Homelessness is about housing | Hacker News Reader

Homelessness is about housing

slowboring.com

93 pointsjseliger155 comments

This is consistent with a comment I left a few months ago: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one.

I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build.

Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes up with it. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.

The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.

Not just zoning reform, we need to make actual free housing for people. We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs. We have a surplus of goods. We don't need people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we just need to give people a place to live and some food to eat so they can contribute and potentially dig themselves out of any hole they have found themselves in.

> We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs.

Bullshit. There is plenty of work that needs to be done.

People are just paid to not do it. In urban areas, they become political slaves, and in rural areas, it destroys any chance they might have of building a local economy.

Citation needed!

This bad meme became very popular when the federal gov paid out an extra $600 (then $400, then $300) / wk in unemployment insurance benefits. In reality UI benefits have been utterly destroyed in some states (see FL -- underfunded, payout is dirt and getting approved or denied took people months) and in the rest of the states the payouts are so low they were totally insufficient.

Perhaps the biggest lie, however, is that people can just stay on these benefits or turn down work -- they are time limited per recipient and turning down work / quitting your job makes you ineligible!

Even government run public housing charges rent. Making housing free will mean even larger subsidies are required for construction, which means fewer units built overall.

> Even government run public housing charges rent.

IIRC, the norm is sliding-scale income contingent with a minimum of zero, so, it only sometimes charges rent, and has costs associated with identifying whether to charge and, if so, the rent to charge, charging, tracking, and collecting it.

We’re well beyond the point where this is a valid argument to make.

>> We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs

That's so wrong. There are more job openings right now than there are unemployed workers. Explain it to me, how is that "an economy that can't provide enough jobs"?

Think about it this way. If there were enough good paying jobs around for everyone then recessions would be impossible because people always have the option to switch to a good job.

That implies that everyone wants to work, AND that the people who are homeless at the margin want to live in a house.

Case in point: I live in a "nice" area up on a hill in my city and there are multiple homeless who sleep/have camps in the hillside directly adjacent. One of them drives a bmw and has been there at least 6 months. A couple sits in their car all day in the same spot doing who knows what.

There are many people who simply do not want to take part in society, while still living within it.

> The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.

California recently enacted a law with teeth, it requires regions to meet specific, aggressive housing goals, and if the regional proposals don't pass the scrutiny of the state government the region completely loses control over its zoning rules.

Some action has happened on that front that's promising - but IMO the most promising thing about these new laws isn't how effective they will be (mildly) but the attitudinal changes they represent.

The RHNA rules are riddled with loopholes, and cities are already finding creative ways to jumping through them. Most notably it does not strictly require that zoned capacity be likely (or even possible) to develop.

You'll find examples where cities have proposed rezoning mountain-side lots on steep ravines in order to fulfill state RHNA mandates, knowing full-well that any actual project would be unbuildable. Time will tell if state regulators will have the teeth to go after cities for this kind of blatant bad faith NIMBYism.

It almost seems like the law was created with the full intent of tearing down local zoning privileges en masse. I won't get my hopes up, but I would love to see that.

I wasn't at all surprised when damn near every community appealed the new RHNA rules (49 jurisdictions tried last I checked). I was surprised when only two were successful. We'll see what they actually end up doing, but it's a nice step in the right direction.

Actually just removing all public comment would be more impactful than anything. In nearly every jurisdiction, including places like SF (edit: Bay Area not only SF proper), there is ample housing theoretically permitted under current zoning. The problem is we don’t have rule of law in cities, we have fickle and subjective rule by angry mob.

Whether a building meets zoning codes should be a straightforward yes or no question that results in a fairly quick turnaround for a building permit, or a specific list of defects from the code and remedies that would bring the project into compliance.

> Actually just removing all public comment would be more impactful than anything. In nearly every jurisdiction, including places like SF, there is ample housing theoretically permitted under current zoning.

Is there a source for this?

I doubt it, because the nameplate capacity of San Francisco after its 1970s downzoning was very close to its actual size now. Same for Los Angeles, which was down-zoned from 10 million to 4 million in the 1970s.

https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/programs/housing/housing-supply/z...

Sorry, let me clarify: the SF _Bay Area_ has a lot more housing theoretically allowed within existing zoning.

But I’ll admit, in the case of the Bay Area, it’s such a desirable place to live that if they build a million homes tomorrow I’m not sure it would satisfy demand, though I do think that would be enough to move us down the price curve a bit.

This. If a proposed building meets the zoning requirements, it should be able to be built, full stop. To build anything you have to kowtow to the local building commission and the extortion of local groups[0]. Simply decreeing that it is a property owner's right to 'build a 5 story apartment building on a lot zoned for 5 story apartment buildings[1]' would do so much to alleviate housing pressure.

[0]Invariably environmental studies will be insufficient, traffic studies will be insufficient, the color of the neighborhood will be disrupted, gentrification!, etc.

[1]Consistent with rules and codes clearly defined, preferentially with affirmative defense against frivolous legal action.

This, this, this.

And we need to make it easier to build and run something other than single-family dwellings. Boarding houses used to be a common fixture in the US: think a cross between a dorm and a military barracks.

Give the residents decently secured lockers and some private security with actual teeth[1], not to mention some counseling, and the folks that land here might actually stand a chance at rebuilding their lives.

[1] As in "Sell meth here, and we will literally chuck you out the door like yesterday's garbage. Lawsuits don't mean shit to us."

> As in "Sell meth here, and we will literally chuck you out the door like yesterday's garbage. Lawsuits don't mean shit to us."

Public and public-subsidized housing already has that kind of policy (and much broader than that since it extends beyond “sell”, “meth”, and “here”) in the US by federal mandate; its a driver of homelessness, not a solution.

> So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.

This is such a good point that it really deserves hammering-home.

The causal relationship with mental illness and substance abuse, and homelessness, is bidirectional. Homelessness causes both mental illness and substance abuse (you try existing with no roof, no food, few possessions, and constantly being treated as subhuman) - but also pre-existing mental illness and substance abuse are far easier (and for the folks in the back who can't be swayed by humanism: cheaper) to tackle when the person has stable housing.

Housing is not the only lever we can pull to reduce homelessness, but it really is the largest one.

