For Homeless Advocates, a Discouraging Lesson in L.A.: Money Is Not Enough
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For instance, here in Bend, I like to comment favorably on proposed developments, but it's hard to catch the open comment period. I've talked with city staff about the issue, and eventually they'll switch to another platform that allows it, but for now, it's a matter of looking at the site every now and then.
Mental health services are ineffective if a person's basic needs aren't met. Giving homeless people a home is far from enough, but you can't expect a homeless person to get better if they are stuck out on the streets.
I did recently see a video of two guys biking on trail in Orange County (I think) and it was lined on each side for miles with tents and makeshift shacks. I never saw anything like that when I lived there. It was impressive.
Someone affiliated with local church mentioned that their shelter is actually low on occupancy, and any attempts to help more homeless were met with distrust, outright refusal to be affiliated with "the system", and a bunch of crazier reasons.
Someone from Anaheim local government also chimed in and mentioned that although that's not the city's official position, a lot of city efforts were turned down by the homeless, and any rational person has been helped and can get help through existing agencies.
Anyway, from where I stand, here's the rub. My BIL needs to be medicated to not succumb to his delusions, his extreme mania, and extreme paranoia (he is diagnosed schizoaffective). When he is medicated, he can hold down a (part-time, minimum wage) job, help with chores, and can generally be a fairly reliable person in the family. Yet, he is an adult. If he chooses not to take his medication, that is his right. But, when he chooses not to take his medication, he ends up homeless, self-medicating, and will eventually find his way back in to a state run mental health facility through crime. He has been stuck in this cycle for half of his life, he will be turning 30 in a year or two.
I want to make a distinction here that this person has never served time. He probably should've, given some of the things he has done that have gotten him arrested, but he's in the system and so he seems to get a get out jail free card for the types of crime he commits.
He always has a place to live (though he doesn't like some of these places, like my home, because of the rules that come with it). He has SSI that is deposited directly to his account from the state once a month. He has access to health care and mental health professionals (Medi-Cal). What he doesn't have, and what I suspect many folks in his condition don't have, from years of talking to others in our situation, is a genuine desire to, or the ability to, confront their illness.
We are waiting patiently for that to change. We're not very optimistic, but we are hopeful. We've learned through counseling, education courses, etc... myself over the last decade, my wife has been at it even longer, that he has to be in control (with the obvious exceptions, like when he's locked up). Trying to force him to do what is in his own self-interest is a self-indulgent and self-serving behavior that just makes everything worse.
It's a very hard reality to live with, especially so when it's your family, but there's nothing that anyone can do to help a person who doesn't want to help themselves.
Just because we do something one way doesn't make it the best way.
She's 54 years old now and hasn't changed much since her first "breakdown" in her early 20s. I think it's safe to say she never will. Her's was triggered by postpartum syndrome after we had a child that died shortly after birth. It was a terrible thing to witness. It happened over the course of about two weeks and got to the point where it was an obvious safety issue for our year old daughter so I had to have her "committed".
She spent time in various psyche wards in the Los Angeles area, including the County Hospital. I visited her there many times and I can attest that it was always an adventure.
She was never a threat to me or anyone else but she's committed petty crimes on occasion while living on the streets. She's bounced around between halfway houses and the streets and brief stays in psyche wards and local jails since. I left California when our daughter was 3-1/2 years old. Over the years since when she's been doing good our daughter has visited her for a few weeks at a time and got to know her and that side of her family, so for us it's not been near so hard as could have been.
Getting our daughter away from that chaos was a deliberate decision on my part. I didn't want her constantly wrapped up in that. I've helped her mother out many times over the years and never turned down her requests for help, but there's been years go by in between when we didn't hear from her and often when we did she contacted me to ask for money and didn't want to get back into any sort of program.
She has a brother who's set her with an apartment and paid all her bills and gave her a comfortable allowance over the past ten or more years and she's decided to head back to the streets and disappeared a few times still. Last we heard she was doing a short stint in jail somewhere out there.
When she's doing good she's really quite brilliant, and when she heads out to the streets she's as determined to be there as one could be and there is no stopping her.
I don't see how it would do any good to lock her up. Not her or society as a whole.
It's true, she hasn't stayed long in any public housing or program, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there and available when she's needing it or willing to try and work at normalizing. I know for sure it's helped her many times.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Despite-money-and...
49 units at $23 million or $469k/unit. Is it me or is this an insanely high number? Remember, it's not even a house.
This project would be better off buying up some delapidated properties and making them habitable again.
LA housing: a 100 year old 900 sq foot place surrounded by chain link fences for the low price of $450k.
http://cityobservatory.org/the-high-high-price-of-affordable...
