Wake Up California

[ambient]

Originally Posted by Mr. Boring

The US used to have mental hospitals and treatment for those unfortunates prior to the 1970s. Some countries Finland, Japan, Poland, Hungary, Korea, Iceland etc to take care of their unfortunate folks - even if it means higher taxes. I wonder why those countries do but the US doesn't.

So first you complain about the effects of "Socialism," and now you're suggesting you want to pay higher taxes for a better social net? Boy are you confused..

[aileesic]

Originally Posted by Beardown91737

Yeah? This is Sunday LA Times material. Yeah you found hundreds or maybe a couple thousand of drug addicted whites so you are able to make sweeping judgements and everyone will have to believe them?

Yes Latin American immigrants comprise a lot of the construction workforce. It hasn't always been that way. White and African American construction workers built a lot of the city you see. Maybe even most of it. The construction trade was unionized and paid well enough that workers could buy houses of their own. Not everyone goes to college and those are some of the jobs that people did before they were undercut by recent arrivals. There was even a time when the trade unions in places like Chicago and probably most other cities had racist policies that favored white union members over African American. Then over time, illegal immigration provided a supply of low wage workers. First those workers filled jobs like restaurant dishwashers. That was my first job as a teenager, but from September to June, it was hard for restaurants to find replacements for the $1.60/hr teenage labor. Immigrant labor filled that opportunity, but then expanded into all hours of operation in some locations. In the building trades, immigrants started doing the peripheral work but then started moving into more central roles in construction. This increased the profit for builders and depressed to wages to workers.

There is some thought that having these low wage workers makes housing more affordable. That is a huge misunderstanding of how home prices work. The builder will price at the absolute maximum they can get, no matter how much they shaved the cost during the construction. Low priced migrant labor does not make a $600K house sell for $580K. It just puts another 20 grand into the builder's pocket.


During the 1980s, there were advocates who fought the locking away of mental health patients, so there was more mainstreaming into society and less involuntary committment. Some reduction in facilities was Reagan budget cuts for mental health, but the mainstreaming was a larger factor.

Mainstreaming has been a huge failure, and I am saying this from personal experience as well. What needs to be stopped right now is forcing everyone to set the bar too high for people who will not be able to reach it. I also fault those who claim mental illness does not exist or those who claim some people are just "lazy."

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by wac_432

That means that almost half of the ENTIRE homeless population are newcomers and the total population of outsider homeless who are moving in will double the homeless population every 20 years! To put it in perspective, with 100K border crossers at our "crisis-level" US border emergency, we're getting 0.03% increase in illegals every year. A town with a 5% homeless influx is a 166X bigger influx than our "border crisis."

I don't know about you, but someone who moved into town in 2009 is not exactly local born-and-raised. Imagine if your TOTAL town population of homed people went up 40% in 10 years. That's a bigger boom town than during the gold rush! You'd be like "where the <bleep> are all these newcomers coming from!?! Yet, because they're homeless, they're suddenly more local than locals.

My town's population has increased 1% in the past decade. However, our homeless population self-reports that 40% of them have lived in our county for less than 5 years! If that isn't a massive outside influx, nothing is.

Yet homeless advocates will point to that exact same number (Oh, 60% of them have been here for more than 5 years, they're MOSTLY local) PFFFT! Gimme a break! You guys seriously suck at math.

Speaking of math, let alone social science, this assessment you advance is absurd.

First off, we are living in an extremely mobile society. People being “from” a place - as in birthed-and-raised - is pretty near meaningless in modern day America.

Secondly, the issue isn’t whether they are “from” the city they are currently homeless in anyway. It is about whether they arrived homeless to take advantage of weather / benefits. And the answer is, for about 90% on average around the nation, no ... they didn’t. When a person moves to a city, gains employment and housing - and subsequently loses income and housing, they were bonafide productive residents. There are no discriminations in homeless services locally or nationally that differentiate and bestow or deny based on time of residence.

Third, your summary declaration that I bolded in quoting you above, is NOT at all what the statistics say: the statistics do NOT report that 40% of the homeless arrived homeless. They do NOT report that already homeless persons are moving into your (or other) areas en-mass. Flatly untrue.

