"The bottom line: Per the Washington Post, California's homeless issue is related to soaring housing costs, mental health and substance abuse issues and "legal hurdles to getting people off the streets — all issues that could complicate federal officials’ ideas to stage an intervention."
It would seem that in many cases mental health and substance abuse problems are a more significant factor. People of sound mind typically do not find themselves out on the streets long term because their rent went up.
I'm not sure that's clear from the data, but even if it is true the problems remain related. Families cannot afford to house relatives who might not be able to support themselves.
Ignoring that, many folks of sound mind and body are homeless. They live in cars and borrowed spaces, and suffer greatly for it. All because Californians refuse to build adequate housing.
There's a certain amount of self reinforcement in this. Once a person become homeless, it taxes them psychologically, leading to further issues with mental health and substance abuse. There are success stories of the chronic homeless being able to overcome their situation but for the most part the earlier an intervention happens, the greater the chance of success. The truly difficult part in all of this is that we are an individualistic nation that puts high value on freedom, including the freedom to enter into a downward spiral of self destruction.
Freedom of movement also complicates things as those jurisdictions that offer the most (productive or not) are often swamped by those who became homeless elsewhere. We hear a lot about cities dumping their homeless on each other but Megabus can be as cheap as $1.50. The freedom of movement and the low cost of it does more to move the homeless around than any "clean the streets" initiative a city engages in. Homelessness will never be solved at the local level. Though local services can help address the symptoms of homelessness, no local entity has the power to address the root causes nationally.
Except, how long will they remain of sound mind and without substance abuse once they're out on the street?
It's not destiny, of course, but it'd be naive to assume that becoming homeless won't change the odds of someone developing a mental illness, or a drug habit to attempt to cope.
Based on past data, our current homelessness programs are working for people without mental or drug abuse issues. 80% of the homeless tend to recover within several months, while only about 20% are chronically homeless.
IMO the current homeless problem stems from the shutdown of old mental institutions by the Kennedy’s. There were good reasons for their crusade, such as problems with abuse and neglect. The issue is that no solution or alternative was given for shutting down the asylums which leads us to our current predicament
Anyone think it’s not just the cost of housing driving this but largely driven by meth and heroin and mental illness? The visibly homeless people I see on the sides of the road in tents in California aren’t just becoming homeless due to a rent increase—-their drug addiction and lack of treatment for mental illness are the bigger issues. Lack of universal healthcare means if you’re poor and mentally ill, you can easily end up on the street if you don’t have family to care for you. Since Prop 47 passed, heroin and meth are basically decriminalized and openly used on the streets in front of police. Likewise, Prop 57 decriminalized theft up to $950/day so now we have an epidemic of car break ins and theft from stores and no real police response. So I think the people we see on the streets would have been in prison before prop 47 and 57 passed. We definitely need more public housing and to build more houses, but I truly think meth and heroin are the elephant in the room that we aren’t addressing. We just keep giving out needles and don’t even arrest the dealers. It’s insanity.
I’m torn about this. While nothing good ever came out of drug abuse, even less good comes out of giving the government more power and the “War on Drugs”.
I’m okay with decriminalizing drug use but not property crime.
It's a mistake to conflate the highly visible homeless with unhoused people in general.
For every highly visible homeless person there are probably a dozen that try to keep out of sight.
And I would also point out that it's far far easier to fall into drug addiction, and for mental health issues to take over, when somebody doesn't have housing or their basic needs met.
When you lose your apartment because you can't pay rent and an unexpected expense has tapped all your money, you look to all the resources you can to survive. Maybe you start couch surfing, but eventually you exhaust all your friends. Then when you're on the street, and it's clear that you're unsafe, maybe you look to new groups to hell get by. In that setting, starting down the pa Th if heroin is far easier than when you're working long hours and struggling to make rent.
The path from working a job to ending up in a tent in a visible area doesn't happen overnight. It's a long path.
And there's a huge amount of flus of people I to and out of homelessness. The counts they do are a point in time, and don't count the much larger number of people that become homeless then figure out how to get out or get assistance.
If you're only going by visual indicators then you're going to get a terribly skewed sample. In most municipalities it's illegal to be publicly homeless for any length of time. So all you're going to see is folks living in defiance of those regulations.
A homeless family trying to keep their kids warm and fed is not going to risk being sucked into the prison labor racket if they can possibly avoid it.
They're absolutely arresting people and confiscating their property if they're settling in urban areas. Most major cities regularly bust up "homeless camps".
If the police run you out of any place you try to sleep and arrest you if they see you three times in a week, they're arresting you for being homeless, regardless of any specific law they're citing.
> Likewise, Prop 57 decriminalized theft up to $950/day so now we have an epidemic of car break ins and theft from stores and no real police response
This seems insane! $950 is huge, you could fill up a cart with 3 months worth of groceries for less than half of that amount. I'm guessing this means your average Californian has to pay much higher grocery prices in order to cover the costs of loss?
Idk if it’s the news or what but California seems to be turning into a bureaucratic nightmare. I don’t think more housing (OP) solves much of the issues that California has either.
The visibly homeless are like 1/4 of the homeless population. Most homeless people live in their cars, sleep on a rotating series of friends couches, or find a situation that allows them to get by, and they are homeless for less than a year. For example 10% of college students in California are homeless and for the most part they’re not crazy drug addicts.
Right, there are different causes and durations of homelessness. I definitely realize the group you’re talking about exist, but like you acknowledge and from what I’ve read those are the temporary homeless who often either relocate or get subdivided housing. This is the group that social services are actually doing well at helping.
I’m really just talking about the other group that seems to be exponentially growing in population and is a massive problem related to drug addiction that people want to avoid talking about. Worse, the laws are actively enabling their addictions. Society is just waiting for them to OD and die. I think it’s just an awful status quo that I’ve never seen in any other developed country.
Do you have evidence of the $950 figure? I read through prop 57 and it concerns parole boards allowing non violent offenders to be released after they fully complete their initial sentence for the primary crime. From Wikipedia: “ Previously, prisoners were often required to serve extra time by a sentence enhancement, such as those for repeated offenders.”
