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"It's not one entity that's going to solve this," [Hartman] said. "It's not on corporations. It's not on congregations. It's not on government. It's not on foun

"It's not one entity that's going to solve this," [Hartman] said. "It's not on corporations. It's not on congregations. It's not on government. It's not on foundations. It's all of us working together." While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay we won't see much affordable housing. Real estate laws do not reward and have not ever rewarded "working together". If Seattle funneled the money going towards anti-homeless structures to building municipal housing instead this "homeless crisis" would be resolved quickly. It wouldn't fix everything and it'd be just as hard for someone who's both unemployed and homeless to get back on their feet but it would make it easier for them to stay on their feet.

atlasunshrugged 7y ago
But I think the sentiment is probably correct - it seems unlikely that one party could solve the problem unilaterally. It's likely going to take many people coming together and pushing an agenda to produce an outcome that resolves or partially resolves the issues. Of course the problem here is that opposition parties (NIMBYists, corporates, etc.) are usually better organized with deeper pockets than associations and groups advocating for homeless rights, whose members are usually pretty disenfranchised, not organized, and without much money to advocate for their positions.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay But that's not the system! The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities. If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone! You can help: https://yimbyaction.org/give/ https://yimbyaction.org/give/
- tim333 7y ago
  For that to go through politically you'd probably need support from the existing NIMBY house owners. This could be possible if they allowed fairly free construction in some non central area in return for some vagrancy laws so the homeless were kind of made to go there rather than pooping on the streets where the NIMBYs are. Both groups could win that way.
  - quaquaqua1 7y ago
    Imagine making it a crime to sleep outside. No thanks! I would much prefer to rent "illegally" or sleep in my car before we criminalize being at a certain location at 4am
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Open defecation is a health hazard, which the WHO and UNICEF are trying to get rid of throughout the world. Yes, we should be providing reasonable alternatives (such as environmentally-friendly public toilets) but to say that there's no real issue here seems quite misguided.
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      I was in San Francisco for about 1 hour last year before I saw multiple people asleep on the sidewalk downtown in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I was there about 16 hours before I watched a woman, a block from OpenAI, step out of a tent (in a row of tents and tarps) and squat immediately front of her tent, take a dump, and go back into her tent before I could walk 20 feet. Never in my 33 years of life at the time had I thought I'd witness such a thing, that's when I realized what I assumed was a police horse barn somewhere nearby (we have mounted police, and hansom cabs, in downtown Indianapolis) was the smell of human feces and urine, not road apples and hay. Then I started looking where I was walking and noticed brown smudge after brown smudge after brown lump. Saw a decent one outside of YC's SF office too maybe halfway down the block. Homeless people have to use the restroom, if they're homeless they don't have a toilet and are probably going to do it on the sidewalk or in an alley. This is how disease spreads.
      - quaquaqua1 7y ago
        Then fine her for shitting in public and not sleeping in it :) It's like saying we should ban batteries because maybe you will throw them in the river.
    - tim333 7y ago
      You don't really have to imagine as places like Las Vegas have similar laws already. It's a trade off. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777356656/las-vegas-bans-sleeping-camping-in-public-places https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777356656/las-vegas-bans-slee...
- everdev 7y ago
  > If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone! It's not that simple. Rapidly increasing the housing supply has all kinds of effects on communities: * Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand) * Increasing traffic and strain on community services like schools * Environmental impact * Rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area Zoning laws and the permit process exist to help ensure safe buildings but also to help protect the home value of existing residents. This makes sense in communities with the infrastructure to support it though and we definitely should be looking into ways to safely house everyone.
  - PlasticTank 7y ago
    > Decreasing the value of nearby homes People often overlook this point way too quickly, they don't consider people with mortgages, if you saved up for a house and purchased with a mortgage then when the flood gates are opened and your house value drops, you now owe more than your house is worth, not a good position to be in.
    - sneak 7y ago
      Poor investment decisions should not be insured by your neighbors and local government.
