6 ms·

I was having dinner with a buddy last week, and we were discussing the issue, as he lives in Mar Vista and I live in Beverly Grove (just recently having moved f

I was having dinner with a buddy last week, and we were discussing the issue, as he lives in Mar Vista and I live in Beverly Grove (just recently having moved from Santa Monica). It's become a remarkable problem for the city, and it's hard to convey the impact if you don't live here. One thing I wondered was how we properly incentivize the city to take steps to manage the situation. Right now, the city brings in $6B in annual revenue (almost 25% of its budget) in property taxes. Despite the remarkable climb in homelessness, property tax revenue continues to climb, because property values are seemingly skyrocketing despite the issue. As an example, I live on a street where one half of a 100 year old duplex would run > $1M, with dozens of homeless people living within a hundred yards of my house. It's not uncommon for one to walk up and down the street, ringing doorbells asking for assistance, or harassing you as you walk down the street. Never mind the piles of trash & excrement left on the street. I've learned not to drive down the alleyway that runs perpendicular to my street, as it's not uncommon to have people sleep in the middle of the road. If property values were sinking because of the issue (which in a normal housing market would happen because of safety concerns), the city would be more well incentivized to come up with solutions. But, outside of just citizen complaints, city hall doesn't really have any skin in the game. Now, you could say, "You're part of the problem. If people like you are willing to move there, you cause the property values to rise." Well, yep, you're right. However, I WANT the city to solve this problem responsibly, and moving away doesn't help me be a part of this solution. I'm hopeful that the sales tax we self-imposed to raise funds to address the issue begin to help, but I'm mostly unimpressed with the changes thus far.

