7 ms·

Homelessness is about housing

93 points by jseliger 5y ago

shams93 5y ago
The so called "labor shortage" is also very related to lack of housing, nobody really wants to take a job if they have a 16 hour each way commute to and from affordable housing.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  There's also unwillingness (or inability) to relocate, even when the destination is affordable. There are foundries and factories dotting the Midwest, where they struggle to get enough people to show up sober. Few want to upend their lives for a job that is of unknown duration though
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    It is not affordable if the pay does not compensate for the income volatility. Volatility (perceived or real) is often times ignored in calculations, because it is difficult to translate into a number. But people can see and feel it, and sure they might over estimate and under estimate it, but it is part of people’s calculations.
  - dleslie 5y ago
    There's a reason why many of their staff have trouble showing up sober. The job sucks.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > Few want to upend their lives for a job that is of unknown duration though This is one of the problems. The question about moving somewhere is "What happens when my job evaporates?" If you're sitting in the Midwest, the answer is "Congratulations, you get to move again.". Another problem with leaving a high cost of living area for a low cost of living area is that moving back to the high cost of living area can be almost impossible. Once you slip off the housing pyramid scheme in a high cost of living area, you can't get back onto it. It's better to stay in the high cost of living area until you've banked enough money that you can leave permanently. > There are foundries and factories dotting the Midwest, where they struggle to get enough people to show up sober. Add an extra zero to the hourly wage and people will show up sober. This isn't a hard problem to solve. I get soooo tired of this. My anecdote along the lines of this was sitting at an injection molding conference while they sat and whined that they couldn't hold on to workers. And need more people in the pipeline. Etc. ... I'm somewhat sympathetic--I was a hiring manager during the DotBomb so I understand getting poached quite intimately. It doesn't help that working on an injection molding line is a tough job and pretty physically demanding--molds are basically a 40-100 cubic feet of steel and changing them out is rough. So, they finally name the poachers ... Amazon and Foxconn. Holy hell! I simply couldn't keep my mouth shut and went non-linear. I said loudly and in no uncertain terms that if they're losing people to two of the worst employers on the planet that they simply need to shut the hell down. Otherwise, shut the fuck up about poaching and pipelines until your salaries don't suck donkey balls. I didn't make many friends that day. But the couple I did had their heads screwed on straight. Just because the employer is in the Midwest doesn't make them competent.
    - structural 5y ago
      There's also a not insignificant number of employers that use their status as one of a very few employers in town to abuse employees, either in salary or otherwise, because the barrier to quitting is "do I want to uproot my entire family and have to move?" This definitely factors into people not wanting to move to places where there aren't not only jobs, but enough variety in employers to hedge against the worst of the worst.
  - Rapzid 5y ago
    > Yeah it's cold there, but the factory is hot and you'll be working 16 hour days there.. No you will be able to afford an efficiency with heat and have a few bucks left for a movie maybe once a month.. Well you'll be working 6 days a week anyway, you will have fun at work with your coworkers. Oh, one thing though.. It's REALLY important you show up to work sober okay so.. Is this an everyday thing or.. I'm shocked the Midwest doesn't have recruiters on site at the homeless encampments every day. Shocked I tell you.
baron816 5y ago
Imagine if every homeless person in SF got over their drug habit or was cured of their mental illness or physical disability or what ever other issue they had that drove them to being homeless. Then they all got stable jobs that they were good at and happy with. What kind of jobs do you think they’d get? Would they all become SWEs making $300k? Maybe they’d be lawyers, or marketing executives, or university presidents, or hospital administrators? I doubt it. The problem is that those people aren’t going to be able to get the kinds of jobs that would make it possible to even afford rent a place here. And most homeless don’t have the kinds of issues I listed before. And many among the ones who do have those issue as a result of becoming homeless. The city can throw any amount of money at trying to help the homeless, but it’s not going to make a difference if the minimum cost of living is above what they could ever earn.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  They'd move out of SF, something they can't do now due to the availability of drugs, good weather, and sympathetic tourists with money to spare.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    It's really great that you can blame your problems on tourists.
- trident5000 5y ago
  You cant live in San Francisco then. Pack your bags and live somewhere you can afford. That may sound harsh but its reality. You're not entitled to live anywhere you want just like i cant live on billionaires row in manhattan. edit: should have known this wouldnt be popular considering half of HN is trapped in cali absurd prices but refuse to leave. Too bad. Applies to you as well.
  - gregable 5y ago
