Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study

by chaostheory • 8 years ago

239 119 8 years ago

ianmcgowan• 8 years ago

An interesting, yet depressing story. Quite a nuanced look at a complex issue. The portaits of the homeless people involved helped humanize an otherwise abstract problem.

The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story. The Guardian seems to be taking a page from The NY Times recently.

trevyn• 8 years ago

Weird, I experienced the interactivity as completely broken on iOS Chrome. I couldn’t even scroll properly to just read the article.

nitwit005• 8 years ago

I also hit that issue on android. Had to keep scrolling on a text portion of the page until it skipped past the chart.

Symbiote2• 8 years ago

The Guardian has been doing this for many years. I don't know when it started, but there are some examples linked from this overview from 2011.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/mar/28/data-v...

dylan604• 8 years ago

The graphics and web design are very cool, definitely enhancing the story.

The web design is not intuitive. Why the need to break the browser's most basic functionality of vertical scrolling. The chart "visualizing" the data in 3 stages made me think the page was at the bottom. The animation finished, and then I tried to scroll past, except nothing happened. I had to continue "scrolling" to get the page to not move but have the next stage of animation start. Also, scrolling text over background text just looks confusing

everybodyknows• 8 years ago

Phoenix AZ was running a program like this decades ago. They'd tell the homeless about the great weather and services in San Diego, and put them on the bus -- no arrangements at all on the receiving end. Then they started getting phone calls from SD city hall...

ObsoleteNerd2• 8 years ago

While they should definitely consider serving up a more static version for mobile (couldn't scroll on Firefox Android), the experience of reading this article on my desktop was truly awesome.

I absolutely loved the graphics, cinemagraphs, and entire experience, and really do think it added immensely to the story itself.

Is there a name for this style of article? Do they use some existing JS library or is it all hand crafted?

alexbecker• 8 years ago

Scrolling even on desktop was janky for me, and it was hard to center the paragraphs that were supposed to overlay the maps.

ObsoleteNerd2• 8 years ago

Goes to show just how broken the web is lately. I quit web dev after 20 years in the industry because it was frustrating me so much. I pretty much exclusively deal with hardware now and love that if I solder everything right, and put everything where it's supposed to, it works, and anything wrong with it is usually my fault or a broken component.

Worked perfectly on Firefox Developer Edition / Windows 10. Was smooth and I didn't notice a single issue, FWIW.

nickevershed• 8 years ago

We call them "big scrollies" in my newsroom, I have also seen the format referred to as "Scrollytelling". There are a few libraries such as graph-scroll and scrolllama which work well with d3 specifically, but otherwise you can just make your own.

darawk13• 8 years ago

IMO this is exactly what we ought to do. A big problem for the homeless is that they become poor in a place with no jobs for them, and then they get stuck. There are lots of places with shortages of the kind of labor they can offer, and making travel easier for them is a great thing to help fix that market failure.

prolikewh0a• 8 years ago

With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise. Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc.

Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see the homeless any longer.

spaceflunky• 8 years ago

Yes, there are jobs in every city, but in major cities there is difficulty in finding housing and transportation. The cost of living is also high, so it's easy to get into debt. Whereas in smaller cities, it's typically easier to get on your feet because housing is more accessible, transportation is better, and the general CoL is a lot lower.

taurath• 8 years ago

Having a home is frequently a prerequisite to be able to

A: show up to work on time

B: be groomed

C: establish a pattern of living

It’s hard to go to work not knowing if your car will be towed. Granted, where people COULD afford to live isn’t the city centers, where the services are and where people congregate. And the suburbs don’t want them either. Pretty sad state of affairs - we need to provide a real safety net so people aren’t stuck below the line of employability.

darawk13• 8 years ago

With unemployment this low there are plenty of entry level jobs people can get into in every city in the country. I live in Seattle and I see people out begging to give people entry level/beginner jobs by the light rail stations and all around the city, but homelessness is still on the rise.

