Homelessness rises in U.S., driven by California housing crisis

> The [Los Angeles] Times, however, found that about 67% had either a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder. Individually, substance abuse affects 46% of those living on the streets — more than three times the rate previously reported — and mental illness, including post-traumatic stress disorder, affects 51% of those living on the streets, according to the analysis.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless...

Sounds like you agree that high rents are at least somewhat to blame for homelessness.

Well, that part is redundant because if they were, they wouldn't be allowed in homeless shelters in the first place! An obvious source of selection bias.

Zillow's research group looked at the correlation between rent (as a % of income) and homelessness rate. "Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income": https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...

That's not causality, but it's not nothing. In particular, they found two inflection points: "The first threshold is 22 percent: Any uptick in a community’s rent affordability beyond 22 percent translates into more people experiencing homelessness. The second threshold is 32 percent: Any increase in rent affordability beyond 32 percent leads to a faster-rising rate of homelessness."

Obviously both rent and income affect % spent on rent, but reducing or eliminating municipalities' bans on certain housing styles is far simpler than changing the supply of jobs.

(Full paper is "Inflection points in community-level homeless rates": https://wp.zillowstatic.com/3/Inflection_Points_20181213-ee1...)

I'm not sure that's relevant. Based on your anecdote, the people in question in tent camps wouldn't be taking the jobs regardless of the immigration situation.

I’m joking of course, but I know someone’s seriously thought of this.

Responsible people don't subject their kids to life on the streets. Addicts do. I've worked in homeless shelters in DC, Denver, and even Arkansas. My mother died a homeless drug addict. She and her husband were very adept at moving from city to city, usually at the urging of social workers who would tell them what city they could move to after they had exhausted the temporary benefits of the current city. They never were willing to hold a job.

When rents get too high, normal functional humans move to another place, or take a roommate. My father had 5 kids to raise by himself when my mother bailed on us, and we had to do this.

Addicts like my mom fooled dozens of social workers into thinking they were just normal people who couldn't get work. She could keep the act up for 8 hours or even longer. But a 2 day period was all it took to see through the bullshit. I think you got fooled as well. Talk to any drug treatment specialist and they can explain to you the reality.

Temporary homeless vs chronically homeless are two different problems with 2 different causes. California is filled with chronically homeless people. If you think they want to work, you don't understand drug addicts and their generally high intelligence and ability to manipulate.

There are currently two Americas: the one inhabited by the ~10% of people who work in tech and make $150k+, and the one inhabited by everyone else. If you’re part of “everyone else,” your participation in the economy is likely in domestic service to them (Uber drivers, house cleaners, etc). If you’re complaining about immigrants taking jobs, you’re probably part of “everyone else” — immigrants are seen as a positive to folks in my social class because they’re cheap domestic labor. It’s why the GOP has supported lax immigration policy for decades.

We need to have a serious conversation as to whether food, shelter and health care should be considered human rights. Free market economics cannot solve this problem — it actually only serves to make workers more desperate so they accept shittier and shittier working conditions serving the elite in order to eat.

people upvoted it.

> When housing prices force typical households to spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent, those communities begin to experience rapid increases in homelessness.

https://endhomelessness.org/new-research-quantifies-link-hou...

California housing isn't "inefficient." The housing codes are made with the idea of keeping houses up through natural disasters and serviceable for a long time. We might modify that last provision (as Tokyo does, for example) but it comes with it's own problems.

The idea that somehow housing regulation increasing costs is the core or even a major contributor to the problem is one that requires substantial evidence.

Unless you're referring to "Californian contractors are overpaid," which seems more like a reflection of the expensive cost of living here than "inefficiency."

So people sitting in $900,000 homes are saying you know what? I'm gonna live in a tent under a bridge.

Is that what they are doing

And “rehab resort” is the biggest pile of BS I’ve read in a while.

Ignoring that, many folks of sound mind and body are homeless. They live in cars and borrowed spaces, and suffer greatly for it. All because Californians refuse to build adequate housing.

Freedom of movement also complicates things as those jurisdictions that offer the most (productive or not) are often swamped by those who became homeless elsewhere. We hear a lot about cities dumping their homeless on each other but Megabus can be as cheap as $1.50. The freedom of movement and the low cost of it does more to move the homeless around than any "clean the streets" initiative a city engages in. Homelessness will never be solved at the local level. Though local services can help address the symptoms of homelessness, no local entity has the power to address the root causes nationally.

It's not destiny, of course, but it'd be naive to assume that becoming homeless won't change the odds of someone developing a mental illness, or a drug habit to attempt to cope.

I’m okay with decriminalizing drug use but not property crime.

For every highly visible homeless person there are probably a dozen that try to keep out of sight.

And I would also point out that it's far far easier to fall into drug addiction, and for mental health issues to take over, when somebody doesn't have housing or their basic needs met.

When you lose your apartment because you can't pay rent and an unexpected expense has tapped all your money, you look to all the resources you can to survive. Maybe you start couch surfing, but eventually you exhaust all your friends. Then when you're on the street, and it's clear that you're unsafe, maybe you look to new groups to hell get by. In that setting, starting down the pa Th if heroin is far easier than when you're working long hours and struggling to make rent.

The path from working a job to ending up in a tent in a visible area doesn't happen overnight. It's a long path.

And there's a huge amount of flus of people I to and out of homelessness. The counts they do are a point in time, and don't count the much larger number of people that become homeless then figure out how to get out or get assistance.

A homeless family trying to keep their kids warm and fed is not going to risk being sucked into the prison labor racket if they can possibly avoid it.

This seems insane! $950 is huge, you could fill up a cart with 3 months worth of groceries for less than half of that amount. I'm guessing this means your average Californian has to pay much higher grocery prices in order to cover the costs of loss?

Additionally it allows for juvenile judges to have leeway in deciding if a juvenile should be tried as an adult.