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> For homelessness, not having a home is the very definition of the issue I'm more interested in why they don't have a home. Is it really because rent is too h

by umvi 7y ago

> For homelessness, not having a home is the very definition of the issue I'm more interested in why they don't have a home. Is it really because rent is too high as you mentioned? Why can't they move to cheaper housing or take on a roommate? How come they don't have a family to fall back on (parents, siblings, etc)? These are the types of questions I want studied, not "how can we most effectively slap a bandaid on this symptom we are observing?" > You want to see fewer homeless? The single best thing you can do is advocate for more housing in your city. What I really want to see is fewer people getting into a position where they need to rely on the government to survive. How can we identify and address those root causes?

DoreenMichele 7y ago
I literally just answered exactly that and the answer is "Increase the supply of affordable (in the most literal sense of the word) housing in the US because there is a nationwide shortage." I don't mean "affordable housing" as some euphemism for government owned housing. I mean stuff you can get for under $600 that doesn't require you to own a car to get to it. There is a dearth of such housing across the entire freaking nation. For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove... The Clear Connection Between Housing Costs and Homelessness https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-connection-between-housing.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c... The Missing Middle https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing-middle.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing... I actually "majored" in this in college, so to speak. Before I spent nearly six years homeless, I wanted to be an urban planner. I was pursuing a bachelor's in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing intended to eventually also get a Masters in Urban Planning. As part of that program, I took a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I feel like I repeat these exact same points ad nauseum on Hacker News. Our housing policies have increasingly encouraged a very upper class version of single family detached homes designed for nuclear families and our demographics have diverged from that population. We literally don't build housing designed explicitly for the needs of single people, childless couples, etc and we have more such households than we used to have. We now have this insane expectation that single people should rent housing designed for a nuclear family and fill the extra bedrooms with strangers to split the rent. Then we make movies, like Single White Female, about what a nightmare it is to have to live with total strangers to make your life work. We've torn down more than a million SROs. We've largely zoned out of existence new Missing Middle Housing. People can't rent what doesn't actually exist and affordable housing in a walkable neighborhood mostly doesn't exist in the US. We simply don't build it. Then we run around acting like homeless people are all crazies and junkies, irresponsible, don't have self discipline, etc etc. and when you say "Just build more housing that works for people" you get crazy-making replies saying "But WHY?????" Because it would fix the vast majority of this problem. That's why. And then I feel like spitting nails because I don't know what I need to do to more effectively communicate about this thing that I've literally studied.
- umvi 7y ago
  > and our demographics have diverged from that population Sounds to me like a core part of the problem is the disintegration of the nuclear family. Maybe we need to go back and start promoting good old fashion nuclear families as the core unit of society.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    Our demographics have diverged because we are living longer, marrying later, having kids later, having fewer kids and pursuing more education. With 7 billion people on the planet, there's a lot of pressure to have fewer children, not more. Some of those two person households are empty nesters whose kids have moved out. The relatively high percentage of nuclear family homes post WW2 was a historical anomaly and it's simply not sustainable. So, no, that's not actually a better solution than "Let's build the kind of smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods that used to be the norm before we stupidly zoned them out of existence."
- belorn 7y ago
  Only anecdotally, but a pattern I have noticed here in Sweden is that the government seems to not want to be in charge of building homes for people. Affordable housing projects historically tend to up as the worst part of any city, something which I suspect is part of why every politician treat the topic as the plague. Local government seems to instead try get private actors to handle the job of creating more affordable housing, and the common tool I keep hearing is decision that areas of newly built homes must have a certain amount of rent based apartments. Private actors however seems to want to build a house and then get paid and move on, either by building condos or have each resident buy a "share" in organization that is formed to "own" the building. The apartments are thus modeled after people who can afford that large initial investment, and the dictated portion that need to be rent based is sized similar and selected among those that didn't get initially sold for one reason or an other. So from what I see the problem is not that urban planners focus on the nuclear family, but rather that no one want to build houses in order to regain the investment through slowly renting it out to many low income residents. Of course this just an observation, so it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on it.

by umvi 7y ago

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I literally just answered exactly that and the answer is "Increase the supply of affordable (in the most literal sense of the word) housing in the US because there is a nationwide shortage." I don't mean "affordable housing" as some euphemism for government owned housing. I mean stuff you can get for under $600 that doesn't require you to own a car to get to it. There is a dearth of such housing across the entire freaking nation. For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove... The Clear Connection Between Housing Costs and Homelessness https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-connection-between-housing.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c... The Missing Middle https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing-middle.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing... I actually "majored" in this in college, so to speak. Before I spent nearly six years homeless, I wanted to be an urban planner. I was pursuing a bachelor's in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing intended to eventually also get a Masters in Urban Planning. As part of that program, I took a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I feel like I repeat these exact same points ad nauseum on Hacker News. Our housing policies have increasingly encouraged a very upper class version of single family detached homes designed for nuclear families and our demographics have diverged from that population. We literally don't build housing designed explicitly for the needs of single people, childless couples, etc and we have more such households than we used to have. We now have this insane expectation that single people should rent housing designed for a nuclear family and fill the extra bedrooms with strangers to split the rent. Then we make movies, like Single White Female, about what a nightmare it is to have to live with total strangers to make your life work. We've torn down more than a million SROs. We've largely zoned out of existence new Missing Middle Housing. People can't rent what doesn't actually exist and affordable housing in a walkable neighborhood mostly doesn't exist in the US. We simply don't build it. Then we run around acting like homeless people are all crazies and junkies, irresponsible, don't have self discipline, etc etc. and when you say "Just build more housing that works for people" you get crazy-making replies saying "But WHY?????" Because it would fix the vast majority of this problem. That's why. And then I feel like spitting nails because I don't know what I need to do to more effectively communicate about this thing that I've literally studied.

umvi 7y ago
> and our demographics have diverged from that population Sounds to me like a core part of the problem is the disintegration of the nuclear family. Maybe we need to go back and start promoting good old fashion nuclear families as the core unit of society.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Our demographics have diverged because we are living longer, marrying later, having kids later, having fewer kids and pursuing more education. With 7 billion people on the planet, there's a lot of pressure to have fewer children, not more. Some of those two person households are empty nesters whose kids have moved out. The relatively high percentage of nuclear family homes post WW2 was a historical anomaly and it's simply not sustainable. So, no, that's not actually a better solution than "Let's build the kind of smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods that used to be the norm before we stupidly zoned them out of existence."
belorn 7y ago
Only anecdotally, but a pattern I have noticed here in Sweden is that the government seems to not want to be in charge of building homes for people. Affordable housing projects historically tend to up as the worst part of any city, something which I suspect is part of why every politician treat the topic as the plague. Local government seems to instead try get private actors to handle the job of creating more affordable housing, and the common tool I keep hearing is decision that areas of newly built homes must have a certain amount of rent based apartments. Private actors however seems to want to build a house and then get paid and move on, either by building condos or have each resident buy a "share" in organization that is formed to "own" the building. The apartments are thus modeled after people who can afford that large initial investment, and the dictated portion that need to be rent based is sized similar and selected among those that didn't get initially sold for one reason or an other. So from what I see the problem is not that urban planners focus on the nuclear family, but rather that no one want to build houses in order to regain the investment through slowly renting it out to many low income residents. Of course this just an observation, so it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on it.