dbasedweeb 8y ago
The problem is that a city lacks the resources to manage a country-wide problem. A lack of social support, especially mental healthcare means that you have more than half a million schizophrenics aloe on the streets. The war on drugs creates yet another class of “untouchables” and the crossover between drug use and mental illness muddies the issue. This is something the federal government and states need to consider from the ground up, but instead they just shunt money to private sector cronies, prisons, and cops.
- wjossey 8y ago
  I think that's fair, but there's a minimum they could be doing locally that they're not. If we can't fundamentally solve the problem, we can find some better ways to manage it locally. There's a bridge on RT 2 near the Glendale / Silver Lake area that can't be described as anything other than a public health hazard due to the amount of people, junk, and debris that line the sidewalks. The city chooses not to address it (for, what I optimistically hope are legitimate reasons), but it's been that way for going on 2 years now, so I begin to wonder. I appreciate the complexity of the drug & mental health issues (have an aunt who has been homeless much of her life b/c of mental health issues), and I also understand how as a society we decided to allow those with mental health issues to have the right to not enter treatment. It's a massively complicated situation (hence me not really stating true solutions, other than finding ways to incentivize better collective action).
DoreenMichele 8y ago
One of the problems is people get interested in "helping the homeless" which often goes bad places, instead of reducing incidence of homelessness. One of the things we need to solve the latter issue is more housing being built, especially entry level housing. Some stats: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-statistics-on-homelessness.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-... https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-statistics-on-homelessness-and.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-sta...
- fulafel 8y ago
  It may be the right place, if lack of home is not the person's biggest problem.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Some of the ways it goes bad places: 1. Defining the help based on their status as homeless. This means they need to be on the street to get help. Getting off the street can disqualify them for ongoing services. 2. Many programs to help people with serious problems come with a lot of strings attached. They are often highly controlling. Jumping through the hoops involved can be a huge burden in its own right. 3. Terrible, terrible "concentration of poverty" effects. One of the problems with living in, for example, public housing projects is that everyone you know is poor. You lack access to human capital, to people in the know, to people with connections and power. Homeless programs take that issue and cube it. You are standing in line with addicts and people who are seriously ill, who are smoking while you wait or who smell strongly of cigarette smoke or of marijuana and who are very germy, coughing and sniffling constantly. It's a great way to make sure you stay sick and get sicker. It's also a very challenging social environment to crowd together a bunch of people who are very stressed out and who typically lack good coping mechanisms for dealing with social friction. 4. Some of the worst programs charge money to participants and/or use them as free labor to help sustain the service. These services typically have a very poor track record of actually helping people solve their personal problems. Anyone's personal problems are always a combination of two factors: Them and the rest of the world. If you are the wrong gender in a sexist environment or the wrong color in a racist environment or the wrong socioeconomic class in a classist environment, other people can be an active barrier to you being able to solve your problems. I have about six years of college. I was homeless because I have an incurable medical condition and I was clear that working a corporate job and living in a mold filled apartment were barriers to me being healthy and solving my problems. I'm not mentally ill and I don't take drugs. I chose to go sleep in a tent while figuring out how to make money online so I could get myself healthier. The one thing I consistently asked in various online forums was for help figuring out how to make money online. I mostly didn't get any such help. I got pissed all over and told I was "panhandling the internet" and just a charity case. I did eventually figure out how to make a little money online. That plus paying off my student loan helped me get off the street. My income is still incredibly low. I still have an incurable medical condition. I still deal with sexism and classism as barriers to my income goals. If I had been treated with the same respect as anyone else on Hacker News who is trying to figure out how to create a profitable online business and taken seriously in my goal of developing an earned income, I believe I would have developed that income much quicker and would be making a lot more money. Having to figure it all out myself with no one willing to toss me a clue and people actively pissing on my efforts has been quite the uphill battle. So when I hear you say that things going what I describe as "a bad place" may be the right place if lack of a home is not their biggest problem, what I hear is justification for intentionally keeping people's problems alive out of prejudice. What I hear is the assumption that people who are currently very poor or who have mental health issues or an addiction don't really deserve the kind of help that would give them a shot at getting a good life. Because that's how I got treated and it actively made it harder to resolve my issues.
