Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

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I moved to Portland a year ago. We certainly have a lot of homeless people, many of which are people caught up in the substance abuse cycle with particular drugs. However, one day I was driving back to East Portland, I drove under an underpass that's a particularly rough place. I saw a woman that looked to be my mom's age with what appeared to be a modern suit case, she was well dressed, and sober looking. The blood drained from me head to toe; as I said, I saw my mom in that person and I was instantly depressed. When I got home I decided I'd drive back to the underpass the next day. When I did she was gone. There are a lot of services here if you're sober so I suspect they swooped in and found her.

Portland's housing problem is multifold. There's not enough single unit housing, but even single family homes are affected by an overly burdensome and expensive permitting process. It adds thousands of dollars to construction and creates a lot of delays so when a house is torn down the lot sits empty. The city also allowed a number of lots to be classified as historical; one near my house is now just a vacant lot that a historical home used to sit on but burned down. You now can't build on that lot. We need to get rid of historical homes in Portland, we need to geographically diversify the housing density, and we need a full scale review of our permitting process.

It's comforting to think homelessness is caused by people making bad decisions, but it's almost entirely a result of bad public policy. West Virginia has a much higher rate of drug addiction than Portland, but much less homelessness. Because drug addicts in West Virginia can afford housing. Other places have worse access to mental healthcare but less homelessness for the same reason.

Demand in metropolitan areas has drastically outpaced supply. Because zoning laws prevent increasing density and because the government got out of the housing business and put it entirely in the hands of the private market which doesn't like entry level homes because the profit margins are less.

As the cost of housing increases relative to median income homelessness increases. It's basically a control knob.

Housing is cheap in West Virginia because it's currently experiencing the largest population exodus in the US.

https://apnews.com/article/al-state-wire-west-virginia-lifes...

West Virginia didn’t outlaw new housing like Portland did. American cities largely rejected supply and demand over the last decades, as land-owning interests found alliance, variously, with renting incumbents and the economically naive.

Charleston didn’t make better policy than Salem; it simply didn’t pass the bad ones.

I agree, but also think it's important to remember that the federal government didn't used to just leave it up to the private sector. The government used to be a major source of homebuilding. Had the federal government not abandoned the project of building public housing supply would be higher. They're much better equipped for overcoming local zoning limitations than a land developer.

Federal response used to also be much more in line with this being a housing crisis. They built a quonset hut village that held a couple thousand people in LA after WWII before postwar homebuilding caught up more. That could be done with a pen stroke again today and thousands could be housed tomorrow, but you can imagine the political footballing that would be involved with something like this.

Portland recently passed legislation to allow infill of 2- and 4-plexes. There is new construction (corporate and residential) going up everywhere. Your agenda is showing.

Single family zoning is still a thing in west virginia, its just you have a lack of jobs so there aren’t a ton of people moving there.

So perhaps the solution is more affordable senior housing built in lower cost of living areas? If we’re subsidizing the housing, medical care (Medicare), income (Social Security or a bridge to it), you don’t need to build in expensive urban cores; location is not as important. Suburban cores are probably fine if the land cost is reasonable and close enough to public transit.

Connections to your community, family, and friends are important. No one wants to go die somewhere far from everyone they know because they can’t afford otherwise. Plus in California you’d have to go remarkably far before apartment prices actually significantly dent. Go way out to lancaster in la county and you still pay high rents, nv and az aren’t too much cheaper now either, so whats left then in the southwest, tijuana?

> So perhaps the solution is more affordable senior housing built in lower cost of living areas?

That's still necessary but we're past the optimum point where that is helpful.

Once folks transition into homelessness, they've lost their income earning ability. Reacquiring employment is much harder after homelessness and much worse for older people. For them, the pool of who will hire them sharply decreases year by year.

We need a modern sort of WPA. Even for some of the mentally ill homeless people there is plenty of work in the city for them to do if we bothered designing a jobs program.

Doesn't matter why. Whether it's through policy or by accident affordable housing keeps homelessness low.

I think it’s hard to compare West Virginia to Portland, and conclude that the differences are a result of policy decisions.

No West Virginia didn't make housing affordable through policy, but the fact that housing is affordable and homelessness is low despite high levels of drug addiction highlights that housing costs are a powerful control knob for homelessness and blaming drug addiction is a red herring.

can you expand upon that? What else other than policy decisions would have a major impact? demographics?

