The government website stats support the claim: ~29% of the entire US homeless population is in California, which is disproportional when compared to other state population densities.[1] That said, the piece doesn't offer much constructive advice on how to fix it. Californians have been witnessing the very real, large increase in tent cities, addicts, feces, ... for years now, but so far they still vote for the same people and policies that create the problem.
In the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park.
Even when Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Fran, he tried to enact a "Care not Cash" program to get people into mental health services instead of cash handouts; the people turned on him, and even set fire to his front lawn in protest.
Californians are getting precisely the kind of world they've voted for. It's ugly, and it literally stinks. Yes, how to fix it is the question, but I'm not sure the people have had enough yet. The recall election of Newsom next month will be an indicator. If he's recalled, then a new day of hope begins. Hope, anyway....
The callous disregard for human life exhibited in this post is sickening.
My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces?
Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space, maybe from the automobile lanes and parks that infest our cities and spew far more stinky poison than people living rough.
A fair amount of those who frequent this site are purely concerned with how to squeeze the most profit out of the most people possible, no matter the collateral damage that may come from those goals.
> Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space...
The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes.
> The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes.
All right, where do you think the encampments should be set up?
Who are these people? Why are they homeless? Where are their families? Do they want to not be homeless? What is preventing them from not being homeless?
Before you try to answer the question of what they should do and where should they go, I think you realistically need to answer these questions.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that these questions have reasonable answers (different in detail for each such person), that the homeless people that live in such encampments do not have a viable alternative to 'living rough', and the best solution they were able to come up with (for whatever reasons) was pitching a tent in a public park.
What alternative are you going to offer them that doesn't present barriers they can't surmount?
Sickening is it? You're physically ill from reading that?
We can talk frankly about real problems as they exist, their potential causes and solutions, and we can be right, wrong and everywhere in between. But what we can't do is continue looking for excuses to get outraged so as to feel morally superior to other people. If you want to see where that gets us, look no further the homeless problem in California.
Assuming those statistics are trustworthy (which I don't necessarily, homeless people are notoriously undercounted by the census for instance and may be unevenly counted in different places), maybe more people become homeless in CA. I guess I'd want to know what % of the homeless population were recent transplants to CA vs what % of CA residents in general are recent transplants. Also, if they are homeless and recent transplants to CA, were they homeless before they moved to CA? Before assuming lots of homeless people are moving to CA more research required than that single number.
And then even if so... so what? I assume the point is doing something about people who have no homes, like reducing the number of people who have no homes. Perhaps we'd also want to know why they are moving to CA to begin with. Perhaps we'd say CA should get federal funding to deal with it's disproportional homeless problem, and then figure out the best use of that funding. I dunno.
Like, is the point something other than blaming homeless people for being homeless, or punishing people for being homeless, or make people's lives harder when they are homeless -- cause, what does that do, what's the point of that you think?
Californians are getting precisely the kind of world
they've voted for. It's ugly, and it literally stinks.
Yes, how to fix it is the question, but I'm not sure the
people have had enough yet. The recall election of Newsom
next month will be an indicator. If he's recalled, then a
new day of hope begins.
This. Sums it up neatly. Popular wisdom says Newsom has large enough money bags to defeat the recall effort quite handily. I personally do not think Californians have had enough, despite everything we have seen over the last few years - with the wildfires, PG&E's planned blackouts, ever burgeoning taxes with jack all to show for it, school boards prioritizing campaigns to rename schools honoring racist historical figures over everything else, general wasteful expenditure & graft etc.
...the people turned on him, and even set fire to his front
lawn in protest.
That's putting it a tad mildly, given what happened.
July 2009 - Then-mayor Gavin Newsom and wife Jennifer
Siebel Newsom had only just moved into a new home in the
Upper Haight when their front stoop was promptly defecated
upon.[1]
[1]
A Brief History Of Poop On The Streets Of San Francisco
> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"
Is to (1) complain about a lack of constructive solutions, (2) blame Newsom and (3) not provide a constructive solution. "Hope" is free though. You can have mine, I wasn't using it.
I see your point, but I read GP a little different - the solution they mentioned is to stop voting for leadership that is perpetuating the problem with garbage policies. That combines the blame and solution in one statement, but is a constructive solution. You don't like the policies or realities of CA? Stop voting for people that implement and double down on the policies creating the realities. Not much of a dog in this fight, but if CA can solve the problem it would help a lot of other cities/states that look to CA for guidance.
"Stop voting for people" is kinda the problem with California. Since the US is a 2-party system, and California is leftish, California is effectively a single-party system. So the people get, more or less, what the party picks for them. On the other hand, "dismantle the 2-party system" is quite the yak-shave.
Can you please explain how criminalizing homelessness, for example by enforcing sit/lie ordinances, would help homeless people find homes? Likewise, getting people into mental health services is not likely to get them a place to live. You seem to think that somehow “getting tough” on homeless people is going to make them straighten up and find a place to live, when in reality it will just cause them to move out of your view, so you don’t have to see them any longer.
I basically agree with everything you've said here, but one nitpick:
>In the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park.
The larger issue is that US courts have repeatedly struck down loitering laws, which makes their enforcement impossible. Cities now can't legally restrict people hanging out on their sidewalks, public spaces etc.
Fun fact in the 1700s the British transported large numbers of vagabonds to what would later become the states. This strategy it seems works great when you have somewhere else where you can make the parties assistance someone else's problem. It is inherently harder when the person remains your problem regardless.
This is unnecessarily darwinian in its conception. It also ignores that the major NE cities invest more into building shelters because they decided people freezing to death on the sidewalk was unacceptable.
I second the op, it's hard to just be homeless when it gets freezing cold. Put differently, if I had to choose a place to be homeless, I'd start by choosing a place with good weather, that's a (hypothetical) fact.
Do you know that it's true that per-capital NE cities invest more into shelters? View from Seattle, an enormous amount of money is spent on homeless outreach and shelters that I have never seen reflected in any other area (other than the Pacific rim).
Which puts them in the system, and they get the help they need or they rebel and leave- facing the choice of migrate or die. It’s not pretty but it’s the reality, because nature is a harsh teacher.
"Dumping ground" implies other places did this to CA, which isn't substantiated by the article. As it says, the vast majority of CA homeless are from within the state.
In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.
I'm really not convinced that high housing costs accurately depict the source of the homelessness problem in CA. If it does, it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see.
Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be benefited by lower housing prices.
These people could not afford nor likely ever would afford, a house that cost literally anything. Most of these people suffer from a mental illness and/or a drug addiction which makes holding down a job unlikely to ever happen. What they need is publicly funded mental health hospitals, like the ones that were destroyed in the 80s.
Of course high housing costs are a huge problem, but I just don't think they tell the whole story when it comes to CA homelessness. There's an elephant in the room that far too many people don't want to address. It's the aforementioned population of people who either can't or won't work and the solution we have for them right now is the street.
California already has a 1% income tax allocated just to mental health, and has collected $7.4 billion so far just from this tax[0]. How is that working?
Our government, either through corruption or incompetence, can somehow manage to spend billions in tax payer dollars with very little to show for it.
When I advocate for something like a mental health program, it assumes a government which is functional enough to actually implement it. What we currently have here in CA couldn't be further from that.
Correcting myself: California has corrected $7.4 billion _as of 2011_, after only six years of operation.
Note that the tax is not indexed to inflation: already, the million-dollar threshold is worth only $715k in 2005 dollars. After another ~17 years at 2% inflation, the same tax will be charged on earners of $500k+ in 2005 dollars.
You do need to own a house to suffer the consequences of bad zoning policies, if owning prices go up, rent goes up as well.
Not to mention that when owning prices are high, there’s a bigger incentive for local governments to use every opportunity to help other people who might not need as much help but have more consistent voting habits
The piece mentions Single-Room Occupancies (SROs), which used to be where a lot of people in similar situations would live.
I agree that this doesn't solve the problem for everyone, and there's also a place for publicly funded mental health hospitals. But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
"But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice."
There is a difference between the technically "homeless" and the visibly homeless who camp out on sidewalks etc. which is what most people are talking about when the "homeless problem" is mentioned.
Handful of interesting/data-driven organizations in the Bay Area dispel exactly this. It was eye opening to me to attend some of their public events where they run through their data.
> But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
The low hanging fruit is usually picked first. So let’s focus on picking the low hanging fruit if we aren’t already (they might already do a good job here), while the chronic homeless problems will be tough to solve.
> But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
I beg to differ. I've spent significant time around what could be broadly categorized as "the homeless" in California, specifically in LA and OC, over the last 13 years. As recently as 3 days ago, I was searching for a mentally ill and homeless family member in LA. Last I heard he was on the coast, but I wasn't able to find anyone who knew or had seen him. This is an annual or bi-annual occurrence for me. Sure I'm not out there every day, but I feel as though I am competent on the subject. I certainly have more time in rank than most people that speak up on this one.
If you offered an SRO to most of the people that I've come across in the last 10 years, they'd tell you to go fuck yourself.
Many of them prefer their perceived freedom living on the street vs. being placed into a living situation they didn't chose. In the handful of cases I am familiar with, including my brother in law, it's owed to untreated/neglected/self-medicated mental illness that manifests itself as a deep paranoia and distrust of authority types.
I agree with you, and I love what the Finnish are doing on multiple fronts, but I don't think you're going to learn too much by comparing Finland to the United States.
The investigations and surveys I have seen on the subject suggest that the homeless population you are describing makes up a minority of the overall homeless population. It is something in the range of 30%-50% depending on the source (it is notoriously difficult to get accurate numbers on homeless populations).
Your anecdote is a classic form of bias if you just take a step back and reexamine it. You identify most homeless people as being like that because those are the people you immediately recognize as being homeless. Someone who is homeless purely due to the high cost of housing probably isn't immediately identifiable as homeless on sight.
High housing costs aren't the totality of what OP is talking about. Zoning laws prohibiting construction of lower cost housing options make alternatives in a given locale unobtainable, regardless of cost. This is done to protect the valuation of SFHs, often enough. Designating districts as 'historic' or zoning shenanigans can do this. It's fundamentally a NIMBY problem, which is very different than the issue of regulatory burden for construction (environmental assessments, permitting, etc.). Both of these factors contribute to the problem though.
> it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see.
What you see is highly unrepresentative of homelessness.
You never see the people trying to scrape by in their cars. You never see the people couch surfing. You never see the people struggling but also struggling to not be known as homeless.
Because once you hit that position of being clearly homeless in appearance, all sorts of doors slam shut and getting out of homelessness is an order of magnitude harder.
And being in the precarious state of being homeless, but still fully functional, makes it all the harder to get to jobs on time, harder to protect any assets, harder to keep clean and not look homeless. And all that takes a huge toll on a person's psyche, and that extended stress can bring up mental issues that would have been completely manageable without the additional stress of not having a home base to run all the essential parts of life.
For every clearly homeless person you see, with severe mental issues, there are easily 5-20 that you would never know are homeless without following them around and seeing that they don't go back to an apartment at night.
And this all comes down to housing costs. For all the people we kick off the economic ladder, that run out of money for housing and don't have enough to move to a cheaper area, they are left in a very difficult spot, with little way to get back into housing. I've known people in my town that have been willing to put down 6 months of rent, or even 12, ahead of time, and been unable to land an apartment lease. Even market rate housing has lines that go out the door, and more applicants than the landlord knows what to do with.
If one of your top complaints about the homeless is that they poop (an unavoidable bodily function you might be familiar with), then I'm not sure I trust your judgment about policy matters.
California largely has weather that you can survive outdoor in year round and social programs that provide for and policies that show empathy for homelessness.
I believed this when I lived in California. Now I’m not so sure: it is true that people without shelter can easily die in much of the country, but California isn’t the only place with mild winters. Why don’t Arizona, New Mexico, large parts of Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, etc. have the same problem?
Assuming that California will just naturally have a larger homeless population than everywhere else means that nobody will spend much effort trying to solve the problem. Is it possible that California is just unusually bad when it comes to handling homelessness?
I think its the second part of the last sentence you missed. California has empathetic social services. But also 4 of those states have harsh summers. Some just have small populations in general. The biggest city in alabama has only 200k people. California has multiple major city areas
Coastal California is typically cooler than all of the states you mentioned in summer and warmer in einter. The other states have their own homeless populations- even Minneapolis get encampments that last into winter- but none are as favorable to outdoor survival and comfort as the southern Pacific Coast.
Also, california spends much more than all of the other states on providing assistance to the homeless, and is far more tolerant of bad behavior (public drug use, drunkeness, defecation, etc).
California isn't bad at handling the homeless so much as it is bad at getting the homeless to become housed, mentally and financially stable.
Honest question: Are you claiming that "liberal" has something to do with it?
If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this. If so, maybe you can elaborate on what you mean. Are there non-liberal high-cost cities in the US in a better state? Furthermore, it's worth noting that the other high-cost cities worldwide almost universally seem to have more left-leaning (or US liberal) policies on most issues than most high-cost cities in the US. I'm not sure I see the connection between the political alignment and the state of decay, homelessness, and crime in high-cost cities.
Look at that graph and then ask yourself what changed in 2013. Hint, 1994-2001 they had a republican mayor. 2002-2013 they had a moderate republican who turned into a moderate democrat. And 2014 - now they've had a radical progressive.
This would make sense if "number of homeless people sleeping in a registered shelter" was in any way a useful statistic. Without a denominator, such as number of available shelter beds, and other data such as where are the shelters in relation to clusters of homeless people... it can tell a lot of different stories.
There are millions of variables that inform "the homeless problem" and isolating a pretty minor one -- political affiliation of a single politician in the nation's largest city, overseen by both state and federal governments -- just strikes me as really simplistic.
