42 ms·

The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

• exogeny 8y ago
  I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots. Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both.
  • manfredo 8y ago
    The complexity lies in the web of incentives that make up regional and local politics. The people most negatively affected have the least clout politically. The people with the most political influence have a vested interest in ensuring housing prices don't drop. So as a result, the optimal choice for a politician isn't the optimal choice for the city as a whole. Not to mention policies like rent control that can produce a huge sort term political gain, at the expense of making drastically harder to build more housing in the future.
  • rhacker 8y ago
    How can we accomplish this without being a nanny state? I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. I don't know the answer, but I think I do know why you will go to your grave without it being solved - GOP vs Dems solution to this is the exact opposite, and we are permanently stuck. We can't go full bore on either solution (both of which can probably work to some extent) but instead we're 100% deadlocked for the rest of time.
    • th0ma5 8y ago
      > I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. See them? Where? In articles? Friends?
      • rhacker 8y ago
        Friends, Family and billions of articles https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-unemployment-went-down-because-the-number-of-people-working-did/#4cd6d00408bc https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/05/05/sure-une...
        • rconti 8y ago
          Literally the only mention of a social safety net in the linked article was "fewer people working means less income and wealth — as well as long-term economic stability creating pressure on social safety nets, such as they are." The wording implies that there is not much of a social safety net to begin with. Can you cite some of the actual programs? My understanding is the social safety net is the weakest it's been in many decades. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my "general feeling" seems at least as valuable as your general feeling. Unemployment insurance and temporary assistance are both that, temporary. Social Security Disability is, I believe, considered the most widely abused program simply because there aren't many others left to abuse.
    • mAEStro-paNDa 8y ago
      The US already acts as a nanny state for it's rich corporations.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • ImRichKillMe 8y ago
      Yeah we are until we stop be too greedy to help people who need it. You talk about work but lets examine how much work the richest people actually do. Delegation doesn't count as real work. Having money to pay someone else to do work also doesn't count as real work.
    • zanny 8y ago
      It takes less than a whole person to supply a common western standard of living to a person living in the west. This means it takes a subset of the population to provide for the well-being of the whole. This is why unemployment is such a problem today. The only demand for labor is for experienced, skilled labor that can innovate for capitalists to make them more money. The grunt work the average person would want done (new construction, infrastructure rennovation, etc) is wanted by people who don't have the capital to see it happen. The rest are a fraction of the population that keeps society running. We saw in this last century an approach to 1% of the population being responsible for the farming and raising of all the food we consume. Another percent will package and transport it. Maybe another percent will prepare and cook it if not for us doing it ourselves. The number of people employed in the industries of resource extraction and power generation, power line maintenance, home construction, furniture production, and so on... many of which are skilled professions that require educations many of the displaced don't have time or money to acquire... all combined aren't even close to a quarter the population. A lot of that productivity was exported overseas as well, exacerbating the problem. We aren't in a situation where you should look at the homeless and say "I'm so mad they aren't working because I don't have X or Y and they could make it / get it for me". You have everything you want. You can't think of anything you are willing to pay them to do with the skills they have. There is nothing for them to do anyone is willing to pay them for or invest in them to achieve.
    • gnulinux 8y ago
      US already is a nanny state. Can you imagine a country spending so much money on spying their own citizens? You must be confusing yourself, or surely must be joking.
  • WesleyLivesay 8y ago
    I don't think it is either too challenging or too complex for politicians and people to understand, the problem is one of incentives. Those with the resources that could be taxed and redistributed do not want to be taxed and have resources taken away from them. Since they have resources they can use some percentage of them to both influence politicians and influence other people. The people who do not have resources cannot do either of these things.
    • deepsun 8y ago
      Which is pretty much what happened before Great Depression.
  • DanHulton 8y ago
    I mean, I think you're missing a key factor here: politicians require money to be elected. The poor (the folks most affected by these issues) don't have the money to donate. The rich (the ones you propose taxing) do. Thus, the only ones who can get elected are catering to an audience that does not want this problems solved in this way (and indeed, one could argue, does not care to have it solved at all). Until the problem of money in politics gets fixed, your "simple" problem is largely unfixable.
    • timb07 8y ago
      In a properly-operating democracy, politicians require votes to be elected; money helps, but isn't sufficient. The 1% may have 50% (or more) of the money, but they only have 1% of the votes. The 99% (or rather, those members of the 99% who vote as if they're in the 1%) need to exert their power at the polling booth.
      • kamarg 8y ago
        You're doing a disservice to those 99% or at least those of us that do vote by assuming this is the only issue that people vote on. There's a wide range of priorities between the 0% and 99.9% on the economic scale and what goes into most peoples' decision to vote for someone is almost always nuanced even if the newspapers and tv interviews try to make it look like everyone that voted for the "wrong" candidate only voted for them because of X issue.
      • 51lver 8y ago
        The 1% own the media companies which are happy to tell you what a winner looks like, and there is a general belief that voting with your heart is inferior to voting for a probable winner.
        • simplify 8y ago
          The latter problem would be solved with approval voting at least https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
      • 8y ago
  • sien 8y ago
    It's difficult to fix housing supply because NIMBYs have so much power on local political activity. It's not just a US problem either. In Australia, Sweden, the UK, Germany, France and many other places housing is more expensive than it should be. If you want to do something go and get active in the YIMBY movement. https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement https://www.yimby.wiki/wiki/YIMBY_movement
    • jahaja 8y ago
      NIMBY/YIMBY arguments seem just too convenient an excuse for me. It's almost if one has actively tried to find something that can plausibly explain the housing crisis but does not challenge the status quo of structural/systematic problems in any way shape or form. In Sweden the seemingly prime effect of these movements is to remove democratic influence to the benefit of construction companies, even though that only rarely is the cause of delays, and certainly not the root cause of the housing shortage. And here's an anecdote from Sweden from the early 90s: To get a cheap rental flat in high standard, albeit in a working class neighborhood, my parents were able to walk into the office of the municipal housing company and more or less pick a key from the wall and go take a look at it. If they liked, they got it. These were the days where the state still took an interests in providing housing to its citizens and planned, and built, accordingly. Now there's the market and a housing bubble consisting of too many expensive apartments that few can afford. To now suggest that the state should again start building cheap housing to a population where the middle-class is up to their neck in inflated mortgages is impossible. This is the real NIMBY.
