U.S. homelessness jumps to record high amid affordable housing shortage
npr.org
npr.org
Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style. Resurrect the Federal Works Agency and restore the powers of the Army Corps of Engineers to file eminent domain paperwork in the morning and roll bulldozers after lunch.
Maybe its just my country and the way we do things but these words dont make sense in this order. What do you mean by public housing?
Public housing in the US is stigmatized because there's a focus on the deliberately ghettoized, designed-to-fail low income housing that was built in the 20th century. This is held up as the definition of public housing, but there are other version of it that were and are successful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
The US 'attempt' to do public housing is like your child, being told to wash the dishes, simply smashes all the dishes and says that this chore is impossible because look, all the dishes got broken. Meanwhile the kids next door have built an entire dishwashing machine in the time your child spent complaining it wasn't possible.
Landing the plane by going nose-down into the ground is not.
I work for a Singapore company, and the issues my coworkers complain about are that houses are leased for 99 years, have a 6-8 year waiting list, and are very expensive.
This makes it difficult to live near your office because you can't easily move. Many coworkers have 1.5-hour commutes one way via MRT.
None have shared this with me, but a huge amount of your assets are poured into an apartment that is a lease with an expiration date. In the USA, you can rely on home equity in your retirement, but if your lease is ending in 20 years, it's not valuable.
A 99 year lease is a kind of estate duty that restarts the opportunity clock each generation. This way the kids will inherit less and really have to work to create their own wealth. The only thing they are able to inherit is early life preparation like education. I’m sure there are other advantages parents pass down to their kids but by imposing limits, social mobility is preserved.
societal tools that force people to save (Social Security, mortgages, opt out 401k) are great for addressing this issue.
We have social security in the US which isn’t quite the same. Not sure if the public will ever accept CPF type systems — might feel too paternalistic to Americans.
You can opt out tho
Maybe as a society, less generational wealth is a good thing.
Ideally, we want to promote the most talented people into the positions where they have the most power and can wield it wisely. With inherited wealth, we instead give huge advantages to, not the talented, but the lucky, and we end up with incompetent leadership who are able to simply buy power with an inconsequential fraction of their wealth. When power is bought and not earned, you end up with people who do idiotic things with power. Eventually the society rots from within and is toppled by more efficient groups.
Consider my house. I paid $280k for it in 2007. Zillow estimates it is now worth $454k and Redfin estimates $498k. So on paper I've gained about $200k.
But since property tax is based on value I've also gained a quite a bit on my property tax bill. Same with house insurance. Until I actually sell the house I gain no benefit from the gain in value, except possibly I could take out a larger home equity loan than I would be able to otherwise.
When I do sell it then I've got a nice windfall right? Not really. Since houses have gone up all over the place if I buy another house the gains go into that.
How about if I instead rent an apartment? Rents are way up since 2007 too, so the money runs out roughly as fast as it would have if house prices and rent had stayed the same as they were in 2007.
So yeah, I'd be happy with the lower taxes and lower insurance that lower prices would bring, and would vote for measures that would bring that about such as more development. But only if whatever is done to lower prices in my region is also being done in the rest of the state and country.
What would be a reasonable estimate of when it could start to “get better”? I find “country eating its young” to be a perfect metaphor and honestly I don’t see any hope, it’s sad to see.
I have been in the US for close to 15 years now, as a renter, and the insane rent increase driven by housing shortage is truly sour. Every year there’s a high probability that my rent will be dramatically jacked up, to the point where I have moved 11 times since I came here, in several instances directly driven by a 20% rent increase.
And I work in tech so generally can afford things due to high pay, I cannot even imagine how less fortunate professionals in other careers manage. Probably tons of roommates or accepting 2h commutes.
All this has definitely added a sense of instability to my life that certainly contributed to other downstream decisions, some serious like never having kids (not the only reason, but a factor nonetheless), and some trivial like never buying any nice furniture/tools because it’s just going to be an annoyance when I’ll have to move again in N months after the landlord says they can now get $4k on the market instead of my current $3.5k.
