Source: Million-Dollar Murray

This article from the New Yorker tells the story of a homeless man in Reno, Nevada. He is constantly being arrested for drunkiness and needs to go to the hospital for various injuries. The story serves as a segway to the nature of homelessness in the United States. The article references a study by Dennis Culhane, who discovered that the time spent in homeless shelters does not follow a normal distribution as previously thought. Instead, it follows the power-law distribution that we studied in class. 80% of people that stay in homeless shelters stay for only a day or two, while 10% tend to return periodically in the winter, and finally the last 10% are the chronically homeless who stay in shelters for extended periods of time. The chronically homeless usually have some kind of disability, and it is this 10% that people normally think of when they think of the homeless.

The power-law distribution of the homeless has important policy implications. Because of the severity of their situation, the chronic homeless consume much more from the government in the form of health care, social-services, and jail time than their counterparts who tend to have shorter terms of homelessness. They tend to visit the emergency room frequently, costing the hospitals thousands of dollars. Occupying one cot at a shelter costs nearly $24,000 each year. Philip Mangano, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, believes in the power-law of the homeless and uses it to reform cities’ policies regarding homelessness. To curb the cost of shelters, he advocates paying extra attention to the poorest of the poor: giving them apartments and checking up on them frequently. This way governments can save money: it is cheaper to pay for an apartment for these people and help them get jobs then to have them on the streets in shelters. This forces the homeless to live within the system and establish themselves. Some people oppose this system; why should the poorest people be rewarded while working mothers are unable to pay rent for a home for their children? The point of this system, however, is mostly to reduce the exorbitant costs that the chronically homeless impose on the system, not necessarily to help those most deserving.

This idea of paying special attention to the few causing the problem can be related to what we talked about in class about the power-law distribution of in-links to web pages. Those web pages with more in-links are probably the more popular sites on the web, and as their popularity grows, more and more of the total bandwidth of the internet will be taken up by these sites. It may be the case that these extremely popular sites will have to be paid special attention to make sure that they do not use up all the bandwidth and drown out the rest of the internet, much like the way the chronically homeless can use up more than their share of social services money.