If I read that right, the mortality rate in the general population in 2020 (1027 per 100k); was higher than that found in the homeless community in 2011 (814 per 100k).
Who says the world is not becoming more dangerous (and not just among the homeless)?
In 2020, the two main sources of life-sustaining resources for people without housing -- public spaces and other people -- were almost entirely cut off.
In this case, I think the assumption that doesn't bear out is "stable amount of population". The relationship between death rate and expected lifespan is likely calculable, but only if you also have either age data or at least approximate change in birthrate data, preferably going back to living memory. We might have that available somewhere, but I don't think your estimate came from having it.
Like let's say there's a terrible war, and half of all people die. Can we conclude that most people are dying around 2? This example is extreme, but shows that we at least need some averages over time to start making a case for life expectancy being predicted well by the data
Yes, but also part of my point, that the above author based on these numbers implied that World is getting more dangerous, but firstly as you mentioned these numbers are meaningless if we don't know the exact demographics of the 100k and secondly for a stable 100k these would be really good numbers.
But even then you can hardly determine that it is a bad or unexpected number, as you would get that number if each year same amount of people were born and died and everyone lived to 100.
It's a really unfortunate year for comparison. There was that one advantage to being outside...
For those not reading the article,
> The death rate across all 22 localities increased from 814 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2011, to 2,752 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2020.
> Among the general population, the nationwide mortality rate was much lower: 1,027 deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It might "just" be the homeless population is ageing. We really need a model prediction of how we expected the homeless population death rate to change over time. I doubt it is in a steady state.
"The number of Californians 55 and older who sought homelessness services soared 84% between 2017 and 2021" (from the article), so something demographic is changing. It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.
45% percent of households with members ages 55 to 64 have no savings at all. The median retirement account balance is about $100,000; most middle-class people need $600,000. There are 39 million workers 55 and older in the U.S. Workers 75 and older are the fastest-growing age segment of the workforce.
It was in the article. I am more interested in knowing why the author of the article chose those two particular years. Was 2011 the lowest number out of the last 25? Was 2020 the highest?
If they were chosen to cherry-pick the data in order to better support a predetermined conclusion, then the whole study is suspect. Too many people do that on a wide variety of topics and then wonder why readers are so skeptical.
Money alone doesn't fix problems like this. Many cities spend a ton of money on homeless services, but without meaningfully fixing the problem. You need the political will to enact the right sorts of policies, and I firmly believe that to truly fix our homeless problems, we need to fundamentally rethink how society and economies work, which isn't something you do overnight (assuming people even want to do it).
Even the more short-term solution of just giving people housing and letting them take the next steps is controversial in the US, for IMO stupid reasons. Taxpayers here don't want to give other people stuff for free, for the most part, even if doing so would make the taxpayers' lives better too.
Then again, $200B could house a lot of people. A quick search suggests there's in excess of 650,000 homeless people in the US. I'm sure that's an undercount, so let's round that up to one million. That's $200,000 per homeless person. Some will need more in order to get and stay on their feet (say, people with serious mental illnesses or substance abuse issues), and some will need less (like someone who had their working hours reduced and is now coming up short on rent).
Of course, that $200B wouldn't go to solving homelessness, even if we didn't have to spend it on other people's religious wars or to fight against other people's imperialist tendencies (yes, I recognize some amount of hypocrisy there). But it's fun to think about what we could do if it did.
Ultimately, though, is it more important long-term to help Ukraine than to fix our homeless problem? I don't think there's a clear answer there. I'm not comfortable in a world where people like Putin find little resistance to invading neighboring countries (not to mention other certain dictatorships that will feel emboldened to do the same if the rest of the world doesn't care). I'm really disappointed and saddened by the state of things when people have to live out on the streets, though; that's a pretty big deal.
There’s no point to a country. It’s just a form of governance that is in vogue in the 21st century. Like every bureaucracy, a country wants to grow and survive.
The homeless is also a very broad term. I think this sort of article doesn’t refer to people that are able and willing to work, but have to live from their cars. It’s usually about people that are often incapable of being a functioning member of society, beyond their housing status.
The best way to help these people is not to give them “benefits”. It’s to permanently place them in facilities that can afford them a humane existence. There’s no reasonable amount of “benefit” you can give to some of these people otherwise.
Nordic countries do something absolutely insane and give these people a home. Unheard of I know right. The only homeless you see are either voluntarily homeless, or part of the mafia that extorts money from people pretending to be homeless (around helsinki its common). But I think it's better to view homes as a investment rather than place for a person to live, it's only way to get the numbers that matter up.
Not saying nordic countries are some sort of perfect countries, but it does remind you that if country does not care about you, why should you care about the country.
Canada de-facto banned most type of homes/appointments due to regulations and zoning. Both in conjunction makes building housing expensive and slow.
Canada is ways past of useful regulations.
Over-regulation costs lives.
