The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities | Hacker News Reader

The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

bloomberg.com

270 pointskimsk112316 comments

Long-time Seattle resident here who volunteered for several years in the homeless community. Homelessness has always been a thing in Seattle, but has definitely become a much larger issue in the past five years.

I'll spare my thoughts on any number of reasons as to why we got here as a city, but will say I think we are doing a terrible disservice to actually finding a solution by lumping "anyone who doesn't have a home" into the "homeless crisis."

There are so many nuanced issues across a variety of problems here. There are drug abuse issues, mental health issues, physical health issues, cost of living issues, etc., and not to mention the varying cocktail of comorbidity, that to bulk "people without permanent housing" all under the umbrella of "homeless crisis" is not going to get us anywhere. Trying to assist the single mother with children who lives in her car because she lost her job is a VASTLY different issue than trying to assist the drug addict sitting in an alley passed out in their own feces. But at the end of the day, they're both human beings, and it breaks my heart that either of them are in that situation.

Several separate issues, that need to be subdivided and approached in distinct ways if any progress is to be made on any of them. Smaller, subdivided problems should feel more solvable, too.

Unfortunately, a lot of the solutions are expensive and frankly politically toxic. Despite Seattle's deep blue on most things, suddenly we get very "every person for themselves" the second homelessness has a price tag.

I have wondered if the aggressive response to homeless folks doesn't stem from recognition of how little it would take to end up in their shoes...

Certainly the fact that ones own financial security is fragile makes people feel threatened by beggars - some people, you could give away everything you own and they’d still be asking for more. However I think a lot of attitudes stem from the opposite - a lack of understanding that many homeless people are regular people, or could be, or could have been.

I think you have hit many things amazingly well with Seattle homelessness.

I think one of the reasons why we get very "every person for themselves" when the price tag comes up is it's hard to think of the single mother living in her car while working every day because the most visible members are the addicts sitting in the alley passed out in their own feces next to your stolen bicycle. Also it's hard to get data on who is the more representative group.

> it's hard to think of the single mother living in her car while working every day because the most visible members are the addicts sitting in the alley passed out in their own feces next to your stolen bicycle

I think this is what's going to result in a rather massive upheaval in the next city council elections in Seattle. There seems to be a belief--right or wrong[0]--that "the vagrants are taking over, the community is sick of it, and our generosity is at an end." (In quotes because it's a characterization.) There has already been one candidate for council in district 6 (Ballard, Crown Hill, Northwest Seattle), who subsequently dropped out because of other political drama, that made his main plank that he was going to do nothing except push to roll back spending at every opportunity and get ordinances passed requiring the police to actively go after "vagrancy."

He didn't get very far, mostly because of the aforementioned drama, but that he got as much attention as he did is telling. I think if a more viable, or at least level-headed, candidate starts to challenge the district 6 incumbent (I'm picking on district 6 because a lot of the noise about this problem has been coming from there and 6 includes Aurora Ave N) on the basis of this belief that the problem is too far out of control and must be stopped with a big hammer, the divide between the two groups will become pretty stark. And if that challenger doesn't win, it'll be a pretty close race.

0 - I happen to think this belief is wrong.

There's some merit to this but I'd say it's still a little off the mark. Homelessness is a condition, how people got there is one thing, the main tools to "fix it" are fairly straightforward: give people housing. Dealing with everything else (mental health issues, drug addiction, etc.) can be dealt with separately, and will be vastly easier without having the fundamental problem of homelessness.

how people got there is one thing, the main tools to "fix it" are fairly straightforward: give people housing

The solution sounds straightforward, the path to get there looks like a Gordian knot. How do you pay for it? How do you get that funding source to go along with your plans to pay for it? Etc.

Well, we could stop making it illegal. That'd be a great first step.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-seatt...

What do you mean by "Gordian knot" here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First

> In August 2007, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that the number of chronically homeless individuals living on the streets or in shelters dropped by an unprecedented 30 percent, from 175,914 people in 2005 to 123,833 in 2007. This was credited in part to the "housing first" approach; Congress in 1999 directed that HUD spend 30% of its funding on the method.

The page is full of more success stories like that. If it's so impossible, why is it already being done all over the world?

> Studies in New York City and in Utah have shown that every homeless person housed in programs such as Housing First saves taxpayers $10,000 and $8,000 a year, respectively. A research study at University of Northern Carolina also reported that a housing project for the chronically homeless called Moore Place had saved the county $2.4 million.

Yet it "seems like a Gordion knot" because how would we pay for it... that's the answer, you don't pay, you save money. So if the problem is how some people feel about something, because they haven't informed themselves, then they should feel something else, problem solved.

> How do you pay for it?

You'll be diverting people away from the criminal justice system and away from involuntary mental health hospital stays. Those can be fantastically expensive, and not particularly useful.

> How do you get that funding source to go along with your plans to pay for it?

Yes, that's a problem that seems hard to fix.

Pay for it in taxes, let the government set up an agency providing assistance. Would require big changes in the system you have in the US though, ugly bureaucracy, and whispering some forbidden words like "socialism".

But it's reality, not fantasy: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance-overview

Taxes? I believe they were invented (let me check) in the stone age, so that might be something we could look into.

You speak like this is something nobody's ever done before, but it's been done, repeatedly and often throughout the world and even in America.

> give people housing

Except now you'll just attract homeless folks from outside of your region. The city with the best homeless program will attract the most homeless folks--all paid for by that city's taxpayers.

This is why I maintain the only way to address the problem is at the federal levelm. They should at least be the ones who bankroll the whole operation. It shouldn't be the city's responsibility to fund the fix--homeless people can move anywhere in the country and it isn't fair for local taxpayers to foot the bill. Citizens country-wide should pay for a solution.

(citation needed)

Federal taxpayers might be willing to house homeless folks in cheap places like western Kansas or Oklahoma. They'd be less willing to pay for a nice place like San Francisco. They've been paying taxes for years, and no one ever offered them free digs in a swanky cosmopolitan city. How many of the San Francisco homeless would want to live in western Kansas, even in a free apartment? These "obvious" solutions hide lots of assumptions.

At the federal level the housing supply is excessive to the point of Detroit house prices being close to negative, some counties in Kansas and Oklahoma providing free land if only people move there, dying coal towns in Appalachians having an oversupply if available housing and Mississippi delta towns being relatively cheap to place people in manufactured housing?

Sure, that doesn’t solve the problem of everyone who’s homeless in LA or SF, but then where do you draw a line on people’s preferences vs reasonable availability?

If a million new homeless people decide they would rather move to LA and not Kansas, should the federal government accommodate accordingly? What if then they say they’d really prefer Santa Monica to East LA? What if within Santa Monica most express the preference for proximity to the ocean and walking distance to downtown amenities?

Where does the federal government then draw a line on providing essential services vs catering to someone’s lifestyle preferences?

They can move around the world too, so "federal" isn't going to do the job, at least without adding an effective deterrent to crossing borders.

I disagree. The inability or unwillingness to provide for one's self is the condition, and there are many constraints which may force a person into that condition. Homelessness is a side effect and consequence of the condition.

Homelessness is a condition, it's not a character trait. I still find it shocking that so many find it so easy to hate the poor and the homeless and to blame them for those problems. Usually those people know the least about homelessness and poverty, but that rarely stops them from having an opinion.

give people housing.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be a solution with adverse consequences and likely won't fix anything. I am for diversifying our housing stock in a way that better serves our needs, as I commented on at length elsewhere in this discussion. But this is a problem space I have studied, and I don't think this works, for a long list of reasons.

>Dealing with everything else (mental health issues, drug addiction, etc.) can be dealt with separately, and will be vastly easier without having the fundamental problem of homelessness.

But you can turn this around as well: just move "homelessness" to the list, and mark something else as fundamental:

>Dealing with everything else (mental health issues, homelessness, etc.) can be dealt with separately, and will be vastly easier without having the fundamental problem of drug addiction.

> give people housing.

The population of the tent city in Santa Ana california was an unmitigated disaster for those who took the vouchers and residents. That did not work because the population of people living on the street in Southern California are doing it by choice (be it for the freedom to do drugs, mental illness or other defect). People who want help, generally don't get turned away in high income areas - every single church in the wealthiest areas, have a program and members willing to help those in need.

In many cases, drug addiction and mental issues come as a result of homelessness itself. There is a severe mental toll inflicted on human beings that are required to live as outcasts in their own city.

I mean, I see why that would be possible, but considering cause and effect, one is more likely to burn out their support network by having a drug addiction and mental issues than the other way around.

My support network flew away when I lost jobs, quit jobs, and finally became homeless. They get frustrated by various things and call it being negative or difficult or similar. There’s a strong unwillingness to empathize. I realized some things I did/didn’t do to attract parasitic people to my life, but I’ll digress there. Ymmv of course, but in general people are made very uncomfortable by the situation and may jump ship on a totally sober person.

Support networks only have so much energy in them, some have more some have less. They burn out as you use them, I think that’s just human nature. Richer people generally have deeper ones, poorer people generally have shallower ones, I guess because they have their own problems to deal with.

You sound a lot like my brother. And you seem to have landed in much the same position. I could not help him keep a job so I won't pretend I could help you, either. The best thing that has happened to him is he found an employed woman whose head is fucked up in about the same way his is, and so they get along nice. And she owns her place. So at least he isn't homeless at this point.

Why did you quit jobs?

>Unfortunately, a lot of the solutions are expensive and frankly politically toxic.

At the end of the day, everything is political. Instead of shying away from it engage with it because it is the only way you'll change society.

Truth.

In fact, the more harsh way to frame this is people need to understand whether they have an interest in politics does not change the fact others do.

And we all live with the product of those of us who do get involved politically.

Speak or be spoken for has real teeth when viewed through this lens.

I think what we can do tomorrow is lighten regulations on things like how many people are allowed in a hotel room. This could help many people tonight.

Next is feeding the homeless, some cities limit how they can be fed.

We need to take a close look at these sorts of regulations as soon as possible. Just these two things could make a huge impact.

This is a well known issue known for a long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_hotels_in_the...

> At the end of the day, everything is political.

It only is if you view everything through a political lens. Science and psychology, for example, are not political.

Plus you can affect change without the political system. Starting with improving oneself. Then family members. Then local community. If enough people did that, that would be a societal change and maybe we wouldn't have such a crisis in the first place.

>Science and psychology, for example, are not political.

Could you clarify? Do you mean to say that these fields of study don't yield results that have political implications? Or that these fields are impervious to political influence because...well I don't know, they aren't performed by humans?

I mean they aren't political by definition. They exist at a lower layer and are apolitical by default. They can be used or corrupted by politics - and are.

But people do science. We bring our bias, limited vision, and our politics and opinions.

Which is why there is the scientific method. Good science is reproducible and provable regardless of what your opinion is.

Facts are facts regardless.

'Facts' bend to the funding available. Money (can) drive conclusions. Interpretation is a matter of prior experience and available terminology. Even our hallowed logic stands on unprovable axioms.

That and there is an incredible shortage of reproductions and garbage publications that are difficult or impossible to replicate with the available information.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170411104516.h...

These point to soft sciences, so I suppose my point doesn't stand so much for things like climate change publications, or evolutionary biology.

> Science and psychology, for example, are not political.

Science is extremely political. Ask any PI who's written a grant or published a paper before whether they think science is apolitical.

If you believe that changes to society can only be made through government action: yes, everything is political. If you reject that assumption, you may think differently.

> suddenly we get very "every person for themselves" the second homelessness has a price tag.

A confounding factor involved here is that many government strategies for dealing with the homeless are endless money pits without noticeable results. I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with their tax dollars going to that purpose if they didn't feel like nothing was actually happening from it.

Actually spending targeting homelessness is fairly minimal. So, IMO it’s hard to call it a money pit.

Is that not due to simply not spending?

If you estimate ~20k per homeless person per year * 550,000 homes in the US you get on the order of 11 Billion dollars per year out of something like 7,150 Billion of total government spending.

On the other hand if you look at social security as one way to reduce homelessness it’s vastly more expensive.

Neither one of those actually speaks to our spend.

I was more acknowledging it's not that easy to put a single number on that spend. The low number is a little over half that 11 billion I mentioned, but you can easily come up with other metrics which provide vastly larger figures.

Okay got it. :D That's totally fair. Honestly, I don't think we are spending, or the problem wouldn't be where it is right now.

Two things are needed. One, attack the root cause. To remedial spending to beat back this problem that we're now faced with.

We need those things, because Downstream effects from all of this will be very very expensive.

Well in SF and Seattle the spending continually increases and the homelessness problem manages to get worse every year. Sounds like a money pit.

The money pit is the cost of housing. Homelessness and artificial housing scarcity go hand-in-hand.

Dumping this on Local government and homeless people move around based on what’s best for them. Solve it nationally and you don’t have that problem.

