California homelessness is, obviously, deeply tragic for a lot of reasons, and I think anybody selling a "simple solution" is either lying or just wrong.
But man, when I drive through downtown L.A. and see street after street of tents on corners down below 70-story luxury condos with gigantic "LOTS OF VACANCIES! NEW, LOW RATES!" banners... boy, does it bum me the fuck out. Surely, I think, surely a just society would see those two elements and put the puzzle pieces together.
If you put the puzzle pieces together, it spells s-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-m /s In other developed nations the government subsidizes housing for the disadvantaged- and more often than not this investment will pay back in the future.
There are enormous subsidies for the homeless in San Francisco to the tune of hundreds of millions a year. Due to incompetent governance, those subsidies are actually making the problem worse.
Homelessness is often seen as a situation, rather than a consequence or an outcome of certain events. Giving people housing isn't always an answer. A lot of homeless people ended up being homeless because of addictions, psychological problems,and some unfortunate circumstances. Unless those things are addressed first and foremost,while also placing people in some sort of housing, whether it's a temporary hostel,or longer term social housing, there won't be any improvements in this situation.
I actually think there are tons and tons of "homeless" people who are completely invisible because they're otherwise normal people who just happen to be living in their car or a tent for an extended period. The people I've met who have been in that situation were not dealing with addiction or psychological problems. They were simply victims of circumstance. In at least one case I'm aware of the person was kicked out by her husband with no job and no address and was totally unable to access any social services. Her getting housing enabled her to get a job and access services she didn't have access to when she was homeless.
I think giving people housing is a huge part of getting them off the streets, and I think you underestimate the number of people who are homeless because you're not seeing the countless homeless people who are keeping their lives together in spite of not having a permanent address.
I'm very well familiar with homelessness, probably much better than an average person on this forum. I do agree that a lot of people are victims of circumstances, as I mentioned in my previous comment, and you are right that they often tend to be invisible to the wider society. For this category, getting housing usually solves majority of issues and they can take it from there. The other categories, whether it's mental problems or addiction or anything else, require much wider and more complex approach.
That makes sense to me. I'm used to people not understanding that getting an address solves a lot of problems for a lot of homeless people. And since we're on the same page about that I understand now that you're wanting to focus elsewhere.
> In other developed nations the government subsidizes housing for the disadvantaged- and more often than not this investment will pay back in the future.
It depends on who you consider disadvantaged. In Berlin, 20-25% (~776k in 2018) qualify for subsidized housing. The state owns about 320k apartments, though they're mixed and provide subsidized and market-rates (mostly to finance the subsidies).
Unfortunately as we've seen with Project Roomkey (and like you alluded to) the problem is a lot more complicated than just routing unhoused people to empty beds. The LA Times[1] actually did an interesting series of articles a couple years back, chronicling what happens the city basically moved an entire encampment into a block of apartments.
People are homeless for different reasons. If someone just happens to be down on their luck or having financial trouble after fleeing an abusive family situation, housing seems to work fairly well. However for people with untreated mental illness and addiction, there can be problems. Especially since many of those people would actually turn down a free place to stay (as we saw recently in Echo Park). Maybe we can make more inclusive housing for the homeless that allows large pets and drug use, but the rent you see on those empty apartments is predicated on assumptions on a tenant's risk. Employees people who care about their credit score are going to have a much different risk profile than the homeless.
3 meals a day and a guaranteed hotel room for 6 months, and the city would make a best effort attempt to house everyone in a more permanent situation by September.
However the hotel rooms have really strict rules. For example there's a curfew for a dumb reason[1], and people who get back to the hotel too late have to wait until the next day to return to their rooms. There's also limitations on how much stuff they can bring with them into the hotels (no more than 2 suitcases or shopping carts full of stuff) which if you've seen many encampments you know will be a dealbreaker for some.
[1]: The city has designated COVID screeners during the day, but when they go home it's just security guards at the hotels. However the COVID screening is just a thermometer check so they could totally just teach the security guards how to use thermometers.
> (no more than 2 suitcases or shopping carts full of stuff) which if you've seen many encampments you know will be a dealbreaker for some.
I know a lot of people, myself included, who were fully employed and have rented rooms or even apartments where 2 shopping carts full of stuff would not have fitted.
Absolutely. For many homeless people, having to move into a hotel room would require some serious downsizing (here's one of the more extreme examples in LA- https://i.redd.it/arq8wlg5qfk61.jpg)
There was a recent proposition in Californa to house mentally ill homeless people without first insisting they get mental health / drug rehabilitation treatment.
Of course, it was strongly opposed by essentially all groups with any actual experience in helping homeless people, and of course, because the idea sounds good until you think about it for a few minutes, the ballot proposition passed.
This sounds, well, extremely California. Do you remember which proposition it was? I'd like to check it out in more detail, see if anything's actually happened.