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      Historically, homes weren't meant to be purchased for life for the vast majority of people. In the past few decades people have got in the mindset "I'm going to live here for at least 2 years, I'll buy a house" and then buy, sell, buy, sell, buy sell "Hey, property values are up 30%, time to sell and buy a bigger house!" or "Oooh such and such city/neighborhood sounds cool I'm bored with this city/neighborhood, time to sell!" type behavior. If people would go back to purchasing homes with the full intention of staying there for decades, this wouldn't be an issue for most people.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Increased density tends to go together with higher real-estate values, not lower ones. (What it does is lower demand for real-estate elsewhere, as the high-density area becomes more desirable due to its better amenities.) And it makes it easier to provide "community services" like mass transit, that obviate increased traffic.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Seattle doesn’t really have that problem, lots of new housing is being built, it isn’t the Bay Area. The problem is affordable housing that has little profit to motivate return-oriented developers, and homeless shelters that have huge impacts on the areas where they are placed.
  - adreamingsoul 7y ago
    Seattle does very much have a homeless problem.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Housing becomes affordable by filtering down the market, long after it has been built by "return-oriented" developers. Building more and better housing can accelerate this process.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      And that happens. However, the flop houses that used to exist when I was in college have been driven out of the market.
      - shuckles 7y ago
        Most boarding houses are not code compliant and would not be buildable today. That might have something to do with it.
        seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        A lot of them were just old houses that were unrenovated. They’ve probably been torn down and rebuilt by now. My first place in the U district (1994ish) was a cheap $225/month basement room with shared bathroom and a small kitchenette. The land lady was desperate to keep non-students out so it wouldn’t turn into a flop house.
        7y ago
- vidarh 7y ago
  This is extremely simplistic. Housing is relatively speaking cheap in places where people don't want to live. In places where people do want to live, the cost of land and the cost of heightened demand of construction tends to dwarf planning related costs. Near me, in a London suburb, there are at least half a dozen ~40+ story residential buildings that have approval where no construction is currently happening because the market conditions are not there to make it worthwhile vs. simply waiting a couple of years, because scarcity in house supply keeps driving up prices to the extent that it's not always clear that building now is the right choice, especially not when there are other buildings going up - it's easy to just sit and wait until there's less competition and start construction then. If planning was all that was stopping them, we'd have plenty of these buildings going up right now. Importantly, because these developers have a relatively safe bet in terms of returns once they eventually construct, they are able to find investors to finance assembling and sitting on relatively large tracts of land or low density housing, and thus participate in keeping the supply lower, and thus contribute to the house price growth. There certainly are places where planning is the main thing driving prices up, including parts of London, but the point is that just addressing that tends to be insufficient to address this problem, as cost of increasing density goes through the roof very quickly, and so in hotspots where land is expensive you tend to end up with expensive housing anyway, unless you have governments prepared to force the issue and saturate the market to take out enough demand to drive the price of land down. If you want to address housing prices in a less heavy handed manner, you need to address the centralization of jobs, which tends to mean addressing transport. A pet peeve of mine for London, which applies equally to a lot of big cities, is that addressing the housing and congestion issues in the centre is a net negative overall: It costs a fortune to drive up the density and transport capacity in an already dense area, and it just attracts more demand until things are just as bad and the next "solution" is far more expensive. The more cost-effective solution tends to be actual planning on a larger scale to make bypassing the expensive/congested region easier and more attractive. E.g. in the case of London there are a number of towns that feed a huge amount of people into London. Most of these towns would find it a lot easier to subsume additional housing density at far lower costs. What they lack is the ease of transport from a large enough base to be more attractive places for companies to locate. What's required to kickstart that is largely an initial willingness to invest in upgrading transport links to other places than London. Ironically many of these towns are "new towns" [1] that were in many cases constructed pretty much entirely from scratch to reduce strain on London (and other cities) after the war. And they achieved that, but instead of building on that and also decentralising transport to encourage these towns to grow as hubs in their own right, transport has instead become increasing focused on making commuting in to London faster, so even though many of these towns have their own small commuter belts they are to far too great an extent feeding the problems in London. You don't solve that by letting planning loose, because a lot of these investments are beneficial to wider society but not necessarily profitable individually unless you can take into account how they affect overall economic growth and tax receipts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  The fact that California refuses to build will be its long term demise. You need blue collar workers to keep the lights on in all cities, even those with minimum 7-figure housing costs. They'll lose to states like Texas.
