The counter example is in the article is one of a couple who receive $1500 a month and can't find a residence? You're argument is this is an anomaly?

I don't understand the mental gymnastics some people have to go through in order to convince themselves the problem in articles is not the problem. It happened in the Susan Fowler thread too.

There is also increasingly more evidence that drug use is more attributed to escapism or a learned behavior of happier times and should be treated as a societal issue and mental illness seems to be a catch all for all the societal ills we don't want to deal with. I'd probably be addicted to drugs and have mental illness too if I had to shit in a bucket everyday in my shit filled RV.

If they are receiving government assistance and not working, then the tie to the particular city isn't strong from a "needing to be there". There are communities in California where one can find two bedroom houses/apartments for $900/mo or less. Rooms, studios, etc. may be even cheaper. It may not be desirable to move to some of those communities, but there are options along the west coast that are affordable to the above situation.

Every day people make decisions of whether or not they can afford to live in a location and if not, move to where they can. A community I am quite familiar with have able bodied homeless people that prefer to live in said community and remain homeless. People working in the homeless services insist we need affordable housing for these people, it's never about whether or not affordable housing is available in other areas.

The area of drug use, mental illness and others is way more complicated. As adults, there is no way to involuntary commit someone to get them help, they will have to want to get help in order to change. It is a huge issue and outside my knowledge-base of how to best handle it.

> “I’ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien. “There’s nowhere for these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up.”

It certainly doesn't absolve us of having to build much more, but at least it's a short term solution.

The few months I lived in Cali I had a well paying job, and it still took me a month to find a place to stay.

Reasons I was refused rent included:

- I didn’t have too much work experience (grad school doesn’t count as a job)

- I had a girlfriend, who lived in the East coast, and would visit me frequently

- I didn’t have a green card (I had OPT)

- I worked for a start up, and the landlord didn’t like renting to startups folks

Finally I got a condo in real bad shape for 1400/mo.

You might object that 1400 is not that bad, but I was 1.5 hours north of LA.

What is with this entitlement to live anywhere we want for any price we want?

I realize I'm going for the ad hominem here, but I get the impression that you were so eager to start victim blaming that you haven't even taken the time to read the article before commenting on it.

And if you can get that far, then perhaps you can see that the homelessness problem being described in this article goes well beyond the two causes you're trying to reduce the whole thing to?

She presumably has other options given her education, unlike other psychologically disabled people who have no other option but to live on the street. Of course pathological stubbornness could be a disability.

> “Most homeless people I know aren’t homeless because they’re addicts,” said Tammy Stephen, 54, who lives at a homeless encampment in Seattle. “Most people are homeless because they can’t afford a place to live.”

It's only true in the trivial, unhelpful sense of "if we got housing costs down to $10/month or free, then all the people there could afford a place." But when we talk about housing costs in general and policy around it, we mean something like getting rents down from $3000/month to $1000/month (from vast expansion of building), not some artificial number that no amount of expansion would (scalably) get.

And I don't think you can really take one homeless person living at an encampment, making a self-serving statement, as a source.

Do you have grad school experience? An $1800 grad stipend will help you understand the difference a few hundred bucks make.

I understand the difference that a few hundred bucks makes to a grad student. I don’t think those are the same people that become homeless in significant numbers and that’s why I’m objecting to the narrative: the person that just needs housing prices a few hundred bucks less is not the person going homeless. Those are different problems.

It's harder than it looks, apparently, because millions of low earners -- i.e. almost all of them -- manage to avoid this outcome. I feel like poor people are discussed in the abstract by people who have never actually been poor. Homelessness is still not a normal outcome. Mentally and physically able people are not routinely homeless.

You can try to reason through this from first principles, I guess. That's a fun thing to do on a nerd message board. But I'm telling you that this is not what happens in actual practice.

If it wasn't for my mom, he would definitely be homeless. These situations are not contrived.

Furthermore, what if the problem is mental or physical disability? That's not a valid concern of yours? Maybe the homeless population is spiking because of medical costs. What if you have a medical condition that requires medication or you lose your mind? You lose your job, you lose your medication? I honestly feel you're either a troll, or you're just... obtuse?

For the record, I actually have been poor. My family was one shocking expense away from homelessness for much of my life. Luckily we hung in there by a thread. Clearly our country is full of folks like you who think that anyone who's homeless is a useless and easily discarded piece of trash.

We're a wealthy enough country to give assistance to anyone who needs it. There's no reason we shouldn't.

When you talk about poor people in the abstract, it's easy to contrive scenarios in which somebody loses their job at the gas station and is forced into homelessness. But in actual real life, that's rarely how it plays out.

Moving to a different city is hard. The older they get the harder it is. Most people can’t do it.

When I was six we moved to the easiest place to move to: early 90s greater Toronto Area. No crime. Lots of jobs. Lots of good will from the natives. It was tough.

The Central Valley is ravaged by unique social issues. To dismiss the issues because it’s cheap to live there is insane.

The aphorism I've heard is that "People become homeless for all sorts of reasons. People stay homeless for just one: mental illness."

Note that it's not contradictory for a majority of the homeless (by the numbers) to have jobs and be homeless for reasons beyond their control, and yet for you (as someone who works with the homeless community) to see a majority of them as suffering from mental illness or drug use. This would happen if there's a large margin of people living on the edge: they're making it work one month, then they lose their job or their rent goes up and they're homeless, then they get another job or find a cheaper place and they're no longer homeless. From your perspective as a provider of services, these are transient folks who come in once and then you never see them again, and you wouldn't remember them. From the statistics on homelessness, they could very well make up a much larger fraction of the homeless than the chronic mental illness & drug abuse cases, particularly in times of great economic change like now.