I used to also think that many homeless "preferred the lifestyle of homelessness" but I recently learned of a town in Canada (Medicine Hat) that found it more cost effective to house the homeless. This myth that people prefer to be homeless was shattered and this town found that nearly all homeless were able to reintegrated back into having their own places. The mayor was skeptical at first now, he says, “It makes financial sense. That’s how I had my epiphany and was converted. You can actually save money by giving somebody some dignity and giving them a place to live.”

Medicine Hat on brink of ending homelessness

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/medicine-hat-on-brink-...

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...

At first, this seems very socially liberal and at odds with a Conservative party kind of thing until you look at the financials and realize it actually is fiscally very conservative- it saves a ton of money on policing and medical care.

All that said, have you been to Medicine Hat? That's not a place with a very relaxed 'homeless lifestyle'. It's -15C here in Toronto today, and we're like 700km further south. In the west coast of the USA, you can survive on the street without the air itself killing you.

So what's the political argument against it?

1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.)

2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.)

3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:)

4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs.

I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems.

(source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)

This is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, proponents of the 'HF creates slums' theory tend to fall into one of two camps:

- functionally blind

- landlords

The functionally blind (note that I'm not saying 'sight impaired...this is by design) tend to argue that homelessness is okay...as long as they can't see it. Often, they live in cities like mine (Regina, Canada) where for 3-4 months of the year, it is too cold to sleep outside. Because of this, homelessness in these cities often involves a mishmash of shelters, crashing on various couches, and sleeping in malls during the day/hanging out in coffee shops at night. The rest of the year, whether through policing or civic design, 'homelessness' consists of guerilla camping in parks and other out of the way places. HF does tend to make homelessness more visible. Programs generally start with a marketing campaign designed to attract landlords, then word gets out on which buildings house the formerly homeless.

And, that's when the functionally blind start to complain. Often, the complaints take the same form as people who protest against halfway houses opening up in their neighbourhoods. They print up flyers decrying the 'death' of their neighbourhood, and show up at city council meetings. Later, they seize onto minor crimes (ie - my sister's former roommate's cousin's veterinarian had her purse snatched two blocks from that building) to justify their beliefs.

Landlords are in a more precarious situation. Since HF does not have its own housing, it absolutely requires the support of landlords. Some HF programs are not terribly well funded so, while they guarantee that rent will be paid, they often require some form of discount to be financially feasible. That alone is a strike against them, at least from the perspective of business.

But, if you are a landlord and are willing to work with HF, you have a difficult choice. Realistically speaking, HF candidates have issues which create homelessness in the first place. Candidates often suffer from severe mental illness, chronic addiction, and health problems. They aren't always capable of basic upkeep in suites. So, do you offer up, say 15 suites in one building to the program, or do you spread the suites around multiple buildings. Some landlords have reported that the buildings that house HF candidates are more difficult to rent out and that the rent for all of the suites has to drop accordingly. This is one of the biggest reasons that landlords drop out of the program!

As to the functionally or willfully blind, I wonder if the HF campaigns start their publicity too late. Perhaps if there were more pictures of tent cities and shelters people would realize there is a local problem?

I know up in Anchorage, AK housing first started gaining momentum after quite a number of extremely visible tent camps and homeless folks getting frozen to the sidewalk.

I've never lived in a housing project and to tell you the truth, most of what I know about them comes from hip hop. But, I'd rather live in the projects than under a bridge...

If you're a welfare recipient the typically arrangement is for the rent to cost somewhere in the vicinity of 1/3 of your payment. Full rate Unemployment benefit in Australia is $600 a fortnight including something like $100 a fortnight 'Rent Assistance' payment. I believe welfare payment for people unfit for work for whatever reason is slightly more.

Australia also has fairly good services to homeless and disabled provided by the outreach sections of church organisations. Salvation Army and Mission Australia are the two I'm most familiar with. These services will, in certain circumstances, furnish a home and supply clothes.

