Why housing shortages cause homelessness | Hacker News Reader

Why housing shortages cause homelessness

worksinprogress.co

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Here's a recent statistic from San Francisco:

"City officials said that 40% of the unhoused population surveyed in San Francisco came from another California city or even from out of state, increasing from 28% in 2019." Source: https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-requ...

This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%.

A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.

The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use.

The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services. Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136

There is a huge problem with conflating homeless and drug abuse problems, with the latter drawing empathy and funding away from the former. These are two very different problems with very different solutions. These former you just need housing, maybe job assistance, the latter you need millions of dollars in treatment and related assistance per case that has a very high chance of failing.

There is a huge problem with people portraying the problems as not connected.

A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody.

And drug addiction will prevent anyone who's homeless from getting out because it sucks up any income that could be used to level up in any way.

Drug addicts on the street has become people's impression of homelessness, but it is a completely dishonest one. Yes, that's a problem, no, homes aren't going to help solve it. Low barrier housing (where drug addicts can live without curtailing their lifestyles) is a quick way to lose support for all homeless programs in your region (no one wants to live near low barrier housing), and that adversely effects the larger problem that is actually solvable (housing affordability for functioning people).

Yes, ideally we have infinite resources and we can solve the drug addiction problem without becoming China or Singapore and just stigmatizing the problem to death. But we don't, and dumping in 95% of our funds allocated to homelessness to what is really a drug addiction problem, and barely seeing any progress in either problem, is eventually going to wear the public out.

> A drug addiction problem is a fast track to homelessness for just about anybody

Also homelessness is a fast track to addiction problems for many people. If you feel that bad you are prone to do anything to make it less bad even briefly.

This seems to be a common belief on Hacker News but why? I don't claim to be an expert on these matters, but I've lived in downtown Dallas for about a decade now and spend a lot of time on the street, encountering many unsheltered, chronic homeless. I've also known a fair number of people with drug problems. My first wife was addicted to opioid pills. My brother-in-law has had serious heroin problems, OD'd twice, spent time in prison. My two best friends from high school include one guy who was addicted to speed and did a lot of ecstasy and hallucinogens on top of that, the other was a bad enough alcoholic that it killed her at 36. My wife is an alcoholic who has been hospitalized twice with acute liver failure and vitamin deficiencies.

Not a single one of these people was ever homeless. My wife is a 20+ year engineer with a top secret clearance.

The homeless people I meet, on the other hand, completely run the gamut. I met married couple in their early 20s a few weeks back that stopped to talk to me about skateboarding and showed me pictures of their dogs. I showed them pictures of my cats. They lost their jobs, had no family support, and didn't want to go to a shelter because they've have to give up the dogs, so they lived in a tent down by the cargo rail. Another guy I met the week before that was obviously completely insane. He emptied a bottle of hot sauce on me and threatened to stab me for making noise on a public bridge at 8 AM an hour past sunrise and waking him up. I had at least 8 inches and 80 pounds on him and he was trying to fight me anyway.

I don't think the reasons boil down to something as simple as they're all drug addicts and drug addiction is a guaranteed path to homelessness. Even for the openly crazy, antisocial people that are obviously who the San Francisco tech crowd are actually bothered by, I don't understand what the proposed solutions from the anti-housing crowd are. If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

> If we don't house them and don't treat them, are we throwing them all in prison for life? Executing them? If we don't do either of these things, they're living animals that have to eat, sleep, and shit somewhere. You might prefer it be somewhere you'll never see it, but where? What is a solution that isn't just making it someone else's problem?

Making it someone else's problem is what most of the country has chosen. As this thread notes, SF's homeless population is increasingly from outside the city. Trying to resolve this at the city level is not sustainable.

And so we stigmatize wanting a solution for this problem, and as for the answer to "where?" just say "downtown!" For some reason those with positive contributions to society have to pay a lot of money to stay there, but the insane drug addicts can do whatever they want, and opposing this is somehow not OK.

Morally we should house and treat them. That is a huge resource draw, since if you just throw them into low barrier housing, you just get a bunch of bad crap happening in whatever unfortunate neighborhood you choose for that. So we need millions of dollar in treatment per case, and maybe we can fix them? Like a 20% chance. Those are a high amount of resources for a low chance of success, ideally we should spend the money anyways but practically we can’t afford it. We could just house them with a social worker like Finland does, but 1 social worker per 4 residents is going to cost about the same and doesn’t even try to fix their problem.