Fortunately I am a european citizen and most likely I see myself gravitating more and more there as I age. Europe has a lot of problems, including housing shortage in some pockets, but where I come from, which is a generally desirable urban/suburban metro, it’s easy to find affordable rentals on a 8 year contract, which makes it so much easier to plan your life and not live with the anxiety that in just 9 months a 20% increase will come your way.
https://youtu.be/W4rBe1fGPZU?si=xV2Ai789WXZ548nG&t=442 (linked to where he's about to start talking to skip all the intros and thanks and so on)
There's this article, also, with the main points: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
We need to build a lot more housing - of all shapes and sizes - in the places where people want to live.
If it were just a housing problem, it could be solved with more housing. But we’ve conflated it with drug addiction (at least here in Seattle) and it has become much less solvable as a result.
None of which is to say that drugs are not a problem, or to say that someone with a drug problem isn't more likely to become homeless.
All of that is explained in the article which you responded to without reading it, judging by the timestamp on your comment. Let alone the video, which goes into more depth and talks extensively about drugs.
If you can’t afford housing anywhere, you just won’t survive very long in lots of places, so survival bias starts to show up.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/california...
> The overwhelming majority of homeless people surveyed were locals, not migrants from far away: 90 percent lost their last housing in California, and 75 percent lost it in the same county where they were experiencing homelessness. Of the 10 percent who came from elsewhere, 30 percent were born in California. Most of the others had familial or employment ties, or had previously lived in the state.
But anyways, this article (paywalled) claims that 48% of California adults were born in the state as of 2022: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/california-populat...
The survey also states that "Most participants (87%) were born in the United States. ... Two-thirds (66%) were born in California."
I still don't understand why the survey is statistically impossible.
1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
When laypeople talk about “homelessness”, they typically mean 2 as it’s more visible and disruptive to them.
Some people with drug problems are able to hold down some minimum wage work or part time jobs or something that brings in money.
In Mississippi, that might be enough to keep you housed. In Los Angeles, it's not.
Also you're more likely to be able to stay with a friend or relative with some extra space if housing isn't so tight:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...
A lot of kids from Vicksburg also move to LA and don’t make it because of housing costs, so they move elsewhere. But should they have made it? Should LA be affordable enough for everyone who wants to live there to live there? If not, but we want to subsidize housing for some segment of the American population to live in LA, how do we prioritize? If yes, how much housing do we need to build to satisfy all American and international demand to live in LA?
What is that based on? Also, why are people with a drug problem less deserving than people with housing problems.
Finally, what I understand from experts is that the first step to helping people with drug problems is to get them stable housing.
> What is that based on?
This is based on the fact that we have finite resources. Any resources that go to housing drug addicts could have been used for something else. There is a real opportunity cost there.
> Also, why are people with a drug problem less deserving than people with housing problems.
There are a few issues with housing drug addicts:
1. Understand, these people aren't just run-of-the-mill addicts. They are so addicted to drugs that they'll live in unimaginably horrid conditions to support their addiction. Any housing they receive will be destroyed and made uninhabitable.
2. Housing them makes the system more miserable and undesirable for everyone else. If you're a parent with children and you're facing homelessness, are you really going to use a resource where close contact with heavy drug addicts is possible?
> Finally, what I understand from experts is that the first step to helping people with drug problems is to get them stable housing.
That's actually the second step. The first step is getting the addict to want to quit drugs. Many addicts don't want to stop using, and giving those people housing is not going to be an effective way to combat their addiction if they aren't first interested stopping their addictive behavior.
Why not? Using drugs is illegal.
That applies to every criminal act, so why are we signaling out people addicted to drugs? Plenty of people on Wall Street commit crimes daily, stealing money from innocent people - do we worry about how to preemptively stop them?
