6 ms·

Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.

by s1k3s 3y ago

russdill 3y ago
Everyone wants that solution. No one wants that solution in their neighborhood. Even unsubsidized low cost housing.
- s1k3s 3y ago
  That makes sense, thanks.
- labcomputer 3y ago
  > Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses] I'm not sure I completely agree with that. Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do? You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free. But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone. They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
  - mbfg 3y ago
    can you point to an example where they built homes and the infrastructure to support those homes where people blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"
  - 4RealFreedom 3y ago
    A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I remember correctly, that was only a partial amount because they couldn't get all of the financial information. I think we all need to ask how much of this money actually reaches the intended population and how much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash spigot is always running.
  - russdill 3y ago
    Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough housing. It's certain specific areas do not have sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the area still need to be filled and those people still need somewhere to live.
mullingitover 3y ago
The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable. The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins. (Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  Everyone wants cheaper stuff. The question is how to allocate limited resources.
- majormajor 3y ago
  > The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins. It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less. So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc. That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
  - mullingitover 3y ago
    > So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc. These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.
sovnade 3y ago
Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction. Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc. If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.
- zehaeva 3y ago
  Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people. You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well. [0]https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-leading-the-way-in-ending-homelessness-but-how-are-they-doing-it/ https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le...
  - bsder 3y ago
    Finland already has universal healthcare, no? Don't remove that from your calculations.
  - 221qqwe 3y ago
    You can't really be homeless in Finland during winter for very long though.
- cjpearson 3y ago
  There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis, but where homelessness is less of a problem. The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-democrats-causes/672224/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
majormajor 3y ago
It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build. Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them: Where do you put them? For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all). So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B. But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply. And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately. And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc. Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.
- labcomputer 3y ago
  I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc). It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.
searealist 3y ago
San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.
- abeppu 3y ago
  I think this is a misleading description of the situation. Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement. > many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health. > “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-homelessness-initiative-faltered-project-roomkey-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-h...
  - searealist 3y ago
    I think you snipping away important context from your quote is a misleading description. > According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the ... So basically just grasping at straws for why the program failed.
    - abeppu 3y ago
      I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city. Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out. Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.
matthew9219 3y ago
They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a few people who are down on their luck.

Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.

by s1k3s 3y ago

Non-american ignorant here. Why don't they just build the houses? 17B sounds like a lot.

russdill 3y ago

Everyone wants that solution. No one wants that solution in their neighborhood. Even unsubsidized low cost housing.

s1k3s 3y ago
That makes sense, thanks.
labcomputer 3y ago
> Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses] I'm not sure I completely agree with that. Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do? You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free. But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone. They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
- mbfg 3y ago
  can you point to an example where they built homes and the infrastructure to support those homes where people blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"
- 4RealFreedom 3y ago
  A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I remember correctly, that was only a partial amount because they couldn't get all of the financial information. I think we all need to ask how much of this money actually reaches the intended population and how much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash spigot is always running.
- russdill 3y ago
  Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough housing. It's certain specific areas do not have sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the area still need to be filled and those people still need somewhere to live.

mullingitover 3y ago

The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable. The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins. (Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)

thebigwinning 3y ago
Everyone wants cheaper stuff. The question is how to allocate limited resources.
majormajor 3y ago
> The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins. It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less. So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc. That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
- mullingitover 3y ago
  > So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc. These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.

sovnade 3y ago

Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction. Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc. If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.

zehaeva 3y ago
Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people. You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well. [0]https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-leading-the-way-in-ending-homelessness-but-how-are-they-doing-it/ https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le...
- bsder 3y ago
  Finland already has universal healthcare, no? Don't remove that from your calculations.
- 221qqwe 3y ago
  You can't really be homeless in Finland during winter for very long though.
cjpearson 3y ago
There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis, but where homelessness is less of a problem. The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homelessness-affordable-housing-crisis-democrats-causes/672224/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...

majormajor 3y ago

It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build. Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them: Where do you put them? For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all). So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B. But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply. And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately. And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc. Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.

labcomputer 3y ago
I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc). It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.

searealist 3y ago

San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.

abeppu 3y ago
I think this is a misleading description of the situation. Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement. > many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health. > “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-homelessness-initiative-faltered-project-roomkey-pandemic https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/california-h...
- searealist 3y ago
  I think you snipping away important context from your quote is a misleading description. > According to advocates, in Orange county, many of the ... So basically just grasping at straws for why the program failed.
  - abeppu 3y ago
    I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city. Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out. Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.

matthew9219 3y ago

They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a few people who are down on their luck.