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The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

• jamesmurdza 3y ago
  "In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%." When I read something like this I have to ask—Where is the data for the past 20 years?
  • passwordoops 3y ago
    A few possibilities come to mind -Funding for that project ended and likely not renewed because it wasn't novel enough -The authors moved on to other topics -Government agencies decided not to track that particular data
  • myshpa 3y ago
    The quote you've posted is missing current numbers. We're now at 50%. "In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%. Now, the over-50 demographic represents half of the homeless single adults in the U.S. — with no sign of their numbers slowing, leaving baby boomers (those aged 57 to 75) particularly vulnerable."
    • glimshe 3y ago
      Thank you - one thing that can be slightly misleading when reading this number is that 50% of the homeless adults are over 50. This doesn't mean (and you didn't say so) that 50% of the adults over 50 are homeless. It's not possible to know, by just reading this percentage, whether the homeless situation of older adults is getting better or worse in total numbers.
      • 3np 3y ago
        Further, those numbers alone could also be very good: it could just mean that less people get and will get homeless. That's of course not the case and the actual situation is not good, just sayin'. Good case of how you can spin statistics to tell a story.
    • qznc 3y ago
      This metric is weird. Is it somehow better if “young” adults were homeless?
      • Ensorceled 3y ago
        No one is implying it's better or worse. It's important to know because it changes the problem ... if a lot of homeless people are elderly the solutions need to be different than if they are younger. For instance it's not "job training and introductions into the work force" if these people are past working age.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • rthomas6 3y ago
        I don't think that was implied, but yes! I'd rather be homeless at 20 than homeless at 70. Wouldn't you? At least I'd be less likely to die from a fall. At least I'd be more able to defend myself/run away.
    • Scarblac 3y ago
      What percentage of adults in the US are over 50?
  • entuno 3y ago
    And how much has the percentage of adults in the USA who are over 50 increased in that period?
• expertentipp 3y ago
  It's "I got mine and don't care" until what you've got melts in your hand like an ice cube and then nobody cares.
  • someguydave 3y ago
    Especially if “got mine” depends on a forest of laws and regulations and transfer payments rather than genuine liquid savings and investments
  • zamalek 3y ago
    Indeed, the perpetuators of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" are finding themselves short of said bootstraps.
    • Keirmot 3y ago
      Or that, thinking logically, if you pull yourself by your bootstraps, you either don’t move or fall down.
    • jdechko 3y ago
      If this were about the younger generations being unable to afford housing, the sentiment would be to stop ordering avocado toast and going to Starbucks all the time. Obviously the problem is much bigger and complex, and maybe something will finally be done to fix this for everyone.
  • nness 3y ago
    I've noticed this with my parents — for decades they reacted negatively to any changes the regulations around Australia's housing market, since that was and remains the principal personal wealth creation mechanism in Australia... Until they reached retirement age. Then the painful realisation that, without plentiful housing, rental prices would consume most of their government pension. Now they're one expense away from financial ruin.
    • expertentipp 3y ago
      The sold also the last property from their flipping endeavours or investment portfolio? ouch.
• 0dayz 3y ago
  That's very surprising, given that you typically hear about how it's the baby boomers who reaped the rewards and screwed over everyone else.
  • version_five 3y ago
    They're not all identical and they don't share with each other. The article didn't mention it but I'd also suspect lack of strong family ties is a big contributor. It's going to be people who didn't have kids or have estranged kids and are widowed or unmarried that are most exposed, and that demographic will only keep going up.
    • koolba 3y ago
      > It's going to be people who didn't have kids or have estranged kids and are widowed or unmarried that are most exposed, and that demographic will only keep going up. For millennia that was the standard retirement plan. It covered housing, food, medical care, and even entertainment. And portfolio diversification (ie have lots of kids) was just as important.
    • gustavus 3y ago
      I honestly believe this is probably the biggest problem, it isn't the other issues, it's the dissolution of the family, many poeple got in big on the 80's "divorce" culture that promised that divorce would liberate and free you to live your best life, in the process they destroyed families and lives, especially their children's, and now many of them are realizing why family was always so important, as they've alienated their own and have no where to go.
  • unglaublich 3y ago
    > who reaped the rewards and screwed over everyone else. Having an average net. worth of $1.2M [0] and _still_ having homelessness in your generation only confirms that attitude. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/08/baby-boomers-wealth-is-12-times-greater-compared-to-millennials.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/08/baby-boomers-wealth-is-12-ti...
• tobr 3y ago
  Unless they had a time machine I don’t think any baby boomers became homeless during the Great Depression, so that should be a low bar to clear!
  • thsksbd 3y ago
    Now that I re-reaf the headline you're right. How how to fix it in a concise manner ?
    • wccrawford 3y ago
      Since they're talking about an age range, and the boomers are being looked at because they're currently that age, you'd have to either also specify the name of that age range back then, or drop the names and just use the age range.
    • bertylicious 3y ago
      s/baby boomers/elderly/gi
  • pseg134 3y ago
    That title is pure rubbish! I can’t believe the person that wrote that read it out loud or even in their head. You should always ready the title aloud.
• wtcactus 3y ago
  "In a 2020 journal article for the American Society on Aging, Kushel wrote that of all the homeless single adults in the early 1990s, 11% were aged 50 and older. By 2003, she says that percentage grew to 37%." Society has been built for couples. With the major societal changes in the last 2 decades, we had an explosion of single people wanting to live alone, and the infrastructure is simply not prepared for it. My parents were born poor (poor in a way you simply have no idea in the US) and were able to afford to buy a house (after a lot of work) because they were two working for a common goal. It's a very complex problem. Most discussion around it is: look at what the investment funds are doing to housing, but, in reality, almost no new houses are being built (I'm speaking about my country here, but I suspect it's similar in a lot of places), and people aren't getting/staying married enough time to buy a house and build a family (which will also cause major problems down the line due to rapidly declining birthrates).
  • cyanydeez 3y ago
    In America, it looks like real estate is becoming a victim of capitalism: companies buy properties, convert them to rentals, the collude with each other to "maximize" the value of those rentals. Then they claim the real problem is zoning codes so they can buy up more property just to expand their monopoly. Homelessness is the a low water effect caused by inflation.