We still have homelessness. Services are still stretched to their limits. There's a waiting period for the able-bodied to get in to public housing. We still have rough neighbour hoods.

1. https://dcsi.sa.gov.au/services/housing-sa

2. https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/housing

- end racism.

- end childhood sexual abuse.

- decriminalize all drugs, treat addiction as a health problem and make addictive drugs available under provincial prescription drug programs.

- invest billions of dollars into mental health care.

If you think you can accomplish any of the above, I'll not only vote for you, but I'll quit my job and work for you (for free).

Traditional anti-homelessness programs kind of stink because they work in stages. Candidates have to pass a stage in order to move onto the next and if they fail, they move backwards. The problem with this is that it is hard to stay motivated to stay sober if you live in the same dormitory style shelter where you used to live, where all of your goods are subject to theft, and where you are surrounded by people who are high/drunk on the substance you are addicted to! The other problem is that if you stumble, you generally move backwards and end up even further away from independent housing.

I am Canadian where a striking percentage of the homeless population (especially in the west) is aboriginal. In Canada, we have something called The Indian Act which provides certain benefits to 'status Indians'. One of the benefits it provides is that income earned on a reserve is not subject to federal income tax. The big problem with this is that reserves are often horrid places with absolutely no employment and substandard housing. The second biggest problem is that the Indian Act also works to make the concept of status extinct, but that's far from the point. As an example, the reserve where I spent the first two years of my life (I am not aboriginal, but my Dad was in the RCMP) is more like a concentration camp than a community.

I argue (and this pisses just about everyone off) that one way to cut down on aboriginal homelessness would be to amend the Indian Act so that any money invested on a reserve (provided that the venture employed a certain number of people) would trigger an immediate tax credit and not be subject to any Federal capital gains taxes. Further, I'd argue that any profits earned from these ventures should never be subject to any form of Federal income tax.

Because aboriginal people with status (aka 'status Indians') do not pay federal income tax, if you provided strong tax incentives to investment, you can see a route through which manufacturing in Canada has a similar cost structure to manufacturing in either Asia or in our NAFTA partner countries. Employment on reserves would encourage aboriginal people to move back to their communities, provide more pressure to the federal government to fix the woeful state of housing, and ultimately give people an easier route to gainful employment. Studies have shown that when you bring aboriginal people back into their community and their culture, their mental health/addiction outcomes improve.

Alas, the odds of that happening are likely equivalent to the odds that I will be drafted in the first round of the next NHL draft. (I am 38 years old and don't know how to skate).

So, I think that HF is about the best policy that we have. Though, I would like to see it amended.

Purely from a business point of view, I would like to see HF provide more services (financial and otherwise) to the landlords that participate. I argue that landlords who participate in HF often put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. Therefore, I would like to see strong municipal and federal tax incentives for their participation.

Further, I argue that HF programs themselves could do a far better job of moving their candidates into jobs that they can do. There is no way in hell that many of the people I know who would be HF candidates could ever work in a traditional 'job', but I would like HF to do a better job of exploring non-traditional options.

For example, I am heavy into street papers and think that panhandlers are likely the greatest marketing force on the planet. When a friend and I launched our paper, we gave out a few hundred copies to two highly trusted friends in hopes of doing a nice soft launch to work out the problems. The 'soft launch' generated absolutely massive media coverage - we were featured in every print publication, more than half of the radio stations, and 2/3 of the television stations in our city. It would have cost me thousands of dollars to get that kind of coverage at a PR firm. More interesting, our advertisers had tremendously high conversions, to the point that within two months, our advertisers were offering to pay more to keep their competitors out!

One good friend of mine who sold the magazine those first days suffered from schizophrenia and had spent most of his adult life panhandling. In one very upsetting conversation, he remarked that he always believed that people were following him around with microphones and he wasn't sure, but he was absolutely convinced that this time they were real.

Or, I'm reminded of my friend Scott, an insanely talented artist who buys canvases, paints them at night in his shelter, and then sells paintings on the street.

