The U.S. is richer than it was in the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, so why are there so many more homeless people? I have several possible answers, none entirely satisfactory: They were there then too, just less visible and with less sympathetic labels: Bums, Tramps.
Let me point out the in the rural and smaller (less than 30,000 maybe) suburban communities I am familiar with there are fewer homeless because we care about everyone and work hard to make sure everyone has a place to stay, even if they don't own a house or can afford rent. We treat individuals, not groups, because we know, more or less, the individuals concerned.
We don't virtue signal by putting in place useless but expensive programs that do little to nothing to fix the problem.
I have a former grad student who got her PhD while studying homeless policy. She was fairly liberal, but from a small town in a Blue area. She was appalled to find that she rarely met anyone 'studying' or teaching in homeless policy actually knew real homeless people. "How can they make policy if they aren't familiar with the people they're making policy for?" she asked me. I had to point out they got paid the same either way, and homeless people are "icky." She was quite disappointed.
They are migratory. In Florida we see a new crop every winter and by summer their population thins as they migrate back up north to escape heat and mosquitos.
Yes, e.g. probably most of the homeless in Sweden are gypsies from Romania or Bulgaria who go there because of the Swedish government's laissez-faire attitude toward panhandling. Presumably similar things happen within the US but it's far less conspicuous there.
I spent over a thousand dollars feeding and housing squirrels in my yard. To my surprise I just kept getting more and more homeless and hungry squirrels each month. I am thinking that if I really want to solve the squirrel problem that what I need to do is hire a team of full time people whose job is to attend to squirrels. That will fix it for sure!
I made a similar comment to my wife about food bank usage. Do not be surprised that offering free food increases usage. Now there is legitimate need in some cases, food prices have increased, however, for people with limited funds why not go for the lowest cost option. The only downsides are limited selection and a degree of social stigma.
My grandma, who would be about 100 now, worked for the USDA back in the 50s and 60s. One of her assignments was to visit poor southern households (mostly Black) and advise them on nutrition.
She described a surprising unintended consequence: the advent of cheap laundry soap had given the families a new soup thickener, replacing soil. Apparently, the soil had been providing some necessary minerals that soap flakes did not. So her job was to convince the families to thicken their soup with soil.
Poverty today doesn’t look like that, at all. Food is (mostly) plentiful. Housing is relatively scarce. So poverty looks like homelessness instead of malnutrition. Relative prices…
Nutritious food doesn't seem to be readily available or at least certainly not favoured by most people. Whole food, vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains etc.
I lived across the street from a church which fed the homeless. Long story short, they made a mess of the neighborhood: pooping on porches, keying cars and business windows, and lining up at 3-4 am for a 5-6 breakfast.
My conclusion after hearing them morning after morning was that a lot of them had zero interest in living inside and taking care of a building. They were bums in every sense. They were not evil people, in general, but the city handed out so much charity that they enjoyed living a carefree life and not having to work or take care of their living quarters.
I am convinced that some large part of the homeless population is the government handing out so much charity that the lazy have little incentive to work, and they have learned that the more they make the news, the more the politicians hand out.
Unless someone is completely physically or mentally disabled, being homeless (or even very poor) in America is 100% a choice. And in these cases government or private charities only enable that choice, hurting the recipients of it, and everyone who is forced to live around them.
Another factor to consider on long range trends is drug addiction and local policies toward addiction and drug enforcement.
My experience on a daily basis with open homelessness (tent people) around beach areas is that the problem is psychiatric combined with substance abuse (on the part of the destitute) combined with shameful amounts of leniency (on the part of public officials.) I live in the least affordable place in the US, so that is likely a factor too.
The likely solutions shorter term are enough (very low cost) shelters to house them safely, combined with zero tolerance for camping in unapproved areas and disorderly behavior and vagrancy. Longer term the solution is more affordable housing (pipe dream1) and better elected representatives (pipe dream2).
I was just discussing this with a friend, "as a society we've normalized people living outdoors in every major city, this new, why?" Points that we discussed:
- We are allowing it. Not that long ago our overall position in life was a result of not only our luck but our own personal decisions, choices, and worth ethic. There was always assumed to be a self component to a life outcome. Modern liberalism and Victim, inc. has replaced any bit of self determination with a weird version of a victim-based caste system with immutable outcomes based on predetermined characteristics. The personal decision to consume hard drugs is no longer a choice that you can feely make, but a disease that you have no agency over.
