West Coast baby
I’m not american and have never even been there but doesn’t New York city have the same problems? And AFAIK NYC is very vertical.
NYC doesn’t have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
But NYC is also an extremely expensive place to live, and built vertically due to a lack of space for outward expansion.
NYC doesn’t have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
Because you’ll literally die the very first winter night you’re homeless without shelter in NYC. They have a bunch of shelters, so the problem is less visible, and when they run out of space they bus them to L.A… Those that remain are found frozen to death in the morning.
This is anecdotal from browsing vagabond sources, but there’s a lot of reasons NYC might have fewer homeless.
A) The pigs and rules on the east coast are a lot more brutal towards the homeless than the west coast. This both leads to migration away from the east coast and for the homeless that are there to be much more invisible.
B) The west coast has a history of being relatively welcoming to the houseless / a lot of lore built up around it, so people tend to gravitate towards it.
C) The west coast has a much more survivable climate than the east coast - this is the reason I hear the most.
As a local, I’ll add what I think are more meaningful differences.
First, most homeless people in CA are locals who were forced out, not interstate homeless migrants looking for a good place to be homeless.
The main reason is that CA doesn’t have nearly as many temporary shelters for people to go to. And as you noted, it’s more survivable to live outdoors.
Overall, NYC still has a pretty big population of folks in shelters, but CA has way more folks living in cars, trailers, and tents.
Not sure how you’re defining “bad,” but NYC has an estimated 100k homeless while LA has an estimated 46k.
https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/#:~:text=In a city of more,one of the other boroughs.
Hm, that article is putting LA at about 75k homeless.
NYC also has more than twice the total population of LA. So homed to homeless ratio is a lot worse in LA
In addition to the other replies, it can also matter where in NYC you’re talking about
https://metropolismoving.com/blog/housing-costs-nyc/
Bronx has a median rent to income ratio of 45%, while Manhattan is 30%. This is primarily due to the fact that median income for Manhattan renters is double what it is in the Bronx, but rent doesn’t scale up the same. Against my own expectation, this makes Manhattan a reasonable-ish place to live, at least if we’re just talking about rent and income.
