I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

Why do you favor blaming rent for homelessness instead of lack of jobs that pay well enough? Why can some people afford the rent while others can't?

If you are after a single root cause of homelessness you will be disappointed. Unless you only care to push an agenda.

Yup, and the problem with inadequate housing affordability means pumping money into rehab just further increases the price of housing as you need to house people in rehab, after all!

Get rid of height limits, parking minimums, single-family-only zoning, and make most housing projects zoned by-right without public comment required.

Your "very rich, very powerful" comment is unfounded and a weak attempt to make it seem like a conspiracy. It's the tens of millions of basic, everyday middle-class homeowners who freak out when anything related to their home changes negatively -- lower values, higher taxes, "wrong people" moving into the neighborhood, HOA rules not followed, school system grades declining, traffic increasing, etc etc

I wonder how many homeless are unseen.

My experience with those living on the streets is that substance abuse and mental health is the main symptom of them living that lifestyle. They will be the first ones to tell you if you're willing to have a conversation with them.

In regards to those living on the streets, the main cause of them being homeless is substance abuse and mental illness.

Unlike other states, California property tax rates don’t increase with market value.

The problem isn't that 55% is "high" (or not). The problem is that, currently, there is a housing problem that is significantly profitable for 55% of a population. This means that 55% of people have conflicting interests with fixing this problem.

Prop 13 takes away the normal downside to rising home prices.

They're not a voting block and their financial well being doesn't revolve around their home prices remaining high.

If you buy a $1M 1400 ft^2 in CA, and the price goes down, you're going to be deeply underwater in your mortgage. If home prices stay high enough long enough than it "embeds" itself into politics.

It's worth noting that property taxes in California are only re-assessed on ownership change or new construction. There's no downside to having the value of your home balloon as much as possible.

For the most part this is an important point.

But there is a minor perk that a greatly appreciating house gives you considerably more equity to act as a large rainy day battery via a home equity line of credit or traditional loans backed by home equity.

My home appreciated 20% last two years and while I hate the condition of the housing market, this unlocked a lot of equity years earlier than I expected it to.

> you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to others, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead.

Equity can be leveraged meaningfully without selling, so that's not true.

This seems naive. I'm sure the people looking for SROs or other low income choices are not the people buying $1M houses, but they probably have a good deal of overlap with people who are buying houses that are at the lowest rung on the ladder, who themselves have overlap with the next cohort, etc.

It's a market. Changing it in a major way at the bottom will have knock-on effects through the whole market.

Of course, more directly, people with $1M houses might also be highly motivated to avoid "the wrong kind of person" being able to afford housing any where near them, their schools, etc.

> Would that same homeowner be hurt if we built 100,000 cheap rental apartments?

Of course they would. Million dollar houses in many parts of the country are so insanely expensive not because they’re luxury goods; they’re expensive because supply is so constrained that even mediocre houses are extremely scarce relative to demand. People buying million dollar houses in e.g. the Bay Area know that their house is not particularly fancy, relative to other houses (that often sell for much less in other parts of the country).

As an analogy, consider cars in communist countries. Russian Ladas and East German Trabants were objectively horrible cars, but they cost several years’ average salary because supply was so scarce.

Introduce millions of even cheaper cars into the aforementioned communist countries and the prices of Ladas/Trabants would plummet. Likewise, introduce thousands of low income units into the Bay Area and the price of what used to be starter homes that now go for a million dollars would plummet.

The market isn't so segmented. If there's a massive availability of cheap rental apartments, there will be less demand for cheap or far away houses, which in turn will reduce their prices, which will in turn reduce demand for million dollar houses. Additionally, land can be divided/merged to turn cheap/expensive houses into expensive/cheap houses.

If your house you purchased for $200,000 20 years ago is now worth $1.4M, say, that's $1.2M in profit.

You could live in a smaller house worth $1M and still get $400k of profit you didn't have before.

That doesn't change that they are the source of the problem and that they get paid to cause the problem and be against its solutions. They also throw money into the throats of large corporations that own a huge amount of land.

Technically true but, and this is what makes democracy such a joke, poor people don't vote.

