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Homelessness is a solved problem. SF residents don't want the solution. Real estate is the primary wealth building asset class of long-term residents who boug

Homelessness is a solved problem. SF residents don't want the solution. Real estate is the primary wealth building asset class of long-term residents who bought property ages ago or inherited it. In California property taxes as assessed at time of sale, so you hold onto properties realistically valued at multiple millions while paying taxes at rate appropriate to tens of thousands. Bulldozing a single family home to build a multi-family unit has an enormous cost on the back end given re-assessment. Any potential drop in property values has massive protest. It's such a nice free-ride you will fight tooth and nail for. These residents just want the homeless population "dealt with". The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force. This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact. Consider that between 2010 and 2020, SF built ~25,000 new housing units. Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units. Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them. That would cause property values to plummet. Many long-term residents would have to seek employment after a lifetime of living off rents.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
As long as California is willing to pay market value for said house, then sure. Otherwise, they have no more right to my property than anyone else. The USA isn't a communist country or a dictatorship, and property rights dominate except in the most dire circumstances. So it really isn't a “solved problem”. What would work is shutting the NIMBY's down and letting housing get rezoned by developers for multi-home units.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  How does one determine the correct "market value" of a property where government zoning laws prevent building more dense housing? Perhaps you advocate for removing these zoning laws and then letting the market clear?
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    The property rights absolutist solution would be to build a wall on publicly owned land blockading the private property and reducing its value to nothing and then buying it from the owner at its new market price of zero. When this happens in real life they can apply to the government for an easement, but that's practically communism, so we wouldn't allow that in this thought experiment. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/landlocked.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/landlocked.asp
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Market value is market value. Any competent real estate agent can give you a decent estimate.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  "Work" how? By lining developers' pockets and ruining already-residential areas? So now we'll have overpriced multi-unit monstrosities where a single house stood, covering more ground with concrete, destroying trees, and inviting MORE people to live in an area facing severe drought. BRILLIANT. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." No, YOU'RE A BUNCH OF USER-ABUSING JAGOFFS, HACKER NEWS. PISS OFF. THANKS.
bojangleslover 5y ago
I live in Charlotte and we have a big, growing cluster of tents as well as rising "homelessness" in other areas of downtown as well. The other day, more than half of people I saw walking on the streets were in a bad way. So I don't think the extra space and houses is doing much.
dud6eyrc 5y ago
Homelessness in the US has virtually nothing to do with housing supply. While I'm sure it happens, as a population these are not San Fransiscans who couldn't afford rent and now live in the street.
freyir 5y ago
San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country. How many more people need to be placed in supportive housing in San Francisco before this problem is solved? If homes are abundant in Charlotte, why do so many homeless people live on the streets in San Francisco instead, where there’s not even sufficient housing to support working middle class families? When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. And over 90% of the chronically homeless placed in supportive housing there never move out. So what percentage of the nation’s chronically homeless population can be housed indefinitely at taxpayer expense on a tiny landlocked peninsula where seemingly everyone wants to live? This has become a statewide/nationwide problem and it needs solutions on a bigger scale than one city in isolation can provide.
- vkou 5y ago
  > San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country. Is it actually higher in SF than in NYC? > When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. This is a fascinating idea. Does this mean that kicking one person out of housing somehow remove two from the street? Or could it mean that three people end up homeless in the time that it takes to house one homeless person?
  - zemvpferreira 5y ago
    If I remember correctly from my time there many of SF's homeless are migrants: they're not people who lived in SF and became destitute, but people who moved in/were moved (tales of cities putting homeless en masse on Greyhounds to SF abound) from places with worse weather and economies. In that sense I understand Newsom's position: if homeless are already migrating from all over the US due to life being easier in San Francisco, it might only get worse in the city if conditions improve for individuals. It sucks, but we can't expect SF to solve America's homeless problem alone.
sien 5y ago
Sleeping Rough and not affording homes are related. The Bay Area definitely needs to build more houses. However, in San Fransicko and in other places it is pointed out that New York City, that also has astronomical housing prices and also doesn't build enough, has a fraction of the people sleeping rough that SF does. NYC has lots of temporary shelter for people who are homeless. SF doesn't have enough. From https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h... "New York has an extensive shelter network with over 748 locations that house more than 62,000 individuals and families experiencing homelessness every night. This extensive network means New York has an unsheltered homeless rate of 45 per 100,000 residents¹. San Francisco’s rate is 492 per 100,000 residents², almost 11 times as high." "San Francisco, despite a shelter waiting list of more than 1,000 people, has fewer shelter beds than it did in 2004." I'm most of the way through San Fransicko and would thoroughly recommend the book. It also does mention NIMBYs and YIMBYs but the focus is on the way that SF and other West Coast US cities have dealt very poorly with homeless people while NYC and other cities in the East have dealt much better with the problem.