I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018) | Hacker News Reader

I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)

mcsweeneys.net

294 points2color424 comments

UK has a chronic shortage of houses, as in, if you count the people in the country and how many houses you need, that's a bigger number than what you've got.

Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.

What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.

It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".

Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.

I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.

That, and reduce the immigration ffs. Importing a city-sized population (500k+) every year? - Sorry mate, you just won't be able to build a new city every year.

In the 1950s the UK was adding about 260k babies per year with a population of about 50 million, or about 0.52% per year

Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%.

I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth

Housing demand caused by births and immigration are different. A baby generally calls for an additional bedroom (easier away from the city), an adult migrant generally calls for their own residence near other migrants (easier in the city).

In the past, the population was growing even while net migration was negative. This means people were having babies. This trend reversed in the '80s and migration has made up somewhere between 37% and 128% of annual population growth since then.[1]

There'd have to be some incredible innovation to overcome increased regulation around zoning and dwelling construction generally, NIMBYism, financialization of everything, and a preference shift towards living in land-scarce cities (urban population up ~145% since 1950).

1: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...

Unless you plan for children to never leave the parental home, wouldn't housing demand caused by births just be identical to that caused by immigration, only phase shifted 20 years or so?

Meanwhile the baby is essentially a net drain on productivity, whereas an immigrant is not.

My point was to illustrate that not all population growth is fungible, so comparing birth-driven growth from the '50s to migration-driven growth since the '80s will miss things.

To your point about phase-shifting though, I think that's a definite possibility, but relies on preferences of each community, and how they change by generation.

Urbanization is not solely driven by immigrants, but how likely are immigrants to move into lower density housing when they have kids? What about their kids? And their kids, etc? And compare that to non-immigrant (or non-recently immigrated) preferences.

The relative productivity of babies and immigrants is not of interest to me in talking about housing preference, but you're correct that babies don't directly add much to GDP for the first two decades.

Immigrants can immediately provide labor for building more housing, babies not so much.

The next false argument is saying ”by the time the 50s babies were moving out, the population was higher so the ratio of new homes needed was not as dire”, as if the infants of the 1970s could provide construction labor

Tell that to China, who has been building so many new cities that their housing crisis is too many homes.

China and the UK are not comparable in scale. Also China isn't importing permanent immigrant populations

They are very different societies, sure. I don't think anyone would argue that point. But China has 1.4 billion people, and yet they have an overabundance of housing. If we are trying to find effective strategies for ending homelessness, that seems like a great situation to study.

That's what investor money will do; in western Europe, the same thing has happened with office buildings. At one point, 40% of all office space in the Netherlands was vacant. Investors prefer to invest in office space over housing because it's less parties to interact with, higher rent, 10 year lease contracts, and 100 year lifespan.

I mean. Had it escaped your attention those immigrants are he ones building the cities?

Great, immigrants build as much or more housing than they occupy, as a whole. Good news everyone - problem solved! There's no housing shortage after all!

Without population growth and without immigration your economy will collapse. Good luck with that.

Building new towns is hard because you need jobs nearby and there's no guarantee they'll materialize to a large enough degree to support the town.

I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?

Building new, isolated, towns is hard for that reason. But if you build a town on a train or bus line that connects to places people work you don't need to bootstrap self sufficiency. Building near a highway works too.

Is that a new town? Or sprawl of an existing city? There's only so far out you can reasonably go before the commute stops making sense. Many cities have already hit that limit. For example, there really isn't any space outside Toronto for a new community to have a tolerable commute with the current infrastructure.

I think the key thing is to frame the new city as a city, and not just an extension. As part of that you'd need to keep enough space to let business pop up, etc. I think part of the problem extensions run into is that they don't want to be a city.

I mean, yes to both. Depending on local political boundary systems, it might be part of the main city or not.

Reasonable commute has a different definition for different people. Some people don't commute for work, so two hours to city center is fine if they only go a few times a year. Some only commute for work a couple times a week and an hour and a half sucks, but is doable if the housing is better enough on whatever dimension. Some will be able to move their job to the new location.

If the new town has appropriate zoning and desires, a handful of companies in the city center may setup offices there to reduce office costs and attract workers that are in the periphery, instead of making everyone go into the city center.

This definitely happens around Toronto, just from looking at the density of roads on Google Maps. There's plenty of pockets of density in lines out from Toronto, and there's also several named places where there's no clear boundary between the names (there probably is at other levels of detail).

Terrible infrastructure is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy here. If you've only ever built it out to places that already have density, there won't be places without density almost by definition unless something like Detroit has happened in the meantime.

There's certainly land within close proximity to Toronto that could be used if there were political will. Georgetown is closer than Bletchley Park and already has a (terrible) train connection. Nobleton is like 10km from Vaughan, well within easy reach.

If you look at other Canadian cities there are even easier wins. Calgary has empty land (not parks, not reservation) within 8km of downtown. Winnipeg is practically a model city for this kind of treatment. Vancouver and Montreal are the only obviously difficult ones due to their geography.

But it's still sprawl. Yes, there's cities that can still sprawl more, but building sprawl is not the same thing as building a new city. You're just building a place for people to sleep while they work somewhere else.

You have to build something self sustaining and that requires jobs in the new city. You can't just have a connection to an existing city. You need an industry or institution or something there to attract workers and the workers to support those workers.

Infrastructure makes a big difference, as does WFH.

People commute from Canterbury to London, which is > 50 miles. But they have over 100 trains a day, many of them high speed.

Near a highway there is so much noise for homes though, I'm always shocked people find that acceptable. I checked a home near a highway and I couldn't even open the window due to the noise

Depends on what you count as 'near'. Adjacent to, yeah, it's noisy. Highway noise travels, but not that far. Textured walls and trees and bushes help reduce the distance that noise travels as well.

Oh sure, the places I'm talking about were maybe 100m from two highways. It was insane. I can't even imagine the amount of dust and air pollution you get in your home by opening the window

It depends. I live ~100m from a highway (I-90), and I have an air quality sensor that measures particulate pollution. AQI is usually in single digits.

There are apartments along Highway 427 in Toronto that are like that.

In the US, that's Eminent Domain and it usually doesn't happen without a fight.

So have the fight. People living in plastic tents in the middle cities is abhorrent.

There will be people living in plastic tents in inner cities regardless of whether the government does or does not infringe upon the basic right to private property. You're not proposing the solution to injustice you think you're posing, you're just proposing an argument for more injustice.

...is my point - UK did it multiple times, overall successfully I would say: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_King...

These towns often have a bit of a reputation for being full of, well, 1960s architecture and being a bit dated and unexciting, but frankly that's just a lot of the UK. Functionally, I have been to a few of them and they are just fine, if a little boring, places to live.

> [is it] okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?

I mean, happens all the time with infrastructure projects - roads, railroads, power plants.

> Building new towns is hard because you need jobs nearby and there's no guarantee they'll materialize to a large enough degree to support the town.

There's an Australian quote from the 80s I can't recall the source of right now, but it's something along the lines of "we're a country of people serving each other flat whites", indicating that the primary spend in economy is local service based.

I suspect that's true in most western countries - cafes, supermarkets, dog grooming services, dentists, hairdressers, etc. Many jobs exist where people are, and if a new suburb or city were to crop up, commercial areas would be planned and a smart council could incentivise by discounting rent for the first X years or similar programs.

A lot of the issue in the UK is getting permission to build anything. My dad had a 160 acre farm near london, you can get nordic type cabins for ~£50k (https://www.quick-garden.co.uk/log-cabins/homes/) and you could stick loads there for little money but can you get permission? On no.

I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.

The cost goes beyond the mere material cost of the house itself but if you have a sizable new development how does it fit within the infrastructure where it would be built. Everything from providing services to having adequate road infrastructure. No doubt there is some wonky things in planning but it's also not a case of YOLO'ing up a bunch of cabins. Not to mention that small single homes aren't a very efficient use of new builds.

I built my house for materials cost. You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost. My community is also all private roads with easements, so no public development costs of roads. I built mine with an axe and a shovel. As always the solution is to remove the government from the situation -- with private roads, private water, private septic, and private power there is no one to screech their deranged ramblings on why we need 1,000,000 safety regulations and $30,000 worth of paperwork and permitting to break ground because their precious public resources will be impacted.

$60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .

> You can absolutely most definitely do it for nothing but material cost.

> $60k for a house

Where did you build the house? Presuming it's on land you own, how did you come to own the land? If you purchased it, the purchase amount should be included in the cost. If you did not purchase it, consider how lucky you are.

Edit to reply to the dead reply:

I do see the context of this being on already-owned land so my point is moot. Apologies for that. (For what it's worth, I'm not really convinced by the fact that you can get free land where nobody wants to live but that's another matter.)

Private water works well until the well dries up. It's hitting a lot of homesteaders in the Coachella Valley (CA) and in Arizona right now.

And people discover why CA's building codes are so onerous after the first earthquake knocks over their self-built house. Homes and offices built to current codes are designed to survive a Ritcher 7.0 earthquake with minimal to no damage. People don't even get out of bed for anything below a Ritcher 5. According to Caltech's earthquake tracker (https://scedc.caltech.edu/recent/Maps/Los_Angeles.html, L.A. has had almost 3 dozen earthquakes in the last 3 days alone (the biggest was a 2.8)...and nobody noticed. (For comparison, a 5.x earthquake caused several billions in damage in Washington D.C.; comparable earthquakes have caused so little damage in SoCal it's impossible to find numbers. Fracking-related 2.x earthquakes have caused hundreds of millions in damage in the Midwest, but in L.A., even pets sleep through something that weak.)

Have you done research and found that the majority of the excess cost of constructing California homes is due to the specific regulations dealing with earthquakes? Are you sure there aren't other regulations and/or building codes there that have nothing to do with earthquakes or health/safety, yet massively impact the cost of homes in California?

People love to blame regulations. I live in a bushfire, cyclone and flood prone part of Australia. We have lots of regulations. For example a category 5 cyclone recent hit us, but no one overly concerned because it is a new area, and if you live in a cyclone area your house must be able to withstand 300 km/h winds. If you live in a bushfire area, you are required to have 20,000 litres of water on hand at all times. If you live in near a freeway, you are required to have 14mm glass to dampen the sound.

As it happens, I am building a house now, and an subject to all those regulations. It added maybe 10% to the total. But in real terms housing price has gone up far that that more since the 1970's.

Why? The reason is fairly mundane really: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s... Combine that with modern houses being air-conditioned, need to garage 2 cars, have stone benches and multiple TV's (none of which are mandated by regulation), and you get to the real reason.

It has nothing to do with the regulations, yet people blame it anyway.

We just need to build affordable housing. You would think given there is a demand for it, capitalism would make it happen. Yet it isn't happening. If you want to blame the government for something, not putting the regulations in place to create a market place to ensure it does happen would where I'd be looking. I doubt they would have much to do with reducing building safety, or opening up unsuitable land, and more to do with somehow arranging the financing so that it becomes attractive to build smaller, plain, boring looking cookie cutter houses.

"If you want to blame the government for something..."

* 88% of California jurisdictions have a minimum lot size of 5,000 sq ft or more

* Prior to 2024, jurisdictions in California required a minimum of two spots per single family home, or one to two spots per unit in a multifamily. California created a law to address this in 2024, but jurisdictions in most states still have similar requirements.

* Most jurisdictions in the US have restrictions around density - many only allowing single family homes or strictly limiting the number of multifamily units.

Other countries, including Australia, have similar restrictions. Google says the cost of adding central AC to a home is between $7k and $12k, so likely not a primary driver of the increase in cost of housing. "Multiple TVs" are definitely not a significant driver in increased housing costs.

Those figures aren't useful without more background information. For example, 88% of California jurisdictions have a minimum lot size of 5,000 sq ft (which sounds small to me, so that's a good thing?). For the 5,000 sq ft to be a limitation California would need a lot of inner city jurisdictions. In US and Australian suburbia a 5,000 sq ft lot is small, and there is lots of land outside of the cities. On the other hand, if we are talking high density inner-city housing whether everything is accessible via public transport then 5,000 sq ft is far too large as you say. It would not fly in a European city. But most of California isn't like that, so the 88% sounds fine.

And two parking spots per single family home sounds in line with a California household having close to 2 cars. Again, 2 cars is overkill in the city, but in suburbs with both parents working it's almost a necessity.

Your final point has no figures to back it up at all.

While TV's, AC, plantation blinds, stone bench tops, multiple shower roses, 2 dish washers, plumbed in fridge, and so on each don't add much individually the a modern house today is downright opulent compared to the one I grew up in decades ago. Add that to them doubling in floor area per person housed, and you get to the real reason why costs have more than doubled.

All of that follows from one thing - only rich people have the money to build homes, and they build homes rich people like. Those houses are big. They sit on large green lots. They are fenced. They can garage at least 2 cars. They are expensive, and they want similar houses around them, so they, the people who live there, petition for laws like the ones you mention. And they get them, reasonably enough.

To me it looks like you're blaming the government for delivering what the constituents asked for. Blaming a democratically elected government for passing laws the majority wants isn't going to stop the majority from re-electing them next year. You need to do something more constructive - like come up with reasons why it's in everyones interest (rich and poor alike) to ensure a single mother with 2 can be housed, and them work on solutions for that.

This infatuation in the USA for blaming the government they elected for all their woes is downright odd. Blame generally doesn't get you very far.

There's not really an issue with planning. The actual problem is that developers will then sit on that land rather than build on it, as this is more valuable long term. See "land banks"

I agree there is a lot of red tape and planning issues, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to the problems I listed above. Eg. green belts are there to prevent infinite sprawl of cities, which don't have the infrastructure to support continued growth. For local homeowners, nearby developments are a problem, for selfish but logical reasons.

I think anyone who has actually been hands on trying to improve the lives of the unhomed know that 1) it’s a gradient between “I get kicked out of x everyday and go back at night” and “I’m sleeping under a bridge” and 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem. Often it’s mental health / substance abuse / lack of a support system. Heck I think there is enough movies/shows about how people fall through the cracks that if you really cared you could learn about the problems in a fun night at home watching Netflix.

So no hate to the author but this feels like pointless political posturing

I very much agree. This is how I feel too in regards to this "abundance liberalism": some people think they can fix the whole country by deregulating zoning laws and tweaking a few numbers. It seems foolish to me. Whatever the solution is, I am convinced it requires (re)building actual social nets and welfare.

The post is from 2018, but it's very topical because of "abundance", as you point out.

You might be interested in this podcast Bad Faith: Episode 478 - The Abundance Conspiracy (w/ Sandeep Vaheesan, Isabella Weber, & Aaron Regunberg)

Episode webpage: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130189560

Thanks, I'll take a look!

And yet milei did basically exactly that in Argentina.

Sometimes the need to overcomplicate is itself irrational.