Consequently, I would argue that HF could turn into something of an incubator for street businesses. Everyone, even the homeless, has an incredible array of talent and often it is more a challenge of how to monetize the talent without contributing to the underlying problem. I can foresee all sorts of businesses from online/bricks and mortar art galleries, to graffiti remediation businesses, to clothing design companies, to full blown guerilla marketing teams emerging out of HF programs. The HF of my dreams would give candidates the option of learning basic building maintenance by providing ultra low cost maintenance/building management services to the landlords who participate.

I also tend to argue that HF needs to do a better job of attracting a more diverse set of professionals to run their programs. Traditionally, they draw from social workers whereas I tend to argue that they should be drawing more from business people. Startup founders in particular have so much in common with homeless people that it would be a match made in heaven.

The conservatives we have in the US are so extreme they make even the ones in Canada look very, very liberal. A proposal like that here would induce horrible rage and kicking and screaming about "the free market" and "entitlements". Someone would be called a communist. Maybe impeached. Conservatives run on platforms of removing programs that help the poor, not starting new ones.

There's a reason the blog poster addressed his open letter to the chief of police, and not to a local homeless charity with a check attached. He doesn't want to help solve the problem, he just wants to whine about it really loud to powerful people without doing any work or spending any money and hope it goes away.

it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government.

Do you have examples of effective non-government solutions? Looking at my own country my impression is that government is far more effective than charities (in America or elsewhere) on this issue.

So you pack housing developments with addicts, crazy people and criminals. Next step is they start attracting their friends, and all of the sudden the development turns into a crime-ridden shithole. The families living in these development get screwed.

It also causes other disruption. NYC is adopting this type of policy, so people on waiting lists or in housing they don't like are flocking there from all across the region, and are receiving enhanced benefits. (It's pretty difficult to prove that someone is bona-fide homeless.) Meanwhile, the chronic homeless people who can't hold it together are still addicted, still in need of mental healthcare and are still living under an overpass.

The only solution is way more housing.

Seriously, this is a human issue. We somehow look on these individuals as if they were almost non-human, yet they have powerful stories and painful experiences.

I'm not doing a good job at that but I try to make it a point to reach outside of my fully-customized bubble, and engage other people who could use some respect and human dignity. My impact is minimal in terms of numbers but chatting for 10 min with someone on the street can really make their day. Who knows, if it happens enough, that person may regain the courage it takes to get back in society and reach out to services that are more competent than I at helping in the details.

quit disparaging people who disagree with you. attempt to understand their real motivations rather than harping against some lame stereotype (that doesn't even make sense). that's the way to progress and solving our problems.

Housing first works best for the fist class as well as those who have succumbed to addiction. Some of the others require intensive intervention, perhaps institutional. As someone pointed out, its complex, but it's something beyond any individual's purview, responsibility, etc., so inhabitants who do pay taxes, etc., should expect some kind of organization would be responsible for addressing the issue rather than the knee jerk public castigation for speaking one's opinion about a social issue.

Indeed, something as simple as smoking weed (regardless of the reason) will exclude you from most government assistance. Living indoors is not always a suitable trade-off for giving up medications that work.

But you also have people avoiding an address for whatever legal or avoidance reasons.

http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...

The article mentions that some people had trouble adapting to their new houses. Some slept in tents inside their house, others still slept on the street several days a week until they got used to having a house.

Naturally, though, not all homeless should be categorized this way. A great many of them surely have serious psychological disorders that prevent them from living normal independent lives. Surely many of them have suffered in many ways, and many of them are surely in the circumstances they're in due to factors they couldn't control. These are the ones that really do need help of _some_ kind.

I sympathize with people like the mayor of the town you use as an example, but he's wrong: you don't give people dignity by giving them a place to live. Housing isn't the source of human dignity. When you give people with no dignity things of value, they don't value those things, and then eventually they become valueless through abuse and neglect. That's why homeless shelters have to have volunteers to monitor when they house the homeless. That's why simply building a big apartment complex and giving keys to the homeless isn't a long-term solution and in all likelihood a fast-track to a destroyed property and a bunch of people spending some time in the clink.

