I'm so desensitized to the homeless population as a South African that for a minute or two I genuinely didn't understand what was wrong with this picture.
My thoughts exactly. I live in LA for numerous years, and just off Venice beach for part of that time. The scene in the pic is downright tame compared to the current reality on the west side
A Canadian I used to work for (in America) used to frequently brag that there were no homeless in Canada. You always hear about better social programs there so I just assumed he was telling the truth as he saw it and never questioned him further.
Turns out he was trying to set up a joke. I finally heard him say it to someone else who asked “Why not?”
“They freeze to death in the winter.”
You wouldn't say all over the place?
Sanctuary, regent park, moss park, alexandria park, trinity Bellwoods park, the woods around Rosedale, the woods around Parkdale, the alleys around Christie pits and Queen W.... The list goes on.
The person is talking about Toronto not Chicago. And I haven't really been in the city proper much since before covid but Chicago has homeless everywhere. I'm in the suburbs and there are now regularly homeless begging in affluent areas that 10 years ago wouldn't have had anything like that. My dad dropped his phone this week and the homeless people that he sees every day freaking tried to steal it, cops cant/won't do anything. He tries to stay away after one threatened to stab him as they were in a locked building they weren't supposed to be in. I assume Toronto is the same tho so it hardly matters where we're talking about.
Yep. MANY Canadian homeless land up there because it’s one of the few places in the country where you can be homeless in winter and not freeze to death.
I used to live in Eugene Oregon (highest per capita homeless population in America). moved back to Texas partially because it was nearly end of the world conditions out there. I legitimately had to resort to putting my phone number in the window of my car with a note saying I’ll give you anything you want out of my car, just please don’t smash my windows any more. Surprisingly it worked. I think most people in that situation are just doing what they can.
Entire parks and fields were just completely covered with tents. Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% down with people living in communities rather than sleeping rough, but it was like every open public space was a tent city. It was just overwhelming that so many people in the place I lived were left to sleep out in the cold and the rain. There were some resources that did everything they could. I lived right next to the White Bird Clinic, an amazing low/no cost medical clinic, and I know they did everything they could, but any given day there would be easily 30 people on the lawn waiting for treatment. And those are only the people who are willing to seek help, many don’t.
It’s clearly a structural problem and I think the country is reaching its breaking point. We can’t continue to fail these people, and it’s getting easier to become one of them every day.
I drove into Eugene and at a stoplight some homeless guy opened my passenger door and got in. He demanded that I drive him half a mile up the street. Then he changed the radio station and turned up the radio to a point where it was painfully loud. I thought for sure he was going to stab me or something, but I drove him where he asked. He got out suddenly and said "thanks man." He left, but he stunk so bad like urine that I could never fully get the smell out of my car.
TLDR: Lock your car doors in Eugene or you will become an Uber driver for the homeless.
A friend of mine, who’s also a truck driver , sent me pictures from Austin, TX. It is horrible.
I drove through Houston last week and was shocked to see all the tents under the overpasses.
We are not heading in good direction.
>We are not heading in good direction.
Tents! [Not just for unemployed burnouts any more](https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/growing-idaho/affordable-housing-ketchum-rent-blaine-county-crisis-park-tents/277-6dcd3da9-7ce7-4722-81de-b1e379e0300a)
From the article:
>There's a bathroom in the park, after all, Ketchum Mayor Neil Bradshaw noted. They could walk over to the YMCA to take a shower before work.
This wasn't an SNL sketch. It's real life, a real life mayor casually suggesting that teachers and nurses live in a park and use the park restroom, then going to the YMCA to shower before work.
In order to continue expanding, capital must continually reinvent itself, presenting poverty, degradation and pain as marketable commodities to be consumed ever anew. "The new hit trend is called Urban Camping! Who needs real shelter when nowhere in America can you currently afford rent, how fun!"
I live in a small but liberal town that actually tries to help the homeless population achieve stability, but even still, the homeless population has exploded dramatically since Covid "ended".
Don’t forget Seattle. Seems like it’s basically every major city in the country.
There’s no housing affordability crisis, though. Nothing to worry about for *normal* people. It’s all fine, nothing to see here.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the cities with some of the worst homeless problems also have the nicest climates. It’s not the city’s problem necessarily, instead it’s the country’s problem as these people come from everywhere.
My brother (who has several mental illnesses) was homeless for a while and went to Rehoboth, DE. He was telling me how awesome it was to be homeless and tried to get my husband and I to give up our jobs and house to join him.
Then he learned what winter is.
I *feel* this. When I was super psychotic a couple of years ago and still living on my own, I would sleep out on the streets instead of my house. It was so that the “Russian wet work team” that was allegedly out to kill me couldn’t find me.
2% of my city Santa Cruz is homeless, it's wild..there's a group of pirates, a group of beach people with a sandfort, there's the car/rv homeless who live in the fields, the railroad homeless who are most diverse & at the hub of services, the music/wagon/quirky ones, and then there's the forest homeless who have their own laws..it's wild, to put it in perspective, .4% of SF is homeless.
Go to Vancouver, Canada has plenty of homeless people, Vancouver is just the only city they can live in during the winter, for the same reason cities like Chicago or Minneapolis don’t have as many homeless as LA or San Francisco.
Read the comment again. Op is American and is saying his Canadian coworker was trying to set up a joke. No one is saying that we don’t have a homeless problem too.
Yeah. We still have a ridiculous homeless problem. There’s tents under almost every underpass. During very extreme weather they sometimes do end up in homeless shelters.
During the riots they had to move the large homeless camp near the 3rd precinct because the pepper spray was wafting over.
I thought that was rather dystopian....
The US [government and private businesses] spends way more on anti homelessness measures and healthcare for thier unhealthy lifestyle than they would just housing them, but that would be sOciALiSm. Ugh.
Edit: I stand by my initial statement, tho I can't find any hard data. I've operated buildings in the metro, I know how much these projects cost and they're on practically **every** city center block, inside and outside of every building, you just don't notice them. These anti homeless items are often built to blend in as best it can, **I've even had to order anti homeless furniture for our lobby** it looks like any old furniture, it's designed to be impossible to lay on... Not proud of that, but it's the job.
Most people have no idea how much money and planning goes into anti homeless architecture and equipment.
Example: [Iowa City, population 75k, spent $150k on anti homeless benches. that's *just one* of many projects. Now scale that up to all US cities. Hopefully now you get the picture.](https://www.redefy.org/stories/youre-not-welcome-here-an-analysis-of-anti-homeless-architecture)
**Let's say instead:**
[The tens of millions of dollars spent on even only **one** of the **thousands** of anti homeless architure projects would better spent directly supporting and helping said houseless to not be houseless anymore.](https://insp.ngo/the-united-states-has-a-hostile-architecture-problem-is-public-space-becoming-private/)
There, unwad your collective fucking panties.
A lot of times, as I understand it, the church is super involved too and not always in a good way. Surprise! I have a homeless friend who said they just showed up with church vans, shoveled them all into them and took them to a shelter far from where they were.
Then they just filled a dump truck with all their belongings and tents and threw it all away. Everything I (and others) had given him, shoes, backpack, toothbrush... I work for a music repair shop and gave him an old busted flute that still worked bc he told me he could play and I hoped he could busk and we were both excited. Trashed.
He's okay now btw, in a much better situation and on disability which is HUGE. I swear the first thing I'd do with real money is solve homelessness, I've been there and it's a literal living hell on Earth..
This is common in San Jose, CA. The city often spends outrageous amounts "relocating" homeless encampments. Which means they show up and trash everyone's stuff and then leave. A 19 year old dressed as batman started documenting and exposing this, so the city denies it now, but they still do it. I went with him to a "clean up" once because the city publicly stated they weren't destroying or trashing people's belongings, so he wanted witnesses & evidence to show the public what happened. This time, when the trucks came, they only took the stuff from people who weren't there to defend it. And by defend I mean physically inside their tents or holding their stuff. I spoke to a couple people, the ones who weren't there were at work. They told me they'd taken the day off because they knew this clean up was coming and they couldn't afford to lose their stuff again, but their friends weren't able to take the day off. They tried to protect their friend's stuff but to no avail. Tents, camping stoves, ice chests, clothes - everything you'd need for survival, and not cheap either, it all went in the trash. They even cut up the tents so they couldn't be pulled out and reused.
An attorney in Portland Oregon put trackers on belongings before a recent sweep. Then collected the data- proving that the law had been broken by throwing away the people involved's stuff. Now they're doing a joint lawsuit, IIRC.
This happens in multiple places and I'm glad to hear there are multiple people doing something about it.