Large pets and drug use in multi-family houses built from cardboard (OSB) ? That's one sure way to increase number of mental health issues among those occupying said multi-family houses
Has anyone tried/considered/researched work-camps for the homeless? Like a mini-city with metaphorical padding built-in everywhere, until they're "rehabilitated" back into being able to (and wanting to) survive in the normal world. That includes giving them a salary, shelter, "banking facilities", shops to buy things in, medical facilities and training, etc.
We spend so much on housing criminals in essentially adult daycare to "rehabilitate" them, so why can't we come up with similar elaborate institutions to care for the homeless that have problems functioning in the society we've built around them?
Most European prisons are similar to what you describe (though the focus is on education and training, not working to earn money).
They have much lower recidivism rates than the US (unlike the US prison system, which is optimized to punish and profit, those systems are optimized to reduce crime).
For those reading along, in an interview with a Seattle or Portland police officer dealing with downtown outside homeless people, he said 100% were taking drugs.
Let's say those people on the street moved into the luxury apartment. What do you think the outcome would be? would they suddenly get their life together?
On my phone, so can’t find the link easily, but I seem to remember reading that yes, it seems to work that way. Obviously not with 100% success. But yes. Giving someone a home, shower, etc to call their own does in fact help people get on the right track in a way that very little else seems to do.
Simply giving someone a permanent address allows them to access tons of social services that are completely locked away when you're homeless. Food stamps, unemployment, disability, child care assistance, are some of the very important social programs which require a permanent, non-PO Box, non-General Delivery mailing address before you can access them.
1) Many times, yes. If we want to analyze things logically, oftentimes people just need a safe place to stay so that things are stolen from them/they can avoid drugs/they can tell an employer that they live somewhere in order to have a more stable life.
2) Even if they don't suddenly get their life together, that is looking at things too logically in my opinion. In my opinion, it is the moral thing to help out the needy, and that means providing housing. America's big enough to do it.
> 1) Many times, yes. If we want to analyze things logically, oftentimes people just need a safe place to stay so that things are stolen from them/they can avoid drugs/they can tell an employer that they live somewhere in order to have a more stable life.
This ignores the obvious - that people who have start off with a safe place to stay end up on drugs and homeless.
When I consider what I have observed about trauma - I do basically agree that a safe place is part of the solution, but you are also looking at half a decade or more of support and recovery time in addition.
1. Give all the help possible to these people to get them back into being productive members of society. Those that stay, see next step.
2. Offer a relocation program to live, free, out in the woods. This assumes there are some people who don't want to "work", they don't see value in modern society. I think that's valid, but they can't leech off of society either.
3. Finally those that refuse to live "free", and yet still stay in crime and disease filled pools.. well, i don't trust that they are healthy, capable individuals. They need forced mental health treatment and hopeful rehabilitation, because not only is that not a healthy state of being but it's also not a cost society deserves to pay, imo.
Step 3 scares the hell out of me. So i don't like it, to be clear, because it's not really that different than incarceration. However, keep in mind this is my "ideal", and before forced rehabilitation there is very very significant help and options. #1 includes job programs, housing, food, etcetc - very heavy government program. #2 includes alternate lifestyles, allowing people to break free from the confines of modern society if that is what they're trying to achieve.
[1]: Ideal as in, is not be realistic for a variety of reasons. Getting budgets passed alone for Step1 would be a nightmare of political bikeshedding.
edit: To the downvote, please explain? It feels reactionary to be honest, because i don't think i've said anything controversial when you really think about it. Well, i suppose it's controversial to pro-homeless, if anyone is that..?
the situation with housing operates like an astable multivibrator, as the social bodies charismatic features express fully and demand real change from civic leaders and an end to homeless camps in the form of housing, building to a fever-pitch of bonds passed, reforms enacted, and funding applied.
This all works well until the inevitable transition to action. These once noble creatures then cry foul and refuse the building of any potential settlements as it would decrease their property value. Since the enactment of proposition 13 transformed millions of californians into landed gentry and gilded elite, they are ardently opposed to any change that may in any way impact the hegemony of scarcity, rental profits, and the white dragon of property-as-investment.
Exhausted and vanquished, political leaders coffer the bonds toward rehab progams, expensive rental payments to the landed gentry, and motel rooms to temporarily transfer homeless from street tent to temporary edifice. once funds are depleated, the cycle begins anew.
I'm sure a lot of property owners would be happy to let homeless people stay in their apartments for free or very cheap while there are a ton of market vacancies during the pandemic. However, squatter rights basically make it incredibly risky. The cost of this risk gets passed down from the landlords to lower-income renters, so it makes it even more difficult to escape homelessness. This is why you should never make political decisions based on empathy alone.
> This is why you should never make political decisions based on empathy alone.