Regulatory burden doesn’t help, but I don’t think you should overlook the superabundance of cheap credit as a causal factor. If goods can be purchased with money borrowed far below market rate (like a mortgage) because rates are not determined by a profit motive (ie political or social-engineering reasons), then the long term effect is inflation of said good’s cost. You see this same phenomenon in higher education (subsidized). You do not see it in automobiles (to my knowledge, there are no direct subsidies for auto loans).
“The bay” has a particularly close proximity to cheap money for reasons so numerous they deserve their own book.
I took a greyhound across the south west in the early 90s. The bus would stop at each prison along the way from Texas on, everyone that got on was going to LA where they could live rough.
Whenever they do these investigations of how many of the chronic homeless are local or imported problems, they ask questions like “where did you become homeless?” (Crashing on a friends couch doesn’t count) and always avoid the question “when did you move here?” (So someone moving in a year ago to make it big and became homeless 3 months in would count as a local also).
They did a study in Seattle that found that most of the homeless there were previously housed in Seattle, but also that most were housed in … pioneer square. That would be like someone in LA saying they were last housed in skid row.
This is a common myth and a misunderstanding I understand, I thought the same myself a decade ago. It looks like this thread is going nowhere good, so I'll just throw this over the fence quick and run away: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...
It has been doing this for decades already. North up the coast. Across the wastes of Phoenix which built outward into the desert, and also to Texas which I hear has similar sprawl.
So we have established that housing and homelessness need to be solved at the national level. As such, the influx of people to California to begin with stemmed from within California along with other parts of the country—it has always been a national issue but only visible at the local level.
> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"
Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic! Truly solving the housing crisis would mean for housing costs to go down a lot, which means house values would go down and the 55% will keep fighting that. If you want to stay long term in California and disconnect yourself from the madness that is California housing costs, you have to buy at some point and accept it as the price of entry.
Nobody talks about the harder truth: even with its exclusionary housing policies, California is increasingly not capable of supporting the population it has.
The 2021 fires and worsening drought conditions are just a taste of things to come.
California is extremely capable of supporting its current population, and easily 50% more. The only thing stopping this is proper distribution of land and water. We let wealthy people hoard land and water (Prop 13 and our land rights system), rather than allocating them based on market systems or even more fair systems. We have feudalism baked too deeply into our laws.
California was a semi desert before we built the canals and aqueducts -which is why it was a backwater with few people till that was done and its fertile soil was able to sustain life.
People (city dwellers) came _after_ the farmers.
So, it might be in need of an update, but I think you're mischaracterizing how this happened.
Giving people rights to water simply because they took it from the Spanish first is the definition of feudal. We don't allocate resources logically or helpfully, we give people rights because their ancestors got their first, and it is preposterous economically and morally.
Extensive canals and water rights and riparian water rights
were not developed till the demand by the Gold Rush, and then after its admission into the Union additional laws and provisions were passed and levees and canals built, and then in the early 1900s water from the Colorado was diverted into Calif. then much later aqueducts to channel water into semi-desert cities.
The Spanish may have had a few little channels here and there (for their missions along the el camino), but it wasn't till the Gold Rush people built large elaborate systems for water distribution (for their claims). Then appropriative and riparian rights attracted many farmers into fertile lands.
Does it deserve a revisit, sure. It will be fraught and messy, but sure.
This really depends on where in California you are looking. SoCal? Sure, desert. But the San Joaquin valley was full of freshwater lakes and marshes before the invaders started using it for farming.
Even if, for argument's sake, one accepts your claim, it's quite clear that the policies are not going to change.
I'm a native Californian who left and now lives overseas, and every visit back has not only provided a stark demonstration of California's decline, but also taught me that many Californians refuse to believe their lying eyes.
I have friends and family who in the past 5 years have lost homes to fire, seen their wells run dry, had to flee from toxic wildfire air, etc. and yet all but one of them has stayed. It's insanity in my humble opinion and I think if more Californians had an opportunity to spend some time away from the state, more of them would realize that the state is in great peril. It literally and figuratively is a case of the frog in boiling water.
Things are changing, as the entrenched interests die from old age.
Last year, Prop 15 nearly eliminated the Prop 13 for commercial properties. That this was even within 10% points of passing is such a huge change as to be unthinkable. 15 years ago I would rant about Prop 13 and get nothing but hate from others for my position. These days I'm as likely to find somebody ranting about the evils of Prop 13 as I am to initiate the rants. And the only people I see really arguing for Prop 13 are in the dying our demographics of newspaper comment sections and NextDoor, and nearly no one I meet in person.
We have a huge problem with Boomers and their heirs, but immigration is rapidly changing eh demographics to allow for more sound governance.
Lol, I love the slogan, and it may be true. But I will go down fighting this fight, and in my estimation it is getting easier to fight, even if it's not yet clear who will win.
I would not blame anyone for leaving, given the current insanity of state and local politics, but I also welcome the growing crowd of politically active young people that have far more skin in the game than the aged "got mine, forget you crowd. So if you ever do return, get in touch with local political orgs and you will be making a positive difference.
Political organizations, on both/all sides, are in my opinion a big part of the problem in California. Everything in California is turned into a political issue when it doesn't need to be.
Consumer water needs are just fine. The coastal areas where most people live are building desalinization plants and will keep doing so until consumer water needs are met.
When you talk about California water crisis, you are talking about California Agribusiness water crisis. Yes, the farms in the Central Valley will eventually eat themselves like Easter Island once they drain the aquifer completely.
Desalination is not a magic panacea. It requires significant amounts of energy and has significant environmental impacts.
As for the Central Valley, when the farms "eat themselves", have you considered that growing numbers of Americans will have to do the same? The Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation's food even though it represents 1% of the nation's farmland.
> the only people I see really arguing for Prop 13 are in the dying our demographics of newspaper comment sections and NextDoor, and nearly no one I meet in person.
I like Prop 13. I'd be more than happy to meet you in person.
California has the highest sales tax and income tax in the nation. The amount of revenue it gets from property tax is near the median for the U.S. I think they get enough money and don't need more.
Repealing prop 13 doesn't have to mean taxes go up. Housing can be kept in check by adequate property taxes while lowering income taxes at the same time.
There aren't any meaningful negatives to taxing land because it doesn't disappear when you tax it. Sure, if you tax factories and housing those will "move" to a different location.
In way you have a point: from an airplane it is easy to see that the Bay Area and LA are as flat and uniform as the moon. Real cities have variations in building density that reflect the demand for different areas.
You have described why the housing "crisis" will never be solved in CA. The homeowners will vote down every new apartment complex, every new developer plan, every rezone. It will never end, ever. Current home owners will never vote for less money, ever. The only way CA can fix this is by a state wide vote - demanding housing to be allowed. Home owners in CA love new Panera Breads and new Chipotles - tie any new commercial properties to new housing. New 1brdm condos will never be built ever. This cannot be fought at a county NIMBY level: this must be statewide. %46 of CA do not own homes - the vote count is almost there. I await my downvotes.
I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds:
> San Francisco and the East Bay should see 7,872 new apartments open in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year. It's the highest number of apartments — 13,497 units — added to the region in the last five years.
A lot of folks enter into mental health crisis from the stress, sleep deprivation and other issues caused by being homeless. Certainly not all. But having gone through a time period dealing with stress and sleep deprivation from the comfort of my home, I can empathize.
“Unhoused” — esp families — are rapidly rehoused in SF. Those experiencing “chronic homelessness” (the ‘visible’ humans, who deserve the same amount of love and respect) are more often tied to mental health…just different things are helpful for the different groups.
Even the chronically homeless with mental health issues benefit greatly from having housing. The key is to make it housing they actually can use, let them have their belongings, their pets foe support, let people come and go as they please so they are not prisoners, and don't force people out of the housing everyday.
A lot of the existing housing solutions for the chronically homeless have terrible terrible restrictions that make the housing not work for people, sadly.
Yeah, you know it's almost like those SROs that basically don't exist anymore actually served a purpose. That type of housing is perfect for getting people off the street and into a warm bed at night, while not imposing very many restrictions on them.
Housing First policies are a huge boon to helping people out of homelessness who are dealing with mental illness.
What you derisively call "quarter million dollar condos" are of course helpful for this. It is either from directly housing the currently homeless with mental illness in these homes.
And if these homes do not directly house the homeless, new additional homes, where people's rent goes towards construction and labor rather than merely the pockets of a rentier landlord that just sees their rents ever increase is a huge help. Productive creation of new housing, especially if it increases the vacancy rate, is crucial to reigning in the housing market, a market which is failing our people, and in which landlords and homeowners are profiting from people's misery through perpetual shortages.
And if vacancy rates are not increasing, then we haven't built enough of those "quarter million dollar condos." Keep on building them until there's a surplus and they government can buy them on the cheap and provide housing as a human right.
Anybody who says that we do not need more housing is the very source of our homelessness problem. More housing makes everything easier, and the only cost is that some busybodies don't want to see it. Why pay attention to those people at the cost of helping everybody else?
No but you can prevent people from being evicted and forced onto the street. If the faucet of mental illness is closed then the burden of those who are still there is greatly diminished.
Parts of California, like SF and the East Bay, have started building a lot of housing. Late, and still not enough to make up for the shortfall, but building nonetheless.
The problem is that places like Silicon Valley that have seen the lion's share of job growth haven't built commensurate levels of housing.
lol. Hilarious. 7,872 new apartments open in 2021. That should cover the bay area housing crisis. I am sure we will see a sharp drop in prices next year - due to those nice apartments in Avalon at Mission Bay. lol. Was this a joke? The bay area has a population of 7.7 million. Ill let you get back to your lazy detective work. You are sarcastic right? Hahaha.
^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved. lol.
This could be rewritten without any loss of impact.
>^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved!
The sarcasm is implied and doesn't need a "lol" which just looks immature.
Insulting the poster decreases the quality of discourse and encourages indecency. It increases the chance that the next person who finds you to be in the wrong will likewise be indecent.
Furthermore it drives away people who despite merely being incorrect in one case may have other useful information to share.
Your manner of speaking is a larger negative than someone merely being wrong and it will end up getting you booted from the site because it violates hacker news rules.
"I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds"
Are you kidding? That was their opening sentence to me. I am insulting? What a joke. I have never been treated like that on HN in 8 years. Spare me the lecture.
I’m glad GP posted that because I certainly benefitted from it. Somehow I’d been lulled into thinking people agree to assume good faith here so I got a little lackadaisical. Looking at your tone here I clearly need to change something.
Precisely! I've linked a great article from Vox about how home ownership changes people. In a nutshell, most peoples' largest asset is their home, so they have strong incentives to protect its value. Because the housing crisis is fundamentally a supply crisis, it also causes them to take on a scarcity mindset. This leads to your classic NIMBY behavior, wherein homeowners show up at city council meetings to oppose literally anything going up in their neighborhoods. The end result is that NIMBYism does prop up home values, but, mostly because existing homeowners oppose the building of any more homes in their neighborhoods, thus perpetuating the crisis that caused them to behave this way.
Worth noting that according to [0], this is one of the lowest rates in the country, which would suggest to me this has less of an effect than you are selling here.
Can you clarify this? Property taxes are what are holding me back from making a bid for a more expensive home. If I buy a home for $1 million, won't I have to pay property taxes based on that price even if it was previously tax assessed at $100k.
There’s a cap on increases on the previously assessed value, value is re-assessed when ownership changes (except in certain cases like parents to kids). Look up Prop 13.
Back in the 70s California passed a proposition that limits how much property taxes can increase. [0] As a result of this, if you buy a home and the price goes up afterwards, you won't be paying property taxes on the market price of the house.
If it’s based on square feet and some sort of local average square foot price from the last 12 months then fine.
If it’s based on individual assessors deciding your blossoming cherry grove and a charming mid-century atmosphere likely to appeal to young professional couples then… I’d rather the tax be based of the actual price for which the house last changed hands.
The assessed value is based on recent sales of similar comps.
If you bought your house for $50k in 1979, of course you want it to be based on the original price. In CA, the assessed value can only go up by 2% a year. But if I buy your house today for $1.2m, then I am going to be paying $1,000/month in property taxes. And if you want to move across town, or even downsize a little to that $800k condo, well, then you are going to lose that low low property tax rate.
Which is one of the reason there is a housing shortage. People don't want to upgrade or downgrade or otherwise sell. They just figure out ways to give it to their children or rent it out and keep the low tax rate locked in.
California caps how much property tax can increase each year unless there is a change in ownership. My mom pays $4k/yr in property tax for the house I grew up in, which is currently worth $2M.
The other comments are all correct, but they didn't address your last point. Yes, you will indeed pay taxes on the $1M value, and yeah, high property taxes is definitely something to plan for when buying property in California. The kicker is, as others mentioned, when your home's value is $2M in five years, you're still paying taxes on essentialy a $1M property.
If property taxes were higher you wouldn't have to pay $1 million for the home because nobody can afford those property taxes and subsequently nobody would actually bid $1 million.
Meanwhile if you make property taxes negative then you could afford the same house for $2 million.
Edit: How can property taxes be negative? The government can use income taxes to build infrastructure to raise the value of your land.
> For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic!
Is this appreciation consistent with the rest of the country, or areas with comparable quality of life? If you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to other houses you’d actually want to live in, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead.
So yeah, that starter house you bought for $300k 25 years ago that’s worth over a million now? Unless you’re willing to move to a much lower cost of living part of the country, you could sell that house and buy…another million dollar starter house.
> you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to others, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead.
Equity can be leveraged meaningfully without selling, so that's not true.
Besides HELOCs, what are you referring to? A HELOC is just a tool for getting lower interest rates on another loan, which only would make you wealthier if you happened to invest it in some other appreciating asset with an extremely high ROI.
A HELOC is, literally, a line of credit. You can do anything you want with that money: start a business, go to college, buy bitcoin, buy another property, etc.
... anything you want, but you have to repay what you borrowed? It's true the interest rate is likely better than many other kinds of credit, but it's still a loan.