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  NYC has winters, it’s not temperate all year round. Think about all the poor people that would freeze to death in places like India or SF - if they had winters like the northeast). Warmer places will have the temperature to sustain a homeless population. NYC, prior to our current Democratic mayor, had aggressive law enforcement during Giuliani and Bloomberg terms. They would corral the homeless into specific areas (the poor neighborhoods) and push them out of sight (actual strategy to hide the homeless). You can be homeless in NYC, just not around areas where ‘decent’ folk live. Interpret that however you want. If SF corralled the homeless to the ghettos, no one would notice. Overall, if we take a census of the homeless, we’d easily learn that a good percentage of them are mentally ill and/or drug addicts. It’s much cheaper to build tents for them than provide institutional treatment (prolonged stay in clinics and mental health wards of hospitals). Generally these hospitals don’t have enough beds for everyone and constantly try to release everyone within 72 hours, no matter how severe the situation is. Plus, the cost of healthcare is immense (I’d say orders of magnitude over the tent housing solution). These are forsaken people, we will never solve this. I would recommend SF hide their homeless and get them off the beaches and boardwalks, and put the tents out of sight somewhere desolate. We as a society don’t have a sustainable altruism to succeed here.
throwaway313313 5y ago
All organisms or systems that can grow have limits. In biology, this is typically either the ability to eat or the ability to eliminate waste. A city will always reach a limit. It could be water, transportation infrastructure, economically viable activities given the location, etc, or if you are lucky as a result of the location being desirable, physical space. You can't build your way out of the San Francisco affordability issue even if you (for example) double the aid per homeless person and double the free housing. There is an error in the common thinking about the homeless problem in San Francisco. San Francisco has a homeless problem because it's affluent and provides services, not despite being affluent and providing services. If San Francisco wanted to provide assisted living for members of society that can't support themselves, it would get the most bang for it's buck to provide food, shelter, clean bathrooms, trash services, electricity, and wifi in other willing cities in California. You could build a range of accommodations and shelters, all the way from campsites to cabins to resorts, and you could get user feedback from the residents to determine which operators to expand with and which facilities to shut down. The idea of trying to build your way out of homeless problem in the most expensive and physically constrained city in California is madness. That's just enriching the interests that have become the San Francisco homeless industrial complex. Article: "S.F. pays $61,000 a year for one tent in a site to shelter the homeless. Why?" https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-year-for-one-tent-to-house-16001074.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
alexashka 5y ago
You've given this some thought. What I don't understand is why you think cities should provide shelter for people who don't contribute to them. If you can't make a city a better place - you should have shelter, somewhere cheap and distant. If you get your life together there, you can come and try living in a city again. Living in a city should be a privilege, not a right - cities take a lot of work and if you aren't doing your part - it's ok and you should live with dignity and respect (because we have plenty of food and electricity to go around, for now), but you don't get to live off of other people's efforts by insisting that you get to stay in a city because you were born in one or whatever. Cities are like night clubs, if you don't get the ratio of men to women right, the night club sucks. The same applies to productive and unproductive citizens. Just because we can let anyone into a night club, doesn't mean it won't make it suck for everyone involved. Following the night club analogy, what needs to happen is we need to lower the barrier to opening up new night clubs. There is no reason why we can't build new towns that make use of modern technology that people would flock to - it is not a resource issue, it is an imagination, competence and regulation issue (implementing land value tax to get rid of rent seeking on land), much like everything else in human society.
- RobLach 5y ago
  Because it’s cheaper in the long term, not even considering the social/humanitarian benefits.
  - alexashka 5y ago
    If we're going to go off of what's cheaper, converting homeless people into fertilizer seems best. There are no social benefits to forcing productive members of society to quietly tolerate and provide for unproductive members. It fosters resentment and tension. You see, 'social' includes everyone, not just those we re-allocate someone else's resources towards. There's this stupid idea that if someone's a 'victim', they deserve special treatment. No, that's not an axiom. It is only an axiom if you're stupid and haven't gone out of your way to ever really try and 'help' 'victims' - those that have, quickly realize what a bottomless pit it often is.
- 5y ago
bojangleslover 5y ago
The blow to property values would be lessened though by the fact that you don't have to see "homelessness" every time you eat at an outdoor restaurant or walk your dog.
- taurath 5y ago
  Politically it seems impossible though, because the hit will always be avoided by those with the most power
jjav 5y ago
> Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units. Charlotte, NC also has way more open space to expand than SF, which has none, surrounded by water on three sides and other cities to the south.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  If only there were a third dimension of space.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Kye 5y ago
  I hear up is the hot new dimension in other places that hit the same barrier.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Norway has 5 million people in total, and used to be very homogeneous. I think it was Robert Putnam who showed that with increasing diversity, you will get less solidarity and openness/trust towards strangers. Homelessness may be a solved problem in Norway, but it does not mean that Norwegian solution is readily transplantable into San Francisco. Much like we failed to transplant modern way of life to Afghanistan.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  > Much like we failed to transplant modern way of life to Afghanistan. Which attempt are you talking about. The 3 times the British empire invaded, the three times the Soviet Union invaded or the latest Nato-American invasion. (Historically there was the Sikh, Mugal, Muslim invasions too, etc. etc.) Possibly the locals got a poor view of western "civilization" by being on the wrong end of its armies multiple times. Strangely, I agree with your general point, but possibly from the opposite direction. For example, when Finland was doing its equivalent of the New Deal, I find it unlikely there were any Finn's that would try to use that as political leverage to delay anti-lynching laws and vice-versa. Racists seem to be one of the most corrosively self-defeating forces in human society.