- The wide availability of incredibly cheap and potent drugs turning large swaths of the population into zombies. These drugs didn’t exist in ample supply in society until recent times. They were a thing of labs and hospitals, expensive, and tightly controlled. Couple that with a permissive no-judgment society and you have a large swath of addicts where none existed prior. My inner conspiracy theorist tells me that these drugs are being injected into US society to destabilize. If that is the case, it’s working pretty well, 100% of our large cities often have more drugged out street people wandering aimlessly than folks with jobs that live indoors. The one-two of covid and generally poor quality of life has tanked commercial city-center commercial real estate values. All of which is leveraged. Where did Covid and most street fentanyl originate? Some say the same place.
- The earning power of normal average people. Among people that work for a living, we’ve become a two-tier society. Educated, highly skilled folks, earn well. As do a completely new class of high earning highly skilled technology folks. At the same time, there is little prospect for an average person without marketable skills. A strong back, good work ethic, and showing up every day at the factory isn’t going to get you into the middle class anymore. This is going to cultivate hopelessness in a large swath of the population. Maybe those folks will medicate some of that hopelessness away with the aforementioned strong, abundant, and cheap drugs…
I spend a lot of time in the urban core of my large US city, and witness that after working hours, street people outnumber normies by at least 5 to 1. It’s horrific, disturbingly normalized, and I sit and wonder why a lot. Why is this happening? Why don’t these people get up one day and make different choices? Why is society ceding control of our great cities–ones that took generations to build–to people that are either mentally deficient, engage in aberrant behavior, or both? Is this how we respect and preserve the legacy of generations of our ancestors that built these cities? Loved this piece.
Someone is feeding these street people and tolerating them on the streets. Taking away handouts and making living on the sidewalks illegal would convert 90%+ of them to useful members of society overnight.
But its figures for cities are considerably higher than my source, so they must be using different definitions of homelessness or different data sources.
...The U.S. is richer than it was in the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, so why are there so many more homeless people? ...
I view the economy as an ecology. A richer society will in general support more and more varied 'species'. It is simply easier to be homeless now than in the past. More goods are available very cheaply, or for free when thrown away while still having value. Homeless acquaintances tell me how easy it is to scavenge food from behind restaurants and supermarkets.
Homelessness will increase as a society gets richer. All sorts of alternative lifestyles will increase.
This is fascinating. I didn't realize that there would be about a million people institutionalized today instead of fewer than 100,000 if past trends had continued. I thought the main reason for the increase in homelessness was that affluence gave more people access to drugs, and drug addicts are more likely to end on the streets,. Of course I also figured that deinstitutionalizing mental patients was a strong contributing force as well as the high cost of housing.
If real median rent has increased by 130% and 20th percentile incomes have gone up by only 50%, doesn't that indicate that the affordability of housing has gone down, not up like you concluded? If you factor in that the avg household size dropped from 3.7 to 3.13, that actually makes things worse, not better, since the median housing is paid for by fewer people, meaning its 18% more expensive (3.7/3.13) per person than that 130% rent increase, meaning the real rent per person has gone up by 170%. While income has only gone up by 50% (less than 1/3rd of that). What am I missing?
Another thing to consider is that if the average household size has shrank, it means that people are in units that are less cost-effective. A 1 bedroom apartment is not much less expensive than a 2 bedroom apartment, the reason being that the ratio of bathroom + kitching + living room space to bedroom space is way higher in a 1 bedroom apartment.
If nominal rent is now 13 times what it was and the dollar is a tenth what it was that means that real rent is 1.3 times what it was,13/10, an increase of 30% which is less than in increase in incomes of 50%.
Don't take that "income increased only 50%" too literally. A lot of studies ignore all the welfare, EITC, SNAP, and other programs which transfer a lot of income. Add those back in, and very few people have less income than whatever is the "standard" for measuring poverty.
Thanks for doing the homework. It seems as if one solid move could be a good start toward tamping down the problem: bring back SROs. And ASAP. It’s not unusual now to see people walking along the shoulders of freeways down here in LoCali, heading off to their secluded refuges in the bushes.
Let me point out the in the rural and smaller (less than 30,000 maybe) suburban communities I am familiar with there are fewer homeless because we care about everyone and work hard to make sure everyone has a place to stay, even if they don't own a house or can afford rent. We treat individuals, not groups, because we know, more or less, the individuals concerned.
We don't virtue signal by putting in place useless but expensive programs that do little to nothing to fix the problem.
I have a former grad student who got her PhD while studying homeless policy. She was fairly liberal, but from a small town in a Blue area. She was appalled to find that she rarely met anyone 'studying' or teaching in homeless policy actually knew real homeless people. "How can they make policy if they aren't familiar with the people they're making policy for?" she asked me. I had to point out they got paid the same either way, and homeless people are "icky." She was quite disappointed.
