (218mi), on the way to reno you travel through sacramento. there are alternately many other central valley options at less distance from SF (from which many uber/lyft drivers commute to SF for their day -- for example stockton, modesto). redding is also 217mi from SF if you want to go north instead. eureka is only 271mi. grants pass OR, and los angeles are both in the 380mi ballpark, still within the $100 budget.
i'm not sure why you think vegas has a wider diversity of options -- it could be i don't understand your criteria for options. vegas is central in a vast amount of desert. it's 271mi to LA, 286mi to bakersfield, 302mi to phoenix and 421mi to salt lake city. a massive amount of NV north/northwest of vegas is off-limits military test range -- population density is extremely thin in most directions from vegas.
sources: gmaps for distances, and AAA for gas price (https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=CA) i rounded up to $4.20/gal. 20mpg i picked semi-arbitrarily because i didn't find a good hit in the first search i did.
I used $4 for California. But nobody in Orlando is saying "3.89 what a deal".[1] California's high gas prices exacerbate the problem of distance. In the east $100 provides more range in addition to go along with more options. Even $2.00/gallon wouldn't get you across the all deserts and mountains between SF and Denver. It wouldn't even get you to El Paso where there's nearly 1000 miles of Texas still left.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=gas...
The west coast largely doesn't, and the intermountain and west plains region is far less populated still. See:
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/pop...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
Dense population centres as vertical relief:
https://i.imgur.com/a8tsVUP_d.jpg?maxwidth=1024&shape=thumb&...
The "whys" of this are interesting, though I suspect much of this revolves around water and transport. How much it affects homeless populations is an interesting question as well.
The climactic factors Doreen mentions are undoubtedly a factor, though I suspect the ease/difficulty in finding nontraditional means of support (odd jobs, busking, panhandling, gig work) likely matter. The options for other than traditional single-family and long-term apartment dwelling, and the relative costs of mortgages and rent also undoubtedly matter, as does the ability to get too and from residence, work, and/or services.
My experiences travelling through the US are:
1. The changes in density are hugely apparent, with the almost wholly unpopulated region between California's central valley and the eastern front of the Rockies being most pronounced. There are marked transitions at, say, SF, the 9 bay counties region, Sacramento, Reno, excepting Salt Lake / Wasastch next Denver / Front Range, Omaha, Chicago, and then points east. The density of development along the East Coast, from Boston well into Virginia is hard to appreciate for those who are only familiar with California. And even more rural regions east of the Mississippi and well through the South are far more developed than most of California is. The stretch of CA-99 from Roseville to Bakersfield being only slighly comparable -- it's a linear belt whereas through the Eastern US you'll find comparable or higher densities in all directions.
From San Francisco, for two hours' travel, you have ... more or less two destinations: Sacramento or Stockton. Going north or south, there's nothing until Portland, OR, or Los Angeles. And once you pass Sacramento, there's very slim pickings until you cross the Rockies, or better, the Missouri or Mississippi rivers, which is at best days travel by car or bus. And once you arrive, options may be few and attitudes not particularly welcoming.
2. Density alone isn't vitality. There are relatively habited regions which offer little economic opportunity. That's pointedly obvious as you travel through the Mississippi Delta region, much of Arkansas, and old rust-belt regions of Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Even with density and clement weather, and despite low costs, support is scarce.
The feel of regions that do have some level of wealth or at least money flows is palpable. Aspen, CO, Seattle, WA, and Menlo Park, CA have tremendously different feels than Clinton, IA, St. Louis, MO, or Gallup, NM. Even attractive tourist-based regions often seem to have an edge of concern based on a mix of past indigenous sources of wealth (often mining and timber) now gone and a fear for what happens when the travel fad fades. What passes for generally vibrant in most of the US would be considered strongly depressed in much of California, where the distinctions between even thriving core and outlying regions of the SF Bay Area are severe.
3. Local attitudes matter. Homeless, housing-challenged, car- or van-dwellers, and the like, are more evident where support and services exist, all else being equal. Over the past few decades, I'd say they're more evident generally, and aren't strictly limited to the west or even coastal regions generally.
4. Much of coastal California, as well as the central valley, has and has long had its homeless or transient populations. I strongly recommend Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath as a backgrounder.
The question of why homelessness suddenly emerged in the late 1970s / early 1980s is one that's interested me. I've had an occasional correspondence with Doreen since replying to a comment of hers on HN about a year ago based on some research I'd done on the question at the time. How much of the phenomenon is simply nomenclature and semantics, and how much is an increase in the number / visibility of the unhoused, is something I still don't have a good handle on myself, though I do strongly suspect the problem is getting worse. Failing to offer options other than detached single-family dwellings or rabbit-hutch apartments or housing tower blocks seems another. There really ought be a sensible middle range. There isn't.
