I caught some videos of the homeless problem in LA, San Diego, San Fransisco, and other areas. All these tent cities taking up city parks and trails.
Then I look at my own area of Overland Park Kansas. I can say I have ever seen any homeless person around here. The closest would be some people living in their cars at the WalMart and even those are not that many. Nearby Kansas City Missouri has a larger number of homeless but still, in the entire Kansas City metro area I do not see near the problem the cities in California have.
So I would like to ask the residents of those areas, why do you have such a big homeless population?
I’m guessing:
High cost of living.
Good weather.
An area accepting of the homeless and providing alot of free services.
Good weather, getting lost in the numbers already there, civic and governmental institutional support available, plenty of land/streets/abandoned building to get lost in. A friend was homeless for quite a few years in a few different regions and she highly recommended CA as the place to be best off while being at your worst.
Pittsburgh and other places actually do that in a fashion; arresting some, destroying the camps and forcing people into shelters. If this is punishment or what can be debated but among the homeless population its far from welcome or welcoming.
Homelessness and poverty are moral failings of people who haven’t figured out how to scam their way to wealth or who were so thoughtless as to get an illness or injury without having good medical insurance.
And yes, if you have to be homeless, California is basically the best climate for it. Having been homeless a couple of times (albeit only briefly, and never without shelter or means to buy food), I can say that no healthy person chooses to be homeless unless the alternitives are worse, so you basically have the mentally ill, the wantonly abused, and the utterly desperate, all of whom often turn to drugs as a respite from the hopelessness and boredom, or just to self-medicate in the absence of services and family to care for them.
High cost of living means a lot of people end up homeless, even the employed
Nice weather year round
Lots of upper middle class people to hit up for donations
A culture that offers services and empathy for the homeless
because there are a lot of people in that area period.
If you ever make your way to Tokyo, I think you’d be surprised at just how many homeless people there are, sleeping outside of train stations (or on the trains, if they can scrounge up a few Yen.)
Weather is a big part of why there are a lot more homeless people in California and Hawaii than many other states. New Hampshire has the lowest poverty rate in the country, but it isn’t just because of a great economy; we also have low payments for both unemployment and welfare, very few shelters, and brutal winters. People who can’t find jobs or a couch to sleep on with friends and families leave: the estimated number of homeless people in this state in 2013 was just 1,450, and that includes people who are sleeping indoors. You can’t live on the streets when there are five months of the year when it’s very possible you’ll freeze to death if you try.
New York has a fairly high number of homeless people considering their winters, **but **they have a much better safety net and more shelters (only 5% of the NY homeless are unsheltered, so there have to be a lot of shelters) than many places do.
What struck me about Tokyo was that the homeless left their stuff in the subway stations, and no one took it. Coming from New York I found this incredible.
Ther are plenty of homeless in Florida. Due to a judgement out of Miami/Dade it is illegal to arrest them for just sleeping outside unless you provide them a place. Here in Key West there is a shelter that only opens like 7 pm and makes everyone leave in the mornings so the city has provided them with a place to sleep. Any still sleeping on the beaches or streets can be arrested. They do arrest them but it’s mostly for trespassing or having an open container of alcohol.
I believe the weather plays a huge role in causing homeless to flock to warm spots.
Because we Californians are bleeding heart liberals and like to coddle lazy people. It’s in our DNA. Probably a mutation caused by overexposure to solar radiation, of which we have an abundance. It definitive proof that CA is the worst state to live in, and that our economy sucks. Please don’t move here. You’ll hate it. Everyone here wants to leave, but we’re just too lazy.
I’d be okay with just limiting new immigrants to north of Hesperia and east of Hwy 395. Maybe we could get some of that sweet wall-building money that Mexico is going to give Trump.
You could check out this PDF on homeless/near homeless put out by your own city.The main reason you see no/few homeless in Overland Park seems to be that you move them outside the city limits to other cities. I guess that’s a kind of solution.
OP, you really have no idea how many homeless people you have seen. You know how many people you’ve seen sleeping in their cars or on park benches or on the sidewalk but if you passed the people described in this articleon the street, you wouldn’t have a clue that they were homeless. Nor would you know that someone who spends a week or two on one person’s couch and then moves on to the next person’s couch is homeless. There’s a certain subgroup of homeless people who prefer the street to a shelter (that group generally doesn’t have friends or relatives they can stay with) and they do tend to flock to warmer places, but that’s a small part of the homeless population.