When we look back at the history of the US, the one practice that stands out is slavery. Today, we can only shake our heads and wonder how so-called civilized people allowed that abomination to continue for as long as it did. How can so many people have looked upon so much human suffering for so long, without lifting a finger?
Today, we are forcing people out into the street through low wages and callous layoffs to increase corporate profits. All the while, condoning skyrocketing rents due to the commoditization of housing. Meanwhile, we provide virtually no support for homeless people. We literally leave them out to die in the street, as the article states. This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.
Spoken like someone who has never actually encountered a real homeless person, and only has an abstract, idealistic image of what a homeless person might hypothetically be like.
I am not the commenter to whom you’re replying. But for what it’s worth, I regularly “actually encounter[]” homeless people, and personally interact with at least a few of them multiple times per week. My image of them is neither abstract nor idealistic. I agree with what deepspace wrote.
When participating in a conversation it is more helpful to first test what you are going to say before saying it. In this case what you have said applies equally to your own statement, and doesn't progress the conversation intellectually.
Often if a statement looks like rhetoric, it's because it is.
Having worked with, been, and always at the risk of homelessness, OP is half correct. Not everyone is there because they want to get out, but even when you do you're there in the first place because the systems of society are beyond broken.
I've volunteered with the homeless for years. Someone doesn't get laid off from a corporate job and go live on the street. These are folks who exhausted the social safety nets, ran out of family members to impose on, ran out of friends' couches -- they're alcohol and drug addicts who burned all their bridges. Many of them have never held jobs at all.
Yes, there absolutely are individuals whose homelessness is their own fault - every case is unique, some definitely did it to themselves and the majority did not. But placing all homeless on some sort of pedestal of morality is a really bizarre opinion from my view.
> This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.
A fun (when done right, for some people at least) activity is contemplating various strategies one could execute to accelerate this process, and thousands of other much needed cognitive optimizations.
Garry Tan has a lot of X/Twitter posts on the subject. 68% of SF overdose deaths seem to happen inside shelters. Recently one of the shelter workers overdosed as well. There seems to be a massive disconnect between intention and consequences of policies. https://x.com/garrytan/status/1750566946201047218?s=46&t=bGA...
I still believe treatment centers would be preferable, I just dont think its reasonable to expect that to happen. Requiring sobriety tests helps, I would suppose, the people that are actually interested in getting better, though many homeless allegedly avoid shelters because of the requirements.
I can speculate on a few things that would reduce the rate of homelessness, economy, civil society, religion, but incarceration (where treatment is refused) seems like the only way to stop the cities from bleeding; open air drug use wouldnt be tolerated on private property (and where it is, fine, be my guest, I smoke, at home), it shouldnt be tolerated on public property either, dont be a menace.
I don't have the details behind these numbers, but I wonder if the conclusion is sound? Like, a lot of people who die of sickness die in a hospital. I don't think that means that they are doing a poor job.
I heavily disagree with that. Most legally available drugs are already out of reach for most of the homeless people (even more so in the US). These people are primarily defined by their financial status, if nothing else.
Maybe we are talking about different things. I mean that criminalizing drugs tends to make their use more risky as there are fewer quality controls and no legal recourse for drug users who get low quality or downright poisonous products. Vulnerable populations, like the homeless, who are already easy to exploit, become victims of this culturally and legally defined demarcation.
The only way that I can see that happening is when the price would drop significantly enough so homeless people would prefer it over black-market dealers.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of legal practices, or legally obtainable things, that still have a large black market. Its been historically proven again and again that people will gladly take risks or a loss in quality over affordability.
A poor statement gets a poor response. Start looking at the head of this comment thread before you choose to chide me.
And there is nothing snarky about this. We've seen this exact scenario happen recently in certain areas of the US (e.g. Oregon) and Portugal where they eased off on criminalizing drugs use. You're talking about an economic weak group, where legality is less of an issue than cost. Them being 'homeless' is BY DEFINITION an indication of their poverty.
The GP comment may have been bad or wrong, but it didn't break the site guidelines as far as I can tell.
We need you (i.e. everyone commenting here) to follow HN's rules regardless of how badly other people's posts are. Moderation is inevitably inconsistent because we can't see everything; not even in the same thread.
I just wonder in this data if people who are homeless have mental disorders or addiction problems that make them way more likely to die and the problem isn’t that they are homeless, but that they are addicts or have untreated mental illness. Correlation is not causation.
64 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadWho says the world is not becoming more dangerous (and not just among the homeless)?
Which seems really good to me.
Like let's say there's a terrible war, and half of all people die. Can we conclude that most people are dying around 2? This example is extreme, but shows that we at least need some averages over time to start making a case for life expectancy being predicted well by the data
For those not reading the article,
> The death rate across all 22 localities increased from 814 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2011, to 2,752 per 100,000 homeless residents in 2020.
