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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are no longer usable for all - they have more or less become private spaces for the homeless.

I don't have much respect for communities that solve the issue by just "kicking them out" and passing the problem onto others, but it is almost becoming unacceptably common in America.

It's a pity - this used to be a problem that was mostly solved by the private market. The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc). But in our quest to eliminate slums and "bad neighborhoods" we ended up just spreading them across cities.

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> The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc).

This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing. Developers realize this, snatch up the current options for housing of last resort like SRO buildings, knock them down, and build luxury condos. Supply of the bottom of the market is decreased in favor of supply at the top of the market and this new construction often is less dense than the housing it replaces. People argue that the new supply will eventually trickle down, but that new supply is always snatched up by people moving into the city leaving the people who used live there with no place to go.

There needs to be regulation to force the construction of affordable housing in these markets as the free market has shown it won't be built otherwise.

The free market approach would work but the real-estate markets are not free markets: There is rent-seeking zoning density restrictions that make the land artificially scarce.

Reverse the zoning density restrictions and this will be a return to eliminating the market failure in real-estate.

Allowing more denser zoning would help, but it doesn't fix the problem I mentioned. As I said, new construction is often replacing higher density affordable housing with lower density luxury housing. This is motivated by profit and not zoning.

Mandating density increase would solve this.

Of course the problem is that US cities are legally small, the metro areas are big sprawling low density money sinks, and there's very little zoning coordination between cities in a metro area.

Los Angeles county is enormous and can address this.

Can a country override city regulations effectively?

> The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing.

It doesn't make sense, period. The market is making the ration decision. The city could always buy the expensive real estate and turn it into slums—sorry, "affordable housing"—but this is clearly not a reasonable allocation of limited resources. You want to ensure that everyone has a home, fine, I agree that this is a worthy goal. But those homes don't need to be located in the most expensive areas on the planet. You'd be doing those in need of such housing a favor by relocating them to less expensive areas on the outskirts of the city and concentrating on improving transportation to and from downtown.

>The market is making the ration decision. The city could always buy the expensive real estate and turn it into slums—sorry, "affordable housing"—but this is clearly not a reasonable allocation of limited resources.

No one is saying these need to be city owned properties. The market is making the profit optimizing decision. Regulation can but restrictions on developers and force them to build affordable housing that would still be profitable just not the absolutely most profitable option. It is the same concept as the minimum wage. Sometimes we need to make rules so capitalism doesn't prioritize profit over societal good.

>You'd be doing those in need of such housing a favor by relocating them to less expensive areas on the outskirts of the city

There are no affordable outskirts for a city like Los Angeles. The SRO housing in neighborhoods like Skid Row were some of the only places in the region that a person on minimum wage could afford to live alone. Forcing those people to move hours away from where they work is not "doing those in need of such housing a favor".

> No one is saying these need to be city owned properties. … Regulation can but restrictions on developers and force them to build affordable housing that would still be profitable just not the absolutely most profitable option.

That's just the city seizing developers' property for public use without compensation. Buying the property would give the city moral authority to decide how it's used, while also accurately tracking the cost of the city's policies as opposed to burying that cost in regulations.

> It is the same concept as the minimum wage.

This is not winning you any points. I'm opposed to that too. You're not changing the actual minimum wage, which is always zero unless you're also guaranteeing everyone a job regardless of willingness to do useful work (which would make this more of a UBI than a minimum wage). You're just ensuring that anyone who can't produce enough value to be worth paying your minimum wage becomes unemployable.

> There are no affordable outskirts for a city like Los Angeles.

Then maybe we need to consider that not everyone needs to live (or work) in Los Angeles. If your LA job doesn't pay enough to afford unsubsidized housing in LA then you're basically working for free, at best. Housing is not the primary issue here; what you need is a different job in a more affordable city. I'm not a fan of just handing someone a one-way bus fare and sending them off to be someone else's problem, but if you add job placement and housing in the new location to the package I think it becomes a workable option.

>That's just the city seizing developers' property for public use without compensation.

How is it seizing property? It is just putting in restrictions that reduce the possible profit. It is no different than thousands of other regulations. Is forcing a developer to put fire sprinklers in buildings "seizing property"?

>Then maybe we need to consider that not everyone needs to live (or work) in Los Angeles. If your LA job doesn't pay enough to afford unsubsidized housing in LA then you're basically working for free, at best.

How do you combine this with your opposition to a minimum wage? Who is supposed to do the less desirable jobs in LA if no one doing those jobs can afford to live there?

Regulations always amount to a seizure of property to some extend; the degree depends on how much the value of the property is reduced by the regulations. Ownership of property consists of the right to decide how that property is used. If the city is telling developers how their property is to be used then the city is exercising rights which belong to the property owner—acting as if they were the property owner.