Why must the solution involve more than that?

Can you seriously claim that Milei improved the material conditions of Argentinians? At best, he sold the country for a quick buck to make a few numbers look good, but ultimately doomed the country. I can't think of a single place where austerity was met with positive long-term outcomes.

According to this outlet [1], Argentina seems to have experienced a recent spike in homelessness.

As I said, it's foolish thinking you can fix everything with this "one simple trick". Housing is expensive because the market is gamed, deregulating it further won't fix shit. Those who make it expensive will always succeed in keeping it this way, if we don't take away their power and try to make the game fairer.

[1] https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/quarter-of-rough-s...

I see this take a lot but it's a very static take on homelessness.

Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.

Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.

> Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless

I think a more common situation is that they are on the street because they are unstable, but being on the street makes it much worse.

Yeah I buy that to some extent. But according to the studies I've read, the primary driver of homelessness is rising rent, not mental health issues.

See e.g. https://www.statista.com/chart/32585/change-in-median-rent-a...

Having actually built, planned, and done all the paperwork for a house myself most the extra costs that can't be worked around (you can DIY everything if you want) is permitting, inspection, and codes. I just didn't get my house inspected nor did I submit engineered plans, so saved tons of money, but most people don't have the option to bypass 'safety' inspections and they get gutted like a pig following all those rules.

The actual materials cost of a house, you can build one for $60k no problem and absolute shit-tons of cheap land near jobs (ex: unemployment extremely low in the Dakotas, cheap land, high demand for homeless-tier labor in the fields in bumfucklandia as ICE deports illegals making farmers desperate for anybody).

They may be desperate to hire anybody, but not everyone is willing, with good reason, to work 16 hour days with no overtime pay and sub-minimum wage no benefits and work for only part of the year and get paid under the table. only reason it make since for migrants is the low cost/standard of living back home and currency arbitrage where us dollar are worth so much more than their own currency.

You can enter Mexico, and they have only checked I had paperwork/passport about one times of ten. No reason why you can't do the same thing if you want to do currency arbitrage. Paraguay will give you a residence permit pretty much just for showing up if you can get ahold of a USA passport, or you can avail yourself of the compact of free association and live in Micronesia without a visa. The arbitrage game is for everybody.

Yep, there's plenty of awful jobs with no requirements but a pulse. The problem is that they'll grind your spirit and take all of your dignity and time, if not outright scam you themselves (see: MLM).

I have trouble with a worldview that does not include "the Dakotas" in "bumfucklandia"

I mean, I hate to be cliched, but correlation does not imply causation. There are many possible confounding factors that could be at play here.

Correlation may not imply causation, but where there is causation there usually is correlation. So, if there is a rise in homelessness there is likely some factor contributing to that and if a factor is correlated there is a good chance that it's causal. Homelessness may caused by multiple factors but if it's increasing and those factors are mostly remaining static then looking for the one that is also increasing seems like a good bet.

Sure. But that's surely better than your "I think" above that is just based in a hunch.

Keep in mind these are the same economists who said that Milei's reforms would not alleviate Argentina's inflation

Yes, a big chunk of the homeless are referred to as "invisible" because they seem normal and may even have jobs.

That works as long as they don't strip out all the copper wiring, appliances, doors, windows, and anything else of value either because of drugs or some other unmet real need or other issues that come up when inevitably they can't be monitored 24/7. Which probably will only happen sometimes, but it only takes a few to destroy the whole program due to the sky high cost of construction in the US.

You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.

Maybe for some, but how do you see it playing out?

Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?

I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.

This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.

I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.

Not all of them, no, but if you give someone keys to a home the problem of them not having a home is solved. We may not be equipped to solve their other problems, but that does actually solve that problem.

As far as going somewhere else, the problem is accessibility of resources for the unhoused. Many municipalities don't like the idea of random people going to their town and using the benefits from that town, you have to have lived in that town for many years and ostensibly contributed taxes while you were able to work. So if you were previously housed in LA/NYC, your best bet to getting services is to stay there because having been housed there previously gets you moved up on the list for housing.

> but if you give someone keys to a home the problem of them not having a home is solved.

I guess this is the heart of the debate though - is homelessness caused literally by not having a home? And bonus question - would changing zoning laws as OP suggest solve this?

I'm arguing no - more often than not there are contributing factors other than mental health/abuse/drugs that cause homelessness to be your only option that wouldn't be solved by someone giving you keys. Most obviously - food, utilities, is the house close enough to work that you can walk there, who is paying for maintenance of the house, will you be housed with people that are actually homeless because of mental health issues - and will they do things that cause your own mental health to be impacted etc.

Where are these cheap cost of living and high job availability places? How do you rent a place in a city you've likely never been, without a job already lined up, presumedly no money for a deposit? What do you do when you realize this cheap cost of living place pretty much demands a car to be livable?

Pretty much anything is better than sleeping on the street. Why would you choose to let your last money run out and then you're stuck somewhere where if you have no reasonable way to afford rent on a low paying job.

For instance, move to Cleveland Ohio. Median home price is $173k. Rent is also cheap.

I don't know, make it work. Whats the alternative? Stay in a city and sleep on the street because you don't want to figure out a bus schedule?

Just make it work! As if the only hard part of this is figuring out the bus schedule.

The rich cities that are too expensive to live in are often the ones that provide the most benefits to the homeless, both legal and illegal. Anything from free or discounted food, medical care, laundry, charitable organizations, people who give money to panhandlers, lenient law enforcement, less violent crime, better weather, and easier targets to steal from.

Not to mention your entire support network and your friends are still there.

I think the whole point is to not be homeless. Sure, if you want to be homeless, big expensive cities might be your best bet. And a lot of people that want this lifestyle migrate to these cities for this reason.

I think you're vastly over simplifying the "not be homeless" part. Very highly doubt the majority of homeless people want to be homeless.

> I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.

If you've already been evicted then getting anybody to rent to you is extremely difficult. You are going to need not only the first month of rent but also a deposit at this rental in some other city. And it is going to be hard to get a job right away in your new city. Oh, and maybe you have kids who need to be fed.

Where is this bridge money coming from to make this move work? And what happens if it doesn't work?

bko in the sibling comment said nearly exactly what I was going to say. While I do agree that you can "fall into" this start and it's very difficult to get out of - I'm very skeptical that with no other contributing preexisting factors you wouldn't be able to figure something out. You'd have to be extremely unlikely to

- not have any family

- not have any friends

- not have any savings

- not have anything they could sell

- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)

- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper

- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)

And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?

> - not have any family / friends

This is largely true [0].

> - not have any savings

Americans basically don't have savings; median is $8k [1]. People of color save less, as do people in urban areas, as do poorer people [2], all of which is in line with who is more likely to be homeless.

> - not have anything they could sell

If you think about what one might go through on the path to foreclosure or eviction, you probably sell/lose a lot of things trying to keep your home. Maybe selling your car bought you a few months, maybe you needed it for your job(s) and it got repossessed. There are a lot of circumstances where this can happen: a partner dying, moving out to avoid intimate partner violence, health care costs, etc. This is a "slowly and then all at once" type of thing.

> - not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)

Most of the time they're already working; 53% of homeless and 40% of unsheltered homeless are employed [3].

> - Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper

Moving is very expensive in both a time and money sense:

- find time to pack

- find a new place

- maybe find a new job(s)

- put down deposits on everything

- purchase packing supplies

- either hire movers or do it yourself (if you're able)

- find time to move

- find time to unpack

This might seem like a ridiculous and petty list, but when you have very little time and money you think like this. It's also super stressful to think like this.

> - Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)

US/US State social programs have huge paperwork burdens, onerous anti-fraud requirements, and don't even give you enough money to make rent after all that (the frenzied shouts of "housing subsidies?! do you want housing prices to get even higher?!" are responsible here, also--as always--a healthy amount of racism).

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#:~:text=Most%2...

[1]: https://archive.ph/pOOk1 (MarketWatch)

[2]: https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/how-where-you-l...

[3]: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...

I've housed two sibling that were labeled as "mentally unstable"(raised by mentally abusive narcissists) and "lazy"(has narcolepsy), respectively. Both situations were pretty bad before they landed in our home, but everyone in their lives called us "angels" for taking them in.

Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).

Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.

The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.

Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.

And this is the problem with homelessness. There are two drastically different “classes” of homeless people. There’s the working single mother waitress or nurse who fell behind on bills due to medical debt, maybe rent went up and is just bad at managing spending, saving, etc. Now she’s living in a car.

Then there’s the batshit crazy dude who’s living under the bridge who’s staring off into the trees and can’t hold a coherent conversation. This poor soul is not homeless because his landlord raised his rent from $2000 to $2200 and he just can’t eke by.

However the mother in case 1, could absolutely benefit from:

1. Better health insurance 2. Better financial education 3. A credit on housing or whatever.

This is why no one can agree on homelessness because half the population imagines the “noble” woman scenario and the other half imagines the bat shit dude with his pants around his ankle.

The solutions to each are drastically different. So you sound like an idiot when you say “we just need more homes” when you’re picturing scenario 2. But equally people sound like idiots when you say “we just need more mental institutions” but the listener is picturing scenario 1.

We’re talking in circles and English needs more words to describe these two drastically different types of people.

There's also scenario 3, which you can see pushed throughout this thread - that scenario 2 doesn't really exist, because "that bat shit crazy person smoking fent and screaming at passerbys" was once just a regular, down-on-their luck mother (scenario 1), who was driven insane / driven to drugs by being homeless".

We don't really need more words to describe the scenarios. It's all politics, we know what the game is. Whether you see homeless as primarily category 1(/3) or primarily category 2, seems to align overwhelmingly with your preferred brand of politics. And as such, in the current social milieu, there's effectively no constructive conversation that can happen. It's just political extremists being handed their moral justification for their position, refusing to accept any other version of reality that conflicts with it.

There are two groups of homeless: the financially homeless, which can be helped by providing housing, and the unstable homeless (addicts or mentally ill) for whom housing will do nothing.

The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.

The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)

My whole point is that there are not just these two groups. There is instead a pipeline of your group 1 into 2. Give people homes, cut off that pipeline.

> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

There is a well demonstrated and strong correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. There are absolutely cases where the root cause is pre-existing mental health issues or substance abuse but it is simply not true to say that housing costs are rarely the problem.

Further, homelessness can cause substance abuse and mental health issues. So even if you can look at somebody today and say "wow that person has a massive addiction to meth and clearly just giving them a roof won't solve everything" this does not mean that the reason they became homeless in the first place was a substance addiction.

Building more housing will not solve all homelessness. Frankly, so what? Almost no problem on the planet is solved by a single thing. It'll solve a substantial portion of homelessness. That's still good.

For some homeless taking drugs is done to not die of other homelessness associated cause of death. When your on the street with no where safe and warm to sleep at night you may turn to drugs to keep you up and moving so you dont fall asleep and freeze to death or fall asleep and get mugged/raped/stabbed.

While there's some things that's can be done in the political and legislation spheres, there's a lot more need for just basic human relationships. Talking to those people and making friendships with those who different than you, and might be a little scary or uncomfortable. I suspect a lot of out social and political problems could be solved were we to get off of these shiny screens and spend time being in our bodies, building relationships with real people who don't fit all of our lofty ideals

These problems existed before phones

Putting in a plug for a great book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. https://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0...

This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.

For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.

The concept of humanizing homelessness fascinates me. It really does seem that the cultural default in the US is to view homeless people as subhumans who deserve to lead miserable lives. I’m not saying that this is what you yourself consciously believe(d), but it seems to be the implicit belief underlying much of the discourse around homelessness on HN and in the US more broadly.

Normally when we talk about “humanizing” a problem it’s one that doesn’t have a directly visible human element. But everyone has seen actual homeless people. It’s not something that we are just aware of as an abstract problem.

What exactly is the cultural barrier to seeing what ought to be very obvious? I.e. that homeless people are regular people who are down on their luck, or who are victims of broader societal failings.

The US has a very strong thread of Calvinist/Puritan/Protestant theology and thought running through its cultural foundations. One of the effects of this is a cultural predisposition to believe in something approximating the Just World theory—that is, that if someone is rich, it is because they are a better person (or blessed by God, or destined to be rich), while if they are poor it is because they are inferior people who deserve to be so.

This cultural background makes it very easy for people to look at their own lives and see their successes as their own work, and their failures as bad luck—but then look at other people's lives and see both success and failure as being 100% a product of their own deserving. (When in reality, everyone's successes and failures are a blend of luck and merit, with a pretty heavy emphasis on the luck, especially the luck of what family you were born into.)

This is correct. It goes deeper than this, too. Capitalist economies rely on a myth of meritocracy for labor.

The end result is that we’re forced to view the homeless as lesser. We typically throw around words like addict, because we have to. If we admit that there’s homeless people out there who got so based purely on bad luck, that destroys the promise of America.

It's not just a US thing, though.

I believe that some form of this is pretty common in general simply because that's how people cope with the very fact that homelessness exists in the first place. Like, it's either a massive injustice that pretty much demands that you, personally do something significant about it... or it's "just the way it is", and you can look away. But this latter outlook requires some amount of dehumanization, so people rationalize that the best they can.

100%. This is called the Fundamental Attribution Error, and to my knowledge, it is not at all unique to the US.

I get that you are judging me for my perspective or past perspective, and that's your right (please don't deny it, just own it, it's fine).

I don't think it's a cultural barrier. It's how many humans are generally wired. There are so many problems in the world that if you concern yourself with all of them, you'll be mired in inaction anyway. When you don't have time to help homeless people, you ignore them because to do otherwise would make you feel like a bad person. Pretty simple?

Besides, I don't think it's so simple. Yes, there is an element of luck and society, but there's is also an element of personal responsibility. And only one of those is in the control of the "victim", so I still believe it's harmful to encourage that victim mentality, even when there is truth to it.

What is your personal view on the homeless? What do you do when you see homeless people in the streets?

I’m not talking about ignoring homelessness. Of course people ignore all kinds of instances of human suffering. What I don’t understand is how homelessness could need to be “humanized” when it’s already rather obviously tied to the suffering of individual humans visible to the public.

My view is that we need more housing and cheaper housing. This would do more to help than encouraging homeless people to take “personal responsibility”, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. Is housing only for responsible people? If so, should I be required to leave my apartment and live on the street as due punishment for the irresponsible things that I do on a daily basis? Is there some kind of moral bar you have to pass before you can have a roof over your head? This is nuts. Everyone should have somewhere to live.

And yet not everyone does. And even if you have everyone free housing, not everyone would take it. So now what?

When you ignore a homeless person, you are depersonalizing them on some level. If you saw every homeless person as a some or a daughter, a mother or a father, a best friend, a laughing child, a person doing their best, could you really walk by? Probably not. And they were all these things at one point, perhaps not too long ago.