>before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness

And to build off this, recent counts[1] have found that 26% of Los Angeles's homeless population has mental health issues and 32% has "difficulties with drug or alcohol use". Even if there is zero overlap in those two groups and those issues all originated before the person became homeless (both of those are clearly not true) that would still leave 42% of people who are homeless and don't have either of those issues.

It isn't complicated. A majority of the homeless population is homeless because they simply can't afford a home.

[1] - https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=4561-2020-homeless-count-...

Okay, but help me understand... San Francisco and LA are incredibly expensive places to live. So are you proposing to build so many new apartments in SF or LA that rent drops by over 1,000 a month?

It definitely strikes me that there are a million places to live in this country that are dirt cheap, and there's a 0% chance SF becomes one of them. Maybe there's some data I'm missing about homeless people who can afford $2500 in rent but are on the street because they can't afford $3000, otherwise it just seems the two issues really aren't as connected as people tend to claim.

Part of me wonders if the "angry about rent prices for the homeless" people on HN happen to be angry about rent prices that THEY have to pay...

> So are you proposing to build so many new apartments in SF or LA that rent drops by over 1,000 a month?

Don't want to speak for OP, but I definitely do.

Government would not have to build anying, only get out of the way of people who want to build on their own land.

The Bay Area could easily be a world class metro area with 20 million people, all sleeping indoors.

Do you know of any cities of 20 million+ people with no homeless? Or even one million?

This is an excellent observation, and very very true.

But I would pair it with a potential solution that hasn't been truly tried: universal basic income paid for by taxing away the profits of rentiers, a full land value tax, that makes the exchange value of land zero:

http://progressandpoverty.org/

This is unfortunate a very politically fragile solution. The first thing that property rentiers do is eliminate their taxes, such as with Prop 13 in California. But, with enough economic education, maybe it will work...

The closest enactment of this that I know of is in a conservative government, Singapore. Nearly all land is public, and only leased. Only structures can be owned on public land. It's not perfect, and the waiting lists for housing for citizens are still too long, and non-citizens are thrown into a private market, but the outcomes are still amazing compared to a similar place such as Hong Kong.

>This is unfortunate a very politically fragile solution. The first thing that property rentiers do is eliminate their taxes, such as with Prop 13 in California. But, with enough economic education, maybe it will work...

The fundamental problem is that home owners and landlords both pay the tax. If everyone rents then tenants will obviously vote for higher property taxes to squeeze landlords. If everyone owns their house they obviously want to pay zero taxes on the land. When you have a mix of both then home owners will vote for the interests of landlords who get to squeeze money out of tenants without paying taxes.

I've seen this pattern literally applied to almost every tax situation. Huge oil corporations should stop polluting? It's obviously a case of CO2 taxes but then the small man doesn't want to pay his tiny portion of the tax. They will always pick out the exception on either end. I.e. a poor polluter paying excessive CO2 taxes because he uses some absurdly inefficient way of heating vs a model rich person that managed to get to 0 emissions because he put hundreds of thousands into reducing his CO2 footprint. The vast majority of people do not fit either stereotype.

Zero might be ambitious, but Tokyo has a metro population of 14 million and only about 2500 homeless. Compare the Bay Area city of Berkeley that has 120 thousand people and 1100 of them homeless. That's a lot of room to improve.

I feel like the answer to lot of unanswerable questions involves how they do things in Japan. Seoul has low rates of homelessness as well.

I'm one hundred percent convinced that America can't hope to recreate the institutional successes of Japan/Korea/Singapore in this area, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

Fun fact Japan homelessness peaked during their asset bubble in the 90s and has been declining since.

Also in so many parts of America the “lowest rung” of housing is extremely expensive relative to incomes, which is not something that is true in many cities around the world. Add in the American rejection of urbanism and the services that come with it…

That's a really interesting example. I wonder what we can learn from Tokyo.

Do they have some special affordable housing setup in Tokyo? Or is there some cultural component (it does strike me that even in the us asians are very underrepresented among the homeless)?

Japan has national zoning policies that allow for much greater housing density and incredible public transit in comparison to the US.

I’ve heard there’s also some cultural component where older houses aren’t valued at highly but I can’t really speak to its validity.

Housing is cheap in Tokyo. They just build a lot of it. And, contrary to vestigial American beliefs about tiny Japanese apartments, the typical Tokyo apartment is now more spacious than those of major American cities like New York. And, because they build so much, the typical apartment there is new and nice, instead of old and busted.

I can’t overstate how poor quality and lacking in amenities American condos are when one compares them to ones in Asia. Upper middle class condos in most of Asia are the equivalent of 1%er condos in America.

And the best part is often you buy a condo unfinished and literally get to build it out to your specifications and choose materials. Have never seen that in the US for non yacht owning individuals.

>Housing is cheap in Tokyo.

Eh, it's 400k for a small 1 br on average. That's cheaper than SF or NYC but not cheaper than Chicago or Dallas or Atlanta.

Homelessness as a symptom in every major city doesn’t mean it can’t be solved or improved. Do you believe that the current situation in major cities should be left as is?

OK, I shouldn't have said "all" :)

But I'm very unimpressed with the Bay Area Patriot argument that there are homeless in every big city, so SF is not special.

It reminds me of the eternal Onion headline "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".

Well, and I didn't exactly mean no homeless. A more relevant question might have been, "do you know of million+ cities in the western hemisphere without a large and growing homeless population?" Or something like that.

To me, the answer is more valuable as way to set expectations, rather than a binary verdict on whether the problem is solvable. Is it reasonable to shoot merely for a more manageable homeless population, rather than a complete fix that may not be attainable outside of Japan?

Manageable meant in contrast to out of control with no end in sight.

EDIT:

Will someone kindly upvote the parent comment? I've lost voting privileges.

> "do you know of million+ cities in the western hemisphere without a large and growing homeless population?"

Well that’s convenient, because all the examples I want to emulate are in the eastern hemisphere.

That's fair, but I have doubts about whether we can emulate anything significant from such vastly different societies. Hope I'm wrong.

I don't know about zero homeless, but there are plenty of cities where the weather gets bad enough that if you don't have shelter the only reasonable choices are to go somewhere else or die.