I think the other problem is that the more one city spends to "fix" its homeless problems, the more other areas ship their homeless to these cities with more resources. It's certainly the case in Texas, where many smaller cities and rural areas give homeless people a one-way bus ticket to Austin, Dallas or San Antonio.

This is a common enough misrepresentation of the sources of homelessness that it's imperative that you stop spreading it.

71% of San Francisco's homeless used to have homes in the city, it is likely a similar proportion elsewhere.

http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...

These studies always sound dubious, just like the misrepresentations that you are pointing out. First, they are just surveying a population that is incredibly difficult to survey. Second, they don't look into what they meant by having a home, was it just crashing at a friend's house? Were they ever employed at all in the city? Where were they born, where did they grow up?

Cities act as a catchment for the rural areas around them: you can't really be homeless in Ellensburg or Aberdeen or Walla Walla (with no social services), but you can be homeless in Seattle or Spokane. A lot of kids on the street near UW in Seattle (aka ave rats) hail as far away as Montana. When I was working in downtown Seattle, many of the homeless that came around were Native Americans from various regions in the PNW.

And ya, people do wind up homeless after they move to the big city, but often for reasons back home (they lost their support network and couldn't stay solvent). Anyways, you can't fix the homeless problem in individual cities without also fixing it in the surrounding regions, or even the nation. People are mobile, they will be attracted to the best deal.

>These studies always sound dubious, just like the misrepresentations that you are pointing out.

So are you suggesting we base our understanding of this problem on anecdotes?

The problem I have with that is that the anecdotes that you present are constructed to support the idea that there is nothing to be done, that we must simply accept that homelessness is too big a problem to be solved or even quantified. I refuse to accept that conclusion, and support efforts to understand the problem rationally.

http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/San-Francisc...

I get it, dodgy surveys trump anecdotes. However, these surveys turn in a reality that is so far divorced to what people are experiencing that they are hard to take seriously, check out:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/king-coun...

> The records show that more than 8,000 clients listed their last ZIP code as 98104, which covers Pioneer Square and downtown. That’s about 25 percent of all clients who gave King County ZIP codes. Putnam says clients sometimes list ZIP codes for the shelters where they last stayed or the neighborhood where they’d been seeking services.

Ya, the data is really noisy.

And do you really think the big cities can solve this problem on their own without regional support? Its like saying they can solve healthcare on their own, or any other country-wide problem.

>And do you really think the big cities can solve this problem on their own without regional support?

Absolutely agree with you here. I think regional, even national initiatives are the real way to tackle this. Cities, as you correctly point out, bear the brunt of homelessness' impact. I don't think they can solve this alone.

There is hope that states can act. California just passed a $4 billion bond for housing veterans[1]. I hope the political will can be carried nationally, but have little faith in the current administration. They've already acted negligently, putting people using the GI housing benefit at risk[2]. I hope they face real blowback from this, but it's only one in a litany of scandals and failures at that level.

1. https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_1,_Housing_Pr...

2. https://www.npr.org/2018/11/17/668953517/computer-glitch-lea...

It's not a misconception because it happens on a large scale. Note I'm not arguing that it is all homeless or even a majority, but clearly increasing support for the homeless will draw homeless people there from other, less capable areas. Here is a discussion about a church in Amarillo that paid for 1200 one-way bus tickets to get homeless out of their city: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/5a0pdi/homeless_get...

Why is it a problem when poor people want to move in but not rich people?

Does some homeless dude from Boise degrade Austin any more or less than some programmer from SF? Both are seeking what they think is a going to be a better life. Both are ever so slightly changing the character of their destination by showing up.

>Why is it a problem when poor people want to move in but not rich people?

Because they are a drain on the local economy, often have mental and/or substance abuse issues, and live outside. Is that a real question? You can't honestly protray most homeless people as free spirits painting on the sidewalk and "living their best life".

Why is it a problem when a stranger breaks into your house and raids your fridge but not when you invite a close friend over for a meal?

Both are seeking what they think is a going to be a meal. Both are ever so slightly changing the character of their destination by showing up.

The programmers are raiding the housing supply. The homeless aren't.

Ok yeah you're right then. That makes it a fair comparison. I'll remember that when I see someone passed out in the subway with a needle in their arm as I walk by with my kids.

Homelessness has recently risen rapidly in cities where the cost of rent has also recently risen rapidly.

So is it that other cities are suddenly shipping over way more people, or is it a predominantly local problem caused by rapidly rising rent that can no longer be afforded?

We have cities where existing residents can no longer afford housing that are actively seeking to attract more business to move in, and with that create more competition for housing and higher population. You can't fix the results of housing cost inflation if you keep the upward pressure on the cost - you just will be spending more of your money chasing the upwardly-moving property prices your other policies are causing!

Like documented here:

https://roominate.com/blog/2016/anatomy-of-a-swindle/

> endless money pits

The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area.

The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But that doesn't solve the actual problem.

Homelessness is a systemic problem that can only be meaningly addressed in a humane way by the federal government.

I'd be interested to hear how homelessness can be meaningfully addressed in a humane way by the federal government (especially if it is constitutional).

Maybe not addressed in a prescriptive policy way but a financing way. Let cities do what works best for that city, but all the funding should come from federal grants. It isn't fair to financially burden individual municipalities with what amounts to a systemic, country wide problem.

Noah Smith's perspective on the necessity of a federal approach to homelessness:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-21/ending...

Key graf:

> About 3.5 million Americans will experience homelessness at some point in time, but only about a half-million are homeless at any given time, and roughly 87,000 of these are chronically homeless. By some estimates, housing a homeless person and providing them with a caseworker to see to their needs costs about $10,000 a year. That means for less than a billion dollars a year, chronic homelessness could be ended in the U.S. If temporarily homeless people were housed in temporary housing, and if each temporary residence were occupied half the time, homelessness of all kinds could be eliminated for about $10 billion a year. That’s less than a seventh of what the government spends on food stamps.

This is poppycock.

$10,000 a person is a lie unless maybe if you moved all the homeless from the West Coast to the middle of nowhere in Midwest, but then you would have homeless activists and Midwest NIMBY activists saying that the government is shipping people out to solve the problem.

The activists have politicized every direction of this issue to the point where it's easier to just forget about the homeless rather than try to solve the problem. Most homeless need mental health care and should be forced into mental wards but then you have mental health activists that will protest against this. Other activists would complain that they are gentrifying SF and kicking out all the poor people.

Basically anyone who tries to solve this problem politically can't win because there will be some activist that protests against it to make a name for themselves and it turns into a hotbed issue by the media.

There are people living on a few dollars a day... You really think we can't provide a cot in the equivalent of a walk in closet with communal bathrooms, and simple meals like beans and rice with a few vegetables for $10k/year?

Only if you ship them to a very low cost area, and then you immediately run into political issues as I mentioned, like shipping away your poor and gentrifying the area for rich people. Beans and rice? That's a terrible, unhealthy meal! You need to give them a balanced diet! How could you kill these poor people? Communal bathrooms? That's for criminals and it spreads disease! A walk in closet? These are human beings we're talking about! They're not prisoners, don't treat them like that! They need space!

And that's how it becomes an unsolvable problem. Activists with agendas.

There will always be people like that, but your explanation just comes off to me as excuses to do nothing and continue the status quo.

> Most homeless need mental health care and should be forced into mental wards but then you have mental health activists that will protest against this.

Because conservatives destroyed mental health care in this country.

Not that it was ever good, but it used to exist, until it was systematically dismantled in the 1980s and all the patients were sent out to become … take a guess … that's right … our current chronic homeless population!

Start by (re)building an actual mental health care system if you want to go that route.

How federal involvement will help? Article doesn't detail what powers exactly federal govt possesses that would help, aside from moving spending from local to fed level.

I'd also argue, that having feds in this business would even worsen the situation: now locals could be taken completely out of the loop for decisions like where to place shelters. Like, "oh you don't like shelter in this neighborhood? take a walk - it's a federal decision, live with it."

Funding for mental health / universal health care would take the riskiest cases off the street. This would allow the existing safety nets to function better. Also, basic income.

I’ve been in SF for about 7 years and became homeless in June. The #1 thing that helps me is cash in my pocket, from day labor (odd jobs) and boosters from family and friends who know I’m not a drug addict/alcoholic. Obviously the latter can’t be offered by a gov because it would be abused, but work for cash saved my life. IME cash in hand is the biggest help.

#2 by far is bathroom access... followed by water and food. Anything beyond that feels too permanent for a healthy able bodied person.

The way people treat me when showered is night and day. And then going to places with opportunity/wealthy people and away from homeless populations is essential.

I have a truly genuine question and I swear on my prized and treasured EdgeRouter that I have no ulterior motive except for having a real answer to give to people whenever they also ask this question (often, in my opinion, in bad faith). So, with that, here goes:

Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?

(I won't reply and debate your answer; I'm simply curious and looking to educate myself.)

Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?

Relocating to a place where you don't have a job makes you even more homeless.

Remember that a significant percentage of the homeless are also employed. Many full time. Some as developers.

It's easy to relocate to an unfamiliar place with no family or safety net if you have a job and savings. But if you're just going in the hopes that maybe there's a job, and maybe you'll find a place to live in that requires no deposit, and maybe there's a market for your skills in that place, you're just going to end up on the streets again.

I can appreciate that but, to be honest, that's why I'm asking someone who says he or she is currently homeless. I want to know if that position is theoretically true (that is, people who are housed think it is true) or if it really does have bearing on the day-to-day life of someone who is homeless.

Put another way, I want to know what someone who's actually going through this would say because the question is sarcastically asked so often but I rarely read replies from people who are actually in this situation.

I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person.

1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere.

There are parts of the US where the only road through there is a highway and it is illegal to walk on it. If you leave on foot, you are trekking into territory you aren't familiar with where there may be no readily available bathrooms or eateries etc. Think about how awful it is to travel by car into unknown territory, be in need of a bathroom and have no idea how long until you find one. Then multiply that by at least 100.

You can also die of exposure or run into other seriously scary stuff when traveling by foot. People can wind up homeless with zero prior experience with camping, hiking, etc. Being suddenly without housing in no way guarantees that you are prepared for hiking long distances to go elsewhere.

2. It's vastly easier to find food, bathrooms, support etc in familiar territory.

Being destitute and homeless is scary and problematic enough in familiar territory. Being destitute and homeless in unfamiliar territory is just mind bogglingly more challenging.

3. It's hard to get a job elsewhere first before moving under the best of circumstances.

Going someplace new while homeless to then look for work looks about as fun as jumping off a cliff not knowing what will be at the bottom. Maybe it's a river and you will be okay. Maybe it's jagged rocks.

4. Some homeless people are in the city they have lived in their entire life. They would find it intimidating to go elsewhere under good circumstances. It's too much to contemplate while destitute.

5. Adjusting to a new city is hard under the best of circumstances. It's unthinkable for some homeless individuals who are not only destitute, they may also be physically or mentally ill.

6. The OP seems to have some friends and family helping out. Moving may mean losing what remains of their support network.

7. They can have ties to the local community that are a barrier to leaving, such as having a child with an estranged partner and leaving would mean not seeing their kid again, or they have a job or they are on probation and forbidden from leaving, as just a sampling of issues that can be a barrier to leaving.

I managed to pull off relocating to get back into housing someplace cheaper because I have portable unearned income, I intentionally sought to develop portable earned income on top of that, I'm a former military wife who is no stranger to moving around, and I spent like three years researching where I could go to try to put my life back together. And that's just some of the obvious factors I can list.

I try to encourage homeless people to move someplace cheaper if they can. I try to provide useful information to support such moves and support other solutions.

But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Suggesting it for someone who is destitute utterly strips them of their humanity and completely ignores that they are a complex person with more facets to their life than their income and it really just does not work. Doing that tends to just make problems worse.

(This comment is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination.)

thanks for this post, very helpful!

>>But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute.

Like the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers.

Economic necessity has forced me to do very difficult things in my life. That's what people do, because becoming a burden on your family and the rest of society is a failing in every way.

Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm.

Life is tough. It doesn't get less tough when you redistribute the pain to make it more levelled. It just makes it less fair, by severing the link between responsibility and consequences, while creating unsustainable dependencies that will turn out badly for everyone involved in the long run.

We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever.

> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."

I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)

Our families chose to have us. In the vast majority of families, children are biological progeny of the parents, and so carry their parents genes into the future.

The fact that you're trying to compare disjointed people within a nation to a family where parents support their own children really shows the amount of non-voluntary collectivism you want to impose on society.

>>I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF?

I realize that not all homeless are loitering drug addicts, but they form a significant percentage of the chronically homeless, and a situation where no-strings-attached aid is provided to them at the expense of the taxpayer, while others make the sacrifices to be independent through back-breaking work, is unjust.

It's not just a matter of competence. It's also a matter of choice. Some people choose to take responsibility. Some don't.

Your idea that these laborers are victims of "homeless crack addicts manipulatively employing the victim narrative" is such an extreme miscalculation that I wonder if you even looking at the data honestly.