Doreen has been advocating for SROs as at least a partial solution. She may be right on this, though I see it as at best only a partial element. Co-housing, intentional communities, boarding, and other options may also be useful. As well as a widely implemented land value tax.
Treating housing and real estate as financial assets rather than essential societal services seems to me a very strong component.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499697
That last element turns up in another item I've found fascinating, a 1937 analysis of resistances to technological innovations which includes among other sectors housing, by Berhnard J. Stern:
https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... (Markdown copy: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is)
My attention had been first brought to that by Stern's research assistant for the project, a young Columbia University graduate student named Isaac Asimov.
There are a whole slew of valuable lessons from that piece. I've submitted it a few times to HN though discussion's been light to date.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532443
All told, though, this is a problem that's proved stubbornly resistant to technological (or any other) solutions attempted to date, and for which awareness and understanding are at best limited. Doreen has direct experience (I really don't), and her criticism of what I'd seen as a generally sensible and surprisingly sympathetic White House white paper is cogent.
Maybe it'd be better to look at Greyhound bus fares, instead.
On the street, gas money is still more than a proxy. For the carless, gas money is an ordinary way to get a ride in someone else's car.
Just now, the lowest fair on the Greyhound website for San Francisco to Atlanta six months (4/20/20) from today was $186 and 62 hours. I used six months because that seems like a reasonable lead time for a planned relocation. I used Atlanta because it is a lower cost metro with a lot of opportunity and moderate weather.
The lowest cost ticket to Atlanta tomorrow (10/21/19) is $217. Denver is $156 and leaves at 11pm. Chicago is also $217 at 11pm. I'd need convincing that Denver or Chicago is a better unsheltered living option than San Francisco.
On the one hand, even a Prius is unlikely to get you to Atlanta for $217. On the other hand, you can't take a lot of worldly possessions on the bus and two or more people can't share the cost of transportation.
You can get out of California for $100 or less by train if you buy your tickets in advance for a mid-week date. That's how I left and got back into housing (I'm the author of the piece under discussion).
That can get you to parts of Oregon, Washington or Reno, Nevada. You might also be able to get to Arizona, but I didn't research that because I had no desire to go to Arizona while homeless in California and looking for a path out, so I can't say for sure.
But giving that bit of information sounds like your point is irrelevant and I don't think that's the case.
When I was in San Diego County, I was having trouble figuring out how to get the hell out because there is a large military base occupying much of the far northern part of the county, so you can't just walk through there. With limited funds, paying for Greyhound tickets or the like was a barrier to leaving. I also did not want to go through Los Angeles and most or all long distance transit routes through that area. I have serious health issues, including respiratory problems, and the LA basin is horribly polluted. I didn't want to pass through that on my way out.
I found it challenging enough to find a viable route out of San Diego County on a budget that didn't pass through LA that when I finally left, I documented how I did it for the benefit of other homeless people in San Diego who might want out but think there is no viable way out on their budget, in their circumstances:
https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2015/05/o...
Homeless individuals typically come from the general population and when they don't have the funds (or necessary papers) to do things the "usual" way, they may have trouble thinking up alternate methods. Commuter busses are a non intuitive way to travel that work especially well for homeless individuals because they don't require ID, advance purchase of tickets etc and they don't cost much. I spent a lot less on commuter busses than Greyhound would have cost to cover the same route.
I'm trying to figure out how to effectively publicize that fact, as well as help homeless people find other ways to overcome their myriad barriers to relocating so as to take advantage of opportunities to try to make their lives work. I think the degree to which homeless people end up trapped in homelessness because homelessness itself is a barrier to relocation is a significant part of the problem.
The logistical barriers to relocation once you are homeless are quite substantial. But you are correct that barriers to ready solutions for the general population contribute to a slide into homelessness and then help make it hard to escape. This is an element of the problem overlooked by most people: that factors that make it hard for "normal" (housed) people with problems to address their problems fosters a slide into intractable poverty and ultimately homelessness. The homeless are not a separate population. They are drawn from the general population and policies help create situations where they get behind the right ball and then can't get out. We need to find policies and practices that regerse that trend rather than help to entrench it.
Thank you for leaving the comment. I'm disinclined to agree with the implicit assumption that this metric is the entire explanation, but it does resonate with some of my experiences and highlights an aspect of the issue I'm aware of but haven't explicitly focused on.
I'm aware enough of the connection between physical mobility and upward economic mobility that it influenced the grouping of information on my first homeless site:
https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/p/mobilit...
