There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience.

I volunteered at a soup kitchen in SF a number of years ago. At the orientation meeting, the director said nearly all homeless fit into one of these categories:

1. Mentally ill

2. Addicted to drugs

3. Veterans (Gulf War, Vietnam)

4. Down-on-their-luck families (debt, sudden medical bills, lost job, eviction, etc.)

He said #4 category was the smallest, and these families typically got out of the situation within a year or two at most. A 'Pursuit of Happyness' type situation.

The other problems are much less tractable. The distribution of time spent on the streets was strongly bimodal: people were either on the streets for <2 years, or for decades.

  >There is a strong selection bias here: homeless people who are addicts or suffer from mental health issues are  significantly less likely to be on a computer writing interesting articles of their experience.

One interesting thing also is #3, why are veterans homeless? PTSD?

These places are long gone in the US, because of fire code reasons, local regulations, etc. The minimum housing in many areas that have the hardest hit homeless populations is probably closer to $1500 a month.

What’s more cruel, having people live in tenement housing our having none available at all?

Sorta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

However, I don't know how good of an indicator debt is for one's circumstances, or for the consequences of indebtedness. I suspect not very.

But our cult of individualism says that your successes belong to your boss, and your failures are your own damn fault. So you can die in the gutter and you'll deserve it.

Maybe it’s different in India now. But my generation remembers ‘family’(and I use the term loosely) walking in and leaving through a revolving door for a break from the condition what most people in America call ‘unhoused’.

You feed the guests, house them, pull connections..find a job, heal them, fight for them..whatever until they can leave. If someone can’t manage it, they’d at least duct tape them and drop them off with the next relative with more resources. Keep in mind..’resources’ doesn’t necessarily mean money..it could be pulling a favour or even just giving sane advice.

It boggles my mind that anyone could go hungry in the USA..one of the richest countries in the world. Having said that, a bag of rice, lentils and throwing in some vegetables is cheap. And it is easy to keep people well fed and housed so they can function, recover and revive. The social contract also insists upon reciprocal favors when the time is right. The entire society works on ‘you scratch my back, I will scratch yours’. Together..everyone survives.

Anytime someone has to leave their home town to travel for work or study or vacation or a break from the rat race, the social net will be activated and word will go from one end of the country to another. Also multi generational families were the norm and that’s how wealth..even middle class wealth..accrued.

I knew a girl whose family was from mainland China or Hk ..or maybe Taiwan whose extended family had a restaurant. Everyone worked at the restaurant and she was also working at HSBC. We found out from her that she handed over every paycheck to the family’s head. And he gave her back a monthly stipend. She worked weekends at the restaurant without pay. When she finally decided to marry her boyfriend, the family gifted her a house. Fully paid off. And now she had a family unit of her own and an asset that was hers and hers alone.

Now...everyone who wasn’t a first generation immigrant was shocked by this system. I could grok it. That’s what I think of as a social net. It could be known as ‘co dependent’ in the west, but most people from Asia get it. Because there is no govt ‘welfare social net’ or Medicare or whatever. It took me a while to understand what ‘social safety net’ meant in the United states.

In America, everything is translated in the language of money and what someone else owes to every individual. It’s different. Entirely different world. Clearly.

What we have now in the Western world is not families, it is millions of single independent autonomous actors. They have close friends, but loose families. They have teenage crisis where they try to gain independence from their family. They have work relationships. When they fall, they can’t come back home, they have no place called home. They may say « I’m from Minnesota » but their grandfather was from Belgium. Even in France or Germany, people are unrooted, and a good 15% of them are total migrants, as in, people who fled/left their home country, often in a state of war. Some would raise the flag of a Muslim country and fly there every year. And yet, they are more French than foreign.

This may be a difference with India. We’ve thrown tradition to the bin while inventing modernity, but what we’ve really done is cut through all the ties between people, made them move cities and countries, made them leave their home land with carrots that had grown from the ground for centuries into worker factories where all they owned was a bed (on rental) and a place in the factory, we told them family was a contractual relationship, and shred their sense of belonging to a place. « So why would you help your next of kin? He doesn’t come from here. »

Similarly the results of diversity can be positive or negative. The people who slip through the cracks are those who don’t have enough glue on them to stick to any group that will embrace them as their own out of empathy.

