A new database gives a sharper picture of homelessness across California
latimes.com
latimes.com
The more resources you pour into "helping the homeless," the worse the problem tends to get. You tend to magnify it.
California has seriously bad housing policies that actively push up the cost of housing. They have also underbuilt housing for decades, which is known to push up the cost of housing.
They need to be remedying that issue.
You also need to identify factors that put people at risk of homelessness and help people who have those characteristics rather than helping people based on their current lack of housing. You need to help them regardless of their housing status.
If you help people with serious problems conditional upon being homeless, you tend to entrench the problem of homelessness. It actively makes it harder to get off the street because you can't get help without first being homeless and then you may lose access to help if you get back into housing.
So good programs help people with certain problems or characteristics which put them at risk of homelessness and do so regardless of their current housing status. "Helping the homeless" is an approach that tends to be subject to the Shirky Principle: It tends to preserve the problem it is supposedly aiming to solve.
This data base is potentially of no real value in solving the problem, though it sure has terrific PR value for pretending to solve the problem.
If you really want to solve the problem, start fixing issues that push up market-rate housing to crazy high prices. And, you know, people in California don't really, seriously want that and you will be very hard pressed to get credit for "playing hero" and "helping the homeless."
I used to joke that "Someday, I will be a landlord providing affordable housing. No, I will not be celebrated as someone solving homelessness. I will be vilified in the press as a Slum Lord."
People making headlines for trying to help the homeless are people who want pats on the back for Playing Hero. And they are very much Playing.
I talked to a guy one day who was all "I have dreams of turning this entire block (of the small town where I currently live) into homeless services!" and I was like "Oh, look at the time! I have a meeting to attend! Buh-bye!"
If you really care about the people, you don't dream of growing homeless services. You dream of making society work so that few people end up homeless.
No one will call you a hero for that.
This problem perplexes me, because it seems like it's a runaway train once it gets started.
First, we tend to build really huge homes. Make it possible to build small homes and that makes it possible to increase housing supply without tanking the price of the large houses.
Second, remove some of the tax protections that make housing super cheap for people who have owned it a long time already. This is a major issue in California and it's one people aren't going to want fixed.
It is a subsidy for The Haves who got in before prices went up and intentionally locked in their low costs and pulled the ladder up behind them. Their prices are low. It's everyone else who is paying for that.
You don't have to tank the prices on real estate in California to begin remedying this. Believing you do is part of the problem.
Start bringing down administrative costs and administrative barriers to building more housing. Ease up the choke hold on the supply.
You can have both "more butter and more guns" if you help people make their lives work. It's amazingly hard to be a productive member of society while sleeping in a tend and dodging the police. Getting back into housing tends to bring costs down while improving ability to earn, etc.
Stop flushing the lives of The Have Nots down the toilet in the name of preserving wealth for the privileged few. It does not have to be a tragedy for the already privileged to dump less on the less privileged.
That one's just a matter of messaging. I think you have bigger hurdles around:
* people want to have the same type of housing as they do today, or the opportunity to buy one of those less-dense single family homes in the future. If it's expensive, they can save up - or at least dream about it. If it's replaced with apartments, the option is gone entirely. However, there's lots of low-density commercial and industrial that can be upzoned instead! But if you're demonizing the suburbs and the single-family homes, instead of the single-use strip mall, you're asking for a lot more political opposition.
* and the biggest one to me: it takes SO LONG to build projects. You need streamlined plan approval, more labor availability, and a lot of money to do things in parallel instead of sequentially. Doing things in parallel also helps with some of the short-term property value hits you might otherwise get from a slowly-changing area.
But the only way you stop the land value appreciation is if people move out of the cities and the demand evaporates. And that's more likely if homelessness continues to increase than if you start doing something about the bottom of the housing market. Otherwise, a more populous city doesn't have lower land prices - look at Manhattan, SF, LA vs the rural US.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HousingWorks/comments/l6im7f/why_do...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitizenPlanners/comments/lslfqg/mee...
People may well end up moving out of the big cities. But unless you are expecting a population crash for humanity globally, we just need more housing somewhere in the US.
I suspect California is so hard hit in part because we actively export homelessness from other states to California because the dry, temperate weather means sleeping outside isn't much of a hardship. And then there are myriad barriers to getting back into housing that help keep people long-term homeless once you are there.
It can be difficult to physically leave California on foot:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21309036
Climate:
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and...
For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...
Across the US we need to be resolving our housing issues rooted in decades of housing policy gone awry. That's one of the things that needs to happen here.
Buying a house that you plan to resell is an investment. You don't have a right to a profitable investment, especially not one appreciating at the price that they are in California.