    That's a common response. The problem is that it ignores the fact that San Francisco needs those people to fill jobs that need doing. https://nyti.ms/3yuq3nX https://nyti.ms/3yuq3nX The common response to that then is then we should just raise the pay in an area until every job pays enough to afford to live there, or if not those jobs are clearly not important enough. The problem is that the number of these jobs is growing faster than housing stock. Market forces can't solve the problem of more jobs than homes unless you can build homes or destroy jobs. Take a look at https://bit.ly/36ySeFS https://bit.ly/36ySeFS - Santa Clara County added 300,000 jobs between 2010 and 2020 while building around 6,000 homes per year (5 jobs per home). SF is the same story: total housing units in San Francisco increased by about 23,000 from 2010 to 2018 (https://commissions.sfplanning.org/cpcpackets/1996.0013CWP_2018_Presentation.pdf https://commissions.sfplanning.org/cpcpackets/1996.0013CWP_2..., slide 6). Total employment in San Francisco during the same period grew by almost 300,000. Seattle: total housing units in Seattle from 2010 to 2019 grew by about 59,000 homes (https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/about-seattle#housing https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/abo...). Total employment (labor force) in Seattle during the same period grew by 243,000 (https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUDV534264400000006?amp%253bdata_tool=XGtable&output_view=data&include_graphs=true https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUDV534264400000006?amp%253...)
jseliger 5y ago
This is consistent with a comment I left a few months ago: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build. Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes up with it. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs. The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.
- iamalexm 5y ago
  Not just zoning reform, we need to make actual free housing for people. We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs. We have a surplus of goods. We don't need people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we just need to give people a place to live and some food to eat so they can contribute and potentially dig themselves out of any hole they have found themselves in.
  - 6f8986c3 5y ago
    > We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs. Bullshit. There is plenty of work that needs to be done. People are just paid to not do it. In urban areas, they become political slaves, and in rural areas, it destroys any chance they might have of building a local economy.
pope_meat 5y ago
Perhaps homelessness can't be solved via market solutions...it hasn't so far.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  We've torn down about a million SROs in the last few decades. That's got to be part of the problem. Moving into an SRO is how I got back into housing after years of homelessness. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It doesn’t matter if it’s market solutions or not. Without more housing, California will keep having this problem. Blaming capitalism or government or whatever is a red herring. Build. More. Housing.
- cscurmudgeon 5y ago
  Because the govt. has not let the market solve it. In what free market are NIMBYs given this much free reign?
  - Izikiel43 5y ago
    The medieval free market
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  The market solution was flophouses. Government regulation is one thing preventing that market solution now. Another thing would be people like me who aren't about to have that type of housing in their neighborhood and would vote out any politician who allowed it.
gorwell 5y ago
Did anyone else notice this euphemism treadmill update? "for people experiencing homelessness" "the number of people experiencing homelessness" "of those experiencing homelessness" This softer language with more syllables is not for the benefit of the homeless, it's for everyone else so they don't feel as bad about it. Which makes it less likely anything will be done. George Carlin made this point brilliantly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
- paulpauper 5y ago
  Lol I am feeling more homeless today than usual
- KerrickStaley 5y ago
  The point of this wording is that "homeless" is not an identity, not a classification that permanently groups people into one category or another. Rather, it's a condition that people can experience, whether chronic or transient.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  No, that's absolutely got nothing to do with sparing the feelings of a stigmatized group or anyone else. It's entirely about helping people better understand that "the homeless" are not some separate, distinct group of people. They come from the general population. Anyone can end up homeless. The more we make it hard on individuals to leave that situation and rejoin society, the more we cut our own throats.
  - xanaxagoras 5y ago
    If you talk to me about "the homeless" if you have something interesting to say I'll listen. If you talk to me about "people experiencing homelessness" my eyes glaze over and I stop listening.
runarberg 5y ago
> Leftists often raise the true-but-misleading factoid that the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given day is generally much smaller than the number of homes that are unoccupied on any given day. > But as we covered [...] it’s not the case that homelessness is high where vacancy rates are high. I wonder if the author is willfully ignorant here. The point leftists are making is not that of correlation and causation, but that of the lack of political will. The point is that we could solve homelessness today if there was a political will. The point is usually along the lines of: “Homelessness is a really solvable problem, see if we used all the vacant housing we could house every single homeless person, sometimes many times over”. There is no correlation nor causation in this argument. And the point is so obvious I can’t imagine how the author got their reading into it, other then blanket dismissal of arguments from the political left. > I know it’s a little bit counterintuitive to people, but in a broad sense, the biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos. > market-rate housing generates tax revenue by bringing in new affluent residents, and that revenue can be used to finance an affordable housing trust fund or new public housing or whatever else you want. Here we go. The author seems to be proposing a trickle-down theory of housing. I’m not an economist but I’ve heard that trickle down theory is not the best economic theory we have. In fact I was under the impression that such theories were heavily biased by willful thinking, and have no basis in reality. If this were to be true there would need to be a political will to actually spend the hopefully increased tax revenue on housing, however we have no reason to believe that would be the case. And that goes back to the author’s misinterpretation in the previous quotes. If there was a political will, governments would buy up the existing vacant housing and use them to house the homeless.
- lwf 5y ago
  This is addressed directly in the article via economic theory, comparative analysis, and "detailed empirical work" (from studying cases where new housing was built and the observed effect on prices): From the article: > When I first started making the case for land use reform, we had two legs to our argument. One was basic economic theory — more supply equals less scarcity equals lower prices. The other was cross-sectional analysis — metro areas with laxer land use regulation see more construction and lower prices. But we can now add a third leg to that analysis in terms of detailed empirical work. [...] >> We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6 percent relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially.
treis 5y ago
That's some pretty aggressive trend lines for pretty noisy data. Looks pretty L shaped to me. Some outliers with low vacancy and high homelessness that make it look like there's a trend, but I don't know that I really see much of a correlation.
epivosism 5y ago
I found this convincing - proposal to fill in the south bay and build houses there near San Jose. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-... We've filled in a bunch of the bay already (Redwood Shores, Foster City) without problems, but stopped in the 70s. Cities like Boston which developed earlier had massive percentages of their bays taken over (>50%) without problems; but we've basically frozen this type of reclamation. The land along the bay shore is generally underused; there's at least 50sqm of salt ponds which produce very little value and aren't part of any historical ecosystem either.
alex_young 5y ago
Homelessness is not just about a lack of housing right? There are more than 13 million vacant homes in the US: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf Seems like it’s a matter of public policy that we can’t find a place for half a million people to live.
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  I've heard this before, I wonder how much of this a simple 1-2 month vacancy between tenets and how much is actually people owning buildings and not renting them out. It seems like a large portion is short term vacancies. Owning an empty building seems like a bad investment when you could rent it out and make much more money.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - runarberg 5y ago
    I guess this would be an easy question to answer. Just collect data on how long each house stays vacant, you can get e.g. the average time a house in Baltimore will stay vacant, which type of house and which neighborhood is more likely to stay vacant longer, etc. I did a quick google search for some summary on this statistic, but found nothing (unsurprisingly since I have never done this kind of research before). Since this is HN I’m sure if there is will somebody can provide us with a summary—or at least an answer—of whether this is the case.
Lammy 5y ago
> They open by quoting an October 18, 1957 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which says: "If rooming houses are permitted to spread to the city's one- and two-family neighborhoods, there is not much use in talking brave words about fighting blight." RE: """blight""" — https://newrepublic.com/article/119106/ferguson-missouris-complicated-history-poverty-and-racial-tension https://newrepublic.com/article/119106/ferguson-missouris-co... "You can’t really understand Ferguson unless you understand J.D. Shelley. He was a middle-class black man from north St. Louis who in 1945 bought a home in a neighborhood just a few minutes east of Ferguson, unaware of the restrictive covenant that barred its sale to 'people of the Negro or Asian Race'. Alas, this move inflamed Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away and was well aware of the covenant. Kraemer was temporarily vindicated when the Missouri Supreme court backed his lawsuit to enforce the covenant, but the United States Supreme Court overturned the Missouri ruling and forbade the state from enforcing such private agreements. In the wake of the Shelley v. Kraemer decision, blacks began to move out of crowded north St. Louis City, where many had been packed into high-rise projects such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, to north St. Louis County." Pruitt-Igoe is that housing project they implode in "Koyaanisqatsi" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
We recently scored a rental. The ad was up for 2 hours and had 50 applicants. Any rentals in this market get 400 people, each day, trying to rent the home. Googling news stories shows this same scenario playing out across the the US. Businesses want employees but without somewhere for employees to live, it's unclear how they can possibly find new hires. So yea. It's a housing problem.
taurath 5y ago
It really feels like our cities would be a lot better if we had some real central planning and didn’t leave everything as a patchwork. CA is starting to do that with mandating new housing but the dispersed system of government is basically at its worst here.

