> the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing
OK, so $2600 gets a fair bit.
Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending may be lower.
I think it's misleading to compare that dollar amount to the monthly cost of an apartment.
This is NPR reporting. Why would they mislead on an issue like this? I think they're a very credible source, given their progressive bent, to be asking these questions.
But it’s not per-tent is it? It per-tent-and-services-and-meals-and-sanitation-and-project-overheads.
That’s misleading.
> Numbers are numbers.
But the number isn’t what they say it is.
The phrase per-tent either intentionally or unintentionally misleads you to think that’s the cost literally for the tent and should be compared against rent.
I have no idea why people believe NPR to be progressive. The joke name "Nice Polite Republicans" exists for a reason. Liberal news coverage of homeless issues rarely takes a progressive framing, anyway.
Yeah... I have a hard time imagining anyone in the US describing today's NPR as "nice polite Republicans"... Perhaps Bernie Sanders would possibly describe them as centrist?
> The Pew survey found that the NPR audience tends Democratic (17% Republican, 37% independent, 43% Democratic) and centrist (21% conservative, 39% moderate, 36% liberal).
Big yawn. Imagine suggesting that the hundreds -that we know about- of folks killed while just trying to live their damn lives constitute "a terrorist state"
If I was that bad at basic logic, I'm not sure I'd tell on myself like that.
Promoting an author who’s book is literally titled, “In Defense of Looting”[1] isn’t progressive. It’s promoting the breakdown of the rule of law. That wasn’t an accident either.
"One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'"
To the extent that they identify that the view is labelled with the editorially appropriate moniker: 'Controversial' - I'm glad that people have a chance to speak their minds.
'Covering' a book or a perspective is not overtly 'promoting' it.
If they're drawing from a wide perspective (they don't quite though), then this would be a good thing.
Even NPR had to admit that it was wrong to publish that story, or at least do so without calling it out as factually inaccurate:
> This Q&A with a provocative author did not serve NPR’s audience. You and several other NPR fans pointed out that NPR’s own prior reporting contradicted some of the things this author was saying. On top of being wrong about recent events, the author’s characterization of the Civil Rights Movement is a distortion and oversimplification.
The issue with the piece is not 'facts' - it's the characterization of 'looting' as effectively a form of 'legit revolutionary behaviour', actions which are necessary to invoke change.
That's not a completely irrational idea and is worthy of some discussion.
The bigger issue with NPR is not that they carried the piece, it's that they likely would not have carried too many alternative viewpoints. They are 'sided'.
Yeah NPR is largely for wealthy college educated liberals, who largely gesture towards helping the homeless but have no substantial interest in doing so. NPR has had numerous articles that take the small business owner’s perspective over the worker, and other such things. They are in no way left-leaning.
There’s an easy litmus test for news organizations - words. Do they use Latino or Latinx, for example? Illegal alien vs. undocumented immigrant vs refugee. Sex vs gender assigned at birth (usually when talking about a trans person).
NPR used to be fairly centrist, but these days they’re far to the left. If I turn on my car there’s about a 9/10 chance my local station will be talking about some form of identity politics.
That’s all the radio, though. I believe they at least try to approach the center in their online articles.
When you tune into public radio you're most likely not listening to NPR. Public radio stations draw their programming from many sources, including in many cases shows produced by the station. NPR does distribute more content to public radio stations than do APM, PRI/PRX, or WNYC, but their programs don't comprise a majority of public radio content.
Unfortunately your litmus test especially doesn't work that well for NPR, at least in one example. They distribute (but do not produce - partly because it wouldn't meet their editorial guidelines) a show about issues facing Latin Americans in the United States called Latino USA. Yet nobody who listens to it would deny the show takes quite a strong progressive stance on political issues.
I'd also add that NPR's most popular shows, the newscasts Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, are all remarkably boring politically and take a sort of weaker sauce version of the BBC's neutral and somewhat hostile approach to interviewing, regardless of political bent.
The hosts of All Things Considered regularly use latinx, but at least the last time I heard them use a Hispanic reporter they used the word latino. I don't know if that was a change in policy or if the reporter doesn't like the word themselves.
All Things Considered may be "boring" politically, but they are far from neutral - I don't listen to the other two very often. Easy example - for weeks, if not months, they called what was going on at the border "Trumps Family (sometimes Child) Separation Policy," even though anyone informed knew the very first day that it was not his policy. It wasn't until the story finally started to die down did they used the (at least somewhat) correct phrase "The increase in family separations due to Trump's zero tolerance policy."
"undocumented immigrant" isn't necessarily the same as "refugee", likewise sex vs assigned gender. if you're going to critique word choice you should know what those words mean
I know what the words mean, but "refugee" usually means "someone who shouldn't qualify as a refugee but is going to try to use it/lie to get in to an economically favorable country" nowadays, but that's a bit of a mouthful.
My guess is framing it as a $ per person per month came from whoever pointed the report out to the journalist, possibly one of the interviewees (Comptroller, Legal Aid, Councilmember etc). From there the comparison to rent is pretty natural.
I don't think this is bad reporting or anything, I was commenting to help people avoid getting into the trap of thinking in the most obvious framing after skimming a headline.
As long as the local government has tons of money doing nothing in their budget, they are going to find a way to spend it, and they're not going to care if they overpay because what else are they going to spend it on? In coastal California, the rule is never ever give that money back by lowering taxes. Taxes only go up. If there's too much money being generated by the taxes to spend, start spending it on homelessness or whatever utopian goal sounds good.
Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.
Building more houses would help a lot in coastal California. Labor costs follow housing costs, so anything involving a local human being doing work is insanely overpriced.
If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction.
Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions.
Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work.
(Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
> My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities
I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero.
Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
Sure, if that’s an option. Where I live they shut down the bus route in front of my house during covid. There’s no plan to bring it back. The entire neighborhood was built around the idea of transit. Of course that’s priced in to rent and of course that didn’t go down.
The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled.
To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically.
Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office.
I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal.
The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure.
You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year.
Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it.
What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives.
Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)
In order to eliminate taxes on the homeless, the state and local sales tax needs to be eliminated, and permanently set to 0%.
The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
You don't even have to build housing specifically for the homeless. You don't have to build BMR or affordable housing. Just build more housing, period, and the problem will eventually solve itself.
The problem with saying this is that while it makes sense if you connect the dots, the path of those dots isn't direct so it's non-obvious to some. A government spending that money can't just build housing and have it solve the problem through market forces because the government won't be participating in the market that way. What a government has to do is incentivize the market, and through incentivizing the market (even if that's taking out many disincentives that have been put in place) cause market participants to build more housing.
So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.
> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them.
I very much doubt that on both counts! But even still, I have a feeling that there is a very high cap for dollars spent directly helping homeless folks that reduce indirect spending 1:1 on other budget line items.
I think the reasoning is that if you spend more money on healthcare you don’t necessarily get better outcomes, you’ll just spend more. Thus the US’ very high per person spend vs worse health outcomes. The issue isn’t that the US doesn’t spend enough, it’s that it spends on the wrong thing.
Similarly with homelessness, spending $2600/month for temporary tents isn’t improved by adding funds. Doubling the money and providing twice as much tent space won’t help homelessness as much as longer term housing that would cost less. Or changing zoning to allow more housing that would definitely cost less.
These are both important problems and need resources, but in some ways more funds are worse.
"Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?"
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.
> Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.
> “The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Total weasel words. You move to LA with one week of money for hotel = "fell into homelessness in L.A.".
In Seattle, the local group did a survey like this. About a quarter put their last housing zip code as the one with the shelter, in Pioneer Square, an expensive area if you aren't homeless. GIGO
It seems to be more that in cold climates governments are compelled to provide shelter for homeless people so they don't die on the street, whereas in warmer climates governments are okay with leaving them on the street.
Both San Francisco and New York have similar proportions of homeless people, but New York has shelter beds for almost all of them whereas San Francisco has shelter beds for only 40%.
San Francisco has some of the best services available out of all California cities. And yet 70% of homeless people lived in SF for at least a year before becoming homeless while 55% lived in SF for a decade or more. Another 14% lived in the Bay Area. Only 8% came from out of state.
Have you ever lived in Florida? Lots of homeless end up there because it’s warm and nice. It’s kind of interesting talking to folks and learn their stories. I don’t know the percentage, but I literally knew people who would move around cities in the urban sprawl over who had the best food, etc.
In most counties, I honestly think they try to spend every last cent in there budget, in order to ask for more the following year.
I live in a pretty good county (Marin County), but I am astonished over the waste of tax money.
I am too young to remember pre-prop 13, but waste was so much. Every year, no matter how much they took in in taxes, it was spent the following year, according to my father. (That's why Jarvis wrote a book called, I'm Mad as Hell. I have an autographed copy someone threw away.)
During the drought in the 70's ranchers were trucked in water, as a political favor. (I actually don't mind this one). Politicians were bought off legally with county tax money. Every night was a big hootenanny at Marin Joes. My point is there was a huge amount of waste.
O.k.--today is much better? Yea--you would think? I used to work at a county beach while in college. One day the maintance guts were throwing tools into a dumptster. Perfectly good chainsaws, hand tools, etc. I asked what's up? They told me if they didn't throw away the "broken tools", their budget would not be the same. I went back there at night and took three chain saws I still have to this day.
There's a department in my county called Open Space. They literally fill in their huge white trucks in the morning, throw some grass/litter in the back, and joy ride in the open space. They could nix this department, and cut back on police funds, and that money could go to a homeless fund. My county has no real crime. The cops are basically Revenue Collectors at this point.
My point is they will never claim to have extra money, unless we demand it.
I would like to see every bit of free County, federal, and state opened up to free camping.
Homelessness is beyond debate.
We need to act yesterday.
Sorry about sounding so preachy, but I know too many people getting ticked for sleeping because they don't have a home.
(Keep an eye on Sausalito, Ca. The authorities decided to get tough on anchor-outs. They decided to vigorously enforce a three day anchorage muni code.
They went beyond enforcement. They broke laws, but It's hard to prove because their is no video evidence. For instance, they towed boats for no reason. It's the city worker's word against a boater. It's like our version against a cop's version. A code that everyone has disregarded for years, including luxury yacht owners, like Allen from Microsoft. He would spend weeks docked in the same spot. (He had a beautiful yacht though.)
They wanted the low income boats out of their view. Rich people find poor people an eye sore. They were dirty homeless shiftless bums after all. Many older ladies were out there to. Probally druggies, or prostitutes? Just scummy people. Why should those wealthy residents have to look at that? (Ironically, every person who I have overheard saying, "Eye sore" has been genetically challenged aesthetically, but monetarily fit.)
Well the boaters having nowhere to go, set up tents in Dunphy Park. They are neat, and only had one provoked criminal arrest. (There brilliant plan of homeless harassment backfired for now?). Oh yea, Richardson Bay has had Anchor Outs since before the 50's. (Yes--Homeless Harassment is alive an well. You can call it Broken Window whatever, but it's nothing more than harassing peopke until they move on.)
The city told them to move to a toxic site, with a bunch of regulations, like early morning tent take down. One woman is disabled, and said she needed help setting up her tent, and needed somewhere to lie down during the day. Plus--a major symptom of depression is sleep reversal. Don't ask me how I know.
The homeless fought back. A kind advocacy group sued the city, and got a temporary restraining order.
In the USA, the Supreme court ruled you can't force homeless people to move, unless you have a bed for them. One win I love!
Right now the situation is up in the air. I heard t...
> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.
If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results.
Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.
$31,000/yr is already pretty shit, and it’s even worse when you consider the opportunity cost of not using that space on a person who’s actually going to gain a productivity benefit from living in SF.
Comparing this to regular rents is not really fair isn't it? Even if the government chooses to pay rent instead of providing this camp, getting landlord's to rent to a homeless person cannot be counted on. On top of that they still need to find work and food. Granted may be not a daunting task if the housing and security is taken care of.
The title of this post has been editorialized to be more provocative. The NPR article is actually titled “High Cost Of Los Angeles Homeless Camp Raises Eyebrows And Questions” and is far less inflammatory than this title suggests.
I disagree. The article also clarifies why that price seems higher than it actually is (e.g. the program may reduce costs of policing elsewhere in the city by providing an orderly source of food and water (which that cost also includes)). It’s a more nuanced look than what the OP’s title suggests.
Nobody like nuance unless it supports their narrative. I know a guy who hated Obama who said he played too much golf. When Trump started playing golf and exceeding even Obama's outings, he said, well a man who works hard needs a vacation. That experience taught me that regardless of political affiliation most people employ nuance when it suits them so they can clearly think in shades of grey. But our problem is that we insist on taking a position and pursue winning above all else.
I would argue that this title is less editorialized. This title plainly states the main fact and subject of the article. Whereas the NPR title leaves the cost nebulous so that we can all wonder, and then click. I would further argue that that ambiguous “high cost” is meant to imply to that reader that the “cost” is extremely high.
In short, this title is more accurate, less editorialized, and less click-baity.
I don't want to diminish the link above and it's efforts but how a first world society has to resort to stuff like this is just mind-boggling.
I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable.
Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right.
Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their citizens and the richest countries aren't? When will people see housing price appreciation far beyond wage inflation as a serious detriment to society?