I'm sort of at a loss for understanding the misunderstanding here. Someone without equity in their home probably cannot get a loan of any sort. Access to capital, as a loan or any other form, is a huge thing. So if your home gives you access to that loan, this is important.
Most people don't have a use for a line of credit other than to spend it on things that don't make them any money. Everyone I know that did this used it to say, pay off a bunch of credit card debt, or build a new kitchen that will be worthless by the time they sell their house anyways.
> Most people don't have a use for a line of credit other than to spend it on things that don't make them any money.
Even if that were true (it's really not—it may be at any one moment but over a substantial period of years people tend to have emergent needs and opportunities that not having access to capital, or higher cost access to capital, either misses with real costs or pays more with, quite obvious, real costs) people tend to borrow and spend money on things that don't make money fro time to time; if you have a lower financing costs for such frivolous purchases, you are richer than someone who has the same spending pattern with higher financing costs.
just because you cannot think of a use for such a line of credit, doesn't mean that having the option is useless. And even if most people mis-use this line of credit, it is still an option that's not available. Availability of options is in itself valuable.
And i really dont think people are dumb and cannot think of productive uses for such a line of credit.
> A HELOC is just a tool for getting lower interest rates on another loan
Yes, paying less money if you have to borrow to meet the same emergent need or opportunity as another person makes you richer than the one who pays more.
But there is a minor perk that a greatly appreciating house gives you considerably more equity to act as a large rainy day battery via a home equity line of credit or traditional loans backed by home equity.
My home appreciated 20% last two years and while I hate the condition of the housing market, this unlocked a lot of equity years earlier than I expected it to.
A HELOC just lets you unlock lower interest rates for accruing additional debt. It’s very different from actually having that additional money in your pocket.
Unless you are taking that equity out via home equity loans, it doesn’t really matter until you sell. My home went up 18% this year but…so what? It’s not like we are leaving anytime soon. It’s just a paper gain that could be gone next year.
your own imputed rent, if you owned your own place is not "locked in".
By living in the property, you are giving up receiving the rent that could've been generated. This means a general rental increase also affects property owners - it's just invisible and often not counted since no money changes hand.
That makes no sense. If the land was cheaper you could buy a more expensive house that is of higher quality. You don't need to fill the bags of the old land owner.
55% is one of the lowest home ownership rates in the country. If high levels of home ownership drive policies that prohibit new construction and drive up prices, how is it that places like Minnesota, with a home ownership rate in the mid-70s, are so cheap to live in?
The problem isn't that 55% is "high" (or not). The problem is that, currently, there is a housing problem that is significantly profitable for 55% of a population. This means that 55% of people have conflicting interests with fixing this problem.
> Yes, and those 55% wield extremely disproportionate political power.
House owners don't have any additional political power than renters. Still one vote per person and politicians don't consult homeowners any more often than anyone else.
No one say they do, point is they benefit from not solving housing and has SOME power simply by being a large group. I you believe solving housing is public interest then that's a problem.
Of course you can say when 55% of people are against affordable housing then affordable housing is not public interest.
Those homeowners get richer and richer every year. Their borrowing power increases and even as renters are getting gouged by rising rents, homeowners don't even have to worry about their property tax going up. This leads to disproportionate political power.
One Czech ex-minister of health owns 67 properties. So he probably has a lot of acquintances and relatives among the political elite of my country. To me it seems he has more political power than me, a dude sitting in underwear and ranting on Hackernews.
No doubt high level (ex)politicians are very privileged and operate above most limitations imposed on regular people. But that's moving the goalposts of the discussion pretty far indeed.
The original premise was that the entire "55% [of homeowners] wield extremely disproportionate political power". Sure, a few of those homeowners are also politicians with disproportionate political power. But nearly everyone is just regular people with one vote and no other influence, whether homeowner or renter.
Someone: wield extremely disproportionate political power.
You: House owners don't have any additional political power than renters.
Me: one dude has 67 properties and connections to political elite, so he probably has more political power than renters. Implicitly: chances are the entire political system amassed a huge amount of properties, and are in one bed with prominent businessmen, who have the capital to acquire even more properties than said politicians.
I have friends more invested in housing issues than I am. But they generally agree with my assessment that without fixing transportation issues there is only downsides for homeowners and even renters to new development. It definitely seems like developers don't want to to pay a cent for mass transit. The just want to build lux houses and lofts in some neighborhood and then run away with the money.
I think Scott Wiener is right. Build mass transit and allow developers build housing close in.
Picking a couple specific issues, to me, seems like a naive hope in counting a majority of over-privileged under-taxed folk whose land-value goes up the more they suppress change or growth. Trying to argue this or that specific issue, get them to come around each time, seems unlikely to provide real progress.
They're not a voting block and their financial well being doesn't revolve around their home prices remaining high.
If you buy a $1M 1400 ft^2 in CA, and the price goes down, you're going to be deeply underwater in your mortgage. If home prices stay high enough long enough than it "embeds" itself into politics.
It's worth noting that property taxes in California are only re-assessed on ownership change or new construction. There's no downside to having the value of your home balloon as much as possible.
Yes, if you actually want to stay in California, rising house prices only actually benefit you if you never want to buy a larger house - but the weird tax laws also disincentivize downsizing. If the smaller house costs more than your current house did when you bought it, you’ll see a significant property tax rise.
I believe that, to counter this, There are some counties where if you move to a smaller house, you get to keep a tax rate akin to what it would’ve cost you at the time you purchased your old house!
At this point the only economically rational thing for the other 45% to do is leave. Yes California is awesome in lots of ways, but it's someone else's house (literally) and you don't really live there.
If enough people do this, the NIMBYs will get what they deserve as home values crash.
If enough people leave because housing is too expensive, then eventually housing stops being too expensive and people stop leaving. Eventually an equilibrium is reached, but that we might be at that equilibrium already if California’s population isn’t crashing.
California has a huge economy with a lot of network effects that draw and hold people there. Going remote and geographic diversification of industries will help people escape the California rent trap.
SpaceX is leaving. VCs increasingly fund startups anywhere or fully remote.
Software companies are going remote. It’s happening. COVID has accelerated some of these trends a lot, especially remote.
I don't think housing prices are an issue. one part of the homeless are mentally ill. This is a very hard problem and I don't think anyone has the answers for yet, but its not home prices.
Another major group of the homeless is drug addicts. Again, home prices isn't going to change that.
I think its very rare someone goes homeless because their rent went up. if they can't afford it, they usually move.
I'll get down-voted before this but that's how I feel, and I think this 'more affordable homes will solve homelessness' is a waste of time.
The answer to mental illness is quality mental healthcare available to those in need, along with housing first policies to create stability for those seeking care. This has costs of course.
California is the fifth largest economy in the world (Between Germany and the United Kingdom) and yet can’t prioritize this spending (and the spending that is taking place is not very effective or efficient).
The people who become homeless because their rent went up certainly exist. These people tend to be homeless for a short amount of time because they are able to eventually find new housing. Maybe they live in their car for awhile. Maybe they couch surf. But it's a good point that there are people with mental health / drug problems that have issues beyond housing cost. Both can be true at the same time.
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
Mentally ill people also sometimes live in houses, believe it or not. Some are barely getting by. When housing prices go up, they become homeless. When housing prices drop, some can keep it together well enough to pay rent.
Where are they gunna move to, and how are homes being $1m not a problem in your mind? Most people will never be able to pay for that, nevermind afford it. Delusional.
You are assuming that having low income housing somehow impacts the price of higher end housing, and I am not sure that this is true. Would a person with a million dollar house be hurt if we built 100,000 more million dollar houses? Yes. Would that same homeowner be hurt if we built 100,000 cheap rental apartments? It certainly doesn't seem like it. However much property values fall due to less people looking for low-end housing, you would think they would go up due to not being surrounded by homeless camps.
I would say the people who are incentivized to oppose cheap housing are the lower-end landlords.
> Would that same homeowner be hurt if we built 100,000 cheap rental apartments?
Of course they would. Million dollar houses in many parts of the country are so insanely expensive not because they’re luxury goods; they’re expensive because supply is so constrained that even mediocre houses are extremely scarce relative to demand. People buying million dollar houses in e.g. the Bay Area know that their house is not particularly fancy, relative to other houses (that often sell for much less in other parts of the country).
As an analogy, consider cars in communist countries. Russian Ladas and East German Trabants were objectively horrible cars, but they cost several years’ average salary because supply was so scarce.
Introduce millions of even cheaper cars into the aforementioned communist countries and the prices of Ladas/Trabants would plummet. Likewise, introduce thousands of low income units into the Bay Area and the price of what used to be starter homes that now go for a million dollars would plummet.
I still think you are underappreciating the difference between people who buy homes and people who rent. To buy a house, you need a certain income, a down payment etc. The people who live in low income housing have none of those things and were never potential buyers anyway.
I don’t think that’s fair. Plenty of people rent because it’s the only option they can afford right now, even at high salaries. If you don’t yet own a home, making a meaningful down payment will take years and years of savings. To afford a mortgage on a $500k house in a west coast city, you’re looking at $100k of savings.
The point is that loads of people would love to own a house or upgrade their living situation, but are priced out of it. These people are all competing for rentals, driving rent up. As a result, it’s not hard to simply not be able to afford rent, and end up on the street.
This would be fixed by drastically increasing supply, so that housing at the low end of the market is more affordable, both rentals and ownership.
The general point of this thread, though, is that everyone who already bought a house cannot afford to loose that value, as it’s likely the biggest financial risk and investment they have. This means there is essentially no pressure for the market to decrease prices. (I imagine developers wouldn’t want to ever make less rent either.)
So long as housing is treated as an investment for the property owners, there is only pressure for prices to go up.
I'm still not convinced of this. At least not among people who live in their houses. If you're not planning on moving, an underwater mortgage isn't a "problem" unless you lose your job, or have an other emergency. I don't think these people have a strong political view on housing prices one way or the other. People with INVESTMENT properties though...that's a different story.
This seems naive. I'm sure the people looking for SROs or other low income choices are not the people buying $1M houses, but they probably have a good deal of overlap with people who are buying houses that are at the lowest rung on the ladder, who themselves have overlap with the next cohort, etc.
It's a market. Changing it in a major way at the bottom will have knock-on effects through the whole market.
Of course, more directly, people with $1M houses might also be highly motivated to avoid "the wrong kind of person" being able to afford housing any where near them, their schools, etc.
The market isn't so segmented. If there's a massive availability of cheap rental apartments, there will be less demand for cheap or far away houses, which in turn will reduce their prices, which will in turn reduce demand for million dollar houses. Additionally, land can be divided/merged to turn cheap/expensive houses into expensive/cheap houses.
> therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going
This is a too-frequent HN meme but it doesn't really work that way. There is no special club of homeowners that have more say in what politicians do. Just one vote per person, same as non-homeowners.
And turns out homeowners don't spend time thinking about this, let alone scheming to somehow "keep the housing crisis going". A house is a place to live, that's all.
That doesn't change that they are the source of the problem and that they get paid to cause the problem and be against its solutions. They also throw money into the throats of large corporations that own a huge amount of land.
I agree with the premise of the article, that a large proportion of California's homeless move there because it's easier to he homeless for all the reasons listed, but that's about the substance of the article. It blames the problem on detached housing and demands solutions without an inkling of a hint at any.
Our homeless problem is the result of 2 things: a mental health problem and to a much lesser extent the pervasiveness of the speculative real estate market driving up costs (a market largely driven by equity in the California housing market I might mention).
The solution to this problem is not less detached housing, it is more of any housing anywhere that it has been artificially suppressed, and raising interest rates to a market dictated level rather than artificially suppressing them to hold up the house of cards, and more importantly, helping people address their mental health problems.
It's really not mostly mental health problems. I've studied this issue for years.
I write about homelessness on Street Life Solutions. I try to write about housing and community development stuff elsewhere, like Eclogiselle.com and https://projectsro.blogspot.com/.
This post wasn't intended to be some opus solving everything. I wanted to make one point: California's extreme homeless problem is not somehow entirely the fault of California government, though that is a factor. There are other factors, like weather and a national shortage of housing that has been ongoing for a lot of years and isn't remotely peculiar to California.
California has 12 percent of the nation's entire population and 27 percent (or more -- different sources vary) of the nation's homeless population. That's not just a "California problem." That's a national problem disproportionately impacting California.
There's a lore more to the issue than can be contained in a single post. I tried to make one point and only one point. Addressing how to resolve the nation's housing problems will take more than a single blog post.
I lived in San Francisco from ~1999 to about 2003, and the homeless problem then was pretty bad. I can only imagine what the city must be like these days.
So what do you think is the root problem? A national housing shortage? What do you think drives that shortage if so? What do you think are good solutions? I understand it takes more than a blog post but every big problem takes more than a blog post, we can still have a conversation about it here. Could you shed a little light on the issue for us?
We need to bring back smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods. We aren't providing the right kinds of housing.
Our American ideal is a home designed for a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 kids because that's who had the money to finance the birth of the modern suburb. That was never the majority of our demographics but we've further diversified away from that in the decades since.
Meanwhile, our housing stock has increasingly converged on their ideal home and that ideal home has grown larger and more sprawling over time because the only people who could afford it were people with good money. Our 1950s suburban home has more than doubled in size, from about 1200 sqft to over 2400 sqft in recent years.
If we had just kept building 1950s style little suburban homes, we wouldn't have such a mess. But we didn't. Our homes today are that single family detached house dream on steroids.
We need to reverse course. We have vastly more small households of just one to three people, meanwhile our housing stock tends to skew to three bedrooms or larger.
I personally live in a very very small home and live minimally and it cost me almost nothing. I'm sure I lucked out compared to the average person.
So what is the reason that these smaller homes aren't more common? I would think that if there were a market for these homes someone would cash in on it, so is it zoning? Is it people's aversion to building their own homes themselves and the service-ification of everything? How do we reverse course and what are the pressures preventing that, in your view?