93 points by jseliger 5y ago

The so called "labor shortage" is also very related to lack of housing, nobody really wants to take a job if they have a 16 hour each way commute to and from affordable housing.

aidenn0 5y ago
There's also unwillingness (or inability) to relocate, even when the destination is affordable. There are foundries and factories dotting the Midwest, where they struggle to get enough people to show up sober. Few want to upend their lives for a job that is of unknown duration though
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is not affordable if the pay does not compensate for the income volatility. Volatility (perceived or real) is often times ignored in calculations, because it is difficult to translate into a number. But people can see and feel it, and sure they might over estimate and under estimate it, but it is part of people’s calculations.
- dleslie 5y ago
  There's a reason why many of their staff have trouble showing up sober. The job sucks.
- bsder 5y ago
  > Few want to upend their lives for a job that is of unknown duration though This is one of the problems. The question about moving somewhere is "What happens when my job evaporates?" If you're sitting in the Midwest, the answer is "Congratulations, you get to move again.". Another problem with leaving a high cost of living area for a low cost of living area is that moving back to the high cost of living area can be almost impossible. Once you slip off the housing pyramid scheme in a high cost of living area, you can't get back onto it. It's better to stay in the high cost of living area until you've banked enough money that you can leave permanently. > There are foundries and factories dotting the Midwest, where they struggle to get enough people to show up sober. Add an extra zero to the hourly wage and people will show up sober. This isn't a hard problem to solve. I get soooo tired of this. My anecdote along the lines of this was sitting at an injection molding conference while they sat and whined that they couldn't hold on to workers. And need more people in the pipeline. Etc. ... I'm somewhat sympathetic--I was a hiring manager during the DotBomb so I understand getting poached quite intimately. It doesn't help that working on an injection molding line is a tough job and pretty physically demanding--molds are basically a 40-100 cubic feet of steel and changing them out is rough. So, they finally name the poachers ... Amazon and Foxconn. Holy hell! I simply couldn't keep my mouth shut and went non-linear. I said loudly and in no uncertain terms that if they're losing people to two of the worst employers on the planet that they simply need to shut the hell down. Otherwise, shut the fuck up about poaching and pipelines until your salaries don't suck donkey balls. I didn't make many friends that day. But the couple I did had their heads screwed on straight. Just because the employer is in the Midwest doesn't make them competent.
  - structural 5y ago
    There's also a not insignificant number of employers that use their status as one of a very few employers in town to abuse employees, either in salary or otherwise, because the barrier to quitting is "do I want to uproot my entire family and have to move?" This definitely factors into people not wanting to move to places where there aren't not only jobs, but enough variety in employers to hedge against the worst of the worst.
- Rapzid 5y ago
  > Yeah it's cold there, but the factory is hot and you'll be working 16 hour days there.. No you will be able to afford an efficiency with heat and have a few bucks left for a movie maybe once a month.. Well you'll be working 6 days a week anyway, you will have fun at work with your coworkers. Oh, one thing though.. It's REALLY important you show up to work sober okay so.. Is this an everyday thing or.. I'm shocked the Midwest doesn't have recruiters on site at the homeless encampments every day. Shocked I tell you.