Outside of personal interventions and great investment of resources into individuals, I'm not sure there are really any great solutions. It makes me sad, but I don't have any great ideas for how to help them better (writ large), than try to meet some basic material needs (food pantries, temporary shelters) and keep them safe.

I searched "salt lake city homeless" remembering the program there and the SF Gate article discussing it's applicability to SF happened to be the first result, so I'm just embracing the irony, not trying to force it.

In reality, the homeless population in 2016 SF and in 2014 Medicine Hat are shaped by the specific conditions and incentives in those communities.

Certainly, being homeless in Iceland would be different that being homeless in Liberia. I was just sharing an example of a situation where a person had their views about the homeless changed. In this case it was the mayor of Medicine Hat.

So, it isn't they are homeless because they like the lifestyle, but it is often because of an illness that they prefer that lifestyle.

We've all certainly felt extraordinary pressures related to common every-day life. Mental illness makes dealing with these pressures very difficult, often almost impossible. I would not blame someone for trying to escape those pressures.

My philosophy is: certain things are good for everyone if everyone has them. Some of these things: food, education, healthcare, place to sleep (securely), modest personal possessions, and so forth.

Reasons are mostly because of what you said. Homelessness leads to a general decline in society. If more people have healthcare, the general health of everyone goes up. If more people are fed, more people are productive, and production is good for everyone (to draw an incredibly broad generality). And so on.

It's unrealistic to say we'll do all those things 100%, but I do not think they are unrealistic goals for a modern and technologically advanced society.

Price breakdown:

30bil/year to end world hunger. 175bil/year to end world poverty.

20bil/year to end homelessness in the US.

I can't find numbers for everything, but those are some good ones to think about.

If people could separate themselves from their emotions, if they were taught stoicism, Buddhism or how free will and the self is a (likely) an illusion, then maybe they'd be stronger.

I can't elaborate, but I know people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that are young, beautiful and have everything, but can't handle life, and tried to kill themselves but why?

Because an obese corrupt doctor told them that he knew the mysteries of the brain, and that they need to take a lighter form of methamphetamine every day for the rest of their life to be normal.

As Dr. Carl Hart explained, adderall is basically meth- http://www.vice.com/read/a-neuroscientist-explains-how-he-fo...

That person is in college, and the social acceptance of taking adderall to succeed is scary. If you can handle a low dose, great, I'm all for practicality. But most can't and the idea that amphetamines can cure a lack of focus is pseudoscience.

So excuse my tone, but I don't believe in what you said. The problem is behavioral choices (health, what you read/watch/interact) and learning how to deal with one's own thoughts and impulses, not mythical theories on brain chemisty.

What you are saying is often the cause of the problem, not the solution.

A lot of them are mentally handicapped or dealing with acquired mental illnesses. Even under good conditions, treating either is hard. Of course EMS/fire fighters/volunteers working in shelters aren't able to do that.

More often than not, we see them a few days later with Steel Reserve cans littered about after someone calls 911 for what appears to them a dead man on the side of the road.

Mental illness is brutal. I feel for these guys, especially as I get older and start seeing my age equivalent homeless folks with PTSD and the like. The Vietnam vets are being replaced with Gulf war and Afghanistan vets. It is heart breaking to be sure... especially because many of us have served. We try, again, to hook these guys up with the VA... but they must want the help. It will not work otherwise.

New treatments such as VR based exposure therapy, or MDMA therapy are promising, but the standard of care is currently CBT and/or drugs, which have generally poor outcomes.

We just don't know how to treat PTSD in general. This has nothing to do with whether people 'want' help or not.

I'm not minimizing their issues, nor am I saying one-size fits all... but I would be remiss to not say: there are a lot of people dealing with mental/medical problems that are resistant to traditional therapies that don't resort to self-destructive behaviour to cope.

To wave off all the choices they make on a day-to-day basis is a disservice them and flies in the face of the people that are dealing with the same issues in non-self-destructive manner.

