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Homelessness rises faster where rent exceeds a third of income (2018)

161 points by _xnmw 5y ago

anon776 5y ago
Zillow sure did a lot to help with rent going up. We will be feeling the ramifications of their business decisions for years to come.
- lkxijlewlf 5y ago
  Progress Residential is worse, but yeah, Zillow didn't help.
  - aarondf 5y ago
    Whats the story with Progress Residential?
    - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
      https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/how-a-billion-dollar-housing-bet-upended-a-tennessee-neighborhood/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/how-a-bil...
hirundo 5y ago
Combine this with the correlation between rent and population density, and the rise of remote work, socializing and entertainment, and this creates an outward, de-clustering pressure on population. It increases demand for suburban and rural property. That comes with the ecological cost of increased human competition for animal habitats. Best case, it also creates effective pressure for extra terrestrial colonization, pluralizing our egg baskets. NIMBY could fuel human exploitation of the solar system.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  >Best case, it also creates effective pressure for extra terrestrial colonization, pluralizing our egg baskets. NIMBY could fuel human exploitation of the solar system. I feel like this glamorizes the issue and makes the fundamental fact that we aren't respecting the humanity of those around us RIGHT NOW seem like it's all part of a grand "plan". Versus the more obvious fact that the society we currently have created is suboptimal and must be corrected
  - api 5y ago
    > NIMBY could fuel human exploitation of the solar system. Then it just becomes NIMB: Not In My Biosphere.
  - hirundo 5y ago
    Correcting whatever is suboptimal needs to be done in the context of the larger forces. E.g., if you're being carried away from shore by a rip tide it's useful to have enough theory to understand that you should swim parallel to the shore rather than straight in. In the same sense, to address homelessness effectively we need to be aware of the larger economic incentives. Rent control is a notorious example.
    - mullingitover 5y ago
      I'm not convinced that rent control is really a factor in either direction. Los Angeles and San Francisco have had rent control for a very long time, and they have sky-high homeless popuations. Oregon banned rent control in the state constitution, and Portland has a huge homeless population. The common thread in all these cities is a war on developers, and it certainly looks like a large homeless population is what you get for winning that war.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I'd combine them slightly differently: As cities get bigger, lower incomes get forced either out of the city or into more and more precarious living situations. But I wonder to what degree this is a US phenomenon. Take Tokyo, for instance. It has an amazing array of commuter rail lines linking it to the surrounding area. And it sits in a country where the population is not rising. So, to what extent does this dynamic apply to Tokyo? And if it doesn't apply to Tokyo, could we fix it in the US by 1) adding huge amounts of commuter rail, and 2) stopping population growth?
buran77 5y ago
As unpopular as it may sound, the reason we have so many homeless is that the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. Slowly more people slip through the cracks into homelessness and lose all their power, and fewer people are left to care about them and vote in their interest. That's the perverse thing about this, the moment you get hit by homelessness you lose basically even the most basic power you had to fight against it, your power to vote. The only way to realistically fix this is if homelessness becomes at the very least a very sizable minority, if not a majority. And while that may be the push needed to address it, it would also be a humanitarian catastrophe.
- nickff 5y ago
  >" As unpopular as it may sound, the reason we have so many homeless is that the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. Slowly more people slip through the cracks into homelessness and lose all their power, and fewer people are left to care about them and vote in their interest." I think your points are actually the popular ones. The less-popular view is that the current homeless crisis is highly correlated with drug-addiction, and it's not clear that just providing housing to fentanyl addicts will solve it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    The question is what came first. The drug addiction or homelessness? I think a lot of people see that even if they work hard they won't go anywhere so they give up. When I grew up in Germany we had neighbors where the dad had no education, worked in a warehouse, had a house, 3 children and the mom stayed at home. In the same area now they can barely scrape by if both parents work full time. Add some mental problems to this and you quickly drop out because there is no safetey margin left these days.
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
nickff 5y ago
It's not clear that they demonstrated causality here; I would guess that the explanation is a 'dreaded third thing'. Homelessness tends to be most concentrated in rich coastal cities; the desirability and wealth also happen to cause high rents (especially relative to earnings). One of the chart captions says "Homelessness climbs faster when rent affordability reaches 22% and 32% thresholds", but they don't seem to have actually found data that demonstrated this was a temporal (rather than a geographic) effect.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  i’m also worried about how they calculate this rent-to-income ratio. > Monroe County in Florida, where the median market rate rent consumes 62.9 percent of the area’s median household income. at this point, if they’re using the IRS definition of “household”, they’re probably overestimating how much each household pays on rent. as rent per sqft rises there’s a competing effect whereby more people of different tax households pool their income and collectively rent just one unit. e.g. median IRS household income is $100,000. median house rent is $60,000/yr. 4 unrelated people each making the median income choose to share that roof. the median share of income going to rent in this case is 15% — not the 60% that could be calculated if you compared median unit rent directly to median IRS household income. the methodology seems pretty important and should be touched on, otherwise it’s easy for the reader to misinterpret what these numbers actually mean.