> And even if you have everyone free housing, not everyone would take it. So now what?

Possibly nothing? If you have free housing for anyone who wants it then you'll have some residue of homeless people, but not nearly as many as there are now.

You'll get mental issues if you sleep under a bridge for a while. You see, homelessness is a very low-status existence. Hormone levels mirror it and make your mind to be low-status. It changes your behavior in perceptible ways. Like a position of leadership changes a personality of people by adjusting their hormone levels, so a position of low-status omega do.

It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.

Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.

In my experience among young people sometimes homelessness is also just living with some friends, moving between friends places or some random locations, with most of your stuff being stored somewhere, without having permanent place to stay for long periods of time (like a year), and that’s usually because of affordability and availability.

That works for a bit but eventually friends get sick of it, and if they don't a baby is born and it suddenly becomes real weird and very obvious you are intruding on the baby. There is a timer ticking in this scenario. By the time all your friends have kids the chance you can stay anywhere reaches ~zero.

> rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem.

It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.

Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.

https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...

As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).

https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...

Now, this is a whole other philosophical debate - but why does anyone need to live in LA? I really doubt that people of sound mind are living their homes willingly to be homeless in LA. Sure - there is the crowd that think LA is where they need to be to make it - and I'm sure more than 0 of them believe in the grind so much that they do decide to be homeless on purpose HOWEVER (with no data to back it up) I'm confident that's not the majority of homeless people in LA.

I'm saying of sound mind not as pejorative to be clear but I think for most people of "sound mind" they could figure something out that's not living on the streets (getting roommates, moving somewhere cheaper etc)

The weather is nice, and there are public services. No-one wants to be homeless in Bakersfield. It is expensive for people with money.

Remember that 25% of unauthorized immigrants live in California, mostly in the south. Last year, California made them eligible for Medicaid for health care (MediCal). It probably is attractive that people there can get health care and providers can get reimbursed.

https://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php

I think that's the wrong angle to look at this from.

People do live in LA, and they expect to be able to do things like shop at a grocery store and buy their coffee at a Starbucks.

Therefore, there's a need for people to work at such jobs.

If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA, that means there's a structural problem that needs to be solved, one way or another, and individual choices (like "I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.

> If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA, that means there's a structural problem that needs to be solved, one way or another

This is one of the key underlying problems that doesn't get enough attention. And the current Admin's policies are only making it worse.

> If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA

There's a huge gap between "I can't afford to buy a $700,000 house" and "I live on the streets" though. Renting is an option, renting (or buying) and having room mates is an option. Not living in Beverly Hills is an option etc.

> I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.

I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is. People want to be a hair stylist in LA instead of North Dakota because of the high population density and general wealthiness of the population. During covid, we saw an exodus of people out of the HCoL areas *because* the "non essential" jobs they relied on also moved out (not clear which came first, but the point remains). So generally yeah, if you can't get your hair cut in LA because all the stylists moved out of the city, you'll either commute, or move where everyone else did (which I guess is gentrification in a nutshell)

Either way. I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here

> There's a huge gap between "I can't afford to buy a $700,000 house" and "I live on the streets" though.

Sure. But that's not what I was talking about. I'm saying if it is very difficult or impossible for an average grocery store clerk to find an apartment in LA where they can live what most people would consider a fairly normal life—ie, living alone or with a small number of roommates, each with their own bedroom or sharing one with an actual partner—then that's a systemic failure, not an individual one.

> I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is.

Right. That's part of the system that we're working within.

What I'm saying is that individual choices, like "LA is too expensive; I'll move somewhere else" do not solve the problem. As in, yes, that individual is no longer dealing with the unaffordability of housing in LA, but housing in LA is still unaffordable.

> I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here

I mean, the author is clearly satirizing the position of an upper-middle-class person, but the problem they're highlighting is absolutely one that Starbucks workers in high-cost-of-living areas face.

I'm not sure what your experience is. To your 2nd point, I googled "homelessness studies" and here's some stuff I found:

The bulk of homelessness is a housing problem [0]. Per-capita rates are the highest in the most expensive places to live. This isn't because homeless people migrate to the places w/ the best homelessness programs either: they're largely long-term residents of their cities [1]. Homelessness is increasing because incomes are not keeping up with housing costs [2]. Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%. While severe illness can lead to homelessness, it also works the other way around [3]. There are many homeless families, often headed by women but many are also "intact" families [4]. People of color are also dramatically overrepresented: Black Americans are 13% of the population but 40% of the homeless [5]. It's hard to imagine Black Americans are 3x more likely to have severe mental illness or addiction problems.

I think it's pretty conclusively a housing cost problem. Maybe not entirely, maybe not everywhere, but it does seem like we'd take care of most of the problem in most places by bringing down housing costs.

(n.b. the NIH book source is from 1988, but I found most of its basic findings were corroborated by more recent sources)

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex....

[2]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

[3]: https://community.solutions/research-posts/the-costs-and-har...

[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex...

[5]: https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/raci...

Homelessness studies is a useless field because it conflates those temporarily without a permanent home with those living on the streets.

Which is to say a family who lost their home and is living with a friend while supportive housing services is getting them accomodations is considered as 'homeless' as the crazy man who sleeps under the bridge and exposed himself to young girls.

Everyone is supportive of the former and by and large this group is helped and gets housed.

The latter... No one needs that

No it doesn't, there's the term "unsheltered homeless" for the group you're talking about.

>Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%.

Horrible, but despite those increases, there are not rental units going unoccupied in any large number. Cutting prices will not house more people, if all the rentals are already full.

What is supposed to happen is that as rental prices go up, supply is increased to capitalize on it. But that's not happening, in most areas, for various reasons.

The core problem is the curve of population growth versus the curve of housing units. Prices are an consequence of that, not the cause.

It probably doesn’t help that landlords (and sometimes even flatmates) basically want you to get a security clearance, proof that you could afford to buy the house outright, and a commitment to rent for at least a year.

I’ve been closely involved with one of the largest shelter providers in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of years and I can say this is not true for the vast majority of people we serve. The primary causes of homelessness for those people are getting evicted because of a temporary financial crunch (health issue, lost a job, etc), domestic issues (leaving a domestic violence situation) or legal issues (refugees, etc). I had a similar belief (that substance and mental instability) prior to working with this organization because the visibly homeless people I saw seemed to fall into that category so I fell into this bias. However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.

It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas

> However, what people miss are the tons of people living in their cars, wearing regular clothes, not panhandling and showing up to work best they can.

Sure, this is what I'm talking about when I say there is a gradient. But for argument sake/illustrative purposes though - what would housing have to cost to end homeless? And bonus question - what would zoning laws have to look like to get to this price?

I imagine the answer would have to be "free" but we know for a fact that wouldn't end homelessness because homeless shelters exist that cost $0 and homelessness still exists (yes, even where there isn't overcrowding).

And sure yes, I'm sure there are people that are hanging on by their finger nails - if rent goes up $100/m they'd have to live in their cars but I'm skeptical that zoning law reform is the thing that's going to save them (or end homelessness as the OP suggests)

Having a roof above one's head should be a right, not a privilege. It becomes even more of a privilege when people view real estate as investment. They want to profit. For example, in Toronto, there are lots of apartments that are 'unrentable' because they were so badly designed that it's awful. They were built for investors to sell. Think of a studio costing 600k. Who wants to pay 600k for a studio? Like, where would someone be in life that they can spend 600k? I'd assume the majority would be married. They won't want a studio. Values are reversed. It's profit over welfare, unfortunately.

Lots of people that went to shelters prefer the streets because of several issues with people in the shelter. Violence, substance abuse, theft, etc. It's not like they prefer to be on the streets but sometimes that's the best option.

I'm not saying that this is the case for everyone on the streets; I'm saying that it is a fact that it happens and some people prefer the streets over shelters because of that.

It's one thing to just say something nice ought to be a right, and it's another to put it into a rigorous law that will last us indefinitely and have sprawling effects on a lot of different areas while we make sure it doesn't ruin or break anything.

At the extreme end, with absolutely zero zoning restrictions, you could build capsule hotels for people to live in, driving the price for a tiny tiny room to, say $300/month. With a minimum wage of $15, you'd need to only work 20 hours a month to afford that. Double it to account for taxes. Figure they have EBT for food. Assume they're able to use a platform like Reflex to pick up retail shifts (like driving for Uber but for retail).

With zero zoning, there's no telling how bad the capsule to bathroom ratio would be, which would make them unlivable, but as a thought experiment, it says that there is some price point where it's possible, so the real question is to find what's practical. If the choice is between a plastic tent exposed to the elements with no water, sewage or heating/AC, electricity, and an uncomfortably small hotel room with a shared bathroom, I'd rather the hotel room.

In practice, these hotels become full of mentally ill, drug-dependent, and sometimes violent people, to the point where most people actually do feel safer in a tent.

You can police things, but it’s not an easy problem. Where do you draw the line? Zero tolerance? As soon as someone has an angry outburst, or is caught with drugs, they’re back on the streets? Then you get back where you started pretty quickly.

College dorms seem to be able to solve this problem, so it should be doable for adults as well.

College dorms aren't full of mentally ill drug addicts. The population that lives on the streets has very little in common with students living in college dorms.

Law enforcement gaps are a different issue altogether

> 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem

I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.

While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.

A huge number of people end up on the street by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore. We tell ourselves it’s substance abuse, so we can pretend it’s their own fault and couldn’t happen to us

> We tell ourselves it’s substance abuse, so we can pretend it’s their own fault and couldn’t happen to us

I don't disagree that many people disregard the problems of the homeless however I want to be abundantly clear that that I'm arguing against

> by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore.

It's not simply that, things have to be going wrong in your life (not necessarily your fault) that losing your income puts you on the streets. Which goes back to the gradient - for some people losing their income will have no visible impact, for some they'll be under a bridge but which one it ends up being will depend on other factors in your life (having savings, friends, etc)

It's mostly the cost of housing. The rate of homelessness goes up and down in direct relation to the cost of housing as a fraction of median income. What you also see is places with high rates of drug addiction and mental illness, but low rates of homelessness like West Virginia. Because housing costs are low there. Even a drug addict can scrape together enough to stay dry.

What you are seeing is that when the cost of housing goes up it's the people on the margins of society who are pushed onto the streets first and have the hardest time getting back into stable housing. That doesn't mean the cost of housing wasn't the driving force.

That was my reaction. Nimbyism is an easy scapegoat, and is a factor, but the problem is much more complex.

For example, there is a rental cartel operating in the USA.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

AirBnB is a factor.

The housing first initiative proved definitively that all secondary factors are much more treatable when the subject is housed. The societal cost of housing is way less than dealing with all the problems caused by people being unhoused.

I enjoyed reading it, even if it leaves a bitter taste by knowing that it is describing a very real feeling. Also I like how the author also relates the NIMBY problem to sabotaging public transportation initiatives.

I live in Zurich - the tightest rental market in the world (.7% availability) but don't really have a homeless problem for some reason. I have met a lot of people that have had to move to neighboring cities though.

How is public transport to nearby commuter towns? If it's affordable/convenient/reasonably quick that can help a lot, I suspect. (But am quite ignorant so appreciate correction!)

Very good, generally. It's affordable by Swiss standards, which is to say expensive for tourists but remarkably good value if you're a resident on a median salary. The cost of the whole-country annual rail pass costs less than a point to point season ticket in the UK, and there is no peak travel. So you should never pay more than 3-4k a year. Most people just get a half price card (often employer subsidised) and/or a local pass which is generally better value unless you're commuting between cities.

Switzerland has the best rail system in the world (IMHO). One app can manage ticketing across all public transit in the entire country, and it is extremely fast and reliable. Lots of people who work in Zürich, for example, commute in from Zug (due to lower taxes in the neighboring canton).

> extremely fast

It's generally called "as fast as necessary", more focused on total journey lenght with the clock-face schedule across the whole country. Other countries certainly have faster trains.

I guess "fast" is what I mean when I think "on time, efficient" (compared to, say, the struggles Deutsche Bahn has had in recent years). There are no bullet trains laterally crossing Switzerland in under an hour, I suppose.

it's nit-picky, but I think the swiss approach of "as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible" is worth separation from "train go fast", especially since it's mostly the later that shows up in comparisions/statistics because it's much easier to calculate.

In Dublin on 1st of February 2025 there were 1200 properties available to rent in a city of 1.5 million.

I wonder what could have happened in Dublin to use up loads of the available housing? Does anyone know?

Probably AirBNB

Years and years of insufficient building, combined with zoning rules that discourage apartment buildings.

EDIT: It's fascinating that I'm downvoted for this. I wonder if the voters also live in Dublin?

They’d much rather blame brown people and tech workers than admit that fixing things might require allowing more homes

With most housing things, people like to blame everything else except for supply restrictions, you can also see this in the other replies to the comment you replied to. It's way easier to blame ghosts than it is for any politician to piss off the homeowner constituency.

It's (unfortunately) rational for politicians to respond to home owners, as they stay in one place for longer, and therefore are more likely to vote for you in the future.

But it's also significant infrastructural deficits (water and power) that are downstream of incredible debt taken on by the government as a result of the 2007 crash (as well as a planning system where dogs have the right to object to planning applications).

Many such cases

Airbnb, free migrant housing, rampant unvetted immigration and a tech industry that pays more in comparison to other industries.

Ireland doesn't give free immigrant housing. They have processing centers where you can stay while your application is being processed. They are very bare bones accommodations and you only stay there for up to 14 days.

Where do they live after the 14 days? Who pays their rent? I know in the UK private landlords are offered very favourable terms via SERCO, which would beat those they would get if they rented to individuals.

And where do they go on day 15? Mars? Uranus?

Please don't kid around, we know exactly how the government facilitates the migrations. If it weren't a biggie, why are there protests happening on the streets of Dublin?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_anti-immigration_prote...

I was told by a local while living there a major factor was Google and Meta (and others) buying out entire buildings to house their staff

... because after Ireland agreed to implement the OECD minimum corporate tax rate (15%) same as everyone else, Ireland just didn't do as agreed, came up with some excuse (I would tell you which excuse, but they keep retroactively changing it), the prime minister explained in at least 5 extensive speeches how fabulous, fantastic and great he was for implementing it, and kept it at 12.5%. Then the minister of finance signed up to another minimum tax initiative in 2023 (the "EU Minimum Tax Directive"), in trade for EU money. In this they agreed to retroactively impose EU taxes up to 15% on all companies (oh and no deductions allowed to get it below 15%), and pay most of that money to the EU instead.