      • CryptoPunk 8y ago
        I recommend you look at the economic research on the issue of zoning restrictions on housing supply: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...
        • jahaja 8y ago
          I'd think it would be good manners to at least provide a summary that puts the report into the discussions context when linking to some pdf report.
  • rb808 8y ago
    > I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Ugh, if it was that easy it would have been done already. Look at the recent wars over the best way to run an economy. Its never that simple. Perhaps European system is the best? Or maybe they just got wealthy by exploiting their colonies for the last few hundred years so they can afford to look after everyone for a while as their economies slowly strangle themselves into obsolescence. Or Perhaps California should be run more like Republican states - they have far fewer homeless. The solutions aren't obvious as you say.
    • Jtsummers 8y ago
      Easy things aren't done quite often. It's the ease itself that is the cause of delay. "We can do it later, it won't take long." Meanwhile, the impact of not doing continues to harm the person, company, community, world. But they keep delaying because it won't be hard, when the time is right.
    • sgt101 8y ago
      Well, then Portugal (not invaded twice and smashed to pieces in a century) should be richer than Belgium and Holland (blown to bits, slaughtered and battlefields in ultra war) due to all three ruthlessly exploiting their colonial properties, but suffering different misfortune in the 20th century. And yet this is not so - oddly the liberal democracies (regardless of imperial wickedness) seem to be doing better than recent fascist kleptocracies. This is not a co-incidence; where people are safe and can plan they create positive outcomes. Where they have no idea what is going to happen next and are exposed to bandits they keep their heads down and look after themselves.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • chaostheory 8y ago
    You're right. Homelessness is just a symptom of other problems. Another key thing to understand is that 80-90% of homeless people are no longer homeless after approximately 4-8 months. In other words, the current patchwork system of public programs and non-profits work. Only 10-20% of the homeless population is chronically homeless. The most common issues are related to mental health, drug addiction, or a combination of both. imo I don't feel that individual states or cities can really solve the problem since they all tend to play the game of "let's ship this troubled person away from here". A long term solution will need to involve the federal gov. It's also hard to solve due to the stigma and lack of understanding from the public at large when it comes to mental illness.
  • baybal2 8y ago
    This is what's called gridlock or lack political willpower. While I am not an American, I'm feeling one tune constantly when I talk with American professionals in China, and it is something close to this: "I am given a terrible choice in between between living in a sad, stagnating, dysfunctional civil state with bureaucracy and fascist tendencies, or hell, but with full-blown and well run progressive fascist bureaucracy, and which is fun to live in"
  • cwperkins 8y ago
    I know you may not think so, but its important to realize that your response is highly biased. Many people see this differently and personally I think the best solution is for communities to realize this is an issue and volunteer time and money to help solve it. Things like volunteering time to go teach young kids and teens to code, taking a weekend to help with habitat for humanity, at a soup kitchen or helping with a coat drive. I firmly believe it is as big a problem as it is because the average person sees it as an intractable that they cannot solve and in the city its even more pronounced because there's less of a sense of community and more of a sense of fending for oneself. We need LESS red tape to help cities develop affordable housing more quickly, INNOVATION to bring down the cost of housing (think modular housing) and a CAN DO attitude that this is a problem WE CAN fix. As JFK famously said "We choose to ... not because it is easy, but because it is hard." And that's the mentality we need. Tax and re-distribution may be PART of the answer, but not THE answer.
  • endtime 8y ago
    Inequality isn't the right measure unless you make some assumptions that have, historically, not held (e.g. fixed total amount of wealth). All you care about is that the poorest people can afford somewhere to live. Toy example: If everyone can afford a home, and then Jeff Bezos increases his wealth by 1000x, inequality goes up but no one becomes homeless. I'm not saying wealth inequality is meaningless, but I think making it a primary concern creates an instance of Goodhart's law.
    • cwkoss 8y ago
      We should measure and optimize for the the growth in wealth of the bottom X percent of citizens. Who makes up that portion may change, but that portion will consistently be the one that needs the most help.
      • endtime 8y ago
        That seems like a better metric to me as well. Though solutions which maximize this and also increase inequality are often unpopular (e.g. free markets).
  • AngryData 8y ago
    Because then people would have to confront challenges to their highly propagandized views of economics and political standards. People would have to admit that the 'free market' isn't some catch-all solution to problems and that sometimes it is the cause of problems. They would have to admit capitalism itself isn't some naturally occurring and self-maintaining phenomenon and realize how easily it can be, and is, arbitrarily manipulated by people either good or bad. They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. They would need to recognize the full extent that the concentration of power and wealth has contributed to political corruption. Nobody wants to admit that their preconceived notions might be a bunch of bullshit they were purposefully fed, and not something they thought up and devised themselves.
    • CryptoPunk 8y ago
      What "free market" are you talking about? The US has been moving rapidly towards being a highly regulated social democracy over the last 50 years. Central economic planning by local, state and federal government has steadily replaced the right to private contract and property. I recommend you look at the raw statistics on: 1. The absolute level of inflation adjusted social welfare spending per capita. 2. The percentage of GDP consumed by social welfare spending by the government. 3. The number of regulations in force. Between 1960 and 2018. It seems like the more social democracy fails, the more the alleged dominion of the free market is blamed. You would think from hearing all these laments about "neoliberalism" that we're in a free market paradise, when exactly the opposite is the case. >>They would have to confront the idea that much of what they are told is highly influenced advertising and propaganda purposefully created to mislead them into one action or another. You can start by taking your own advice.