999900000999 5y ago
Eh, people can either decide to live an unaffordable hell holes or not. I wasn't surprised to see LA here. When I was a young adult. , anyone could get a minimum wage job, and while it wasn't the absolute best apartment, you at least had a roof over your head. Now the city is a living nightmare for anyone who doesn't make at least 100K a year, I also noticed in the last 10 years or so the city got much meaner. The charm is gone, but I think rational people will move and be fine. If you want to be stupid, and watch your rent increase well beyond what you can afford, stay. This isn't just LA, but any unaffordable city.
- CydeWeys 5y ago
  Moving cities is expensive (the actual moving expenses plus up front costs of a new lease, and also no income until you can find a new job). If you're already struggling to afford rent then it's likely beyond your financial capabilities.
  - fundad 5y ago
    Yeah agreed. People with the money to move to a new city and live indoors aren’t the ones losing their homes. I do think our housing shortage makes hiring even harder in a tight labor market.
- scythe 5y ago
  Telling people to move away might be good individual advice, but it isn't a "solution" to managing a city, and it's bad for the national economy as a whole if people can't live in productive metropolitan areas. Statistically, there are always going to be some growing cities and some shrinking cities, because a stochastically generated distribution like population movement should have a nonzero standard deviation. If growing cities are consistently unaffordable, that's a national problem.
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    I have no faith in the people who run cities like LA. They have no ability, nor will to fix such a massive problem. With LA this has been in motion for decades. You let everyone say construction offends them, and make it so only luxury housing is profitable to build. This is the result. LA is uniquely horrible since you both need a car and an extremely expensive apartment. Even on the low end you're talking about $600 to $1,000 for the privilege of driving.
belltaco 5y ago
So the homeless aren't mostly comprised of people with mental issues who'd have been homeless anyway? Also, homelessness itself can trigger mental issues across the general population who previously were well to do.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Some are, some aren't. As the cost of housing goes up, the fraction of the homeless who are homeless for economic reasons also goes up.
- lkbm 5y ago
  I mean, I suspect it's mostly be people with mental health issues, but I rarely see any evidence for the "who'd been homeless anyway" part. I know plenty of people with mental health issues who aren't homeless. Most of them work productive jobs and support themselves. Mental health issues are usually manageable if you have the resources to manage them. If homelessness is increasing, then it seems likely that something's causing the increase. If the cause is mental illness, something's causing that mental illness to be more prevalent or less manageable. High rent seems like a decent hypothesis of it being less manageable.
- honksillet 5y ago
  Mental health and addiction issues. (The later is the root of most of the former.)
- notch656a 5y ago
  > Also, homelessness itself can trigger mental issues across the general population who previously were well to do. I'm sure it does but I'm genuinely curious whether this legitimately drives a significant increase in mental issues. Anecdotally as someone who's always been able bodied thus able to find day labor doing mindless unskilled work like moving drywall even in the worst economies, I find homelessness to be less stressful as the responsibilities and day to day worries just were much more basic. It takes maybe 2 hours of day labor a day to live a luxurious by homeless standard existence (plenty of money for food, drink, patching tent/shelter, maintaining excellent REI-tier outdoor clothing that ensure you're nice and warm in all climates, etc). By contrast, now that I have legal residence-zoned housing (in my state I could be found in violation of child negligence laws if I don't provide whatever CPS considers adequate shelter, so I have no choice) I find my stresses and worries to be much higher as the amount of money needed to maintain artificially limited thus expensive housing to be significantly higher. If you are of sound body and mind, free of addiction and able and willing to work a couple hours a day (which believe it or not, lots of shitty jobs will tolerate you not being showered or whatever just fine), being homeless can be a pretty easy and low worry - even freeing - existence.
supernova87a 5y ago
Homelessness also decreases when cities simply let more housing be built, even if luxury housing. https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-buildings-help-low-income-renters/ https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-building... For some reason liberal policymakers (or their constituents) either can't seem to get that in their head, or can't act on it. And instead cling to things like rent control, which "feel good" in the short run but end up doing the opposite of what was intended. Sometimes I think that every policy (that isn't a "duh, of course" policy) should come with an expiration date. So that the people you wanted to help are specifically identified, and given a finite time to be helped -- and people who come after know that it's a one-time intervention and the system is what it is from now on. Then when the people you thought it would serve / benefit are gone, you are required to assess whether it worked as you thought, and it doesn't just go on autopilot forever. Now, whether the policymakers would respect that, or simply keep on extending it on public opinion, who knows. It's just too easy for well-intentioned people to put in place rules they think will work, and go away for 10 years and discover it didn't, and then still do nothing to fix it.