... which Ireland proceeded not to do. Then the new prime minister went onto TV declaring what a great success all this was for Ireland (... while ignoring that this is literally stealing money from other EU countries), and how they intend to continue this and were putting some of the money into a new "Irish" sovereign wealth fund (isif.ie) that has since used the money to hire the zero-experience-and-suspiciously-young-for-such-positions-but-totally-awesome investement team [2] composed of members of his own party that have been tasked with investing in Irish x business (please replace x with "the taoseach's new business" when making investment decisions and leave it out when publishing in the paper)

For unknown reasons, there is nothing on the isif.ie site about what they effectively do: steal money from EU hospitals, schools, pensions ... to personally enrich large US companies, and of course themselves. This is also missing from the government speeches on how fantastic they are.

But do not worry. Meanwhile in Brussels and Strasbourg, the requisition for a meeting about the approval of the color of the bikeshed (so called because when you call the place where you park your armoured Audi A9 motorcade a bikeshed chances of reelection go up dramatically. It IS, of course, a garage that was built where a park with a playground used to be) where then the request for the beginning of the process to requisition a meeting room to discuss who will make the agenda for discussing a meeting room for the actual issue is making great progress!

[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-finance/press-releases/m...

[2] https://isif.ie/about/meet-the-team

> ... because after Ireland agreed to implement the OECD minimum corporate tax rate (15%) same as everyone else, Ireland just didn't do as agreed, came up with some excuse (I would tell you which excuse, but they keep retroactively changing it), the prime minister explained in at least 5 extensive speeches how fabulous, fantastic and great he was for implementing it, and kept it at 12.5%. Then the minister of finance signed up to another minimum tax initiative in 2023 (the "EU Minimum Tax Directive"), in trade for EU money. In this they agreed to retroactively impose EU taxes up to 15% on all companies (oh and no deductions allowed to get it below 15%), and pay most of that money to the EU instead.

Can you provide a source for this assertion? AFAIK, we've implemented the 15% rate (but the profit shifting part died in the US senate, which Ireland is not responsible for).

> the zero-experience-and-suspiciously-young-for-such-positions-but-totally-awesome investement team [2]

They all look to be 40+ from the linked page (except for one lady who looks to be late 20's/early 30s).

> omposed of members of his own party that have been tasked with investing in Irish x business (please replace x with "the taoseach's new business" when making investment decisions and leave it out when publishing in the paper)

I really hate Fianna Fail (the Taoiseach's party) but Micheal Martin has never been corrupt. He is literally the most boring person in the world, but he's not corrupt.

> For unknown reasons, there is nothing on the isif.ie site about what they effectively do: steal money from EU hospitals, schools, pensions ... to personally enrich large US companies, and of course themselves. This is also missing from the government speeches on how fantastic they are.

Look, I get that this is tax avoidance in some sense, but it's worth noting that most US tech companies are booking all non-US revenue in Ireland (taxed at 15%) rather than Bermuda (taxed at 0%) for about a decade now.

Do you think that Ireland should have had to bail out banks with a debt exceeding the country's GDP? Was this moral? And then basically be put into controls on the part of the EU (who are the people preventing them from burning the bondholders).

Ireland is basically the most indebted country per head in the world at this point (the GDP looks better because of the tax dodging multinationals).

And lets be honest, the same multinationals would have found a different country to launder money through if Ireland wasn't there.

To answer the question above about properties in Dublin, this has a number of reasons:

1. post 2007 (the crash) housebuilding stopped for about a decade 2. Over the past decade, Ireland has seen significant immigration, particularly in the cities which has driven up prices 3. A zoning/planning system which is very similar to California and a culture where people object to the opening of an envelope 4. Lots and lots of investment in rental properties which pushes up house prices, which pushes up rents, which pushes up house prices.

Basically a lot of the above are problems of success, which Ireland is bad at dealing with because we've basically never had any success before.

> Can you provide a source for this assertion?

https://www.google.com/search?q=current+tax+rate+for+multina...

> They all look to be 40+ from the linked page

Not really. 30, some even less. Average age is probably 40. So indeed, suspiciously young the positions they hold. How many leaders of a large investment fund are under 60 at least?

> Look, I get that this is tax avoidance in some sense, but

(it is)

> Do you think that Ireland should have had to bail out banks with a debt exceeding the country's GDP?

(yes, that is, after all, the promise a country or anyone makes when they borrow money. Alternatively you could NOT bail them out)

> And lets be honest, the same multinationals would have found a different country to launder money through if Ireland wasn't there ...

I couldn't make my point any better than you did here. This is stealing, simply because it is not Irish tax revenue.

> Basically a lot of the above are problems of success, ...

Enabling tax avoidance, especially after signing international treaties that you would do the opposite is not success.

> The new global minimum effective tax rate of 15% means that many large multinational corporations operating in Ireland will face a top-up tax.

From the second line of the AI overview. I mean, seriously?

So the 12.5% rate remains for irish headquartered companies, NOT multinationals. And personally I'm OK with that (cries as he pays 52% marginal).

> Not really. 30, some even less. Average age is probably 40. So indeed, suspiciously young the positions they hold. How many leaders of a large investment fund are under 60 at least?

You and I clearly have different ideas of what older people look like. They mostly look like the kind of middle-aged people I work with. And I think you're missing that most of those roles are pretty low-level, the investment fund is very very small by investment fund standards.

> (yes, that is, after all, the promise a country or anyone makes when they borrow money. Alternatively you could NOT bail them out)

So, the Irish government tried (repeatedly) to renegotiate those deals. The bondholders were (mostly) fine with it (as they'd bought the bonds later). The ECB and the IMF refused to allow this to happen, for fear of contagian. This lead to basically all capital projects (housing/water etc) being cut, and basically the entire public service taking massive pay cuts. And remember, at this point the multinationals were paying approximately zero tax, so people like me (higher rate taxpayers) funded all of this.

And as a result, we have huge infrastructural deficits and a housing crisis (where this thread got started).

> This is stealing, simply because it is not Irish tax revenue.

This is a ridiculous argument, who does the tax revenue "belong" to? If the US charges Shell taxes on their US activity is that stealing? If the Feds charge Shell tax revenue on their Texas activities is that stealing? If Shell pay all their corporate tax in Delaware is that stealing?

I'm making the assumption that you are Dutch (based on previous comments). Was the Dutch East India company stealing from India? Is that also against your moral code? Do you plan to make reparations to the Indians about this?

> Enabling tax avoidance, especially after signing international treaties that you would do the opposite is not success.

Again, on the assumption that you are Dutch, do you realise that most of the schemes avoiding all of the tax (the double irish with a dutch sandwich) involved your country? Was that OK? How come you haven't changed your tax laws?

Note: i think there's a really interesting question here around where revenue "should" be taxed so even if you're annoyed at the rest of the comment, I'd appreciate your thoughts on that.

First, you're right that Ireland is the currently worst offender (in tax law). It is not at all the only country violating EU treaties when it suits them.

> So the 12.5% rate remains for irish headquartered companies, NOT multinationals. And personally I'm OK with that (cries as he pays 52% marginal).

And what IS a "multinational"? It is a collection of country-limited companies owned by a single global entity. So in other words, these days almost EVERY multinational IS an "Irish headquartered company". Meta (Facebook) Ireland is the European headquarters. Amazon Ireland is ...

And if you look at the stats, the 12.5% is exactly what Ireland charges multinationals, because of the above reason. If you look at who pays this, it's American pharma companies, US internet companies, ... it's multinationals.

> You and I clearly have different ideas of what older people look like

Yes we do seem to. When it comes to leadership of large funds, the people usually look like mummies.

> The ECB and the IMF refused to allow this to happen, for fear of contagian ...

Actually true, kind of. Ireland demanded the whole EU lowers it's corporate tax rate, together with Ireland and the whole EU said "fuck off". Then Ireland just ignored it's obligations, made a lot of money off that, and called it a success.

As a result, the future seems to be that all payments will be taxed when they happen. Any kind of payment, across any border. You want to send 5$ to another EU country? You have to declare what for and it will be fully taxed during the money transmission, in 20 different ways at least. Right now that happens for VAT, but it will happen for VAT, various taxes, company tax, profit tax, "top up" tax, ... That's what they're negotiating, that's what's coming. It will be a total disaster, but if Ireland (and others, true) keep just violating treaties everyone will violate treaties (not just tax treaties) and there is simply no other choice.

> And as a result, we have huge infrastructural deficits and a housing crisis ...

Which Ireland is solving by causing an even bigger problem everywhere else in the EU.

> who does the tax revenue "belong" to?

The consensus of everyone, including the Irish state is that income should be taxed where it is earned. Which is the same reason most financial analysts call Ireland's revenue "artificial": it has nothing to do with Ireland. It comes from the large EU economies, and the UK. France, UK, Germany, Italy. THAT is where Irish GDP is produced, and it is taxed in Ireland, which goes against international treaties Ireland signed. That's the point.

So Ireland's government has signed (more than once) that this is illegal ... and does it anyway.

> Was the Dutch East India company stealing from India?

In my opinion, yes. EVEN by the standards of the time they were. Also from the Dutch citizens btw: they paid no tax, because they were owned by the royal family. But it happened a long time ago ...

They crashed and burned, by the way, the Dutch East India company, by the way, crashed and burned when foreign states started "enforcing tax" (well ... really just outright preventing the system the Dutch East India company operated under through outright military force, which resulted in Wars, that of course were NOT paid for by the company, or the royal family for that matter. We paid for them. Not even just the Dutch)

> Dutch tax law ...

Dutch tax law still follows the treaties the Netherlands signed. Corporate tax in the Netherlands is pretty high (26%, and because dividends are taxed, the effective tax rate is closer to 40%)

The same is right now happening in Munich, and Bavaria's politicians are still against building more homes.

It makes for a compelling argument for these companies to build campusses / cities, offering housing as another perk for working for them. Of course, it would have to be regulated to avoid the mining town exploitation.

I wouldn't mind working in e.g. Ireland if a furnished apartment was part of the offer.

Switzerland ships the homeless by bus to other European capitals for free.

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/swiss-city-offers-beggars-one-way...

I think that has more to do with the summer gypsies than an endemic homeless problem.

You realize that's a slur, right?

Really, you wanna police speech on HN? What priggishness. smh As long as the gypsies in Slovakia call themselves thus, you have no moral leg to stand on.

> As long as the gypsies in Slovakia call themselves thus

As is the case with the n-word.

I'm not policing anything (obviously, since I'm not in any position of authority) - I am however pointing it out since I've come across people that truly didn't know.

I call my wife “baby” but that doesn’t mean it is ok for random men to call her that. You are free to use ethnic slurs if you want, and people are free to point out that they are in fact slurs.

It's socially constructed, what's a slur. Something below a fact.

What, you downvoted to disagree? Look:

"We asked many members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities how they preferred to describe themselves. While some find the term “Gypsy” to be offensive, many stakeholders and witnesses were proud to associate themselves with this term and so we have decided that it is right and proper to use it, where appropriate, throughout the report." Women and Equalities Committee, UK Parliament. 2019.

Of course that was six years ago, maybe it's a slur now. Or maybe it's a slur to you, but not to them. Or it won't be slur tomorrow, or it's a slur everywhere but not on Tuesdays and except in Scotland. Socially constructed, see? Not factual.

I find it fascinating that Europeans will look down on Americans for their race problems, but mention the Roma/travelers and they respond in a way that would make Archie Bunker say calm down.

> I find it fascinating that Europeans will look down on Americans for their race problems

I don't know why Americans keep saying we look down on you for your "race problems," but we do not. Generally speaking, we look down on you for manufacturing race problems for politics as a team sport. We have our own race problems.

> Generally speaking, we look down on you for manufacturing race problems for politics as a team sport.

Which we don’t do.

What you need to understand is that race problems in the US are very complex because of our history and diversity. We have people from all over the world here, truly. And it’s not small percentages.

In comparison, most European nations are much more homogeneous. And, no offense, but y’all are not handling it as well as you should be given your position. The amount of extreme racism I hear from Europeans especially in regards to immigration is repugnant. Immigration which is comparatively quite low.

> but don't really have a homeless problem for some reason.

You border security and permit system kicks out anyone with even a remote chance to become homeless, you're welcome.

There is definitely a large homelessness problem in Zurich. Maybe you just don't go outside?

I'd like to advertise deregulating housing construction as a very clear way to help solve desperate housing problems in many countries (such as in the USA). You can check out more about it here https://www.econlib.org/build-baby-build-now-under-construct...

I'm not sure where you live, maybe that could help in your area.

But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.

This does NOTHING to help homelessness...

Yes it does. Every new home adds supply and lowers the price of homes along the demand curve. Not to mention increasing the tax base to fund public housing.

Is this the real estate version of the "trickle down" theory?

You take half the land left in the county for construction and build 5 mil mansions with ridiculous garden acrage instead of more affordable houses. You've now constrained yourself in the number of affordable homes you can build in your county in the future, as land is finite. Maybe you took a few k's off the 10 mil mansions for a short while. Congratulations.

I don't think building high-end housing will completely solve homelessness, no, but it is a non-trivial improvement especially when it comes to tax revenues that can be used to build public housing.

We only build high-end housing in CA because it's wildly expensive to build housing at all. It's especially expensive exactly because the cost of the "affordable" (subsidized) housing that is required for most of these developments has to be passed to the home buyers, not the general public (who should be funding subsidized housing), which means the housing will be wildly expensive regardless.

Again, the idea that building "high end" (market rate) housing does nothing is just wrong. It's part of an approach that honestly deals with the problem of public housing funding, as will as market rates. The if we want the market to start producing housing for the middle class (and we should want that), we'll need to make it inexpensive and accessible to build so that normal people can redevelop their homes, we take the delta in property values, and use that money to fund public housing for those people most in need.

>the idea that building "high-end" housing does nothing is just wrong.

Not sure anyone said this. The parent said it does nothing to solve homelessness and unless the homeowners are housing homeless people in their mansions, I think they're by and large correct. And you still have to contend with the luxury homes taking away future building potential by occupying a ridiculous amount of finite land that a county has available.

People call it a housing crisis for a reason. You don't solve a crisis by championing something by arguing "hey, it's not nothing" anymore than you would attempt to solve a famine crisis by dripping a couple of drops of water in a few malnourished kids' mouthes.

>Not sure anyone said this

It's literally what the person I was responding to said:

>>But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.

>>This does NOTHING to help homelessness...

Given the Prop 13 tax environment. Building expensive homes is a necessary condition to facilitate local tax revenues necessary to build public housing.

I would never argue that just allowing high-end homes is enough. I'm saying that allowing high-end homes is also part of the holistic solution. OP is the one saying that it does nothing. It does not do nothing. It's not a "one or another" thing... we need to build more homes at every income level, and there is no way to do that without largely deregulating the housing environment so that developers cannot simply all target the luxury market.

>It's literally what the person I was responding to saidz

This is funny, I literally quoted the exact line you quoted.

In good faith, let me perfectly clear:

As I said in my previous comment and you requoted: Their original comment said it does nothing to help homelessness (my emphasis, again).