Is the following a fair way to re-frame your statement? "This is why political decisions based on empathy should consider the long-term wellbeing of everyone involved."
FWIW, I didn't see anything wrong with your original wording.
But I think sometimes conservative-like ideas are unfairly labelled as incompassionate. When in reality they're intended to be more compassionate in the long run.
280k homeless?!?!? Japan claims they are down to ~4k nationwide and AFAIK they don't have nearly as much support for the homeless (could be totally wrong on that). What they do have AFAICT is a culture of self reliance so that someone who is homeless generally feels guilty about asking for help (not saying that's good or bad thing, only saying that's what I believe is the culture)
They aren't often easy to see but if go into a public park, if you see blue vinyl tarps in the bushes those are often a homeless person living there. There's a few in Yoyogi park and some in Shinjuku Central park (next to Tokyo's gov HQ). Otherwise in the winter some people try to sleep in the subway stations close to closing time.
Japan does not have "free" medical support AFAIK. You have to pay into the national health insurance or otherwise pay your own medical bills. On the other hand, prices are regulated.
Japan has a lot of homeless that can only be seen by visiting certain places,such as internet cafes, where they can shelter at least for a bit or for the whole night.
I get the impression many of the homeless on Japan are quite a bit tidier than their US counterparts. They try to keep their areas neat and coordinate to keep their surroundings clean as well. Yes, occasionally you can see someone who just doesn’t care about appearances, but that’s more an exception.
Theyre homeless out of necessity. They tidy up because they don't want someone complaining about them so that they get harassed. The japanese mindset on homelessness is shame.
For that kind of price at an internet cafe, which may be outdated info anyway, you'd probably just get a chair at a shared table. The reclining chair and a little private cubicle would be quite a bit higher for an entire night, probably comparable to hotel rates. A shelter or youth hostel would be better.
There is also a social/cultural "shame" mentality of being homeless there so people don't wear it like a badge like they kinda do in the US. Pot smoking hippies are looked on far worse there than they are here.
Some like to pretend that we can just build infinite new housing, for free or almost no cost, and that will give everyone a nice American level luxury dwelling, all with no environmental costs. I feel like such opinions are built on ignorance or at the very least naïveté about the home building industry. One can invest in the home builders to profit from these misinformed opinions as they increasingly drive policy towards deregulation and corporate welfare for the mega-developers.
Maybe some people believe that, but overall that seems to be more of a straw-man argument if anything. I believe what is more common is the thought that we, as a country, can provide housing for people who have no place to live without making a large impact on tax payers below the upper class. Or is this naive in your opinion as well?
It’s innumerate I would argue. There are a lot of “ought to be” aspects to life but it’s not a very useful layer of thought. I prefer thinking about “what is” and from there think about changing things for the better. By “what is” I’m referring to empiricism, collecting data and using numbers to facilitate reason. The two modes, what ought to be vs what is, needn’t be incompatible, though acceptance is a difficult first step for many. In any case, if there is solid empirical evidence for the yimby-topian fantasies I hear, about how mixed used shopping plazas will solve the worlds ills, literally, I’ve yet to be convinced by any of it but I’d love to read any studies you might provide.
Public policy constantly requires leaps of faith to try to make the country better. You can't know that providing housing to the homeless helps them until you actually try it for the first time.
What is: Based on currently available numbers, there are about 59 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.[1]. We do not have a shortage of houses, but instead a shortage of desire to house the homeless.
What makes you think we, as one of the most powerful countries in the world, cannot provide housing to the homeless?
Also, if you want to actually have a conversation about this, I would appreciate if you don't belittle my comments.
I agree that vacant units, and units that are unsafe due to lead, asbestos, etc... are a very real problem and a good target for public policy. I think the idea that I often hear, that we can build new homes until rents are so low it decreases homelessness, to be a poorly thought out idea. To see a good example of how it turns out, look at San Jose’s new google village. Homelessness increases while the developers and google get rich, and the public get a few hundred “low income” studio apartments that if they don’t sit vacant will end up renting to the googlers who are the only ones who can actually afford the $3000 “low income” rent, for example.
You are spot on here with this assessment. It would be far cheaper to buy busses for these people back to where they came from to live the lower COL life they can actually survive in.
Maybe they're homeless and housing prices are so high because of the fact that there are a myriad of people that make it a landlords market. Meaning, ample demand, minimal supply.
Homesless people fall in several camps. However, why is it that homelessness is a bigger issue in CA vs NY? Likely because CA has been lax on homelessness to a degree where aimless vagabonds and drug addicts think it's acceptable. It's not. For reasons economic and ethical. Nobody wants homelessness and nobody wants to be homeless. But from the outside looking in, when you tolerate it like CA does, it seems like a lot of homeless people are content with it. Which sets a precedent that being homeless is okay in those cities.