baron816 5y ago

Imagine if every homeless person in SF got over their drug habit or was cured of their mental illness or physical disability or what ever other issue they had that drove them to being homeless. Then they all got stable jobs that they were good at and happy with. What kind of jobs do you think they’d get? Would they all become SWEs making $300k? Maybe they’d be lawyers, or marketing executives, or university presidents, or hospital administrators? I doubt it. The problem is that those people aren’t going to be able to get the kinds of jobs that would make it possible to even afford rent a place here. And most homeless don’t have the kinds of issues I listed before. And many among the ones who do have those issue as a result of becoming homeless. The city can throw any amount of money at trying to help the homeless, but it’s not going to make a difference if the minimum cost of living is above what they could ever earn.

phendrenad2 5y ago
They'd move out of SF, something they can't do now due to the availability of drugs, good weather, and sympathetic tourists with money to spare.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  It's really great that you can blame your problems on tourists.
trident5000 5y ago
You cant live in San Francisco then. Pack your bags and live somewhere you can afford. That may sound harsh but its reality. You're not entitled to live anywhere you want just like i cant live on billionaires row in manhattan. edit: should have known this wouldnt be popular considering half of HN is trapped in cali absurd prices but refuse to leave. Too bad. Applies to you as well.
- gregable 5y ago
  That's a common response. The problem is that it ignores the fact that San Francisco needs those people to fill jobs that need doing. https://nyti.ms/3yuq3nX https://nyti.ms/3yuq3nX The common response to that then is then we should just raise the pay in an area until every job pays enough to afford to live there, or if not those jobs are clearly not important enough. The problem is that the number of these jobs is growing faster than housing stock. Market forces can't solve the problem of more jobs than homes unless you can build homes or destroy jobs. Take a look at https://bit.ly/36ySeFS https://bit.ly/36ySeFS - Santa Clara County added 300,000 jobs between 2010 and 2020 while building around 6,000 homes per year (5 jobs per home). SF is the same story: total housing units in San Francisco increased by about 23,000 from 2010 to 2018 (https://commissions.sfplanning.org/cpcpackets/1996.0013CWP_2018_Presentation.pdf https://commissions.sfplanning.org/cpcpackets/1996.0013CWP_2..., slide 6). Total employment in San Francisco during the same period grew by almost 300,000. Seattle: total housing units in Seattle from 2010 to 2019 grew by about 59,000 homes (https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/about-seattle#housing https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/abo...). Total employment (labor force) in Seattle during the same period grew by 243,000 (https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUDV534264400000006?amp%253bdata_tool=XGtable&output_view=data&include_graphs=true https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUDV534264400000006?amp%253...)

jseliger 5y ago

This is consistent with a comment I left a few months ago: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build. Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes up with it. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs. The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.