I have been woolgathering and I also think the main reason is the young age of America. It simply leapfrogged into prosperous existence after minor dramas in its relatively short timeline. The only collectively experienced trauma is the civil war and that’s just a memory now. And it doesn’t even apply to everyone in the small population dataset. Weak small magnets.

America is also a nation of immigrants. We have never had any kings or queens. We have never deferred to authority ever and have no notion of social contracts. We believe in our ‘vote’.

There is always a reverse reciprocality to responsibility. If you borrow money from me, you will feel obligated to pay me back. Because my face will keep floating in front of your eyes or I will knock on your door loudly. It is easier to deny this with a govt. Perhaps that will lead to life changes.

During the tougher times of my life, I didn’t have time to lose myself with drugs or alcohol. I fretted about failing my parents, grandparents, teachers, ancestors, community...if I hadn’t been a wannabe atheist dickhead during my ill spent youth, I guess the thought of failing my faith would have been a weight upon me too.

Recently, I have been exploring ways to re enter my universe of religious/spiritual faith. In my wool gathering, I wondered if communism, socialism, capitalism are all religions too.

it’s the same with relationships between a person and institutions. You have faith in the institution of marriage, the institution of law, the institutions of education, the institutions of trade and commerce etc. No relationship is consummated without a voluntary vesting of power.

Another big one is military and armed forces. I am anti-war and I don’t want to say anything that will even indirectly glorify war connected concepts. But conformity and shared social responsibility is a big thing with people from countries with mandatory draft. We don’t have that either. Most positive behaviours come from negative inputs. I am just pinning it here. It is not something I like to delve into...but to be fair, that we have never had any major wars or mandatory conscription also contributes to the weak social glue.

Faith in government is a form of religion too. The people who pray to the elected god of politics are disappointed when they are not rescued.

The suffering faithful cry out to their gods... why won’t you rescue me? The others wonder how the unblessed have sinned. Some others are smug in their own worship of the gods. Some create new gods. Cults emerge.

When you start thinking of faith in govt as no different from faith in a god/higher power, it won’t be too long before you realize that it is US who have vested power in that institition.

And then there is the issue of contracts. Every relationship is based on an understood contract. Be it a mother/child or a bank/customer.

In most countries..let’s take Scandinavian countries because they are the America’s favourite...the contract is between govt and tax payers. These countries were monarchies initially. The notion of economic social net is a very old one. As is social contracts. They go hand in hand. That America had never had a functioning monarchy and has a diverse expanding population with weak glue could also be a reason.

I agree with you. I phrase it this way: In the 1500 in Europe, people believed the origin of universal public good came from God, now people believe the state represents public good. It is very dangerous, as in both cases it is reified by humans who clearly don’t only have positive intentions.

I've no doubt that, for every person who ends up rough sleeping in the US there are 1000 who move back in with their parents. Or sleep on a friend's couch. Or get gifted a few hundred bucks from a loved one to tide them over. Or move in with a partner when otherwise they wouldn't have.

But there will always be some people who don't have any social connections left to spend - if your parents have died, or were abusive, or you're a first generation immigrant, moving back in with them might not be an option. Maybe you've had $300 from grandpa several times before, and lost it to your gambling addiction. Maybe you've stayed with your sister before and scared them with your untreated mental illness.

None of which is common - but if a million people are struggling to make rent it's a simple numbers game: some of them won't have any social connections to fall back on.

Perhaps the problem is that there IS a govt welfare program. The complaint currently is that what’s being done is not enough. The truth is that it will never be enough. The govt and tax payers can shovel mountains of dollars into the maw of the problem and it will never be enough.

The way American welfare programs are designed is like sticking a band aid for cancer and hoping rosy health will return.

If we stop relying on govt, perhaps our tribal instincts to care for each other will return ...perhaps it will finally dawn on us that we rely on our kith and kin...that we come from other people like us and it was not the govt that birthed us.

I don't think that's true. Welfare as commonly understood doesn't really exist any more in the US. The closest is TANF (temporary assistance for needy families) but that requires you to have children and is time limited. SNAP gives you food benefits but that is limited to 3 months unless you have a job or are in workforce training. For the most part, your random homeless person on the street isn't eligible for these and doesn't get benefits. The loophole is disability but that's a pretty tough process to go through. Not likely that many homeless can muster it.

If you get Section 8 housing assistance in the US, it is illegal to house that relative who needs a hand without an extensive paperwork and approval, which you probably won't get. It is especially difficult if that relative has a drug charge in their past, including "smoking a joint at age 16". (If that relative has a felony drug charge in their past, they also can't get federal student loans ever.)