  - sneak 7y ago
    Nevada is my guess; it’s a lot closer and more fun.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
      The replacement state --so long as it has a pro-building policy-- is arbitrary. Whether it's Arizona, or Nevada, or Texas, etc. could be up to debate. These places look mighty appealing for households that don't earn $300k/year, which is most households.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  That's oversimplfying things quite a lot to say the least. I see this sentiment shared often but the reality is that the major Texas cities are going through similar growing pains as companies and people move out here. The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards which has a huge problem in that traffic quickly becomes a disaster due to poor infrastructure and city planning. Putting housing on land you own wouldn't solve much because it would still result in poor people being pushed further and further out of the city and congestion being made a major problem. This isn't to say NIMBYs aren't a problem, but rather that even if you removed them greed from landlords and land value in cities would still be a problem.
  - sneak 7y ago
    > The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards Citation needed. Most cities that have a lot of density also have a lot of people who don’t own cars.
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
      Have you lived in Texas? My citation is that I live in Austin and living here without a car simply isn't possible for a lot of people. The public transit infrastructure is poor, walkability is inconsistent thanks to poor roadwork and sidewalk connections. It's a fact that Texas cities have generally handled density through sprawl.
      - sneak 7y ago
        Yes, I have. I think you are saying something like “they have been designed to grow outwards” simply because that is how they have been built so far; I think it is about the same as saying an empty city-sized field is “designed to grow outwards”. Cities grow out, until they grow up. Even NYC didn’t have skyscrapers at one time. It will remain car-centric until such time density becomes sufficiently high that one can walk to enough different things, the achievement of which requires building vertically.
        7y ago
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Many of us, even with other liberal tendencies, think the homeless in Seattle are given too much leeway in the city, especially with the unpolicing and decriminalization of petty crimes going on. The few million used on anti-homeless structures isn’t going to build more than a handful of homes and won’t make a significant dent in the problem. I love Seattle, but it’s hard to move back with a family considering the situation, especially compared to Bellevue where the policing is much more serious.
- Aloha 7y ago
  I agree with you to an extent - but you cant criminalize just being homeless either - and thats the problem, thats what many cities were effectively doing (see Los Angeles). It's a multi-pronged approach to solve the issue, which prongs you use is a matter of how aggressive you're willing to get to solve it however.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    > cant criminalize just being homeless either Yes, you can. It really is that simple. The homeless problem isn't persistent because it's technically hard. It's persistent because a segment of society is addicted to moral posturing in a way that blocks necessary and obvious solutions. There is no legal or moral problem. Build adequate shelters in inexpensive locations and arrest everyone who camps on the street and refuses to go to one of these shelters. (This approach is also compatible with the recent SCOTUS stance on the subject.) Everyone needs a place to sleep, but there is no reason for society to support squatting on random public land as a lifestyle choice.
    - Aloha 7y ago
      Morally you shouldn't and legally you currently cannot. What's your proposal, arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever?
      - krapp 7y ago
        >arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever At least then the homeless would have guaranteed access to shelter, food and medical care, and likely drug treatment and employment programs. It's more humane than lining public spaces with spikes and caltrops to drive the homeless away like unwanted animals, and Americans would likely much rather pay taxes to jail the homeless than to subsidize "socialist" initiatives like public housing and food distribution.
Aloha 7y ago
I agree with you wholeheartedly, while I'm a markets-first person in general, either the city itself needs to build the housing itself, or it needs to reduce the cost and difficulty of getting permits so the market will work. The reason we're in this boat is because the existing locals are rent-seeking, and don't want to live in a denser city - which causes a crisis elsewhere, because the people keep coming. In general, West Coast Cities seem to have this idea, that if you ignore the problem of insufficient housing - be it the symptoms (high rent, no affordable units) or the causes excessive permitting costs/lengthy approval times and restrictive zoning, it'll just go away. There are prosperous bustling big cities without housing affordability issues, they build housing, either in the city, or in nearby suburbs. The reality of it is people are moving there whether they like it or not. Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. it can't pretend to be an ocean liner, and pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"

