18 ms·

Homelessness Is a Housing Problem

41 points by vwoolf 5y ago

WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
The idea that "homelessness" is about a lack of homes is a dumb idea that just won't die. Those who promote it endlessly simply will not go out in the world and use their own senses to determine for themselves that it isn't true. Here's how you do it: go out and talk to the "homeless" and keep notes as to whether homelessness is probably that person's primary problem. The results: upwards of 90% of those surveyed will have some other main problem, and it will almost certainly be addiction, mental illness, or both. All of a sudden, it stops being a mystery why "homelessness" is a perennial problem: because we're misusing the term "homeless" for two of the most intractable problems in the human world. Calling those people "the homeless" is like calling cancer patients "the hairless". When I lived in a different place, I went on long walks. I started buying little care packages to give to those who were suffering out on the street. I gave an older woman a package and she was grateful and we had a nice exchange. The next time I tried, she almost attacked me. Think her primary problem is lack of a home? Lack of a home is just one symptom of her real problems.
m348e912 5y ago
Alan Graham. founder of Community First Village, a 27-acre community in East Austin that provides affordable, permanent housing for the homeless believes that the single greatest cause of homelessness is “a profound, catastrophic loss of family,” whether by forces like death or divorce, or institutional failures in the criminal justice and foster care systems. “The Community First Village is the recognition that human beings need to be in relationship with each other, and that housing will never solve homelessness but community will,” Does housing availability have an effect on homeless, sure. But addiction, mental health, and trauma, play a much more prevalent role. I'm far from am expert in this topic, this just reflects my understanding. I'd love to hear a different point of view.
- lazypenguin 5y ago
  Community first is a wonderful initiative. Everyone always comes up with grandiose solutions to many world problems but it’s amazing how “community” is usually a good fix for many issues.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  All of these things interact and affect one another. Say you're living in some common marginal situation working a low-wage job with high rent. Some event happens where suddenly you require a few hundred dollars, nothing serious for most of us here but the sort of thing that happens every year or two - maybe your ancient car you have to use to commute to your job conks out, maybe you have a common medical issue requiring care and time off work, maybe your dental work can no longer be ignored, maybe you need an abortion because the idea of having a child in this situation is too ridiculous to even consider. This shock makes you short on rent. Maybe you're able to recover the next month, but maybe not. Ideally you have family you can fall back on. If not, now you're homeless. Without housing it is massively more difficult and time-consuming to perform basic maintenance acts like showering, shaving, defecating, or feeding yourself. Think of any camping trip you've gone on. It's easy to start slipping at your job and you're much more likely to be fired. But say you really hustle and actually keep your job, like many unhoused people. Without a safe place to retreat to & relax, without a quiet place to sleep undisturbed by cars roaring by, you enter a spiral. Your mental health, already not great after years of stress associated with your marginal financial situation, decreases markedly and then drops off a cliff. You become deeply depressed or are unlucky enough to finally trigger more serious mental health disorders that have been lurking, waiting for the chance to rear their heads. It's very easy to stop showing up for your job here, but you still manage to put yourself together and drag yourself over there pretty well. Your coworkers start to complain about the way you smell. Your physical health begins to deteriorate. At any stage of this process your plunge could have been arrested by a supportive family. And at any stage in this process your plunge could have been massively accelerated by the introduction of drug use. Once mental health starts to go, self-medicating seems more and more appealing. Few joys are left available to you. For most unhoused people, it's only a matter of time. Once you are addicted to drugs all of the difficulties enumerated above are multiplied. It is extremely difficult to kick drugs in the best of times (how many of us know of some well-off family with a black sheep child who has been to family-funded rehab nearly double-digit times?) and now there is basically no incentive nor ability to do so. Mental health issues are also extremely difficult to heal. Many of us here have been depressed and understand how difficult it is to recover even in good economic circumstances. The absolute best you can hope for upon escaping all of this is to return to a marginal low-wage high-rent existence doing its best to kick you back down the cycle. The #1 takeaway here is that people like to talk about homeless people with mental health or drug addiction issues, and it is impossible not to admit the simple truth - their recovery is impossible without being given housing. A safe place to retreat, rest, and convalesce.
- ahahahahah 5y ago
  > I'd love to hear a different point of view. Not enough to read the article, I guess.
  - Schiendelman 5y ago
    Yeah, the article explicitly controls out the parent’s assertion and yet they show up handwaving. I’m glad I’m not the only one who was frustrated.
burner556 5y ago
This is just obviously not true. Sure, there are people that sleep in their car and could probably use somewhere to stay. However the visible majority of homeless in California, let’s say the “dramatic” homeless, are absolutely not just a house away from normalcy. Tale as old as time, California charters a hotel to house the homeless and it turns into a drug orgy smearing shit on the walls paradise. Yeah yeah, the only difference between the aggressive homeless person screaming and smashing water bottles against plate glass store windows and me is that I have a roof over my head. Look around and give me a break with that nonsense.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > homeless person screaming and smashing water bottles against plate glass store windows and me is that I have a roof over my head I am sorry, but you are part of the problem because, whether realising or not, you are perpetuating the. toxic idea that you must be a highly productive, psycologically stable member or society before you 'deserve' a roof over your head. I've lived in a poor country, we had plenty of alcoholics, drug addicts, wife beaters and other assorted assholes as neighbours, none of them were homeless becauae housing was cheap. It also does not take a PHD in psycology to realise that if you take one of them, and make them live on the street for a few years, their condition will deteriorate. The fact thay you have to prove that housing and housing-less are connected just shows how deep our collective head is up the arse of this new, late-stage-capitalist, neoliberal bullshit. I am not sure any CCP propaganda can be as effective. The system is plain self destructive - half the population reports that they can't afford to have kids, and the #1 expence is housing. How are you gonna have evil capitalist paradise if all the wage slaves die out? Oh, wait, what do we care, the whole planet is gonna burn up regardless. People call Chinese government evil, byt as least they have a plan that goes beyong the next quarterly report.
