4 ms·

It is mentioned in the article about a woman working full time, yet still unable to afford rent. I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go i

It is mentioned in the article about a woman working full time, yet still unable to afford rent. I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go in addressing the housing market; which in California is really really bad. This isn't just "build more homes" (which is already an extremely difficult task in the state given the zoning laws) but comprehensive housing policies. Take a look at the way Austria has controlled rent prices (though californians might not like the fact that around 70% of housing in austria is limited or non profit). Also, this is a US-wide problem. California just has the best weather and open doors. But I doubt it's going to get better, wealth inequality does nothing but increase in the US. We'll see, but this looks to me more of a symptom than a sickness in itself.

creshal 3y ago
Austria doesn't have a coordinated federal housing policy either, it's mostly just Vienna that aggressively builds city- or NPO-owned housing (and even there it's "only" about 40-45%¹). And one important aspect of Vienna's housing policy is that these housing units are generally fairly nice, and offered to everyone at cheap prices, to avoid ghettoisation and have upper middle class families with doctorates live next door to long-term unemployed. I'm not sure how well that'd go with American sensibilities. ¹: https://www.iba-wien.at/iba-wien/iba-wien/soziale-wohnungspolitik https://www.iba-wien.at/iba-wien/iba-wien/soziale-wohnungspo...
crooked-v 3y ago
The most frustrating part of that is the absurd number of people who see the obvious problem of wildly expensive and tightly constrained housing supply, complain about it being impossible to buy a home, and then actively refuse to even allow for the possibility that cities may have been under-building for some time.
- nradov 3y ago
  If those people bothered to actually vote instead of just complaining online then the problem would be less severe.
  - rcpt 3y ago
    Why do you think that the people posting about housing online don't vote?
  - jerojero 3y ago
    Well you can only vote either Republican or Democrat, should you become a single issue voter? What if neither of the parties is really proposing strong housing regulation anyway. Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue?
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue? If its actually important, you might need to do more than voting, which is the minimum effort democratic engagement.
    - nradov 3y ago
      This mostly isn't a Republican versus Democrat issue. Most housing development decisions are made at the county and city level, and those races are usually either non-partisan, or effectively single party. You can just show up at a campaign event and ask the candidate for their positions on housing issues.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
There's multiple issues and there's no easy fix, but here's some points from a laypersons' point of view. Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not kept up with population growth. Population growth has been higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate change, war, economic whatnots, etc. The market / the economic powers that be overcorrected after the 2008 crash, causing interest rates to be really low for a long time. This caused both high end investors and relative laypeople to invest, amongst other things in housing. Some people were able to buy a second, third, whatever house and rent it out, and with private rent, the amount they can charge was pretty much unlimited. That removed houses from the market, and made it so people couldn't afford to buy a house or build up any kind of posessions - if you own a house, the building is yours to keep, and the mortgage payments pay off the loan, if you rent it, that money is just gone, you don't build up anything. Minimum wage hasn't gone up, wages have not kept up, and employers have been getting away with tightening the thumbscrews on their staff for a long time now. With that in mind, minimum wage is a patch; if people are paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were legally allowed to. Inflation. That won't get better, with energy crises, climate change causing crop failures, etc etc etc. Speaking of climate change, it will cause both water shortages (also due to overconsumption, e.g. through irrigation) and consequent mass migrations; people can't live where there's no water. There's probably a lot more, but you get the idea. Shit sucks and there's no quick fix.
- pookha 3y ago
  Seems like just a simple supply issue. These complex zoning regulations have made it cost prohibitive for developers to make any margins unless they focus on high-end condo's or apartments. The zoning envelopes need to be re-worked so that builders aren't having to live on razor thin margins.
davidw 3y ago
High level, statistically speaking, there's a lot of evidence that homelessness correlates with housing prices. What's remarkable is how mad people get about the pretty self-explanatory notion that as a thing increases in costs, fewer people can afford it. They want to blame drugs or mental health or something. And while those do play a part for many people, the price of housing is what looms over it all: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-... Spending money to try and do something about homelessness at the same time the housing market is like a big factory that produces more homelessness via rising prices... I won't say it's useless, because it does help some people, but it's a losing fight. The housing market is bigger than the amount of assistance that can be brought to bear.
- pydry 3y ago
  >They want to blame drugs or mental health or something. Because the actual solutions involve taking a scythe to property prices and rents and thats the last thing investors want. They, and the media outlets they own, would prefer to see people dying on the street than that, but theyre not comfortable admitting it. Hence drugs, mental health crisis, yadda yadda anything except real solutions - 20ccs of rent control stat, taxing the hell out of their fattened up property portfolios and an exercise regimen of Singapore style social housing construction.
  - davidw 3y ago
    There are a lot of different ways of building 'enough' housing: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-... Everyone has different preferences and ideas there, but the shortage is so, so damaging right now in so many ways.
  - carom 3y ago
    False. I want more units. There is a demand and I want to meet that demand for money. I want to buy land that people can't afford and subdivide it to make it available to them. Win win. Single family home owners are the people who oppose density with their entire being. I hear them cry about traffic, parking, their view, noise, about their neighborhood's character. That regime is the problem. If it is profitable I will build housing all day long. If you cap rents and require unprofitable units to be built, I can't build as much. Then you are left competing for the finite supply of single family homes. Good luck! My property has rent control. Two 600 dollar a month units. Unprofitable. No way to get those to market so I Ellis act the whole thing. Good work rent control, you just made a 4 unit building into a single family home. Now there are some more regulations that disincentivize rebuilding by requiring unprofitable units or restoring the previous rental level. Great, let's delay building +10 units for a decade. These controls are so hair brained and only make the situation worse. You don't need social housing, you just need to get out of the way of the market.
hobo_in_library 3y ago
Also, the "build more homes" makes a big assumption about _where_ the homes should be built. There are already small towns across the US where homes are ridiculously cheap because no one wants to move there, and in fact people are moving out. If you were to spread the homeless out around towns such as those (or create a new small town a couple hours away from a big city) you'd end up with a lot of supply. Now, would the homeless be willing to move to such a place to get a home? The ones who really want to pull themselves up probably would.
lvl102 3y ago
Don’t think building more homes in SF would help with homeless problems. The thing about SF and CA in general is that it is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world.

