Cause of homelessness? Not drugs or mental illness, study says | Hacker News Reader

Cause of homelessness? Not drugs or mental illness, study says

latimes.com

22 pointsrrauenza34 comments

> Not drugs or mental illness, study says

Meanwhile, in the actual body of the article,

> Aldern, a data scientist and policy analyst in Seattle, and Colburn, an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, said they are not suggesting that mental illness, addictions and other issues are not contributing factors to homelessness.

Sometimes I wonder if newspaper editors actually bother to read the articles anymore

The whole article gives zero evidence of the statement in the headline.

Even worse, it is directly contradicted by the studies from San Franscisco where something like 15% of the homeless have a traumatic brain injury.

So, better than 1 in 10 of the homeless in SF should be in a medical facilty for starters.

However, building and funding medical facilities is expensive. So, the electorate is willing to do anything except what the data actually tells them to do. So, let's build housing and then whine when it doesn't work so we can go back to ignoring the homeless.

TBI hardly means you're supposed to be institutionalized. Just ask car accident victims, NFL linemen, boxers, veterans

I would posit the reason why you'll find few homeless in low population dense areas is the same why you'll find few starbucks there - not enough human activity to support them.

> By looking at the rate of homeless per 1,000 people, they found communities with the highest housing costs had some of the highest rates of homelessness

Correlation != Causation

The rest of the article is just noisy musing about this false conclusion, like

> But the point is, there are people who are addicted and mentally ill in Chicago, and Chicago has one-fifth the homelessness of Seattle and San Francisco. So what’s going on here?

Well for one thing, you don't die in the winter in Seattle or SF if you're unhoused. I'm also willing to bet the homeless resources in SF and Seattle are top notch relative to Chicago.

However, the most frustrating part about this type of rhetoric is that it is completely useless. The affordable housing is not coming. We are not about to build subsidized apartments to house all the homeless in some of the most valuable real estate on earth.

When functional people get priced out of a neighborhood, they leave and go to cheaper locales. Meanwhile the prevailing mindset is that the most needy must be located in expensive city centers. This flies in the face of the behavior of a rational actor. It stands to reason, programs to help the homeless should be moved to lower cost of living areas, where the participants stand a chance of getting back on their feet and where we can afford to subsidize this process.

Of course, I also believe we need to build lots of housing in places like SF, Seattle and elsewhere, but it's just not going to be 'affordable' for the types of people that are homeless. Even with the right amount of housing, the economically less fortunate do not get to live in the most desirable areas.

They found that areas with high housing costs are correlated with high levels of homelessness? Well of course! People want to live in desirable places and that both drives up the cost of housing and attracts homeless people at the same time.

Remove that confounding variable and you’re left with addiction and mental health.

If the problem really is lack of housing, why don't we build high-density cheap container-hotels like they have in Japan?

A very small living space would at least provide a safety net.

the usual factors: zoning, nimbyism , and also it has to be in proximity of jobs.

Yup -- there was a great article on HN a while back about why zoning in Japan works so much better than zoning in the US:

http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

TL;DR: You can build housing almost anywhere if there exists demand.

In the US, too, it seems like there's a high amount of empty commercial/industrial real estate. Zoning keeps it from being usable by anything else.

I also often wonder if something like a hybrid employee owned business+occupant owned housing could ever be bootstrapped. Something to function like a small village in the modern era/larger surrounding. But that wouldn't just be a hippy/cult commune.

> In the US, too, it seems like there's a high amount of empty commercial/industrial real estate. Zoning keeps it from being usable by anything else.

Nope, the finance agreements keep that space empty.

Missing rent can generally be tacked onto the end of your financing. Lower rent causes the basis of your finance agreement to change and you will have to cough up cash.

So, owners are willing to let spaces sit empty for years to avoid having to paying cash (which they probably don't have) to the bank.

It's all musical chairs until higher interest rates cause a few failures which cascades through the entire system.

Yeah this is something that can easily be solved by a vacancy tax. It provides city revenue on top of fixing the economic deadweight loss, a double-win from an economic POV.

Good to see SF at least is moving in that direction.

That’s definitely worse.

The government controls zoning and is already negotiating with new developers and nimby's to put in affordable housing

That’s what project housing was. The US doesn’t have the same compliant kinds of poor people like Japan.

C != c, etc

Disappointed they don't seem to have controlled for weather. And that they use the fact that there aren't huge numbers of homeless in Detroit as "evidence" of anything other than it would be really really shitty to be homeless in Detroit.

Meanwhile temperate climates where it's decent outside year round is also hugely associated with high housing prices.

finding: lack of affordable housing.

Aren't markets doing exactly what they were designed to do? There's no rule of markets that says everyone ends up with a good. I'm not sure what the problem is here.

The simple model of the market -- that supply and demand will balance and establish a price -- is a first-order approximation. It's often very efficient.

But externalities and market-failures are always lurking, and sometimes they're dominant, and they can mess up the balance even in the long term.

In this case you might think that someone could buy some land+materials+labor in order to create-and-sell shelter. And that eventually the cost of shelter would be comparable to the cost of those inputs.

And that works in a lot of places where housing is relatively affordable.

But is that mechanism really setting the prices in San Francisco? And if not, what is causing the imbalance? How is the market being constrained and distorted? To whose benefit?

> I'm not sure what the problem is here.

Aside from the obvious that a growing proportion of the population can't afford to not be homeless?

It's almost as if treating land as property to be bought and sold in a market rather than a basic human right to which every human is equally entitled might be in and of itself a plague on society.

I mean, there are some regulations involved too.

Housing developers usually aren't the problem.

Ah, there it is, the worst take on hn today. Congrats!

I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone who can demonstrate that a maket can guarantee everyone a place to live, but so far the current state of affairs seems to be evidence of the contrary. It looks exactly like a market failure of a good with inelastic demand, but no one wants to come out and say that.

Wow, market realism much? You don't even seem to realise that's not the point that was being critiqued.

Also housing is not a free market in the slightest. It's heavily subsidized for the benefit of 'investors' in the form of unpaid for infrastructure and being far less taxed than labour among other things, and extremely distorted by euclidean zoning and nimbyism.

If markets by themselves can’t supply everyone with a place to live- something which every human needs- then perhaps we should try a different approach. There are plenty of ways to solve this problem.

Finland is an extreme example of a housing market that provides a place for everyone to live. Obviously it's not a free market, but does it not prove you wrong?

Right, and a market didn't accomplish that. This did

> Julkisen vallan tehtävänä on edistää jokaisen oikeutta asuntoon ja tukea asumisen omatoimista järjestämistä.

Powers outside of the academic oversimplification of supply and demand are at play in both markets, US and Finland. What is your logic that differentiates that which leaves people homeless in the US as "the market at work"?

Basic economic definitions. The markets have no obligation to meet ineffective demand. In fact that's the real issue at stake. What does ineffective demand look like in housing markets: homelessness.

Ineffective demand (in this case a sad thing) can be met, though [Finland], yet you say there is no problem. I’m upset by your callous remark.

I see. I use being incorrect as a rhetorical device in order to be proven wrong so that we can have this conversation about how markets don't provide housing through ineffective demand. Saying something wrong on the internet is a good way to get people to make the arguments I want them to make.

Then I’m glad you don’t actually feel that way.

There are a few large and looming problems in the US.

Housing is definitely amongst these.

(I'd put pensions / retirement and healthcare up there as well, amongst others.)

not a surprise. people always looking for simple explanations that affirm own moral superiority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com