  - saargrin 5y ago
    Regarding Afghanistan, you forget to mention that part of history where Afghanis raided and conquered large parts of what is now India (the Durani empire and Babur come to mind) , not to mention raiding into Persia and Merv Its hard to pretend Afghanis' view of "civilization" was formed by the British "invasion" which was not permanent
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Excellent additional detail, but not sure how it interacts with my point? I think someone invading you (3 times) is highly likely to give you an opinion about them and their ideals, even if they fail, but maybe the Afghanis are a bit more "forgive and forget" than most.
ralusek 5y ago
Homelessness of this kind has very little to do with housing, if at all. What you've said here is all true as it relates to the affordability of housing, but that's not why these people are homeless. I've said it before, and I'll said it again: people seem to act as if the only two options are having a house in the most expensive city in the world, or being homeless in the most expensive city in the world. If I can't afford a house in the most expensive city in the world, my immediate thought isn't going to be "well I guess I can't live anywhere then, streets it is."
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Once you recognize this problem, it can be solved by grandfathering people in, basically paying off the people who used to benefit so that the rules can be changed to be fairer in the future. This feels a bit icky but is a recurring pattern. For example, when slaves were emancipated the previous owners were often compensated, because if not they would politically block it happening. I feel it's going to get to a crunch in some places before people do anything about it but various places will start adopting variants of this to deflate the bubble. Basically passing some of the land value tax onto the lucky current property owners as an annuity, and allowing them to move somewhere cheaper and decouple safely from the local property market. Probably needs enough of a threat that they'll just be forced to pay the full tax before they'll cave though, so it's just politics at that point. Who has more power and/or propaganda will decide the outcome.
bradleyjg 5y ago
I’m a lifelong renter that would love to see yimby policies put in place, but this is misleading. Norway is cold. Show me a city where people can sleep outdoors year round without dying that doesn’t have homeless and then we can see what an effective solution looks like.
- grecy 5y ago
  Australia has roughly 116,000 homeless out of a population of 25,690,000 [1] [1] https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/need-help/homelessness-support-services/national-homelessness-week/homelessness-statistics/ https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/need-help/homelessness-supp...
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    Homeless is an ill defined term. The definition used by governments and NGOs is different from the one used by everyone else. The former seem to deliberately lean in to the confusion in order to tie policy goals related to their more expansive definition to the greater public interest in solving the narrower problem. In any event, it doesn’t take very many homeless by the colloquial definition to make a city unpleasant. I don’t know whether or not Sydney has a homelessness problem and that link doesn’t tell me.
JeremyNT 5y ago
We should certainly subsidize the building of homes and give them to the homeless (or at least make them very affordable). Can you link to the details of the program in Charlotte? As somebody who is from NC, most home building is driven by for profit developers and it actually increases demand. They target higher end construction since the margins are higher. This is a feedback loop since the increased density of wealthy residents results in areas gaining even more amenities that the higher density will support, and thus becoming more attractive places to move for people in higher col areas out of state. Building wealth by ensuring new units end up in the hands of low income people is a wonderful idea, but around here it seems to be the opposite occurring.
- wjamesg 5y ago
  I am in NC. All the new development in my area seems to be homes crammed as closely together as possible on mowed down property - no trees or neighborhood identity whatsoever.
- kentonv 5y ago
  > most home building... actually increases demand. Is there data supporting this claim? It seems quite extraordinary that supply would create more demand than it satisfies. That's just not how economics usually works. If affluent people from around the country are moving to Charlotte, I would think they're likely drawn by other factors, such as their jobs or family roots bringing them there, not by the mere existence of fancy housing and gentrified neighborhoods. If the new development didn't exist, those people would still be moving but would end up choosing slightly lower-end housing -- forcing up the prices and thus forcing out existing residents. This "making fancy houses only increases home prices" argument seems like a rationalization invented by people who are looking for a reason to block such development. It seems highly unlikely to me that this would actually be true. Politically, it's easy to be angry at developers for only building high-end housing, when it seems like the real problems are at the low end of the market. However, in reality, you can't expect it to be any other way -- and that's OK, because building high-end homes actually does help the low end of the market too. New construction is inherently high-end. It's actually hard to build a new house or apartment building that isn't desirable to affluent people -- you'd have to go out of your way to use old design standards and bad materials that don't cost any less but make the home less desirable. This isn't economically viable for developers. So of course developers are always going to target mid-to-high end. But that's fine, because when you build more high-end housing, then people move up from slightly lesser housing, making that housing available for people to move up to from even lower-end housing, and so on. This eventually makes housing available at the low end of the market for people who couldn't previously afford housing at all -- or perhaps for the government to rent on behalf of homeless people at an acceptable cost. San Francisco is bizarrely full of terrible 100+-year-old apartments with high-income techies living in them, just because there's nowhere else for them to live. This is a failure. That should be low-end housing, but it's not because there's not enough high-end housing for all the affluent people.
