
Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country - chaostheory
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study
======
habosa
Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to
proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped
into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt.

It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the
homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home
grown problem.

[0]:
[http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...](http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php)

~~~
pound
Just a little nit: while article says they lived in SF and !had homes! survey
linked says they were just SF residents prior to becoming homeless (though it
mentions that 49% of them were living in SF at least 10 years, but don't
forget that ~65% of SF residents are renters).

Residency usually just based on any bill with city address within last 30
days.

I can easy imagine case when someone moved to SF with hope that things will
work out in big city, spent savings on few months of rent and with nowhere
else to go and no established income ended up on the streets. While it's a sad
situation it fits that previous SF residency narrative and in the same time
not exactly part of some native san franciscans ending up on streets due to
yet another gentrification cycle everybody so keen to bring up whenever
homeless origin is being mentioned.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
There's an even bigger problem. There was no validation at all. It was based
on self reporting which, in turn, was based on asking [ideally] random
homeless individuals, and then extrapolating that outward. There is an
incentive for individuals to lie here if they believe that 'native' homeless
might be subject to preferential treatment, or if reporting 'native' homeless
increases could result in more favorable incentives for the homeless. And
given how big of news homelessness and home price issues are in San Francisco,
I think this motivation is a major concern.

I am curious about the baselines here for other areas though. Even given the
incentive to lie, the reported numbers given still seem quite high to me. The
most liberal metric is living in the city for at least 10 years, which applied
to just below 50% of the homeless. Even if we take the most conservative
metric of 'migratory' patterns, with 30% of individuals having moved to San
Francisco _after_ becoming homeless, that still seems very high. But I don't
really have a baseline for comparison in other major cities and search is not
turning up any particularly great sources.

~~~
jshevek
Absolutely. Self reported data like this is nearly worthless in a serious
discussion about policies and their consequences.

------
joeblau
I lived in San Francisco from 2011 - 2016 then moved to Pittsburgh, PA for a
job opportunity. This past August, I went back to SF for a team building
activity and I was blown away by how many fewer homeless people there were on
the streets (excluding Tenderloin).

When I lived in SF, there were blocks that I would place money on being a
homeless person there, and it seemed like most of them were relocated. Tons of
familiar streets in SOMA were at or near zero homeless people. The interesting
part is that my co-workers, who never lived in SF, remarked about how many
homeless people were still out in the streets. To them, there were tons of
homeless people and to me there were hardly any. I was so shocked that I even
called one of my friends who is from the Bay Area and asked him what was going
on?

~~~
staticautomatic
They seem to just be relocating to other parts of the city as formerly
homeless-heavy areas like parts of SOMA and the mission "gentrify." I walk
through the loin twice a day on my way to my office on market st near the
post-apocalyptic parts of SOMA and see a higher concentration of homeless in
those areas than I used to. Perhaps you're revisiting the parts they've left
or my un-scientific observations are wrong.

~~~
losteric
They also seasonally relocate, heading south in the winter and spreading out
in the summer. Seattle's transient homeless population is largely gone by mid-
December

~~~
marmshallow
Well now it barely seems like we are talking about human people.

~~~
have_faith
How would you prefer that sentence be written?

------
jakelarkin
this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and
extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share
of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and
mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over
a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if
society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused
care & rapid re-housing.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their
feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing._

I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get
"people back on their feet".

But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this
country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The
Rent Is Too Damn High.

IMO solving this problem is by no means "simple". How expensive is it to do
"focused care"? Has it been tried, and what's its track record?

~~~
michaelchisari
_There 's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country.
There are many people who have mental illness._

Anybody with a drug problem should be able to walk into a hospital, say "I'm
addicted to X" and get into treatment immediately, free of charge.

Anybody with a mental illness should be able to walk into a hospital, say "I
can't take care of myself because X keeps happening in my brain" and get into
treatment immediately, free of charge.

If you've ever tried to help someone get clean or get mental health inpatient
care in the U.S., you can completely understand how people end up on the
streets who could otherwise be productive members of society.

~~~
conanbatt
> free of charge.