They did not claim it does absolutely nothing at all to help the housing pool in some little way, which I believe are the words your are putting in their mouth.

You implied in your original comment that they were also saying the latter, and by doing so, you moved the discussion from homelessness to whether or not an action helps in some small way to bring home prices down. The latter may help the upper middle class housing situation perhaps but is not guarenteed to allieviate homelessness in anyway and may in fact do nothing to help it, or at least, that point still has to be argued. That is the distinction.

>I'm saying allowing high-end homes is part of the solution.

Yes I understand that. Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.

I appreciate the response.

Also in good faith. My entire point is that housing is an ecosystem. To say that "homelessness" is somehow independent of this housing ecosystem is to focus on the blemish, not the disease.

If we literally build enough houses to house the current homeless people and did nothing else, in a few years time we would have more homeless people to house.

>Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.

I mean, this is an easy thing to say, but is a very complicated in actuality, and I go to the meetings in SF and I know exactly what is happening.

The "luxury homes", really, mostly just market-rate homes (if you want real luxury homes in San Francisco, go to Pacific Heights where you will bay $10M, not $1.5M), they are allowed to be built, and the vast majority of the do have deed restricted "affordable" homes attached, these are quickly distributed via lottery. However, one of the reason why these "luxury" homes are so expensive as that the costs of those deed restricted homes must be included in the market rate homes. This is just how it's done in CA.

The public housing in SF is constantly plagued by both funding problems and political problems. The funding problems are mainly that (1) for the reasons in Ezra Klein's Abundance, since they are public projects, the cost at least twice as much to build as private developments, and (2) the cities promising these homes have not secured funding when the promises are made, and finally (3) while financing is being secured, the spaces get put to alternative use that local residence value and then when it comes time to actually build the housing, it is not politically viable because they residents will lose the fun thing they have had since the project started.

I feel I don't need to explain point (1) because Ezra Klein literally just wrote a book about it.

Point (2) is just a regular part of politics, and in SF it's an insane political position, where the Progressive candidates both promise housing without securing financing and then blame Moderate politicians (especially at the state level) for not carving out state funding for SF specific projects. This is just good politics when you're looking for a villain, because you get to win both with the promises, and the broken promises. It's also the reason I kick and scream so much about how actual luxury housing is extremely effective at bringing in new revenues for public housing because even with insane laws like Prop 13 that are slowly starving our cities of tax revenue, building new, dense high cost housing dramatically increases revenues that can be used to develop public housing that can otherwise not be built. Talk is cheap, tying new property tax revenue to public housing development actually gets things done.

Point (3) refers to the iconic failure that is San Francisco's "Biergarten" housing site. The city delayed development of the housing site, and leased the land for alternative use, in this case, the Biergarten outdoor bar was started and became successful. Fifteen years later there is no housing and the bar is still there. Why? Because closing the bar to build housing, public or otherwise, is too politically unpopular now because while the housing is needed, it is effectively a net loss for existing residents. I specifically fought against a similar proposal for 730 Stanyan public housing project at neighborhood meetings where residents were kicking and screaming that we should put the land to "good use" while the development stalled, specifically because the site was promised for housing without any financing in place. Thankfully the proposals were rejected, and the public housing project will soon be open to the public.

I'm extremely passionate about housing policy. Housing should be approaching the cost of production of housing, like in Vienna. Instead, because we treat housing as a kind of piecemeal project where the whole goal is to solve some specific need, we miss the point entirely. We should be building as much housing as is practically possible, specifically to drive the cost of housing as close to the cost of production. We can have aesthetic concerns here, but folks who want low density should not be rent-seeking in major cities. That's exactly what suburban environments are there to serve. If we care about the welfare of our middle-class, lower-classes, and homeless, we need to prioritize every aspect of the housing ecosystem, and the means we must build luxury housing to fund public housing. We should be approving every single luxury housing project.

---

Biergarten project background (from 2015!): https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing-crisis-pits-hayes-va...

Similar proposal from HANC for 730 Stanyan: https://www.hanc-sf.org/meetings/24-home/623-hanc-continues-...

When you have moderate Democrats (who say they want to solve the housing crisis for the poor and lower middle class) and fiscal conservative Republicans both championing "deregulation" and "abundance"(?) in the abstract while being cheerled by the same group of billionaires and private equity firms, you know one of them is the sucker.

hint: its not the fiscal conservatives, billionaires or private equity firms.

Those guys will say, "Hey, thanks for getting these poor folk to vote against their interest. We'll take it from here and proceed to build the luxury buildings that were too annoying to build before instead of those unseemly affordable housing projects."

How come housing in red state cities are so much more affordable?

see this Tim Dillon rant: https://youtu.be/ui-gY9zthgI (starts at approx. 6th min)

But more seriously, you can talk to Jessica Preheim formerly of the Houston Coalition for the Homeless.

There’s a disturbing trend of people living im their car who have a job or more and who aren’t doing drugs or have a serious mental ilness aside from the anxiety from the lifestyle of living in their cars. Youtube is full of interviews of these people.

Came here to say exactly this.

People living in their cars is a kind of shadow population that is almost impossible to count. I lived in a small-ish town with literally a handful of the type of homelessness we normally think of, yet at least once per month I would see someone getting gas that was clearly living in their car, and this was at a really cheap gas station nowhere near the interstate, so it was locals who knew where to get gas.

Last year, in my state, the legislature outlawed being homeless by defining it as the crime of "unlawful camping" [0]. It allows for sleeping in your car if and only if the registration and insurance are current AND you move the car every 12 hours. You can also use violence to defend your property against "unlawful campers" and/or squatters and/or people whose lease/rental period has expired.

0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb5.html the 2024 "crime bill".

I wonder if that unlawful camping legislature can be fought back as it can’t be considered camping if you have no other residence. And camping is by definition outside urban areas… I understand not wanting junkies around but criminalising some poor folks who fell on hard life is just senseless.

I don't think housing will help the people with mental health issues and addiction problems.

Honestly I think sometimes building (compassionate, 21st century) mental health "asylums" and treatment centres would do more to end homelessness.

Being homeless makes peoples mental health issues massively worst then whatever there was before. So yes, housing actually helps people with mental health issues.

And yes, as housing becomes less available, people with mental health issues are among the worst affected.

This is a scapegoat at best in areas with high homelessness. The mentally ill and drug abusers are the most visible part of the homeless population not all the homeless population. There are also complex relations to cause vs effect where mental illness may be at manageable levels until a crisis like homelessness exacerbates it or drug use may be a result of being homeless instead of a cause.

The mentally ill and drug abusers are also the ones who need to be dealt with in a way totally separate from those who are struggling but trying to get back on their feet and need a place to shower and sleep safely.

They cause disproportionate damage to cities and the cause of aiding homeless itself. It's asinine to conflate the two issues and waffle back and forth between "more houses" and nimby name-calling. Neither will help.

We should have 21st century asylums and more houses. I won't accept a false choice, we can do both. (I'd argue we also need subsidized job relocation programs so people don't get stuck in high CoL areas looking for minimum wage jobs. There are very affordable areas to live in USA that want workers, let's make this market more efficient).

And yet it works almost flawlessly everywhere it's been tried. But sure, the US is different, special. That's always the argument, right?

Americans love being exceptional, especially when it excuses their mistreatment of the poor

I don't think it's fair to equate this problem with just "the poor", and it's certainly not fair to equate "the poor" with homeless, mentally ill, drug abusers, or serial offenders. Those are the folks I'm referring to, not "the poor" as a general economic class. That should be obvious.

It's most certainly not fair to equate the homeless with "serial offenders". Most homeless people are simply poor. Most of the middle class are "drug abusers".

But whatever you gotta tell yourself to excuse the mistreatment.

I believe you have never been to or around the situation I'm talking about. That's ok, but let me assure you it's a very very small minority of drug users and homeless. Nobody is proposing anything for those two large groups. Just a few very bad locations that get overlooked because of these kinds of misunderstandings which absolutely do need something different.

You're stuck in a false dichotomy. There's nothing wrong with adopting all the housing reform you want. But we also (additionally not instead of) need something immediate to treat the acute, highly localized problem of mentally ill and drug abuse in encampments. If in fact you have not been to one (e.g. Venice Beach a few years ago) and seen the enormous encampments and destruction they inflict on nearby property, it's hard to understand. Maybe you have?

This isn't about American exceptionalism, because either A) other countries don't have this problem (great!) or B) they do and all the "do it like they do" was just proven wrong as a solution to both the problems or C) they did have this problem and it was solved by these policies - great! The immediate intervention of getting the worst offenders off the street is a temporary solution and housing policy wins long term.

But no matter what there's no reason to push back on two heterogenous solutions because it includes more than just your favorite one.

You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely? And what do you think the lack of place to shower and sleep safely does with already mentally ill person?

Like common, this does not passes the smell test. When housing is cheap, mentally ill can pay housing and have easier time getting support to get that housing. Their mental health issue do not escalate so quickly due to lack of sleep and constant danger.

> You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely?

Giving a locking door to an addict is a death sentence. As countless experiments have proven, unsupervised shelters all over California have been literally destroyed by addicts and the mentally unwell. I'm talking faeces on the walls, blood and urine everywhere, horrific attacks in the units, and eventually the place just gets burnt down. So these people need supervised shelter. In a facility. Where they're prevented from harming others and themselves. De-institutionalisation was a huge mistake. There were abuses and they needed reform, but throwing schizophrenics and addicts into the street was not kind or humane, and leaving them there is just as immoral.

It's almost like there needs to be something between locking them up against their will, and just ignoring them entirely.

Weird.

There is such a gulf between the idealized treatment for an ideal downtrodden patient and the reality of a severely mentally ill person (especially with drugs involved).

Kind of a pointless stance when trying to build that support infrastructure walks you into the same NIMBY-wall.

Not every homeless person has mental health issues. And most probably those with mental health issues _because_ they are homeless.

Rounding all the homeless up into an asylum is just sweeping the problem under the carpet.

Asylums, historically, were just a way to jail more "undesirables" in a way that isn't legally a jail. Some definitely started with good intentions, but they all tend to morph into jails.

I don't think housing will hurt the people with mental health issues and addiction problems.

We need something in the middle. The ability to be a functional adult is forced into being a binary thing. You either succeed, or you crash and burn down into being homeless, institutionalized, etc.

There really aren't many ways to meet halfway - to have living spaces where you can live up to your abilities and have safety nets for the areas where you struggle. We have "halfway houses" to help people re-enter society after crashing, but not much to catch people before they fall.

(We do have some programs that try to help, but they are swamped, or inefficient, either expensive or under-funded, or some combination of those things. )

West Virginia is literally the demonstration that this sentiment is completely wrong. They have a higher drug abuse rate than California, but effectively do not have homelessness at any rate that we do… because you can get a place to live for very, very little money.

It is very obvious that the housing availability is a major factor.

For some people, a kind of assisted living is available - independent apartments, but with a social worker visiting once a week or a few times a week if necessary.

Of course, who will pay for it? There's plenty of money but it's all in corporations and shareholders.

This isn't everywhere. I live in Nashville and we have SO MUCH housing being built. Just apartment building after apartment building after apartment building.

Is any of it affordable for the median household income in your area? If so, that’s great!

New housing doesn't have to be affordable for everyone.

Median income goes towards old housing.

When more people are being priced out of a market than new housing units are added, then yeah they do need to be cheaper to make housing more available. The net result is more stratification, not less.

Ask anyone how to make cheap housing though. No one has a convincing answer. I'm convinced that it's the right question.

Default on U.S. debt.

A U.S. default would spike interest rates, crash bond markets, trigger a credit freeze, and destroy consumer confidence. Mortgages would become unaffordable. Mass foreclosures and job losses would crush demand. Asset fire sales would follow. Housing prices would collapse.

This would also reshuffle assets, so speculators and highly leveraged people would be punished instead of being rewarded.

It will also cleanup the situation for future generations so kids won't have to be under extreme debt to pay back in some way to government, because the older people lived above their means.

That's how you make existing housing cheap. That's not how you make new housing cheap. We still have a shortage.

Myeah, not ideal, by logic it should make future housing even more expensive, as the USD weakens, so importing materials get more expensive.

The dilemma is you can’t make new housing cheap because if the price falls too much it becomes unprofitable to build and you don’t get new supply.

My city is currently facing this where the interest rate hikes, build tax hikes and falling prices have created a perfect storm of vastly reduced housing starts.

>if the price falls too much it becomes unprofitable to build and you don’t get new supply

This is saying "building is expensive because building is expensive". Why is it expensive and how do we address it to make it cheaper?

There’s not a lot of confusion about how to build cheaper.

Build less and worse per unit. Share foundations, roofs, walls, and common areas. Build less square footage per unit. Build less fancy per square foot (cheaper kitchens and baths). Use all standard materials and finishes. Install low-end appliances and HVAC. Everything cookie-cutter; no per-unit changes. Use less land per unit (and maybe less expensive land overall). Have no private outdoor space (or just a tiny balcony).

That’s not well aligned to how to maximize profits from a given unit though (fairly obviously and by intentional design).

just subsidize it. raise taxes on people making for than, say, $3 million a year, and give that money to construction companies to build homes. (subject to strict oversight that the money actually be used to build affordable homes)

Parts of this do align well with how to maximize profits. Shared walls, progressively smaller units over time and removing balconies have been the story of condo buildings over the last generation. The area that doesn’t line up is the low end apartment fixtures. It turns out people will pay $15k for $10k better of appliances and countertops.

All of those things probably work. Why do we have to give up so much that was considered standard 50 years ago? Recipe for social unrest.

There are 1.5 times as many people in the US competing for the same amount of land and buying houses using mortgages that are around 40% cheaper and many mortgages accept down payments that are 1/6th the size versus 1975, with underwriting that judges debt-to-income of 36% as “ideal” and some programs allowing 50% versus a limit of 25% in 1975, meaning the same amount of 1975 Americans plus the 50% extra Americans can all bid way, way more for that house you want, forcing you to pay up if you want it more than they do. In that time period, dual income households went from a minority to a majority, further heating up the competition.

Houses are also around 1.5 times the size with more bathrooms per bedroom in 2025 vs 1975, so “build less square footage and less fancy per square foot” isn’t at all “giving up so much that was standard 50 years ago”, but rather returning toward the standard of 50 years ago.

Sounds like you found a niche that market hasn't exploited then. Can I build a small house for fraction of the cost or most of my cost is going to be land?

It’s not an unknown niche.

Land cost depends on the location. You can find an acre of rural land for $1K. Or an 1/8th acre for $1M or more in a city.

For a cheap parcel of land in an unincorporated area with no building permit process, but with existing grid power, you can buy and build quite reasonably. (There are several YouTube channels covering builds like this.) In these areas, I wouldn’t overlook existing properties as well.