lazide 5y ago
Do you have any links for the homelessness is a solved problem claim? While I’ve seen societies that have reduced the problem, I haven’t seen any that have solved the problem - at least if they are bigger than ‘toy’ populations. Plenty of places pretending they solved the problem by shipping people to jail or similar if they refuse to live somewhere the authorities demand they do. That said, SF is pretty much a poster child for almost worst case homelessness (and if adjusted by regional per capita income may legitimately be the worst). I guess part of the difficulty is what exactly the definition of ‘the problem’ in ‘the homeless problem’ means seems to vary a lot by person, and most of the plans or influence here are coming from people who are quite explicitly not homeless, which is the group being ‘helped’. Which sets up some serious moral hazards.
- homo_ergaster 5y ago
  Finland’s recent policies are a good example https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-january-26-2020-1.5429251/housing-is-a-human-right-how-finland-is-eradicating-homelessness-1.5437402 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-janua...
  - lazide 5y ago
    That is definitely not evidence of the claim?
    - homo_ergaster 5y ago
      How is it not? They solved homelessness
      - lazide 5y ago
        1) that is a political news piece (not anything rigorous) written in Canada for Canada that is breathless about victory in Finland, and where the primary source appears to be the primary political activist for the policies in Finland. Aka, good luck getting a solid idea of real trade offs or problems. When you read it there is almost no actual data. Where the head political advocate for the policy provides some data, it shows progress, but as quoted, not victory or a solution, see “ A lot of progress has been made. We now have the lowest number of homeless. Our present government has decided that the rest of the homeless should be halved within the next four years and completely end by 2027” So we’d need 5 years before even the most gang busters assessment could say if it was solved or not. And it seems to be because it was decided, not because that is what projections show will happen? So if the last 10% don’t co-operate, then what? 2) Finland has only 5.5 million people in a massive land area, and one of the lowest population densities in the world. They also are remarkably ethnically consistent. They also have a incredibly hostile climate that will strongly discourage (or outright kill in the first month of winter) anyone who is unsheltered homeless. They also have socialized medicine. They are also very wealthy because of natural resources which almost no other country has. For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area discussed earlier on it’s own has approximately 50% larger population than all of Finland all on it’s own in only 5% of the land area, and none of those other factors helping (add scare quotes depending on the factor). That is pretty much the definition of a ‘toy population’ in this case, and even they aren’t saying it’s actually solved in that case yet, just that it totally will be at some point in the future. While I think SF advocates have stopped trying to claim victory is possible or they’ll have it under control at some point in the future, there was a time that is what they said too.
samstave 5y ago
The entire nations property values are FN insane. They should ALL drop. 1350 sf for $599,000 thats $450/sf - wtf. in the ghetto in SF. and the home is a ghetto looking home on the outside with zero land. I LOVE Joe Rogan shitting all over LA and SF. The podcast with the author is fantastic to have in the background and listen to. again, I want to help the homeless with 'Care Fleet' -- See my other comment on that.
zthrowaway 5y ago
Giving them a home isn’t going to solve their drug addiction. Far from having a 100% solution.
rsj_hn 5y ago
So SF will now be giving away houses, huh? OK, I'll take a free home in SF, sure. But not to the middle class, no, just to the homeless. Then how many days do I need to survive on the street in order to get a free house? If it's a hundred days, and one of these places is 800K, then that's like paying me 8K per day -- it's a no brainer. For a free house, I'm even willing to mutter to myself and defecate on your porch. You are right, this would cause property values to plummet -- it's literally paying me to come into your neighborhood and be antisocial. Just give me the date and time of the degradation olympics and there will be lots of people willing to participate. More people than SF can afford to build houses for. You get more of what you subsidize, not less.
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>Homelessness is a solved problem. It is but I can 100% confirm that nobody in cali wants to solve that problem. >The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force. This solution isn't viable neither. The Cali government policy(ies) is increasing the rate of homelessness. Even if you were to round them all up and send all homeless out of the state, it isn't viably going to solve the problem. >This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact. It's worse than that. You might expect there's some benefit there but this mechanism itself is actually making the situation worse. Though it's certainly not popular to discuss that direction. Afterall what you're saying is road to hell is paved with good intentions. >Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them. Not quite accurate, they dont give away free homes. It's more like bomb shelters and such that the homeless can live in, but even that'snot quite accurate. The sole reason Norway has practically no homeless is because they have no actual minimum wage.
nikonyrh 5y ago
"...so you hold onto properties realistically valued at multiple millions while paying taxes at rate appropriate to tens of thousands." Doesn't that make the tax percentage very low when prices have risen so much? And in addition the percentage varies from unit to unit, even if they are identical in all aspects (including their value) except when it was last sold. What a weird system.
MrWiffles 5y ago
> Consider that between 2010 and 2020, SF built ~25,000 new housing units. > > Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units. Could you tell me where you got your data on this? Not because I want to pick it apart, but because I'm in the process of figuring out where I want to live long-term now that I've decided to leave Texas for good, and rate of new home construction is one of the data parameters I'm looking at in hopes that it'll be at least one positive indicator of realistic housing costs in the area. I'm looking at TONS of other factors as well, but this is a critical one since housing is by far the most expensive line item in any family or individual budget these days. Thanks!