  • mdavis6890 8y ago
    "Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both." >> The latter only. "Reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs" will not put a single additional person in a house, however noble that goal may be. There are more people in a given area than homes, so some people don't get to live in one. You can force those people to leave, or you can build homes for them, or you can let them be homeless.
  • reading-at-work 8y ago
    > It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found. It's not just intuition, there's evidence to support it. I think building more housing is the quickest and more bipartisan solution, since tax and spending changes are magnets for political drama.
  • BurningFrog 8y ago
    I understand how building more housing would improve a housing shortage. But I don't understand how reducing inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, while not building more housing, would improve a housing shortage!
  • conanbatt 8y ago
    Economics has come to explain and attack the particular problem of homelessness amongst rich areas in the late 1800's, with Henry George's Poverty and Progress. The economic field definitely has a simple recipe to attack the root cause of this issues, but its one that, in my opinion, is politically unfeasible, as it goes mostly against the middle class, and retired people as well as the rich. The solution is called LVT, land value tax, and its popular since adam smith, to modern day left-leaning econs like stiglitz, or right-leaning like Milton friedman.
• jdlyga 8y ago
  To the barricades!
• Zdup 8y ago
  In San Francisco is equally bad. In the morning @7am you see so many people sleeping on sidewalks like sardines, it's pretty sad considering it's a rich city.
  • enriquto 8y ago
    It is not only sad. It is mind-blowingly absurd and overwhelmingly inhuman.
    • aphextron 8y ago
      Capitalism.
      • thoughtexplorer 8y ago
        ...has resulted in the lowest rate of poverty the world has ever seen. Although certainly not a perfect system and could be improved, be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
      • dang 8y ago
        Please don't post unsubstantive comments here, regardless of capitalism.
  • conanbatt 8y ago
    Not only that, but san Francisco exported half its homeless people according to a Guardian piece about Homeless bussing. Can you imagine the city with double the homeless?
  • dawhizkid 8y ago
    Equally bad compared to what? As an SF resident I would argue SF has one of the worst homeless situations in the country - not necessarily in terms of overall numbers (LA/NY have more), but in terms of what I see as severe mental health issues and drug use among many (but not all) homeless people I see here.
    • 8y ago
• jakelarkin 8y ago
  "Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them."
  • jbob2000 8y ago
    Houston is also in Texas, which has habitable land area greater than most countries. Toronto is kind of stuck at the moment because if we want to build more housing, we have to bulldoze the Oak Ridges Moraine, which we can’t do because it’s critical to our water supply (though conservative governments often try). So our only option, like many cities, is to build up. Which is expensive and requires expensive maintenance. Which nobody wants to pay for to give to people who are unlikely to contribute back (debatable).
    • jeffreyrogers 8y ago
      Houston also doesn't have zoning laws, though having lots of land helps with that.
      • 2RTZZSro 8y ago
        Houston has deed restrictions, which effectively work the same as zoning. There is zero land available for you to live in a safe neighborhood near downtown. All new housing is located in dangerous areas. You ABSOLUTELY MUST use a car to get around unless you want to risk being assaulted, robbed, or worse. The homeless population in Houston is out of control and has gotten worse in parts of town. Vehicle break-ins, burglary, rapes, and armed robbery are completely out of control. The only actually safe places in the entire city are Jewish neighborhoods such as Rice Village. The police are absolutely useless and crime is VASTLY under-reported. Police hung up on me multiple times and lost my reports each time after I was a victim of a hit-and-run, burglarized vehicle three times, my apartment door was kicked in, and my apartment was burglarized. My neighbor's guns were stolen from his truck and his apartment was burglarized. He was a Houston police officer at the time. Everywhere I lived the same things happened REGULARLY. My neighbor was a wheelchair bound young woman and her door was kicked in around noon, 6 feet across the hallway from the leasing office. All of these places I mention are in gated communities. I lived in three apartments less than a mile off the tram red line over three years. Houston is a living hell for law abiding citizens. Not only is it incredibly criminal, ALL infrastructure is CRUMBLING and there is trash literally everywhere aside from Rice Village and River Oaks. Utterly disgusting. Police and landlords have told me: "It's just a big city, crime happens. We can't do anything about it, just have insurance." (i.e., socialize the cost of having criminals around while doing NOTHING to reduce criminality). People who think like this deserve everything they get when it backfires on them. Maybe they enjoy being repeatedly raped like a form of Stockholm Syndrome. I, for one, do not enjoy being raped of my hard work and time by criminals or living under the constant threat of my hard work, time, and life being robbed from me. If you live in Houston and don't constantly carry a fully loaded handgun, you are taking your life in your hands. Screw that. I don't want to live in a literal hell. Such is life in Houston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyMY2JnVUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyMY2JnVUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj3XO3HopsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj3XO3HopsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0diH5fNLYmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0diH5fNLYmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gctMJhFezE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gctMJhFezE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZQDwXT71_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZQDwXT71_E
• sharkweek 8y ago
  Long-time Seattle resident here who volunteered for several years in the homeless community. Homelessness has always been a thing in Seattle, but has definitely become a much larger issue in the past five years. I'll spare my thoughts on any number of reasons as to why we got here as a city, but will say I think we are doing a terrible disservice to actually finding a solution by lumping "anyone who doesn't have a home" into the "homeless crisis." There are so many nuanced issues across a variety of problems here. There are drug abuse issues, mental health issues, physical health issues, cost of living issues, etc., and not to mention the varying cocktail of comorbidity, that to bulk "people without permanent housing" all under the umbrella of "homeless crisis" is not going to get us anywhere. Trying to assist the single mother with children who lives in her car because she lost her job is a VASTLY different issue than trying to assist the drug addict sitting in an alley passed out in their own feces. But at the end of the day, they're both human beings, and it breaks my heart that either of them are in that situation. Several separate issues, that need to be subdivided and approached in distinct ways if any progress is to be made on any of them. Smaller, subdivided problems should feel more solvable, too. Unfortunately, a lot of the solutions are expensive and frankly politically toxic. Despite Seattle's deep blue on most things, suddenly we get very "every person for themselves" the second homelessness has a price tag.