Undocumented construction workers and/or shoddy building materials are the traditional methods.

Housing becomes cheaper when supply outstrips demand. That is really all there is to it. If there is induced demand due to new housing being built, you just need... more housing.

This does appear to be an application of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure). Affordable housing is neat but it implicitly encourages infinite housing be built and does nothing to address employment and crazy down payment requirements (especially for those who could otherwise pay the mortgage!).

Depends if you find the following prices affordable, for TN salaries. Here's one blog I found [0]; seems Nashville has a slight glut at the high-end:

> Nashville home prices went up in May 2025, but not by much compared to last year.

> Average sale price $853.8K; median price stayed flat at $613K.

> But here's what's interesting: sellers had to drop their asking prices more than before. The average list price was $1.012 million, but homes actually sold for about $158K less than that...

> More Homes Available for Buyers: Active inventory jumped +29% compared to last year.

> Total inventory (including homes under contract) increased +16%

> Sales Activity Slowing Down -18%

[0]: https://www.nashvillesmls.com/blog/nashville-housing-market-...

Affordable housing is good, but building of housing of all types lowers housing prices for everyone[0]. Build it all!

[0]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

It is a big problem in Democratic states like California, where the leftists (Dean Preston and other leftist NIMBYs) have allied themselves with homeowner liberals to make it impossible to build housing.

Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.

There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.

North Adams Massachusetts has plenty of empty housing. There is a lot of vacant housing in Western Massachusetts.

Those are words that are low in epistemic legibility.

I look at metrics to arrive at my opinions. Things like the difference between the number of new housing per capita in various cities in California compared to Austin, Texas. Things like the R^2 when you do a linear regression of the amount of new housing per capita against changes in rental inflation.

I can't really follow your comment but new housing costs a lot because we now have high standards for what can be legally rented for buildings with more than 5 units.

The housing I was describing as plentiful is a mixture of existing housing as either standalone or fewer than 5 units.

To be fair, Minnesota is getting it right and Washington is reluctantly stumbling in the right direction. However, I’m forced to agree on the general sentiment.

California is a bit embarrassing. We’ll see how the Builder’s Remedy and laws like SB 1123 play out, I suppose.

There are no leftists in the US. The people you are refering to a liberals, who are defacto identical to conservatives

Dean Preston is a self-described socialist. A socialist is not a conservative.

His instagram bio reads "Housing advocate, democratic socialist", so if self-descriptions are taken as truth, it kinda undermines the whole point of the argument.

Well, but a self-described socialist might just not be a socialist.

My guess is that a Chinese communist is not a leftist.

Hi there! I live in the US. I am a leftist. I am in favor of prison abolition, universal basic income, massively increased taxation of the rich, and voting reform.

Care to explain why I either don't count or don't really exist?

Because of the two party system, you have to either vote Democrat or Republican for your vote to count, so your actually leftist ideals, which are to the left of the centrist Democrat party, do not meaningfully exist as a voting block.

So the only political movements that you think are allowed to be said to exist in a country are those explicitly and broadly represented by a major party?

I mean, I guess that's a position you could take, but it seems like a pretty extreme one.

> prison abolition

Can we stop calling reform abolishment? I know it's more fun to call it abolishment because it triggers the people you disagree with, but it's entirely counter-productive.

I'm just getting so tired of these constant motte and bailey fallacies in US political discourse.

People use the word "abolition" not to trigger you but because it's the word they mean to use and because they explicitly don't believe in reform.

You may not respect it enough to take it seriously, but it is a position that some socialists hold.

Oh I take it seriously and I also agree that in the US there's a large population that's sent to prison for no good reason, with almost no attention paid to rehabilitation and treatment.

However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.

Some form of restriction of movement will be required for frequent violent offenders. You may abolish the old system since you believe it's rotten to the core and you may call whatever replaces it something other than prison, but it will still be prison.

> However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.

"Prison" (carceral punishment) does not encompass all possible restrictions on personal freedom and movement. Even in systems with carceral punishment, other restrictions on freedom and movement are used for some situations, that do not involve incarceration.

And this is exactly why calling for "prison abolishment" is so counter-productive, because when most people hear that the assumption is that everyone who's in prison right now is free to go.

It does not help your cause to adopt a motto that espouses a more extreme position than you actually hold and both your supporters and detractors will feel betrayed when they learn your position is actually more moderate.

>And this is exactly why calling for "prison abolishment" is so counter-productive, because when most people hear that the assumption is that everyone who's in prison right now is free to go.

So what? You say "DEI" or "woke" and people assume you mean racism against white people. You say "toxic masculinity" or "feminism" and people assume you hate all men. "Pro choice" means you choose to murder babies. Transgender people are pedophiles and fetishists. Immigration is invasion. Atheists are incapable of morality. Opposition to Israeli Zionism is antisemitism. Any economic system besides free market capitalism is socialism, all socialism is communism and all communism leads to the death camps. Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others. By the way did you the Nazis were socialist, and BLM was a violent Marxist army that burned entire cities to the ground?

Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible, so they don't have to take it seriously. Their minds are protected by a cloud of thought-terminating cliches. Despite this, one doesn't let the opposition control one's language or police one's tone, because that just leads to one's own argument being co-opted and undermined.

The position being described here begins with "abolish the prisons," it just doesn't end with that. But that isn't reform, and if one called it "reform" just to be civil, no one would even bother to listen. Even getting people to consider the nature of the systems they live within and benefit from enough to say "abolish the prisons? That's crazy talk" is getting them to examine their biases more deeply than they probably have in their entire lives.

'The scolding will continue until politics improves.'

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It will, and every now and then we'll riot, because progress doesn't depend on reasonable people.

Shaw deserves better than to be so misread. Progress so called depends far more on the "reasonable" than otherwise, because we so far outnumber all others. We are whom you must convince and yet you show open contempt for the task, which is why only in days when everyone is half mad with terror do you ever get even half a hearing - which is twice what your risible excuse for a coherent ethos actually deserves.

You're the only in this conversation expressing contempt. Good day.

Very much so, thanks. I hope but doubt yours goes as well.

> Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible.

That is true, there is a concerted effort to control the narrative and define terms that are left vague with the most unfavorable or extreme interpretation. This is possible is because these terms are left so open to interpretation, however the vagueness is not an accident rather it is fully intentional.

The real reason that slogans like "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" are so vaguely defined is because America's two-party system demands "big tent" politics. Both parties need slogans that will unite both extremists and moderates on their side of the political spectrum. The fact that "prison abolishment" can be interpreted as both "fundamental reform" and "all prisoners go free" is a feature, not a bug.

Most politicians will actively avoid giving a solid definition to these slogans, because they know that when they do they will a lose voters. So be aware that adopting vague slogans is to your own detriment too, because the people you think support your position may not actually share your interpretation.

> Can we stop calling reform abolishment?

People talking about "prison abolition" aren't talking about reform when they do.

Some people talking about prison abolition (but far from all, or even the majority) might also be willing to accept reform as an intermediate step or compromise, and might engage in discussion about the shape of reform that might be acceptable in that role, but that's secondary too, and not the focus of, their advocacy for abolition.

Because you very likely still defend capitalism and US hegemony

...Where on earth do you get that idea?

Of course, one does have to be careful with one's definitions when talking about "capitalism", because I've seen people mean everything from "the current, specific, late-stage capitalist system and nothing else" to "the basic concept of exchanging currency for goods and services" and everything in between. Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing the former and some of the stuff in the middle, but I'm skeptical that even in a fully post-scarcity society we would abandon the need for the latter.

As for US hegemony...I think that the current situation demonstrates very well why it's a serious problem. We're a single point of failure, and the polarization here has been rising for decades, leaving something like this all but inevitable. Indeed, even if someone like Trump had not come along and normalized hatred and fascism, we would still have likely been in a situation where every 4-8 years the US's policies on a wide range of things flipped violently back and forth.

No; while I fear that the transition will be very rocky, the world will be better off if a broader coalition of nations can collectively take up the role of attempting to enforce the notion of universal human rights across the globe. While they're at it, maybe they'll finally be able to get the US to agree to things like the UN Convention on Rights of the Child, and the authority of the International Criminal Court.

Is "blue state" / "red state" the right distinction, or "rich area" / "poor area"? Rich people anywhere will do all they can to keep their property values from going down.

There is a proposal to build an apartment complex in my neighborhood in Northern Virginia. The houses that had Trump lawn signs up last year, now have lawn signs arguing to block the new housing (or "preserve the neighborhood's character").

NIMBYism is an economic issue, not a culture issue. It has far more to do with how much impact the new housing is expected to have on the value of people's property. Or more saliently, the equity they have in the property. If people expect that nearby housing will cut their $500k equity in half, they're likely to petition against it, regardless of whether their governor is a Republican or a Democrat.

NIMBY isn't red or blue, it's just fear and greed.

It’s part fear and greed, but also part rational and practical.

Increased housing nearby brings increased traffic, parking pressure, crowding, and noise, none of which are positives for current residents. Fear and greed don’t motivate renters to be NIMBY, yet we have NIMBY renters because of other factors.

> leftists

Lmao

Housing costs in Texas are going up too: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-bi...

No homeless people in Nashville?

Until WFH is common, areas are condemned to affordable housing shortages or commuting nightmares. Yeah, some areas pony up for dedicated path public transit but that’s rare. There’s lots of land over there but the jobs are over here. And people don’t want houses like the 50’s and don’t seem to like high density housing with kids.

And nobody wants to see their real estate property decline in value…

It already was common.

Wonderful article. We need more of this.

It's universal problem everywhere where you pay with dollars and euros. The jobs are not where the housing is. Where the jobs exist the housing immediately becomes a turbo investment vehicle. Where there are no jobs the housing is not particularly cheap either. The solution usually is to inherit a real estate or two in desirable location. So we continue ignoring it or everyone are like "I have mine, fuck you"?

How about in Singaporean Dollars? The Signapore housing market is centrally organized by the government, so the problem is not universal, it just takes a government not bought by capitalist interests against housing policy for their citizens.

Is lack of enough homes the main reason for homelessness?

Yes. https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

I think that's not necessarily the most important question. A more important one is "are more homes (dwellings) the easiest way to reduce homelessness?", and "do more dwellings reduce the number of rough sleepers?", to which the answer is "yes". During Covid lockdowns, the UK housed all street-homeless people at four days notice (other countries did this too). This was possible because of the sudden availability of hundreds of thousands of vacant hotel rooms.

For at least a little while, a massive influx of supply of dwellings entirely eliminated rough sleeping in the UK, mitigating the harshest impacts of homelessness for thousands.

Was it mandatory to be out of the streets, police enforced? Were the hotels free for the homeless population? Trying to figure out whether it was the increase of availability only, or combined of forced housing/low price point.

Voluntary - a small population chose to stay on the streets. The accommodation & some meals were provided at no cost to the individual.

When you examine an island of critical business development with desperate need for workforce yes, otherwise you will mostly find rent and prices that compromise life conditions. Basic needs aren't a market you can easily disrupt (unless you plan to let a class of slaves or poors be created).

My country has enough homes (in principle, and there is pressure on the system), but we still have homeless people.

Maybe in the US it is about building houses, but at some point it isn't anymore. I once wrote this here: [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903859

There should always be a surplus of homes, the point is to get a sufficient surplus in the places that are in demand that this places downward pressure on prices, aka competition.

One question would be how could we create any incentive for someone to build a home in an area that's currently in equilibrium?

Starting a new home construction in a location with falling housing prices isn't an obviously winning business strategy.

House prices don't fall forever, and as long as selling prices don't fall below cost of construction + margin, there's still incentive to build. There are numerous examples around the US where this is taking place, like Austin.

You don't need an incentive, you can just build it. Not everything that's good needs to make money.

Indeed. Only if you’re unhappy with the current pace of that does it make sense to examine whether the incentives are correct.

Habitat for Humanity is doing great work.

For n decades now (the value of n depends on who you ask) most of the money circulating in the system is money made on money, or in general volatile money. In these setups, scarce resources become useful as a "safety net" in various pockets of the economy. Natural resources come under this category. Land too, comes under this category.

Ideally you want the only competition for housing land to be multiple humans wishing to live there. The homogenity of human wants and needs will ensure you don't get ridiculously unpredictable outcomes. You will also benefit from network effects.

However, BlackRocks use for land is completely different. So many things stop mattering when the land is being pieced up and the risk distributed to a million retirement accounts.

Over-financialisation hurts the intended use of scarce resources. Today, no human has the ability to consider it important owning independent personal access to scarce resources such as farmland and water bodies. Similarly, I predict, people will be forced to stop wanting personal housing land. When, is the question.

Six generations ago, over 80% of Americans worked in farming. Owning your family's farmland made sense as a means to even out the land you farmed versus the land you owned. As farming industrialized, became more efficient, and food became readily available with less than 2% of Americans working in farming. In that world, the amount of farmland you needed to personally own to offset the amount you personally farmed was zero.

Will the same happen for housing? Everyone starts out naturally "short" one unit of housing. To gain housing, you can rent or buy it. Buying it puts you "even" in the same way as above: your ownership and your usage is in balance.

I don't see the factor that would cause people to stop wanting personal housing land.

Would this be considered creative non-fiction?

Do you remember that teacher in school who would sometimes lash out at a poorly performing student?

This made me feel like I was watching a frustrated lash out from someone who cares.

Captures the author's feelings; but fails as a piece of persuasion.

It is humor. I don't watch south park to be persuaded for example.

It makes claims, even if done in a humorous manner.

It is still an argument.

A bit broad. I guess the broadness of satire that people enjoy probably is a measure of how close the revolution is?

Also kind of the simplicity of the problem: You have homeless -> give them homes = no more homeless. Just build a shit ton of public housing. It really doesn't help the liberals argument that in the last 40 years, China raised 800 million people out of poverty. [1]

[1] according to the communists at the world bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

It's not just about homelessness though, sure the article is, but the crisis is not. It's about standard of living and making sure we are building a future where people have better lives than the previous generations. We need housing to approach the cost of production for people to build wealth. Otherwise, we will always have rent-seeking by existing homeowners.

Whether we do that by gigantic public housing projects, non-profit coop developments, or markets building housing for profit is almost irrelevant to the point that it's currently effectively illegal to build housing in the vast majority of cities.

We should be looking to Vienna, which has had the most success at keeping urban housing affordable and available. They did so by always building more housing all the time. They're doing basically the opposite of what we do in CA where we fight about which type of housing we should build one or two buildings of. We need to just legalize and fast track housing of all kinds.

City of San Diego added over 9000 units last year, homelessness increased 8-/

When a shiny new 2 bedroom apartment is priced at $4200/month, it isn't going to do ANYTHING to resolve homelessness.

Outlaw AirBnB! Outlaw empty "investment" properties. There are a lot of things that could actually help. Empowering the California real estate mafia won't do anything for anyone here except the developers.