> Don't want to speak for OP, but I definitely do.

Yes, ditto, moi aussi.

>So are you proposing to build so many new apartments in SF or LA that rent drops by over 1,000 a month?

That would be great and I think it would be good for the cities overall, but that isn't really the problem that is causing homelessness.

Housing is not a single market. People on the street generally aren't choosing between a 800 sqft 1 bedroom and a tent. However when we build housing we often focus on the top of the market with luxury condos that come with dishwashers, central air, washer/dryers, and parking spaces. Building those doesn't help homeless people. We need new construction across the entire spectrum of housing including single room occupancy that often serves as a last option before someone is forced onto the street. Living in a 100 sqft home with a communal bathroom isn't great, but it sure beats living on the street.

And I comfortable knowing that increasing the supply of that SRO housing isn't going to make my rent any cheaper.

The reason that we "focus" on the expensive high end housing is the same that prices are high: in scarcity, those with the most money get served first.

That and new SROs have been banned; they might be profitable but they are illegal to build in most jurisdictions. My town recently made them legal again, but the anti-growth crowd has paradoxically started opposing them in full force because they are "unaffordable" despite being far more affordable than other options.

Also, SRO construction could make your rent cheaper. Pressure on supply comes from both directions, and as 2-bedroom apartments that house 8 people start to have fewer people due to SROs, is helps everyone. Or due to any affordable housing, honestly. I'm of the opinion that all supply is good, from deeply subsidized deed-restricted below market rate units, to luxury that is used only as a second or third house. (Those luxury units pay big impact fees and lots of property taxes, and prevent the luxury unit tenant from taking a more affordable unit).

>That and new SROs have been banned; they might be profitable but they are illegal to build in most jurisdictions.

I am more familiar with the LA market than SF, but they are legal in LA and a few are in the process of being built[1]. The developer for those is a non-profit though which leads back into your first point. We build at the top of the market because that is the most profitable. I believe there needs to be government incentives or regulation to spur construction across the full spectrum of housing

[1] -http://www.srohousing.org/index.html

Agreed that there should be changes in regulation, but most of that is allowing a lot more construction.

Right now we allow neighbors, particularly wealthy and powerful neighborhoods with the most amenities and the most demand for housing, to stop new housing. This is the core problem.

Housing markets have never delivered for all of society, but right now by constraining them heavily, we are in the worst possible situation. I personally support a robust system of public housing, for all income levels that uses cross subsidy to expand the public housing system and provide for all income levels.

However, being more politically realistic, even allowing young professionals to pay laborers to build new housing, rather than forcing them to pay landlords and drive out lower income people, would be a big improvement over our current system. But even this small change seems politically intractable, unless we move zoning and permitting responsibility to the state level rather than city/county level. This is how Japan has made housing much more affordable, by not local power brokers and land owners act as rentiers.

Building luxury apartments helps because it keeps all the rich people out of the affordable apartments meant for the non rich.

And yet, people keep coming to San Francisco, LA, and other cities because there is work there. You can't look at housing costs divorced from other costs of living, either: for example, moving to places that are "dirt cheap" in housing will likely come with a reduction in income as well as a rise in other costs. Replacing mass transit with an car-required lifestyle is expensive (and if you can't afford rent, it's somewhat likely you won't be able to afford a car, insurance, etc.).

Additionally, an important factor in most of these cases is that they have some amount of debt, perhaps significant. So even if they could be marginally better off if they reduce income by some and reduce costs by enough where they can afford rent in a cheaper place, their existing debt doesn't shrink and becomes effectively unpayable over any period of time.

In short, yes, the real proposal is to build so much new housing that rent drops by over a thousand a month. There's very few places in the country where that wouldn't be a great idea, not just in California... even those "dirt cheap places to live in this country" aren't dirt cheap anymore, things have changed quite a bit in the past few years.

Thanks. I’ve lived homeless and borrowed a lot from VanLife for 3 years in SF. Here’s my work on the subject; still in progress:

Https://Harlanji.com/urban-camping-pro

One of my projects is analyzing my data during various housing periods in the past 3-10 years like receipts, as a basis for the Physics concept art at the end. It’s open source and writing is not my primary vocation but I have the distilled experience there and am working on editing and the data.

Thanks for addressing drugs and mental illness as you did, as well. I’d add that those things likely increase as people are stuck on the street and face adversity and lose hope. I manage to evade detection as homeless for the most part, got tough in lockdown without showers and with reduced bathroom access. Hard to stay employed without a shower, hence housing is critical to the bootstrap process of “get a job, bum!”

>margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8,

In most of the country, Section 8 housing sets an artificially high floor on the price of rentals. Military bases often have a similar impact. In both cases, landlords (rationally) price rentals the highest amount they know the government will pay.

As section 8 has become more prevalent in the last decade (being a requirement for most types of speculative construction financing due to Dodd Frank), it has become more and more influential in determining "market" rates of rental housing.

Which is also why you see apartment complexes competing via "features", and not price.

I don't know what the solution is, but it's classic unintended consequences that "affordable housing" requirements have led to higher prices.

I am a bit surprised to hear this, as I've always had section 8 applicants offer less than market rate. Owners only accept it because tenants often stay longer, and the rent is guaranteed (you're paid by the government directly, and the tenant reimburses the government their portion).

Right- and that was my experience with it as well, up until the last decade or so.

The benefits you list are also true for markets that would "naturally" be priced lower than section 8 limits.

The policies hud put in place to try and get nicer areas and more landlords to accept section 8, really just translated into being policies of willing to pay higher rent amounts.

There's some circular reasoning going on, in that higher priced rentals must be nicer or in nicer areas. And the bigger apartment company players know how to game it, especially with new construction in cheaper areas of high rent zip codes.

This site always makes me smile https://newyorkyimby.com/

I'm not sure why this isn't common sense but I see this problem happening in the town I live in right now.

Average rent these days seems to start at around $2000 Canadian for a 1 bedroom/bachelor suite. Minimum wage is $15/h. Wage for an average job is between $15-$20/h.

$15/h is $2400/m gross and like $1600-$1800 net depending on your employer's accountant.

It's literally not possible to afford even a bachelor suite on minimum wage where I live.

