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Comment by cheriot | Hacker News Reader

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable.

Solution in two parts

1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)

2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside

There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.

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The problem is that people in the U.S. so often only see homelessness through the lens of where they live. Homelessness is a unique problem in each city. For example, the west coast has favorable weather and a history of being a destination for people after they are released from prisons or mental facilities. In cities on the east coast there is more leftist-narrative style homelessness: people who were depending on family and their family died, missing a check and sleeping rough for a bit, etc.

There are also huge problems with treating the many different problems the same way. For example, California would probably benefit a lot more from building a mental health crisis center and Georgia might benefit more from temporary housing that actually gives you your own address (so that you can list it on job applications, cell service, etc).

But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.

"But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use"

What's a west coast city with empty shelters? The ones in my town are full.

I will repeat this every time someone uses “favorable weather” to explain California’s barbaric treatment of its homeless: nobody wants to die of exposure. You can die of expose at temperatures well above what housed people consider “comfortable.” The number of homeless people who would rather stay outside in your “favorable climate” versus being afforded the basic dignity of a roof and room is a rounding error.

Contrary to leftist belief just giving people a roof over their head doesn't magically fix things. Where it that easy. A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or antisocial. You can't just drop these people in a neighbourhood and everyone lived happily ever after.

Nobody claims housing fixes those things, but it is an improvement over the same people sleeping on the sidewalk.

We don't need to put off the simple solutions because there are harder ones after that.

I didn’t say it “fixes” things, whatever that can possibly mean. All I’ve done is counter the normal excuse for the barbaric practice of not providing basic amenities to the most needy.

I don't know a single leftist who wants to just drop the homeless in housing and forget about them. Usually, when people talk about housing-first policies, they're advocating for flipping the script: don't make treatment, abstinence or work a prerequisite for housing; give them a permanent address, a climate-controlled shelter, and a secure place to store their belongings. And then, concurrent to that, you can help them get a job and treatment for illness or addiction.

Most people regardless of politics are simply NIMBY and assume because they haven’t been in the same situation but think they know better, it’s just like Emma/Clueless.

I know people who got section 8 housing and just lazed around, I remember one guy said he moved out to pay himself and I didn’t understand why someone would rationally do that, it’s similar to moving out of your parent’s home. It feels good to work for what you get, our struggles and pain are what drives our personal growth, rather than subsidizing symptoms and masking the problems like being beaten by your husband but the antidepressants and opiates are soothing enough to stay.

> A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or antisocial.

1. the article data doesn't back that up. it showed most of the growth was not mentally ill drug users.

2. Being homeless might make you mentally ill, drug using anti-social person.

Honestly spoken like someone who hasn’t been homeless or is close to anyone who has been homeless. A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.

And the complicating factor is the percentage of people like this depends on the city! Eg Utah’s approach to homelessness probably won’t work for Oregon.

I have spent my entire life around the homeless, in a city that has a universal shelter mandate. I’ve also spent the better part of a decade volunteering in food pantries and community kitchens.

> A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.

No. What they don’t want is to be corralled like livestock into shared living spaces, with no privacy or protection for their property. That’s not because they’re mentally ill; it’s because it’s degrading. Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.

> Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.

The one's flashing their genitals and screaming at strangers?

The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely nuanced and varied, by this archetype is certainly what a lot of people are going to think of when they hear the term. It's hard for me to imagine degradation is relevant to them.

Emphasis on "overwhelmingly." One of the most pernicious problems in homeless advocacy is that the average person only remembers their worst encounters with mentally ill homeless people, not the tens of thousands of people who they've silently passed on the street.

that’s because there’s two different types of homelessness, and people are intent on conflating the two

That feels intentionally misleading though. If I ask you about the severely mentally unwell, and you refer to a guy with heavy depression while there's observable examples of people in literal states of lunacy, you may be technically correct, but obviously you will be misunderstood.

These aren't the "severely mentally ill" that the comment intended imo.

Where do you feel intentionally misled? The overwhelming majority of homeless people are not raving lunatics.

Where you responded to a claim that a lot of people are severely mentally ill and you said it was a matter of their dignity.

The people with any amount of thought delegated to dignity are not the part of the severely mentally ill being asked about.

I'm not following. Here's the claim, as I interpreted it:

"Many homeless people do not want shelter because they are mentally ill."

Here's how I responded: first, there just aren't that many mentally unwell homeless people in the "naked and screaming" sense. Second, that those who are mentally unwell, to whatever degree, do not accept forms of shelter not because of that illness but because those forms of shelter are, by normal standards, extremely degrading. We would never dream of asking someone who hasn't otherwise been dehumanized to willingly subject themselves to constant surveillance, a living space shared with desperate strangers, and the complete absence of any guarantees around the security of their private property.