Additionally it allows for juvenile judges to have leeway in deciding if a juvenile should be tried as an adult.
>The initiative reduced the classification of most nonviolent property and drug crimes—including theft and fraud for amounts up to $950—from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Then read this to see the real world consequences:
I’m blaming it on our lack of response. If you’re mentally ill and can’t afford insurance, ongoing treatment and prescriptions, then what do you do? In every other country that’s not a problem they have.
This is a problem of supply. “An unprecedented $1 billion” will buy you at most three thousand new dwellings, probably fewer given high cost and inefficiency of housing construction in California.
California has been under-building housing for decades, to the extent that people will call this current activity a housing “boom” even though it’s only slightly above historic lows.
> inefficiency of housing construction in California.
California housing isn't "inefficient." The housing codes are made with the idea of keeping houses up through natural disasters and serviceable for a long time. We might modify that last provision (as Tokyo does, for example) but it comes with it's own problems.
The idea that somehow housing regulation increasing costs is the core or even a major contributor to the problem is one that requires substantial evidence.
Unless you're referring to "Californian contractors are overpaid," which seems more like a reflection of the expensive cost of living here than "inefficiency."
Well you are very wrong there. The inefficiency is in the permit process. In San Francisco it takes years to get your project approved, and that time is money. Many projects also just don’t get approved, and the carrying costs and fees of those failures don’t even get added to the average cost per dwelling that eventually gets reported. In many jurisdictions permitting and planning consume a full third of the cost and take years.
> Well you are very wrong there. The inefficiency is in the permit process. In San Francisco it takes years to get your project approved, and that time is money.
There is no denying that California refuses to build housing. This does raise the cost of Californian housing. However, this is characterized distinctly from efficiency of the housing regulations and building codes in most conversations specifically to avoid the dodge many developers present, "Housing codes are too strict, it's inefficient to build homes in California."
If I ended up misreading your post as a result of context, I apologize for doing so. I did not mean to put words into your mouth. But please consider that many other people may read this and read the same intent because of specific phrasing you're using.
Sacramento is majority-renter according to the Census, and is the fifth most competitive (ie worst, from buyer’s perspective) housing market in America according to Redfin. I can’t imagine why you think there is “plenty” here.
It's not like there's a shortage of work that society needs done, but that capitalists won't be able to make money off of. I think this is a perfect target for getting people on their feet.
Maybe someone or a not profit could built an app which pays people for picking up trash. The user would take a pic of the trash then a pic of proper disposal. The user would get paid some small amount that varies based on item, maybe 5-20 cents. The company could use the exif data from the photos for various studies. That data could be resold or used to help companies built better products or realize their customers are ruining their brand by throwing Pepsi cans on the ground instead of the recycling bin. If you brought on the social media aspect your users could humble brag about the few dollars a month they make helping keep the earth clean.
The same people that are paying 1bn to build unprofitable housing? (I have to assume the housing is unprofitable or else it wouldn't be so difficult to build it)
Housing is so expensive that you'd have to pay ~$50k/year even for those jobs. That's the big problem: anything you do on the demand side, like paying people higher wages, or giving them housing vouchers, goes directly into the landlords' pockets.
This article is rather thin on facts connecting the rise of California real estate to homelessness. There's a passing mention of a WaPo article that mostly lists addiction and legal hurdles as the reason for homelessness.
How did this reach the top posting while being...so thin?
Newspaper and magazine articles like this never have the kind of statistical analysis and tests that you're asking for. It'd be nice, but it's not a realistic expectation.
This is clearly not a flag-able story, so perhaps shrugging and moving on about your day is the best call.
I see things here all the time that I think are light on details or outright lies (usually thinly veiled cryptocurrency ad copy). There are many readers of HN these days and you just gotta accept that and move on.
People don’t need to read the article to upvote what they already know. This morning I stood on the balcony of my San Francisco apartment on a very high floor, but not high enough where I could not see and hear the homeless people croak. Someone has to do something.
Understandable for sure. I'm not a nimby but I don't see how blindly building housing in certain areas will ever lead to a stopping of public heroin injection and meth smoking.
The housing cost link seems flimsy on its best day. "these people smoke crack on the streets. Housing costs are high. They must need a low income condo, then they'll stop smoking crack outside my balcony."
Fund mental health and public health care if you want to stop the aggro homeless buildup. Don't build more studio apartments.
There is a particular cross section of the populace that has an ideological basis for hating California and will blindly accept any negative perceptions or narratives about it.
IIRC there's some data that correlates housing costs with rates of homelessness.
> When housing prices force typical households to spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent, those communities begin to experience rapid increases in homelessness.
Why? Vacancy rates are near all-time lows in California’s major cities. Most cities are around 2-4% vacancy whereas you need about 10% vacancy to operate a healthy market.
Unless rent control happens and only a tiny fraction of the apartments are at market rate. If that's the case the messed up portion of the market will just keep exploding.
Who said that those units aren't used? It's just that they cost is so high, that bigger and bigger portion of the population can't afford it anymore.
It doesn't help that foreign investors also purchase the property and either don't rent it (afraid it will reduce its value) or use it for AirB&B. That causes the supply to go even lower and prices go higher.
That's essentially the same thing. Not enough housing supply will have the predictable effect of increased rents that will price some out of the market.
Sure, there are also homeless people who live in cars and vans, motels, shelters. More than most realize. There's families, veterans, etc. But they don't make up the majority of people experiencing chronic homelessness.
I'm confused why the poster replied with a bunch of stats and then deleted the post. I suppose because they didn't really support the argument and one at least seemed to be misquoted?
These articles keep claiming that high rents, mental illness and substance abuse are the causes of the homelessness surge. But rarely, if ever, are any statistics cited. The HUD report referenced by the article does not discuss causes either.
I can tell you from my experience working in homeless encampments in Oakland that most of the people living there are neither mentally ill, nor abusing drugs. Most of them are people who would ordinarily work on the very bottom rung of the employment ladder, in jobs that 20 years ago would be a good fit for someone undermotivated, or quirky, or otherwise unfit for a more “responsible” job.
