8 ms·

Affordable Housing Program Costs More, Shelters Less

59 points by mgdo 9y ago

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
This isn't a surprise. Real estate and subsequent policy is hard. Everybody has to live somewhere, and people who work have to work somewhere. Those places have to meet all sorts of standards which cost money, even if we can all agree they are necessary (ex: running water, bedrooms need window access for fire escape, etc). The costs of real estate raise the costs for everybody. The renter. The company on floor 6. The bagel shop around the corner. When their real estate costs go up, the rent goes up, the prices of bagels go up, and so on. There is no magic wand to fix this problem. Like climate change, it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible. As far as we can tell, population will keep rising, and the value of land will keep going up. Real estate cost problems are never going to just go away.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  No, there's no magic wand. More and more I feel there's no wand at all. I feel policy makers are so far removed from not having running water that this just isn't on their radar.
- tabeth 9y ago
  Everything you've stated is true only if you limit your scope to some arbitrary geographical region. If you look at the greater picture, the reality is that most land on earth, even land deemed livable, is vacant. There lies the solution to the problem. The only question that remains is: how do we get people to move there?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dsp1234 9y ago
    it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible. how do we get people to move there? It seems the two of you agree, unless you feel that getting people to move there is a small problem that does not require action on many fronts.
    - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
      Not really. Moving people sounds good in theory, but sparse communities are much more expensive to maintain. Roads, utilities, services, and the grand daddy of rural poverty: access to health care. Turns out freshly minted M.D.s with six figure student debt prefer not to sacrifice their income by working in rural America. Also, once you move enough people, real estate costs go up again and the problem isn't really solved.
      - tabeth 9y ago
        I don't think freshly minted M.Ds are hardly representative of America. Even if they were, there's a middle ground between sparse rural areas and hyper dense Tokyo's.
        rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
        You're missing the point. Rural America is more expensive than urban America, and has fewer and worse quality services. Absent government subsidies for matters such as the provision of roads and utilities, as well as programs like Medicaid that help rural Americans find health care, rural Americans would be dirt poor. I live in upstate New York. I know well the cities, the suburbs, and the rural backcountry. They are truly worlds apart.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > There is no magic wand to fix this problem. Actually, there is. Increase the availability of desirable living spaces in and around urban centers, and reduce commuting time by connecting these desirable living spaces with a working public transportation network.
evjim 9y ago
Space is as necessary of a life resource as water and air. We should look at the 1800's and the Homesteading Acts as a template for a new land distribution program. There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere. It is absurd that somebody is paying $550/month to live in a place without running water. In under 2 months I built a cabin for under $500 and have enough space to grow a garden.
- handedness 9y ago
  Is your cabin in a city with a population of 1.3m? While it sounds very cool, it doesn't sound like the idea would scale, either. > There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere. Anywhere there are utilities. Also, who decides how those chunks are allocated? Who gets a chunk in Monaco and who gets one in the New Mexico desert?
  - evjim 9y ago
    Utilities aren't needed. Solar is cheaper than running new electrical. Wireless internet is affordable and fast. Henry George has some good ideas on valuing and taxing land. Maybe even negatively taxing the worse land.
- CPLX 9y ago
  It's not the 1800's, I'm not sure if anyone is going to line up for a square plot of land with no services in an undeveloped area.
- tmh79 9y ago
  this is the opposite of what we should do. Spread out living situations contribute hugely to global climate change. We should instead focus on building so much housing in dense urban areas that there will be no scarcity to provide value, and we should also institute a land tax to ensure that land is used for its most efficient purpose. That will drive prices down and allow people to live a sustainable lifestyle.
cubano 9y ago
Oh man, is this a subject I'm currently experiencing first hand. Two months ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost everything I owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech and clothes, and pretty much all of my societal self-worth. For the last two months I've been living on-and-off at a shelter, and the problems are legion as far as working my way out of it. Finding a decent paying job while navigating the shelter minefields? I battle it everyday, but when someone steals your charging cords and toiletries while you sleep and you lose all connections to the net for a week while you figure out how to get a new USB-C charging cord with no income and miss a week's worth of trying to find work, it's easy to be discouraged and wonder if you will ever make it. I'm 52yo and I'm exhausted all the time, except for a couple of hours in the morning after I wake and work on trying to find work. According to the health app in my phone, I'm walking 6-8 miles a day just getting between the local Starbucks where I "work", the shelter, and places where I can find some crap to eat. What I find most odd is that there is absolutely no tech whatsoever at the shelter...no public wifi, very minimal computer access (30min a day after hours wait). Don't get me wrong I am incredibly grateful that the shelter exists, and the kind folks working there are doing God's work, but too many people "living" there are making no efforts to move on and just see the place as a free flop-house. Lately I've been sleeping in an empty lot near downtown because I've twice now caught fairly serious illnesses sleeping at the shelter, and it's ridiculous that you are expected to bunk-up at 3p everyday at a place with no public wifi so someone like me can't work in the afternoon and evening.. Yes yes, I get it...I made the choices that put me in my shit-sandwich situation, but doesn't everyone, even the "blameless" people depicted in this story? Couldn't most have made better choices somewhere along their lives to prevent themselves from having to live in low-income situations? Much of the article discusses how the rich developers, in Florida at least, are gaming the tax-credit side of building low-cost housing in order to enrich themselves illegally. Same old same old. I’ve known many building contractors in my life and almost all employ various sorts of schemes to make extra money during the construction phases.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