  - Workaccount2 5y ago
    You don't have to be highly productive to deserve a house, you just have to be net positive productive. I don't think anyone (well some people) is against society extending a credit to help people get back on their feet, but the issue is that historically it just becomes net negative producers now being even more negative by virtue of having a living space paid for with little signs of improvement. The credit just gets written off as a compounding loss. I suggest watching Soft White Underbelly on YT, he does tons of homeless interviews and outreach trying to get people back on their feet. The solution is definitely not "just throw houses and therapy at the problem"
pydry 5y ago
There's a strong disincentive to cast homelessness as a housing problem: property prices. Nobody particularly minds if a bit of money is spent on mental health services or drug addiction therapy but money spent on new social housing in your area that uses your tax money to reduce the value of your home and potentially bring people you wouldnt want as neighbors? Yeah, people arent keen on that. Even ordinary, caring "lefty" people hate that idea. The 1% also dont want to put downward pressure on the value of their property portfolios with extra housing or upward pressure on wages and they own the media and think tanks so mental health/drugs cause homelessness rather than are caused by homelessness when they discuss it. Or, it gets cast as a lack of personal responsibility for the right wing press. Either way the only working solution is the least politically palatable, so cities run by people who care end up just building a methadone clinic or something because that's all you'll be allowed to do. Then the right wing and liberal press will take a shit on them because what little they were able to do on a tiny budget didnt really solve anything.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  I like how people who talk about personal responsebility always talk about someone else's responsebility to avoid themselves taking on responsebility for the state of the world/society/their neighbourhood and no-one ever calls them out on it!
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    How is this hypocritical? If someone says “[xyz] is your responsibility, not mine”, how is that inconsistent with their worldview on personal responsibility? They don’t just love responsibility for sake of it and don’t simply want as much as they can for themselves.
_---____--_-- 5y ago
"Why do some US cities struggle more with homelessness? A new book explores a key component of the issue: housing supply." It's a Captain Obvious class of article, hopefully the next one will explore the correlation between thirst and water deprivation
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  Well large areas of american public policy are built on the idea that homelessness is caused by the poor choices of individual homeless people and that shaming them more will solve it. So it may be obvious but it still needs to be repeated and reinforced.
- pydry 5y ago
  It's important coz otherwise capital will decide which way the correlation flows and big money is (literally) invested in homelessness being caused by mental illness and drugs. This is a question a lot like "does hiking the minimum wage cause unemployment?" in that a lot of private wealth hinges upon the public believing a plausible falsehood. Rigorous scientific study can offset that.
moltke 5y ago
Homelessness is caused by: 1) Drug addiction (addicts and the mentally ill are no longer rational actors and it's cruel to treat them as such, stop paying them to sleep on the sidewalk) 2) Immigration (like it or not, pumping up demand weather they're paying for it or the government makes housing much more expensive for everyone.) 3) Cheap credit (Everyone knows how this works and worse still it directly effects the most disadvantaged while funneling their money to the wealthy.) 4) High cost of construction labor 5) Material supply chain issues (which is largely the same as the last two, it's all just inflation.) 6) Expensive regulation that adds to construction cost (zoning, building codes etc.) Housing is part of it but not the only part. Some of these things could be easily fixed in ways that benefit everyone who lives here (housed or not.) No one in charge wants to though and you should be asking why.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Specifically in regards to 2: Canada constructed 244,025 new homes in 2021[0] (this includes new condos and apartments). By comparison, Canada allowed 401,000 new permanent residents through immigration in 2021[1]. Now obviously some of those immigrants are going to be families that only need one home, but basically almost all of the new housing supply being created in Canada is so small that it could be bought up by the new permanent resident population. And that's before you get into temporary visas, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, and foreign investors buying up housing as a store of wealth and letting it sit vacant, and we haven't even gotten into the demand from the rising generation of young Canadians looking to enter the housing market. 0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-housing-starts-hit-record-in-2021-rising-21-per-cent/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-ho... 1: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2021/12/canada-welcomes-the-most-immigrants-in-a-single-year-in-its-history.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
- bannedbybros 5y ago
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Pigalowda 5y ago
These policy experts need to sit down with social workers, case managers, ER and psychiatric center physicians and staff. The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues. These people have no choice but to be visible. They obviously can’t succeed in their current state. Where can someone go who has baseline mental health issues, has been low SES for their entire life, and has no real support network? When this type of person is in crisis a shelter isn’t going to be a safe convalescent house to get mental health treatment and stability/sobriety. The US is woefully inadequate here. We let our lowest functioning and least supported (as in support network of family and friends) members of society walk the streets panhandling by day and sleeping in the dirt by night. US cities need convalescent facilities and long term psychiatric facilities for the indigents who are mentally unable to tackle their own enormous critical problem and for the ones who are long term addicted and need strong support. (Long term alcohol use and amphetamine use lead to different kinds of psychosis. Wernicke/Korsakoff and amphetamine induced psychosis respectively. These people are not sound enough of mind to do this without long term facilities. We don’t have those in the US anymore. Unsupervised public housing is not the answer for these people. Perhaps for the less apparent higher functioning and invisible poor it is.
- cascom 5y ago
  I think you make a great distinction between the visible and invisible homeless, and that the solutions to those two problems are totally different.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  The intermittent homeless (or invisible homeless) are the majority and the cheapest to correct. They are also more likely to include children and can help prevent intergenerational issues. That group can be helped by public housing.
- rkk3 5y ago