The amount of money that actually goes to homeless people is extremely low, and most of those meager funds are used to give them food and temporary shelter so they don't literally die outside. And even then, the amount of taxes that "low wage laborers" earn is slim. Why can't those with vast excessive wealth give some of it to services that can rehabilitate the homeless, or create unskilled or low skill jobs that pay enough to keep people indoors?

If a homeless addict is smoking crack outside, what he needs is a shelter that can rehabilitate him, get him off drugs and get him employed somewhere where he can make meaningful contributions and connections to his society. Services like these barely exist, and are in desperate need of the money that we for some reason insist on giving to the wealthiest mega billionaires who keep it in offshore accounts and refuse to give to the people they are directly responsible for putting on the streets via critically unsustainable low wages.

To assume that the homeless are homeless because of "responsibility and consequence" is to totally ignore any systemic circumstance outside of their control that may have led them to become homeless or jobless in the first place.

Thanks for this comment. It's not too usual to see a perspective this clear and well thought out.

Some other points:

"Moving" without a car is not so simple. You can hitchhike, with the success of that depending on how you're able to present yourself and the culture of the local area. You can walk, but only so long as the nearest places are spaced in small distances, and if not you would need overnight gear. The weather is also a major factor here.

Knowing where to go is also another factor. Even for someone with a phone and internet it can be a challenge. First there's so many places. But how would you know that where you're going is any better than the place you're at? It represents a gamble that could result in you depleting already limited resources without any gain. Even if your current area is expensive at least you already know where the community food pantries are located, where and from who to get free/inexpensive clothing, good places to stealth camp... Moving to a completely new area puts you in a place of zero knowledge in exchange for only the possibility of finding work.

There is a hump you have to crest to acquire long-term housing. You need (depending on where you live) at least several hundred dollars to put in a security deposit. You need several hundred more to cover the next few months of rent. You need a job. You need to feel secure that you'll still have that job in a few months or at least have a replacement ready. You probably need a vehicle. You need for it to be dependable. You need to be presentable before being able to acquire that job. You might need references for either the job or apartment. You might need some sort of rental history.

Not to mention if you've been living on the edge for years it might have changed you. For some people it puts on them a character of supreme humbleness, for others it makes them very outwardly resentful against those who apparently have so much. Sometimes those changes are too visible to hide and in a way frames you to people living in normal and casual society as "other."

Getting over that hump when you have next to nothing is difficult.

To add to the list, you're not going to move north in the winter. Maybe go back to the town you are from in the summer.

Why are you still in SF? There are day jobs available pretty much everywhere.

Simple. Put a ceiling on rents. Allow no-one to own more than one home and insist they live in the one they own. In the UK we have a "bedroom tax" but it is aimed at the poor, not the rich as it should be. Make it illegal to discriminate against anyone based on their income source or the state of their health. Build housing exclusively for low-income occupants instead of throwing everything onto the insidious property market. Ban property markets altogether and replace them with government-regulated allocation. No. Thought not. No-one is really serious about solving the world housing crisis. So long as politicians rely on the comfortable middle-class for their survival nothing will change.

And this is exactly why the bay area is in such terrible conditions. Every bit of regulation you add, only decreases the housing available. more regulation is what got us into this mess. The less regulation we have, and less zoning, the more housing we'll have, it's that simple. We simply need more housing, lots more. once that happens prices will come down.

> We simply need more housing, lots more. once that happens prices will come down.

When the majority of politicians or their partners own second homes, that ain't going to happen.

> Put a ceiling on rents

Sorry, but this is the worst possible solution. Source: basic economics.

Rent control is one of the most dangerous "solutions" to high housing costs people ever toss out. It would destroy the housing market and make it vastly more expensive than it is now.

Demonstrably untrue. Spend some time in Vienna or Berlin.

Eh, berlin is a city with the housing capacity in multiples of its population. You dont need to put any ceiling on rents to have them down.

> We find that landlords actively respond to the imposition of rent control by converting their properties to condos and TICs or by redeveloping the building in such as a way as to exempt it from the regulations. In sum, we find that impacted landlords reduced the supply the available rental housing by 15%. Consistent with this evidence, we find that there was a 20% decline in the number of renters living in impacted buildings, relative to 1990-1994 levels, and a 30% decline in the number of renters living in units protected by rent control.

> These results highlight that forcing landlords to provided insurance against rent increases leads to large losses to tenants

—The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco[1]

The study largely fins that, in addition to rent control causing the available supply to decrease, and tenant mobility/freedom to decrease, it largely harms new renters, and results in a wealth transfer to existing renters.

It does not solve the problem, and it does not on the whole benefit society.

[1]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24181.pdf

Doesn't it seem to you that the problem is those regulations that can allow the exemptions rather than rent control?

I mean, if it wasn't possible to exempt a building from the regulations, there wouldn't be an issue with rent control.

When you don't allow exemptions from rent control, you get something like the Bronx in the 1970s, where landlords set fire to their own buildings to collect insurance money rather than rent them out. [1] There's always an exemption - if you don't provide a legal one, people will find an undetectable illegal one.

[1] https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20100610/BLOGS01/30610...

The article you posted does not say anything about fire (I searched for the word 'fire').

Even in that case though, what was the percentage of buildings burnt because of rent controls? if it was extremely low (as in less then 0.01%), then there is no real problem.

Search for "arson" instead.

There was a photo-essay of the devastation (seriously, it looked like a war zone) posted on HN about a month ago. I can't find the link now, but if you Google "pictures of 1970s Bronx", the Image Search links give you a sense.

This is so illogical.

For one, who is going to build these properties for low-income people only? Costs will be almost the same, profits will be way less. So why would a developer bother?

In fact, the recent change to require a higher percentage of low income units in new structures has killed the pipeline for new building starts.

Even if it seems counterproductive to the goal of helping low income people, historically new building starts have always been aspirational. Which makes sense - everyone wants a new car, but if you have little money you are better off getting a reliable used car. It is exactly the same for housing. When someone moves into a new condo that opens up a unit (and lowers the price incrementally) for someone who has less to spend.

Would it make sense to force carmakers to build cheap cars that only low-income people are eligible to buy?

You're thinking purely within a capitalist framework. There is no capitalist solution to this problem. The solution is unprofitable. I encourage you to think outside this framework as humanity itself is at stake not just profits.

Ok, so I could imagine rent control would work fine in (e.g.) the bay area if there was also (1) Government-built (or heavily subsidized) housing to get around the fact that rent control limits the capitalist demand for new housing (2) Strong central government to force out NIMBYs for the greater social good

In this context, would you agree that rent control seems counterproductive unless we were to switch to a socialized economy overall?

> There is no capitalist solution to this problem.

I'm curious if others here would agree with this; I don't have a strong opinion yet.

Really, housing is where capitalism breaks down.

Zoning screws with the free market. Look into how Japan does zoning[0] to see evidence that weak zoning laws and strong enforcement of individual property rights work together to keep property prices low.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

I was being sarcastic :)

Capitolist solutions exist to this problem, democracy keeps voting them down.

Remove the majority of zoning, and the free market will solve the housing problem quite quickly.

Sure houses will be up next to each other, and they'll be smaller, and the yards will cost even more than they do now, but housing will be affordable.

> Remove the majority of zoning

Sure, factories with toxic waste in residential neighborhoods are a great idea!

> Sure houses will be up next to each other

And we learned nothing from the massive urban fires othe 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries apparently.

All these onerous regulations you whinge about exist because thousands of people DIED from the conditions they outlaw.

Majority of the rules, not all.

Remove set backs, get rid of minimum yard requirements, loosen height restrictions.

The rest of the world has houses right next to each other, as do America's most prosperous cities.

Manhattan, the dense parts of SF, Boston, Chicago, etc.

The regulations about minimum grass and 4 foot of set back and no more than 1 or 2 stories, have nothing to do with fire regs and everything to do with long disproven ideas about suburban design that hark back to 1950s ideals.

Visit a modern dense city, Tokyo and London don't have massive fire outbreaks (sprinklers and modern fire codes still work even at density), but they do have an insane about of economic activity in the dense neighborhoods.

Want to solve the housing crisis and get people off the streets? Dump 50% more houses on to the market, heck have cities subsidize their construction if need be, and watch housing prices plummet. Watch mass transit become the life blood of a city, and watch entire new types of jobs become available. (People in NYC may be annoyed at bike messengers, but it is a job created by density!)

How about building new better houses for the rich or the richer, and so the old houses would be left for the poorer?

Why not deal with the problem by manipulating the supply side of the equation?

Regulations increase the value of goods and services by creating predictability. Competition reduces the cost of goods.

So spake Adam Smith. Sorry but the Invisible Hand is a fairy tale.

You know who disagrees with you on that? Karl Marx.

Marx believed that capitalism tends to self-destruct which is diametrically opposite to Adam Smith's belief in capitalism's self-correcting Invisible Hand. I don't get where you're coming from.

In this utopia, if you want to move into SF for work, then what happens, specifically?

Is it like Vienna, where you go on a wait list?

> Put a ceiling on rents. Allow no-one to own more than one home and insist they live in the one they own.

Doesn't the latter make the former moot, or is this a limit on rent of spare rooms in owner-occupied housing?

Build more highrises seems better solution. Asia builds them on the cheap and on conveyor belt. And they do fine.

In comparison to SF/LA/NY etc. we have very few homeless people in Scandinavia. If I were to speculate then I think our extensive social security systems (free healthcare & education etc.) is the reason why. But then we all pay 30-55 % tax on our income to fund that social security.

People of Scandinavian descent in the US have much lower levels of homelessness as well, so I think it's far more likely a socio-cultural cause, rather than political.

You work hard, your family works hard, and you help people out. Its sort of unspoken, but I've seen it in action a few times.

In no sense is that a "Scandinavian"-specific trait.

Another reason is the very strong motivation provided by your winter. Being homeless results in death, which explains why you have very few homeless people in Scandinavia.

Your area also has the highest rates of compulsory mental health hospitalization in Europe. To do so in the US would likely not be constitutional.

There aren't good solutions, only ugly ones that we've gotten rid of in the name of free will and self-reliance.

To start, Reagan gutted the mental health system so that people who need life-long mental health support were more or less dumped on the streets. It also meant people who could get jobs and have a normal life with some support began to end up on the streets when things broke wrong for them.

So bringing back mental health services would take a lot of stress off of police and hospitals and ultimately cost taxpayers much less and help many people. The negative is that there are no clear boundaries around who should be involuntarily admitted to a mental health facility. But having zero services clearly isn't a great solution.

Secondly, drug users are either criminalized (very expensive) or minimally-aided to avoid immediate problems (with things like clean needles and safe spaces). Detox can be expensive and require considerable long-term support on top of personal will. There really isn't a good solution to tackle this, but there are some obvious solutions. Like a voluntary detox program where at the end you are enrolled in the military for 2-4 years. That starts to get some "indentured servitude" vibes but it is hard to find a decent way to deal with such a difficult issue.

The military doesn't want such people anymore. Most recovering addicts can't pass current physical, mental, and educational standards for recruiting. But some kind of non-military jobs program would be helpful.

I think we need to restructure tax incentives related to housing and diversify our policies and finance mechanisms related to housing.

In a nutshell, the vast majority of our policies and programs related to housing are designed to support single family detached housing designed for a nuclear family or rentals that mirror that to a large degree. We created such systems practically overnight at the end of WW2. We have fleshed it out and tweaked it since then, but the underlying assumptions and mental models have remained largely the same. Meanwhile, reality has changed and what worked for the famines that became the parents of the Baby Boomers no longer really works, yet we aren't adapting.

(Source: I was specifically studying housing and housing policy and history in hopes of becoming an urban planner when life got in the way.)

> Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area.

This is just provably false. Utah solved it's homelessness problem by just giving people homes. And it was pretty effective.

> This is just provably false

Utah is not an example that proves anything. It's a fairly unusual area when talking about this problem. Utah's entire population is less than Los Angeles.

The claim that 91% of Utah's homeless population was abated is somewhat suspicious, given the remaining 14k would mean they had a previous 155k+ - which outstrips the homeless count of most major cities (including Los Angeles). This is not as cut an dry as "make more housing" because that isn't demonstrated. Certainly not with numbers that are all over the place.

Does it make sense that they get the same number of senate seats as California?

That's why we have the house of representatives.

At the time that was the whole point -- that states like Rhode Island and Connecticut wouldn't be outvoted by states like Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Excluding CA, only texas, Florida, and NY have bigger populations than the LA metro area.

From what I have read, Utah's ability to pull that off is tied to the strong influence of the Mormon church there and its institutions. So it's probably not readily replicable in other US states.

The Mormon Church played a big role in it because that organization is involved in its community. But it's not like it only helped Mormons. Everyone was helped, regardless of religion or lack thereof.

Why can't the Utah success be replicated elsewhere? There are no religion-specific aspects to the Utah plan.

Are you implying that atheists are incapable of compassion, generosity, or the need to help their fellow man?