Build and maintain public housing. We should be making sure that housing is available for everyone. If you don't have housing it can be significantly more expensive and challenging to live (beyond the obviously visible challenges.)
Part of the reason homelessness exists is to economically say "you can't afford to live here." Why do all these homeless people aggregate to large cities proportionally higher than in the midwest let's say? Cause nobody aspires to get famous and rich there. But homelessness is marginal in most areas because housing is hardly an issue.
California plans just that, well sort off. I heard they will convert prime real-estate parings along best beaches into tiny house lots, top dollar beach front properties for the homeless.
This is the wrong focus. This type of approach tends to make things worse.
The more resources you pour into "helping the homeless," the worse the problem tends to get. You tend to magnify it.
California has seriously bad housing policies that actively push up the cost of housing. They have also underbuilt housing for decades, which is known to push up the cost of housing.
They need to be remedying that issue.
You also need to identify factors that put people at risk of homelessness and help people who have those characteristics rather than helping people based on their current lack of housing. You need to help them regardless of their housing status.
If you help people with serious problems conditional upon being homeless, you tend to entrench the problem of homelessness. It actively makes it harder to get off the street because you can't get help without first being homeless and then you may lose access to help if you get back into housing.
So good programs help people with certain problems or characteristics which put them at risk of homelessness and do so regardless of their current housing status. "Helping the homeless" is an approach that tends to be subject to the Shirky Principle: It tends to preserve the problem it is supposedly aiming to solve.
This data base is potentially of no real value in solving the problem, though it sure has terrific PR value for pretending to solve the problem.
If you really want to solve the problem, start fixing issues that push up market-rate housing to crazy high prices. And, you know, people in California don't really, seriously want that and you will be very hard pressed to get credit for "playing hero" and "helping the homeless."
I used to joke that "Someday, I will be a landlord providing affordable housing. No, I will not be celebrated as someone solving homelessness. I will be vilified in the press as a Slum Lord."
People making headlines for trying to help the homeless are people who want pats on the back for Playing Hero. And they are very much Playing.
I talked to a guy one day who was all "I have dreams of turning this entire block (of the small town where I currently live) into homeless services!" and I was like "Oh, look at the time! I have a meeting to attend! Buh-bye!"
If you really care about the people, you don't dream of growing homeless services. You dream of making society work so that few people end up homeless.
If you drive down home costs in hyper inflated cities in California, where people got legitimate loans on that hyper inflation, who is left holding the bag? Someone has to pay that debt that is now worthless due to decreased inflation, right?
This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
A place to start is simply put a stop to the hyper-inflation. Housing costs do not have to come down as your first step. Just stop having them double every other day, so to speak, and you will start easing some of these issues.
Agreed, I'm just puzzled at what the end state is. Would we expect that everyone who moves in and out of this area takes a gradual loss on home prices until they normalize, do we have financial tools for mitigating it, will the tax payers pay the cost? These are some of the options I've had run through my head.
Look, no one needs to take a loss on anything, per se.
First, we tend to build really huge homes. Make it possible to build small homes and that makes it possible to increase housing supply without tanking the price of the large houses.
Second, remove some of the tax protections that make housing super cheap for people who have owned it a long time already. This is a major issue in California and it's one people aren't going to want fixed.
It is a subsidy for The Haves who got in before prices went up and intentionally locked in their low costs and pulled the ladder up behind them. Their prices are low. It's everyone else who is paying for that.
You don't have to tank the prices on real estate in California to begin remedying this. Believing you do is part of the problem.
Start bringing down administrative costs and administrative barriers to building more housing. Ease up the choke hold on the supply.
You can have both "more butter and more guns" if you help people make their lives work. It's amazingly hard to be a productive member of society while sleeping in a tend and dodging the police. Getting back into housing tends to bring costs down while improving ability to earn, etc.
Stop flushing the lives of The Have Nots down the toilet in the name of preserving wealth for the privileged few. It does not have to be a tragedy for the already privileged to dump less on the less privileged.
Densification definitely isn't going to hurt many people's property values in the long term. Your 5000sqft lot could now be sold to someone who's going to build 10 units on it? That's still gonna be worth a lot of money.
That one's just a matter of messaging. I think you have bigger hurdles around:
* people want to have the same type of housing as they do today, or the opportunity to buy one of those less-dense single family homes in the future. If it's expensive, they can save up - or at least dream about it. If it's replaced with apartments, the option is gone entirely. However, there's lots of low-density commercial and industrial that can be upzoned instead! But if you're demonizing the suburbs and the single-family homes, instead of the single-use strip mall, you're asking for a lot more political opposition.
* and the biggest one to me: it takes SO LONG to build projects. You need streamlined plan approval, more labor availability, and a lot of money to do things in parallel instead of sequentially. Doing things in parallel also helps with some of the short-term property value hits you might otherwise get from a slowly-changing area.