1. We are so far from building enough to even lower the price of houses, let alone depreciate them from $3m to $800k.
2. The idea that most residents in SF have outstanding debts of $3m is just.. you need to get out in this city a little more.
3. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. If there is even a possibility that with more building, the cost of your home would go from $3m to $800k, you shouldn't be going into debt if you are planning on not living in this home for the rest of your life.
Second, I don't live in SF, I live in a different area. Inflation is an issue here too, and I am genuinely concerned about how remedies would impact not only people directly but the city and the state. If California or it's cities do bad, there are implications across the country. Telling me to "get out of the city" is a confusing statement given that I know people that have these kinds of debts.
Three sounds like an empathy problem, so we can skip that one.
It seemed for a while like SLC had found a working solution. But as I recall, they eventually dropped it. It feels like a solvable problem, but as a society we will have to come to terms with our ideas of morality, as well as the role of gov't (specifically in health care and psychiatric treatment).
https://www.zillow.com/research/homelessness-rent-affordabil...
And California is really bad at providing housing that's affordable.
They aren't often easy to see but if go into a public park, if you see blue vinyl tarps in the bushes those are often a homeless person living there. There's a few in Yoyogi park and some in Shinjuku Central park (next to Tokyo's gov HQ). Otherwise in the winter some people try to sleep in the subway stations close to closing time.
Japan does not have "free" medical support AFAIK. You have to pay into the national health insurance or otherwise pay your own medical bills. On the other hand, prices are regulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan#Internet...
Really makes me sad, kids deserve better. We can do better.
/s
What is: Based on currently available numbers, there are about 59 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.[1]. We do not have a shortage of houses, but instead a shortage of desire to house the homeless.
What makes you think we, as one of the most powerful countries in the world, cannot provide housing to the homeless?
Also, if you want to actually have a conversation about this, I would appreciate if you don't belittle my comments.
Nobody said anything about building housing for free, but we definitely could build way more housing than we currently are. Why is that ignorant?
Homesless people fall in several camps. However, why is it that homelessness is a bigger issue in CA vs NY? Likely because CA has been lax on homelessness to a degree where aimless vagabonds and drug addicts think it's acceptable. It's not. For reasons economic and ethical. Nobody wants homelessness and nobody wants to be homeless. But from the outside looking in, when you tolerate it like CA does, it seems like a lot of homeless people are content with it. Which sets a precedent that being homeless is okay in those cities.
But man, when I drive through downtown L.A. and see street after street of tents on corners down below 70-story luxury condos with gigantic "LOTS OF VACANCIES! NEW, LOW RATES!" banners... boy, does it bum me the fuck out. Surely, I think, surely a just society would see those two elements and put the puzzle pieces together.
1: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing-...
I think giving people housing is a huge part of getting them off the streets, and I think you underestimate the number of people who are homeless because you're not seeing the countless homeless people who are keeping their lives together in spite of not having a permanent address.
It depends on who you consider disadvantaged. In Berlin, 20-25% (~776k in 2018) qualify for subsidized housing. The state owns about 320k apartments, though they're mixed and provide subsidized and market-rates (mostly to finance the subsidies).
What good is money if you can’t use it to convince other people to do things for you?
Yes that's literally the point of money: a store of value and a medium of exchange.
People are homeless for different reasons. If someone just happens to be down on their luck or having financial trouble after fleeing an abusive family situation, housing seems to work fairly well. However for people with untreated mental illness and addiction, there can be problems. Especially since many of those people would actually turn down a free place to stay (as we saw recently in Echo Park). Maybe we can make more inclusive housing for the homeless that allows large pets and drug use, but the rent you see on those empty apartments is predicated on assumptions on a tenant's risk. Employees people who care about their credit score are going to have a much different risk profile than the homeless.
[1]: Called The Streets Within, part 1 here: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-15/the-stre...
However the hotel rooms have really strict rules. For example there's a curfew for a dumb reason[1], and people who get back to the hotel too late have to wait until the next day to return to their rooms. There's also limitations on how much stuff they can bring with them into the hotels (no more than 2 suitcases or shopping carts full of stuff) which if you've seen many encampments you know will be a dealbreaker for some.
[1]: The city has designated COVID screeners during the day, but when they go home it's just security guards at the hotels. However the COVID screening is just a thermometer check so they could totally just teach the security guards how to use thermometers.
I know a lot of people, myself included, who were fully employed and have rented rooms or even apartments where 2 shopping carts full of stuff would not have fitted.
Of course, it was strongly opposed by essentially all groups with any actual experience in helping homeless people, and of course, because the idea sounds good until you think about it for a few minutes, the ballot proposition passed.