But there’s no place for them anymore; automation has replaced some of those jobs, and a combination of plunging wages and a more ruthless Amazon-style workplace has made many of the jobs that are left intolerable. People are choosing a tent in the park in Oakland over working three part-time jobs and being micromanaged by an AI just to barely afford 1/7th of an apartment. And, we have imported tens of millions of unskilled, mostly unauthorized immigrants who are happy to take those jobs - another thing you won’t hear discussed in these articles.
>And, we have imported tens of millions of unskilled, mostly unauthorized immigrants who are happy to take those jobs - another thing you won’t hear discussed in these articles.
It sounds like Survival of the Fittest. Only we aren't as willing to let our fellow humans just die from not being fit enough like our ancestors would have.
Oh yes we are. My uncle died there this summer, unemployed and homeless. He had been a firefighter while serving a stint in prison but of course when you get out you can't do that kind of work because California doesn't let criminals fight fires except when they're in prison. And pretty much nobody else wants to hire ex-cons either, so when you combine that with poor coping skills, survival of the fittest left him homeless and dead on the streets.
Except, the unemployment rate is very low right now. And stats show that drug usage and mental illness rates among the homeless are rather high:
> The [Los Angeles] Times, however, found that about 67% had either a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder. Individually, substance abuse affects 46% of those living on the streets — more than three times the rate previously reported — and mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, affects 51% of those living on the streets, according to the analysis.
This is the flip side of the selection bias that was affecting the previous comment. Given the resources that are being put into "addressing homelessness", the homeless are heavily incented to resort to a homeless shelter. If they stay on the streets, it's likely because they have drug-related or mental issues, thus shelters would just turn them away.
I’ve not been to a single shelter (Midwest US) where drug use and mental illness weren’t rampant. This in spite of policies attempting to keep a safe and drug-free environment.
> People are choosing a tent in the park in Oakland over working three part-time jobs and being micromanaged by an AI just to barely afford 1/7th of an apartment.
Sounds like you agree that high rents are at least somewhat to blame for homelessness.
Proximally, they are. But all too many people point to that as the One True Cause of the homelessness surge, when it is not. The two factors I pointed out - illegal immigration and an increasingly brutal workplace - are topics that news outlets shy away from, for political and business reasons. It's infuriating.
I would take all this a step farther, in fact: the recent surge in illegal immigration is, itself, a proximal cause; that phenomenon is being now driven by climate change. But again, you don't usually hear that mentioned when people and news outlets discuss illegal immigration.
the recent surge in illegal immigration is ... now driven by climate change
I’m curious what you mean by that. According to the DHS [1], Mexico is far and away the most represented country of origin for people who have immigrated to the US illegally. Are you saying this is caused by climate change acutely affecting Mexico’s economy?
> I can tell you from my experience working in homeless encampments in Oakland that most of the people living there are neither mentally ill, nor abusing drugs.
Well, that part is redundant because if they were, they wouldn't be allowed in homeless shelters in the first place! An obvious source of selection bias.
That's not causality, but it's not nothing. In particular, they found two inflection points: "The first threshold is 22 percent: Any uptick in a community’s rent affordability beyond 22 percent translates into more people experiencing homelessness. The second threshold is 32 percent: Any increase in rent affordability beyond 32 percent leads to a faster-rising rate of homelessness."
Obviously both rent and income affect % spent on rent, but reducing or eliminating municipalities' bans on certain housing styles is far simpler than changing the supply of jobs.
So 'rent affordability' here means percentage of income spent on rent? Higher affordability means higher rent/income, which means rent is less affordable. This is very confusing terminology.
It's simpler than it sounds. "Rent affordability" is rent as a % of income. Going above 22% is associated with an increase in homelessness. Going above 32% is associated with a change in the rate of increase in homelessness (ie, not only does it rise, it goes up faster than it does from 22%-31%).
I've done several of these in my youth - they were luxurious compared to the offerings now. Forty hours a week, no gamification, human bosses, daytime shifts, few injuries. Making the workplace like that would be an actual effort at making America great again.
Completely agree, every time this kind of articles make it to the front page I feel like there are many accounts spreading FUD here. A lot of issues in the US are blamed on mental illness
You complain about these articles providing little to no statistics, but then you jump to personal anecdotes with no statistics, and for good measure let’s add some anti immigration sentiment as well which is also not backed by any numbers
If we’re being honest they’re the nearly the same thing given the ever increasing restrictions to legal immigration to the point where it’s starting to hurt US R&D
I'm not the New York Times, I'm n=1. I can't really generate my own statistics. And see the other person's reply about immigration vs. illegal immigration.
You don’t need to be the NY times to collect data when we have the internet. We live in the 21st century now, and not the 20th. Here’s some data on chronic homelessness:
That took me less than a minute to find, though it’s not the first source I’ve read on the subject
The recurring theme between several studies is that of the homeless, 80% are able to recover in less than a year; while 20% are chronically homeless due to mental disabilities or drug addiction
I just find it ironic that you complain about a practice that you do yourself
> And, we have imported tens of millions of unskilled, mostly unauthorized immigrants who are happy to take those jobs - another thing you won’t hear discussed in these articles.
I'm not sure that's relevant. Based on your anecdote, the people in question in tent camps wouldn't be taking the jobs regardless of the immigration situation.
I'm saying that because we have so much unskilled labor supply in the country, businesses can make those jobs horrible if it improves their bottom line - that's just the nature of supply and demand.
So what are you suggesting? We have the government create a lot of unproductive “make work” jobs for these people? Kick out those who want to work hard and escape poverty, but were unlucky to be born in a different country?
Create affordable housing. Universal healthcare. Basic income. Perhaps universal higher education. Actually collect taxes from the very very large companies (Apple Amazon, etc).
There's tons of affordable housing in the country.
> Universal healthcare.
If you show up at ER, they cannot legally refuse you healthcare. They'll bill you a lot, but since you're homeless, fortunately you'll never get it in mail.
> Basic income.
And when the basic income check gets immediately exchanged for drugs, what then? How does it help?
> Perhaps universal higher education.