So morally you are right. Maybe in the future when we achieve a post scarcity society we could do that. Today we could focus money instead on helping people before they become addicted to drugs, we would get much better bang for buck of limited resources. I think it is a bit dangerous to teach our kids that we can and will be able to save them even if they try fent (or something unknowingly laced with fent), because that likely isn’t true ATM.

You're downplaying a catastrophic loss of family. All of these people you're rattling off are connected to you and are part of your social graph, which is something humans thrive on. You disconnect people from a community (death loss of job) and you're likely to see homeless. It's one of the reasons people give up and succumb to living on the streets outside of mental illness (which is another major factor that goes into this). A clear means of treating this problem is to put people BACK into a community that has expectations and guidelines.

Quoting the SF link:

> Seventy percent (70%) of respondents reported living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless. Of those, over half (55%) reported living in San Francisco for 10 or more years.

Granted, that report is almost 5 years old and seems to be prior to Covid (which scrambled a hell of a lot). However, it does seem like the vast majority of homeless are local.

> All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society.

Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals.

Something like 3/5 of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. Those people need a medical facility first and foremost.

Universal healthcare would go a long way to helping with the homeless problem. However, Americans aren't smart enough to see benefit. Shrug.

Those are self reported numbers, and the questions are often loaded. We did a similar survey here in Seattle and we had most of the unhoused community saying they were from the pioneer square area of Seattle, which is a bit ridiculous when you think about it. I’d take any of these surveys with a grain of salt, and it is more reliable to go by criminal records (but only works for people who are arrested a lot).

> Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals.

Those deprived people of freedom simply for not being of the proper mindset to hold down a job. It completes the circuit "support corporations or get arrested". I'm not convinced about your TBI statistic either. I would guess schizophrenia would be the majority

there are ways to support yourself without supporting a corporation

> > Welcome to the results of having closed the state hospitals. > > Those deprived people of freedom

Are you actually arguing that closing most mental health facilities was the only way to fight for individual freedom?

I'm arguing against locking someone up because they aren't willing or fit to be a cog in a wheel (aka function in the confines of a job to pay rent and "stay off the streets"). Not-being-a-wage-slave isn't an illness.

I live in LA and my girlfriend worked for a long time in homeless services and in her experience you have the causality wrong. Often people either start drug habits or their existing drug habits become worse in response to homelessness. As an example, she's met half a dozen people who live on the street and smoke meth specifically to stay awake so their stuff doesn't get stolen. And I agree on your point about LAHSA being way over budgeted, much of what they're doing is a complete waste of money.

> smoke meth specifically to stay awake so their stuff doesn't get stolen

And you seriously believe that?

It also sucks to be homeless. paired with self medication, yes. this is one of the reasons. survival mode will cause extreme behaviors for anyone.

Yes, I'm sure it went like:

- Oh jeez, I need to stay awake so people don't steal my stuff. Does anybody here have coffee? No? Only meth? Oh well.

And no other way.

> And no other way.

This was never mentioned.

Let's remember:

Homeless person. Coffee on the street at 3am every night, or hauling your...we'll say cart of stuff for simplicity; to some coffee shop, is not realistic.

So instant coffee is less obtainable than meth?

It just doesn’t make sense.

Meth can keep you up longer but you’ll still need to sleep eventually.

People like to justify “bad” behavior. We all do it all the time. I just ate some potato chips even though I knew I had enough food today because I have a long day tomorrow and told myself it’d help me sleep.

Who said all the time? Thats a strawman you construct just to knock down. Obviously that isnt practical. This is a bad faith assertion.

We could take a moment to think abiut how it starts and why. Lets suppose you get into an altercation or proximity of a known bad actor and have concerns. Someone offers you a small bump so you can take shifts. happens everyday to the homeless. Day to day problems are highly contextual (eg students taking adderall to cram similarly). Addictions evolve from innocent actions.

It's funny, because every homeless person I've seen carries a coffee pot with them.... but I've never once seen someone able to buy meth on a city street corner at night.

I often see comments like this on HN and my first thought is if the person writing them has any sort experience with drug use.

Have you ever taken any sort of hard drug ever in your life? Or been around the people who do?

What is your experience with drugs and how does it shape your perception of the people who do them and the reasons why they do them?

Is the addiction much different from severe alcoholism? If not different, than my comment relatively accurately describes the logic. I've seen many hopeless alcoholics.

