So with your current living situation, you have an inside view (as well as an an outside view) of the situation; I’m listening to you. And I appreciate what you said about violence towards the homeless: just in the past day or so, supposedly a serial killer in L.A. is stalking the homeless, killed three of them; and in Las Vegas, unrelated, one homeless person was killed and 4 others injured in a single incident.
I did a little checking on stats. HUD provides them, but collects data on only one day of each year, and their data contradicts private, state and local reports, which find higher rates of homelessness than HUD. HUD reports about 600,000 homeless people in the country in 2022. Over the previous five years, there was an increase of 5.7% (which is attributed to pandemic aid drying up), but over the past decade, a decline of 6.3%. (The Wall Street Journal reports a national 11% increase in homelessness between 2022 and 2023.) HUD again: In 2022, more than half of the homeless population was in 4 states: CA (30%), NY (13%), Florida (5%), and Washington (4%). The states with the highest rates of homelessness relative to the number of residents were CA, Vermont, Oregon, and Hawaii. Differences in per capita homelessness across the US are not explained by varying rates of mental illness, drug addiction, or poverty, but by differences in the cost of housing.
HUD reports that about 20% of the homeless have severe mental illness (122,000 of them in 2022). About 20% of the homeless are “chronically homeless” (homeless a year or more, or 4 episodes of homelessness in the past 3 years). This is an historical high. There was a 47% increase in the chronically homeless in the past 5 years, attributed to major rent increases, and a 28% increase in the past decade.
What you said about the problem of homelessness sometimes being more in the eye of the observer made me think of the situation in San Francisco. SF classifies the homeless as either “unsheltered” (people sleeping on the streets, in parks, or cars) and “sheltered” (people staying in emergency shelters or transitional housing or another safe space). From 2013-2017, the unsheltered population grew by about 1%, but in that same time period, complaints about them (often by businesses) increased a whopping 781%. Dispatches from 911 (due to callers expressing concerns about the homeless, not criminal activity) increased 72%.
The unsheltered population now accounts for 40% of people homeless in SF, another historical high. And it is the “heightened visibility of the problem” that people (businesses, cities, individuals) are reacting to. Development and gentrification of areas disperses the unsheltered from places where they used to be able to exist “out of sight” or more safely and stably.
The visibility issue can warp public perception of the extent of homelessness. In CA in 2022, for instance, 67% of the homeless were unsheltered (and visible), whereas in New York, only 5% were (so 95% of the homeless in NY were “out of sight.”)
I read part of a very long article at Wikipedia on “Homelessness in the U.S.” A very substantial article giving some history, among other things, and I’ll read more of it later. The homeless have gone by a lot of different names: in 14th century England, they were called “vagabonds” or “unlicensed beggars” and subject to public whippings and other punishments. Homelessness in the US emerged as a national issue in 1870, where there were lots of single men homeless after the Civil War, and they referred to themselves as “hobohemia.” Homelessness spiked in the 1930s during the Depression where “Hooverville” camps sprang up, and again in the late 2000s following the Great Recession. They have been called “transients” as well, and there are now counter-culture “gutter punks” and “urban survivalists” and people who refer to themselves as “sleeping rough,” and people like you who are voluntarily van living.
The Wikipedia article identifies 3 main factors related to homelessness: socioeconomic, interpersonal, and individual (or LR, LL, and UL/UR in integral speak). It lists many causes of homelessness, well worth the read. I did not know, for instance, that nearly one-half of foster children in the U.S. become homeless when released from foster care at age 18. What is up with that?? Actually, I can speculate myself.
Because there are so many different contributing factors and causes, it does make it truly hard to address the situation in any comprehensive way, and it also makes it easy for entities to “pass the buck” on the problem. Some of the socioeconomic factors alone in the last decade–e.g. lack of affordable housing, rent increases, high mortgages, high eviction rates, etc.–seem to get little to no substantive attention. While the innumerable root causes for homelessness are inadequately addressed, so are the immediate concerns–the bed and shower as you say.
Still, while it is of no use and is perhaps even unkind to people experiencing being unhoused for me to say this, even if the homeless population in the US were 1 million, that’s .003% of the total population.
And, there are signs of some change maybe coming through the courts, at least for the unsheltered. Phoenix dispersed the tent encampments from various parts of the city, and was then ordered by the courts to purchase land for a homeless tent camp, complete with 24-hour security, sanitation facilities, and cooling centers, and walking distance to shops. I see this not as any permanent solution, but as a positive step, anyway.
While I question that too, whether we’re any happier or wiser as a world, we really don’t know much about what people complained about during the Stone Age, we don’t know their particular grievances in their lives, given the oral tradition of that time. The artifacts we have tend to be things that mystify or intrigue us, monuments, cave paintings/pictographs, etc., and as I say, we don’t really know what their complaints were in their daily lives, so it’s hard to make comparisons about happiness and such.
I have interests in some other areas but I will keep going with the focus on homelessness.