Put another way: being homeless doesn't make you lose your sense of dignity. Being mentally ill doesn't either, except in the worse cases. Treating the overwhelming majority like they're criminal timebombs is dehumanizing and just doesn't match the facts on the ground.

So again: what's being missed here? I'm interested in the 99% case, which includes a very large number of mentally ill homeless people. I'm not engaging in the 1% case, because I think it's a frivolous diversion from the needs of a great many suffering people.

I'm confused by your post. You appear to be aware that this caricature of a homeless person that you've invented is wrong, based on:

> The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely nuanced and varied,

but in the rest of the post you appear to be discussing this strawman as if it is the primary concern.

It's not a caricature. These people are easy to find in many cities. They're not uncommon sights, even if they don't resemble the average homeless person.

The question was about the "severely mentally ill".

If the counterpoint is that it's rude to acknowledge the people who seem to be utterly insane, well I think that's kind of shit. If it's that these aren't the people we're referring to when we say "severely mentally ill", then I think that's just disingenuous.

A person can be severely mentally ill in many ways, not all of them are highly public and immediately offensive to passers by. So while the people you describe would indeed fall into that category, many readers would likely place other people with debilitating mental illnesses into that category as well.

That's true, but someone who is severely mentally ill in an invisible way is not going to be categorized as such by a passerby, so it's an obviously semantic ambiguity. Saying what is technically true but not understood is just distracting.

That's not necessarily true either. Someone who is catatonic might be noticed by a passerby but doesn't scream "this person isn't safe to have in a shelter".

From this comment and below (and 99% vs 1% claim; I've heard very different numbers on addiction and debilitating mental illness), would you, or other people in the industry support my, "Housing First, OR ELSE" approach? Give homeless people SRO style housing with private rooms, purpose-built. No support, no wrap-around services - just housing and maybe food. They can stay there forever, or move out if they get it together. If the problem is really lack of dignity/etc., "99%" should accept it and get it together, right? On the flip side, if you get housing, or refuse housing, and still commit violent/property crimes (/especially/ against your SRO mates, to ensure the housing quality is not compromised) - it's speedily prosecuted and you go to jail with 3-strike-style escalating penalties.

In my view it would solve homelessness in a few years, housing people between SROs (99%?) and jails (1%?). That is if entire billion-dollars-combined homeless budgets could be redirected to SRO construction.

> an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.)

There's a lot hiding in that "etc". Some other reasons people refuse to use (some) shelters:

- shelter is / feels unsafe due to a subset of the sheltered population

- shelter has a curfew that does not allow you to maintain your work schedule

- shelter won't let you bring your child or pet or stuff

Shelter won't let you drink, even in moderation.

I get the reasons for that, even ignoring the moral mission ones; it's too much effort to monitor for abuse and just easier to issue an outright ban.

A substantially different world if we had friendly AI to do that monitoring and maybe individual tiny-houses or apartments rather than a bunkhouse free-for-all like Squid Games.

who really cares about abuse at this point? if you demand that people who have ruined their lives through substance abuse quit on a dime before you let them in - you can't expect them to ever be ready to do that.

for me the real issue is that some of these people - users and not, are quite messed up, and can really end up doing horrible things to the staff and the other residents.

policing that seems pretty impossible

I've seen this first hand and its difficult to comprehend. Some people would rather sleep in dead cold winter than to be in shelters. That's worth investigating...

I worked on a shelter in Seattle for a year. The biggest reason people wouldn’t come in is because they needed to check in at a regular time every day, which is a ridiculous requirement. Other shelters were even more stringent, with no smoking (tobacco) or breathalyzer tests, needing to attend daily prayer, and/or daily social worker check-ins. The shelters are run like the residents are children.

The problem is that the rich people who give money to the shelter have moral stipulations along with their money, since they want to feel like they are “rehabilitating” people with the money they throw st the problem.

If I had to operate under the same requirements as the shelter to keep my apartment, I would be on the streets too.

This is spot on. My experience volunteering at shelters is very similar.

The worst one was also the largest. They had a waitlist (effectively). You had to sign up in the beginning of winter, arrive between 7pm and 8pm, and mandatory breathalyzer. If they suspected you of using, urinalysis was also mandatory. There was a 3 strike policy but generally they would give you the boot after 1 infraction.

The majority of the people I interacted with there were chronic homeless, owing to the bureaucracy around being at that particular shelter.