tropo 8y ago
It is absurd that general change in the real estate market should change the tax revenue of the city. It doesn't naturally relate to the income of residents, the need for city services, or the cost to supply city services. When the tax revenue goes up, the city gets addicted to it. When tax revenue goes down, the cuts are painful. This is part of what led to the various tax caps put in place in many states, which in turn causes problems like people who can't afford to move closer to where they work due to a tax rate reset. Those tax caps should have been on the per-person revenue. That would tie revenue to population. It would prevent short-sighted politicians from expanding the budget during a real estate bubble, and would eliminate the need to make cuts when real estate crashes. Instead of having the budget be a function of property value and a tax rate, the tax rate would be a function of the population and the property value.
- cheriot 8y ago
  When housing gets more expensive it has a cascading effect. Need a plumber? That just got more expensive because that guy either has more expensive housing costs or commutes from farther away. Want a coffee? That coffee shop's rent has gone up and so are their prices. The cost of literally everything goes up with property values and that applies to city services as well.
  - tropo 8y ago
    To some extent yes, but barely. Basing the budget on real estate value makes two incorrect assumptions: 1. city employees and contractors spend 100% of their money on real estate 2. city employees and contractors are immediately affected -- for example, by paying rent that instantly rises These assumptions are so far from reality that it is better to assume that the revenue need not increase when real estate value increases.
    - cheriot 8y ago
      1. Nobody is making that assumption. I already described two ways non-housing expenses go up with real estate. There are many more. 2. Cities need to build schools, water pipes, roads, traffic signals, etc when new people move to the area. Many of these expenses are immediate and impact fees aren't going to be high enough. Tax caps are counter productive and there are no shortage of problems with funding fundamental services through municipal budgets. But taxing real estate can make sense.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Proposition 13 limits the revenue that localities can realize due to property value rises, of course.
- wjossey 8y ago
  It's my understanding of prop 13 that once a house is sold, the property taxes are re-assessed. I know some of the houses I've looked at in the past year would have had over $1,000 a month in property taxes, as an example. Even with it being a sellers market w/ low inventory in the area, the property values tripling in the past decade have certainly helped the property tax income for the city.
adrianratnapala 8y ago
> If property values were sinking because of the issue ..., the city would be more well incentivized to come up with solutions. But, outside of just citizen complaints, city hall doesn't really have any skin in the game. There's something missing here. Politicians are vote-seekers by selection; whereas city tax revenues are not theirs to enjoy personally. So why do you think there is an incentive to make (public) money rather than keep voters happy? It's not that you are necessarily wrong. I can imagine various ways governance can get twisted to produce an incentive to maximise revenue. But how do you think it happened in LA specifically.
- wjossey 8y ago
  In a city which basically only votes one way, your primary constituency (liberals) and your donor base become your only constituencies. Your ability then, as a member of city council / as mayor, is your ability to allocate discretionary funds (and keep that primary / donor base happy). The primary donor base in LA lives in Beverly Hills (which isn't city of LA but often are business owners in the city of LA), Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, & Hollywood Hills. These areas are far more controlled in terms of the homeless population. Areas where the homeless population is much higher are in the gentrifying / growing middle class areas (mind you, in LA, a middle class household income is $250k+ w/ a $1M home) like Silver Lake, Echo Park, Downtown, Central LA (where I live). These areas, the home owners / renters are more likely house poor (notice I said house poor, not actually poor), and are not the heavy donors to local politicians. Here's a fairly good document outlining some historic homeless densities in the area. http://www.vchcorp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-Homeless-Count-Results.pdf http://www.vchcorp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-Homel... The granularity isn't great, and so it's hard to point out exactly where the problem areas are. But, as someone who walks from Beverly Hills to my house in Beverly Grove, I can tell you it's night and day when you cross the boundary in to the city of LA vs. BH. As for the constituencies that vote in primaries, I don't have a ton of data to back up my assumptions. I'd presume that areas like south-central, east LA, and other high-urban areas are where the majority of the votes come from, which can be more heavily influenced by local endorsements / interest groups (like unions) than by specific issues like homelessness. But, as I said, no evidence to back that assumption up, just instinct from living here. So, in summary- Your donor base is annoyed by the problem (because they have to drive past the issue) but it's not a burning issue as there aren't homeless encampments in the Palisades. Your heavy voting base is annoyed, but have other serious issues that are a higher priority, like violent crime, poverty, and education issues with LA unified. I love LA. I really do. But we've got a lot of diverse issues that need addressing on a constant basis, just to keep our heads above water.