I didn't say it only helped Mormons.

From what I gather, the Mormon church has a very complex and well developed infrastructure for deciding who gets help, what kind of help they get, etc. This seems unlikely to be readily and easily replicable without the Mormon church. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in god. It has to do with social infrastructure.

It's a bit more than that. It's also a mindset that, yes, we really will give real money and effort to help people.

A government agency could eventually build the social infrastructure (though they might make a mess of it). But building the consensus that we're going to solve this problem, even if it costs us a lot is... difficult. As you said, probably not reproduceable elsewhere.

I'm a non-Mormon living in Utah. I don't praise the Mormon Church very often. But on this I think they have done well, to have the desire and willpower to address the issue.

Thanks.

Though, to my mind, the willpower and desire is part and parcel of what I am talking about when I say social infrastructure. That sense of community and social responsibility etc is something we tend to see closely tied to religious groups and tend to not see to that degree for, say, government run social programs.

Ah, I see. Then government almost certainly cannot create that social infrastructure. But if it already exists (Utah and Sweden, for example), then it makes it a lot easier for the government to address this kind of problem.

I wouldn't say it's well developed. It's set up to get people on their feet temporarily. That covers many cases. It's less helpful for cases where chronic issues require ongoing help. Source: former Mormon, used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership, saw the inside baseball, politics, sausage-making, etc.

From what I gather from reading stuff on the internet, it appears to be "well developed" relative to what is generally happening elsewhere. Given the state of things elsewhere, it absolutely doesn't surprise me to hear that's a low bar to meet and the perspective from inside seems less than impressive.

>former Mormon

*former Latter-day Saint

>used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership

You mean, send people to the storehouse as part of the Bishopric? It's pretty rare for people to be given money. Food from the storehouses yes, work through Church-owned companies and help via job placement services yes.

At least around here, maybe it's different in SLC.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information. I'm currently in the bishopric of a ward in South Salt Lake, and I think it's rare for a week to go by without writing checks for rent, prescriptions, or utilities. I signed two checks just yesterday.

My personal experience? Perhaps things are different in SLC but out here it's:

"Who can help bro/sis so and so" or in EQ "So and so is looking for part-time work if you know of any place" and being sent to the storehouse for food. A friend was told no financial assistance and that she should consider subletting one of the rooms in the house she rented, even though there were 3 bedrooms for her and 5 kids and then 'coincidentally' within a week after that she had family services in her house saying she had x days to get a functional refrigerator before her children would be taken (apparently that's a thing). People here will ask for help on the private FB group for the ward when they do occasionally need it.

I imagine you see more instances because you probably have a considerably larger ward. We don't even set up overflow most weeks and I'm fairly certain in 13 years I've had to share a pew less than 5 times for sacrament and even at tri-stake mid-singles firesides we have tons of empty pew space.

I was never in SLC. I was in the South and the Midwest.

With regards to referring to the Mormon church as Mormon: I will use the common reference standard as it will likely be returned to in a few years. The whole recent re-labeling is useful internally but not my business externally.[0] Not my rodeo, not my clowns.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/08/17/us/m...

Based on my experience walking down the street in Utah, I don't think they've "solved" homelessness.

Utah is pretty different.

You can’t afford to live in San Francisco on a teacher’s salary. If it were possible for all homeless people to get housing in San Francisco, does that apply for all teachers, too? For everybody making minimum wage? There just isn’t enough housing in San Francisco to provide it to everyone with a low-paying job in the area, regardless of how it is paid for, regardless of whether you overthrow capitalism and institute an all wise dictator.

Either we need to build lots more housing in San Francisco, or house the homeless somewhere else, or accept a permanent homeless underclass in San Francisco.

>Utah solved it's homelessness problem by just giving people homes. And it was pretty effective.

Utah doesn't have a climate suited to living on the streets. When you're averaging just shy of 4 feet of snow a year and 3-4 months of freezing temps it's a lot different than say Seattle or San Francisco where the average low is above freezing all year.

It's an endless money pit because if you subsidize something, you get more of it. The massive increase in subsidies for low-income single parents has resulted in a massive increase in children born into single parent families over the last 50 years.

So that means if we want to solve homelessness, we need to start taxing homeless people.

Or just stop subsidizing them. In the short term, it's more suffering for the poor, but in the long run, it's fewer people born into multi-generational poverty traps and into communities where they learn to become dependent and game government programs, because the dominant source of income is unconditional social assistance programs provided at the taxpayer's expense.

You think homeless people were predominantly born on the street to homeless parents?

No but they come from predominantly poor families, and are disproportionately represented by those raised in single parent households.

So you can provide early childhood nutrition to kids, welfare to their mom, free education for the mom, free childcare, etc, to try to improve the outcomes for children raised in these households, but one of the adverse effects of that is that the economic disincentive for having a child as a single mother is massively reduced, resulting in more children being born into single-parent families. The conservatives were absolutely right about the long term effects of welfarism, as shown by 50 years of rapidly rising rates of single parenthood.

The argument you made against the city or state solution applies equally well to the federal solution. People cross borders for housing. It takes a very strong deterrent to stop this. You can choose to help people and enforce borders, or you can choose to let people suffer and be lax about borders.

> Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area.

I thought this too, but it turns out that despite San Francisco's relatively high expenditures on homeless, only 10% of the homeless population was living out of state at the time they became homeless. (http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin...)

  only 10% of the homeless population was living out of state at the time they became homeles

That's purely from uncorroborated survey data with neither details nor verification.

A greater percentage of present-day homeless claim to have been housed in SF 10 years ago than the general non-homeless population!

Why does that surprise you? Non homeless include immigrants and exclude emigrants. People tend to immigrate to the city in their 20s and leave in their 30s.

> solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area

I agree with this idea, but i was shocked to see that San Francisco is a net-exporter of homeless people. That really points to some other root cause.

> without noticeable results.

To make an analogy, consider that hospitals dump millions of dollars, and physician hours into their trauma wards. Yet, so many of the patients in them keep dying!

Clearly, the rational thing to do is to declare that trauma treatment is a waste of time and money, and is not achieving meaningful results. We should cut physician hours, and re-allocate them to some other area of the hospital, that has a better survival rate. /s

Or, alternatively, consider all the efforts you put into testing and code reviewing your code - yet bugs still slip through to release. If all you do is count the number of bugs that make it to release, with no baseline, you may conclude that all that testing effort is not having noticeable results. We should shut down the Jenkins server, and just let any dev submit whatever we want, without any review.

The problem is that as long as you see homeless people in your city, you will think that there are no noticeable results to these programs. That the situation might be twice as bad if those programs weren't in place... Doesn't really cross the mind.

> endless money pits without noticeable results

Homelessness budgets are money pits because our first line of defense is so often the ER where the patients can cost tens of thousands of dollars per day. The patients with serious mental health or substance abuse problems also have nowhere to go after the ER...so they get stuck there for many extra days/weeks because no one will take them. Do the math and each hospital visit can easily extend past $1 million and typically are at least in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Why can't something like this work?

https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

> Trying to assist the single mother with children who lives in her car because she lost her job is a VASTLY different issue than trying to assist the drug addict sitting in an alley passed out in their own feces.

I'm not sure it is so different.

I mean it may be on the long term, but the first step of helping them is making sure they get a place to live. You're unlikely to solve any of their other problems effectively unless these people can have a start of a more regular life - and having a place to live is pretty much a condition for everything else.

> that to bulk "people without permanent housing" all under the umbrella of "homeless crisis" is not going to get us anywhere

It's interesting that you raise that point. I was technically "homeless" for about a year once, as I wasn't living in permanent accomodation, but rather in a backpackers hostel in my home country.

I was actually pretty happy with my living situation, and had no desire to move into permanent accomodation. It was also a massive advantage when I decided to quit my job and move countries, I didn't have any contracts to cancel or work my way out of. I simply handed in my notice, booked a flight, and 3 weeks later I was in a new country.

These days I'd be much more hard pressed to do that. I'm on a 1 year lease, I have a 2 year contract with my ISP, I have has gas bills, water bills, and power bills in my name, I own an entire house worth of furniture. It actually makes me a bit sad that I'm immobile, I enjoyed the freedom of the concept that I could pack up and leave at a moments notice (which I eventually did).

I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix.

Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots.

Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both.

The complexity lies in the web of incentives that make up regional and local politics. The people most negatively affected have the least clout politically. The people with the most political influence have a vested interest in ensuring housing prices don't drop. So as a result, the optimal choice for a politician isn't the optimal choice for the city as a whole. Not to mention policies like rent control that can produce a huge sort term political gain, at the expense of making drastically harder to build more housing in the future.

How can we accomplish this without being a nanny state? I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. I don't know the answer, but I think I do know why you will go to your grave without it being solved - GOP vs Dems solution to this is the exact opposite, and we are permanently stuck. We can't go full bore on either solution (both of which can probably work to some extent) but instead we're 100% deadlocked for the rest of time.

> I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place.

See them? Where? In articles? Friends?

Friends, Family and billions of articles

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-une...

Literally the only mention of a social safety net in the linked article was "fewer people working means less income and wealth — as well as long-term economic stability creating pressure on social safety nets, such as they are."

The wording implies that there is not much of a social safety net to begin with.

Can you cite some of the actual programs? My understanding is the social safety net is the weakest it's been in many decades. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my "general feeling" seems at least as valuable as your general feeling.

Unemployment insurance and temporary assistance are both that, temporary.

Social Security Disability is, I believe, considered the most widely abused program simply because there aren't many others left to abuse.

The US already acts as a nanny state for it's rich corporations.

It takes less than a whole person to supply a common western standard of living to a person living in the west. This means it takes a subset of the population to provide for the well-being of the whole.

This is why unemployment is such a problem today. The only demand for labor is for experienced, skilled labor that can innovate for capitalists to make them more money. The grunt work the average person would want done (new construction, infrastructure rennovation, etc) is wanted by people who don't have the capital to see it happen. The rest are a fraction of the population that keeps society running.

We saw in this last century an approach to 1% of the population being responsible for the farming and raising of all the food we consume. Another percent will package and transport it. Maybe another percent will prepare and cook it if not for us doing it ourselves. The number of people employed in the industries of resource extraction and power generation, power line maintenance, home construction, furniture production, and so on... many of which are skilled professions that require educations many of the displaced don't have time or money to acquire... all combined aren't even close to a quarter the population. A lot of that productivity was exported overseas as well, exacerbating the problem.

We aren't in a situation where you should look at the homeless and say "I'm so mad they aren't working because I don't have X or Y and they could make it / get it for me". You have everything you want. You can't think of anything you are willing to pay them to do with the skills they have. There is nothing for them to do anyone is willing to pay them for or invest in them to achieve.

US already is a nanny state. Can you imagine a country spending so much money on spying their own citizens? You must be confusing yourself, or surely must be joking.

I don't think it is either too challenging or too complex for politicians and people to understand, the problem is one of incentives.

Those with the resources that could be taxed and redistributed do not want to be taxed and have resources taken away from them. Since they have resources they can use some percentage of them to both influence politicians and influence other people. The people who do not have resources cannot do either of these things.

Which is pretty much what happened before Great Depression.

I mean, I think you're missing a key factor here: politicians require money to be elected. The poor (the folks most affected by these issues) don't have the money to donate. The rich (the ones you propose taxing) do. Thus, the only ones who can get elected are catering to an audience that does not want this problems solved in this way (and indeed, one could argue, does not care to have it solved at all).

Until the problem of money in politics gets fixed, your "simple" problem is largely unfixable.

In a properly-operating democracy, politicians require votes to be elected; money helps, but isn't sufficient.

The 1% may have 50% (or more) of the money, but they only have 1% of the votes. The 99% (or rather, those members of the 99% who vote as if they're in the 1%) need to exert their power at the polling booth.

You're doing a disservice to those 99% or at least those of us that do vote by assuming this is the only issue that people vote on. There's a wide range of priorities between the 0% and 99.9% on the economic scale and what goes into most peoples' decision to vote for someone is almost always nuanced even if the newspapers and tv interviews try to make it look like everyone that voted for the "wrong" candidate only voted for them because of X issue.

The 1% own the media companies which are happy to tell you what a winner looks like, and there is a general belief that voting with your heart is inferior to voting for a probable winner.

The latter problem would be solved with approval voting at least https://ncase.me/ballot/

> The 1% may have 50% (or more) of the money, but they only have 1% of the votes.

Yes, but that money also buys political votes via contributions, political influence, and affects legislation favorably towards themselves. Look at how much money Google alone spent in 2017 on lobbying ($18M). If that wasn't gaining them tremendous influence, I highly doubt they'd be doing it. Not to single Google out (they just spent more than anyone else last year)... they all do it... because they have the money to do it... and it pays off.

The 1% have a lot more influence than just their "1 vote each."

http://fortune.com/2018/01/24/google-facebook-amazon-apple-l...

Money can pay for marketing and shills to flood online forums to trick peoples voting.

Sure, makes sense. Thank you for the reply.