Partly because of the rise in legally mandated standards - in california there are laws stating the minimum area of housing for a family of a given size which is way higher than the minimum that people would settle for if the price was correspondingly lower - most poorer people including me earlier in life would prefer to pay half or 1/3 the amount for half or 1/3 the space. The aim of the minimum is sometimes stated as “we don’t want people to live in slums”…and the result is that people either commute up to 2 hours each way, break the law, or end up on the street
That's a fair call, there's certainly places in the states that treat it as yet another utility rather than an investment.
From my experience in Asia the attitude is so wildly different, they build more houses than is ever needed, people can run stores and sell basic goods out of their spare front room for a few hours a day as side income.
I'm not familiar with local laws in the US but in Australia you'd get fined a few thousand dollars trying to sell groceries from a house in suburbia, many have to get in their cars and travel a few km to the designated "commercial" area simply to buy some bread. There's a lot the West could learn from the East yet we are far too stubborn to actually do it.
>> I'm not familiar with local laws in the US but in Australia you'd get fined a few thousand dollars trying to sell groceries from a house in suburbia, many have to get in their cars and travel a few km to the designated "commercial" area simply to buy some bread.
This would definitely play out the exact same way in America.
Low-cost urban housing is illegal to construct in the US due to building safety codes, rules on minimum size, etc. The US federal government (and some state/city governments) has a tendency to always increase safety standards just enough that the bottom X% of people are priced out. They do it with cars as well. New cars start dipping to the low-mid $10K range? Time to make infotainment systems mandatory and add more mandatory airbags. This doesn’t affect 90% of consumers but the bottom 10% get squeezed out again.
I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions.
Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartment than a 12x12 tent. I know that this calculation is an over simplification of costs, but it still gives you a decent perspective on what can be done with that kind of money.
And I disagree this will save money long term or elsewhere. When you don't address the root cause and spend money wisely, you only leave room for more spending in the future.
You're misunderstanding the fundamental function of modern government. That $2600 goes to a contractor (political crony, friend, or relative) who then mostly pockets the money through salaries, sub-contracts, and such. This is the purpose of the spending and there was never an intent to help anyone in the first place.
Which is why the money going to this program would be far better spent going towards the building of public housing. Tax payers get real estate assets, homeless people get homes.
so you're saying you wouldn't rent to someone purely because they were homeless? w/ attitudes like this it's not surprising there's so many people living on the street
1) You have to pay extra to get a landlord to agree to the risk of housing a homeless person with likely no way to pay rent if the government program ends who also is more likely to have drug problems / mental health issues. This person may also be more likely to harass other tenants. Even if you don't believe this to be true, many landlords will and they won't agree to rent to such people without a substantial extra charge.
2) Cost in potential missed rent from neighboring tenants. If a landlord agrees to this program and other tenants move out due to the behavior of the homeless tenant, then that lost cost is also a problem.
Or you could make vagrancy a crime and deter people from thinking that behavior is okay. Sure somewhat cruel, but so is making average citizens feel unsafe because there are thousands of people with nothing left to lose hounding them.
It reminds me of the programs that some cities have to buy bus tickets for homeless people to send them to other cities/states just to get rid of them.
Won't these programs just expand ad infinitum if we don't address the root causes of homelessness? I'm glad we're helping the homeless, but the lack of housing is a symptom and less so a cause. LA has way more homeless people than it used to. Why don't we address that?
Its probably nicer being homeless in California than living poor in Minnesota or some other place thats cold (not an American, and never been to Minnesota). I've just always thought if I was homeless I'd move to the beach where its warm.
I'm not an expert and I admit my views on this are pretty extreme...but surely there's inefficiency there. What if we didn't judge what they were doing (it occurs anyway so we "tacitly approve" in effect), but instead provide the same service for them: tents on the street, muck-about area, access to food, drugs, but do so in an efficient way but at a better price. It seems the quality of things they get and the outcomes for the general public represent a pretty low ROI for 2600 a month/tent. A providor model might also enable a measure of control not in the sense of "controlling them" but more in the sense of we're able to maybe "improve" some things (maybe better food, better tents, better drugs, better outcomes for other non-vagrants who share the streetspace).
edit: I should have read the article. That's exactly what they were doing. I incorrectly assumed it was a "measured cost" of homelessness. I suppose what I imagined tho was less like a refugee camp with fences and guards, and more like a re-use of some of the old port/industrial area close to where many of the LA camps used to be anyway. A more NGO/adhoc style approach. But maybe the current model is working, apart from cost, I don't know :p :) xx
Posting this because most people in HN have a warped view of what homelessness is, especially in california. First of all, when most people think homeless they think "fentanyl addict out of his mind living in squalor" and while there are certainly a bunch of those people in the homeless population, they aren't even a majority of the homeless.
In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will be homeless for less than 12 months, they are likely employed while they are homeless at least in a part time capacity, or they are in college. These folks generally refuse to get services and spend their time sleeping in their car, crashing on friends couches, and in a pinch, sleeping in tents outside away from the wild areas. In general, these people are on hard times due to bad luck more or less, and are struggling to get out of it.
Another 1/3 of the homeless are people who used to be in the prior group, but are now "chronically homeless". They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place, and the best way to prevent people from becoming transiently homeless is to prevent them from losing their stable housing or getting them into stable housing within the first 12 months of them becoming homeless. It is much harder to "rehabilitate" someone who has been homeless for 12+ months than it is to rehabilitate someone who has been homeless for <12 months.
One issue we have now is that is very easy for people to move from "safely housed" to "transiently homeless" and one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing so people in the precarious spot have alternatives to living in a tent. Its not going to be an immediate feedback loop but its the only sustainable way to prevent the growing numbers of homeless in US cities.
Whenever I see someone who is quite clearly very recently homeless I give them as much money as I can afford to, like $50-100, because I feel like it can get them out of homelessness. When I see someone completely out of their mind I don’t feel like anything I can do will make a material difference, just get them different levels of stoned for the next 3 hours.
the crazy thing is that there are a ton of "recently homeless" folks you encounter in your daily life without even knowing it. Something like 10% of the cal state university students are homeless. My wife is a doc in the ER and deals with a bunch of folks who are going through these issues. Many retail workers, service workers etc are homeless, shower at the gym, and have been living in their car or friends couches for the past few months and will probably find a place to live in the next few months.
This is the most stereotype hn comment I can imagine.
Why does your goal have to include putting them in some weird spot where youre holding power over them to teach some "entrepreneur mentality". Most of the temporarily homeless population is embarrassed to ask for money, just treat them like an adult if youre going to offer help.
This is completely asinine. You're working on the assumption that these people have the opportunity and bandwidth for entrepreneurship. Guess what homelessness takes away from you?
Take a quick peek at Maslow's hierarchy of needs please and map both their situation and what you're asking of them.
People aren't dogs, you don't train anyone to have "entrepreneur mentality" by giving them asinine tasks. It is condescending as hell and, worse: it is degrading.
1. It's illegal to be a victim. Why do you allow yourself to be robbed, or even have a lock put on your door?
2. Penal transport. Since everyone gets to do what they want, I'm rounding up everyone I don't like. I put them on some coast, perhaps one day, the moon. In 10 months, 10 tons of processed materials, like fuel, are waiting on the coast line. If they are one ounce short, the coastline gets microwaved.
It would be impossible to commit a crime. Perfectly legal too. All the law has to do is limit the violence. Mental illness, the worst of it, looks just like intoxication. It takes a very long time to bounce back from it, if you ever do.
Would you mind posting the sources? Even if its anedotal or not authoritative, it would be good to inform where you learned about the 1/3-2/3 breakdown.
one area is the "point in time homeless surveys" here: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/san-francis... the data can be a little hard to interpret for different categories/parts of the report. For instance, when 10% of the respondents say they have been homeless for 30 days or less, you can extrapolate this and assume that this same number of people is rotating in and out of homelessness frequently and over a year the number of homeless in this bit is 12x the number in the point in time survey. I picked up a lot of this through volunteering and participating in homeless social services and doing housing related activism.
That is well and all, but seems like a bit of a distraction from the OP. While 2/3 of homeless may be transient homeless, it seems incredibly unlikely that most of the people living in tents fall into that category rather than into the chronically homeless camp.
Wouldn’t the fact that the population is split 2/1 mean that it is very likely that unhoused people living in those tents do fall into that category? I believe that’s what the GP is referring to when they say that people have a warped view about homelessness; that the situation “seems” one way because of anecdotal experience and media representation.
No, as pointed out by the GP, there are a lot of "homeless" people who are living out of their car / crashing on a friend's sofa / etc. While these people are technically homeless, I wouldn't say the general public as a skewed view of homelessness – it's just when people say homeless they're not usually talking about people crashing on a friend's sofa. People in tents almost by definition are not the kind of homeless that will crash on a sofa / live out of a car. And are generally the type of homeless that are panhandling, which is of course the most visible group.
It's similar to how there is a disconnect in how people talk about "mass shootings" and what the public think that means. The public thinks of a mass shooting as what the FBI calls an "active shooter" event, where someone is just opening fire on random people, while in stats and things it's just any shooting where 3+ people get shot, which can include gangland-style violence. People aren't "confused", we're just using two different definitions.
My point is of course not that the transient homeless don't need help or anything like that. It's just strange to bring them into it when presumably they are not a large percentage of the "habitually living in tents" homeless, which should of course be handled differently.
> one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing
One pedantic quibble. It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically. It's perfectly fine simply to build more housing of any type. Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market.
Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing. The rich prefer to live in new housing stock, and the poor prefer to get discounts on old housing stock. The same way that a robust new car market creates a secondary market for cheap used cars.
A lot of people with good intentions will try to block any type of development that doesn't specifically include affordable housing. But this is the exact opposite of what's needed. The best way to lower the cost of housing is to increase the supply of housing. And the best way to do that is to unleash developers whatever is most profitable whenever and whoever they want without government regulation and NIMBY activists getting in their way.
Market housing creates affordable housing by displacing demand. No matter what kind of housing you build, as long as it gets built now it will lower prices now.
More luxery houses would lower prices for luxery housing, but not necessarily for affordable housing. I don't know how much those are competing markets
New housing is always relatively "luxury" because newness is itself a luxury. Much of what is relatively affordable now was relatively "luxury" when it was built. But if you stop building anything new it would be like trying to keep the price of cars down by banning new cars – what will happen after a decade or two if you did that?
To use your car analogy- just because a new car will be worth more than a used one (and this is much more true of cars than houses), that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a luxery car. Sure, newness is a type of luxery (I'm not sure how much housing price depreciates with time, but I'll believe you on this one), but new houses can be built to cater to wealthy buyers or to cater to lower income buyers.
In addition to the relation between luxury housing market and affordable housing market that others are calling out, regulations and other hurdles to build are a reason expensive units are built rather than cheap ones. If you need 15 permits to build in SoMa and changes requested by one council can require going through the process for another permit again, your fixed cost gets so high that you really have no choice but to build expensive units. I'm sure housing cost would quickly get under control of SF for example were to eliminate any height and other zoning constraints and have as the only requirement that you are able to get insurance for your building.
That assumes there are market incentives to actually fill the housing that is built. What about when buildings of hundreds of luxury condos are built and they just sit empty, either owned by disinterested "investors" or unwilling to be sold for the market-directed price?
Fair— I kind of picked one at random. Obviously part of the point of that dude's effort is that this is a difficult thing to get numbers on. Here's some other coverage around responses to a planned vacant unit tax:
Maybe, but that is difficult when a) the "investors" are split between connected, powerful people who really don't want to see their investments go negative; and families just getting started who could be utterly ruined by an underwater mortgage, and b) the fact that the housing situation is a crisis now; there isn't time to faff around and hope that ten to twenty years the invisible hand of the market does this or that.
I think you're mostly right, but it's not as straightforward as 1 dwelling per household and everyone just moves up a rung. Market housing could get bought up by people who are currently living with roommates (but would like their own home) or one of the 52% of young adults currently living with their parents.[0] Those spots are then unlikely to become available for the homeless.
This is just another symptom of the major lack of housing in the US, and needs to be solved as well, but it highlights how difficult it is to alleviate homelessness when there are other casualties of the housing market as well. By all means, build as much housing as soon as possible, but some of it will probably need to be specifically targeted at homeless or poorer populations.
Why are those people living with roommates? Because they can't afford not to. If they suddenly move out and fill up a space they otherwise couldn't afford, that requires that prices have gone down.
This is all true if we're talking about supply demand lines on a graph, but when on earth in real life is a for-profit company gonna whoops accidentally build so much that they have to take a loss and then keep building? lol.
I mean the idea is correct, but I don't think we can depend on the private market to deliver on this concept.
Don't get me wrong SF badly needs more housing and needs to approve tons more, I'm just saying there are limits to the outcome. At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.
Now if we had a not for profit government agency that steadily built housing regardless of the market conditions, say they were working toward a vacancy rate goal, now that could create surplus housing.
You might see friction there though in the private market would pull back.
I was arguing against the idea that adding "luxury" housing won't lower prices.
Most people understands it does it if you add a million units, but for some reason they can't grasp that each new unit contributes.
I was not predicting anyone would build a million units overnight, certainly not accidentally.
> At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.
SF has been very near this point for decades. Because new construction is mostly illegal, and if not extremely expensive and slow. Because of explicit policy from the SF BoS.