- salmonfamine 5y ago
  Why would they allow more housing to be built? That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA. Discard any notion that all but a very small minority of policymakers are truly motivated by ideology.
  - nostromo 5y ago
    I live in a deep blue city (Seattle) and have interacted with some local policy makers. In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart. This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.
    - beebmam 5y ago
      Completely agree. We should be aiming to elect doctors and engineers (i.e. people who understand Systems Theory) for political positions, not people who have prescriptive solutions.
danschumann 5y ago
Schools should teach ratios about housing expenses vs income. Somehow we should make kids practice budgeting, controlling spending, etc, not just teaching, but practicing for years, because when you get out of school, there are are a few simple, yet difficult(emotionally), things which will dictate success more than the memorized logic. Emotions take practice.
- black_13 5y ago
- kinos 5y ago
  How does personal fiscal responsibility effect the global housing economy and availability of a highly limited good?
  - danschumann 5y ago
    The highness is indeed based on where you live, which is your choice. As Dave Ramsey says, "you don't get a pass on the math because you live in California". You people are nutbags. It also affeCts what people will put up with when it comes to regulatory policy (the constraint that puts a squeeze on building new housing). People learn empty logic until they reach the real world, when they have an extremely rude awakening, and the suicide rate continues to increase as more and more people cannot bear to face what the real world entails, when they come to the violent realization that they are unfit for the real world, because they've been coddled by the school system and taught the opposite of what their priorities should have been (such as encouraging debt to get a degree ). Degrees are great, but a degree means you must work to pay it off, and if you must work at Starbucks while you wish you had more time to devote to artwork, you realize you were served a raw deal. So my soapboxed friend, isolated in your ivory cage, trying to sound smart, does your skepticism ever hinder on curiosity? Physics of what is truly real will catch up to you all, I persist it!!! Methinks!
avelis 5y ago
This will only continue. Single family zoning laws perpetuate the housing inequality all throughout major US cities. "Housing is a human right." Is great to hear but in practice we don't even abide by that in governance.
mullingitover 5y ago
We should be clear that we force people onto the street, it's a collective choice. Need proof? Simply pass a constitutional amendment that no elected official shall be eligible for re-election if the annual count of homeless individuals exceeds 100 people statewide. We would have emergency shelters built for every homeless person within a month, street teams sweeping back alleys 24/7, and hotlines for reporting encampments.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  No, they'd simply redefine what the word homeless means.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  There are shelters for every homeless person already. The homeless prefer the street.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    This is simply false. For example in Los Angeles[1]: > There are currently 435 sites countywide with 11,499 beds available. Meanwhile there are 48,041 unsheltered homeless people in LA county at last count[2]. With that being said, some people do not want to use shelters, and because the shelter beds are wildly outnumbered by the homeless population the government is not allowed to penalize anyone for camping on the street. Only when the government has provided adequate shelter for everyone can any ordinances against street camping be enforced, per the Supreme Court ruling in Martin v. Boise. [1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/400d7b75f18747c4ae1ad22d662781a3 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/400d7b75f18747c4ae1ad22... [2] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php
    - jsjohns2 5y ago
      Comparing the number of available beds with the number of unsheltered homeless people does not disprove parent's argument that there is a bed for everyone who wants a bed. A better question would be -- what the average shelter utilization?
wyager 5y ago
A priori it seems astoundingly unlikely to me that rent prices are causing people to become homeless at the margins. There's a huge gap in means between someone who just barely can't afford rent in SF and someone who lives on the street in SF. The former will move somewhere cheaper rather than living on the street. Almost certainly this effect is mediated by the fact that homeless people choose to move to cities which have high rent (because those cities tend to have better weather, better social services, etc.).
- m_herrlich 5y ago
  This. Living in a city with this problem, I struggle to imagine a significant causal relationship between housing prices and homelessness. The people I see in tents are not priced out. Magically roll rents back 20 years and they would still be largely unaffordable to this crowd.
  - _xnmw 5y ago
