Shortage of affordable housing guarantees that some people will become homeless
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It’s a very large hill to climb (sustainably overcoming homeless) and no surprise some people choose to “find stability” by just not bothering and living wherever they land.
Edit: haha and I forgot to mention basically needing to have a real residential address to even get a job (and a bank account!) and stuff. It’s such a vicious cycle which is just to reiterate “it’s a large hill to climb”.
By contrast, the visible homeless are a visceral inconvenience, even a danger, so people feel strongly about how that problem is addressed. As a smallish woman, I am on high alert in certain areas of San Francisco, Oakland, etc. I'm not all that likely to be accosted, but if I ever am, it will be a big deal, so navigating those places is nerve-wracking because my threat-detection is constantly dialed up.
I would compare it to, like, road planning versus traffic enforcement. The former has far-reaching, long-term impact (like housing policy) but the latter is what gets people heated, due to the immediate impact in their day-to-day lives.
The article calls NYC a failure for spending $3B/year to (mostly) shelter the homeless.
Meanwhile, smaller cities like Seattle and SF spend in the realm of $1B/year to (mostly) not shelter the homeless.
But the article has harsher words for NYC than for the west. Something has gone very wrong when having the homeless in tents on the sidewalk is seen as the more virtuous and enlightened model.
I understand the argument for upzoning, and I'll be watching how it goes in Minneapolis. But I have little faith that it will do much to address visible homelessness. The chronically homeless are not generally the people who would be making rent if the cost went down by 30%.
0) Admit you need help.
1) Get into a shelter, which means, no drugs. Drug tests. Screens. No violence.
2) Get a job, which means salvation army or city projects.
3) Get a room in a halfway house, with private room.
4) Get keys to an apartment with ability to make rent and commute.
5) Rebuild support network. Re-connect with family, rebuild friendships. Get others on step 0)
Evidence: see https://scoop.me/housing-first-finland-homelessness/
The article tries to claim mental illness by focusing on a tiny subset population in warm climate coastal cities, which ignores millions of homeless in Detroit, Chicago, NY, Baltimore, Philly etc etc
Put simply, this blogger is incorrect.
I've been told that building luxury housing would free up existing housing, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Developers and owners seem to be in a desperate race to convert their non-luxury properties into luxury housing, reducing the stock of affordable housing altogether.
The central issue at play here is that only one group who comprises a very small portion of overall influence who wants to see housing become more affordable is... first-time home buyers, and even they don't want the price to go down after they've managed to get into their first house. The whole system is setup to incentivize a "pull the ladder up behind you" mentality because the whole system is arranged fundamentally around the idea that a house is a growth investment rather than a utilitarian object.
I don't know how we get around this problem.
The solution to expensive housing isn't to prevent development, but to allow for denser development. When given the choice between low-rise and mid-rise, developers will tend to chose mid-rise, as it allows them more money on the same lot size. More supply can bring down prices. Even renters who can't afford the newer more expensive unit benefit, because the folks who move into the new units must vacate their unit first [1].
[1] https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1325...
But the best economic research I’ve read concludes with great certainty that no amount of building, not even the most absurd, wildly improbable hypothetical amounts, would do anything more than slow the rate of rent increase.
A small studio in the Bay Area rents for 2400, at the low end.
McDonalds is paying $17 an hour. Assuming you get 160 hours a month and pay no taxes, that’s $2700 a month.
If you find a studio within walking distance of a McDonald’s, assuming the all of these best case scenario factors (17 dollar an hour wage, no taxes and a $2400 studio which you can somehow pay fist and last for), that leaves you $300 a month for food, bills and other stuff.
To me, that’s not sustainable.
And the key point, is that no amount of building, even the most absurd “thought experiment” hypothetical amounts, will move that needle.
I will say, because of the loosening of zoning, more and more in law studios are being built in the backyards of the ubiquitous suburban track homes. Some of those can be rented for $1800 dollars give or take, which is the best thing to happen in terms of housing in a decade or more. But, many of those are substandard, and it’s another way for the landed gentry to exploit their prop 13 privileges and exploit the working poor. As much as I’d like to be happy about it, it’s hard to not see it as a sort of new feudalism.
Anyway, I guess I just want to say it’s a problem, but one without easy answers. People are homeless for a lot of reasons, some of those are solvable. Housing prices however are the least solvable of all the myriad issues involved. Most people will have to leave, or get higher paying jobs. I choose to leave.