That would destroy most of the value of higher education. If everyone has a degree, it makes a degree worthless: outside of some small percentage of students, higher education don't really teach anything useful, it's value is mostly in certifying that you're a kind of person who is smart enough to get admitted, and conscientious enough to jump through required hoops.
> Actually collect taxes from the very very large companies (Apple Amazon, etc).
How much do you think you'd be able to collect from them? We already pull trillions in taxes. Is everything else so much higher priority that we couldn't already shift our spending to fix this problem? Really, this is not a problem of lack of resources, though your eagerness to tax the big bad business shows where your priorities are.
I haven't suggested anything, except that the problem is much more complex than most people acknowledge, and that some causes of the problems seem to be deliberately ignored.
That being said, I would recommend universal healthcare, vouchers for free daycare for lower-income Americans, and a new omnibus of worker protections to allow more humane workplaces (sorry, Amazon and Tyson Chicken). Also, much more vigorous prosecution and sentencing of those who employ illegal immigrants.
There are plenty of places for them. Just not in the Bay Area. Leaving the bay was the best decision I’ve ever made. Second place was moving to the Bay Area from Arkansas in 2000. Get your experience and get the hell out. When I first arrived I could only afford an apartment in Pittsburg. Never Oakland and SF wasn’t even considered. Too many people boo-hooing about not being able to afford things... do something about it yourself instead of relying on the worthless city, county, and state governments to do so on your behalf.
I agree with you, up to a point. Like you, I'm perplexed by the people who claim that the Bay Area homelessness crisis exists because "there's not enough housing." Yes there is, and it's somewhere else. Often it seems we Bay Area people think this area is some magical place, and not being able to live here is somehow a violation of human rights.
But, homelessness is also a trap. Once one becomes homelessness, life changes very quickly, and it's hard to get out of it - it's almost impossible to wash off the literal and figurative stink of it and find a way out, even when one of those ways might be moving to a cheaper state.
It's not a violation of human rights, but it's definitely a symptom of failed policies. A community that copes with growth by forcing its poorest residents out is failing in its basic responsibilities. Society is supposed to provide a floor under its members instead of reverting to survival-of-the-fittest.
Not everyone wants to live in a big city. Should those type of people not be allowed to exist? They built up a city and did it so well that so many people want to live there. There has to be a way to ration the limited supply else their town becomes a big city. The best way (in many ways) is to ration housing to whoever is willing to spend the most.
How is allowing current owners to assert control (via regulation) over land they don't own, to serve their own private interests, better than allowing that land to be developed for higher-density use, in the interest of a larger number people?
Society isn't obligated to protect people's investments at the expense of its least fortunate members.
1) Why is using supply / demand the best way to set a price for a house?
2) Why should Americans be able to live and protect a town and prevent it form becoming a big city?
As for 1, because that is human nature. Any other method that goes against human nature doesn't work in large scale. In places that set a price, typically products are given to people with connection (see Soviet butcher getting their kid into a good school by giving the best cut of the meat to the teacher).
With regard to 2, this point comes down to what rights you think someone should have. I believe that a community should be able to form and develop themselves without too much government interference. Let's say that a community builds themselves under a tight bond, like the Amish. Imagine if the government wanted to create a huge homeless shelter in their community and house many previously homeless people there. That would completely disrupt their peaceful way of life. It seams logical to say that in that case it is bad what the government did. Similarly, some people building a town don't want the crime / dirtiness / corruption of big city. If a politician were to campaign that they will turn every town into a big city, I doubt that they would win.
With regard to topic 1, you're saying supply and demand should set the price in a natural way. But regulating the use of land owned by others interferes with the natural operation of supply and demand. Established homeowners create regulations to prevent developers from increasing supply to meet the demand, on land the developers have fairly purchased or can purchase on the open market.
With regard to topic 2, no community has the legal right to exclude anyone from moving there. If it makes economic sense for newcomers to arrive, they will arrive. If supply and demand were allowed to operate, homes would be built for them as they arrived. Instead the wealthiest members of the community interfere with supply, for their own benefit, and the least fortunate members of the community are evicted.
(I'm disregarding the homeless shelter in the Amish community because it's a contrived example. It's too far removed from any actual set of conflicting interests to have much bearing.)
Exactly. Large swathes of the upper midwest are depopulating. Cheap housing until those living on the coasts or desert southwest are forced to move due to climate change.
I’ve seen articles about teaching prisoners to code and coal miners to code. Learning to code is being framed as a panacea for all social ills. It’s become rather comical.
Drug addicts are amazingly adept at lying and manipulation.
Responsible people don't subject their kids to life on the streets. Addicts do. I've worked in homeless shelters in DC, Denver, and even Arkansas. My mother died a homeless drug addict. She and her husband were very adept at moving from city to city, usually at the urging of social workers who would tell them what city they could move to after they had exhausted the temporary benefits of the current city. They never were willing to hold a job.
When rents get too high, normal functional humans move to another place, or take a roommate. My father had 5 kids to raise by himself when my mother bailed on us, and we had to do this.
Addicts like my mom fooled dozens of social workers into thinking they were just normal people who couldn't get work. She could keep the act up for 8 hours or even longer. But a 2 day period was all it took to see through the bullshit. I think you got fooled as well. Talk to any drug treatment specialist and they can explain to you the reality.
Temporary homeless vs chronically homeless are two different problems with 2 different causes. California is filled with chronically homeless people. If you think they want to work, you don't understand drug addicts and their generally high intelligence and ability to manipulate.
To be sure, I am no great detective or even particularly smart; I'm sure people fool me every day. I used to work in substance abuse research, and your story (which I am sorry to hear) rings very true. You're right that I don't have any kind of magic vision to see who's a drug addict and who isn't, so my observations above should probably be taken with some skepticism.
Immigrants have far less to do with this than the wealth concentration created by online aggregators like Amazon or Google. Do you think Bezos is going to pay more or encourage better working conditions if the people are white?
There are currently two Americas: the one inhabited by the ~10% of people who work in tech and make $150k+, and the one inhabited by everyone else. If you’re part of “everyone else,” your participation in the economy is likely in domestic service to them (Uber drivers, house cleaners, etc). If you’re complaining about immigrants taking jobs, you’re probably part of “everyone else” — immigrants are seen as a positive to folks in my social class because they’re cheap domestic labor. It’s why the GOP has supported lax immigration policy for decades.