The answer, IMHO, is that some have effectively demonized people with drug addictions and people who are unhoused, to legitimize hate and violence in our society (and to get rid of people they don't like). 'I hate/fear unhoused / mentally ill people, so it's ok to choke one to death or lock them away without trial.'
It's not only hurts and oppresses those individuals, but it lays the foundation for the next stages - progressive protestors, and soon mass detention of immigrants. It's either human rights for all or for none.
I've seen where many people with those problems live, and the places aren't horrid, just lacking in money and social services.
It just seems like demonization of yet another group - this time, people who have drug addictions. Why is it important to demonize them?
> This is based on the fact that we have finite resources. Any resources that go to housing drug addicts could have been used for something else. There is a real opportunity cost there.
And anything spent on other things could have been spent helping people addicted to drugs. Why is one more important or deserving than the other, other than the demonization?
> 1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
> 2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
What is that based on? Do you have any data to support these categories as something real? It sounds a lot like, '1) people I like; and 2) people I hate.'
It's wrong to discuss human beings like animals, and as if they exist to please or displease you, and as if they can be treated like animals.
They are people with their own experiences, like you, sensations and emotions and lives, who matter just as much as you do and belong in public spaces just as much. I've spent lots of time in major cities; chronically homeless people are among the least disruptive, and I've talked to many and know a few people in that situation; people on opioids are in their own worlds, often in a dream.
- High rent
> Research finds that where rents go up, so does homelessness
- Illegal border crossings
> HUD officials say another key factor was the recent increase in asylum seekers coming to the U.S.
- Extreme weather & Maui fire
It does not mention the opioid crisis.
You're right though, not much mainstream media traction on this story.
> FEMA has allocated $197 million to three companies, none of which are based in Hawaii, to administer the Direct Lease program
Smells of borderline corruption from the get-go. What a shit show.
Places like West Virginia have way less homelessness than places with high housing costs like the west coast.
Homelessness is a housing problem. Drugs make it worse, but are not the primary cause.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
COLD towns without major homeless shelter capabilities always have lower rates of homelessness b/c the cold weather is literally life threatening.
Warm(er) regions, like most of the West Coast that isn't known for blizzards, have higher rates of homelessness b/c there is little risk of death if a homeless person camps out in the woods. Note that a lot of homeless folks in warmer regions didn't become homeless in those warm regions - they often become homeless in northern regions and migrate to warm regions prior to winter.
Comparing homelessness in WV to Cali doesn't seem fair since so much of the folks that become homeless in WV are forced to leave the state to survive.
New York has higher rates of homelessness than West Virginia.
The part of Oregon where I live has a pretty extreme climate, and has way too much homelessness.
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/or/bend - this is not a climate people move to because it's comfortable and easy like Los Angeles.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/106265050/claim-homelessness-i...
Some of them would need years of physical therapy to fix their limping, if that is even possible.
I lived in lots of places for a couple of years or less to take advantage of short term opportunities. You just made those impossible, since there is a lot of overhead in buying and selling a house, and you don’t do that if you are just in a place for two years.
no, there are different slices here, tons of rentals are hyper-profitable now(acquired on much cheaper and with lower interest rates), they will still exist.
> you haven’t really made it feasible for a 19 year old working at McDonalds, or some guy stuck in a crap job in Mississippi
the point is that there will be cheap inventory for them too. Once real estate stopped being attractive investment vehicle, there will be huge outflow of capital which will crash prices, and this will actually put huge pressure on rental prices too.
The net result is that it added thousands of rentals onto the market! https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/metro-vancouver-rental-housi...
A very good thing but notably this is mostly a one time increase in homes (though the tax continues to incentivize newly built condos to be rented).
So it's a good emergency sort of measure that absolutely helps with a supply shortfall, but in the long term there needs to be followthrough in more systemic policies to build more homes.
Interest rates are high. Maybe no one is willing to buy and renovate those lots because the cost of acquiring enough capital to do so is prohibitive.