  • blacksmith_tb 8y ago
    I have wondered if the aggressive response to homeless folks doesn't stem from recognition of how little it would take to end up in their shoes...
    • code_duck 8y ago
      Certainly the fact that ones own financial security is fragile makes people feel threatened by beggars - some people, you could give away everything you own and they’d still be asking for more. However I think a lot of attitudes stem from the opposite - a lack of understanding that many homeless people are regular people, or could be, or could have been.
  • blang 8y ago
    I think you have hit many things amazingly well with Seattle homelessness. I think one of the reasons why we get very "every person for themselves" when the price tag comes up is it's hard to think of the single mother living in her car while working every day because the most visible members are the addicts sitting in the alley passed out in their own feces next to your stolen bicycle. Also it's hard to get data on who is the more representative group.
• throwaway112018 8y ago
  Gentrification and skyrocketing rents are clearly creating a crisis in many cities that impact people who need housing most. Families, elderly, those with chronic illness, etc. They need housing, and the government should prioritize this population. The problem is, these articles and homeless advocates never differentiate this sympathetic population from the hardcore drug users, aggressive panhandlers, and people engaged in theft and violent crime. I don't blame local neighbors from opposing shelters that attract this element. My city recently relocated a shelter to a new neighborhood and surprise surprise, street crime, used needles, prostitution, and everything you might expect from this group showing up en masse followed. There are also lifestyle street people who enjoy the lifestyle for the freedom it offers. Do they deserve services and free apartments? They're there by choice. You can see videos all over YouTube celebrating this lifestyle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFAu5dzHq3BJvZsO58N8fXA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFAu5dzHq3BJvZsO58N8fXA
• thomasfl 8y ago
  My favourite Richard Branson quote: «Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.» The same goes for cities. For a city, the inhabitants come first. Take care of the inhabitants, and the inhabitants will take care of business. Ensure inhabitants have a safe place to live and give them higher education, and the inhabitants will give a return on the investment.
• TomMckenny 8y ago
  A big part of the problem is the use of Revenue Management Software to set prices. This obviously ends up working like a cartel. I note that: -Even when nation wide vacancies were at their highest in 30 years, rental price rose. -Even as home prices plummeted, rental price rose. -Rent has risen 30% _nation_ wide just since 2013 so zoning an limits on building can't be the main cause. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
  • biztos 8y ago
    I've never heard of Revenue Management Software. What effect does it have exactly? If you own some apartments, wouldn't you just check the local advertised prices and set your prices similarly, possibly also using whatever your social network of landlords can tell you?
    • techsupporter 8y ago
      RMS is what airlines use to price tickets and have done almost since the automated calculating computer was invented. Use of that kind of software has spread to all kinds of industries. Large rental property management companies absolutely use RMS. You can see it in action if you go to the rental sites for a large apartment development (if you want one in real life, search for "Thorton Place Apartments" in Seattle). Every possible amenity or detail about the apartment is factored into the overall rent, including which direction it faces, floor, whether it's recently been painted, along with how many of this particular type or in this building are left over, and then your particulars like how long of a lease you want, whether you're bringing a pet[0], and even what employer you work for. That all gets crunched and a number falls out that sometimes has a relationship to what the glossy marketing copy also had printed on it. Rents for each unit can and will vary day-by-day as apartments are rented and notices handed in. 0 - Thorton Place doesn't do it but another apartment building in Lake City absolutely does bump up the base rent by around $17 if you pick "with pet" versus "without pet," in addition to lumping in a $45 "pet rent" fee.
      • ryanwaggoner 8y ago
• intralizee 8y ago
  The majority of people in society have a herd mentality. Thinking patterns such as one adopts the social norms and never questions them. These people observe homeless, subconsciously consider them outsiders, and treat them as not part of the herd with disconnecting from the problem belonging to everyone. Nothing will change until people stop seeking to blame Government or the Rich. Everyone has to take the blame for something to get done. I personally think everyone has become sociopaths to some degree compared to previous generations when it comes to people down on their luck.
• TaylorGood 8y ago
  Orange County, CA is not a city per se, but a runoff river trail that leads to the ocean quickly became a community of homeless. When the tent area was finally disbanded (1), here are the stats: – 700 - 1,000 homeless – 215 tons of trash or debris – 1,165 pounds of hazardous waste, including human and pet feces – 5,115 needles – 1,000 stolen bikes (2) (1) https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/01/see-before-and-after-photos-of-the-santa-ana-river-trail-with-homeless-people-gone-and-trash-cleaned-up/ https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/01/see-before-and-after-p... (2) https://www.ocregister.com/2017/11/16/a-half-loaded-gun-an-underground-bunker-and-1000-hidden-bikes-found-at-fountain-valley-homeless-camp/ https://www.ocregister.com/2017/11/16/a-half-loaded-gun-an-u...