Many of the things people do to help their families have been made to have bad consequences for poor people in the US. To me, it feels as if there has been a systematic effort to break poor families, take away their ability to help each other, and ensure that they continue to be embroiled in "the system" in the US.

Isn’t section 8 itself a welfare program?

‘Help’ here should flow down from the haves to have nots. For the have nots to help each other is counter intuitive and counter productive. No solid results. And can be detrimental to the original goal of social welfare.

It dilutes the notion of section 8. If the goal is feeding someone with a bowl of soup so he can be strong enough to start working, then splitting the bowl of soup between three people defeats the purpose. Everyone is still hungry, everyone is too weak to work and nobody achieved their goal. It is a waste of resources.

If one needs to get out of debt, do they go to someone who is debt free or to someone who also needs to get out of debt?

> Many of the things people do to help their families have been made to have bad consequences for poor people in the US. To me, it feels as if there has been a systematic effort to break poor families, take away their ability to help each other, and ensure that they continue to be embroiled in "the system" in the US.[..]

Can you give an example?

Homeless crisis and affordable home crisis will never be solved without robust transport networks.

Yes, we can house a lot of people who need help. No, we can’t house them in San Francisco. Or in other expensive metros.

As an aside, when prefab house builder from mare island offered to build units for the homeless, the unions protested and SF mayor, London Breed had to acquiesce to build them in the city and use Union labour only.

So it was decided in 2014..maybe 2016..that after they find lots to build in SF, funds would go to build homeless units(not pre fab because Union labour was a condition).

After that, the whole thing is hanging in limbo. Because..as if..there will be land in SF to build homes for the homeless. Daft..laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

But there are also homeless Germans, despite of safety nets existing in theory. I think it is often associated with mental illness and addiction, making it difficult for people to master the bureaucracy to get access to social services.

In Germany, I've only seen homelessness due to mental illness, because the bureaucracy in the social programs causes too much friction for them to use it with decent success. There are organizations that help people navigate the mazes and paperwork, but it's still too much friction.

In America, it's both, but primarily economic. The levels of economic inequality in America is something I'd only seen in third world countries before. TBH I'm surprised at how low the corruption level in government jobs is given how dire peoples circumstances have become. It is much worse than in other first world countries, but not as bad as in places like Mexico or India. The higher the inequality, the more the proportion pushed towards mental illness in the homeless people living there. San Francisco was particularly bleak...

In Japan, it's also primarily economic, but I suspect that's mainly due to their tendency to hide mental illness away since it's a source of shame. The "tent cities" in the parks were a sight to behold...

this myth gets repeated and has no basis in reality. people in every city that offer any kind of service for the poor think that this attracts poor people. i guess it’s easier to believe that people are choosing to cheat society than society failed to provide for them

From the charts in your article it still doesn't seem unlikely that many homeless people migrated there for the jobs, a ka money - 30% in the "1 to 4 years" bracket, 48% if you go to "up to 9 years".

In my city (Berlin) it certainly seems to be the case that it is often immigrants who end up homeless, presumably because the social net for citizens doesn't fully apply to them.

That's a poor choice of words that betrays your lack of knowledge on the subject. Instead of guesses about what is happening backed up with with "why else" reasoning, why not just do a little research on your own first? Or at least start with a question instead of a claim?

If you would apply the principle of charity, you would have been able to read my comment correctly.

> homeless people flock to places with spare money and mild climate.

Here is what it would look like as a question:

Do homeless people move to places with spare money and mild climate?

The "why else" construction is not a literal question. It's rhetoric device used to make a claim about reasoning. It implies that you've thought through all the possible reasons and you've come up with the obvious answer.

But if you were really making a sincere question, the answer to "why else" is: that is where they lived when they became homeless.

"It implies that you've thought through all the possible reasons and you've come up with the obvious answer."

No, me writing "MIGHT" literally implies the opposite of that.

It is also an aspect to consider, in any case - it is a valid question of why there are many homeless in a rich place. Merely claiming "inequality" is not actually an answer. In theory, the rich place should offer more job opportunities than poor places elsewhere.

Which theory? Because trickle down doesn't have much support in terms of evidence. Often it's actually the wealth that causes the homelessness. As wealthy people move into an area and rents skyrocket, people who once could afford to live there end up on the street.