    Magically roll back the clock 20 years along with the rent prices, and I suspect a lot of the people that became homeless in the past 20 years would've never become homeless in the first place.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  When I lived in Atlanta across the street from a homeless shelter, I frequently saw vans from rural areas come in and drop off homeless. One shelter (not the one I lived next to) even sent out fliers to rural communities soliciting their homeless to come there. The one time I got to talk to the driver of one of the vans, he said he ran a church that simply didn't have the means to take care of the homeless that popped up in their community so the only thing they could do was give them a ride to a city that had facilities for them. It didn't sound like they were intentionally dumping their problems on the city, they simply didn't have the means to do anything for them. The gas it took to drive the van to the city and back probably was a dent in their limited budget. Even if that community only brought one homeless person to the city every other year, when you think of how many rural communities that struggle financially there are, it adds up to lots of homeless ending up in big cities. The bad thing for the homeless is that even if their support network back home was broken, there was some possibility of repairing it. Once they're moved to a big city where they have no social network other than the shelter, it's difficult to recover.
pjerem 5y ago
Just out of curiosity, is it the norm in the US to be able to exceed a third of your income in rents ? In my country, in theory, you cannot have more than 33% of your income used to pay rent. Well, it’s not forbidden, the bank can be flexible, but they surely are double checking because they take the risk for the debt to be cleared if you became insolvent because of them.
- xvedejas 5y ago
  There isn't any debt involved in paying rent (are you thinking of mortgage?) and the bank isn't taking any risk, isn't guaranteeing any rent payments. I'm not even sure that a bank strictly needs to be involved in someone paying rent, they could pay in cash for instance. Where are you that a bank guarantees rent payments?
  - dymk 5y ago
    Not sure why the bank has come up in this discussion about rent and risk. This is a landlord/tenant concern. Renting to somebody who has a high chance of not being able to pay their rent 3 months from now is indeed a risk, and one that landlords go to great lengths to avoid. Prospective renters may not be in debt yet, but nonpaying renters are hard to get rid of.
    - pjerem 5y ago
      My bad, as a non English speaker, I just inverted rent and mortgage payment.
- mostlystatic 5y ago
  It's the same in the UK, everything over 33% is called "unaffordable" and you'll fail the affordability checks during referencing. I don't think it's a legal requirement though, just safer for the landlords. Personally, I've never had a stable income in the UK, so for the last two places I rented I had to pay 12 months upfront. I'm quite skeptical the 33% threshold makes much sense (though it may be a decent heuristic in most cases). Compare these two scenarios: 1) Affordable rent: £18k/yr income, £500/mo rent, £823/mo left after tax 2) Unaffordable rent: £30k/yr income, £1000/mo rent, £1005/mo left after tax #2 is better off financially than #1, assuming costs other than housing are similar [1]. But the 33% affordability threshold will make it harder for #2 to rent than #1. [1] I think that's broadly the case, but will vary based on circumstances. E.g. childcare is more expensive in London, or you might need a car in a rural area.
coding123 5y ago
While we have a minimum wage, I'm guessing the non-existance of a maximum average wage is the real cause of rising rents.
jsjohns2 5y ago
If you are naïve enough to think that we will simply build our way out of the homelessness crisis, I encourage you to book a flight to Los Angeles and strike up a conversation with any first responder. They will all tell you the same story -- the homeless are nearly all on Methamphetamine and/or Fentanyl. Yes, rent prices have increased over the last decade. But the affordability, purity, availability, and use of those very destructive drugs have also increased over the same time period. The chart that I would be interested in seeing is are those elements plotted against homelessness rate. I suspect that the correlation coefficient between per-capita meth use and homelessness rate would be ~1.
- loeg 5y ago
  West Virginia has very high rates of drug addiction, and yet much lower homelessness than LA. It’s because housing is much, much cheaper. That only happens by building more.
  - jsjohns2 5y ago
    Comparing LA and WV is like comparing apples and oranges. At least those are both fruits. Those locales differ on much more than just housing costs.
    - loeg 5y ago
      You're asking readers to imagine that LA is representative of other areas, but reject the idea that LA is comparable to WV? I think you need to pick one to make a coherent argument.
      - jsjohns2 5y ago
        I suspect that there is a strong non-linear effect, i.e., introducing novel drugs into a state with very cheap housing does not move the needle that much on homelessness (WV) but is catastrophic when done in a city with expensive housing (LA). We should address the housing problem. We should also address the drug problem.
- 5y ago
savant_penguin 5y ago
This is infuriating The same people who complain about homelessness and pretend to care about the poor are the ones to call the building of new housing """gentrification""" Endless committees to decide if someone can build new housing is just absurd. (Hello California) This is why the building of new homes should _not_ be a matter of vote. Just like deciding your career or in which companies to invest. The overall public should _not_ get a say in what private contractors build, unless in absolutely extreme cases such as when pollution is involved (noise/air..). Just like McDonald's does not get a say in whether a new Burger King should open, homeowners should not get a say in whether new housing should be built. No matter how much they pretend ""it'll push poor out of cities!!!1!""
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I'm happy to see this here. As someone who has studied this problem space, I believe that housing supply issues are a major root cause of homelessness in the US. I don't think there's any conspiracy, just a lack of solid understanding of the problem. I think we are "victims of our own success" in that I think our last housing crisis was solved by the birth of modern suburbs and this made the single family detached house designed for a nuclear family our default standard and trying to emulate that or improve on that has gone weird and unhelpful places. But thrilled to see an article connecting homelessness to housing supply issues rather than the tired trope of "They are all junkies and crazies."