> Among the general population, the nationwide mortality rate was much lower: 1,027 deaths per 100,000 people in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"The number of Californians 55 and older who sought homelessness services soared 84% between 2017 and 2021" (from the article), so something demographic is changing. It'd be interesting to know what happened to their retirement savings.
What happened to what retirement savings?
https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20231028173718/https://www.nirso...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39448800
Housing is also wildly unaffordable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39550922 (citations)
Multi-year medical problems leading to bankruptcy and divorce.
More notable -- and horrifying -- is the large rise in the homeless mortality rate between 2011 and 202.
If they were chosen to cherry-pick the data in order to better support a predetermined conclusion, then the whole study is suspect. Too many people do that on a wide variety of topics and then wonder why readers are so skeptical.
Even the more short-term solution of just giving people housing and letting them take the next steps is controversial in the US, for IMO stupid reasons. Taxpayers here don't want to give other people stuff for free, for the most part, even if doing so would make the taxpayers' lives better too.
Then again, $200B could house a lot of people. A quick search suggests there's in excess of 650,000 homeless people in the US. I'm sure that's an undercount, so let's round that up to one million. That's $200,000 per homeless person. Some will need more in order to get and stay on their feet (say, people with serious mental illnesses or substance abuse issues), and some will need less (like someone who had their working hours reduced and is now coming up short on rent).
Of course, that $200B wouldn't go to solving homelessness, even if we didn't have to spend it on other people's religious wars or to fight against other people's imperialist tendencies (yes, I recognize some amount of hypocrisy there). But it's fun to think about what we could do if it did.
Ultimately, though, is it more important long-term to help Ukraine than to fix our homeless problem? I don't think there's a clear answer there. I'm not comfortable in a world where people like Putin find little resistance to invading neighboring countries (not to mention other certain dictatorships that will feel emboldened to do the same if the rest of the world doesn't care). I'm really disappointed and saddened by the state of things when people have to live out on the streets, though; that's a pretty big deal.
The homeless is also a very broad term. I think this sort of article doesn’t refer to people that are able and willing to work, but have to live from their cars. It’s usually about people that are often incapable of being a functioning member of society, beyond their housing status.
The best way to help these people is not to give them “benefits”. It’s to permanently place them in facilities that can afford them a humane existence. There’s no reasonable amount of “benefit” you can give to some of these people otherwise.
Not saying nordic countries are some sort of perfect countries, but it does remind you that if country does not care about you, why should you care about the country.
Canada had few -40C nights this winter, homeless shelters were completely full.
Today, we are forcing people out into the street through low wages and callous layoffs to increase corporate profits. All the while, condoning skyrocketing rents due to the commoditization of housing. Meanwhile, we provide virtually no support for homeless people. We literally leave them out to die in the street, as the article states. This attitude will likely be viewed in a similar light a hundred years from now as we view slavery today.
Often if a statement looks like rhetoric, it's because it is.
Having worked with, been, and always at the risk of homelessness, OP is half correct. Not everyone is there because they want to get out, but even when you do you're there in the first place because the systems of society are beyond broken.
I also volunteered working with the homeless. There is nobody who chooses to live on the streets. Those who do have mental health issues.
I am 100% sure it is a society problem, not an individual problem.
A fun (when done right, for some people at least) activity is contemplating various strategies one could execute to accelerate this process, and thousands of other much needed cognitive optimizations.
I can speculate on a few things that would reduce the rate of homelessness, economy, civil society, religion, but incarceration (where treatment is refused) seems like the only way to stop the cities from bleeding; open air drug use wouldnt be tolerated on private property (and where it is, fine, be my guest, I smoke, at home), it shouldnt be tolerated on public property either, dont be a menace.
Keep in mind that there are a lot of legal practices, or legally obtainable things, that still have a large black market. Its been historically proven again and again that people will gladly take risks or a loss in quality over affordability.
And there is nothing snarky about this. We've seen this exact scenario happen recently in certain areas of the US (e.g. Oregon) and Portugal where they eased off on criminalizing drugs use. You're talking about an economic weak group, where legality is less of an issue than cost. Them being 'homeless' is BY DEFINITION an indication of their poverty.
If you still want to double down on considering my post 'snarky', how can you also not say the same about 'https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=39580412&goto=item%3Fi...' in this very thread.
We need you (i.e. everyone commenting here) to follow HN's rules regardless of how badly other people's posts are. Moderation is inevitably inconsistent because we can't see everything; not even in the same thread.
Round down to ~ 3 Billion https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4808
181,399 round up to 250,000 https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/01/californ...
Simple math = 12000 USD per person - food, shelter, clothing, treatment, burial, etc
State actor and industry takes a slice of the profit: https://youtu.be/z6iW1poC-0c?si=EFrK07ew2vaX_yMD
Iterate across the country.
Almost like historical payback: https://youtu.be/u1dbOf63roI?si=q8fV1fya60abnceX
The same anti-housing policies driving up homeless rates also makes helping them more expensive.