    • epistasis 3y ago
      This is not caused by companies. This is caused by individual homeowners exerting local control over the amount of housing in their small local area. The few companies making money off this are just piggy-backing on the homeowners who drive the political process. Private equity saw what homeowners have done in the US and thought "hey we can benefit from this regulatory capture without even having to do any of the work of capture," and even with that they are a tiny minority of housing. Let's correctly place the blame so that we can fix the problem. Even banning all corporate ownership of homes does nothing to house these homeless folks, only building more home will get people into them and break the sell-side power.
• jongjong 3y ago
  Part of the problem is government regulation. In some places, it's almost impossible to build new houses due to regulations. Some portion of the population wants to see house prices continue to increase and they will vote for politicians who will implement policies which will support that agenda. Of course this happens at the expense of another, also large portion of the population who do not own a house and have to pay higher rents. I think we have a situation where part of the population is literally voting to appropriate wealth from another part of the population. Voting for more immigration which drives up demand for houses and voting for more regulations which constrain the supply of housing. At the same time, those people who do not own a house are wising up to the scheme and so they increasingly refuse to work or provide value to society. Instead, they resort to their own financial schemes, illegal activity, freeloading government benefits; they've checked out from the system. Even those who would like to contribute increasingly find that they can't due to government regulations and their inability to amass enough capital to get started on their venture. It seems that we are headed for an economic and political disaster. The government should not allow itself to be weaponized against part of the population for the benefit of another. The other problem is related to the role of debt in modern society. It doesn't make sense that modern banking is centered around mortgages. The point of debt was to finance new business ventures to create economic value to empower people to provide as much value as possible; not to prop up massive financial schemes which jeopardize people's ability to keep a roof over their heads.
  • 8jef 3y ago
    This
  • dwallin 3y ago
    Immigration is such a straw man, an influx of people with generally low capital availability and incomes is clearly not the cause of expensively priced housing and rents. Saying government regulation causes it is also meaningless unless you specify WHAT government regulation you believe is causing housing issues, historical evidence clearly indicates that no regulation doesn’t lead to the outcome you desire. It’s very clear that the key is figuring out what sorts of regulation, taxes and laws would lead to an optimal solution and in order to begin to do that you really need to break down how the demand and supply of housing actually works. The demand side of rent prices is generally based on the surplus value created by an area for its residents. The value of rent prices is all about providing signals about relative utility to potential residents. This is key because it means that absolute rent is largely unimportant, the relative rent is the key. All rent paid above actual services provided does not create economic value, it instead captures surplus value from its residents and delivers it to rentiers. The issue with rent control and other similar regulation is not that it limits overall rent levels, it’s that it distorts the relative signaling. However this needs to be balanced with the negative effects large rent increases have upon tenants. A world where people are constantly forced to move due to a rapidly changing market might be price efficient, but it creates lots of negative externalities. The key here is establishing rent rules that are loose enough to create accurate price signaling, but tight enough to minimize these externalities. The demand side for purchasing for individuals is based on individuals and companies evaluating on a range of criteria which largely boils down to the utility it directly provides, the rent you can charge others for their utility in the properly (or conversely, the rent it allows you to avoid), and its value as a speculative investment. However it is clear that in the problematic markets we are discussing, the prices are extremely dominated by the latter two. This leads to the supply side of this also being somewhat counterintuitive. People seeking to invest their capital in property actually have two primary ways of profiting: via rent collected or by appreciation in property value. If you own property, and you have additional capital to invest, do you invest in improving your existing housing stock or into buying additional property? The answer is you invest in whichever has the highest rate of return. In low housing stock environments the answer is going to typically be to invest it in additional property over improving existing properties. You might think that rising rents would change this ratio, but this gets it backwards. Rising rents leads directly to increased property values and so largely has the opposite effect, it encourages investment in buying property over improving it. This makes it clear that to increase investment in housing stock, your best method is to discourage speculative investment in favor of investments that raise the quantity and quality of housing stock. The way you structure regulation, incentives and taxation should reflect this. Everything else is noise, and doesn't actually solve the problem. Side note: An exception here happens in cases where development leads to massive differential between start and end value. This is why in these sorts of high speculation environments development becomes highly slanted towards turning low density buildings into massively high density, high margin buildings. This is generally not ideal, as this type of construction has lots of negative externalities on its surrounding neighborhoods, and tends to make communities averse to further development. Making lots of small incremental improvements in housing stock is far less disruptive to neighborhoods but will only really happen in environments slanted towards improvement over speculation.
• andrewstuart 3y ago
  Governments don’t care. It won’t get fixed.
  • scotty79 3y ago
    Rich people care it doesn't get fixed. So it won't because rich have 100% veto power in the US.
• jschveibinz 3y ago
  A couple of resources: https://www.payingforseniorcare.com/medicaid-waivers/assisted-living https://www.payingforseniorcare.com/medicaid-waivers/assiste... https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-programs https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-... https://calmatters.org/health/2023/02/california-homeless-seniors/ https://calmatters.org/health/2023/02/california-homeless-se...
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  There are five workers supporting every retiree, and this is still happening. If you are approaching 40, there will be about two workers supporting you when you retire. I’m thinking this is the start of something much bigger.
  • Ensorceled 3y ago
    Yes, this is why the "it's immigration" comments are incredibly naive. Immigration is trying to prop up this system.
    • betaby 3y ago
      Doesn't seem to work in Canada.
      • Ensorceled 3y ago
        Didn't say it's working :-/ Canada has two major problems with immigration right now: 1) the rapid increase in numbers is a shock that the immigration systems (including immigrant community resources) can't handle, that shock is exacerbating the housing crisis (and health care crisis and ...) 2) the family reunification program defeats one of the major purposes of immigration, increase the ratio of working age citizens to elderly citizens. I say this as someone who has traditionally been pretty gung ho about immigration.