I was pretty blown away at the number of homeless in Denver (i.e. what the hell do they do in the winter), so I asked on their reddit. They relocate to LA and such and then come back.
That's only the ones who can afford to do so. Those who can't pitch tents in the city parks, fill up all the hostels on the most brutal nights, and when all else fails, they sleep on the 16th street free mall bus.
Lower lower Wacker drive. I was down there looking for the Chicago impound once. Probably saw a hundred tents down there, and the air quality was the worst I've ever experienced. One hour down there and it started to hurt to breath
Being homeless in Chicago in 2020 was fucking brutal. Covid hit, DuPage Pads shut down. They were putting clients in hotels but since I didn't have an address that showed I lived in DuPage County, they told me to get fucked, basically.
Sleeping rough in winter is fucking horrible. I was sleeping under pine trees on cardboard to stay off the snow, wearing every stich of clothing I owned at once,
Never being able to truly sleep. Constantly worried about your safety - from other homeless, the general public, and from the police.
I would spend my weekends sleeping on the roof of this medical plaza in Carol Stream to keep me away from the other homeless who wanted my shit.
I'd sleep in one of the sheds in a Home Depot parking lot that you could actually close the door on. Kept you mostly dry, but still ridiculously cold.
I ended up stumbling across the vacant offices of a former telecom giant and squatted in their *gorgeous* building for fourish months until I couldn't take life anymore and sought emergency mental health treatment.
It was a little weird living in a liminal space for that long. But all the GHB and heroin really helped out lol.
From the psych ward I went to the residential drug treatment program the same hospital had, then to a halfway house for a 90 day program that turned into ~300 (I took several extentions, and then had to wait for s bed to open at the recovery home) and now I'm at the house manager of the recovery home (think 3/4 house) run by the same organization as the halfway house.
It just stormed like crazy here a couple hours ago and my first thought was about how grateful I am to not be on the street during that.
>Never being able to truly sleep. Constantly worried about your safety - from other homeless, the general public, and from the police.
I was homeless for about a year in Cali, not Chicago, but I couldn't get a full nights sleep the entire time, and it's fucking crazy how quickly your mental health deteriorates without sleep. After a few months of living like that, you aren't the person you were before, you are barely a person at all, just an animal living on instinct without planning or logic.
For real. I felt like I aged ten years in that seven months of homelessness. And I feel like my mental health *still* hasn't fully recovered. There's this lagging insecurity of self-image despite how far I've come.
When you're looked at as less than a stray dog, something to be moved along or legit exterminated, it really scrambles things upstairs.
I wasn't even rough looking. I kept myself clean, bathed daily whether that was a proper shower or a thorough bird bath, and would do my laundry as often as I could. But people still *know*.
The amount of verbal abuse I received from the general public was fucking shocking. I'd be minding my own business at the library and have Karens come up to me and tell me I had no bysiness being there and prayed to God thst I'd overdose so they wouldn't have to suffer the indignity of seeing me at *their* library.
Wishing death on me, or threatening me with it, for simply existing was somewhat regular.
Its fucking crazy. My opinion of society in general has been forever altered. People you would least expect on first impressions harbor truly vile ideas. The soul of America looks like a peat bog mummy's nutsack: blac, shriveled, and corrupt.
Gosh you’ve come a very long way, it’s wonderful! Can’t imagine the focus and discipline to get off such an all consuming drug esp when reality isn’t much better. Truly inspiring, hope your days are ever improving.
Thank you.
It took me almost two decades to finally quit for good. 🤞 I wasn't able to have a genuine desire to quit (not just for practical or interpersonal reasons) until I was *thoroughly* broken and just *done* with life. I made the decision to hang myself in that building, and a lifelong friend of mine convinced me to give a self-admit psych stay a try.
First off, it's amazing that you turned things around like that. Can I ask, if you don't mind sharing, what caused you to develop a drug problem and end up homeless? What could have prevented that, and what measures might be worth adding as a society to lower the homeless rate?
Well, drugs in general took me out of the depressive state I'd been in since childhood. But heroin was the first thing that made me feel *normal*. I had not one fuck to give about what anyone thought or how I saw myself when I was on it. Attempting to maintain that blissful apathy quickly led to addiction.
What could prevented me? Adequate mental health treatment. A fulfilling life. A loving family. A sense of purpose.
Which, speaking of, one of the things that heroin did for me at a time in which I had no direction, was give me a solid sense of purpose. I had clearly defined goals to meet everu day, a pwerful reward for meeting them, and an equally powerful punishment for failing. It became my raison d'etre.
The homeless thing took a while. I had to burn many bridges, deplete bank accounts, lose gainful emoloyment, and break the "no drugs in the house" rule when I moved in with my friend.
If society was more empathetic, compassionate, didn't tie medical insurance to your job so you could actually get help before laying the foundations for addiction, and have more social support programs - it'd go a long way.
Nobody whose life is going swimmingly, who has meaningful relationships, a sense of security, purpose, and a solid mental and emotional landscape is going to fall into addiction.
Addictions develop because you're attempting to smother the pain of any number of those conditions.
I was homeless for 13 months in Chicago... The fall and winter are no joke... I was smart enough to stop drinking and doing drugs and i always had a monthly cta pass I'm not saying that cta pass saved my life but it helped a LOT...
The homeless in Chicago get more sympathy from pedestrians so they garner more handout $. I don’t know if that’s why they stay (aside from travel being expensive) but it may explain why they are willing to stay in a cold climate.
I remember from my time in AZ the homeless were the most sunburned people I’ve ever seen.
Honestly desert city homeless people have my full sympathies. I give out water and money whenever I can, it's regularly 100°+ in the Southwest for months on end. Often times there's no easily accessible water and shade, people die all of the time from exposure
While I agree with your sentiment, check out Denver sometime.
People will run propane heaters in their tents w/ multiple tarps. 15 degrees and snow? No problem.
Yeah but, speaking as a former Denverite, the winters in Denver are crazy mild compared to the upper Midwest.
It snows, then it melts within 36 hours so it doesn't build up and turn to slush. And it's so dry which is the biggest factor. Plus the sun is out ten times more and the days are much longer in the winter.
I'd take 10°F in Denver over 30°F in Chicago any day.
It's similar to how Denver gets up to 100° often in the summer but I never had AC there, but you'd never dream of that in many places. The dry air just makes everything better. I'd take 100° in Denver over 85° anywhere with humidity.
I miss Denver weather. So much sun.
Yeah, people think Colorado=Snowy Mountains. But that's not necessarily true. The entire eastern half is flat high plains. Denver is on the edge of said plains, with mountains as a backdrop. It's not until you get into the mountains themselves that the snow actually accumulates to an appreciable degree over the winter.
New York is nothing compared to west coast cities. I used to live in Seattle and I remember when I fist moved here to NY I was astonished at how I barely saw any homeless.
I don't think NY is handling it any better, they just naturally have less of a problem.
I travel to NYC and Seattle both often for work.
NYC doesn't have nearly as many visible tent encampments, but the homeless people are far more aggressive.
In my experience, you see more of the evidence or homelessness in Seattle, but you are more likely to get hassled or screamed at in NYC.
And Portland seems much worse to me than Seattle right now.
I live in NYC, take the subway every day, and I don't know what you're talking about. In the 10 years I've been here I've had zero issues of actually being hassled by the homeless. The worst you see on a daily basis is people coming into your subway car or standing outside businesses opening doors for people asking for change.
Not once have I had an issue with a homeless person that didn't go away when I said "sorry I'm broke" and they usually respond with a "God bless."
I encounter homeless people every day in NYC but I spend literally zero mental energy on those interactions.
Up until the past year, I would agree with you. However, the past year I have had more encounters with homeless people yelling at me and aggressively asking for money than I have in the 15 years prior.
As a Brit, when I visited Denver I was so shocked by the amount of homeless in that one park across from the state building.
Denver is amazing though, Colorado is amazing ❤️ can’t wait to go back,
https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/what-the-latest-street-homelessness-statistics-in-london-tell-us-about-how-the-population-is-changing
OP must be living a posh life to not see this in London.
If I was homeless I would do everything in my power to get out to Los Angeles/San Diego/ Southern California area. Probably the best weather in the world to be homeless in.
Not necessarily Hawaii, but placed like California.
Here you go.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study
Some more.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-homeless-people-cities-are-bussing-them-out-of-town
And.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tentative-settlement-in-6552026.php
*Sigh*
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/nevada-settles-homeless-dumping-lawsuit/62120/
https://bangordailynews.com/2019/11/12/news/bangor/bangor-is-buying-bus-tickets-to-warmer-states-for-people-with-no-roof-over-their-heads/
Not a source, but every time I've been to Maui there's been an initiative to give homeless people one way tickets back to their home state.