We need to have a serious conversation as to whether food, shelter and health care should be considered human rights. Free market economics cannot solve this problem — it actually only serves to make workers more desperate so they accept shittier and shittier working conditions serving the elite in order to eat.
The purpose of the code is to assist social services case managers, who match people at risk with potential resources such as shared housing placements.
If you're interested in volunteering, feel free to message me. If you're interested in donating, see https://donorbox.org/hackforla
Strange when I see HN diverge from “tech twitter” in this situation. Why are so many on here skeptical of the legitimacy of the housing crisis in California? Maybe it’s that this website draws a broader audience, but it’s a fairly accepted fact among people that live in CA, including myself, that it is indeed a crisis.
And no, not everyone who is homeless is a meth head.
Everyone is only willing to believe the facts that support their own interest. California home owners will deny housing is the cause of homelessness similar to how Texas oil barons will deny climate change even exists.
This is a poor comparison because nobody is claiming homeless doesn’t exist. If you had said “as oil barons will claim oil isn’t the cause of the climate crisis” that would be better. It’s also better because like fossil fuel burning literally damages the environment, lack of affordable homes in an area is literally the cause of homelessness. But that is a useless point, of course more homes would fix the issue but to what end, are you going to build enough homes so everybody who wants to live in the Bay Area can? Obviously not, so there will still be homelessness. “Just build more houses!” Not being an actual answer is the point
> are you going to build enough homes so everybody who wants to live in the Bay Area can? Obviously not, so there will still be homelessness. “Just build more houses!” Not being an actual answer is the point
This is a strawman argument. There will always be homelessness because there will always be people that prefer to be homeless. Building more homes will reduce a significant amount of homelessness that exists due to structural reasons.
This is not a housing crisis, there is enough houses built in California. This is an overpopulation crisis : Simply too many people searching for a house. Don't take the problem the reverse way.
If there are enough houses how is it "overpopulation". It's clearly a failing of the housing market. It's not able to efficiently allocate houses to people that need them, it's designed to allocate houses only to people who can maximize profit for land owners.
IMO at least some of the problem is the historical laxness with which California has approached drugs. You have decades and decades of drug use being de facto legal to the point where now you will not be arrested for shooting heroin in front of a police officer. You could tax all the billionaires out of the state and they still not afford the rehab expense for all of the addicts in California. How many chances do you get at success? Why not just start taking heroin so you get a free stay indoors, with free food at a rehab resort?
The United States is barbaric when it comes to social support systems.
I used to live in the States and I'm happy to now be in Canada for moral reasons. I can only speculate from my experience (when I went through hard times as a student working on my CS degree with unsupportive family "me being lgbt and they being religious conservatives") and trying to navigate what was available in my area while living in the USA.
I've come to the conclusion that religious ideology is to blame, as similar to rising cost of homes & tuition, and not enough jobs for everyone (when you consider most people have low skillsets); while considering not everyone can become a programmer or whatever in-demand profession because most people just don't have what it takes with age making it increasingly difficult to get into a skilled field with health factoring into the equation.
I think homelessness is rarely the outcome of drug abuse. People aren't going to drugs in a great life for no particular reason. In any case deciding to do drugs with life then spiralling downhill to where they're homeless is just ridiculous to assume is the cause. The idea that people do it to themselves is nonsensical. We're living in a harder time than the 90s, 80s, 70s, for the less privileged and the system needs to be revamped to get people into homes that don't cost them anything if they cannot pay for it.
I agree with much of what you said but the religious ideology attribution is a non-sequitur. The Bay Area and Los Angeles are pretty much the opposite of hotbeds for piety, yet they have the most severe homelessness problems.
I'm not from California but a lot of homeless people navigate to California from elsewhere. Homelessness is on the rise in general. Religious ideology creates thinking patterns of the blame is on the victim and not from the system they reside in being unfavourable with the person's genetics & environmental upbringing.
> a lot of homeless people navigate to California from elsewhere
That’s a common misconception. According to this study [0] 70% of people who were homeless in SF in 2019 lived in the city before they became homeless.
30% makes it a common misconception? I did find this part interesting because I can relate somewhat to it. A good portion of the population isn't getting the necessary support in their upbringing is what I get from it. Although much of the self reported data seems to suggest they just cannot afford a home.
> survey data reveal that young people who identify as LGBTQ+ represent up to 40% of the approximately 550,000 unaccompanied youth and young adults experiencing homelessness in the United States. It is estimated that 12% of SanFrancisco’s population identifies as LGBTQ+; 27% of survey respondents identified as LGBTQ+. Among survey respondents identifying as LGBTQ+, 55% identified as gay, lesbian, or same-gender loving; 29% as bisexual; 13% as transgender; 3% as genderqueer/gender non-conforming; and 5% as questioning.
Compared to respondents who did not identify as LGBTQ+, respondents who identified as LGBTQ+ were more likely to report having experienced domestic violence (48% compared to 27%). Respondents who identified as LGBTQ+ also reported a higher incidence of HIV or AIDS related illness (14% compared to 4%). LGBTQ+ respondents were also more likely to report first experiencing homelessness as a youth or young adult than non-LGBTQ+ survey respondents (58% and 40%, respectively).
I think this is a difficult topic to assess. The measures are subtle and hard to define clearly for surveys and for our layman discussions. What thresholds are there to define last residency? What duration or level of security must be met for migrants to become local?
Does someone having an apartment or other arrangements for 1-18 months count as being a local resident prior to their homelessness? I think local natives see these immigrants differently than those who grow up here and fail to thrive.
I don't think most people are imagining that SF or LA homeless are all arriving on a hobo train from the 1930s. But, I think we do see a lot of people who migrate to these regions, attempt to establish themselves, and sometimes fail. More so than there are people migrating out of the regions and then failing at their destination.
This is one of the rare cases where I agree with the Trump administration. California does deserve all this criticism for years of policies that over-regulated housing, leading to a severe shortage.
And the California solution continues to be stricter tenant protections and more housing subsidies.