I see homeowners complain on facebook about tenants not paying rent. Many of these homeowners are also business owners paying their employees minimum wage.

The homeless population in town has expanded exponentially over the last year. Homeowners complain about that.

There's a huge disconnect I just don't understand.

You can't pay people less than what average rent cost per month then complain there's homeless people. Either jobs need to pay more or rent needs to go down. It's just not reasonable at all currently.

You can't draw blood from stone as it were.

Indeed. Homelessness is about housing like living is about breathing.

Yes, OP makes a point with their empirical data plotted neatly on a scatterplot demonstrating a nice correlation between housing availability and homelessness. So OP found a nice variable that they can fit in their models. Great. But OP cannot conclude that this is the whole story. Ignoring wage stagnation leaves a pretty big hole in their explanation on what homelessness is about.

I'm not entirely sure why models are necessary. It's basic math.

if (job_pay < food + rent + basic_living_expenses){

    ++homelessness

}

else{

    sustainable_society()

}

Real basic logical shit honestly.

In reality there are way more loops than this, since markets tend to be self correcting.

One problem right now is some wealth variables are being incremented in loops that you can only break in to if you have assets, like in the property market.

If you are talking about land prices, that's not wealth, that's the ability to extort wealth out of other people.

No, I'm referring to this:

- Person A and Person B have the same income and live in similar properties.

- Person A rents at $1800/mo and is able to save $1000/mo

- Person B owns a $700K property, has $140K of equity (20%), and therefore pays down a mortgage of $560K at a rate of ~3.6% (makes the numbers work, and pretty accurate), totaling repayments of ~$2,800/mo over 25 years.

On paper these two have the same disposable income and it seems that Person B's net worth is 'only' $140K higher. But, consider what happens over 5 years, even without house prices going up

- Person A will have saved $60K overall

- Person B will have have $74K in additional equity (now owe $486K), and can now refinance at 70% LTV instead of 80% LTV. This gain is because they saved interest on the debt repaid over 5 years.

Person A would have had to invest their $1000/mo savings in to something yielding a massive 8%/year and pay no tax on their returns to reach a $74K balance in that time.

Now consider that if house prices even go up 2%/year over that 5 years (inline with inflation), that Person B will also have an additional $70K of equity. Meanwhile Person A is only $60K to $70K (depending on the performance of their own investments) of their way to a $150K deposit, on a now $770K property.

Once you have hard assets and leverage, you have a huge engine of wealth behind you.

Also, Person A's rent will increase every year no matter what happens

Yep, potentially contractually by some measure of inflation.

The problem is, both person A and Person B have more money than the original $15-$20/h wage earner I spoke of in my original post.

The amount of money you are describing

>Person A rents at $1800/mo and is able to save $1000/mo

Is unimaginable for someone making $15-$20/h.

Sometimes the people on HN really don't seem to grasp the reality of being an average working person.

Everything you said in your post is nonsense that means nothing to a person literally living pay cheque to pay cheque with unchangeable expenses greater than income.

No, it's not nonsense.

The person earning $15-20/h is 100% affected by this, since it leads to even greater inequality.

These people you describe are renting and landlords want a certain yield on their properties. Higher demand for houses (or reduced supply) push prices up, which in turn push up rents.

I really don’t understand what people mean when they talk about the law of supply and demand with housing. What exactly does it mean for a demand of housing to go up? Population growth? Immigration? Or is it speculative buying and landlording? What about supply of housing? Does public housing mean increased supply? More shelters? What about squats? Or are just talking about municipal zoning?

How does the economic law of supply and demand apply here? Everybody needs a house, lest they get homeless. By applying the law of supply and demand to housing you will inevitably get speculators and landlords—that is unless you regulate the market heavily—and with that you get stakeholders to the market and lobbying to policy makers. Then there is a serious power dynamics in favor landlords. So regulations are most likely not gonna favor tenants, who risk becoming homeless.

Or does demand here refer to favorable neighborhoods (as OP hints at). So a new light rail station connecting to work sites increase demands for housing in that particular neighborhood at the cost of other neighborhoods who will now see reduced housing prices and increased vacancy? How is that good either? This seems like you (and OP) are willing throw some neighborhoods under the bus to gentrify some neighborhoods while impoverishing others. If not then what kind of demand are you talking about?

No. What I want is for the market to stay away from housing... Or at the very least give me the option of public housing so that I personally have the choice of opting out of this silly game. Housing is far to important to my well being for the rich folks to play their silly games over.

>Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors

While that is definitely true, I'd add that less than ten percent[0] of homeless people have drug dependency/mental health issues, as was discussed recently[1] on HN.

Which bolsters your point that it's affordable housing that's at issue. I live in NYC and that's one of our biggest issues too, but for different reasons

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27953080

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948732

The inability to build housing is emotionally coupled to lack of political will to raise taxes, empower workers…

The owners want to keep power.

We’re basically servicing last generations success in that we’re obliged to let them fund our way of life.

I don’t owe some chud who got rich in the 90s deference due to 30+ year old success.

It’s the same with house building; we have to prop up these imagined values of people who “won” before we were born.

Tax the rich or eventually the poor will outnumber them and eat them.

> Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed.

I live in Santa Monica, CA. The notion that mental illness and drugs are not the primary contributors to homelessness runs totally counter to common sense and my lived experience.

Today, on 4th & Pacific, there was a man passed out asleep on a the median in broad daylight. No tent. Just splayed out baking in the sun. Earlier this week, I saw a man stop by each trash can along the Venice boardwalk to dig through and pick out half-eaten fast food. Eyes rolled back. An emaciated old woman passed out in the sand in a fetal position. A man using a power drill on the air and muttering to himself.

These people are not on the margins. They are never bouncing back. Homes could be $0 and they would still be on the streets. And they are the rule not the exception.

Meth is dirt cheap, widely available in Los Angeles, and it induces psychosis. Isn't it obvious that's the issue?

And they are the rule not the exception.

Meth is dirt cheap, widely available in Los Angeles, and it induces psychosis. Isn't it obvious that's the issue?

As a long time volunteer and giver to drug rehab programs, I'm very sympathetic to this argument, but I still agree with OP.