Precisely! I've linked a great article from Vox about how home ownership changes people. In a nutshell, most peoples' largest asset is their home, so they have strong incentives to protect its value. Because the housing crisis is fundamentally a supply crisis, it also causes them to take on a scarcity mindset. This leads to your classic NIMBY behavior, wherein homeowners show up at city council meetings to oppose literally anything going up in their neighborhoods. The end result is that NIMBYism does prop up home values, but, mostly because existing homeowners oppose the building of any more homes in their neighborhoods, thus perpetuating the crisis that caused them to behave this way.

You can read about this, plus some background on relevant research here: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22597947/homeowner-nimby-affor...

> The homeowners will vote down every new apartment complex, every new developer plan, every rezone.

Homeowners don't get to vote or have any say on such things. The city planning commission will approve, or not, whatever they will.

In the rare case where a vote is relevant, every resident gets one vote regardless of housing owner or renter status.

I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds:

> San Francisco and the East Bay should see 7,872 new apartments open in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year. It's the highest number of apartments — 13,497 units — added to the region in the last five years.

Surprised?

If enough people leave because housing is too expensive, then eventually housing stops being too expensive and people stop leaving. Eventually an equilibrium is reached, but that we might be at that equilibrium already if California’s population isn’t crashing.

Land value taxes reduce the value of land and increase the value of work.

The 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count¹ reported 32% for substance use and 26% for long-term mental health issues.

It's also worth keeping in mind that drug addictions and mental health issues can arise from homelessness rather than cause it.

¹https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-ange...

The people who become homeless because their rent went up certainly exist. These people tend to be homeless for a short amount of time because they are able to eventually find new housing. Maybe they live in their car for awhile. Maybe they couch surf. But it's a good point that there are people with mental health / drug problems that have issues beyond housing cost. Both can be true at the same time.

The answer to mental illness is quality mental healthcare available to those in need, along with housing first policies to create stability for those seeking care. This has costs of course.

California is the fifth largest economy in the world (Between Germany and the United Kingdom) and yet can’t prioritize this spending (and the spending that is taking place is not very effective or efficient).

Mentally ill people also sometimes live in houses, believe it or not. Some are barely getting by. When housing prices go up, they become homeless. When housing prices drop, some can keep it together well enough to pay rent.

Where are they gunna move to, and how are homes being $1m not a problem in your mind? Most people will never be able to pay for that, nevermind afford it. Delusional.

California is extremely capable of supporting its current population, and easily 50% more. The only thing stopping this is proper distribution of land and water. We let wealthy people hoard land and water (Prop 13 and our land rights system), rather than allocating them based on market systems or even more fair systems. We have feudalism baked too deeply into our laws.

There’s some nuance to that. 70% were already in SF when they became homeless, but the vast majority of San Franciscans aren’t from here. Only a third we’re even born in California. So it seems like people move here, become homeless, and stay.

And 30% coming here after becoming homeless isn’t peanuts.

The difference is that they will return to places like SF, LA and NYC, because they are treated much worse in other places.

Basically, take your one way bus ride to Dallas, where you then take a 1 way ride back to SF, from where you’re unlikely to go back to Dallas.

> it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see.

What you see is highly unrepresentative of homelessness.

You never see the people trying to scrape by in their cars. You never see the people couch surfing. You never see the people struggling but also struggling to not be known as homeless.

Because once you hit that position of being clearly homeless in appearance, all sorts of doors slam shut and getting out of homelessness is an order of magnitude harder.

And being in the precarious state of being homeless, but still fully functional, makes it all the harder to get to jobs on time, harder to protect any assets, harder to keep clean and not look homeless. And all that takes a huge toll on a person's psyche, and that extended stress can bring up mental issues that would have been completely manageable without the additional stress of not having a home base to run all the essential parts of life.

For every clearly homeless person you see, with severe mental issues, there are easily 5-20 that you would never know are homeless without following them around and seeing that they don't go back to an apartment at night.

And this all comes down to housing costs. For all the people we kick off the economic ladder, that run out of money for housing and don't have enough to move to a cheaper area, they are left in a very difficult spot, with little way to get back into housing. I've known people in my town that have been willing to put down 6 months of rent, or even 12, ahead of time, and been unable to land an apartment lease. Even market rate housing has lines that go out the door, and more applicants than the landlord knows what to do with.

The investigations and surveys I have seen on the subject suggest that the homeless population you are describing makes up a minority of the overall homeless population. It is something in the range of 30%-50% depending on the source (it is notoriously difficult to get accurate numbers on homeless populations).