We spend so much on housing criminals in essentially adult daycare to "rehabilitate" them, so why can't we come up with similar elaborate institutions to care for the homeless that have problems functioning in the society we've built around them?
They have much lower recidivism rates than the US (unlike the US prison system, which is optimized to punish and profit, those systems are optimized to reduce crime).
2) Even if they don't suddenly get their life together, that is looking at things too logically in my opinion. In my opinion, it is the moral thing to help out the needy, and that means providing housing. America's big enough to do it.
This ignores the obvious - that people who have start off with a safe place to stay end up on drugs and homeless.
When I consider what I have observed about trauma - I do basically agree that a safe place is part of the solution, but you are also looking at half a decade or more of support and recovery time in addition.
1. Give all the help possible to these people to get them back into being productive members of society. Those that stay, see next step.
2. Offer a relocation program to live, free, out in the woods. This assumes there are some people who don't want to "work", they don't see value in modern society. I think that's valid, but they can't leech off of society either.
3. Finally those that refuse to live "free", and yet still stay in crime and disease filled pools.. well, i don't trust that they are healthy, capable individuals. They need forced mental health treatment and hopeful rehabilitation, because not only is that not a healthy state of being but it's also not a cost society deserves to pay, imo.
Step 3 scares the hell out of me. So i don't like it, to be clear, because it's not really that different than incarceration. However, keep in mind this is my "ideal", and before forced rehabilitation there is very very significant help and options. #1 includes job programs, housing, food, etcetc - very heavy government program. #2 includes alternate lifestyles, allowing people to break free from the confines of modern society if that is what they're trying to achieve.
[1]: Ideal as in, is not be realistic for a variety of reasons. Getting budgets passed alone for Step1 would be a nightmare of political bikeshedding.
edit: To the downvote, please explain? It feels reactionary to be honest, because i don't think i've said anything controversial when you really think about it. Well, i suppose it's controversial to pro-homeless, if anyone is that..?
This all works well until the inevitable transition to action. These once noble creatures then cry foul and refuse the building of any potential settlements as it would decrease their property value. Since the enactment of proposition 13 transformed millions of californians into landed gentry and gilded elite, they are ardently opposed to any change that may in any way impact the hegemony of scarcity, rental profits, and the white dragon of property-as-investment.
Exhausted and vanquished, political leaders coffer the bonds toward rehab progams, expensive rental payments to the landed gentry, and motel rooms to temporarily transfer homeless from street tent to temporary edifice. once funds are depleated, the cycle begins anew.
Is the following a fair way to re-frame your statement? "This is why political decisions based on empathy should consider the long-term wellbeing of everyone involved."
But I think sometimes conservative-like ideas are unfairly labelled as incompassionate. When in reality they're intended to be more compassionate in the long run.
Don't know why more people don't see the connection between these two things when..
1. A large percentage of homeless people are addicted to drugs.
2. A popular drug was legalized in California at the exact same time homelessness exploded.
This ruling really caught every West Coast city with their pants down, because it laid bare the the fact that they had no effective strategy for managing the homelessness crisis, and were papering over the problem by using the police to harass homeless people until they moved on elsewhere. This is basically the strategy that the entire United States uses - make their lives miserable and hope they move on. Lots of people tend to move on in a western direction, until they get to the coast. Some cities are even brazen enough to buy one way Greyhound tickets for their homeless population, and they tend to send them to San Francisco, Portland and Seattle - cities that are trying to approach homelessness humanely. So essentially, the cities on the West Coast are footing the bill for the way the rest of the country treats the homeless, and being prevented from employing those same measures themselves. Add that to an explosion in housing costs, and you’ve got the mess we’re in right now.
Maybe it's to make it seem like ending homelessness is an easy fix. Just provide cheap housing.
Drive around Los Angeles and notice the tents and homeless encampments. There are square miles where it's easy to see literally hundreds of these encampments, under freeway passes, beside highways, encircling parks, etc.
I could walk outside and find at least 50, if not more, within 10 city blocks of me.
Then just do the math, 400 city blocks in a square mile, 500 square miles in Los Angeles.
divide that by 15,000 or 20,000 homeless and it's easy to see that the overwhelming homeless are out in the open.
It's tragic, and it's a hard to fix. We've been trying to provide cheap housing for homeless for decades and the truth is most don't want housing.
I've toured treatment centers in skid row, the counselors there say they struggle to get people to come inside for treatment. Most are paranoid and struggle with addiction and illness and they need to want help.
Because most homeless are unstable addicts and mentally ill. And that's a problem that can't be solved by building structures.
They need treatment facilities, rules against open encampments and jail for repeat law violations.