People don't really like drugs. That kind of addiction is usually closely connected to something else in their life going wrong. If the only happiness you can find in your life is in a pill or a pipe, then that's where you will go until it destroys you.

This is where OP's "on the margins" argument comes back. If housing is more affordable, you'll have fewer miserable people and fewer people on drugs. If you transform public schools from prisons/daycares into institutions that actually feed and empower the curiosity of children, they'll have less a reason to buy drugs from each other. If you make it easier for people to start businesses and follow their dreams, they'll have a purpose that feeds them instead of a chemical.

You can't eliminate the drug problem this way, but it can be improved on the margins simply by giving more people an easier path to happiness.

But how does this solve the immediate problem of psychotic people roaming my neighborhood?

That's not an immediate problem. That's a long term problem.

What are you going to do? Incarcerate them for life? If you let them leave before they die they are bound to roam a neighborhood.

If this isn’t a problem in need of an immediate solution, then what is? Those people need help today, not if/when LA figures out how to fix fifty years of housing stock mismanagement. I would be surprised if the old woman in the sand is alive in five years.

And what about the vagrant trying to break into my apartment complex last week? The other one with a sharp object who got arrested in my neighbor’s backyard a couple of weeks ago? The young guy in my old neighborhood who was stabbed to death in his backyard by a different vagrant? The man passed out snoring right outside my girlfriend’s front doorstep?

Along this line of awareness is something I've been noticing more.. with housing costs what they are, many people are stuck in toxic (sometimes extremely abusive) living arrangements.

Which may lead one or more people in those living situations to reach for an escape via drugs/alcohol - which may lead the others living with that to suffer more..

Yet neither of the two (maybe more) can afford to escape the living situation, as most people can not afford to move to a new place alone - it seems many are stuck with having (often multiple ) roommates - which keeps the living in pain cycle going, with no way out.

breaking a lease or eviction or leaving and having someone else fail via owing money / damages / eviction can make it even harder to get a better living situation - even if the damages were not in control of the person, sometimes the first person doesn't even know what happened until they've spent time and money to apply to a new place and get rejected.

There are indeed many more social / cultural costs beyond what most people consider I agree.

With people needing to work 75 hours per week to pay for an average place - any with kids will have much of our future generations being raised by cats and tvs, no parents around to guide anything - so we're also creating a repeating social hell cycle in other ways too.

I always wonder about one of the greatest contradictions in economic liberalism.

Employers complain about lazy workers. Citizens complain about drug addicts. Poor people can't manage their finances.

The contradiction lies in the belief that all people act rationally but as soon as someone behaves in a way you do not agree with they are automatically assumed to act irrationally.

Lazy workers are irrational but nobody stops and wonders if there is a rational reason for them to be lazy.

Drug addicts are irrational but nobody stops and wonders if there is a rational reason for them to take drugs.

Poor people are irrational but nobody stops and wonders if there is a rational reason why they can't manage their finances.

Really, what has happened is that rationality has been redefined to be subjective success and irrationality the failure to achieve subjective success. In other words, we did a simple language trick to praise the winners for winning and blame the losers for losing.

I think the top comment on the article nails it perfectly. There is a bit of a bait-and-switch happening when we talk about homelessness.

The first thing one has to do is define homeless, which actually has many definitions. By number, most homeless are socially normal people staying with relatives and friends.

But that isn't what people imagine when we discuss homelessness.

> The first thing one has to do is define homeless, which actually has many definitions. By number, most homeless are socially normal people staying with relatives and friends.

Me and my 5 kids just came within a hair of being homeless. As in, we beat the long, long odds and scored the 1-rental-for-every-100-families-looking.

To clarify, families with cash in the bank are facing strong prospects for homelessness this year. Families without cash, with special needs, or many other common factors might as well buy tents now because there is nowhere for them to go.

Most folks without a home don't want to be seen. Hell, most folks with a home don't want to be seen most of the time (since most peoples' free time is probably spent in their home).

It makes perfect sense that the people in the absolute worst position (severe mental illness or disability or severe, hard drug addiction) are going to be some of the most visible but it doesn't make them a majority.

Well, where is this invisible majority hiding?

No RVs at all in Santa Monica, limited parking in general, close to zero tents, a limited number of parks, and no forests. The city proper is filled with tent encampments but is otherwise not that much different.

I’m not sure what you are getting at? Being in a tent doesn’t mean someone is mentally ill or using hard drugs.

> I’m not sure what you are getting at?

There is one general characterization of a homeless person who has severe mental illness or is in the throes of addiction. There is another of a person who is simply down on his luck. He sleeps in his car on a side street at night, showers at the local YMCA, and takes the bus to his minimum wage job. If housing was cheaper, or if government assistance better, then he could afford a small apartment.

I agree that the latter exist and I think you would agree that the former exists. The data suggests that the majority of the population falls into the latter camp.

What I'm getting at is -- we should treat the data with more skepticism. It doesn't match what I see with my own eyes. Something is off. Either my eyes are grossly deceiving me or it's just wrong. Yes, I'm more likely to overestimate the number in the former camp than underestimate -- but it's just overwhelming. The ratio seems like it's 100:1 not 7:3 or something. They can't be that good at blending into society.

> Being in a tent doesn’t mean someone is mentally ill or using hard drugs.

My intuition is that there is a very tight correlation between the two. It seems almost tautological to me that someone who chooses* to live in filth in a tent on a median or under an overpass is mentally ill. Maybe I'm wrong.

* "Chooses", not in the sense that they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job, but in the sense that -- why don't they put up their tent in a cleaner less densely populated part of town and take a free bus ride into town?

Imagine if every homeless person in SF got over their drug habit or was cured of their mental illness or physical disability or what ever other issue they had that drove them to being homeless. Then they all got stable jobs that they were good at and happy with. What kind of jobs do you think they’d get?

Would they all become SWEs making $300k? Maybe they’d be lawyers, or marketing executives, or university presidents, or hospital administrators?

I doubt it.

The problem is that those people aren’t going to be able to get the kinds of jobs that would make it possible to even afford rent a place here.

And most homeless don’t have the kinds of issues I listed before. And many among the ones who do have those issue as a result of becoming homeless.

The city can throw any amount of money at trying to help the homeless, but it’s not going to make a difference if the minimum cost of living is above what they could ever earn.

