Spike in Homelessness in US Cities Isn’t Slowing Down

it makes sense though as this is how the middle class sees a lot of their wealth passed through death and marriage, its houses for the middle class. its just that the middle class is shrinking and so now the same houses are owned by fewer families. for everyone else there is renting and homelessness.

There's some of that for sure, but real estate is a good inflation hedge. So if you print like we have been and new supply doesn't jack up, then here we are.

That's just a natural economic thing; not a political system at play, other than a byproduct of massive printing which has been out of control for some time.

I mean, we had interest rates jack up (for the US in modern times at least lol) and prices didn't drop as much as they should (and many that lost in bidding wars in the frothy market went to the sidelines)

When the Fed goes the other way because they have no real choice, prices are going even higher.

Even without the politics/nimbyism I am trying to imaging a realistic scenario where housing prices go down and stay down in California, but I just can't.

The real problem is wages aren't allowed to go up.

Is it possible to have a healthy flourishing community where housing prices decrease every year? Has this ever happened anywhere?

Why is Minnesota less likely to succeed?

The malign thing about prop 13 is is basically means that for muni's property tax doesn't cover required services. It also distorts prices driving them higher.

Trump voting states don't offer services for homeless, so they leave for places that do. Is that so surprising?

Not to mention the morality of cutting soup kitchens and shelters just so your state's homeless become someone else's problem.

In the interests of constructive feedback:

Are those absolute numbers or per capita numbers? If the former, are there population trends which would affect the graph?

What happened between 2018 and 2023? Why is the Biden story missing?

Were there methodology changes anywhere in here? Are the methodologies the same between states? If they are the same, is it possible that funding issues affect how accurate the numbers are?

The graph honestly doesn’t tell me that much.

If thats the case then its really a form of additional wealth transfer from the blue states to the red states. They save money on taxes by not tackling this problem/creating it in the first place and then dump the externalities onto blue state taxpayers.

> "it is estimated that 75% of SF’s homeless are from outside of the city" -- Where are you getting that 75% number from? The latest survey I'm familiar with showed nearly exactly the opposite (71% of homeless in SF had a prior place of residence in SF). See https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/22/san-francisco-homeless-peo...

Well, California's housing crisis is uniquely intense by almost any measure (affordability, relative/absolute homeless population, median family wealth).

Prop 13 is a unique and meaningful contributor to a glacial housing market -- if moving homes (to an equally-expensive home!) would quadruple your property tax, you're probably not gonna sell. And slow/frozen markets result in increased prices.

Housing costs are high because it's hard to build a house. It's a dangerous task requiring a lot of logistics and coordination. There are toxic chemicals, dangerous heights, sharp objects, and requires being in unhealthy poses and breathing in fumes during the construction. Then there's the financial risks, with people not paying as promised, or withholding some pay due to work quality. At the end of the day, people are not willing to sacrifice their health as cheaply, and there isn't a new influx of cheap migrant labor, so the costs will remain high in the future.

It's pretty hard data, not generalizations.

It's odd how much people resist the notion that "fewer people can afford a good as it becomes more expensive" with housing. It's like the Twilight Zone of economics where supply and demand no longer apply.

Arresting that guy will help solve the vagrant problem. It won't solve the homelessness problem, and that's definitely a hugely important point. Most people who become the vagrant type of homeless have serious underlying mental illness or got seriously deep into drugs though, and they're in a state where they are not going to voluntarily accept help. A guy down on his luck is unlikely to turn into this disruptive stereotype even if he does unfortunately end up on the street longer term, while there are vagrants who came from wealthy families and are on the street entirely by "choice" (which I put in quotes because they are seriously ill).

I heard a talk recently from a couple social workers that run programs for addressing homelessness in New York. There are 100 or so homeless people that are well known to services in NYC because they have repeatedly refused offers for help, and these people have stayed on the streets for years while an entire homeless populations' worth of people has been successfully helped back onto their feet (of course with a never-ending flow that keeps the overall population at high numbers). Occasionally one of the vagrants ends up in the news for attacking someone, but short of that they will be left on the streets, which is really a lose/lose.

> The guy on the corner screaming and smoking meth is NOT a representative homeless person - it's a second issue that doesn't really have a word.

In general, those are mentally ill people who aren't getting proper treatment. They don't have family members willing or able to support them, so they slip through the cracks in our social systems.

To me, it's cruel to treat these people like criminals, so I fundamentally disagree that they should be arrested.

Almost two decades ago I started dating this Chinese girl who had relatively recently come over from mainland, yet in the space of 5 years after arriving managed to leave an abusive home situation, find work as a medical interpreter ( and thereby secure her own work visa to stay in this country) and save up a down payment for a modest house.

She told me at the time, which I thought was some sort of amusing misunderstanding about language, that I was "homeless boy" - because I lived in an _apartment_. And thus that she needed to help me get into a house (hint hint) so that I could stop being homeless and be a "man."

I had never heard the word homeless used this way before, but as the years went by I began to understand that it was not a mistake at all but a very particular attitude about what constitutes being settled down and stable in one's life and that I, despite whatever other qualities I had that appealed to her, was unacceptably immature and reckless in this department.

Much later on I discovered that for various reasons, there's a certain generation of Chinese immigrants that as a cohort correspond roughly to our late gen Xers/early millenials, who broadly seem to share this point of view.