But the only way you stop the land value appreciation is if people move out of the cities and the demand evaporates. And that's more likely if homelessness continues to increase than if you start doing something about the bottom of the housing market. Otherwise, a more populous city doesn't have lower land prices - look at Manhattan, SF, LA vs the rural US.
Some decades back during a big crisis, Athens, Greece managed to solve its issues. It was a grass roots movement that the government basically rubber-stamped.
People may well end up moving out of the big cities. But unless you are expecting a population crash for humanity globally, we just need more housing somewhere in the US.
I suspect California is so hard hit in part because we actively export homelessness from other states to California because the dry, temperate weather means sleeping outside isn't much of a hardship. And then there are myriad barriers to getting back into housing that help keep people long-term homeless once you are there.
It can be difficult to physically leave California on foot:
Across the US we need to be resolving our housing issues rooted in decades of housing policy gone awry. That's one of the things that needs to happen here.
> This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
Buying a house that you plan to resell is an investment. You don't have a right to a profitable investment, especially not one appreciating at the price that they are in California.
Agreed. That said, a huge portion of metropolitan California cities are stricken with inflation. If you drive down the cost of every home that's $3M to $800 across a majority of the city, where most people have loans for $3M then your good faith action may actually bankrupt your city and it's citizens over night. That's what we're discussing here.
I have so many objections to this line of thought.
1. We are so far from building enough to even lower the price of houses, let alone depreciate them from $3m to $800k.
2. The idea that most residents in SF have outstanding debts of $3m is just.. you need to get out in this city a little more.
3. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If there is even a possibility that with more building, the cost of your home would go from $3m to $800k, you shouldn't be going into debt if you are planning on not living in this home for the rest of your life.
First, I'm not projecting any kind of line of thought. Trace back my comments and I'm asking questions, because I genuinely do not know. It seems like there's a lot of directions to go but no definitive answers (what I referred to as a runaway train) Not everyone is here to argue with you, some of us are here to ask some thought provoking questions that we genuinely don't know the potential answers to.
Second, I don't live in SF, I live in a different area. Inflation is an issue here too, and I am genuinely concerned about how remedies would impact not only people directly but the city and the state. If California or it's cities do bad, there are implications across the country. Telling me to "get out of the city" is a confusing statement given that I know people that have these kinds of debts.
Three sounds like an empathy problem, so we can skip that one.
If they use cell data, they will eventually be able to track real-time migration of non-residents living in the area. In the future, the census could be updated in real time.
Oh, well, as long as it's just children we are eartagging like animals in a science experiment, sure, I am down with that. Nevermind my previous objections in the name of freedom and privacy.
I don't know about California specifically, but I have observed that homelessness is getting really out of control in Portland. It's just crazy how many tent camps have cropped up in public places all over the city. Just in the last year it has exploded. I felt really embarrassed just driving up the interstate and seeing it on display. We don't lack the resources to deal with it.
It seemed for a while like SLC had found a working solution. But as I recall, they eventually dropped it. It feels like a solvable problem, but as a society we will have to come to terms with our ideas of morality, as well as the role of gov't (specifically in health care and psychiatric treatment).
Legal weed probably does draw some people in, but the ruling in Martin vs. Boise had a much bigger impact. In that case, the 9th Circuit court, which has jurisdiction over the West Coast, ruled that it was cruel and unusual to prevent people from sleeping outdoors if there was no meaningful alternative available to them, and granted them the defacto right to camp in public spaces.
This ruling really caught every West Coast city with their pants down, because it laid bare the the fact that they had no effective strategy for managing the homelessness crisis, and were papering over the problem by using the police to harass homeless people until they moved on elsewhere. This is basically the strategy that the entire United States uses - make their lives miserable and hope they move on. Lots of people tend to move on in a western direction, until they get to the coast. Some cities are even brazen enough to buy one way Greyhound tickets for their homeless population, and they tend to send them to San Francisco, Portland and Seattle - cities that are trying to approach homelessness humanely. So essentially, the cities on the West Coast are footing the bill for the way the rest of the country treats the homeless, and being prevented from employing those same measures themselves. Add that to an explosion in housing costs, and you’ve got the mess we’re in right now.
Basically anyone that lives in a California city can use common sense to see through the flawed idea that the majority of homeless aren't addicts or mentally unstable. For whatever reason, the obviously false, "majority of homeless are law abiding victims of circumstance" narrative continually gets perpetrated through bias or bogus science.
Maybe it's to make it seem like ending homelessness is an easy fix. Just provide cheap housing.
Drive around Los Angeles and notice the tents and homeless encampments. There are square miles where it's easy to see literally hundreds of these encampments, under freeway passes, beside highways, encircling parks, etc.