They'd move out of SF, something they can't do now due to the availability of drugs, good weather, and sympathetic tourists with money to spare.

It's really great that you can blame your problems on tourists.

You cant live in San Francisco then. Pack your bags and live somewhere you can afford. That may sound harsh but its reality. You're not entitled to live anywhere you want just like i cant live on billionaires row in manhattan.

edit: should have known this wouldnt be popular considering half of HN is trapped in cali absurd prices but refuse to leave. Too bad. Applies to you as well.

That's a common response. The problem is that it ignores the fact that San Francisco needs those people to fill jobs that need doing. https://nyti.ms/3yuq3nX

The common response to that then is then we should just raise the pay in an area until every job pays enough to afford to live there, or if not those jobs are clearly not important enough. The problem is that the number of these jobs is growing faster than housing stock. Market forces can't solve the problem of more jobs than homes unless you can build homes or destroy jobs. Take a look at https://bit.ly/36ySeFS - Santa Clara County added 300,000 jobs between 2010 and 2020 while building around 6,000 homes per year (5 jobs per home).

SF is the same story: total housing units in San Francisco increased by about 23,000 from 2010 to 2018 (https://commissions.sfplanning.org/cpcpackets/1996.0013CWP_2..., slide 6). Total employment in San Francisco during the same period grew by almost 300,000.

Seattle: total housing units in Seattle from 2010 to 2019 grew by about 59,000 homes (https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/abo...). Total employment (labor force) in Seattle during the same period grew by 243,000 (https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUDV534264400000006?amp%253...)

If you really need them, then pay them more. Otherwise you dont need them do you.

People dont want to pay a business enough so they can hire people? Then you dont get the business.

Economics works itself out if you let it.

I feel like you didn't really address anything past the second sentence of the comment you were responding to.

> Economics works itself out if you let it.

Sure. But exclusive single-family zoning, for example, isn't exactly "letting it".

> Economics works itself out if you let it.

It's not just the businesses that are lost. Entire towns are at risk. We're facing the same problem in a lot of small mountain towns here in Colorado. Businesses can't hire because workers can't afford to leave anywhere near. The poor business environment and rising prices destroys the quality of life for locals, and the feedback can drain the population.

I feel like this is an experiment that hasn't been fully conducted on a large scale anywhere, but I fear it will be soon.

My point is if rich people are moving in and driving home prices up, then those same people should have the ability and willingness to pay higher prices to local businesses who can then pay employees more.

If their business is not a necessity or something the community wants, then yes they are going out of business.

I have sympathy for that small town feel, trust me. But thats how its going to go.

The most common policy responses in this thread are suggesting that the solution is to allow more building by relaxing zoning restrictions and lowering the amount of public input on new development, ie greater property rights.

How are you not for that if you believe what you stated in your last sentence?

There shouldn't be a billionaire's row in Manhattan. There shouldn't be billionaires.

In my experience the percentage of homeless that have serious addiction issue (alcohol, meth or heroin) approaches 100%

In the US, the majority of homeless people are homeless for economic reasons[1], and not because of mental illness or addiction.

[1] https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Homeless_Stats_...

Your document doesn't really support your claim.

>at least 2.5 to 3.5 million Americans sleep in shelters, transitional housing, and public places not meant for human habitation [...] At least an additional 7.4 million have lost their own homes and are doubled-up with others due to economic necessity

In other words, if we expand the definition of homeless to include people who are living with others "due to economic necessity", then most of the "homeless" are homeless for economic reasons. That's not exactly the same as "most people who are conventionally homeless (for a lack of a better term) are homeless for economic reasons". When you say "homeless", most people think of "sleeping on the streets", not "crashing at a friends house".

>In other words, if we expand the definition of homeless to include people who are living with others "due to economic necessity", then most of the "homeless" are homeless for economic reasons. That's not exactly the same as "most people who are conventionally homeless (for a lack of a better term) are homeless for economic reasons". When you say "homeless", most people think of "sleeping on the streets", not "crashing at a friends house".

That seems to be a distinction without a difference, IMHO.

If you have friends who will let you crash on their couch, does that make you less homeless than if you don't have any friends? Or at least none that will let you crash on their couch?

The vast majority of homeless people wouldn't be homeless if they could afford to rent/buy housing.

That sounds like economic reasons to me. Or am I missing something?

> Or am I missing something?

You seemed to have missed the point of my comment. I'm not advocating for/against whether "homeless" should count people who are living with others due to economic necessity. I'm pointing out that heavyset_go's definition of "homeless" likely differs drastically than the one used by honksillet, and that him sneakily changing the definition to make a counterclaim is misleading at best.

And you seem to have missed the point of mine.

Which was that the "definitions" of homelessness you're comparing aren't really relevant to whether or not homelessness is primarily an economic issue.

I'd add that nitpicking about those definitions doesn't add anything to the discussion, nor does it elucidate anything useful or interesting IMHO.

It's pretty clear that the vast majority of homelessness, however you might reasonably define it, is related to economic hardship and insecurity.

I spent nearly six years homeless. I have never used meth or heroin and I don't typically drink alcohol.

I'm not an addict. I never have been.

You are the perfect person I want to have a conversation with. Assuming we are operating under a similar definition of homelessness which people find to be a problem, IE dispersed living on public property within city limits.

How did this happen? What became a barrier for work mainly? Skills, network ? Did you find groups of other homeless similar to yourself or did you isolate yourself.

You might be interested in some of my blogs:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/

https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

In addition to the links she gave, you can look back at her HN comments. Lots of good stuff here.

>How did this happen? What became a barrier for work mainly? Skills, network ? Did you find groups of other homeless similar to yourself or did you isolate yourself.

Not GP, but the biggest barrier to work I had was not having a regular place to shower or keep clean clothes.

For some strange reason, employers don't like it if you're unbathed and in dirty clothes. I was never able to figure out why. Perhaps you could opine on that?

Sarcasm aside, I do remember reading and talking to formally homeless folks saying that they would commonly have gym memberships for this very reason.

Second to that at least in the city I live in, many barbershops and dry cleaners offer free service to homeless who are going to be interviewed.