What's your take?

There's room for both your gf and the op to be right and wrong because the system isn't a one way path of causality, it's a repeated game with lots of feedback loops. I would say of course higher housing costs increase homelessness, of course a drug problem gets worse or gets started when one becomes homeless, of course drug addicted homeless go to where it's the easiest to be drug addicted homeless, of course increasing homeless spending will increase a certain subset of homeless,etc.

Have you heard of the game musical chairs?

Anyway let’s say 10 kids are playing musical chairs. There are 9 chairs available. One of these kids had broken their leg a few days ago.

Let me ask you this, after the first round which one of the kids is likely going to be the kid without a chair?

So yeah, substance abuse is in fact a problem. However even if you remove all drugs from society, you’ll still have people left without chairs. Just the profile of those people will change.

> All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem.

a) "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote." Your personal experience, as valid as it may be, does not define the totality of the problem.

b) Did you ever stop to think that maybe people who end up homeless for any of the countless reasons people do might turn to alcohol and other drugs to cope with the stress and hopelessness of, y'know, being homeless?

c) Even of those who became homeless because of a substance abuse problem, what makes them any less deserving of basic human rights and dignity?

d) Countless studies have now shown that giving unsheltered people, including those with substance abuse problems, unconditional housing not only keeps them off the street, in the vast majority of cases they're able to get clean and work normal jobs again.

You seem to be asserting that these people are homeless because of their addiction. Why are you so sure the causality doesn't flow the other way?

That would imply drug addiction rates have increased with unhoused rates, but AFAIK they haven’t.

The big difference is the loss of cheap SRO housing. It used to be easy to find a flop house to stay in for $50 a month. Very unglamorous but at least it’s off the street and even people with a serious habit could afford it.

It would be hidden in the noise because the homeless population is still a very small fraction of the total

> A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

It is true that a lot of people complaining about "homelessness" are actually complaining about personally seeing a homeless person. But homeless people are also people. Our society owes them dignity too. I believe that what you describe is not a problem with the discussion, but a problem of empathy among people who would just as happily have a homeless person die as house them, since both do the job of keeping that homeless person away from their walk to work equally well.

I have always wondered about that, there was this phrase that floated around in the Bay Area of "it can happen to anyone" so I always thought about the steps it would take for me to become homeless. I would have to:

Lose my job

Lose the ability to get a new job

Burn all my savings and assets

Burn all my familial relationships

Burn all my friendships

Get rejected by all social welfare programs

It feels like barring mental illness or drug addiction it would be a real challenge to end up homeless if you are trying not to be. I definitely sympathize with drug addicts because we had doctors liberally prescribing one of the most addictive chemicals on earth to people for 25 years, but I am also suspicious of the narrative that you just stumble into homelessness despite your best efforts.

I think you aren't thinking about the cascade. So for one, losing the job, that depends on the job but let's say that it's a crappy low paid job where corporate has figured out how to make everyone replaceable. You're out, say your like many and you've spent most of your money on rent and have maybe like a grand in the bank, you go out looking for a job and can't get another one (any reason let's just assume it's not a "moral failing problem" which gives people peace of mind because "they're homeless because they're an addict and therefore they only have themselves to blame"). So now you can't pay rent (it's month to month because it's all you could get in El cerrito), you eventually get kicked out, the cascade starts, no money = no cell phone or email to apply to jobs, no place to live means no showering = hard to interview, spin up some trauma from seeing shit happen on the street that freaks you out, boom it just snowballs. (In this scenario I'm assuming that they don't just have a family to fall back on who can support their needs while they try and get another job)

True for almost any average-to-well paid white collar work, but it's surprisingly easy to end up homeless for anyone already below the poverty level, or even just not making 6+ figures in a high cost of living area.

I've known several folks - generally minimum wage adjacent jobs, retail, food service, etc. Landlord decides not to renew their lease, rental housing availability is next to none in a lot of my locality, and family lives out of state. Never made enough money to even have a savings.

Suddenly they are without housing. Maybe they can crash at a friend's house, maybe not. If they can't, they're going to be spending time and effort trying to get assistance, maybe have to take a few days off work, because of the nature of those jobs, maybe they get fired. Now they are both homeless and unemployed.