creshal 3y ago

Austria doesn't have a coordinated federal housing policy either, it's mostly just Vienna that aggressively builds city- or NPO-owned housing (and even there it's "only" about 40-45%¹). And one important aspect of Vienna's housing policy is that these housing units are generally fairly nice, and offered to everyone at cheap prices, to avoid ghettoisation and have upper middle class families with doctorates live next door to long-term unemployed. I'm not sure how well that'd go with American sensibilities. ¹: https://www.iba-wien.at/iba-wien/iba-wien/soziale-wohnungspolitik https://www.iba-wien.at/iba-wien/iba-wien/soziale-wohnungspo...

crooked-v 3y ago

The most frustrating part of that is the absurd number of people who see the obvious problem of wildly expensive and tightly constrained housing supply, complain about it being impossible to buy a home, and then actively refuse to even allow for the possibility that cities may have been under-building for some time.

nradov 3y ago
If those people bothered to actually vote instead of just complaining online then the problem would be less severe.
- rcpt 3y ago
  Why do you think that the people posting about housing online don't vote?
- jerojero 3y ago
  Well you can only vote either Republican or Democrat, should you become a single issue voter? What if neither of the parties is really proposing strong housing regulation anyway. Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Like, who are people actually supposed to vote for that will solve this issue? If its actually important, you might need to do more than voting, which is the minimum effort democratic engagement.
  - nradov 3y ago
    This mostly isn't a Republican versus Democrat issue. Most housing development decisions are made at the county and city level, and those races are usually either non-partisan, or effectively single party. You can just show up at a campaign event and ask the candidate for their positions on housing issues.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

