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I lived in Oakland and Berkeley for about eight years and left a few years ago. As someone originally from New York, I’m baffled at this idea that there’s no place left to build in the Bay Area. The East Bay still has large swaths of land with nothing on it. SF has plenty of options for building upward. There’s open land to the south. The political gridlock in Bay Area politics is the problem. I’ve never seen more dysfunctional government in my life.

Ultimately the government is the people. The problem is that the established wealthy single family owning class want to retain the status quo they bought into, and reject any and all political change. Cynical politicians leverage this to get elected and serve those interests by rejecting any change.

Exactly.

There's a lot less homeless when you aren't constantly lubricating the "miss one paycheck -> living in car -> seriously homelss" slope.

> A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.

Affordability isn’t simply a function of supply in a market but the wealth distribution of market participants. When wealth is concentrated, housing ownership is concentrated in the hands of rentier capital, which is precisely what determines the amount of financial outflows from the poor to the wealthy in the form of housing prices (rent and mortgages).

Texas is not a druggie safe space. California is.

Texas cities don't just stumble into better homelessness outcomes because they build more houses—though, yes, their zoning laws are less suffocating than California's bureaucratic strangulations, letting developers churn out homes while keeping rents from spiraling into the stratosphere.

The real engine here isn't just policy, it's the stubborn, unapologetic religious underpinnings of Texas. Those churches you see in Austin, from non-denominational barns to Catholic sanctuaries, are the sinew of a community that doesn't bend to the fickle winds of election cycles. The faithful don't wait for a ballot to act—they feed, clothe, and stabilize the downtrodden with a doggedness that shames the state's tepid, vote-chasing programs. Why? Because they answer to a higher power than city hall, and their time horizon isn't the next electoral race. Contrast this with the secular cathedrals of the blue coasts, where government is God and every solution is a press release, not a commitment. SF's "enforcement-first" shuffle—clear an encampment, watch it refill—betrays a system that worships process over results.

Texas' edge lies in cheap homes plus a culture that scorns the state's monopoly on virtue. The religious don't just build safety nets, they weave them into the social fabric, outlasting the transient schemes of politicians.

So if I'm understanding correctly, your argument is that more homes and lower housing prices wouldn't solve the issue of people not being able to find homes they can afford without people being religious as well? Or is it that only religious people would be willing to build more homes at cheaper prices?

nah this is nonsense.

News flash: churches exist even in the left coast.

One of the biggest non profit organizations that helps people in Vancouver's DTES is Union Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army.

Nonetheless severe poverty has persisted in this city my entire life. The churches hand out food and run some shelters but it's a band aid.

The solution would start with housing, but the government refuses to spend the money to build it. So the status quo persists, with non-profits, many of them religious, step into the void just to keep people alive.

> The solution would start with housing

This is the answer. Housing cannot be both an investment and broadly affordable. Our society needs to choose.

Honestly its time to rip the bandaid off here with housing. Build, build, build. Fuck the NIMBYs, use eminent domain and buy them out. Build up, not out, and start driving prices down.

We need to stop making real estate an investment vehicle and an endlessly appreciating asset. "Line must go up" is fine for the stock market and a company's profit, it need not apply to a basic human need.

There are churches in California.

There are more churches in California than their are in Texas. We just don't brag about it as much because religion isn't a costume in California like it is in red states.

Saying California has churches is like saying a desert has cacti—it's true, but it misses the point.

Texas' religious density, from Austin's sprawling non-denominational hubs to its Catholic and Protestant strongholds, isn’t just a headcount of steeples, it's a cultural force that outmuscles the state’s flimsy, election-timed gestures.

These communities don't just exist—they act, relentlessly, weaving safety nets that endure beyond the next ballot. California's churches, where they stand, are drowned out by a secular dogma that kneels to bureaucracy over human need. If they were enough, San Francisco wouldn't be playing whack-a-mole with encampments while Houston houses people and moves on.

California has more churches - but not more practitioners.

San Francisco has four Orthodox Christian cathedrals. Many big cities only have a single Orthodox Church, much less a cathedral. San Francisco also has a many Catholic Churches - most with an ethnic component, not to mention Buddhist and cultural associations.

Most of these are due to extreme diversity, not religiosity.

Diversity isn’t an absolute good.

Having 200 churches, each with 50 members, does not make you more religious than a city with two megachurches, each with 20,000 members.

Nor does going to a megachurch to hear a rock band play Christian rock while your pastor tells you how great Trump is make you more religious than going to a more pious orthodox smaller church.

Don't act like this is the solution. It's the same as "religious people give more to charity than secular" which rapidly becomes untrue if you remove "their church" as the charity, in which case secular people tend to give more.

But, you say, it's the church that is doing all that charitable work, so why should it get removed from that accounting?

Religious people like to point to charitable giving.

But studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who, if anything, are likely to skew the numbers more positively) show that across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget," and an additional 5% goes to "church-run programs" (be it after-school care, social, or group activities).

If a secular charity - and let's go to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten), we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e., doing what they are being given money to do).

I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if secular charities regularly spent only one percent of their givings on what they were entitled to enjoy tax exemption for, they'd likely have such a status revoked.

And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.

A study by ECCU (https://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu....) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.

If you’ve got data showing California closing the gap, I’m all ears. But until then, the scoreboard speaks for itself.

> These communities don't just exist—they act

This smells like ChatGPT.

So you’re saying Texas Christians are more christian than California Christians.