stjohnswarts 5y ago

As long as California is willing to pay market value for said house, then sure. Otherwise, they have no more right to my property than anyone else. The USA isn't a communist country or a dictatorship, and property rights dominate except in the most dire circumstances. So it really isn't a “solved problem”. What would work is shutting the NIMBY's down and letting housing get rezoned by developers for multi-home units.

i_am_proteus 5y ago
How does one determine the correct "market value" of a property where government zoning laws prevent building more dense housing? Perhaps you advocate for removing these zoning laws and then letting the market clear?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  The property rights absolutist solution would be to build a wall on publicly owned land blockading the private property and reducing its value to nothing and then buying it from the owner at its new market price of zero. When this happens in real life they can apply to the government for an easement, but that's practically communism, so we wouldn't allow that in this thought experiment. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/landlocked.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/landlocked.asp
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Market value is market value. Any competent real estate agent can give you a decent estimate.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
"Work" how? By lining developers' pockets and ruining already-residential areas? So now we'll have overpriced multi-unit monstrosities where a single house stood, covering more ground with concrete, destroying trees, and inviting MORE people to live in an area facing severe drought. BRILLIANT. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." No, YOU'RE A BUNCH OF USER-ABUSING JAGOFFS, HACKER NEWS. PISS OFF. THANKS.

bojangleslover 5y ago

I live in Charlotte and we have a big, growing cluster of tents as well as rising "homelessness" in other areas of downtown as well. The other day, more than half of people I saw walking on the streets were in a bad way. So I don't think the extra space and houses is doing much.

dud6eyrc 5y ago

Homelessness in the US has virtually nothing to do with housing supply. While I'm sure it happens, as a population these are not San Fransiscans who couldn't afford rent and now live in the street.

freyir 5y ago

San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country. How many more people need to be placed in supportive housing in San Francisco before this problem is solved? If homes are abundant in Charlotte, why do so many homeless people live on the streets in San Francisco instead, where there’s not even sufficient housing to support working middle class families? When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. And over 90% of the chronically homeless placed in supportive housing there never move out. So what percentage of the nation’s chronically homeless population can be housed indefinitely at taxpayer expense on a tiny landlocked peninsula where seemingly everyone wants to live? This has become a statewide/nationwide problem and it needs solutions on a bigger scale than one city in isolation can provide.

vkou 5y ago
> San Francisco already has among the highest number of people placed in supportive housing per capita of any city in the country. Is it actually higher in SF than in NYC? > When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. This is a fascinating idea. Does this mean that kicking one person out of housing somehow remove two from the street? Or could it mean that three people end up homeless in the time that it takes to house one homeless person?
- zemvpferreira 5y ago
  If I remember correctly from my time there many of SF's homeless are migrants: they're not people who lived in SF and became destitute, but people who moved in/were moved (tales of cities putting homeless en masse on Greyhounds to SF abound) from places with worse weather and economies. In that sense I understand Newsom's position: if homeless are already migrating from all over the US due to life being easier in San Francisco, it might only get worse in the city if conditions improve for individuals. It sucks, but we can't expect SF to solve America's homeless problem alone.

sien 5y ago

Sleeping Rough and not affording homes are related. The Bay Area definitely needs to build more houses. However, in San Fransicko and in other places it is pointed out that New York City, that also has astronomical housing prices and also doesn't build enough, has a fraction of the people sleeping rough that SF does. NYC has lots of temporary shelter for people who are homeless. SF doesn't have enough. From https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h... "New York has an extensive shelter network with over 748 locations that house more than 62,000 individuals and families experiencing homelessness every night. This extensive network means New York has an unsheltered homeless rate of 45 per 100,000 residents¹. San Francisco’s rate is 492 per 100,000 residents², almost 11 times as high." "San Francisco, despite a shelter waiting list of more than 1,000 people, has fewer shelter beds than it did in 2004." I'm most of the way through San Fransicko and would thoroughly recommend the book. It also does mention NIMBYs and YIMBYs but the focus is on the way that SF and other West Coast US cities have dealt very poorly with homeless people while NYC and other cities in the East have dealt much better with the problem.