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I fairly often comment on the topic of homelessness. I am routinely told on HN that the high cost of housing is unrelated to the rise in homelessness. This article states otherwise and I quoted it here: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-connection-between-housing.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c... Some things I routinely talk about: This country tore down up to 80 percent of SROs over the course of a couple of decades, probably because the Baby Boomers didn't need that kind of dirt cheap housing when they came of age. We never rebuilt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-sro/553946/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-... The American concept of "proper housing" is rooted in the housing boom that followed soldiers coming back home from WW2 and most of our current policies, financing mechanisms, etc are rooted in that era. The default expectation was that it was housing for a nuclear family and we are still being haunted by the ghost of those expectations, though they don't really serve us well anymore for a variety of reasons. So when people talk about the need for "affordable housing," most people seem to hear government subsidized housing, The Projects, and poverty housing. I'm not sure how to get around that. It absolutely isn't what I mean. I mean we need to develop demographically appropriate housing, such as SROs that a single person working at Taco Bell could afford. We also need that housing to be viable without a car. The reality that you basically need a car to get around in large parts of the US and the cheapest housing typically requires a car is part of the problem here. For most Americans, housing is their single largest expense and a car is their second largest. This is in the process of changing as Millenials give push back against such expectations, but it is still largely the norm here. I don't know of any good terms that already exist for trying to make such distinctions. They might need to be invented. So, first, we need a variety of housing options that effectively and appropriately serve lifestyles other than nuclear family with kids, a full time homemaker and a primary breadwinner. We currently are trying to force-fit people into such housing who don't live that way. For example, we assume that the answer for single young people is to rent a place designed for a family and then get enough roommates to fill up all the bedrooms and make the place affordable. And this is a nightmare option for many people. Rooming with total strangers is inherently problematic. Second, we need housing that doesn't de facto assume that you own a car and have a driver's license and all that. We need housing that serves people who don't want to have a car or who can't do that for some reason, whether cost or age or disability. I don't really know of terms in common usage for either of those concepts. Those are some of the things I have in mind when I talk about a need for "affordable housing," but it isn't what other people hear when I say that. They hear "Craptastic slums that no one wants to live in and no one wants in their neighborhood" or they hear "socialism where we just hand people homes they can't afford" or something. And that's absolutely not what I am going for.
• claydavisss 8y ago
  Better title: Income Inequality Reaches Death Spiral In Democrat-run Cities LA SF NYC Seattle - please dispute my claim with facts... California is ground zero for homelessness in the industrialized world and has a veto-proof Democrat majority
  • commandlinefan 8y ago
    I keep noticing that, too. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, though - do regions become left-leaning because they start to experience poverty (and people start to vote in left-leaning politicians who promise wealth redistribution) or do they become poor because they vote in left-leaning politicians who impose wealth redistribution policies?
    • claydavisss 8y ago
      In typical HN fashion, my comment was "flagged" but cannot be refuted. The point stands: California is a Democrat monopoly while having the worst infrastructure, homelessness, and the nation's highest poverty rate. But not one HN reader can respond factually.
  • majormajor 8y ago
    Income equality is more about the top end changing dramatically than the bottom end changing dramatically. "LA SF NYC are too rich and too business and super-wealthy-friendly" is a very different argument than the one you're making, and yet the only thing you note could support it just as well. So maybe it's more complicated than that.
    • claydavisss 8y ago
      Its only "complicated" for people who continue to believe that Democrats represent the working class.
  • ghoglan122 8y ago
    As if a Republicans-run state would solve the problem. That's a good joke
• orliesaurus 8y ago
  We can build companies that will change minds of voters but we can't provide homes to those who can't afford them. Mind blown.
• blancheneige 8y ago
  homelessness is the societal manifestation of the lower end of the bell curve. period. anyone who's interacted with homeless people knows this. yes there are exceptions, and no they do not make up the bulk of the distribution. putting your hand in the sand and blaming "slow wage growth" or some other secondary factor instead of pointing out the obvious is a disservice to those people. and before you call me harsh, know that I mean this in the complete opposite way: acknowledging the problem with pragmatism is the first step toward its resolution.
  • andrewmcwatters 8y ago
    being a serf is the societal manifestation of the lower end of the bell curve. period. anyone who's interacted with peasants knows this. yes there are serfs who fell out of wealthy families, and no they do not make up the bulk of the distribution. putting your hand in the sand and blaming "aggressive royal taxation" or some other secondary factor instead of pointing out the obvious is a disservice to the peasantry. and before you call me uncouth, know that I mean this in the complete opposite way: acknowledging the problem with honor is the first step towards its resolution.
    • blancheneige 8y ago
      not sure what point you where trying to make with this analogy. hierarchies are an emergent property of every self-assembling structure -- we all started from the same unicellular organisms after all.
  • whatever456 8y ago
    You are spot on. It's unpopular to talk about this, but it's absolutely true. 90% of homeless people are on the low end of the IQ spectrum, some with other mental issues to boot. Low IQ is strongly correlated with poor self control and an inability to delay gratification. You couple that with a lack of decently paid low-skill work in America (thanks Globalism!) and these people can't survive any longer. They simply don't have the biological or mental makeup to succeed. 50 years ago they would have worked at a machine press, or done physical manufacturing tasks like assembly. Those options don't exist anymore.
• code_duck 8y ago
  I hang out in an area of Denver where they can’t seem to build $500,000/2,500 a mo. condos fast enough, and a couple blocks full of homeless people sleep 1/4 miles away. A coffee shop I visit at had its portapotties taken over by a homeless band who informed us they were sleeping there and we should donate. Turned out they were also smoking crack. So far it seems the city’s plan is to keep pushing them around the city - Denver is privatizing alleys, for instance. I imagine that at some point the food missions will be moved towards Sun Valley, Valverde, Commerce City, North Aurora or the like. In Eugene it was a more intense issue. I swear the two cities have equal communities despite the populations differing by an order of magnitude. Bands of homeless people rove the streets with bicycles with trailers, collecting recycling to fund their lives at the insane meth/bicycle thievery park downtown. My girlfriend’s daughter took out the trash and said “there’s a guy in the dumpster”. Clearly a lot of people need psychological services and job counseling - if they were in homes, they could not sustain them. Given that the US doesn’t even seem to be likely to devote proper care of our aging relatives in residential care over the next 30 years, it seems unlikely.
• jammygit 8y ago
  I've known a few people who might have ended up homeless, at least for a while, without their family or friend support systems. 'Society' just assumes everybody has that support I guess.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• gre 8y ago
  I stayed a night in LA a few weeks ago at an AirBNB in a condo in a prime location near Little Tokyo and can't stop thinking that society would be better off if this condo were owned and occupied by a family instead of being basically a for-profit hotel. I don't know how to stop this de facto rezoning except by imposing huge taxes on housing that is not the owner's primary residence and closing all the loopholes that come along with that. This would free up more properties for people to own as a primary residence, and AirBNB users et al could still rent out rooms in their primary residence. It doesn't solve actual homelessness, the solution for that seems to be build more housing.
