LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month
npr.org
npr.org
In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will be homeless for less than 12 months, they are likely employed while they are homeless at least in a part time capacity, or they are in college. These folks generally refuse to get services and spend their time sleeping in their car, crashing on friends couches, and in a pinch, sleeping in tents outside away from the wild areas. In general, these people are on hard times due to bad luck more or less, and are struggling to get out of it.
Another 1/3 of the homeless are people who used to be in the prior group, but are now "chronically homeless". They may have gotten into drugs or developed a mental issue in the first 12 months that they became homeless. These people are the "out of their minds" camp dwellers we think about when we think about the homeless. The biggest risk factor for being in this group is becoming homeless in the first place, and the best way to prevent people from becoming transiently homeless is to prevent them from losing their stable housing or getting them into stable housing within the first 12 months of them becoming homeless. It is much harder to "rehabilitate" someone who has been homeless for 12+ months than it is to rehabilitate someone who has been homeless for <12 months.
One issue we have now is that is very easy for people to move from "safely housed" to "transiently homeless" and one big way to prevent this downward trend in quality of life is to build more cheap housing so people in the precarious spot have alternatives to living in a tent. Its not going to be an immediate feedback loop but its the only sustainable way to prevent the growing numbers of homeless in US cities.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-cal-state-homeless...
https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/upload...
Ie. "Here's $50. Go and buy me some ice cream. You can have another $50 when you bring it to me".
It discourages begging and encourages an entrepreneur mentality.
Why does your goal have to include putting them in some weird spot where youre holding power over them to teach some "entrepreneur mentality". Most of the temporarily homeless population is embarrassed to ask for money, just treat them like an adult if youre going to offer help.
Take a quick peek at Maslow's hierarchy of needs please and map both their situation and what you're asking of them.
It's similar to how there is a disconnect in how people talk about "mass shootings" and what the public think that means. The public thinks of a mass shooting as what the FBI calls an "active shooter" event, where someone is just opening fire on random people, while in stats and things it's just any shooting where 3+ people get shot, which can include gangland-style violence. People aren't "confused", we're just using two different definitions.
My point is of course not that the transient homeless don't need help or anything like that. It's just strange to bring them into it when presumably they are not a large percentage of the "habitually living in tents" homeless, which should of course be handled differently.
One pedantic quibble. It's not necessary to build cheap housing specifically. It's perfectly fine simply to build more housing of any type. Today's new expensive housing will indirectly create more cheap housing in the pre-existing housing stock, by pulling demand out of the market.
Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing. The rich prefer to live in new housing stock, and the poor prefer to get discounts on old housing stock. The same way that a robust new car market creates a secondary market for cheap used cars.
A lot of people with good intentions will try to block any type of development that doesn't specifically include affordable housing. But this is the exact opposite of what's needed. The best way to lower the cost of housing is to increase the supply of housing. And the best way to do that is to unleash developers whatever is most profitable whenever and whoever they want without government regulation and NIMBY activists getting in their way.
We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.
Someone who studied this in Toronto by overlaying nighttime photos to find units where the lights are literally never on: https://www.movesmartly.com/articles/condo-units-sitting-emp...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/musne8/dispro...
https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2021/02/real-esta...
This is just another symptom of the major lack of housing in the US, and needs to be solved as well, but it highlights how difficult it is to alleviate homelessness when there are other casualties of the housing market as well. By all means, build as much housing as soon as possible, but some of it will probably need to be specifically targeted at homeless or poorer populations.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
price = F(supply, demand) therefore demand = G(price, supply) and supply = H(price, demand)
Still, we need to remove barriers that prevent middle-class housing from being built, such as parking minimums and other bureaucracy.
San Francisco has ~400k housing units. If you build a million more, prices will go down very sharply.
When there is more housing units than people who want to live there, prices go towards zero, whether they're "luxury" or not.
I mean the idea is correct, but I don't think we can depend on the private market to deliver on this concept.
Don't get me wrong SF badly needs more housing and needs to approve tons more, I'm just saying there are limits to the outcome. At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.
Now if we had a not for profit government agency that steadily built housing regardless of the market conditions, say they were working toward a vacancy rate goal, now that could create surplus housing.
You might see friction there though in the private market would pull back.
Most people understands it does it if you add a million units, but for some reason they can't grasp that each new unit contributes.
I was not predicting anyone would build a million units overnight, certainly not accidentally.
> At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.
SF has been very near this point for decades. Because new construction is mostly illegal, and if not extremely expensive and slow. Because of explicit policy from the SF BoS.
If housing construction were legalized in SF, say by adopting the regulations of Houston or Tokyo, there would be an enormous construction wave in the city. No one can predict to what level, but after that has transformed the city we can take stock and see if any other measures need to taken.
But I don't see SF doing anything of the kind without at least a decade of hesitation. The city is far too conservative to change.
Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation.
Also, all the actual luxury housing that ends up being built is bought by wealthy investors buying their third or fourth property. Just look at the housing market in London.
> Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing.
Eichlers and Craftsman homes were targeted squarely at the middle class of their time. Now in the Bay Area, the price of a "middle class" home is probably skewed to something around $1,000/sqft, but I don't know if middle class wages can actually afford that.
[0] - https://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-affor...
What data are you basing this claim off of? Many people (especially young people in finance and tech) move every few years, and some of them want luxury apartments. That reduces the demand for cheaper housing stock. A 25 y/o moving to SF isn't going to buy an apartment and stay there for their entire life.
And no, “all” the luxury housing is not being bought by investors. Even in places where this is a problem it is nowhere near “all”. Investors can also just buy existing housing. Once again, what you anti-housing folks are claiming as a problem of building new housing, is a problem that is going to happen anyway and will be even worse if we don’t build new housing.
People living a $1mil shithole aren't going to be moving into a $2mil luxury home. You need to find the buyer that can afford a $2mil luxury house. This is why the problem takes so long to work out. Prices are inflated, and luxury homes will be inflated even more - the people that would normally buy them aren't going to be able to move and afford them. Combine this with how people can just sit on homes rather than sell them, it's gonna take a real long time for prices to make their way down.
Anecdote time
I’m nowhere near rich, but we recently upgraded from a condo to a house and kept our condo. Our intention is to rent it out until our kid is old enough to move out and give it to them.
This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. I'm genuinely curious as I've never been to LA or spent significant time in parts of the US where this problem is at its worse. I live in the midwest and there are plenty of places I could buy or rent here if I needed - cheap and expensive - but I'm lucky enough to have a decent place now so I can be picky about the next one.
It can be hard to immediately see that there is a shortage of something like housing, because it’s rare that people will actually end up without housing because there isn’t enough to go around. But this is because people will rationally choose to live further and further from their jobs and commute longer and longer distances as the shortage drives prices up near their workplace, rather than choosing to go without housing.
Luckily, I haven't had to move in a while, but it was bad enough that when I got my place, I signed for it purely based on the opinion of a friend who could go see it for me. If I had waited the extra week to come home from the trip I was on, it almost certainly would not have been vacant.
Only if people actually live in those houses, and they're bought by people living in the cheaper houses right now who then move up in to the new housing stock.
If people buy the new houses as investments and leave them empty most of the year then it has no impact on the rest of the housing market, or if people from outside buy them and move to the city then it just increases the population of the city with no effect on the lower social strata. This is precisely what happens in places like London. There's a boom in house building but it's often apartments bought by foreign investors (allegedly for money laundering... ).
Directly building more social housing would have a far greater impact than trying to affect cheap housing stock by 'trickle down' methods.
"Wealth investment leaves an estimated 125,000 homes in London without anyone living in them."
There are 268,385 empty homes in England according to the government (people get a tax break in most parts of England if they own a property that is unoccupied and unfurnished so its quite easy to track empty homes), and half of them are luxury houses in London.
I'm not saying that's definitely the case everywhere, but I am saying it's worth considering.
If the economy cannot consume all the products the suppliers produce you need to encourage consumption.
If you perfectly hit the balance (unlikely but in theory possible) then you need to do... nothing, neither savings nor consumption increases.
It depends on what your economy needs.
Also, the report doesn't tell us how many non-vacant homes there are in their survey area, so we have to guess. London reportedly has 3.59 million dwellings, so 25,000 vacant homes would only represent 0.7% of homes being vacant. Even if you use the higher 125,000 number, that's still only 3.5% of all homes. That's a fairly low vacancy rate, and about right for a city.
Even after the pandemic, housing officials report a 3.4% vacancy rate, which is the highest in eight years. https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/london-apartment-vacancy.... Before that, it was only at 1.8%. That's extremely low.
You can tax vacant homes, but in general, those taxes have a very small effect on housing prices. It's far, far more effective to allow people to build more housing, including luxury housing.
Manhattan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/american-h...
Seattle https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/luxury-apartments-whos-bu...
Melbourne https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ghost-tower-warn...
Boston https://bostonagentmagazine.com/2018/09/11/study-bostons-new...
Vancouver: The article claims that there is ~5% vacancy rate. This is actually below the normal rate for vacancies in the US. Condos have a higher vacancy rate, but the article offers a reasonable explanation.
Manhattan: Ultra-luxury home vacancies aren't the same as luxury apartment buildings. Most people are not buying $5-$10 million condos. And even if the buildings are unsold, they aren't necessarily unoccupied.
Seattle: Again focuses on "foreign investors" and unsold apartments. No concrete data on how many those apartments are actually empty.
Melbourne: > Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald said, based on the water data, Melbourne's actual vacancy rate was closer to 7 per cent.
7% is on the high-end of vacancy rates, but if you reduced that down to 5% then the effect on prices would still be low.
Boston: No data on vacancy rates. Again, sale != occupancy. There are plenty of property management companies that build out luxury apartment buildings and directly rent to people.