Put another way: If the city tells developers that 10% of their land must be reserved for low-income housing, this is functionally equivalent to the city outright claiming 10% of the developers' land, turning it into low-income housing, and "compensating" the developers with the lower revenues from the rents on the low-income housing rather than the much higher rents which they would have received if the land had been developed normally. There is some compensation, yes, but not just compensation based on the value of the land. The difference is externalized onto the developers, and indirectly onto everyone purchasing or renting property, including (especially) those just above the cutoff to qualify for the low-income housing. The regulation thus amounts to a highly regressive property tax.

> Who is supposed to do the less desirable jobs in LA if no one doing those jobs can afford to live there?

Either these less-desirable jobs start paying more or they don't get done. If they're actually needed then they will pay enough to ensure that those doing them can afford to live nearby, independent of any minimum wage.

> But those homes don't need to be located in the most expensive areas on the planet.

A substantial fraction of the homeless are currently employed and another bug chunk are only transitorily unemployed. Forcing them away from where the work is not a great solution; its a form if welfare trap where in exchange for improving their current condition you remove their ability to get out of a dependent situation.

> You'd be doing those in need of such housing a favor by relocating them to less expensive areas on the outskirts of the city

The outskirts aren't that much less expensive in terms of either capital or ongoing costs for housing, but have less infrastructure to support an influx of new population. By the time you pay for the capital and ongoing costs for the additional transportation, etc., you probably have come up with a much more expensive solution.

While “the market is doing the rational thing for the market to do” isn't, IMO, an argument against doing something different to address social ills, you have to realize that if you deploy that argument against housing in the inner city, it applies with at least equal force in the outskirts.

> It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work.

There is no free market approach to fixing any crisis; “free market” means the absence of pursuit of centralize goals like fixing crises.

There may be market-oriented approaches (i.e., subsidies and/or taxes to alter supply and/or demand to incentivize the desired results), but that's a different issue.

There doesn't need to be regulation to force construction - they need to remove the regulation that prohibits construction.

> The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing.

Isn't part of the problem that these places have regulations against high density housing? If San Francisco allowed for high-rises to be built I bet developers would be running over themselves to build affordable housing.

Better transportation would also help.

IMO the city should provide enough homeless shelters for everyone and then just make homelessness illegal. So if you are found sleeping in a tent you get referred to the nearest shelter and if you refuse you get arrested.

We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

> Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

They do, and this is sometimes why homeless people avoid the shelters. You cannot hold someone in a shelter against their will.

Also, more than a few of those chronic drug addictions are self-medicating for other conditions that are only tangential to housing itself and aren't going to get any better if you take the drugs away without offering other support.

That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail. Homelessness and drug abuse can not be allowed to exist to keep public spaces safe.

> That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail

You can't jail someone for not sheltering themselves. That would most probably violate their civil rights and would not survive a test in the courts.

You can jail someone for camping in a park, though. If they want to go sleep and shamble in the woods, go for it. Not on the sidewalks.

> Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions

Many homeless choose the street over the shelter for this reason

Homelessness is already illegal in most places. They are already often referred to the nearest shelter. They are already frequently arrested.

Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in.

You need to do more research on the topic. VICE has some decent documentaries on the issue.

>Homeless shelter's don't help, they're ridiculously dangerous to be in.

Then solve this problem.

The problem I constantly see with homelessness in America is that municipalities constantly half ass every attempt to fix it, and then throw up their hands and say "well that didn't work, I guess there's nothing we can do!" Building homeless shelters without making them safe places to be is the perfect example of half-assing. I mean ffs, it's in the name: shelter. A homeless shelter not being safe doesn't mean that homeless shelters don't work, it just means your execution was shit.

Do yourself a favour and volunteer at your nearest shelter for an afternoon.

Do yourself a favor and don't make assumptions about me. I've volunteered at homeless shelters before. At a previous company, I was in charge of working directly with a homeless shelter to organize volunteer events for my colleagues. I have firsthand experience at homeless shelters that have successfully become shelters where people really want to be there rather than on the street because of the services and environment they provide.

it would be constructive to provide some examples of concrete things municipalities can do, and that we can learn about so we can hold them accountable.

I mentioned it in my earlier comment but in my experience it really comes down to continued funding and not "half assing" efforts. The successful homeless shelter I mentioned earlier is not a revolutionary shelter that is doing vastly different things, it's just a shelter that, due to outside donations and support, is able to actually follow through on things like providing security, nutritional food, community building, and opportunities to gain work experience.

In contrast, some of the other homeless "shelters" I've seen are just barely funded enough by the city to keep the roof from leaking and the lights on with minimal staffing. That just doesn't work.

