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> These articles keep claiming that high rents, mental illness and substance abuse are the causes of the homelessness surge.

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...)

So 'rent affordability' here means percentage of income spent on rent? Higher affordability means higher rent/income, which means rent is less affordable. This is very confusing terminology.

It is not confusing at all you've just put it backwards. High affordability means a low rent/income ratio.

It's simpler than it sounds. "Rent affordability" is rent as a % of income. Going above 22% is associated with an increase in homelessness. Going above 32% is associated with a change in the rate of increase in homelessness (ie, not only does it rise, it goes up faster than it does from 22%-31%).

Here's a graph: https://wp.zillowstatic.com/3/inflection-72aee4-1024x1024.pn...

There are plenty of places for them. Just not in the Bay Area. Leaving the bay was the best decision I’ve ever made. Second place was moving to the Bay Area from Arkansas in 2000. Get your experience and get the hell out. When I first arrived I could only afford an apartment in Pittsburg. Never Oakland and SF wasn’t even considered. Too many people boo-hooing about not being able to afford things... do something about it yourself instead of relying on the worthless city, county, and state governments to do so on your behalf.

I agree with you, up to a point. Like you, I'm perplexed by the people who claim that the Bay Area homelessness crisis exists because "there's not enough housing." Yes there is, and it's somewhere else. Often it seems we Bay Area people think this area is some magical place, and not being able to live here is somehow a violation of human rights.

But, homelessness is also a trap. Once one becomes homelessness, life changes very quickly, and it's hard to get out of it - it's almost impossible to wash off the literal and figurative stink of it and find a way out, even when one of those ways might be moving to a cheaper state.

It's not a violation of human rights, but it's definitely a symptom of failed policies. A community that copes with growth by forcing its poorest residents out is failing in its basic responsibilities. Society is supposed to provide a floor under its members instead of reverting to survival-of-the-fittest.

Not everyone wants to live in a big city. Should those type of people not be allowed to exist? They built up a city and did it so well that so many people want to live there. There has to be a way to ration the limited supply else their town becomes a big city. The best way (in many ways) is to ration housing to whoever is willing to spend the most.

Why is that the best way, or even a good way?

How is allowing current owners to assert control (via regulation) over land they don't own, to serve their own private interests, better than allowing that land to be developed for higher-density use, in the interest of a larger number people?

Society isn't obligated to protect people's investments at the expense of its least fortunate members.

I will respond to your both claims separately.

1) Why is using supply / demand the best way to set a price for a house?

2) Why should Americans be able to live and protect a town and prevent it form becoming a big city?

As for 1, because that is human nature. Any other method that goes against human nature doesn't work in large scale. In places that set a price, typically products are given to people with connection (see Soviet butcher getting their kid into a good school by giving the best cut of the meat to the teacher).

With regard to 2, this point comes down to what rights you think someone should have. I believe that a community should be able to form and develop themselves without too much government interference. Let's say that a community builds themselves under a tight bond, like the Amish. Imagine if the government wanted to create a huge homeless shelter in their community and house many previously homeless people there. That would completely disrupt their peaceful way of life. It seams logical to say that in that case it is bad what the government did. Similarly, some people building a town don't want the crime / dirtiness / corruption of big city. If a politician were to campaign that they will turn every town into a big city, I doubt that they would win.

With regard to topic 1, you're saying supply and demand should set the price in a natural way. But regulating the use of land owned by others interferes with the natural operation of supply and demand. Established homeowners create regulations to prevent developers from increasing supply to meet the demand, on land the developers have fairly purchased or can purchase on the open market.

With regard to topic 2, no community has the legal right to exclude anyone from moving there. If it makes economic sense for newcomers to arrive, they will arrive. If supply and demand were allowed to operate, homes would be built for them as they arrived. Instead the wealthiest members of the community interfere with supply, for their own benefit, and the least fortunate members of the community are evicted.

(I'm disregarding the homeless shelter in the Amish community because it's a contrived example. It's too far removed from any actual set of conflicting interests to have much bearing.)

Exactly. Large swathes of the upper midwest are depopulating. Cheap housing until those living on the coasts or desert southwest are forced to move due to climate change.

Immigrants have far less to do with this than the wealth concentration created by online aggregators like Amazon or Google. Do you think Bezos is going to pay more or encourage better working conditions if the people are white?

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.

> Do you think Bezos is going to pay more or encourage better working conditions if the people are white?

No, but if he has five times as many people competing for the same position, he won't have to pay as much to fill it.

Drug addicts are amazingly adept at lying and manipulation.

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.

To be sure, I am no great detective or even particularly smart; I'm sure people fool me every day. I used to work in substance abuse research, and your story (which I am sorry to hear) rings very true. You're right that I don't have any kind of magic vision to see who's a drug addict and who isn't, so my observations above should probably be taken with some skepticism.

> When rents get too high, normal functional humans move to another place, or take a roommate

That's ridiculous. Roommates are something for students, not for people working a full-time job.

If an adult working full time for minimum wage cannot find any housing options, the housing market is broken and needs repair.

> People are choosing a tent in the park in Oakland over working three part-time jobs and being micromanaged by an AI just to barely afford 1/7th of an apartment.

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

That argument makes no sense to me, high rents are a symptom of not enough housing, which IS the problem

That sounds like it makes perfect sense. They're all interrelated.

Proximally, they are. But all too many people point to that as the One True Cause of the homelessness surge, when it is not. The two factors I pointed out - illegal immigration and an increasingly brutal workplace - are topics that news outlets shy away from, for political and business reasons. It's infuriating.