crate_barre 5y ago
NYC has winters, it’s not temperate all year round. Think about all the poor people that would freeze to death in places like India or SF - if they had winters like the northeast). Warmer places will have the temperature to sustain a homeless population. NYC, prior to our current Democratic mayor, had aggressive law enforcement during Giuliani and Bloomberg terms. They would corral the homeless into specific areas (the poor neighborhoods) and push them out of sight (actual strategy to hide the homeless). You can be homeless in NYC, just not around areas where ‘decent’ folk live. Interpret that however you want. If SF corralled the homeless to the ghettos, no one would notice. Overall, if we take a census of the homeless, we’d easily learn that a good percentage of them are mentally ill and/or drug addicts. It’s much cheaper to build tents for them than provide institutional treatment (prolonged stay in clinics and mental health wards of hospitals). Generally these hospitals don’t have enough beds for everyone and constantly try to release everyone within 72 hours, no matter how severe the situation is. Plus, the cost of healthcare is immense (I’d say orders of magnitude over the tent housing solution). These are forsaken people, we will never solve this. I would recommend SF hide their homeless and get them off the beaches and boardwalks, and put the tents out of sight somewhere desolate. We as a society don’t have a sustainable altruism to succeed here.

throwaway313313 5y ago

All organisms or systems that can grow have limits. In biology, this is typically either the ability to eat or the ability to eliminate waste. A city will always reach a limit. It could be water, transportation infrastructure, economically viable activities given the location, etc, or if you are lucky as a result of the location being desirable, physical space. You can't build your way out of the San Francisco affordability issue even if you (for example) double the aid per homeless person and double the free housing. There is an error in the common thinking about the homeless problem in San Francisco. San Francisco has a homeless problem because it's affluent and provides services, not despite being affluent and providing services. If San Francisco wanted to provide assisted living for members of society that can't support themselves, it would get the most bang for it's buck to provide food, shelter, clean bathrooms, trash services, electricity, and wifi in other willing cities in California. You could build a range of accommodations and shelters, all the way from campsites to cabins to resorts, and you could get user feedback from the residents to determine which operators to expand with and which facilities to shut down. The idea of trying to build your way out of homeless problem in the most expensive and physically constrained city in California is madness. That's just enriching the interests that have become the San Francisco homeless industrial complex. Article: "S.F. pays $61,000 a year for one tent in a site to shelter the homeless. Why?" https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-year-for-one-tent-to-house-16001074.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...

alexashka 5y ago

You've given this some thought. What I don't understand is why you think cities should provide shelter for people who don't contribute to them. If you can't make a city a better place - you should have shelter, somewhere cheap and distant. If you get your life together there, you can come and try living in a city again. Living in a city should be a privilege, not a right - cities take a lot of work and if you aren't doing your part - it's ok and you should live with dignity and respect (because we have plenty of food and electricity to go around, for now), but you don't get to live off of other people's efforts by insisting that you get to stay in a city because you were born in one or whatever. Cities are like night clubs, if you don't get the ratio of men to women right, the night club sucks. The same applies to productive and unproductive citizens. Just because we can let anyone into a night club, doesn't mean it won't make it suck for everyone involved. Following the night club analogy, what needs to happen is we need to lower the barrier to opening up new night clubs. There is no reason why we can't build new towns that make use of modern technology that people would flock to - it is not a resource issue, it is an imagination, competence and regulation issue (implementing land value tax to get rid of rent seeking on land), much like everything else in human society.

RobLach 5y ago
Because it’s cheaper in the long term, not even considering the social/humanitarian benefits.
- alexashka 5y ago
  If we're going to go off of what's cheaper, converting homeless people into fertilizer seems best. There are no social benefits to forcing productive members of society to quietly tolerate and provide for unproductive members. It fosters resentment and tension. You see, 'social' includes everyone, not just those we re-allocate someone else's resources towards. There's this stupid idea that if someone's a 'victim', they deserve special treatment. No, that's not an axiom. It is only an axiom if you're stupid and haven't gone out of your way to ever really try and 'help' 'victims' - those that have, quickly realize what a bottomless pit it often is.
5y ago

bojangleslover 5y ago

The blow to property values would be lessened though by the fact that you don't have to see "homelessness" every time you eat at an outdoor restaurant or walk your dog.

taurath 5y ago
Politically it seems impossible though, because the hit will always be avoided by those with the most power

jjav 5y ago

> Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units. Charlotte, NC also has way more open space to expand than SF, which has none, surrounded by water on three sides and other cities to the south.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
If only there were a third dimension of space.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Kye 5y ago
I hear up is the hot new dimension in other places that hit the same barrier.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Norway has 5 million people in total, and used to be very homogeneous. I think it was Robert Putnam who showed that with increasing diversity, you will get less solidarity and openness/trust towards strangers. Homelessness may be a solved problem in Norway, but it does not mean that Norwegian solution is readily transplantable into San Francisco. Much like we failed to transplant modern way of life to Afghanistan.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> Much like we failed to transplant modern way of life to Afghanistan. Which attempt are you talking about. The 3 times the British empire invaded, the three times the Soviet Union invaded or the latest Nato-American invasion. (Historically there was the Sikh, Mugal, Muslim invasions too, etc. etc.) Possibly the locals got a poor view of western "civilization" by being on the wrong end of its armies multiple times. Strangely, I agree with your general point, but possibly from the opposite direction. For example, when Finland was doing its equivalent of the New Deal, I find it unlikely there were any Finn's that would try to use that as political leverage to delay anti-lynching laws and vice-versa. Racists seem to be one of the most corrosively self-defeating forces in human society.
- saargrin 5y ago
  Regarding Afghanistan, you forget to mention that part of history where Afghanis raided and conquered large parts of what is now India (the Durani empire and Babur come to mind) , not to mention raiding into Persia and Merv Its hard to pretend Afghanis' view of "civilization" was formed by the British "invasion" which was not permanent
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Excellent additional detail, but not sure how it interacts with my point? I think someone invading you (3 times) is highly likely to give you an opinion about them and their ideals, even if they fail, but maybe the Afghanis are a bit more "forgive and forget" than most.