        • username_my1 3y ago
          No way immigration doesn't help, I see this in germany help so many startups enter the market and build successful businesses that drive the economy. The problem is that it's not a solution, the solution is to constantly push against inequility and increase social mobility while investing in productive industries (less housing speculations more manufacturing). those are tough bills to swallow and they will lead any elected goverment out of the office, because strong shifts to an economy like this come with a lot of short term pain. and no one is willing to setdown and deal with 10 years of poor economy so that the future of the country is better.
• somewhereoutth 3y ago
  It never ceases to astonish me how the richest country on the planet is still in 'survival mode' where everyone has to justify their claim to, well, anything at all. In Europe (even as it was largely laid waste after WW2), it is understood that we are all together, and simply by existing we have a right to at least a basic level of living. Perhaps part of that is that because communism was so close, for so long, it was realised that without addressing the needs of the whole population, Western Europe would also succumb to communism (or indeed fascism again).
  • Kretinsky 3y ago
    It's the richest country because everyone is in survival mode and has a strobg pressure to get their head above the water. In socialist euro countries you can go with the flow created by the welfare state.
    • phyrex 3y ago
      It’s the richest country because it has tons of natural resources and wasn’t bombed to pieces in WW2
      • escapedmoose 3y ago
        Americans (myself often included) so easily take our insanely beneficial geography and natural resources for granted!
      • hermannj314 3y ago
        And didn't lose 10-40% of its adult male population. However, number of movies made extolling your country's sacrifice during WW2 divided by lives your country actually lost? Well, in that statistic, America is truly #1.
      • Kretinsky 3y ago
        South America is ressource rich, hasn't had a major war for more than a century, and yet isn't so rich. Why?
  • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
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• fullarr 3y ago
  Fixed income and inflation do be like that tho
• tomohawk 3y ago
  Not a boomer, but from long observation, boomers tend to carry a lot of debt in order to have a certain lifestyle. This includes borrowing money for depreciating assets, not paying off homes, buying too much house because financing was available, consolidating debt into a loan secured by your house, etc. The risk associated with this gets much higher as your earning potential gets shorter. Yet, a lifetime of borrowing habits are tough to kick. Boomers also started out in an age when pensions were a thing. The problem is many of those pensions did not work out due to wall street raiders, bankruptcy, etc. For example, the unlawful restructuring of GM voided the retirements of thousands of engineers and other white collar employees. If you were expecting a nice pension to continue to finance your debt, you're going to be in a world of hurt.
• momirlan 3y ago
  this is the generation that had it best: jobs for life, good benefits, cheap houses, etc. they also destroyed the planet with their "American dream" style consumption. what's coming for the new generations if these are suffering ?
  • staringback 3y ago
    If houses were so "cheap", why is the home ownership rate higher today? Why wouldn't everybody just buy one of those "cheap" houses? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
    • momirlan 3y ago
      trust me, when i bought my first house in '97 the prices were 5 times lower than today. my salary was 75% of what I'm making today. so even late boomers (which I am) had their chance.
  • Mistletoe 3y ago
    This was my thought reading the article. They had every opportunity to fail upwards. The numbers will be staggering in the future if the boomer generation is having issues now and didn’t secure a home in the $23,000 home era. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... They could have secured a house at a ratio of 4 times their median annual income and now that number is 7 times.
  • DontchaKnowit 3y ago
    I see this perspective a lot, and I really don't understand it. Millennials have it pretty damn good as well. And everyone wants to ignore how difficult the 80s were as far as jobs, housing, etc. Boomers got bumblefucked in the 80s. Interest rates for home loans were abysmal, small banks failed all over the place, business loans got called, etc etc. I think the only thing gen z or millennials really have to complain about is the fact that the government hocked them risky loans for bullshit education.
• oooyay 3y ago
  I moved to Portland a year ago. We certainly have a lot of homeless people, many of which are people caught up in the substance abuse cycle with particular drugs. However, one day I was driving back to East Portland, I drove under an underpass that's a particularly rough place. I saw a woman that looked to be my mom's age with what appeared to be a modern suit case, she was well dressed, and sober looking. The blood drained from me head to toe; as I said, I saw my mom in that person and I was instantly depressed. When I got home I decided I'd drive back to the underpass the next day. When I did she was gone. There are a lot of services here if you're sober so I suspect they swooped in and found her. Portland's housing problem is multifold. There's not enough single unit housing, but even single family homes are affected by an overly burdensome and expensive permitting process. It adds thousands of dollars to construction and creates a lot of delays so when a house is torn down the lot sits empty. The city also allowed a number of lots to be classified as historical; one near my house is now just a vacant lot that a historical home used to sit on but burned down. You now can't build on that lot. We need to get rid of historical homes in Portland, we need to geographically diversify the housing density, and we need a full scale review of our permitting process.
  • breakyerself 3y ago
    It's comforting to think homelessness is caused by people making bad decisions, but it's almost entirely a result of bad public policy. West Virginia has a much higher rate of drug addiction than Portland, but much less homelessness. Because drug addicts in West Virginia can afford housing. Other places have worse access to mental healthcare but less homelessness for the same reason. Demand in metropolitan areas has drastically outpaced supply. Because zoning laws prevent increasing density and because the government got out of the housing business and put it entirely in the hands of the private market which doesn't like entry level homes because the profit margins are less. As the cost of housing increases relative to median income homelessness increases. It's basically a control knob.
    • klodolph 3y ago
      I think it’s hard to compare West Virginia to Portland, and conclude that the differences are a result of policy decisions.
• slillibri 3y ago
  One minor nit, people in their 50’s and early 60’s would be GenX not boomers.
  • badcppdev 3y ago
    That's a fairly important fact rather than just a nit.
    • badcppdev 3y ago
      Replying to myself. The article is also kind of incorrect when it says boomers are 57 to 75 as the youngest boomers are going to be 59 I think (1946-64)
      • TjZkxkxeky 3y ago
        I think the reason marketing and journalists use "boomers" is that they can then spend a paragraph explaining what a boomer is. Born in the 40s, born in the 50s, born in the 60s, born in the 70s would have saves us so much ink for the last 80 years, but I think _not_ saving ink was rather the point.