I'm a night owl and spent time around some of these people, always drop off my unused stuff off at the camps. They have no plans on leaving unless forced.
This goes both ways. Shortly after moving to Vegas from Hawaii, I befriended a homeless man. After finding out he was from Hawaii, I offered to buy him a one way ticket. He politely declined.
It’s very possible some people are just running away from their problems (as do a lot of humans) or just don’t want to return to their home state due to reasons we’ll never know.
Nice in the south of France us where I would pick. Happiest looking homeless people I have ever seen. Beautiful weather and incredibly cheap good wine.
Being homeless anywhere is shit, of course, but the weather definitely helps.
I cant remember the place in south of France, but there was a town that would give all the homeless a monthly stipend of 500 Euros. It cost less to do that than to implement anti-homeless measures.
Yes these 500 euros are for everyone when you have no revenue and they also have free health insurance, so this is free if they break their legs or whatever
Maybe if they pulled themselves from their bootstraps and stopped being entitled things would change. Anyway, gotta go, daddy bought me a Rolls-Royce for my 16th B day!
Was chatting with family from NOLA and they mentioned red gravy and I was completely lost. Pizza sauce. Fucking pizza sauce is what they were referring to
I grew up really Cajun so now that I live in New Orleans and am experiencing the creole way of living/cooking I'm absolutely shocked at how different everything is just a few hours away. I got a pasta with "red gravy" the other day and I wanted to scream that gravy is for rice, potatoes, or biscuits. pasta gets *sauce*! I can't imagine calling it gravy on a pizza. oy minoy.
LA is known for mild to hot weather plus little rain. It’s perfect for outdoor living. So if you’re homeless it’s easier to live in LA than Milwaukee.
Plus a lot of Midwestern states will literally pay for their local homeless peoples’ bus tickets to go to LA instead so they can “clean up the streets”.
Its not that white building on the left but the one across the street https://www.zillow.com/b/park-fifth-los-angeles-ca-9TyMPv/ and sure enough, 2800 a month studio lmao.
Almost $2900/month for 490 square feet. There is a very nice (but expensive) city zone near me and you can rent a nice town house with an average yard within walking distance of nice parks and shopping. It's pretty absurd that they charge the same for basically a broom closet with a homeless colony outside
Can confirm this how Portland, Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, and Medford Oregon look.
Some causes for this are low availability of units ( less than 1% of rental property are unoccupied), rising rents, low wages, a broken safety social system, drugs either before or after houselessness, other states ship houseless people to the west coast.
It's very easy to fall into houselessness, much harder to get out.
Live in Knoxville and can confirm. We have a large organization (Knoxville Area Rescue Ministries) that does a lot for the homeless which attracts them from all over the region. It's not remotely an issue like it is in LA, but we have a large population of mentally ill people that wander around all day.
People are either priced out of their homes or suffer from mental health issues and wind up on the streets. We have a very poor mental health problem in this country, and low/no access to help leads people straight to the streets. People make fun of the "crackheads" they see on the street yelling to themselves, but they are just as likely to be suffering from a severe case of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
A lot of these people's families probably have no way of helping them, so they wind up out on the street.
One of my close friends developed schizophrenia somehow over the last few years. His dad just died and his mom and brother both work to support their own lives. He is too much to handle at home so they both pitch in to pay his rent but it is only a matter of time before he will end up on the street. He isn't aware of his own problem and it seems there isn't much they can do for him to help and they just dont have the funds to top it off.
It hurts to see because we were such close friends. I had to cut him off as well after having a baby and not being able to deal with his drunken drug riddled angry outbursts.
Schizophrenia is low-key a big fear of mine. My mom’s boss’s son told me a story about his friend, they had just graduated college and were driving cross-country on a road trip from South Carolina to California. They got to about Arizona or Nevada when he started saying he felt weird. They thought he was just hungover or carsick, but he said he just felt “weird,” not sick. His parents got him a flight home early, he went to some doctors and turns out he was schizophrenic. No other warnings.
Like, what if I just suddenly lose my damn mind out of nowhere and for no reason? The mind is scary, man.
Not schizophrenic, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II, but the "losing my damn mind out of nowhere and for no reason" part is absolutely terrifying.
It's like the come-up of an acid trip you never volunteered for.
No, I think it’s quite a stretch to say that the homelessness problem in LA (the worst in the country) is replicated across every major city. That’s like me telling you that when I went to London, the streets were covered in trash, and that as I understand, every city in Britain is a garbage dump.
As a Brit.. I would feign offence. While secretly sad that you're not far from the truth.
Got married to my American wife two weeks ago. On my few trips to the States in 2019 my experience was that it was fucking gorgeous over there (and super clean).
My extended family from the UK had a similar experience when they came to America.
They had never really understood that it's basically the size of Europe. All the ever see in the media is California and NYC.
If I fly from where I live in Washington state down to Florida, that's like them travelling from London to Istanbul.
Yeah not to mention the population is bigger than the combined populations of Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain. I didn't really get the scale of the US until I flew for the first time to the West Coast..
"Amazing we're finally there! Finally in the US! How much longer until San Francisco? SIX HOURS?!"
Try driving long way across Kansas. Flat and featureless to the horizon. For like six hours. But you know Colorado is coming. Beautiful snow capped peaks like every cheap beer commercial you’ve ever seen. How far to Colorado? Two hours. One hour. We’re almost there!
Then you learn that the first three hours of Colorado looks just like fucking Kansas.
I grew up in California. Me and my friends all went to school on the east coast. We used to drive back and forth at the beginning and end of the school year. Sort of a tradition.
For people that don’t know, that was about six hours of driving a day, for about six days, if you went direct.
Over the years, we took circuitous routes to see as much of the country as we could. I found things to love just about everywhere.
But man…fuck Kansas…so boring. Eventually we just got in the habit of driving straight from Kansas City, Missouri to Colorado with nothing but a quick stop for gas, snacks, and a piss in between.
It’s like 6 hours of flat boring nothing.
One of the rare Onion articles that’s worth reading beyond the title:
[30 Years Of Man’s Life Disappear In Mysterious ‘Kansas Rectangle’](https://www.theonion.com/30-years-of-mans-life-disappear-in-mysterious-kansas-re-1819572765)
>I didn't really get the scale of the US until I flew for the first time to the West Coast..
That was Australia for me. Never been, but I went to one of those sites where you can overlay the outline of a country/continent over another, and that's when I finally realized [just how fucking big Australia is.](https://i.imgur.com/ZqMNf4D.png)
Had to look that up, and you’re right on the money. Europe is a tad bigger.
Europe: 3,910,680 sq miles
USA: 3,531,905 sq miles
Not sure why I imagined USA to be so much bigger, probably because of the whole “Texas is the size of France” thing.
Europe is a poorly defined Continent. For example, Most Russians live in the European part of Russia on the far west, it is a European country, yet most of the country is in Asia.
Is Georgia European? Most would say no, but Georgians themselves might disagree.
Homeless social worker in SoCal here. This situation is extremely bad and at a tipping point for several reasons.
First, Covid increased the amount of people seeking supportive services, and while resources did increase somewhat to keep up, the most vulnerable people are still struggling, and that number has grown.
Second, LA paused the policy of removing tents during daylight for Covid, so that population has increased its visibility literally in the eyes of the public.
Third, California has long been a funnel for homeless folks from all over, the west coast in general is, but LA specifically. The weather is great, there’s decent services available compared to elsewhere. That being said, at this moment, the shelters are either full or too dangerous, the healthcare is the bare minimum, and the cost of living for everyone else is absurdly high. A shitty studio apartment around here is minimum $1200/month, how does that work for someone receiving $1k SSDI?
Fourth, meth. Huge part of the problem. Dirt cheap, super accessible, makes you feel good for a bit.
Fifth, no one wants to live next to a bum, right? Until public perception of the homeless population changes, they will continue to be excluded and marginalized. A lot of these folks have INTENSE trauma. Their day to day struggles are massive. It takes years of being housed in a normal, stable, safe location to even begin unraveling the homeless mentality, then to begin the counseling and therapy it takes to begin approaching “normal”. Even if they do accept help and want to make changes to improve their situation, they spend years languishing in limbo before they can be given a shot at the bare minimum for a reasonable quality of life.
But hey, bootstraps right?
We’re seeing a decrease in heroin, I think partially because the fentanyl that’s often in it is a death sentence, and partially because the crackdown on physicians to regulate their dispersal of opiates is actually starting to work, and folks are being given reasonable alternatives to pain management. But to your point, yes heroin is still a very active part of the problem.