conanbatt 8y ago
If we talk california, the core issue is housing. Housing is a state-wide policy problem: the most onerous building codes in the country, hardest NIMBYism, and uneven taxation: income taxes and sale taxes that hit the renters and not the landlords. The solution is Land Value Tax. Just that will jettison the NYMBY attitude into anti-regulation, as opposed to pro-regulation, and then buildings will lower rents, which are the main cause and cost of homelessness.
- weiming 8y ago
  Are high rents really the root cause of homelessness in places like Tenderloin or the Skid Row? Mental health, drug abuse, etc. seem more likely culprits. Just because I can't afford a mansion in Beverly Hills, I don't choose to be homeless on someone's doorstep. I live more modestly somewhere else more affordable.
  - adamsea 8y ago
    Tenderloin / Skid Row may be special cases where people with mental issues are most concentrated, but in LA it’s not hard to look around many areas (like Santa Monica) and see smaller homeless encampments in parks or people living out of their vehicles, etc. In Los Angeles or the Bay Area the more affordable places get gentrified (Boyle Heights) and then the people living there who were just getting by financially may have nowhere to go, depending on their living and work circumstances, and the price of renting in other areas (which can be extreme). My imho / two-cents theory.
  - FundThrowaway 8y ago
    One of the most depressing moments I've experienced was when I was still in school and we did a charity thing for a month where we'd go to the local homeless shelter and help out with various tasks and interact with the homeless people who would come by the shelter. The reason it was depressing wasn't what you'd expect, I had expected to feel sorry for them but in turned out that the vast vast majority of them were perfectly happy to be homeless they had no want for a better life, they just wanted handouts and felt entitled to them, it was really a strange experience that stuck with me.
slavik81 8y ago
That's kind of a weird system. Here they normalize your home's value against the average home value, so there's no change in tax owed if everyone's homes increased equally. Is there some reason they don't do that in LA?
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Imagine you had practically unlimited funds. In other words some large number, but not millions of dollars per homeless individual. How would you solve homelessness? Let's imagine with the most straight forward solution. You simply make them not homeless by giving them a home. Now you've suddenly set this city to face a massive increase of migration of homeless individuals who'd also like a free home. You're also going to face antagonism from the general population who end up spending huge chunks of their income just to get a small space to call their own. Free public housing, if remotely tolerable, is something many regular people would also be attracted to. And if you kick the homeless out of this free housing once they start earning money, you've created quite the broken incentive system! And then you have to consider the reason for homelessness. There are absolutely some individuals that end up homeless because of unfortunate circumstance outside of their control. Though for these individuals homelessness is often a brief affair before they get back on their feet anyhow. Among the other reasons for homelessness are mental health issues, substance abuse problems, and even choice where some individuals would rather be 'free' than participate in society. I think when we look at solutions we often consider all homeless as the group of unfortunate circumstance. And they're indeed relatively easy to solve. Even just giving them a low interest loan would often be sufficient to get them back on their feet. But I'm not sure how large a chunk of all homeless these individuals are. And for the other individuals, homelessness may not even be their most significant obstacle to overcome. In a way I see this like education. We constantly argue that lack of money is the reason America's educational results are slipping. And we ignore the fact that places like Vietnam outperform us on math and science with educational spending that's a tiny fraction of ours per student, even when parity adjusted. The point there is that money may just be a red herring. You can always claim the problem is not enough of it, when the real problem may be something much more fundamental with no easy solution.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure that if I had unlimited funds, I'd take the naive approach of fixing homelessness by building homes. I'd design a mini-village for 5000 people, able to stand alone or surrounded by others. Then I'd build that, over and over again. I'd keep building as long as they kept coming. I know this wouldn't solve the problem, but it would give those with a better handle on the situation more power to solve it.
Balgair 8y ago
I lived just east of SM for a few years, in the Sawtelle. As such I voted in LA, not SM, so I may be a bit off base. One thing to remember is that LA is not very 'votey'. When the mayoral elections were going on, I actually did vote. When I looked up the percentages later, my single vote for the mayor was effectively the voice of 60,000 Los Angelenos. The participation rate in LA City is very low. Something to factor in.