If housing construction were legalized in SF, say by adopting the regulations of Houston or Tokyo, there would be an enormous construction wave in the city. No one can predict to what level, but after that has transformed the city we can take stock and see if any other measures need to taken.
But I don't see SF doing anything of the kind without at least a decade of hesitation. The city is far too conservative to change.
Yea, 100% Agree. Fully supportive of all housing. I was specifically referring to SRO type housing or boarding houses which are currently illegal to build, but there is so much simple stuff to be done here anything helps.
Boarding houses used to be pretty common in the USA. Are they really illegal to build now? "Sober Living" homes seem legal to build, they're all over the place, and they meet the definition of "boarding house".
I see you've read that CityObservatory article from a few years back [0].
Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation.
Also, all the actual luxury housing that ends up being built is bought by wealthy investors buying their third or fourth property. Just look at the housing market in London.
> Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing.
Eichlers and Craftsman homes were targeted squarely at the middle class of their time. Now in the Bay Area, the price of a "middle class" home is probably skewed to something around $1,000/sqft, but I don't know if middle class wages can actually afford that.
> Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation.
What data are you basing this claim off of? Many people (especially young people in finance and tech) move every few years, and some of them want luxury apartments. That reduces the demand for cheaper housing stock. A 25 y/o moving to SF isn't going to buy an apartment and stay there for their entire life.
I believe the confusion is over the term "buy." In San Francisco/US terminology, a 25 y/o is likely to rent or lease an apartment. Buying would more likely be of a condo (or a house, as you mentioned.)
Why would you need to wait a generation? More like a couple of months. People who are moving to luxury housing live somewhere now, which is less new. When they move out of there, someone else can move in, etc. and on down the line freeing up multiple housing units one by one at ultimately different prices. It adds to the total housing stock in the city immediately.
And no, “all” the luxury housing is not being bought by investors. Even in places where this is a problem it is nowhere near “all”. Investors can also just buy existing housing. Once again, what you anti-housing folks are claiming as a problem of building new housing, is a problem that is going to happen anyway and will be even worse if we don’t build new housing.
> People who are moving to luxury housing live somewhere now, which is less new.
People living a $1mil shithole aren't going to be moving into a $2mil luxury home. You need to find the buyer that can afford a $2mil luxury house. This is why the problem takes so long to work out. Prices are inflated, and luxury homes will be inflated even more - the people that would normally buy them aren't going to be able to move and afford them. Combine this with how people can just sit on homes rather than sell them, it's gonna take a real long time for prices to make their way down.
I’m not sure it would be a whole generation, but I could see a decent percent taking a generation.
Anecdote time
I’m nowhere near rich, but we recently upgraded from a condo to a house and kept our condo. Our intention is to rent it out until our kid is old enough to move out and give it to them.
Do we actually have a "housing" shortage, though? I know that supply of stereotypical single-family, detatched homes is massively outstripped by demand in many parts of the US and that's a problem. But is there actually a shortage of "housing" - places to live - including apartments, condos, duplexes, mobile homes, etc?
This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. I'm genuinely curious as I've never been to LA or spent significant time in parts of the US where this problem is at its worse. I live in the midwest and there are plenty of places I could buy or rent here if I needed - cheap and expensive - but I'm lucky enough to have a decent place now so I can be picky about the next one.
Yes, there is a housing shortage in many major US cities. This is evident both from the high rent in these cities, and the large share of workers who commute long distances to work in these cities.
It can be hard to immediately see that there is a shortage of something like housing, because it’s rare that people will actually end up without housing because there isn’t enough to go around. But this is because people will rationally choose to live further and further from their jobs and commute longer and longer distances as the shortage drives prices up near their workplace, rather than choosing to go without housing.
Absolutely. I live in West LA, one of the places in the US worst hit by the housing shortage and it is hard to even find an apartment and vacancies are filled quick.
Luckily, I haven't had to move in a while, but it was bad enough that when I got my place, I signed for it purely based on the opinion of a friend who could go see it for me. If I had waited the extra week to come home from the trip I was on, it almost certainly would not have been vacant.
Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market.
Only if people actually live in those houses, and they're bought by people living in the cheaper houses right now who then move up in to the new housing stock.
If people buy the new houses as investments and leave them empty most of the year then it has no impact on the rest of the housing market, or if people from outside buy them and move to the city then it just increases the population of the city with no effect on the lower social strata. This is precisely what happens in places like London. There's a boom in house building but it's often apartments bought by foreign investors (allegedly for money laundering... ).
Directly building more social housing would have a far greater impact than trying to affect cheap housing stock by 'trickle down' methods.
"Wealth investment leaves an estimated 125,000 homes in London without anyone living in them."
There are 268,385 empty homes in England according to the government (people get a tax break in most parts of England if they own a property that is unoccupied and unfurnished so its quite easy to track empty homes), and half of them are luxury houses in London.
I'm not saying that's definitely the case everywhere, but I am saying it's worth considering.
The current UK government is full of people who believe rich people keeping their money is how you stimulate the economy in to growth. It's not a completely unreasonable position according to economic theory but there are plenty of reasons to disagree with it.
The actual report says that there are 125,000 homes in London without permanent residents. Those homes aren't unoccupied; they're often used for AirBnB or temporary rentals. That's not a vacancy. In reality, only a fifth of those homes are empty most of the time.
Also, the report doesn't tell us how many non-vacant homes there are in their survey area, so we have to guess. London reportedly has 3.59 million dwellings, so 25,000 vacant homes would only represent 0.7% of homes being vacant. Even if you use the higher 125,000 number, that's still only 3.5% of all homes. That's a fairly low vacancy rate, and about right for a city.
You can tax vacant homes, but in general, those taxes have a very small effect on housing prices. It's far, far more effective to allow people to build more housing, including luxury housing.
None of the articles support a narrative that there is an epidemic of vacancies among high-end housing.
Vancouver: The article claims that there is ~5% vacancy rate. This is actually below the normal rate for vacancies in the US. Condos have a higher vacancy rate, but the article offers a reasonable explanation.
Manhattan: Ultra-luxury home vacancies aren't the same as luxury apartment buildings. Most people are not buying $5-$10 million condos. And even if the buildings are unsold, they aren't necessarily unoccupied.
Seattle: Again focuses on "foreign investors" and unsold apartments. No concrete data on how many those apartments are actually empty.
Melbourne: > Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald said, based on the water data, Melbourne's actual vacancy rate was closer to 7 per cent.
7% is on the high-end of vacancy rates, but if you reduced that down to 5% then the effect on prices would still be low.
Boston: No data on vacancy rates. Again, sale != occupancy. There are plenty of property management companies that build out luxury apartment buildings and directly rent to people.
The real issue is lack of housing, which can be fixed by letting developers build more housing, including high-end housing.
Vancouver: "condominiums that are owned and not available for rent had a whopping 12.5 per cent vacancy rate"
The Manhattan article links to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad... which says "Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015... remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts" and "7,050 new condo units available for sale in Manhattan in January [2020]"
Melbourne: "Docklands... 17 per cent consuming no water in 2013" and "12.4 per cent of Cardinia and Clyde homes reported no water use."
Boston: "12 of Boston’s newest and biggest luxury developments could remain largely empty despite having sold most of their available condo units to buyers."
Vancouver: "City housing planner Matthew Bourke said there doesn't appear to be a correlation between empty homes and housing prices, given that the vacancy rate remained flat while prices skyrocketed.... Bourke told council that about 70 per cent of single-family homes marked as vacant in 2014 were found to be waiting for a renovation permit." 12.5 * 0.7 = 3.75% (this can't be directly compared to other vacancy numbers, though).
Manhattan: Unsold != unoccupied.
Melbourne: Now we're cherrypicking districts that have less than 15,000 residents total in a city of 5 million in one specific year? This is essentially p-hacking to support a non-existent narrative.
Wow, buying a house and leaving it vacant most of the year doesn't seem like a very good investment. In my experience when people I've known bought an investment property the number one thing on their minds was occupancy, and if they thought it would lie vacant for more than a month or two, they wouldn't buy it.
I do see your point about foreign investors though, they will view the house as a bank account, one that won't lose money, and will probably appreciate, and is safe from the corruption (or corruption investigations) of their home country. And they have money they need to put somewhere, so why not there?
But even they would probably prefer someone to be living in it and paying them in the meantime, because that improves the return by a lot, and doesn't put the principal at risk.
Same in Seattle, my block has a 2017 constructed home that has never had occupants, owned by a non-resident from China. He owns at least a few other empty new homes in the inner suburbs as well.
About once every 2 weeks his son pops by to make sure the house has not burned down or had a pipe burst.
Currently living in zone 2 north-east London and house prices have seemed pretty flat for the last couple of years. Flats have had a surge due to current stamp duty holiday... and prices outside London seem to have increased a lot with people anticipating a permanent move to remote/hybrid working.
Taxes on empty properties aren't high, but you still need to consider maintenance... and there's an opportunity cost of leaving a house empty rather than renting it out.
Just interested in your data - thanks!
Update: found https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/pretty-vacant in one of your sibling posts - was that what you were referring to? I just read it (on my phone, so might have missed it), but didn't see any numbers for investment returns here... and there was a fairly-extensive section talking about London property being used for money-laundering instead - is that what you're referring to?
In CA (at least Los Angeles) there are some tax laws in place that allow a home owner to make more in tax breaks by not renting a house or building vs renting it out.
I don’t know the details as I'm a renter but from speaking with a few Realtors they mentioned the companies the worked at did this.
Housing prices in my area have literally doubled in the last 5~ years. Sitting on a house doesn't look so bad with those returns. At the same time flipping is also a housing investment method that inflates prices while often diluting the quality of the housing market, as it's often not done properly.
Let's also not forget the housing crisis saw a lot of money pouring into bad investments. Assuming people only make wise investments is naive. The market is crazy right now with people paying over asking and waiving inspections. A lot of people are going to ride that train over the cliff.
I dunno, I do see "luxury" apartments being built rather often around here, but starting at $2K/mn for a 1 bedroom isn't really affordable.
Political NIMBYism probably does play some part along with the pandemic, but again, that doesn't mean these investors are paying attention to that. There is a gold rush on at the moment.
People who move into these more expensive units leave other, less-luxury units though that now someone else can move into. Of course, as someone else pointed out, there is actually pent up demand outside of major cities as well by people wanting to move to the city. But still our only realistic, long term solution out of this mess that 40 years of insufficient construction had gotten us into is unprecedented construction. Upzone and remove barriers to get permits.
Luxury second homes should simply be taxed at a high rate, it’s one of the least defensible indulgences so with enough of a campaign it could happen. Ditto for speculative foreign buyers, this is already happening in some cities that have been hard hit by such “investments”.
I'm fascinated by how widespread this weird idea is.
Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock.
Why can't you do the same trick with existing housing?
I’ve heard of it too, apparently foreign money (mostly China) needs a legit way to pull the money out of their country and real estate is a good way to do it that doesn’t alarm regulators. Can’t say why it doesn’t make sense to rent it out. But I do know that Vancouver passed laws to limit this type of purchase.
Did Vancouver pass limits on foreign purchases because that was the underlying reason for the high cost of housing, or did they pass limits because that was easier than actually building new housing?
>Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock.
Where I live the housing prices are expected to go up roughly 15% this year. So someone buying a house for 600k can expect to sell it for 690k making 90k. That is 7500 USD a month. If you wanted to make that much money from rent you would have to squeeze 4 or 5 tenants into the property. It is simply not worth the hassle trying to rent buildings out when house prices go up at such a high rate
Homeless people of people with low income cannot afford $4k rent. Also I find it preposterous that people can make $7.5k/month in the first place from just house value increase. At the rate at which housing get more and more expensive we will soon reach a point where new home owners will never be able to fully pay a mortgage back
It's not either/or, which is why I'd assume the parent poster called it weird. That investor could make the appreciation and of top of it could make the rental income. So it is weird, from their perspective, to leave it empty. If they're flipping real estate for profit (as opposed to buying a home to live) why reject the extra income.
Also, selling a rental property with a solid history of rental income tends to be better than one with a history of sitting empty. Although that probably doesn't apply to mansions.
> If people buy the new houses as investments and leave them empty most of the year
Fortunately, this is already a metric that is tracked, called the vacancy rate. And what we see is, that in in-demand cities, that have high rents, the vacancy rate is pretty low.
So, if the vacancy rate is 5%, that means that if you build 100 houses, then 95 of them are going to be lived in. Yes, it sucks that those other 5 houses are not lived in, but those extra 95 houses, in our example, are still a good thing.
> This is precisely what happens in places like London
It is really not. A quick google search shows that the vacancy rate is as low as any other major in-demand city.
One factor in vacancy rates at least in SF / NY - rent control. You really CANNOT rent to someone without a big risk - so if you have an elderly parent who might want to move in in the future, you have kids who might want a place - and are wealthy - you really need to keep place empty.
So yes, the rich do leave I think more places empty in some places because they can afford to and because the economic calculation is not simple. If you rent and want to end the rental later you end up in a bad spot.
Ok, this is a nice story that one could make up. But once again, my point is that vacancy rate is something that is already tracked.
In San Francisco, the vacancy rate is about 3.5%.