ralusek 5y ago

Homelessness of this kind has very little to do with housing, if at all. What you've said here is all true as it relates to the affordability of housing, but that's not why these people are homeless. I've said it before, and I'll said it again: people seem to act as if the only two options are having a house in the most expensive city in the world, or being homeless in the most expensive city in the world. If I can't afford a house in the most expensive city in the world, my immediate thought isn't going to be "well I guess I can't live anywhere then, streets it is."

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Once you recognize this problem, it can be solved by grandfathering people in, basically paying off the people who used to benefit so that the rules can be changed to be fairer in the future. This feels a bit icky but is a recurring pattern. For example, when slaves were emancipated the previous owners were often compensated, because if not they would politically block it happening. I feel it's going to get to a crunch in some places before people do anything about it but various places will start adopting variants of this to deflate the bubble. Basically passing some of the land value tax onto the lucky current property owners as an annuity, and allowing them to move somewhere cheaper and decouple safely from the local property market. Probably needs enough of a threat that they'll just be forced to pay the full tax before they'll cave though, so it's just politics at that point. Who has more power and/or propaganda will decide the outcome.

bradleyjg 5y ago

I’m a lifelong renter that would love to see yimby policies put in place, but this is misleading. Norway is cold. Show me a city where people can sleep outdoors year round without dying that doesn’t have homeless and then we can see what an effective solution looks like.

grecy 5y ago
Australia has roughly 116,000 homeless out of a population of 25,690,000 [1] [1] https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/need-help/homelessness-support-services/national-homelessness-week/homelessness-statistics/ https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/need-help/homelessness-supp...
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  Homeless is an ill defined term. The definition used by governments and NGOs is different from the one used by everyone else. The former seem to deliberately lean in to the confusion in order to tie policy goals related to their more expansive definition to the greater public interest in solving the narrower problem. In any event, it doesn’t take very many homeless by the colloquial definition to make a city unpleasant. I don’t know whether or not Sydney has a homelessness problem and that link doesn’t tell me.

JeremyNT 5y ago

We should certainly subsidize the building of homes and give them to the homeless (or at least make them very affordable). Can you link to the details of the program in Charlotte? As somebody who is from NC, most home building is driven by for profit developers and it actually increases demand. They target higher end construction since the margins are higher. This is a feedback loop since the increased density of wealthy residents results in areas gaining even more amenities that the higher density will support, and thus becoming more attractive places to move for people in higher col areas out of state. Building wealth by ensuring new units end up in the hands of low income people is a wonderful idea, but around here it seems to be the opposite occurring.

wjamesg 5y ago
I am in NC. All the new development in my area seems to be homes crammed as closely together as possible on mowed down property - no trees or neighborhood identity whatsoever.
kentonv 5y ago
> most home building... actually increases demand. Is there data supporting this claim? It seems quite extraordinary that supply would create more demand than it satisfies. That's just not how economics usually works. If affluent people from around the country are moving to Charlotte, I would think they're likely drawn by other factors, such as their jobs or family roots bringing them there, not by the mere existence of fancy housing and gentrified neighborhoods. If the new development didn't exist, those people would still be moving but would end up choosing slightly lower-end housing -- forcing up the prices and thus forcing out existing residents. This "making fancy houses only increases home prices" argument seems like a rationalization invented by people who are looking for a reason to block such development. It seems highly unlikely to me that this would actually be true. Politically, it's easy to be angry at developers for only building high-end housing, when it seems like the real problems are at the low end of the market. However, in reality, you can't expect it to be any other way -- and that's OK, because building high-end homes actually does help the low end of the market too. New construction is inherently high-end. It's actually hard to build a new house or apartment building that isn't desirable to affluent people -- you'd have to go out of your way to use old design standards and bad materials that don't cost any less but make the home less desirable. This isn't economically viable for developers. So of course developers are always going to target mid-to-high end. But that's fine, because when you build more high-end housing, then people move up from slightly lesser housing, making that housing available for people to move up to from even lower-end housing, and so on. This eventually makes housing available at the low end of the market for people who couldn't previously afford housing at all -- or perhaps for the government to rent on behalf of homeless people at an acceptable cost. San Francisco is bizarrely full of terrible 100+-year-old apartments with high-income techies living in them, just because there's nowhere else for them to live. This is a failure. That should be low-end housing, but it's not because there's not enough high-end housing for all the affluent people.