Blaming developers, rather than the local governments that restrict supply.
I’ve been following these issues closely for years, and have been active in advocacy around them. I’m now convinced it won’t get substantially better without federal involvement.
These people can surely move to some cheaper locations but they choose not to.
That means assumed opportunity cost is bigger for them if they make a move to cheaper location.
If you go 4 months homless and the manage to find some benevolent company owner, who hired you and you get paid good salary, then you end up staying in same well off area with added benefit that now you aren't homless anymore.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIt would seem that in many cases mental health and substance abuse problems are a more significant factor. People of sound mind typically do not find themselves out on the streets long term because their rent went up.
Ignoring that, many folks of sound mind and body are homeless. They live in cars and borrowed spaces, and suffer greatly for it. All because Californians refuse to build adequate housing.
Freedom of movement also complicates things as those jurisdictions that offer the most (productive or not) are often swamped by those who became homeless elsewhere. We hear a lot about cities dumping their homeless on each other but Megabus can be as cheap as $1.50. The freedom of movement and the low cost of it does more to move the homeless around than any "clean the streets" initiative a city engages in. Homelessness will never be solved at the local level. Though local services can help address the symptoms of homelessness, no local entity has the power to address the root causes nationally.
It's not destiny, of course, but it'd be naive to assume that becoming homeless won't change the odds of someone developing a mental illness, or a drug habit to attempt to cope.
IMO the current homeless problem stems from the shutdown of old mental institutions by the Kennedy’s. There were good reasons for their crusade, such as problems with abuse and neglect. The issue is that no solution or alternative was given for shutting down the asylums which leads us to our current predicament
I’m okay with decriminalizing drug use but not property crime.
For every highly visible homeless person there are probably a dozen that try to keep out of sight.
And I would also point out that it's far far easier to fall into drug addiction, and for mental health issues to take over, when somebody doesn't have housing or their basic needs met.
When you lose your apartment because you can't pay rent and an unexpected expense has tapped all your money, you look to all the resources you can to survive. Maybe you start couch surfing, but eventually you exhaust all your friends. Then when you're on the street, and it's clear that you're unsafe, maybe you look to new groups to hell get by. In that setting, starting down the pa Th if heroin is far easier than when you're working long hours and struggling to make rent.
The path from working a job to ending up in a tent in a visible area doesn't happen overnight. It's a long path.
And there's a huge amount of flus of people I to and out of homelessness. The counts they do are a point in time, and don't count the much larger number of people that become homeless then figure out how to get out or get assistance.
A homeless family trying to keep their kids warm and fed is not going to risk being sucked into the prison labor racket if they can possibly avoid it.
If the police run you out of any place you try to sleep and arrest you if they see you three times in a week, they're arresting you for being homeless, regardless of any specific law they're citing.
This seems insane! $950 is huge, you could fill up a cart with 3 months worth of groceries for less than half of that amount. I'm guessing this means your average Californian has to pay much higher grocery prices in order to cover the costs of loss?
https://www.courts.ca.gov/prop47.htm
Idk if it’s the news or what but California seems to be turning into a bureaucratic nightmare. I don’t think more housing (OP) solves much of the issues that California has either.
Right, there are different causes and durations of homelessness. I definitely realize the group you’re talking about exist, but like you acknowledge and from what I’ve read those are the temporary homeless who often either relocate or get subdivided housing. This is the group that social services are actually doing well at helping.
I’m really just talking about the other group that seems to be exponentially growing in population and is a massive problem related to drug addiction that people want to avoid talking about. Worse, the laws are actively enabling their addictions. Society is just waiting for them to OD and die. I think it’s just an awful status quo that I’ve never seen in any other developed country.
Additionally it allows for juvenile judges to have leeway in deciding if a juvenile should be tried as an adult.
https://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-ff-pol-proposit...
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_47,_Reduced_P...
>The initiative reduced the classification of most nonviolent property and drug crimes—including theft and fraud for amounts up to $950—from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Then read this to see the real world consequences:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...
Now you can just walk around stealing packages with virtually no consequences. SFPD all but refuses to cite for theft now.
California has been under-building housing for decades, to the extent that people will call this current activity a housing “boom” even though it’s only slightly above historic lows.
California housing isn't "inefficient." The housing codes are made with the idea of keeping houses up through natural disasters and serviceable for a long time. We might modify that last provision (as Tokyo does, for example) but it comes with it's own problems.
The idea that somehow housing regulation increasing costs is the core or even a major contributor to the problem is one that requires substantial evidence.
Unless you're referring to "Californian contractors are overpaid," which seems more like a reflection of the expensive cost of living here than "inefficiency."
There is no denying that California refuses to build housing. This does raise the cost of Californian housing. However, this is characterized distinctly from efficiency of the housing regulations and building codes in most conversations specifically to avoid the dodge many developers present, "Housing codes are too strict, it's inefficient to build homes in California."
If I ended up misreading your post as a result of context, I apologize for doing so. I did not mean to put words into your mouth. But please consider that many other people may read this and read the same intent because of specific phrasing you're using.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/little-rock-homeless-pic...
How did this reach the top posting while being...so thin?
people upvoted it.
Edit: Sans real data, this article just fuels anecdata based political pissing matches. This article is flotsam.
I see things here all the time that I think are light on details or outright lies (usually thinly veiled cryptocurrency ad copy). There are many readers of HN these days and you just gotta accept that and move on.
The housing cost link seems flimsy on its best day. "these people smoke crack on the streets. Housing costs are high. They must need a low income condo, then they'll stop smoking crack outside my balcony."
Fund mental health and public health care if you want to stop the aggro homeless buildup. Don't build more studio apartments.
If they are already addicted, throw them in some kind of rehab center, away from sight.
> When housing prices force typical households to spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent, those communities begin to experience rapid increases in homelessness.
https://endhomelessness.org/new-research-quantifies-link-hou...
It doesn't help that foreign investors also purchase the property and either don't rent it (afraid it will reduce its value) or use it for AirB&B. That causes the supply to go even lower and prices go higher.
So people sitting in $900,000 homes are saying you know what? I'm gonna live in a tent under a bridge.