There can be lots of reasons why houses sit vacant. I don’t think we should assume ill intent.
In large parts of Scandinavia there is an obligation to have residents in an apartment. The only legal reason not to have an apartment occupied is that it is for sale, or on the market for finding a renter (within the market price).
IMHO there is absolutely no reason to let units stay empty for any longer than what normal resident churn mandate.
But aside from Riverside it looks like buildings in the US West are used very efficiently
This feels like another "safe and effective" talking point.
Is this efficient?
The opposition is strong and well organized. But the population is suffering.
So what vacancy rate do you want, ideally? Not sure, but you'll notice from your own source that 6.9% is around as low a vacancy rate as the US has had since the turn of the millennium.
FWIW, looking at vacancy statistics across the whole of the country can be misleading. They include houses that are vacant for any reason - including properties that are condemned, under renovation, or in the middle of nowhere where there are no jobs.
That latter point is key. As more and more economic activity has moved to white-collar coastal cities and away from rural or suburban blue-collar middle America, it's no surprise there are going to be vacancies in regions where the economy's been hollowed out. So we can conjecture that the record low vacancy rate is even more problematic, because those vacancies are likely less equally distributed to areas that need them.
Assume 120 homes in an area, evenly distributed per month on yearly leases. If all renters switch every month and it takes a month to re-rent the unit, there is a vacancy rate of 8.3%
Obviously not every renter moves every lease end, but also some units are in places no one wants to live, others are mispriced, some need renovation or extensive cleaning, etc.
But from a cursory sanity check the 6.9% number is likely reasonable for a fairly tight rental market.
> One bright spot was a decline in the number of unhoused veterans. This year that actually fell to a record low, after years of intense investment in subsidized housing and support services.
That decline was due to someone caring about the issue; planning, financing, and executing. But mostly, because someone cared about actually addressing the issue.
There's a homelessness issue amongst veterans. So, let's try subsidies and support to reduce the severity of the issue. It seems to work. What did we learn, and can we build on those lessons in general? It's better to use a bandaid than just bleed.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
If there are 100 houses and 110 people, (and there can't be room-mates), wages can go to infinity and the homeless rates won't be reduced.
Everyone knows that housing problems locally can be solved by making the places less desirable to live in. But it’s not a solution that anyone is interested in pursuing (rightfully so).
It's like a prisoner's dilemma where property owners as a class may not want more housing so that they are wealthier on paper, but any individual property owner will want to build housing because that'll grow their wealth faster.
Here in Oregon, we're making some progress on housing reform. The mayor of my city attended the YIMBYTown conference a few years back when she was a city councilor. Heck, the now-governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, spoke at it, and continues to work on housing policy.
Part of the puzzle is that reforms are better at the state level, where it's easier to say "yeah, we have a housing crisis, and these things will fix it" and you're not confronted by a local angry mob of NIMBYs intent on stopping homes from being built.
YIMBY’s get really angry when I suggest developing Dolores Park.
I'm willing to be inconvenienced for the greater good; are you?
And I’d have the warm fuzzy doing a “greater” good. All the way to the bank.
We must decide whether we’ll be a civilization that bows to NIMBYism and stays stuck in squalor or allow building the future.
This strikes me as one of those gasoline on the fire suggestions. Made me laugh though! I never get perspectives like this anywhere but HN.
I think self interest being what it is, easier evictions would raise rents.
I am a landlord in a place which is liberal. I will keep my place vacant for months against a mountain of applications until I find someone which I feel comfortable with signing a lease (that bar is HIGH). My place is dirt cheap, I have 3% interest on a place I bought after real estate crash and I only charge enough to cover my mortgage and condo fees (could easily charge additional $1.5k/month). I would be 100% more open to signing a lease with someone who needs an afforable place A LOT more than my current and former tenants but with the present laws I have to deal with there is absolutely no way that will ever happen
That said, you're saying that you could charge 1.5k more for the place, but don't because you value other qualities in a tenant more, right?