I could walk outside and find at least 50, if not more, within 10 city blocks of me.
Then just do the math, 400 city blocks in a square mile, 500 square miles in Los Angeles.
divide that by 15,000 or 20,000 homeless and it's easy to see that the overwhelming homeless are out in the open.
It's tragic, and it's a hard to fix. We've been trying to provide cheap housing for homeless for decades and the truth is most don't want housing.
I've toured treatment centers in skid row, the counselors there say they struggle to get people to come inside for treatment. Most are paranoid and struggle with addiction and illness and they need to want help.
Because most homeless are unstable addicts and mentally ill. And that's a problem that can't be solved by building structures.
They need treatment facilities, rules against open encampments and jail for repeat law violations.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadBut man, when I drive through downtown L.A. and see street after street of tents on corners down below 70-story luxury condos with gigantic "LOTS OF VACANCIES! NEW, LOW RATES!" banners... boy, does it bum me the fuck out. Surely, I think, surely a just society would see those two elements and put the puzzle pieces together.
1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing-...
I think giving people housing is a huge part of getting them off the streets, and I think you underestimate the number of people who are homeless because you're not seeing the countless homeless people who are keeping their lives together in spite of not having a permanent address.
It depends on who you consider disadvantaged. In Berlin, 20-25% (~776k in 2018) qualify for subsidized housing. The state owns about 320k apartments, though they're mixed and provide subsidized and market-rates (mostly to finance the subsidies).
What good is money if you can’t use it to convince other people to do things for you?
Yes that's literally the point of money: a store of value and a medium of exchange.
People are homeless for different reasons. If someone just happens to be down on their luck or having financial trouble after fleeing an abusive family situation, housing seems to work fairly well. However for people with untreated mental illness and addiction, there can be problems. Especially since many of those people would actually turn down a free place to stay (as we saw recently in Echo Park). Maybe we can make more inclusive housing for the homeless that allows large pets and drug use, but the rent you see on those empty apartments is predicated on assumptions on a tenant's risk. Employees people who care about their credit score are going to have a much different risk profile than the homeless.
[1]: Called The Streets Within, part 1 here: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-15/the-stre...
However the hotel rooms have really strict rules. For example there's a curfew for a dumb reason[1], and people who get back to the hotel too late have to wait until the next day to return to their rooms. There's also limitations on how much stuff they can bring with them into the hotels (no more than 2 suitcases or shopping carts full of stuff) which if you've seen many encampments you know will be a dealbreaker for some.
[1]: The city has designated COVID screeners during the day, but when they go home it's just security guards at the hotels. However the COVID screening is just a thermometer check so they could totally just teach the security guards how to use thermometers.
I know a lot of people, myself included, who were fully employed and have rented rooms or even apartments where 2 shopping carts full of stuff would not have fitted.
Of course, it was strongly opposed by essentially all groups with any actual experience in helping homeless people, and of course, because the idea sounds good until you think about it for a few minutes, the ballot proposition passed.
We spend so much on housing criminals in essentially adult daycare to "rehabilitate" them, so why can't we come up with similar elaborate institutions to care for the homeless that have problems functioning in the society we've built around them?
They have much lower recidivism rates than the US (unlike the US prison system, which is optimized to punish and profit, those systems are optimized to reduce crime).
2) Even if they don't suddenly get their life together, that is looking at things too logically in my opinion. In my opinion, it is the moral thing to help out the needy, and that means providing housing. America's big enough to do it.
This ignores the obvious - that people who have start off with a safe place to stay end up on drugs and homeless.
When I consider what I have observed about trauma - I do basically agree that a safe place is part of the solution, but you are also looking at half a decade or more of support and recovery time in addition.
1. Give all the help possible to these people to get them back into being productive members of society. Those that stay, see next step.
2. Offer a relocation program to live, free, out in the woods. This assumes there are some people who don't want to "work", they don't see value in modern society. I think that's valid, but they can't leech off of society either.
3. Finally those that refuse to live "free", and yet still stay in crime and disease filled pools.. well, i don't trust that they are healthy, capable individuals. They need forced mental health treatment and hopeful rehabilitation, because not only is that not a healthy state of being but it's also not a cost society deserves to pay, imo.
Step 3 scares the hell out of me. So i don't like it, to be clear, because it's not really that different than incarceration. However, keep in mind this is my "ideal", and before forced rehabilitation there is very very significant help and options. #1 includes job programs, housing, food, etcetc - very heavy government program. #2 includes alternate lifestyles, allowing people to break free from the confines of modern society if that is what they're trying to achieve.
[1]: Ideal as in, is not be realistic for a variety of reasons. Getting budgets passed alone for Step1 would be a nightmare of political bikeshedding.
edit: To the downvote, please explain? It feels reactionary to be honest, because i don't think i've said anything controversial when you really think about it. Well, i suppose it's controversial to pro-homeless, if anyone is that..?