iamalexm 5y ago
Not just zoning reform, we need to make actual free housing for people. We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs. We have a surplus of goods. We don't need people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we just need to give people a place to live and some food to eat so they can contribute and potentially dig themselves out of any hole they have found themselves in.
- 6f8986c3 5y ago
  > We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs. Bullshit. There is plenty of work that needs to be done. People are just paid to not do it. In urban areas, they become political slaves, and in rural areas, it destroys any chance they might have of building a local economy.

pope_meat 5y ago

Perhaps homelessness can't be solved via market solutions...it hasn't so far.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
We've torn down about a million SROs in the last few decades. That's got to be part of the problem. Moving into an SRO is how I got back into housing after years of homelessness. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
Robotbeat 5y ago
It doesn’t matter if it’s market solutions or not. Without more housing, California will keep having this problem. Blaming capitalism or government or whatever is a red herring. Build. More. Housing.
cscurmudgeon 5y ago
Because the govt. has not let the market solve it. In what free market are NIMBYs given this much free reign?
- Izikiel43 5y ago
  The medieval free market
rufus_foreman 5y ago
The market solution was flophouses. Government regulation is one thing preventing that market solution now. Another thing would be people like me who aren't about to have that type of housing in their neighborhood and would vote out any politician who allowed it.

gorwell 5y ago

Did anyone else notice this euphemism treadmill update? "for people experiencing homelessness" "the number of people experiencing homelessness" "of those experiencing homelessness" This softer language with more syllables is not for the benefit of the homeless, it's for everyone else so they don't feel as bad about it. Which makes it less likely anything will be done. George Carlin made this point brilliantly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

paulpauper 5y ago
Lol I am feeling more homeless today than usual
KerrickStaley 5y ago
The point of this wording is that "homeless" is not an identity, not a classification that permanently groups people into one category or another. Rather, it's a condition that people can experience, whether chronic or transient.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
DoreenMichele 5y ago
No, that's absolutely got nothing to do with sparing the feelings of a stigmatized group or anyone else. It's entirely about helping people better understand that "the homeless" are not some separate, distinct group of people. They come from the general population. Anyone can end up homeless. The more we make it hard on individuals to leave that situation and rejoin society, the more we cut our own throats.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago
  If you talk to me about "the homeless" if you have something interesting to say I'll listen. If you talk to me about "people experiencing homelessness" my eyes glaze over and I stop listening.

runarberg 5y ago

> Leftists often raise the true-but-misleading factoid that the number of people experiencing homelessness on any given day is generally much smaller than the number of homes that are unoccupied on any given day. > But as we covered [...] it’s not the case that homelessness is high where vacancy rates are high. I wonder if the author is willfully ignorant here. The point leftists are making is not that of correlation and causation, but that of the lack of political will. The point is that we could solve homelessness today if there was a political will. The point is usually along the lines of: “Homelessness is a really solvable problem, see if we used all the vacant housing we could house every single homeless person, sometimes many times over”. There is no correlation nor causation in this argument. And the point is so obvious I can’t imagine how the author got their reading into it, other then blanket dismissal of arguments from the political left. > I know it’s a little bit counterintuitive to people, but in a broad sense, the biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos. > market-rate housing generates tax revenue by bringing in new affluent residents, and that revenue can be used to finance an affordable housing trust fund or new public housing or whatever else you want. Here we go. The author seems to be proposing a trickle-down theory of housing. I’m not an economist but I’ve heard that trickle down theory is not the best economic theory we have. In fact I was under the impression that such theories were heavily biased by willful thinking, and have no basis in reality. If this were to be true there would need to be a political will to actually spend the hopefully increased tax revenue on housing, however we have no reason to believe that would be the case. And that goes back to the author’s misinterpretation in the previous quotes. If there was a political will, governments would buy up the existing vacant housing and use them to house the homeless.