That, and the egos associated with most directors of homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

Violence is a huge factor why people avoid shelters here in New York. They are filled with people who should be on Riker's Island or were recently released who regularly prey on other shelter dwellers. Incompetent City Hall bureaucrats are unwilling to address the problem, waving their finger in the air and crying about abolishing prisons. Having the autonomy to come and go as you please and live the way you want in a shelter is important, but even more important is feeling relatively confident you won't be robbed, raped or stabbed.

The shelters _are_ unsafe and I wouldn't blame the average person for choosing a tucked away park over a hive of mentally ill and violent people. The solution is difficult though. I'm thinking we need some way to provide secure shelter. Something like those pod hotels where you get a private, lockable pod so you don't have your phone stolen or get raped in the middle of the night.

Shelters are pretty terrible.

The real solution is to legalize massive housing construction, so everyone can sleep in a home, however simple.

The west coast also has the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). It prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone. This is impossible given the number of homeless people so we're stuck with encampments everywhere.

I think it's exceptionally possible to build enough shelter space, and adequate funds for most large cities. However what makes it possible is the people who object to construction of new shelter space, who oppose the creation of safe parking spaces, and the creation even of encampments with basic services.

IMHO the impulse to keep people out of their city and their neighborhood results in encampments and generally worse conditions both for those with and without houses.

> I think it's exceptionally possible to build enough shelter space, and adequate funds for most large cities. However what makes it possible is the people who object to construction of new shelter space, who oppose the creation of safe parking spaces, and the creation even of encampments with basic services.

If you mean that it's possible except for the voters then that may be true but it's kind of irrelevant.

> IMHO the impulse to keep people out of their city and their neighborhood results in encampments and generally worse conditions both for those with and without houses.

It's entirely sensible to oppose encampments in my neighborhood.

Fires, crimes, and assaults are regular occurrences at encampments and homeless people in Seattle are effectively immune from prosecution.

Would you want a habitual offender like Francisco Calderon (https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/warrant-issued-for...) or Travis Berge (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/meth-mental-illness-murder-...) as a neighbor?

> But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.

This is not correct. In most places, there is a wild shortage of shelters. For example King County has ~4000 shelter beds and ~12,000 people who need shelter.

AFAIK the only place where there are enough shelter beds is NYC where they are legally required to provide anyone with shelter.

Look at occupancy rates of those shelters — they’re almost all low.

#2 people won't let you build shelters where it's affordable to do so. Seattle's homeless shelters should be built outside Moses Lake, not where a studio costs $300k+. For the amount we already spend, every single chronically homeless person could be housed in dorms built out there and pay for the social workers. Since they aren't doing that, it's clear the real motivation is not to help the homeless.

Outside Moses Lake is far outside Seattle's jurisdiction.

It's also far too far away from jobs jobs jobs.

Yes, but its not like most of the formerly-homeless sheltered individuals are getting a job in the urban core near the business district where many of the shelters are

Are jobs concentrated specific places or all over? Where do transit lines run? Where are other services located?

In many cities, the transit is hub-spoke from downtown (which is mostly offices), so not a lot of opportunities.

> Are their jobs concentrated elsewhere? Knowledge worker jobs are concentrated downtown, and jobs that are likely to look favorably upon someone homeless are probably not concentrated in any one area.

Not a lot of opportunities for what?

It sounds like it would be more difficult for homeless people to travel from or to anywhere else on average.

There are quite a few farms out there which need labor. At the wage paid in Seattle, employers can get a more productive worker than someone who has been chronically homeless is capable of being.

And? We don't feed Seattleites with food grown inside its jurisdiction or have landfills within its borders, or house all its prisoners, so why should that be a limitation for where to locate shelters?

Shelters won't fix the issue.

San Francisco did a breakdown on their homeless.

Almost 75% have some chronic health problem. 15% have a traumatic brain injury.

That requires facilities for long term medical care. And it basically means universal healthcare.

Unfortunately this puts us back to "You know all those facilities that we closed back in the 70s? Yeah, closing them was a stupid idea and we needed to fix them instead."

Sure, shelter, assisted living, prisons, whatever your poison, it's still far cheaper to do outside the area in 99th[0] percentile land costs.

[0] spitballing here

It has been talked about ad nauseam that the closure of mental health facilities in the 70s has hurt us with chronic mental health issues today.

The problem is that even if we did re-open them today, staffing them would be a nightmare. There is a nearby mental health facility run by my state. They simply do not have enough employees and cannot fill positions and it’s an issue that has existed since before the pandemic.

It needs to happen, but it won’t be easy, so it probably won’t happen.