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/12321-Fairhill-Rd-Clevela...
It is important to remember that the rust belt was the silicon valley of its day. No longer. Economic success is often ephemeral. At least there is still enough money in Cleveland to maintain these monuments to distant wealth.
It is not just you, and I've worked for many LA nonprofit and public agencies, including some involved in homelessness and mental health services. It's not surprising to me that the city can't keep enough homelessness services, for reasons I write about in "L.A. digs a hole more slowly than economics fills it back in: The Proposition HHH Facilities Program RFP" http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-f... .
Oddly, one of the better descriptions I've read about why LA costs so much comes from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/6lvwh4/im_an_ar...
Boyle Heights is not a wealthy/expensive neighborhood and there is a large amount of housing stock that could be rehabbed/rebuilt for this project for far less. Even multifamily buildings.
This is the very definition of NIMBY. Where exactly do these people think projects like this should go, given that NIMBYs exist everywhere?
Most of silicon valley before the tech boom was orchards. Before the orchards, it was undeveloped land.
An argument could be made that development should have been frozen when it was orchards since it provided food, farming jobs, and bucolic scenery.
Environmentalists perhaps would prefer that even the orchards shouldn't have built and that the land was best kept as natural habitat.
Sounds like an improvement to me.
But let's say 50% of those people aren't in the place to get jobs because they are Elderly, Mentally Unstable, Substance Addicted.
Could we move those homeless people who aren't "job ready" outside the city to a cheaper area? And then maybe move them back into affordable housing once they are ready to transition into a job?
These are human beings, and suggesting they be "moved" to different areas because of their socioeconomic status or being "Elderly, Mentally Unstable, Substance Addicted" is completely unacceptable to me.
https://video.nest.com/clip/cc20a6ffc52d485696c62b1708ffe5d6...
https://video.nest.com/clip/7c5ff8b138d44bafb1ff3f44ef8154be...
(warning: 2nd link has profanity)
-He has been sent by the court to literally every possible program in Santa Clara County for assistance, and has left everyone of them intentionally (usually after a few days) despite being ordered by the Court to complete the program(s).
-As a result of constantly violating the Court's orders regarding these programs, he ended up spending the maximum amount of time in County jail that the Court could impose before being released.
-Travis has made it very clear that he does not want help in any form, and that he likes his lifestyle and enjoys harassing people.
-After he left jail, it did not take long for him to revert to his old bad behaviors - substance abuse, aggressive panhandling and petty theft, and harassing local businesses.
The clips above are of him harassing the owner and patrons of Hannah's Coffee and Sweets. More recently, he emptied a trash can full of dog poop bags on the sidewalk, and kicked them all in front of a hair salon's door on the corner of Julian and Stockton.
What is your solution for people like Travis, who continually harass and endanger people and businesses in San Jose?
Suggesting that the entire homeless population are criminals is disingenuous at best, and this kind of fear-mongering distracts from productive discussion about how best to help.
I never said that the entire homeless population are criminals. I merely provided a single, real-life example of someone for whom current policies and institutions have failed, then asked you as to what you think should be done.
Anyway under this plan they won't be forcefully relocated, the offers will simply be available at a different location.
Lots of problems (most?) in many neighborhoods (and organizations in general) and families are not a simple function of "not enough money." They are deep rooted problems with self-sustaining feedback loops of vice.
There's true poverty unhappiness, which is simply not enough money to pay normal bills. But science has basically settled at this point in that "after being enough to pay the bills and have a little in savings, happiness no longer increases with more income." And happiness is a pretty good qualifier of general well-being.
You can't dump money into Afghanistan and have them all run around with American flags and Mustangs.
You can't dump money into a neighborhood and expect everyone to become great workers who love each other.
Likewise, you can't "love people" more and expect it either. You don't stop a drug abusing family member with only hugs. You send them to therapy. _Love is not enough_.
The best summary is in this quote from the article:
>“You cannot force a project onto a community at all costs,” said Mr. Huizar,
Even if politicans and "well meaning" people are hell bent on pushing something through, doesn't mean it's going to actually help people. ("The road to hell is paved with good intentions.")
People are not simple. Adults have decades of experiences that got them where they are. And simply giving them something won't undo those experiences. They need counselling. They need structure and jobs that rewards positive character traits. And guess what? Plenty of people still aren't going to get better. Why? Because you can't improve people who don't want to get better. You can't "fix people" like solving a math problem. Both parties have to commit and genuinely desire change.