I would take all this a step farther, in fact: the recent surge in illegal immigration is, itself, a proximal cause; that phenomenon is being now driven by climate change. But again, you don't usually hear that mentioned when people and news outlets discuss illegal immigration.

the recent surge in illegal immigration is ... now driven by climate change

I’m curious what you mean by that. According to the DHS [1], Mexico is far and away the most represented country of origin for people who have immigrated to the US illegally. Are you saying this is caused by climate change acutely affecting Mexico’s economy?

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

There was no recent surge, it peaked out in 2005 and has been declining. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2018/11/27/u-s-unauthor...

> And, we have imported tens of millions of unskilled, mostly unauthorized immigrants who are happy to take those jobs - another thing you won’t hear discussed in these articles.

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 saying that because we have so much unskilled labor supply in the country, businesses can make those jobs horrible if it improves their bottom line - that's just the nature of supply and demand.

Except, the unemployment rate is very low right now. And stats show that drug usage and mental illness rates among the homeless are rather high:

> 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...

This is the flip side of the selection bias that was affecting the previous comment. Given the resources that are being put into "addressing homelessness", the homeless are heavily incented to resort to a homeless shelter. If they stay on the streets, it's likely because they have drug-related or mental issues, thus shelters would just turn them away.

I’ve not been to a single shelter (Midwest US) where drug use and mental illness weren’t rampant. This in spite of policies attempting to keep a safe and drug-free environment.

Unemployment is a bad metric for judging whether or not that population is having trouble with work.

As a formerly homeless person, eventually we give up looking for work. We wouldn’t be counted in the top line unemployment number.

So what are you suggesting? We have the government create a lot of unproductive “make work” jobs for these people? Kick out those who want to work hard and escape poverty, but were unlucky to be born in a different country?

Create affordable housing. Universal healthcare. Basic income. Perhaps universal higher education. Actually collect taxes from the very very large companies (Apple Amazon, etc).

> Create affordable housing.

There's tons of affordable housing in the country.

> Universal healthcare.

If you show up at ER, they cannot legally refuse you healthcare. They'll bill you a lot, but since you're homeless, fortunately you'll never get it in mail.

> Basic income.

And when the basic income check gets immediately exchanged for drugs, what then? How does it help?

> Perhaps universal higher education.

That would destroy most of the value of higher education. If everyone has a degree, it makes a degree worthless: outside of some small percentage of students, higher education don't really teach anything useful, it's value is mostly in certifying that you're a kind of person who is smart enough to get admitted, and conscientious enough to jump through required hoops.

> Actually collect taxes from the very very large companies (Apple Amazon, etc).

How much do you think you'd be able to collect from them? We already pull trillions in taxes. Is everything else so much higher priority that we couldn't already shift our spending to fix this problem? Really, this is not a problem of lack of resources, though your eagerness to tax the big bad business shows where your priorities are.

I haven't suggested anything, except that the problem is much more complex than most people acknowledge, and that some causes of the problems seem to be deliberately ignored.

That being said, I would recommend universal healthcare, vouchers for free daycare for lower-income Americans, and a new omnibus of worker protections to allow more humane workplaces (sorry, Amazon and Tyson Chicken). Also, much more vigorous prosecution and sentencing of those who employ illegal immigrants.

You complain about these articles providing little to no statistics, but then you jump to personal anecdotes with no statistics, and for good measure let’s add some anti immigration sentiment as well which is also not backed by any numbers

> [...] let’s add some anti immigration sentiment [...]

They didn’t say that. They said “unauthorized immigrants”. Most people aren’t anti-immigration, but rather against unauthorized immigration.

If we’re being honest they’re the nearly the same thing given the ever increasing restrictions to legal immigration to the point where it’s starting to hurt US R&D

I'm not the New York Times, I'm n=1. I can't really generate my own statistics. And see the other person's reply about immigration vs. illegal immigration.

You don’t need to be the NY times to collect data when we have the internet. We live in the 21st century now, and not the 20th. Here’s some data on chronic homelessness:

https://www.usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/Homele...

That took me less than a minute to find, though it’s not the first source I’ve read on the subject

The recurring theme between several studies is that of the homeless, 80% are able to recover in less than a year; while 20% are chronically homeless due to mental disabilities or drug addiction

I just find it ironic that you complain about a practice that you do yourself

Interesting that you don't cite anything that shows automation and immigration are the main drivers either...

I recommend "On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane" by Emily Guendelsberger.

What are some examples of these bottom of the rung jobs you’re referring to?

Fast food. Warehouse picking. Wholesale food packing. "Attendant" style jobs. Basic landscaping.

I've done several of these in my youth - they were luxurious compared to the offerings now. Forty hours a week, no gamification, human bosses, daytime shifts, few injuries. Making the workplace like that would be an actual effort at making America great again.

Yeah it’s sad. A lot of these busy work jobs are easily automated. Really the only solution to this is a universal basic income.

Completely agree, every time this kind of articles make it to the front page I feel like there are many accounts spreading FUD here. A lot of issues in the US are blamed on mental illness

Have we considered teaching the homeless to code?

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

You're being downvoted, but there's a lot of valid social critique contained in the seemingly cruel "learn to code" meme.

I’ve seen articles about teaching prisoners to code and coal miners to code. Learning to code is being framed as a panacea for all social ills. It’s become rather comical.

> I can tell you from my experience working in homeless encampments in Oakland that most of the people living there are neither mentally ill, nor abusing drugs.

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.

homeless encampments are not shelter with an admission policy