Where it's personally frustrating for me: I've sold two companies in my life, and saw my tax rate jump from the lowest to the highest. I'm fine with that. I did well and despite all the work I put in, I recognize the amount of good fortune that was involved - and I'm perfectly happy to give back more because it affects me less, and because it's my fair share.

I recognize that a lot of others don't feel that way, and certainly recognize the influence that money has on politics. That's sad and frustrating to me.

> I'm perfectly happy to give back more

If you really feel that way, charitable organizations can effectively distribute donations far more efficiently and effectively than any government organization has ever been able to. I suspect that if all of the people who say they feel the same way did just voluntarily donate what they considered their own fair share to charity, the homeless crisis would be mostly solved.

When it comes to stuff like housing, government regulations like zoning can stand in the way.

If we had an unfettered market perhaps cheap apartments could be built and given to the homeless by charity. In practice new housing that complies with all zoning codes, labor regulations, etc ends up costing quite a lot.

Government certainly has a role to play here even if it is just changing policies to stop driving up costs. Of course governments also have eminent domain power and other powers that private organizations can’t access.

Unfettered market? I think the word you were looking for is 'slums'.

Beats sleeping on the street. If single room occupancy hotels or flophouses hadn’t been zoned out of existence there’d be many fewer homeless in the US.

Yea, verily.

I spent nearly 6 years homeless. I'm currently in an SRO. It is like a million times better.

Do you have a source? Is that true for all charities, or just some organizations?

Social Security has been the most effective anti-poverty program in history and it has less than 1% overhead. Can any charity match that?

That's lovely sounding, but false for a couple of reasons.

1) There's a capability gap. Charities can't do a number of things that are needed that local government can. Simple things like permission to operate portable toilets, or working alongside cops for redirection away from jail it possible, are somewhere between multi-month activities outside their core-competencies to impossible for private actors.

2) The vast bulk of private charities segment their 'market' in various ways that leaves gaps. That's fine, but it isn't going to "mostly solve" the issues caused by society-wide economic failures.

3) Because the problems are so varied, coordination reaps substantial benefits. Social workers talking to cleanup crews talking to mental health talking to cops is a dynamic that your local churches are not equipped to take part in.

Kneejerk antigovernment bias is a national pastime, I know. I'll even play along when it is valid. But the idea that the Salvation Army is going to spring to the rescue is fantasy.

A few quick things - one, what evidence do you have that charities are so much better at distributing resources than governments?

Two, many people don't think rich people should be the ones choosing how we help those in need and who should qualify for that help. Popular causes will get more money, and that often times doesn't line up with what is actually needed.

Third, you seem to completely ignore the problem of collective action. Saying "why don't you just give your own money and leave everyone else alone" is not a way to accomplish things in a society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

> If you really feel that way, charitable organizations can effectively distribute donations far more efficiently and effectively than any government organization has ever been able to.

The hundreds of billions of dollars per year paid out with minimum fuss by Social Security suggest otherwise.

There's probably not a lot of outright malevolent actors out there. Just a lot of people slightly favoring things which are in their own interest. Which, we should say, is generally understood to be what's supposed to happen.

People with school age kids probably vote to approve new funding for school districts at a higher rate than people without kids. Even if the difference is only a couple percent. Is that a scandal? No. Indeed, if nobody had kids, there probably shouldn't be a school. If everybody had kids, why, a good school is an the very heart of the community.

> politicians require money to be elected.

I feel this is an easy cop out. And while money absolutely influences politics, votes get people elected. And in today's age of connectivity, there should be no reason a candidate can't overcome that money barrier if they appeal to the the wider populace.

I think the reality is more we don't want to look at ourselves as architects of the negatives we see. Like how many here dont like the current state of government and can say they are highly politically active in creating change?

Sadly I think apathy is one of the largest variables for poor government.

In this "It's actually votes that counts after all"-scenario, how would you explain the vast difference in worker rights and benefits, who surely constitutes the majority of the eligible voters, compared to West-European countries? I also think you're overestimating the "age of connectivity"-populace with regards to actual voting power.

I'd estimate the majority of active contributors to HN earn $150k+, putting them squarely in the upper percentiles of income-earners -- and definitely in the would-be-taxed bucket. Yet the sentiment expressed in the original comment is still the dominant mood here and elsewhere. The issue is not as clear-cut as "the poors want redistribution but the rich don't," Mark Benioff publicly threw his support behind the just-passed measure C, which would target a tax hike on companies like his.

Irrespective of income, nobody in SF can stand the status quo. It's not a question of whether there's a willingness to pay -- I personally wonder if anyone even has a credible plan.

$150-300k puts you squarely in the upper percentiles of income-earners, but it does not put you into the range of meaningful campaign donors that get the ear of electable politicians. From the perspective where we're talking about the influence of money on politics, $150-300k is still on the side where your opinion gets ignored because of your lack of money that you're going to spend on political influence.

If you think that only donors matter, or even that they matter most, I would wonder how you explain both local (SF) results and the current national electoral mood. Donor-emphasis has poor predictive power as a political theory, which was my point.

>>I'd estimate the majority of active contributors to HN earn $150-300k

I can't think of any meaningful way to resolve this, but I'm guessing the majority earn less than $150k...

some aspects of the political problems are definitely driven by voting blocs rather than money per se. For example, construction trade unions leverage generally block changes to simplify/de-cost the building code or the use of public money for pre-fab housing. Those are just concrete examples I'm aware of, theres probably similar dynamics in healthcare, government administration, environmental policy.

We end up no matter what fix you propose, having to fix it while the engine is running. Saying you have to fix money first is no solution. You can't fix money in politics, until you can overcome money in politics, at which point you may act to reduce the influence of money in politics.

On the hopeful side, I feel like there is a bottom enabling threshold where money is needed for a campaign, but beyond that basic level there are many modern channels for voter engagement.Those channels only now are really starting to be employed effectively by younger, newer politicians and will let us "fix the engine while it's running".

We may well find it possible to compete with big money in politics.

Some campaigns were successful on small donations and people power.

A lot more of those will be running between now and 2020.

We should have more good data once we see elected people perform in Congress.

The big question is whether they can maintain agency longer term.

It's difficult to fix housing supply because NIMBYs have so much power on local political activity. It's not just a US problem either. In Australia, Sweden, the UK, Germany, France and many other places housing is more expensive than it should be.

If you want to do something go and get active in the YIMBY movement.

https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement

NIMBY/YIMBY arguments seem just too convenient an excuse for me. It's almost if one has actively tried to find something that can plausibly explain the housing crisis but does not challenge the status quo of structural/systematic problems in any way shape or form. In Sweden the seemingly prime effect of these movements is to remove democratic influence to the benefit of construction companies, even though that only rarely is the cause of delays, and certainly not the root cause of the housing shortage.

And here's an anecdote from Sweden from the early 90s:

To get a cheap rental flat in high standard, albeit in a working class neighborhood, my parents were able to walk into the office of the municipal housing company and more or less pick a key from the wall and go take a look at it. If they liked, they got it. These were the days where the state still took an interests in providing housing to its citizens and planned, and built, accordingly. Now there's the market and a housing bubble consisting of too many expensive apartments that few can afford. To now suggest that the state should again start building cheap housing to a population where the middle-class is up to their neck in inflated mortgages is impossible. This is the real NIMBY.

I recommend you look at the economic research on the issue of zoning restrictions on housing supply:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...

I'd think it would be good manners to at least provide a summary that puts the report into the discussions context when linking to some pdf report.

Here's an excerpt from the executive summary:

>>Over the past three decades, local barriers to housing development have intensified, particularly in the high-growth metropolitan areas increasingly fueling the national economy. The accumulation of such barriers – including zoning, other land use regulations, and lengthy development approval processes – has reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to growing demand. The growing severity of undersupplied housing markets is jeopardizing housing affordability for working families, increasing income inequality by reducing less-skilled workers’ access to high-wage labor markets, and stifling GDP growth by driving labor migration away from the most productive regions.

Other relevant excerpts:

>>Researchers examining proxy measures – including the prevalence of zoning and land use cases in state courts, which correlate strongly with static indices of housing barriers and supply constraint surveys – have found that barriers to housing development increased rapidly from 1970 to 1990, and continue to increase through the present day. 2

...

>>Though popular coverage of these challenges has been most focused on the Bay Area, Seattle, and major East Coast cities, Los Angeles provides a clear illustration of the impact of the primary barrier to development – restrictive zoning. In 1960, Los Angeles was zoned to accommodate 10 million people; after decades of population growth and increased demand, the city is today zoned for only 4.3 million people.9

...

>>In just the last 10 years, the number of very low-income renters paying more than half their income for rent has increased by almost 2.5 million households, to 7.7 million nationwide, in part because barriers to housing development are limiting housing supply.11 Since 1960, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent has more than doubled from 24 percent to 49 percent.12 And over that time, real household income increased by 18 percent, but inflation adjusted rents rose by 64 percent.

...

>>A recent study noted that in theoretical models of mobility, economic research suggests our Gross Domestic Product would have been more than 10 percent higher in 2009 if workers and capital had freely moved so that the relative wage distribution remained at its 1964 level. 21 Most of this loss in wages and productivity is caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high- productivity regions, including zoning regulations and other local rules.

So to summarize, economists have observed an increase in zoning/land-use restrictions since about 1970. They attribute the rise in the proportion of income consumed by rent to these restrictions on housing supply growth.

They conclude that absent zoning and other restrictions on housing supply expansion, the US would have less income inequality and a significantly higher GDP.

Thanks. But as I suggested above, the same is happening in other countries, including mine, without these restrictions. And just as here, the report speaks of various tax and cash incentives etc, basically profit guarantees, needed to get private companies to build affordable housing. So to suggest that zoning restrictions are the core issue doesn't seem to hold water, even though I won't deny that it may increase the problem in the US.

Not sure how you can use such assured language when the very next line in your last cherry-pick about the GDP is this:

> This estimate is tentative, and would imply that some cities would see counterfactual employment increases of a significant magnitude resulting from reduced housing restrictions

Stockholm has a severe housing shortage due to government restrictions like rent control:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/19/why-stockholm-...

Zoning seems to be the biggest problem in the US. I don't know how much it contributes to housing shortages in other countries.

Sigh, so you googled up an interview with a representative from Fastighetsägarna (literally translated "The property owners") and conclude with confidence that government restrictions is the reason. These were in place during the time of my anecdote as well.

Thanks for posting that report.

You might be interested in this report by the Australian Reserve Bank about Australia's housing price problems.

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/2018/pdf/rdp2018-03....

It uses the cost calculation of zoning that was worked out by Ed Glaeser and applies it to Australia.

> I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix.

Ugh, if it was that easy it would have been done already. Look at the recent wars over the best way to run an economy. Its never that simple.

Perhaps European system is the best? Or maybe they just got wealthy by exploiting their colonies for the last few hundred years so they can afford to look after everyone for a while as their economies slowly strangle themselves into obsolescence.

Or Perhaps California should be run more like Republican states - they have far fewer homeless.

The solutions aren't obvious as you say.

Easy things aren't done quite often. It's the ease itself that is the cause of delay. "We can do it later, it won't take long." Meanwhile, the impact of not doing continues to harm the person, company, community, world. But they keep delaying because it won't be hard, when the time is right.

Well, then Portugal (not invaded twice and smashed to pieces in a century) should be richer than Belgium and Holland (blown to bits, slaughtered and battlefields in ultra war) due to all three ruthlessly exploiting their colonial properties, but suffering different misfortune in the 20th century.

And yet this is not so - oddly the liberal democracies (regardless of imperial wickedness) seem to be doing better than recent fascist kleptocracies.

This is not a co-incidence; where people are safe and can plan they create positive outcomes. Where they have no idea what is going to happen next and are exposed to bandits they keep their heads down and look after themselves.

You're right. Homelessness is just a symptom of other problems. Another key thing to understand is that 80-90% of homeless people are no longer homeless after approximately 4-8 months. In other words, the current patchwork system of public programs and non-profits work. Only 10-20% of the homeless population is chronically homeless. The most common issues are related to mental health, drug addiction, or a combination of both. imo I don't feel that individual states or cities can really solve the problem since they all tend to play the game of "let's ship this troubled person away from here". A long term solution will need to involve the federal gov. It's also hard to solve due to the stigma and lack of understanding from the public at large when it comes to mental illness.

This is what's called gridlock or lack political willpower.