Your anecdote is a classic form of bias if you just take a step back and reexamine it. You identify most homeless people as being like that because those are the people you immediately recognize as being homeless. Someone who is homeless purely due to the high cost of housing probably isn't immediately identifiable as homeless on sight.

California already has a 1% income tax allocated just to mental health, and has collected $7.4 billion so far just from this tax[0]. How is that working?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Servi...

The piece mentions Single-Room Occupancies (SROs), which used to be where a lot of people in similar situations would live.

I agree that this doesn't solve the problem for everyone, and there's also a place for publicly funded mental health hospitals. But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.

High housing costs aren't the totality of what OP is talking about. Zoning laws prohibiting construction of lower cost housing options make alternatives in a given locale unobtainable, regardless of cost. This is done to protect the valuation of SFHs, often enough. Designating districts as 'historic' or zoning shenanigans can do this. It's fundamentally a NIMBY problem, which is very different than the issue of regulatory burden for construction (environmental assessments, permitting, etc.). Both of these factors contribute to the problem though.

No offense, but equating housing with owning a house is part of the problem.

If one of your top complaints about the homeless is that they poop (an unavoidable bodily function you might be familiar with), then I'm not sure I trust your judgment about policy matters.

I believed this when I lived in California. Now I’m not so sure: it is true that people without shelter can easily die in much of the country, but California isn’t the only place with mild winters. Why don’t Arizona, New Mexico, large parts of Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, etc. have the same problem?

Assuming that California will just naturally have a larger homeless population than everywhere else means that nobody will spend much effort trying to solve the problem. Is it possible that California is just unusually bad when it comes to handling homelessness?

Honest question: Are you claiming that "liberal" has something to do with it?

If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this. If so, maybe you can elaborate on what you mean. Are there non-liberal high-cost cities in the US in a better state? Furthermore, it's worth noting that the other high-cost cities worldwide almost universally seem to have more left-leaning (or US liberal) policies on most issues than most high-cost cities in the US. I'm not sure I see the connection between the political alignment and the state of decay, homelessness, and crime in high-cost cities.

> ...homeless people are not "trash", but there is a similarity in your thinking...

Nope. No similiarity here. We can only solve the problem when we treat people with dignity.

We shouldn't alienate them. They are people just like you and me. The idea is to lower the cost while improving living standard for them.

> Why should countries like Indonesia, which has a per capita GDP of under $5,000 USD and no shortage of its own problems...

GDP is irrelevant here. Indonesia, Thailand, etc have many cities popular with backpackers and westerners living a nomadic lifestyle. Fresh fruits and fish. Great outdoor. Nice beach. Cheap motorbike. Great landscape and nature. Low-stress.

It can be a joint social venture set up by NGOs. We will need really smart founders to structure things in a way that will benefit the local economy there, while giving a decent life to those who were originally living on the street. A life with diginity e.g. where they do volunteer work in rehab (eg cooking), or as a craftman, an English teacher, a botanist, an entheogenesis research assistant, etc.

Are you talking about the panhandling gas can scam? They aren’t actually moving, out of gas, or whatever.

> ... moving people who can’t cope in their own country to a foreign country...

Homelessness is a specturm. Some people may just need a lift-up, (or an experience that changes the way life is viewed so they can find meaning in it again [1]) to be back to managing a functioning life again. What you want is to give them an opportunity to be in a less stressful enviroment with proper shelters and foods.

Addiction of any form (to cig, to opium, or to herions, etc, as well the more socially acceptable forms such as to sex, work, consumerism) is a coping mechanism for stress. It's counter-productive to be in an urban setting with the worst living conditions (ie homeless) which maximizes stress in so many aspect of your daily life, and then trying to 'cure' addiction and turn people into a functioning unit in society again so they can work enough hours to make enough income to pay rent.

Perhaps it's more productive to view every homeless person as someone who was burnt-out and broke, and happened to run out of options in their attenuated safety net like getting a loan from their parents to pay rent. And from that on existing health/mental conditions/dependencies they had would often exacerbate, and it got harder and harder to break the vicious cycle.

> ... interested in importing homeless Americans with mental/health issues...

Mental/health issues are a spectrum too. And this is not about "importing homeless Americans". This should be more like a rehab/retreat none-profit program for people who are stressed out in urban American life to experience life in a more stree-free enviroment closer to nature to connect back with the plants and terrains (away from all loud, harsh and unhealth stimuli and mind-numbing concretes, smells and unfriendiness of an overpopulated city).

