A Window onto an American Nightmare
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
> In San Francisco today, people who earn less than [$82,000] a year—or a [$117,000] for a family of four—are considered low-income.
Most people outside of San Francisco would consider that a lot of money. Would a barista working at a Starbucks in the city ever earn that much? What about a public school teacher or cleaning staff? Essential services that need to be filled are worked by people who need to live somewhere.
> San Francisco officially reported 8,640 homeless residents in 2002—a peak—and almost as many in 2019 ... San Francisco spends more per capita on homelessness solutions than nearly any other U.S. city—three hundred and thirty million dollars a year.
330000000 / 8640 = 38194
> the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom in the city is now, by one estimate, about thirty-five hundred dollars
3500 * 12 = 42000
These numbers are surprisingly close. Moreover, 1) you need one apartment per family not per person 2) you can pay below median if you buy in bulk and aren't very picky 3) many homeless have jobs.
In other words, not all of the $330 million is for that 8,640 people, most of it is going toward housing people who would otherwise be homeless.
However, there's a dilemma where cities that have the best services (and climate) for people who are happy camping anywhere will attract folks who come there just to be homeless, like the subject of this story.
> He made money by hunting exotic minerals and rocks.
Did he? Or was he stealing exotic minerals and rocks from the National Parks in 48 states he camped at? (See https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/permits.htm#CP_JUMP_547... ) Shame on the New Yorker fact-checkers for not confirming where he got those minerals.
If every construction company and contractor in the entire state of CA came to SF and started building apartment buildings as fast as they could, they would still only add enough capacity to prevent rates rising, at best.
No human agency can actually bring the prices down.
He collects and analyzes historical data going back to 1948.
Punchline: "Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago."
Rent in the Bay Area has gone up 6.6% per year for sixty years.
> In conclusion
> San Francisco is an expensive city because it is an affluent city with a growing population and no easily available land for development. Sonja Trauss is right that building more housing would reduce rents of both high- and low-end apartments. Tim Redmond is right that building enough housing to make much of a dent in prices would change the visual character of most streets, although the result could be more like Barcelona than like the Hong Kong that he fears. The unsettled question is which of these is the higher priority.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
> If you want to do your own analysis, the data is all available to download on Github. Please let me know what other explanations you find for the patterns!
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/why-writers-dont-write-hea...
This coverline caused particular rage internally amongst staff: https://images.app.goo.gl/cGhZ8usRNCBqhcp49
Does anybody know about these legal challenges?
But why NYC?
An immigrant leaving New York for a cheaper COL metro is leaving all this behind for the great unknown.
One other important factor is that in New York City it is very easy to live without a car. For poor people, a car is easily an expense just as large as housing. New York City has housing cost of $1.6K a month but transportation cost of $6k a year [0]; St Louis has housing cost of $960 a month but transportation cost of $11k a year.[1]
[0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/#?focus=place&gid=16861 [1]https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?focus=place&gid=14098
Per year, as per your link.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/lgbtq-indiv...
Big cities also tend to be where you find sufficient soup kitchens and the like to not starve to death if you have absolutely nothing. Not all homeless have absolutely nothing. Many have some kind of an income, it's just not enough to support a middle class life (or even a lower class life that includes housing). But it can still be helpful to be in a big city where not everyone will know you and there are resources, etc.
There are substantial challenges to traveling while homeless. You may lack ID and this is a barrier to buying tickets on long distance travel options like buses or trains. You certainly lack money and bus tickets cost money. Many routes in the US are de facto closed to foot traffic. If you have no car, no driver's license, no money for tickets or no ID, going anywhere else is hugely challenging.
Most people who are homeless are disabled in some manner. They have health issues or they are mentally ill or they are ADHD, etc. This makes getting any kind of job hard. It can make just getting through the day hard.
I walked and caught rides while homeless and traveled from Georgia to California. Previous comment by me about some of the challenges of trying to walk anywhere in the US:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21309036
I run several blogs about homelessness or related resources aimed at trying to help the homeless survive and get their lives back. You should be able to find all of them via Street Life Solutions (linked above).
I don't know if you've never faced homelessness, but it gets worse the longer you're homeless in many ways. There are no creative solutions from outsiders that wouldn't occur to the homeless, just resources the haves will not share with the have-nots. Homeless people don't need ideas, they need free money, liberty, and agency. All of which aren't offered at the tip of the tongue, but with the offering of funding.
SF and NYC would be better off finding those cheaper cities that need workers and showing them how to run services for the homeless. They might also want to connect the marginally homeless with these cities early.