I've also know people in similar situations that ended up on a downward drug spiral as well, but only after the fact. I think it's a chicken or the egg problem for some homeless folks. Were they addicts first, leading to a downward spiral that lead to chronic homelessness, or were they just someone living in poverty, trying to scrape by, screwed by the system and turned to drugs later on?

Add to it that public transportation sucks in most of the USA outside of urban areas (and even in some urban areas as well), so anyone already without a car has limited job prospects in the event of layoffs or an economic downturn in their local area.

So yeah, I don't necessarily abide by the "it can happen to anyone" but there is absolutely a significant subset of the USA's population that is essentially one unfortunate event away from homelessness.

Suppose you're living paycheck to paycheck and your car breaks down.

Lose my job - yep

Lose the ability to get a new job - no car

Burn all my savings and assets - you couldn't pay to fix your car, so you have no savings or liquid assets

Burn all my familial relationships - hope you didn't turn to (or increase preexisting) drug use due to ^

Burn all my friendships - ^

Get rejected by all social welfare programs - easy, be male and addicted to drugs

There you have it

Yes. Watch out though that many "social welfare programs" are remarkably perverse and difficult to obtain, use or keep.

I think you're significantly overplaying your hand here, and over-assuming the ability of others too.

I'm sure you're very successful and a hard worker with great skills, but plenty of people are pretty mediocre. And plenty of people don't have great high-paying corporate jobs, even if they are hardworking. Personally, my family's savings could sustain us for years without a job, but that wasn't true when we were (single and) young.

Losing a job is easy, even if you did nothing wrong and plenty of people really struggle to find a new job with a similar pay. I had a friend who was laid off from a Stanford medical researcher position (~80k/yr), and he worked retail for 12 months (~30k/yr) before finding a true replacement job. He could barely pay his (pre-existing) SF-bay-area rents on that salary. His groceries were paid out of savings or generous friends. If anything actually went wrong (medically, car accident, etc), he'd actually have run out of money to live. None of his family lived in the US (or had USD savings), so he'd have to uproot his life to live with them. He had friends, but living with a friend is a huge ask - you can only stay on a couch for so long. It's easy to say you'll help a friend, but when their budget is $1k/mo short, you'll burn through a friend or family's generosity fast.

I don't know if most people on HN have looked, but finding a place to rent in SF Bay Area for <2k/mo is hard. If you make minimum wage, it's really hard to find a place to live. If you go from a higher salary, where you can afford 2k/mo, to a lower one where you can't, you're really screwed, because moving is not cheap either, and selling all your stuff (to eventually re-buy later) or hiring movers will certainly deplete the savings of people who can least afford it.

Certainly drugs or mental illness speeds up this downward spiral, but it should be noted that "living with friends or family" usually qualifies as homeless for most of these statistics, not when you start living in a box under the freeway... so "it can happen to everyone" is more true even for you when you realize that you only need to pass 3/6 of your listed steps.

>Burn all my savings and assets

For about 25% of Americans this would take less than a month (https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2024/08/survey-one-in-four-am...)

A disabling chronic life threatening illness could do it.

Escaping a bad domestic situation too. Gay kid kicked out by parents, violence, rape, etc.

Brain injury would do it. Maybe caused by an accident or military service.

Ditto PTSD.

In other words, there's no shortage of ways to lose everything.

> Get rejected by all social welfare programs

Disabled people are the least able to fight for their own care. To say nothing of learning how to ask for help to begin with.

> quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

Quality of life issues for others are not caused by "homelessness". They are caused by mental illness, or crime, or very aggressive lack of care for others. Being homeless is not what causes someone to spread garbage everywhere, to poop on the sidewalk, to break car windows.

Blaming homelessness is a political act. By someone who has a political axe to grind - and who doesn't give a crap about quality of life issues.

In the same line, see the fight against people living in RVs. Many of them cause no problem, others do.

In the same line, see San Francisco "street cleaning" parking hassles. Is it about street cleaning? What street cleaning?

Question: Were you born in SF?

I’m not sure why the statistic should be considered interesting.

Like what is the amount of housed population that come to sf from another California city or out of state?

SF is an economic driver of the USA. It will attract people from all over. Sometimes those people will become homeless.

In fact we should expect people in a poor economic situation to move to where the jobs are (ie, sf). That’s the system working. It would be weird that someone struggling with lack of work should stay put and just suffer.

> plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing

Well, it kind of is; almost any nonzero cost. If they had to come up with a hundred bucks rent, it would be a problem. At that level, it's unconnected to any housing crisis.