  > Two months ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost everything I owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech and clothes, and pretty much all of my societal self-worth. How does that happen? How does a search during jaywalking stop lead to loss of those things?
slavik81 9y ago
This seems like such a roundabout system. We run a program to give people money to build housing and rent it out for less than it's worth to people who don't have the money to pay full price for housing. It seems like you could cut out a lot of the complexity just by giving the money directly to the people who can't afford housing. Or, being a little less trusting, pay some portion of their rent directly.
- nostrebored 9y ago
  That would just cause an increase of low rents.
- pc86 9y ago
  Paying a portion of their rent would just drive up rent prices.
  - mhb 9y ago
    Yes, until more supply is created to meet the increased demand.
  - moultano 9y ago
    Some, but enough to entirely eat it up provided that there are lots of unsubsidized renters.
- jotux 9y ago
  >It seems like you could cut out a lot of the complexity just by giving the money directly to the people who can't afford housing. Or, being a little less trusting, pay some portion of their rent directly. Isn't this Section 8? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)
  - one2three4five 9y ago
    Yes.
- sparkling 9y ago
zkms 9y ago
There is a lot that could be done to fix this crisis that would not even require more government spending -- drastically reform land use regulations, zoning laws, and other similar regulations. Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate a certain amount of luxury (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy limits, and restrictions on roommates who aren't family). By mandating a certain level of luxury (and thus, of cost), the only effect is to make sure that people who can't afford it will end up homeless; or illegally subletting, squatting, or some other black-market, unsafe option that leaves them at the mercy of slumlords who know that they are the last option for housing. It's crucial to note that there is no backpressure mechanism at work here -- reducing housing options for people with the least money will not cause the construction of housing that meets those standards. Mandating luxury does not work without mandating supply as well. Such zoning laws ended SROs and rooming houses (by prohibiting any new construction) and such drastic reductions in the cheapest housing options have led us to this. Mandating any sorts of minimum standards for luxury of housing units without mandating supply will not fix anything. I use the word "luxury" intentionally here -- from the perspective of someone who has had to sleep in homeless shelters, a dry room big enough for a bed and with a door that locks (for which one has the only key) is serviceable housing. To quote Paul Groth, > a good hotel room of 150 square feet—dry space, perhaps with a bath or a room sink, cold and sometimes hot water, enough electric service to run a 60-watt bulb and a television, central heat, and access to telephones and other services—constitutes a living unit mechanically more luxuriant than those lived in by a third to a half of the population of the earth. As Dolores Hayden reminds us, many of the world's people would consider an American two-car garage an excellent dwelling in its own right. Hell, even the smallest commercial office space rentals are much cheaper (i've seen some go for $200/month) and safer (they are in sprinklered buildings) than any housing most USians can access. It is morally abhorrent for zoning laws to criminalise renting a room inside a sprinklered building when the alternative is living on the street or in a homeless shelter.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate a certain amount of luxury (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy limits, and restrictions on roommates who aren't family). If you believe that enabling unsanitary 3rd world hellholes, just because you assume that would make housing a tiny bit less expensive, represents any type of progress... Perhaps you should rethink your priorities.
danielvf 9y ago
It's kind of funny, but all the photos of the "good guys" in the article are lit with light falling on the front of the face, while the "bad guys" are lit with the key light on the side of their face, and at least on eye in shadow.
Mz 9y ago
We razed something like 80% of SROs in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers were coming of age. They came from this bizarrely large "middle class" created by WW2 and most of them didn't need nor want cheap entry level housing. Their expectations set expectations and standards that we are still suffering from. It is time to wake up, recognize that SROs and the like are needed and recreate the societal fabric we tore out and never replaced.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
If we wanted to actually solve the homeless problem, we'd build cheap housing. Pretty much everything else follows. This isn't politically feasible, since everyone wants to make it difficult to do near them in hopes of foisting the problem of "undesirables" off to anywhere else. So assuming some long-term political will to overcome the NIMBYs, here's a plan that'd actually work to solve SF's homeless problem: 1. Design a standard-plan Single-Room Occupancy building, along the style of the Russian Khrushchyovka [1]. Prefab / economy of scale, three to five stories, no elevator, shared bathrooms and kitchens. Optimize it to be the cheapest habitable room that you can give someone a key to. 2. Pass a state law allowing a department to buy land and build one of these regardless of local zoning and input. You want to stop us from fixing the housing problem? Too bad, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. 3. Add in a feedback mechanism to force construction of more housing where/when rents get too high. Something like set up a waitlist system and automatically build another one of these when the waitlist gets long enough inside a geographic area. Qualify people for free or subsidized rents based on current market rates - rental rates go up, and you can make more money and still qualify, which causes more people to enter the waitlist, which causes more units to get built, which drives rents down.

