Because Americans don't have a culture of taking care of each other. They rely on the government to do it, government doesn't always want to, and the citizens don't demand that government does it.

Source: am American & formerly homeless

If root cause we're cultural you'd suspect another rich country like France would have better numbers, but they don't: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-homeless-people...

Japan seems to do pretty well. There seems to be a culture there that the person above is talking about. But far more important is they allow the kind of hostels and low cost housing that has been regulated out of existence in a lot of modern countries and cities. For instance, cyber cafes and capsule hotels which are as cheap as $10 a night are extremely popular with the poorest Japanese.

However if I were expecting to be homeless soon I would wish to be in Finland.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...

Of course the article is about someone who does take care of others instead of waiting for the government to do it. Hopefully there will be more people like that in the future.

This wasn't pure charity. This is religious outreach, proselytization.

>> Powers saw a way to address a need in his community and share his faith in the process. A devout Christian, he wanted to shift from discussing the teachings of the church to living them out by helping others.

so you think he should stop? (answer: no)

I would have to know more about the situation. Providing a laundry service is good, but is a mobile service better than putting those resources into a fixed site? And, because this is private charity, how much of a tax deduction is this guy taking? Is he deducting the cost of the vehicle? If he is taking deductions then this activity is being effectively subsidized by taxpayers. That money might be better spent more efficiently on other services.

It's doubtful that this one guy is a registered charity. As a private individual you can't just claim your expenses and actions as a deduction. It's also kind of sad that your first thought when you see someone who decided to do something in his own way help your big concern is he's "inefficiently using tax deductions for his personal project". Maybe you should examine your own contributions?

>> "Powers started the program, which he dubbed Loads of Love, last year after seeing a YouTube video about Orange Sky Laundry."

The California "Loads of Love" charity which this person seems to have founded http://www.loadsoflovesb.org/

How to make donations: https://www.networkforgood.org/donation/MakeDonation.aspx

Their FAQ re Tax: https://networkforgood.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150073...

"Network for Good issues tax receipts at the time of donations."

So ya, this is does seem to be a registered charity and donations are tax deductible.

There is a strong sentiment in the US against paying more taxes in general to level the playing field a bit and help people in need, it's usually labeled as socialism. And now it's not even ok to use the incentives put in place for people who want to give extra money? Registering as a charity is the only way to make donations tax deductible, taking that away would basically reduce the donation and their effectiveness by the average tax rate of people with money to give, and they are usually not in the 12% bracket.

At this point I'm not a fan of higher taxes because the cost of living is going through the roof. If we had good healthcare not attached to employment, a modest cost of living, and effective social programs, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes.

I hope that more people are charitable. I don't hope there is a need for it. So many news stories of individual charity like this aren't uplifting. They are actually a depressing reminder of the failure of society and by extension government. Collectively we don't prioritize a social safety net. Some groups and ideologies reject government's role in a safety net or worse that the unfortunate are undeserving of basics like shelter and laundry.

Individual charity doesn't work at scale. Organized private charity doesn't work at scale. This is why the social security administration was established.

> Americans don't have a culture of taking care of each other. They rely on the government to do it,

Surely it is the other way about. Americans give to charity much more than Europeans as far as I can tell and volunteering and doing things like this engineer's mobile laundry seem much more common in the US. On the other hand governments in Europe (at least northern Europe which is the part i know most about) seem to put rather more effort into housing the homeless and making the lot of those without a job more bearable.

Americans will take care of their family and their community. This generally does not extend to a random homeless person.

Isn't a random homeless person part of their community?

No.

Unless you redefine community to mean 'anyone within a particular geographic area' which renders the concept meaningless.

I get that they are not necessarily a part of their community, but the responses to my comment have been that he is necessarily not a part of that person's community just because one is homeless. What about the area in between? Like couldn't a person befriend a "random homeless person", and then that person becomes very much a part of their community?

they're part of the homeless community, but that doesn't help much. Homeless people do try to look out for each other, but lack of resources and personal demons make that hard. Community is far more than physical proximty; it's often the opposite where living near each other is a symptom of the underlying values, beliefs and shared traits. There are lots of communities in the same physical area.

I've often wondered, don't the people who are homeless have family who are not homeless? And if so, why isn't their family taking care of them?

Sadly, they do. And often times this is the help their family ended up at.

