I haven't read Shellenberger myself, but if his thesis is that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction, mental illness, etc., and not housing unaffordabil

I haven't read Shellenberger myself, but if his thesis is that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction, mental illness, etc., and not housing unaffordability, then from the empirical data I've heard of, I would have to disagree. > Because unlike poverty and mental illness and drug abuse and weather and welfare benefits and other factors, the places that have the highest housing costs, and the least housing supply, have the largest homeless populations: > [graphs] > In literally any other realm, this would come as no surprise. You can’t have what you can’t afford. If someone says, “I want a $2000 laptop, but can’t afford it,” nobody would find that hard to believe. But if someone says, “I really want the single largest and most crippling expense known to man, housing, but can’t afford it,” for some bizarre reason people would say, “that’s not true!,” or “correlation isn’t causation,” or “homelessness isn’t a housing problem,” or something patently insane. As I said before, the topic of homelessness breaks people’s brains. > The story of homelessness in America is perfectly captured by the following quote in the Economist: >> Few Americans lived on the streets in the early post-war period because housing was cheaper. Back then only one in four tenants spent more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with one in two today. The best evidence suggests that a 10% rise in housing costs in a pricey city prompts an 8% jump in homelessness. > And that’s just it: before modern-day homelessness, there was poverty, there was mental illness, there was nice weather, there was welfare, there were liberal places, and there were drugs. So, something must have changed. And what changed were the rents: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-k... A related critical article I found on the Wikipedia page for his book seems to be exactly along these lines: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/blog/san-fransicko-incorrect-about-housing-affordability-and-homelessness https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/blog/san-fransicko-incorrect-a... Nevertheless, it's entirely possible that San Francisco's other policies have exacerbated the issues caused by homelessness and housing unaffordability. I don't think it's too much to ask that the city should allow more housing to be built and that organised retail theft gangs be punished.