It'll cost less than the War On Drugs, and if enough smart people are involved, we can definitely structure it in a way where on a long run it'll economically and culturally beneift all parties.

> ...worked and paid taxes in any foreign country? Then you would know how hard it is...

The purpose is to introduce a change of enviroment to a less-stressful one for them. Something like a training visa or work holiday pass (or even an education one [2]) would do. It would be easy esp when the orgs backing you have international recog.

As an NGO, there are many ways this can be executed after fundings are secured. We definitely need to collaborate with local institutes in ways that make sense to them. It can also be something that has an element of spirituality to it (like a church or temple retreat that also helps with rehab), or a commune on self-sustainability (where they'll still have to do work everyday). I see this as the most pragmatic way to lower the cost of living while giving people a dignified living experience that would be much better (and meaningful) than living on the street in CA as a homeless person.

[1]: this is why a change of environment can be extremely impactful to mental health. And this is also why psilocybins, etc, taken in the right settings, are useful for mental wellness. )

[2]: Can typically last 6 months to a year. And if we have 4 countries involved, that will be 2~4 years. After that there are many ways this can branch off.

We can start off with 5000 quota a year to gauge interest (we'll make it easy for people to apply), and gradually scale up to 50,000 in 5~10 years, (while keeping track of how effective this is comparing to the alternatives).

Rampant property crime with no legal repercussions is common here. People shoot up in parks (and now on school property!) and the city is now denying permits for kids to use parks because of the camps.

The problem is a learned helplessness of the electorate combined with reasonable voters leaving, resulting in people who want to double down on the status quo replacing them.

There is zero political will to enforce vagrancy, open air drug use, and private property law if someone is living in a tent. No standards == these people feel empowered to do whatever they want, while contributors to the tax base are treated poorly. I still get a ticket 30 mins after parking too far from the curb, and the city council does not like that I make a good income and own a single family home.

Blight and crime. And as I mentioned in the other fork, I grew up in Russia during the 90ies collapse, so my standards for lack of blight and crime are relatively low ;)

By stuff going on 15 blocks away I don't mean an odd car window smashed. I mean e.g. giant homeless camps (to the point where e.g. running events in the local park are canceled due to safety concerns), people shoplifting on industrial scale, break-ins, or e.g. people operating a loud, smoke-belching machine shop at night in a park right under somebody's windows.

I second the op, it's hard to just be homeless when it gets freezing cold. Put differently, if I had to choose a place to be homeless, I'd start by choosing a place with good weather, that's a (hypothetical) fact.

Do you know that it's true that per-capital NE cities invest more into shelters? View from Seattle, an enormous amount of money is spent on homeless outreach and shelters that I have never seen reflected in any other area (other than the Pacific rim).

Have you ever been to a homeless shelter? There's a reason homeless live on the street even in areas that have shelter availability.

Which puts them in the system, and they get the help they need or they rebel and leave- facing the choice of migrate or die. It’s not pretty but it’s the reality, because nature is a harsh teacher.

Assuming those statistics are trustworthy (which I don't necessarily, homeless people are notoriously undercounted by the census for instance and may be unevenly counted in different places), maybe more people become homeless in CA. I guess I'd want to know what % of the homeless population were recent transplants to CA vs what % of CA residents in general are recent transplants. Also, if they are homeless and recent transplants to CA, were they homeless before they moved to CA? Before assuming lots of homeless people are moving to CA more research required than that single number.

And then even if so... so what? I assume the point is doing something about people who have no homes, like reducing the number of people who have no homes. Perhaps we'd also want to know why they are moving to CA to begin with. Perhaps we'd say CA should get federal funding to deal with it's disproportional homeless problem, and then figure out the best use of that funding. I dunno.

Like, is the point something other than blaming homeless people for being homeless, or punishing people for being homeless, or make people's lives harder when they are homeless -- cause, what does that do, what's the point of that you think?

   Californians are getting precisely the kind of world
   they've voted for. It's ugly, and it literally stinks.
   Yes, how to fix it is the question, but I'm not sure the
   people have had enough yet. The recall election of Newsom
   next month will be an indicator. If he's recalled, then a
   new day of hope begins.