I'm right there with you on administrative barriers.
What do you think of other housing options more common in the US, such as mobile homes, RVs, duplexes/quadplexes etc? What about ideas like renting rooms, dormitory style housing with shared spaces and things like that?
Mobile homes, RVs and the Tiny House movement are basically hacks to get around a broken system. The first tiny house was put on wheels to get around the zoning codes rather than fight them (I'm old enough, I read some of the earliest coverage of it back when it was a new idea).
Those things are proliferating mostly because we won't fix our broken system. Not mostly because people actually prefer that stuff.
Dorms, duplexes, renting a room etc fall under what I advocate for: SROs and Missing Middle Housing.
How are they hacks and not solutions? If smaller living spaces for smaller family units is a solution wouldn't they be solutions and not hacks? If people actually want smaller housing and choose these things, aren't they real solutions?
Mobile homes date back to the same time as the modern suburb, were designed to target a similar demographic and are pretty ubiquitous across most of rural US, as are RVs in many places.
I've seen tiny houses on wheels for the reason you state, I actually have neighbors with really beautiful houses like this.
Can you give me some examples of housing that has been zoned out of existence that you have in mind? Apartment buildings, duplexes and renting a room are not illegal in the vast majority of municipalities.
RVs absolutely make for walkable neighborhoods, and everyone gets a little garden space too if they want. Some RV parks even have a grocery store inside.
I thought we were looking at solutions to homelessness? Why does a dwelling have to appreciate in value? This appreciation of price in the current housing market is not natural and is the result of increasing population, artificial restriction of building more housing and is arguably a symptom of the root cause of the homelessness problem in the US. If the goal is solving homelessness how can that be expected to continue?
Parking minimums and street width minimums are a huge issue. They are an active barrier to building an old fashioned, walkable, mixed use downtown and actively undermine the health of such places that still do exist in some areas.
There's lots of literature on that fact.
Set backs and other zoning changes also mean you often cannot build townhomes right up to the lot line, even if older townhomes right up against the lot line dominate the street in question. They are grandfathered in and don't have to be torn down, but you can't build more like it. This typically makes such homes highly prized and expensive and out of the reach of most people.
How do you reconcile "national shortage of housing" being the cause with California being the most expensive state with the most homeless? Shouldn't a national problem cause people to migrate AWAY from the expensive housing? Housing in the US (median, not SF) is one of the cheapest relative to income among the developed countries, AFAIK.
Also, I can tell you from my own example that it's a chicken and egg problem. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you I'd like to have Singapore-style vehicle taxes, introduced gradually, so that developmental patterns would change, basically forcing people into transit and walkable neighborhoods. However, based mainly on living in Seattle, I am now 100% pro-driving, anti-transit and dream of moving to suburbs, specifically because I want to be far away from blight (and I grew up in Moscow in the 90ies economic collapse, so my standards for lack of urban blight are pretty low). Now, I am only willing to accept Singapore-style (or Moscow-style) urban environment with Singapore-style/Moscow-style ruthless enforcement of law and order.
Homeless people often go where the weather is tolerable. Many homeless people prefer to camp outside rather than stay in the shelter system. California is the overall best state to camp outside long-term and year-round.
It then becomes a recipe for remaining homeless because the housing is so expensive. It's easy to camp out, not easy to afford rent.
If you can't afford housing anywhere in the US, going someplace you can camp reasonably comfortably makes sense. Remaining someplace with worse weather doesn't automatically cure whatever other issues are contributing to your intractable poverty.
Most shelters have serious problems, like mold. They aren't actually safe because you can be harassed, assaulted or have your stuff stolen by other homeless people.
A high percentage of homeless people have health issues. This means putting a bunch of them together exposes already sick people to cross contamination with other diseases, making their health worse.
They have curfews and other rules making it one step removed from a prison. If you have any funds of any kind, some will charge you for being there, making you essentially their prisoner with no means to escape.
Housing is cheap in much of the country though, and really cheap in some areas. Also, there are warm states that are not CA that don't have the problem (relatively speaking), and there are far colder states like NY or WA that do (ditto for locations within states). Why don't NY homeless move to e.g. Detroit? Far cheaper housing, comparable climate.
The only people who wouldn't benefit from this under nationwide housing shortage theory are indeed those who cannot afford any housing at all because they eh, don't have their shit together on any level. But then, walkable housing nationwide is not going to fix that.
It tends to be cheap where there's no grocery stores, no jobs, etc. If you have to drive a long way for everything you need, it's not a cheap lifestyle, even if your rent is relatively low.
Nationwide walkable housing would, in fact, fix it for some people, in part by bringing down the cost of housing and transit to a level they could reach.
Do you think that walkable housing is viable nationwide? Seems to me it would only be viable in urban areas, vast swathes of north America are very very remote, the people that live there by and large choose to. Wouldn't it make more sense to just build more grocery stores?
It's viable in a lot more areas than it exists in currently.
I'm not suggesting no one should ever live in a remote area. If that's what people want, cool.
When I say nationwide, I mean we need more housing that makes sense in all 50 states, not just California. I don't mean this should be the only kind of infrastructure we allow.
No jobs? The salary differential in entry level jobs is much smaller than in high paying jobs between Detroit in NY, and rent differential is vast. If you take many of the homeless who cannot take any realistic job, the difference in salaries is 0.
Even including driving (which you don't need to do much more in declining/stably cheap, but still dense, older cities) it's still cheaper.
Walkable housing would fix it for a very small slice of the people, as far as I can tell.
I wonder how much the moving of jobs outside has contributed to this. The few documentaries I saw had interviews with homeless, and the general theme was that they couldn’t land a job.
Does no one remember when other states were paying for bus fares to California to get the homeless out of their state?
Does no one remember states paying to fly the homeless to Hawaii?
The above might sound ridiculous, but what sounds cheaper? Solving California’s massive homeless problem or simply getting the homeless out of the state on the next plane or bus?
There’s some nuance to that. 70% were already in SF when they became homeless, but the vast majority of San Franciscans aren’t from here. Only a third we’re even born in California. So it seems like people move here, become homeless, and stay.
And 30% coming here after becoming homeless isn’t peanuts.
Every place does this. I was homeless in San Francisco & applied for assistance. They made sure to let everyone know they'd buy you a one way ticket to pretty much any place you wanted to go.
How can it be housing when there are so many vacancies? I honestly don't understand this. Obviously they can't afford it, but that's how markets work. When there is high demand, prices go up.
It seems to me the solution is just for people to go elsewhere... again, the housing is there, plenty of rentals everywhere, except too expensive for someone who is living on the streets to, all of a sudden, start paying for, yet they can't live anywhere else?
Also politicians where talking about an exit tax for people who leave, or something like that. You can't have it both ways: be the most popular destination and also have affordable housing. It's either/or, and people who can't afford simply need to go elsewhere that they can afford. How can that not be an option for people?
It seems to me everyone just ignores individual incentives when talking about this problem. What are these people on the street motivated by? What do they want? And why can't they decide to go to a less popular, and cheaper place to live and work? I honestly would not stay in CA if I couldn't afford it, and would at least find a cheaper place to be homeless in, just to have a better chance to afford a place. When are we going to start factoring in these people's agency and incentives? They are people with desires, motivations, and plans.
Ok, yeah the lack of walkable cities does make sense. Almost all cities require cars even with cheap housing, and large cities provide better job opportunities. I still feel we're not factoring in people's motivation for living on the streets, and authorities seem to provide incentives which encourage it. I'm sure there is a percentage of people that could find alternatives like living with a friend or relative, if they really had to, but CA feels forcing people is somehow not being empathetic or something, when really you are enabling them and perhaps setting them up for a lifetime of being on the streets.
I think we should factor in incentives, and also the diverse reasons and motives each person has, as oppose to blaming it all on lack of housing.
I mean the housing IS there, just maybe not in the high demand areas. Is is that we need to have a bunch of excess housing so it lowers in price?
I had a couple friends who were homeless in SF, and slowly got out of it. Places like SF are just limited in square footage, it's like an island basically, yet people are living on the streets there for decades... shouldn't they try a different city if they really didn't want to be on the streets? I mean years outside in the same city seems suspicious to me that it's really housing.
Directly next to where I live there are multiple people living in the hillside.
Each day for the past year+ they park their BMW, Honda Accord, and Toyota Camry on our street, and then walk off into the park, hop a fence, and down to wherever it is their tents are.
It's really perplexing to see someone driving a ~2010 clean BMW while choosing to live in the hillside. My determination is that they're simply choosing that lifestyle for whatever reason.
Ah high percentage of people living homeless in Los Angeles, (in the region of 60% if I remember from the survey) have at least one job. They get paid money, just not enough money to rent somewhere. There is no "lifestyle" to choose.
You have a limited budget that isn't enough to pay rent. Do you choose paying the unaffordable rent or setting up the tent while maintaining your mobility?
Most areas (pre-pandemic) did not have enough vacancy to put pressure on the housing market. Most of the vacancy was caused by units being renovated/fixed, places waiting for a leaseholder to move in, etc.
This is even true of low-income housing and shelters. Occasionally people will gripe about shelter vacancies, without realizing it’s really difficult to maintain 100% housing utilization without denying some people housing.
Right, but is this in the high demand areas only? Are there no other nearby cities with cheaper rent and also potential jobs? I still blame the authorities for allowing areas with high concentration of homeless people, since that discourages them to find solutions and instead enables them to settle down with other people outside, when perhaps they could try their luck in a less expensive, less dense area.
I invite you to pick any major city, particularly one on the west coast with a population over 500K for their metro area who's name you recognize from any news or professional setting.
Look up the rents in the downtown area. Then look at a traffic map for around rush hour in the morning / evening; the worst part of that period. Take a sample of suburbs an hour, maybe even two hours out to form some rings.
The price of rent goes down a little, but the price in fuel and taxation on a commuter doesn't. MOST of these cities also, if they even have it, will have mass transit optimized to a mega-downtown hub with spokes, for peek commuters only. Even that will still suck about as much as traffic, but costs less.
Pre-pandemic, when I last looked at numbers, Seattle wanted around 3000+ a month for like a single room apartment, maybe a bit less if it was a really crummy place. A rundown suburb an hour or so out cost about half of that for a little more, or for a tiny bit less you could rent a house, including a covered garage.
I don't have any experience with the housing issue in California, but got involved a while back trying to find pragmatic solutions in Seattle.
The situation is a mess and there is an entire "homeless industrial complex" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism.
Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse.
At first I was in the "Housing First" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in "Rehab First".
A local news station released a great documentary called "Seattle is Dying". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago.
https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw
>Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse.
Because home prices and rents keep going up. Homelessness is an inevitable side effect of that.
Funneling money on rehab rather than providing places to actually live cant fix that. It's attacking a symptom not the cause.
However, attacking the cause (property prices/rents) would make a lot of very rich, very powerful people very angry - all backed by an army of overleveraged homeowners terrified of negative equity.
Until property owners are apoplectic with fury about declining property values I doubt the problem will stop getting worse.
The thought that there can be enough jobs that pay “well enough” is a myth. There are only so many jobs that can provide the wages needed for rent in a given city, and there are always more people that want it than have it. Of course there is no single root cause but if I had to point one out I would finger the stagnation of real wages.
Also don’t forget that you can have high unemployment and lots of available jobs at the same time if the skills doesn’t match up. It is complete rubbish and false to claim that we can train anybody to do any job.
I've never understood why working the most entry level job should afford you a midrange 2br. Why not link minimum wage to 3x rent for an entry level apartment?
>Why do you favor blaming rent for homelessness instead of lack of jobs that pay well enough?
Two sides of the same coin.
>Unless you only care to push an agenda.
Some people prefer to prevaricate and show only faux concern for the homeless, I guess.
It's understandable - there are a lot of people who while they dont want to be seen to be outright hostile to the plight of the homeless, will react negatively to the idea of seeing the value of their assets decline.
> Why do you favor blaming rent for homelessness instead of lack of jobs that pay well enough?
In most countries, homelessness is concentrated in wealthy, but expensive cities e.g. London, NYC. There are plenty of well-paying jobs (even relatively unskilled ones) but high rents more than make up for it. I felt significantly more housing-secure living in a cheap area with a shitty job than in an expensive area with a good job.
If everyone is paid more but the housing supply remains limited housing prices will simply increase further.
My friend in California makes twice as much as I do on the east coast. I can afford a home and he can’t.
Supply and demand. Housing prices will only go down when there is significant excess supply.
If you want to help homelessness build more housing. Not specifically low income housing, just lots of housing. No it is not going to help the people living on the street right now, but it is the only real solution.
The problem is not lack of jobs. The problems is that a larger and larger % of the population doesn’t have the skills/IQ/whatever to do those jobs. Or the cost (car etc.) of getting the job isn’t covered by the pay.
Yup, and the problem with inadequate housing affordability means pumping money into rehab just further increases the price of housing as you need to house people in rehab, after all!
Get rid of height limits, parking minimums, single-family-only zoning, and make most housing projects zoned by-right without public comment required.
Seattle light rail was sold to the voters with one premise being upsizing the surrounding neighborhoods. Once construction began, upsizing became controversial and never happened in some neighborhoods because of gentrification fears.
My experience with those living on the streets is that substance abuse and mental health is the main symptom of them living that lifestyle. They will be the first ones to tell you if you're willing to have a conversation with them.
Your "very rich, very powerful" comment is unfounded and a weak attempt to make it seem like a conspiracy. It's the tens of millions of basic, everyday middle-class homeowners who freak out when anything related to their home changes negatively -- lower values, higher taxes, "wrong people" moving into the neighborhood, HOA rules not followed, school system grades declining, traffic increasing, etc etc
What continues to amaze me is that the US completely ignore successful programs run in other countries. The US spent more $ per person on education, healthcare, homelessness etc. and get consistently worse results than countries in Europe for example. I wonder if it is a weird “US #1” kinda thing that makes it impossible to admit that the US can learn from other countries? Or is there some other explanation? Perhaps an unwillingness to actually solve those problems because of a general individualistic/selfish/not my problems mentality?
