13 ms·

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. M

We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable. Solution in two parts 1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.

zz865 5y ago
> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.
- xvedejas 5y ago
  If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.
- cheriot 5y ago
  Housing needs to be where the economic opportunity is. That's why there's empty homes in Detroit and a rent burdened population in coastal cities.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    There’s empty houses in SF. Your point? The rent controlled 5 bedroom that has the same price in 1999 for the single renter doesn’t feel burdened, if they could use the existing housing and rent at market value, more people will have housing and the government will save money. You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work. Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.
    - cheriot 5y ago
      SF has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, which is part of what drives up prices. My point is that we need housing where the housing shortage is.
- epistasis 5y ago
  The only way I would ever support this is if the people who say "no more people after me, this place was perfect when I moved into my current place" pay for the complete construction costs of the née places elsewhere. Everybody moved at some point, whether it was when they were born and they stayed in the same house their entire life, or when they moved out from their parents house, or when they moved out of the studio apartment after getting married and settled down. If people want to keep others away, they need to pay for that privilege. Otherwise they are just leaches on society.
mulmen 5y ago
What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street? Where do you build these dorms? Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc? We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all.
- cheriot 5y ago
  > What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street? When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question. > Where do you build these dorms? Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities. > Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc? no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside. > We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all. There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms. Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    > When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question. It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it? > Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities. Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs? > no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside. Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't? > There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms. Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. We have a long history of trying all kinds of approaches that didn't work for whatever reason. There's no simple answer. > Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower. This assumes they want to find a job though.
    - 5y ago
nradov 5y ago
We absolutely should build more homeless shelters. However many homeless people refuse to stay in current dorm style shelters because they don't allow drug use, or pets, or the other residents are dangerous.
- cheriot 5y ago
  This is a debate that comes up and I'm only familiar with the specifics in San Francisco. I won't claim it's the same anywhere else. The shelters are full so the obvious problem is not people refusing to sleep in them. At the same time, many of the "offers" of going inside are disingenuous. People giving up all of their belongings (specifically tent and camping stove), leaving loved ones, and the promised shelter is only guaranteed for a couple weeks. When I say dorm style shelters I specifically mean each person has a door to lock and feel safe behind. Most current shelters are dozens of cots in a large room. I wouldn't feel safe there either.
  - boc 5y ago
    You're describing SROs and they've been disappearing from cities like SF, despite being a decent option (on paper) for transition housing. Here's a primer: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-resident-occupancies-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-20bf7aa0b3c8 https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-...
    - cheriot 5y ago
      Yes, SROs are great and it's extremely difficult to build new ones even where they're zoning compliant. We need a lot more of them.
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    I can bet, the shelter utilization is highly correlated with the cost of square foot in the area, which is a proxy for general desirability. And the solution should be to increase the desirability of other areas, rather than making homelessness the new norm. As a nice side effect, this will solve the general housing availability issues as well. Except, the public opinion is that we should somehow all stick to a handful of coastal megacities and join the race to the bottom in terms of square feet per person, noise and cleanliness. This certainly benefits big property developers, big vendors and big employers that wouldn't be economically viable in a much sparser area, but I genuinely don't understand why so many people are happy to voluntarily move into a hamster wheel.
nostrebored 5y ago
The problem is that people in the U.S. so often only see homelessness through the lens of where they live. Homelessness is a unique problem in each city. For example, the west coast has favorable weather and a history of being a destination for people after they are released from prisons or mental facilities. In cities on the east coast there is more leftist-narrative style homelessness: people who were depending on family and their family died, missing a check and sleeping rough for a bit, etc. There are also huge problems with treating the many different problems the same way. For example, California would probably benefit a lot more from building a mental health crisis center and Georgia might benefit more from temporary housing that actually gives you your own address (so that you can list it on job applications, cell service, etc). But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.
- cheriot 5y ago
  "But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use" What's a west coast city with empty shelters? The ones in my town are full.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I will repeat this every time someone uses “favorable weather” to explain California’s barbaric treatment of its homeless: nobody wants to die of exposure. You can die of expose at temperatures well above what housed people consider “comfortable.” The number of homeless people who would rather stay outside in your “favorable climate” versus being afforded the basic dignity of a roof and room is a rounding error.
  - MomoXenosaga 5y ago