Kudos for being a hands-on part of the solution instead of a hand-wringing theoretician.

But if the only response to “how can things be done better” is “send more money”, anyone who has been on the funding side of things will just move on.

Not “half-a*ing” things doubtless has a lot of components. If you are as successful in your shelter as you say, you have a bunch of proven best practices that can be implemented by other shelters and those who certify them. What are those? How can a funder support the implementation of even one of those specific ideas? That will bring out the wallet faster than a blank check appeal. (Are there even certification and rating programs in this space?)

Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered.

-Have a pet? Not coming with you. A stint at the pound, likely followed by euthanization due to overcrowding.

-How about a family? If you can even get into a shelter, odds are it's going to be male or women and children.

-Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk.

-Very little space for personal possessions, high incidence of theft.

>Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

I would strongly encourage you to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Not only do they need the help, you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs.

> you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs

Is this not also a problem at homeless encampments?

Making it illegal to be homeless means outside encampments too.

No it doesn’t. People already sell drugs outside of homeless encampments. Making it illegal to be homeless changes nothing.

Making it illegal to be homeless means making it illegal to be homeless. Not just in encampments.

They said homeless shelters have a lot of drug activity. You implied encampments do too. What was your point if it wasn't about encampments?

Their point was about drug activity being a problem in shelters relative to encampments.

Your comments about making homelessness illegal seem like a non-sequitur.

foxpurple proposed making homelessness illegal and forcing everyone into shelters. They didn't mention encampments. The strongest plausible interpretation of what they said is outside encampments too.

xnyan explained problems with shelters relative to unspecified alternatives. They didn't mention encampments either. The comment they replied to didn't mention encampments. And you pointed out some of their points don't make sense if they were just comparing to encampments. The strongest plausible interpretation of what they said is they weren't just comparing to encampments.

The strongest plausible interpretation is that the comments haven’t randomly thrown away the context of the conversation.

This entire conversation is about the dangers of encampments, and how to solve that problem.

Also you haven’t explained how your comment isn’t a non-seqitur. As far I can see it is an out of context contradiction that doesn’t change anything about the meaning of anything.

> Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk.

I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence, full of dangerous people with drug and mental health problems.

> I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence

This is the equivalent of suggesting that there is irony in the position that one can support animal welfare but still be against the position of beating animals with a stick (rather than an iron bar).

Homeless shelters can be violent. They are certainly full of people with (often untreated) mental illnesses. They are also not a solution to homelessness, but rather a solution to the problem of people sleeping on the street.

Solutions to homelessness often require providing permanent housing to people whom you may not like and who you, personally, may believe do not deserve a "free" apartment or house. It involves giving people a permanent foundation on which they can start to build a post-homelessness life. This is why it is never a popular solution - what I find ironic is that voters who want to "solve" homelessness never actually start with the simplest solution, giving away secure and dignified housing.

A real solution involves notions of security, safety, etc and often requires homeless people, particularly those who have lived homeless for a long time, to unlearn those strategies they have employed in order to survive. Shelters do not provide this type of support.

People are too shy to say it but I think a lot of them would prefer a much more violent solution to the problem. I mean, what other answer could there even be, if you don't like the status quo and also don't think homeless people should be offered housing? That's the dark secret behind a lot of these debates where people's positions otherwise seem nonsensical, I think.

Agree. A related dark position that a not-insignificant number of people hold is that it's actually necessary and perhaps beneficial to have a visible homeless class living in unnecessarily cruel conditions as a means of coercion to keep working no matter how terrible your job is.

I suppose it makes sense from a certain perspective, but I think the lack of a safety net is a costly economic mistake. Take bankruptcy as an example, you can take risks and if something goes wrong (including bad decisions), you are not necessarily ruined forever because we allow you to walk away from some or all of the debt.

There's a cost to allowing bankruptcy, but I think it's worth it even though I've had to "pay" (indirectly) for other's bad decisions. I think about all the value lost to society because we make the danger of not having a job, even for a short time, very high for most members of society.

The technical term for the phenomenon you've identified is the "reserve army of labor."

> I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence, full of dangerous people with drug and mental health problems.

Homeless shelters typically lack privacy and security from other residents (something most, even high density, regular housing does not lack for very good reasons). So, even if dangerous people were no more common in the homeless population than the general population, the small number of them would drive others out of shelters, and they'd become super concentrated there.

And advocates for better treatment of the homeless tend to acknowledge the greater incidence of serious drug and mental health problems in the population as something services need to address.

So, where is the irony?

>Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered.