  > These policy experts need to sit down with social workers, case managers, ER and psychiatric center physicians and staff. > The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues. The most visible homeless are also a small minority of the people who deal with Homelessness in America - which is why they are addressing housing. California had a homeless population of 150,000 in 2021 [1], most whom were not living on the sidewalk & dealing with drug and/or psychiatric problems. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-population-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...
jrd79 5y ago
Those trend line fits are hilarious. Unmodeled confounding factors, anyone? I especially like where they choose if something should be a log-linear fit vs. a linear fit. And the 95% confidence interval only containing less than 10% of the samples. These guys are amazing. And Greg Colburn is a professor! Good job, guys. Go find other work.
- tcskeptic 5y ago
  The confidence is for the slope of the regression line. Are you objecting to something the interval is not trying to accomplish or am I missing something (entirely possible)?
  - jrd79 5y ago
    A one-dimensional affine fit (usually called a linear fit) contains two parameters: a slope and an offset. Both have error bounds, and the offset error bounds on this data would be huge. Data presentation that is not intended to deceive would have shown the vertical spread of the estimate too. But that spread would have been so wide that it would reveal that the fit is terrible and that reasonable conclusions cannot be drawn from these model fits. This is not scientific work. It is ideological policy advocacy dressed up as data science.
    - hervature 5y ago
      I think you are conflating two different things. The R^2 is incredibly poor for all the plots. That's essentially what you are complaining about. However, you can still have a very low R^2 but a statistically significant slope. While I agree that the article needs more support due to only doing univariate analysis and potentially missing huge confounders, your complaint is not valid. Here is code for basically random points that have a tight slope coefficient: import numpy as np import statsmodels.api as sm n = 1000 desired_R2 = 0.05 mu = 0 sigma_noise = 0.1 sigma = np.sqrt(sigma_noise*2*(desired_R2/(1-desired_R2))) X = np.random.normal(mu, sigma, n) noise = np.random.normal(0, sigma_noise, n) y = X + noise X = sm.add_constant(X) model = sm.OLS(y, X).fit() model.summary()
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
My city in Poland offers help to homeless people. There is only one condition. For them to stop drinking. They never do.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  You presumably know at least a few housed people in your life with drinking problems. Why don't they just quit drinking? Why do you think it would be easier to quit drinking while also not having housing?
- retrac 5y ago
  This reminds me of wet shelters. [1] I'd encourage people interested in this topic to read up on them. It's fascinating. They provide alcoholics with alcohol. Usually a scheme like 1 - 2 drinks per hour, on the house, if they abstain from outside alcohol and drugs and otherwise obey the shelter rules. The results are (to me) quite counter-intuitive. For some drinkers, if you give them a rate-limited but ultimately unrestricted supply of booze, and tie access to it to good behaviour -- but not abstention -- they actually stabilize their intake and start slowly decreasing it over time. They tend to keep coming to the shelter (free booze!). Participants in wet shelters drink less than on the streets as they're rate-limited. Their health generally improves. Some eventually even wean themselves off this way. The cyclical nature of drug addiction when in poverty means complete chaos, withdrawal, then binging again. Just giving them booze interrupts that. This ties into my pet hypothesis (not exactly revolutionary, I know) that homeless people, as well as drug addicts, quite rationally really, seek to avoid immediate chaos, disorientation, and pain. Drug withdrawal is chaos and pain (of a completely intolerable kind for some) and so is avoided, even at enormous longer-term cost. (Similar results with stabilization, improved health and self-tapering have been seen with providing heroin addicts access to opiates, too. [2] The % that exit such programs sober who stay sober is higher than pretty much any other form of drug addiction treatment. Makes one wonder if we're going about addiction the wrong way.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment
tlogan 5y ago
There are at least 3 types of homelessnes and each of these types have different solution: 1) people who have drug and mental issues 2) people (and families) who do not have drug and metal issues but just bad luck (lost job, released from jail and cannot find job, etc.) 3) people want be to transient (runaways, hanging out and traveling, etc.). Members of this group slowly become group one. I have a strong opinion that there needs to 3 different solutions which should NOT be mixed (I.e., do not provide shared housing for the first group and second group).
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  Just to add to the other person who replied to you - group 2 causes much of group 1.
  - tlogan 5y ago
    Yes. And group 2 is so easy to take care. But we are putting them into the same shelters as group 1 or doing some “let’s build affordable housing“. We need readlily available and free housing for these people - with transport and consoling. However this requires coordination on the state level and some help from businesses: sometime housing is not available in the same county but maybe neibouring county might have.
- wnkrshm 5y ago
  Group 2 also easily decays into group 1, depending on whether they receive help at that stage or not.
amelius 5y ago
Poverty is a money problem.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Homelessness is not just tantamount to a poverty problem.
logicalmonster 5y ago
I believe that homelessness is only a housing problem for a percentage of people who are temporarily "down on their luck" and need a place to stay while they find a job. For the normal person who had a string of simultaneous bad things happen to them (car broke down, water heater exploded, they fell down the stairs and couldn't work for a months, etc) that caused their finances to die, most normal people have the ability to recover from that, especially with some assistance. But there's no helping the mentally ill or drug addicts with a house. You could gift them a mansion, and they'll find a hammer and tear up the walls either looking for demons hiding in the walls to kill, or trying to find wiring or metal scrap to sell for drugs.
- lkbm 5y ago
  > I believe that homelessness is only a housing problem for a percentage of people who are temporarily "down on their luck" and need a place to stay while they find a job. I agree. (I'd change "only" to "mostly", but close enough.) But I also recognize that people aren't born in whatever state they're in, and it seems apparent that getting into "down on your luck" homeless state is the first step into being part of the drug-addicted, mentally unstable homeless population. Do you suppose those drug addicts were born addicted? Do you suppose no home owners are mentally ill? There has to be a path from largely functional, housed, and employed, to on the street, on drugs, and mentally unstable. Pretending such a path doesn't exist is comforting for those of us who haven't started down it, but it's certainly not going to give us an accurate understanding of the world. Stop looking at a snapshot of people and look at the progression.
