Houston has the most permissive rules for building housing in the country, so funding housing should be that much easier there!
A comment from the source research:
• Although Houston does not have formal zoning, its land-use regulations combine to create a de facto zoning system that replicates elements of a traditional code.
• Houston controls all the same land-use categories as other comparable cities with zoning, but it lacks a citywide overlay zoning map
• Despite the popular perception that Houston’s “lack of zoning” allows for a uniquely untethered housing market, it performed similarly to the cities of Dallas and Los Angeles in new housing construction and housing costs.
• Houston’s one-size-fits-all approach makes it more difficult to produce detailed plans for smaller areas—i.e. along commercial corridors or for different neighborhoods.
• The use of nuisance lawsuits to challenge otherwise legal land use has been challenging to interpret in a city with an informal zoning code. Although the success of these lawsuits varies, this form of land-use challenge still manages to stall construction and increase legal costs for developers.
• Houston’s less formal development system also means that challenging unwanted land uses requires that residents have the financial resources or know-how to take advantage of the existing tools to protect a neighborhood. This leads to disparities in which Houstonians are able to effectively organize and influence development within their neighborhoods.
[1] https://youtu.be/TaU1UH_3B5k?t=281
[2] source research - https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/105220/KI...
BTW, I meant to write "finding", not "funding". Too late to change now though.
still think the comment adds context for how Houston zoning works, so I'm going to let it stand.
Many cities have plenty of existing buildings that could be repurposed and many cities real estate prices are extremely high due to the land already being built out. Very few if any government budgets can afford (nor should they) to place homeless in ultra-expensive markets; it would be inefficient to do this.
Homeless may need to be placed in outlying areas (outside even the jurisdiction of where the homeless originated) where real estate is cheaper. Coordinating this though may be difficult since many homeless bring crime and drugs with them.
There should be federal laws protecting your right to build to prevent cities like SF from preventing the construction of housing to try and push out poor people
Source: lived in midtown terrace for years in a serial-numbered home from '56. everything was bad. No functional ground in the electrical panel, plenty of paper-jacked BX wire. actually no insulation. My 1000 sq ft of living space in SF used as much energy in the winter as my 4k ft house in Colorado does, and the climates are way different.
so no, not all SFH in SF are shit.
You're not seeing the full picture because you're not looking at the problem long-term. The cheap housing of today is the expensive stuff built 30-40 years ago that has depreciated. I drive by mansions built in the early 1900s that have become apartments for college students.
Houses depreciate as tastes in style and location shift over the years. I've walked through ghettos where the buildings have beautiful Italianate brick work that probably cost a fortune to build new.
In 30 years, those trendy apartment buildings you see popping up all over will be subsidized housing.
Source: bought a house in SF in the past year. The majority of SF's land area is single-family housing. There's as much undeveloped land in Sunset backyards as there is in all of Golden Gate Park - possibly more. Lots of single-family and duplex houses on the two blocks adjoining both N and L train lines.
Not to mention everything south of SF (Daly City, San Mateo, Mountain View, etc) is nearly 100% suburbia with absolute prohibitions on density of any kind.
Replace 'homeless' with any other minority group and you basically have the ethos of the American real estate market for the past 100 years.
America's strategy of the wealthy simply relocating undesirable groups without actually solving any of their problems is a very short-sighted one (read the classic: "San Francisco's problems today are the rest of America's problems in 20 years")
Also, This is not about a minority group. It is about people with no money, which believe it or not exists across all minority groups.
Homeless people are by all definitions a minority.
I can’t really understand why you are asking the other questions (accidentally replying to another comment?)
Doesn’t it make sense to have a centralized area with services for mental health, job training, housing to assist the homeless? And doesn’t it make sense to build these facilities in areas with cheaper land costs than downtown areas like San Francisco so that money spent reaches more of the homeless?
After all, the goal is to help these people as effectively as possible, without letting our individual conscience regarding having to move them to another area impact the efficiency of the operation.
This has the causality backwards. Places don't become expensive due to the land being built out. The land gets built out because it's expensive, and in the process reduces the price of housing.