So why other big cities in other continents have so few homeless compard to SF and LA?

We do have people with mental problems here in Spain, but most don't roam the streets and end up living under a bridge.

And I can assure you the Spanish institutions are not precisely brilliant dealing with problems.

I have no idea, but I suspect it is combination of factors.

Let me ask, does Spain have and enforce loitering laws that prevent homeless of camping in front of businesses? Is this a factor in driving them to under the bridges instead of roaming the streets?

Because CA prohibits the police from enforcing any of these laws, and many prosecutors refuse to charge anyone with "low level" crime.

SF and LA (and CA in general) has the nicest weather, unlike other parts of the US where you have Extreme cold, extreme heat, or both in many area's LA and SF have mild temperate weather with limited rain fall, this promotes a "roaming the street" style of living.

You can see homeless people in my mid-sized city. They typically sit in front of supermarkets or places where they can get money. It's always the same faces. If there's a law about that, it isn't being enforced.

Most of Spain has a weather similar to CA.

It's almost like the second group has been deeply traumatized over time by a society whose only response to their mental health issues was a "fuck you" to the point that their mental health just keeps deteriorating and they become completely anti-social and actively avoid help, because fuck it why contribute back to a system that won't contribute to you. Many view the assistance as just being a pathway to get them back to contributing to a system that already failed them, not real help.

We could always do what Finland does: admit that these people will never be productive members of society again and get them into housing with social workers on staff. Yes, it’s a constant drain, but Finland says it actually saves money doing it that way, since the services people use on the street turn out to be even more expensive.

The big issue is that the USA doesn’t have a national strategy for dealing with homelessness. So any city offering programs that provide housing will become popular very quickly, with predictable results.

Finland is part of the EU and has a national strategy. While migration is easier between member countries, it isn’t unrestricted. You have to live in an EU country for some time before qualifying for welfare there, which means poor people can’t easily shop for the best social welfare. Finland doesn’t put its homeless in institutions, just in semi assisted living situations.

Homelessness is definitely a national problem. The fact that someone without housing from Great Falls Montana first winds up in Spokane and then Seattle should give you a clue. Yes, you can’t be homeless in great falls because you’ll die, so you move to a place where you’d at least survive with services and maybe better weather. Expecting the west coast cities to shoulder the nation’s homelessness burden is not just ludicrous, it is ultimately futile.

The premise is important in how the problem can be solved or not. If it’s a national problem and we treat it like a local problem, no solution can possibly work. If it is a local problem and we treat it like a national problem, likewise. Non-profits that count these things don’t do it very well, eg when they did the count in Seattle they found out 70% of its homeless population was from pioneer square (probably where they were counted), which is crazy if you know Seattle. We have a huge data problem which leads to bad solutions given wrong assumptions.

>>Finland is part of the EU and has a national strategy. While migration is easier between member countries, it isn’t unrestricted. You have to live in an EU country for some time before qualifying for welfare there, which means poor people can’t easily shop for the best social welfare. Finland doesn’t put its homeless in institutions, just in semi assisted living situations.

you have completely missed the Point, Finland is comparable to the single state of California, in fact Finland by most measurements is smaller both in economics and population than California.

California has a State wide (in this analogy would be a "national" Strategy)

The US is comparable to the entire EU, so it would be a "union wide" strategy not a "national" strategy.

Each State in the US, in this analogy would be a "nation" in the EU.

Critically here as well, most states do not have any kind of time limit on welfare, and I am not sure if it would be legal to do so in the US.

>>Homelessness is definitely a national problem.

Homelessness is a State Problem.

>Expecting the west coast cities to shoulder the nation’s homelessness burden is not just ludicrous, it is ultimately futile.

yet we expect Boarder stated to shoulder the nations burden for unregulated boarder? Any attempts by those states to move that population is viewed negatively, and any attempt to stop that migration is likewise negative.

>>We have a huge data problem which leads to bad solutions given wrong assumptions.

And you believe the federal government will solve this? Really? What examples do you have of them solving any social problem ever.?

You can easily move from Texas to California (greyhound flows are still vastly biased that way). You can’t easily move from Greece to Finland. It isn’t comparable at all, in fact, the fallacious premises you hold are why we can’t make any progress on this problem despite dumping billions of dollars of resources into it (LA alone has a $1.3b/year budget for the problem).

You believe migration from Texas to California is the reason LA has wasted 1.3 Billion on failed homeless programs?

What evidence do you have to support that claim...

Not just Texas, from the whole country. Texas is just the second biggest state out there and lacks social programs, also I took a greyhound across the USA when I was a kid and saw it first hand.

Think about it: lots of people from LA aren’t from LA or even California, why would its unhoused population be any different? The same is true with Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. We have freedom of movement in the USA, anyone can just show up and live in a city without permission, it isn’t like the “EU” as you claimed. Free migration of people means that if any city or state decides to just give housing to all its unhoused population, unhoused in the rest of the country would quickly congregate on that place. No, we don’t have that in Seattle or LA yet, but the sucky social services in those places is way better than Great Falls MT or Houston TX. So people come.

Most states also don't really have a comprehensive strategy for dealing with homelessness.

And social care is not institutionalization. In Finland specifically homeless people are given independent housing. It's a completely different thing. Look it up before you start comparing it with failed Titicut Follies-esque institutions in the US.