People can be homeless without living on the street. Homeless doesn't necessarily mean shelterless, it means you don't have a home.

What experience is that? Handing out food to homeless people a while back about 1 of the 20 was drunk and the rest sober and lucid. One had given up heroin.

Not according to the National Coalition for the Homeless:

> The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2003) estimates, 38% of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26% abused other drugs.

https://nationalhomeless.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Subs...

>> The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2003) estimates, 38% of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26% abused other drugs.

Actually, more recent data[0] shows that 36% of chronically homeless people have drug dependency/mental health issues. And since only ~20% of the homeless are chronically homeless, that's less than ten percent of the homeless population.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27953080

Drugs are escapism. Nobody wants to be addicted to booze or meth or heroin if they were otherwise happy with their life. The same factors lead to addition and homelessness.

Is anecdotal evidence is a solid basis for public policy?

The point of the article is that the homeless need homes. It is encouraging the city to spend money on that, which seems to address your main point.

> The problem is that those people aren’t going to be able to get the kinds of jobs that would make it possible to even afford rent a place here.

Even people with decent jobs in the core Bay Area cities (or even the peripheral ones) often commute in from some place more peripheral and cheaper to live then where their jobs are located.

Amazon could always use more workers.

But I agree with you about the rising cost of housing. It's ridiculous.

>Imagine if every homeless person in SF got over their drug habit or was cured of their mental illness or physical disability or what ever other issue they had that drove them to being homeless.

Wow, privilege makes you blind, indeed.

> The problem is that those people aren’t going to be able to get the kinds of jobs that would make it possible to even afford rent a place here.

So we're back to bus tickets, then?

Only partly joking because you're completely right. I'm not sure a path from homelessness to financial stability really exists in San Francisco right now.

> They open by quoting an October 18, 1957 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which says: "If rooming houses are permitted to spread to the city's one- and two-family neighborhoods, there is not much use in talking brave words about fighting blight."

RE: """blight""" — https://newrepublic.com/article/119106/ferguson-missouris-co...

"You can’t really understand Ferguson unless you understand J.D. Shelley. He was a middle-class black man from north St. Louis who in 1945 bought a home in a neighborhood just a few minutes east of Ferguson, unaware of the restrictive covenant that barred its sale to 'people of the Negro or Asian Race'. Alas, this move inflamed Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away and was well aware of the covenant. Kraemer was temporarily vindicated when the Missouri Supreme court backed his lawsuit to enforce the covenant, but the United States Supreme Court overturned the Missouri ruling and forbade the state from enforcing such private agreements. In the wake of the Shelley v. Kraemer decision, blacks began to move out of crowded north St. Louis City, where many had been packed into high-rise projects such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, to north St. Louis County."

Pruitt-Igoe is that housing project they implode in "Koyaanisqatsi" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE

Did anyone else notice this euphemism treadmill update?

"for people experiencing homelessness"

"the number of people experiencing homelessness"

"of those experiencing homelessness"

This softer language with more syllables is not for the benefit of the homeless, it's for everyone else so they don't feel as bad about it. Which makes it less likely anything will be done. George Carlin made this point brilliantly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

Lol I am feeling more homeless today than usual

The point of this wording is that "homeless" is not an identity, not a classification that permanently groups people into one category or another. Rather, it's a condition that people can experience, whether chronic or transient.

No, that's absolutely got nothing to do with sparing the feelings of a stigmatized group or anyone else. It's entirely about helping people better understand that "the homeless" are not some separate, distinct group of people. They come from the general population.

Anyone can end up homeless. The more we make it hard on individuals to leave that situation and rejoin society, the more we cut our own throats.

If you talk to me about "the homeless" if you have something interesting to say I'll listen.

If you talk to me about "people experiencing homelessness" my eyes glaze over and I stop listening.

I'm not someone who uses that framing. I'm just telling you why it gets used.

I typically talk about "the homeless population" or "homeless individuals." I spent years homeless. I have had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I'm a blogger and freelance writer and I think language matters but I also generally agree that people sometimes get too hung up on language to the point where it's counterproductive. I try to not get too hung about it or be too nitpicky, personally.

Very timely and apropos Carlin reference.

My landlord is a company that manages Apartment Communities each of which has a couple of hundred Apartment Homes. It's nauseating. Makes me think of a point that Hicks made brilliantly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbAAVLcMzr4

Speaking of George Carlin, he also made a bit on homelessness and came to the same conclusion the article did: https://youtu.be/lncLOEqc9Rw?t=202

I was just about to make the exact same point. Housing is warfare. You'll find few friends. Be extremely careful with advice.

> Leftists often raise the true-but-misleading factoid that the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given day is generally much smaller than the number of homes that are unoccupied on any given day.

> But as we covered [...] it’s not the case that homelessness is high where vacancy rates are high.

I wonder if the author is willfully ignorant here. The point leftists are making is not that of correlation and causation, but that of the lack of political will. The point is that we could solve homelessness today if there was a political will. The point is usually along the lines of: “Homelessness is a really solvable problem, see if we used all the vacant housing we could house every single homeless person, sometimes many times over”. There is no correlation nor causation in this argument. And the point is so obvious I can’t imagine how the author got their reading into it, other then blanket dismissal of arguments from the political left.

> I know it’s a little bit counterintuitive to people, but in a broad sense, the biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos.

> market-rate housing generates tax revenue by bringing in new affluent residents, and that revenue can be used to finance an affordable housing trust fund or new public housing or whatever else you want.

Here we go. The author seems to be proposing a trickle-down theory of housing. I’m not an economist but I’ve heard that trickle down theory is not the best economic theory we have. In fact I was under the impression that such theories were heavily biased by willful thinking, and have no basis in reality.

If this were to be true there would need to be a political will to actually spend the hopefully increased tax revenue on housing, however we have no reason to believe that would be the case. And that goes back to the author’s misinterpretation in the previous quotes. If there was a political will, governments would buy up the existing vacant housing and use them to house the homeless.

This is addressed directly in the article via economic theory, comparative analysis, and "detailed empirical work" (from studying cases where new housing was built and the observed effect on prices):

From the article:

> When I first started making the case for land use reform, we had two legs to our argument. One was basic economic theory — more supply equals less scarcity equals lower prices. The other was cross-sectional analysis — metro areas with laxer land use regulation see more construction and lower prices. But we can now add a third leg to that analysis in terms of detailed empirical work. [...]