The real issue is lack of housing, which can be fixed by letting developers build more housing, including high-end housing.
The Manhattan article links to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad... which says "Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015... remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts" and "7,050 new condo units available for sale in Manhattan in January [2020]"
Melbourne: "Docklands... 17 per cent consuming no water in 2013" and "12.4 per cent of Cardinia and Clyde homes reported no water use."
Boston: "12 of Boston’s newest and biggest luxury developments could remain largely empty despite having sold most of their available condo units to buyers."
Manhattan: Unsold != unoccupied.
Melbourne: Now we're cherrypicking districts that have less than 15,000 residents total in a city of 5 million in one specific year? This is essentially p-hacking to support a non-existent narrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinia,_Victoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde,_Victoria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands,_Victoria
Boston: "could remain largely empty." This is speculation. Where is the data?
I do see your point about foreign investors though, they will view the house as a bank account, one that won't lose money, and will probably appreciate, and is safe from the corruption (or corruption investigations) of their home country. And they have money they need to put somewhere, so why not there?
But even they would probably prefer someone to be living in it and paying them in the meantime, because that improves the return by a lot, and doesn't put the principal at risk.
About once every 2 weeks his son pops by to make sure the house has not burned down or had a pipe burst.
Currently living in zone 2 north-east London and house prices have seemed pretty flat for the last couple of years. Flats have had a surge due to current stamp duty holiday... and prices outside London seem to have increased a lot with people anticipating a permanent move to remote/hybrid working.
Taxes on empty properties aren't high, but you still need to consider maintenance... and there's an opportunity cost of leaving a house empty rather than renting it out.
Just interested in your data - thanks!
Update: found https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/pretty-vacant in one of your sibling posts - was that what you were referring to? I just read it (on my phone, so might have missed it), but didn't see any numbers for investment returns here... and there was a fairly-extensive section talking about London property being used for money-laundering instead - is that what you're referring to?
I don’t know the details as I'm a renter but from speaking with a few Realtors they mentioned the companies the worked at did this.
Let's also not forget the housing crisis saw a lot of money pouring into bad investments. Assuming people only make wise investments is naive. The market is crazy right now with people paying over asking and waiving inspections. A lot of people are going to ride that train over the cliff.
Those returns are underwritten by voters rejecting new housing. If that political landscape changes, the incentives for landholders evolve.
Political NIMBYism probably does play some part along with the pandemic, but again, that doesn't mean these investors are paying attention to that. There is a gold rush on at the moment.
Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock.
Why can't you do the same trick with existing housing?
Where I live the housing prices are expected to go up roughly 15% this year. So someone buying a house for 600k can expect to sell it for 690k making 90k. That is 7500 USD a month. If you wanted to make that much money from rent you would have to squeeze 4 or 5 tenants into the property. It is simply not worth the hassle trying to rent buildings out when house prices go up at such a high rate
Make $7500/month from house value increase, and also, say, $4k from rent.
This increases the resale value since the house is generating income to the buyer.
It's not either/or, which is why I'd assume the parent poster called it weird. That investor could make the appreciation and of top of it could make the rental income. So it is weird, from their perspective, to leave it empty. If they're flipping real estate for profit (as opposed to buying a home to live) why reject the extra income.
Also, selling a rental property with a solid history of rental income tends to be better than one with a history of sitting empty. Although that probably doesn't apply to mansions.
Fortunately, this is already a metric that is tracked, called the vacancy rate. And what we see is, that in in-demand cities, that have high rents, the vacancy rate is pretty low.
So, if the vacancy rate is 5%, that means that if you build 100 houses, then 95 of them are going to be lived in. Yes, it sucks that those other 5 houses are not lived in, but those extra 95 houses, in our example, are still a good thing.
> This is precisely what happens in places like London
It is really not. A quick google search shows that the vacancy rate is as low as any other major in-demand city.
So yes, the rich do leave I think more places empty in some places because they can afford to and because the economic calculation is not simple. If you rent and want to end the rental later you end up in a bad spot.
Ok, this is a nice story that one could make up. But once again, my point is that vacancy rate is something that is already tracked.
In San Francisco, the vacancy rate is about 3.5%.
So, in other words, regardless of whatever story you are making up about parents, or rent control or whatever, the actual data shows, that the vacancy rate is very low, and therefore not much of a problem.
I know someone who sublet an extra room to someone, a year later her wonderful lease was destroyed, landlord sued her and the women never paid a dime, could not be evicted, claimed she felt unsafe and got a restraining order against the person actually paying rent etc so they ended paying rent on two places, one to live in and one for the women.
I mean - this stuff does turn you off renting a small bit.
That said, supply is REDICULOUSLY constrained around here, red tape is nuts, minimum requirements crazy, affordability payments high etc. So yeah, no question that there is artificial scarcity.
First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone else will move in who lives outside the city and was previously priced out of the mid-tier housing. We see the same type of thing when designing transportation systems in a city. Adding in a new road can actually increase traffic as it ends up encouraging more people to drive who otherwise wouldn't have.