161 points by _xnmw 5y ago

Zillow sure did a lot to help with rent going up. We will be feeling the ramifications of their business decisions for years to come.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Progress Residential is worse, but yeah, Zillow didn't help.
- aarondf 5y ago
  Whats the story with Progress Residential?
  - lkxijlewlf 5y ago
    https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/how-a-billion-dollar-housing-bet-upended-a-tennessee-neighborhood/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/how-a-bil...

hirundo 5y ago

Combine this with the correlation between rent and population density, and the rise of remote work, socializing and entertainment, and this creates an outward, de-clustering pressure on population. It increases demand for suburban and rural property. That comes with the ecological cost of increased human competition for animal habitats. Best case, it also creates effective pressure for extra terrestrial colonization, pluralizing our egg baskets. NIMBY could fuel human exploitation of the solar system.

SQueeeeeL 5y ago
>Best case, it also creates effective pressure for extra terrestrial colonization, pluralizing our egg baskets. NIMBY could fuel human exploitation of the solar system. I feel like this glamorizes the issue and makes the fundamental fact that we aren't respecting the humanity of those around us RIGHT NOW seem like it's all part of a grand "plan". Versus the more obvious fact that the society we currently have created is suboptimal and must be corrected
- api 5y ago
  > NIMBY could fuel human exploitation of the solar system. Then it just becomes NIMB: Not In My Biosphere.
- hirundo 5y ago
  Correcting whatever is suboptimal needs to be done in the context of the larger forces. E.g., if you're being carried away from shore by a rip tide it's useful to have enough theory to understand that you should swim parallel to the shore rather than straight in. In the same sense, to address homelessness effectively we need to be aware of the larger economic incentives. Rent control is a notorious example.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    I'm not convinced that rent control is really a factor in either direction. Los Angeles and San Francisco have had rent control for a very long time, and they have sky-high homeless popuations. Oregon banned rent control in the state constitution, and Portland has a huge homeless population. The common thread in all these cities is a war on developers, and it certainly looks like a large homeless population is what you get for winning that war.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
I'd combine them slightly differently: As cities get bigger, lower incomes get forced either out of the city or into more and more precarious living situations. But I wonder to what degree this is a US phenomenon. Take Tokyo, for instance. It has an amazing array of commuter rail lines linking it to the surrounding area. And it sits in a country where the population is not rising. So, to what extent does this dynamic apply to Tokyo? And if it doesn't apply to Tokyo, could we fix it in the US by 1) adding huge amounts of commuter rail, and 2) stopping population growth?

buran77 5y ago

As unpopular as it may sound, the reason we have so many homeless is that the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. Slowly more people slip through the cracks into homelessness and lose all their power, and fewer people are left to care about them and vote in their interest. That's the perverse thing about this, the moment you get hit by homelessness you lose basically even the most basic power you had to fight against it, your power to vote. The only way to realistically fix this is if homelessness becomes at the very least a very sizable minority, if not a majority. And while that may be the push needed to address it, it would also be a humanitarian catastrophe.

nickff 5y ago
>" As unpopular as it may sound, the reason we have so many homeless is that the people who have more deciding power decide to vote to focus on very different issues. Slowly more people slip through the cracks into homelessness and lose all their power, and fewer people are left to care about them and vote in their interest." I think your points are actually the popular ones. The less-popular view is that the current homeless crisis is highly correlated with drug-addiction, and it's not clear that just providing housing to fentanyl addicts will solve it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  The question is what came first. The drug addiction or homelessness? I think a lot of people see that even if they work hard they won't go anywhere so they give up. When I grew up in Germany we had neighbors where the dad had no education, worked in a warehouse, had a house, 3 children and the mom stayed at home. In the same area now they can barely scrape by if both parents work full time. Add some mental problems to this and you quickly drop out because there is no safetey margin left these days.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago

nickff 5y ago

It's not clear that they demonstrated causality here; I would guess that the explanation is a 'dreaded third thing'. Homelessness tends to be most concentrated in rich coastal cities; the desirability and wealth also happen to cause high rents (especially relative to earnings). One of the chart captions says "Homelessness climbs faster when rent affordability reaches 22% and 32% thresholds", but they don't seem to have actually found data that demonstrated this was a temporal (rather than a geographic) effect.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wallacoloo 5y ago
i’m also worried about how they calculate this rent-to-income ratio. > Monroe County in Florida, where the median market rate rent consumes 62.9 percent of the area’s median household income. at this point, if they’re using the IRS definition of “household”, they’re probably overestimating how much each household pays on rent. as rent per sqft rises there’s a competing effect whereby more people of different tax households pool their income and collectively rent just one unit. e.g. median IRS household income is $100,000. median house rent is $60,000/yr. 4 unrelated people each making the median income choose to share that roof. the median share of income going to rent in this case is 15% — not the 60% that could be calculated if you compared median unit rent directly to median IRS household income. the methodology seems pretty important and should be touched on, otherwise it’s easy for the reader to misinterpret what these numbers actually mean.