100% agree that we need a lot more mental health facilities.

It's not about fixing every problem, but we can make the problem less bad. The instability and insecurity of sleeping outside makes everything else worse.

There are also a lot of people that are functional, but end up homeless because housing is too expensive. Texas doesn't have better healthcare than California, but Houston has fewer homeless because housing is cheaper.

> 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside

We used to allow SROs, like the classic YMCA you'd see where people down on their luck would live in old movies. These are now illegal to build in most places, and the existing ones are being closed down.

That seems to me to be a big mistake. People talk a lot about affordable housing but as far as I can tell they aren't talking about housing that would be affordable to build. People seem to only want to talk about subsidized housing in luxury developments, at least in the discussions I'm party to.

Of course only a few of these units get built in any development, after much wrangling from the city, and then the city and the developers pat themselves on the back while the lack of housing is hardly budged and the affordable housing advocates are unappeased. I think SRO-style housing is the only realistic way to make affordable housing widely enough available that people well below the median income for an area can be guaranteed housing.

This seems weird until you understand the mechanisms.

The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. It's probably part of our inherent "human nature" sense of ethics.

The SRO landlord is seen as exploiting poor people by taking their money in exchange for pretty terrible housing. So we ban the SROs, and now these people have to sleep in the streets.

But that actually feels OK, because NOW THERE IS NO ONE EXPLOITING THEM!

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

We absolutely should build more homeless shelters. However many homeless people refuse to stay in current dorm style shelters because they don't allow drug use, or pets, or the other residents are dangerous.

This is a debate that comes up and I'm only familiar with the specifics in San Francisco. I won't claim it's the same anywhere else.

The shelters are full so the obvious problem is not people refusing to sleep in them.

At the same time, many of the "offers" of going inside are disingenuous. People giving up all of their belongings (specifically tent and camping stove), leaving loved ones, and the promised shelter is only guaranteed for a couple weeks.

When I say dorm style shelters I specifically mean each person has a door to lock and feel safe behind. Most current shelters are dozens of cots in a large room. I wouldn't feel safe there either.

You're describing SROs and they've been disappearing from cities like SF, despite being a decent option (on paper) for transition housing.

Here's a primer: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-...

Yes, SROs are great and it's extremely difficult to build new ones even where they're zoning compliant. We need a lot more of them.

I can bet, the shelter utilization is highly correlated with the cost of square foot in the area, which is a proxy for general desirability.

And the solution should be to increase the desirability of other areas, rather than making homelessness the new norm. As a nice side effect, this will solve the general housing availability issues as well.

Except, the public opinion is that we should somehow all stick to a handful of coastal megacities and join the race to the bottom in terms of square feet per person, noise and cleanliness. This certainly benefits big property developers, big vendors and big employers that wouldn't be economically viable in a much sparser area, but I genuinely don't understand why so many people are happy to voluntarily move into a hamster wheel.

> rather than making homelessness the new norm

if more people have housing homelessness would be less of a norm

The drug free thing is frustrating because it seems like it’s mostly optics.

Can’t be seen to be implicitly supporting drug use, so you have to deprive your residents of privacy, protection, and freedoms.

Nor, in some cases, do they allow for oddball work schedules. So even if you have work, due to the hours you have, no shelter for you.

That's a really good point. I've heard of curfews as early as 9pm!

> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)

People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match.

SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to.

https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/

And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF.

“Build it and they will come”

Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US

> And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF.

"Induced demand" is a fallacy. The demand isn't induced, it was there the whole time and being suppressed by high prices (or, in case of highways, congestion). If there is very high demand, the amount of supply needed to satisfy it is equally high, but that is by no means the same as being infinite and impossible to do.

There are also ways to satisfy the demand for "highways" other than building more highways. Like building more housing closer to where jobs are so people don't have to drive such long distances.

Often these alternatives are better, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your problem is actually that your highway doesn't have enough lanes. This isn't a question you can answer in the general case without looking at the specifics.

> Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US

Because that's where a lot of the homeless are because they can't afford the price of housing there. There are literally people in San Francisco who are homeless despite having a full-time job.

Also, it's not "housing for the homeless," it's just housing. Build enough and the price comes down. Then people can afford it instead of being homeless. There is obviously also a benefit to be had for the person who isn't homeless but is spending 60% of their income on an apartment the size of a parking space.

Induced demand is not a fallacy.

And we’re not building housing here we’re building shelters.

Induced demand for housing is a fallacy. There's only a very very small range of living space that people want.