The homeless are mobile. Wouldn't we expect them to congregate in the places most supportive of homelessness, regardless of what is causing it?
They are migratory. In Florida we see a new crop every winter and by summer their population thins as they migrate back up north to escape heat and mosquitos.
Yes, e.g. probably most of the homeless in Sweden are gypsies from Romania or Bulgaria who go there because of the Swedish government's laissez-faire attitude toward panhandling. Presumably similar things happen within the US but it's far less conspicuous there.
It's safe to assume that you get more of what you subsidize. Quick google search says that recently California spent 24B in 5 years on homelessness https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-homelessness-spending-audit-24b-five-years-didnt-consistently-track-outcomes/. I doubt in the 60s they spent even remotely close to the equivalent of that.
I spent over a thousand dollars feeding and housing squirrels in my yard. To my surprise I just kept getting more and more homeless and hungry squirrels each month. I am thinking that if I really want to solve the squirrel problem that what I need to do is hire a team of full time people whose job is to attend to squirrels. That will fix it for sure!
I made a similar comment to my wife about food bank usage. Do not be surprised that offering free food increases usage. Now there is legitimate need in some cases, food prices have increased, however, for people with limited funds why not go for the lowest cost option. The only downsides are limited selection and a degree of social stigma.
Remember that not much of that money goes to the homeless, or even to the program outputs. Most of it goes to people who 'service' the programs.
My grandma, who would be about 100 now, worked for the USDA back in the 50s and 60s. One of her assignments was to visit poor southern households (mostly Black) and advise them on nutrition.
She described a surprising unintended consequence: the advent of cheap laundry soap had given the families a new soup thickener, replacing soil. Apparently, the soil had been providing some necessary minerals that soap flakes did not. So her job was to convince the families to thicken their soup with soil.
Poverty today doesn’t look like that, at all. Food is (mostly) plentiful. Housing is relatively scarce. So poverty looks like homelessness instead of malnutrition. Relative prices…
And thanks for the fascinating story about your grandmother!
The "modern" way of eating is creating an overweight but malnourished population.
Nutritious food doesn't seem to be readily available or at least certainly not favoured by most people. Whole food, vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains etc.
Those things are readily available to most people if they want them. Your complaint is about what other people prefer.
I lived across the street from a church which fed the homeless. Long story short, they made a mess of the neighborhood: pooping on porches, keying cars and business windows, and lining up at 3-4 am for a 5-6 breakfast.
My conclusion after hearing them morning after morning was that a lot of them had zero interest in living inside and taking care of a building. They were bums in every sense. They were not evil people, in general, but the city handed out so much charity that they enjoyed living a carefree life and not having to work or take care of their living quarters.
I am convinced that some large part of the homeless population is the government handing out so much charity that the lazy have little incentive to work, and they have learned that the more they make the news, the more the politicians hand out.
Unless someone is completely physically or mentally disabled, being homeless (or even very poor) in America is 100% a choice. And in these cases government or private charities only enable that choice, hurting the recipients of it, and everyone who is forced to live around them.
...
In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money would buy,
And the gods of the copybook headings said, "If you don't work, you die."
...
Another factor to consider on long range trends is drug addiction and local policies toward addiction and drug enforcement.
My experience on a daily basis with open homelessness (tent people) around beach areas is that the problem is psychiatric combined with substance abuse (on the part of the destitute) combined with shameful amounts of leniency (on the part of public officials.) I live in the least affordable place in the US, so that is likely a factor too.
The likely solutions shorter term are enough (very low cost) shelters to house them safely, combined with zero tolerance for camping in unapproved areas and disorderly behavior and vagrancy. Longer term the solution is more affordable housing (pipe dream1) and better elected representatives (pipe dream2).
I was just discussing this with a friend, "as a society we've normalized people living outdoors in every major city, this new, why?" Points that we discussed:
- We are allowing it. Not that long ago our overall position in life was a result of not only our luck but our own personal decisions, choices, and worth ethic. There was always assumed to be a self component to a life outcome. Modern liberalism and Victim, inc. has replaced any bit of self determination with a weird version of a victim-based caste system with immutable outcomes based on predetermined characteristics. The personal decision to consume hard drugs is no longer a choice that you can feely make, but a disease that you have no agency over.
