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I read the article and skimmed through the underlying paper; the authors of the latter are careful to note that they cannot establish a causal relationship. In
by prottog 4y ago
I read the article and skimmed through the underlying paper; the authors of the latter are careful to note that they cannot establish a causal relationship.
Interviews of homeless people, at least in some West Coast cities, indicate that drug addiction is perhaps the single biggest contributor to homelessness.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoIf you're not convinced, I can also point you to a more recent piece by Matthew Yglesias that I found compelling that drew out the relationship between housing/rent prices and homelessness. https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing
- prottog 4y agoBelieve me, I'm in favor of building much, much more housing than we are now, and of a more diverse kind. But by focusing on the price of housing (whether for rent or purchase), I think the conversation gets wrongly shifted to how to directly address the problem of some people not having enough money to pay their rent or afford a down payment; and we inevitably descend into ineffective policies like rent control or affordable housing mandates on new construction. The supply of housing needs to drastically increase in housing-constrained places that suffer from homelessness. That means fewer zoning regulations, fewer environmental regulations, stronger rights of property owners to develop and sell or rent their property for what the market will bear, allowing "poorer" housing (like the boarding houses that Yglesias's article discusses), and so on and so forth. But you also need to convince the public that the people they see strung up on the street can be good neighbors; otherwise none of that policy change would happen. So we must also address drug addiction.