Induced demand for highways definitely is not a fallacy. People can go from needing zero highway miles a day, up to 60-90 highway miles a day, depending on where they live. This sort of range is an order of magnitude higher than what could potentially be induced by having access to, say, cheaper construction methods.

In fact, for housing, the opposite seems to occur. When there are more people in an area, people tend to take up less individual space. It's only when people live far away from anything that they seems to expand to 1000+ square feet/person.

You’ve got cause and effect backwards. More people in an area take up less space because it’s more expensive and vice versa when living far away.

And of course you can induce demand with housing. If suddenly you could find $1,000/month 1 bed apartments in SF how many people you think would move there?

You're conflating pent up demand with induced demand. People want housing in SF because they work here. The jobs are the cause. In other words, office construction in a hot economy creates demand for housing.

Not going to lie but all of that just sounds like "demand".

> Induced demand is not a fallacy.

It is a fallacy. The demand is there either way. It's just a regular supply and demand curve, where there is more demand at a lower price (and "price" includes the time cost of sitting in traffic congestion).

The heart of the fallacy is the assumption that the demand is infinite and it's impossible to ever satisfy it. It's not. It's just non-linear.

> And we’re not building housing here we’re building shelters.

Shelters are housing. But also, why aren't we building housing? Build a lot more housing and fewer people will be homeless or need "shelters" because housing will cost less.

> it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics

Trickle down economics is a Republican justification for cutting taxes for the rich. Building new homes under Prop 13 increases the taxes paid by rich people.

Between 2015 and 2019 SF built 19,000 new homes and added 60,000 new jobs. In what world does that not drive up prices? This obsession with developer profits is convenient rhetoric to justify a hunger games like housing market.

Even SRO rooms were going for $1,200 pre-pandemic. This is how struggling people become homeless. Houston doesn't have less homeless because Texas has a better safety net. It's because housing is cheaper.

Here's a simple fact: we need to have enough homes for everyone that works here, retired in place, and that's growing up here. We do not have that right now. Luckily building large residential buildings is something humanity has known how to do for the last 100 years. We "just" need the political will to do it.

"Trickle-down economics" is not a well-defined term.

If all you're doing is giving money to Zuckerberg so he can buy more yachts and mansions, that money is not going to end up in the hands of regular people, and now he's bidding against them for scarce real estate.

If you give tax cuts to small business owners so they have more money to expand their businesses and make it easier to go into competition with incumbents so that consumers have more choices and competition drives down consume prices, that money is going to end up in the pockets of regular people.

> SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019.

In areas with a massive housing shortage, alleviating it would require building a massive amount of housing. So... build a massive amount of housing. There is no law against it, once you get rid of the law against it.

> The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live

Its obviously not true. Its a working theory - the more housing available, the lower the cost - is true. But SF has such a high demand you can probably double housing in SF and demand would not satiate. That said, seattle has built tons of housing, and stalled some of the exploding costs of housing.

There is probably no good solution to SF's issue - its so out of hand and so expensive that even if you doubled the city you wouldn't solve the issue. Like you said - 6 blocks just to homeless shelters is a lot (doable, but a lot). Especially for a city so geographically constrained.

It's the ratio of homes to jobs. "How many homes does SF need?" is hard because it's a moving target as the city permits new office construction.

I ballparked the housing gap a while back by comparing the ratio of employment/residents with 30 years ago and came up with ~80,000 missing homes. That's in a city of 400,000 homes right now.

An imperfect measure for sure, but I think affordability is achievable if we stop prohibiting the solutions.

> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)

Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.

If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.

Housing needs to be where the economic opportunity is. That's why there's empty homes in Detroit and a rent burdened population in coastal cities.

There’s empty houses in SF. Your point? The rent controlled 5 bedroom that has the same price in 1999 for the single renter doesn’t feel burdened, if they could use the existing housing and rent at market value, more people will have housing and the government will save money.

You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work.

Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.

SF has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, which is part of what drives up prices.

My point is that we need housing where the housing shortage is.

The only way I would ever support this is if the people who say "no more people after me, this place was perfect when I moved into my current place" pay for the complete construction costs of the née places elsewhere.

Everybody moved at some point, whether it was when they were born and they stayed in the same house their entire life, or when they moved out from their parents house, or when they moved out of the studio apartment after getting married and settled down.

If people want to keep others away, they need to pay for that privilege. Otherwise they are just leaches on society.

What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street?

Where do you build these dorms?

Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc?

We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all.

> What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street?

When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question.

> Where do you build these dorms?

Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities.

> Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc?

no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside.

> We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all.

There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.

Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.

> When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question.

It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it?

> Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities.

Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?

> no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside.

Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?

> There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.

Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. We have a long history of trying all kinds of approaches that didn't work for whatever reason. There's no simple answer.

> Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.

This assumes they want to find a job though.

> It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it?

If the shelters are full, it's clear people are using them. If we start seeing vacancies in shelters, then we can worry about this.

I don’t doubt we need more space now. Vacancies in shelters would suggest we created too much supply, which would be a waste of resources. I prefer to take the approach of understanding the current needs and working to address all of those needs.

> I prefer to take the approach of understanding the current needs and working to address all of those needs.

So what is your proposed solution?

I asked up-thread if dorm style housing should have restrictions. That's a genuine question. I don't have the answers.

It is not acceptable that we have any number of people sleeping on the street. I realize we can't simply prohibit that. But if we are going to reclaim our public spaces we need solutions that work for everyone. There is never going to be one simple solution to that.

So yeah, build more housing. But what kind? Some of it should simply be affordable housing for gainfully employed people. Some should be dorm style for emergency stays. Some should have a focus on rehab. Some should have a focus on finding employment. There's probably a need for a mix. But we definitely need some places that are safe for vulnerable populations which have more restrictions and different resources than low-barrier-to-entry based shelters or housing.

Should we try to put addicts on a rehab path? Are we willing to ignore that problem to solve homelessness? I don't know. I think it's worth having a conversation.

It's complicated and messy and unclear.

If that’s true, do houses with years long vacancies in NYC or LA mean that housing is too high in supply?

Having been homeless, the needs are best served with a reliable friend network, an emergency place you can stay at that is a step above a shelter/church I never been to a woman’s only shelter, I heard they suck too though.

I prefer staying with friends but hidden spots are fine like hammock in a park, storage units, amenities like showers at the gym, or houses, and a feeling of purpose, growth and not failure. Brahmins take an oath of poverty and are respected, as are monks who beg for food. If you can, understand the needs from dogfooding.

All of the shelters where I live are full. The article describes increasing chronic unsheltered populations in west coast cities. Do any of these have empty shelter beds? SF and LA do not.

"Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?"

Tell them to take a hike. The state needs to get more involved with objective rules so we don't have a game of each neighborhood screaming NIMBY.

> Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?

I don't know the answer to this. When we have enough shelters and people have a locked door to sleep behind this will probably be the next problem to solve.

> Actually providing public housing isn't simple though.

Shelters and public housing are different. Any kind of shelter has to be fully maintained with public funds because the people sleeping in them are broke.

There's a countries with large amounts of successful public housing. The theme is that it's well maintained so it's actually desirable for stable, normal people. Allowing a wider range of incomes to move in so that rent can cover operations and maintenance makes it less dependent on the whims of local pols.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Telling NIMBYs to take a hike isn’t simple. How do you actually achieve that?

The question is not if we have enough shelter space. The question is if there are homeless who do not want shelter space. In other words do we have another problem to focus on in parallel.

California had a lot of success with Project Home Key that acquired existing hotels and converts them to supportive housing. It worked well because it was quick and often required only one vote by local authorities. In contrast, building new shelters is too easy to drag out and kill with a thousand paper cuts. Some SF Supervisors have spent years saying they want a homeless shelter in their district, but just can't find a place to put it. Others propose a site and then drag out funding forever.

My ideal solution would be a state agency that funds and builds shelters, supportive housing, public housing etc. Each municipality gets a list of how many beds it needs and can pick the locations. BUT if they refuse to pick sites then the state does it for them. Then the state builds it without any more bottlenecks on local politicians.

imo the key is allowing local choice, but not to say no.

If we make shelters a realistic option and a large number of people won't take them we'll have another problem. But we haven't gotten to that bridge yet.

Being a resident of Seattle I'm not thrilled about the state of Washington making decisions about what happens in my city. I can get behind something like gating funding based on results but I'm not thrilled about the state dictating how the city spends money. I could also get behind the idea of a state-owned-and-operated shelter network which happens to have locations in cities. But in general I have a preference toward local government having responsibility where possible.

I'm not opposed to building more shelters. But it's not a complete solution. So what is the rest of the solution?

I might not be thrilled with state intervention either, but I do not doubt its necessity. Here in California the state has a new housing target that is allocated to regions. The regions then allocate new housing targets to cities. And pretty much every single one of the cities in the Bay Area is having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to meet those targets. My own city is having to violate its own low-density regulations to get it done.

If it were not for the state promising heavy financial consequences for cities failing to plan appropriately for growth, the cities wouldn’t be doing squat about the problem, and things would continue to get worse. How do we know? Because that’s exactly how the last couple of cycles have gone.