So, in other words, regardless of whatever story you are making up about parents, or rent control or whatever, the actual data shows, that the vacancy rate is very low, and therefore not much of a problem.
I'm not disagreeing at all. But I know of enough unusual vacancies in SF among the rich that it strikes me as a small corner factor. In another city (smaller, parents live there) EVERYONE rents when they are not in their space. I mean, even just for summer if traveling. But when you come back, the tenant must leave (and does).
I know someone who sublet an extra room to someone, a year later her wonderful lease was destroyed, landlord sued her and the women never paid a dime, could not be evicted, claimed she felt unsafe and got a restraining order against the person actually paying rent etc so they ended paying rent on two places, one to live in and one for the women.
I mean - this stuff does turn you off renting a small bit.
That said, supply is REDICULOUSLY constrained around here, red tape is nuts, minimum requirements crazy, affordability payments high etc. So yeah, no question that there is artificial scarcity.
A quick Google will also show that the vacancy rate for high end property is higher, and that builders are building more high end property, so logically there is less useful housing stock being added than the overall vacancy rate would imply.
The vacancy rate in Dublin (in Ireland) is 1.6%, but I was there 2 weeks ago and there are so many empty buildings - some of them empty at least since I lived there back in the 90s/00s. I'm not sure that vacancy rate reflects the reality of a city's unproductive building stock
When people buy housing and leave it empty, they are buying the land, the house is a bonus. People never buy housing as an investment unless they use it to reduce the cost of living (pretty much never) or rent it out (happens a lot). Buying land works fine because of rent seeking.
Assuming the infrastructure is there to support it. Developers are more than happy to pass costs onto the government/taxpayer while keeping the profit, such as by building enormous neighborhoods with a single access road or in high risk flood zones. My brother's neighborhood is right now dealing with a developer who is building a 500-unit housing project whose only entrance and exist is the two lane road in front of his house. They'd have direct access to the highway except for the fact they're too cheap to bridge a five foot wide creek.
This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons.
First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone else will move in who lives outside the city and was previously priced out of the mid-tier housing. We see the same type of thing when designing transportation systems in a city. Adding in a new road can actually increase traffic as it ends up encouraging more people to drive who otherwise wouldn't have.
Also the housing market is not a singular market. The type of person who would live in a 3 bedroom luxury condo is not the same type of person who would live in an SRO hotel that shares a bathroom. Most people have a small window of what housing they consider acceptable and what budget they can afford. When a city gentrifies and knocks down SRO housing and replaces it with luxury condos (something that has happened a lot in both LA and the Bay Area over the last couple decades), the available units at the bottom of the market decreases in favor of the top of the market. That doesn't result in everyone in the city just moving up one rung on the housing ladder. Competition for the affordable units is now even higher because there are less of them available.
> cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market
“Never” is too strong.
It happened to me in New York. I negotiated down my rent on account of nearby buildings with better amenities opening at slightly higher but similar enough pricing, net effective.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn and San Francisco were busy blocking all new construction, thereby forcing their restaurant workers to compete with millionaires.
You are disputing a point I never made. I didn't say "no units ever get cheaper". I said when growth outpaces new housing "cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market".
You said yourself that the new construction had slightly higher pricing meaning your unit was in the same basic market as the new construction and also implies you likely were not shopping at "the bottom of the market". Do you think you would have been able to negotiate your rent down if the new building was in an entirely different class and was charging 2x or 3x your rent?
> Do you think you would have been able to negotiate your rent down if the new building was in an entirely different class and was charging 2x or 3x your rent?
Yes. What do you think people bidding for ultra-lux housing do if they don’t have supply?
In New York, the ultra-wealthy have penthouses. In San Francisco, they have rows of townhouses. Which one do you think displaces more affordable housing?
I think you are saying San Francisco should embrace greater density in order to solve its problem. That's pretty short-term thinking.
Start here: San Francisco, for very specific geographic and regional reasons, will not have sufficient housing in the next century, and it will continue to have growing homeless populations. Solve for a 50-year horizon.
> San Francisco, for very specific geographic and regional reasons, will not have sufficient housing in the next century
Some of the densest cities on the planet are on islands. San Francisco is on a peninsula. It is a low density city with tons of infill potential. That densification potential, together with slow population growth in the developed world, makes the problem perfectly tenable. (That said, homeowners would lose money. So not holding my breath.)
> No way would homeowners lose money long term if San Francisco turns into Hong Kong
In the short term they would. And in the long term, they would gain wealth but lose their iron grip on the city. Never underestimate the seductiveness of power. As long as San Francisco’s renters believe density is impossible or will price them out, homeowners (specifically, about half a dozen families) will retain their lock on the city.
A 3 bedroom luxury condo never becomes an SRO hotel with shared bathrooms regardless of how little maintenance goes into the place. A neglected property will obviously fall down market in terms of desirability, but a place like that will never reach the actual bottom of the market.
I can't provide a counterexample to the specific 3br luxury->SRO scenario, but it certainly does happen on occasion that previously expensive units wind up getting subdivided into cheaper units. I knew someone who lived in a low-end furnished room (with shared bathroom) that had previously been part of a larger unit.
I'm not sure that is an equivalent example. The previous example was housing falling into a lower tier of the market through lack of maintenance. Your example is actively retrofitting a place to be in a different tier of the market. That isn't really the same thing because your example requires new investments and is actively creating new housing at the bottom of the market rather than just allowing a place to deteriorate through inaction.
You're thinking too specific. Retrofits can be expensive or they can be cheap. The point is that housing stock drifts downmarket as it ages. Sometimes quickly.
I used to live in San Luis Obispo, CA. There's a house in the middle of town that clearly used to be an enormous beautiful mansion. It looks like it belongs on a plantation. It's still beautiful, but it's now 9 funky apartments.
I'm not sure your point anymore. According to Trulia that is a 11 bedroom, 10 bath, nearly 6k sq ft home. Was it switched to 9 apartments because the place fell down market as it aged or was it retrofitted because there is very little market for a single family house like that in SLO? Also are we even sure those individual apartments are truly down market? Like you said, the house still looks great from the outside. It certainly doesn't look like a "slum" like you mentioned in your first comment.
I criticised a previous comment of yours because of incorrect implication of "induced demand" as the situations are very different but I like this comment.
>Was it switched to 9 apartments because the place fell down market as it aged or was it retrofitted because there is very little market for a single family house like that in SLO?
Definitively, I would have to invite my extended family to fill the building.
>Also are we even sure those individual apartments are truly down market?
They definitively cost less than renting the entire building, which is what stickfigure's anti-apartment stance would mandate.
> It certainly doesn't look like a "slum" like you mentioned in your first comment.
Of course not, it can't look like a slum because the exterior hasn't changed. We are running into a problem here. The classification or living arrangement is apparently the deciding factor behind the "character of the neighborhood" and whether it is a slum. How can that be? Well, maybe it's not the building or the architecture or the zoning and so on, maybe it's the inhabitants that turn the place into a slum? You certainly can't see them from the outside.
We also run into another problem, if there are "evil" people that turn neighborhoods into slums by their mere presence then how do you distinguish between slum people and non slum people? It should be impossible in practice. Of course, there is a reliable(in the sense that it is self fulfilling) visual proxy for that.
That sounds like an argument to add housing at an extremely high rate. Of course places like the Bay Area have huge pent up demand that requires huge supply to satisfy, the housing in these cities have been constricted for decades and needs substantial resources to correct. This is like saying that more money generally doesn't help debt if you accumulate more debt than you earn. Somehow, the point is missed.
The existence of SRO hotels and similarly "special" dwellings are symptoms of severe housing deficit yet they're portrayed as necessary. There's no reason that the bottom of the housing market needs to be specially gimped, especially when LA is paying $2600 per month for a tent. In a less starved & dysfunctional market, old and adequate housing stock can satisfy that role.
> someone else will move in who lives outside the city
I don't really see this as a gotcha. Those would-be new arrivals to the city don't materialize out of thin air. Presumably they left some other place behind, and their migration is freeing up housing stock wherever they leave behind. The underlying dynamic is still the same. New housing increases low-end affordability by soaking up mid-end demand for old housing stock.
Maybe you build housing in the Bay Area, and all it does is bring in new people who pay the same market rate. But that migration will free up housing stock in Ohio. The only difference is that instead of helping the house poor in your local area the policy helps the house poor in flyover country. Unless you place a lot more moral weight on helping Californians than Midwesterners, what's the difference?
>Unless you place a lot more moral weight on helping Californians than Midwesterners, what's the difference?
The difference is that housing costs take up a much higher percentage of wages in California than Ohio and as a result there are many many more homeless people in California than Ohio.
Sure, if you want to take a holistic view of the entire planet, the people have to come from somewhere and there is a finite demand for global housing. However that just isn't a practical way to look at it when the problems are localized. Different cities and regions have varying levels of desirability. It makes sense to build housing in those cities and regions for a wide spectrum of the population. The solution shouldn't just be "if you are poor, move to Ohio".
My sense of community would have to be severely damaged or underdeveloped to be content with municipal policies possibly helping individuals who live thousands of miles away while passing by people living in tents on a daily basis.
We're already there. The US has 15.6 million vacant homes [0] and only around 567,000 homeless people [1]. Unfortunately people skirting homelessness often don't have the resources to pick up and move half way across the country so you're going to need a radical proposal for moving the homeless to where the homes are.
This may be true if the housing market has sufficient capacity to build homes at the required rate. The UK’s experience over the past 50 years is that the private sector has built around 170k homes per year, but the rate of household formation suggests we need around 300k extra each year.
The U.K. hasn’t built 300k+ homes per year (or anything like that) since the government stopped building houses - the private sector has never picked up the slack. And the result is hugely increased prices.
What's the bottleneck? Obviously the demand is there, right? What's constraining the private supply side to expand? (More explicitly: what happened when the public sector building shrunk, why private sector did not pick up the slack?)
Is the difference that council housing is in a large part publicly funded? Difference in the permitting process?
> Adding in a new road can actually increase traffic as it ends up encouraging more people to drive who otherwise wouldn't have.
You're alluding to "induced demand," which does not claim that adding a new road increases traffic. When it becomes "cheaper" (in terms of time) to drive, more people will start driving, but the cost of driving (time to get from A to B) still goes down.
This is basic economics, except with time instead of money. Adding a new road is a positive supply shock, which causes demand to rise until equilibrium, but the new price is going to be below the old price.
The problem with wider roads is a shift away from walking, cycling, public transport to car driving but that isn't what the comment complained about, considering the car (the single family home) is already there and anything you do can only increase efficiency. Building apartments it is the exact opposite and can only help over the long term.
Your logic is present in a lot of economic thinking, but it is flawed as it assumes people are purely rational actors that make decisions at the margins. That is a classic Economics 101 assumption that turns out to only be true in theory.
In reality people are stubborn. We chase sunk costs and we repeat inefficient behavior because it is habit. People therefore won't necessarily choose to drive based on an evaluation of that individual trip. They will base it on things like whether they own a car, whether they have an unlimited pass for their local mass transit system, and simply what they did the last time they made the same trip. Therefore traffic can actually exceed where it was before as new and improved roads can lead to people buying more cars and people being less reliant on public transit.
You're right that basic econ doesn't always hold, but in practice, it often does. In this case we actually have data on how road expansion affects transport times, which show that transport times slightly drop (as econ 101 predicts).
>We see the same type of thing when designing transportation systems in a city.
I don't know how to describe this but sometimes people say things that drive an agenda which from a first glance support the agenda but when you dig deep down into the details you realize that there is a second message that completely contradicts the actual agenda the comment pushes.
For example, "induced demand" is something that happens on roads because they are free to use by any road user. By building wider roads you make it very cheap to drive both in terms of congestion and money. Public transport costs money, is space efficient and slow. Driving a car is inefficient, convenient, fast and when you consider the "better service" it is worth the additional cost. Therefore people will stop using public transport and start driving cars, because roads are free.
This almost contradicts the agenda because housing isn't provided for free, you have to pay for it and you have to pay a huge premium for inefficient but convenient housing (single family homes). Of course, the problem is that there is a subsidy that encourages inefficiency similar to free roads, namely property tax freezes. An old single family home may have a lower tax burden than a new apartment. It's effectively a subsidy to homeowners that haven't moved out. However, the real contradiction lies in the fact that the argument hasn't been against property tax freezes, instead the criticism is aimed at new construction, which does not suffer from the subsidy problem.
I'm all for building more housing for people. Ending homelessness, by definition, would mean to provide housing.
But the thing is, we don't even need to build more housing. There are more than 30 times more vacant homes [0] than there are homeless. It makes the most sense to redistribute resources more effectively and efficiently. We should be looking at our system as a whole when it clearly doesn't distribute necessary resources effectively (e.g. food insecurity, wealth inequality, homelessness when there are 30 times more vacant homes than there are homeless, etc.)
This is the worst possible take. Yes, there are vacant homes. They are by and large vacant because there is no economic opportunity near these homes. The vacancy rates in cities with high homelessness rates are at or below 1%. Yes, there may be more homes than homeless in these cities but "the homeless that currently reside in a locale" are not the total extent of the stakeholders that may want to move in our out of a city.