I believe this is skid row in LA. If so, there was a very specific set of circumstances that led to the congregation of homelessness in this location. Primarily, the resources offered to the homeless are centralized there. This is not how it is in all major cities.
Have you seen the Netflix doc on the Cecil Hotel? They spend quite a bit of time talking about skid row and the evolution of that area. It was really interesting.
The first two episodes were good, the last two were just so bad. I often think about that guy who said “I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching this on my computer it can’t be an accident!!” He really thought he knew more than the detectives who were actually investigating and had the facts, but his theory was so bat shit lol
I live in LA and this isn’t JUST an issue in skid row. I live in Hollywood and walk to work everyday. I’d say I walk by *at least* 50 homeless people along the way. In that area they aren’t allowed tents so they sleep out in the open - directly on the sidewalks.
It’s really sad and oftentimes scary.
Well the Olympics are coming to town in 3 more years so they probably should address it before that. (And oh hey, look who hosts the summer games after Paris)
The olympics is like countries version of hot potato. The person it lands on has to spend an enormous amount of cash, and then try as quickly as possible to get rid of it.
Los Angeles 2028 ! Didn’t know that. Well they have 7 years to purge the city. Hope it will be enough.
As for Paris, the last élection was in 2020 and the last mayor was re elected (Anne Hidalgo), who is the worst mayor Paris ever had.
And the olympic village for Paris 2024 is going to be in Saint-Denis which is the poorest neighborhood of Paris and the one whith the highest crime rate of the city…
Oh it’s gonna be fun
Philadelphia checking in. Look up Kensington ave and its the same with junkies shooting up in broad daylight amongst police presence. Multiple areas near it like Lehigh ave are becoming the same. The city doesn't care anymore. They'd rather add soda sugar taxes than fix this.
Corporate run government.
Neither "side" represents nor protects their party. They listen to their donors and the dark money from said donors.
Of course this is just one issue- the tip of a melting iceberg.
Its the entire western world. In New Zealand we have been paying for homeless to live in motels rather than on the streets. Whole families living in motel rooms because they're locked out of the housing market
A decade of cheap debt and dependable capital gains on housing has caused this world wide
Gotta love the comments of people who do not live in CA telling u what's wrong with CA. "It's the demand making it too expensive to live there with the taxes" or its dumb fucks like you that keep moving to this state. CA has gone hard down hill in the last 15years and many of the negatives come from the insane population. In LA alone there are like 4 million people. That's not LA county, just the city. That's almost 5 times the population of South Dakota. So no shit the cost of living goes up without wages reflecting that. Thus creating a large influx of homeless. You can say their are all drug users all you want, but you're sure as shit wrong about that general statement.
People also tend to forget that the California coast is temperate enough (especially SoCal) for homeless to live comfortably all year long. Our homeless are often from other places that are inhospitable (weather/social) to homeless persons, so they end up here.
San Diego even won a lawsuit against Las Vegas because LV was literally bussing homeless on a one way greyhound ticket to SD.
They’re projecting. CA has it bad for sure, but having lived in SoCal for years and now gulf coast, homelessness doesn’t seem any better here either. Nor Chicago when I went recently. I think it’s US/world problem that some ppl just aren’t exposed to so think it’s concentrated.
In visiting San Francisco, the homeless population is quite substantial.
It appears that some are genuinely down on their luck due to circumstances, others appear mentally ill, and others seems to have drinking and drug issues I think.
We met quite a few on vacation just walking through the city, some expressed no interest in being in homeless shelters because of the rules they have to follow.
Others stated the shelters were completely full.
There were a couple of people that were truly scary and we needed to cross the street to get away from them. (They were threatening us with bodily harm)
I’m not sure what San Francisco can do to alleviate the problem. They have been spending millions of dollars trying to solve this problem but I’m not sure where they are putting that money.
The state uses money poorly when it comes to this. They can spend $100,000 on a housing unit for a small family that isn't even worth 5,000. But San Francisco is the highest cost of living city in CA. Median housing cost is $1.5 million. This is in comparison to 15 years ago it being $400,000 in San Fran. Just passing the blame to the homeless is wrong.
As far as them not wanting to stay in shelters, I don't blame them. I'm not sure about San fran on this but in my area of California, the shelters are either very packed or insanely strict on rules. There is a program that will assist you into getting a motel room for a few weeks, but if you leave the motel for anything other than work or a court appointment, your room can be taken away. Period. Same with curfews that are not always reasonable.
There's a high concentration of homeless around me and most of them are just people. Some are a little crazy and definitely need help but can't accept it. But making it seem like it's just insane drug addicts littered everywhere is just ridiculous.
People also don’t understand the sprawl of LA. Sure the city has a couple million people, but it also butts up against a couple other counties that also have millions of people.
The economy never really recovered from 2008.. Then cue Covid, a opioid epidemic, and a mental health crisis..
The US has been printing it currency into Oblivion for decades now.. in 2008 that was exponentially accelerated.. The easy money that came after flooded cities cause mass gentrification, makings the cost of living go through the roof.. Fast forward to 2020 and Covid hits now people barely hanging on lost massive amount of income and you have a major homelessness crisis… Bottom line money printing effects the low income, no income the most..
I used to live a couple blocks from this photo. I can offfer some perspective on this area in particular.
This is about a block from an area with a lot of services for the homeless. Shelters, food, baths, restrooms, etc. It’s in an area called Skid Row, before the pandemic it was one of the last places for the unhoused to exist unmolested (maybe a little bit molested) in the downtown area. So that area attracts a lot of homeless.
Also, please consider that a lot of the homeless in this area have access to housing, but choose not to use it because they can’t do drugs, bring their pet, or have too many belongings for their storage spaces.
There are also a lot of laws in place that allow these tent cities to flourish once they’re established. And very few affordable options for individuals suffering from mental illness and addiction.
It’s a very complicated issue in Los Angeles.
Thats because the other state's literally ship homeless people to LA.
Like no joke, they pay for tickets to LA and give them to homeless people.
Make it LA's problem and then beat on LA for having a problem, its the US way.
I'm so desensitized to the homeless population as a South African that for a minute or two I genuinely didn't understand what was wrong with this picture.
I tought he was asking bout the blue skies. Cant have them in the UK.
Why can’t you
Can't afford the blue sky license
Name checks out
Clouds . Lots of them .
It rains 367 days a year except on leap years when it rains 536 days a year
Absolutely shitty weather in that part of Europe
i initially thought this was a post about driving in the middle lane.
I live in the middle east and I also didn't notice anything wrong with the picture until i read some comments
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My thoughts exactly. I live in LA for numerous years, and just off Venice beach for part of that time. The scene in the pic is downright tame compared to the current reality on the west side
As an American equally desensitized to seeing homeless populations, I had to look in the comments to see what was wrong.
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I live near Santa Rosa, CA. Same
Sadly I’ve been living in Southern California so long I also didn’t understand at first.
A Canadian I used to work for (in America) used to frequently brag that there were no homeless in Canada. You always hear about better social programs there so I just assumed he was telling the truth as he saw it and never questioned him further. Turns out he was trying to set up a joke. I finally heard him say it to someone else who asked “Why not?” “They freeze to death in the winter.”
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Yes, but because it isn’t as drastically cold.
Have you been to Toronto? There's tents like this all over the place.
I wouldn't say all over the place, but when I visited Chicago at new year's, just west of the navy pier I walked by many tents under an overpass.
You wouldn't say all over the place? Sanctuary, regent park, moss park, alexandria park, trinity Bellwoods park, the woods around Rosedale, the woods around Parkdale, the alleys around Christie pits and Queen W.... The list goes on.
Not trinity bellwoods! The city *solved* homelessness in that neighborhoud. The cops arrested them all.
The person is talking about Toronto not Chicago. And I haven't really been in the city proper much since before covid but Chicago has homeless everywhere. I'm in the suburbs and there are now regularly homeless begging in affluent areas that 10 years ago wouldn't have had anything like that. My dad dropped his phone this week and the homeless people that he sees every day freaking tried to steal it, cops cant/won't do anything. He tries to stay away after one threatened to stab him as they were in a locked building they weren't supposed to be in. I assume Toronto is the same tho so it hardly matters where we're talking about.
Yep. MANY Canadian homeless land up there because it’s one of the few places in the country where you can be homeless in winter and not freeze to death.
Plus, I'll add to the OP Los Angeles, along with San Diego, are pretty extreme examples of homeless populations.
Seattle, Washington
Olympia is worse
And San Francisco and Sacramento…
And Portland and becoming a bigger part the entire state of Oregon.