• nobodyandproud 3y ago
  By how much is the total number raw number of homeless increasing?
  • jakewins 3y ago
    Yeah the article uses terrible numbers, like the rate of the share of homeless is what they are talking about right? I looked up the homelessness numbers from the 30s, in absolute numbers it was about 4x what it is today - 2 million homeless vs todays half million. Given that the population has roughly tripled since the 30s that means the rate of homelessness is about 12x lower today than during the Great Depression?
    • 3minus1 3y ago
      Yeah, the article comparing this to Great Depression is super misleading. This bugs me so much.
• silenced_trope 3y ago
  My mom was homeless for years, thankfully she got stable housing right before covid took off. - in shelters/churches-with-cots there would be crazed drug-users, she was threatened numerous times in them and the shelter can't do anything - I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing - she's entirely dependent on getting social security, for food, housing, etc. she fears any politician that even talks about going after it - she's 70 and is currently looking for work :( currently looking for jobs as a substitute teacher, for which I'm scared to death for her given all the videos online of kids beating up teachers and getting away with it, but what else can be done? - I bought her a new (used) car recently, a tiny SUV -- when we were on the lot looking at it she wanted to see how the seats go down so that she could try laying down in it to make sure she fits, in case it ever happens again
  • thejackgoode 3y ago
    >given all the videos online of kids beating up teachers and getting away with it I don't think I heard of a single such story in my life. Is it a thing?
    • nnadams 3y ago
      Yes unfortunately. There are TikTok "challenges" go slap your teacher for example. Similar to the "challenges" where you should eat a spoon of cinnamon, eat a Tide pod, etc. There's an air of do this and film it for clout. Most kids roll their eyes as well of course, but there are people who follow along.
      • lolinder 3y ago
        Facebook was bad, Instagram was worse, but TikTok is downright freaky. It's like each additional layer of multimedia added to social media amplifies whatever mental toxin these platforms feed people. Edit: as a sibling notes, this particular challenge appears to not actually exist: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/10/07/slap-a-teacher-challenge-tiktok/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/10/07/slap-a-teacher-challe...
• piker 3y ago
  Is this normalized for the base rate? Aren't baby boomers a massive proportion of the population that is just ... aging? Should any different result be expected? (There is a concern if you have a lot of old, homeless people, but that's different from the concern implied that something systemic is causing old people to go homeless at a rate higher than the base.)
• lordfrito 3y ago
  [flagged]
• zb1plus 3y ago
  In places like the bay area with a housing crisis and limited space to expand, the state should seize office buildings (remote work is the future and would help alleviate the shortage while new housing is developed) by eminent domain and set up a scheme like Singapore's HDB system [1] to develop affordable housing. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Development_Board
  • alephnerd 3y ago
    I agree with the sentiment but it's legally and politically untenable in the US (edit: to use eminent domain) Singapore was able to build out the HDB because it was a One Party State that didn't take kindly to activists. For example, when the HDB program was being built out, there was massive resistance by the people living in the villages used to build those HDBs. Those villagers often leaned socialist (Barisal Sosialis), and that party was largely neutered under emergency acts [0] with trade unionists and party activists being sent to Chaangi Jail indefinitely, along with protests and conspiracy theories about the ruling party burning down Kampongs/Villages to force residents to move into HDBs [1] While this in hindsight was the right move, the cost is VERY HIGH. The point is, redevelopment while caring for human rights and property laws is HARD. If you are a One Party State that can jail pesky activists willy nilly and owns all the newspapers, it's possible. But this is not how America works, and sure as hell not California. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Coldstore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Coldstore [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Ho_Swee_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Ho_Swee_fire
    • Grimburger 3y ago
      This seems a somewhat dramatised account? The Malayan emergency response had the solid backing of the west and was essentially just a continuation of the cold war across the region at the time, it's definitely a lot deeper than just zoning laws and is rooted in a decades long civil war with communist insurgents. There's absolutely no reason we in the Anglosphere couldn't emulate the HDB system and bringing up cold war incidents from 60 years ago isn't really relevant at all to how it works on the ground today. Tangentially: Singaporean HDB owners have been harping on about oversupply for years now and the government is foolishly listening to those with a clear vested bias for increasing their own asset prices: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/govt-careful-calibrating-hdb-flat-supply-meet-demand-says-desmond-lee-parliament-rejects-psps-public-housing-motion-2102691 https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/govt-careful-calibrati...
• jmyeet 3y ago
  I don't wish homelessness upon anyone but you have to recognize that it was the baby boomers that created this situation. We, as a society, are desensitized to state violence. The state withholding basic necessities so a few can profit is state violence. In the wealthiest country on Earth there is absolutely no justification for anyone not having shelter and adequate food and water. The homeowners who vote in these wealth transfers for themselves are fooling themselves. First, if every house goes from $300k to $800k, you haven't made $500k. You still need to live somewhere and you still only have 1 house unit of wealth. The real beneficiaries are the very wealthy who buy up a lot of housing stock. Second, that wealth in many cases won't be transferred to their children. It'll get completely consumed by end-of-life care.
  • nemo44x 3y ago
    Adequate food and water and shelter is available to everyone. We spend billions on it every year. People choose not to access it either due to mental illness, drug/alcohol addiction, or some other antisocial or personal reason. And although there’s help for those issues I’d agree more could be done, especially for the vast numbers of mentally ill that walk amongst us. We do have a safety net though. You are advocating for a hammock.