dbasedweeb 8y ago

The problem is that a city lacks the resources to manage a country-wide problem. A lack of social support, especially mental healthcare means that you have more than half a million schizophrenics aloe on the streets. The war on drugs creates yet another class of “untouchables” and the crossover between drug use and mental illness muddies the issue. This is something the federal government and states need to consider from the ground up, but instead they just shunt money to private sector cronies, prisons, and cops.

wjossey 8y ago
I think that's fair, but there's a minimum they could be doing locally that they're not. If we can't fundamentally solve the problem, we can find some better ways to manage it locally. There's a bridge on RT 2 near the Glendale / Silver Lake area that can't be described as anything other than a public health hazard due to the amount of people, junk, and debris that line the sidewalks. The city chooses not to address it (for, what I optimistically hope are legitimate reasons), but it's been that way for going on 2 years now, so I begin to wonder. I appreciate the complexity of the drug & mental health issues (have an aunt who has been homeless much of her life b/c of mental health issues), and I also understand how as a society we decided to allow those with mental health issues to have the right to not enter treatment. It's a massively complicated situation (hence me not really stating true solutions, other than finding ways to incentivize better collective action).

DoreenMichele 8y ago

One of the problems is people get interested in "helping the homeless" which often goes bad places, instead of reducing incidence of homelessness. One of the things we need to solve the latter issue is more housing being built, especially entry level housing. Some stats: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-statistics-on-homelessness.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-... https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-statistics-on-homelessness-and.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-sta...

fulafel 8y ago
It may be the right place, if lack of home is not the person's biggest problem.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Some of the ways it goes bad places: 1. Defining the help based on their status as homeless. This means they need to be on the street to get help. Getting off the street can disqualify them for ongoing services. 2. Many programs to help people with serious problems come with a lot of strings attached. They are often highly controlling. Jumping through the hoops involved can be a huge burden in its own right. 3. Terrible, terrible "concentration of poverty" effects. One of the problems with living in, for example, public housing projects is that everyone you know is poor. You lack access to human capital, to people in the know, to people with connections and power. Homeless programs take that issue and cube it. You are standing in line with addicts and people who are seriously ill, who are smoking while you wait or who smell strongly of cigarette smoke or of marijuana and who are very germy, coughing and sniffling constantly. It's a great way to make sure you stay sick and get sicker. It's also a very challenging social environment to crowd together a bunch of people who are very stressed out and who typically lack good coping mechanisms for dealing with social friction. 4. Some of the worst programs charge money to participants and/or use them as free labor to help sustain the service. These services typically have a very poor track record of actually helping people solve their personal problems. Anyone's personal problems are always a combination of two factors: Them and the rest of the world. If you are the wrong gender in a sexist environment or the wrong color in a racist environment or the wrong socioeconomic class in a classist environment, other people can be an active barrier to you being able to solve your problems. I have about six years of college. I was homeless because I have an incurable medical condition and I was clear that working a corporate job and living in a mold filled apartment were barriers to me being healthy and solving my problems. I'm not mentally ill and I don't take drugs. I chose to go sleep in a tent while figuring out how to make money online so I could get myself healthier. The one thing I consistently asked in various online forums was for help figuring out how to make money online. I mostly didn't get any such help. I got pissed all over and told I was "panhandling the internet" and just a charity case. I did eventually figure out how to make a little money online. That plus paying off my student loan helped me get off the street. My income is still incredibly low. I still have an incurable medical condition. I still deal with sexism and classism as barriers to my income goals. If I had been treated with the same respect as anyone else on Hacker News who is trying to figure out how to create a profitable online business and taken seriously in my goal of developing an earned income, I believe I would have developed that income much quicker and would be making a lot more money. Having to figure it all out myself with no one willing to toss me a clue and people actively pissing on my efforts has been quite the uphill battle. So when I hear you say that things going what I describe as "a bad place" may be the right place if lack of a home is not their biggest problem, what I hear is justification for intentionally keeping people's problems alive out of prejudice. What I hear is the assumption that people who are currently very poor or who have mental health issues or an addiction don't really deserve the kind of help that would give them a shot at getting a good life. Because that's how I got treated and it actively made it harder to resolve my issues.

tropo 8y ago

It is absurd that general change in the real estate market should change the tax revenue of the city. It doesn't naturally relate to the income of residents, the need for city services, or the cost to supply city services. When the tax revenue goes up, the city gets addicted to it. When tax revenue goes down, the cuts are painful. This is part of what led to the various tax caps put in place in many states, which in turn causes problems like people who can't afford to move closer to where they work due to a tax rate reset. Those tax caps should have been on the per-person revenue. That would tie revenue to population. It would prevent short-sighted politicians from expanding the budget during a real estate bubble, and would eliminate the need to make cuts when real estate crashes. Instead of having the budget be a function of property value and a tax rate, the tax rate would be a function of the population and the property value.