lwf 5y ago
This is addressed directly in the article via economic theory, comparative analysis, and "detailed empirical work" (from studying cases where new housing was built and the observed effect on prices): From the article: > When I first started making the case for land use reform, we had two legs to our argument. One was basic economic theory — more supply equals less scarcity equals lower prices. The other was cross-sectional analysis — metro areas with laxer land use regulation see more construction and lower prices. But we can now add a third leg to that analysis in terms of detailed empirical work. [...] >> We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6 percent relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas. We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially.

treis 5y ago

That's some pretty aggressive trend lines for pretty noisy data. Looks pretty L shaped to me. Some outliers with low vacancy and high homelessness that make it look like there's a trend, but I don't know that I really see much of a correlation.

epivosism 5y ago

I found this convincing - proposal to fill in the south bay and build houses there near San Jose. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vKErZy7TFhjxtyBuG/make-more-... We've filled in a bunch of the bay already (Redwood Shores, Foster City) without problems, but stopped in the 70s. Cities like Boston which developed earlier had massive percentages of their bays taken over (>50%) without problems; but we've basically frozen this type of reclamation. The land along the bay shore is generally underused; there's at least 50sqm of salt ponds which produce very little value and aren't part of any historical ecosystem either.

alex_young 5y ago

Homelessness is not just about a lack of housing right? There are more than 13 million vacant homes in the US: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf Seems like it’s a matter of public policy that we can’t find a place for half a million people to live.

frankbreetz 5y ago
I've heard this before, I wonder how much of this a simple 1-2 month vacancy between tenets and how much is actually people owning buildings and not renting them out. It seems like a large portion is short term vacancies. Owning an empty building seems like a bad investment when you could rent it out and make much more money.
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- runarberg 5y ago
  I guess this would be an easy question to answer. Just collect data on how long each house stays vacant, you can get e.g. the average time a house in Baltimore will stay vacant, which type of house and which neighborhood is more likely to stay vacant longer, etc. I did a quick google search for some summary on this statistic, but found nothing (unsurprisingly since I have never done this kind of research before). Since this is HN I’m sure if there is will somebody can provide us with a summary—or at least an answer—of whether this is the case.

Lammy 5y ago

> They open by quoting an October 18, 1957 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which says: "If rooming houses are permitted to spread to the city's one- and two-family neighborhoods, there is not much use in talking brave words about fighting blight." RE: """blight""" — https://newrepublic.com/article/119106/ferguson-missouris-complicated-history-poverty-and-racial-tension https://newrepublic.com/article/119106/ferguson-missouris-co... "You can’t really understand Ferguson unless you understand J.D. Shelley. He was a middle-class black man from north St. Louis who in 1945 bought a home in a neighborhood just a few minutes east of Ferguson, unaware of the restrictive covenant that barred its sale to 'people of the Negro or Asian Race'. Alas, this move inflamed Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away and was well aware of the covenant. Kraemer was temporarily vindicated when the Missouri Supreme court backed his lawsuit to enforce the covenant, but the United States Supreme Court overturned the Missouri ruling and forbade the state from enforcing such private agreements. In the wake of the Shelley v. Kraemer decision, blacks began to move out of crowded north St. Louis City, where many had been packed into high-rise projects such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, to north St. Louis County." Pruitt-Igoe is that housing project they implode in "Koyaanisqatsi" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq_SpRBXRmE

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

We recently scored a rental. The ad was up for 2 hours and had 50 applicants. Any rentals in this market get 400 people, each day, trying to rent the home. Googling news stories shows this same scenario playing out across the the US. Businesses want employees but without somewhere for employees to live, it's unclear how they can possibly find new hires. So yea. It's a housing problem.

taurath 5y ago

It really feels like our cities would be a lot better if we had some real central planning and didn’t leave everything as a patchwork. CA is starting to do that with mandating new housing but the dispersed system of government is basically at its worst here.