  • nickstefan12 8y ago
    This is important. I agree that taxing / mandating one house per person / family is probably the only way to reign in rent seeking.
  • prostoalex 8y ago
    It’s ironic considering that DTLA of all Los Angeles sub markets is the one with virtually no zoning restrictions and has some of the highest numbers of construction cranes in the nation. But before we all go onto AirBnB rampage, have you looked at any available properties in that zip code? The schools are complete garbage (an elementary school kid was recently stabbed by a homeless drug addict), the crime rate is high, public transport is next to non-existent, and there’s feces of various origins in the plain view on the sidewalk. Downtown LA officials have been trying to revitalize the neighborhood by expanding the convention center, permitting more hotel rooms, making business rent cheap and attracting more visitors like yourself, not pitching the neighborhood that’s adjacent to Skid Row to a suburban nuclear family with 2.2 kids.
    • gre 8y ago
      I don’t know about the schools there, but imagine if families instead of rentals occupied the condos—I bet the schools would shape up real fast. I admittedly haven’t researched/thought about how to fix schools, but getting parents raging seems obvious to start.
• atemerev 8y ago
  You mean, in the bluest cities?
  • tropdrop 8y ago
    All dense cities are blue. When you live next to an immigrant neighbor with a radically different lifestyle, and you two become friends, you start adopting some blue political leanings. Compound that with density. Over the past 10 years I frequently visited some suburbs near Ogden, Utah (I lived there before). 10 years ago there were no homeless panhandling anywhere outside of downtown SLC. Now, they're not only in Salt Lake City and Ogden - I see them in the tiny towns of Clinton, of West Point, outside of Walmarts in extremely red, extremely religious, extremely suburban areas. All while the state's official story is how they've "eradicated" [1] homelessness. The visual record, just driving in all these places, does not support that. It looks like what they've done is eliminate shelters, spread people out over the whole state (sometimes by force via operation Rio Grande), then introduced new "numbers" showing how great they've done. Observing Utah is when it first began to dawn on me how national of an issue homelessness is. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles...
  • richardknop 8y ago
    That is a nonsensical comment. All big cities are mostly blue, and all countryside is mostly red. That has nothing to do with this.
• llamataboot 8y ago
  Just paying for housing is a surprisingly cost effective and simple solution that is empirically backed as more cost effective and better outcomes for the individuals involved in nearly every study. Housing first, then figure out what support looks like for other issues.
  • baroffoos 8y ago
    You can't just throw a house at someone and expect everything to be alright. You need to give these people support to return to functioning lives. A lot of those free houses would end up trashed.
• newnewpdro 8y ago
  The homeless problem always gets worse when a population grows, like most problems. Even if you hold the homeless % constant, the problem got worse.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    References requested.
    • newnewpdro 8y ago
      References? It's rather simple and obvious math. If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of homeless people on the streets doubled. We like to focus on per-capita figures/%ages because they can make us feel good about ourselves. Except the problems you see on the street are not constant when their incidence %age stays constant, as the population grows. For them to stay constant, the %age must shrink in proportion to the growth, which is practically impossible. Growth applies to everything, including your problems.
      • dredmorbius 8y ago
        Actually I was referring to the homelessness increasing as population increases. The periods of most rapid population growth in the US were the decade of the 1810s, with a subsequent peak in the 1850s. In the 20th century, the peak decades were the 1900s and 1910s (21% each), then the 1960s (18%). Rates of growth have fallen consistently since the 1960s, with the exception of the decade of 2000 - 2009. As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, use of the term "homelessness" took off in the 1980s, during a period of modest population growth, by historical standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State... See also: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population
        • newnewpdro 8y ago
          Ok, I was not referring to the rate increasing. I am simply stating that the rate doesn't have to increase for the homeless problem to grow, because it grows in absolute numbers with the population.
• steve918 8y ago
  100% of the public parks and ~80% of the remaining greenspace in downtown Portland has become permanent homeless camps. Anywhere there is a 5x5ft patch of grass there is a tent.
• pastor_elm 8y ago
  For most of industrialized history in the West, poor people lived crammed in tenements and multi-family apartments where they didn't get much beyond a room. This is still the case in much of the developing world. Has it ever occurred to anyone that spacious living spaces for everyone in every city simply isn't tenable? It worked for a couple decades, but that was a different time and these cities were different places.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• paxys 8y ago
  The only way to fix the housing crisis is to build more houses. It isn't rocket science, but every conversation or debate about this issue seems to go on and on in every direction without people actually facing this fact. The same people who vote to increase taxes to fix homelessness will simultaneously vote down every new housing project. Just seems so bizarre to me.
  • Tokkemon 8y ago
    You can build them all day long, but then you have to have people who can live in them and pay for the cost of building that house, either through mortgages or taxes to the government. And we all know how well the public housing projects went and still go to this day...
    • CryptoPunk 8y ago
      Prices always reach their market clearing level. More housing == lower prices, when all other factors are controlled for.
• partisan 8y ago
  I was walking through Manhattan on Sunday along Broadway north of Union Square Park and I saw at least 2-3 homeless or panhandlers _per block_ along the way. I was directly asked for money a few times as well. I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it. There is no cushion for people living on the margins of society anymore. Not here, at least. When I was a kid, my mother was able to raise three of us on her one paltry salary. Good luck doing that on several salaries now. And as someone with a good income and two earner household, I can’t help but feel that I am one recession away from struggle. I don’t have a home my parents will leave to me in flyover country that I can retreat to if shit hits the fan.