Rent controlled housing is intervention that drives the rest of it up, and causes hoarding where they want to keep the old prices in a multi bedroom apartment, higher prices for others that cause long vacancies, they’re dreading building a certain amount of affordable housing from upper bureaucrats, that prescribed only one solution that doesn’t fit into the data, so the problems of intervention are being solved with the same intervention that caused it.

Rent control has only existed in a handful of CA municipalities, but the exorbitant housing costs are everywhere in the SF, SV, LA regions.

To your point, CA's regional housing needs assessments are state level intervention to undo city level interventions (zoning, permitting) that prohibit housing.

Aren’t those the most important areas that need housing? Isn’t rent control being used as the proposed solution for affordable housing? Wouldn’t removal help? The cost is also less nature and it can lose attractive characteristics, like how gentrification changes environments.

The state mandates that some of the allocation go too "affordable housing" and that the placement of said housing is not obviously redlined (e.g. you can't just dump some flophouses on an abandoned military base and call that an affordable housing solution). The state does not mandate rent control, and not all cities with huge housing needs pursue rent control. So yes, there's a shape to the stare-level intervention, but nothing as draconian as you describe.

Removing rent control does not address the housing shortage.

The city built office space for more jobs and prohibits housing for those new workers. That's the problem to solve.

Depends on how broadly you define the problem. My points here are not that there's a complete solution so much as there's straight forward steps that do a lot of good. There will definitely still be problems after solving these.

Ohh come on! Yes, some of these questions are relevant, theoretically.

> Why build something if people won't use it?

We know some people will use it since the ones already built are full. If we look at other cities - eg. NYC we see the ratio sheltered to unsheltered are different from SF. The difference? Availability of shelter. SF has hundreds of beds and thousands of homeless. Surely a few hundred more beds would be used.

> Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?

The article illustrated that the majority of the growth was with people that are not drug users, so this is a big issue, but you can exclude drug users and still make a difference without dealing with this question. (but maybe you should find a way to help them too).

> This assumes they want to find a job though.

Surely some do. If not, they're still a person and we should help them.

You seem to be interpreting "what do you do with people who won't stay in shelters" as "we should not build more shelters", which is not an argument that is being made. I am simply asking what do you do with the people who don't want to stay in shelters? What can we do for them?

I do not believe that we should ignore any group of homeless just because there is a simple solution for some of it.

Maybe there is an argument for building different types of shelters. Maybe some of them are not voluntary. Maybe some allow drugs and some do not.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. Pretending this is simple is doing a disservice to everyone involved.

> What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street?

This describes an incredibly miniscule number of people. There are a lot of problems with existing shelters (as mentioned quite a few times in thia thread) so currently it's hard to disentangle "wants to sleep on the streets" from "doesn't want the available alternatives." Yeah, there probably are a few folks like this. Having an oversupply of 1% isn't going to break the bank.

That doesn’t answer the question. I’m not opposed to building more shelter space. But what do you do with the people who don’t want to stay there?

Do you make it non-optional? Do you just accept that there will always be some people living on the street? At what point can a camping ban in public parks be reinstated and enforced? Can it ever be? Should it?

You're on hacker news. The first rule of optimization is to /benchmark and profile first/ and then work on the part of the problem that will give you the biggest wins. Don't just work on the imagined problem, because you will usually be working on the wrong thing.

I thought hackernews was a place for thoughtful conversation.

How should we optimize solutions to homelessness? Is there some ideal amount of homelessness? Have we already reached it?

Recall that this thread started with a comment offering a two part solution that does not address an unwillingness to stay in shelters.

I think that camping should be legitimized and allowed.

For example, I saw in LA camping areas being cleaned by city workers peacefully (with a token police car watching over) and it seemed like a nice middle ground.

Do you mean dedicated camping areas or putting tents in existing public parks?

Something like https://campsecondchance.rumblecrash.com/ but for tents?

Honestly, I don't know exactly. I haven't thought this through in detail.

I just think that living without being involved with a building and such is valid, and I'd like to see it recognized.

I believe in harmonious co-existence, so I guess I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way", which is what I've practiced for lack of a better option, though I usually don't use a tent in the city.

I think it is legitimate and valid for an individual to exist and live without being involved in paperwork, joining some kind of program, etc.

And I support anyone going that way.

> I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way"

I think that's a reasonable take.

I don't think that living in a public park is a valid lifestyle choice. Those places can't serve their purpose as public areas for recreation if they are also someone's home. I understand that people do it now because they are desperate. We should provide them with better options. Or at least acceptable options that allow the rest of the citizens of the city to also live their lives.

