We have real life data. Cities in California are spending north of $50,000 a year per homeless person (higher than finland's median income!) and the problem is still as bad as ever. The climate is also dry and warm 330 days a year.
With that kind of spending, how can it be that homeless people have trouble finding shelters? Sounds like a lot of that money is going to middlemen and outsourcing companies than the actual people that need it.
Unless things changed since I last looked, that number is obtained by taking the budget and dividing by the number of people still homeless.
So, for instance, if you had 100 potholes and paid $1 million to fix 99 of them, leaving a single pothole, this statistic would read: you spent $1 million per pothole.
You can use other metrics (eg the NHIP count[0]), but they point to the same thing. Under the NHIP count metric, SF is doing better than most metropolitan areas in the US, but even with huge spending on the problem, the number of homeless people continues to rise year after year. The per-capita count of number of successfully sheltered homeless people in SF (per city resident) is the highest in the country, but even still, I see dozens of completely unsheltered people walking to Bart from my apartment.
Eg Chicago winters are very hard to live through if you don't have stable access to warm housing, and the West coast offers a reprieve from that.
I wonder if any of the factor is that affordable housing in SF is extremely difficult to find? Especially if you don't have access to a vehicle for commutes and have to find housing in an area well served by public transit?
* Shelters not allowing pets - many would rather remain homeless than give up their dog
* Shelters not allowing drugs
* Social services officers looking too much like cops (many homeless have had bad enough experiences with cops to keep them away from anyone cop-like)
* Spending on 'discomfort' measures (eg deliberately-hostile architecture to discourage people from being homeless)
* Effective mitigations being politically unpopular.
For instance: cold-calling people who have just separated from their spouse to offer counseling substantially reduces the number of people you have to lift out of homelessness at very little cost. However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.
> However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.
This is strange. I'd guess that free therapy, or at least government-subsidized mental health initiatives, would be pretty popular on the left. That leaves me with the right. But therapy doesn't really seem like something that's easy to get jealous about. Are people going to get mad at articles about "therapy queens" that see a dozen therapists per week?
I wouldn't resent destitute/at-risk people from receiving free therapy, especially if it lessened the tax bill that I will eventually pay anyway, but it's not hard to see why better off people might be irritated by this. therapy usually costs somewhere in the range of $60-120/hr, and it can be quite difficult to find a good fit that is in-network. I get paid decently, but if I went to therapy four times a month, that would already be my largest budget category after rent.
except we also have additional data from overseas. Australia has comparatively mild winters and my family is originally from Queensland where some of the "worst" towns for unemployment and disadvantage clearly have a bit of a "paradise" effect (that is to say, if you're going to live on unemployment, you might as well live where there's good weather, fishing and swimming year round and prices are a bit cheaper than the urban centres).
Australia does provide public housing, but I'll take a stab and say it's cut back from its peak amount.
When you travel through California (and the US in general), i'd estimate homelessness and poverty to be at least an order of magnitude worse in the US (I want to hesitate to say two orders of magnitude worse) compared to anything I see at home. Clearly there's something about society and/or the structure of social safety nets that has a real and measurable effect on poverty and homelessness overall.
/ before someone jumps onto Google to try to disprove me: I've been to both countries (several times in fact), and worked with both homelessness and official national statistics. One of the things internet pundits misunderstand is the definition and measures of homelessness/poverty between the two countries: I think my estimate is pretty fair napkin math, it might be a 4 or 5 multiple instead, but I think we're quibbling by that point.
"Homelessness then, in Australia, is more than lacking a roof over your head, it is also the absence of those features associated with “home”: permanence, security, and the freedom to come and go."
"If the world were to accept Australia’s definition and include everyone with inadequate shelter, the number would exceed 1.6 billion – roughly 20 percent of the population. Also excluded from official figures are the world’s 65 million displaced refugees in temporary accommodation."
I spent ~10 years moving about annually from apartment to apartment. It wasn't due to lack of resources. I had no sense of permanence, but I would definitely not have said that I was inadequately sheltered.
as long as you had some form of legal tenure over your resident property (this would include rental agreements and long term stays), and the property was deemed suitable by Australian standards for human habitation, you would not have been included in the homeless numbers.
merely being mobile or moving a lot is not likely enough to make you considered homeless by the Australian definition.
however, if you were mobile BECAUSE you were unable to obtain a secure residence and tenureship, or the residences you inhabited were of such a low standard that they didn't meet community standards for acceptable habitation, then you probably would.
I'm struggling to remember, but there would likely be a means/ intention component as well: so FIFO workers, mobile executives are not homeless, but couch surfing students or young people may very well be (even if they spent recent time sleeping under a roof). people camping (or glamping), grey nomads, for example, aren't considered homeless.
that being said, even if these people were counted, it's more of an argument that Australian official numbers should be even lower (though i'd recommend most people to focus of the primary/ first level homeless count for the common "popular" view of homelessness if we're going to reduce a complex phenomenon to a simple digestible stat: but it has the downside that people can then tend to misinterpret low homelessness for other arguments: say, how much poverty there is or how much social housing we need.
It sounds like you're aware that, according to official statistics, homelessness is higher per capita in Australia than in California or the US as a whole. I'm open to the idea that this might be due to definitional or measurement problems, but you've gotta explain what those problems are, not just assert that they must exist.
The obvious alternative explanation is that Americans might simply be less tolerant of measures to decrease the visibility of homeless.
sorry, but HN isn't a great medium for long technical posts :)
The basic issue is that Australia naive measurements and numbers carry a three tier definition of homelessness: at the lowest level you have what we call "sleeping rough" which is probably the concept closest to what most people and Americans think of as "homeless". But the Australian definition also includes the likes of insecure accommodation and inappropriate accommodation: couch surfers, people living in accommodation with inadequate living conditions, people sleeping in their cars, in socially provisioned homeless accommodation and emergency/crisis accommodation (domestic violence, youth, men and aged issues were the traditional breakdown of most services in my day).
To compare between the two nations from official sources you have to bring them back onto a somewhat comparable basis.
That makes sense. I'm gonna have to dig into the exact definitions at some point, but I agree HN comments aren't a great place to really get into that.
there's also a couple of sources and differences: the main one commonly quoted is the ABS source, derived from the census taken every 5 years, and with specific practices implemented to try to accurately enumerate homeless populations. thankfully there doesn't seem to be enough variance for the relative infrequency to be an issue, but the other quirk is that census is done in winter, and contrary to some popular impressions, homeless populations can be highly mobile and show seasonal effects.
Another source include homeless service provisions, but last time I looked at those they didn't always tend to be on a individual natural person basis.
lastly, homeless service provision, with a few caveats, is one of the only things that might locally and empirically show behaviours of what economists call a "giffen good". And, somewhat paradoxically, provision of homeless services can, to a point, increase the percieved systemic demand for homeless services. increased supply can also create more (real and percieved) demand. the relationship these complexities have with trying to measure homelessness is tricky to say the least...
The climate isn't the only factor. Any comparison of homelessness between the US and other countries that doesn't take into account the opioid crisis (which is almost entirely US-centric) is missing a primary driver of homelessness in the US right now.
Given the severity of Finnish winters, I'm not surprised.
Try a similar approach in, say, Hawaii or the Bahamas, and see how many homeless you'll see roaming around.