I don't think that "we don't need to build more housing" follows from "we have more vacant houses than houseless". It seems like the implicit assumption there is we have the ability to move all the houseless to those house, but that sounds really unlikely (albeit an extremely interesting project if it's tried).
> It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically
because cheap housing falls from the sky. It trickles down, yknow. Some people get rich first, then we all profit from their breadcrumbs. There's a god, and god is just. Jeez.
The best way to lower the cost of housing is to
increase the supply of housing. And the best way
to do that is to unleash developers whatever is
most profitable whenever and whoever they want
without government regulation and NIMBY activists
getting in their way.
You had me up until here. There is surely a (messy) middle ground between "recognizing that increasing housing supply drives down pricing" and "letting real estate developers do literally whatever they want."
I spent quite a few years living in a "trendy" area where housing developers crammed as much housing into it as possible. The results were not pretty. Very easy to create an environmental and quality-of-life nightmare which is particularly unfair to those already living in the area, with no say over what becomes of it.
The goals of housing developers are not necessarily aligned with that of society.
Another comment in this thread prompted me to research a bit. While building expensive housing is probably fine, it seems that the cities with the most success have adopted a housing first[0][1][2] policy. Building cheap housing (and housing homeless there) is a major part of what is seen by many as the most effective solution.
Owning a home in LA is like investing in microsoft stock in the 90's. Now that it's so inflated, you don't want it to go down. More houses = less value to your house. When people are looking at having to lose a quarter million or more they're the ones showing up and running the city council.
I suspect that you're excluding a nontrivial proportion of homeless people who simply do not wish to live with the burden of employment and responsibilities of rent/mortgage when they can live outdoors in perpetually nice weather. I don't know how significant this number is but I don't think it's fair to ask society to subsidize their lifestyle.
Percentage wise, few transiently homeless people become chronically homeless. Far more people each year cycle through a period of transient homelessness than the average number of transiently homeless people at any point in time.
I mean they might die at 60 instead of 80, but that could still mean 30 or 40 years on the street. A homeless camp isn't necessarily conducive to lengthy lifespans but it's not Stalingrad.
> They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place,
One of the things that took me along time to realize was simply not having a safe, quiet and stable place to sleep for an extended period time would drive virtually anyone into drugs, alcohol and mental illness.
Its because HN is the silicon valley town crier whose readers are either transient, foreigners, or people coming from privilege already in the area. Groups so far removed from the problem that they have no idea what's going on.
They'll latch on to any contrived empathic half-solution and then leave the area.
> Posting this because most people in HN have a warped view of what homelessness is
You, good intentions aside, are the one with the warped perspective.
This is social justice warrior nonsense. Advocates love to cite the same self-collected/anecdotal data that just happens to support to their expensive, unhelpful, selfish ”mission”.
What you’re doing isn’t working because you’re not even addressing the symptoms let alone the problem. Jesus Christ. But, as they say, it is difficult to get an advocate to understand their “solutions” suck when their salary depends upon not understanding it.
"[transient homeless] generally refuse to get services"
Is this because the services don't really offer effective help for this group?
I understand why mental illness or addiction might keep people from using services. But if someone is just down on their luck and won't accept any help (assuming they need it), something seems wrong with that picture.
Homeless shelters are often not safe or pleasant places.
I don't have a definitive article or source to link to, but there are myriad accounts of theft, violence, and sexual violence at homeless shelters.
If I was homeless I would almost certainly prefer to sleep in my car (if I still owned one) or couch-surf with friends/family if possible.
Is this because the services don't really offer
effective help for this group?
What the transiently homeless want/need is are jobs that pay a living wage so that they can begin paying for their own housing once again. That is what really breaks the "cycle" of homelessness. It's difficult for anybody, much less a homeless shelter, to place people into those sorts of jobs.
Aside from the things already mentioned about safety, these things don't take pride into account. Just see how some comments here view homeless and the general attitude towards anyone accepting welfare.
This is also an often missed point of UBI, it will help people that are unwilling to accept help otherwise. Either due pride or safety concerns (see the Dutch tax authorities mess right now that has ruined families that were dependent on child care support)
Whatever you think of specific solutions (please don't start debating UBI... ) it's quite obvious to me that we need to change quality of life safetynets from a pull to a push system.
Apologies for reposting, but I think it matters and should be highly visible:
"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]
Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.
Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97
I haven’t heard this side of the story. Would you mind sharing any sources you have on the proportions of people who are transiently homeless and those who are homeless permanently?
So digging into the report that is linked from the article and other commenters here (link below, search for "Pilot Safe Sleep Site" in that article), some relevant points:
1. The "$2600" number is calculated from the $1,491,410 total cost / 70 spaces / 8 months.
2. Regarding staffing, "The staffing plan Urban Alchemy recommends for a successful program is a minimum staff-to-participant ratio of one (1) to 12." So included in the price tag is at least 6 paid staffers, and I'm assuming 24 hour coverage is needed (or at least 16 hour coverage).
3. Regarding the price, "Given the program’s high cost, we recommend that the data outcomes/effectiveness of the program
be reported on by the CAO and LAHSA before initiating additional sites. "
I think this all highlights what a mistake it was regarding the basic shutdown of federal mental hospitals in the early 80s [2]. If it turns out that the cost for dealing with homeless is this high for a simple tent encampment in a parking lot because of the cost of support services, why not provide that support in a more permanent medical facility (obv. not all homeless are mentally ill but many/most of long term homeless are).
The mental hospitals were bad. When something is known to be bad in California, it is made illegal, thus solving the problem completely (/s).
There was a similar thing with the foster care system; I'm not sure if it was state-wide or just my county, but they banned foster care group homes (which had worse outcomes than typical foster families[1]). Of course everyeone already knew that it was better to place these kids in a typical foster family, but there was nowhere else to place them. Now there are plenty of "Theraputic residential treatment centers" which seem to be roughly the same thing, just with a different name.
(Side note: if you can, become a foster family; there aren't enough)
1: Even the whole "outcomes are worse" is a bit dubious since usually kids don't end up in group homes until they've been kicked out of one or more foster families, so these kids were already being failed by the system before ending up in group homes.
Deinstitutionalization was a mistake. While the advent of psychiatric drugs in the 60s reduced the need for these massive long term care facilities, there are still (and always will be) mentally ill people who require long term care. The community mental health facilities that were to replace asylums never materialized, and now a majority of these people now spend their life on the street. Some will argue that these facilities were inhumane, but I think it's far more inhumane to just kick severely mentally ill people out on the street with no support resources.
I don't think we should fall into the trap of thinking it has to be one or the other. people shouldn't be kicked out onto the street & the asylums absolutely were inhumane. reestablishing them is not a decent solution, & "requires long term care" doesn't necessarily mean "needs to be locked up"
Monthly rent for a furnished apartment at my university (i.e. already overpriced and in demand) is $1049.
Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).
Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is partially mental health problem, it cannot be solved just by handing out free apartments.
If we get to the point where the government is actually trying to solve homelessness by giving people homes, then I'd be kinda optimistic about mental health getting taken seriously too. (More optimistic than I am now, at least)
I'm extrapolating it from various personal encounters, but I have no data.
Vox doesn't have data either. They are stating that government spends money very inefficiently at homeless and assumes it would be more efficient to hand out homes. This is wrong because:
* government will hand out homes also very inefficiently
* handing out homes might be cheaper than policing homeless people, but it does not guarantee that it fixes homeless problem for reasons I described and for other reasons (like some people might consider declaring themselves homeless to get free apartments)
I'm not saying Vox is wrong, I'm just saying that Vox is correctly writing about different aspect of the issue, but does not explain how to solve homelessness.
States have a unfavorable opinion of having another state's homeless population shipped to them. I'm aware that Nevada been sued several times by California cities for busing their homeless one-way to California.
a lot of these people specifically come to california because they want to live on the street and do drugd and visit the beach and enjoy it. i’ve seen many of them admit it. losers in iowa or some random state where they could easily get an apartment for 500 bucks a month or live with parents but would rather move to california and not have a job
You had to apply and be accepted to the university, and their confidence that you won't turn your apartment into a crack den is factored into the monthly rent.
Throwing money at a corrupt bureaucracy didn't solve a complex problem? Shocker.
Proposition HHH allocated $1.2 billion towards the problem and essentially nothing was accomplished.
"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]
Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.
Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97
Okay, but giving them housing likely doesn't eliminate the emergency treatment, nor the jail time, in a great many cases.
(I would guess a majority, but I have no data to back that. My expectations is that the transient homeless are not getting into trouble for the most part.)
> But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness.
It will cost the government less, no question, the analysis is great in this regard. But the reason it doesn't happen is because the analysis is incomplete.
My theory is, housing a homeless person decreases the value of the land where they're housed severely and quickly, land that takes relatively an extremely long time to grow in value. That's why what always happens is expensive tents on worthless, unexploitable land (parking lots under highways, sidewalks, city parks).
I personally think this is horrible, but I believe it's a better model of what really happens.
Frustrating that we never hear about the costs of the status quo, of doing nothing and having the "solution" be that people sleep outside. Do folks think that's healthy? We pay for this in the incredible expense of highly trained (and paid!) EMT, fire and police.
$2663/mo untaxed is a decent chunk of change. But let’s assume that is the cost to temporary house someone that has no other option. My question is, why is there no standardized process in California to address someone who is unhoused?
I like to say make the solution like the Apple Store in the sense that for 99% of people, there is a possible researched path to recovery, housing, and employment.
For $32k, 64k, 96k — 3 years, can we build a process using our modern knowledge of social work, psychology, addiction, etc. to get an individual back on their feet, or at least in a holding pattern with less misery?
Stuff like this reminds me of the situation with healthcare, mental health and prisons.
The US is reluctant to set up welfare and social systems in a proactive way but then the situation can't be ignored and they end up spending way more money on some band aids. Probably a lot of people who cost insane amounts of money while in prison could helped be much cheaper with drug addiction treatment and other mental health care. Same with homelessness. No subsidized living spaces so people end up on the street which then costs more than the subsidized living would have cost.
Health care is the same. People believe universal health care is too expensive and somehow the country ends up with by far the most expensive health system per capita in the world with worse results.
This article takes the $2,600/tent at face value (maybe bc it’s click bait?) and never digs in: •what does it cost a jurisdiction to clean streets and parks of human feces when there are no portapotties?
•what does it cost charities to run a soup kitchen when people have no means to store or cook food?
•what cost the homeless when they are robbed and victimized?
All these costs -and much more- are external to the equation as presented.
Can anyone estimate how much it would cost a scrappy private company to provide similar services sustainably? My guess is that it would be far less than $2600/m.
I imagine the main reason nobody does this is due to the minefield of legal issues, being accused of exploitation, etc. Not to mention the personal safety risk of your staff, and so on.
If anything the marginal cost per unit would be a better metric. The fact that big bureaucracy is expensive at small scale isn't that surprising.
There is also a major fallacy here, that this money could be simply used to put people into homes dollar for dollar. If they are this inefficient getting people into tents, whats to say that the inefficiency isn't magnified with a more complicated project.
There is no magical box that you can go drop cash into that pays rent for someone who was previously homeless. It comes with it's own set of logistics.
Last year I went from making $20K/mo to <$2K/mo, for quite a while. As my money was drying up, I didn’t have a lot of options. I had credit but I didn’t want to use it. I had a kid, but I couldn’t promise him future school supplies. I was a “professional” type, so I could get house sitting gigs (via online) far and wide. I drove 10 hours for some of them and gigged online, still collected $1900/mo pre-tax from a client — I’d have to make good on the taxes eventually. Eventually I found a gig back in SF, starting salary was $200K. Then I landed a consulting gig at $250K. I finally took an FTE role at $200K with a 20% bonus and strong promotion probability. I made it. That part of the story took 18+ months and I struggled to make sub-rental deposits.
I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options.
Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me visit my kid as much as possible and sleep in his bedroom, but I couldn’t land a 6 figure job at the end of the narrative. The options aren’t awesome, nor sufficient, and the cruelty and neglect, even from other friends, is mortifying. It was really fucking hard for me, but I’m fine again. I don’t see how it’s humane for the likes of those who don’t have my arc as their probability. My European friends shake their heads and know the US is really broken.
This comment, including the part about Europe, prompted me to research this issue a bit. I Googled 'European homelessness' and came across articles[0][1]that suggest that while there are a few cases of success in cities like Helsinki (or Salt Lake City[2]) with 'Housing First' policies, homeless is getting worse in Europe. Denmark and Finland seem to be doing well[1][3], and could serve as a model.
I'd like to learn more about if Europe overall is doing better than the United States. I couldn't find comparative numbers with solid data. Thank you for sharing your story, I am glad you found a light at the end of the tunnel.
Homeless is getting worse and illegal immigration compounds the problem. The more advanced countries (like the UK) have center for homeless who are not drug addicts. That means the majority of homeless on the street are either ignorant or drug addicts. I always remind them there are tax funded centers.
Other countries are not so lucky (especially in Southern Europe) and you see all sort of homeless, from drug addicts, to youngsters without a job, to illegal immigrants.
A professional making 200/250k in Europe is also incredibly rare but you could live with 2k/m in a lot of places (which is true in some places of the USA as well - certainly not SF).
Real estate is also more expensive in Europe, so getting your own house is generally easier in some places in the USA (certainly not SF).