    Contrary to leftist belief just giving people a roof over their head doesn't magically fix things. Where it that easy. A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or antisocial. You can't just drop these people in a neighbourhood and everyone lived happily ever after.
coryrc 5y ago
#2 people won't let you build shelters where it's affordable to do so. Seattle's homeless shelters should be built outside Moses Lake, not where a studio costs $300k+. For the amount we already spend, every single chronically homeless person could be housed in dorms built out there and pay for the social workers. Since they aren't doing that, it's clear the real motivation is not to help the homeless.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Outside Moses Lake is far outside Seattle's jurisdiction.
  - mjevans 5y ago
    It's also far too far away from jobs jobs jobs.
    - vineyardmike 5y ago
      Yes, but its not like most of the formerly-homeless sheltered individuals are getting a job in the urban core near the business district where many of the shelters are
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Are jobs concentrated specific places or all over? Where do transit lines run? Where are other services located?
        vineyardmike 5y ago
        In many cities, the transit is hub-spoke from downtown (which is mostly offices), so not a lot of opportunities. > Are their jobs concentrated elsewhere? Knowledge worker jobs are concentrated downtown, and jobs that are likely to look favorably upon someone homeless are probably not concentrated in any one area.
agumonkey 5y ago
Hygiene service vans with showers for the rest
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Wasn't there a study that came out showing every single one of those things done by CA or Seattle failed?
notJim 5y ago
> 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside We used to allow SROs, like the classic YMCA you'd see where people down on their luck would live in old movies. These are now illegal to build in most places, and the existing ones are being closed down.
- telchar 5y ago
  That seems to me to be a big mistake. People talk a lot about affordable housing but as far as I can tell they aren't talking about housing that would be affordable to build. People seem to only want to talk about subsidized housing in luxury developments, at least in the discussions I'm party to. Of course only a few of these units get built in any development, after much wrangling from the city, and then the city and the developers pat themselves on the back while the lack of housing is hardly budged and the affordable housing advocates are unappeased. I think SRO-style housing is the only realistic way to make affordable housing widely enough available that people well below the median income for an area can be guaranteed housing.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  This seems weird until you understand the mechanisms. The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. It's probably part of our inherent "human nature" sense of ethics. The SRO landlord is seen as exploiting poor people by taking their money in exchange for pretty terrible housing. So we ban the SROs, and now these people have to sleep in the streets. But that actually feels OK, because NOW THERE IS NO ONE EXPLOITING THEM! https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
GhettoComputers 5y ago
Removing subsidies from people who got a lower rate with 3 bedrooms before and applied for price freezes would help, they have no reason to move. The rich not wanting their views obstructed with larger buildings or taking away cultural landmark statuses where housing can be built would help, but what about building codes and safety, since earthquakes are a fear? Anyone who can’t afford housing where they’re at and wants to have housing moves, it’s often ignored that homeless people might be fine being homeless and prefer it to being housed in another area they can afford. I agree there should be housing for people who want it, but I don’t decide I want to live in Beverly Hills and demand affordable for me housing and refuse to leave. If only I could enjoy Echo Park or the Bay Area without paying for housing somehow...
m0zg 5y ago
> neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street. Neither is improved by giving them housing. Housing should be modest, and it should be preceded by forced rehab. Instead, in Seattle, for example, they're giving the homeless hotel-style housing without requiring them to get addiction treatment and without a requirement to do anything job-wise. Seattle's King county projects that such valiant (and extremely expensive!) efforts will triple the already sizable homeless population in 10 years, yet they are continuing down this path anyway, just like SF did many years ago. Why? Because it's already a billion dollar industry in the state, and as such it'll continue to metastasize, just like any other government "service". So solution needs to have 3 parts at least, and part zero should be "forced rehab". Without that no other part will ever work. There needs to be a part about employment in there somewhere for people who are able to work. I don't care that they don't wanna.
khazhoux 5y ago
> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match. SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to. https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/ https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/
- refurb 5y ago
  And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF. “Build it and they will come” Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF. "Induced demand" is a fallacy. The demand isn't induced, it was there the whole time and being suppressed by high prices (or, in case of highways, congestion). If there is very high demand, the amount of supply needed to satisfy it is equally high, but that is by no means the same as being infinite and impossible to do. There are also ways to satisfy the demand for "highways" other than building more highways. Like building more housing closer to where jobs are so people don't have to drive such long distances. Often these alternatives are better, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your problem is actually that your highway doesn't have enough lanes. This isn't a question you can answer in the general case without looking at the specifics. > Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US Because that's where a lot of the homeless are because they can't afford the price of housing there. There are literally people in San Francisco who are homeless despite having a full-time job. Also, it's not "housing for the homeless," it's just housing. Build enough and the price comes down. Then people can afford it instead of being homeless. There is obviously also a benefit to be had for the person who isn't homeless but is spending 60% of their income on an apartment the size of a parking space.
cma 5y ago
Aren't people in homeless shelters still classified as homeless? From the site it is hard to tell how many are sheltered vs out on the street.