Also the housing market is not a singular market. The type of person who would live in a 3 bedroom luxury condo is not the same type of person who would live in an SRO hotel that shares a bathroom. Most people have a small window of what housing they consider acceptable and what budget they can afford. When a city gentrifies and knocks down SRO housing and replaces it with luxury condos (something that has happened a lot in both LA and the Bay Area over the last couple decades), the available units at the bottom of the market decreases in favor of the top of the market. That doesn't result in everyone in the city just moving up one rung on the housing ladder. Competition for the affordable units is now even higher because there are less of them available.
“Never” is too strong.
It happened to me in New York. I negotiated down my rent on account of nearby buildings with better amenities opening at slightly higher but similar enough pricing, net effective.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn and San Francisco were busy blocking all new construction, thereby forcing their restaurant workers to compete with millionaires.
You said yourself that the new construction had slightly higher pricing meaning your unit was in the same basic market as the new construction and also implies you likely were not shopping at "the bottom of the market". Do you think you would have been able to negotiate your rent down if the new building was in an entirely different class and was charging 2x or 3x your rent?
Yes. What do you think people bidding for ultra-lux housing do if they don’t have supply?
In New York, the ultra-wealthy have penthouses. In San Francisco, they have rows of townhouses. Which one do you think displaces more affordable housing?
Start here: San Francisco, for very specific geographic and regional reasons, will not have sufficient housing in the next century, and it will continue to have growing homeless populations. Solve for a 50-year horizon.
Some of the densest cities on the planet are on islands. San Francisco is on a peninsula. It is a low density city with tons of infill potential. That densification potential, together with slow population growth in the developed world, makes the problem perfectly tenable. (That said, homeowners would lose money. So not holding my breath.)
In the short term they would. And in the long term, they would gain wealth but lose their iron grip on the city. Never underestimate the seductiveness of power. As long as San Francisco’s renters believe density is impossible or will price them out, homeowners (specifically, about half a dozen families) will retain their lock on the city.
You mean, "for very specific political and cultural reasons". There's nothing in San Francisco's geography that most world cities haven't solved.
I used to live in San Luis Obispo, CA. There's a house in the middle of town that clearly used to be an enormous beautiful mansion. It looks like it belongs on a plantation. It's still beautiful, but it's now 9 funky apartments.
Street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.2749914,-120.6611941,3a,75y,...
>Was it switched to 9 apartments because the place fell down market as it aged or was it retrofitted because there is very little market for a single family house like that in SLO?
Definitively, I would have to invite my extended family to fill the building.
>Also are we even sure those individual apartments are truly down market?
They definitively cost less than renting the entire building, which is what stickfigure's anti-apartment stance would mandate.
> It certainly doesn't look like a "slum" like you mentioned in your first comment.
Of course not, it can't look like a slum because the exterior hasn't changed. We are running into a problem here. The classification or living arrangement is apparently the deciding factor behind the "character of the neighborhood" and whether it is a slum. How can that be? Well, maybe it's not the building or the architecture or the zoning and so on, maybe it's the inhabitants that turn the place into a slum? You certainly can't see them from the outside.
We also run into another problem, if there are "evil" people that turn neighborhoods into slums by their mere presence then how do you distinguish between slum people and non slum people? It should be impossible in practice. Of course, there is a reliable(in the sense that it is self fulfilling) visual proxy for that.
The existence of SRO hotels and similarly "special" dwellings are symptoms of severe housing deficit yet they're portrayed as necessary. There's no reason that the bottom of the housing market needs to be specially gimped, especially when LA is paying $2600 per month for a tent. In a less starved & dysfunctional market, old and adequate housing stock can satisfy that role.
I don't really see this as a gotcha. Those would-be new arrivals to the city don't materialize out of thin air. Presumably they left some other place behind, and their migration is freeing up housing stock wherever they leave behind. The underlying dynamic is still the same. New housing increases low-end affordability by soaking up mid-end demand for old housing stock.
Maybe you build housing in the Bay Area, and all it does is bring in new people who pay the same market rate. But that migration will free up housing stock in Ohio. The only difference is that instead of helping the house poor in your local area the policy helps the house poor in flyover country. Unless you place a lot more moral weight on helping Californians than Midwesterners, what's the difference?
The difference is that housing costs take up a much higher percentage of wages in California than Ohio and as a result there are many many more homeless people in California than Ohio.
Sure, if you want to take a holistic view of the entire planet, the people have to come from somewhere and there is a finite demand for global housing. However that just isn't a practical way to look at it when the problems are localized. Different cities and regions have varying levels of desirability. It makes sense to build housing in those cities and regions for a wide spectrum of the population. The solution shouldn't just be "if you are poor, move to Ohio".
You don't need to go as far as Ohio, just a commuter suburb.
[0] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
[1] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
The U.K. hasn’t built 300k+ homes per year (or anything like that) since the government stopped building houses - the private sector has never picked up the slack. And the result is hugely increased prices.