cheriot 8y ago
When housing gets more expensive it has a cascading effect. Need a plumber? That just got more expensive because that guy either has more expensive housing costs or commutes from farther away. Want a coffee? That coffee shop's rent has gone up and so are their prices. The cost of literally everything goes up with property values and that applies to city services as well.
- tropo 8y ago
  To some extent yes, but barely. Basing the budget on real estate value makes two incorrect assumptions: 1. city employees and contractors spend 100% of their money on real estate 2. city employees and contractors are immediately affected -- for example, by paying rent that instantly rises These assumptions are so far from reality that it is better to assume that the revenue need not increase when real estate value increases.
  - cheriot 8y ago
    1. Nobody is making that assumption. I already described two ways non-housing expenses go up with real estate. There are many more. 2. Cities need to build schools, water pipes, roads, traffic signals, etc when new people move to the area. Many of these expenses are immediate and impact fees aren't going to be high enough. Tax caps are counter productive and there are no shortage of problems with funding fundamental services through municipal budgets. But taxing real estate can make sense.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

Proposition 13 limits the revenue that localities can realize due to property value rises, of course.

wjossey 8y ago
It's my understanding of prop 13 that once a house is sold, the property taxes are re-assessed. I know some of the houses I've looked at in the past year would have had over $1,000 a month in property taxes, as an example. Even with it being a sellers market w/ low inventory in the area, the property values tripling in the past decade have certainly helped the property tax income for the city.

adrianratnapala 8y ago

> If property values were sinking because of the issue ..., the city would be more well incentivized to come up with solutions. But, outside of just citizen complaints, city hall doesn't really have any skin in the game. There's something missing here. Politicians are vote-seekers by selection; whereas city tax revenues are not theirs to enjoy personally. So why do you think there is an incentive to make (public) money rather than keep voters happy? It's not that you are necessarily wrong. I can imagine various ways governance can get twisted to produce an incentive to maximise revenue. But how do you think it happened in LA specifically.

wjossey 8y ago
In a city which basically only votes one way, your primary constituency (liberals) and your donor base become your only constituencies. Your ability then, as a member of city council / as mayor, is your ability to allocate discretionary funds (and keep that primary / donor base happy). The primary donor base in LA lives in Beverly Hills (which isn't city of LA but often are business owners in the city of LA), Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, & Hollywood Hills. These areas are far more controlled in terms of the homeless population. Areas where the homeless population is much higher are in the gentrifying / growing middle class areas (mind you, in LA, a middle class household income is $250k+ w/ a $1M home) like Silver Lake, Echo Park, Downtown, Central LA (where I live). These areas, the home owners / renters are more likely house poor (notice I said house poor, not actually poor), and are not the heavy donors to local politicians. Here's a fairly good document outlining some historic homeless densities in the area. http://www.vchcorp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-Homeless-Count-Results.pdf http://www.vchcorp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-Homel... The granularity isn't great, and so it's hard to point out exactly where the problem areas are. But, as someone who walks from Beverly Hills to my house in Beverly Grove, I can tell you it's night and day when you cross the boundary in to the city of LA vs. BH. As for the constituencies that vote in primaries, I don't have a ton of data to back up my assumptions. I'd presume that areas like south-central, east LA, and other high-urban areas are where the majority of the votes come from, which can be more heavily influenced by local endorsements / interest groups (like unions) than by specific issues like homelessness. But, as I said, no evidence to back that assumption up, just instinct from living here. So, in summary- Your donor base is annoyed by the problem (because they have to drive past the issue) but it's not a burning issue as there aren't homeless encampments in the Palisades. Your heavy voting base is annoyed, but have other serious issues that are a higher priority, like violent crime, poverty, and education issues with LA unified. I love LA. I really do. But we've got a lot of diverse issues that need addressing on a constant basis, just to keep our heads above water.

conanbatt 8y ago

If we talk california, the core issue is housing. Housing is a state-wide policy problem: the most onerous building codes in the country, hardest NIMBYism, and uneven taxation: income taxes and sale taxes that hit the renters and not the landlords. The solution is Land Value Tax. Just that will jettison the NYMBY attitude into anti-regulation, as opposed to pro-regulation, and then buildings will lower rents, which are the main cause and cost of homelessness.