It's not an easy thing. I have friends who have made it so far, and their struggles were enormous. I have friends and family who didn't make it, and they're now dead. And I know plenty of people who just aren't addictive by nature; they made all the same choices and never had a problem at all.

I get why people don't like this. We all want to believe in the power of will. In particular, we want to believe that the power of our own will is sufficient to the challenges we face. But sometimes it isn't, and if we accepted that, we'd have fewer homeless addicts.

Only if we are the Military-Industrial Complex.

Err... why? Were they on fire? Why is the fire department involved in homeless people?

You've got hospital ambulances, private ambulances, city fire departments, county fire departments, volunteer fire departments and federal fire fighting organizations all potentially in the same place, all summonable by a 911 dispatcher. They all have EMT training and gear. Who shows up and how is it decided? Beats me.

Sometimes human organisation is baffling if you are seeing it from a step further out but makes complete sense when viewed from the inside.

As someone who's been homeless twice, I appreciate that you don't intend to offend, but this is a very loaded and offensive statement. You appear to work with homeless people and have very little sympathy for their situation, which I can understand but it still makes me a little sad.

Becoming homeless is something that can happen to anyone for any number of reasons, and there are different kinds of being homeless. Once you become homeless it becomes harder as time goes on to move back to something permanent. Booze and drugs can sometimes be a simple manner of being able to sleep, or to get away from the situation you're in or how you got there. Choices that seem nonsensical for those who have a warm bed every night make perfect sense when you're worn down by the elements and incredibly poor sleep. After a while the prospect of having to deal with the build up of shit in your life and get shit together becomes a bigger mountain to climb than carrying on when you are, even though your everyday struggle is a mountain of shit in itself.

It's not that people choose a lifestyle as such, it's that sometimes it feels less painful to have a permanent known level of shit in your life than to fight all the way back up to get a permanent place to live and risk being knocked back when you're already pretty fragile. Being homeless is the suckiest thing you can probably reasonably imagine.

It is complex and every story is different. I am sure if I knew every story, there would be some that I would feel sympathy and perhaps compelled to act... but so far, those have been very rare.

> Booze and drugs can sometimes be a simple manner of being able to sleep, or to get away from the situation you're in or how you got there. Choices that seem nonsensical for those who have a warm bed every night make perfect sense when you're worn down by the elements and incredibly poor sleep. After a while the prospect of having to deal with the build up of shit in your life and get shit together becomes a bigger mountain to climb than carrying on when you are, even though your everyday struggle is a mountain of shit in itself.

I am not guaranteed a warm bed every night. No one is, if you really think about it.

Further, you just described being a police officer, fire fighter/ems person with the stresses of the job. Suicide[1], booze/drugs, divorce, anger management are all unfortunate parts of the job for many. How they choose to deal with these issues are another matter entirely.

Sleep issues are a major pain point for me. I choose this life so I have had to develop strategies to deal with it. Some people can't deal with the stress, so they quit/move on, mask it with booze/drugs, have significant behavioural (anger) issues, or kill themselves. Sound familiar?

[1]http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseac...

http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/Firefighters-Addres...

> this is a very loaded and offensive statement

So the fuck what? If you aren't allowed to consider anything offensive, we'd never discuss the difficult issues and make progress on them.

> something that can happen to anyone for any number of reasons, and there are different kinds of being homeless

Yeah blah blah blah he's not saying 'absolutely every homeless person is like this', he's suggesting that maybe the situation isn't as everyone assumes, which may be the case. But you've shut him down with some 'not every homeless' person bullshit.

> It's not that people choose a lifestyle as such

He didn't say choose did he? He said they prefer it - I presume he means prefer it to being institutionalised. You seem to suggest that he thinks they prefer it to being a millionaire, which of course they do not.

Have you ever heard of the idea of being charitable in how you interpret other people's thoughts?

> Being homeless is the suckiest thing you can probably reasonably imagine.