It’s been a few years now. I think a lot has changed in 5 years. I won’t name the places I was frequenting, as I’d like to stay anonymous under this username, but state support in those places, at least in terms of housing-you-had, was way more than we can expect here.
I had an emergency fund, but I’d also been underemployed for some time when I went out on my own. Took a while to get up to that MRR and when the clients went away, we drained it as slowly as possibly. I kept enough in the trough to not miss any of my car payments, for instance. My credit never faltered. But the inbound cash dried up hard, and applying to jobs became my full-time job.
311 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadOK, so $2600 gets a fair bit.
Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending may be lower.
I think it's misleading to compare that dollar amount to the monthly cost of an apartment.
[1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...
Do you not agree the number is misleading?
That’s misleading.
> Numbers are numbers.
But the number isn’t what they say it is.
The phrase per-tent either intentionally or unintentionally misleads you to think that’s the cost literally for the tent and should be compared against rent.
Either describing the number as per-tent is misleading, or the comparison to rent is misleading. Either way, part of it is misleading.
They even basically acknowledge it’s a misleading comparison in the article!
https://www.npr.org/search?query=Homelesss&page=1
Not good. It'll send us back in time if we let it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR_controversies
The guy in the white house, sending Israel billions of dollars in aid while the Israeli government massacres civilians is a democrat, for fuckssake.
If I was that bad at basic logic, I'm not sure I'd tell on myself like that.
They are not into spectacles or aggressive populism, generally correct, a little effete, but are definitely progressive.
They are like the 'Vermont' or 'Nice Schoolteacher' or 'Librarian' of Journalism.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
"One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'"
To the extent that they identify that the view is labelled with the editorially appropriate moniker: 'Controversial' - I'm glad that people have a chance to speak their minds.
'Covering' a book or a perspective is not overtly 'promoting' it.
If they're drawing from a wide perspective (they don't quite though), then this would be a good thing.
> This Q&A with a provocative author did not serve NPR’s audience. You and several other NPR fans pointed out that NPR’s own prior reporting contradicted some of the things this author was saying. On top of being wrong about recent events, the author’s characterization of the Civil Rights Movement is a distortion and oversimplification.
http://view.nl.npr.org/?qs=7c7fd141a65180ed1dafb8fed91fa4fa3...
That's not a completely irrational idea and is worthy of some discussion.
The bigger issue with NPR is not that they carried the piece, it's that they likely would not have carried too many alternative viewpoints. They are 'sided'.
Source 1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...
Source 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-peZ7IeD2w
NPR used to be fairly centrist, but these days they’re far to the left. If I turn on my car there’s about a 9/10 chance my local station will be talking about some form of identity politics.
That’s all the radio, though. I believe they at least try to approach the center in their online articles.
Unfortunately your litmus test especially doesn't work that well for NPR, at least in one example. They distribute (but do not produce - partly because it wouldn't meet their editorial guidelines) a show about issues facing Latin Americans in the United States called Latino USA. Yet nobody who listens to it would deny the show takes quite a strong progressive stance on political issues.
I'd also add that NPR's most popular shows, the newscasts Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, are all remarkably boring politically and take a sort of weaker sauce version of the BBC's neutral and somewhat hostile approach to interviewing, regardless of political bent.
All Things Considered may be "boring" politically, but they are far from neutral - I don't listen to the other two very often. Easy example - for weeks, if not months, they called what was going on at the border "Trumps Family (sometimes Child) Separation Policy," even though anyone informed knew the very first day that it was not his policy. It wasn't until the story finally started to die down did they used the (at least somewhat) correct phrase "The increase in family separations due to Trump's zero tolerance policy."
I don't think this is bad reporting or anything, I was commenting to help people avoid getting into the trap of thinking in the most obvious framing after skimming a headline.
Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.
If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction.
Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions.
Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work.
(Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero.
Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled.
To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically.
Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office.
I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal.
The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure.
You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year.
Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it.
What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives.
Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)
The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.
I very much doubt that on both counts! But even still, I have a feeling that there is a very high cap for dollars spent directly helping homeless folks that reduce indirect spending 1:1 on other budget line items.
Similarly with homelessness, spending $2600/month for temporary tents isn’t improved by adding funds. Doubling the money and providing twice as much tent space won’t help homelessness as much as longer term housing that would cost less. Or changing zoning to allow more housing that would definitely cost less.
These are both important problems and need resources, but in some ways more funds are worse.
That's 6750$ per month.
Pick your poison I guess.
I've never heard of homeless searching for the best place too be homeless! Is there a source for this?
"Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?"
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.
> Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.
> “The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Total weasel words. You move to LA with one week of money for hotel = "fell into homelessness in L.A.".
In Seattle, the local group did a survey like this. About a quarter put their last housing zip code as the one with the shelter, in Pioneer Square, an expensive area if you aren't homeless. GIGO
Both San Francisco and New York have similar proportions of homeless people, but New York has shelter beds for almost all of them whereas San Francisco has shelter beds for only 40%.
Source: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep... (page 18).
I live in a pretty good county (Marin County), but I am astonished over the waste of tax money.
I am too young to remember pre-prop 13, but waste was so much. Every year, no matter how much they took in in taxes, it was spent the following year, according to my father. (That's why Jarvis wrote a book called, I'm Mad as Hell. I have an autographed copy someone threw away.)
During the drought in the 70's ranchers were trucked in water, as a political favor. (I actually don't mind this one). Politicians were bought off legally with county tax money. Every night was a big hootenanny at Marin Joes. My point is there was a huge amount of waste.
O.k.--today is much better? Yea--you would think? I used to work at a county beach while in college. One day the maintance guts were throwing tools into a dumptster. Perfectly good chainsaws, hand tools, etc. I asked what's up? They told me if they didn't throw away the "broken tools", their budget would not be the same. I went back there at night and took three chain saws I still have to this day.
There's a department in my county called Open Space. They literally fill in their huge white trucks in the morning, throw some grass/litter in the back, and joy ride in the open space. They could nix this department, and cut back on police funds, and that money could go to a homeless fund. My county has no real crime. The cops are basically Revenue Collectors at this point.
My point is they will never claim to have extra money, unless we demand it.
I would like to see every bit of free County, federal, and state opened up to free camping.
Homelessness is beyond debate.
We need to act yesterday.
Sorry about sounding so preachy, but I know too many people getting ticked for sleeping because they don't have a home.
(Keep an eye on Sausalito, Ca. The authorities decided to get tough on anchor-outs. They decided to vigorously enforce a three day anchorage muni code.
They went beyond enforcement. They broke laws, but It's hard to prove because their is no video evidence. For instance, they towed boats for no reason. It's the city worker's word against a boater. It's like our version against a cop's version. A code that everyone has disregarded for years, including luxury yacht owners, like Allen from Microsoft. He would spend weeks docked in the same spot. (He had a beautiful yacht though.)
They wanted the low income boats out of their view. Rich people find poor people an eye sore. They were dirty homeless shiftless bums after all. Many older ladies were out there to. Probally druggies, or prostitutes? Just scummy people. Why should those wealthy residents have to look at that? (Ironically, every person who I have overheard saying, "Eye sore" has been genetically challenged aesthetically, but monetarily fit.)
Well the boaters having nowhere to go, set up tents in Dunphy Park. They are neat, and only had one provoked criminal arrest. (There brilliant plan of homeless harassment backfired for now?). Oh yea, Richardson Bay has had Anchor Outs since before the 50's. (Yes--Homeless Harassment is alive an well. You can call it Broken Window whatever, but it's nothing more than harassing peopke until they move on.)
The city told them to move to a toxic site, with a bunch of regulations, like early morning tent take down. One woman is disabled, and said she needed help setting up her tent, and needed somewhere to lie down during the day. Plus--a major symptom of depression is sleep reversal. Don't ask me how I know.
The homeless fought back. A kind advocacy group sued the city, and got a temporary restraining order.
In the USA, the Supreme court ruled you can't force homeless people to move, unless you have a bed for them. One win I love!
Right now the situation is up in the air. I heard t...
It almost seems like the more money that gets poured in, the more expensive everything becomes.
If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results.
Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.
Some people use nuance as a bludgeon, but that fact wouldn’t imply that hand-waiving away details is somehow a valid approach.
In short, this title is more accurate, less editorialized, and less click-baity.
I think LA is talking with Pallet to implement their temporary housing, which would be amazing.
[1] https://www.palletshelter.com
I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable.
Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right.
Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their citizens and the richest countries aren't? When will people see housing price appreciation far beyond wage inflation as a serious detriment to society?
It's affordable here, too. Just not in one of the wealthiest and thus most expensive cities in the United States.
From my experience in Asia the attitude is so wildly different, they build more houses than is ever needed, people can run stores and sell basic goods out of their spare front room for a few hours a day as side income.
I'm not familiar with local laws in the US but in Australia you'd get fined a few thousand dollars trying to sell groceries from a house in suburbia, many have to get in their cars and travel a few km to the designated "commercial" area simply to buy some bread. There's a lot the West could learn from the East yet we are far too stubborn to actually do it.
This would definitely play out the exact same way in America.
Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartment than a 12x12 tent. I know that this calculation is an over simplification of costs, but it still gives you a decent perspective on what can be done with that kind of money.
And I disagree this will save money long term or elsewhere. When you don't address the root cause and spend money wisely, you only leave room for more spending in the future.
But yes looking at this, the program cost is indeed insanely high
1) You have to pay extra to get a landlord to agree to the risk of housing a homeless person with likely no way to pay rent if the government program ends who also is more likely to have drug problems / mental health issues. This person may also be more likely to harass other tenants. Even if you don't believe this to be true, many landlords will and they won't agree to rent to such people without a substantial extra charge.
2) Cost in potential missed rent from neighboring tenants. If a landlord agrees to this program and other tenants move out due to the behavior of the homeless tenant, then that lost cost is also a problem.
edit: I should have read the article. That's exactly what they were doing. I incorrectly assumed it was a "measured cost" of homelessness. I suppose what I imagined tho was less like a refugee camp with fences and guards, and more like a re-use of some of the old port/industrial area close to where many of the LA camps used to be anyway. A more NGO/adhoc style approach. But maybe the current model is working, apart from cost, I don't know :p :) xx
In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will be homeless for less than 12 months, they are likely employed while they are homeless at least in a part time capacity, or they are in college. These folks generally refuse to get services and spend their time sleeping in their car, crashing on friends couches, and in a pinch, sleeping in tents outside away from the wild areas. In general, these people are on hard times due to bad luck more or less, and are struggling to get out of it.
Another 1/3 of the homeless are people who used to be in the prior group, but are now "chronically homeless". They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place, and the best way to prevent people from becoming transiently homeless is to prevent them from losing their stable housing or getting them into stable housing within the first 12 months of them becoming homeless. It is much harder to "rehabilitate" someone who has been homeless for 12+ months than it is to rehabilitate someone who has been homeless for <12 months.
One issue we have now is that is very easy for people to move from "safely housed" to "transiently homeless" and one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing so people in the precarious spot have alternatives to living in a tent. Its not going to be an immediate feedback loop but its the only sustainable way to prevent the growing numbers of homeless in US cities.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-cal-state-homeless...
https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/upload...
Ie. "Here's $50. Go and buy me some ice cream. You can have another $50 when you bring it to me".
It discourages begging and encourages an entrepreneur mentality.
Why does your goal have to include putting them in some weird spot where youre holding power over them to teach some "entrepreneur mentality". Most of the temporarily homeless population is embarrassed to ask for money, just treat them like an adult if youre going to offer help.
Take a quick peek at Maslow's hierarchy of needs please and map both their situation and what you're asking of them.
1. It's illegal to be a victim. Why do you allow yourself to be robbed, or even have a lock put on your door?
2. Penal transport. Since everyone gets to do what they want, I'm rounding up everyone I don't like. I put them on some coast, perhaps one day, the moon. In 10 months, 10 tons of processed materials, like fuel, are waiting on the coast line. If they are one ounce short, the coastline gets microwaved.
It would be impossible to commit a crime. Perfectly legal too. All the law has to do is limit the violence. Mental illness, the worst of it, looks just like intoxication. It takes a very long time to bounce back from it, if you ever do.
It's similar to how there is a disconnect in how people talk about "mass shootings" and what the public think that means. The public thinks of a mass shooting as what the FBI calls an "active shooter" event, where someone is just opening fire on random people, while in stats and things it's just any shooting where 3+ people get shot, which can include gangland-style violence. People aren't "confused", we're just using two different definitions.
My point is of course not that the transient homeless don't need help or anything like that. It's just strange to bring them into it when presumably they are not a large percentage of the "habitually living in tents" homeless, which should of course be handled differently.
One pedantic quibble. It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically. It's perfectly fine simply to build more housing of any type. Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market.
Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing. The rich prefer to live in new housing stock, and the poor prefer to get discounts on old housing stock. The same way that a robust new car market creates a secondary market for cheap used cars.
A lot of people with good intentions will try to block any type of development that doesn't specifically include affordable housing. But this is the exact opposite of what's needed. The best way to lower the cost of housing is to increase the supply of housing. And the best way to do that is to unleash developers whatever is most profitable whenever and whoever they want without government regulation and NIMBY activists getting in their way.
We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.