I think you should understand what this really means. Are you willing to pay
10, 15% extra of your income to sustain 10~25k a month bills for mentally ill
people?

~~~
Ericson2314
Yes

~~~
tjr225
Same here. I would rather that the disproportionately rich pay for it,
however.

~~~
briandear
You would rather someone else pay for your beliefs? The disproportionately
rich already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. The top 1% earn 19% of the
income but pay 35% of the taxes in the US. I’m not sure that’s fair. Rich
people also create the jobs: if they pay more, they have less incentive to
invest more which means fewer businesses being funded and fewer jobs.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
I generally agree with you here, but as an aside there is one nuance you have
to consider. And that's taxation vs disposable income. Imagine somebody earns
$50k and spends $30k on their living expenses and pays a 30% tax rate. They
have $20k left after their basic living expenses, but $15k of that is eaten up
by taxes. Looking at their disposable income, they're paying a ridiculous tax
rate of 75%.

I think it's more reasonable to compare taxation on disposable income. In my
opinion a fair tax would only tax disposable income anyhow. Of course that
creates an incentive to have $0 disposable income but it's no different than
the problem of corporations aiming to report $0 profit.

Progressive tax schemes aim to achieve this, but in a completely broken and
inconsistent fashion. For instance somebody earning $100k in San Francisco is
going to be spending a rather different percent of their income on basic
living expenses than somebody living in Bodunk earning the same, and so
applying the same scheme to both does not make sense. It'd be much easier to
just make everything that qualifies as a 'basic living expense' fully
deductible, and then you pay e.g. 15% on the rest.

~~~
Bahamut
There's more to it here - the wealthy generally are able to better play long
games to further save more, better able to handle unexpected life events that
could devastate the less prepared, and have better alignment with the
government fighting/optimizing for their use cases.

There are a lot more reasons as to the exponential advantages the wealthy
generally enjoy suggest that the wealthy should indeed get taxed more, but
it's probably better suited for discussion elsewhere than HN.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Sure, but I think this starts getting into ideology. I think people should be
taxed rates that, in a vacuum, can be considered fair. I pay 15% of what I
can, you pay 15% of what you can is about as fair as you can get. The reason
I'm not fond of going beyond this is because you start getting into very
subjective territory.

For instance while I agree with all you've said, excepting your conclusion,
I'm sure you'd also agree that lower income individuals would also be much
more likely to end up as the direct beneficiaries of where lots of government
money goes to such medicaid/medicare and various social programs. Since these
lower income individuals are going to be disproportionately more likely to
utilize the benefits of these government programs, would it then not make more
sense for them to shoulder a greater percent of the costs to account for this?
I _absolutely_ do not agree with this conclusion, but at the same time I also
don't see any clear logical flaw in it.

So you can do an ideological tug of war, one way or the other, to no end on
these issues. One ideology might have the wealthy give nearly all of their
income away to help the rest of the population. The other end of ideology
might have people give none away and rely entirely on market dynamics. I think
a fixed and fair sum is one of the more reasonable ways to step outside of
ideology and try to create a system that nobody really loves, but also nobody
can create rational arguments suggesting is, in and of itself, unreasonably
biased towards one group or another.

~~~
conanbatt
> but at the same time I also don't see any clear logical flaw in it.

Great example! And I agree. The example you give is one of the reasons I have
with progressive taxation, by the definition of %. Someone with 1,000,000
income and someone with 30,000 paying the same rate, the richer pays a lot
more than he will use from the state. So in effect, a flat-tax rate is most
likely already progressive.

I am in favor of a flat tax-rate for all, without deductions or exceptions.
And I would go a step further and make the contributions public or pseudo-
public.

~~~
FiveSquared
But what about the extremely poor?

~~~
conanbatt
Aid that comes equally from the rest out of the flat 15%.

Its a different system one where the top 90% each cheap in to help the
distressed 10%, another one where the top 10 give to the top 20, the top 20 to
the top 30, etc.

------
everybodyknows
Phoenix AZ was running a program like this decades ago. They'd tell the
homeless about the great weather and services in San Diego, and put them on
the bus -- no arrangements at all on the receiving end. Then they started
getting phone calls from SD city hall...

------
darawk
IMO this is exactly what we ought to do. A big problem for the homeless is
that they become poor in a place with no jobs for them, and then they get
stuck. There are lots of places with shortages of the kind of labor they can
offer, and making travel easier for them is a great thing to help fix that
market failure.

~~~
prolikewh0a
With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get
into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out
begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations
and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise. Bussing them
elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower,
clean clothes, food, etc.

Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see
the homeless any longer.

~~~
darawk
> With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can
> get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people
> out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail
> stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise.

If that were actually true, then there wouldn't be a homeless problem. The
unemployment rate doesn't count these people. The unemployment rate only
counts people who are 'actively looking' for a new job. People who aren't
looking at all don't show up in the statistics.

> Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a
> bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc.

Let's be careful about the conjugation of that verb. The city is not bussing
them anywhere. The city is offering them free bus tickets, if they believe
they will be happier elsewhere. If they want to stay, they stay. If they want
to leave, they leave.

> Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see
> the homeless any longer.

It's really not. They're not being forced out. They're just being given free
tickets _if they want them_.