So you're saying I should mentally divide homeless people into two "camps", and that one of those camps will be full of guys wearing dirty Keds whom I should scorn?

I don't know if ranting at the people with the least amount of power will accomplish much. I'm also not stoked about the dehumanization that goes along with thinking about people in terms like this.

The book San Fransicko covers this. Apparently, housing doesn’t really reduce the drug dependence and makes it worst because of isolation.

This means that 60% did not come from another city or state and were SF residents. In other words, the majority of homeless in SF became homeless in SF.

SF has a huge homelessness problem and even after reducing it by 40% the problem would still be huge.

Now we can argue about why they became homeless but it seems pretty obvious that exorbitant housing costs mean that some people can’t afford it. City officials saying 40% come from other places shouldn’t distract us from the mismanagement that got us the 60%.

Aren't unsheltered just the peak of the iceberg? Yes, that's the part you crash into, but it exists only because it's supported by much larger mass of homeless people who are one random spat away from becoming unsheltered.

>A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered".

This point is addressed in the article:

> The stories and data in this essay show the missing link between homelessness and housing costs: people without money who avoid becoming homeless do so mostly by staying with others, usually their own parents. This happens outside the formal housing market. But parents’ and others’ ability to offer space is limited by what they can afford in the market. Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.

Why would you think drug abuse and mental illness cause people to become unsheltered rather than the other way around?

I feel like a lot of commenters here have never experienced poverty and chronic stress.

First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.)

Second, the essay's argument matches up pretty well with my experiences living in a variety of poor (by American standards) areas: most poor people get by ok on a broad network of informal favors, workarounds, and grey-economy gigs. Cash and no-questions-asked for a room in a ramshackle roachhouse, swapping cable box discounts for rides to the grocery store, Greg the wheelchair-bound erstwhile addict who watches your place at night in exchange for dinner, etc. High COL areas make these relationship networks harder (as do strict regulations and government oversight).

But personal destructive tendencies make these relationships harder too: Greg gets free dinner, but his buddies who just show up to smoke crack on your porch get their ass kicked by your angry housemate. And so they go somewhere else (the local train station, perhaps). So I wish the article had addressed the social causes of "informal economy breakdown," as well as the economic ones.

All the anecdotes above are real, by the way.

> First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.)

It is generally not legal to fail to provide housing for minors you are the parent of. That would be child neglect. So you can kick them out, but only if you arrange for an alternative.

The 'child neglect' is the key here. Diona was trying to avoid having her baby taken from her and put in the system. In order to take any action against her own mother she would risk having action taken against her.

Hmmm, so in other words the author is saying that high housing prices matter but in more of an indirect way than just making studios out of reach, instead it reduces how much family and friends can/will host people in need.

Not mentioned in the comments I read is that the folks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are stressed and operating less than optimally. Every day is a struggle and any blip reduces functionality.

As for behavioral health issues, a significant number of people experiencing homelessness have them. Some are fairly easily managed with stable housing. Others are not. And then to complicate matters, there are veterans who may have behavioral health challenges and are not being helped by the VA.

The article mentions a housing shortage. It’s very important to differentiate between a “shortage” and “scarcity” Thomas Sowell explains really well how regulation such as rent control has lead to dramatically reduced supply of affordable housing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjxdH49JMc&pp=ygUddGhvbWFzIHN...

Of course the elephant in the room is that there may be no price at which many “homeless” would be willing to pay for housing. They may choose to spend absolutely all available money on drugs, housing be damned.

Surely then a worldwide militaristic repression of drug trade for a few decades should bring homelessness way down right?

I don't get it, does this headline say that when there are not enough houses some people are homeless because they did not get a house while there is not enough of them?

  > YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) advocates… This is why non-YIMBY progressives … and non-YIMBY conservatives

Non-YIMBY… there’s got to be a better term for this…

I read it as trying to include the middle-ground, the maybes and the kindas and the it-depends-ers.

NIMBY would would be a more-exclusive label indicating a smaller subset.

If you're not a YIMBY you're a de facto NIMBY.

That is obviously too reductive. I liked to think of myself as a YIMBY. When they wanted to build two 17 story apartment buildings in my neighbourhood I thought it sounded like a great idea, even though they would be much taller than any existing buildings there. Whenever anybody suggests tearing down some old buildings in a certain 'historic' (or dilapidated as some might say) part of my town and building actually useful housing there, I'm all for it. But when I found out that the city had plans to bulldoze this one park and playground I took my daughter to almost every day, and build student housing there, I quickly realised that I was also quite the NIMBY when things are happening in my actual back yard.