There's multiple issues and there's no easy fix, but here's some points from a laypersons' point of view. Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not kept up with population growth. Population growth has been higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate change, war, economic whatnots, etc. The market / the economic powers that be overcorrected after the 2008 crash, causing interest rates to be really low for a long time. This caused both high end investors and relative laypeople to invest, amongst other things in housing. Some people were able to buy a second, third, whatever house and rent it out, and with private rent, the amount they can charge was pretty much unlimited. That removed houses from the market, and made it so people couldn't afford to buy a house or build up any kind of posessions - if you own a house, the building is yours to keep, and the mortgage payments pay off the loan, if you rent it, that money is just gone, you don't build up anything. Minimum wage hasn't gone up, wages have not kept up, and employers have been getting away with tightening the thumbscrews on their staff for a long time now. With that in mind, minimum wage is a patch; if people are paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were legally allowed to. Inflation. That won't get better, with energy crises, climate change causing crop failures, etc etc etc. Speaking of climate change, it will cause both water shortages (also due to overconsumption, e.g. through irrigation) and consequent mass migrations; people can't live where there's no water. There's probably a lot more, but you get the idea. Shit sucks and there's no quick fix.

pookha 3y ago
Seems like just a simple supply issue. These complex zoning regulations have made it cost prohibitive for developers to make any margins unless they focus on high-end condo's or apartments. The zoning envelopes need to be re-worked so that builders aren't having to live on razor thin margins.

davidw 3y ago

High level, statistically speaking, there's a lot of evidence that homelessness correlates with housing prices. What's remarkable is how mad people get about the pretty self-explanatory notion that as a thing increases in costs, fewer people can afford it. They want to blame drugs or mental health or something. And while those do play a part for many people, the price of housing is what looms over it all: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-about https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-... Spending money to try and do something about homelessness at the same time the housing market is like a big factory that produces more homelessness via rising prices... I won't say it's useless, because it does help some people, but it's a losing fight. The housing market is bigger than the amount of assistance that can be brought to bear.

pydry 3y ago
>They want to blame drugs or mental health or something. Because the actual solutions involve taking a scythe to property prices and rents and thats the last thing investors want. They, and the media outlets they own, would prefer to see people dying on the street than that, but theyre not comfortable admitting it. Hence drugs, mental health crisis, yadda yadda anything except real solutions - 20ccs of rent control stat, taxing the hell out of their fattened up property portfolios and an exercise regimen of Singapore style social housing construction.
- davidw 3y ago
  There are a lot of different ways of building 'enough' housing: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-... Everyone has different preferences and ideas there, but the shortage is so, so damaging right now in so many ways.
- carom 3y ago
  False. I want more units. There is a demand and I want to meet that demand for money. I want to buy land that people can't afford and subdivide it to make it available to them. Win win. Single family home owners are the people who oppose density with their entire being. I hear them cry about traffic, parking, their view, noise, about their neighborhood's character. That regime is the problem. If it is profitable I will build housing all day long. If you cap rents and require unprofitable units to be built, I can't build as much. Then you are left competing for the finite supply of single family homes. Good luck! My property has rent control. Two 600 dollar a month units. Unprofitable. No way to get those to market so I Ellis act the whole thing. Good work rent control, you just made a 4 unit building into a single family home. Now there are some more regulations that disincentivize rebuilding by requiring unprofitable units or restoring the previous rental level. Great, let's delay building +10 units for a decade. These controls are so hair brained and only make the situation worse. You don't need social housing, you just need to get out of the way of the market.

hobo_in_library 3y ago

Also, the "build more homes" makes a big assumption about _where_ the homes should be built. There are already small towns across the US where homes are ridiculously cheap because no one wants to move there, and in fact people are moving out. If you were to spread the homeless out around towns such as those (or create a new small town a couple hours away from a big city) you'd end up with a lot of supply. Now, would the homeless be willing to move to such a place to get a home? The ones who really want to pull themselves up probably would.

lvl102 3y ago

Don’t think building more homes in SF would help with homeless problems. The thing about SF and CA in general is that it is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world.