Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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I'm the author.

It's really not mostly mental health problems. I've studied this issue for years.

I write about homelessness on Street Life Solutions. I try to write about housing and community development stuff elsewhere, like Eclogiselle.com and https://projectsro.blogspot.com/.

This post wasn't intended to be some opus solving everything. I wanted to make one point: California's extreme homeless problem is not somehow entirely the fault of California government, though that is a factor. There are other factors, like weather and a national shortage of housing that has been ongoing for a lot of years and isn't remotely peculiar to California.

California has 12 percent of the nation's entire population and 27 percent (or more -- different sources vary) of the nation's homeless population. That's not just a "California problem." That's a national problem disproportionately impacting California.

There's a lore more to the issue than can be contained in a single post. I tried to make one point and only one point. Addressing how to resolve the nation's housing problems will take more than a single blog post.

But thank you for commenting.

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?

We need to bring back smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods. We aren't providing the right kinds of housing.

Our American ideal is a home designed for a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 kids because that's who had the money to finance the birth of the modern suburb. That was never the majority of our demographics but we've further diversified away from that in the decades since.

Meanwhile, our housing stock has increasingly converged on their ideal home and that ideal home has grown larger and more sprawling over time because the only people who could afford it were people with good money. Our 1950s suburban home has more than doubled in size, from about 1200 sqft to over 2400 sqft in recent years.

If we had just kept building 1950s style little suburban homes, we wouldn't have such a mess. But we didn't. Our homes today are that single family detached house dream on steroids.

We need to reverse course. We have vastly more small households of just one to three people, meanwhile our housing stock tends to skew to three bedrooms or larger.

I personally live in a very very small home and live minimally and it cost me almost nothing. I'm sure I lucked out compared to the average person.

So what is the reason that these smaller homes aren't more common? I would think that if there were a market for these homes someone would cash in on it, so is it zoning? Is it people's aversion to building their own homes themselves and the service-ification of everything? How do we reverse course and what are the pressures preventing that, in your view?

We need to remove administrative barriers, like zoning barriers. And we need financing mechanisms.

The easiest thing to finance in the US is single family detached homes. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of them.

It's quite hard to finance some types of housing popular in other countries, like cohousing.

I'm right there with you on administrative barriers.

What do you think of other housing options more common in the US, such as mobile homes, RVs, duplexes/quadplexes etc? What about ideas like renting rooms, dormitory style housing with shared spaces and things like that?

Mobile homes, RVs and the Tiny House movement are basically hacks to get around a broken system. The first tiny house was put on wheels to get around the zoning codes rather than fight them (I'm old enough, I read some of the earliest coverage of it back when it was a new idea).

Those things are proliferating mostly because we won't fix our broken system. Not mostly because people actually prefer that stuff.

Dorms, duplexes, renting a room etc fall under what I advocate for: SROs and Missing Middle Housing.

How are they hacks and not solutions? If smaller living spaces for smaller family units is a solution wouldn't they be solutions and not hacks? If people actually want smaller housing and choose these things, aren't they real solutions?

Mobile homes date back to the same time as the modern suburb, were designed to target a similar demographic and are pretty ubiquitous across most of rural US, as are RVs in many places.

I've seen tiny houses on wheels for the reason you state, I actually have neighbors with really beautiful houses like this.

It's fine that they exist. The problem is we've zoned out of existence other options.

These don't make for car-free living in walkable neighborhoods. And they don't appreciate in value the way standard housing typically does.

Can you give me some examples of housing that has been zoned out of existence that you have in mind? Apartment buildings, duplexes and renting a room are not illegal in the vast majority of municipalities.

RVs absolutely make for walkable neighborhoods, and everyone gets a little garden space too if they want. Some RV parks even have a grocery store inside.

I thought we were looking at solutions to homelessness? Why does a dwelling have to appreciate in value? This appreciation of price in the current housing market is not natural and is the result of increasing population, artificial restriction of building more housing and is arguably a symptom of the root cause of the homelessness problem in the US. If the goal is solving homelessness how can that be expected to continue?

Parking minimums and street width minimums are a huge issue. They are an active barrier to building an old fashioned, walkable, mixed use downtown and actively undermine the health of such places that still do exist in some areas.

There's lots of literature on that fact.

Set backs and other zoning changes also mean you often cannot build townhomes right up to the lot line, even if older townhomes right up against the lot line dominate the street in question. They are grandfathered in and don't have to be torn down, but you can't build more like it. This typically makes such homes highly prized and expensive and out of the reach of most people.

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.

Homeless people often go where the weather is tolerable. Many homeless people prefer to camp outside rather than stay in the shelter system. California is the overall best state to camp outside long-term and year-round.

It then becomes a recipe for remaining homeless because the housing is so expensive. It's easy to camp out, not easy to afford rent.

If you can't afford housing anywhere in the US, going someplace you can camp reasonably comfortably makes sense. Remaining someplace with worse weather doesn't automatically cure whatever other issues are contributing to your intractable poverty.

> Many homeless people prefer to camp outside rather than stay in the shelter system

Why?

Most shelters have serious problems, like mold. They aren't actually safe because you can be harassed, assaulted or have your stuff stolen by other homeless people.

A high percentage of homeless people have health issues. This means putting a bunch of them together exposes already sick people to cross contamination with other diseases, making their health worse.

They have curfews and other rules making it one step removed from a prison. If you have any funds of any kind, some will charge you for being there, making you essentially their prisoner with no means to escape.

Housing is cheap in much of the country though, and really cheap in some areas. Also, there are warm states that are not CA that don't have the problem (relatively speaking), and there are far colder states like NY or WA that do (ditto for locations within states). Why don't NY homeless move to e.g. Detroit? Far cheaper housing, comparable climate.

The only people who wouldn't benefit from this under nationwide housing shortage theory are indeed those who cannot afford any housing at all because they eh, don't have their shit together on any level. But then, walkable housing nationwide is not going to fix that.

It tends to be cheap where there's no grocery stores, no jobs, etc. If you have to drive a long way for everything you need, it's not a cheap lifestyle, even if your rent is relatively low.

Nationwide walkable housing would, in fact, fix it for some people, in part by bringing down the cost of housing and transit to a level they could reach.

Do you think that walkable housing is viable nationwide? Seems to me it would only be viable in urban areas, vast swathes of north America are very very remote, the people that live there by and large choose to. Wouldn't it make more sense to just build more grocery stores?

It's viable in a lot more areas than it exists in currently.

I'm not suggesting no one should ever live in a remote area. If that's what people want, cool.

When I say nationwide, I mean we need more housing that makes sense in all 50 states, not just California. I don't mean this should be the only kind of infrastructure we allow.

No jobs? The salary differential in entry level jobs is much smaller than in high paying jobs between Detroit in NY, and rent differential is vast. If you take many of the homeless who cannot take any realistic job, the difference in salaries is 0.

Even including driving (which you don't need to do much more in declining/stably cheap, but still dense, older cities) it's still cheaper.

Walkable housing would fix it for a very small slice of the people, as far as I can tell.

Donate now: https://www.patreon.com/m/DoreenMichele

Thank you.

There's also PayPal and Venmo for one time tips.

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.

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