Who are you arguing with here? Who disagrees with you? All he said is that some of these homeless people may prefer being on the street to being taken into the care of the state.

You are destroying debate!

You reacted as if iuguy had tried to "shut down" discussion with an ideological dictum, but that's not at all what he did. Both iuguy and monkmartinez have commented out of deep personal experience. We're incredibly fortunate to have commenters posting from that level, most of all in so rage-baity a thread.

Showing up with a bullhorn and blaring angry arguments is the last thing you should be doing on HN to begin with, but to insert that at the most meaningful point of human communication in this thread is really an abuse.

For a number of years I helped run a Saturday morning soup kitchen at a church near the VA in West LA. Talked to a lot of people, mostly guys, and heard this a lot too, but for most of them it's not the whole story.

Most of the homeless people I encountered had a point in their lives when the system failed them. Many of them had some traumatic event and fell into alcoholism or drugs. Many of them either had a weak social net (family or friends) or burned through that net. Counselling was not available or came too late, and once they were far enough along unemployment ran out. Eventually they embraced homelessness because they could no longer imagine an alternative, so that they could think something positive about themselves.

My sense is that there was a window during which the system could have helped them with their problems when it became too much for their friends/family and before they went too far down that path. But certain elements in our society (cough Republicans/Libertarians) just don't want to help people at risk.

This phrase is doing a lot of work for your argument -- the implication is that alcohol and drugs are like open manholes, and people are just falling in.

I believe in treating addiction. I also believe in removing stigmas associated with drug crimes. I think we should help people. But we shouldn't all assume that drugs cause poverty, 100% of the time. Poverty sometimes causes drug use. Hopelessness and despair (economically, socially) lead to chemical escapism.

My point is that not every drug addict is a victim of a disease which keeps him from contributing to society. People use drugs for a lot of reasons.

I am a Republican/Libertarian, and I take a small amount of offense to the accusation that we "just don't want to help." On the contrary, I believe the current strategies -- house them, feed them, give them clean needles -- is doing more harm than good. It makes the lifestyle sustainable without giving them any hope for something better.

A better way forward: - Stop charging drug users with felonies that prevent them from getting jobs in the future - Legalize almost all drugs, except for those that put the public at harm by causing psychosis. - More mental health services, including committing more people. We're failing schizophrenics when we don't force them into treatment. - Grow the economy. We need more jobs for the lower rung of the labor force. The first step towards despair is often unemployment. - If we're going tax dollars, let's create public jobs for people. I don't mind if subsidized housing is part of the package. - Stop creating homeless havens. It's counterproductive. You can't allow people to defecate on the street in broad daylight and call it compassion. When you do that, people travel to that neighborhood from all over because it's a place where they won't be hassled. It becomes impossible to run a small business there, families leave, the neighborhood dies.

I'm not saying we should fill the jails with the homeless. But why not provide public restrooms, and then arrest and/or commit those who are using the sidewalk? If we need someone to maintain the restrooms -- pay the homeless.

For example in my city of ~ quarter mil. people, there are approximately 1000 people living on the streets and another 1000 without home (no adress, permanently living in hostels, people in prisons that no longer have home).

Currently I know that there is project that focuses on the families without home (afaik 300-400 ppl?), where the plan is to move them into the city owned flats (there is more than 20 000 flats owned by the city with several hundred empty)

I like the logic behind that. To catch people without home before they end up on the street and give them an adress. What do you think?

1. "We already have lot of empty flats nobody lives in and need to maintain them" 2. "We already rent many flats for like 300$ a month to low income families, that have the courage for like 10 different visits to municipal office" 3. "Families that are on the edge of homelesness already live in some hostel and might be paying more than 300$ a month just to have a place to stay."

At least that is the gist of it as far as I know.

Second, this is an EU city, so I know that they want to get some initial funds from EU funds (the first set of flats needs to undergo reconstruction, because the basic utilities, like water and electricity are in terrible state) as a pilot 'housing first' project in the republic.