I have considered it, and I don't care. I live in one of these high homeless cities, and it's horrid. No one who hasn't lived in a place like this can really understand the decay that a lot of homeless inflict upon a city and upon social cohesion. I am leaving as soon as possible. The lives and cities of productive members of society do not deserve to be ruined by homeless people. Go to the shelter or go to jail. Camping on the sidewalk or in the park should not be an option. I don't care if the shelter sucks, that still doesn't give you the right to camp in the park. I don't care if the park sucks either, that doesn't give you the right to camp in my back yard, which has actually happened and the police declined to remove the person.

If we have to sacrifice a few people who are overwhelmingly drug addicted or mentally ill or just unintelligent to make our lives and cities orders of magnitude better, sorry, but I'm voting for that option.

I agree in principle that if there's a safe bed available, setting up a tent in a park should be illegal. But reality is complicated and there are lots of edge cases.

Theft and assaults happen at shelters, so maybe there's a bed available but do people feel safe? If you were assaulted at a shelter would you want to return the next night? Forcing people to chose between two unsafe options (shelter or jail) feels cruel.

Addiction also complicates things. Should a shelter allow substance abuse? If so it can be a really bad place for recovering addicts. If shelters do not allow substance abuse, then addicts have no place to legally exist. If locking them up actually helped their addiction that might be ok, but it does not.

There are other problems with shelters. Many of them have weird hours and capacity limits. Many are gender segregated. What people need is a space where they feel safe, they can store their belongings, they can come and go as needed to get to appointments and services, they can live with a partner or on their own. These are the things that will help people get back on their feet, overcome addiction, etc, and "shelters" are totally inadequate.

I wonder how Japan could manage their cities so well, even though they also have their own share of homeless people. As for the US, I think the US people brought the problem upon themselves, at least in some degree: it's increasingly rare to see serious discussions on pros and cons of different solutions. Instead, it's all about politics. The moment someone wants to discuss a solution, somewhere some activist or politician will shout out racism or equity or oppression or white supremacy or some other moral slurs. Amazingly, voters, at least those in big cities, love that.

This seems like a misdiagnosis. To my mind, the obvious problem is the wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever someone suggests building an apartment complex, let alone a homeless shelter. Impossible to take a step to address the problem if every proposal is shut down by concerned homeowners making a scene at every town meeting.

This town meeting driven zoning is ridiculously unique to America. In most places there's a faceless bureaucracy that decides whether the to issue the permit or not. They mechanistically check the zoning and other regulations and that's it. The neighbors can go to court if they seriously think the bureaucracy missed something.

Public hearing only happens when it's a public project.

I’d be curious to see a comparison with other countries with a federal system. My suspicion is that a fetish for local control makes these kind of beggar-thy-neighbor outcomes likelier, but most comparisons have people going for examples like Japan which don't have anything like a federal system.

Resident of Tokyo for years here. The homeless here make some money from picking up trash and selling to the municipalities so noone begs. Also Tokyo is super safe, so they can sleep wherever without worrying. Also you have to count the fact that housing is insanely cheap in places like Tama (although very far from city center)

But lately I have noticed an increase in homeless people, maybe its just Coronavirus? At any rate i wish the city did more. Both for them and for the rest of people. I wish them the best, but let's be honest its not a good sight or smell.

A big difference I noticed in Japan was that the streets that have clusters of homeless are super clean, and people were not violent. It's not like in SF, for instance, where people littered on streets and assaulted pedestrians.

> It's a pity - this used to be a problem that was mostly solved by the private market.

No, it wasn't. It was “solved” (or, at least, those afflicted were encouraged to keep a low profile so as not to disturb “decent folk”) by government through actual and de facto imprisonment, whether involuntary and abusive institutionalization of those with mental health problems or criminalization of vagrancy.

some small cities literally buy their homeless bus tickets to get rid of them, and their politicians point to the places they send them as liberalism run amok… how do you even undo such callousness

While this is true (my mother works as a homeless community outreach nurse in a "destination" state and has talked to individuals who show up as a result of this) its only a tiny trickle of the torrent.

A huge, huge number of your local homeless population is just that, local. A plurality of them are homeless due to unaddressed mental health issues. Solving homelessness completely may be impossible, but better mental health treatment infrastructure would get us a lot closer.

Happened in my city.

hmmm, maybe it's just me but your tone seems thoughtfully heartless.

You are heartbroken that public spaces can't be used by all, but you aren't heartbroken that so many people have no other options other than to live in those spaces.

Your compassionate solution is to bring back slums, flop houses, and chicken wire hotels (I actually had to look that up), so that you can get back to using your precious public spaces free of those less fortunate.

I'm sure he's open to hearing your ethical, compassionate, and politically viable alternate proposal. Go ahead and post it.

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