    • jmyeet 3y ago
      No, we don't. I'll take your comment in good faith though. When people talk about homelessness they often refer to people living in the streets. Like an iceberg though, this is just the visible part of homelessness. Before you get to this point you go through several stages. The first stage of housing insecurity is couchsurfing and staying a few days here and there with relatives and friends. At some point this dries up and you move onto the next stage: living in your car. This last until your car gets towed or stolen or torched and you can't afford to fix it. At this point you are now on the streets. Before this you may have been able to hold down a job. Now it gets incredibly difficult. As for providing housing, you don't specify what but I suepct you're talking about shelters. Many homeless people prefer to live on the streets. Why? Shelters tend to be highly restrictive, have limited availability and be incredibly unsafe. You might have to be in for curfew at like 3pm. You will be in a large room with people who may be mentally unwell and/or may have weapons. SA is a real risk. Having your stuff stolen is a huge risk. So after staying there for 12 hours you may then have to go to some religious service and then get fed, maybe. You are right that a lot of money does get spent on this problem without it going anywhere. There is an awful lot of rent-seeking that goes on here as well as general corruption (eg [1][2][3]). What we need is a housing-first policy. That is, provide permanent private shelter. According to HUD, it would require $20 billion to end homelessness [4]. Not $20 billion a year. Just $20 billion. We also need to address to main cause of homelessness: the cost of housing. It's not drugs or mental illness that cause most people to become homeless. It's being unable to afford housing, even while employed. [1]: https://sfstandard.com/2022/11/17/city-audit-finds-serious-problems-at-government-funded-homelessness-nonprofit/ https://sfstandard.com/2022/11/17/city-audit-finds-serious-p... [2]: https://deal.town/san-francisco-chronicle/update-sf-officials-years-of-corruption-future-of-homelessness-sweeps-up-to-court-PKJ2SX8G4L https://deal.town/san-francisco-chronicle/update-sf-official... [3]: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2021-07-20/san-diego-homeless-budget-affordable-housing https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/stor... [4]: https://aah-inc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/whomeless.pdf https://aah-inc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/whomeless.pdf
• coldtea 3y ago
  Wait until a few more years of this, of the dollar losing its stronghold in global commerce, of trade wars, of the impact of AI/LLM on jobs, and of further climate change impact... Fun times!
  • rabuse 3y ago
    The future is bleak, and that's why I chose to never bring children into this mess. The line ends with me.
• tasuki 3y ago
  > never made enough to put money away Or, more often, earned enough to put money away yet decided to have fun instead.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    Yeah, spending $60k on that fancy new hip so they can go out and... walk.
    • friend_and_foe 3y ago
      I think they're talking about in their youth. I don't know about you, but this is the generation that invented credit cards, I've seen several, including my own parents, live their lives like the future didn't matter. Now they're older and reality is hitting them.
      • hotpotamus 3y ago
        Perhaps there is a lesson there on the importance of public pensions and services.
• Clubber 3y ago
  Significantly increasing social security payments would go a long way.
  • thehappypm 3y ago
    Oh god please no. It’s already on the way to being insolvent
    • Clubber 3y ago
      We should fund it better and remove the income cap of $164K.
      • thehappypm 3y ago
        The income cap is insanity. And i say that as a beneficiary of it
• tirey 3y ago
  [flagged]
• bradley13 3y ago
  "There are a lot of services here if you're sober so I suspect they swooped in and found her." That's what is important. If someone has just had a run of lousy luck,there must be services to help them get back on their feet. The mentally ill, the junkies? You need services that give them a way out, but you cannot force them to use those services. If they won't accept help, then all that's left is "tough love": Force them out to out-of-the-way places, so they don't mess up everyone else's lives, and let them do whatever they need to do.
  • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    >> "There are a lot of services here if you're sober so I suspect they swooped in and found her." > If someone has just had a run of lousy luck,there must be services to help them get back on their feet. For the most part, there aren't. Not in most of the US. Housing waiting lists were years long for decades. In the last few years it's gone from difficult to impossible. My boomer sister just learned her long-time lease won't be renewed next year and she is planning for a transition to homelessness - because she can calculate simple odds. In 2021, me + adult kids nearly joined the growing group of homeless people with money in the bank - because there was nowhere to go. Every available rental had hundreds of applicants. Since then, rents here are 50-300% over what they were 3 years ago (we're paying >2x). There's no detail about modern housing that supports the notion that vulnerable people aren't at risk.
    • notsurenymore 3y ago
      I was briefly homeless this year (technically still am, but I lucked out and now bumming with an old friend) I was out of work for a long time and my lease ran up. I found myself stuck in one of the most overpriced (in terms of housing housing costs vs avg local pay) markets. There was no support for me. Most of the other homeless people I met were older individuals. I didn’t talk to them much, but there were no open drug users (they were probably out there, but I stuck to there parts of town where they didn’t congregate, including staying away from shelters) and I assume most of them were on fixed income and simply got priced out of the market. There’s no aid I was aware of. As you noticed, for many things, there’s massive waiting lists. Even the cheaper apartments out here have waiting by lists, and when I looked at the price to rent just a room, I was floored. People were often charging more to live in a room out of their house than you would pay for a low end apartment. And they still wanted first/last/security/credit check/background check etc. I’m still not sure if I’m going to make it out. I’d have to find work that’s going to pay enough for me to make it past the jump, and that’s looking less likely by the day. I’ve thought about just saying screw it, and moving to a cheaper area, but then I’m in the same position, in a foreign environment where I know nobody and have no network. I was speaking to my old neighbor a couple months before my lease was up about the economic situation. I was shocked when she told me that back in 08, her landlord actually lowered rents.
• swayvil 3y ago
  Because a small group of wealthy individuals own pretty much everything and charge everybody else as much rent as possible. That was always the plan. That's the name of the game. I think it's called "late stage capitalism".
• ehutch79 3y ago
  almost as if it isn't avocado toast that's making millennials poor
  • rayrey 3y ago
    Just need to hustle more /s
    • gremlinsinc 3y ago
      No matter what size bootstraps I use I can't for the life of me pull myself up by them, it's almost like an impossible task or something.
• thm 3y ago
  Original link: https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/why-more-baby-boomers-are-homeless-2d2b913b https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/why-more-baby-boomers-ar...
• seventytwo 3y ago
  Weird - maybe they should have voted en masse for the party that is bent on cutting government benefits.
• rthomas6 3y ago
  I was holding out on joining the wave of doomerism that pervades everyone's mindset so thoroughly nowadays, but I'm starting to be won over. Between economic things like this and the apparent infeasibility of carbon capture (meaning a likely 3+ degree C increase in global temperature (and the resulting catastrophic effects that not even activists talk about because the scenario is too bleak to imagine)), I am starting to join the doomer mindshare.
