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Be that as it may, the median home in Oakland is $749,000. That's far in excess of what an average person can be able to afford, let alone someone who is strug

Be that as it may, the median home in Oakland is $749,000. That's far in excess of what an average person can be able to afford, let alone someone who is struggling with mental illness. --------- That's why I'm saying the first step here is to make $50,000-ish housing units as a first step. It doesn't matter if they're low-end high-density condos or trailer parks, you need something cheap to solve the problem of homelessness. The lack of money + the expensive houses cause homelessness directly. The issue of mental health is a diversion. Mental health complicates things but its certainly not the end-all / be-all of this situation. Its not even the most important issue. Oakland's problem is fundamentally the the number of housing units available. If you don't have enough homes at low enough prices, homelessness will come around. You don't need to be mentally sick to become unable to live in a $749,000 home. ------- This is a city completely devoid of low-income housing units (ie: trailer parks). Is it really that big of a surprise that people can't afford a home to degrees far greater than other cities? I've seen autistic people, schizophrinic people, and bipolar individuals hold their own homes and be productive members of society. Mental health is no "excuse" for becoming homeless. I've also seen perfectly rational, 100% healthy people lose their homes and become homeless.

nate_meurer 5y ago
It seems apparent that your experience with this subject is dwarfed by wahern's. It's funny how you just papered over their entire response to you with "be that as it may". Couple of questions for you, since you seem to be expert on refractory homelessness: - How do you propose to prevent severely mentally ill and drug addicted people from destroying the $50,000 homes they're allowed to live in free of charge? - Are you aware of the strict screening and eligibility requirements that homeless applicants undergo to qualify for existing housing-first programs? Why do you suppose things are done this way? Are you familiar with the cost of maintaining the housing in these programs, even with the strict screening in place? What solutions do you propose for many homeless folks who don't pass these screenings? Or for the many others who do pass initially, but relapse into the addictions, illnesses, and crimes that brought them here to begin with, and bring those problems into the communities you've put them in? - Exactly how do we go about building your $50,000 dwellings near any big city in California, let alone the bay area? Detailed steps, please. Keep in mind that your super affordable housing must actually be in these cities, enough to provide even remotely affordable intensive mental health and addiction treatment services and high frequency wellness and maintenance checkups that these folks will require, often indefinitely. So... where will the land come from? What's your budget for that land, and for the necessary improvements like grading, sewer, water, and electric? What is your budget for condemning or buying out existing housing in the most expensive cities in the country?
wahern 5y ago
We absolutely need to build more subsidized housing. And I support those policies, including many of the perennial bond measures. I do so out of earnestness and the hope that the next bond measure will placate the various NIMBY factions on the Board of Supervisors. They disappoint every time, but failure would only truly come when I and others like me give up on sincere attempts at compromise. But we (San Francisco, Oakland, etc) can't build ourselves out of the homeless problem. Our problems and their causes are multifaceted. In 2004 Mayor Newsom committed San Francisco to that very solution with a 10-year plan, and by 2014 it had acquired or built a long-term residence for every chronically homeless person in 2004. Approximately 3,000 units for 3,000 people. See https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/404-Ten%20Year%20Plan%20Anniversary%20Report%20-%20Final%20Draft.pdf https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents... Chronic homelessness was near a nadir. However, over the next several years homelessness exploded even though in terms of economic inhospitableness nothing had appreciably changed since 2014. As a child we moved all over the place, town to town, state to state, chasing better jobs and cheaper living, with varying degrees of success. Poor people, even with empty pockets, are resourceful and somehow manage to get around. Some are better at it than others. This phenomenon is especially stark in accounts of genocide, where some people are seemingly unable to fathom relocating even when they have the economic and physical means and despite knowing their death is imminent. But the operative word is some; some can't, but some can. (Neither the poor nor even the homeless are a homogenous group, and much is lost in our--including my own--reductive aggregations.) It would be patently inhumane and unreasonable to pick any homeless person on the street and demand that they move away. On the other hand, policies that assume as a general matter that the poor or homeless can't, won't, or shouldn't relocate in search of better opportunities or conditions are sorely misguided, not to mention doomed to failure when adhered to at such a local level. Moreover, from a purely accounting perspective, neither San Francisco nor Oakland have the resources to mitigate all the economic pressures for housing. For definitions of "affordable" bandied about by many on the far left, if you crunch the numbers (e.g. $500k per unit, which is somewhat conservative) San Francisco would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build enough subsidized housing, and that's if the situation remained static. That's not remotely realistic even though the City of San Francisco already enjoys the highest revenue per capita of any major American city. To think Oakland, a far less wealthy city, could merely build its way out of the current problem using public funds and without displacing anybody is even less realistic, to say the least.