  • electricslpnsld 8y ago
    > I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it. What up, Astoria native (then Stuyvesant then Columbia) checking in. The current level of (visible) homelessness in NYC is nothing compared to NYC in the early 2000s, let alone the 90s. Even in the late 90s the parts of upper Manhattan I frequented had burned out car husks and people shooting up in the streets. Hell, when I was in school you couldn't walk through Morningside or Riverside park without tripping over homeless people. Manhattan is downright bucolic compared to they way it used to be. The state of things isn't perfect, now, but it is orders of magnitude better than it used to be.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• PHGamer 8y ago
  i remember cases where some guy tried to build tiny homes for the homeless in LA and the government shut him down. I know here in another part of the county, there was some land freed up for new development but a preservation society sued to prevent development unless certain conditions were met. Less housing ending up happening as they could demolish everything. Government is getting in the way of cheap housing.
• booleandilemma 8y ago
  I think part of the problem is that there is a certain percentage of homeless people that are just completely irredeemable. Anyone that’s spent some time riding on the NYC subway can attest to this. No matter how much money you throw at them, they will keep begging or acting crazy. Short of locking them up, what do you do with those people?
  • anigbrowl 8y ago
    Irredeemable? Have they committed some awful moral transgression? Certainly some people are chronically incapable of looking after themselves, but please avoid such prejudicial language.
    • booleandilemma 8y ago
      I’m talking about the people who will never be functioning members of society, no matter how much support we give them (monetary or otherwise). If you don’t understand what I mean you haven’t met enough homeless people.
      • anigbrowl 8y ago
        I have met plenty of homeless people, and yuor objection is not responsive to the criticism I made.
  • asdff 8y ago
    > Short of locking them up, what do you do with those people? Give them access to mental health services.
• negativez 8y ago
  Since this a crazy hard problem that won't be solved in a comments section, how about playing with a completely silly idea instead: > Outlaw rental housing - force everyone to own their residence The people we're most interested in helping are those pushed out by rising rents. Rents can't rise if they don't exist. New migrants can't drive rent up if rent doesn't exist - to the contrary, they would be increasing property value for all residents. I'm confident we can make this work, people.
  • jakelarkin 8y ago
    so instead of rent you pay interest, various property taxes, and hoa, maintenance, or property management. Most of which are still subject to inflation and price/wage disparity. a better high level discussion would be how to reform the policy goal of owning housing as saving mechanism and store of personal wealth, since it can't be both a great investment for the prior generation and affordable to the next one at the same time (if wages are stagnant)
• reading-at-work 8y ago
  > It’s not bad everywhere. Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them. That’s dampened the effect of rising rents, Zillow found. This seems like a quick and practical solution that would provide effective assistance while more nuanced factors like mental health are debated about. Why aren't more cities increasing the housing supply given the obvious benefits of doing so?
  • phil248 8y ago
    In part because building housing in places like San Francisco and NYC is incredibly expensive. Trying to house people with the least means in the most expensive corners of the planet doesn't make a lot of sense to be frank about it. Houston may be more of a middle ground in terms of building cost and access to land.
• dr_dshiv 8y ago
  Living in Amsterdam, it is very rare to encounter homeless people or panhandlers. It wasn't always this way -- so I really credit the policy designers. They build these really cute social housing centers for a range of subsidized apartments -- and always include a petting zoo in the middle because, I guess, it saves money in the end. Doing nothing is way more expensive.
  • eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    When I was in Amsterdam a few years ago I faced pretty aggressive panhandling / scamming; it was that fine line between panhandling and robbery. On the way from central station to my airbnb, I had someone try to follow me and get my address. Another night I had someone waiting outside of my place. I live in Denver, Colorado and although we have a huge homeless population, I've never had a problem with them. It's mostly just people sitting around asking for money, but I've never been followed or aggressively approached like I have in European cities (Italy was awful).
• apo 8y ago
  In the late 1980s I attended a talk at a political gathering in San Francisco. The speaker asked the audience members to think about the scores of homeless people they saw walking to the event. The speaker then made a statement that I'll never forget: "This is what a modern depression looks like." When most people think of a Depression, the image that comes to mind is black-and-white photos of mobs of people standing in bread lines. What if 1930s-style depressions are no longer possible? Central banks intervene in every crisis no matter how small, handing out freebies to banks and financial institutions. However, these groups can only spend so much money on themselves. A little gets spent on frivolous crap like vacations, boats, and watches, a lot gets spent on ridiculous startup ideas and other terrible speculations, and the vast majority gets parked in the stock and bond markets where it grows and grows with each new infusion of fake money. What if modern central banking has made a repeat of the Great Depression impossible? Consider the possibility that the US has been in the modern equivalent of a Depression since the 1980s. It doesn't feel like a Depression because most people have housing and jobs, and GDP goes up. But focusing on these metrics ignores three very annoying pieces of information: 1. wages have been flat for many years 2. inflation for essential goods/services (housing, health care, child care) has outpaces inflation year after year 3. the homeless problem just keeps getting worse
• williesleg 8y ago
  According to leading economists, the elite Hollywood stars, sports stars, politicians and Silicon Valley elites can all solve this by donating roughly 10% of their wealth, nothing more, nothing less. But they won't. Instead they polarize the masses by continuing this cancer.
• CryptoPunk 8y ago
  The US spends far more now on social welfare than it did in the 1950s, 60s or 70s. Social assistance to drug addicts concentrated in neighourhoods where a disproportionate number reside, combined with reluctance to institutionalize them, or otherwise force them to stop doing drugs, creates ghettos where drug abuse predominates, that perpetuate drug use lifestyles. From the other end, restrictions on housing construction, like zoning by-laws, and limitations on private property rights, like rent control, lead to housing scarcity, which pushes more people to the margins where they are more likely fall through the cracks.
• weeksie 8y ago
  Fix the high price of housing. Expensive places push more people into homelessness. Sure, services are still needed but by fixing housing you'll make the biggest dent and do good for the most people. We need to upzone the near ring suburbs of these cities at the very minimum.