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    reality isn't doomerism, really just is.... reality. Those who call it doomerism live near a river called denial, apparently it's a pretty popular place these days. They either don't want to think about it, or they think a man is going to descend from the heavens and save them, I wouldn't count on that happening. There's room for hope we can science our way out or at least ai might be able to find solutions we can't think of, assuming it doesn't kill us first.
    • rthomas6 3y ago
      Maybe. I think we're going to buy time with geoengineering, but it won't solve everything or actually fix any core issues.
    • pcthrowaway 3y ago
      > Those who call it doomerism live near a river called denial, apparently it's a pretty popular place these days. Well down by denial river, anyone who wants housing bad enough has access to it. The working class isn't being bled dry. There are no socioeconomic problems, and you have your house and comfortable life because you worked for it, just like everyone else is able to. No wonder it's such a popular place to live.
• incahoots 3y ago
  Ah yes, apathy my old friend. We can recognize the various problems that got us here, but when it comes to resolving them, well that’s simply a bridge too far. Take note: we absolutely have the resources to defeat homelessness and hunger, it’s just not a profitable model.
  • jeffbee 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I think Boomers share a lot of blame for where we're at, policy wise, but also not everyone who is a Boomer had a say in poor housing policy (ie NIMBYs keeping us short millions of housing units over decades), the deprecation of pensions for 401ks that no one could afford to fund (due to globalization and stagnant incomes), an employment environment where you could become unemployed in your 50s or early 60s with no chance of finding another job, desperately hoping to make it to Social Security, unchecked medical costs due to no meaningful national healthcare system reform, etc. Like a parent caring for a child with a limited world view and not yet emotionally mature, instead of being resentful about the situation [1] (which would be totally fair, there is a lot of history and metaphorical debt to resent), we can work towards fixing it with policy that benefits the Boomers who are left (~2M of 55+ cohort dies every year, and only a fraction of seniors are unhoused) but will provide benefit for the next cohort to pass through that age bracket. It'll be costly, but it always is because we're irresponsible collectively more often than not and kick the can economically into the future. We might as well spend on durable infrastructure if we're going to spend. TLDR Build affordable non market senior housing in locations that won't cause auto dependency, build with a 100 year lifetime for structures, put Boomers there until they die, wash and repeat with the next wave of destitute or near poverty seniors. [1] "I can't afford to hate people. I don't have that kind of time." -- Bob Ross (have several extended family members in senior housing across various states)
      • jeffbee 3y ago
        > we can work towards fixing it with policy that benefits the Boomers who are left As a member of Walk Bike Berkeley and Berkeley Neighbors for Housing and Climate Action I go to war every week, against Boomers, for the exact policies that will benefit them: more housing, better transit and walking facilities. And every week they show up to denounce those policies using their tired Boomer memes. Building housing is "trickle-down economics". A street that's suitable for all ages and all modes is "radical bike lobby". Both of these organizations are full of hundreds of younger people dedicated to saving Boomers from themselves.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  Tough af problem because capitalism is so powerful which a country needs to thrive but can cause great inequality
• zelias 3y ago
  [flagged]
• fastaguy88 3y ago
  This article does not say anything about whether more baby boomers are becoming homeless. It says that the fraction of homeless over 60 has increased dramatically. But exactly the same number of people who were homeless in their 40s twenty years ago could still be homeless now, and if the homeless people in their 60s then have mostly died, a larger fraction of homeless people could be their 60s. Perhaps the fraction of homeless 60 year olds has increased (and it would be nice to know what that number is), but we cannot tell from this article. Policy changes in the 1970s — closing of state mental hospitals and the Vietnam war — dramatically increased the number of homeless. That group has gotten older. But it is very unclear that there are new factors that are forcing baby boomers into homelessness.
• TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  Welcome to late stage capitalism.
• throw1234651234 3y ago
  The tragedy here is that if you don't see this coming 20 years out, or at 45, it's really too late. I have a few relatives who are in their mid / early 60s, and there is not much they can directly do outside of a huge amount of luck and "hustling" like they are 25.
• wubbert 3y ago
  [dead]
• EncomLab 3y ago
  Property taxes are a huge and growing problem.
  • dennis_jeeves2 3y ago
    Interesting, you are the only guy who has mentioned this. In this thread most people are baying for the blood and money of the rich, regardless of how they obtained their wealth. Not many are thinking of of the government taking away huge portions of one's savings through property taxes. ( and also vai inflation i.e printing money and income taxes)
• chabes 3y ago
  I’m having a difficult time finding any mention of rental markets and their impact on housing in the article, as well as the comments here. Seems like a big part of the context is missing from the discussion.
• randsp 3y ago
  Sometimes I think we are heading towards a similar situation here in Spain but for millennials. House built per year are at its lowest point and most of the houses are owned by baby boomers. If you want to buy a house you are competing against not only regular buyers but also real estate investment companies which are almost impossible to compete with, only way is to get mortgages for more years than you will be able to work, so people without good retirement plans will not be able to pay such mortgages
• rmk 3y ago
  Ah, so all the boomers who want to use their houses as nest eggs and have driven up prices making housing unaffordable for future generations have also wrecked the prospects of those less fortunate in their own generation. What's more unconscionable is the fact that young people are not forming families, not that some boomers are facing the consequences of their actions. It would be nice if all boomers faced the music, but that ain't gonna happen.
  • postalrat 3y ago
    Anyone who buys a house wants to use it as a nest egg. Its not just a baby boomer thing. You want cheap housing? Figure out a way to build houses for cheap. That's how it was done in the past.
    • rabuse 3y ago
      Agree with this. I've honestly been thinking about tapping out of the rental game and just going full van life for awhile, with the ability Starlink grants to us remote workers.
    • throwaway5959 3y ago
      Smaller houses might help.