That said, I doubt there's much work for the SF homeless. Between addiction and mental health problems, most aren't employable.
The only statistics that should be trusted are ones that have verifiable records proving the historical residency of homeless populations. Everything else is easily manipulable and not trustworthy.
This is at the very best a conspiracy theory. Poll takers intentionally trying to get the wrong answers to garner political support? And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?
Such claims require at least some substantiation. Is there anybody who is willing to put their real name out there that has observed this?
My personal experience, in Santa Cruz, does not match what you claim. There was a recent vicious attack by a homeless person, and the police found the attacker hiding in his mother's house in town.
At least where I live, I've heard a lot of conspiracy theories, many now openly discussed and not just in whispers, of a "homeless-industrial complex" where people are supposedly making bank on faux solutions to homelessness and non-profit providers are just funneling money off to the wealthy people who run the non-profits and leaving clients and volunteers hung out to dry.
As an occasional volunteer for some of those groups, I do not see this. Granted, I may not be anywhere as involved in Deep Homelessness as I might need to be in order to pull back the veil and expose the bitter truth. From my point of view, I see a shitload of people who have been dealt a terrible hand. a lot of them were people who were doing just fine before, maybe not great but were getting by and then a life event happened that, sure, from our perspectives on HN of most of us making in the low six figures to start, would have seen coming and could have planned for. But, for whatever reason, these people didn't and damn, once you fall out of "normal society," climbing back in is hard. as. fuck.
One person I helped was technically literate--we set up Yubikey auth for his Google account, for goodness sake--and had no vices besides posting up at the library to play Clash of Clans on his aging Android phone. But it still took an inordinate amount of time to get together all of the identity and proofing documents he needed to get an ID to go onto a military base to take a specialty job. In one case, he only got one of the documents because he knew a notary (me) and could have a form sworn to and stamped in under a day at no cost.
I don't think people truly appreciate just how fragile modern life is if they've never fallen out of it.
That has garnered budgets in the hundreds of millions a year in several cities as well as allowance to have permanent camps, open drug abuse, littering, and environmental damage. That is, it has got them protection from the laws everyone else (such as law abiding taxpayers) are subject to.
As for substantiation - many people have had the anecdotal experience of running into homeless and discovering that they moved to SF, Portland, or Seattle with no plan and no means to support themselves. When the claimed data consistently disagrees with anecdotal experience, it points to something wrong with the process. I’m not the only one to speculate they are being coached.
In Seattle for example, they are organized enough to attend every relevant city council meeting and shout down any opposing views to expanding funding for various organizations that supposedly provide services to the homeless but have largely achieved nothing except spreading blight across the city. These organizations and their staff is what people refer to as the homeless-industrial complex. Their entire careers and livelihoods are based on drawing salaries from this process.
Obvious I don’t have strong evidence of such coaching (like on a video tape). But it is unreasonable to expect that I would, and it doesn’t invalidate my perspective. Clearly having no strong verification of identity is a major gap in these surveys. There is no reason for anyone to take that data at face value. We should assume everyone is not a long time local resident unless they can prove otherwise. Right now, taxpayers are being fleeced and are subsidizing the nomadic lifestyles of these populations in many cities.
Politically, this is almost impossible to do. When programs have provided funding to help people move to areas where they have support from friends or family, or to match up with jobs they could do but can't get to, the outcry is near-universal: "You're shoving your problems off onto the rest of the country! We don't want your cast-offs!" For good measure, they'll throw in using "liberal" or "freeloader" or "welfare" as an expletive.
The reverse--providing transportation to cities like San Francisco or Portland or Seattle, where the local community has decided to provide more services--is seen as far less politically unpopular, though doesn't happen very often but when it does, is seen as a good thing by the sending communities. "Well, they have the money to deal with it; we don't." "They like being 'Freeattle' so let them." As if there is some political motivation to being good humans to other humans.
Of course it's not anywhere near as stark contrast as my words seem like they imply; there's a whole lot of nuance and general bickering about what should/could/can be done. But if trying to be an advocate for housing and helping people out of these kinds of situations has taught me anything, people can be extremely petty about outcomes that seem like someone "undeserving" is "getting something" for "free."
> Finding a job, as a classroom aide for special-needs students, was easy. But she struggled to find an affordable apartment. When I met D., her days began at 6 A.M., on a mat on a shelter floor. She dropped her son off at fifth grade, then went to her classroom to teach.