weiming 8y ago
Are high rents really the root cause of homelessness in places like Tenderloin or the Skid Row? Mental health, drug abuse, etc. seem more likely culprits. Just because I can't afford a mansion in Beverly Hills, I don't choose to be homeless on someone's doorstep. I live more modestly somewhere else more affordable.
- adamsea 8y ago
  Tenderloin / Skid Row may be special cases where people with mental issues are most concentrated, but in LA it’s not hard to look around many areas (like Santa Monica) and see smaller homeless encampments in parks or people living out of their vehicles, etc. In Los Angeles or the Bay Area the more affordable places get gentrified (Boyle Heights) and then the people living there who were just getting by financially may have nowhere to go, depending on their living and work circumstances, and the price of renting in other areas (which can be extreme). My imho / two-cents theory.
- FundThrowaway 8y ago
  One of the most depressing moments I've experienced was when I was still in school and we did a charity thing for a month where we'd go to the local homeless shelter and help out with various tasks and interact with the homeless people who would come by the shelter. The reason it was depressing wasn't what you'd expect, I had expected to feel sorry for them but in turned out that the vast vast majority of them were perfectly happy to be homeless they had no want for a better life, they just wanted handouts and felt entitled to them, it was really a strange experience that stuck with me.

slavik81 8y ago

That's kind of a weird system. Here they normalize your home's value against the average home value, so there's no change in tax owed if everyone's homes increased equally. Is there some reason they don't do that in LA?

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

There's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Imagine you had practically unlimited funds. In other words some large number, but not millions of dollars per homeless individual. How would you solve homelessness? Let's imagine with the most straight forward solution. You simply make them not homeless by giving them a home. Now you've suddenly set this city to face a massive increase of migration of homeless individuals who'd also like a free home. You're also going to face antagonism from the general population who end up spending huge chunks of their income just to get a small space to call their own. Free public housing, if remotely tolerable, is something many regular people would also be attracted to. And if you kick the homeless out of this free housing once they start earning money, you've created quite the broken incentive system! And then you have to consider the reason for homelessness. There are absolutely some individuals that end up homeless because of unfortunate circumstance outside of their control. Though for these individuals homelessness is often a brief affair before they get back on their feet anyhow. Among the other reasons for homelessness are mental health issues, substance abuse problems, and even choice where some individuals would rather be 'free' than participate in society. I think when we look at solutions we often consider all homeless as the group of unfortunate circumstance. And they're indeed relatively easy to solve. Even just giving them a low interest loan would often be sufficient to get them back on their feet. But I'm not sure how large a chunk of all homeless these individuals are. And for the other individuals, homelessness may not even be their most significant obstacle to overcome. In a way I see this like education. We constantly argue that lack of money is the reason America's educational results are slipping. And we ignore the fact that places like Vietnam outperform us on math and science with educational spending that's a tiny fraction of ours per student, even when parity adjusted. The point there is that money may just be a red herring. You can always claim the problem is not enough of it, when the real problem may be something much more fundamental with no easy solution.

logfromblammo 8y ago
I'm pretty sure that if I had unlimited funds, I'd take the naive approach of fixing homelessness by building homes. I'd design a mini-village for 5000 people, able to stand alone or surrounded by others. Then I'd build that, over and over again. I'd keep building as long as they kept coming. I know this wouldn't solve the problem, but it would give those with a better handle on the situation more power to solve it.

Balgair 8y ago

I lived just east of SM for a few years, in the Sawtelle. As such I voted in LA, not SM, so I may be a bit off base. One thing to remember is that LA is not very 'votey'. When the mayoral elections were going on, I actually did vote. When I looked up the percentages later, my single vote for the mayor was effectively the voice of 60,000 Los Angelenos. The participation rate in LA City is very low. Something to factor in.