lazide 5y ago

Do you have any links for the homelessness is a solved problem claim? While I’ve seen societies that have reduced the problem, I haven’t seen any that have solved the problem - at least if they are bigger than ‘toy’ populations. Plenty of places pretending they solved the problem by shipping people to jail or similar if they refuse to live somewhere the authorities demand they do. That said, SF is pretty much a poster child for almost worst case homelessness (and if adjusted by regional per capita income may legitimately be the worst). I guess part of the difficulty is what exactly the definition of ‘the problem’ in ‘the homeless problem’ means seems to vary a lot by person, and most of the plans or influence here are coming from people who are quite explicitly not homeless, which is the group being ‘helped’. Which sets up some serious moral hazards.

homo_ergaster 5y ago
Finland’s recent policies are a good example https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-january-26-2020-1.5429251/housing-is-a-human-right-how-finland-is-eradicating-homelessness-1.5437402 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-janua...
- lazide 5y ago
  That is definitely not evidence of the claim?
  - homo_ergaster 5y ago
    How is it not? They solved homelessness
    - lazide 5y ago
      1) that is a political news piece (not anything rigorous) written in Canada for Canada that is breathless about victory in Finland, and where the primary source appears to be the primary political activist for the policies in Finland. Aka, good luck getting a solid idea of real trade offs or problems. When you read it there is almost no actual data. Where the head political advocate for the policy provides some data, it shows progress, but as quoted, not victory or a solution, see “ A lot of progress has been made. We now have the lowest number of homeless. Our present government has decided that the rest of the homeless should be halved within the next four years and completely end by 2027” So we’d need 5 years before even the most gang busters assessment could say if it was solved or not. And it seems to be because it was decided, not because that is what projections show will happen? So if the last 10% don’t co-operate, then what? 2) Finland has only 5.5 million people in a massive land area, and one of the lowest population densities in the world. They also are remarkably ethnically consistent. They also have a incredibly hostile climate that will strongly discourage (or outright kill in the first month of winter) anyone who is unsheltered homeless. They also have socialized medicine. They are also very wealthy because of natural resources which almost no other country has. For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area discussed earlier on it’s own has approximately 50% larger population than all of Finland all on it’s own in only 5% of the land area, and none of those other factors helping (add scare quotes depending on the factor). That is pretty much the definition of a ‘toy population’ in this case, and even they aren’t saying it’s actually solved in that case yet, just that it totally will be at some point in the future. While I think SF advocates have stopped trying to claim victory is possible or they’ll have it under control at some point in the future, there was a time that is what they said too.

samstave 5y ago

The entire nations property values are FN insane. They should ALL drop. 1350 sf for $599,000 thats $450/sf - wtf. in the ghetto in SF. and the home is a ghetto looking home on the outside with zero land. I LOVE Joe Rogan shitting all over LA and SF. The podcast with the author is fantastic to have in the background and listen to. again, I want to help the homeless with 'Care Fleet' -- See my other comment on that.

zthrowaway 5y ago

Giving them a home isn’t going to solve their drug addiction. Far from having a 100% solution.

rsj_hn 5y ago

So SF will now be giving away houses, huh? OK, I'll take a free home in SF, sure. But not to the middle class, no, just to the homeless. Then how many days do I need to survive on the street in order to get a free house? If it's a hundred days, and one of these places is 800K, then that's like paying me 8K per day -- it's a no brainer. For a free house, I'm even willing to mutter to myself and defecate on your porch. You are right, this would cause property values to plummet -- it's literally paying me to come into your neighborhood and be antisocial. Just give me the date and time of the degradation olympics and there will be lots of people willing to participate. More people than SF can afford to build houses for. You get more of what you subsidize, not less.

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

>Homelessness is a solved problem. It is but I can 100% confirm that nobody in cali wants to solve that problem. >The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force. This solution isn't viable neither. The Cali government policy(ies) is increasing the rate of homelessness. Even if you were to round them all up and send all homeless out of the state, it isn't viably going to solve the problem. >This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact. It's worse than that. You might expect there's some benefit there but this mechanism itself is actually making the situation worse. Though it's certainly not popular to discuss that direction. Afterall what you're saying is road to hell is paved with good intentions. >Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them. Not quite accurate, they dont give away free homes. It's more like bomb shelters and such that the homeless can live in, but even that'snot quite accurate. The sole reason Norway has practically no homeless is because they have no actual minimum wage.

nikonyrh 5y ago

"...so you hold onto properties realistically valued at multiple millions while paying taxes at rate appropriate to tens of thousands." Doesn't that make the tax percentage very low when prices have risen so much? And in addition the percentage varies from unit to unit, even if they are identical in all aspects (including their value) except when it was last sold. What a weird system.

MrWiffles 5y ago

> Consider that between 2010 and 2020, SF built ~25,000 new housing units. > > Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units. Could you tell me where you got your data on this? Not because I want to pick it apart, but because I'm in the process of figuring out where I want to live long-term now that I've decided to leave Texas for good, and rate of new home construction is one of the data parameters I'm looking at in hopes that it'll be at least one positive indicator of realistic housing costs in the area. I'm looking at TONS of other factors as well, but this is a critical one since housing is by far the most expensive line item in any family or individual budget these days. Thanks!