  - m348e912 5y ago
    >>it seems apparent that getting into "down on your luck" homeless state is the first step into being part of the drug-addicted, mentally unstable homeless population. I think it's the opposite. Many drug addicts start off housed, either with family or on their own. As their addiction takes over their lives they lose their job and burn bridges with their family and eventually end up on the street. I've seen examples of families of addicts are loving and would house them in a minute if it wasn't for their addition and toxic behavior.
bannedbybros 5y ago
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MaxMoney 5y ago
dwin 5y ago
I want to defend this article since a lot of people in the comments are bashing it. There are a few facts here that point to housing prices as the primary driver in homelessness rates: - as an example in the article, King County WA has a homelessness rate 5x of Miami-Dade County. - Why is that? Florida is obviously not more generous with subsidies or financial help to homeless people, it’s not a climate where people can’t live outside, it doesn’t have way more mental health issues than Seattle - if you look at the homelessness rates in cities they correspond strongly with rents. Mental illness rates don’t seem to change much between cities. It’s true that the thing that causes people to become homeless is often a crisis of some kind - adiction or mental health, job loss, etc. What people in the comments here aren’t doing is modeling what happens in a place where housing is cheap vs housing is expensive. In a place where housing is cheap, addiction or mental health issues might mean you can keep living in your shitty apartment and making rent; life is less precarious. Mentally ill people talk to themselves in the comfort of their own home! Obviously there are people who are homeless even in low cost of living areas and they need support to find shelter, but if rich areas built enough housing to lower prices, some amount of the homelessness crisis would be solved “for free.”
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  It’s better than free. If you simply stop restricting (upward) development, you also get way more tax revenue and can sustain your infrastructure better.
kixiQu 5y ago
Parts of the piece I'd have hoped would be reflected in the discussion: > First, the people sleeping on the street only represent a subset of the total population of people experiencing homelessness. In the 2020 count, chronic homelessness (what policy makers call being homeless for at least a year and living with some kind of physical or mental disability, including mental illness, a chronic health condition, and substance use disorder) accounted for less than 30 percent of the homeless cases in King County, while the chronic unsheltered population made up less than 17 percent of total cases. Second, we know that mental health and drug use can be both a cause of homelessness and a consequence. The trauma associated with homelessness is significant; that drug use and mental illness might result from this experience is not surprising. Research confirms this relationship. > Despite this complexity, the fundamental question remains: Does variation in rates of these individual risk factors like poverty explain variation in rates of homelessness witnessed across the country? In other words, do we have more homelessness in Seattle because we have more poor people or more drug users? Our research suggests the answer is no. There follow some supporting graphs, etc. > Individual risk factors help account for who in a given city might lose their housing at any given point in time, but housing markets—rents and vacancy rates—set the context in which those risk factors are expressed. Without looking at housing markets, you can’t explain why Seattle has a much higher rate of homelessness than Chicago, Minneapolis, or Dallas. The fundamental conclusion is that the consequences of individual vulnerabilities are far more severe in locations with less accommodating housing markets.
specialist 5y ago
I know people who work on sustainable & affordable housing as well as homelessness. It's generally understood that we need more housing. A lot more. And some huge fraction of the "unhoused" (?) is due to affordability (ever rising rents). Confirming this folk theory with hard data and analysis will prove very useful in the ongoing policy battles. (A lot of political hobbyists continue to mindlessly repeat value-based and morality tale stories, when simple economics explains quite a bit.)
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  I wish it was useful. Models have shown this for decades. Data doesn’t change the root cause - land owners don’t want competition from other land owners in housing.
littlestymaar 5y ago
Homelessness is a feature, not a bug, it's the stick. Nobody would work wearing diapers in Amazon warehouses for miserable wages if they weren't afraid of lacking food and becoming homeless.
- danaris 5y ago
  I think the point here is that we're making a feature request to remove that.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    I'm not sure the BDFL is benevolent enough to accept it though. And since the USSR fork fiasco, I'm not sure we have many options left[1]… [1] no pun intended
giantg2 5y ago
"Homelessness Is a Housing Problem" Tautology? That doesn't really help us fix it, or even understand it. You could give people housing, but that's not going to fix the underlying causes, and may not be the best help we can give some of the individuals. That could be inability to get or hold a job due to criminal history or mental health, jobs that don't pay enough to afford living expenses (more about market/job structure than simply raising minimum wage, although reforms around that can make sense), etc. Now for some segment of the homeless population, possibly a fairly large one, giving someone an address can help them get a job and get back on their feet - I'm thinking Norway's (or was it Sewden?) model, but other structural issues would have to be addressed to make that work, like how the "justice" and healthcare (substance abuse and mental health especially) system are structured as well as social conventions/stigmas related to them.
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  Step one is to stop restricting housing growth so that the subset of people who are on the edge don’t fall off. Then it gets easier for a lot of existing systems to help people who are capable of getting back into (cheaper) housing to do so. And then we can focus on people who really need more care because we won’t be actively making things way worse the way we are with our housing policies now.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I don't know about this. Most places aren't very restrictive. The big cost is labor and materials. Both of these are constrained resources. Any rapid increase will lead to even higher costs. Again, preferences of the people with the money to actually build new construction will be to buy run down houses to remodel or level and start over, with large area and expensive options of course. I don't really see anything indicating the housing supply at the low end of the spectrum would increase, nor that overall prices would drop given that inputs would increase.
    - Schiendelman 5y ago
      No offense intended, but yes, you definitely don’t know about this. Most cities with high demand allow nothing more dense than houses on 2/3 or more of their land. It is easy to falsify your argument about personal preference because people are willing to pay much more per sqft for condos in the center than houses at the edge.