The only reason I don't laugh quite out loud is that I have a misfortune of living in Seattle and my wife refuses to move until something "actually happens" to us, as opposed to stuff going on 15 blocks away.
California is not suffering from others' "broken" policy, but only from its own.
It's an unpopular opinion, but I think it's great that there are people out there who concentrate the entire problem around themselves and spare the rest of us. They should suffer the consequences of their very willful and insistent stupidity. We should make fun of them, from safe distance.
Rampant property crime with no legal repercussions is common here. People shoot up in parks (and now on school property!) and the city is now denying permits for kids to use parks because of the camps.
The problem is a learned helplessness of the electorate combined with reasonable voters leaving, resulting in people who want to double down on the status quo replacing them.
There is zero political will to enforce vagrancy, open air drug use, and private property law if someone is living in a tent. No standards == these people feel empowered to do whatever they want, while contributors to the tax base are treated poorly. I still get a ticket 30 mins after parking too far from the curb, and the city council does not like that I make a good income and own a single family home.
It should be socially acceptable to live in a tent. There shouldn't be a big jump between renting a room and living in a tent. People who live in tents shouldn't be seen as some kind of underclass with the label "homeless". There should be a continuum with painless mobility between a tent, a room, an apartment, a house. Everyone should be expected to follow the law. The system should work for all people, all the way from 0 to infinity.
I am not sure people complain about the tents. There is a lot more that comes with that. Tents block public areas and sidewalks. There is a lot of trash accumulated around tents. There are usually no bathrooms or showers around which leads to urine and poop, unpleasant smells, dangerous trash like needles, etc.
Do we? I don't think we do anything cheaper than an SRO. At the very least, tents in public areas (or on private land!) are not the answer. In any case, we have these campground solutions already. They are called "campgrounds". They are just not an efficient use of urban land, although sometimes they also exist close to cities, e.g. some in Hawaii iirc.
Mainly though, this is a strawman. Tents themselves are not the biggest problem when they don't e.g. block a sidewalk, piece of public infrastructure, or a road. The problem is piles of garbage, needles, dumping sewage into lakes and streams, increase in crime, not-yet-criminal or never-prosecuted safety concerns (e.g. someone I know can no longer take an obvious bike trail to where they're going because of some close calls with aggressive barely human campers).
Blight and crime. And as I mentioned in the other fork, I grew up in Russia during the 90ies collapse, so my standards for lack of blight and crime are relatively low ;)
Relatively close to Woodland park, for an example. It's not as bad there but it's still basically taken over, with e.g. sporting events canceled due to safety concerns. I just don't want to wait until it spreads.
I’m in the same boat. Given, we’re in nice a part of the city with 2016-level issues. But given that spiteful urban voters want to bring down nicer neighborhoods instead of lifting up their own with sensible law enforcement, it’s only a matter of time until it hits us too.
By stuff going on 15 blocks away I don't mean an odd car window smashed. I mean e.g. giant homeless camps (to the point where e.g. running events in the local park are canceled due to safety concerns), people shoplifting on industrial scale, break-ins, or e.g. people operating a loud, smoke-belching machine shop at night in a park right under somebody's windows.
Many years ago, I took a college class through SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy. My recollection: New York was ten times the overall population as San Francisco and the two cities had about the same number of homeless.
The problem in San Francisco is pretty bad. It's not equally bad across the state. I ran some numbers at one time and concluded that per capita, homelessness was twice as bad in San Diego as in Fresno, for example.
So it's not evenly distributed across the entire state. San Francisco is especially badly impacted from what I gather.
You've also failed to provide evidence of your claim, so there isn't any utility in your comment unfortunately. Add an example or two of claims lacking evidence and perhaps some discussion can take place
Having lived in small towns and big cities, hot/cold Northeast/Midwest and sunny CA, I have thought for years that CA cities are the ideal destination for homeless. If you need to beg, you need a city with moneyed or generous people, preferably both. You don’t want to freeze or soak too much. It’s really simple. And drifting to CA has been done for a long time.
I've spent my life mostly in the East (in places where housing is expensive (e.g. Singapore, Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai), as well as places with low cost of living in Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia ). I have not been to CA so this may be a silly question:
What if there are joint initiatives/collaborations between US and its Eastnern allies to sponsor and help people who are struggling on the street due to homelessness to start afresh with a job and a house in say, Canggu, Bali (where things are quite chill & they'll enjoy a much higher quality of life), etc, work there a few years, save up and do some rehab, etc, and then they can decide to come back to the States or continue their life there?
I'm a school drop-out. In my early twenties there were times when I was really broke. So I would move to places with a low cost of living, charge up, and go back to the (relatively high-burn-rate) city life again when it makes sense.
The US has a history of sending waste to other countries[1].
Obviously, homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking: take something that is seen as a scourge and send it to other countries so that it's out of sight and the largest costs of dealing with it are borne by others (usually poor people).
Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems, take in homeless Americans, a good number of whom have severe mental illness and/or substance abuse issues? What's the benefit to the Indonesian people?
> ...homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking...
Nope. No similiarity here. We can only solve the problem when we treat people with dignity.
We shouldn't alienate them. They are people just like you and me. The idea is to lower the cost while improving living standard for them.
> Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems...
GDP is irrelevant here. Indonesia, Thailand, etc have many cities popular with backpackers and westerners living a nomadic lifestyle. Fresh fruits and fish. Great outdoor. Nice beach. Cheap motorbike. Great landscape and nature. Low-stress.
It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab (eg cooking), or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.
I'm an expat myself and while not a backpacker, I have traveled extensively in SE Asia. I can honestly think of few things worse than taking people who can't support themselves in their home country and shipping them off to SE Asia where they will be thousands of miles away from their family and friends living in a society whose culture they don't understand. If you send them to SE Asian nomad hubs, they will be surrounded in many cases by cheap booze, easy access to drugs, and hordes of prostitutes and shady locals and expats.
> It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab, or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.
Have you really spent time in SE Asia? If you have, you'd know that Indonesia and Thailand are very protective of their labor markets and are not going to be interested in sacrificing local jobs for the benefit of homeless Americans. In Thailand for instance, under the Alien Employment Act, foreigners are basically shut out from many of the kind of jobs you are hinting at.
English teachers generally need a Bachelor's degree and clear criminal background check. TEFL certification is also sometimes needed. How many homeless Americans do you think will meet these criteria, and do you really think SE Asians want homeless Americans (some with mental illness and substance abuse issues) teaching their kids?
> ...few things worse than taking people who can't support themselves in their home country and shipping them off to SE Asia...
Also, we don't evict people and "ship them off". It's about giving them an oppournity with incentives to make a decision in their life, a new chapter that they can choose to embark on if they see it as a better alternative to being homeless in CA.
Have you ever been approached by someone in a city saying they need money to get back to their town? Moving even temporarily is a great barrier to entry for a lot.
Wow. So you think that moving people who can’t cope in their own country to a foreign country with a different language/culture will improve things? And you think that other countries would be interested in importing homeless Americans with mental/health issues? Really? Have you ever lived, worked and paid taxes in any foreign country? Then you would know how hard it is to even get a work permit.
> ... moving people who can’t cope in their own country to a foreign country...
Homelessness is a specturm. Some people may just need a lift-up, (or an experience that changes the way life is viewed so they can find meaning in it again [1]) to be back to managing a functioning life again. What you want is to give them an opportunity to be in a less stressful enviroment with proper shelters and foods.
Addiction of any form (to cig, to opium, or to herions, etc, as well the more socially acceptable forms such as to sex, work, consumerism) is a coping mechanism for stress. It's counter-productive to be in an urban setting with the worst living conditions (ie homeless) which maximizes stress in so many aspect of your daily life, and then trying to 'cure' addiction and turn people into a functioning unit in society again so they can work enough hours to make enough income to pay rent.
Perhaps it's more productive to view every homeless person as someone who was burnt-out and broke, and happened to run out of options in their attenuated safety net like getting a loan from their parents to pay rent. And from that on existing health/mental conditions/dependencies they had would often exacerbate, and it got harder and harder to break the vicious cycle.
> ... interested in importing homeless Americans with mental/health issues...
Mental/health issues are a spectrum too. And this is not about "importing homeless Americans". This should be more like a rehab/retreat none-profit program for people who are stressed out in urban American life to experience life in a more stree-free enviroment closer to nature to connect back with the plants and terrains (away from all loud, harsh and unhealth stimuli and mind-numbing concretes, smells and unfriendiness of an overpopulated city).
It'll cost less than the War On Drugs, and if enough smart people are involved, we can definitely structure it in a way where on a long run it'll economically and culturally beneift all parties.
> ...worked and paid taxes in any foreign country? Then you would know how hard it is...
The purpose is to introduce a change of enviroment to a less-stressful one for them. Something like a training visa or work holiday pass (or even an education one [2]) would do. It would be easy esp when the orgs backing you have international recog.
As an NGO, there are many ways this can be executed after fundings are secured. We definitely need to collaborate with local institutes in ways that make sense to them. It can also be something that has an element of spirituality to it (like a church or temple retreat that also helps with rehab), or a commune on self-sustainability (where they'll still have to do work everyday). I see this as the most pragmatic way to lower the cost of living while giving people a dignified living experience that would be much better (and meaningful) than living on the street in CA as a homeless person.
[1]: this is why a change of environment can be extremely impactful to mental health. And this is also why psilocybins, etc, taken in the right settings, are useful for mental wellness.
)
[2]: Can typically last 6 months to a year. And if we have 4 countries involved, that will be 2~4 years. After that there are many ways this can branch off.
We can start off with 5000 quota a year to gauge interest (we'll make it easy for people to apply), and gradually scale up to 50,000 in 5~10 years, (while keeping track of how effective this is comparing to the alternatives).
Maybe a shift of perspective is in order. What if the homeless "problem" is merely the most visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years?
You expect a homeless problem in a depression. You expect drug use to cripple large segments of society in a depression. You don't expect the problems that come with a depression to be fixable. And you expect those with means to jealously guard them from expropriation during a depression.
The thing that separates a modern depression from those that came before is that central banks have pulled out the stops to try to prevent the slide into depression. Their toolbox is limited, so many problems (such as housing) become worse as prices spiral higher out of range of working people, and as jobs continue to flood overseas on cargo ships. Wealth inequality blossoms as the haves keep it (thanks to QE and stock market machinations) and the have-nots lose it. Certain sectors (technology) continue to thrive while everything else (manufacturing, services) spiral downwards. It's easy to blame yourself if the depression is so unevenly distributed.
In following this path, central banks have obliterated cues (massive unemployment, bread lines, collective action) that would otherwise make it obvious that a depression was underway. Kind of like what might happen if you could not smell rot or feces, but could still smell food. Things might seem just fine, but only if you willfully ignored certain non-olfactory clues.
>visible symptom of a modern depression that has been underway for many years?
There's never been more prosperity. The visibly homeless are mentally ill or on drugs. It's due to our lack of healthcare access and ability to exist on the fringes of society if one so chooses. More people in foster care end up homeless than graduate high school.
What is also not recognised is that there is a growing percentage of people who is unable to perform any job available in a modern society. Because of mental/IQ/education/soft skill problems. The result is a growing underclass of people that the rest of society try to ignore or (especially in the US) punish for “being lazy”.
Every state believes they are America's dumping ground.
That doesn't change the fact that the overall rate of homelessness pre covid had been declining for years in america yet increasing only on the west coast.
Sure. Why not. They (government and citizens who elect the government) are all stupid patsies who willing allow themselves to be abused in this way. They get what they deserve! If they had spines, they prevent it and/or reverse it. But they "think with emotions" so they are incapable of doing the right thing for the state and its citizens.
BTW NYC did the same thing during the 1970s/1980s to clean up homelessness and criminality of NYC: folks were bused to upstate cities of Albany, Rochester and Buffalo to "get them out of the problem space" of NYC. That was key to how NYC recovered from the 1970s hell-hole it has become. Now it's returning to the same and current leadership is again spineless.
It is true, California, namely SF, has the highest density of homeless people I have ever seen. Climate, as the author points out is a huge factor, but it is really a confluence of climate, housing costs, and lenient policies toward vagrancy.
A. It is possible to be homeless in much of California’s coastal cities and towns and not die of exposure. In DC and NY you could easily die of heat stroke in the summer, hypothermia in the winter, or a hurricane or tropical storm if living in a tent or on the sidewalk, so eventually everyone needs to find shelter.
B. Housing is so incredibly expensive on the west coast that you can effectively be working a full-time job and still not be able to afford basic housing. This is not really true of anywhere on the east coast. Sure, cities like DC and NY are expensive, but you don’t have to go too far from the city center to find moderately priced housing. In other east coast cities on the east coast homes and rent can be downright cheap and you could live with a roof over your head, albeit not well, working full time at minimum wage.
C. SF is very lenient and tolerant of homelessness. NY and almost every east coast city, is much less so. Police will clear streets and not allow encampments or people to loiter or sleep in certain areas. These street clearing policies certainly do not solve homelessness, but it does reduce visibility of homelessness. During my last visit to SF homeless people were pretty much everywhere, in every neighborhood and every park.
324 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadIn the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park.
Even when Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Fran, he tried to enact a "Care not Cash" program to get people into mental health services instead of cash handouts; the people turned on him, and even set fire to his front lawn in protest.
Californians are getting precisely the kind of world they've voted for. It's ugly, and it literally stinks. Yes, how to fix it is the question, but I'm not sure the people have had enough yet. The recall election of Newsom next month will be an indicator. If he's recalled, then a new day of hope begins. Hope, anyway....
[1] https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca
My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces?
Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space, maybe from the automobile lanes and parks that infest our cities and spew far more stinky poison than people living rough.
I'm not sure how you could be surprised.
San Francisco spends tens of millions of dollar a year cleaning its streets.
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-milli...
> Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space...
The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes.
All right, where do you think the encampments should be set up?
Before you try to answer the question of what they should do and where should they go, I think you realistically need to answer these questions.
What alternative are you going to offer them that doesn't present barriers they can't surmount?
We can talk frankly about real problems as they exist, their potential causes and solutions, and we can be right, wrong and everywhere in between. But what we can't do is continue looking for excuses to get outraged so as to feel morally superior to other people. If you want to see where that gets us, look no further the homeless problem in California.
"Please don't fulminate."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
Edit: actually, because you're repeatedly abusing this site, I've banned this and several other accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28335658
And then even if so... so what? I assume the point is doing something about people who have no homes, like reducing the number of people who have no homes. Perhaps we'd also want to know why they are moving to CA to begin with. Perhaps we'd say CA should get federal funding to deal with it's disproportional homeless problem, and then figure out the best use of that funding. I dunno.
Like, is the point something other than blaming homeless people for being homeless, or punishing people for being homeless, or make people's lives harder when they are homeless -- cause, what does that do, what's the point of that you think?
A Brief History Of Poop On The Streets Of San Francisco
https://sfist.com/2019/05/01/a-brief-history-of-poop-on-the-...
> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"
Is to (1) complain about a lack of constructive solutions, (2) blame Newsom and (3) not provide a constructive solution. "Hope" is free though. You can have mine, I wasn't using it.
>In the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park.
The larger issue is that US courts have repeatedly struck down loitering laws, which makes their enforcement impossible. Cities now can't legally restrict people hanging out on their sidewalks, public spaces etc.
The blog post has more linked sources than most content marketing spam that appears on HN from page.
There are already several comments on the post by HN users that are repeating statements from the post. This suggests it is HN material.
> pure flamebait and not really relevant for HN.
All three claims in what you respond to address that case head-on. It isn't as if they're talking about twitter, facebook, or discord stats.
2) Its popular for homeless because the weather is great and the surrounding community tolerates it.
https://www.streetsheet.org/homeward-bound-program-offers-fr...
In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.
https://youtu.be/6EHPt8eoSJI
Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be benefited by lower housing prices.
These people could not afford nor likely ever would afford, a house that cost literally anything. Most of these people suffer from a mental illness and/or a drug addiction which makes holding down a job unlikely to ever happen. What they need is publicly funded mental health hospitals, like the ones that were destroyed in the 80s.
Of course high housing costs are a huge problem, but I just don't think they tell the whole story when it comes to CA homelessness. There's an elephant in the room that far too many people don't want to address. It's the aforementioned population of people who either can't or won't work and the solution we have for them right now is the street.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Servi...
When I advocate for something like a mental health program, it assumes a government which is functional enough to actually implement it. What we currently have here in CA couldn't be further from that.
Note that the tax is not indexed to inflation: already, the million-dollar threshold is worth only $715k in 2005 dollars. After another ~17 years at 2% inflation, the same tax will be charged on earners of $500k+ in 2005 dollars.
Not to mention that when owning prices are high, there’s a bigger incentive for local governments to use every opportunity to help other people who might not need as much help but have more consistent voting habits
I agree that this doesn't solve the problem for everyone, and there's also a place for publicly funded mental health hospitals. But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
There is a difference between the technically "homeless" and the visibly homeless who camp out on sidewalks etc. which is what most people are talking about when the "homeless problem" is mentioned.
The low hanging fruit is usually picked first. So let’s focus on picking the low hanging fruit if we aren’t already (they might already do a good job here), while the chronic homeless problems will be tough to solve.
I beg to differ. I've spent significant time around what could be broadly categorized as "the homeless" in California, specifically in LA and OC, over the last 13 years. As recently as 3 days ago, I was searching for a mentally ill and homeless family member in LA. Last I heard he was on the coast, but I wasn't able to find anyone who knew or had seen him. This is an annual or bi-annual occurrence for me. Sure I'm not out there every day, but I feel as though I am competent on the subject. I certainly have more time in rank than most people that speak up on this one.
If you offered an SRO to most of the people that I've come across in the last 10 years, they'd tell you to go fuck yourself.
Why? Sorry if question is dumb..
Your anecdote is a classic form of bias if you just take a step back and reexamine it. You identify most homeless people as being like that because those are the people you immediately recognize as being homeless. Someone who is homeless purely due to the high cost of housing probably isn't immediately identifiable as homeless on sight.
What you see is highly unrepresentative of homelessness.
You never see the people trying to scrape by in their cars. You never see the people couch surfing. You never see the people struggling but also struggling to not be known as homeless.
Because once you hit that position of being clearly homeless in appearance, all sorts of doors slam shut and getting out of homelessness is an order of magnitude harder.
And being in the precarious state of being homeless, but still fully functional, makes it all the harder to get to jobs on time, harder to protect any assets, harder to keep clean and not look homeless. And all that takes a huge toll on a person's psyche, and that extended stress can bring up mental issues that would have been completely manageable without the additional stress of not having a home base to run all the essential parts of life.
For every clearly homeless person you see, with severe mental issues, there are easily 5-20 that you would never know are homeless without following them around and seeing that they don't go back to an apartment at night.
And this all comes down to housing costs. For all the people we kick off the economic ladder, that run out of money for housing and don't have enough to move to a cheaper area, they are left in a very difficult spot, with little way to get back into housing. I've known people in my town that have been willing to put down 6 months of rent, or even 12, ahead of time, and been unable to land an apartment lease. Even market rate housing has lines that go out the door, and more applicants than the landlord knows what to do with.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/21/nevada...
South Park made an episode about it with the song “California loves the homeless”.
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/California_Loves_the_Homel...
California largely has weather that you can survive outdoor in year round and social programs that provide for and policies that show empathy for homelessness.
Assuming that California will just naturally have a larger homeless population than everywhere else means that nobody will spend much effort trying to solve the problem. Is it possible that California is just unusually bad when it comes to handling homelessness?
Also, california spends much more than all of the other states on providing assistance to the homeless, and is far more tolerant of bad behavior (public drug use, drunkeness, defecation, etc).
California isn't bad at handling the homeless so much as it is bad at getting the homeless to become housed, mentally and financially stable.
If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this. If so, maybe you can elaborate on what you mean. Are there non-liberal high-cost cities in the US in a better state? Furthermore, it's worth noting that the other high-cost cities worldwide almost universally seem to have more left-leaning (or US liberal) policies on most issues than most high-cost cities in the US. I'm not sure I see the connection between the political alignment and the state of decay, homelessness, and crime in high-cost cities.
Look at that graph and then ask yourself what changed in 2013. Hint, 1994-2001 they had a republican mayor. 2002-2013 they had a moderate republican who turned into a moderate democrat. And 2014 - now they've had a radical progressive.
There are millions of variables that inform "the homeless problem" and isolating a pretty minor one -- political affiliation of a single politician in the nation's largest city, overseen by both state and federal governments -- just strikes me as really simplistic.
“The bay” has a particularly close proximity to cheap money for reasons so numerous they deserve their own book.
Whenever they do these investigations of how many of the chronic homeless are local or imported problems, they ask questions like “where did you become homeless?” (Crashing on a friends couch doesn’t count) and always avoid the question “when did you move here?” (So someone moving in a year ago to make it big and became homeless 3 months in would count as a local also).
They did a study in Seattle that found that most of the homeless there were previously housed in Seattle, but also that most were housed in … pioneer square. That would be like someone in LA saying they were last housed in skid row.
Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic! Truly solving the housing crisis would mean for housing costs to go down a lot, which means house values would go down and the 55% will keep fighting that. If you want to stay long term in California and disconnect yourself from the madness that is California housing costs, you have to buy at some point and accept it as the price of entry.
The 2021 fires and worsening drought conditions are just a taste of things to come.
People (city dwellers) came _after_ the farmers.
So, it might be in need of an update, but I think you're mischaracterizing how this happened.
The Spanish may have had a few little channels here and there (for their missions along the el camino), but it wasn't till the Gold Rush people built large elaborate systems for water distribution (for their claims). Then appropriative and riparian rights attracted many farmers into fertile lands.
Does it deserve a revisit, sure. It will be fraught and messy, but sure.
https://eccentricculinary.com/californias-vanishing-lakes-an...
I'm a native Californian who left and now lives overseas, and every visit back has not only provided a stark demonstration of California's decline, but also taught me that many Californians refuse to believe their lying eyes.
I have friends and family who in the past 5 years have lost homes to fire, seen their wells run dry, had to flee from toxic wildfire air, etc. and yet all but one of them has stayed. It's insanity in my humble opinion and I think if more Californians had an opportunity to spend some time away from the state, more of them would realize that the state is in great peril. It literally and figuratively is a case of the frog in boiling water.
Last year, Prop 15 nearly eliminated the Prop 13 for commercial properties. That this was even within 10% points of passing is such a huge change as to be unthinkable. 15 years ago I would rant about Prop 13 and get nothing but hate from others for my position. These days I'm as likely to find somebody ranting about the evils of Prop 13 as I am to initiate the rants. And the only people I see really arguing for Prop 13 are in the dying our demographics of newspaper comment sections and NextDoor, and nearly no one I meet in person.
We have a huge problem with Boomers and their heirs, but immigration is rapidly changing eh demographics to allow for more sound governance.
I would not blame anyone for leaving, given the current insanity of state and local politics, but I also welcome the growing crowd of politically active young people that have far more skin in the game than the aged "got mine, forget you crowd. So if you ever do return, get in touch with local political orgs and you will be making a positive difference.
Why do we tolerate ageism on Hacker News?
@dang
When you talk about California water crisis, you are talking about California Agribusiness water crisis. Yes, the farms in the Central Valley will eventually eat themselves like Easter Island once they drain the aquifer completely.
As for the Central Valley, when the farms "eat themselves", have you considered that growing numbers of Americans will have to do the same? The Central Valley produces a quarter of the nation's food even though it represents 1% of the nation's farmland.
I like Prop 13. I'd be more than happy to meet you in person.
California has the highest sales tax and income tax in the nation. The amount of revenue it gets from property tax is near the median for the U.S. I think they get enough money and don't need more.
So is the Moon, with enough effort and cost, but that's not the point.
> San Francisco and the East Bay should see 7,872 new apartments open in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year. It's the highest number of apartments — 13,497 units — added to the region in the last five years.
Surprised?
A lot of the existing housing solutions for the chronically homeless have terrible terrible restrictions that make the housing not work for people, sadly.
What you derisively call "quarter million dollar condos" are of course helpful for this. It is either from directly housing the currently homeless with mental illness in these homes.
And if these homes do not directly house the homeless, new additional homes, where people's rent goes towards construction and labor rather than merely the pockets of a rentier landlord that just sees their rents ever increase is a huge help. Productive creation of new housing, especially if it increases the vacancy rate, is crucial to reigning in the housing market, a market which is failing our people, and in which landlords and homeowners are profiting from people's misery through perpetual shortages.
And if vacancy rates are not increasing, then we haven't built enough of those "quarter million dollar condos." Keep on building them until there's a surplus and they government can buy them on the cheap and provide housing as a human right.
Anybody who says that we do not need more housing is the very source of our homelessness problem. More housing makes everything easier, and the only cost is that some busybodies don't want to see it. Why pay attention to those people at the cost of helping everybody else?
Parts of California, like SF and the East Bay, have started building a lot of housing. Late, and still not enough to make up for the shortfall, but building nonetheless.
The problem is that places like Silicon Valley that have seen the lion's share of job growth haven't built commensurate levels of housing.
>^ This! The California population is 39 million. The bay area population is 7.7 million. With the 7,000 new apartments coming online we should see a sharp housing price decrease. Problem solved!
The sarcasm is implied and doesn't need a "lol" which just looks immature.
Insulting the poster decreases the quality of discourse and encourages indecency. It increases the chance that the next person who finds you to be in the wrong will likewise be indecent.
Furthermore it drives away people who despite merely being incorrect in one case may have other useful information to share.
Your manner of speaking is a larger negative than someone merely being wrong and it will end up getting you booted from the site because it violates hacker news rules.
Are you kidding? That was their opening sentence to me. I am insulting? What a joke. I have never been treated like that on HN in 8 years. Spare me the lecture.
Homeowners don't get to vote or have any say on such things. The city planning commission will approve, or not, whatever they will.
In the rare case where a vote is relevant, every resident gets one vote regardless of housing owner or renter status.
You can read about this, plus some background on relevant research here: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22597947/homeowner-nimby-affor...
[0] https://blog.stewart.com/stewart/2019/11/05/u-s-homeownershi...
* I didn’t vet this source much but it apparently pulls from UC Census data.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
If it’s based on square feet and some sort of local average square foot price from the last 12 months then fine.
If it’s based on individual assessors deciding your blossoming cherry grove and a charming mid-century atmosphere likely to appeal to young professional couples then… I’d rather the tax be based of the actual price for which the house last changed hands.
If you bought your house for $50k in 1979, of course you want it to be based on the original price. In CA, the assessed value can only go up by 2% a year. But if I buy your house today for $1.2m, then I am going to be paying $1,000/month in property taxes. And if you want to move across town, or even downsize a little to that $800k condo, well, then you are going to lose that low low property tax rate.
Which is one of the reason there is a housing shortage. People don't want to upgrade or downgrade or otherwise sell. They just figure out ways to give it to their children or rent it out and keep the low tax rate locked in.
If property taxes were higher you wouldn't have to pay $1 million for the home because nobody can afford those property taxes and subsequently nobody would actually bid $1 million.
Meanwhile if you make property taxes negative then you could afford the same house for $2 million.
Edit: How can property taxes be negative? The government can use income taxes to build infrastructure to raise the value of your land.