$60 in gas would have got them closer. I started thinking about how hard it is to get away from California back in January. I was heading back to Auburn from Mojave. I got a brake related warning light on I8 in Arizona and pulled into an Advanced Autoparts to get an OBD code. It's close to 10pm The store's reader doesn't do brake codes. But one of the guys has his in his car. He's from...I don't remember...but not a California city I'd go out of my way to visit. He tells me had to get out. Bad environment. His car is something small. Twenty + years old. And was cheap when it was new. Tuscon is a long way across a lot of Mojave and basins and ranges from where he left. Far enough that he doesn't go back to visit mom. He didn't half to check my code. He gets bored with nothing to do. ADHD diagnosis. I get the sense his coworker feels there's more dignity in boredom. Probably helps him cope with the other guy's ADHD on the dark winter nights. He's read the codes. I express my gratitude and crash for the night in the Walmart parking lot...staying at the W.
Sometime in the next 600 miles I realize how far California mostly is from everyplace except somewhere else in California. Six hundred miles gets me to Odessa Texas. The last 100 of it smells like motor oil. Lights twinkling in the night like the edge of a city that never comes. Permian Basin full tilt. The hotels have shed houses in their parking lot. The RV parks aren't recreational. Neither are the vehicles. Roughnecks are living in the biggest tent Walmart sells at the state park campground. It's full. I sleep next to an abandoned truck scale along a stretch of US80 now routed on I20. I'd miss it all if I flew. I wouldn't have time to think.
Since June 2017 I've made five road trips in the American west. The most recent was the shortest at 3000 miles over 12 nights. Unless my move to California counts in the van with a little furniture and the two dogs. That was 2400 miles in 72 hours and there are six trips. The longest 9600 miles in 28 days out to the end of the Olympic Peninsula with Victoria across the Straight of Jaun de Fuca.
There are only four significant routes from the great plains to the Pacific (plus a few variations). The Great Northern Railroad route from Minneapolis to Portland now I90. The Union Pacific from Omaha to Oakland ends up being I80. The ATSF through Flagstaff and across the Mojave into Barstow is now I40. It used to be Route 66. And the Southern Pacific is now I10. It's still the only all weather route to the West Coast and was only made possible by the Gasden Purchase despite all that Mexico ceded following the war. Time hasn't changed the geography. The only road over the Sierra Nevada between Barstow (access to LA) and Donner's Pass (access to Oakland) runs through Yosemite National Park over Tioga Pass. Two lanes. No commercial traffic.
Living on the road isn't being homeless and it's elements of poverty are the poverty of choice. But it exposes the challenge that geography. There's no conspiracy behind Amtrak terminating all those east west lines in Los Angeles. Geography is why I40 turns south at Barstow toward LA. Going around the Sierras is viable. Going over them isn't.
In the east distance is lesser, mountains lower, routes more. It impacts our mental maps. Americans think about the West based on the geography of the East. Based on Europe. It isn't. Most of the coast between San Francisco and LA is sparsely inhabited. There's Monterey. All the coast North of San Francisco is. Portland and Seattle and Vancouver are a mountain range inland. They're relatively near the Pacific coast. But not nearly on it.
We need to allow up zoning and get rid of detached single family only zones.
Heck, I'm all for fully decomodifying housing - which I recognize is radical - but the incentives for buying and building housing today don't align with housing the most people in the best conditions possible.
100% on board with this. Having a place to live is too important to leave to the whims of the market. It's arguably more important than having our publicly-funded military—there's no point in defending land if people aren't able to live on it.
The incentives for commodity housing are to build more if the price is high. There aren't a lot of incentive structures that improve on that.
The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing. I'd bet that turns out to be worse in practice, but if it has ever worked out anywhere ever I'd be interested in the case study.
It would be a much better idea to stick to non-radical things like tweaking the zoning so developers aren't banned from building things.
Once you reach a certain point, it might not be in your best interest for the housing supply to increase, as your existing investments won't be as valuable.
> The only alternative that doesn't have strictly worse incentives are if the government builds and assigns all housing.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing -- we can change the incentives in various ways. For example, tax on land value not property value. (Encouraging housing to be built rather than parking lots). Allow tenants the right of first offer on property they are renting, so an apartment complex can become a coop rather than owned by a private entity. Increase taxes on non-owner occupied properties, to encourage folks not to just buy and hold vacant property. Improve protections for tenants -- increase penalties for landlords who do not maintain their properties. There's probably a lot more ways we could incentivize increasing the number of people housed rather than maximizing the revenue for the landlord.
Build distributed public housing, in smaller, more manageable buildings. Don't require that public housing revenue covers all maintenance for the property -- if we agree that we should build some, why would we let it fall into disrepair? We should adequately fund its care.
In addition to tenant coops, support cohousing.
We see this in, for example, housing, diamonds, law degrees, and doctors licences. Until Uber and Lyft came along, in taxi medallions.
This is how Singapore works. It has been working great there.
HOPE VI is a program of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is intended to revitalize the worst public housing projects in the United States into mixed-income developments. Its philosophy is largely based on New Urbanism and the concept of defensible space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPE_VI
My view is increasingly that it needs to be de-assetified, if that's a word, or de-financialised, almost certainly through a land value tax.
