5 ms·

All of the shelters where I live are full. The article describes increasing chronic unsheltered populations in west coast cities. Do any of these have empty she

All of the shelters where I live are full. The article describes increasing chronic unsheltered populations in west coast cities. Do any of these have empty shelter beds? SF and LA do not. "Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?" Tell them to take a hike. The state needs to get more involved with objective rules so we don't have a game of each neighborhood screaming NIMBY. > Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there some that are drug friendly and some that aren't? I don't know the answer to this. When we have enough shelters and people have a locked door to sleep behind this will probably be the next problem to solve. > Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. Shelters and public housing are different. Any kind of shelter has to be fully maintained with public funds because the people sleeping in them are broke. There's a countries with large amounts of successful public housing. The theme is that it's well maintained so it's actually desirable for stable, normal people. Allowing a wider range of incomes to move in so that rent can cover operations and maintenance makes it less dependent on the whims of local pols.

mulmen 5y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Telling NIMBYs to take a hike isn’t simple. How do you actually achieve that? The question is not if we have enough shelter space. The question is if there are homeless who do not want shelter space. In other words do we have another problem to focus on in parallel.
- cheriot 5y ago
  California had a lot of success with Project Home Key that acquired existing hotels and converts them to supportive housing. It worked well because it was quick and often required only one vote by local authorities. In contrast, building new shelters is too easy to drag out and kill with a thousand paper cuts. Some SF Supervisors have spent years saying they want a homeless shelter in their district, but just can't find a place to put it. Others propose a site and then drag out funding forever. My ideal solution would be a state agency that funds and builds shelters, supportive housing, public housing etc. Each municipality gets a list of how many beds it needs and can pick the locations. BUT if they refuse to pick sites then the state does it for them. Then the state builds it without any more bottlenecks on local politicians. imo the key is allowing local choice, but not to say no. If we make shelters a realistic option and a large number of people won't take them we'll have another problem. But we haven't gotten to that bridge yet.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Being a resident of Seattle I'm not thrilled about the state of Washington making decisions about what happens in my city. I can get behind something like gating funding based on results but I'm not thrilled about the state dictating how the city spends money. I could also get behind the idea of a state-owned-and-operated shelter network which happens to have locations in cities. But in general I have a preference toward local government having responsibility where possible. I'm not opposed to building more shelters. But it's not a complete solution. So what is the rest of the solution?
    - phlakaton 5y ago
      I might not be thrilled with state intervention either, but I do not doubt its necessity. Here in California the state has a new housing target that is allocated to regions. The regions then allocate new housing targets to cities. And pretty much every single one of the cities in the Bay Area is having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to meet those targets. My own city is having to violate its own low-density regulations to get it done. If it were not for the state promising heavy financial consequences for cities failing to plan appropriately for growth, the cities wouldn’t be doing squat about the problem, and things would continue to get worse. How do we know? Because that’s exactly how the last couple of cycles have gone.
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Rent controlled housing is intervention that drives the rest of it up, and causes hoarding where they want to keep the old prices in a multi bedroom apartment, higher prices for others that cause long vacancies, they’re dreading building a certain amount of affordable housing from upper bureaucrats, that prescribed only one solution that doesn’t fit into the data, so the problems of intervention are being solved with the same intervention that caused it.
        cheriot 5y ago
        Rent control has only existed in a handful of CA municipalities, but the exorbitant housing costs are everywhere in the SF, SV, LA regions. To your point, CA's regional housing needs assessments are state level intervention to undo city level interventions (zoning, permitting) that prohibit housing.

mulmen 5y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful response. Telling NIMBYs to take a hike isn’t simple. How do you actually achieve that? The question is not if we have enough shelter space. The question is if there are homeless who do not want shelter space. In other words do we have another problem to focus on in parallel.

cheriot 5y ago
California had a lot of success with Project Home Key that acquired existing hotels and converts them to supportive housing. It worked well because it was quick and often required only one vote by local authorities. In contrast, building new shelters is too easy to drag out and kill with a thousand paper cuts. Some SF Supervisors have spent years saying they want a homeless shelter in their district, but just can't find a place to put it. Others propose a site and then drag out funding forever. My ideal solution would be a state agency that funds and builds shelters, supportive housing, public housing etc. Each municipality gets a list of how many beds it needs and can pick the locations. BUT if they refuse to pick sites then the state does it for them. Then the state builds it without any more bottlenecks on local politicians. imo the key is allowing local choice, but not to say no. If we make shelters a realistic option and a large number of people won't take them we'll have another problem. But we haven't gotten to that bridge yet.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Being a resident of Seattle I'm not thrilled about the state of Washington making decisions about what happens in my city. I can get behind something like gating funding based on results but I'm not thrilled about the state dictating how the city spends money. I could also get behind the idea of a state-owned-and-operated shelter network which happens to have locations in cities. But in general I have a preference toward local government having responsibility where possible. I'm not opposed to building more shelters. But it's not a complete solution. So what is the rest of the solution?
  - phlakaton 5y ago
    I might not be thrilled with state intervention either, but I do not doubt its necessity. Here in California the state has a new housing target that is allocated to regions. The regions then allocate new housing targets to cities. And pretty much every single one of the cities in the Bay Area is having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to meet those targets. My own city is having to violate its own low-density regulations to get it done. If it were not for the state promising heavy financial consequences for cities failing to plan appropriately for growth, the cities wouldn’t be doing squat about the problem, and things would continue to get worse. How do we know? Because that’s exactly how the last couple of cycles have gone.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Rent controlled housing is intervention that drives the rest of it up, and causes hoarding where they want to keep the old prices in a multi bedroom apartment, higher prices for others that cause long vacancies, they’re dreading building a certain amount of affordable housing from upper bureaucrats, that prescribed only one solution that doesn’t fit into the data, so the problems of intervention are being solved with the same intervention that caused it.
      - cheriot 5y ago
        Rent control has only existed in a handful of CA municipalities, but the exorbitant housing costs are everywhere in the SF, SV, LA regions. To your point, CA's regional housing needs assessments are state level intervention to undo city level interventions (zoning, permitting) that prohibit housing.