>> We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6 percent relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially.

The vacant housing and the homeless people are in different places. You would need to forcibly relocate people to use that vacant housing.

I found this convincing - proposal to fill in the south bay and build houses there near San Jose.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-...

We've filled in a bunch of the bay already (Redwood Shores, Foster City) without problems, but stopped in the 70s. Cities like Boston which developed earlier had massive percentages of their bays taken over (>50%) without problems; but we've basically frozen this type of reclamation.

The land along the bay shore is generally underused; there's at least 50sqm of salt ponds which produce very little value and aren't part of any historical ecosystem either.

That's some pretty aggressive trend lines for pretty noisy data. Looks pretty L shaped to me. Some outliers with low vacancy and high homelessness that make it look like there's a trend, but I don't know that I really see much of a correlation.

We recently scored a rental. The ad was up for 2 hours and had 50 applicants. Any rentals in this market get 400 people, each day, trying to rent the home. Googling news stories shows this same scenario playing out across the the US. Businesses want employees but without somewhere for employees to live, it's unclear how they can possibly find new hires.

So yea. It's a housing problem.

It really feels like our cities would be a lot better if we had some real central planning and didn’t leave everything as a patchwork. CA is starting to do that with mandating new housing but the dispersed system of government is basically at its worst here.

Perhaps homelessness can't be solved via market solutions...it hasn't so far.

We've torn down about a million SROs in the last few decades. That's got to be part of the problem.

Moving into an SRO is how I got back into housing after years of homelessness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

It doesn’t matter if it’s market solutions or not. Without more housing, California will keep having this problem.

Blaming capitalism or government or whatever is a red herring. Build. More. Housing.

Because the govt. has not let the market solve it. In what free market are NIMBYs given this much free reign?

The medieval free market

The market solution was flophouses. Government regulation is one thing preventing that market solution now. Another thing would be people like me who aren't about to have that type of housing in their neighborhood and would vote out any politician who allowed it.

Homelessness is not just about a lack of housing right?

There are more than 13 million vacant homes in the US: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

Seems like it’s a matter of public policy that we can’t find a place for half a million people to live.

I've heard this before, I wonder how much of this a simple 1-2 month vacancy between tenets and how much is actually people owning buildings and not renting them out. It seems like a large portion is short term vacancies. Owning an empty building seems like a bad investment when you could rent it out and make much more money.

I guess this would be an easy question to answer. Just collect data on how long each house stays vacant, you can get e.g. the average time a house in Baltimore will stay vacant, which type of house and which neighborhood is more likely to stay vacant longer, etc.

I did a quick google search for some summary on this statistic, but found nothing (unsurprisingly since I have never done this kind of research before). Since this is HN I’m sure if there is will somebody can provide us with a summary—or at least an answer—of whether this is the case.

The so called "labor shortage" is also very related to lack of housing, nobody really wants to take a job if they have a 16 hour each way commute to and from affordable housing.

There's also unwillingness (or inability) to relocate, even when the destination is affordable.

There are foundries and factories dotting the Midwest, where they struggle to get enough people to show up sober. Few want to upend their lives for a job that is of unknown duration though

There's a reason why many of their staff have trouble showing up sober. The job sucks.

It is not affordable if the pay does not compensate for the income volatility.

Volatility (perceived or real) is often times ignored in calculations, because it is difficult to translate into a number. But people can see and feel it, and sure they might over estimate and under estimate it, but it is part of people’s calculations.

> Few want to upend their lives for a job that is of unknown duration though

This is one of the problems.

The question about moving somewhere is "What happens when my job evaporates?" If you're sitting in the Midwest, the answer is "Congratulations, you get to move again.".

Another problem with leaving a high cost of living area for a low cost of living area is that moving back to the high cost of living area can be almost impossible. Once you slip off the housing pyramid scheme in a high cost of living area, you can't get back onto it.

It's better to stay in the high cost of living area until you've banked enough money that you can leave permanently.

> There are foundries and factories dotting the Midwest, where they struggle to get enough people to show up sober.

Add an extra zero to the hourly wage and people will show up sober. This isn't a hard problem to solve.

I get soooo tired of this.

My anecdote along the lines of this was sitting at an injection molding conference while they sat and whined that they couldn't hold on to workers. And need more people in the pipeline. Etc. ... I'm somewhat sympathetic--I was a hiring manager during the DotBomb so I understand getting poached quite intimately. It doesn't help that working on an injection molding line is a tough job and pretty physically demanding--molds are basically a 40-100 cubic feet of steel and changing them out is rough.

So, they finally name the poachers ...

Amazon and Foxconn.

Holy hell!

I simply couldn't keep my mouth shut and went non-linear. I said loudly and in no uncertain terms that if they're losing people to two of the worst employers on the planet that they simply need to shut the hell down. Otherwise, shut the fuck up about poaching and pipelines until your salaries don't suck donkey balls.

I didn't make many friends that day. But the couple I did had their heads screwed on straight.

Just because the employer is in the Midwest doesn't make them competent.

There's also a not insignificant number of employers that use their status as one of a very few employers in town to abuse employees, either in salary or otherwise, because the barrier to quitting is "do I want to uproot my entire family and have to move?" This definitely factors into people not wanting to move to places where there aren't not only jobs, but enough variety in employers to hedge against the worst of the worst.

They aren't going to add an extra zero to the job when they can pay 50% more to existing employees to work a second shift. Of course that feeds into "the job sucks" which makes them less attractive as an employer which supports the "Just because the employer is in the Midwest doesn't make them competent" In fact I would say most of the employers in the midwest are incompetent.

> Yeah it's cold there, but the factory is hot and you'll be working 16 hour days there.. No you will be able to afford an efficiency with heat and have a few bucks left for a movie maybe once a month.. Well you'll be working 6 days a week anyway, you will have fun at work with your coworkers. Oh, one thing though.. It's REALLY important you show up to work sober okay so.. Is this an everyday thing or..

I'm shocked the Midwest doesn't have recruiters on site at the homeless encampments every day. Shocked I tell you.

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