I think the issue you describe could be avoided by using a Georgist taxation paradigm. Essentially stop taxing income and tax land value instead. This helps poor people keep more of their paycheck and socialises rental income from landlords without disincentivising investment in the rental. The political feasibility of tax reform on this scale is the main issue.
The wealth passed down by their ancestors in their communities propels them through the hardship; whereas those who had their wealth and livelihoods stolen for generations of slavery have had nearly nothing to provide their communities to accommodate these downtrodden from within.
How much longer will we go like this until we recognize we need massive wealth transfer?
I know this probably won't go over well here, but...
How do you do this in a way that respects the idea of property rights? A lot of wealth is just stuff. Property, houses, cars, etc. Things people simply inherited, through no fault of their own. Some of it is stuff they bought with their own money. Why should it be taken away? "Wealth transfer" sounds a lot like "take from the rich and give to the poor". This doesn't sound in any way fair.
I recognize the problem, but the only solutions I can see that are in any way fair are to increase inheritance taxes for everyone, to tax everyone based on their wealth and use that money to help the poor find housing or get a job, or to encourage the wealthy to give some of their money or stuff voluntarily to those less fortunate than themselves.
I'm not poor, but I'm no where near wealthy, either. I don't think the large disparity in wealth is great for the country, but I don't like seeing people's rights trampled upon, even with good intentions.
Sounds like a good question from the French aristocrats. :)
Whatever the answer to your question is, the aristocrats say we'd better step on it.
The contextual distinction is a mirage, of course. It's still ghoulish and psychopathic.
As you know:
We're currently experiencing a generations long transfer of wealth. In the wrong direction.
The wealthy aren't going to recognize their parasitic relationship to society, much less forfeit their advantages.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." -- Frederick Douglass
You seem to be suggesting that the black-white wealth gap is the result of some sort of generational wealth transfer, harkening back to the ante-bellum days, but this is not supported by the data.
According to the Fed, whites are ~20% more likely to get an inheritance, with the median amount being the same for whites and blacks (85K)[0]. The median inheritance of 85K, applied to 20% of white households can't begin to account for the fact that the median of all white families wealth (at $188K) is 7x that of black families' (at $24K).
Further, the white-black wealth gap appears long before folks start receiving inheritances. Most inheritance comes from dying parents, which normally occurs when the heirs are in their ~50s. Even so, among older millennials (who are in their 30s) the median wealth gap is already 83K (7x).[1]
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/racial-gap-typical-wealth-bl...
That itself is a good clue that the author is clueless.
It's blog spam that can be summarized to something like "here is the problem, upvote to show you agree that this is a problem"
I'm not saying that this article does gratify intellectual curiosity! but the assumption in your question is mistaken.
> Homelessness is best understood as a “flow” problem, not a “stock” problem. Not that many Americans are _chronically_ homeless—the problem, rather, is the millions of people who are precariously situated on the cliff of financial stability, people for whom a divorce, a lost job, a fight with a roommate, or a medical event can result in homelessness. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, roughly 207 people get rehoused daily across the county—but 227 get pushed into homelessness. The crisis is driven by a constant flow of people losing their housing.
The next hurdle seems to be that supply and demand itself is governed by market forces. No one is going to build affordable housing in areas where supply is already high, thus making them attainable. They’re building them in high-demand areas which means they’ll be competitive and make money.
Am I missing something here? This doesn’t seem obvious other than the cause. Solving market forces seems a lot more difficult.
Why is nooone willing to increase the level of supply unless they can make a lot of money and so optimizing for luxury housing?
Because housing is expensive to build.
Why is housing expensive to build?
Because there is a lot of red tape and regulations.
Why is there a lot of red tape and regulations?
Because of existing home owners lobbying for it to resist the increase of supply.
Why are NIMBYs fighting more housing?
Because more housing decreases their own house prices and investment.
Why are people so preoccupied with their house prices - is it greed?
No, because for an entire generation of people, their house price is the only retirement investment they can rely on.
Why?
Because the social safety net in North America has eroded and if you disrupt the housing supply you're just going to have a different problem of a retiring generation that we cannot take care of.
>Because more housing decreases their own house prices and investment.
This is actually not true. Density will raise baseline prices. For example, your house gets bought for $1m and turned into 4plex of $500k condos.
the causes are VERY complex and one size doesn't fit all, just read the report.