I just don't see a way to blame a story like that on "we attract more homeless people than other cities." The problem is your houses cost too much. Whatever the policy solution for that ends up being -- building more apartments and reforming zoning laws, or de-gentrifying neighborhoods, or rent control, or minimum wage increases, or whatever economic theories people come up with -- the individual strategy doesn't change the core problem.
The core problem is that if teaching assistants can't afford apartments, the economic math is never going to work out for SF. You are always going to have a high population of homeless people if low-income essential workers can't afford a place to live. No other fix is ever going to change that.
> D., the special-needs instructor, also college-educated and fully employed, told me, “Someone housed today, unless they’re making eighty thousand dollars a year, could be homeless tomorrow. That’s the bottom line.”
Again, I'm an outside observer here, I don't know what I'm talking about. But as an outside observer, that quote doesn't sound to me like "our social services are too good, so we get too many freeloaders." It sounds like, "we #$%!@ed up our economy and we don't know how to fix it."
:) In related news, Nintendo Switch scalpers really do want everybody to be able to get a Switch, just as long as increasing production doesn't affect any of the prices they can charge in Ebay auctions.
In my experience from that time, mostly spent around Seattle, that roughly 2/3's of the people you see on the streets have some kind of physical, mental or emotional problems that prevent them from navigating modern civilization.
(As an aside I don't think most folks in it have a good idea just how challenging modern society can be. The street is sort of like a time machine in that living there is like going back in time two or three centuries. There are a lot of inconveniences but life is fundamentally simpler if all you have to worry about each day is that day's food and a place to crash that night. That's why I support a safety net. Not welfare in the sense of ongoing payments forever but a way to catch and support people when they stumble, to help them back to a normal life. Related to that, there's a guy who has sat in front of University district Safeway for twenty years selling "Street Sheet". To me selling Streetsheet isn't meant to be a lifetime job. If dude had put a dollar a day in a saving account with compound interest he would be ready to retire soon. That's the kind of thing I mean about helping people use civilization's API.)
Of the remaining 1/3 or so you have a mix of e.g. punk rock anti-society types, hippies, nomads, runaway kids(!), and drifters. In other words, folks who either want to be there or have no better option.
There are very few people who have their act together and live on the street because it's actually pretty easy to get off the street if you have a good attitude and are willing to work.
The answer to the OP's question is simply that people who can move to another city and get a job do that and so aren't homeless anymore.
This is plainly wrong. Saving $1 per day, at 7% interest, would net about $15,000 after 20 years.
See for yourself: https://financialmentor.com/calculator/compound-interest-cal...
Again, I don't know why people think the city of San Francisco wants to kill their homeless population. Their policies favor the homeless population over the safety of families that live in neighborhoods other than the Marina, Pacific Heights, and North Beach.
At market rates. That's expensive. $1M per lot expensive.
> rezone the properties for multifamily dwellings and either auction them off...
Expect those single-family homeowners to sue because the land as clearly worth more than the city paid, they just gamed the system.
> the city could clear out lots of under-assessed junk
The taxes were too low, the buildings are often junk, but the assessments are correct.
> even the owners who get bought out in the ED proceeding will get a huge paycheck
Again, the paycheck is too low unless you making the zoning change before a new appraisal. ED isn't really needed for this; you just need to rezone areas and actually allow building, but SF does neither.
Your reply also had ~nothing to do with property to house the homeless in the short-term. This is how you build housing projects.
On track, but the process you describe is overcomplicated. The whole process can be collapsed to "SF needs to upzone most of the city".
Land zoned for multifamily dwellings is worth a lot more than land zoned for single family dwellings, so the owners would have reasonable grounds to sue if the city used eminent domain to seize their property under single family zoning with plans to upzone to multifamily zoning. They would probably win and be entitled to fair compensation for assessed value as of the later zoning. So if the city were going to pursue this route it would need the upzoning first, which the city has always been able to do and has refused to do anyway.
I've done the same, to an extent - but if I ended up homeless at any point I would not have expected society to pay for my continued foolishness.
There's no doubt that welfare in some form is ideal for a modern society, but people should recognize that willingness to work is tied to desire for survival/comfort and willingness to work for most people decreases as the welfare floor increases.
Forcing someone to work for those who do not contribute to society is theft. There is no reason to believe that the average person will commit to pursuits beneficial for the collective if his needs are guaranteed to be met regardless of his willingness or ability to participate.
This is a terrible way to think about a functioning society. Taxes are not theft, and we absolutely should be supporting those who do not 'contribute to society'.
What about folks with mental illnesses, physical impairments, advanced age, pregnancy, recovering from injuries, drug/alcohol addiction, or any other number of reasons why someone might need to have us all cover for them? Why is it any different in this case?