59 points by mgdo 9y ago

This isn't a surprise. Real estate and subsequent policy is hard. Everybody has to live somewhere, and people who work have to work somewhere. Those places have to meet all sorts of standards which cost money, even if we can all agree they are necessary (ex: running water, bedrooms need window access for fire escape, etc). The costs of real estate raise the costs for everybody. The renter. The company on floor 6. The bagel shop around the corner. When their real estate costs go up, the rent goes up, the prices of bagels go up, and so on. There is no magic wand to fix this problem. Like climate change, it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible. As far as we can tell, population will keep rising, and the value of land will keep going up. Real estate cost problems are never going to just go away.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
No, there's no magic wand. More and more I feel there's no wand at all. I feel policy makers are so far removed from not having running water that this just isn't on their radar.
tabeth 9y ago
Everything you've stated is true only if you limit your scope to some arbitrary geographical region. If you look at the greater picture, the reality is that most land on earth, even land deemed livable, is vacant. There lies the solution to the problem. The only question that remains is: how do we get people to move there?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dsp1234 9y ago
  it is an enormous problem that requires action on as many fronts as possible. how do we get people to move there? It seems the two of you agree, unless you feel that getting people to move there is a small problem that does not require action on many fronts.
  - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
    Not really. Moving people sounds good in theory, but sparse communities are much more expensive to maintain. Roads, utilities, services, and the grand daddy of rural poverty: access to health care. Turns out freshly minted M.D.s with six figure student debt prefer not to sacrifice their income by working in rural America. Also, once you move enough people, real estate costs go up again and the problem isn't really solved.
    - tabeth 9y ago
      I don't think freshly minted M.Ds are hardly representative of America. Even if they were, there's a middle ground between sparse rural areas and hyper dense Tokyo's.
      - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
        You're missing the point. Rural America is more expensive than urban America, and has fewer and worse quality services. Absent government subsidies for matters such as the provision of roads and utilities, as well as programs like Medicaid that help rural Americans find health care, rural Americans would be dirt poor. I live in upstate New York. I know well the cities, the suburbs, and the rural backcountry. They are truly worlds apart.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
geezerjay 9y ago
> There is no magic wand to fix this problem. Actually, there is. Increase the availability of desirable living spaces in and around urban centers, and reduce commuting time by connecting these desirable living spaces with a working public transportation network.