On mass, I'd bet dollars and donuts that what we'd find is people being evicted, or threatened with eviction, in order to raise rents. Situations like "property values have gone up 10% this year and I was too low to begin with. they've got 6 months left on their lease, but if I evict them I bet I have more cache to keep the deposit and I can ~fix my prices~. Business!"
Maybe your principles wouldn't have you do that, but people statistically make self interested decisions like that more often than compassionate ones.
Balance compassion for self and others oughta be the guide.
what you are saying though is a core problem with writing sensible laws, if they are landlord-leaning the landlords will be evicting left and right to make a few extra bucks. if they are tenant-leaning you get families moving from minnesota do east coast that pay sec deposit and first month’s rent and then live in your place for 18 months without possibility of eviction (some covid laws are still in place…)
And yet, despite the complaints, the evidence says otherwise: There is no shortage of landlords. Property is in very high demand - prices are extreme.
There could be a shortage of rental property - oh that’s exactly what the article is talking about.
This should be illegal.
If you want zero effort assets to put your money into, then real-estate really is not you.
This behavior is highly immoral.
I think I like this suggestion more. If that law were passed tomorrow a lot of landlords would want out of the business. Flooding the market with cheap housing seems more likely to reduce homelessness than making it easier to evict tenants.
Oh, this is already what happens.
Also, I’m not sure why people continuously believe that getting rid of property owners will somehow be good for renters, or that the price would be reduced to an amount where poor people can buy it. Empirically never has happened.
Not at all? Not a single landlord would want out of the business? If you couldn't even evict if somebody never paid a single dime of rent, I think that would cascade and destroy the whole industry. An extreme measure that I didn't suggest, you did.
> I’m not sure why people continuously believe that getting rid of property owners will somehow be good for renters.
I don't want to get rid of property owners. I inherently believe it's better to own a home than rent. I do believe converting renters into home owners is good for the ex-renter.
> Renter, property owner. We're all people.
So yes, making it hard to evict people reduces the supply of rental housing and that will raise rents and increase homelessness.
Before you go posting links about Social Security and Federal Taxes, it doesn't matter to local governments, they don't see that money. Also worth noting, Local Governments don't work like Federal Government, any debt they take on must be repaid on time or go bankrupt which is not good.
I understand that people are worried about this – and it's certainly an intuitive idea –, but is it true? I would count taxes on the total economic output / labour, not just the taxes from what is captured as salary (after all, underpaid workers make the world go 'round), but any analysis would do.
So sure, the entire US GDP and thus taxes is extremely reliant on these workers but who sees the benefits is not uniform throughout the country and thus the friction around immigration.
I don't know the solutions, I'm just aware of the problem.
Many cities have overly-restrictive building codes that prevent adequate housing from being built, which raises housing costs.
Our immigration rate is too high for the amount of new housing units we build, which raises housing costs.
Many businesses have taken a hardline stance against remote work, even for jobs where it would make sense. That forces people to live in areas with inadequate housing, which raises housing costs.
Existing housing is being increasingly purchased by multibillion dollar companies for rent-seeking purposes, which raises housing costs.
There's really no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, but slightly reducing the immigration rate, limiting corporate ownership of detached single family homes, incentivizing remote positions, and forcing cities to approve more new units would almost certainly improve the situation.
These people have to live somewhere — and whether they're taking up a single bedroom or an entire residence, they're living somewhere. So I don't think you should be downvoted. There's nothing wrong with asking about how an uncountable yet sizable population will affect the dynamics of an inelastic good.
Total net migration is probably 8 million over the past 4 years: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...
* Since some people tend to often claim people who are here legally are "illegals" it's important to note that asylum seekers are here legally as are those granted TPS.
The “illegal immigrants” are homeless thing feels like a meme to me, but I live far from the southern border so maybe it’s worse down there?
the army is rising
we formed a new religion
lol