Is the difference that council housing is in a large part publicly funded? Difference in the permitting process?
You're alluding to "induced demand," which does not claim that adding a new road increases traffic. When it becomes "cheaper" (in terms of time) to drive, more people will start driving, but the cost of driving (time to get from A to B) still goes down.
This is basic economics, except with time instead of money. Adding a new road is a positive supply shock, which causes demand to rise until equilibrium, but the new price is going to be below the old price.
See: https://youtu.be/6dwSIO_Slhc?t=236, except imagine the supply shock is in the other direction.
In reality people are stubborn. We chase sunk costs and we repeat inefficient behavior because it is habit. People therefore won't necessarily choose to drive based on an evaluation of that individual trip. They will base it on things like whether they own a car, whether they have an unlimited pass for their local mass transit system, and simply what they did the last time they made the same trip. Therefore traffic can actually exceed where it was before as new and improved roads can lead to people buying more cars and people being less reliant on public transit.
https://www.thecgo.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Can-We-Bui... (Pages 8-10)
I don't know how to describe this but sometimes people say things that drive an agenda which from a first glance support the agenda but when you dig deep down into the details you realize that there is a second message that completely contradicts the actual agenda the comment pushes.
For example, "induced demand" is something that happens on roads because they are free to use by any road user. By building wider roads you make it very cheap to drive both in terms of congestion and money. Public transport costs money, is space efficient and slow. Driving a car is inefficient, convenient, fast and when you consider the "better service" it is worth the additional cost. Therefore people will stop using public transport and start driving cars, because roads are free.
This almost contradicts the agenda because housing isn't provided for free, you have to pay for it and you have to pay a huge premium for inefficient but convenient housing (single family homes). Of course, the problem is that there is a subsidy that encourages inefficiency similar to free roads, namely property tax freezes. An old single family home may have a lower tax burden than a new apartment. It's effectively a subsidy to homeowners that haven't moved out. However, the real contradiction lies in the fact that the argument hasn't been against property tax freezes, instead the criticism is aimed at new construction, which does not suffer from the subsidy problem.
But the thing is, we don't even need to build more housing. There are more than 30 times more vacant homes [0] than there are homeless. It makes the most sense to redistribute resources more effectively and efficiently. We should be looking at our system as a whole when it clearly doesn't distribute necessary resources effectively (e.g. food insecurity, wealth inequality, homelessness when there are 30 times more vacant homes than there are homeless, etc.)
[0]: https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...
Usually they are where there is a housing surplus, because population in the area has declined.
I predict offering the people in my Oakland neighborhood shantytowns housing in abandoned rustbelt towns will not find many takers.
because cheap housing falls from the sky. It trickles down, yknow. Some people get rich first, then we all profit from their breadcrumbs. There's a god, and god is just. Jeez.
The best way to lower the cost of housing is to
increase the supply of housing. And the best way
to do that is to unleash developers whatever is
most profitable whenever and whoever they want
without government regulation and NIMBY activists
getting in their way.
I spent quite a few years living in a "trendy" area where housing developers crammed as much housing into it as possible. The results were not pretty. Very easy to create an environmental and quality-of-life nightmare which is particularly unfair to those already living in the area, with no say over what becomes of it.
The goals of housing developers are not necessarily aligned with that of society.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho... [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [2]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392
1/3 would over time vastly out number the 2/3 group unless the two third group is growing exponentially.
One of the things that took me along time to realize was simply not having a safe, quiet and stable place to sleep for an extended period time would drive virtually anyone into drugs, alcohol and mental illness.
They'll latch on to any contrived empathic half-solution and then leave the area.
Is this because the services don't really offer effective help for this group?
I understand why mental illness or addiction might keep people from using services. But if someone is just down on their luck and won't accept any help (assuming they need it), something seems wrong with that picture.
I don't have a definitive article or source to link to, but there are myriad accounts of theft, violence, and sexual violence at homeless shelters.
If I was homeless I would almost certainly prefer to sleep in my car (if I still owned one) or couch-surf with friends/family if possible.
Is this because the services don't really offer
effective help for this group?
This is also an often missed point of UBI, it will help people that are unwilling to accept help otherwise. Either due pride or safety concerns (see the Dutch tax authorities mess right now that has ruined families that were dependent on child care support)
Whatever you think of specific solutions (please don't start debating UBI... ) it's quite obvious to me that we need to change quality of life safetynets from a pull to a push system.
"In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 per year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000."[0]
Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.
Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/need/
Edited to format
OK, so $2600 gets a fair bit.
Also looking at the report [1] this rate is calculated by dividing the total cost of the pilot by the duration and number of clients. So that is including one-time set up, planning and evaluation in the cost, which is probably a decent fraction of the cost as it's only an 8 month pilot. The recurring cost for extending may be lower.
I think it's misleading to compare that dollar amount to the monthly cost of an apartment.