This all works well until the inevitable transition to action. These once noble creatures then cry foul and refuse the building of any potential settlements as it would decrease their property value. Since the enactment of proposition 13 transformed millions of californians into landed gentry and gilded elite, they are ardently opposed to any change that may in any way impact the hegemony of scarcity, rental profits, and the white dragon of property-as-investment.
Exhausted and vanquished, political leaders coffer the bonds toward rehab progams, expensive rental payments to the landed gentry, and motel rooms to temporarily transfer homeless from street tent to temporary edifice. once funds are depleated, the cycle begins anew.
Is the following a fair way to re-frame your statement? "This is why political decisions based on empathy should consider the long-term wellbeing of everyone involved."
But I think sometimes conservative-like ideas are unfairly labelled as incompassionate. When in reality they're intended to be more compassionate in the long run.
They aren't often easy to see but if go into a public park, if you see blue vinyl tarps in the bushes those are often a homeless person living there. There's a few in Yoyogi park and some in Shinjuku Central park (next to Tokyo's gov HQ). Otherwise in the winter some people try to sleep in the subway stations close to closing time.
Japan does not have "free" medical support AFAIK. You have to pay into the national health insurance or otherwise pay your own medical bills. On the other hand, prices are regulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan#Internet...
What is: Based on currently available numbers, there are about 59 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.[1]. We do not have a shortage of houses, but instead a shortage of desire to house the homeless.
What makes you think we, as one of the most powerful countries in the world, cannot provide housing to the homeless?
Also, if you want to actually have a conversation about this, I would appreciate if you don't belittle my comments.
[1]: https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/
Nobody said anything about building housing for free, but we definitely could build way more housing than we currently are. Why is that ignorant?
Homesless people fall in several camps. However, why is it that homelessness is a bigger issue in CA vs NY? Likely because CA has been lax on homelessness to a degree where aimless vagabonds and drug addicts think it's acceptable. It's not. For reasons economic and ethical. Nobody wants homelessness and nobody wants to be homeless. But from the outside looking in, when you tolerate it like CA does, it seems like a lot of homeless people are content with it. Which sets a precedent that being homeless is okay in those cities.
Really makes me sad, kids deserve better. We can do better.
https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
And California is really bad at providing housing that's affordable.
The more resources you pour into "helping the homeless," the worse the problem tends to get. You tend to magnify it.
California has seriously bad housing policies that actively push up the cost of housing. They have also underbuilt housing for decades, which is known to push up the cost of housing.
They need to be remedying that issue.
You also need to identify factors that put people at risk of homelessness and help people who have those characteristics rather than helping people based on their current lack of housing. You need to help them regardless of their housing status.
If you help people with serious problems conditional upon being homeless, you tend to entrench the problem of homelessness. It actively makes it harder to get off the street because you can't get help without first being homeless and then you may lose access to help if you get back into housing.
So good programs help people with certain problems or characteristics which put them at risk of homelessness and do so regardless of their current housing status. "Helping the homeless" is an approach that tends to be subject to the Shirky Principle: It tends to preserve the problem it is supposedly aiming to solve.
This data base is potentially of no real value in solving the problem, though it sure has terrific PR value for pretending to solve the problem.
If you really want to solve the problem, start fixing issues that push up market-rate housing to crazy high prices. And, you know, people in California don't really, seriously want that and you will be very hard pressed to get credit for "playing hero" and "helping the homeless."
I used to joke that "Someday, I will be a landlord providing affordable housing. No, I will not be celebrated as someone solving homelessness. I will be vilified in the press as a Slum Lord."
People making headlines for trying to help the homeless are people who want pats on the back for Playing Hero. And they are very much Playing.
I talked to a guy one day who was all "I have dreams of turning this entire block (of the small town where I currently live) into homeless services!" and I was like "Oh, look at the time! I have a meeting to attend! Buh-bye!"
If you really care about the people, you don't dream of growing homeless services. You dream of making society work so that few people end up homeless.
No one will call you a hero for that.
This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
First, we tend to build really huge homes. Make it possible to build small homes and that makes it possible to increase housing supply without tanking the price of the large houses.
Second, remove some of the tax protections that make housing super cheap for people who have owned it a long time already. This is a major issue in California and it's one people aren't going to want fixed.
It is a subsidy for The Haves who got in before prices went up and intentionally locked in their low costs and pulled the ladder up behind them. Their prices are low. It's everyone else who is paying for that.
You don't have to tank the prices on real estate in California to begin remedying this. Believing you do is part of the problem.
Start bringing down administrative costs and administrative barriers to building more housing. Ease up the choke hold on the supply.
You can have both "more butter and more guns" if you help people make their lives work. It's amazingly hard to be a productive member of society while sleeping in a tend and dodging the police. Getting back into housing tends to bring costs down while improving ability to earn, etc.