If that were actually true, then there wouldn't be a homeless problem. The unemployment rate doesn't count these people. The unemployment rate only counts people who are 'actively looking' for a new job. People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics.

Bussing them elsewhere doesn't help when they still don't have a home, a bathroom/shower, clean clothes, food, etc.

Let's be careful about the conjugation of that verb. The city is not bussing them anywhere. The city is offering them free bus tickets, if they believe they will be happier elsewhere. If they want to stay, they stay. If they want to leave, they leave.

Bussing them out is just an idea done by the rich so they don't have to see the homeless any longer.

It's really not. They're not being forced out. They're just being given free tickets if they want them.

Symbiote2• 8 years ago

That's OK, but it seems reasonable to follow up on whether the bus ticket was useful or not.

Otherwise it's just conveniently moving the problem elsewhere.

darawk13• 8 years ago

Well, keep in mind the agency here. This isn't the city 'moving' anyone, these are people who are choosing to move themselves. I don't see why the city ought even have the responsibility to ensure they have somewhere to stay. Let them go where they want.

joeblau2• 8 years ago

I lived in San Francisco from 2011 - 2016 then moved to Pittsburgh, PA for a job opportunity. This past August, I went back to SF for a team building activity and I was blown away by how many fewer homeless people there were on the streets (excluding Tenderloin).

When I lived in SF, there were blocks that I would place money on being a homeless person there, and it seemed like most of them were relocated. Tons of familiar streets in SOMA were at or near zero homeless people. The interesting part is that my co-workers, who never lived in SF, remarked about how many homeless people were still out in the streets. To them, there were tons of homeless people and to me there were hardly any. I was so shocked that I even called one of my friends who is from the Bay Area and asked him what was going on?

staticautomatic• 8 years ago

They seem to just be relocating to other parts of the city as formerly homeless-heavy areas like parts of SOMA and the mission "gentrify." I walk through the loin twice a day on my way to my office on market st near the post-apocalyptic parts of SOMA and see a higher concentration of homeless in those areas than I used to. Perhaps you're revisiting the parts they've left or my un-scientific observations are wrong.

losteric• 8 years ago

They also seasonally relocate, heading south in the winter and spreading out in the summer. Seattle's transient homeless population is largely gone by mid-December

Ibethewalrus2• 8 years ago

Ahh the Loin...

ghaff• 8 years ago

Counterpoint. I've been traveling to SF pretty regularly for a very long time but for whatever reasons hadn't been there for year +. Was at an event at the Moscone in July. Found the homeless situation around the Moscone, Civic Center, etc. to be pretty shockingly bad. I'm not sure how anyone could think it had improved.

joeblau2• 8 years ago

Oh yeah, 6th street - 8th street on market is still the same. I actually walked back from the Mission one night and one of my co-workers was like "You walked me through a crack den." Most of the people down there were strung out and not violent, but he was definitely not comfortable.

Gilde[1] is right near the area you're talking about and they provide tons of services for the homeless and mentally ill so there is a high concentration around that area.

[1] https://www.glide.org

jakelarkin3• 8 years ago

this is the Nash Equilibrium type problem that exists with US federalism and extreme poverty. Cities just ship people around hoping to reduce their share of cost, while the homeless just become more physically sick or addicted, and mentally traumatized, so they become more costly to care for in aggregate over a lifetime. Everyone is worse off. It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing.

PhantomGremlin• 8 years ago

It would be so much simpler, cheaper if society just got people back on their feet as quickly as possible with focused care & rapid re-housing.

I think everyone can agree that it would greatly benefit society to get "people back on their feet".

But how? There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness. In many places, The Rent Is Too Damn High.

IMO solving this problem is by no means "simple". How expensive is it to do "focused care"? Has it been tried, and what's its track record?