While I am not an American, I'm feeling one tune constantly when I talk with American professionals in China, and it is something close to this:

"I am given a terrible choice in between between living in a sad, stagnating, dysfunctional civil state with bureaucracy and fascist tendencies, or hell, but with full-blown and well run progressive fascist bureaucracy, and which is fun to live in"

I know you may not think so, but its important to realize that your response is highly biased. Many people see this differently and personally I think the best solution is for communities to realize this is an issue and volunteer time and money to help solve it. Things like volunteering time to go teach young kids and teens to code, taking a weekend to help with habitat for humanity, at a soup kitchen or helping with a coat drive. I firmly believe it is as big a problem as it is because the average person sees it as an intractable that they cannot solve and in the city its even more pronounced because there's less of a sense of community and more of a sense of fending for oneself. We need LESS red tape to help cities develop affordable housing more quickly, INNOVATION to bring down the cost of housing (think modular housing) and a CAN DO attitude that this is a problem WE CAN fix. As JFK famously said "We choose to ... not because it is easy, but because it is hard." And that's the mentality we need. Tax and re-distribution may be PART of the answer, but not THE answer.

Inequality isn't the right measure unless you make some assumptions that have, historically, not held (e.g. fixed total amount of wealth). All you care about is that the poorest people can afford somewhere to live.

Toy example: If everyone can afford a home, and then Jeff Bezos increases his wealth by 1000x, inequality goes up but no one becomes homeless.

I'm not saying wealth inequality is meaningless, but I think making it a primary concern creates an instance of Goodhart's law.

We should measure and optimize for the the growth in wealth of the bottom X percent of citizens.

Who makes up that portion may change, but that portion will consistently be the one that needs the most help.

That seems like a better metric to me as well. Though solutions which maximize this and also increase inequality are often unpopular (e.g. free markets).

Because then people would have to confront challenges to their highly propagandized views of economics and political standards. People would have to admit that the 'free market' isn't some catch-all solution to problems and that sometimes it is the cause of problems. They would have to admit capitalism itself isn't some naturally occurring and self-maintaining phenomenon and realize how easily it can be, and is, arbitrarily manipulated by people either good or bad. They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. They would need to recognize the full extent that the concentration of power and wealth has contributed to political corruption.

Nobody wants to admit that their preconceived notions might be a bunch of bullshit they were purposefully fed, and not something they thought up and devised themselves.

What "free market" are you talking about? The US has been moving rapidly towards being a highly regulated social democracy over the last 50 years. Central economic planning by local, state and federal government has steadily replaced the right to private contract and property.

I recommend you look at the raw statistics on:

1. The absolute level of inflation adjusted social welfare spending per capita.

2. The percentage of GDP consumed by social welfare spending by the government.

3. The number of regulations in force.

Between 1960 and 2018.

It seems like the more social democracy fails, the more the alleged dominion of the free market is blamed. You would think from hearing all these laments about "neoliberalism" that we're in a free market paradise, when exactly the opposite is the case.

>>They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another.

You can start by taking your own advice.

"Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both." >> The latter only. "Reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs" will not put a single additional person in a house, however noble that goal may be. There are more people in a given area than homes, so some people don't get to live in one. You can force those people to leave, or you can build homes for them, or you can let them be homeless.

> It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found.

It's not just intuition, there's evidence to support it. I think building more housing is the quickest and more bipartisan solution, since tax and spending changes are magnets for political drama.

I understand how building more housing would improve a housing shortage.

But I don't understand how reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, while not building more housing, would improve a housing shortage!

Economics has come to explain and attack the particular problem of homelessness amongst rich areas in the late 1800's, with Henry George's Poverty and Progress.

The economic field definitely has a simple recipe to attack the root cause of this issues, but its one that, in my opinion, is politically unfeasible, as it goes mostly against the middle class, and retired people as well as the rich.

The solution is called LVT, land value tax, and its popular since adam smith, to modern day left-leaning econs like stiglitz, or right-leaning like Milton friedman.

In the late 1980s I attended a talk at a political gathering in San Francisco. The speaker asked the audience members to think about the scores of homeless people they saw walking to the event. The speaker then made a statement that I'll never forget:

"This is what a modern depression looks like."

When most people think of a Depression, the image that comes to mind is black-and-white photos of mobs of people standing in bread lines.

What if 1930s-style depressions are no longer possible? Central banks intervene in every crisis no matter how small, handing out freebies to banks and financial institutions. However, these groups can only spend so much money on themselves. A little gets spent on frivolous crap like vacations, boats, and watches, a lot gets spent on ridiculous startup ideas and other terrible speculations, and the vast majority gets parked in the stock and bond markets where it grows and grows with each new infusion of fake money.

What if modern central banking has made a repeat of the Great Depression impossible?

Consider the possibility that the US has been in the modern equivalent of a Depression since the 1980s. It doesn't feel like a Depression because most people have housing and jobs, and GDP goes up. But focusing on these metrics ignores three very annoying pieces of information:

1. wages have been flat for many years

2. inflation for essential goods/services (housing, health care, child care) has outpaces inflation year after year

3. the homeless problem just keeps getting worse

I stayed a night in LA a few weeks ago at an AirBNB in a condo in a prime location near Little Tokyo and can't stop thinking that society would be better off if this condo were owned and occupied by a family instead of being basically a for-profit hotel.

I don't know how to stop this de facto rezoning except by imposing huge taxes on housing that is not the owner's primary residence and closing all the loopholes that come along with that. This would free up more properties for people to own as a primary residence, and AirBNB users et al could still rent out rooms in their primary residence.

It doesn't solve actual homelessness, the solution for that seems to be build more housing.

This is important. I agree that taxing / mandating one house per person / family is probably the only way to reign in rent seeking.

It’s ironic considering that DTLA of all Los Angeles sub markets is the one with virtually no zoning restrictions and has some of the highest numbers of construction cranes in the nation.

But before we all go onto AirBnB rampage, have you looked at any available properties in that zip code? The schools are complete garbage (an elementary school kid was recently stabbed by a homeless drug addict), the crime rate is high, public transport is next to non-existent, and there’s feces of various origins in the plain view on the sidewalk.

Downtown LA officials have been trying to revitalize the neighborhood by expanding the convention center, permitting more hotel rooms, making business rent cheap and attracting more visitors like yourself, not pitching the neighborhood that’s adjacent to Skid Row to a suburban nuclear family with 2.2 kids.

I don’t know about the schools there, but imagine if families instead of rentals occupied the condos—I bet the schools would shape up real fast. I admittedly haven’t researched/thought about how to fix schools, but getting parents raging seems obvious to start.

School financing flows through property taxes, and they’re the same whether the property is occupied by a family, childless couple, an absentee out-of-town owner or an investor.

Schools currently enjoy 100% of the money with nowhere near 100% of load, which in theory should result in smaller classes and excellent teacher-to-student ratios.

In reality though LA Unified School District has been cutting so many sweet pension deals to the previous employees (and current retirees) that most of that money is appropriated by pension funds long before the current employees (or kids) see any of it.

Combined with decreased enrollment across the board (people intent on having kids and large families tend to move out of LA more than they move into LA) and increased life expectancy of most retirees, things are not exactly looking bright for parents considering LA Unified for their education needs.

Just read an article about it from June, what a tough problem! No amount of complaining from parents can make enough pension money appear. Thanks for writing about it.

My favourite Richard Branson quote: «Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.»

The same goes for cities. For a city, the inhabitants come first. Take care of the inhabitants, and the inhabitants will take care of business. Ensure inhabitants have a safe place to live and give them higher education, and the inhabitants will give a return on the investment.

I hang out in an area of Denver where they can’t seem to build $500,000/2,500 a mo. condos fast enough, and a couple blocks full of homeless people sleep 1/4 miles away. A coffee shop I visit at had its portapotties taken over by a homeless band who informed us they were sleeping there and we should donate. Turned out they were also smoking crack. So far it seems the city’s plan is to keep pushing them around the city - Denver is privatizing alleys, for instance. I imagine that at some point the food missions will be moved towards Sun Valley, Valverde, Commerce City, North Aurora or the like.

In Eugene it was a more intense issue. I swear the two cities have equal communities despite the populations differing by an order of magnitude. Bands of homeless people rove the streets with bicycles with trailers, collecting recycling to fund their lives at the insane meth/bicycle thievery park downtown. My girlfriend’s daughter took out the trash and said “there’s a guy in the dumpster”.

Clearly a lot of people need psychological services and job counseling - if they were in homes, they could not sustain them. Given that the US doesn’t even seem to be likely to devote proper care of our aging relatives in residential care over the next 30 years, it seems unlikely.

Living in Amsterdam, it is very rare to encounter homeless people or panhandlers. It wasn't always this way -- so I really credit the policy designers. They build these really cute social housing centers for a range of subsidized apartments -- and always include a petting zoo in the middle because, I guess, it saves money in the end. Doing nothing is way more expensive.

When I was in Amsterdam a few years ago I faced pretty aggressive panhandling / scamming; it was that fine line between panhandling and robbery. On the way from central station to my airbnb, I had someone try to follow me and get my address. Another night I had someone waiting outside of my place.

I live in Denver, Colorado and although we have a huge homeless population, I've never had a problem with them. It's mostly just people sitting around asking for money, but I've never been followed or aggressively approached like I have in European cities (Italy was awful).

For most of industrialized history in the West, poor people lived crammed in tenements and multi-family apartments where they didn't get much beyond a room. This is still the case in much of the developing world.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that spacious living spaces for everyone in every city simply isn't tenable? It worked for a couple decades, but that was a different time and these cities were different places.

Gentrification and skyrocketing rents are clearly creating a crisis in many cities that impact people who need housing most. Families, elderly, those with chronic illness, etc. They need housing, and the government should prioritize this population.

The problem is, these articles and homeless advocates never differentiate this sympathetic population from the hardcore drug users, aggressive panhandlers, and people engaged in theft and violent crime. I don't blame local neighbors from opposing shelters that attract this element. My city recently relocated a shelter to a new neighborhood and surprise surprise, street crime, used needles, prostitution, and everything you might expect from this group showing up en masse followed.

There are also lifestyle street people who enjoy the lifestyle for the freedom it offers. Do they deserve services and free apartments? They're there by choice. You can see videos all over YouTube celebrating this lifestyle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFAu5dzHq3BJvZsO58N8fXA

I was walking through Manhattan on Sunday along Broadway north of Union Square Park and I saw at least 2-3 homeless or panhandlers _per block_ along the way. I was directly asked for money a few times as well.

I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it. There is no cushion for people living on the margins of society anymore. Not here, at least. When I was a kid, my mother was able to raise three of us on her one paltry salary. Good luck doing that on several salaries now.

And as someone with a good income and two earner household, I can’t help but feel that I am one recession away from struggle. I don’t have a home my parents will leave to me in flyover country that I can retreat to if shit hits the fan.

> I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it.

What up, Astoria native (then Stuyvesant then Columbia) checking in. The current level of (visible) homelessness in NYC is nothing compared to NYC in the early 2000s, let alone the 90s. Even in the late 90s the parts of upper Manhattan I frequented had burned out car husks and people shooting up in the streets. Hell, when I was in school you couldn't walk through Morningside or Riverside park without tripping over homeless people. Manhattan is downright bucolic compared to they way it used to be. The state of things isn't perfect, now, but it is orders of magnitude better than it used to be.

"Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them."

Houston is also in Texas, which has habitable land area greater than most countries.

Toronto is kind of stuck at the moment because if we want to build more housing, we have to bulldoze the Oak Ridges Moraine, which we can’t do because it’s critical to our water supply (though conservative governments often try). So our only option, like many cities, is to build up. Which is expensive and requires expensive maintenance. Which nobody wants to pay for to give to people who are unlikely to contribute back (debatable).

Houston also doesn't have zoning laws, though having lots of land helps with that.

Houston has deed restrictions, which effectively work the same as zoning.

There is zero land available for you to live in a safe neighborhood near downtown. All new housing is located in dangerous areas. You ABSOLUTELY MUST use a car to get around unless you want to risk being assaulted, robbed, or worse.

The homeless population in Houston is out of control and has gotten worse in parts of town.

Vehicle break-ins, burglary, rapes, and armed robbery are completely out of control. The only actually safe places in the entire city are Jewish neighborhoods such as Rice Village. The police are absolutely useless and crime is VASTLY under-reported. Police hung up on me multiple times and lost my reports each time after I was a victim of a hit-and-run, burglarized vehicle three times, my apartment door was kicked in, and my apartment was burglarized. My neighbor's guns were stolen from his truck and his apartment was burglarized. He was a Houston police officer at the time. Everywhere I lived the same things happened REGULARLY. My neighbor was a wheelchair bound young woman and her door was kicked in around noon, 6 feet across the hallway from the leasing office. All of these places I mention are in gated communities. I lived in three apartments less than a mile off the tram red line over three years.

Houston is a living hell for law abiding citizens. Not only is it incredibly criminal, ALL infrastructure is CRUMBLING and there is trash literally everywhere aside from Rice Village and River Oaks. Utterly disgusting.

Police and landlords have told me: "It's just a big city, crime happens. We can't do anything about it, just have insurance." (i.e., socialize the cost of having criminals around while doing NOTHING to reduce criminality). People who think like this deserve everything they get when it backfires on them. Maybe they enjoy being repeatedly raped like a form of Stockholm Syndrome. I, for one, do not enjoy being raped of my hard work and time by criminals or living under the constant threat of my hard work, time, and life being robbed from me. If you live in Houston and don't constantly carry a fully loaded handgun, you are taking your life in your hands.