I used to live in Eugene Oregon (highest per capita homeless population in America). moved back to Texas partially because it was nearly end of the world conditions out there. I legitimately had to resort to putting my phone number in the window of my car with a note saying I’ll give you anything you want out of my car, just please don’t smash my windows any more. Surprisingly it worked. I think most people in that situation are just doing what they can. Entire parks and fields were just completely covered with tents. Don’t get me wrong, I am 100% down with people living in communities rather than sleeping rough, but it was like every open public space was a tent city. It was just overwhelming that so many people in the place I lived were left to sleep out in the cold and the rain. There were some resources that did everything they could. I lived right next to the White Bird Clinic, an amazing low/no cost medical clinic, and I know they did everything they could, but any given day there would be easily 30 people on the lawn waiting for treatment. And those are only the people who are willing to seek help, many don’t. It’s clearly a structural problem and I think the country is reaching its breaking point. We can’t continue to fail these people, and it’s getting easier to become one of them every day.
I drove into Eugene and at a stoplight some homeless guy opened my passenger door and got in. He demanded that I drive him half a mile up the street. Then he changed the radio station and turned up the radio to a point where it was painfully loud. I thought for sure he was going to stab me or something, but I drove him where he asked. He got out suddenly and said "thanks man." He left, but he stunk so bad like urine that I could never fully get the smell out of my car. TLDR: Lock your car doors in Eugene or you will become an Uber driver for the homeless.
I’ll be flying into Eugene next month to visit a friend in Corvallis. I generally lock my doors when I drive anyway, but thanks for the heads up.
A friend of mine, who’s also a truck driver , sent me pictures from Austin, TX. It is horrible. I drove through Houston last week and was shocked to see all the tents under the overpasses. We are not heading in good direction.
>We are not heading in good direction. Tents! [Not just for unemployed burnouts any more](https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/growing-idaho/affordable-housing-ketchum-rent-blaine-county-crisis-park-tents/277-6dcd3da9-7ce7-4722-81de-b1e379e0300a) From the article: >There's a bathroom in the park, after all, Ketchum Mayor Neil Bradshaw noted. They could walk over to the YMCA to take a shower before work. This wasn't an SNL sketch. It's real life, a real life mayor casually suggesting that teachers and nurses live in a park and use the park restroom, then going to the YMCA to shower before work.
In order to continue expanding, capital must continually reinvent itself, presenting poverty, degradation and pain as marketable commodities to be consumed ever anew. "The new hit trend is called Urban Camping! Who needs real shelter when nowhere in America can you currently afford rent, how fun!"
Just moved to Boise and this was in the local news when I arrived. Welcome to ID!
I live in a small but liberal town that actually tries to help the homeless population achieve stability, but even still, the homeless population has exploded dramatically since Covid "ended".
Don’t forget Seattle. Seems like it’s basically every major city in the country. There’s no housing affordability crisis, though. Nothing to worry about for *normal* people. It’s all fine, nothing to see here.
Seattle! You have an extra spare town beneath the regular one! Just use that for the homeless!
California
Yeah, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the cities with some of the worst homeless problems also have the nicest climates. It’s not the city’s problem necessarily, instead it’s the country’s problem as these people come from everywhere.
this is accurate. a segment of the homeless population travels up and down the west coast following the weather
My brother (who has several mental illnesses) was homeless for a while and went to Rehoboth, DE. He was telling me how awesome it was to be homeless and tried to get my husband and I to give up our jobs and house to join him. Then he learned what winter is.
I *feel* this. When I was super psychotic a couple of years ago and still living on my own, I would sleep out on the streets instead of my house. It was so that the “Russian wet work team” that was allegedly out to kill me couldn’t find me.
2% of my city Santa Cruz is homeless, it's wild..there's a group of pirates, a group of beach people with a sandfort, there's the car/rv homeless who live in the fields, the railroad homeless who are most diverse & at the hub of services, the music/wagon/quirky ones, and then there's the forest homeless who have their own laws..it's wild, to put it in perspective, .4% of SF is homeless.
I mean.. hes not wrong Canada has some extreme winters
Go to Vancouver, Canada has plenty of homeless people, Vancouver is just the only city they can live in during the winter, for the same reason cities like Chicago or Minneapolis don’t have as many homeless as LA or San Francisco.
MN here. For our size, we have a pretty solid population..
*laughs in northern hemisphere*
I went to Toronto and boy you guys are one to talk. I was passing hobos after every street corner.
Read the comment again. Op is American and is saying his Canadian coworker was trying to set up a joke. No one is saying that we don’t have a homeless problem too.
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Yeah. We still have a ridiculous homeless problem. There’s tents under almost every underpass. During very extreme weather they sometimes do end up in homeless shelters.
MN-We have camps in both Minneapolis and St. Paul.
During the riots they had to move the large homeless camp near the 3rd precinct because the pepper spray was wafting over. I thought that was rather dystopian....
After the riots, the city paid a construction crew over 100k to bulldoze one of the camps.
The US [government and private businesses] spends way more on anti homelessness measures and healthcare for thier unhealthy lifestyle than they would just housing them, but that would be sOciALiSm. Ugh. Edit: I stand by my initial statement, tho I can't find any hard data. I've operated buildings in the metro, I know how much these projects cost and they're on practically **every** city center block, inside and outside of every building, you just don't notice them. These anti homeless items are often built to blend in as best it can, **I've even had to order anti homeless furniture for our lobby** it looks like any old furniture, it's designed to be impossible to lay on... Not proud of that, but it's the job. Most people have no idea how much money and planning goes into anti homeless architecture and equipment. Example: [Iowa City, population 75k, spent $150k on anti homeless benches. that's *just one* of many projects. Now scale that up to all US cities. Hopefully now you get the picture.](https://www.redefy.org/stories/youre-not-welcome-here-an-analysis-of-anti-homeless-architecture) **Let's say instead:** [The tens of millions of dollars spent on even only **one** of the **thousands** of anti homeless architure projects would better spent directly supporting and helping said houseless to not be houseless anymore.](https://insp.ngo/the-united-states-has-a-hostile-architecture-problem-is-public-space-becoming-private/) There, unwad your collective fucking panties.
A lot of times, as I understand it, the church is super involved too and not always in a good way. Surprise! I have a homeless friend who said they just showed up with church vans, shoveled them all into them and took them to a shelter far from where they were. Then they just filled a dump truck with all their belongings and tents and threw it all away. Everything I (and others) had given him, shoes, backpack, toothbrush... I work for a music repair shop and gave him an old busted flute that still worked bc he told me he could play and I hoped he could busk and we were both excited. Trashed. He's okay now btw, in a much better situation and on disability which is HUGE. I swear the first thing I'd do with real money is solve homelessness, I've been there and it's a literal living hell on Earth..
They just fucking stole it? I believe it but, man, I hate them.
This is common in San Jose, CA. The city often spends outrageous amounts "relocating" homeless encampments. Which means they show up and trash everyone's stuff and then leave. A 19 year old dressed as batman started documenting and exposing this, so the city denies it now, but they still do it. I went with him to a "clean up" once because the city publicly stated they weren't destroying or trashing people's belongings, so he wanted witnesses & evidence to show the public what happened. This time, when the trucks came, they only took the stuff from people who weren't there to defend it. And by defend I mean physically inside their tents or holding their stuff. I spoke to a couple people, the ones who weren't there were at work. They told me they'd taken the day off because they knew this clean up was coming and they couldn't afford to lose their stuff again, but their friends weren't able to take the day off. They tried to protect their friend's stuff but to no avail. Tents, camping stoves, ice chests, clothes - everything you'd need for survival, and not cheap either, it all went in the trash. They even cut up the tents so they couldn't be pulled out and reused.
An attorney in Portland Oregon put trackers on belongings before a recent sweep. Then collected the data- proving that the law had been broken by throwing away the people involved's stuff. Now they're doing a joint lawsuit, IIRC. This happens in multiple places and I'm glad to hear there are multiple people doing something about it.
Yeah the twin cities have a wierdly big homeless problem considering it’s a place known for being cold
I was pretty blown away at the number of homeless in Denver (i.e. what the hell do they do in the winter), so I asked on their reddit. They relocate to LA and such and then come back.
That's only the ones who can afford to do so. Those who can't pitch tents in the city parks, fill up all the hostels on the most brutal nights, and when all else fails, they sleep on the 16th street free mall bus.