zz865 5y ago

> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.

xvedejas 5y ago
If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.
cheriot 5y ago
Housing needs to be where the economic opportunity is. That's why there's empty homes in Detroit and a rent burdened population in coastal cities.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  There’s empty houses in SF. Your point? The rent controlled 5 bedroom that has the same price in 1999 for the single renter doesn’t feel burdened, if they could use the existing housing and rent at market value, more people will have housing and the government will save money. You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work. Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.
  - cheriot 5y ago
    SF has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, which is part of what drives up prices. My point is that we need housing where the housing shortage is.
epistasis 5y ago
The only way I would ever support this is if the people who say "no more people after me, this place was perfect when I moved into my current place" pay for the complete construction costs of the née places elsewhere. Everybody moved at some point, whether it was when they were born and they stayed in the same house their entire life, or when they moved out from their parents house, or when they moved out of the studio apartment after getting married and settled down. If people want to keep others away, they need to pay for that privilege. Otherwise they are just leaches on society.

mulmen 5y ago

What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street? Where do you build these dorms? Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc? We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all.

cheriot 5y ago
> What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street? When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question. > Where do you build these dorms? Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities. > Are there barriers to living in these dorms? Sobriety requirements, job searching, etc? no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside. > We should definitely try to solve this but I don't think it is simple at all. There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms. Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
- mulmen 5y ago
  > When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question. It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it? > Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities. Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs? > no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside. Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't? > There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms. Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. We have a long history of trying all kinds of approaches that didn't work for whatever reason. There's no simple answer. > Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower. This assumes they want to find a job though.
  - 5y ago

nradov 5y ago

We absolutely should build more homeless shelters. However many homeless people refuse to stay in current dorm style shelters because they don't allow drug use, or pets, or the other residents are dangerous.

cheriot 5y ago
This is a debate that comes up and I'm only familiar with the specifics in San Francisco. I won't claim it's the same anywhere else. The shelters are full so the obvious problem is not people refusing to sleep in them. At the same time, many of the "offers" of going inside are disingenuous. People giving up all of their belongings (specifically tent and camping stove), leaving loved ones, and the promised shelter is only guaranteed for a couple weeks. When I say dorm style shelters I specifically mean each person has a door to lock and feel safe behind. Most current shelters are dozens of cots in a large room. I wouldn't feel safe there either.
- boc 5y ago
  You're describing SROs and they've been disappearing from cities like SF, despite being a decent option (on paper) for transition housing. Here's a primer: https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-resident-occupancies-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-20bf7aa0b3c8 https://thebolditalic.com/life-inside-sf-s-vanishing-single-...
  - cheriot 5y ago
    Yes, SROs are great and it's extremely difficult to build new ones even where they're zoning compliant. We need a lot more of them.
- john_moscow 5y ago
  I can bet, the shelter utilization is highly correlated with the cost of square foot in the area, which is a proxy for general desirability. And the solution should be to increase the desirability of other areas, rather than making homelessness the new norm. As a nice side effect, this will solve the general housing availability issues as well. Except, the public opinion is that we should somehow all stick to a handful of coastal megacities and join the race to the bottom in terms of square feet per person, noise and cleanliness. This certainly benefits big property developers, big vendors and big employers that wouldn't be economically viable in a much sparser area, but I genuinely don't understand why so many people are happy to voluntarily move into a hamster wheel.

nostrebored 5y ago

The problem is that people in the U.S. so often only see homelessness through the lens of where they live. Homelessness is a unique problem in each city. For example, the west coast has favorable weather and a history of being a destination for people after they are released from prisons or mental facilities. In cities on the east coast there is more leftist-narrative style homelessness: people who were depending on family and their family died, missing a check and sleeping rough for a bit, etc. There are also huge problems with treating the many different problems the same way. For example, California would probably benefit a lot more from building a mental health crisis center and Georgia might benefit more from temporary housing that actually gives you your own address (so that you can list it on job applications, cell service, etc). But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.

cheriot 5y ago
"But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use" What's a west coast city with empty shelters? The ones in my town are full.
woodruffw 5y ago
I will repeat this every time someone uses “favorable weather” to explain California’s barbaric treatment of its homeless: nobody wants to die of exposure. You can die of expose at temperatures well above what housed people consider “comfortable.” The number of homeless people who would rather stay outside in your “favorable climate” versus being afforded the basic dignity of a roof and room is a rounding error.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Contrary to leftist belief just giving people a roof over their head doesn't magically fix things. Where it that easy. A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or antisocial. You can't just drop these people in a neighbourhood and everyone lived happily ever after.

coryrc 5y ago

#2 people won't let you build shelters where it's affordable to do so. Seattle's homeless shelters should be built outside Moses Lake, not where a studio costs $300k+. For the amount we already spend, every single chronically homeless person could be housed in dorms built out there and pay for the social workers. Since they aren't doing that, it's clear the real motivation is not to help the homeless.