Widespread homelessness is the result of a severe shortage in affordable housing, a widening gap between rising housing costs and stagnant wages, and an insufficient safety net for individuals with disabling conditions. Though these drivers are structural and systemic, individuals often have one or multiple major events or factors that precipitate their homelessness. An inability to secure adequate housing can lead to an inability to address other basic needs, such as health care and adequate nutrition.
Of course, the first part of this approach is easy to put in place, but the second part never quite seems to happen in practice.
Affordable housing might patch over the problem of high cost of living - but it's yet another bandaid, isnt it? If it costs taxpayer money to subsidize housing to make it affordable, then you'd just be subsidising the wage costs for businesses indirectly.
If affordable housing could be built privately without state subsidy, i would imagine the private sector would already have done it (let's disregard the NIMBYism for now). The fact that this currently doesn't happen, but that expensive ("unaffordable") housing does still get built means that affordable housing is not profitable. So what would make it profitable? Density - aka, fix the NIMBY problem, or lower cost of material/labour. Unfortunately, i dont see any of these problems getting solved in the near/medium term at all.
I'm generally not referring to subsidized housing. Yes, certain incentives for building less expensive housing are needed. As you suggest, currently the incentives are towards building more high end, unaffordable housing. Some of it could come down to changing zoning to allow higher density or conversion of office space into housing space. Other ideas would be to create units that share some kind of central kitchen, for example - this would probably require a change in building codes.
> or, those workers migrate to another city where the cost of living is lower
Sure, some of that could happen and likely has. But people on the lower end of the income strata also tend not to be able to afford to move very far. Also, if you compare places with lower cost of living they tend to also have less amenities like restaurants so it could be that those workers don't move there because the jobs aren't there.
Looking back a hundred years or so it seemed we had more options for people on the lower end of the income scale: boarding houses, longterm hotels (which were affordable for people like artists who didn't make much - lots of writers who later became famous lived in longterm hotels), even places like the Y(MCA) (which apparently still exist, but now are more like exercise/activity centers that don't seem to offer any housing options)
Other states bus homeless people to those cities, but that's ignored in this article.
Other cities with harsher climates have less homeless people because they can't survive the winters homeless, but that's ignored in this article.
Any person selling you a "simple obvious answer" to a complex issue is a charlatan pushing an agenda or trying to make money off of you. There is more nuance to homelessness than "tech workers make too much money"
This is not at all the point made by the author. The finger is being pointed at regulations which prevent increasing the supply in housing driven by NIMBYism. The article points out that the crisis dates back to the 80s - predating not just the current tech explosion but also the dotcom boom. Knowledge workers are not just programmers.
> Other cities with harsher climates have less homeless people because they can't survive the winters homeless, but that's ignored in this article.
The article does not ignore but explicitly addresses your point ("[...] With similar reasoning, we can reject the idea that climate explains varying rates of homelessness. [...]") and brings high rates of homelessness in cities with harsh winter climates: Seattle, NYC, and Boston.
> There is more nuance to homelessness than "tech workers make too much money"
What you wrote has nothing to do with what's actually in the article.
As for the bus issue, most sources I found (eg, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...) show that the flow is _out_ of the big coastal cities when it occurs.
I'm sure there is more nuance, but zoning and the lack of true market forces to build more and denser housing seems to be a very large piece of the puzzle.
Writers would like us to believe that the vast majority of homeless are people down on their luck, who are working jobs and just need a break.
Unfortunately, most homeless (at least on the West Coast where I live) are mentally ill, drug addicts, lifestyle homeless, or a combination of those. They don't fit into modern society, and don't particularly want to. They say they want to, but when push comes to shove they'd rather not be subject to "rules."
There are always people who don't want to be part of society. Today they've become more media savvy and are saying what the left wants to hear. As far as I can tell no local reporter has ever tried to cross-reference a homeless person's story, or pressed a homeless person on why they don't use the multitude of resources available to them.
OTOH, I don't blame them. Why get a job and be part of the system when you can just hang out, steal shit, and smoke up? It's a modern hunter/gatherer life.
The majority of the homeless are not in the 3 categories you mention. Those who are just "down on their luck" are much more likely to be living out of a car, or in a shelter as opposed to living on the street. They are also much less likely to be panhandling.
So it can be simultaneously true that most homeless are "just down on their luck" and that most homeless you encounter are not.