41 points by vwoolf 5y ago

The idea that "homelessness" is about a lack of homes is a dumb idea that just won't die. Those who promote it endlessly simply will not go out in the world and use their own senses to determine for themselves that it isn't true. Here's how you do it: go out and talk to the "homeless" and keep notes as to whether homelessness is probably that person's primary problem. The results: upwards of 90% of those surveyed will have some other main problem, and it will almost certainly be addiction, mental illness, or both. All of a sudden, it stops being a mystery why "homelessness" is a perennial problem: because we're misusing the term "homeless" for two of the most intractable problems in the human world. Calling those people "the homeless" is like calling cancer patients "the hairless". When I lived in a different place, I went on long walks. I started buying little care packages to give to those who were suffering out on the street. I gave an older woman a package and she was grateful and we had a nice exchange. The next time I tried, she almost attacked me. Think her primary problem is lack of a home? Lack of a home is just one symptom of her real problems.

m348e912 5y ago

Alan Graham. founder of Community First Village, a 27-acre community in East Austin that provides affordable, permanent housing for the homeless believes that the single greatest cause of homelessness is “a profound, catastrophic loss of family,” whether by forces like death or divorce, or institutional failures in the criminal justice and foster care systems. “The Community First Village is the recognition that human beings need to be in relationship with each other, and that housing will never solve homelessness but community will,” Does housing availability have an effect on homeless, sure. But addiction, mental health, and trauma, play a much more prevalent role. I'm far from am expert in this topic, this just reflects my understanding. I'd love to hear a different point of view.

lazypenguin 5y ago
Community first is a wonderful initiative. Everyone always comes up with grandiose solutions to many world problems but it’s amazing how “community” is usually a good fix for many issues.
ahelwer 5y ago
All of these things interact and affect one another. Say you're living in some common marginal situation working a low-wage job with high rent. Some event happens where suddenly you require a few hundred dollars, nothing serious for most of us here but the sort of thing that happens every year or two - maybe your ancient car you have to use to commute to your job conks out, maybe you have a common medical issue requiring care and time off work, maybe your dental work can no longer be ignored, maybe you need an abortion because the idea of having a child in this situation is too ridiculous to even consider. This shock makes you short on rent. Maybe you're able to recover the next month, but maybe not. Ideally you have family you can fall back on. If not, now you're homeless. Without housing it is massively more difficult and time-consuming to perform basic maintenance acts like showering, shaving, defecating, or feeding yourself. Think of any camping trip you've gone on. It's easy to start slipping at your job and you're much more likely to be fired. But say you really hustle and actually keep your job, like many unhoused people. Without a safe place to retreat to & relax, without a quiet place to sleep undisturbed by cars roaring by, you enter a spiral. Your mental health, already not great after years of stress associated with your marginal financial situation, decreases markedly and then drops off a cliff. You become deeply depressed or are unlucky enough to finally trigger more serious mental health disorders that have been lurking, waiting for the chance to rear their heads. It's very easy to stop showing up for your job here, but you still manage to put yourself together and drag yourself over there pretty well. Your coworkers start to complain about the way you smell. Your physical health begins to deteriorate. At any stage of this process your plunge could have been arrested by a supportive family. And at any stage in this process your plunge could have been massively accelerated by the introduction of drug use. Once mental health starts to go, self-medicating seems more and more appealing. Few joys are left available to you. For most unhoused people, it's only a matter of time. Once you are addicted to drugs all of the difficulties enumerated above are multiplied. It is extremely difficult to kick drugs in the best of times (how many of us know of some well-off family with a black sheep child who has been to family-funded rehab nearly double-digit times?) and now there is basically no incentive nor ability to do so. Mental health issues are also extremely difficult to heal. Many of us here have been depressed and understand how difficult it is to recover even in good economic circumstances. The absolute best you can hope for upon escaping all of this is to return to a marginal low-wage high-rent existence doing its best to kick you back down the cycle. The #1 takeaway here is that people like to talk about homeless people with mental health or drug addiction issues, and it is impossible not to admit the simple truth - their recovery is impossible without being given housing. A safe place to retreat, rest, and convalesce.
ahahahahah 5y ago
> I'd love to hear a different point of view. Not enough to read the article, I guess.
- Schiendelman 5y ago
  Yeah, the article explicitly controls out the parent’s assertion and yet they show up handwaving. I’m glad I’m not the only one who was frustrated.

burner556 5y ago

This is just obviously not true. Sure, there are people that sleep in their car and could probably use somewhere to stay. However the visible majority of homeless in California, let’s say the “dramatic” homeless, are absolutely not just a house away from normalcy. Tale as old as time, California charters a hotel to house the homeless and it turns into a drug orgy smearing shit on the walls paradise. Yeah yeah, the only difference between the aggressive homeless person screaming and smashing water bottles against plate glass store windows and me is that I have a roof over my head. Look around and give me a break with that nonsense.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> homeless person screaming and smashing water bottles against plate glass store windows and me is that I have a roof over my head I am sorry, but you are part of the problem because, whether realising or not, you are perpetuating the. toxic idea that you must be a highly productive, psycologically stable member or society before you 'deserve' a roof over your head. I've lived in a poor country, we had plenty of alcoholics, drug addicts, wife beaters and other assorted assholes as neighbours, none of them were homeless becauae housing was cheap. It also does not take a PHD in psycology to realise that if you take one of them, and make them live on the street for a few years, their condition will deteriorate. The fact thay you have to prove that housing and housing-less are connected just shows how deep our collective head is up the arse of this new, late-stage-capitalist, neoliberal bullshit. I am not sure any CCP propaganda can be as effective. The system is plain self destructive - half the population reports that they can't afford to have kids, and the #1 expence is housing. How are you gonna have evil capitalist paradise if all the wage slaves die out? Oh, wait, what do we care, the whole planet is gonna burn up regardless. People call Chinese government evil, byt as least they have a plan that goes beyong the next quarterly report.
- Workaccount2 5y ago
  You don't have to be highly productive to deserve a house, you just have to be net positive productive. I don't think anyone (well some people) is against society extending a credit to help people get back on their feet, but the issue is that historically it just becomes net negative producers now being even more negative by virtue of having a living space paid for with little signs of improvement. The credit just gets written off as a compounding loss. I suggest watching Soft White Underbelly on YT, he does tons of homeless interviews and outreach trying to get people back on their feet. The solution is definitely not "just throw houses and therapy at the problem"