If you stroll into homeless communities you'll see a pretty common thread: Addiction. When someone ends up homeless due to drug/alcohol abuse, there's often very little a family can do to (productively) help short of an ultimatum "Get Help or Get Out". Whether it's effective/right or not, many of those families feel they are taking care of them by giving them the choice of continuing to live the life they've chosen or accept help ... with a myriad of conditions attached.

There's degrees of homelessness. At first you're sleeping on a friend's couch or something. By the time someone is actually living on the street or in a shelter they have burned those relationships.

Source: have had a friend slide into homelessness. It was horrible for all friends and family, and probably worst of all for the one becoming homeless.

Honestly, I decided to go straight to homelessness because I didn't want to strain my personal relationships any further. I tried talking to friends about needing a place to stay. But being in San Francisco, everyone's house was tiny & expensive. They simply didn't have a place for me. I talked with my parents about moving home, and they would have let me stay there, but they also said they weren't thrilled at the idea of having a broke, depressed adult dependent living in their house & asking for money/food/everything. I would have gone home if I REALLY had to, but I managed to get myself to stability before needing to do that.

Good point about burning those relationships. As I mentioned previously about "addiction", if you've ever had a family member who's an addict, you can see real quickly how those relationships get burned.

After you've elected to trust that individual one more time only to find the last remaining valuables you owned have been pawned for a fix.

There's a lot of homelessness in queer youth because they've been disowned by their families.

People in poverty have difficulty accessing health care, and birth control goes along with that. Depending where you live, there might be a holy war being waged on free birth control. If your parents are homeless, you might be put in a foster home until you're old enough to be a homeless adult.

I enjoyed watching Pose, which touches on this topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pose_(TV_series)

> Americans will take care of their family and their community.

Given the numbers of homeless, obviously many do not. Not even for vets who risked their lives and gave their physical and mental health for their country.

this is a relatively new phenomenon; in the past we had a lot more benevolent and faith based organizations that we've displaced with government services. Far less people a active members of churches and nobody joins the elks, shriners, knights of columbus, etc. anymore that I know. We're also far more transient and have moved to big cities in huge numbers. None of these things encourage the community and connectivity that caring for each other demands.

It seems to me that people the works over think it is the homeless’s own fault they are homeless. That’s the problem.

I wonder how American culture evolved for self reliance over time, or what are the underlying causes for it.

This is a question without any prejudice. I'm from another part of pale blue dot where the situation is exact opposite.

Only a few centuries ago many Americans lived on the frontier. Frontier life has been venerated by many since then. This gives rise to the popularity self-reliance, guns, rural and suburb living, small government and privatization, deregulation, car ownership over public transportation, etc.

Part of the American psyche is an emphasis on the individual over the state, and smaller tribes over larger communal groups. This creates the narrative of self-reliance and making it on your own, regardless if it is true or not.

> what are the underlying causes

I don't want to reduce this complex issues to just one cause, but

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

might help to understand at least parts of what we are seeing.

that's definitely part of what made America today through the initial settlement from Western Europe. A big challenge is that population growth is not coming from the same areas anymore, so expecting the same driving values is probabvly not going to work. True or not, the USA is still a beacon for opportunity and an escape from some pretty dire places. The lack of social safety systems is a polarizing but effective marketing tool for the people it attracts.

In terms of GDP per capita, the U.S. is not the richest country in the world.

If one deducts the fraction of GDP spent on propping up terrible regimes, it has even less to spend on citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

For the same reason there is little to no universal health care, welfare, retirement, workers rights, or higher education system — the US values short-term profit over basic humanity.

  > For the same reason there is little to no universal health care, welfare, retirement, workers rights, or higher education system — the US values short-term profit over basic humanity.

It's interesting how easy it is to take someone's political opinion and derive the worst possible motivation out of it. Each one of these statements requires someone to provide the service. I do not require anything out of anyone else in order to exercise the variety of rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Should "access to Healthcare" become a right, it has to be provided by someone for free or paid for by someone else. There are people who are willing to work for free, or for less than what the skill-level should arguably require, but there are many more people who won't.

For many, going to school for 7 years to become a surgeon is motivated by the lifestyle/paycheck that being a good surgeon can offer. For many, having to pay for healthcare keeps them from using the services unnecessarily, and not getting care. In countries where universal healthcare exists, some people who need care wait in line for it. Neither are good outcomes. But summarizing an opposing political viewpoint with "Those guys are just dumb/evil" rather than trying to understand the complexity of all of the issues involved (even if the outcome is "good for you" but "bad for someone else" and being willing to weigh those two outcomes as equal with participants who have an equal right to their life/liberty/property) is one of the reasons we are where we are in America.