SolaceQuantum• 8 years ago

From what I understand there have been several successful pilot projects that are variously shut down or are considered inappropriate for other cities (politically unpopular). Utah just straight up housed people to great success. NYC has a massive homeless population but they also put a ton of money into housing their homeless- also to fairly decent success. For drug addiction, there have been successful needle providing clinics in Canada and America currently has methodone clinics to great success. There are various police programs just for connecting homeless people to resources to get clean and start working, and otherwise providing them what they need to survive until they’re ready, and we know these have had success also. None of them are politically popular and there’s a lot of opposition to implementing any of them.

michaelchisari3• 8 years ago

There's a virtually unlimited stream of drugs coming into this country. There are many people who have mental illness.

Anybody with a drug problem should be able to walk into a hospital, say "I'm addicted to X" and get into treatment immediately, free of charge.

Anybody with a mental illness should be able to walk into a hospital, say "I can't take care of myself because X keeps happening in my brain" and get into treatment immediately, free of charge.

If you've ever tried to help someone get clean or get mental health inpatient care in the U.S., you can completely understand how people end up on the streets who could otherwise be productive members of society.

rectang• 8 years ago

The intractable problem is that helping the homeless is seen as moral hazard by a large segment of the American populace. Our programs are incoherent because some want to provide assistance and others to withhold it.

jakelarkin3• 8 years ago

we've rebuilt like 15 countries (after bombing them) in the past ... somehow its totally impossible to temporarily house a fractional percentage of people in our country and make sure they get a job or their meds instead of addicted to heroin

theres so many bs political excuses; bad zoning, bad building regulation, bad union rules, bad health regulations, bad drug laws, civil legal liability, cost of Rx drugs ... as if government doesnt have have power to fix those things. it's a feigned helplessness because the poor inherently have no political leverage/value to those in power.

SturgeonsLaw• 8 years ago

Great strides in helping the homeless can be achieved by giving them housing. It almost sounds like a tautology, and it triggers outrage in certain segments of the population, but once people have that stable foundation they can then work towards rebuilding their life.

lsc• 8 years ago

IMO solving this problem is by no means "simple".

I think providing people housing is simple. It's just expensive.

briandear5• 8 years ago

With the hundreds of millions SF spends on the homeless, it could be fair to say that a large number of homeless don’t want “care” or “re-housing.” The city spends more and more and it doesn’t make a dent in the numbers. An objective observer might suggest that the more you subsidize something, the more of it you get. Compared to most places, it’s easier to be homeless in San Francisco, which could create a disincentive for the homeless to care about getting off the street.

jakelarkin3• 8 years ago

i agree SF needs less coddling and way stronger sticks (at least for the young & able-bodied), but fundamentally theres no where for these people to go to try to get it together. cost of housing way above welfare/SSID in a 50 mile radius. there's zero net shelter space. because the political incentives on the west coast (nimby, mellow weather, already high taxes) are to not bother to build them.

theres also not enough jail space or PD headcount, so dealers, petty burglars just cycle in and out without consequence. its a vicious cycle of extreme poverty that starts and ends with a corrupt, poorly run local government

eeZah7Ux• 8 years ago

Having to download HD videos an many MB of other stuff to read few pages of text on poverty.

Oh the sad irony :(

RickJWagner• 8 years ago

The guy from Key West is bummed because he can't go back to the shelter he was living at. His plan was to return there, even as a fallback. He was COUNTING on it being there for him.

I think that's part of the problem.

jimnotgym• 8 years ago

Does anyone else find that it especially easy to accidentally click ads on The Guardian whilst browsing on mobile? I don't get it with other sites. If so, I wonder what they have done to make that the case?

I'm generally less annoyed by the Guardian site than many, so don't bother with 'Reader View'

habosa• 8 years ago

Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt.

It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem.

[0] http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...

conanbatt8• 8 years ago

The article even turns it around: if no bussing were included, the homeless population might be double what it is. SF is a net homeless exporter (with the huge caveat of impartial data).

pound• 8 years ago

Just a little nit: while article says they lived in SF and !had homes! survey linked says they were just SF residents prior to becoming homeless (though it mentions that 49% of them were living in SF at least 10 years, but don't forget that ~65% of SF residents are renters).

Residency usually just based on any bill with city address within last 30 days.

