Do you think that those options (couch surfing, cars, and etc) don’t count as homeless?
If I’ve got a tent in some greenspace I’m homeless, but if I have a car to sleep in I’m not?
Technically the people living in cars, couchsurfing, and motels can be considered homeless, but those options are more sustainable than encampments in public spaces. Encampments are going to be more problematic because of issues relating to blight, public safety, and loss of tax revenue in the area. I can see people choosing encampments because they are a more desirable option than their other living choices, but it’s not like all the people living in encampments are addicts who were previously living in the woods and drainage ditches. A city which stops enforcing a camping ban will see an explosion in encampments from people who see them as a more desirable housing option that what they currently have. Someone who barely scrapes together $$/day or $$$/month for a motel or apartment from begging or day laborer jobs may decide to just give it up and instead hang out in for free in a tent in a public space. I think that contributes to the homeless problem in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Austin, etc. If there are no restrictions on street living, then people who are at the bottom edge of the workforce may decide that’s a better option than the effort to make money for more stable housing. No need to give their few dollars to landlord when they can live in a tent and keep their money in their pocket. Certainly that’s not the case for all homeless people, but the homeless population will expand if there are no restrictions on homeless living.
I’d take that bet.
Even though popular wisdom says otherwise (constant claims of people being bussed in from the midwest), I believe that over 80% of Seattle-area homeless are from the Seattle-area and over 90% are from the state (cite). According to the same article, that’s true up-and-down the coast.
How long of a pre-homeless duration do these studies consider when determining where a person is “from”?
For example, suppose a person moves to the area and lives with friends or something like that while looking for a job, then it doesn’t work out and he starts living on the street, is that person considered “from the area” or not?
Yeah, what Spiff said. I don’t count someone who still has a Texas driver’s license who’s never registered their vehicle here as “from here.” And as I said, the license plates I see every damned day on wrecked out live-in-mobiles and zombie RVs do not lie. Not to mention that these census counts of homeless occur once a year (a “Point In Time” count) and gee, ya think homeless people don’t know how to lie? “Where are you from?” “Oh, I’m from Bend.” See how easy that is?
For the purposes of the ongoing discussion about whether people move to a place because of the better treatment of the homeless, it’s irrelevant.
In the example you give, the person moves to somewhere to find a new job, not so that they can be more comfortably homeless. I suppose a few people in that situation might think “at least if it doesn’t work out there are some great homeless shelters that the city runs” but probably not enough to be captured statistically.
What’s the incentive to lie, in this case?
Dude, you ever talk to homeless people? They lie like rugs, all the time, for no discernible reason. A lot of them are on drugs, and junkies lie. A lot of them have extensive criminal backgrounds, and criminals lie. And the ones who’re just down on their luck are justifiably paranoid and will lie about anything they think might be a problem–like “Oh, if they think I don’t belong here they’ll take my shit and put me on a bus.” What you or I think of as incentive is not necessarily what a homeless person would agree is incentive, it’s a very different kind of life and it has its own rules that do not correspond handily to the rules of “normal” society–hence all the conflict between the housed and the unhoused.
Right.
But suppose there are 2 places, A and B, and A is much more hospitable to homelessness than B. Let’s assume that no people move from B to A specifically in order to become homeless there. But in the situation I described, people who moved from A to B and ended up becoming homeless are likely to return to A, while people who moved from B to A are likelier to remain in A, thus boosting the homeless population in A on a net basis relative to B. The question is the extent to which surveys of where homeless people “came from” capture this.
Exactly. And if you’re from a place where being homeless is allowed to be criminalized all to hell and gone and every time you pitch a tent somewhere the cops come and take your tent and your shit and maybe beat the crap out of you and you hear from the grapevine that if you go out to the Left Coast the law doesn’t allow the cops to roust you and take your shit and beat you up just for being homeless then you might just decide to figure out a way to get there because it’s easier to be homeless. Add in the favorable weather conditions and easy winters and you get a lot of homeless migration–just like you got a lot of migration from the Dust Bowl to California during the Great Depression. “Everybody knows” that the Left Coast is the land of fucking milk and honey for the destitute and so they tend to migrate.
Are they?
I mean, it’s not an insignificant expense to move under these kinds of conditions for someone who’s homeless. The most likely outcome would be for the newly homeless to stay where they ended up. For those who could return to their place of origin, I’d guess many of them would return to a situation where they would no longer be homeless, although likely in a marginal housing situation.
Again, on the really small margins, you may be right, but I’m not sure there’s going to be a significant effect on the big picture.
FWIW I looked into the data on how many homeless have come from “somewhere else” and there isn’t anything like high quality data available. The data availability is low, as is the data quality. It is impossible to discern from the data out there what portion of homeless in a given metro area were born in, or who have long established personal or familial roots in the area vs what portion maybe moved there and did some couch surfing for a while or maybe had some roommates, but then things fell through etc. It’s also difficult to tell just from the question “what was the zip code of your last residence” whether that person had relocated to the region at least in part due to their homelessness.
It doesn’t seem at all crazy to me that someone could relocate to a region for better climate or such, knowing they might have to sleep outside, maybe things take a good turn for them and they get to rent a room in a house for a few months, but then end up back on the street.
On a meta level like, we shouldn’t care or want to help those people less because they aren’t “well anchored” in the region. But also on a meta level if there is a genuine effect of largish numbers of people migrating because of a perception that homeless life is better in one city versus another, that can be an issue too. It could also be an issue even if they are not a majority of the homeless population, right? Like maybe an area can handle, and has built out support services that cover a certain amount of homelessness, and say there’s an incident where a 15% increase in the homeless population occurs because of migration…the numbers would suggest ~87% of the homeless population is local, but +15% onto resources not prepared for it will create a “crisis”, nonetheless.
I don’t know what is or isn’t happening, I think it is unlikely that there’s never been a homeless person cold and hungry in Philadelphia, who hasn’t thought “man if I could get money together for a greyhound ticket to Los Angeles, I’d probably move there” and then followed through on it. Likewise, I doubt that the only reason Los Angeles has so many homeless people is because of migrants from elsewhere. Without more solid data it’s hard to say what the proportions are, but my hunch is neither absolutist position is accurate.
Patterson Hood moved there, and ever since, the place has gone to Hell!