In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.
Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be benefited by lower housing prices.
These people could not afford nor likely ever would afford, a house that cost literally anything. Most of these people suffer from a mental illness and/or a drug addiction which makes holding down a job unlikely to ever happen. What they need is publicly funded mental health hospitals, like the ones that were destroyed in the 80s.
Of course high housing costs are a huge problem, but I just don't think they tell the whole story when it comes to CA homelessness. There's an elephant in the room that far too many people don't want to address. It's the aforementioned population of people who either can't or won't work and the solution we have for them right now is the street.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Mental_Health_Servi...
When I advocate for something like a mental health program, it assumes a government which is functional enough to actually implement it. What we currently have here in CA couldn't be further from that.
Note that the tax is not indexed to inflation: already, the million-dollar threshold is worth only $715k in 2005 dollars. After another ~17 years at 2% inflation, the same tax will be charged on earners of $500k+ in 2005 dollars.
Not to mention that when owning prices are high, there’s a bigger incentive for local governments to use every opportunity to help other people who might not need as much help but have more consistent voting habits
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.
There is a difference between the technically "homeless" and the visibly homeless who camp out on sidewalks etc. which is what most people are talking about when the "homeless problem" is mentioned.
The low hanging fruit is usually picked first. So let’s focus on picking the low hanging fruit if we aren’t already (they might already do a good job here), while the chronic homeless problems will be tough to solve.
I beg to differ. I've spent significant time around what could be broadly categorized as "the homeless" in California, specifically in LA and OC, over the last 13 years. As recently as 3 days ago, I was searching for a mentally ill and homeless family member in LA. Last I heard he was on the coast, but I wasn't able to find anyone who knew or had seen him. This is an annual or bi-annual occurrence for me. Sure I'm not out there every day, but I feel as though I am competent on the subject. I certainly have more time in rank than most people that speak up on this one.
If you offered an SRO to most of the people that I've come across in the last 10 years, they'd tell you to go fuck yourself.
Why? Sorry if question is dumb..
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.
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.
Whenever they do these investigations of how many of the chronic homeless are local or imported problems, they ask questions like “where did you become homeless?” (Crashing on a friends couch doesn’t count) and always avoid the question “when did you move here?” (So someone moving in a year ago to make it big and became homeless 3 months in would count as a local also).
They did a study in Seattle that found that most of the homeless there were previously housed in Seattle, but also that most were housed in … pioneer square. That would be like someone in LA saying they were last housed in skid row.
“The bay” has a particularly close proximity to cheap money for reasons so numerous they deserve their own book.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/21/nevada...
South Park made an episode about it with the song “California loves the homeless”.
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/California_Loves_the_Homel...
California largely has weather that you can survive outdoor in year round and social programs that provide for and policies that show empathy for homelessness.
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?
Also, california spends much more than all of the other states on providing assistance to the homeless, and is far more tolerant of bad behavior (public drug use, drunkeness, defecation, etc).
California isn't bad at handling the homeless so much as it is bad at getting the homeless to become housed, mentally and financially stable.
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.
Look at that graph and then ask yourself what changed in 2013. Hint, 1994-2001 they had a republican mayor. 2002-2013 they had a moderate republican who turned into a moderate democrat. And 2014 - now they've had a radical progressive.