This. Sums it up neatly. Popular wisdom says Newsom has large enough money bags to defeat the recall effort quite handily. I personally do not think Californians have had enough, despite everything we have seen over the last few years - with the wildfires, PG&E's planned blackouts, ever burgeoning taxes with jack all to show for it, school boards prioritizing campaigns to rename schools honoring racist historical figures over everything else, general wasteful expenditure & graft etc.

   ...the people turned on him, and even set fire to his front
   lawn in protest.

That's putting it a tad mildly, given what happened.

   July 2009 - Then-mayor Gavin Newsom and wife Jennifer
   Siebel Newsom had only just moved into a new home in the
   Upper Haight when their front stoop was promptly defecated
   upon.[1]

[1]

A Brief History Of Poop On The Streets Of San Francisco

https://sfist.com/2019/05/01/a-brief-history-of-poop-on-the-...

Can you please explain how criminalizing homelessness, for example by enforcing sit/lie ordinances, would help homeless people find homes? Likewise, getting people into mental health services is not likely to get them a place to live. You seem to think that somehow “getting tough” on homeless people is going to make them straighten up and find a place to live, when in reality it will just cause them to move out of your view, so you don’t have to see them any longer.

Your response to

> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"

Is to (1) complain about a lack of constructive solutions, (2) blame Newsom and (3) not provide a constructive solution. "Hope" is free though. You can have mine, I wasn't using it.

I basically agree with everything you've said here, but one nitpick:

>In the Bay Area, they at one time had "Sit/Lie" laws prohibiting loitering -- but the locals condemned them as cruel and inhumane. Instead, they advocate that it's ones right to camp in the public park.

The larger issue is that US courts have repeatedly struck down loitering laws, which makes their enforcement impossible. Cities now can't legally restrict people hanging out on their sidewalks, public spaces etc.

I do like how you can always tell who is criticizing from afar when they say "San Fran" rather than something that a local would actually say.

The solution is very simple, tax the land.

Ok, yeah the lack of walkable cities does make sense. Almost all cities require cars even with cheap housing, and large cities provide better job opportunities. I still feel we're not factoring in people's motivation for living on the streets, and authorities seem to provide incentives which encourage it. I'm sure there is a percentage of people that could find alternatives like living with a friend or relative, if they really had to, but CA feels forcing people is somehow not being empathetic or something, when really you are enabling them and perhaps setting them up for a lifetime of being on the streets.

I think we should factor in incentives, and also the diverse reasons and motives each person has, as oppose to blaming it all on lack of housing.

Right, but is this in the high demand areas only? Are there no other nearby cities with cheaper rent and also potential jobs? I still blame the authorities for allowing areas with high concentration of homeless people, since that discourages them to find solutions and instead enables them to settle down with other people outside, when perhaps they could try their luck in a less expensive, less dense area.

It has been doing this for decades already. North up the coast. Across the wastes of Phoenix which built outward into the desert, and also to Texas which I hear has similar sprawl.

So we have established that housing and homelessness need to be solved at the national level. As such, the influx of people to California to begin with stemmed from within California along with other parts of the country—it has always been a national issue but only visible at the local level.

So what do you think is the root problem? A national housing shortage? What do you think drives that shortage if so? What do you think are good solutions? I understand it takes more than a blog post but every big problem takes more than a blog post, we can still have a conversation about it here. Could you shed a little light on the issue for us?

How do you reconcile "national shortage of housing" being the cause with California being the most expensive state with the most homeless? Shouldn't a national problem cause people to migrate AWAY from the expensive housing? Housing in the US (median, not SF) is one of the cheapest relative to income among the developed countries, AFAIK.

Also, I can tell you from my own example that it's a chicken and egg problem. If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you I'd like to have Singapore-style vehicle taxes, introduced gradually, so that developmental patterns would change, basically forcing people into transit and walkable neighborhoods. However, based mainly on living in Seattle, I am now 100% pro-driving, anti-transit and dream of moving to suburbs, specifically because I want to be far away from blight (and I grew up in Moscow in the 90ies economic collapse, so my standards for lack of urban blight are pretty low). Now, I am only willing to accept Singapore-style (or Moscow-style) urban environment with Singapore-style/Moscow-style ruthless enforcement of law and order.

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I lived in San Francisco from ~1999 to about 2003, and the homeless problem then was pretty bad. I can only imagine what the city must be like these days.

California is a honey pot for homeless people, that is not a national problem but a local reality.

From what Ive heard only 25% or so of the homeless came to CA from somewhere else.