pydry 5y ago

There's a strong disincentive to cast homelessness as a housing problem: property prices. Nobody particularly minds if a bit of money is spent on mental health services or drug addiction therapy but money spent on new social housing in your area that uses your tax money to reduce the value of your home and potentially bring people you wouldnt want as neighbors? Yeah, people arent keen on that. Even ordinary, caring "lefty" people hate that idea. The 1% also dont want to put downward pressure on the value of their property portfolios with extra housing or upward pressure on wages and they own the media and think tanks so mental health/drugs cause homelessness rather than are caused by homelessness when they discuss it. Or, it gets cast as a lack of personal responsibility for the right wing press. Either way the only working solution is the least politically palatable, so cities run by people who care end up just building a methadone clinic or something because that's all you'll be allowed to do. Then the right wing and liberal press will take a shit on them because what little they were able to do on a tiny budget didnt really solve anything.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I like how people who talk about personal responsebility always talk about someone else's responsebility to avoid themselves taking on responsebility for the state of the world/society/their neighbourhood and no-one ever calls them out on it!
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  How is this hypocritical? If someone says “[xyz] is your responsibility, not mine”, how is that inconsistent with their worldview on personal responsibility? They don’t just love responsibility for sake of it and don’t simply want as much as they can for themselves.

_---____--_-- 5y ago

"Why do some US cities struggle more with homelessness? A new book explores a key component of the issue: housing supply." It's a Captain Obvious class of article, hopefully the next one will explore the correlation between thirst and water deprivation

giraffe_lady 5y ago
Well large areas of american public policy are built on the idea that homelessness is caused by the poor choices of individual homeless people and that shaming them more will solve it. So it may be obvious but it still needs to be repeated and reinforced.
pydry 5y ago
It's important coz otherwise capital will decide which way the correlation flows and big money is (literally) invested in homelessness being caused by mental illness and drugs. This is a question a lot like "does hiking the minimum wage cause unemployment?" in that a lot of private wealth hinges upon the public believing a plausible falsehood. Rigorous scientific study can offset that.

moltke 5y ago

Homelessness is caused by: 1) Drug addiction (addicts and the mentally ill are no longer rational actors and it's cruel to treat them as such, stop paying them to sleep on the sidewalk) 2) Immigration (like it or not, pumping up demand weather they're paying for it or the government makes housing much more expensive for everyone.) 3) Cheap credit (Everyone knows how this works and worse still it directly effects the most disadvantaged while funneling their money to the wealthy.) 4) High cost of construction labor 5) Material supply chain issues (which is largely the same as the last two, it's all just inflation.) 6) Expensive regulation that adds to construction cost (zoning, building codes etc.) Housing is part of it but not the only part. Some of these things could be easily fixed in ways that benefit everyone who lives here (housed or not.) No one in charge wants to though and you should be asking why.

HideousKojima 5y ago
Specifically in regards to 2: Canada constructed 244,025 new homes in 2021[0] (this includes new condos and apartments). By comparison, Canada allowed 401,000 new permanent residents through immigration in 2021[1]. Now obviously some of those immigrants are going to be families that only need one home, but basically almost all of the new housing supply being created in Canada is so small that it could be bought up by the new permanent resident population. And that's before you get into temporary visas, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, and foreign investors buying up housing as a store of wealth and letting it sit vacant, and we haven't even gotten into the demand from the rising generation of young Canadians looking to enter the housing market. 0: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-housing-starts-hit-record-in-2021-rising-21-per-cent/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-ho... 1: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2021/12/canada-welcomes-the-most-immigrants-in-a-single-year-in-its-history.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
bannedbybros 5y ago
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Pigalowda 5y ago

These policy experts need to sit down with social workers, case managers, ER and psychiatric center physicians and staff. The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues. These people have no choice but to be visible. They obviously can’t succeed in their current state. Where can someone go who has baseline mental health issues, has been low SES for their entire life, and has no real support network? When this type of person is in crisis a shelter isn’t going to be a safe convalescent house to get mental health treatment and stability/sobriety. The US is woefully inadequate here. We let our lowest functioning and least supported (as in support network of family and friends) members of society walk the streets panhandling by day and sleeping in the dirt by night. US cities need convalescent facilities and long term psychiatric facilities for the indigents who are mentally unable to tackle their own enormous critical problem and for the ones who are long term addicted and need strong support. (Long term alcohol use and amphetamine use lead to different kinds of psychosis. Wernicke/Korsakoff and amphetamine induced psychosis respectively. These people are not sound enough of mind to do this without long term facilities. We don’t have those in the US anymore. Unsupervised public housing is not the answer for these people. Perhaps for the less apparent higher functioning and invisible poor it is.

cascom 5y ago
I think you make a great distinction between the visible and invisible homeless, and that the solutions to those two problems are totally different.
HWR_14 5y ago
The intermittent homeless (or invisible homeless) are the majority and the cheapest to correct. They are also more likely to include children and can help prevent intergenerational issues. That group can be helped by public housing.
rkk3 5y ago
> These policy experts need to sit down with social workers, case managers, ER and psychiatric center physicians and staff. > The most visible homeless people that are the jarring entropy in American cities are always going to be the low functioning indigent population with mental health and/or addiction issues. The most visible homeless are also a small minority of the people who deal with Homelessness in America - which is why they are addressing housing. California had a homeless population of 150,000 in 2021 [1], most whom were not living on the sidewalk & dealing with drug and/or psychiatric problems. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-population-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...