I can easy imagine case when someone moved to SF with hope that things will work out in big city, spent savings on few months of rent and with nowhere else to go and no established income ended up on the streets. While it's a sad situation it fits that previous SF residency narrative and in the same time not exactly part of some native san franciscans ending up on streets due to yet another gentrification cycle everybody so keen to bring up whenever homeless origin is being mentioned.

TangoTrotFox3• 8 years ago

There's an even bigger problem. There was no validation at all. It was based on self reporting which, in turn, was based on asking [ideally] random homeless individuals, and then extrapolating that outward. There is an incentive for individuals to lie here if they believe that 'native' homeless might be subject to preferential treatment, or if reporting 'native' homeless increases could result in more favorable incentives for the homeless. And given how big of news homelessness and home price issues are in San Francisco, I think this motivation is a major concern.

I am curious about the baselines here for other areas though. Even given the incentive to lie, the reported numbers given still seem quite high to me. The most liberal metric is living in the city for at least 10 years, which applied to just below 50% of the homeless. Even if we take the most conservative metric of 'migratory' patterns, with 30% of individuals having moved to San Francisco after becoming homeless, that still seems very high. But I don't really have a baseline for comparison in other major cities and search is not turning up any particularly great sources.

ericfrenkiel• 8 years ago

Considering there is existential incentive to lie about being from San Francisco, this survey qualifies as a biased source of information. It should not be held up as proof that whatever is working would work better if only we would please double the budget.

tomcam2• 8 years ago

I couldn't find the part about where they had phones. Can you quote it for me so I can search for it?

masonic2• 8 years ago

http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/lifeline/

Plans can include mobile data, too. Even those is the USA illegally can qualify.

tomc1985• 8 years ago

Forget San Francisco. Everyone talks about SF. Few talk about LA. Nobody talks about Santa Barbara or San Diego.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7-w4szWoQ

The encampments shown there (which are talking about LA) are exactly like the encampments dotting the coastline in SB and along the onramps in Barrio Logan in SD. I imagine the problem is emdemic to most of the populated California coast.

masonic2• 8 years ago

If you check the links regarding that "poll", they don't even exist (the sfgov ones).

The only such study wasn't even a "study", just a survey with no verification of the responses. And the responses defy reality (e.g. 48% claim to have had permanent SF residence for over 10 years, which is a higher rate than the general self-supporting population).

_57jb• 8 years ago

I really appreciate the amount of data and what felt like an objective view on both sides of the issue, some folks greatly benefited whereas it was problematic for others.

Ultimately it landed in needing more data, immense respect for that type of data driven journalism.

Really love the visuals added as well!

jorblumesea• 8 years ago

The US lacks a true mental healthcare system, and not even a healthcare system available to the poor. Not a surprise that cities just move the problem around, what can they do? It's a national problem with zero national coordination or resources.

briandear5• 8 years ago

That isn’t true at all. Just a quick google search reveals a plethora of indigent care along with Medicaid as well as faith-based organizations. We should be more outraged at the VA system.

brownbat• 8 years ago

Reminded me of this story about Puerto Rico's practice of sending those with addictions to Chicago:

http://interactive.wbez.org/puertoricochicagopipeline/

flyGuyOnTheSly2• 8 years ago

But he maintained the policy was justified to discourage abuse – a point echoed by his former deputy, Mike Tolbert, who said it was the only way to prevent the shelter from being used as a “travel agency”.

Why not simply restrict the free travel ticket a second time? Instead of the basic necessities like food and shelter?

Writing that out makes even less sense once you think it through, however.

If the goal of the city is to relieve itself of homeless people, they should offer as many free bus tickets out of town as homeless people can ask for... Even multiple tickets in a row... Becoming that dreaded "travel agency" that Mike Tolbert warns about.

Surely it would be less expensive to pay for a second free bus ticket than to pay two police officers to arrest the same person 3+ times in a row for sleeping on the beach... And eventually the person might find a city or town that caters to their needs better than their first destination might have and end up staying.

briandear5• 8 years ago

So taxpayers just keep paying for tickets until the person figures things out? If they know it’s a one way ticket and returning could result in an arrest for vagrancy, that seems to be a pretty strong incentive to stay away. The Key West man in the story admitted that he didn’t think they were serious. Well, they were.