atlasunshrugged 7y ago

But I think the sentiment is probably correct - it seems unlikely that one party could solve the problem unilaterally. It's likely going to take many people coming together and pushing an agenda to produce an outcome that resolves or partially resolves the issues. Of course the problem here is that opposition parties (NIMBYists, corporates, etc.) are usually better organized with deeper pockets than associations and groups advocating for homeless rights, whose members are usually pretty disenfranchised, not organized, and without much money to advocate for their positions.

BurningFrog 7y ago

> While the system (created by governments and corporations) rewards providing housing priced at however much people will pay But that's not the system! The 2019 system is that building housing is illegal without very costly and hard to get permits in most non Texas big cities. If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone! You can help: https://yimbyaction.org/give/ https://yimbyaction.org/give/

tim333 7y ago
For that to go through politically you'd probably need support from the existing NIMBY house owners. This could be possible if they allowed fairly free construction in some non central area in return for some vagrancy laws so the homeless were kind of made to go there rather than pooping on the streets where the NIMBYs are. Both groups could win that way.
- quaquaqua1 7y ago
  Imagine making it a crime to sleep outside. No thanks! I would much prefer to rent "illegally" or sleep in my car before we criminalize being at a certain location at 4am
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Open defecation is a health hazard, which the WHO and UNICEF are trying to get rid of throughout the world. Yes, we should be providing reasonable alternatives (such as environmentally-friendly public toilets) but to say that there's no real issue here seems quite misguided.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    I was in San Francisco for about 1 hour last year before I saw multiple people asleep on the sidewalk downtown in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I was there about 16 hours before I watched a woman, a block from OpenAI, step out of a tent (in a row of tents and tarps) and squat immediately front of her tent, take a dump, and go back into her tent before I could walk 20 feet. Never in my 33 years of life at the time had I thought I'd witness such a thing, that's when I realized what I assumed was a police horse barn somewhere nearby (we have mounted police, and hansom cabs, in downtown Indianapolis) was the smell of human feces and urine, not road apples and hay. Then I started looking where I was walking and noticed brown smudge after brown smudge after brown lump. Saw a decent one outside of YC's SF office too maybe halfway down the block. Homeless people have to use the restroom, if they're homeless they don't have a toilet and are probably going to do it on the sidewalk or in an alley. This is how disease spreads.
    - quaquaqua1 7y ago
      Then fine her for shitting in public and not sleeping in it :) It's like saying we should ban batteries because maybe you will throw them in the river.
  - tim333 7y ago
    You don't really have to imagine as places like Las Vegas have similar laws already. It's a trade off. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777356656/las-vegas-bans-sleeping-camping-in-public-places https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777356656/las-vegas-bans-slee...
everdev 7y ago
> If you could just put up housing on land you own and charge however much people will pay for it, this housing crisis would quickly be gone! It's not that simple. Rapidly increasing the housing supply has all kinds of effects on communities: * Decreasing the value of nearby homes (supply and demand) * Increasing traffic and strain on community services like schools * Environmental impact * Rapidly changing the demographic and possibly culture of the area Zoning laws and the permit process exist to help ensure safe buildings but also to help protect the home value of existing residents. This makes sense in communities with the infrastructure to support it though and we definitely should be looking into ways to safely house everyone.
- PlasticTank 7y ago
  > Decreasing the value of nearby homes People often overlook this point way too quickly, they don't consider people with mortgages, if you saved up for a house and purchased with a mortgage then when the flood gates are opened and your house value drops, you now owe more than your house is worth, not a good position to be in.
  - sneak 7y ago
    Poor investment decisions should not be insured by your neighbors and local government.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    Historically, homes weren't meant to be purchased for life for the vast majority of people. In the past few decades people have got in the mindset "I'm going to live here for at least 2 years, I'll buy a house" and then buy, sell, buy, sell, buy sell "Hey, property values are up 30%, time to sell and buy a bigger house!" or "Oooh such and such city/neighborhood sounds cool I'm bored with this city/neighborhood, time to sell!" type behavior. If people would go back to purchasing homes with the full intention of staying there for decades, this wouldn't be an issue for most people.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Increased density tends to go together with higher real-estate values, not lower ones. (What it does is lower demand for real-estate elsewhere, as the high-density area becomes more desirable due to its better amenities.) And it makes it easier to provide "community services" like mass transit, that obviate increased traffic.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Seattle doesn’t really have that problem, lots of new housing is being built, it isn’t the Bay Area. The problem is affordable housing that has little profit to motivate return-oriented developers, and homeless shelters that have huge impacts on the areas where they are placed.
- adreamingsoul 7y ago
  Seattle does very much have a homeless problem.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Housing becomes affordable by filtering down the market, long after it has been built by "return-oriented" developers. Building more and better housing can accelerate this process.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    And that happens. However, the flop houses that used to exist when I was in college have been driven out of the market.
    - shuckles 7y ago
      Most boarding houses are not code compliant and would not be buildable today. That might have something to do with it.