Screw that. I don't want to live in a literal hell. Such is life in Houston.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyMY2JnVUDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj3XO3HopsM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0diH5fNLYmU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gctMJhFezE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZQDwXT71_E

Any solution that doesn't involve allowing the market to make housing more affordable, and relies only of funneling taxpayer money to public housing, is doomed to be crushed under the perverse incentives it creates.

In San Francisco is equally bad. In the morning @7am you see so many people sleeping on sidewalks like sardines, it's pretty sad considering it's a rich city.

It is not only sad. It is mind-blowingly absurd and overwhelmingly inhuman.

Capitalism.

...has resulted in the lowest rate of poverty the world has ever seen.

Although certainly not a perfect system and could be improved, be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, regardless of capitalism.

Not only that, but san Francisco exported half its homeless people according to a Guardian piece about Homeless bussing.

Can you imagine the city with double the homeless?

Equally bad compared to what? As an SF resident I would argue SF has one of the worst homeless situations in the country - not necessarily in terms of overall numbers (LA/NY have more), but in terms of what I see as severe mental health issues and drug use among many (but not all) homeless people I see here.

I remember being impressed by how many apparently high-functioning homeless people I saw out near Venice in LA a few years ago. I managed to avoid Skid Row, I guess that's where you'd go to see SF-style homelessness but in a more... integrated? boxed-in? tolerated? style.

For this to exist in a city of billionaires is obscene and inexcusable.

SF is the worst I've seen in the US (granted, I only lived in SF and Boston). Saying it's "equally bad" is almost funny. In Boston, LA, NYC, homeless problem is almost nowhere near SF.

You're probably not wrong, but there are a lot fewer places for the homeless "problem" to hide in SF than in, say, LA.

That's a fair point.

SF can't even provide affordable housing for the working class. People with full time jobs.

It's a city where you need to be making >$100k/yr to even get a 1 bd apt.

Orange County, CA is not a city per se, but a runoff river trail that leads to the ocean quickly became a community of homeless. When the tent area was finally disbanded (1), here are the stats:

– 700 - 1,000 homeless

– 215 tons of trash or debris

– 1,165 pounds of hazardous waste, including human and pet feces

– 5,115 needles

– 1,000 stolen bikes (2)

(1) https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/01/see-before-and-after-p...

(2) https://www.ocregister.com/2017/11/16/a-half-loaded-gun-an-u...

100% of the public parks and ~80% of the remaining greenspace in downtown Portland has become permanent homeless camps. Anywhere there is a 5x5ft patch of grass there is a tent.

I've known a few people who might have ended up homeless, at least for a while, without their family or friend support systems. 'Society' just assumes everybody has that support I guess.

I think part of the problem is that there is a certain percentage of homeless people that are just completely irredeemable.

Anyone that’s spent some time riding on the NYC subway can attest to this. No matter how much money you throw at them, they will keep begging or acting crazy.

Short of locking them up, what do you do with those people?

Irredeemable? Have they committed some awful moral transgression? Certainly some people are chronically incapable of looking after themselves, but please avoid such prejudicial language.

I’m talking about the people who will never be functioning members of society, no matter how much support we give them (monetary or otherwise).

If you don’t understand what I mean you haven’t met enough homeless people.

I have met plenty of homeless people, and yuor objection is not responsive to the criticism I made.

> Short of locking them up, what do you do with those people?

Give them access to mental health services.

The US spends far more now on social welfare than it did in the 1950s, 60s or 70s.

Social assistance to drug addicts concentrated in neighourhoods where a disproportionate number reside, combined with reluctance to institutionalize them, or otherwise force them to stop doing drugs, creates ghettos where drug abuse predominates, that perpetuate drug use lifestyles.

From the other end, restrictions on housing construction, like zoning by-laws, and limitations on private property rights, like rent control, lead to housing scarcity, which pushes more people to the margins where they are more likely fall through the cracks.

homelessness is the societal manifestation of the lower end of the bell curve. period. anyone who's interacted with homeless people knows this. yes there are exceptions, and no they do not make up the bulk of the distribution.

putting your hand in the sand and blaming "slow wage growth" or some other secondary factor instead of pointing out the obvious is a disservice to those people. and before you call me harsh, know that I mean this in the complete opposite way: acknowledging the problem with pragmatism is the first step toward its resolution.

being a serf is the societal manifestation of the lower end of the bell curve. period. anyone who's interacted with peasants knows this. yes there are serfs who fell out of wealthy families, and no they do not make up the bulk of the distribution.

putting your hand in the sand and blaming "aggressive royal taxation" or some other secondary factor instead of pointing out the obvious is a disservice to the peasantry. and before you call me uncouth, know that I mean this in the complete opposite way: acknowledging the problem with honor is the first step towards its resolution.

not sure what point you where trying to make with this analogy. hierarchies are an emergent property of every self-assembling structure -- we all started from the same unicellular organisms after all.

A big part of the problem is the use of Revenue Management Software to set prices. This obviously ends up working like a cartel.

I note that:

-Even when nation wide vacancies were at their highest in 30 years, rental price rose.

-Even as home prices plummeted, rental price rose.

-Rent has risen 30% _nation_ wide just since 2013 so zoning an limits on building can't be the main cause.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

I've never heard of Revenue Management Software. What effect does it have exactly?

If you own some apartments, wouldn't you just check the local advertised prices and set your prices similarly, possibly also using whatever your social network of landlords can tell you?

RMS is what airlines use to price tickets and have done almost since the automated calculating computer was invented. Use of that kind of software has spread to all kinds of industries.

Large rental property management companies absolutely use RMS. You can see it in action if you go to the rental sites for a large apartment development (if you want one in real life, search for "Thorton Place Apartments" in Seattle). Every possible amenity or detail about the apartment is factored into the overall rent, including which direction it faces, floor, whether it's recently been painted, along with how many of this particular type or in this building are left over, and then your particulars like how long of a lease you want, whether you're bringing a pet[0], and even what employer you work for.

That all gets crunched and a number falls out that sometimes has a relationship to what the glossy marketing copy also had printed on it. Rents for each unit can and will vary day-by-day as apartments are rented and notices handed in.

0 - Thorton Place doesn't do it but another apartment building in Lake City absolutely does bump up the base rent by around $17 if you pick "with pet" versus "without pet," in addition to lumping in a $45 "pet rent" fee.

Yeah, I see this on cruise ship cabins now too. There are different classes, but the cabin pricing varies a decent amount within each class based on all kinds of minor factors. Midships vs forward or after, close to elevator, what's above / below you, size of balcony, adjoining room, pullout couch, obstructed view, etc, etc. Kind of annoying in that you used to be able to "get lucky", but it's more efficient in a competitive market (which cruising definitely is) to be able to select exactly what you want and only pay for that.

What it sounds like to me is better optimization of vacancy. If you can raise rent by 50% and only lose 25% of tenants, you have increased revenue while also decreasing expenses.

Exactly. And the bottom 25% become homeless.

I've worked on the most popular apartment (i.e. multi-family) price optimization software in the past. Those market prices are used in the forecasting models (they are even obtained in some cases by teams calling complexes manually and asking for prices since they are not advertised). You can't easily obtain this data on your own, because these prices are only disclosed to larger entities for aggregating, they don't advertise them much. Essentially you forecast to optimize for mid-ninety percent occupancy and factor in market comparisons (with models to determine similarity) to come up with a price combined with lease lengths. It's ruthlessly capitalistic and primitively supply and demand oriented. In fact, you can do pretty well even without neighboring market data and only paying attention to yourself.

I've watched my own software used to raise my rents often. The system works very well and makes landlords lots of money, but it is incredibly simple once you have the data.

The only way to fix the housing crisis is to build more houses. It isn't rocket science, but every conversation or debate about this issue seems to go on and on in every direction without people actually facing this fact. The same people who vote to increase taxes to fix homelessness will simultaneously vote down every new housing project. Just seems so bizarre to me.

You can build them all day long, but then you have to have people who can live in them and pay for the cost of building that house, either through mortgages or taxes to the government.

And we all know how well the public housing projects went and still go to this day...

Prices always reach their market clearing level. More housing == lower prices, when all other factors are controlled for.

We can build companies that will change minds of voters but we can't provide homes to those who can't afford them. Mind blown.

I believe a key fact that's ignored is that the cities where this is happening are the most hospitable. Above freezing all year, plenty of areas to setup camp that are protected by the city, and poor enforcement for street crimes (there's no money in jailing a homeless person unless they're committing a felony). Homelessness in Seattle is much worse than New York for a number of reasons, but the fact that camping outside in New York during winter would kill you helps work the numbers a bit too. If it's too cold to be outside, you'll opt for a homeless shelter where you're required to follow rules that inevitably help you to get back on your feet.

Just paying for housing is a surprisingly cost effective and simple solution that is empirically backed as more cost effective and better outcomes for the individuals involved in nearly every study.

Housing first, then figure out what support looks like for other issues.

You can't just throw a house at someone and expect everything to be alright. You need to give these people support to return to functioning lives. A lot of those free houses would end up trashed.

This seems like a quick and practical solution that would provide effective assistance while more nuanced factors like mental health are debated about. Why aren't more cities increasing the housing supply given the obvious benefits of doing so?

In part because building housing in places like San Francisco and NYC is incredibly expensive. Trying to house people with the least means in the most expensive corners of the planet doesn't make a lot of sense to be frank about it.

Houston may be more of a middle ground in terms of building cost and access to land.

i remember cases where some guy tried to build tiny homes for the homeless in LA and the government shut him down. I know here in another part of the county, there was some land freed up for new development but a preservation society sued to prevent development unless certain conditions were met. Less housing ending up happening as they could demolish everything. Government is getting in the way of cheap housing.

Homeless hacker chiming in. Throw away acct for pseudo anonymity. I been homeless in LA for 2 years now. Previously, I worked as a developer for 15 years. The closest I ever got to touching "success" was that one time standing before the porcelain King in the Men's Room right next to Bezos at Amazon. It's rather surreal to see where I am now and think that I once pissed into the same hole in the ground as the Richest Man on Earth. c'est la vie.

This whole article is just Liberal hand wringing bullshit. Every reply in this thread is just more Liberal Do-Gooder handing wringing bullshit. Not a single one of you here understand what it's really like to be ejected from the Economy and forced to live as a leper underneath Metropolis among the Morlocks in Tent City, and not a single one of you have a realistic idea to "solve" the problem of homelessness in society. But you'll think you know it all, and that if only your dumb idea XYZ was adopted, it would be the silver bullet to solve a pathologically non-linear societal system of thousands and millions of discontinuous variables.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair

"Homelessness" isn't a "problem" that can be solved and wrapped up with a pretty red bow because you all are Sinclair's man in the street. You all are the problem. The phenomenon of homelessness is not an effect--it's a consequence. It is not a disease in itself, it is the symptom of a much greater syndrome. How can you begin to solve a "problem" when you haven't even identified the root of the problem?

Look around you. What's happening isn't rocket brain surgery. This shit is just Malcolm X's proverbial "chickens coming home to roost." America is sick. It's dying. Your society is decaying. Your cities are slums, your economy is fake, fewer and fewer fat cat asshole thieves scheme to take bigger and bigger slices of the diminishing pie for themselves, all the while inviting in every illiterate 3rd World "Shitholer" peasant illegal immigrant to take the resources of your Native Born neighbor. Your Govt is literally being run by elderly senile cartoon characters who are too busy squabbling over WWF wrestling plot minutia while the real power--the Deep State and the Military Industrial Complex continues business as usual and is radar phased locked onto expanding more and more Wars fighting for Israel and for Tyrants of Oil Fiefdoms, damn the consequences, and damn the American boys dying for it. Your Financial Industry of empty suits only care about kicking the can and off-shoring and out sourcing every last warm body that can be replaced by a Drone in order to shave operating costs to earn their myopic bonus for inflating their revenue by .0001% and priming the pump of their stock price through even more corporate buy backs. Your economy was blown the fuck up 10 years ago, and the Federal Reserve inflated the money supply by printing tens of trillions of fiat to soak up housing and all property to prop up already outrageous astronomical prices.

Why am I and 500,000 Americans homeless while 500,000 houses sit empty across America? Oh yeah, that's right, those houses are "investment vehicles" which must be protected because muh Free Markets, and because God forbid any policies resembling a Nationalized Socialism take root in America and blow away the illusion that a self-coherent Capitalism even exists. Meanwhile, We The People are depreciating assets and "not economically viable."

Here's why. If you hate Trump, just wait until you see the next cartoon character we meme into the Presidency. You may be baffled "why is the Alt-Right smarter than us and why do they keep winning against all fake odds?" The answer has been staring you in the face the whole time. Next time, there's going to be a guy running for President and he's going to hit all of notes and promise the right things to fix everything and punish everyone who deserves it, and his name will be something like "Adolf" and me and 70 million voters are going to elect him and then maybe you'll sit down and seriously challenge your whole reality and everything you thought you knew and ask yourself "how did we end up here?"