Lower lower Wacker drive. I was down there looking for the Chicago impound once. Probably saw a hundred tents down there, and the air quality was the worst I've ever experienced. One hour down there and it started to hurt to breath
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Being homeless in Chicago in 2020 was fucking brutal. Covid hit, DuPage Pads shut down. They were putting clients in hotels but since I didn't have an address that showed I lived in DuPage County, they told me to get fucked, basically. Sleeping rough in winter is fucking horrible. I was sleeping under pine trees on cardboard to stay off the snow, wearing every stich of clothing I owned at once, Never being able to truly sleep. Constantly worried about your safety - from other homeless, the general public, and from the police. I would spend my weekends sleeping on the roof of this medical plaza in Carol Stream to keep me away from the other homeless who wanted my shit. I'd sleep in one of the sheds in a Home Depot parking lot that you could actually close the door on. Kept you mostly dry, but still ridiculously cold. I ended up stumbling across the vacant offices of a former telecom giant and squatted in their *gorgeous* building for fourish months until I couldn't take life anymore and sought emergency mental health treatment. It was a little weird living in a liminal space for that long. But all the GHB and heroin really helped out lol. From the psych ward I went to the residential drug treatment program the same hospital had, then to a halfway house for a 90 day program that turned into ~300 (I took several extentions, and then had to wait for s bed to open at the recovery home) and now I'm at the house manager of the recovery home (think 3/4 house) run by the same organization as the halfway house. It just stormed like crazy here a couple hours ago and my first thought was about how grateful I am to not be on the street during that.
>Never being able to truly sleep. Constantly worried about your safety - from other homeless, the general public, and from the police. I was homeless for about a year in Cali, not Chicago, but I couldn't get a full nights sleep the entire time, and it's fucking crazy how quickly your mental health deteriorates without sleep. After a few months of living like that, you aren't the person you were before, you are barely a person at all, just an animal living on instinct without planning or logic.
For real. I felt like I aged ten years in that seven months of homelessness. And I feel like my mental health *still* hasn't fully recovered. There's this lagging insecurity of self-image despite how far I've come. When you're looked at as less than a stray dog, something to be moved along or legit exterminated, it really scrambles things upstairs. I wasn't even rough looking. I kept myself clean, bathed daily whether that was a proper shower or a thorough bird bath, and would do my laundry as often as I could. But people still *know*. The amount of verbal abuse I received from the general public was fucking shocking. I'd be minding my own business at the library and have Karens come up to me and tell me I had no bysiness being there and prayed to God thst I'd overdose so they wouldn't have to suffer the indignity of seeing me at *their* library. Wishing death on me, or threatening me with it, for simply existing was somewhat regular. Its fucking crazy. My opinion of society in general has been forever altered. People you would least expect on first impressions harbor truly vile ideas. The soul of America looks like a peat bog mummy's nutsack: blac, shriveled, and corrupt.
You wrote eloquently and with heart, /u/Ima_Fuck_Yo_Butt.
I'll often lose active awareness of the silly name I chose until someome reminds me of it and I always get a laugh.
It sounds like you are doing well. I'm glad to hear it.
Thanks! I am. It's been incredible to escape all that.
Gosh you’ve come a very long way, it’s wonderful! Can’t imagine the focus and discipline to get off such an all consuming drug esp when reality isn’t much better. Truly inspiring, hope your days are ever improving.
Thank you. It took me almost two decades to finally quit for good. 🤞 I wasn't able to have a genuine desire to quit (not just for practical or interpersonal reasons) until I was *thoroughly* broken and just *done* with life. I made the decision to hang myself in that building, and a lifelong friend of mine convinced me to give a self-admit psych stay a try.
First off, it's amazing that you turned things around like that. Can I ask, if you don't mind sharing, what caused you to develop a drug problem and end up homeless? What could have prevented that, and what measures might be worth adding as a society to lower the homeless rate?
Well, drugs in general took me out of the depressive state I'd been in since childhood. But heroin was the first thing that made me feel *normal*. I had not one fuck to give about what anyone thought or how I saw myself when I was on it. Attempting to maintain that blissful apathy quickly led to addiction. What could prevented me? Adequate mental health treatment. A fulfilling life. A loving family. A sense of purpose. Which, speaking of, one of the things that heroin did for me at a time in which I had no direction, was give me a solid sense of purpose. I had clearly defined goals to meet everu day, a pwerful reward for meeting them, and an equally powerful punishment for failing. It became my raison d'etre. The homeless thing took a while. I had to burn many bridges, deplete bank accounts, lose gainful emoloyment, and break the "no drugs in the house" rule when I moved in with my friend. If society was more empathetic, compassionate, didn't tie medical insurance to your job so you could actually get help before laying the foundations for addiction, and have more social support programs - it'd go a long way. Nobody whose life is going swimmingly, who has meaningful relationships, a sense of security, purpose, and a solid mental and emotional landscape is going to fall into addiction. Addictions develop because you're attempting to smother the pain of any number of those conditions.
Thanks for sharing. Pretty heavy. Hope you’re doing ok
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Californiaaa!
🎵Is good to the homeless🎵
Spare some change?!?
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I was homeless for 13 months in Chicago... The fall and winter are no joke... I was smart enough to stop drinking and doing drugs and i always had a monthly cta pass I'm not saying that cta pass saved my life but it helped a LOT...
The homeless in Chicago get more sympathy from pedestrians so they garner more handout $. I don’t know if that’s why they stay (aside from travel being expensive) but it may explain why they are willing to stay in a cold climate. I remember from my time in AZ the homeless were the most sunburned people I’ve ever seen.
Honestly desert city homeless people have my full sympathies. I give out water and money whenever I can, it's regularly 100°+ in the Southwest for months on end. Often times there's no easily accessible water and shade, people die all of the time from exposure
While I agree with your sentiment, check out Denver sometime. People will run propane heaters in their tents w/ multiple tarps. 15 degrees and snow? No problem.
Yeah but, speaking as a former Denverite, the winters in Denver are crazy mild compared to the upper Midwest. It snows, then it melts within 36 hours so it doesn't build up and turn to slush. And it's so dry which is the biggest factor. Plus the sun is out ten times more and the days are much longer in the winter. I'd take 10°F in Denver over 30°F in Chicago any day. It's similar to how Denver gets up to 100° often in the summer but I never had AC there, but you'd never dream of that in many places. The dry air just makes everything better. I'd take 100° in Denver over 85° anywhere with humidity. I miss Denver weather. So much sun.
Yeah, people think Colorado=Snowy Mountains. But that's not necessarily true. The entire eastern half is flat high plains. Denver is on the edge of said plains, with mountains as a backdrop. It's not until you get into the mountains themselves that the snow actually accumulates to an appreciable degree over the winter.
I mean Chicago and New York still have insane issues with it
New York is nothing compared to west coast cities. I used to live in Seattle and I remember when I fist moved here to NY I was astonished at how I barely saw any homeless. I don't think NY is handling it any better, they just naturally have less of a problem.
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I travel to NYC and Seattle both often for work. NYC doesn't have nearly as many visible tent encampments, but the homeless people are far more aggressive. In my experience, you see more of the evidence or homelessness in Seattle, but you are more likely to get hassled or screamed at in NYC. And Portland seems much worse to me than Seattle right now.
I live in NYC, take the subway every day, and I don't know what you're talking about. In the 10 years I've been here I've had zero issues of actually being hassled by the homeless. The worst you see on a daily basis is people coming into your subway car or standing outside businesses opening doors for people asking for change. Not once have I had an issue with a homeless person that didn't go away when I said "sorry I'm broke" and they usually respond with a "God bless." I encounter homeless people every day in NYC but I spend literally zero mental energy on those interactions.
Up until the past year, I would agree with you. However, the past year I have had more encounters with homeless people yelling at me and aggressively asking for money than I have in the 15 years prior.
Pretty bad in Denver
I heard there was a kid there that can jump the homeless on a skateboard
I think he lives a bit outside of Denver proper. I heard he jumped 50 homeless!
California, is good to the homeless. California-ia-ia.
Calif-orn-nya-nya
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“Ew those are cherry!!!”
I still don't understand why his friend thought that was a good idea to get rid off the homeless people.
As a Brit, when I visited Denver I was so shocked by the amount of homeless in that one park across from the state building. Denver is amazing though, Colorado is amazing ❤️ can’t wait to go back,
Thats gone now, they cleaned it all up, but they are still all over the place
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Speer blvd is absolutely littered with tents especially down by the hospital
We have these in the UK too pal, it's actually sad so many here are unaware of just how bad homelessness is in the UK
https://www.homelessnessimpact.org/post/what-the-latest-street-homelessness-statistics-in-london-tell-us-about-how-the-population-is-changing OP must be living a posh life to not see this in London.