Stop flushing the lives of The Have Nots down the toilet in the name of preserving wealth for the privileged few. It does not have to be a tragedy for the already privileged to dump less on the less privileged.
That one's just a matter of messaging. I think you have bigger hurdles around:
* people want to have the same type of housing as they do today, or the opportunity to buy one of those less-dense single family homes in the future. If it's expensive, they can save up - or at least dream about it. If it's replaced with apartments, the option is gone entirely. However, there's lots of low-density commercial and industrial that can be upzoned instead! But if you're demonizing the suburbs and the single-family homes, instead of the single-use strip mall, you're asking for a lot more political opposition.
* and the biggest one to me: it takes SO LONG to build projects. You need streamlined plan approval, more labor availability, and a lot of money to do things in parallel instead of sequentially. Doing things in parallel also helps with some of the short-term property value hits you might otherwise get from a slowly-changing area.
But the only way you stop the land value appreciation is if people move out of the cities and the demand evaporates. And that's more likely if homelessness continues to increase than if you start doing something about the bottom of the housing market. Otherwise, a more populous city doesn't have lower land prices - look at Manhattan, SF, LA vs the rural US.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HousingWorks/comments/l6im7f/why_do...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/lslfqg/mee...
People may well end up moving out of the big cities. But unless you are expecting a population crash for humanity globally, we just need more housing somewhere in the US.
I suspect California is so hard hit in part because we actively export homelessness from other states to California because the dry, temperate weather means sleeping outside isn't much of a hardship. And then there are myriad barriers to getting back into housing that help keep people long-term homeless once you are there.
It can be difficult to physically leave California on foot:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21309036
Climate:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and...
For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
Across the US we need to be resolving our housing issues rooted in decades of housing policy gone awry. That's one of the things that needs to happen here.
Buying a house that you plan to resell is an investment. You don't have a right to a profitable investment, especially not one appreciating at the price that they are in California.
1. We are so far from building enough to even lower the price of houses, let alone depreciate them from $3m to $800k.
2. The idea that most residents in SF have outstanding debts of $3m is just.. you need to get out in this city a little more.
3. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If there is even a possibility that with more building, the cost of your home would go from $3m to $800k, you shouldn't be going into debt if you are planning on not living in this home for the rest of your life.
Second, I don't live in SF, I live in a different area. Inflation is an issue here too, and I am genuinely concerned about how remedies would impact not only people directly but the city and the state. If California or it's cities do bad, there are implications across the country. Telling me to "get out of the city" is a confusing statement given that I know people that have these kinds of debts.
Three sounds like an empathy problem, so we can skip that one.
/s
It seemed for a while like SLC had found a working solution. But as I recall, they eventually dropped it. It feels like a solvable problem, but as a society we will have to come to terms with our ideas of morality, as well as the role of gov't (specifically in health care and psychiatric treatment).
Don't know why more people don't see the connection between these two things when..
1. A large percentage of homeless people are addicted to drugs.
2. A popular drug was legalized in California at the exact same time homelessness exploded.
This ruling really caught every West Coast city with their pants down, because it laid bare the the fact that they had no effective strategy for managing the homelessness crisis, and were papering over the problem by using the police to harass homeless people until they moved on elsewhere. This is basically the strategy that the entire United States uses - make their lives miserable and hope they move on. Lots of people tend to move on in a western direction, until they get to the coast. Some cities are even brazen enough to buy one way Greyhound tickets for their homeless population, and they tend to send them to San Francisco, Portland and Seattle - cities that are trying to approach homelessness humanely. So essentially, the cities on the West Coast are footing the bill for the way the rest of the country treats the homeless, and being prevented from employing those same measures themselves. Add that to an explosion in housing costs, and you’ve got the mess we’re in right now.
Maybe it's to make it seem like ending homelessness is an easy fix. Just provide cheap housing.
Drive around Los Angeles and notice the tents and homeless encampments. There are square miles where it's easy to see literally hundreds of these encampments, under freeway passes, beside highways, encircling parks, etc.
I could walk outside and find at least 50, if not more, within 10 city blocks of me.
Then just do the math, 400 city blocks in a square mile, 500 square miles in Los Angeles.
divide that by 15,000 or 20,000 homeless and it's easy to see that the overwhelming homeless are out in the open.
It's tragic, and it's a hard to fix. We've been trying to provide cheap housing for homeless for decades and the truth is most don't want housing.
I've toured treatment centers in skid row, the counselors there say they struggle to get people to come inside for treatment. Most are paranoid and struggle with addiction and illness and they need to want help.
Because most homeless are unstable addicts and mentally ill. And that's a problem that can't be solved by building structures.
They need treatment facilities, rules against open encampments and jail for repeat law violations.