If we actually want change--and not to just send money to feel better about ourselves (see: Live Aid, which gave almost nothing to actual victims and may have actually helped kill over 100,000 [1])--we can't simply "Give money." We need actual scientists doing research (they already exist) and we need to find and listen to them even if their recommendations don't align with our political ideologies.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/24/g8.debtrelief
There is a huge deficit of affordable housing in the US. This significantly contributes to people who have various problems being unable to keep a roof over their head.
I actually think "homes for the homeless" is an oxymoron. We need basic, decent housing for people who are living at the fringe of society because they are elderly, handicapped, single moms, etc. We need homes for a certain demographic for whom the standard 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in the 'burbs simply does not work, in part because it is just too much money (in part because it is just too much space -- it is nigh impossible to find a small place in the US).
I think two things need to happen:
1) We need to develop programs aimed at empowering homeless people to solve it themselves.
2) We need more affordable housing -- nationwide.
I would actually prefer to see more market based affordable housing. We tore down most of that in the 60s and 70s, largely because the Baby Boomers who were coming of age didn't need a small, cheap place. But, they were a demographic anomaly, and we haven't rebuilt what we tore down. We are seeing the consequences of that.
Problem is job growth is incredibly centralized into a few urban cores. While property values on the west coast and the Boston -> DC strip bloat out of control entire counties worth of homes are being abandoned in the Rust Belt and midwest as the recession killed the last sparks of industry and never brought any jobs back there.
That is why housing prices are out of control. We should realize that the centralization of work should come with the centralization of living, where we build much denser housing to accommodate, but we don't do that because of NIMBY city councils and obtuse zoning laws.
Affordable housing is profitable if you let it be built. It isn't a matter of needing the government to throw money at building affordable housing. 50 stories of condos in almost any major metro area at 400-800 sq ft could sell at tens of thousands rather than millions of dollars and still be profitable for the materials and labor that went into building them, even at the current inflated land values. It is simply the case that nobody can build anything like that because every city in the country staunchly opposes such construction for both private NIMBY interests and the desires of businesses operating to attract the rich to the cities and not the poor, even when the jobs they want to fill they only offer poor wages for.
That is why housing prices are out of control. We should realize that the centralization of work should come with the centralization of living, where we build much denser housing to accommodate, but we don't do that because of NIMBY city councils and obtuse zoning laws.
I just got myself off the street earlier this month after 5 years, 8 months and 1 week. I did it by 1) developing a portable online income and 2) moving out of California to a small town.
So, I beg to differ. I think this can be solved.
We have the technology. We can rebuild it. We can make it better. ;-)
I wish they would simply normalize campsites for living. I've heard people live in tents in India. Seems more humane than pretending we don't need that here when in reality we're denying people the right to be ANYWHERE.
American zoning, minimum house sizes, do contribute to the problem. We have created a situation where the Haves live in ever larger houses and can afford two or more places and the Have Nots are increasingly out on the street.
I don't know the answer here. I think certain minimum standards for housing matter. But, we should definitely tweak something. Setting the bar for minimum housing standards so high that large numbers of people can't attain housing at all is messed up.
Source? Detroit still has properties like https://www.trulia.com/property/5031044564-16565-Strathmoor-... and some counties in Kansas and Missouri still give out free land if you promise to build a house there.
There's a huge deficit of affordable housing in some areas of the US, and incredible imbalance of growth and job opportunities due to the increasing centralization and monopolization of the US economy.
For now, I will just note that:
1) I have portable income and can potentially move anywhere in the US.
2) I was willing to move to almost anywhere in the continental US to get back into housing that I could afford that also would not be a threat to my health.
3) I have spent 2+ years searching for a town with either rents around $400 a month and/or houses for sale that were under ~$70k that also were actually fit for human habitation without first putting tens of thousands of dollars worth of work into them.
4) I have spent hours upon hours combing through real estate listings, auction sites that list distressed property etc.
5) I have looked at the details of super cheap properties in Detroit and other cities.
There were a bunch of houses in Detroit listed at $1 on one auction site. When you read the fine print, there is at least $500 worth of closing costs and the houses are horrifying uninhabitable shitholes.
I found a place I could go, but it was like the proverbial needle in a haystack. Most of those super cheap houses listed on the internet are absolutely not the sort of thing where someone could just move in and start paying a couple hundred a month for the mortgage. Many of them are being sold as tear downs. They have been through a fire or flood and are not currently fit for human habitation.
I also looked at houses in the middle of nowhere. I have looked at houses that explicitly say things like "No foundation. Will not qualify for financing. Cash only." I signed up for a rent to own website. The first property I inquired about got a reply that said, no, they don't actually do rent to own arrangements.
I have six years of college. I bought a house for no money down in my twenties. I was willing and able to go just about anywhere. I found it to be a very hard problem to solve.