[1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...
Do you not agree the number is misleading?
That’s misleading.
> Numbers are numbers.
But the number isn’t what they say it is.
The phrase per-tent either intentionally or unintentionally misleads you to think that’s the cost literally for the tent and should be compared against rent.
Either describing the number as per-tent is misleading, or the comparison to rent is misleading. Either way, part of it is misleading.
They even basically acknowledge it’s a misleading comparison in the article!
Not good. It'll send us back in time if we let it.
They are not into spectacles or aggressive populism, generally correct, a little effete, but are definitely progressive.
They are like the 'Vermont' or 'Nice Schoolteacher' or 'Librarian' of Journalism.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
"One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'"
To the extent that they identify that the view is labelled with the editorially appropriate moniker: 'Controversial' - I'm glad that people have a chance to speak their minds.
'Covering' a book or a perspective is not overtly 'promoting' it.
If they're drawing from a wide perspective (they don't quite though), then this would be a good thing.
> This Q&A with a provocative author did not serve NPR’s audience. You and several other NPR fans pointed out that NPR’s own prior reporting contradicted some of the things this author was saying. On top of being wrong about recent events, the author’s characterization of the Civil Rights Movement is a distortion and oversimplification.
http://view.nl.npr.org/?qs=7c7fd141a65180ed1dafb8fed91fa4fa3...
That's not a completely irrational idea and is worthy of some discussion.
The bigger issue with NPR is not that they carried the piece, it's that they likely would not have carried too many alternative viewpoints. They are 'sided'.
Source 1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...
NPR used to be fairly centrist, but these days they’re far to the left. If I turn on my car there’s about a 9/10 chance my local station will be talking about some form of identity politics.
That’s all the radio, though. I believe they at least try to approach the center in their online articles.
Unfortunately your litmus test especially doesn't work that well for NPR, at least in one example. They distribute (but do not produce - partly because it wouldn't meet their editorial guidelines) a show about issues facing Latin Americans in the United States called Latino USA. Yet nobody who listens to it would deny the show takes quite a strong progressive stance on political issues.
I'd also add that NPR's most popular shows, the newscasts Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, are all remarkably boring politically and take a sort of weaker sauce version of the BBC's neutral and somewhat hostile approach to interviewing, regardless of political bent.
All Things Considered may be "boring" politically, but they are far from neutral - I don't listen to the other two very often. Easy example - for weeks, if not months, they called what was going on at the border "Trumps Family (sometimes Child) Separation Policy," even though anyone informed knew the very first day that it was not his policy. It wasn't until the story finally started to die down did they used the (at least somewhat) correct phrase "The increase in family separations due to Trump's zero tolerance policy."
I don't think this is bad reporting or anything, I was commenting to help people avoid getting into the trap of thinking in the most obvious framing after skimming a headline.
Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.
If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction.
Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions.
Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work.
(Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero.
Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled.
To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically.
Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office.
I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal.
The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure.
You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year.
Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it.
What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives.
Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)
The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.
I very much doubt that on both counts! But even still, I have a feeling that there is a very high cap for dollars spent directly helping homeless folks that reduce indirect spending 1:1 on other budget line items.
Similarly with homelessness, spending $2600/month for temporary tents isn’t improved by adding funds. Doubling the money and providing twice as much tent space won’t help homelessness as much as longer term housing that would cost less. Or changing zoning to allow more housing that would definitely cost less.
These are both important problems and need resources, but in some ways more funds are worse.
That's 6750$ per month.
Pick your poison I guess.
I've never heard of homeless searching for the best place too be homeless! Is there a source for this?
"Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?"
> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.
> Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.
> “The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said.
> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.
> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.
Total weasel words. You move to LA with one week of money for hotel = "fell into homelessness in L.A.".
In Seattle, the local group did a survey like this. About a quarter put their last housing zip code as the one with the shelter, in Pioneer Square, an expensive area if you aren't homeless. GIGO
Both San Francisco and New York have similar proportions of homeless people, but New York has shelter beds for almost all of them whereas San Francisco has shelter beds for only 40%.
Source: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep... (page 18).
I live in a pretty good county (Marin County), but I am astonished over the waste of tax money.
I am too young to remember pre-prop 13, but waste was so much. Every year, no matter how much they took in in taxes, it was spent the following year, according to my father. (That's why Jarvis wrote a book called, I'm Mad as Hell. I have an autographed copy someone threw away.)
During the drought in the 70's ranchers were trucked in water, as a political favor. (I actually don't mind this one). Politicians were bought off legally with county tax money. Every night was a big hootenanny at Marin Joes. My point is there was a huge amount of waste.
O.k.--today is much better? Yea--you would think? I used to work at a county beach while in college. One day the maintance guts were throwing tools into a dumptster. Perfectly good chainsaws, hand tools, etc. I asked what's up? They told me if they didn't throw away the "broken tools", their budget would not be the same. I went back there at night and took three chain saws I still have to this day.
