alt Hacker News> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless.
I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.
In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes.
Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.
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Even if it’s true that most unhoused people are mentally ill — and I agree with Tim’s reply — you have must consider causation versus correlation. Is an unhoused person dysfunctional because they were always that way and thus doomed to lose shelter, or are they dysfunctional because living on the streets is extremely damaging?
You see this question a lot when discussing drug usage among homeless. The percentages of addicts is undeniably high; we know this from point in time counts, for example. Some people take that as proof that homelessness is the fault of the homeless: they made the bad decision to take drugs, and that’s why they lost their jobs. But there’s also a lot of data showing that people are more likely to become addicted as a way to cope with street life.
And if, in fact, losing your home is something that can happen relatively easily in part because of wealth inequality, we’re right back to the original assertion.
Underbuilding is for sure another factor. It’s just not the only one.
I think you're seeing a segment of the homeless population and assuming that it represents the whole. It's likely that you encounter homeless people in your daily life and don't recognize them as being homeless.
> Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization
Sources? This just sounds like cope from a wealthy individual who wants to feel better about not helping the problem.
> Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill
Is that _why_ they're homeless? And are you aware of "drug induced schizophrenia?"
> which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.
There are no _cheap_ ways to do it. There are _tons_ of nice ways to do it.
> so all types of housing are very expensive.
And you're speaking of an area that has weather patterns that are conducive to living outside.
> Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.
Immediately? No. Proximally? Yes. Obviously.
At some point, it’s not a shortage. Everyone naturally wants to live in the best city on earth but expecting one city to house 8 billion people is silly. It’s okay to admit that some cities are at their natural reasonable capacity.
I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent.
Agree on the underbuilding.