I mean vacancy taxes will help, but the only reason why “investment properties” even exist is because of the intentional, artificial housing shortage.

Houses are deteriorating assets that only gain their wealth because of the land value appreciation. If you can just build new housing, there is no reason to hoard the existing housing, because your neighbors might try and capture that value before you can.

The homeless in the US that you see living in tents and underpasses etc. are the mentally ill, and the chronically drug addicted or a combination of both. Those people aren't going to be helped by building new housing. They need treatment and probably will need to be forced into assisted living accommodations. We definitely need to build more housing in most cities, but most of the governments in these areas make it difficult to do so. Once the baby boomers start dying off, we should see more housing hitting the market...

how much does san francisco spend per homeless person per year om homeless services?

In a democratic society, it is natural that building new houses becomes incredibly hard once a bit more than 50% of voters are happy with their housing situation. In a way, it may be a sign of democratic backslide when housing is still built in large quantities then: capitalism (developers' profits) trumps democracy (people wishing to keep and increase value of their homes).

This is like a 4chan post.

From what I have seen there isn't a housing shortage as much as an "affordable housing" shortage.

Just my observation. Tons of overpriced apartments being built at 2x the price of the average renter.

Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.

The issue is skewed supply and demand. If it’s profitable to buy housing as an investment, lower to middle class folk can’t compete with the upper class and businesses in the purchasing power, no matter how much housing gets build. I’m not sure whether there’s a good solution to this problem.

There is. Progressive taxation. Your first purchase is tax free. Second is a percentage and the more you accumulate the higher the percentage.

I'm trying to see how this would work. Would this be single family homes only? Duplexes and triplexes? Apartments/condos?

It doesn't matter, any residential property.

If I build a 40-unit apartment building (provides housing for 36 families on average), am I taxed as if that’s 40 residential properties? Do we want to use tax policy to punish this construction?

No punish people buying multiple properties as "investments".

Tax the purchase not the construction.

If I build a 40 unit building and sell it to my wife (or my neighbor) or sell it to BlackRock, there’s no difference in how many units exist nor how many families can live there. My tax treatment should be the same as theirs.

If you restrict or punish the purchase of housing via tax policy, you simultaneously restrict the sale of it by original constructors, which serves as an impediment to that original construction.

Here in Norway they've tried to curb this somewhat by eliminating the wealth tax value discount you get on secondary homes. Your primary gets a 75% discount up to $1mill, then 30% on anything above $1mill, while secondaries count in full. So it's much less favorable to own multiple homes now as an investment.

Of course, most of those who did own extra homes as an investment rented them out as well, so rental prices here has gone through the roof as landlords and common folk with an extra apartment or two has sold the homes.

It's profitable for investment because of low supply.

I need to dig out the link, but there is a Study from Finland that shows this is incorrect:

As housing stock quality improves, everyone upgrades. Which leaves room at the bottom level to get on the ladder into lower quality cheaper housing.

Also supply and demand: if prices are increasing it is mostly because supply is not keeping up with demand.

Lastly, like all other products in a market, we should see a general improvement in quality, this isn't a bad thing (think how cars how 10x more reliable, comfortable and fuel efficient than they used to be).

I'd be interested in that study, because that doesn't match what I'm seeing on coastal US cities.

https://youtu.be/uuCuTThT_Tw

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2021/09/114685-study-market-...

> From what I have seen there isn't a housing shortage as much as an "affordable housing" shortage.

It's generally much more illegal to build cheap housing, both in the direct sense that building codes require all new housing to be built to extremely high standards, and the indirect sense that in places without by-right development (which is most desirable cities sadly) your neighbours are going to fight a lot more against cheap houses getting built than they'll fight against expensive houses getting built.

> Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.

Already been happening for years.

Not really talking about new builds.

Where I live the majority of affordable housing has been bought up and turned into investment rentals or vacation rentals. They will leave the houses empty instead of lowering rent.

Current average rental cost is 3x what the average renter makes. More apartments are being built (very cheap, inefficient designs) but the cost is still above what the average renter makes.

Collusion is a bigger issue than new builds.

Prices only keep going up as long as there's an expectation of future profits. Everyone loves to hate investors (especially foreign ones), but cornering the market only works if it's impossible for other people to build new houses.

Various studies have found that even building expensive housing reduces rents for the entire market as it pushes people with more money into the new housing and reduces upward price pressure on older housing. Yes, it'd be good to build housing of all types. But even just building luxury apartments or whatever has an effect.

I share your frustration with only overpriced, luxury housing being built. However, I think you are misattributing the blame here. The reason why only expensive luxury housing gets built in so many areas is almost always because the local government only allows developers to build luxury apartments. If housing construction was deregulated, then actual rampant capitalism would see profit in building affordable housing and then build affordable housing. Take a look at things like ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is a pretty awesome medicine, but it isn't only for rich people now. It is very cheap and affordable. Same with cell phones.

Not talking about luxury. It is about raising prices on what was affordable 5 years ago. Companies/Corporations purchasing the rentals in the area and doubling the rent because a website told them they should.

Just my observations from my area.

Giving housing to the homeless means we change the homeless into neighbours.

And who the hell wants a poor person as a neighbour.

[flagged]

What does this have to do with poor or homeless people?

You don't understand. I'm a real person who's had real experiences. I am now disinclined to invest in housing for the homeless because you won't take my real problems seriously. If you actually don't understand the connection you should refrain from commenting.

You sound like the exact person this article is satirizing.

I doubt you could describe the target of this piece but it is not people like myself. That is not to say that the piece should taken seriously. She would have been wiser to simply tweet the title rather than lift the veil on her various unearned grudges. At any rate, you can continue try to insult me but it will not persuade me. You might not think that matters but here we are.

Marijuana usage is now in the mainstream. You might as well ask how to prevent your property from smelling like cigarette smoke.

That has been addressed in some jurisdictions:

>San Rafael law prohibits smoking in all apartment and condo complexes (if your home shares a wall with another home – you can’t smoke there). A housing complex is only allowed to create outdoor smoking areas if they meet certain criteria. Landlords and property managers are required to enforce this law through lease agreements. For more information about this, check out this handbook:

>https://www.cityofsanrafael.org/documents/san-rafael-smoke-f...

My property doesn't smell like cigarette smoke. I've had various mechanisms of enforcement to prevent it. Also marijuana usage is not in the mainstream in my community. In order to prevent it I will not make the investments advocated for here.

I can go weeks without smelling cigarettes or seeing someone smoking a cigarette.

But every fucking day marijuana. Every public park; marijuana. Sports events; marijuana. Just sitting in traffic; marijuana. Waiting in fucking line at my kids' after-school pickup, marijuana.

It's a little ridiculous at this point.

I am a huge proponent of legalized marijuana, but for real. The people that do this are ruining it for the rest of us. Luckily it makes SO MUCH MONEY that I don't think we'll ever see it outlawed again, but. This is exactly what the pearl-clutching anti-pot people said would happen.

The commenters here have simply assured me that allowing these people to live near me will expose my young children to marijuana smoke, and that I will not and should not have any recourse. Many of them are marijuana smokers themselves. They have no answers, to the extent they could even see this as a problem at all or understand my very common point of view.

This seems like a no-brainer, and I will continue to vote and advocate against these policies, to the extent that I need to because most of the people I live near agree with me. Thanks all.

I live in a relatively affluent (upper-middle class) area away from any urban center.

It's not poor people that are smoking more pot, sorry for the bad news.

It's gone up among many demographic slices, including the two we're discussing. At this point I don't have to experience it. The commenters here --including yourself-- think that I do and some think that I should, and I'm wondering how I would continue to prevent it. They've provided no clear answers, only insults and condescension. And that's fine! I just leave here unconvinced and will not follow their prescriptions.

> sorry for the bad news

Sorry you didn't realize that supporting legal pot would make you smell more pot.

>Sorry you didn't realize that supporting legal pot would make you smell more pot.

I guess I thought better of my fellow citizens. You don't really see people drinking a beer in line at school, or sitting in traffic. I assumed it would be the same with pot, and I'm genuinely confused on what is different in peoples' minds.

The original point I responded to was that if you have homeless people around you, you'll have the smell of pot. The point I'm trying to get across is that it isn't homeless folks or poor folks. It's everyone.

Oh it's certainly not everyone.

> The commenters here have simply assured me that allowing these people to live near me will expose my young children to marijuana smoke, and that I will not and should not have any recourse.

At least in the state I live in, the only legal place to smoke is on your own property.

So, if you dont want to smell it, you are basically arguing for it to become fully illegal again so you can call the cops on your neighbors. Thats a legitimate position to have but definitely not everyone agree with you.

(personally I am far more bothered by nasty exhaust fumes from vehicles and gardeners and I'm pretty sure they are worse for health too)

I don't want people smoking on their balcony while I have my windows open on a nice day. I don't want a child's room to smell like pot smoke and I want the free enjoyment of my property. I will not support this policy proposal as it further whittles my rights away.

stop smoking it then?

take your own advice

[flagged]

They are being sarcastic.

They are, however, falling afoul of the generalized version of Poe's Law [0]. If you want to satirize positions like this on the internet, you really need to leave some indication that that's what you're doing. If you just remain committed to the bit, you will look exactly like the very real assholes who believe these things unironically.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Hard disagree. Satire is never labeled as such. By identifying sarcasm or sardonicism, you would basically be saying that the comment is not inherently absurd enough to be immediately recognizable as laughably wrong. The whole point of sarcasm is to highlight absurdity.

There will always be people who misinterpret this kind of writing. That doesn't make it bad writing; some people are just a little dumb. The writing isn't for them.

> the comment is not inherently absurd enough to be immediately recognizable as laughably wrong

But how do you achieve this when there are a significant number of real people willing to write even more absurd things with no irony whatsoever?

Sarcasm also doesn't work very well on HN generally. In this case though, it's more of a continuation of TFA which is overtly sarcastic/satirical.

Different sources say 40 to 50% of homeless have substance abuse problems. A lot of people don't want addicts as neighbours.

A substantial reason why these people have substance addictions is because they are homeless and use substances to cope.

Reducing the price of rent can prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.

What mechanism of enforcement do I have when this person continues to use substances in their subsidized housing? How do I prevent my young children from smelling this person's marijuana? How do I prevent my young children from interacting with these people when they play outside?

Poor people are people. "My child should never have to interact with a person living in subsidized housing" is a rather remarkable claim.

Is your plan simply to imprison all poor people?

> rather remarkable claim.

Mundane actually. I want my children to play outdoors without interacting with drug users. Your perspective is skewed.

> Is your plan simply to imprison all poor people?

No, and this doesn't follow.

I do not know any other mechanism to ensure that your child never interacts with a poor person except to imprison them all.

This is silly. You don't really believe this. My status quo is potless. We're discussing a policy change.

I really do believe this. And I hope it makes it clear to others why wanting to keep housing prices high to prevent your kids from smelling pot is an outrageous opinion.

I'm telling you it's obviously not true since I'm a walking counterexample. My children currently do not experience marijuana in any way.

"What mechanism of enforcement"??

Well, maybe you should just give them judgmental glares until they realize that being poor is a bad choice and stop it!

Or maybe you should move, since you apparently have such stringent standards for what's "allowed" to be around you and your children.

I have a better idea. I'll stay where I am and keep drug users away from my children like normal parents do.

> A substantial reason why these people have substance addictions is because they are homeless and use substances to cope

My experience is the opposite, I have family who do streetworking.

And the data is wider than your experience I suppose.

Yes, there are homeless people with pre-existing substance abuse problems. But so many people have this idea that somebody has their life together and then they try meth and then they end up homeless and that's how most homelessness works. This makes the "well, they deserve it and there is nothing to be done" position stick.

> And the data is wider than your experience I suppose.

Not that I care much. Me and my children will live as far from addicts and the homeless as I can manage, thank you very much.

> But so many people have this idea that somebody has their life together and then they try meth and then they end up homeless and that's how most homelessness works

Usually people who are on drugs have their life fall apart, which ultimately ends in homelessness.

Poor person? Sure. Drug addict or mentally ill? No.

… or crazy. I know a lot of people who’ve struggled with homelessness and they (1) have serious mental health problems and (2) usually have no insight into them.

Yes, I know the talking point that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but for the sane homelessness is usually a temporary condition, for the insane it is chronic.

Homeless people are people. Society has an obligation to everybody, not just me. Unless your plan is "just imprison homeless people forever" then people are going to need be around homeless people while homelessness exists.

Society has an obligation to nobody. Governments are only obligated to serve the taxpayers that fund them.

Imprisoning homeless people is not an acceptable solution, because imprisonment costs taxpayer money.

A better solution is to let the market work. If you can't afford the rent for a city, you shouldn't be allowed to be in that city at all, even in a prison cell. People who can't afford to live in an inhabited area should be permitted to camp in the wilderness.

Honestly, my European perspective is that a homeless person is someone who burnt through their entire support network - family, friends, state help. If they're mentally fit, then their choices landed them on the street, not my problem, be a fucking adult. If they're not mentally fit, then they should be sent to a mental institution, because they won't function in the society no matter what you do.

Also, of course nobody wants to live with poor people. I don't buy this romantic image of poor people being fair citizens failed by the rest of the society. I moved into a poor neighborhood and immediately had my bike stolen, literally living the meme. Real estate prices are lower here exactly because it's a black immigrant neighborhood full of poor people.

Sounds privileged.

Reading this comment thread was a fun way to start my day. Always funny to see people react to satire about them.

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(2018)

> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/homa-mojtabai

Sweetheart, I don’t expect you to pick up a hammer and some nails nevermind build a home.

It's insane. I'm seeing this even I'm straight up ghettos. No evictions/perfect credit/income 3X rent/first+last+deposit

All to live in a place I'd need to buy a gun for a security.

This is in a small Midwestern city. Someone ran down, but overall maybe only a little worse than other small cities I've lived.

I've been trying to find a place for over a year now. I don't have the credit, but have the income. My gf has the credit but not the income. We're basically pariahs.

This is not helpful, funny, or intelligent. It’s a child’s rant about the world.

At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.

At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.

I really want to see a whole town built in US out of commie block style high rises or Chinese dystopian ant nests, and how quickly it will devolve into a ghetto, because there’s no authoritarian arm to keep it in check.

The typical counterpoint to this NIMBYism isn't, communism, but rather most of Texas (where there's loosening zoning law) or West Virginia (where there's abundant poverty and social problems but also abundant housing).

So Manhattan with less brick and more modern insulation?

I thought it was funny. And sad.

The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".

Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).

> I’m the kind of person who contributes to society by starting companies that leverage technology to build smart tea kettles that brew themselves while you sleep at night. I’m a fucking innovator.