    • rmk 3y ago
      > Anyone who buys a house wants to use it as a nest egg. Its not just a baby boomer thing. This is a recent phenomenon, and it is not universal at all. The boomers are the first generation not to protect pensions but instead gut them, and also to simultaneously use their houses as ATMs which HELOCs and such, which exploded in the boomers' heyday, the mid-late 80s. Almost every large institution and measure that supports the rampant inflation of house prices and keeps their values afloat came into its own with the explicit encouragement and effort of the boomers.
• diogenescynic 3y ago
  Tragically/ironically, they did it to themselves by pulling up the ladder once they climbed it. They made zoning laws so restrictive it all but choked off and suppressed new development, making sure that supply was restricted allowed them to use their homes as ATMs.
• coding123 3y ago
  This is the kind of news that's been suppressed by the administration(s). Until we have a government that's willing to admit there's a problem, we're never going to have a fix. All we hear from both R and D is that the economy is doing great, never better, maximum employment. I blame the suffering on the internet - which has hyper focused the "mob" to blame something immediately when something sounds horrible. For some reason our "fix" is to group people into camps that forever have 50% of the population that can blame the other 50%. This way, no one ever feels at fault - they simply "switch sides" as soon as they perceive a bit more blame on them.
  • hansoolo 3y ago
    >For some reason our "fix" is to group people into camps that forever have 50% of the population that can blame the other 50%. This way, no one ever feels at fault - they simply "switch sides" as soon as they perceive a bit more blame on them. This says so beautifully what I, as European, never understood about the US political system. They say it's the THE democratic system in the world, but yet there are only two parties! How could that even work?! I mean, we in Germany have a lot to deal with too. But at least we can balance our blame on at least 3 political parties....
• hotnfresh 3y ago
  Oh boy. Just wait for Gen X. It’ll be a retirement crisis. At-same-age savings levels for generations after the boomers start at “catastrophic” for X and are markedly worse for each generation after them. This’ll hit around the same time as we can no longer pretend our healthcare system isn’t a total disaster (keeps increasing in price faster than the rate of inflation—there exists a point at which it becomes a crisis), and probably not long after it becomes common knowledge that you need private tutors or your kids aren’t gonna get into any but a very low-tier university, if they go to public k-12 schools (we’re easing into that problem now—give it five years, the trend will be clear by then, and beyond obvious in 10, I doubt any of the things that might avert this new state of affairs are gonna happen)
  • rcarr 3y ago
    I still hold out hope that Silicon Valley will take over the education system before then. I've recently started Math Academy and I'm quite impressed with it. Duolingo still needs work but it's improving. I think (hope?) tools like this will eventually take over - they're certainly better than the dire excuse for an education I received.
    • hotnfresh 3y ago
      My expectation is that SV will siphon off quite a bit of money, but have little effect on outcomes. I expect it will be part of how some school districts try to deal with staffing shortages without significantly increasing wages—I think we’ll see several different tech-enabled attempts at fixes—but that all will basically fail. I do expect a few model schools will succeed with them, and be used to sell the rest, but it’ll be the usual story of unusually-competent leadership and above-average staff making something work well that does not work when those elements are absent, which is the usual case with school reform success stories. But, a bunch of systems and a bunch of training seminars and manuals will be sold to a lot of school districts. Folks are gonna make money off this.
      • rcarr 3y ago
        But isn't the hope that if we get these apps right, then the competence of the leadership and the staff doesn't matter so much anymore, just the drive of the individual student?
• throwaway5959 3y ago
  They had three decades of the best economy the world has ever seen to save and invest, along with plenty of time to fix the structural issues around homelessness and the poor. I don’t think it’s possible to manufacture a violin small enough.
• gavin_gee 3y ago
  Some good commentary in this thread, however one topic thats never raised in the topic of affordable housing is fast cheap public transit. I could never imagine being able to buy a house in London. but the train network makes it possible to live in a more affordable neighbourhood and commute as needed. In the US we seem to think that cities can continue to have affordable housing in the most desireable areas. this is a false hope. what we need to have is faster cheaper transit to satelittle communities. Seattle is the perfect example. If we have high speed rail between Bellingham and Seattle it would dramatically change the dynamics of the housing situation in Seattle.
  • Slava_Propanei 3y ago
    [dead]
  • GenerocUsername 3y ago
    Available transit needs to include safe transit. The current bus and light rail situation has turned off swaths of the working class to support the dredges of the drug-addict class by their lack of fare-enforcement and other low-end enabling schemes that sound great on paper, but lead to complicated downstream chilling effects on the entire region.
    • cornercasechase 3y ago
      Public transit is much safer than driving in your car. Someone skipping fare does not compare to even a light fender bender.
      • dr_dshiv 3y ago
        Yeah, but it doesn’t feel like public transit is safe. That’s important. Public transit in other countries feels nice. In the US, you feel poor. Design, maybe, matters?
      • denimnerd42 3y ago
        I think people mean a more irrational feeling of safety, rather than hard statistics. They don't want to see or be near those antisocial behaviors when they're taking transportation. Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.
• 3minus1 3y ago
  Wow, the article provides 3 datapoints and the metric is not even that good. I wish articles could go better when talking about trends. How about an actual timeseries of number of homeless people per capita alongside another one of homeless people over 50 per capita? Like it's really hard to draw any conclusions based on the very poor data the article provides.
• AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 3y ago
    Thanks. I've changed the title to make it more in line with what the article seems to be saying.
• georgeburdell 3y ago
  A distant family member, 80 years old, long-widowed and without children, almost became homeless in Florida due to rapidly rising rents in the town she has lived in since the ‘80s. She never bought a house or condo, and the company where she worked part time as an admin assistant folded last year. The landlord gave her six months’ notice, which I thought was generous, but she ultimately did not secure alternate housing there within per price range of $1,300/mo. She has moved to senior housing near her older brother in the midwest, but where she otherwise has no connections. It’s a sad final chapter.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  Homelessness and the population of billionaires... probably unrelated phenomena =)
• th3byrdm4n 3y ago
  Create a progressive tax on multiple homes. Increase tax on corporate owners. There
  • rubymancer 3y ago
    I had to read this several times and... this is a great solution. As taxes, these are a negative incentive for hoarding housing stock and increase gov't revenues to (potentially at least) help to house seniors.