I am not opposed to dedicated property or areas for tent living, but it can't be in existing parks or other public spaces like sidewalks and transit facilities. And there have to be amenities such as showers, bathrooms and trash service. Essentially a state campground in the city.

I don't think mandating what's valid and not valid on public areas is valid. How is "recreation" any more valid than "sleeping"?

That’s disingenuous.

I’m not opposed to sleeping in parks. Like, sure, take a nap. But no, you can’t live there.

Take a look at the homeless camps in Seattle parks and greenbelts. That’s not staying out of anyone’s way. There’s nothing harmonious about it.

Basic services are mandatory in camping areas. Without bathrooms we get human waste accumulation and runoff. Without trash service we get fires. This isn’t hypothetical. Go look around Seattle.

Dictating what is done with public spaces is absolutely valid. That is how civilization works. It’s why we even have public spaces.

Without rules on what’s allowed in parks they’d be developed into something else.

>But no, you can’t live there.

What do you think gives you the right to make that call?

Democracy.

Is that when the majority decides for everyone?

> I believe in harmonious co-existence, so I guess I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way", which is what I've practiced for lack of a better option, though I usually don't use a tent in the city.

There's a city in the Vancouver area which has a radically different approach, that I'd describe as YIMFY. Food bank, needle exchange, shelters, etc are in an otherwise affluent part of town (not coincidentally, there's a police precinct right there too). They don't want to hide the homeless, they want to keep an eye on the problem. And by keeping it in the public view, voters consistently fund the programs to get people help.

> This describes an incredibly miniscule number of people

Citation needed

I would rather sleep outside than in any homeless "shelters" I've been told about by people who have stayed in them.

They're horrible places designed only for one purpose: keeping the undesirables out of the public eye.

It was that way ~100 years ago when Orwell wrote "Down and Out", and very little has changed since then.

_What if they want to sleep on the street?_ Let's start by sheltering as many people as we can, and when our problem becomes "too many empty beds", then we can move on to that problem.

_Where do we build them?_ I bet there are choices we can make that house 100+ people for every 1 person who is mildly inconvenienced.

_Are there barriers to living in these dorms?_ No.

Homelessness is not a single problem. We can't pretend there is a single solution. Reality is more complex than just saying "build beds" and not adding any rules or guidelines.

Why should recovering addicts be forced to live in a setting where they are tempted by drugs? Why shouldn't they be given a chance to live in a drug-free setting?

Why should victims of abuse be forced to live near potential abusers? Shouldn't we consider their needs?

Clearly we need shelters suited to the needs of individuals.

But what are those needs, and what do we do if someone refuses the opportunity? I don't think "ignore them" is a satisfactory answer.

Nobody in these threads is saying that housing them is the silver bullet. But shelter is part of the foundation of a human's hierarchy of needs, and being anything but single-minded about people's right to shelter distracts from helping them obtain it.

That’s an absurd statement. As you say, there is no silver bullet. In other words there is no single-threaded solution. We have to do better.

Removing subsidies from people who got a lower rate with 3 bedrooms before and applied for price freezes would help, they have no reason to move. The rich not wanting their views obstructed with larger buildings or taking away cultural landmark statuses where housing can be built would help, but what about building codes and safety, since earthquakes are a fear?

Anyone who can’t afford housing where they’re at and wants to have housing moves, it’s often ignored that homeless people might be fine being homeless and prefer it to being housed in another area they can afford. I agree there should be housing for people who want it, but I don’t decide I want to live in Beverly Hills and demand affordable for me housing and refuse to leave. If only I could enjoy Echo Park or the Bay Area without paying for housing somehow...

Aren't people in homeless shelters still classified as homeless? From the site it is hard to tell how many are sheltered vs out on the street.

Hygiene service vans with showers for the rest

> neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.

Neither is improved by giving them housing. Housing should be modest, and it should be preceded by forced rehab. Instead, in Seattle, for example, they're giving the homeless hotel-style housing without requiring them to get addiction treatment and without a requirement to do anything job-wise. Seattle's King county projects that such valiant (and extremely expensive!) efforts will triple the already sizable homeless population in 10 years, yet they are continuing down this path anyway, just like SF did many years ago. Why? Because it's already a billion dollar industry in the state, and as such it'll continue to metastasize, just like any other government "service".

So solution needs to have 3 parts at least, and part zero should be "forced rehab". Without that no other part will ever work. There needs to be a part about employment in there somewhere for people who are able to work. I don't care that they don't wanna.

Wasn't there a study that came out showing every single one of those things done by CA or Seattle failed?

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