That all explained, “nearly half” is grossly misleading to say the very least. Anyone actually familiar with research on homelessness knows that mobility / transience exists, but is (approximately) 85% regionally static. Transience from far distances (cross states and nation) is in the range of 15%. Links to studies abound throughout these forum threads. Without dragging a bunch up all over again, I’ll redirect you to the most scientific and statistically comprehensive: the study by the VA cited previously.

[Mr. Boring]

Originally Posted by ambient

So first you complain about the effects of "Socialism"...

I did?

[wac_432]

Originally Posted by Tulemutt

When a person moves to a city, gains employment and housing - and subsequently loses income and housing, they were bonafide productive residents. There are no discriminations in homeless services locally or nationally that differentiate and bestow or deny based on time of residence.

Third, your summary declaration that I bolded in quoting you above, is NOT at all what the statistics say: the statistics do NOT report that 40% of the homeless arrived homeless. They do NOT report that already homeless persons are moving into your (or other) areas en-mass. Flatly untrue.

That all explained, “nearly half” is grossly misleading to say the very least. Anyone actually familiar with research on homelessness knows that mobility / transience exists, but is (approximately) 85% regionally static. Transience from far distances (cross states and nation) is in the range of 15%. Links to studies abound throughout these forum threads. Without dragging a bunch up all over again, I’ll redirect you to the most scientific and statistically comprehensive: the study by the VA cited previously.

So, your assertion is that the 40% of homeless individuals who indicate that they have lived in a certain city less than [5 or] 10 years, did not arrive as homeless transients and decided to stay, but rather they all (or at minimum 25% (of total homless) became homeless because of a loss of job, increase in expenses, or the like in that same time frame?

Do you have statistics that show how many of the homeless are recently homeless, and do those numbers support your argument?

[Tulemutt]

Originally Posted by wac_432

So, your assertion is that the 40% of homeless individuals who indicate that they have lived in a certain city less than [5 or] 10 years, did not arrive as homeless transients and decided to stay, but rather they all (or at minimum 25% (of total homless) became homeless because of a loss of job, increase in expenses, or the like in that same time frame?

Do you have statistics that show how many of the homeless are recently homeless, and do those numbers support your argument?

Yes. And yes.

And it’s not “my argument.” It’s not an argument at all. It’s just factual reality.

The list of reasons is long: loss of job, increase in expenses, physical illness, mental illness, domestic abuse, slipping into alcohol or drug addiction, timing out of career as one ages, being thrown out of home for being LGBTQ, release from prison in the internet age where landlord background checks are thorough and merciless ... more ... compounded by rising housing costs and reduction of low-cost housing options such as SRO’s.

Understand, for starters, that approx 75% of all homeless are reintegrated to housing and support in less than a year. Average time homeless for the majority is in the 2 month range.

The other 25% are long term “chronics”. Whole ‘nuther story for them. Those chronics are the ones who cost the most money to manage and cause the vast majority of difficulties for all of us.

When parsing the numbers / statistics, right there, apply the above to the “40%”, “50%”, and “60%” myth narratives you are hearing about. Boom. Collapse the fake narratives.

When I have read some of your posts in the past, I find you to be a pretty sharp thinker for the most part. If you were to learn the issues as I have (I have been helping homeless, mostly veterans due to my military background, on and off for over 30 years ... fighting evictions, enrolling for medical support/care, finding treatments, suicide counseling, finding housing assistance and venues) I expect you’d readily grasp the realities that most homeless don’t want to leave what they consider home turf. The majority hope for reintegration and value familiar streets, friends, family, past relationships of all kinds, medical services they are established with and know, ... right down to bus routes. For most, home is where they have always or long known ... or came to with a desire for the locale. They do not want to leave.

For the severely mentally ill, psychotics, schizophrenics, and other delusional disorders, well, they really aren’t hardly aware of where they are compared to other places ... “places”, geographically speaking, mean pretty much zip. They can’t plan their way from one bite of a discarded sandwich to the crust.

Severe alcoholics aren’t concerned with much other than how much is left in this afternoon’s bottle and where’s the next one.

Junkies and meth heads don’t want to leave their supply network for even a day. Traveling is a threat to most.

Thieves? Yeah, they move around.

Just plain lazy bums, young or old? Sure, some of those shift around too. They’ve always existed: hobos, bums, tramps, whatever you want to call them.

This sad world is extensively studied since many years past. Lots of research from universities, foundations, local and national governments, Veteran’s Administration.

As with most things, once you crawl inside the belly of the beast you find simplicity and reductionism are not applicable.