Someone who studied this in Toronto by overlaying nighttime photos to find units where the lights are literally never on: https://www.movesmartly.com/articles/condo-units-sitting-emp...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/musne8/dispro...
https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2021/02/real-esta...
This is just another symptom of the major lack of housing in the US, and needs to be solved as well, but it highlights how difficult it is to alleviate homelessness when there are other casualties of the housing market as well. By all means, build as much housing as soon as possible, but some of it will probably need to be specifically targeted at homeless or poorer populations.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
price = F(supply, demand) therefore demand = G(price, supply) and supply = H(price, demand)
Still, we need to remove barriers that prevent middle-class housing from being built, such as parking minimums and other bureaucracy.
San Francisco has ~400k housing units. If you build a million more, prices will go down very sharply.
When there is more housing units than people who want to live there, prices go towards zero, whether they're "luxury" or not.
I mean the idea is correct, but I don't think we can depend on the private market to deliver on this concept.
Don't get me wrong SF badly needs more housing and needs to approve tons more, I'm just saying there are limits to the outcome. At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.
Now if we had a not for profit government agency that steadily built housing regardless of the market conditions, say they were working toward a vacancy rate goal, now that could create surplus housing.
You might see friction there though in the private market would pull back.
Most people understands it does it if you add a million units, but for some reason they can't grasp that each new unit contributes.
I was not predicting anyone would build a million units overnight, certainly not accidentally.
> At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.
SF has been very near this point for decades. Because new construction is mostly illegal, and if not extremely expensive and slow. Because of explicit policy from the SF BoS.
If housing construction were legalized in SF, say by adopting the regulations of Houston or Tokyo, there would be an enormous construction wave in the city. No one can predict to what level, but after that has transformed the city we can take stock and see if any other measures need to taken.
But I don't see SF doing anything of the kind without at least a decade of hesitation. The city is far too conservative to change.
Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation.
Also, all the actual luxury housing that ends up being built is bought by wealthy investors buying their third or fourth property. Just look at the housing market in London.
> Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing.
Eichlers and Craftsman homes were targeted squarely at the middle class of their time. Now in the Bay Area, the price of a "middle class" home is probably skewed to something around $1,000/sqft, but I don't know if middle class wages can actually afford that.
[0] - https://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-affor...
What data are you basing this claim off of? Many people (especially young people in finance and tech) move every few years, and some of them want luxury apartments. That reduces the demand for cheaper housing stock. A 25 y/o moving to SF isn't going to buy an apartment and stay there for their entire life.
And no, “all” the luxury housing is not being bought by investors. Even in places where this is a problem it is nowhere near “all”. Investors can also just buy existing housing. Once again, what you anti-housing folks are claiming as a problem of building new housing, is a problem that is going to happen anyway and will be even worse if we don’t build new housing.
People living a $1mil shithole aren't going to be moving into a $2mil luxury home. You need to find the buyer that can afford a $2mil luxury house. This is why the problem takes so long to work out. Prices are inflated, and luxury homes will be inflated even more - the people that would normally buy them aren't going to be able to move and afford them. Combine this with how people can just sit on homes rather than sell them, it's gonna take a real long time for prices to make their way down.
Anecdote time
I’m nowhere near rich, but we recently upgraded from a condo to a house and kept our condo. Our intention is to rent it out until our kid is old enough to move out and give it to them.
This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. I'm genuinely curious as I've never been to LA or spent significant time in parts of the US where this problem is at its worse. I live in the midwest and there are plenty of places I could buy or rent here if I needed - cheap and expensive - but I'm lucky enough to have a decent place now so I can be picky about the next one.
It can be hard to immediately see that there is a shortage of something like housing, because it’s rare that people will actually end up without housing because there isn’t enough to go around. But this is because people will rationally choose to live further and further from their jobs and commute longer and longer distances as the shortage drives prices up near their workplace, rather than choosing to go without housing.
Luckily, I haven't had to move in a while, but it was bad enough that when I got my place, I signed for it purely based on the opinion of a friend who could go see it for me. If I had waited the extra week to come home from the trip I was on, it almost certainly would not have been vacant.
Only if people actually live in those houses, and they're bought by people living in the cheaper houses right now who then move up in to the new housing stock.
If people buy the new houses as investments and leave them empty most of the year then it has no impact on the rest of the housing market, or if people from outside buy them and move to the city then it just increases the population of the city with no effect on the lower social strata. This is precisely what happens in places like London. There's a boom in house building but it's often apartments bought by foreign investors (allegedly for money laundering... ).
Directly building more social housing would have a far greater impact than trying to affect cheap housing stock by 'trickle down' methods.
"Wealth investment leaves an estimated 125,000 homes in London without anyone living in them."
There are 268,385 empty homes in England according to the government (people get a tax break in most parts of England if they own a property that is unoccupied and unfurnished so its quite easy to track empty homes), and half of them are luxury houses in London.
I'm not saying that's definitely the case everywhere, but I am saying it's worth considering.
If the economy cannot consume all the products the suppliers produce you need to encourage consumption.
If you perfectly hit the balance (unlikely but in theory possible) then you need to do... nothing, neither savings nor consumption increases.
It depends on what your economy needs.
Also, the report doesn't tell us how many non-vacant homes there are in their survey area, so we have to guess. London reportedly has 3.59 million dwellings, so 25,000 vacant homes would only represent 0.7% of homes being vacant. Even if you use the higher 125,000 number, that's still only 3.5% of all homes. That's a fairly low vacancy rate, and about right for a city.
Even after the pandemic, housing officials report a 3.4% vacancy rate, which is the highest in eight years. https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/london-apartment-vacancy.... Before that, it was only at 1.8%. That's extremely low.
You can tax vacant homes, but in general, those taxes have a very small effect on housing prices. It's far, far more effective to allow people to build more housing, including luxury housing.
Manhattan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h...
Seattle https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/luxury-apartments-whos-bu...
Melbourne https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ghost-tower-warn...
Boston https://bostonagentmagazine.com/2018/09/11/study-bostons-new...
Vancouver: The article claims that there is ~5% vacancy rate. This is actually below the normal rate for vacancies in the US. Condos have a higher vacancy rate, but the article offers a reasonable explanation.
Manhattan: Ultra-luxury home vacancies aren't the same as luxury apartment buildings. Most people are not buying $5-$10 million condos. And even if the buildings are unsold, they aren't necessarily unoccupied.
Seattle: Again focuses on "foreign investors" and unsold apartments. No concrete data on how many those apartments are actually empty.
Melbourne: > Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald said, based on the water data, Melbourne's actual vacancy rate was closer to 7 per cent.
7% is on the high-end of vacancy rates, but if you reduced that down to 5% then the effect on prices would still be low.
Boston: No data on vacancy rates. Again, sale != occupancy. There are plenty of property management companies that build out luxury apartment buildings and directly rent to people.
The real issue is lack of housing, which can be fixed by letting developers build more housing, including high-end housing.
The Manhattan article links to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad... which says "Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015... remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts" and "7,050 new condo units available for sale in Manhattan in January [2020]"
Melbourne: "Docklands... 17 per cent consuming no water in 2013" and "12.4 per cent of Cardinia and Clyde homes reported no water use."
Boston: "12 of Boston’s newest and biggest luxury developments could remain largely empty despite having sold most of their available condo units to buyers."
Manhattan: Unsold != unoccupied.
Melbourne: Now we're cherrypicking districts that have less than 15,000 residents total in a city of 5 million in one specific year? This is essentially p-hacking to support a non-existent narrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinia,_Victoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde,_Victoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands,_Victoria
Boston: "could remain largely empty." This is speculation. Where is the data?
I do see your point about foreign investors though, they will view the house as a bank account, one that won't lose money, and will probably appreciate, and is safe from the corruption (or corruption investigations) of their home country. And they have money they need to put somewhere, so why not there?
But even they would probably prefer someone to be living in it and paying them in the meantime, because that improves the return by a lot, and doesn't put the principal at risk.
About once every 2 weeks his son pops by to make sure the house has not burned down or had a pipe burst.
Currently living in zone 2 north-east London and house prices have seemed pretty flat for the last couple of years. Flats have had a surge due to current stamp duty holiday... and prices outside London seem to have increased a lot with people anticipating a permanent move to remote/hybrid working.
Taxes on empty properties aren't high, but you still need to consider maintenance... and there's an opportunity cost of leaving a house empty rather than renting it out.
Just interested in your data - thanks!
Update: found https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/pretty-vacant in one of your sibling posts - was that what you were referring to? I just read it (on my phone, so might have missed it), but didn't see any numbers for investment returns here... and there was a fairly-extensive section talking about London property being used for money-laundering instead - is that what you're referring to?
I don’t know the details as I'm a renter but from speaking with a few Realtors they mentioned the companies the worked at did this.
Let's also not forget the housing crisis saw a lot of money pouring into bad investments. Assuming people only make wise investments is naive. The market is crazy right now with people paying over asking and waiving inspections. A lot of people are going to ride that train over the cliff.
Those returns are underwritten by voters rejecting new housing. If that political landscape changes, the incentives for landholders evolve.
Political NIMBYism probably does play some part along with the pandemic, but again, that doesn't mean these investors are paying attention to that. There is a gold rush on at the moment.
Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock.
Why can't you do the same trick with existing housing?
Where I live the housing prices are expected to go up roughly 15% this year. So someone buying a house for 600k can expect to sell it for 690k making 90k. That is 7500 USD a month. If you wanted to make that much money from rent you would have to squeeze 4 or 5 tenants into the property. It is simply not worth the hassle trying to rent buildings out when house prices go up at such a high rate
Make $7500/month from house value increase, and also, say, $4k from rent.
This increases the resale value since the house is generating income to the buyer.
It's not either/or, which is why I'd assume the parent poster called it weird. That investor could make the appreciation and of top of it could make the rental income. So it is weird, from their perspective, to leave it empty. If they're flipping real estate for profit (as opposed to buying a home to live) why reject the extra income.
Also, selling a rental property with a solid history of rental income tends to be better than one with a history of sitting empty. Although that probably doesn't apply to mansions.
Fortunately, this is already a metric that is tracked, called the vacancy rate. And what we see is, that in in-demand cities, that have high rents, the vacancy rate is pretty low.
So, if the vacancy rate is 5%, that means that if you build 100 houses, then 95 of them are going to be lived in. Yes, it sucks that those other 5 houses are not lived in, but those extra 95 houses, in our example, are still a good thing.
> This is precisely what happens in places like London
It is really not. A quick google search shows that the vacancy rate is as low as any other major in-demand city.
So yes, the rich do leave I think more places empty in some places because they can afford to and because the economic calculation is not simple. If you rent and want to end the rental later you end up in a bad spot.
Ok, this is a nice story that one could make up. But once again, my point is that vacancy rate is something that is already tracked.
In San Francisco, the vacancy rate is about 3.5%.
So, in other words, regardless of whatever story you are making up about parents, or rent control or whatever, the actual data shows, that the vacancy rate is very low, and therefore not much of a problem.
I know someone who sublet an extra room to someone, a year later her wonderful lease was destroyed, landlord sued her and the women never paid a dime, could not be evicted, claimed she felt unsafe and got a restraining order against the person actually paying rent etc so they ended paying rent on two places, one to live in and one for the women.
I mean - this stuff does turn you off renting a small bit.
That said, supply is REDICULOUSLY constrained around here, red tape is nuts, minimum requirements crazy, affordability payments high etc. So yeah, no question that there is artificial scarcity.
First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone else will move in who lives outside the city and was previously priced out of the mid-tier housing. We see the same type of thing when designing transportation systems in a city. Adding in a new road can actually increase traffic as it ends up encouraging more people to drive who otherwise wouldn't have.
Also the housing market is not a singular market. The type of person who would live in a 3 bedroom luxury condo is not the same type of person who would live in an SRO hotel that shares a bathroom. Most people have a small window of what housing they consider acceptable and what budget they can afford. When a city gentrifies and knocks down SRO housing and replaces it with luxury condos (something that has happened a lot in both LA and the Bay Area over the last couple decades), the available units at the bottom of the market decreases in favor of the top of the market. That doesn't result in everyone in the city just moving up one rung on the housing ladder. Competition for the affordable units is now even higher because there are less of them available.
“Never” is too strong.
It happened to me in New York. I negotiated down my rent on account of nearby buildings with better amenities opening at slightly higher but similar enough pricing, net effective.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn and San Francisco were busy blocking all new construction, thereby forcing their restaurant workers to compete with millionaires.
You said yourself that the new construction had slightly higher pricing meaning your unit was in the same basic market as the new construction and also implies you likely were not shopping at "the bottom of the market". Do you think you would have been able to negotiate your rent down if the new building was in an entirely different class and was charging 2x or 3x your rent?
Yes. What do you think people bidding for ultra-lux housing do if they don’t have supply?
In New York, the ultra-wealthy have penthouses. In San Francisco, they have rows of townhouses. Which one do you think displaces more affordable housing?
Start here: San Francisco, for very specific geographic and regional reasons, will not have sufficient housing in the next century, and it will continue to have growing homeless populations. Solve for a 50-year horizon.
Some of the densest cities on the planet are on islands. San Francisco is on a peninsula. It is a low density city with tons of infill potential. That densification potential, together with slow population growth in the developed world, makes the problem perfectly tenable. (That said, homeowners would lose money. So not holding my breath.)