> I do not require anything out of anyone else in order to exercise the variety of rights protected by the Bill of Rights.

Being able to read and write helps and that seems to be best provided by universal primary education, which does seem to be provided as a right in the US (even though it is not guaranteed by the constitution).

Being healthy also helps and that seems to be best provided by universal free at point of use healthcare, which is not provided as a right in the US.

Why should you get one 'free' and the other not? After all the education also has to be paid for by someone else.

Yet countries that borrow multiples of their entire GDP and shift this burden onto future generations are growing for the long term? It's a little more complicated than you lay it out.

No workers rights, despite the same unions as other countries, legal protections and regulations? No higher education, despite the greatest concentration of attractive universities in the entire world? Do you actually believe your statement or was it made to ellict the emotional response I had?

There is no universal retirement? Social security doesn’t count? No welfare?

That’s not true. Or if it’s true then Canada doesn’t have those either.

  > But how come there are so many homeless people in the richest country in the world? 

I think the replies to this thread and others offer a pretty interesting answer. I'm guessing, though can't confirm, that many of the replies are from people who live in America or a similar rich western country. However, the responses are all written as though the reply was written by someone observing the problem from the outside, "Americans don't... Americans value x over y".

Unfortunately, it feels a lot like "it's someone else's problem to solve" ... unless the solution is complaining about others not solving the problem. Or that supporting "public policy", higher taxes and things "The Government Should Be Doing" is enough (or even a good idea)[0].

But it's so hard to do something ... it's not. Find a good church. Don't like religion? Find a good service organization. The church I attend, every single Sunday, directly pushes us to "go out into the community". This place does it differently, in some ways, than others. Rather than a top-down "here's the organizations we support" with leadership running them, they encourage members to "go out and do" and if what you're doing is working, they -- for lack of a better word, provide the marketing[1]. They'll provide financial support, too, but it's rarely needed. Out of that, we have hundreds of small service groups, many of which were founded a few hours after a Sunday service by a "someone who showed up that day".

There was a woman at my church who decided to load up on supplies and hop in her minivan driving around the worst parts of Detroit to hand underwear, toothbrushes, and food to drug-addicted sex workers a few years ago. I don't know the latest count, but they were running 8 vans of them within a few months and several volunteers came from the streets the vans were visiting. We have several volunteer run groups that operate like Habitat for Humanity, and we have a rotating shelter staffed with volunteers. There's plenty of ways to reach out to a fellow human being who's life you could be a part of and plenty of fellow human beings who need volunteers to help.

They're doing something right, for sure. Best I can tell is that they encourage us to "take ownership of the problem" and "lead by doing" -- so these groups are all run by people who "go to church on Sunday" rather than "Professional Christians(tm)". They don't worry as much about people going out and "doing something that'll make the church look bad". AFAIK, it's not happened in the 20 years I've been there despite the approach[2], and many of our volunteers don't look like your typical "Sunday Best Church Folks".

My apologies if this sounds like I'm scolding -- I'm am, but I'm no better than those complaining about "Americans Not Doing Anything(tm)" -- it's been a year since I've done any volunteer work and as I've gotten older, the amount of volunteering I've done has been less and less. In my 20s, I was much more involved, and as is typical -- kids/job -- I've made a series of excuses that have kept me from being more involved. I'm tired. I worked hard. I don't have the energy to volunteer. It's stupid thinking, really. I've never left a volunteer activity feeling anything other than awesome and filled with energy.

[0] If the extent of your support for the homeless begins and ends here, it's worth doing a bit of research to determine if your support is counterproductive, or -- worst case -- if the program in question exists to employ a bureaucrat rather than solve a problem.

[1] That sounds really wrong the way it's stated, but my church is a multi-campus large organization. The hard part of any volunteer activity is volunteers. Though external funding is sometimes needed, money is very rarely the problem -- getting people's time is. A huge number of people want to volunteer but want to help doing something that they're comfortable doing. When a church has as many service groups as ours does, there's something that fits -- the tricky part is getting that information out widely enough that you connect the volunteer with the job (and make it one-click to sign-up).

[2] There's no organizations dedicated to anything political/picketing/culture wars -- they don't operate that way. It makes them a little unpopular with the "Big Churches" but if the established folks (most of whom lead dead congregations) are upset and can't articulate the reasons, that's a pretty good indicator that we're doing something right.