5 ms·

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

by 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.
kansface 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. Citizens at the margins who can't find a place don't go directly to the streets - they crash with family, then friends, then live in their car (until they can't afford to move it). Most homeless in SF are invisible. Getting this cohort into an apartment is mostly dependent on having affordable apartments.
- Tiktaalik 5y ago
  There was an explosion of street homelessness in Vancouver in 2020, with 400 some people eventually occupying a park. Everyone was on /r/vancouver was like "where did all these people come from?!" Well it's as you say. They were the "hidden homeless," couch surfing at their friends. All of a sudden the pandemic hit and these publicly owned social housing apartments added new rules saying "no guests" and such, and suddenly boom, you see the real amount of homeless.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
People move to these coastal cities because they're vibrant economic centres. They are looking to improve their situation so they go to places where the jobs are, just like anyone else. The same thing that attracts SF tech workers. Then misfortunes happen, they lose their job, they lose their health, they lose their apartment etc etc. Now they're stuck. They don't move to cheaper areas of the country because 1) there are real costs to moving (money they don't have) and 2) the economic prospects in the cheaper part of the country are worse.
- wyager 5y ago
  > the economic prospects in the cheaper part of the country are worse. This is not meaningfully true for people with lower skill levels. You can have a much higher standard of living as a laborer in Laredo than in SF.

by wyager 5y ago

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.

kansface 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. Citizens at the margins who can't find a place don't go directly to the streets - they crash with family, then friends, then live in their car (until they can't afford to move it). Most homeless in SF are invisible. Getting this cohort into an apartment is mostly dependent on having affordable apartments.

Tiktaalik 5y ago
There was an explosion of street homelessness in Vancouver in 2020, with 400 some people eventually occupying a park. Everyone was on /r/vancouver was like "where did all these people come from?!" Well it's as you say. They were the "hidden homeless," couch surfing at their friends. All of a sudden the pandemic hit and these publicly owned social housing apartments added new rules saying "no guests" and such, and suddenly boom, you see the real amount of homeless.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

People move to these coastal cities because they're vibrant economic centres. They are looking to improve their situation so they go to places where the jobs are, just like anyone else. The same thing that attracts SF tech workers. Then misfortunes happen, they lose their job, they lose their health, they lose their apartment etc etc. Now they're stuck. They don't move to cheaper areas of the country because 1) there are real costs to moving (money they don't have) and 2) the economic prospects in the cheaper part of the country are worse.

wyager 5y ago
> the economic prospects in the cheaper part of the country are worse. This is not meaningfully true for people with lower skill levels. You can have a much higher standard of living as a laborer in Laredo than in SF.