There's a department in my county called Open Space. They literally fill in their huge white trucks in the morning, throw some grass/litter in the back, and joy ride in the open space. They could nix this department, and cut back on police funds, and that money could go to a homeless fund. My county has no real crime. The cops are basically Revenue Collectors at this point.
My point is they will never claim to have extra money, unless we demand it.
I would like to see every bit of free County, federal, and state opened up to free camping.
Homelessness is beyond debate.
We need to act yesterday.
Sorry about sounding so preachy, but I know too many people getting ticked for sleeping because they don't have a home.
(Keep an eye on Sausalito, Ca. The authorities decided to get tough on anchor-outs. They decided to vigorously enforce a three day anchorage muni code.
They went beyond enforcement. They broke laws, but It's hard to prove because their is no video evidence. For instance, they towed boats for no reason. It's the city worker's word against a boater. It's like our version against a cop's version. A code that everyone has disregarded for years, including luxury yacht owners, like Allen from Microsoft. He would spend weeks docked in the same spot. (He had a beautiful yacht though.)
They wanted the low income boats out of their view. Rich people find poor people an eye sore. They were dirty homeless shiftless bums after all. Many older ladies were out there to. Probally druggies, or prostitutes? Just scummy people. Why should those wealthy residents have to look at that? (Ironically, every person who I have overheard saying, "Eye sore" has been genetically challenged aesthetically, but monetarily fit.)
Well the boaters having nowhere to go, set up tents in Dunphy Park. They are neat, and only had one provoked criminal arrest. (There brilliant plan of homeless harassment backfired for now?). Oh yea, Richardson Bay has had Anchor Outs since before the 50's. (Yes--Homeless Harassment is alive an well. You can call it Broken Window whatever, but it's nothing more than harassing peopke until they move on.)
The city told them to move to a toxic site, with a bunch of regulations, like early morning tent take down. One woman is disabled, and said she needed help setting up her tent, and needed somewhere to lie down during the day. Plus--a major symptom of depression is sleep reversal. Don't ask me how I know.
The homeless fought back. A kind advocacy group sued the city, and got a temporary restraining order.
In the USA, the Supreme court ruled you can't force homeless people to move, unless you have a bed for them. One win I love!
Right now the situation is up in the air. I heard there is ongoing harrasement from authorities, but I don't know for sure.
I'm getting tired. Just had the second vaccine dose, and it hit he hard. Flu symptoms for a day, and a half.)
It almost seems like the more money that gets poured in, the more expensive everything becomes.
If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results.
Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.
Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartment than a 12x12 tent. I know that this calculation is an over simplification of costs, but it still gives you a decent perspective on what can be done with that kind of money.
And I disagree this will save money long term or elsewhere. When you don't address the root cause and spend money wisely, you only leave room for more spending in the future.
But yes looking at this, the program cost is indeed insanely high
1) You have to pay extra to get a landlord to agree to the risk of housing a homeless person with likely no way to pay rent if the government program ends who also is more likely to have drug problems / mental health issues. This person may also be more likely to harass other tenants. Even if you don't believe this to be true, many landlords will and they won't agree to rent to such people without a substantial extra charge.
2) Cost in potential missed rent from neighboring tenants. If a landlord agrees to this program and other tenants move out due to the behavior of the homeless tenant, then that lost cost is also a problem.
Obviously, the numbers will change with the area. The cost of an apartment in the Bay Area or LA would be much greater, for example. But the book makes a good case that it'd cost society less overall to just take care of people than to ignore rampant homelessness. I'm inclined to believe it.
Related, there's an eye-opening limited series podcast on homelessness called "According to Need" that I found very compelling.[1] The host lives in the Bay Area, so there was a lot focus [t]here. I strongly recommend checking it out to learn just how stacked the system can be against people trying to overcome homelessness. For example, did you crash on someone's couch in the last thirty days? Doesn't matter if you've got nowhere to crash tonight, you don't qualify for a bed.
[0] The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale first edition pg 97
(I would guess a majority, but I have no data to back that. My expectations is that the transient homeless are not getting into trouble for the most part.)
It will cost the government less, no question, the analysis is great in this regard. But the reason it doesn't happen is because the analysis is incomplete.
My theory is, housing a homeless person decreases the value of the land where they're housed severely and quickly, land that takes relatively an extremely long time to grow in value. That's why what always happens is expensive tents on worthless, unexploitable land (parking lots under highways, sidewalks, city parks).
I personally think this is horrible, but I believe it's a better model of what really happens.
I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options.
Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me visit my kid as much as possible and sleep in his bedroom, but I couldn’t land a 6 figure job at the end of the narrative. The options aren’t awesome, nor sufficient, and the cruelty and neglect, even from other friends, is mortifying. It was really fucking hard for me, but I’m fine again. I don’t see how it’s humane for the likes of those who don’t have my arc as their probability. My European friends shake their heads and know the US is really broken.