999900000999 5y ago

Eh, people can either decide to live an unaffordable hell holes or not. I wasn't surprised to see LA here. When I was a young adult. , anyone could get a minimum wage job, and while it wasn't the absolute best apartment, you at least had a roof over your head. Now the city is a living nightmare for anyone who doesn't make at least 100K a year, I also noticed in the last 10 years or so the city got much meaner. The charm is gone, but I think rational people will move and be fine. If you want to be stupid, and watch your rent increase well beyond what you can afford, stay. This isn't just LA, but any unaffordable city.

CydeWeys 5y ago
Moving cities is expensive (the actual moving expenses plus up front costs of a new lease, and also no income until you can find a new job). If you're already struggling to afford rent then it's likely beyond your financial capabilities.
- fundad 5y ago
  Yeah agreed. People with the money to move to a new city and live indoors aren’t the ones losing their homes. I do think our housing shortage makes hiring even harder in a tight labor market.
scythe 5y ago
Telling people to move away might be good individual advice, but it isn't a "solution" to managing a city, and it's bad for the national economy as a whole if people can't live in productive metropolitan areas. Statistically, there are always going to be some growing cities and some shrinking cities, because a stochastically generated distribution like population movement should have a nonzero standard deviation. If growing cities are consistently unaffordable, that's a national problem.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  I have no faith in the people who run cities like LA. They have no ability, nor will to fix such a massive problem. With LA this has been in motion for decades. You let everyone say construction offends them, and make it so only luxury housing is profitable to build. This is the result. LA is uniquely horrible since you both need a car and an extremely expensive apartment. Even on the low end you're talking about $600 to $1,000 for the privilege of driving.

belltaco 5y ago

So the homeless aren't mostly comprised of people with mental issues who'd have been homeless anyway? Also, homelessness itself can trigger mental issues across the general population who previously were well to do.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Some are, some aren't. As the cost of housing goes up, the fraction of the homeless who are homeless for economic reasons also goes up.
lkbm 5y ago
I mean, I suspect it's mostly be people with mental health issues, but I rarely see any evidence for the "who'd been homeless anyway" part. I know plenty of people with mental health issues who aren't homeless. Most of them work productive jobs and support themselves. Mental health issues are usually manageable if you have the resources to manage them. If homelessness is increasing, then it seems likely that something's causing the increase. If the cause is mental illness, something's causing that mental illness to be more prevalent or less manageable. High rent seems like a decent hypothesis of it being less manageable.
honksillet 5y ago
Mental health and addiction issues. (The later is the root of most of the former.)
notch656a 5y ago
> Also, homelessness itself can trigger mental issues across the general population who previously were well to do. I'm sure it does but I'm genuinely curious whether this legitimately drives a significant increase in mental issues. Anecdotally as someone who's always been able bodied thus able to find day labor doing mindless unskilled work like moving drywall even in the worst economies, I find homelessness to be less stressful as the responsibilities and day to day worries just were much more basic. It takes maybe 2 hours of day labor a day to live a luxurious by homeless standard existence (plenty of money for food, drink, patching tent/shelter, maintaining excellent REI-tier outdoor clothing that ensure you're nice and warm in all climates, etc). By contrast, now that I have legal residence-zoned housing (in my state I could be found in violation of child negligence laws if I don't provide whatever CPS considers adequate shelter, so I have no choice) I find my stresses and worries to be much higher as the amount of money needed to maintain artificially limited thus expensive housing to be significantly higher. If you are of sound body and mind, free of addiction and able and willing to work a couple hours a day (which believe it or not, lots of shitty jobs will tolerate you not being showered or whatever just fine), being homeless can be a pretty easy and low worry - even freeing - existence.

supernova87a 5y ago

Homelessness also decreases when cities simply let more housing be built, even if luxury housing. https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-buildings-help-low-income-renters/ https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-building... For some reason liberal policymakers (or their constituents) either can't seem to get that in their head, or can't act on it. And instead cling to things like rent control, which "feel good" in the short run but end up doing the opposite of what was intended. Sometimes I think that every policy (that isn't a "duh, of course" policy) should come with an expiration date. So that the people you wanted to help are specifically identified, and given a finite time to be helped -- and people who come after know that it's a one-time intervention and the system is what it is from now on. Then when the people you thought it would serve / benefit are gone, you are required to assess whether it worked as you thought, and it doesn't just go on autopilot forever. Now, whether the policymakers would respect that, or simply keep on extending it on public opinion, who knows. It's just too easy for well-intentioned people to put in place rules they think will work, and go away for 10 years and discover it didn't, and then still do nothing to fix it.