pseudalopex 5y ago
Outside Moses Lake is far outside Seattle's jurisdiction.
- mjevans 5y ago
  It's also far too far away from jobs jobs jobs.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    Yes, but its not like most of the formerly-homeless sheltered individuals are getting a job in the urban core near the business district where many of the shelters are
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Are jobs concentrated specific places or all over? Where do transit lines run? Where are other services located?
      - vineyardmike 5y ago
        In many cities, the transit is hub-spoke from downtown (which is mostly offices), so not a lot of opportunities. > Are their jobs concentrated elsewhere? Knowledge worker jobs are concentrated downtown, and jobs that are likely to look favorably upon someone homeless are probably not concentrated in any one area.

agumonkey 5y ago

Hygiene service vans with showers for the rest

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Wasn't there a study that came out showing every single one of those things done by CA or Seattle failed?

notJim 5y ago

> 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside We used to allow SROs, like the classic YMCA you'd see where people down on their luck would live in old movies. These are now illegal to build in most places, and the existing ones are being closed down.

telchar 5y ago
That seems to me to be a big mistake. People talk a lot about affordable housing but as far as I can tell they aren't talking about housing that would be affordable to build. People seem to only want to talk about subsidized housing in luxury developments, at least in the discussions I'm party to. Of course only a few of these units get built in any development, after much wrangling from the city, and then the city and the developers pat themselves on the back while the lack of housing is hardly budged and the affordable housing advocates are unappeased. I think SRO-style housing is the only realistic way to make affordable housing widely enough available that people well below the median income for an area can be guaranteed housing.
BurningFrog 5y ago
This seems weird until you understand the mechanisms. The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. It's probably part of our inherent "human nature" sense of ethics. The SRO landlord is seen as exploiting poor people by taking their money in exchange for pretty terrible housing. So we ban the SROs, and now these people have to sleep in the streets. But that actually feels OK, because NOW THERE IS NO ONE EXPLOITING THEM! https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

GhettoComputers 5y ago

Removing subsidies from people who got a lower rate with 3 bedrooms before and applied for price freezes would help, they have no reason to move. The rich not wanting their views obstructed with larger buildings or taking away cultural landmark statuses where housing can be built would help, but what about building codes and safety, since earthquakes are a fear? Anyone who can’t afford housing where they’re at and wants to have housing moves, it’s often ignored that homeless people might be fine being homeless and prefer it to being housed in another area they can afford. I agree there should be housing for people who want it, but I don’t decide I want to live in Beverly Hills and demand affordable for me housing and refuse to leave. If only I could enjoy Echo Park or the Bay Area without paying for housing somehow...

m0zg 5y ago

> neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street. Neither is improved by giving them housing. Housing should be modest, and it should be preceded by forced rehab. Instead, in Seattle, for example, they're giving the homeless hotel-style housing without requiring them to get addiction treatment and without a requirement to do anything job-wise. Seattle's King county projects that such valiant (and extremely expensive!) efforts will triple the already sizable homeless population in 10 years, yet they are continuing down this path anyway, just like SF did many years ago. Why? Because it's already a billion dollar industry in the state, and as such it'll continue to metastasize, just like any other government "service". So solution needs to have 3 parts at least, and part zero should be "forced rehab". Without that no other part will ever work. There needs to be a part about employment in there somewhere for people who are able to work. I don't care that they don't wanna.

khazhoux 5y ago

> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV) People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match. SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to. https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/ https://svdp-sf.org/what-we-do/msc-shelter/

refurb 5y ago
And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF. “Build it and they will come” Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF. "Induced demand" is a fallacy. The demand isn't induced, it was there the whole time and being suppressed by high prices (or, in case of highways, congestion). If there is very high demand, the amount of supply needed to satisfy it is equally high, but that is by no means the same as being infinite and impossible to do. There are also ways to satisfy the demand for "highways" other than building more highways. Like building more housing closer to where jobs are so people don't have to drive such long distances. Often these alternatives are better, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your problem is actually that your highway doesn't have enough lanes. This isn't a question you can answer in the general case without looking at the specifics. > Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US Because that's where a lot of the homeless are because they can't afford the price of housing there. There are literally people in San Francisco who are homeless despite having a full-time job. Also, it's not "housing for the homeless," it's just housing. Build enough and the price comes down. Then people can afford it instead of being homeless. There is obviously also a benefit to be had for the person who isn't homeless but is spending 60% of their income on an apartment the size of a parking space.

cma 5y ago

Aren't people in homeless shelters still classified as homeless? From the site it is hard to tell how many are sheltered vs out on the street.