Also Californians: Let's vote in a Property Tax scheme where the amount you pay is based on when you or your ancestors bought the home.
Also, also Californians: Weird why do we have 25% of the nation's homeless population???
This is like snarkily claiming "Senators: let's oppose all new laws", which refuses to acknowledge that gridlock comes from a sufficient minority exists to create hurdles for any new policy.
The problem is that roughly 0% of Californians will say they want no new housing, but a enough of them will oppose the specific projects that are near them, with the effect that all housing construction projects get hindered, even when everyone says in the abstract that more housing is needed and important.
What we are seeing is only a product of extremely high demand meeting an unstoppable (ish) force. The results are not great.
It's almost like the folks screaming about "affordable housing" figured out they like yelling about the problem more than they actually want the problem to be solved.
Apparently the building was too tall or too close or too many of the people in it were not the sort she wanted to live next to. But shes is still a fan of affordable housing in other neighborhoods.
Government is one way to outsource charity. Vote for programs, pay your taxes, and you care. When it actually affects you directly, that's a very different kind of charity, and requires a different kind of caring.
As a I Californian, think it's darker. I think Californians don't believe in more housing at all. I think they will say to your face they want more lower income housing, but behind closed voting booth they vote NO to housing.
I don't think NIMBYism is confined to California. Lots of people understand more housing is needed somewhere, but also don't want a high-rise next door to them.
I'm pretty sure a large contingent of the most wealthy Californians (oligarch types) are secretly quite pro homelessness. Their mere presence exerts a motivating effect on the workforce simply by dint of a clear example of what may happen to you too if you lose your job.
Also, the only really effective way to arrest the rise of homelessness is to trash the value of their existing property portfolios by building sufficient housing.
Raise taxes, just not mine (I'm not as rich as that other guy).
More affordable housing, but less sprawl. Don't tell me what to do with my property, but subsidize that last mile of internet.
Those evil (whatevers) need to pay their fair share, and give me free stuff
It does not drive the cost to build or buy a new home up. In fact, it increases the cost of new home ownership and therefore drive new home price down.
It is more complicated in the case of rental prices, but it is still a 1% tax that gets passed on to renters.
The problem is that a new house costs 1 million dollars, not that there is a 1% tax on that new house. This is a supply problem. If a new house cost 250k, a 1% tax would be irrelevant
as for point 1, it's kinda not the case. My area is > 70% new construction (5 years or younger). There are whole neighborhoods here that look totally finished up until a certain house, and then are just rows on rows of half built plywood.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-k...
For most Americans, when they think of homeless people they don’t really care as long as they are out of sight and out of mind. So I believe that’s where the misconception comes from.
• More than half of all people experiencing homelessness in the country were in four states: California (30% or 171,521 people); New York (13% or 74,178 people); Florida (5% or 25,959 people); and Washington (4% or 25,211).
• California accounted for half of all unsheltered people in the country (115,491 people). This is more than nine times the number of unsheltered people in the state with the next highest number, Washington. In the 2022 point-in-time count, Washington reported 12,668 people or just six percent of the national total of people in unsheltered locations.
[1] page 16 of https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-...
Also didn't want to copy paste the whole page, thinking people here know that California's population is nowhere near half or even 30% of the US population. The link I shared has on page 16 a map that addresses your point, and also on the same page:
• California also had the highest rate of homelessness, with 44 people experiencing homelessness out of every 10,000 people in the state.
The link you posted is interesting. It does take numbers form a variety of different sources and it is difficult to know if the methodologies are always comparable. That page uses HUD numbers (and the map I am pointing to) as one of the sources. The states ranking it gives for homeless per capita is from 2019 (prepandemic), and different from the one HUD has in their latest report.
I guess I also always assumed that like, "hey, if it were me, I'd be going where I won't die from the cold". I hold that there's gotta be some displaced individuals in this cohort, but by the looks of the numbers, they're mostly drowned out in what looks like a much worse problem than one might assume.
At the end of the day, this is (as so many things are) rooted in the wealth gap. There's a certain level of difficulty one can be forgiven for not wanting to engage in - and it's real hard to make ends meet under the current circumstances.
California’s first problem is that it is in denial. Its second problem is that it refuses to think it is the cause of the problem or responsible for the solution.
doesn’t help most of the union have been busing homeless people to California. And sadly California has started turning to busing as well.