Is this appreciation consistent with the rest of the country, or areas with comparable quality of life? If you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to other houses you’d actually want to live in, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead.
So yeah, that starter house you bought for $300k 25 years ago that’s worth over a million now? Unless you’re willing to move to a much lower cost of living part of the country, you could sell that house and buy…another million dollar starter house.
Equity can be leveraged meaningfully without selling, so that's not true.
Most people don't have a use for a line of credit other than to spend it on things that don't make them any money. Everyone I know that did this used it to say, pay off a bunch of credit card debt, or build a new kitchen that will be worthless by the time they sell their house anyways.
Even if that were true (it's really not—it may be at any one moment but over a substantial period of years people tend to have emergent needs and opportunities that not having access to capital, or higher cost access to capital, either misses with real costs or pays more with, quite obvious, real costs) people tend to borrow and spend money on things that don't make money fro time to time; if you have a lower financing costs for such frivolous purchases, you are richer than someone who has the same spending pattern with higher financing costs.
And i really dont think people are dumb and cannot think of productive uses for such a line of credit.
Yes, paying less money if you have to borrow to meet the same emergent need or opportunity as another person makes you richer than the one who pays more.
But there is a minor perk that a greatly appreciating house gives you considerably more equity to act as a large rainy day battery via a home equity line of credit or traditional loans backed by home equity.
My home appreciated 20% last two years and while I hate the condition of the housing market, this unlocked a lot of equity years earlier than I expected it to.
your own imputed rent, if you owned your own place is not "locked in".
By living in the property, you are giving up receiving the rent that could've been generated. This means a general rental increase also affects property owners - it's just invisible and often not counted since no money changes hand.
House owners don't have any additional political power than renters. Still one vote per person and politicians don't consult homeowners any more often than anyone else.
Of course you can say when 55% of people are against affordable housing then affordable housing is not public interest.
The original premise was that the entire "55% [of homeowners] wield extremely disproportionate political power". Sure, a few of those homeowners are also politicians with disproportionate political power. But nearly everyone is just regular people with one vote and no other influence, whether homeowner or renter.
You: House owners don't have any additional political power than renters.
Me: one dude has 67 properties and connections to political elite, so he probably has more political power than renters. Implicitly: chances are the entire political system amassed a huge amount of properties, and are in one bed with prominent businessmen, who have the capital to acquire even more properties than said politicians.
You: u R M0v1nG tHe gO4lPoStS. You are a clown xD
I think Scott Wiener is right. Build mass transit and allow developers build housing close in.
If you buy a $1M 1400 ft^2 in CA, and the price goes down, you're going to be deeply underwater in your mortgage. If home prices stay high enough long enough than it "embeds" itself into politics.
Rising prices also traps people -- they can't afford to move anywhere unless they go far away.
As a CA homeowner (nortgage paid up!) I'd be much happier if house prices were half off what they are.
I believe that, to counter this, There are some counties where if you move to a smaller house, you get to keep a tax rate akin to what it would’ve cost you at the time you purchased your old house!
But, that increase is capped at a percent per year, which practically speaking means taxes lag behind home values when they increase.
Property taxes in CA (Prop 13) go up by 2% every year.
Come on, taxes on land are glorious. Hongkong charges 17% income taxes on the rich and <7% on people who earn less than the median.
https://youtu.be/XL3n59wC8kk?t=1917
If enough people do this, the NIMBYs will get what they deserve as home values crash.
SpaceX is leaving. VCs increasingly fund startups anywhere or fully remote. Software companies are going remote. It’s happening. COVID has accelerated some of these trends a lot, especially remote.
You could live in a smaller house worth $1M and still get $400k of profit you didn't have before.
That’s why the sunbelt states are seeing population growth. Cheap housing.
Never mind that it’s states like California, New York and Connecticut that are paying for those states’s ability to attract people with cheap housing.
Another major group of the homeless is drug addicts. Again, home prices isn't going to change that.
I think its very rare someone goes homeless because their rent went up. if they can't afford it, they usually move.
I'll get down-voted before this but that's how I feel, and I think this 'more affordable homes will solve homelessness' is a waste of time.
California is the fifth largest economy in the world (Between Germany and the United Kingdom) and yet can’t prioritize this spending (and the spending that is taking place is not very effective or efficient).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...
It's also worth keeping in mind that drug addictions and mental health issues can arise from homelessness rather than cause it.
¹https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-ange...
I would say the people who are incentivized to oppose cheap housing are the lower-end landlords.
Of course they would. Million dollar houses in many parts of the country are so insanely expensive not because they’re luxury goods; they’re expensive because supply is so constrained that even mediocre houses are extremely scarce relative to demand. People buying million dollar houses in e.g. the Bay Area know that their house is not particularly fancy, relative to other houses (that often sell for much less in other parts of the country).
As an analogy, consider cars in communist countries. Russian Ladas and East German Trabants were objectively horrible cars, but they cost several years’ average salary because supply was so scarce.
Introduce millions of even cheaper cars into the aforementioned communist countries and the prices of Ladas/Trabants would plummet. Likewise, introduce thousands of low income units into the Bay Area and the price of what used to be starter homes that now go for a million dollars would plummet.
The point is that loads of people would love to own a house or upgrade their living situation, but are priced out of it. These people are all competing for rentals, driving rent up. As a result, it’s not hard to simply not be able to afford rent, and end up on the street.
This would be fixed by drastically increasing supply, so that housing at the low end of the market is more affordable, both rentals and ownership.
The general point of this thread, though, is that everyone who already bought a house cannot afford to loose that value, as it’s likely the biggest financial risk and investment they have. This means there is essentially no pressure for the market to decrease prices. (I imagine developers wouldn’t want to ever make less rent either.)
So long as housing is treated as an investment for the property owners, there is only pressure for prices to go up.
It's a market. Changing it in a major way at the bottom will have knock-on effects through the whole market.
Of course, more directly, people with $1M houses might also be highly motivated to avoid "the wrong kind of person" being able to afford housing any where near them, their schools, etc.
This is a too-frequent HN meme but it doesn't really work that way. There is no special club of homeowners that have more say in what politicians do. Just one vote per person, same as non-homeowners.
And turns out homeowners don't spend time thinking about this, let alone scheming to somehow "keep the housing crisis going". A house is a place to live, that's all.
Our homeless problem is the result of 2 things: a mental health problem and to a much lesser extent the pervasiveness of the speculative real estate market driving up costs (a market largely driven by equity in the California housing market I might mention).
The solution to this problem is not less detached housing, it is more of any housing anywhere that it has been artificially suppressed, and raising interest rates to a market dictated level rather than artificially suppressing them to hold up the house of cards, and more importantly, helping people address their mental health problems.
It's really not mostly mental health problems. I've studied this issue for years.
I write about homelessness on Street Life Solutions. I try to write about housing and community development stuff elsewhere, like Eclogiselle.com and https://projectsro.blogspot.com/.
This post wasn't intended to be some opus solving everything. I wanted to make one point: California's extreme homeless problem is not somehow entirely the fault of California government, though that is a factor. There are other factors, like weather and a national shortage of housing that has been ongoing for a lot of years and isn't remotely peculiar to California.
California has 12 percent of the nation's entire population and 27 percent (or more -- different sources vary) of the nation's homeless population. That's not just a "California problem." That's a national problem disproportionately impacting California.
There's a lore more to the issue than can be contained in a single post. I tried to make one point and only one point. Addressing how to resolve the nation's housing problems will take more than a single blog post.
But thank you for commenting.
There's also PayPal and Venmo for one time tips.
Our American ideal is a home designed for a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 kids because that's who had the money to finance the birth of the modern suburb. That was never the majority of our demographics but we've further diversified away from that in the decades since.
Meanwhile, our housing stock has increasingly converged on their ideal home and that ideal home has grown larger and more sprawling over time because the only people who could afford it were people with good money. Our 1950s suburban home has more than doubled in size, from about 1200 sqft to over 2400 sqft in recent years.
If we had just kept building 1950s style little suburban homes, we wouldn't have such a mess. But we didn't. Our homes today are that single family detached house dream on steroids.
We need to reverse course. We have vastly more small households of just one to three people, meanwhile our housing stock tends to skew to three bedrooms or larger.
So what is the reason that these smaller homes aren't more common? I would think that if there were a market for these homes someone would cash in on it, so is it zoning? Is it people's aversion to building their own homes themselves and the service-ification of everything? How do we reverse course and what are the pressures preventing that, in your view?
The easiest thing to finance in the US is single family detached homes. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of them.
It's quite hard to finance some types of housing popular in other countries, like cohousing.
What do you think of other housing options more common in the US, such as mobile homes, RVs, duplexes/quadplexes etc? What about ideas like renting rooms, dormitory style housing with shared spaces and things like that?
Those things are proliferating mostly because we won't fix our broken system. Not mostly because people actually prefer that stuff.
Dorms, duplexes, renting a room etc fall under what I advocate for: SROs and Missing Middle Housing.
Mobile homes date back to the same time as the modern suburb, were designed to target a similar demographic and are pretty ubiquitous across most of rural US, as are RVs in many places.
I've seen tiny houses on wheels for the reason you state, I actually have neighbors with really beautiful houses like this.
These don't make for car-free living in walkable neighborhoods. And they don't appreciate in value the way standard housing typically does.
RVs absolutely make for walkable neighborhoods, and everyone gets a little garden space too if they want. Some RV parks even have a grocery store inside.
I thought we were looking at solutions to homelessness? Why does a dwelling have to appreciate in value? This appreciation of price in the current housing market is not natural and is the result of increasing population, artificial restriction of building more housing and is arguably a symptom of the root cause of the homelessness problem in the US. If the goal is solving homelessness how can that be expected to continue?
There's lots of literature on that fact.
Set backs and other zoning changes also mean you often cannot build townhomes right up to the lot line, even if older townhomes right up against the lot line dominate the street in question. They are grandfathered in and don't have to be torn down, but you can't build more like it. This typically makes such homes highly prized and expensive and out of the reach of most people.
Also, I can tell you from my own example that it's a chicken and egg problem. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you I'd like to have Singapore-style vehicle taxes, introduced gradually, so that developmental patterns would change, basically forcing people into transit and walkable neighborhoods. However, based mainly on living in Seattle, I am now 100% pro-driving, anti-transit and dream of moving to suburbs, specifically because I want to be far away from blight (and I grew up in Moscow in the 90ies economic collapse, so my standards for lack of urban blight are pretty low). Now, I am only willing to accept Singapore-style (or Moscow-style) urban environment with Singapore-style/Moscow-style ruthless enforcement of law and order.
It then becomes a recipe for remaining homeless because the housing is so expensive. It's easy to camp out, not easy to afford rent.
If you can't afford housing anywhere in the US, going someplace you can camp reasonably comfortably makes sense. Remaining someplace with worse weather doesn't automatically cure whatever other issues are contributing to your intractable poverty.
Why?
A high percentage of homeless people have health issues. This means putting a bunch of them together exposes already sick people to cross contamination with other diseases, making their health worse.
They have curfews and other rules making it one step removed from a prison. If you have any funds of any kind, some will charge you for being there, making you essentially their prisoner with no means to escape.
The only people who wouldn't benefit from this under nationwide housing shortage theory are indeed those who cannot afford any housing at all because they eh, don't have their shit together on any level. But then, walkable housing nationwide is not going to fix that.
Nationwide walkable housing would, in fact, fix it for some people, in part by bringing down the cost of housing and transit to a level they could reach.
I'm not suggesting no one should ever live in a remote area. If that's what people want, cool.
When I say nationwide, I mean we need more housing that makes sense in all 50 states, not just California. I don't mean this should be the only kind of infrastructure we allow.
Even including driving (which you don't need to do much more in declining/stably cheap, but still dense, older cities) it's still cheaper.
Walkable housing would fix it for a very small slice of the people, as far as I can tell.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28335986 + my response
Nevada used to give homeless mental patients bus tickets to California [0][1].
[0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/10/nevada-settles-b...
[1] http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-bus...
Does no one remember when other states were paying for bus fares to California to get the homeless out of their state?
Does no one remember states paying to fly the homeless to Hawaii?
The above might sound ridiculous, but what sounds cheaper? Solving California’s massive homeless problem or simply getting the homeless out of the state on the next plane or bus?
Source: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ExecutiveSu...
And 30% coming here after becoming homeless isn’t peanuts.
Basically, take your one way bus ride to Dallas, where you then take a 1 way ride back to SF, from where you’re unlikely to go back to Dallas.
It seems to me the solution is just for people to go elsewhere... again, the housing is there, plenty of rentals everywhere, except too expensive for someone who is living on the streets to, all of a sudden, start paying for, yet they can't live anywhere else?
Also politicians where talking about an exit tax for people who leave, or something like that. You can't have it both ways: be the most popular destination and also have affordable housing. It's either/or, and people who can't afford simply need to go elsewhere that they can afford. How can that not be an option for people?
It seems to me everyone just ignores individual incentives when talking about this problem. What are these people on the street motivated by? What do they want? And why can't they decide to go to a less popular, and cheaper place to live and work? I honestly would not stay in CA if I couldn't afford it, and would at least find a cheaper place to be homeless in, just to have a better chance to afford a place. When are we going to start factoring in these people's agency and incentives? They are people with desires, motivations, and plans.
We used to build small homes in walkable neighborhoods where you could live without a car and have reasonable rent. That's mostly gone.
You not only need to cover the cost of a large home, cars are mostly not optional for most Americans. This is a huge additional expense.
The combination is killer.
I think we should factor in incentives, and also the diverse reasons and motives each person has, as oppose to blaming it all on lack of housing.
Most people on the street don't want to be there. The research points to housing as the primary root cause.
I had a couple friends who were homeless in SF, and slowly got out of it. Places like SF are just limited in square footage, it's like an island basically, yet people are living on the streets there for decades... shouldn't they try a different city if they really didn't want to be on the streets? I mean years outside in the same city seems suspicious to me that it's really housing.