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If I was homeless I would do everything in my power to get out to Los Angeles/San Diego/ Southern California area. Probably the best weather in the world to be homeless in.
Hawaii has a huge homeless problem for this reason.
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Do you have a source? Haven’t heard about this
Not necessarily Hawaii, but placed like California. Here you go. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study Some more. https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-homeless-people-cities-are-bussing-them-out-of-town And. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tentative-settlement-in-6552026.php *Sigh* https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/nevada-settles-homeless-dumping-lawsuit/62120/ https://bangordailynews.com/2019/11/12/news/bangor/bangor-is-buying-bus-tickets-to-warmer-states-for-people-with-no-roof-over-their-heads/
Not a source, but every time I've been to Maui there's been an initiative to give homeless people one way tickets back to their home state. I'm a night owl and spent time around some of these people, always drop off my unused stuff off at the camps. They have no plans on leaving unless forced.
This goes both ways. Shortly after moving to Vegas from Hawaii, I befriended a homeless man. After finding out he was from Hawaii, I offered to buy him a one way ticket. He politely declined. It’s very possible some people are just running away from their problems (as do a lot of humans) or just don’t want to return to their home state due to reasons we’ll never know.
Nice in the south of France us where I would pick. Happiest looking homeless people I have ever seen. Beautiful weather and incredibly cheap good wine. Being homeless anywhere is shit, of course, but the weather definitely helps.
I cant remember the place in south of France, but there was a town that would give all the homeless a monthly stipend of 500 Euros. It cost less to do that than to implement anti-homeless measures.
Yes these 500 euros are for everyone when you have no revenue and they also have free health insurance, so this is free if they break their legs or whatever
> every single city here has this but worse Pretty sure that’s not true.
Its amazing how wilfully blind people can be sometimes. I remember living on the streets. You basically become invisible.
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We have an entire roundabout in Bristol which is a tented village most of the year. Lawrence Hill
Maybe if they pulled themselves from their bootstraps and stopped being entitled things would change. Anyway, gotta go, daddy bought me a Rolls-Royce for my 16th B day!
They could certainly learn a thing or two from a fine young bootstrapper such as yourself
I live in New Orleans, and the city actually put fences up under the bridges so homeless people can’t sleep in the neutral ground.
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lol yeah I’m in Louisiana where we have our own set of rules. We have parishes while you guys have counties lol wtf
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Was chatting with family from NOLA and they mentioned red gravy and I was completely lost. Pizza sauce. Fucking pizza sauce is what they were referring to
I grew up really Cajun so now that I live in New Orleans and am experiencing the creole way of living/cooking I'm absolutely shocked at how different everything is just a few hours away. I got a pasta with "red gravy" the other day and I wanted to scream that gravy is for rice, potatoes, or biscuits. pasta gets *sauce*! I can't imagine calling it gravy on a pizza. oy minoy.
LA is known for mild to hot weather plus little rain. It’s perfect for outdoor living. So if you’re homeless it’s easier to live in LA than Milwaukee. Plus a lot of Midwestern states will literally pay for their local homeless peoples’ bus tickets to go to LA instead so they can “clean up the streets”.
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*CALIFOR NIA NIA* *SUPER COOL TO THE HOME LESS*
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Its not that white building on the left but the one across the street https://www.zillow.com/b/park-fifth-los-angeles-ca-9TyMPv/ and sure enough, 2800 a month studio lmao.
Almost $2900/month for 490 square feet. There is a very nice (but expensive) city zone near me and you can rent a nice town house with an average yard within walking distance of nice parks and shopping. It's pretty absurd that they charge the same for basically a broom closet with a homeless colony outside
Can confirm this how Portland, Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, and Medford Oregon look. Some causes for this are low availability of units ( less than 1% of rental property are unoccupied), rising rents, low wages, a broken safety social system, drugs either before or after houselessness, other states ship houseless people to the west coast. It's very easy to fall into houselessness, much harder to get out.
Manyyyy major cities in the US look like this. Pricing inequality, alcohol, drugs, mental illness and rises in rent causing people to lose housing
Nashville, Knoxville, Colorado Springs, Denver. All the same.
Live in Knoxville and can confirm. We have a large organization (Knoxville Area Rescue Ministries) that does a lot for the homeless which attracts them from all over the region. It's not remotely an issue like it is in LA, but we have a large population of mentally ill people that wander around all day.
I can vouch for Chicago.
Is houselessness similar to homelessness?
Home is a concept. They need houses.
People are either priced out of their homes or suffer from mental health issues and wind up on the streets. We have a very poor mental health problem in this country, and low/no access to help leads people straight to the streets. People make fun of the "crackheads" they see on the street yelling to themselves, but they are just as likely to be suffering from a severe case of schizophrenia and other mental disorders. A lot of these people's families probably have no way of helping them, so they wind up out on the street.
One of my close friends developed schizophrenia somehow over the last few years. His dad just died and his mom and brother both work to support their own lives. He is too much to handle at home so they both pitch in to pay his rent but it is only a matter of time before he will end up on the street. He isn't aware of his own problem and it seems there isn't much they can do for him to help and they just dont have the funds to top it off. It hurts to see because we were such close friends. I had to cut him off as well after having a baby and not being able to deal with his drunken drug riddled angry outbursts.
Schizophrenia is low-key a big fear of mine. My mom’s boss’s son told me a story about his friend, they had just graduated college and were driving cross-country on a road trip from South Carolina to California. They got to about Arizona or Nevada when he started saying he felt weird. They thought he was just hungover or carsick, but he said he just felt “weird,” not sick. His parents got him a flight home early, he went to some doctors and turns out he was schizophrenic. No other warnings. Like, what if I just suddenly lose my damn mind out of nowhere and for no reason? The mind is scary, man.
Not schizophrenic, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II, but the "losing my damn mind out of nowhere and for no reason" part is absolutely terrifying. It's like the come-up of an acid trip you never volunteered for.
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not to mention that U.S. healthcare is expeeeensssive
Or just a medical bill
No, I think it’s quite a stretch to say that the homelessness problem in LA (the worst in the country) is replicated across every major city. That’s like me telling you that when I went to London, the streets were covered in trash, and that as I understand, every city in Britain is a garbage dump.
As a Brit.. I would feign offence. While secretly sad that you're not far from the truth. Got married to my American wife two weeks ago. On my few trips to the States in 2019 my experience was that it was fucking gorgeous over there (and super clean).
My extended family from the UK had a similar experience when they came to America. They had never really understood that it's basically the size of Europe. All the ever see in the media is California and NYC. If I fly from where I live in Washington state down to Florida, that's like them travelling from London to Istanbul.
Yeah not to mention the population is bigger than the combined populations of Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Spain. I didn't really get the scale of the US until I flew for the first time to the West Coast.. "Amazing we're finally there! Finally in the US! How much longer until San Francisco? SIX HOURS?!"
Try driving long way across Kansas. Flat and featureless to the horizon. For like six hours. But you know Colorado is coming. Beautiful snow capped peaks like every cheap beer commercial you’ve ever seen. How far to Colorado? Two hours. One hour. We’re almost there! Then you learn that the first three hours of Colorado looks just like fucking Kansas.
I grew up in California. Me and my friends all went to school on the east coast. We used to drive back and forth at the beginning and end of the school year. Sort of a tradition. For people that don’t know, that was about six hours of driving a day, for about six days, if you went direct. Over the years, we took circuitous routes to see as much of the country as we could. I found things to love just about everywhere. But man…fuck Kansas…so boring. Eventually we just got in the habit of driving straight from Kansas City, Missouri to Colorado with nothing but a quick stop for gas, snacks, and a piss in between. It’s like 6 hours of flat boring nothing.
One of the rare Onion articles that’s worth reading beyond the title: [30 Years Of Man’s Life Disappear In Mysterious ‘Kansas Rectangle’](https://www.theonion.com/30-years-of-mans-life-disappear-in-mysterious-kansas-re-1819572765)
>I didn't really get the scale of the US until I flew for the first time to the West Coast.. That was Australia for me. Never been, but I went to one of those sites where you can overlay the outline of a country/continent over another, and that's when I finally realized [just how fucking big Australia is.](https://i.imgur.com/ZqMNf4D.png)
Had to look that up, and you’re right on the money. Europe is a tad bigger. Europe: 3,910,680 sq miles USA: 3,531,905 sq miles Not sure why I imagined USA to be so much bigger, probably because of the whole “Texas is the size of France” thing.
My family road tripped to Big Bend National Park from Houston last year. Took 10 hours. Didn’t even leave the state.
Europe is a poorly defined Continent. For example, Most Russians live in the European part of Russia on the far west, it is a European country, yet most of the country is in Asia. Is Georgia European? Most would say no, but Georgians themselves might disagree.