salmonfamine 5y ago
Why would they allow more housing to be built? That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA. Discard any notion that all but a very small minority of policymakers are truly motivated by ideology.
- nostromo 5y ago
  I live in a deep blue city (Seattle) and have interacted with some local policy makers. In truth, they just aren't very smart. And worse, they are quite confident they are indeed very smart. This isn't some grand conspiracy to increase homelessness and increase the cost of housing. The problem is that we elect idiots to local government.
  - beebmam 5y ago
    Completely agree. We should be aiming to elect doctors and engineers (i.e. people who understand Systems Theory) for political positions, not people who have prescriptive solutions.

danschumann 5y ago

Schools should teach ratios about housing expenses vs income. Somehow we should make kids practice budgeting, controlling spending, etc, not just teaching, but practicing for years, because when you get out of school, there are are a few simple, yet difficult(emotionally), things which will dictate success more than the memorized logic. Emotions take practice.

black_13 5y ago
kinos 5y ago
How does personal fiscal responsibility effect the global housing economy and availability of a highly limited good?
- danschumann 5y ago
  The highness is indeed based on where you live, which is your choice. As Dave Ramsey says, "you don't get a pass on the math because you live in California". You people are nutbags. It also affeCts what people will put up with when it comes to regulatory policy (the constraint that puts a squeeze on building new housing). People learn empty logic until they reach the real world, when they have an extremely rude awakening, and the suicide rate continues to increase as more and more people cannot bear to face what the real world entails, when they come to the violent realization that they are unfit for the real world, because they've been coddled by the school system and taught the opposite of what their priorities should have been (such as encouraging debt to get a degree ). Degrees are great, but a degree means you must work to pay it off, and if you must work at Starbucks while you wish you had more time to devote to artwork, you realize you were served a raw deal. So my soapboxed friend, isolated in your ivory cage, trying to sound smart, does your skepticism ever hinder on curiosity? Physics of what is truly real will catch up to you all, I persist it!!! Methinks!

avelis 5y ago

This will only continue. Single family zoning laws perpetuate the housing inequality all throughout major US cities. "Housing is a human right." Is great to hear but in practice we don't even abide by that in governance.

mullingitover 5y ago

We should be clear that we force people onto the street, it's a collective choice. Need proof? Simply pass a constitutional amendment that no elected official shall be eligible for re-election if the annual count of homeless individuals exceeds 100 people statewide. We would have emergency shelters built for every homeless person within a month, street teams sweeping back alleys 24/7, and hotlines for reporting encampments.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
No, they'd simply redefine what the word homeless means.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
colinmhayes 5y ago
There are shelters for every homeless person already. The homeless prefer the street.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  This is simply false. For example in Los Angeles[1]: > There are currently 435 sites countywide with 11,499 beds available. Meanwhile there are 48,041 unsheltered homeless people in LA county at last count[2]. With that being said, some people do not want to use shelters, and because the shelter beds are wildly outnumbered by the homeless population the government is not allowed to penalize anyone for camping on the street. Only when the government has provided adequate shelter for everyone can any ordinances against street camping be enforced, per the Supreme Court ruling in Martin v. Boise. [1] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/400d7b75f18747c4ae1ad22d662781a3 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/400d7b75f18747c4ae1ad22... [2] http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php http://www.laalmanac.com/social/so14.php
  - jsjohns2 5y ago
    Comparing the number of available beds with the number of unsheltered homeless people does not disprove parent's argument that there is a bed for everyone who wants a bed. A better question would be -- what the average shelter utilization?

wyager 5y ago

A priori it seems astoundingly unlikely to me that rent prices are causing people to become homeless at the margins. There's a huge gap in means between someone who just barely can't afford rent in SF and someone who lives on the street in SF. The former will move somewhere cheaper rather than living on the street. Almost certainly this effect is mediated by the fact that homeless people choose to move to cities which have high rent (because those cities tend to have better weather, better social services, etc.).

m_herrlich 5y ago
This. Living in a city with this problem, I struggle to imagine a significant causal relationship between housing prices and homelessness. The people I see in tents are not priced out. Magically roll rents back 20 years and they would still be largely unaffordable to this crowd.
- _xnmw 5y ago
  Magically roll back the clock 20 years along with the rent prices, and I suspect a lot of the people that became homeless in the past 20 years would've never become homeless in the first place.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
When I lived in Atlanta across the street from a homeless shelter, I frequently saw vans from rural areas come in and drop off homeless. One shelter (not the one I lived next to) even sent out fliers to rural communities soliciting their homeless to come there. The one time I got to talk to the driver of one of the vans, he said he ran a church that simply didn't have the means to take care of the homeless that popped up in their community so the only thing they could do was give them a ride to a city that had facilities for them. It didn't sound like they were intentionally dumping their problems on the city, they simply didn't have the means to do anything for them. The gas it took to drive the van to the city and back probably was a dent in their limited budget. Even if that community only brought one homeless person to the city every other year, when you think of how many rural communities that struggle financially there are, it adds up to lots of homeless ending up in big cities. The bad thing for the homeless is that even if their support network back home was broken, there was some possibility of repairing it. Once they're moved to a big city where they have no social network other than the shelter, it's difficult to recover.