Mental health is usually the root of the problem. Many homeless people had jobs, homes, families that would take care of them and now that's all gone because they can no longer hold down a job, are usually on drugs, and family can't or won't deal with their behavior any longer.
We say homeless people are all "junkies and crazies" and blame their lack of housing on them. Meanwhile, there are junkie millionaire musicians and actors. We don't use their existence as an excuse to conclude "drug addiction leads to wealth!"
I get told over and over again that housing costs aren't a factor in homelessness at all. In reality, it's a known and proven factor, but it's one that doesn't feed the narrative that homelessness is fundamentally an individual problem rather than a systemic societal problem.
So how do you explain people that make a good living to living in a box by the railroad tracks if not some sort of mental illness? It has nothing to do with the cost or availability of housing. If the rent gets too high, a person not mentally ill would just move to a more affordable city/part of the city rather than live on the streets.
"We say homeless people are all "junkies and crazies" and blame their lack of housing on them"
Giving someone a house that can't even feed themselves won't fix the problem.
"Meanwhile, there are junkie millionaire musicians and actors. We don't use their existence as an excuse to conclude "drug addiction leads to wealth!"
Why would we? Most drug addicts aren't wealthy. Wealthy people are sometimes drug addicts. That's a ridiculous argument.
"it's a known and proven factor, but it's one that doesn't feed the narrative that homelessness is fundamentally an individual problem rather than a systemic societal problem."
It is a systemic problem. Cities like San Francisco won't address the problem with mental illness and they have laws in place that allow homeless people to shit and piss in the streets with impunity.
There are tons of shelters in and around the city (and most big cities), but most won't go because they won't be able to get drunk or high.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04...
My assumption is finances being the real problem and the general homeless are an age where if you don't have the resources like your peers, well this is the outcome with the outlook of not caring.
Basically, I think getting them off the street will result in them getting back on the street because of their age and financial situation.
It was heavily fostered by my high school drop-out father who had enormous derision for "overeducated" but incompetent fools and he wore it very aggressively on his sleeve. As my post-secondary education crept towards six years of college, I've actively worked at toning down my contempt for the "overeducated" as it was gradually turning into hypocrisy. ;)
I'm critiquing a paper basically coming out of the White House that can't get a simple and obvious fact right that "climate" is not remotely the same thing as "daytime January temps."
It's clear in my mind that part of why the paper gets this important detail wrong is that a high percentage of people with white collar jobs have spent precious little time outside. They don't do much if any manual labor out of doors. They don't walk anywhere as a form of transportation. They don't go camping.
The well off in developed countries are increasingly out of touch with how weather actually works and how it impacts people who need to walk in it and what not.
I didn't want to spend a lot of time getting into the psychology of that, but I did want to in a nutshell capture the fact that people of privilege who spend the vast majority of their lives either in a building or traveling between buildings in a vehicle are failing to grasp something fundamental that would have been far more obvious to anyone a hundred years ago. This new norm of people spending so little time out of doors came into being within my lifetime.
When I was young, people walked places. Middle class and upper class college students took summer construction jobs. People routinely slept with the windows open.
Etc.
All of that has largely gone away in recent decades. We now have people in the US who only ever visit the outdoors during pleasant weather as a form of recreation who have little experience dealing with weather for purposes of getting anything practical done.
If you think "chronically housed" is some kind of insult, I'm open to suggestions for better ways to succinctly express all of the above. I'm a freelance writer by trade. It's absolutely not a best practice to have a multi paragraph derail at the start of an article to try to explain a concept of that sort.
But I think it is essential to paint a picture that "you folks writing policy papers -- who hardly ever go outside -- have a giant hole in your experiences that is a de facto barrier to understanding the problem space and here is the reality on the ground."
Soldiers are all young healthy men. Homeless people are not. There are both men and women, middle-aged and old, with chronic conditions etc.
Additionally, soldiers have access to good equipment, including water- and wind-proof clothing, and provisions. The homeless often don't have those.
It's one thing surviving the Korean winter with the kit provided by the US army and army rations (if not three proper meals a day), and quite another to survive it wrapped up in donated blankets and newspaper.
Finally, soldiers are trained to work together and support each other. The homeless often have no idea how to do this.
If the US Military, working with young, healthy, trained, and equipped troops cannot sustain prolonged outdoor living outside the Line of Palms, then any population less conditioned and adapted would fare worse.
The argument is that given an optimal population, equipment, support, organisation, and organisational structure, the US military can make outdoor survival possible slightly outside the LoP. Expecting a general, or disadvantaged, population without means and organisation is far less tractable.
https://www.palmtalk.org/forum/index.php?/topic/53712-latitu...
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