It might make you feel better to just ignore what I'm saying by discounting it as "oh that guy is mentally ill, that's why he's homeless to begin with, just ignore the crazy man and keep being apathetic and don't try to do anything and leave it for the Govt to Do Something About It."

But don't feel bad for me. I feel bad for you. Because I have enjoyed a head start prepping for the coming systemic collapse that is going to rip America apart to its foundations and shovel dirt over the grave of our little 242 year long "Grand Experiement." I know how Extended Involuntary Urban Camping, I know how to live off canned food and the bare minimum of resources, I know how to steal water and electricity and whatever else I need, I know how to live little better than an animal with no consciousness about "next week" or "next month", because I live in the day-to-day. I have learned it's survival of the fittest. You have not. One day soon you'll wake up and your Soylent fridge will be empty, your Googley Bus won't be there, your Googleplex will be empty and picked apart by tweakers for scrap metal and everything you thought was a permanent fixture of Civilization will be gone. I'll be fine. I didn't need the majority of that shit anyways. Your mind will be blown when you see how little you truly Need to get by just to survive.

As for my future, I don't waste my time with such a luxury. Chop wood, carry water--that's Zen. I hate the entire Computing Industry by the way. Yes, you too. Why would I want to get back into the Hamster Wheel? Why would I want to rejoing being part of the problem again? Programming Blinken Light bullshit for bullshitters does not interest me in the slightest anymore. This industry has changed since I remember it in the Dotcom era. I no longer recognize it. The only "fun" I find these days in programming is in leveling up in Reverse Engineering to break as much software as I can and attack it as broadly and as devestating as possible with the explicit goal of dumping 0days to put as many of you out of business as I can and try real hard to roll Computing Inc as far back into the pre-Internet Dark Ages of the 1960's and 1970's as I can.

Not going to lie, this was genuinely thought-provoking. I'm curious about a few things though:

1. The second part of your comment makes it sound like you're homeless by choice, but the beginning makes it sound like you've just fallen on some very rough times. I'd like to hear more about your story and how you came to be where you are.

2. The middle part of your comment about Trump and what comes next really does concern me. I think we're at a crossroads right now, but I'm a lot less convinced than you that we're going to go down the wrong road. If I look back at points in America's history like the Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, etc, this doesn't seem like we're at our most dysfunctional. We managed to pass through those eras without societal collapse. Doesn't mean we will this time, but what makes you so sure we won't?

3. The final couple paragraphs of your comment remind me of what I've read of stoicism. I commend you for realizing how little of our modern creature comforts are truly necessary, and being willing to honestly weigh them against their costs, both to you and to broader society. But you seem convinced that those who currently live a more "normal" existence will be paralyzed and helpless in the event of societal collapse. Why can't they adapt if you have?

Fix the high price of housing. Expensive places push more people into homelessness. Sure, services are still needed but by fixing housing you'll make the biggest dent and do good for the most people. We need to upzone the near ring suburbs of these cities at the very minimum.

This is a very old problem. In 1879, Henry George called it the paradox of progress and poverty. Prosperity causes land values to go up, and this inevitably creates a class of winners and losers. Some of the losers can't afford rent at all.

You mean, in the bluest cities?

All dense cities are blue. When you live next to an immigrant neighbor with a radically different lifestyle, and you two become friends, you start adopting some blue political leanings. Compound that with density.

Over the past 10 years I frequently visited some suburbs near Ogden, Utah (I lived there before). 10 years ago there were no homeless panhandling anywhere outside of downtown SLC. Now, they're not only in Salt Lake City and Ogden - I see them in the tiny towns of Clinton, of West Point, outside of Walmarts in extremely red, extremely religious, extremely suburban areas. All while the state's official story is how they've "eradicated" [1] homelessness. The visual record, just driving in all these places, does not support that. It looks like what they've done is eliminate shelters, spread people out over the whole state (sometimes by force via operation Rio Grande), then introduced new "numbers" showing how great they've done.

Observing Utah is when it first began to dawn on me how national of an issue homelessness is.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles...

That is a nonsensical comment. All big cities are mostly blue, and all countryside is mostly red. That has nothing to do with this.

The majority of people in society have a herd mentality. Thinking patterns such as one adopts the social norms and never questions them. These people observe homeless, subconsciously consider them outsiders, and treat them as not part of the herd with disconnecting from the problem belonging to everyone. Nothing will change until people stop seeking to blame Government or the Rich. Everyone has to take the blame for something to get done. I personally think everyone has become sociopaths to some degree compared to previous generations when it comes to people down on their luck.

The homeless problem always gets worse when a population grows, like most problems.

Even if you hold the homeless % constant, the problem got worse.

References requested.

References? It's rather simple and obvious math.

If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of homeless people on the streets doubled.

We like to focus on per-capita figures/%ages because they can make us feel good about ourselves. Except the problems you see on the street are not constant when their incidence %age stays constant, as the population grows. For them to stay constant, the %age must shrink in proportion to the growth, which is practically impossible.

Growth applies to everything, including your problems.

Actually I was referring to the homelessness increasing as population increases.

The periods of most rapid population growth in the US were the decade of the 1810s, with a subsequent peak in the 1850s. In the 20th century, the peak decades were the 1900s and 1910s (21% each), then the 1960s (18%). Rates of growth have fallen consistently since the 1960s, with the exception of the decade of 2000 - 2009.

As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, use of the term "homelessness" took off in the 1980s, during a period of modest population growth, by historical standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...

Ok, I was not referring to the rate increasing. I am simply stating that the rate doesn't have to increase for the homeless problem to grow, because it grows in absolute numbers with the population.

To the barricades!

I fairly often comment on the topic of homelessness. I am routinely told on HN that the high cost of housing is unrelated to the rise in homelessness. This article states otherwise and I quoted it here: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c...

Some things I routinely talk about:

This country tore down up to 80 percent of SROs over the course of a couple of decades, probably because the Baby Boomers didn't need that kind of dirt cheap housing when they came of age. We never rebuilt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

The American concept of "proper housing" is rooted in the housing boom that followed soldiers coming back home from WW2 and most of our current policies, financing mechanisms, etc are rooted in that era. The default expectation was that it was housing for a nuclear family and we are still being haunted by the ghost of those expectations, though they don't really serve us well anymore for a variety of reasons.

So when people talk about the need for "affordable housing," most people seem to hear government subsidized housing, The Projects, and poverty housing. I'm not sure how to get around that. It absolutely isn't what I mean.

I mean we need to develop demographically appropriate housing, such as SROs that a single person working at Taco Bell could afford. We also need that housing to be viable without a car. The reality that you basically need a car to get around in large parts of the US and the cheapest housing typically requires a car is part of the problem here.

For most Americans, housing is their single largest expense and a car is their second largest. This is in the process of changing as Millenials give push back against such expectations, but it is still largely the norm here.

I don't know of any good terms that already exist for trying to make such distinctions. They might need to be invented.

So, first, we need a variety of housing options that effectively and appropriately serve lifestyles other than nuclear family with kids, a full time homemaker and a primary breadwinner. We currently are trying to force-fit people into such housing who don't live that way. For example, we assume that the answer for single young people is to rent a place designed for a family and then get enough roommates to fill up all the bedrooms and make the place affordable.

And this is a nightmare option for many people. Rooming with total strangers is inherently problematic.

Second, we need housing that doesn't de facto assume that you own a car and have a driver's license and all that. We need housing that serves people who don't want to have a car or who can't do that for some reason, whether cost or age or disability.

I don't really know of terms in common usage for either of those concepts. Those are some of the things I have in mind when I talk about a need for "affordable housing," but it isn't what other people hear when I say that. They hear "Craptastic slums that no one wants to live in and no one wants in their neighborhood" or they hear "socialism where we just hand people homes they can't afford" or something. And that's absolutely not what I am going for.

Maybe they should call it something more real like "Rent you can afford with two weeks of minimum wage work".

I have no idea. But I welcome suggestions, no matter how silly sounding, as a means to help me mentally sort this out. So thank you for replying.

How about "Starting wage housing"? Something that implies a financial beginning rather than a financial slump or misfortune.

I don't know why you are vilifying government housing, it is very obviously the solution. Housing initiatives have always been a target for budgetary looting by politicians looking to solidify their legacy with more glamorous and superficial endeavors, but properly managed they are the only way for affordable housing to happen in cities that are already grossly affordable even for full time workers.

The market will never fix this, either. Why should a developer spend money to build something and wait far longer (if ever) to recoup their initial investment from affordable rental rates, when they can just price right along with the market and be out of the red sooner? Real estate booms and crashes, no one wants to wait for their goose to lay its first egg a decade after the local real estate market cools off. The market always favors the most rapid turn around on investment, and in cities like SF where tech companies gladly hand 22 year olds more money than they've ever seen, the quickest and safest buck for a developer are these cheap, fast, luxury builds that can command rents at the top of the market because the units smell like new paint.

The current favorite strategy among local governments is to offer developers large tax incentives to tack on a small percentage of low income units along with the luxury build. It is hardly even a half measure, as the rest of the luxury build will surge the rest of the local real estate market. Instead of offering tax incentives to attract luxury developers, local governments should instead let the market dictate what level of luxury building will be profitable, and focus on building low income municipal housing that is properly managed, and it's budget protected from raiding. Maybe something modern, and modular such that a family unit can be cheaply reconfigured into studios as demand dictates. In my city, the downtown YMCA has low income apartments in the dozen or so floors above the recreation facilities, and it works to keep these residents off the streets and employed.

I'm not vilifying anything. I'm just saying that I don't have any convenient phrases that handily sum up the kinds of things I intend and using the phrase "affordable housing" means something to other people that I'm not intending. I keep saying "affordable housing" and it keeps going bad places and I'm realizing that it does so because it is not the right expression to communicate what I have in mind.

Doreen, question for you or others: why did homelessness explode as a problem over the 1970s and as an issue in the 1980s?

Google's Ngram Viewer isn't a perfect reference, but it does show that various mentions of "homeless", "homeless person", and "homelessness" exploded in the 1980s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homeless%2Chom...

I've previously gone through earlier references, and noted that up through the 1960s, references were frequently to persons "made homeless by" some event: a structure fire, a tornado, a hurricane, etc. It was an acute condition, not a chronic one.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+homeless&yea...

There's also a tie to economic circumstances, if you look at the trace for "homeless man" here:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homeless+perso...

"Transient" was an earlier term:

https://books.google.com/books?id=HC0iAQAAIAAJ&q=%22and+home...

That pairs fairly well with "homeless" in the Ngram viewer, though many of the references are to phenomena other than housing (lunar transits, transition matrices, arterial systems, Markov chains, etc.):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transient%2C%2...

Also "unattached"

https://books.google.com/books?id=vpUbAQAAMAAJ&q=%22and+home...

There were thought to be 50-60k homeless in New York City in 1914:

https://books.google.com/books?id=zAjTAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA29&dq=%2...

Present numbers are 63,000 through September 2018, 130,000 different homeless persons sleeping in municipal shelters over 2017:

http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-hom...

I've speculated that it might be the financial system itself, and the primacy of the role of financial asset rather than service good of real estate which plays a role -- something I find bordering in lunacy myself, though possibly worth considering:

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/eDscpi6K...

I don't actually know The Answer to your question. But:

The United States saw a decrease in single room occupancy housing during the period of 1960s and 1970s urban decay. For example, in Chicago 81% of the SRO housing stock disappeared between 1960 and 1980.[1]

My general belief is that we probably tore down SROs (and generally got rid of other low cost housing, such as boarding houses) because when the Baby Boomers came of age, they were unusually well off and didn't need dirt cheap housing of that sort. They moved from their parent's home to something relatively middle class.

Then the generations after them weren't so well off, the cheap housing we had torn down did not get replaced as need for it ramped up and this left poor people few to no viable housing options.

New housing tends to be built for wealthier people and it trickles down to the poor as it ages. I am not aware of a good means to suddenly supply large quantities of inexpensive housing once it has been destroyed. That doesn't seem to be how things get done.

I'm hoping to figure out some solutions. But I don't yet have a clear idea what they might be.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

Since this a crazy hard problem that won't be solved in a comments section, how about playing with a completely silly idea instead:

> Outlaw rental housing - force everyone to own their residence

The people we're most interested in helping are those pushed out by rising rents. Rents can't rise if they don't exist. New migrants can't drive rent up if rent doesn't exist - to the contrary, they would be increasing property value for all residents.

I'm confident we can make this work, people.

so instead of rent you pay interest, various property taxes, and hoa, maintenance, or property management. Most of which are still subject to inflation and price/wage disparity.

a better high level discussion would be how to reform the policy goal of owning housing as saving mechanism and store of personal wealth, since it can't be both a great investment for the prior generation and affordable to the next one at the same time (if wages are stagnant)

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