Is there a reason that the press is always making scapegoats out of tech nerds? The vast majority of people are not employed in tech, and are part of the same society and have very similar self interests.

Truly tired of everything being a criticism of Silicon Valley, as if everyone else are saints.

I don't think it's making scapegoats per se. But Sillicon Valley has been very influential in the public discourse in the previous 1-2 decades, and huge SV (or tech in general) entrepreneurs have used their success and money to gain an outsized political influence on many of these issues. Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are some of the most obvious figures that have driven public policy discourse (and Elon Musk at least even had a direct hand in the implementation of said policies), but there are many others.

What you're seeing is a backlash to this influence, and the fairly disastrous consequences it has usually had.

The tech industry has played an out-sized role in the economic distortions to society the article is satirising. Maybe you should take a look inside yourself just to check that you're not taking this satirical article as a personal attack.

I'm a SaaS founder and I have the exact same criticism of tech. America is where some of the most brilliant minds and advanced technology and trillions in VC funds go towards building ad-tech and scrolling algorithms and B2B SaaS spreadsheet replacement apps while essentials like food and housing and healthcare get worse and more expensive.

McSweeney's seems to spread the criticism around fairly, not just scapegoating tech:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/minutes-from-the-latest-...

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-westillwork-t...

Follow-up:

All these replies missed my point. I’m not saying tech is blameless, rather that the press constantly criticizes tech for both doing too much and doing nothing and not fixing society. I would argue that this is toxic and ignores the agency of literally all other professions/people.

Further, to ignore the housing/etc lobbying by basically everyone else outside of tech and make it seem like SV giants control the housing crisis is just boring. Do note that most of the developed world is facing this, not just specifically SV/USA.

> rather that the press constantly criticizes tech

Clearly we're consuming different types of media, because on my estimation tech gets let off fairly light relative to the damage we cause.

As practitioners, we're not entitled to get angry about being criticised for the damage we cause at least until we've stopped it.

I’m not a big fan of online performative self-hate and classic elite-liberal virtue signaling, so maybe this article and these replies are not for me.

If I have to be a self-hater to be able to read an article that's critical of me and the industry I'm in, and not be offended by it, then I guess that makes me a self-hater.

>online performative self-hate and classic elite-liberal virtue signaling

The "all opinions I don't like are not held honestly, it's a trick" meme is very tiring. In respect to your original point, no this isn't some unique critique that singles out SV. The SV disruptor is just a shorthand for the rich and landed that will always be opposed to new housing. This could be drop-in replaced with a mid-career NYC finance bro, or successful Texan oil & gas professional, just exchange some things for prayer and bootstraps.

They are the same because in all those cases their wealth (real o perceived potential) depends in housing value go only up.

If you have to claim everyone missed your point, consider that you failed to express it well. You’re arguing something different now, which is fine but trying to say that other people failed to read your mind is a bit insulting when we can read both comments. You’re taking an aside in a satirical piece much too personally, and really shouldn’t identify so personally with a huge industry with many people, including some who sound a lot like that.

It is not stereotype of a nerd, it is a stereotype of an enterpreneur. Those are not nerds, not even close.

Nah the tech industry deserves it and it's only getting worse

I live just outside Minneapolis. There's an absolute glut right now of largely unoccupied apartments that have sprung up in the last couple years anywhere there was an open lot and many places there wasn't - tearing down a number of historic buildings in the name of cheaply built wooden framed apartments. Well over 100 new buildings in the last five years within a 10 mile radius. Most of them cost more per month to live in than my monthly home payment. I frankly don't understand why someone who could afford to live in them would.

The homelessness problem is also visibly the worst it's been in my lifetime.

I'm genuinely doubtful the problem is lack of housing alone. The person curled up under the bridge, the person screaming on the corner, they need more than another apartment they still can't afford added to the world. That doesn't help them.

No matter how many of these luxury apartment buildings you build, these people can't afford the rent. The owners of the buildings would seemingly rather see them sit at quarter occupancy than lower rents, and it's kind of understandable.

We're drowning in unaffordable housing and people are still homeless.

I feel you there with only luxury housing being the only kind of housing being built in many areas. Honestly, a lot of it is damn ugly too. Allowing developers to construct non-luxury housing would help much more than only allowing them to build luxury housing.

I'm not even sure it's entirely a matter of being blocked from doing so as much as the incentives merely not being there. What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower.

The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unrestricted space to develop a couple miles away in the next town.

It's a tough problem.

>What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower.

This makes sense to me, and I hear it all the time, but when was it ever in a builder's interest to make affordable housing? Why does this perverse incentive seem like a recent thing?

My wild guess would be urban renewal grants and drastically lower land costs made it easier to recoup investments. I'm sure that's only part of the equation though. Part of it is probably also just the realization they could be making more money.

A house used to be simpler, materials cheaper, permitting nearly nonexistent, and a crew much less skilled and compensated.

Same here. I am in a small midwestern USA city of less than 100k people. Someone got a grant to build some housing. Instead of building affordable housing they tried to build a huge "luxury" apartment complex with rent way above average for the city.

Ithaca built a lot of housing in the last few years but is still said to be the most expensive small city in the US. Some of these buildings have a high fraction of "affordable" units, but one "luxury development for seniors" is about as late as a nuclear reactor and hasn't found any tenants because... seniors who have money go to Florida and don't stay in upstate NY.

where i live (Boston) it is impossible to build anything new that is not qualified as "luxury" because its competing with a 150 year old tenement with 20year old appliances.

i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?

When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.

where i live (Boston) it is impossible to build anything new that is not qualified as "luxury" because its competing with a 150 year old tenement with 20year old appliances.

Right. The solution (or part of the solution, there is no "all-around solution") is not only building more housing, but having a social structure that allows people to earn enough to afford the housing. But our society isn't set up that way. Employers want to pay as little as possible -- or feel they have to pay as little as possible to stay competitive and above water. If you're not earning a living wage, then it doesn't matter how much housing is being built.

And to say "just build so much that supply > demand and prices will drop" doesn't work, because private developers won't build housing they can't make a tidy profit on.

It's very understandable once you get into the nitty gritty economics of it, where there is no tax on unoccupied housing. F there were a substantial tax on homes that were empty, that would incentivize landlords to rent out housing instead of having it sit empty.

It would crash the economy though. Apartments are valued in terms of asking rent hence being content to eat at some rent earning potential to maintain value of an otherwise appreciating asset. Many people are leveraged in this real estate market by virtue of buying wide index funds which contain companies in this industry, either directly or in their retirement package.

I know next to nothing about the US but France has 3 million unoccupied housings.

https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7727384

How did that happen? People buy houses and then not live there like Canada? Or there is not enough people? Can I move to france and live for free pls

Sure, if you don't mind living out in the sticks :P France has a big concentration of people around the big cities with a big empty diagonal in the middle of the country, form south-west to north-east (literally called 'la diagonale du vide'). Not only are you far from anything resembling a city, but infra for public & private transport are lacking. So if you can wfh and find a place with good 4g/5g coverage, and you won't miss social interactions, it can be great value. But as soon as you get closer to e.g. Paris or Lyon, things look very different.

Sounds about perfect where do I sign up.

There are lots of websites where you can search for rural housing in france, but it's quite fragmented so there is no real one-stop-shop where you can find everything. You can start here though: https://www.proprietes-rurales.com/ (I am not affiliated in any way with the website, was just the first one i found)

You won't "live for free" as France has quite a high tax rate. But if you have any valuable skill and are open to the culture you can certainly live a good life there.

I just meant rent free obviously.

Literally in the title of the article "... in areas of decreasing demographics ...".

So yes if you are willing to live in areas :

- without jobs, - without healthcare - in ghost towns

I happen to live in a rural area. Rural France is not the third world. Small towns are very much alive. Healthcare is organized around "pôles de santé". Now about jobs... that's an interesting point and probably the most important. The society as whole should favor decentralizing work. There is no point in concentrating jobs around big cities.

The vast majority of jobs are not decentralized and will not be for the foreseeable future. You cannot be a steelworker or waiter or actor from a home office or location that doesn't have high in-person demand for those things. There are countless reasons jobs are (and should be) concentrated around big cities. You are lucky and speaking from a position of privilege if this is not something you worry about.

This is not about me and so-called privileges. You forget the large amount of jobs in farming, handiwork, healthcare, and so on. There are certainly ways to decentralize through policies.

I didn't forget about any jobs. Sure, some jobs can be less centralized. But you said "There is no point in concentrating jobs around big cities". This is wrong and I corrected you.

Except build more homes ... or limit immigration. 10M British residents, 17% of the population, were born elsewhere. Up 4 million since 2018 when this was written. Whether you think that's good or not they need somewhere to live.

I never understood these posts as if the average homeowner has any power at all over zoning laws. You are just scapegoating the people who show up to townhalls and the hypothetical voter that will vote out politicians who lower property values.

In reality it's always the fault of the politician who refuses to make necessary change because it will hurt their personal career. This entire article reeks of christian self flagellation.

In Massachusetts it’s the voters themselves to blame.

Massachusetts passed a law mandating upzoning in communities well served by public transit:

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/multi-family-zoning-requir...

And town voters in certain communities have instead consistently voted down plans to move into compliance, and instead choose to endlessly sue the state to delay it:

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/27/timeline-t...

These voters aren’t hypothetical scapegoats - they’re real.

I think the article is satirizing a strawman.

Most of the people being ridiculed are not homeowners looking down their nose at the homeless, they are basically renting from the banks and chained to mortgages. They will become homeless themselves if the value of housing drops too far from what they borrowed.

It will also have ripple effects in the form of banks going under, retirement funds being depleted, and the economy as a whole tanking. If homes become cheaper too quickly the result will be a lot more homeless, not fewer.

In short, there are very valid non-selfish reasons why people, corporations and politicians don't want to make homes lose value too quickly. It's not malice against the homeless.

This is a systematic problem in many western nations and it doesn't have a simple solution.

This is one of the reasons, why climate-change risks can not be priced into home prices. Take europe- after several instances, homes in mountanous regions and near small rivers/springs are to be expected to be regularly destroyed or damaged with high statistically likelihood. Examples abound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

Now, if the risk was assessed reasonable, the risk would be priced into the housing in those regions and industrial activities in these regions. Austria, germany and some other regions would see significant drops in value. Same goes for florida and california, with forrest fires and hurricanes. The market can not be rational, if your lifelihood and pension depends on it.

How did homeless become homeless though?

1. They never had a home before so they kept living like that

2. They had a home before but then they couldn't afford it (or whatever other reason)

I doubt we have a lot of case 1 (born without a home). For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless. I doubt building more homes are going to solve the issues. For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.

There's probably almost 100 million Americans existing under rental stress. This prevents them from being able to save and invest. That means they have no insurance policy if they lose their job. If rent was lower, which it is in places that build more, then this is less likely to happen.

This is a fair point. And better protection regulations too so owners cannot hike rents as they so wish. We have it in Canada so not sure about the US, but I guess at least some states have some sort of protection.

Rent control doesn't work. The unintended negative side effects are too large.

Yep. Rent control means less housing gets built, the exact opposite of what we want.

> For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless.

It's not always all or nothing - sometimes you might be able to afford rent if rent were cheaper.

> For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.

"Build more homes" includes social aka public aka "affordable housing".

Well I'm not against building more homes though.

Luckily, your personal thoughts from first principles with zero review of the available data is not all we have to go on!

There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.

This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).

[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...

Eh, I'm not against building more homes though. I just think biasing towards social housing is better than building homes in general.

The point of that second link above is that any amount of housing, at any price point, lowers cost of housing for everyone, especially lower-income participants in the market.

Housing is in such brutally short supply (goes for major cities in North America as well as Europe) that not only can we not afford to be picky, but in terms of actual effect it doesn't matter: social housing is as effective as luxury housing. Sometimes it is _less_ effective at achieving social goals, if rich people are also trying to get their hands on the same housing stock, because there is not enough to meet demand at the top end of the market.

I think people misunderstand the state of the housing market: it is brutally expensive because of chronic, decades long undersupply, not building enough to meet _new_ demand each year, thus the "debt" in supply has compounded massively. This has strong and weird market effects, such that building lots of cheap housing at huge scale is only a partial solution (and the scale actually needed to alleviate the problem is much larger than anyone is actually willing to contemplate right now).

> The point of that second link above is that any amount of housing, at any price point, lowers cost of housing for everyone, especially lower-income participants in the market.

Not unless you force developers to build even when it's unprofitable (or not profitable enough)

A lot of people become homeless even while they have jobs. They can almost make rent but then some incident happens and they get evicted. Once you've been evicted it becomes remarkably difficult to rent anywhere. Boom, now you are living in your car for the foreseeable future.

Cheaper housing helps prevent this.

Sry lack of new houses doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness.

Of you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.

The problem is lack of a working welfare infrastructure. People become homeless because they're unlucky and once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up.. it's a failure of state at so many levels. Real estate development is the least of them

Speaking from a London perspective, though I'm sure a NY one is worse, not better.

> Sry lack of new houses seems doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness. If you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.

This would only make sense if the smaller houses were reasonably priced as opposed to the bigger ones. This is not the case.

And creating more housing would absolutely be a step in the right direction in terms of reducing extreme housing prices. Unless you don't believe in demand and supply economics, that is.

> Once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up

Yes but that's partly because they can't afford to rent even basic lodging, let alone afford to buy one, and a basic roof over one's head is a pivotal basic need for most things one needs to do in life.

This kind of problem rarely has a single cause but housing costs put pressure on many of them. High housing costs mean people save less and are more vulnerable to other events cascading into homelessness. They also increase stress levels because people live further away from their jobs and spend more time and money commuting while being less able to care for their families, which can have generational impacts when older kids aren’t studying because they’re taking care of younger siblings while their parents work and commute. It also inflated prices for almost everything else because businesses are paying more for their space and have to pay their workers more, too.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t also need things like better support and easily-accessible government healthcare, but we have to recognize that these things are all connected. Salt Lake City somewhat famously found immediately housing people helps with mental/substance abuse issues simply because all of the other problems in life are more approachable when you’re not sleeping on the street, missing appointments, and having your essentials stolen.

Homelesness exists in the US because it's comfortable to be homeless in a rich society. It is not always a result of choice, but so is living in a home.

Still, I sincerely believe more people would choose to be homeless if they tried it, because there is nothing inherently bad in living in a tent if the climate allows it. It's just like tourism but with more amenities available due to urban infra + the stigma (that people mostly learned to ignore due to cultural conditioning of the 70s-today period).

This is a ridiculously silly take. Homelessness greatly reduces your life span, it makes you many times more likely to be a victim of both crime and of police violence, and it makes many simple parts of regular society inaccessible to you.

>it's comfortable to be homeless in a rich society

Do you know this first hand? Have you tried it?

This is one of the all time worst takes I've ever seen on HN

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