jrd79 5y ago

Those trend line fits are hilarious. Unmodeled confounding factors, anyone? I especially like where they choose if something should be a log-linear fit vs. a linear fit. And the 95% confidence interval only containing less than 10% of the samples. These guys are amazing. And Greg Colburn is a professor! Good job, guys. Go find other work.

tcskeptic 5y ago
The confidence is for the slope of the regression line. Are you objecting to something the interval is not trying to accomplish or am I missing something (entirely possible)?
- jrd79 5y ago
  A one-dimensional affine fit (usually called a linear fit) contains two parameters: a slope and an offset. Both have error bounds, and the offset error bounds on this data would be huge. Data presentation that is not intended to deceive would have shown the vertical spread of the estimate too. But that spread would have been so wide that it would reveal that the fit is terrible and that reasonable conclusions cannot be drawn from these model fits. This is not scientific work. It is ideological policy advocacy dressed up as data science.
  - hervature 5y ago
    I think you are conflating two different things. The R^2 is incredibly poor for all the plots. That's essentially what you are complaining about. However, you can still have a very low R^2 but a statistically significant slope. While I agree that the article needs more support due to only doing univariate analysis and potentially missing huge confounders, your complaint is not valid. Here is code for basically random points that have a tight slope coefficient: import numpy as np import statsmodels.api as sm n = 1000 desired_R2 = 0.05 mu = 0 sigma_noise = 0.1 sigma = np.sqrt(sigma_noise*2*(desired_R2/(1-desired_R2))) X = np.random.normal(mu, sigma, n) noise = np.random.normal(0, sigma_noise, n) y = X + noise X = sm.add_constant(X) model = sm.OLS(y, X).fit() model.summary()

Claude_Shannon 5y ago

My city in Poland offers help to homeless people. There is only one condition. For them to stop drinking. They never do.

ahelwer 5y ago
You presumably know at least a few housed people in your life with drinking problems. Why don't they just quit drinking? Why do you think it would be easier to quit drinking while also not having housing?
retrac 5y ago
This reminds me of wet shelters. [1] I'd encourage people interested in this topic to read up on them. It's fascinating. They provide alcoholics with alcohol. Usually a scheme like 1 - 2 drinks per hour, on the house, if they abstain from outside alcohol and drugs and otherwise obey the shelter rules. The results are (to me) quite counter-intuitive. For some drinkers, if you give them a rate-limited but ultimately unrestricted supply of booze, and tie access to it to good behaviour -- but not abstention -- they actually stabilize their intake and start slowly decreasing it over time. They tend to keep coming to the shelter (free booze!). Participants in wet shelters drink less than on the streets as they're rate-limited. Their health generally improves. Some eventually even wean themselves off this way. The cyclical nature of drug addiction when in poverty means complete chaos, withdrawal, then binging again. Just giving them booze interrupts that. This ties into my pet hypothesis (not exactly revolutionary, I know) that homeless people, as well as drug addicts, quite rationally really, seek to avoid immediate chaos, disorientation, and pain. Drug withdrawal is chaos and pain (of a completely intolerable kind for some) and so is avoided, even at enormous longer-term cost. (Similar results with stabilization, improved health and self-tapering have been seen with providing heroin addicts access to opiates, too. [2] The % that exit such programs sober who stay sober is higher than pretty much any other form of drug addiction treatment. Makes one wonder if we're going about addiction the wrong way.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_reduction#Alcohol [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin-assisted_treatment

tlogan 5y ago

There are at least 3 types of homelessnes and each of these types have different solution: 1) people who have drug and mental issues 2) people (and families) who do not have drug and metal issues but just bad luck (lost job, released from jail and cannot find job, etc.) 3) people want be to transient (runaways, hanging out and traveling, etc.). Members of this group slowly become group one. I have a strong opinion that there needs to 3 different solutions which should NOT be mixed (I.e., do not provide shared housing for the first group and second group).

Schiendelman 5y ago
Just to add to the other person who replied to you - group 2 causes much of group 1.
- tlogan 5y ago
  Yes. And group 2 is so easy to take care. But we are putting them into the same shelters as group 1 or doing some “let’s build affordable housing“. We need readlily available and free housing for these people - with transport and consoling. However this requires coordination on the state level and some help from businesses: sometime housing is not available in the same county but maybe neibouring county might have.
wnkrshm 5y ago
Group 2 also easily decays into group 1, depending on whether they receive help at that stage or not.

amelius 5y ago

Poverty is a money problem.

slothtrop 5y ago
Homelessness is not just tantamount to a poverty problem.

logicalmonster 5y ago

I believe that homelessness is only a housing problem for a percentage of people who are temporarily "down on their luck" and need a place to stay while they find a job. For the normal person who had a string of simultaneous bad things happen to them (car broke down, water heater exploded, they fell down the stairs and couldn't work for a months, etc) that caused their finances to die, most normal people have the ability to recover from that, especially with some assistance. But there's no helping the mentally ill or drug addicts with a house. You could gift them a mansion, and they'll find a hammer and tear up the walls either looking for demons hiding in the walls to kill, or trying to find wiring or metal scrap to sell for drugs.

lkbm 5y ago
> I believe that homelessness is only a housing problem for a percentage of people who are temporarily "down on their luck" and need a place to stay while they find a job. I agree. (I'd change "only" to "mostly", but close enough.) But I also recognize that people aren't born in whatever state they're in, and it seems apparent that getting into "down on your luck" homeless state is the first step into being part of the drug-addicted, mentally unstable homeless population. Do you suppose those drug addicts were born addicted? Do you suppose no home owners are mentally ill? There has to be a path from largely functional, housed, and employed, to on the street, on drugs, and mentally unstable. Pretending such a path doesn't exist is comforting for those of us who haven't started down it, but it's certainly not going to give us an accurate understanding of the world. Stop looking at a snapshot of people and look at the progression.
- m348e912 5y ago
  >>it seems apparent that getting into "down on your luck" homeless state is the first step into being part of the drug-addicted, mentally unstable homeless population. I think it's the opposite. Many drug addicts start off housed, either with family or on their own. As their addiction takes over their lives they lose their job and burn bridges with their family and eventually end up on the street. I've seen examples of families of addicts are loving and would house them in a minute if it wasn't for their addition and toxic behavior.