Wikipedia pegs the largest city in West Virginia as Charleston, pop 48,000. Portland is population 650,000 with over twice the density. Homelessness is an easier problem to solve when you have fewer people and more available land per person.

One's a major regional metropolis built on top of trade and the other is a rural area built on top of coal mining. You would need to add 2 more locations to make it closer to a social science examination, perhaps New Orleans and the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.

Portland isn’t perfect but it’s doing a bit better than many places with the elimination of parking minimums and the relative ease of building ADUs.

I do love Portland, but I think within the city we're too uncritical of what goes on here; maybe it's a counter-reaction to sensational national coverage but, imo, equally unhelpful. Dense housing development is being pushed to Eastside (https://projects.oregonlive.com/maps/density/) which has caused the city to remove trees to expand roads because they built it on roads that weren't ready for it, East sides tree density is 2/3 of what it used to be, single unit housing development has stalled quite a bit, and homelessness/camping enforcement downtown (https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4c37f1c3b4d14f3599c...) is pushing the activity associated with it to Northeast and Southeast. If the tale of two Portlands wasn't already a story when I got here, it's definitely in its second chapter now.

Yeah that’s fair, I’m really looking forward to some positive changes from the new ranked choice voting but it’s going to take time for stuff to get better.

100%, I have high hopes for ranked choice voting.

Find an empty building. You and your friends move in. Keep it clean. Plant gardens. Squat like pros. Post regular reports on social media.

Any establishment forces that try to kick you out would look really bad. Court of public opinion would destroy them.

Would this work? Has it been done?

A lot of portland's problems stem from a century of institutional racism.

Do you know why single-family zoning was driven so hard for so long? It keeps out undesirables. The consequences of that policy go very deep, from preventing new development to driving up values of existing properties. Both of which are terrible for affordable housing.

The shockwaves of Portland's past are still reverberating. I'm glad they finally passed laws to allow infill and rezoning, although all the boomers are squawking like crows around roadkill.

My problem with discourse in Portland is that all anybody wants to talk about is the history of these issues. Nobody actually has a plan for fixing them, much less the desire. That's kind of at odds with the history of the issues on the facade, right? When you dig in deep, many groups it used to impact now benefit from those policies in some way and want them around. Those people aren't boomers; they're a more diverse group of young millennials who are just coming into their own.

So we can sit around and talk about history and pop words like boomer off, but it ignores the reality of these problems today. We have an opportunity to come together as larger, more diverse (on multiple fronts) communities and decide what the future looks like, but most people are sitting on their hands making excuses for one reason or another.

I don't know why we don't just have a single state where all homeless people can live. Where homeless people from all over can be bussed into. Where all homelessness resources can be directed. Where a majority of caseworkers can go, where lots and lots of housing can be built and no NIMBYs can complain. A state that is already basically this kind of place. Like West Virginia.

If we do that:

* Corporations would only ever hire there for cheap labor, if they hire there at all. Now these people are never going to escape poverty.

* The state would raise little tax revenue, and it will be easy for other states to reduce funding (and thus offering their own voters tax cuts). So no services there could be funded.

* The people there would be moved away from any remaining support network they do have. Again, this worsens poverty but also seriously hurts mental health.

* Why would the doctors, nurses, case workers, engineers, tradespeople and other non-homeless people your plan depends on move to a place being filled with the worst conditions and inevitably starved of funding?

* Likely many homeless people would not voluntarily join this program, so you're also going to require criminalizing vagrancy and forced relocation. This is a huge violation of their rights.

There's a reason homeless people aren't moving to West Virginia on their own.

I think this is a challenging concept for homeless as it becomes hard to re-integrate them into society and also it's a bit Gestapo sounding. I'm not sure homeless would opt-in, so we'd be plucking them off the streets and shipping them to camps? You can't seek assistance at a shelter/kitchen for fear of entrapment?

However, I have this same idea for how prisons could more value additive to society and those incarcerated. Especially, for non-violent offenders. Would need some guardrails, but I like to think it could be turned into a positive experience where inmates help each other build homes and small businesses, grow their own food, etc. If we eliminated most fiat currency and just provided some basic raw materials for building and perhaps some light manufacturing I could see it working. It'd be a wonderful outcome even if we just were able to reduce recidivism for this group. A dumb choice when you're 18, shouldn't put you on a path of a lifetime of gangs, crime, incarceration, etc. but that's how the current system works and it's very expensive to maintain for taxpayers not to mention the generational impact it has to the family.

We have that state already. It’s called California

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