Her reply has always stuck with me. "Oh! No, they're not homeless, they're Roma."

[All of this is a simplification, and I'm omitting a lot here. The gist ought to be correct, and, I hope, fair to all.]

There are certain cultural barriers when it comes to the Roma. When you have an itinerant population like the Roma (and in Ireland and the UK, Travellers), you will naturally end up with with a conflict of some kind between the settled and travelling populations in a given area, unless both populations are familiar with one another, and even then the opportunities for discrimination are huge. The situation with Travellers in Ireland and the UK isn't as bad as the Roma situation, as the itinerant Roma population is self-isolating and can't speak the same language as the host settled population, whereas at least Travellers can speak the same language, so they're not as isolated from the settled population as the Roma are.

With Travellers, the core issue is that the trades that once allowed them to afford their lifestyle are no longer useful to society at large, so their opportunities for employment are few and far between, which unfortunately leads a greater number down the path of criminality [aside: the vast majority are decent people, but when you're deprived of opportunities, that's going to lead some people to crime]. Add to this that the modern state practically demands a settled lifestyle for things like taxation, education, healthcare, &c., which even further alienates the Traveller and settled populations. Now, you could suggest that they just settle, and some do, but people tend to be attached to their heritage, so for many that's not a runner.

With the Roma, all of that is even worse because they have the added language barrier and an even bigger cultural barrier. Moreover, you also have a trafficking problem surrounding some of the Roma where they're exploited as beggars, and sometimes worse.

So yes, the Roma situation is a completely separate situation from that of homelessness in general, and one nobody has any good answers for yet.

Worse is the homeless situation in third world countries where even less services are available. Being homeless in a Western nation is far different than anywhere else. It may be exaggerated in SF and LA simply because of two reasons, climate and more support for those in need. So the city may actually being doing a good job but is simply attracting more people because they are

tl;dr do not for a moment think that homelessness isn't as bad issue elsewhere, let alone countries where the US is equal to economically.

It's really disheartening to see the plight of people who could have been helped. Especially, given that we (US) spend more per capita on healthcare...

Another interesting observation is the difference between LA and SF. In LA (beach areas and west LA/Westwood) a side from minor inconvenience of a line outside public beach restrooms/showers and some encampments, there really isn't a disruption. In SF, people walk in yelling into stores, act out aggressively in broad daylight and generally don't seem to feel any restraint. I never felt particularly unsafe in LA, but definitely had to watch my surroundings last weekend in SF, much more than ever before in the last decade.

I looked up "Homelessness in the UK" on Wikpedia and the first line is:

> Homelessness in the United Kingdom is kept somewhat at bay

> by a reasonable volume of housing, statutory rights, and

> various government initiatives.

I don't know what figures you are looking at, but one caveat that occurs to me is that the UK's main homelessness charity, Shelter, has a fairly broad definition of homelessness. You don't have to be sleeping in the street for them to consider you "homeless". Which is good, because relying on your friends' sofas for housing is indeed a very crappy situation which government policy should seek to minimize, but bad, because that's not what other people consider homelessness to be.

Reasons many are homeless:

- Psychiatric problems. They can't fit in to normal working conditions because they are for lack of a better word crazy. They also don't get the necessary help due to poverty.

- Lost a job. In a city like New York where the cost of a studio apartment over an hour away by train can cost 1 grand a month, and minimum wage is still $9 an hour, and food is pricy, and metro isn't exactly cheap either, it can be very easy to fall into the homeless problem if you don't have friends and family helping. I know quite a few people who were fortunate to have had a car and able to get up and leave the state rather than sleep on the street.

- Being homeless often means no access to cleanliness which limits your ability to find a job. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

- If you are injured to a point where you can't work, it is not very easy to get government disability. My friend took 2 years to get the benefits while she was completely crippled. She was surviving on the generosity of her friends. When the government finally gave her money, she was able to afford a teensy apartment. If she ended up homeless the government wouldn't give her the benefits because you need an official place of residence.