Drug and alcohol addition are definitely not in the same group as the rest.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "gee, I'd really like to introduce a high-cost, crippling dependency in my life." Understanding that and treating drug abuse like a physical/social disease has turned out to be a surprisingly effective social policy.
It's not clear to me why addicted people should be treated differently than anyone else in any other challenging situation. Certainly once someone is addicted to a drug, there are obvious biological forces preventing them from quitting cold-turkey.
They don't, yet they "drink casually" or "do drugs casually". There's a reason certain religions ban intoxicating substances. Alas, people like to play with fire, then things go wrong, yet society still thinks that it's ok to keep marketing those dangerous substances. If society actually wants to fix the issue, there is a solution, but it doesn't sit well with the greedy and foolish.
You say yourself:
> yet society still thinks that it's ok to keep marketing those dangerous substances
If you're acknowledging that society is pushing people into drugs, doesn't it kind of make sense to hold society responsible for getting them out?
----
But even ignoring the causes of addiction, your suggestion that we ban alcohol/drugs also doesn't have anything to do with whether we should help people who are physically addicted now.
Okay, cool, let's ban heroin. It already is illegal, but whatever. We'll super-ban it. Even after the super-ban, we're still going to need to help the people who are addicted right now -- people who are suffering from both a biological and psychological dependency that is outside of their control to fix on their own.
> people like to play with fire
If you ride your bike without a helmet and accidentally suffer a brain injury, should society help you, even though you ignored safety advice? If you get distracted in your car and crash, should society help you, even though you weren't paying attention? Is your position that only people with birth defects have a legitimate claim to support/grace?
When I was a young kid, my brother and I use to go out in the woods and pretend sword fight with sticks, even though our parents told us this was a stupid, dangerous thing to do. We got lucky, nothing ever happened. But if one of us had accidentally stabbed an eye out, would we have been entitled to any kind of social support?
I still don't see anything that would make a drug addiction different from those scenarios.
I indirectly mentioned that in my post. There is a solution to this problem, but it doesn't sit well with the foolish and the greedy. There is a vested interest that it doesn't get solved.
> Okay, cool, let's ban heroin. It already is illegal, but whatever. We'll super-ban it.
Should also add alcohol to the list.
> I still don't see anything that would make a drug addiction different from those scenarios.
It's very different. In the activities you mentioned, there is a positive outcome involved, or it is a natural part of growing up (kids do stupid things, but that's where the role of the parents come in). Whereas in doing drugs and alcohol, the risk/benefit ratios are so skewed, it's irrational to engage in them in the first place.
You keep on kind of dancing around this "but they deserve it" argument. But who cares if they deserve it? They're not going to go away until someone else helps them. You can't just pass a law that people will stop being addicted to alcohol, that's not how biology works. How people got into a situation where they can't help themselves doesn't matter. They're still in a position where they can't fix their own problems.
And on moralization, to go back to your own point:
> There is a vested interest that it doesn't get solved.
Do you have a plan to get rid of that vested interest? How long is that plan going to take to implement? A year? Two years? Should we just let addicts die on the street until you get around to getting elected to Congress?
If society is at least partially (and arguably largely) to blame for these people's addictions, and if changing society is a difficult, long-term process that requires battling multiple vested interests, then why is it unethical for us to use social resources like taxes in the meantime to help people that society is hurting?
You can't have this both ways. You can't argue that society is obsessed with drugs and that's why we have addiction, while simultaneously arguing that every addicted person is specifically getting what they deserve and isn't worthy of our help.
> It's very different. There is a positive outcome involved, or it is a natural part of growing up
There's a positive outcome involved in glancing at a phone while driving? Riding a bicycle without a helmet is a natural part of growing up?
I strongly agree that kids often do stupid things. Trying drugs and alcohol is one of those stupid things. And to be honest, comparatively, riding a bicycle without a helmet is way more stupid and way more irrational than accidentally getting peer-pressured by a drug-obsessed society into a debilitating addiction.
I don't see a difference here except that one of those activities is being labeled as harmless stupidity, and one of them is being labeled as a moral failing.
Getting addicted to painkillers coming out of surgeries with badly dosed prescriptions is still a common worry for many people. I have friends that refuse to take any painkillers in a hospital specifically because they're frightened of that exact scenario. The best case scenario for people who get addicted to painkillers is for them to get 3rd-party help before they become addicted to more serious drugs. It's absurd to me to argue that their problems were caused by them being stupid or immoral, when I can directly see the role that doctors and the medical industry played in their addictions. Are those people worthy of getting help from society?