No, you're a NIMBY.

The city had to bulldoze the park, because it was probably the only piece of public property it could acquire. It is a response to NIMBYs leaving them no option. If the city could buy 4 adjacent SFH lots and build a tower on it, then parks wouldn't need to be destroyed.

YIMBYism doesn't mean bad urban design. It means more options. Manhattan has plenty of walkable parks. Clearly density and parks aren't at odds with each other.

The fact that the city had to build a massive out-of-proportion tower for students means there was long term unmet demand in the neighborhood.

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make (metaphorically) violent revolution inevitable." -jfk

It would help if voucher programs were more flexible.

E.g. if a $1000 voucher is available for an apartment, why not a $500 one for a relative's room?

And yet as home prices have gone up the number of homeless remains pretty much about the same in California. So if the number of homeless don't really increase with the rise in home prices, then it makes me think there's really just always some % of the population that can't integrate and be productive in society regardless of the cost of housing or economic conditions.

I feel like there’s a vast number of potential variables here. For example, maybe rent prices have not yet caught up.

If you're on meth or fentanyl, it doesn't matter what the price of rent is--you can't afford it when you're using those drugs. I'm sure high rents don't help but pretending that homelessness is a housing issue is wrong--it's very clearly a mental illness and drug problem.

We know that only a large minority of the homeless abuse drugs routinely and that a similarly large minority are homeless due to mental illness. One would expect the two groups to overlap, so it seems reasonable to say that a large proportion of homeless people are neither mentally ill nor drug addicted, or at least that a large proportion aren’t homeless for this reason. Given that this is the case, you would expect a rise in the price of housing to correlate with a rise in homelessness. Since we don’t observe that, I’m guessing that there’s a variable we’re missing. Another potential explanation could be that people tend to move out of the high cost area before going homeless, so they don’t contribute to the homelessness statistics in the high cost area.

“Why food shortages cause hunger”

We recently offered a family camping having to move every week (campground restrictions) a camp location. Unviewable by the public, rural-esk location close to their work and school, a stable safe base.

Government restrictions mean we can't install a externally accessible toilet (our bio-cycle system can handle it) because of this it didn't work.

Never forget homelessness is because the Left made gentrification a dirty word. The Left want other people to share, but no high rises in their suburb. The Left gets the 'character' they want and they use paperwork to stop change.

Quick (spherical cow) math, if you have 1/100 chance of homelessness in a year, you probably will get stuck in the cycle. If you have a partner and they are the same it's 1/10,000 years.

Not sure about how gentrification goes into homelessness, but I agree that it isn't a dirty word.

Gentrification is amazing. It has bad outcomes when a neighborhood has low ownership numbers, but it's well within known risks for yearly renters. There are egalitarian ways to do gentrification ( mandatory affordable housing with low interest dibs for long term renters, x% new housing is rent controlled for 10 years so existing renters get a decade to plan their next move). Done right, it can be a win-win-win for new transplants, homeowners and long term rentals.

Well of course I didn't read the article cuz that would be cheating, but it's a bit like musical chairs, innit? If there aren't enough houses (at prices that are affordable to the majority), then somebody is gonna be left standing when the music stops.

A lot of things in life are a lot like musical chairs, that’s why it’s a great game to play with kids when they’re young so they learn the lesson.

But, there generally is enough housing in the US.

It’s just not proportionately distributed where people want to live and at prices people want to pay (for the location and price).

There is a surplus of abandoned housing in Baltimore, Detroit, and lots of other rust belt towns. But buying an old abandoned house in Detroit means massive investment in maintenance, refurb, and utilities (Detroit utilities are provisioned+allocated+staffed for 2.5 million residents, but half of those left, leaving the remaining few paying 2x per capita).

Meanwhile the residents of affluent suburbs threaten their city representatives/ staffers to make sure they don’t allow more residents to move there.

Yep, it turns out the revealed preference of US people as a whole is they really like infrastructure and living in places where there are good amenities to the point that they would rather share a rented apartment, than own something out of the way.

I guess with a commute and dependents that's really the only way to make it work.

> rather share a rented apartment, than own something out of the way.