evjim 9y ago

Space is as necessary of a life resource as water and air. We should look at the 1800's and the Homesteading Acts as a template for a new land distribution program. There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere. It is absurd that somebody is paying $550/month to live in a place without running water. In under 2 months I built a cabin for under $500 and have enough space to grow a garden.

handedness 9y ago
Is your cabin in a city with a population of 1.3m? While it sounds very cool, it doesn't sound like the idea would scale, either. > There is more than enough land for everyone to have a small chunk. With technology it is easy to be connected and employed anywhere. Anywhere there are utilities. Also, who decides how those chunks are allocated? Who gets a chunk in Monaco and who gets one in the New Mexico desert?
- evjim 9y ago
  Utilities aren't needed. Solar is cheaper than running new electrical. Wireless internet is affordable and fast. Henry George has some good ideas on valuing and taxing land. Maybe even negatively taxing the worse land.
CPLX 9y ago
It's not the 1800's, I'm not sure if anyone is going to line up for a square plot of land with no services in an undeveloped area.
tmh79 9y ago
this is the opposite of what we should do. Spread out living situations contribute hugely to global climate change. We should instead focus on building so much housing in dense urban areas that there will be no scarcity to provide value, and we should also institute a land tax to ensure that land is used for its most efficient purpose. That will drive prices down and allow people to live a sustainable lifestyle.

cubano 9y ago

Oh man, is this a subject I'm currently experiencing first hand. Two months ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost everything I owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech and clothes, and pretty much all of my societal self-worth. For the last two months I've been living on-and-off at a shelter, and the problems are legion as far as working my way out of it. Finding a decent paying job while navigating the shelter minefields? I battle it everyday, but when someone steals your charging cords and toiletries while you sleep and you lose all connections to the net for a week while you figure out how to get a new USB-C charging cord with no income and miss a week's worth of trying to find work, it's easy to be discouraged and wonder if you will ever make it. I'm 52yo and I'm exhausted all the time, except for a couple of hours in the morning after I wake and work on trying to find work. According to the health app in my phone, I'm walking 6-8 miles a day just getting between the local Starbucks where I "work", the shelter, and places where I can find some crap to eat. What I find most odd is that there is absolutely no tech whatsoever at the shelter...no public wifi, very minimal computer access (30min a day after hours wait). Don't get me wrong I am incredibly grateful that the shelter exists, and the kind folks working there are doing God's work, but too many people "living" there are making no efforts to move on and just see the place as a free flop-house. Lately I've been sleeping in an empty lot near downtown because I've twice now caught fairly serious illnesses sleeping at the shelter, and it's ridiculous that you are expected to bunk-up at 3p everyday at a place with no public wifi so someone like me can't work in the afternoon and evening.. Yes yes, I get it...I made the choices that put me in my shit-sandwich situation, but doesn't everyone, even the "blameless" people depicted in this story? Couldn't most have made better choices somewhere along their lives to prevent themselves from having to live in low-income situations? Much of the article discusses how the rich developers, in Florida at least, are gaming the tax-credit side of building low-cost housing in order to enrich themselves illegally. Same old same old. I’ve known many building contractors in my life and almost all employ various sorts of schemes to make extra money during the construction phases.

the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
> Two months ago I was illegally searched during a jaywalking stop and lost everything I owned, including my much-loved remote webdev job, all my tech and clothes, and pretty much all of my societal self-worth. How does that happen? How does a search during jaywalking stop lead to loss of those things?

slavik81 9y ago

This seems like such a roundabout system. We run a program to give people money to build housing and rent it out for less than it's worth to people who don't have the money to pay full price for housing. It seems like you could cut out a lot of the complexity just by giving the money directly to the people who can't afford housing. Or, being a little less trusting, pay some portion of their rent directly.