~~~
adventured
> The unemployment rate only counts people who are 'actively looking' for a
> new job. People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics.

That's entirely incorrect. We track all of these layers in fact.

We have the labor force participation rate, which is available further
separated out into groups, such as by age or race. We track the employment to
population ratio.

We have the U3, U5, U6 unemployment statistics, which track labor based on
various conditions, whether full-time, part-time, discouraged, etc.

We track how many people total are employed full-time or part-time. We know
how many hours they're working.

We track multiple job holders.

We track how many people are not in the labor force.

We track the flow of labor in and out of the labor force.

And we track all of these statistics for different age groups, men & women,
races, etc.

For one big example, the prime working age 25-54 civilian labor force
participation rate. Considered a critical measure of labor force health. It
bottomed out at 80.6% in 2015 and has since climbed back to 82.3% as of
October, slightly below where it was in 2004-05.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060)

~~~
darawk
> That's entirely incorrect. We track all of these layers in fact.

No....it is entirely correct. The unemployment rate that was quoted was
exactly as I described. I didn't say the other statistics weren't _tracked_ ,
I said the statistic quoted above, and the thing commonly referred to as "the
unemployment rate" does not count it.

~~~
maxerickson
You said "People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics."

Why would a reasonable reader assume that "statistics" means "specifically U3
unemployment"?

~~~
darawk
Because the standard meaning of 'unemployment rate' is 'U3 unemployment rate'.
I and many other people believe that it _shouldn 't_ be that way, but it is.
When people quote 'the unemployment rate', they mean 'U3', without exception.

------
flyGuyOnTheSly
>But he maintained the policy was justified to discourage abuse – a point
echoed by his former deputy, Mike Tolbert, who said it was the only way to
prevent the shelter from being used as a “travel agency”.

Why not simply restrict the free travel ticket a second time? Instead of the
basic necessities like food and shelter?

Writing that out makes even less sense once you think it through, however.

If the goal of the city is to relieve itself of homeless people, they should
offer as many free bus tickets out of town as homeless people can ask for...
Even multiple tickets in a row... Becoming that dreaded "travel agency" that
Mike Tolbert warns about.

Surely it would be less expensive to pay for a second free bus ticket than to
pay two police officers to arrest the same person 3+ times in a row for
sleeping on the beach... And eventually the person might find a city or town
that caters to their needs better than their first destination might have and
end up staying.

~~~
briandear
So taxpayers just keep paying for tickets until the person figures things out?
If they know it’s a one way ticket and returning could result in an arrest for
vagrancy, that seems to be a pretty strong incentive to stay away. The Key
West man in the story admitted that he didn’t think they were serious. Well,
they were.

I am not arguing other points of the story, only saying that as a taxpayer,
unlimited free bus tickets to anywhere doesn’t sound like a fair deal for the
people who pay taxes.

Homelessness is a tragedy for some and a lifestyle for others, that’s just a
fact. Being homeless doesn’t somehow make you free of accountability for your
actions: you sign an agreement, that should mean something.

~~~
flyGuyOnTheSly
A lot of "homeless" people are actually "people suffering mental illness who
haven't had adequate treatment".

It seems crazy to you to think that somebody giving you a free bus ticket out
of town isn't serious about your not being able to return... but to a mentally
ill human being it's not so cut and dry.

------
mcnichol
I really appreciate the amount of data and what felt like an objective view on
both sides of the issue, some folks greatly benefited whereas it was
problematic for others.

Ultimately it landed in needing more data, immense respect for that type of
data driven journalism.

Really love the visuals added as well!

------
brownbat
Reminded me of this story about Puerto Rico's practice of sending those with
addictions to Chicago:

[http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/](http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/)

------
ianmcgowan
An interesting, yet depressing story. Quite a nuanced look at a complex issue.
The portaits of the homeless people involved helped humanize an otherwise
abstract problem.

The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story. The
Guardian seems to be taking a page from The NY Times recently.