Is that what they are doing
I can tell you from my experience working in homeless encampments in Oakland that most of the people living there are neither mentally ill, nor abusing drugs. Most of them are people who would ordinarily work on the very bottom rung of the employment ladder, in jobs that 20 years ago would be a good fit for someone undermotivated, or quirky, or otherwise unfit for a more “responsible” job.
But there’s no place for them anymore; automation has replaced some of those jobs, and a combination of plunging wages and a more ruthless Amazon-style workplace has made many of the jobs that are left intolerable. People are choosing a tent in the park in Oakland over working three part-time jobs and being micromanaged by an AI just to barely afford 1/7th of an apartment. And, we have imported tens of millions of unskilled, mostly unauthorized immigrants who are happy to take those jobs - another thing you won’t hear discussed in these articles.
It sounds like Survival of the Fittest. Only we aren't as willing to let our fellow humans just die from not being fit enough like our ancestors would have.
Also you sound like a psychopath. If anyone doesn't belong in society it's people like you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The [Los Angeles] Times, however, found that about 67% had either a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder. Individually, substance abuse affects 46% of those living on the streets — more than three times the rate previously reported — and mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, affects 51% of those living on the streets, according to the analysis.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless...
As a formerly homeless person, eventually we give up looking for work. We wouldn’t be counted in the top line unemployment number.
Sounds like you agree that high rents are at least somewhat to blame for homelessness.
I would take all this a step farther, in fact: the recent surge in illegal immigration is, itself, a proximal cause; that phenomenon is being now driven by climate change. But again, you don't usually hear that mentioned when people and news outlets discuss illegal immigration.
I’m curious what you mean by that. According to the DHS [1], Mexico is far and away the most represented country of origin for people who have immigrated to the US illegally. Are you saying this is caused by climate change acutely affecting Mexico’s economy?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_U...
Well, that part is redundant because if they were, they wouldn't be allowed in homeless shelters in the first place! An obvious source of selection bias.
Zillow's research group looked at the correlation between rent (as a % of income) and homelessness rate. "Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income": https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
That's not causality, but it's not nothing. In particular, they found two inflection points: "The first threshold is 22 percent: Any uptick in a community’s rent affordability beyond 22 percent translates into more people experiencing homelessness. The second threshold is 32 percent: Any increase in rent affordability beyond 32 percent leads to a faster-rising rate of homelessness."
Obviously both rent and income affect % spent on rent, but reducing or eliminating municipalities' bans on certain housing styles is far simpler than changing the supply of jobs.
(Full paper is "Inflection points in community-level homeless rates": https://wp.zillowstatic.com/3/Inflection_Points_20181213-ee1...)
Here's a graph: https://wp.zillowstatic.com/3/inflection-72aee4-1024x1024.pn...
I've done several of these in my youth - they were luxurious compared to the offerings now. Forty hours a week, no gamification, human bosses, daytime shifts, few injuries. Making the workplace like that would be an actual effort at making America great again.
They didn’t say that. They said “unauthorized immigrants”. Most people aren’t anti-immigration, but rather against unauthorized immigration.
https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/Homele...
That took me less than a minute to find, though it’s not the first source I’ve read on the subject
The recurring theme between several studies is that of the homeless, 80% are able to recover in less than a year; while 20% are chronically homeless due to mental disabilities or drug addiction
I just find it ironic that you complain about a practice that you do yourself
I'm not sure that's relevant. Based on your anecdote, the people in question in tent camps wouldn't be taking the jobs regardless of the immigration situation.
There's tons of affordable housing in the country.
> Universal healthcare.
If you show up at ER, they cannot legally refuse you healthcare. They'll bill you a lot, but since you're homeless, fortunately you'll never get it in mail.
> Basic income.
And when the basic income check gets immediately exchanged for drugs, what then? How does it help?
> Perhaps universal higher education.
That would destroy most of the value of higher education. If everyone has a degree, it makes a degree worthless: outside of some small percentage of students, higher education don't really teach anything useful, it's value is mostly in certifying that you're a kind of person who is smart enough to get admitted, and conscientious enough to jump through required hoops.
> Actually collect taxes from the very very large companies (Apple Amazon, etc).
How much do you think you'd be able to collect from them? We already pull trillions in taxes. Is everything else so much higher priority that we couldn't already shift our spending to fix this problem? Really, this is not a problem of lack of resources, though your eagerness to tax the big bad business shows where your priorities are.
That being said, I would recommend universal healthcare, vouchers for free daycare for lower-income Americans, and a new omnibus of worker protections to allow more humane workplaces (sorry, Amazon and Tyson Chicken). Also, much more vigorous prosecution and sentencing of those who employ illegal immigrants.
But, homelessness is also a trap. Once one becomes homelessness, life changes very quickly, and it's hard to get out of it - it's almost impossible to wash off the literal and figurative stink of it and find a way out, even when one of those ways might be moving to a cheaper state.
How is allowing current owners to assert control (via regulation) over land they don't own, to serve their own private interests, better than allowing that land to be developed for higher-density use, in the interest of a larger number people?
Society isn't obligated to protect people's investments at the expense of its least fortunate members.
1) Why is using supply / demand the best way to set a price for a house?
2) Why should Americans be able to live and protect a town and prevent it form becoming a big city?
As for 1, because that is human nature. Any other method that goes against human nature doesn't work in large scale. In places that set a price, typically products are given to people with connection (see Soviet butcher getting their kid into a good school by giving the best cut of the meat to the teacher).
With regard to 2, this point comes down to what rights you think someone should have. I believe that a community should be able to form and develop themselves without too much government interference. Let's say that a community builds themselves under a tight bond, like the Amish. Imagine if the government wanted to create a huge homeless shelter in their community and house many previously homeless people there. That would completely disrupt their peaceful way of life. It seams logical to say that in that case it is bad what the government did. Similarly, some people building a town don't want the crime / dirtiness / corruption of big city. If a politician were to campaign that they will turn every town into a big city, I doubt that they would win.