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        A lot of them were just old houses that were unrenovated. They’ve probably been torn down and rebuilt by now. My first place in the U district (1994ish) was a cheap $225/month basement room with shared bathroom and a small kitchenette. The land lady was desperate to keep non-students out so it wouldn’t turn into a flop house.
        7y ago
vidarh 7y ago
This is extremely simplistic. Housing is relatively speaking cheap in places where people don't want to live. In places where people do want to live, the cost of land and the cost of heightened demand of construction tends to dwarf planning related costs. Near me, in a London suburb, there are at least half a dozen ~40+ story residential buildings that have approval where no construction is currently happening because the market conditions are not there to make it worthwhile vs. simply waiting a couple of years, because scarcity in house supply keeps driving up prices to the extent that it's not always clear that building now is the right choice, especially not when there are other buildings going up - it's easy to just sit and wait until there's less competition and start construction then. If planning was all that was stopping them, we'd have plenty of these buildings going up right now. Importantly, because these developers have a relatively safe bet in terms of returns once they eventually construct, they are able to find investors to finance assembling and sitting on relatively large tracts of land or low density housing, and thus participate in keeping the supply lower, and thus contribute to the house price growth. There certainly are places where planning is the main thing driving prices up, including parts of London, but the point is that just addressing that tends to be insufficient to address this problem, as cost of increasing density goes through the roof very quickly, and so in hotspots where land is expensive you tend to end up with expensive housing anyway, unless you have governments prepared to force the issue and saturate the market to take out enough demand to drive the price of land down. If you want to address housing prices in a less heavy handed manner, you need to address the centralization of jobs, which tends to mean addressing transport. A pet peeve of mine for London, which applies equally to a lot of big cities, is that addressing the housing and congestion issues in the centre is a net negative overall: It costs a fortune to drive up the density and transport capacity in an already dense area, and it just attracts more demand until things are just as bad and the next "solution" is far more expensive. The more cost-effective solution tends to be actual planning on a larger scale to make bypassing the expensive/congested region easier and more attractive. E.g. in the case of London there are a number of towns that feed a huge amount of people into London. Most of these towns would find it a lot easier to subsume additional housing density at far lower costs. What they lack is the ease of transport from a large enough base to be more attractive places for companies to locate. What's required to kickstart that is largely an initial willingness to invest in upgrading transport links to other places than London. Ironically many of these towns are "new towns" [1] that were in many cases constructed pretty much entirely from scratch to reduce strain on London (and other cities) after the war. And they achieved that, but instead of building on that and also decentralising transport to encourage these towns to grow as hubs in their own right, transport has instead become increasing focused on making commuting in to London faster, so even though many of these towns have their own small commuter belts they are to far too great an extent feeding the problems in London. You don't solve that by letting planning loose, because a lot of these investments are beneficial to wider society but not necessarily profitable individually unless you can take into account how they affect overall economic growth and tax receipts. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The fact that California refuses to build will be its long term demise. You need blue collar workers to keep the lights on in all cities, even those with minimum 7-figure housing costs. They'll lose to states like Texas.
- sneak 7y ago
  Nevada is my guess; it’s a lot closer and more fun.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    The replacement state --so long as it has a pro-building policy-- is arbitrary. Whether it's Arizona, or Nevada, or Texas, etc. could be up to debate. These places look mighty appealing for households that don't earn $300k/year, which is most households.
fzeroracer 7y ago
That's oversimplfying things quite a lot to say the least. I see this sentiment shared often but the reality is that the major Texas cities are going through similar growing pains as companies and people move out here. The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards which has a huge problem in that traffic quickly becomes a disaster due to poor infrastructure and city planning. Putting housing on land you own wouldn't solve much because it would still result in poor people being pushed further and further out of the city and congestion being made a major problem. This isn't to say NIMBYs aren't a problem, but rather that even if you removed them greed from landlords and land value in cities would still be a problem.
- sneak 7y ago
  > The cities are designed to grow outwards, rather than upwards Citation needed. Most cities that have a lot of density also have a lot of people who don’t own cars.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    Have you lived in Texas? My citation is that I live in Austin and living here without a car simply isn't possible for a lot of people. The public transit infrastructure is poor, walkability is inconsistent thanks to poor roadwork and sidewalk connections. It's a fact that Texas cities have generally handled density through sprawl.
    - sneak 7y ago
      Yes, I have. I think you are saying something like “they have been designed to grow outwards” simply because that is how they have been built so far; I think it is about the same as saying an empty city-sized field is “designed to grow outwards”. Cities grow out, until they grow up. Even NYC didn’t have skyscrapers at one time. It will remain car-centric until such time density becomes sufficiently high that one can walk to enough different things, the achievement of which requires building vertically.
      - 7y ago