- The wide availability of incredibly cheap and potent drugs turning large swaths of the population into zombies. These drugs didn’t exist in ample supply in society until recent times. They were a thing of labs and hospitals, expensive, and tightly controlled. Couple that with a permissive no-judgment society and you have a large swath of addicts where none existed prior. My inner conspiracy theorist tells me that these drugs are being injected into US society to destabilize. If that is the case, it’s working pretty well, 100% of our large cities often have more drugged out street people wandering aimlessly than folks with jobs that live indoors. The one-two of covid and generally poor quality of life has tanked commercial city-center commercial real estate values. All of which is leveraged. Where did Covid and most street fentanyl originate? Some say the same place.
- The earning power of normal average people. Among people that work for a living, we’ve become a two-tier society. Educated, highly skilled folks, earn well. As do a completely new class of high earning highly skilled technology folks. At the same time, there is little prospect for an average person without marketable skills. A strong back, good work ethic, and showing up every day at the factory isn’t going to get you into the middle class anymore. This is going to cultivate hopelessness in a large swath of the population. Maybe those folks will medicate some of that hopelessness away with the aforementioned strong, abundant, and cheap drugs…
I spend a lot of time in the urban core of my large US city, and witness that after working hours, street people outnumber normies by at least 5 to 1. It’s horrific, disturbingly normalized, and I sit and wonder why a lot. Why is this happening? Why don’t these people get up one day and make different choices? Why is society ceding control of our great cities–ones that took generations to build–to people that are either mentally deficient, engage in aberrant behavior, or both? Is this how we respect and preserve the legacy of generations of our ancestors that built these cities? Loved this piece.
Someone is feeding these street people and tolerating them on the streets. Taking away handouts and making living on the sidewalks illegal would convert 90%+ of them to useful members of society overnight.
Query; "Why Are There More Homeless Than There Used To Be?
Answer; All of the above plus the government, our duly appointed rulers, want it that way!
Portland surely belongs on the list. From a quick look at the numbers, it would be number one. Also number 10 in zoning restrictiveness.
I found a page that agrees with you, shows it fourth highest.
http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.html
But its figures for cities are considerably higher than my source, so they must be using different definitions of homelessness or different data sources.
I was surprised to see Eugene but not Portland. Where do the homeless go when it rains and pours? They must have strong waterproofed tents
...The U.S. is richer than it was in the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, so why are there so many more homeless people? ...
I view the economy as an ecology. A richer society will in general support more and more varied 'species'. It is simply easier to be homeless now than in the past. More goods are available very cheaply, or for free when thrown away while still having value. Homeless acquaintances tell me how easy it is to scavenge food from behind restaurants and supermarkets.
Homelessness will increase as a society gets richer. All sorts of alternative lifestyles will increase.
This is fascinating. I didn't realize that there would be about a million people institutionalized today instead of fewer than 100,000 if past trends had continued. I thought the main reason for the increase in homelessness was that affluence gave more people access to drugs, and drug addicts are more likely to end on the streets,. Of course I also figured that deinstitutionalizing mental patients was a strong contributing force as well as the high cost of housing.
The city of Tallahassee, 14th on the list, is very blue.
I didn't have voting figures for the city, only for the county it was in, hence the asterisk.
Andrew Gillum former mayor
I blame Satan.
If real median rent has increased by 130% and 20th percentile incomes have gone up by only 50%, doesn't that indicate that the affordability of housing has gone down, not up like you concluded? If you factor in that the avg household size dropped from 3.7 to 3.13, that actually makes things worse, not better, since the median housing is paid for by fewer people, meaning its 18% more expensive (3.7/3.13) per person than that 130% rent increase, meaning the real rent per person has gone up by 170%. While income has only gone up by 50% (less than 1/3rd of that). What am I missing?
Another thing to consider is that if the average household size has shrank, it means that people are in units that are less cost-effective. A 1 bedroom apartment is not much less expensive than a 2 bedroom apartment, the reason being that the ratio of bathroom + kitching + living room space to bedroom space is way higher in a 1 bedroom apartment.
If nominal rent is now 13 times what it was and the dollar is a tenth what it was that means that real rent is 1.3 times what it was,13/10, an increase of 30% which is less than in increase in incomes of 50%.
Ah, thank you. I see I added a 100% where it didn't belong.
Don't take that "income increased only 50%" too literally. A lot of studies ignore all the welfare, EITC, SNAP, and other programs which transfer a lot of income. Add those back in, and very few people have less income than whatever is the "standard" for measuring poverty.
Thanks for doing the homework. It seems as if one solid move could be a good start toward tamping down the problem: bring back SROs. And ASAP. It’s not unusual now to see people walking along the shoulders of freeways down here in LoCali, heading off to their secluded refuges in the bushes.