In the short term they would. And in the long term, they would gain wealth but lose their iron grip on the city. Never underestimate the seductiveness of power. As long as San Francisco’s renters believe density is impossible or will price them out, homeowners (specifically, about half a dozen families) will retain their lock on the city.
You mean, "for very specific political and cultural reasons". There's nothing in San Francisco's geography that most world cities haven't solved.
I used to live in San Luis Obispo, CA. There's a house in the middle of town that clearly used to be an enormous beautiful mansion. It looks like it belongs on a plantation. It's still beautiful, but it's now 9 funky apartments.
Street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2749914,-120.6611941,3a,75y,...
>Was it switched to 9 apartments because the place fell down market as it aged or was it retrofitted because there is very little market for a single family house like that in SLO?
Definitively, I would have to invite my extended family to fill the building.
>Also are we even sure those individual apartments are truly down market?
They definitively cost less than renting the entire building, which is what stickfigure's anti-apartment stance would mandate.
> It certainly doesn't look like a "slum" like you mentioned in your first comment.
Of course not, it can't look like a slum because the exterior hasn't changed. We are running into a problem here. The classification or living arrangement is apparently the deciding factor behind the "character of the neighborhood" and whether it is a slum. How can that be? Well, maybe it's not the building or the architecture or the zoning and so on, maybe it's the inhabitants that turn the place into a slum? You certainly can't see them from the outside.
We also run into another problem, if there are "evil" people that turn neighborhoods into slums by their mere presence then how do you distinguish between slum people and non slum people? It should be impossible in practice. Of course, there is a reliable(in the sense that it is self fulfilling) visual proxy for that.
The existence of SRO hotels and similarly "special" dwellings are symptoms of severe housing deficit yet they're portrayed as necessary. There's no reason that the bottom of the housing market needs to be specially gimped, especially when LA is paying $2600 per month for a tent. In a less starved & dysfunctional market, old and adequate housing stock can satisfy that role.
I don't really see this as a gotcha. Those would-be new arrivals to the city don't materialize out of thin air. Presumably they left some other place behind, and their migration is freeing up housing stock wherever they leave behind. The underlying dynamic is still the same. New housing increases low-end affordability by soaking up mid-end demand for old housing stock.
Maybe you build housing in the Bay Area, and all it does is bring in new people who pay the same market rate. But that migration will free up housing stock in Ohio. The only difference is that instead of helping the house poor in your local area the policy helps the house poor in flyover country. Unless you place a lot more moral weight on helping Californians than Midwesterners, what's the difference?
The difference is that housing costs take up a much higher percentage of wages in California than Ohio and as a result there are many many more homeless people in California than Ohio.
Sure, if you want to take a holistic view of the entire planet, the people have to come from somewhere and there is a finite demand for global housing. However that just isn't a practical way to look at it when the problems are localized. Different cities and regions have varying levels of desirability. It makes sense to build housing in those cities and regions for a wide spectrum of the population. The solution shouldn't just be "if you are poor, move to Ohio".
You don't need to go as far as Ohio, just a commuter suburb.
[0] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
[1] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
The U.K. hasn’t built 300k+ homes per year (or anything like that) since the government stopped building houses - the private sector has never picked up the slack. And the result is hugely increased prices.
Is the difference that council housing is in a large part publicly funded? Difference in the permitting process?
You're alluding to "induced demand," which does not claim that adding a new road increases traffic. When it becomes "cheaper" (in terms of time) to drive, more people will start driving, but the cost of driving (time to get from A to B) still goes down.
This is basic economics, except with time instead of money. Adding a new road is a positive supply shock, which causes demand to rise until equilibrium, but the new price is going to be below the old price.
See: https://youtu.be/6dwSIO_Slhc?t=236, except imagine the supply shock is in the other direction.
In reality people are stubborn. We chase sunk costs and we repeat inefficient behavior because it is habit. People therefore won't necessarily choose to drive based on an evaluation of that individual trip. They will base it on things like whether they own a car, whether they have an unlimited pass for their local mass transit system, and simply what they did the last time they made the same trip. Therefore traffic can actually exceed where it was before as new and improved roads can lead to people buying more cars and people being less reliant on public transit.
https://www.thecgo.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Can-We-Bui... (Pages 8-10)
I don't know how to describe this but sometimes people say things that drive an agenda which from a first glance support the agenda but when you dig deep down into the details you realize that there is a second message that completely contradicts the actual agenda the comment pushes.
For example, "induced demand" is something that happens on roads because they are free to use by any road user. By building wider roads you make it very cheap to drive both in terms of congestion and money. Public transport costs money, is space efficient and slow. Driving a car is inefficient, convenient, fast and when you consider the "better service" it is worth the additional cost. Therefore people will stop using public transport and start driving cars, because roads are free.
This almost contradicts the agenda because housing isn't provided for free, you have to pay for it and you have to pay a huge premium for inefficient but convenient housing (single family homes). Of course, the problem is that there is a subsidy that encourages inefficiency similar to free roads, namely property tax freezes. An old single family home may have a lower tax burden than a new apartment. It's effectively a subsidy to homeowners that haven't moved out. However, the real contradiction lies in the fact that the argument hasn't been against property tax freezes, instead the criticism is aimed at new construction, which does not suffer from the subsidy problem.
But the thing is, we don't even need to build more housing. There are more than 30 times more vacant homes [0] than there are homeless. It makes the most sense to redistribute resources more effectively and efficiently. We should be looking at our system as a whole when it clearly doesn't distribute necessary resources effectively (e.g. food insecurity, wealth inequality, homelessness when there are 30 times more vacant homes than there are homeless, etc.)
[0]: https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...
Usually they are where there is a housing surplus, because population in the area has declined.
I predict offering the people in my Oakland neighborhood shantytowns housing in abandoned rustbelt towns will not find many takers.
because cheap housing falls from the sky. It trickles down, yknow. Some people get rich first, then we all profit from their breadcrumbs. There's a god, and god is just. Jeez.
I spent quite a few years living in a "trendy" area where housing developers crammed as much housing into it as possible. The results were not pretty. Very easy to create an environmental and quality-of-life nightmare which is particularly unfair to those already living in the area, with no say over what becomes of it.
The goals of housing developers are not necessarily aligned with that of society.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho... [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392
1/3 would over time vastly out number the 2/3 group unless the two third group is growing exponentially.
One of the things that took me along time to realize was simply not having a safe, quiet and stable place to sleep for an extended period time would drive virtually anyone into drugs, alcohol and mental illness.
They'll latch on to any contrived empathic half-solution and then leave the area.
You, good intentions aside, are the one with the warped perspective.
This is social justice warrior nonsense. Advocates love to cite the same self-collected/anecdotal data that just happens to support to their expensive, unhelpful, selfish ”mission”.
What you’re doing isn’t working because you’re not even addressing the symptoms let alone the problem. Jesus Christ. But, as they say, it is difficult to get an advocate to understand their “solutions” suck when their salary depends upon not understanding it.
Is this because the services don't really offer effective help for this group?
I understand why mental illness or addiction might keep people from using services. But if someone is just down on their luck and won't accept any help (assuming they need it), something seems wrong with that picture.
I don't have a definitive article or source to link to, but there are myriad accounts of theft, violence, and sexual violence at homeless shelters.
If I was homeless I would almost certainly prefer to sleep in my car (if I still owned one) or couch-surf with friends/family if possible.
What the transiently homeless want/need is are jobs that pay a living wage so that they can begin paying for their own housing once again. That is what really breaks the "cycle" of homelessness. It's difficult for anybody, much less a homeless shelter, to place people into those sorts of jobs.This is also an often missed point of UBI, it will help people that are unwilling to accept help otherwise. Either due pride or safety concerns (see the Dutch tax authorities mess right now that has ruined families that were dependent on child care support)
Whatever you think of specific solutions (please don't start debating UBI... ) it's quite obvious to me that we need to change quality of life safetynets from a pull to a push system.
"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]
Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.
Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/need/
Edited to format
Your info is out of date - that's exactly what's happening.
One police officer dealing with homeless in Portland or Seattle recently said 100% of the people he dealt with were on drugs and living in tents.
In SF, rents are so high that you won't be "transiently homeless" - you're priced out of the market without already having a pretty good job.
1. The "$2600" number is calculated from the $1,491,410 total cost / 70 spaces / 8 months.
2. Regarding staffing, "The staffing plan Urban Alchemy recommends for a successful program is a minimum staff-to-participant ratio of one (1) to 12." So included in the price tag is at least 6 paid staffers, and I'm assuming 24 hour coverage is needed (or at least 16 hour coverage).
3. Regarding the price, "Given the program’s high cost, we recommend that the data outcomes/effectiveness of the program be reported on by the CAO and LAHSA before initiating additional sites. "
I think this all highlights what a mistake it was regarding the basic shutdown of federal mental hospitals in the early 80s [2]. If it turns out that the cost for dealing with homeless is this high for a simple tent encampment in a parking lot because of the cost of support services, why not provide that support in a more permanent medical facility (obv. not all homeless are mentally ill but many/most of long term homeless are).
[1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...
[2] https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...
There was a similar thing with the foster care system; I'm not sure if it was state-wide or just my county, but they banned foster care group homes (which had worse outcomes than typical foster families[1]). Of course everyeone already knew that it was better to place these kids in a typical foster family, but there was nowhere else to place them. Now there are plenty of "Theraputic residential treatment centers" which seem to be roughly the same thing, just with a different name.
(Side note: if you can, become a foster family; there aren't enough)
1: Even the whole "outcomes are worse" is a bit dubious since usually kids don't end up in group homes until they've been kicked out of one or more foster families, so these kids were already being failed by the system before ending up in group homes.
Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).
This article seems to suggest that giving out access to housing is in fact effective:
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
Vox doesn't have data either. They are stating that government spends money very inefficiently at homeless and assumes it would be more efficient to hand out homes. This is wrong because:
* government will hand out homes also very inefficiently
* handing out homes might be cheaper than policing homeless people, but it does not guarantee that it fixes homeless problem for reasons I described and for other reasons (like some people might consider declaring themselves homeless to get free apartments)
I'm not saying Vox is wrong, I'm just saying that Vox is correctly writing about different aspect of the issue, but does not explain how to solve homelessness.
This is my surprised face lol.
Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.
Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/need/
(I would guess a majority, but I have no data to back that. My expectations is that the transient homeless are not getting into trouble for the most part.)
It will cost the government less, no question, the analysis is great in this regard. But the reason it doesn't happen is because the analysis is incomplete.
My theory is, housing a homeless person decreases the value of the land where they're housed severely and quickly, land that takes relatively an extremely long time to grow in value. That's why what always happens is expensive tents on worthless, unexploitable land (parking lots under highways, sidewalks, city parks).
I personally think this is horrible, but I believe it's a better model of what really happens.
I like to say make the solution like the Apple Store in the sense that for 99% of people, there is a possible researched path to recovery, housing, and employment.
For $32k, 64k, 96k — 3 years, can we build a process using our modern knowledge of social work, psychology, addiction, etc. to get an individual back on their feet, or at least in a holding pattern with less misery?
The US is reluctant to set up welfare and social systems in a proactive way but then the situation can't be ignored and they end up spending way more money on some band aids. Probably a lot of people who cost insane amounts of money while in prison could helped be much cheaper with drug addiction treatment and other mental health care. Same with homelessness. No subsidized living spaces so people end up on the street which then costs more than the subsidized living would have cost.
Health care is the same. People believe universal health care is too expensive and somehow the country ends up with by far the most expensive health system per capita in the world with worse results.
All these costs -and much more- are external to the equation as presented.
There is also a major fallacy here, that this money could be simply used to put people into homes dollar for dollar. If they are this inefficient getting people into tents, whats to say that the inefficiency isn't magnified with a more complicated project.
There is no magical box that you can go drop cash into that pays rent for someone who was previously homeless. It comes with it's own set of logistics.
I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options.
Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me visit my kid as much as possible and sleep in his bedroom, but I couldn’t land a 6 figure job at the end of the narrative. The options aren’t awesome, nor sufficient, and the cruelty and neglect, even from other friends, is mortifying. It was really fucking hard for me, but I’m fine again. I don’t see how it’s humane for the likes of those who don’t have my arc as their probability. My European friends shake their heads and know the US is really broken.
I'd like to learn more about if Europe overall is doing better than the United States. I couldn't find comparative numbers with solid data. Thank you for sharing your story, I am glad you found a light at the end of the tunnel.
[0]https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/22/homelessness-in-europe-a... [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 [2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [3]https://archive.thinkprogress.org/four-countries-the-united-...
Homeless is getting worse and illegal immigration compounds the problem. The more advanced countries (like the UK) have center for homeless who are not drug addicts. That means the majority of homeless on the street are either ignorant or drug addicts. I always remind them there are tax funded centers.
Other countries are not so lucky (especially in Southern Europe) and you see all sort of homeless, from drug addicts, to youngsters without a job, to illegal immigrants.
A professional making 200/250k in Europe is also incredibly rare but you could live with 2k/m in a lot of places (which is true in some places of the USA as well - certainly not SF). Real estate is also more expensive in Europe, so getting your own house is generally easier in some places in the USA (certainly not SF).