Yes, homelessness absolutely causes people to go insane. I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

But some people end up homeless because their mental health issues weren't treated (or weren't treated well) while they were still housed and functional. It can only take a few bad episodes to lose your job, and the next job, and then your home, and then you're screaming at the pigeons at 2pm in SOMA.

The vast majority of people who experience homelessness are on the streets for 1 night before getting their act together and finding a place to live. That means the people who are on chronically on the street are dealing with more issues.

The people you see shouting on the street are usually suffering from schizophrenia, which has a base rate of 1% in the general population but exceeds 20% among the homelessness. Untreated schizophrenia will lead someone to homelessness, almost inevitably.

He needs both! But yes, he needs a home first, like everyone else needs.

When you can't afford your place anymore; you live in your car and join a cheap gym with showers or sleep on the sofa of friends and family. Most people don't remain homeless, and aid spent for this group of homeless are super effective at getting them out of homelessness faster. The person that is driven to yelling at trees caused the stress of being homeless with no other underlying conditions, is the ultra-rare.

I'm no expert on homelessness, but I've spent a number of years assembling and distributing care packages for the homeless population in my area (not in California). I started doing this after seeing the body of a person who had died on the sidewalk from hypothermia one winter.

I've learned a whole lot of things from talking with these people over the years.

My first observation is that about half of them are homeless because they have serious mental or emotional problems that prevent them from functioning in society.

About half have serious drug or alcohol problems. There is an enormous overlap between this group and the mentally/emotionally ill group.

A smaller percentage are young people who have, basically, dropped out of "the rat race". They have chosen that life.

And the smallest percentage are people who suffered a serious blow in their life and were unable to recover. Most often, this was a serious illness of some sort. Sometimes it was the death of a loved one, a terrible divorce, that sort of thing.

I have developed a kind of "sixth sense" for telling if someone is homeless or not (you very often can't tell just by a casual look). I remember making my rounds one evening and spotting a 30something guy, clean, clean clothes, etc. But my sense told me he was homeless.

I approached him and offered a care package. He was exceptionally grateful. He told me that he'd been homeless for about a week, as a result of a horrific divorces in which he lost everything, followed by losing his job because he couldn't function as a result of his marital trouble.

I knew, and told him, that if he stayed on the street for very long, he would become trapped, and become one of the grizzled people yelling at trees sooner or later.

One of the things that makes this issue so hard is that there isn't just one cause of homelessness. It's a complicated problem. But one thing is very clear to me -- as a society, we are failing these people. The US is the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the planet. That we allow people to live like this is criminally negligent and inhumane.

And, another thing I learned because I've seen it first-hand, is that no matter how comfortable, established, or well-off you are -- it's possible for you to become homeless far faster than you would ever think.

> There will be developers building anything legal to build at any cost level that they think will lead to returns

Have you ever considered that developers also own existing property and land?

Developers and construction companies are not the same.

> There will be developers building anything legal to build at any cost level that they think will lead to returns.

Developers will prioritize high-margin projects. Which is why almost all new developments are "luxury developments". I cant remember hearing about a low-cost development except as begrudging token to "affordable housing" tacked onto a luxury development to meet the letter of the law.

I'm really sorry that happened to you.

There's a major lack of empathy for people who are homeless.

The response to homelessness being more police violence is horrific, especially how they basically throw away all their belongings just so people don't have to see the poor and desperate in their neighborhoods.

Its absolutely inhumane.

Federal Government spending is a large contributor to inflation. It increased sharply during the pandemic and never corrected.

There is some evidence that increasing minimum wage increases the prices of goods for minimum wage workers so that their rising wages don't actually give them more buying power, also we can just not make it illegal to build new housing in places where there is already housing but ymmv.

Is inflation a myth to you? The lowest-paid people have seen the highest wage increases in the past several years, do you think the grocery store and Starbucks didn't adjust accordingly to raise prices?

Almost no one in the US makes minimum wage. Last I paid attention it was <2% of workers.

>Yes, for most homeless the issue is housing affordability, but for the homeless that people complain about, the mentally ill and violent drug addicts, housing affordability is not the problem.

I don't know about you and can't speak for anyone else, but I complain the loudest about people who are homeless (especially families with young children) because of housing affordability.

Those with mental health and/or substance abuse issues are (at least in my mind) a separate issue -- one that is related to public health and not housing. And we fail those folks even worse than those who just can't afford housing.

>If the "annoying" homeless were all forcibly institutionalized no one would care about the "quite" homeless which is why discussion ignores them.

Are you really making that argument? If so, why stop with incarceration? We used to sterilize[0] those folks too. They're not really human anyway, since if they were, they wouldn't be homeless or mentally ill right? Because homelessness, addiction and mental illness are moral failings that only reflect on the individual and not on the society in which they live. In fact, why don't we just euthanize them. And why stop with the homeless? Those useless unemployed folks need to go too. And don't forget about the old and infirm. They don't add anything productive, so why should we suffer them to live at all?

Yes, I realize that you're not advocating for euthanizing Grandma, but what you are advocating isn't so far (as history has shown) from that. Or, as the old saw goes, "Don't wish for what you want. You might just get it."

[0] https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2020/11/04/americas-forgotten-histo...

Would you agree that an influx of narcotics from our southern border has a lot to do with a rise in homelessness across the US?

Causality can go both ways