With regard to topic 2, no community has the legal right to exclude anyone from moving there. If it makes economic sense for newcomers to arrive, they will arrive. If supply and demand were allowed to operate, homes would be built for them as they arrived. Instead the wealthiest members of the community interfere with supply, for their own benefit, and the least fortunate members of the community are evicted.
(I'm disregarding the homeless shelter in the Amish community because it's a contrived example. It's too far removed from any actual set of conflicting interests to have much bearing.)
I’m joking of course, but I know someone’s seriously thought of this.
Responsible people don't subject their kids to life on the streets. Addicts do. I've worked in homeless shelters in DC, Denver, and even Arkansas. My mother died a homeless drug addict. She and her husband were very adept at moving from city to city, usually at the urging of social workers who would tell them what city they could move to after they had exhausted the temporary benefits of the current city. They never were willing to hold a job.
When rents get too high, normal functional humans move to another place, or take a roommate. My father had 5 kids to raise by himself when my mother bailed on us, and we had to do this.
Addicts like my mom fooled dozens of social workers into thinking they were just normal people who couldn't get work. She could keep the act up for 8 hours or even longer. But a 2 day period was all it took to see through the bullshit. I think you got fooled as well. Talk to any drug treatment specialist and they can explain to you the reality.
Temporary homeless vs chronically homeless are two different problems with 2 different causes. California is filled with chronically homeless people. If you think they want to work, you don't understand drug addicts and their generally high intelligence and ability to manipulate.
That's ridiculous. Roommates are something for students, not for people working a full-time job.
If an adult working full time for minimum wage cannot find any housing options, the housing market is broken and needs repair.
There are currently two Americas: the one inhabited by the ~10% of people who work in tech and make $150k+, and the one inhabited by everyone else. If you’re part of “everyone else,” your participation in the economy is likely in domestic service to them (Uber drivers, house cleaners, etc). If you’re complaining about immigrants taking jobs, you’re probably part of “everyone else” — immigrants are seen as a positive to folks in my social class because they’re cheap domestic labor. It’s why the GOP has supported lax immigration policy for decades.
We need to have a serious conversation as to whether food, shelter and health care should be considered human rights. Free market economics cannot solve this problem — it actually only serves to make workers more desperate so they accept shittier and shittier working conditions serving the elite in order to eat.
No, but if he has five times as many people competing for the same position, he won't have to pay as much to fill it.
The purpose of the code is to assist social services case managers, who match people at risk with potential resources such as shared housing placements.
If you're interested in volunteering, feel free to message me. If you're interested in donating, see https://donorbox.org/hackforla
And no, not everyone who is homeless is a meth head.
This is a strawman argument. There will always be homelessness because there will always be people that prefer to be homeless. Building more homes will reduce a significant amount of homelessness that exists due to structural reasons.
And “rehab resort” is the biggest pile of BS I’ve read in a while.
I used to live in the States and I'm happy to now be in Canada for moral reasons. I can only speculate from my experience (when I went through hard times as a student working on my CS degree with unsupportive family "me being lgbt and they being religious conservatives") and trying to navigate what was available in my area while living in the USA.
I've come to the conclusion that religious ideology is to blame, as similar to rising cost of homes & tuition, and not enough jobs for everyone (when you consider most people have low skillsets); while considering not everyone can become a programmer or whatever in-demand profession because most people just don't have what it takes with age making it increasingly difficult to get into a skilled field with health factoring into the equation.
I think homelessness is rarely the outcome of drug abuse. People aren't going to drugs in a great life for no particular reason. In any case deciding to do drugs with life then spiralling downhill to where they're homeless is just ridiculous to assume is the cause. The idea that people do it to themselves is nonsensical. We're living in a harder time than the 90s, 80s, 70s, for the less privileged and the system needs to be revamped to get people into homes that don't cost them anything if they cannot pay for it.
That’s a common misconception. According to this study [0] 70% of people who were homeless in SF in 2019 lived in the city before they became homeless.
[0] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/FINAL-PIT-Report-201...
> survey data reveal that young people who identify as LGBTQ+ represent up to 40% of the approximately 550,000 unaccompanied youth and young adults experiencing homelessness in the United States. It is estimated that 12% of SanFrancisco’s population identifies as LGBTQ+; 27% of survey respondents identified as LGBTQ+. Among survey respondents identifying as LGBTQ+, 55% identified as gay, lesbian, or same-gender loving; 29% as bisexual; 13% as transgender; 3% as genderqueer/gender non-conforming; and 5% as questioning. Compared to respondents who did not identify as LGBTQ+, respondents who identified as LGBTQ+ were more likely to report having experienced domestic violence (48% compared to 27%). Respondents who identified as LGBTQ+ also reported a higher incidence of HIV or AIDS related illness (14% compared to 4%). LGBTQ+ respondents were also more likely to report first experiencing homelessness as a youth or young adult than non-LGBTQ+ survey respondents (58% and 40%, respectively).
Does someone having an apartment or other arrangements for 1-18 months count as being a local resident prior to their homelessness? I think local natives see these immigrants differently than those who grow up here and fail to thrive.
I don't think most people are imagining that SF or LA homeless are all arriving on a hobo train from the 1930s. But, I think we do see a lot of people who migrate to these regions, attempt to establish themselves, and sometimes fail. More so than there are people migrating out of the regions and then failing at their destination.
What now?
And the California solution continues to be stricter tenant protections and more housing subsidies.
But the subsidies are nowhere near enough. This article suggests it would cost $12B for the Bay Area alone. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/10/cost-to-end-san-francisco-ba...
And when polled, 57% of Californians continue to blame the wrong causes: https://extras.mercurynews.com/blame/
Blaming developers, rather than the local governments that restrict supply.
I’ve been following these issues closely for years, and have been active in advocacy around them. I’m now convinced it won’t get substantially better without federal involvement.
Let's downvotes begin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
These people can surely move to some cheaper locations but they choose not to.
That means assumed opportunity cost is bigger for them if they make a move to cheaper location.
If you go 4 months homless and the manage to find some benevolent company owner, who hired you and you get paid good salary, then you end up staying in same well off area with added benefit that now you aren't homless anymore.
A good amount there want to offer a universal basic income of what 1k to every person. I guess you can live off of 1k a month in CA?