nostrebored 9y ago
That would just cause an increase of low rents.
pc86 9y ago
Paying a portion of their rent would just drive up rent prices.
- mhb 9y ago
  Yes, until more supply is created to meet the increased demand.
- moultano 9y ago
  Some, but enough to entirely eat it up provided that there are lots of unsubsidized renters.
jotux 9y ago
>It seems like you could cut out a lot of the complexity just by giving the money directly to the people who can't afford housing. Or, being a little less trusting, pay some portion of their rent directly. Isn't this Section 8? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)
- one2three4five 9y ago
  Yes.
sparkling 9y ago

zkms 9y ago

There is a lot that could be done to fix this crisis that would not even require more government spending -- drastically reform land use regulations, zoning laws, and other similar regulations. Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate a certain amount of luxury (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy limits, and restrictions on roommates who aren't family). By mandating a certain level of luxury (and thus, of cost), the only effect is to make sure that people who can't afford it will end up homeless; or illegally subletting, squatting, or some other black-market, unsafe option that leaves them at the mercy of slumlords who know that they are the last option for housing. It's crucial to note that there is no backpressure mechanism at work here -- reducing housing options for people with the least money will not cause the construction of housing that meets those standards. Mandating luxury does not work without mandating supply as well. Such zoning laws ended SROs and rooming houses (by prohibiting any new construction) and such drastic reductions in the cheapest housing options have led us to this. Mandating any sorts of minimum standards for luxury of housing units without mandating supply will not fix anything. I use the word "luxury" intentionally here -- from the perspective of someone who has had to sleep in homeless shelters, a dry room big enough for a bed and with a door that locks (for which one has the only key) is serviceable housing. To quote Paul Groth, > a good hotel room of 150 square feet—dry space, perhaps with a bath or a room sink, cold and sometimes hot water, enough electric service to run a 60-watt bulb and a television, central heat, and access to telephones and other services—constitutes a living unit mechanically more luxuriant than those lived in by a third to a half of the population of the earth. As Dolores Hayden reminds us, many of the world's people would consider an American two-car garage an excellent dwelling in its own right. Hell, even the smallest commercial office space rentals are much cheaper (i've seen some go for $200/month) and safer (they are in sprinklered buildings) than any housing most USians can access. It is morally abhorrent for zoning laws to criminalise renting a room inside a sprinklered building when the alternative is living on the street or in a homeless shelter.

geezerjay 9y ago
> Laws that require fire sprinklers, escape routes, and floors that don't collapse aren't the issue -- the issue lies with laws that mandate a certain amount of luxury (like minimum square-footage requirements, occupancy limits, and restrictions on roommates who aren't family). If you believe that enabling unsanitary 3rd world hellholes, just because you assume that would make housing a tiny bit less expensive, represents any type of progress... Perhaps you should rethink your priorities.

danielvf 9y ago

It's kind of funny, but all the photos of the "good guys" in the article are lit with light falling on the front of the face, while the "bad guys" are lit with the key light on the side of their face, and at least on eye in shadow.

Mz 9y ago

We razed something like 80% of SROs in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers were coming of age. They came from this bizarrely large "middle class" created by WW2 and most of them didn't need nor want cheap entry level housing. Their expectations set expectations and standards that we are still suffering from. It is time to wake up, recognize that SROs and the like are needed and recreate the societal fabric we tore out and never replaced.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

If we wanted to actually solve the homeless problem, we'd build cheap housing. Pretty much everything else follows. This isn't politically feasible, since everyone wants to make it difficult to do near them in hopes of foisting the problem of "undesirables" off to anywhere else. So assuming some long-term political will to overcome the NIMBYs, here's a plan that'd actually work to solve SF's homeless problem: 1. Design a standard-plan Single-Room Occupancy building, along the style of the Russian Khrushchyovka [1]. Prefab / economy of scale, three to five stories, no elevator, shared bathrooms and kitchens. Optimize it to be the cheapest habitable room that you can give someone a key to. 2. Pass a state law allowing a department to buy land and build one of these regardless of local zoning and input. You want to stop us from fixing the housing problem? Too bad, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. 3. Add in a feedback mechanism to force construction of more housing where/when rents get too high. Something like set up a waitlist system and automatically build another one of these when the waitlist gets long enough inside a geographic area. Qualify people for free or subsidized rents based on current market rates - rental rates go up, and you can make more money and still qualify, which causes more people to enter the waitlist, which causes more units to get built, which drives rents down.