~~~
trevyn
Weird, I experienced the interactivity as completely broken on iOS Chrome. I
couldn’t even scroll properly to just read the article.

~~~
nitwit005
I also hit that issue on android. Had to keep scrolling on a text portion of
the page until it skipped past the chart.

------
blondie9x
Homelessness and lack of sufficient housing supply which drives the
affordability problem is a national crisis. We need national solutions. We
need to build more transit and more housing near that transit. We need to
build denser and more towards the core. We need to not neglect the inner
cities. America has the power to build better cities and solve this problem
together.

Affordability and skyrocketing rent costs will improve if we work harder to
increase the supply of housing near transit points. We need to act on this
issue quickly.

~~~
abricot
Lack of housing is one reason, but don't think it is the only one.

In Denmark there is no reason for anyone to be homeless by purely economic
reasons, but we still have about 6500 out of a pop. of 5.77M

------
mncharity
I wonder to what extent poor non-homeless populations are similarly shifted
around the country, albeit more slowly?

A city in New Hampshire used federal funds to build low-income housing. Which
attracted low-income people. Who disproportionately used city services. Which
cost more than the added taxes and federal funds which came with them. So the
city bought low-income housing. And tore it down. Which seems analogous to
buying bus tickets out of town?

~~~
scottlocklin
Erm, which city? I just moved here.

~~~
tomcam
Not in the low income housing section, I hope

------
burlesona
I’d vaguely heard of this before, a lot of friends and coworkers here in SF
have said things like “you know that _____ just puts homeless on a one-way bus
to San Francisco, that’s why it’s so bad here.” I thought it was an urban
legend.

I was surprised and honestly amused to discover that this is real, but that it
goes in the other direction, with SF bussing out ~10k homeless people in the
last decade. Wow.

------
em3rgent0rdr
How much of homelessness is a result of laws hampering construction, such as
zoning laws, building restrictions, rent control, which lead to housing costs
significantly higher than what a free market would provide?

~~~
evanlivingston
I think not a lot.

~~~
Kalium
Some portion of the people experiencing homelessness is due to their being
unable to afford housing in the city of their choice. Certainly, being unable
to afford housing isn't helping anyone. But, as you so correctly note, it's
almost certainly not the dominant factor.

With that said, there's some room for subtlety around land-use questions. For
instance, land-use regulation can make it very difficult to build a shelter or
a mental health treatment center. When the infrastructure to get people off
the streets cannot be built, the most vulnerable among us will tend to stay
where they are.

------
Spooky23
Cities with services often attract homeless and people looking for a better
deal. My dad ran a section 8 program, and his backlog plunged when NYC started
accepting more people... you could wait months upstate or show up in Brooklyn
and be in a free temporary placement in hours or days.

Other places will mention this to clients. South Carolina was pretty notorious
for giving sick Medicaid patients to northeast states with enhanced Medicaid
in the past, for example.

------
ObsoleteNerd
While they should definitely consider serving up a more static version for
mobile (couldn't scroll on Firefox Android), the experience of reading this
article on my desktop was truly awesome.

I absolutely loved the graphics, cinemagraphs, and entire experience, and
really do think it added immensely to the story itself.

Is there a name for this style of article? Do they use some existing JS
library or is it all hand crafted?

~~~
alexbecker
Scrolling even on desktop was janky for me, and it was hard to center the
paragraphs that were supposed to overlay the maps.

~~~
ObsoleteNerd
Goes to show just how broken the web is lately. I quit web dev after 20 years
in the industry because it was frustrating me so much. I pretty much
exclusively deal with hardware now and love that if I solder everything right,
and put everything where it's supposed to, it works, and anything wrong with
it is usually my fault or a broken component.

Worked perfectly on Firefox Developer Edition / Windows 10. Was smooth and I
didn't notice a single issue, FWIW.

------
RickJWagner
The guy from Key West is bummed because he can't go back to the shelter he was
living at. His plan was to return there, even as a fallback. He was COUNTING
on it being there for him.

I think that's part of the problem.

------
jimnotgym
Does anyone else find that it especially easy to accidentally click ads on The
Guardian whilst browsing on mobile? I don't get it with other sites. If so, I
wonder what they have done to make that the case?

I'm generally less annoyed by the Guardian site than many, so don't bother
with 'Reader View'

------
eeZah7Ux
Having to download HD videos an many MB of other stuff to read few pages of
text on poverty.

Oh the sad irony :(

------
jorblumesea
The US lacks a true mental healthcare system, and not even a healthcare system
available to the poor. Not a surprise that cities just move the problem
around, what can they do? It's a national problem with zero national
coordination or resources.

~~~
briandear
That isn’t true at all. Just a quick google search reveals a plethora of
indigent care along with Medicaid as well as faith-based organizations. We
should be more outraged at the VA system.