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Many of us, even with other liberal tendencies, think the homeless in Seattle are given too much leeway in the city, especially with the unpolicing and decriminalization of petty crimes going on. The few million used on anti-homeless structures isn’t going to build more than a handful of homes and won’t make a significant dent in the problem. I love Seattle, but it’s hard to move back with a family considering the situation, especially compared to Bellevue where the policing is much more serious.

Aloha 7y ago
I agree with you to an extent - but you cant criminalize just being homeless either - and thats the problem, thats what many cities were effectively doing (see Los Angeles). It's a multi-pronged approach to solve the issue, which prongs you use is a matter of how aggressive you're willing to get to solve it however.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  > cant criminalize just being homeless either Yes, you can. It really is that simple. The homeless problem isn't persistent because it's technically hard. It's persistent because a segment of society is addicted to moral posturing in a way that blocks necessary and obvious solutions. There is no legal or moral problem. Build adequate shelters in inexpensive locations and arrest everyone who camps on the street and refuses to go to one of these shelters. (This approach is also compatible with the recent SCOTUS stance on the subject.) Everyone needs a place to sleep, but there is no reason for society to support squatting on random public land as a lifestyle choice.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    Morally you shouldn't and legally you currently cannot. What's your proposal, arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever?
    - krapp 7y ago
      >arrest everyone who's homeless and jail then forever At least then the homeless would have guaranteed access to shelter, food and medical care, and likely drug treatment and employment programs. It's more humane than lining public spaces with spikes and caltrops to drive the homeless away like unwanted animals, and Americans would likely much rather pay taxes to jail the homeless than to subsidize "socialist" initiatives like public housing and food distribution.

Aloha 7y ago

I agree with you wholeheartedly, while I'm a markets-first person in general, either the city itself needs to build the housing itself, or it needs to reduce the cost and difficulty of getting permits so the market will work. The reason we're in this boat is because the existing locals are rent-seeking, and don't want to live in a denser city - which causes a crisis elsewhere, because the people keep coming. In general, West Coast Cities seem to have this idea, that if you ignore the problem of insufficient housing - be it the symptoms (high rent, no affordable units) or the causes excessive permitting costs/lengthy approval times and restrictive zoning, it'll just go away. There are prosperous bustling big cities without housing affordability issues, they build housing, either in the city, or in nearby suburbs. The reality of it is people are moving there whether they like it or not. Seattle has had 20 years of almost continuous growth, with little housing expansion, and almost no affordable units (compared to growth. it can't pretend to be an ocean liner, and pull up the gangplanks and go "oh, sorry, we're full now, maybe you should try Portland? best of luck to you!"