• mooman219 8y ago
  I believe a key fact that's ignored is that the cities where this is happening are the most hospitable. Above freezing all year, plenty of areas to setup camp that are protected by the city, and poor enforcement for street crimes (there's no money in jailing a homeless person unless they're committing a felony). Homelessness in Seattle is much worse than New York for a number of reasons, but the fact that camping outside in New York during winter would kill you helps work the numbers a bit too. If it's too cold to be outside, you'll opt for a homeless shelter where you're required to follow rules that inevitably help you to get back on your feet.
• accelerateruina 8y ago
  Homeless hacker chiming in. Throw away acct for pseudo anonymity. I been homeless in LA for 2 years now. Previously, I worked as a developer for 15 years. The closest I ever got to touching "success" was that one time standing before the porcelain King in the Men's Room right next to Bezos at Amazon. It's rather surreal to see where I am now and think that I once pissed into the same hole in the ground as the Richest Man on Earth. c'est la vie. This whole article is just Liberal hand wringing bullshit. Every reply in this thread is just more Liberal Do-Gooder handing wringing bullshit. Not a single one of you here understand what it's really like to be ejected from the Economy and forced to live as a leper underneath Metropolis among the Morlocks in Tent City, and not a single one of you have a realistic idea to "solve" the problem of homelessness in society. But you'll think you know it all, and that if only your dumb idea XYZ was adopted, it would be the silver bullet to solve a pathologically non-linear societal system of thousands and millions of discontinuous variables. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair "Homelessness" isn't a "problem" that can be solved and wrapped up with a pretty red bow because you all are Sinclair's man in the street. You all are the problem. The phenomenon of homelessness is not an effect--it's a consequence. It is not a disease in itself, it is the symptom of a much greater syndrome. How can you begin to solve a "problem" when you haven't even identified the root of the problem? Look around you. What's happening isn't rocket brain surgery. This shit is just Malcolm X's proverbial "chickens coming home to roost." America is sick. It's dying. Your society is decaying. Your cities are slums, your economy is fake, fewer and fewer fat cat asshole thieves scheme to take bigger and bigger slices of the diminishing pie for themselves, all the while inviting in every illiterate 3rd World "Shitholer" peasant illegal immigrant to take the resources of your Native Born neighbor. Your Govt is literally being run by elderly senile cartoon characters who are too busy squabbling over WWF wrestling plot minutia while the real power--the Deep State and the Military Industrial Complex continues business as usual and is radar phased locked onto expanding more and more Wars fighting for Israel and for Tyrants of Oil Fiefdoms, damn the consequences, and damn the American boys dying for it. Your Financial Industry of empty suits only care about kicking the can and off-shoring and out sourcing every last warm body that can be replaced by a Drone in order to shave operating costs to earn their myopic bonus for inflating their revenue by .0001% and priming the pump of their stock price through even more corporate buy backs. Your economy was blown the fuck up 10 years ago, and the Federal Reserve inflated the money supply by printing tens of trillions of fiat to soak up housing and all property to prop up already outrageous astronomical prices. Why am I and 500,000 Americans homeless while 500,000 houses sit empty across America? Oh yeah, that's right, those houses are "investment vehicles" which must be protected because muh Free Markets, and because God forbid any policies resembling a Nationalized Socialism take root in America and blow away the illusion that a self-coherent Capitalism even exists. Meanwhile, We The People are depreciating assets and "not economically viable." Here's why. If you hate Trump, just wait until you see the next cartoon character we meme into the Presidency. You may be baffled "why is the Alt-Right smarter than us and why do they keep winning against all fake odds?" The answer has been staring you in the face the whole time. Next time, there's going to be a guy running for President and he's going to hit all of notes and promise the right things to fix everything and punish everyone who deserves it, and his name will be something like "Adolf" and me and 70 million voters are going to elect him and then maybe you'll sit down and seriously challenge your whole reality and everything you thought you knew and ask yourself "how did we end up here?" It might make you feel better to just ignore what I'm saying by discounting it as "oh that guy is mentally ill, that's why he's homeless to begin with, just ignore the crazy man and keep being apathetic and don't try to do anything and leave it for the Govt to Do Something About It." But don't feel bad for me. I feel bad for you. Because I have enjoyed a head start prepping for the coming systemic collapse that is going to rip America apart to its foundations and shovel dirt over the grave of our little 242 year long "Grand Experiement." I know how Extended Involuntary Urban Camping, I know how to live off canned food and the bare minimum of resources, I know how to steal water and electricity and whatever else I need, I know how to live little better than an animal with no consciousness about "next week" or "next month", because I live in the day-to-day. I have learned it's survival of the fittest. You have not. One day soon you'll wake up and your Soylent fridge will be empty, your Googley Bus won't be there, your Googleplex will be empty and picked apart by tweakers for scrap metal and everything you thought was a permanent fixture of Civilization will be gone. I'll be fine. I didn't need the majority of that shit anyways. Your mind will be blown when you see how little you truly Need to get by just to survive. As for my future, I don't waste my time with such a luxury. Chop wood, carry water--that's Zen. I hate the entire Computing Industry by the way. Yes, you too. Why would I want to get back into the Hamster Wheel? Why would I want to rejoing being part of the problem again? Programming Blinken Light bullshit for bullshitters does not interest me in the slightest anymore. This industry has changed since I remember it in the Dotcom era. I no longer recognize it. The only "fun" I find these days in programming is in leveling up in Reverse Engineering to break as much software as I can and attack it as broadly and as devestating as possible with the explicit goal of dumping 0days to put as many of you out of business as I can and try real hard to roll Computing Inc as far back into the pre-Internet Dark Ages of the 1960's and 1970's as I can.
• nwah1 8y ago
  This is a very old problem. In 1879, Henry George called it the paradox of progress and poverty. Prosperity causes land values to go up, and this inevitably creates a class of winners and losers. Some of the losers can't afford rent at all.