Or is it simply the standard demographic problem of "the vast majority of population is in the cities so the vast majority of <pick any characteristic> is mostly in the cities"?

In addition, if you are poor, owning a car is relatively expensive. Not owning a car is an option in some US cities; it's simply a non-starter anywhere suburban or worse.

However, as the article points out, Houston has apparently done better than most simply because it has lots and lots of housing supply. Of course, the downside of that is that Houston is also the poster child for sprawl having not one, not two, not three but effectively four beltways around the city perimiters.

Beijing has 5 urban ring roads and 2 ex-urban ones. Housing is still expensive, but a lot of apartments are just investments. At least the official homeless rate is zero, and lots of people can find affordable subterranean rooms for rent (ant tribe housing).

It's also unsurprisingly where the jobs are.

There's also, in every market, a substantial number of vacant homes owing to transaction latency: houses are vacant after their owners have moved on, but before the new owners or renters move in. You can imagine the system with literally no vacancies, and how it would(n't) work.

100%. Any "Oh look at all the spare housing" needs to be scrutinised.

What does substantial mean here? Does this value have to be over 5%? Because if you move every 2 years, that would be about 36 days of vacancy per move. Is that lower than the average?

In urban markets, as opposed to rural towns that have high vacancies because everyone has moved away over the last 40 years and nobody wants to move there, the number you're looking for is "market vacancies".

>There is a surplus of abandoned housing in Baltimore, Detroit, and lots of other rust belt towns.

That's not housing. "Housing" means places where people are able to live. If you've seen pictures of the abandoned houses in Detroit, you'd know that these simply do not meet the definition. No, they don't need investment in refurb, they need to be demolished; they're completely unsuitable for human habitation after so many years of neglect and decay, and it would make no economic sense at all to try to save them.

Meh. You’re making a distinction without a difference. It’s a dwelling on a parcel zoned for a residence. Lots of rebuilds in my neighborhood are full demolitions.

The reason people don’t buy and refurb the Detroit / Baltimore stock of dilapidated properties is because (1) chain of custody it hard to identify because the property has been abandoned so long and (2) there are lots of unknown risks (liens, high utilities costs, neighborhoods full of similar dilapidated homes, undesirable neighbors).

Sure, orthogonal to the top 3 characteristics of housing value (location, location, and location), there is plenty of housing.

Even cheaper than Detroit and Baltimore, there's plenty of mostly empty apartment towers across China's cities. Why don't we just relocate everyone there?

While true (about the Chinese tower vacancy rates), it is much less than you might expect.

I heard an interview with the guy who popularized the Chinese Ghost Cities a decade or more ago. He has admitted that China has done a pretty good job at populating those dozens of tier 2 and 3 cities that he used to describe as ghost cities.

Ordos new town is still a ghost town, at least until coal comes back. Tianjin can be counted on to always have a couple of ghost districts going on, not to mention the tallest ghost skyscraper in the world (Golden Finance 117). If you are into touring China, you can just go to see for yourself, but I don't recommend going to Ordos just to check out a ghost district.

I dislike the term “want to live” because it feels like it's framing as optional the need to live somewhere you can find a job.

Detroits unemployment rate is on par with the national one and less than hcol places like nyc.

Somewhere you can find a job that pays a living wage.

If you're on the edge of short term housing (month to month lease -> behind on utilities -> extended stay hotels, to a worst case in and out of a homeless shelter) you want to live in a location where your health is less at risk from the environment, mostly the cold.

And so, Southern California, especially where there are some more social safety nets is desirable

I agree with you and in addition I also really dislike trivializing having so many people have to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from their friends and family. This really burns communities and social support networks. It would be better if we could build as much housing as possible in and around existing cities rather than have the economics of scarce housing mandate that so many people have to move away.

There is a an observation I had about economically depressed areas. "If it (the housing) is too cheap, chances are you can't afford it." It goes beyond want at this point into not being suitable for living. Most people work for a living and if there aren't jobs in the area, then the housing is good only for retirees, disabled, or other beneficiaries of passive incomes. And even that is far from ideal as the previous two tend to need advanced services like hospitals in order to survive.

Not really because "not enough housing" is an issue concentrated in a few major cities, not broadly across the USA.

Most people, if they find themselves in a situation where they can't afford to live somewhere, move.

Could it be for the same reason as lack of water causing draught or defunding police causing crime? Nope, I must be too much of a simpleton. I am sure actual explanation is a work of pure genius.

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