So, I would really like to see your sources for these mythical affordable houses. Because I haven't purchased one yet, so I could potentially still go someplace else for some real steal of a deal.
My research suggests that, no, you aren't actually going to get a decent house anywhere in the US for $16k with conventional financing (not "cash buyers only" and/or "oh, yeah, it has this long list of serious problems"). That isn't real.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United... the median household income in the US is at $59k, with most mortgage lenders preference for max of 30% to go towards mortgage payments the Zillow estimator https://www.zillow.com/mortgage-calculator/house-affordabili... tells me that a household earning $59k can afford a $360k house after a $70k down payment - reasonable assumptions considering the 20% down payment requirements. Potential total affordability goes significantly down if the 20% is not met, as I'm guessing you get screwed on interest rates.
Is a significant portion of housing stock in the US priced above $360k?
The history here in the US is this:
We had The Great Depression in the 1930s. People were incredibly poor. This was followed by WW2.
The men went off to war. The women got factory jobs. They stopped building cars when they converted the car factories to jeep factories. Luxury items like sugar were rationed. People were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so farm food could feed the troops.
The result: Two income couples with no opportunity to create babies and no means to spend all their money. Savings rate were as high as 50% during some parts of the war.
The war ends. Soldiers come home. Women quit their jobs en masse to go be wives and moms.
Soldiers get help purchasing houses. They get help going to college.
There is both huge pent up demand for middle class housing and also the means to buy it. The entire nation rises to the occasion to roll out houses. They invent financing mechanisms, etc. Houses get built at breathtaking speed. The modern suburb is born.
Their children, the Baby Boomers, reach adulthood in the 60s and 70s. SROs and boarding houses had been the standard answer for single young adults with entry level jobs. This generation had unprecedented upper class style wealth. They turned their noses up at SROs and the like. The US tore down about 80% of them.
US housing stock skews strongly towards housing designed for a nuclear family. It is strongly shaped to this day by the 1950s nuclear family expectations, only on steroids for various reasons. The size of new houses has more than doubled since the 1950s and we expect a lot of amenities that were not the norm at that time.
Meanwhile, demographics have diversified and moved away from the nuclear family. People are having children later. We have fewer children on average per family. We have more single adults, single parents and childless couples. Yet, our housing expectations default to 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in the burbs type housing. It doesn't even fit the demographics.
We now by default expect single adults to rent a two or three bedroom place designed for a family and share it with room mates. There is damn little actually designed for single people or childless couples.
Our housing is designed for a population, culture and lifestyle that mostly no longer exists. This is the crux of the problem.
As I find things that actually work, I blog about it. I am actively encouraging homeless people in So Cal to leave and go to either cheaper parts of the state or go to another state entirely. Going to the Central Valley did not get me off the street, but it did improve my quality of life. Leaving the state did get me off the street.
There is currently a deadly hepatitis epidemic killing homeless people in So Cal. If these people had a solution, most of them would be out of there like a bat of hell. This problem is quite dire. More actual affordable housing would not magically solve it overnight, but it would be a step in the right direction.
So the expectations around average square footage changed, the expectations around house internals have changed (appliances, wooden floors, A/C, cable hook-ups), expectations around the quality of building materials have changed, as well as various regulations, like fire, electric and earthquake safety codes.
You're right though that price sq.ft. has increased https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/soldmedavgppsf.pdf but (a) the US averages are still slightly below 2004 levels, (b) the dollar figure there is not adjusted for inflation.
In the 1950s, new homes were 1200 sq ft or less and held an average of around 3.5 people. They are now over 2400 sq ft and hold an average of around 2.5 people. They also now come standard with AC, dishwashers, washer-dryer hookups, etc. In the 50s, AC was not standard, dishwashers were not standard and many homes had a washing machine but no dryer. The norm was to have a clothesline in the backyard.
I have been in a house like that. My ex husband's grandparents lived in such a house. It was a two bedroom, one bath place with a washing machine and a clothesline. Dishes were washed by hand in the small kitchen. They had ceiling fans instead of AC. This was in Georgia, where AC is very much expected today.
They raised two kids in that house. The kids shared a bedroom.
So, families have grown smaller. Houses have grown larger and more luxurious. It is nearly impossible to find a small house with just "the basics." That is now considered substandard housing and most jurisdictions in the US have zoning laws that make it illegal to try to recreate 1950s style housing.