And where are homeless people getting all this money to relocate a thousand miles away based on the hopes that they might get a job in a city with a much higher cost of living? None of this even passes a quick common sense test.

Are there no renter protections in the USA, anyway?

The theory is simple that where the area is rich, there are more jobs - catering to the rich people, but also the jobs that make the rich people rich.

As for relocating, in the old days, you could hitchhike or jump on trains.

Plenty of it, it is one of the primary causes. But just to put it in concrete terms that should scare anyone, the average rent in San Francisco in 1994 was about $1000. By 2001 the average rent was $2300. [1]

Consider that other living costs go up along with rent.

> Are there no renter protections in the USA, anyway?

Sometimes. But what happens when you lose your job, and then lose your apartment as a result? How are you going to afford the much higher rents now at a new apartment even if you can find a new job? At minimum wage?

If you ever decide to work with homeless people (you should) you'll hear two types of stories over and over: 1. Diseases such as mental illness and addiction. 2. People who are pretty much just like you and me. And then something unexpected happened. These stories are humbling, because after hearing enough of them you realize that a lot of what's keeping a roof over your own head is luck. Add medical bankruptcy to the mix and you've got the USA.

> The theory is simple that where the area is rich, there are more jobs - catering to the rich people.

So your theory is that rich people hire homeless people off the street to cater to them? NYC has loads of rich people - the most in the world [2]. NYC also has a huge homelessness problem. Maybe that will get solved when and if NYC gets just a few more billionaires?

NY state itself has the highest per capita homelessness rate in the USA [3]. Trickle down doesn't work.

> but also the jobs that make the rich people rich.

This is along the lines of saying "stop being poor, just get one of those jobs that the rich people have".

I would encourage you just read up on the subject instead of inventing theories that sound good to you. Homelessness is a well researched topic, and there is no lack of studies and data around it.

[1] https://johnmacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Rents_Avg-S...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2020/04/07/world...

[3] https://psydprograms.org/the-places-with-the-most-and-least-...

"what happens when you lose your job, and then lose your apartment as a result?"

Then losing your job is the cause, not the rising rents.

"So your theory is that rich people hire homeless people off the street to cater to them?"

I could imagine many people migrate to those places to try to make their luck, because there are many opportunities. Many people trying their luck means also many people failing.

Pretty sure that a couple of dozen Billionaires do NOT cause homelessness.

"Trickle down doesn't work."

People living in New York are probably quite well off in general. A bunch of homeless people don't contradict the trickle down effect. You yourself mentioned mental illness, addiction, and unforeseen events as major causes of homelessness. Notice how rising rents and high paying jobs are not on the list.

"> but also the jobs that make the rich people rich.

This is along the lines of saying "stop being poor, just get one of those jobs that the rich people have"."

Not at all, and this is becoming silly. All I said is that there are presumably the jobs that made the rich people rich, which will usually be a lot of jobs, because rich people will usually have sold a lot of things. Building lots of things requires many workers.

"I would encourage you just read up on the subject instead of inventing theories that sound good to you."

If you are so well read, then provide some convincing evidence for your claims. None of the three links you provided tell us anything about the cause of homelessness. I noticed in the last one that California has very low youth homelessness, though.

Frankly, your "well researched" theories about homeless sound mostly like leftist anti capitalist propaganda to me.

Yes, that's the entire problem I've been encouraging you to stop doing. You don't need to imagine. It's an extremely well researched subject.

I was sincerely hoping you'd put a little work into the research yourself (like I asked you to) instead of continuing to create mental fantasies about why homelessness might happen. We already know why it happens. Without any cherry picking on my part, here are the top five search results from "causes of homelessness". Is it really going to surprise you that "lack of affordable housing" shows up over and over? When average rents goes from $1000 to $2300 in a few years, that's a specific example of "lack of affordable housing" isn't it? It's plain common sense that skyrocketing rents are going to put some people on the street. If you don't believe the articles, talk to some real homeless people, like I have during my volunteer work to help them.

https://atlantamission.org/7-major-causes-homelessness/

https://www.homelesshub.ca/about-homelessness/homelessness-1...

https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/what-cau...

https://www.solutionsfdl.com/resources/what-causes-homelessn...

https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/root-causes-of-hom...

> If you are so well read, then provide some convincing evidence for your claims. None of the three links you provided tell us anything about the cause of homelessness.