bannedbybros 5y ago

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MaxMoney 5y ago

dwin 5y ago

I want to defend this article since a lot of people in the comments are bashing it. There are a few facts here that point to housing prices as the primary driver in homelessness rates: - as an example in the article, King County WA has a homelessness rate 5x of Miami-Dade County. - Why is that? Florida is obviously not more generous with subsidies or financial help to homeless people, it’s not a climate where people can’t live outside, it doesn’t have way more mental health issues than Seattle - if you look at the homelessness rates in cities they correspond strongly with rents. Mental illness rates don’t seem to change much between cities. It’s true that the thing that causes people to become homeless is often a crisis of some kind - adiction or mental health, job loss, etc. What people in the comments here aren’t doing is modeling what happens in a place where housing is cheap vs housing is expensive. In a place where housing is cheap, addiction or mental health issues might mean you can keep living in your shitty apartment and making rent; life is less precarious. Mentally ill people talk to themselves in the comfort of their own home! Obviously there are people who are homeless even in low cost of living areas and they need support to find shelter, but if rich areas built enough housing to lower prices, some amount of the homelessness crisis would be solved “for free.”

Schiendelman 5y ago
It’s better than free. If you simply stop restricting (upward) development, you also get way more tax revenue and can sustain your infrastructure better.

kixiQu 5y ago

Parts of the piece I'd have hoped would be reflected in the discussion: > First, the people sleeping on the street only represent a subset of the total population of people experiencing homelessness. In the 2020 count, chronic homelessness (what policy makers call being homeless for at least a year and living with some kind of physical or mental disability, including mental illness, a chronic health condition, and substance use disorder) accounted for less than 30 percent of the homeless cases in King County, while the chronic unsheltered population made up less than 17 percent of total cases. Second, we know that mental health and drug use can be both a cause of homelessness and a consequence. The trauma associated with homelessness is significant; that drug use and mental illness might result from this experience is not surprising. Research confirms this relationship. > Despite this complexity, the fundamental question remains: Does variation in rates of these individual risk factors like poverty explain variation in rates of homelessness witnessed across the country? In other words, do we have more homelessness in Seattle because we have more poor people or more drug users? Our research suggests the answer is no. There follow some supporting graphs, etc. > Individual risk factors help account for who in a given city might lose their housing at any given point in time, but housing markets—rents and vacancy rates—set the context in which those risk factors are expressed. Without looking at housing markets, you can’t explain why Seattle has a much higher rate of homelessness than Chicago, Minneapolis, or Dallas. The fundamental conclusion is that the consequences of individual vulnerabilities are far more severe in locations with less accommodating housing markets.

specialist 5y ago

I know people who work on sustainable & affordable housing as well as homelessness. It's generally understood that we need more housing. A lot more. And some huge fraction of the "unhoused" (?) is due to affordability (ever rising rents). Confirming this folk theory with hard data and analysis will prove very useful in the ongoing policy battles. (A lot of political hobbyists continue to mindlessly repeat value-based and morality tale stories, when simple economics explains quite a bit.)

Schiendelman 5y ago
I wish it was useful. Models have shown this for decades. Data doesn’t change the root cause - land owners don’t want competition from other land owners in housing.

littlestymaar 5y ago

Homelessness is a feature, not a bug, it's the stick. Nobody would work wearing diapers in Amazon warehouses for miserable wages if they weren't afraid of lacking food and becoming homeless.

danaris 5y ago
I think the point here is that we're making a feature request to remove that.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  I'm not sure the BDFL is benevolent enough to accept it though. And since the USSR fork fiasco, I'm not sure we have many options left[1]… [1] no pun intended

giantg2 5y ago

"Homelessness Is a Housing Problem" Tautology? That doesn't really help us fix it, or even understand it. You could give people housing, but that's not going to fix the underlying causes, and may not be the best help we can give some of the individuals. That could be inability to get or hold a job due to criminal history or mental health, jobs that don't pay enough to afford living expenses (more about market/job structure than simply raising minimum wage, although reforms around that can make sense), etc. Now for some segment of the homeless population, possibly a fairly large one, giving someone an address can help them get a job and get back on their feet - I'm thinking Norway's (or was it Sewden?) model, but other structural issues would have to be addressed to make that work, like how the "justice" and healthcare (substance abuse and mental health especially) system are structured as well as social conventions/stigmas related to them.

Schiendelman 5y ago
Step one is to stop restricting housing growth so that the subset of people who are on the edge don’t fall off. Then it gets easier for a lot of existing systems to help people who are capable of getting back into (cheaper) housing to do so. And then we can focus on people who really need more care because we won’t be actively making things way worse the way we are with our housing policies now.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I don't know about this. Most places aren't very restrictive. The big cost is labor and materials. Both of these are constrained resources. Any rapid increase will lead to even higher costs. Again, preferences of the people with the money to actually build new construction will be to buy run down houses to remodel or level and start over, with large area and expensive options of course. I don't really see anything indicating the housing supply at the low end of the spectrum would increase, nor that overall prices would drop given that inputs would increase.
  - Schiendelman 5y ago
    No offense intended, but yes, you definitely don’t know about this. Most cities with high demand allow nothing more dense than houses on 2/3 or more of their land. It is easy to falsify your argument about personal preference because people are willing to pay much more per sqft for condos in the center than houses at the edge.