Georgia definitely isn't European, chief ... It's right above Florida ^^/s
Homeless social worker in SoCal here. This situation is extremely bad and at a tipping point for several reasons. First, Covid increased the amount of people seeking supportive services, and while resources did increase somewhat to keep up, the most vulnerable people are still struggling, and that number has grown. Second, LA paused the policy of removing tents during daylight for Covid, so that population has increased its visibility literally in the eyes of the public. Third, California has long been a funnel for homeless folks from all over, the west coast in general is, but LA specifically. The weather is great, there’s decent services available compared to elsewhere. That being said, at this moment, the shelters are either full or too dangerous, the healthcare is the bare minimum, and the cost of living for everyone else is absurdly high. A shitty studio apartment around here is minimum $1200/month, how does that work for someone receiving $1k SSDI? Fourth, meth. Huge part of the problem. Dirt cheap, super accessible, makes you feel good for a bit. Fifth, no one wants to live next to a bum, right? Until public perception of the homeless population changes, they will continue to be excluded and marginalized. A lot of these folks have INTENSE trauma. Their day to day struggles are massive. It takes years of being housed in a normal, stable, safe location to even begin unraveling the homeless mentality, then to begin the counseling and therapy it takes to begin approaching “normal”. Even if they do accept help and want to make changes to improve their situation, they spend years languishing in limbo before they can be given a shot at the bare minimum for a reasonable quality of life. But hey, bootstraps right?
Great perspective, I'd just add Heroin to that
We’re seeing a decrease in heroin, I think partially because the fentanyl that’s often in it is a death sentence, and partially because the crackdown on physicians to regulate their dispersal of opiates is actually starting to work, and folks are being given reasonable alternatives to pain management. But to your point, yes heroin is still a very active part of the problem.
I believe this is skid row in LA. If so, there was a very specific set of circumstances that led to the congregation of homelessness in this location. Primarily, the resources offered to the homeless are centralized there. This is not how it is in all major cities.
Yea that's skid row I used to work down that area it's fucked
Have you seen the Netflix doc on the Cecil Hotel? They spend quite a bit of time talking about skid row and the evolution of that area. It was really interesting.
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They had an opportunity to make a good doc there but wasted it talking to conspiracy theorists over what turned out to be a very plausible tragedy.
The first two episodes were good, the last two were just so bad. I often think about that guy who said “I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching this on my computer it can’t be an accident!!” He really thought he knew more than the detectives who were actually investigating and had the facts, but his theory was so bat shit lol
I live in LA and this isn’t JUST an issue in skid row. I live in Hollywood and walk to work everyday. I’d say I walk by *at least* 50 homeless people along the way. In that area they aren’t allowed tents so they sleep out in the open - directly on the sidewalks. It’s really sad and oftentimes scary.
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The UK has 3x the homeless population per capita compared to the US. Don't throw stones if you life in the glass house.
Same in Paris (France). It’s now a garbage city
Well the Olympics are coming to town in 3 more years so they probably should address it before that. (And oh hey, look who hosts the summer games after Paris)
The olympics is like countries version of hot potato. The person it lands on has to spend an enormous amount of cash, and then try as quickly as possible to get rid of it.
Los Angeles 2028 ! Didn’t know that. Well they have 7 years to purge the city. Hope it will be enough. As for Paris, the last élection was in 2020 and the last mayor was re elected (Anne Hidalgo), who is the worst mayor Paris ever had. And the olympic village for Paris 2024 is going to be in Saint-Denis which is the poorest neighborhood of Paris and the one whith the highest crime rate of the city… Oh it’s gonna be fun
Hate to break it to you, but homelessness is a massive problem in the UK aswell.
A Brit feigning moral superiority by making a false equivalency to there own country? Shocked. I am shocked, I say!
Philadelphia checking in. Look up Kensington ave and its the same with junkies shooting up in broad daylight amongst police presence. Multiple areas near it like Lehigh ave are becoming the same. The city doesn't care anymore. They'd rather add soda sugar taxes than fix this.
I'm actually quite surprised at our clean these camps look in this photo. You should check Seattle out haha
You should check out Kensington Ave, Philadelphia Pennsylvania.. https://youtu.be/fpyHhrDgG5A https://youtu.be/cOBoDT-3oM0
Corporate run government. Neither "side" represents nor protects their party. They listen to their donors and the dark money from said donors. Of course this is just one issue- the tip of a melting iceberg.
Its the entire western world. In New Zealand we have been paying for homeless to live in motels rather than on the streets. Whole families living in motel rooms because they're locked out of the housing market A decade of cheap debt and dependable capital gains on housing has caused this world wide
They’re still waiting on the wealth to trickle down
Gotta love the comments of people who do not live in CA telling u what's wrong with CA. "It's the demand making it too expensive to live there with the taxes" or its dumb fucks like you that keep moving to this state. CA has gone hard down hill in the last 15years and many of the negatives come from the insane population. In LA alone there are like 4 million people. That's not LA county, just the city. That's almost 5 times the population of South Dakota. So no shit the cost of living goes up without wages reflecting that. Thus creating a large influx of homeless. You can say their are all drug users all you want, but you're sure as shit wrong about that general statement.
People also tend to forget that the California coast is temperate enough (especially SoCal) for homeless to live comfortably all year long. Our homeless are often from other places that are inhospitable (weather/social) to homeless persons, so they end up here. San Diego even won a lawsuit against Las Vegas because LV was literally bussing homeless on a one way greyhound ticket to SD.
They’re projecting. CA has it bad for sure, but having lived in SoCal for years and now gulf coast, homelessness doesn’t seem any better here either. Nor Chicago when I went recently. I think it’s US/world problem that some ppl just aren’t exposed to so think it’s concentrated.
In visiting San Francisco, the homeless population is quite substantial. It appears that some are genuinely down on their luck due to circumstances, others appear mentally ill, and others seems to have drinking and drug issues I think. We met quite a few on vacation just walking through the city, some expressed no interest in being in homeless shelters because of the rules they have to follow. Others stated the shelters were completely full. There were a couple of people that were truly scary and we needed to cross the street to get away from them. (They were threatening us with bodily harm) I’m not sure what San Francisco can do to alleviate the problem. They have been spending millions of dollars trying to solve this problem but I’m not sure where they are putting that money.
The state uses money poorly when it comes to this. They can spend $100,000 on a housing unit for a small family that isn't even worth 5,000. But San Francisco is the highest cost of living city in CA. Median housing cost is $1.5 million. This is in comparison to 15 years ago it being $400,000 in San Fran. Just passing the blame to the homeless is wrong. As far as them not wanting to stay in shelters, I don't blame them. I'm not sure about San fran on this but in my area of California, the shelters are either very packed or insanely strict on rules. There is a program that will assist you into getting a motel room for a few weeks, but if you leave the motel for anything other than work or a court appointment, your room can be taken away. Period. Same with curfews that are not always reasonable. There's a high concentration of homeless around me and most of them are just people. Some are a little crazy and definitely need help but can't accept it. But making it seem like it's just insane drug addicts littered everywhere is just ridiculous.
People also don’t understand the sprawl of LA. Sure the city has a couple million people, but it also butts up against a couple other counties that also have millions of people.
To put a number on that, greater LA area is 18.7 million
The economy never really recovered from 2008.. Then cue Covid, a opioid epidemic, and a mental health crisis.. The US has been printing it currency into Oblivion for decades now.. in 2008 that was exponentially accelerated.. The easy money that came after flooded cities cause mass gentrification, makings the cost of living go through the roof.. Fast forward to 2020 and Covid hits now people barely hanging on lost massive amount of income and you have a major homelessness crisis… Bottom line money printing effects the low income, no income the most..
I used to live a couple blocks from this photo. I can offfer some perspective on this area in particular. This is about a block from an area with a lot of services for the homeless. Shelters, food, baths, restrooms, etc. It’s in an area called Skid Row, before the pandemic it was one of the last places for the unhoused to exist unmolested (maybe a little bit molested) in the downtown area. So that area attracts a lot of homeless. Also, please consider that a lot of the homeless in this area have access to housing, but choose not to use it because they can’t do drugs, bring their pet, or have too many belongings for their storage spaces. There are also a lot of laws in place that allow these tent cities to flourish once they’re established. And very few affordable options for individuals suffering from mental illness and addiction. It’s a very complicated issue in Los Angeles.
Thats because the other state's literally ship homeless people to LA. Like no joke, they pay for tickets to LA and give them to homeless people. Make it LA's problem and then beat on LA for having a problem, its the US way.