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user-inactivated  ·  2492 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Homelessness up 26% in LA YoY, 10% in Seattle , *61%* among LA youth

We don't have a beach but homelessness in Missouri is a total of 18,000 people in a population of 6 million. Down 36% from 2012 and it was only that high because of a tornado in 2011 that literally demolished peoples' houses. And even then, that's anyone who was homeless. Chronic homelessness in Missouri is a total of 2,200 people.

Here's the source for that. University of Missouri St. Louis Public Policy Research Center.

And I can guess that you're wondering if they're all in one place like KC or STL. But St. Louis is 5% of homelessness despite being 5% of the population. KC is a little higher with 375 chronic homeless (17% with 8% of the population). And those are just the metro areas when in fact St. Louis is just a small part of St. Louis County where there are another million people and KC extends in a similar way.

I just don't understand the appeal of spending all your money to live in LA.





kleinbl00  ·  2492 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Your link is from 2015. Missouri is still collating data from their 2017 count. The LA and Seattle counts are increases from 2016; for some reason Missouri didn't release a 2016 report. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say.

LA County has a population of about 10m. In 2015, there were 44,000 homeless. 60% of that is 26,000 - more homeless than Missouri but not stunningly more. In 2014, 20% of the country's homeless were in California but then, so was 11% of the nation's population.

I've never been homeless. I've known homeless, I ride among homeless, and I've been close to people who work with homeless. There's a stickiness to the situation - for whatever reason, these are people who don't have the resources or support network to start fresh somewhere else. It's one thing to pick up your life and move when you have resources; it cost me $7k to move my family from LA to Seattle and that was heading into a house we already owned. It'd be a lot less if we didn't have a house full of stuff but then the slip from "house full of stuff" to "living on the river" is a gradual one.

    I just don't understand the appeal of spending all your money to live in LA.

I spend a substantial amount of money to avoid doing exactly that and I have no regrets. But there are people who were born there, who live there, who have friends there, who have family there, and it's what they know. I grew up in New Mexico - "Land of Enchantment" which we all called "the land of entrapment" because it's super easy to lose all the resources necessary to leave.

And Albuquerque is like an HO scale model of Los Angeles.