pjerem 5y ago

Just out of curiosity, is it the norm in the US to be able to exceed a third of your income in rents ? In my country, in theory, you cannot have more than 33% of your income used to pay rent. Well, it’s not forbidden, the bank can be flexible, but they surely are double checking because they take the risk for the debt to be cleared if you became insolvent because of them.

xvedejas 5y ago
There isn't any debt involved in paying rent (are you thinking of mortgage?) and the bank isn't taking any risk, isn't guaranteeing any rent payments. I'm not even sure that a bank strictly needs to be involved in someone paying rent, they could pay in cash for instance. Where are you that a bank guarantees rent payments?
- dymk 5y ago
  Not sure why the bank has come up in this discussion about rent and risk. This is a landlord/tenant concern. Renting to somebody who has a high chance of not being able to pay their rent 3 months from now is indeed a risk, and one that landlords go to great lengths to avoid. Prospective renters may not be in debt yet, but nonpaying renters are hard to get rid of.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    My bad, as a non English speaker, I just inverted rent and mortgage payment.
mostlystatic 5y ago
It's the same in the UK, everything over 33% is called "unaffordable" and you'll fail the affordability checks during referencing. I don't think it's a legal requirement though, just safer for the landlords. Personally, I've never had a stable income in the UK, so for the last two places I rented I had to pay 12 months upfront. I'm quite skeptical the 33% threshold makes much sense (though it may be a decent heuristic in most cases). Compare these two scenarios: 1) Affordable rent: £18k/yr income, £500/mo rent, £823/mo left after tax 2) Unaffordable rent: £30k/yr income, £1000/mo rent, £1005/mo left after tax #2 is better off financially than #1, assuming costs other than housing are similar [1]. But the 33% affordability threshold will make it harder for #2 to rent than #1. [1] I think that's broadly the case, but will vary based on circumstances. E.g. childcare is more expensive in London, or you might need a car in a rural area.

coding123 5y ago

While we have a minimum wage, I'm guessing the non-existance of a maximum average wage is the real cause of rising rents.

jsjohns2 5y ago

If you are naïve enough to think that we will simply build our way out of the homelessness crisis, I encourage you to book a flight to Los Angeles and strike up a conversation with any first responder. They will all tell you the same story -- the homeless are nearly all on Methamphetamine and/or Fentanyl. Yes, rent prices have increased over the last decade. But the affordability, purity, availability, and use of those very destructive drugs have also increased over the same time period. The chart that I would be interested in seeing is are those elements plotted against homelessness rate. I suspect that the correlation coefficient between per-capita meth use and homelessness rate would be ~1.

loeg 5y ago
West Virginia has very high rates of drug addiction, and yet much lower homelessness than LA. It’s because housing is much, much cheaper. That only happens by building more.
- jsjohns2 5y ago
  Comparing LA and WV is like comparing apples and oranges. At least those are both fruits. Those locales differ on much more than just housing costs.
  - loeg 5y ago
    You're asking readers to imagine that LA is representative of other areas, but reject the idea that LA is comparable to WV? I think you need to pick one to make a coherent argument.
    - jsjohns2 5y ago
      I suspect that there is a strong non-linear effect, i.e., introducing novel drugs into a state with very cheap housing does not move the needle that much on homelessness (WV) but is catastrophic when done in a city with expensive housing (LA). We should address the housing problem. We should also address the drug problem.
5y ago

savant_penguin 5y ago

This is infuriating The same people who complain about homelessness and pretend to care about the poor are the ones to call the building of new housing """gentrification""" Endless committees to decide if someone can build new housing is just absurd. (Hello California) This is why the building of new homes should _not_ be a matter of vote. Just like deciding your career or in which companies to invest. The overall public should _not_ get a say in what private contractors build, unless in absolutely extreme cases such as when pollution is involved (noise/air..). Just like McDonald's does not get a say in whether a new Burger King should open, homeowners should not get a say in whether new housing should be built. No matter how much they pretend ""it'll push poor out of cities!!!1!""

DoreenMichele 5y ago

I'm happy to see this here. As someone who has studied this problem space, I believe that housing supply issues are a major root cause of homelessness in the US. I don't think there's any conspiracy, just a lack of solid understanding of the problem. I think we are "victims of our own success" in that I think our last housing crisis was solved by the birth of modern suburbs and this made the single family detached house designed for a nuclear family our default standard and trying to emulate that or improve on that has gone weird and unhelpful places. But thrilled to see an article connecting homelessness to housing supply issues rather than the tired trope of "They are all junkies and crazies."