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    also tie tax bracket to rent above a reasonable AMT like 10 percent at 1k, 20 percent at 2k, 35 percent at 3k, 60 percent at 4k, I mean different size rentals will have a different formula, just for examples sake.
  • rthomas6 3y ago
    Even better: a very high tax on the assessed unimproved land value of all privately owned land. This removes the ability to speculate on real estate entirely, which, if you think about it, maybe shouldn't be allowed in the first place, since it is the only good that has a truly fixed supply. This would cause real estate prices to plummet, then remain relatively stable. Obviously you couldn't just do it starting from nothing, but in the long run it would solve housing scarcity, as well as drastically reducing rent seeking behavior, without draconian measures or ending the free market. This idea is called Georgism, and it's not new. It was also supported by several economists, including Milton Friedman.
• armatav 3y ago
  This is horrible. Money printing as an idea needs to go.
• jimt1234 3y ago
  I'm a Gen-Xer, so I'm kinda Switzerland here, but I have to admit this is not without some comedy value: 2015: Millennials: The rent is too damn high! Boomers: Stop whining, you entitled babies! I bought my first house when I was still in high school! You just need to work! 2023: Boomers: The rent is too damn high! Millennials (and Gen-Zers?): Ok, boomer. Just stay away from TikTok.
  • pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Wealth inequality existed even when the boomers were coming of age, even if it wasn't as bad as it is right now. Among the boomers, there are surely a sizeable percentage who were never able to accumulate 'wealth', possibly through no fault of their own. Perhaps they chose the wrong investments, because pretty much every able-bodied, mentally sound boomer with no other extenuating circumstances could have bought a house even at working class wages. Perhaps they had a mentally ill relative they made sacrifices to support. Perhaps they suffered a workplace injury early in their career. Perhaps they retired comfortably but fell victim to a phone scam, and didn't properly budget for a devastating financial loss in addition to crippling inflation. Now that group is being thrown out the streets, very likely by the boomers who had better fortune.
• jononomo 3y ago
  Why can’t we have more boarding houses? 14 people can each get a 220-square-foot room and then share 3 bathrooms, a large kitchen, and a living room. It bothers me that this kind of dwelling is illegal.
  • gremlinsinc 3y ago
    it's not illegal, if it were dorms would be illegal, it's just not many want to go this route and it's probably not profitable for developers, there's a number of intentional communities that do this sort of thing or everyone has tiny homes without a kitchen and they maybe share one big kitchen in an out building or something....
    • jononomo 3y ago
      Please read up on rooming houses before assuming they are legal and just like college dorms. They are illegal almost everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooming_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooming_house Incidentally, 150 years ago rooming houses were something like 30% of the rental market. But because they tend to house low-income people, zoning laws have been put in place to make them illegal. I guess people think it would be better for the poor to live under a bridge somewhere else than in a rooming house in their neighborhood. By the way, a rooming house is different from someone just renting out a couple extra bedrooms in their house -- those are owner-occupied homes and are therefore not considered rooming houses.
• bfrog 3y ago
  Affordable living can be had, where only the citizens can buy land. E.g. the philippines has quite affordable housing. And magically only filipinos can buy land. Coincidence?
  • RIMR 3y ago
    You may be onto something, but we should really draw the line between personal property, and private property more than citizenship. We shouldn't have a problem letting a non-citizen buy a home in the USA, so long as they hold some sort of visa allowing them to be here. But there should maybe be restrictions on letting non-citizens buy properties as investments, and rent them out, especially at scale. Countries like the Philippines also have domestic housing regulations preventing residential property from being sucked up by property management companies to be rented out for profit to such a scale that it prevents prospective homeowners from purchasing real estate.
• bloomingeek 3y ago
  As a senior citizen who just retired, something the article didn't say enough about was bad spending while still employed. MANY of my former co-workers who are still working refuse to control their gambling, credit card levels, buying new vehicles and homes, multiple divorces. Several of them had the courage to ask me how I could afford to retire! I told them, politely, that I practiced not spending money, but saving it in my 401K. I'm not saying my fellow boomers are all doing this with their money while working, this is just my experience with those I know.
• RIMR 3y ago
  You mean to tell me that the generation that championed the defunding of all of our financial and social safety nets are suddenly reaping what they sowed? It's still awful, and we need to fix this, but forgive me if I lack some sympathy here.
• Havoc 3y ago
  Wait till we get to the next generation that could buy even less houses…
• ryanisnan 3y ago
  Make it illegal for corporations to own residential real estate.
• io_oi 3y ago
  Check out my experience with my elderly neighbor. She is at risk of homelessness due to getting cut from benefits. It's hellish. I posted to Ask HN about it recently [1] and it is just mind blowing how bad the USA safety net is. I am baffled. We can barely communicate with them due to months of lag on their end. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37429228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37429228
• Copernicron 3y ago
  I realize this is generally an unpopular opinion around these parts but the way I see it we need more government intervention. The government needs to get back into the business of building affordable housing and needs to fund more needs based housing to help those who can’t afford market rates. They’re the only ones big enough to make a difference and without a profit movtive they’re the only ones who can reasonably make it happen. Private corporations aren’t going to do it because they won’t make enough or any money.
• aqwsde 3y ago
  It's trickling down ...
• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
• _maelstrom 3y ago
  An interesting contrast in this whole debate is Japan, where homes actually depreciate slowly over 20-30 years while the underlying land much more moderately appreciates vs homes in the West [0]. This makes apartments quite cheap, even in popular cities, and the rate of homelessness is quite low [1]. There are small towns trying to sell empty houses for super cheap, though possibly you have to pay to bring them up to code, I am not sure on the details. More recently, renovation has started to become popular [2]. I guess that helps with costs and is more eco-friendly. I'm not sure if this way of doing it is better but it makes sense to me that the house itself, like a car, should lose value as it ages and its parts will require more servicing and replacement. [0] https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/06/06/depreciate-limited-life-span-japanese-home/1527843245 https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/06/06/depreciate-limited-l... [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/homelessness-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/homelessn... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...