I am not arguing other points of the story, only saying that as a taxpayer, unlimited free bus tickets to anywhere doesn’t sound like a fair deal for the people who pay taxes.

Homelessness is a tragedy for some and a lifestyle for others, that’s just a fact. Being homeless doesn’t somehow make you free of accountability for your actions: you sign an agreement, that should mean something.

nambit• 8 years ago

Compared to the millions big cities spend trying to combat homelessness, free bus tickets seem like a bargain.

flyGuyOnTheSly2• 8 years ago

A lot of "homeless" people are actually "people suffering mental illness who haven't had adequate treatment".

It seems crazy to you to think that somebody giving you a free bus ticket out of town isn't serious about your not being able to return... but to a mentally ill human being it's not so cut and dry.

Spooky23• 8 years ago

Cities with services often attract homeless and people looking for a better deal. My dad ran a section 8 program, and his backlog plunged when NYC started accepting more people... you could wait months upstate or show up in Brooklyn and be in a free temporary placement in hours or days.

Other places will mention this to clients. South Carolina was pretty notorious for giving sick Medicaid patients to northeast states with enhanced Medicaid in the past, for example.

mncharity2• 8 years ago

I wonder to what extent poor non-homeless populations are similarly shifted around the country, albeit more slowly?

A city in New Hampshire used federal funds to build low-income housing. Which attracted low-income people. Who disproportionately used city services. Which cost more than the added taxes and federal funds which came with them. So the city bought low-income housing. And tore it down. Which seems analogous to buying bus tickets out of town?

scottlocklin• 8 years ago

Erm, which city? I just moved here.

tomcam2• 8 years ago

Not in the low income housing section, I hope

abfan1127• 8 years ago

do you have a link to this?

mncharity2• 8 years ago

No, sorry, conversation with principals. Many years ago.

burlesona• 8 years ago

I’d vaguely heard of this before, a lot of friends and coworkers here in SF have said things like “you know that _____ just puts homeless on a one-way bus to San Francisco, that’s why it’s so bad here.” I thought it was an urban legend.

I was surprised and honestly amused to discover that this is real, but that it goes in the other direction, with SF bussing out ~10k homeless people in the last decade. Wow.

blondie9x• 8 years ago

Homelessness and lack of sufficient housing supply which drives the affordability problem is a national crisis. We need national solutions. We need to build more transit and more housing near that transit. We need to build denser and more towards the core. We need to not neglect the inner cities. America has the power to build better cities and solve this problem together.

Affordability and skyrocketing rent costs will improve if we work harder to increase the supply of housing near transit points. We need to act on this issue quickly.

abricot• 8 years ago

Lack of housing is one reason, but don't think it is the only one.

In Denmark there is no reason for anyone to be homeless by purely economic reasons, but we still have about 6500 out of a pop. of 5.77M

dantheman• 8 years ago

It's not a national problem, in fact it is extremely regional. It has to due with unnecessary restriction on building in those regions -- primarily to benefit current property owners.

em3rgent0rdr• 8 years ago

How much of homelessness is a result of laws hampering construction, such as zoning laws, building restrictions, rent control, which lead to housing costs significantly higher than what a free market would provide?

evanlivingston• 8 years ago

I think not a lot.

Kalium• 8 years ago

Some portion of the people experiencing homelessness is due to their being unable to afford housing in the city of their choice. Certainly, being unable to afford housing isn't helping anyone. But, as you so correctly note, it's almost certainly not the dominant factor.

With that said, there's some room for subtlety around land-use questions. For instance, land-use regulation can make it very difficult to build a shelter or a mental health treatment center. When the infrastructure to get people off the streets cannot be built, the most vulnerable among us will tend to stay where they are.

Bussed out: how America moves thousands of homeless people around the country

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