Each day for the past year+ they park their BMW, Honda Accord, and Toyota Camry on our street, and then walk off into the park, hop a fence, and down to wherever it is their tents are.
It's really perplexing to see someone driving a ~2010 clean BMW while choosing to live in the hillside. My determination is that they're simply choosing that lifestyle for whatever reason.
That doesn't mean they can afford rent. It just means they have some income, but probably not enough to support a middle class lifestyle.
This is even true of low-income housing and shelters. Occasionally people will gripe about shelter vacancies, without realizing it’s really difficult to maintain 100% housing utilization without denying some people housing.
I invite you to pick any major city, particularly one on the west coast with a population over 500K for their metro area who's name you recognize from any news or professional setting.
Look up the rents in the downtown area. Then look at a traffic map for around rush hour in the morning / evening; the worst part of that period. Take a sample of suburbs an hour, maybe even two hours out to form some rings.
The price of rent goes down a little, but the price in fuel and taxation on a commuter doesn't. MOST of these cities also, if they even have it, will have mass transit optimized to a mega-downtown hub with spokes, for peek commuters only. Even that will still suck about as much as traffic, but costs less.
Pre-pandemic, when I last looked at numbers, Seattle wanted around 3000+ a month for like a single room apartment, maybe a bit less if it was a really crummy place. A rundown suburb an hour or so out cost about half of that for a little more, or for a tiny bit less you could rent a house, including a covered garage.
The situation is a mess and there is an entire "homeless industrial complex" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism.
Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse.
At first I was in the "Housing First" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in "Rehab First".
A local news station released a great documentary called "Seattle is Dying". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago. https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw
The sequel is "The Fight For the Soul of Seattle". https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw
The reason that most people stay clean is the need to get up and go to work the next day.
And the reason they go to work is because it will give them a better standard of living.
Take away permanent jobs, reasonable wages, affordable housing, and many people will simply give up hope.
I'm curious where you got your data from.
Because home prices and rents keep going up. Homelessness is an inevitable side effect of that.
Funneling money on rehab rather than providing places to actually live cant fix that. It's attacking a symptom not the cause.
However, attacking the cause (property prices/rents) would make a lot of very rich, very powerful people very angry - all backed by an army of overleveraged homeowners terrified of negative equity.
Until property owners are apoplectic with fury about declining property values I doubt the problem will stop getting worse.
If you are after a single root cause of homelessness you will be disappointed. Unless you only care to push an agenda.
(EDIT: assuming you have policy to maintain full employment…)
Two sides of the same coin.
>Unless you only care to push an agenda.
Some people prefer to prevaricate and show only faux concern for the homeless, I guess.
It's understandable - there are a lot of people who while they dont want to be seen to be outright hostile to the plight of the homeless, will react negatively to the idea of seeing the value of their assets decline.
In most countries, homelessness is concentrated in wealthy, but expensive cities e.g. London, NYC. There are plenty of well-paying jobs (even relatively unskilled ones) but high rents more than make up for it. I felt significantly more housing-secure living in a cheap area with a shitty job than in an expensive area with a good job.
My friend in California makes twice as much as I do on the east coast. I can afford a home and he can’t.
Supply and demand. Housing prices will only go down when there is significant excess supply.
If you want to help homelessness build more housing. Not specifically low income housing, just lots of housing. No it is not going to help the people living on the street right now, but it is the only real solution.
Get rid of height limits, parking minimums, single-family-only zoning, and make most housing projects zoned by-right without public comment required.
My experience with those living on the streets is that substance abuse and mental health is the main symptom of them living that lifestyle. They will be the first ones to tell you if you're willing to have a conversation with them.
California is not suffering from others' "broken" policy, but only from its own.
It's an unpopular opinion, but I think it's great that there are people out there who concentrate the entire problem around themselves and spare the rest of us. They should suffer the consequences of their very willful and insistent stupidity. We should make fun of them, from safe distance.
The problem is a learned helplessness of the electorate combined with reasonable voters leaving, resulting in people who want to double down on the status quo replacing them.
There is zero political will to enforce vagrancy, open air drug use, and private property law if someone is living in a tent. No standards == these people feel empowered to do whatever they want, while contributors to the tax base are treated poorly. I still get a ticket 30 mins after parking too far from the curb, and the city council does not like that I make a good income and own a single family home.
What I had in mind is that we need to solve those accompanying problems in order to make living in tents socially acceptable.
Tents show up on public areas and sidewalks because there are no better established places for them.
Trash accumulates around tents because there is no established garbage collection procedure like there is for buildings.
Maybe the solution is some kind of campground with a low fee.
Mainly though, this is a strawman. Tents themselves are not the biggest problem when they don't e.g. block a sidewalk, piece of public infrastructure, or a road. The problem is piles of garbage, needles, dumping sewage into lakes and streams, increase in crime, not-yet-criminal or never-prosecuted safety concerns (e.g. someone I know can no longer take an obvious bike trail to where they're going because of some close calls with aggressive barely human campers).
= 161,548 homeless [1] (0.41% of total population)
72% = 116315 people
1. https://www.usich.gov/homelessness-statistics/ca/
Somehow, I thought that figure is significantly larger, when I visited SF, CA - walking around town I could see homeless people everywhere.
The problem in San Francisco is pretty bad. It's not equally bad across the state. I ran some numbers at one time and concluded that per capita, homelessness was twice as bad in San Diego as in Fresno, for example.
So it's not evenly distributed across the entire state. San Francisco is especially badly impacted from what I gather.
What if there are joint initiatives/collaborations between US and its Eastnern allies to sponsor and help people who are struggling on the street due to homelessness to start afresh with a job and a house in say, Canggu, Bali (where things are quite chill & they'll enjoy a much higher quality of life), etc, work there a few years, save up and do some rehab, etc, and then they can decide to come back to the States or continue their life there?
I'm a school drop-out. In my early twenties there were times when I was really broke. So I would move to places with a low cost of living, charge up, and go back to the (relatively high-burn-rate) city life again when it makes sense.
Obviously, homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking: take something that is seen as a scourge and send it to other countries so that it's out of sight and the largest costs of dealing with it are borne by others (usually poor people).
Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems, take in homeless Americans, a good number of whom have severe mental illness and/or substance abuse issues? What's the benefit to the Indonesian people?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla...
Nope. No similiarity here. We can only solve the problem when we treat people with dignity.
We shouldn't alienate them. They are people just like you and me. The idea is to lower the cost while improving living standard for them.
> Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems...
GDP is irrelevant here. Indonesia, Thailand, etc have many cities popular with backpackers and westerners living a nomadic lifestyle. Fresh fruits and fish. Great outdoor. Nice beach. Cheap motorbike. Great landscape and nature. Low-stress.
It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab (eg cooking), or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.
I'm an expat myself and while not a backpacker, I have traveled extensively in SE Asia. I can honestly think of few things worse than taking people who can't support themselves in their home country and shipping them off to SE Asia where they will be thousands of miles away from their family and friends living in a society whose culture they don't understand. If you send them to SE Asian nomad hubs, they will be surrounded in many cases by cheap booze, easy access to drugs, and hordes of prostitutes and shady locals and expats.
> It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab, or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.
Have you really spent time in SE Asia? If you have, you'd know that Indonesia and Thailand are very protective of their labor markets and are not going to be interested in sacrificing local jobs for the benefit of homeless Americans. In Thailand for instance, under the Alien Employment Act, foreigners are basically shut out from many of the kind of jobs you are hinting at.
English teachers generally need a Bachelor's degree and clear criminal background check. TEFL certification is also sometimes needed. How many homeless Americans do you think will meet these criteria, and do you really think SE Asians want homeless Americans (some with mental illness and substance abuse issues) teaching their kids?
I think for it to be sensible it requires a different framing to the problem.
> ...they will be surrounded in many cases by cheap booze...
> ...If you have, you'd know that Indonesia and Thailand are very protective of their labor markets...
> ....do you really think SE Asians want homeless Americans (some with mental illness and substance abuse issues) teaching their kids?
Good points. Related questions are answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28346353
> ...few things worse than taking people who can't support themselves in their home country and shipping them off to SE Asia...
Also, we don't evict people and "ship them off". It's about giving them an oppournity with incentives to make a decision in their life, a new chapter that they can choose to embark on if they see it as a better alternative to being homeless in CA.
Homelessness is a specturm. Some people may just need a lift-up, (or an experience that changes the way life is viewed so they can find meaning in it again [1]) to be back to managing a functioning life again. What you want is to give them an opportunity to be in a less stressful enviroment with proper shelters and foods.
Addiction of any form (to cig, to opium, or to herions, etc, as well the more socially acceptable forms such as to sex, work, consumerism) is a coping mechanism for stress. It's counter-productive to be in an urban setting with the worst living conditions (ie homeless) which maximizes stress in so many aspect of your daily life, and then trying to 'cure' addiction and turn people into a functioning unit in society again so they can work enough hours to make enough income to pay rent.
Perhaps it's more productive to view every homeless person as someone who was burnt-out and broke, and happened to run out of options in their attenuated safety net like getting a loan from their parents to pay rent. And from that on existing health/mental conditions/dependencies they had would often exacerbate, and it got harder and harder to break the vicious cycle.
> ... interested in importing homeless Americans with mental/health issues...
Mental/health issues are a spectrum too. And this is not about "importing homeless Americans". This should be more like a rehab/retreat none-profit program for people who are stressed out in urban American life to experience life in a more stree-free enviroment closer to nature to connect back with the plants and terrains (away from all loud, harsh and unhealth stimuli and mind-numbing concretes, smells and unfriendiness of an overpopulated city).
It'll cost less than the War On Drugs, and if enough smart people are involved, we can definitely structure it in a way where on a long run it'll economically and culturally beneift all parties.
> ...worked and paid taxes in any foreign country? Then you would know how hard it is...
The purpose is to introduce a change of enviroment to a less-stressful one for them. Something like a training visa or work holiday pass (or even an education one [2]) would do. It would be easy esp when the orgs backing you have international recog.
As an NGO, there are many ways this can be executed after fundings are secured. We definitely need to collaborate with local institutes in ways that make sense to them. It can also be something that has an element of spirituality to it (like a church or temple retreat that also helps with rehab), or a commune on self-sustainability (where they'll still have to do work everyday). I see this as the most pragmatic way to lower the cost of living while giving people a dignified living experience that would be much better (and meaningful) than living on the street in CA as a homeless person.
[1]: this is why a change of environment can be extremely impactful to mental health. And this is also why psilocybins, etc, taken in the right settings, are useful for mental wellness. )
[2]: Can typically last 6 months to a year. And if we have 4 countries involved, that will be 2~4 years. After that there are many ways this can branch off.
We can start off with 5000 quota a year to gauge interest (we'll make it easy for people to apply), and gradually scale up to 50,000 in 5~10 years, (while keeping track of how effective this is comparing to the alternatives).
You expect a homeless problem in a depression. You expect drug use to cripple large segments of society in a depression. You don't expect the problems that come with a depression to be fixable. And you expect those with means to jealously guard them from expropriation during a depression.
The thing that separates a modern depression from those that came before is that central banks have pulled out the stops to try to prevent the slide into depression. Their toolbox is limited, so many problems (such as housing) become worse as prices spiral higher out of range of working people, and as jobs continue to flood overseas on cargo ships. Wealth inequality blossoms as the haves keep it (thanks to QE and stock market machinations) and the have-nots lose it. Certain sectors (technology) continue to thrive while everything else (manufacturing, services) spiral downwards. It's easy to blame yourself if the depression is so unevenly distributed.
In following this path, central banks have obliterated cues (massive unemployment, bread lines, collective action) that would otherwise make it obvious that a depression was underway. Kind of like what might happen if you could not smell rot or feces, but could still smell food. Things might seem just fine, but only if you willfully ignored certain non-olfactory clues.
We live in frozen calm of the normalcy bias and it will be our collective downfall.
There's never been more prosperity. The visibly homeless are mentally ill or on drugs. It's due to our lack of healthcare access and ability to exist on the fringes of society if one so chooses. More people in foster care end up homeless than graduate high school.
That doesn't change the fact that the overall rate of homelessness pre covid had been declining for years in america yet increasing only on the west coast.
That alone contradicts the premise.
> That alone contradicts the premise
Other states throw their homeless on busses bound for CA so they can have declining numbers while only the west is growing.
That’s literally the exact premise.
BTW NYC did the same thing during the 1970s/1980s to clean up homelessness and criminality of NYC: folks were bused to upstate cities of Albany, Rochester and Buffalo to "get them out of the problem space" of NYC. That was key to how NYC recovered from the 1970s hell-hole it has become. Now it's returning to the same and current leadership is again spineless.
A. It is possible to be homeless in much of California’s coastal cities and towns and not die of exposure. In DC and NY you could easily die of heat stroke in the summer, hypothermia in the winter, or a hurricane or tropical storm if living in a tent or on the sidewalk, so eventually everyone needs to find shelter.
B. Housing is so incredibly expensive on the west coast that you can effectively be working a full-time job and still not be able to afford basic housing. This is not really true of anywhere on the east coast. Sure, cities like DC and NY are expensive, but you don’t have to go too far from the city center to find moderately priced housing. In other east coast cities on the east coast homes and rent can be downright cheap and you could live with a roof over your head, albeit not well, working full time at minimum wage.
C. SF is very lenient and tolerant of homelessness. NY and almost every east coast city, is much less so. Police will clear streets and not allow encampments or people to loiter or sleep in certain areas. These street clearing policies certainly do not solve homelessness, but it does reduce visibility of homelessness. During my last visit to SF homeless people were pretty much everywhere, in every neighborhood and every park.
Will those of you who hate the homeless hate them, too? All the millions that are going to be camping everywhere? You think it's bad now....just wait.