nate_meurer 5y ago

It seems apparent that your experience with this subject is dwarfed by wahern's. It's funny how you just papered over their entire response to you with "be that as it may". Couple of questions for you, since you seem to be expert on refractory homelessness: - How do you propose to prevent severely mentally ill and drug addicted people from destroying the $50,000 homes they're allowed to live in free of charge? - Are you aware of the strict screening and eligibility requirements that homeless applicants undergo to qualify for existing housing-first programs? Why do you suppose things are done this way? Are you familiar with the cost of maintaining the housing in these programs, even with the strict screening in place? What solutions do you propose for many homeless folks who don't pass these screenings? Or for the many others who do pass initially, but relapse into the addictions, illnesses, and crimes that brought them here to begin with, and bring those problems into the communities you've put them in? - Exactly how do we go about building your $50,000 dwellings near any big city in California, let alone the bay area? Detailed steps, please. Keep in mind that your super affordable housing must actually be in these cities, enough to provide even remotely affordable intensive mental health and addiction treatment services and high frequency wellness and maintenance checkups that these folks will require, often indefinitely. So... where will the land come from? What's your budget for that land, and for the necessary improvements like grading, sewer, water, and electric? What is your budget for condemning or buying out existing housing in the most expensive cities in the country?

wahern 5y ago

We absolutely need to build more subsidized housing. And I support those policies, including many of the perennial bond measures. I do so out of earnestness and the hope that the next bond measure will placate the various NIMBY factions on the Board of Supervisors. They disappoint every time, but failure would only truly come when I and others like me give up on sincere attempts at compromise. But we (San Francisco, Oakland, etc) can't build ourselves out of the homeless problem. Our problems and their causes are multifaceted. In 2004 Mayor Newsom committed San Francisco to that very solution with a 10-year plan, and by 2014 it had acquired or built a long-term residence for every chronically homeless person in 2004. Approximately 3,000 units for 3,000 people. See https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/404-Ten%20Year%20Plan%20Anniversary%20Report%20-%20Final%20Draft.pdf https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents... Chronic homelessness was near a nadir. However, over the next several years homelessness exploded even though in terms of economic inhospitableness nothing had appreciably changed since 2014. As a child we moved all over the place, town to town, state to state, chasing better jobs and cheaper living, with varying degrees of success. Poor people, even with empty pockets, are resourceful and somehow manage to get around. Some are better at it than others. This phenomenon is especially stark in accounts of genocide, where some people are seemingly unable to fathom relocating even when they have the economic and physical means and despite knowing their death is imminent. But the operative word is some; some can't, but some can. (Neither the poor nor even the homeless are a homogenous group, and much is lost in our--including my own--reductive aggregations.) It would be patently inhumane and unreasonable to pick any homeless person on the street and demand that they move away. On the other hand, policies that assume as a general matter that the poor or homeless can't, won't, or shouldn't relocate in search of better opportunities or conditions are sorely misguided, not to mention doomed to failure when adhered to at such a local level. Moreover, from a purely accounting perspective, neither San Francisco nor Oakland have the resources to mitigate all the economic pressures for housing. For definitions of "affordable" bandied about by many on the far left, if you crunch the numbers (e.g. $500k per unit, which is somewhat conservative) San Francisco would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build enough subsidized housing, and that's if the situation remained static. That's not remotely realistic even though the City of San Francisco already enjoys the highest revenue per capita of any major American city. To think Oakland, a far less wealthy city, could merely build its way out of the current problem using public funds and without displacing anybody is even less realistic, to say the least.