The New Urbanism movement actively tried to recreate walkable communities similar to what we used to build. Any New Urbanist project that got built typically went in with a plan, was told it was unbuildable because of zoning laws, road width requirements, etc and then they combed through local laws and regulations and renamed things to try to get it okayed with minimal changes to the actual design. It was an uphill battle every step of the way to try to recreate something akin to 1950s style housing with small homes and a walkable landscape that wasn't completely whored out to a car centric design.
The Tiny House movement puts a lot of small houses on wheels to get around minimum house size rules. And then good luck finding a place within city limits to park it. The city of Fresno recently passed a law to try to make it easier to have a tiny house. The law assumes it will be an accessory building behind a larger conventional house. It basically assumes that it is a stand alone "mother in law unit." The assumption is some relative will live in it, though you can potentially rent it out as well. Tiny houses become glorified upscale trailers. You can live in them in the middle of nowhere and you can tow them behind your truck, but trying to find land to place one legally within city limits anywhere in the US (as a primary residence) seems to be quite the challenge.
Apple Valley, California has a huge minimum lot size for houses that was theoretically supposed to "preserve the rural character" of the town. No, the result was not farm houses with large vegetable gardens. The result was huge houses on huge lots. Driving through a residential neighborhood in Apple Valley is a fascinating glimpse into how our housing regulations so frequently have unintended consequences.
I just want a small home in a walkable neighborhood. I don't need or want AC. I don't need or want a dishwasher. I would be happy to have a washing machine and a clothesline. This style of housing is no longer built.
If you can find it at all, it was built between the 1920s and the 1950s. Such homes tend to fall into one of two categories: they have been improved and kept up to date and are now some of the most expensive real estate in the city in high demand, or they are falling apart and in a neighborhood that looks like a war zone. You may be required to bring everything up to code before you can move in.
I would never say that. My point is only that with even if we had "unlimited free money" to give, there's only a fraction we will save. I'm not saying "don't give money" and saying need more than just money.
I'm actually living near the poverty line and surrounded by people with similar financial situations. I make just too much to afford food stamps, but my medical bills (and large debt from student loans and a period of having to live off credit cards) basically throw me below the line. Money would absolutely help me. I need bills paid. I need treatment. All I want to do is get back to my career. (Read: fixing me would generate a net gain in GDP.) But I'm also surrounded by many people who are not interested in getting better. I'm surrounded by people who (to quote someone else) "act poor"--that is, even though we're poor we don't keep our house like a trashheap with stuff piled up. We don't associate with people with drug problems, stealing problems, and more. We're poor but you've never guess at face value because we spend very carefully, and we're entirely functional adults. Meanwhile, there are people who make more money than us who--through their conscious and subconscious decisions--are constantly in trouble with the law. Giving these people money won't magically stop them from having drug dealers in their extended family.
Give two people the same internet (everyone has internet on their phones these days), one uses it to read Wikipedia and watch instructional videos, and another uses it to watch videos of people fighting all day. Clearly one is statistically more likely to succeed than the other.
I would never say that...
But I'm also surrounded by many people who are not interested in getting better. I'm surrounded by people who (to quote someone else) "act poor"--that is, even though we're poor we don't keep our house like a trashheap with stuff piled up. We don't associate with people with drug problems, stealing problems, and more. We're poor but you've never guess at face value because we spend very carefully, and we're entirely functional adults. Meanwhile, there are people who make more money than us who--through their conscious and subconscious decisions--are constantly in trouble with the law. Giving these people money won't magically stop them from having drug dealers in their extended family.
I agree that you can't force people to get better. But you absolutely said explicitly what was only subtext in your previous comment. You genuinely do feel that a lot of these people are simply lazy fuck ups -- unlike you. You have real problems.
This is a really common attitude. I am aware it is hard to figure out what really works. It is a hard problem to solve. But there are systemic problems here that tremendously compound the problems of folks who already have personal challenges in trying to get their act together.
Except the most recent study that correlates peak income happiness starts out at 65k a year[1], way beyond median and mean household incomes in the US. Nobody anywhere near the poverty line, or in general few people who have ever been near it, will ever be above the happiness income threshold.
Combine that with the research on how the brain is changed by poverty[2] and nobody should be surprised that you cannot just throw money at the problem once and done with it. It would require a tremendous amount of money over a generational timeframe to correct this, and even then there is a culture to poverty that would still precipitate into future generations born into it even if their parents are uplifted.
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.abstract [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-inequality-d...
Anyway, what’s going to happen in this case is this organization is going to be starved out until some developer steps in to buy the property to put in a new strip mall or stack and pack development as the gentrification plan plays out.
Same thing with section 8 vouchers--almost always grouped in one area. By grouping the poor and homeless in one area, it actually keeps them from ever recovering. If you spread them out, they are far more likely to succeed.