I'd like to learn more about if Europe overall is doing better than the United States. I couldn't find comparative numbers with solid data. Thank you for sharing your story, I am glad you found a light at the end of the tunnel.
[0]https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/22/homelessness-in-europe-a... [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 [2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-homelessness-housing/... [3]https://archive.thinkprogress.org/four-countries-the-united-...
Homeless is getting worse and illegal immigration compounds the problem. The more advanced countries (like the UK) have center for homeless who are not drug addicts. That means the majority of homeless on the street are either ignorant or drug addicts. I always remind them there are tax funded centers.
Other countries are not so lucky (especially in Southern Europe) and you see all sort of homeless, from drug addicts, to youngsters without a job, to illegal immigrants.
A professional making 200/250k in Europe is also incredibly rare but you could live with 2k/m in a lot of places (which is true in some places of the USA as well - certainly not SF). Real estate is also more expensive in Europe, so getting your own house is generally easier in some places in the USA (certainly not SF).
1. The "$2600" number is calculated from the $1,491,410 total cost / 70 spaces / 8 months.
2. Regarding staffing, "The staffing plan Urban Alchemy recommends for a successful program is a minimum staff-to-participant ratio of one (1) to 12." So included in the price tag is at least 6 paid staffers, and I'm assuming 24 hour coverage is needed (or at least 16 hour coverage).
3. Regarding the price, "Given the program’s high cost, we recommend that the data outcomes/effectiveness of the program be reported on by the CAO and LAHSA before initiating additional sites. "
I think this all highlights what a mistake it was regarding the basic shutdown of federal mental hospitals in the early 80s [2]. If it turns out that the cost for dealing with homeless is this high for a simple tent encampment in a parking lot because of the cost of support services, why not provide that support in a more permanent medical facility (obv. not all homeless are mentally ill but many/most of long term homeless are).
[1] https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0841_rpt_cao_03...
[2] https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...
There was a similar thing with the foster care system; I'm not sure if it was state-wide or just my county, but they banned foster care group homes (which had worse outcomes than typical foster families[1]). Of course everyeone already knew that it was better to place these kids in a typical foster family, but there was nowhere else to place them. Now there are plenty of "Theraputic residential treatment centers" which seem to be roughly the same thing, just with a different name.
(Side note: if you can, become a foster family; there aren't enough)
1: Even the whole "outcomes are worse" is a bit dubious since usually kids don't end up in group homes until they've been kicked out of one or more foster families, so these kids were already being failed by the system before ending up in group homes.
Some people use nuance as a bludgeon, but that fact wouldn’t imply that hand-waiving away details is somehow a valid approach.
There is also a major fallacy here, that this money could be simply used to put people into homes dollar for dollar. If they are this inefficient getting people into tents, whats to say that the inefficiency isn't magnified with a more complicated project.
There is no magical box that you can go drop cash into that pays rent for someone who was previously homeless. It comes with it's own set of logistics.
Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).
This article seems to suggest that giving out access to housing is in fact effective:
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...
Vox doesn't have data either. They are stating that government spends money very inefficiently at homeless and assumes it would be more efficient to hand out homes. This is wrong because:
* government will hand out homes also very inefficiently
* handing out homes might be cheaper than policing homeless people, but it does not guarantee that it fixes homeless problem for reasons I described and for other reasons (like some people might consider declaring themselves homeless to get free apartments)
I'm not saying Vox is wrong, I'm just saying that Vox is correctly writing about different aspect of the issue, but does not explain how to solve homelessness.
This is my surprised face lol.
All these costs -and much more- are external to the equation as presented.
I think LA is talking with Pallet to implement their temporary housing, which would be amazing.
I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable.
Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right.
Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their citizens and the richest countries aren't? When will people see housing price appreciation far beyond wage inflation as a serious detriment to society?
It's affordable here, too. Just not in one of the wealthiest and thus most expensive cities in the United States.
From my experience in Asia the attitude is so wildly different, they build more houses than is ever needed, people can run stores and sell basic goods out of their spare front room for a few hours a day as side income.
I'm not familiar with local laws in the US but in Australia you'd get fined a few thousand dollars trying to sell groceries from a house in suburbia, many have to get in their cars and travel a few km to the designated "commercial" area simply to buy some bread. There's a lot the West could learn from the East yet we are far too stubborn to actually do it.
This would definitely play out the exact same way in America.
edit: I should have read the article. That's exactly what they were doing. I incorrectly assumed it was a "measured cost" of homelessness. I suppose what I imagined tho was less like a refugee camp with fences and guards, and more like a re-use of some of the old port/industrial area close to where many of the LA camps used to be anyway. A more NGO/adhoc style approach. But maybe the current model is working, apart from cost, I don't know :p :) xx
I like to say make the solution like the Apple Store in the sense that for 99% of people, there is a possible researched path to recovery, housing, and employment.
For $32k, 64k, 96k — 3 years, can we build a process using our modern knowledge of social work, psychology, addiction, etc. to get an individual back on their feet, or at least in a holding pattern with less misery?