I gave you five articles listing the causes of homelessness. Now you're claiming the articles aren't enough.

> If you could give everybody a free house, there would probably be less homeless people.

In many cities they have in fact done this and it works pretty well. It's significantly cheaper than the hospital visits and the extra burden on the police force.

You want to keep inventing theories out of your own imagination, while I have actual experience working with homeless people, in several major cities around the world. If you don't want to believe that gentrification in general and specifically rents going from $1000 to $2300 in a few years causes homelessness for those who were barely able to afford rent in the first place, that's certainly your choice. You can have the last word as I don't see this going in a useful direction.

Um yeah, because they are not? They don't say anything about rising rents causing homelessness, they only mention the same correlation you also mentioned (rich city has many homeless), which doesn't provide any causation. In fact most of them don't provide any evidence at all. Some web site claiming "x causes y" is not actually evidence for anything.

"In many cities they have in fact done this and it works pretty well. It's significantly cheaper than the hospital visits and the extra burden on the police force."

Sure, but that was not what we are discussing. We are discussing the claim that rising wealth increases homelessness. That's an entirely different question. In fact wealthy regions would probably be better able to provide free housing for homeless people than poor places.

If you have actual experience working with homeless people, give us some real information.

I've concluded that the best way to understand America is as the top first world country and a Latin American third world country still struggling with the effects of colonization - in the same physical location. You can see bits of both next to each other, and the ugly coexistence of pretending not to see the problems.

Trump surprised a lot of people by suddenly manifesting the politics of the Latin American country - he's a lot more like Peron than GWB. He's a sort of "business generalissimo": rather than going around in a uniform with a bunch of unearned medals, he talks about his business "successes" (inherited or bankrupt) endlessly.

But there was also a man who was bullied out of the company where he had worked for 21 years. I guess he didn't see homelessness coming for him. Also there was an older woman who lived in her car because she was forced out of the apartment where she lived for her whole life and she refused to accept moving to a different apartment. She had a reputable job, it was after she retired that all these issues came up. So I guess that even here there is no absolute guarantee that one wouldn't end up homeless.

Most homeless in western european countries come either from losing their job and having drug problems, or losing their wifes and thereby homes. The many eastern homeless cross the borders because they can live much better by begging on the streets here than in the east. But there are plenty of homeless, squatters there also. Eg nost of the abandoned village houses in the east were subsequently squatted by gypsies. The city center in Bucuresti is also full of homeless. When writing a book about homeless over the world in the US and Russia, the problems were the same, just that in the USA there's a homeless shipping industry to get them out of the city, but they still prefer the warm south where it's easy to survive. Who wouldn't. Even the rich old folks prefer Florida over NY. Just politicians and police are more inhuman there.

To me it’s always seemed like mostly a way to regulate begging, and also to let both parties pretend it isn’t begging. And in the best case maybe it’s therapeutic for people to write for them.

But it doesn’t seem like anyone reads these, and I wonder, are the other effects worth the cost / effort?

They have to buy all the papers they are distributing in advance. It's a financial risk. But a good income, if you've got a good location.

I vividly remember that just across the Romanian border, there are numerous Roma villages that look quite like Skid Row.

I can't compare European homelessness to its American variant, but I can say it certainly exists. Safety nets have holes in them, particularly for those who aren't in the system. Freelancers are not that well-protected either.

I thought that was widely understood as a contributing factor, yes.

other contributing factors: poor minimum wage laws, at will employment, lack of regulation around housing. health system problems I put in the social safety net category.

These things mean that there is more of a chance that something goes wrong, and you need the social safety net, which isn't there.

My thoughts on the matter, after living in the SF Bay Area for a decade, conclude that for the average person and those that have limited earning potential, Western European or Scandinavian countries can offer a better life to those people, on average.

If you have a high earning potential, then the US is a great place to grow your wealth, pay for your children's expensive education and purchase all the consumerist-centric things your family desires, at a fairly low price.

Additionally, I believe that for people who are seriously mentally ill, it's more difficult to section them in the US. In the UK, it takes a GP and social worker to section someone; I believe in the US it's not that simple.

Of course, cost of living is a big factor anyway. In asian countries, government provided safety nets are rare but since everything is so cheap, at worst you can still manage to eke out a living and find, say, a single room in not-so-great locality.

While it’s not as crazy as in SF or LA, the problem is quite visible throughout the city, as are the homeless people themselves.