- Speaking of a place of residence, a crippled homeless person cannot go to a shelter because they will be preyed upon. And they can't physically fight back. And so they also can't claim benefits because of this. I know one such person.

Try living on the streets and you will become an addicted asshole. I don't think there are a lot of people who can do it for years and stay 'normal'.

I really appreciate that you serve homeless residents just like other residents. But you might consider that the people who you are most frequently called to help are not representative of the homeless population. Look at the national stats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

That's a lot of families. It's a lot of kids. A friend of mine put years into making a documentary about homeless youth in Chicago. I got to meet some of them, and they are entirely different than the picture you paint:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/homestretch/

I think it's also important to note that active addicts generally refuse help no matter what level of society they're in. That's part of the addictive cycle. Homeless addicts claim to prefer their "lifestyle" and will fight to keep it. But so do gainfully employed alcoholics. So do wealthy coke fiends. It's a disease that will kill all of them eventually unless they can start facing how much addiction has screwed up their lives. And as hard as facing that has to be for a well-off person, I expect it's way harder for someone who has fallen so low as to be sleeping under an overpass and living out of a trash can.

To the extent that's true, I suspect that says a lot more about the alternatives that they are presented with than anything else.

When I worked at a VA Medical Center 25 years ago, the problem was identical. You end up feeling more for the social workers than for the vets.

While I have difficulty agreeing that the homeless generally want to be, it seems worth noting that they're not better than normal people, any more than they are worse - they are normal people, with the same charm and/or asshattery as the rest of us. They're just in a situation most of us (or so I think) find singularly undesirable.

This is part of why I have this blog: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

Homeless people need the same things other people need: Work that works for them and other middle class solutions that are largely disappearing from an increasingly polarized America. But what they are offered is mostly contempt and really low quality options and services rooted in a broken, abusive, horrifying set of mental models. And then we are vilified for not being adequately grateful for the shit offered to us.

I don't want to be homeless. But, yeah, I prefer this to the vastly shittier alternatives available to me.

There are 25,000 homeless in my city. I don't know exact numbers but a lot come here to pursue their dreams and some to escape a bad situation back home.

But it is so expensive here. Housing is difficult. Deception is everywhere, in terms of convincing people they have a chance at a career. But more often, they fall into drugs and prostitution, and running the streets -- because it is fun and easy, at first.

So an 18 year old kid who wants to be a singer, can run around meeting interesting people, act like he/she is achieving their dream but really is just partying. Then their irresponsible ways get them on the street.

And a once bright kid becomes diminished by drugs, and stress, and the struggle and emotional pain and torture that living on the streets causes. They then look "mentally ill" but most, in my experience, are merely exhausted and are irresponsible.

I have young friends who are homeless, and I'd start my day drinking coffee with them at Starbucks and then later eating breakfast at my building (a 5-star hotel) with people who could afford to feed a million people for a year.

And my rich friends, a lot are on drugs, and some do insane illegal things, and are generally way worse for society than my homeless friends. And I could often trust my homeless friends more than my rich ones.

At the time, I lived in an $8 million condo for free. And through a conflict of over our philosophies on pandering and prostitution, I moved out abruptly, and was nearly homeless myself. I then got to experience first hand the atrocious public transportation services, the difficulty in renting an apartment and how the City just doesn't care about working class people or the homeless.

The City is inept and just not thinking about solving the problems in a valid way. Instead, they take away electrical outlets in most areas which just punishes tourists, commuters, regular working people etc.

And great institutions, like the pubic libraries, which Carnegie saw as a way to lift up all of society, become refugees for the homeless.

Of course, the majority of homeless people are too far gone. Most are lazy, selfish, destructive and just terrible people.

Were they like that before or did they learn to be that way? Maybe if schools taught kids critical thinking skills and stoicism and how to separate themselves from the emotions, then we'd have a stronger society that knew how to deal with adversity better.

A lot of people, rich poor, smart or uneducated, are slightly fragile and weak. Life is hard, for us all, and society doesn't teach us how to live life very well.