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Homelessness is a housing problem: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem-when-cities-build-housing-homelessness-goes-down/ https://se
by jseliger 3y ago
Homelessness is a housing problem: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-problem-when-cities-build-housing-homelessness-goes-down/ https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-pro...:
There’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.
The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.”
- c22 3y agoIt is true that housing is too expensive and this is a primary cause of homelessness, but I can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here. Sure, adding a bunch of empty houses to an area will create a downward pressure on prices, but at best this is temporary. When I look around, the densest cities are also the most expensive to live in so making places denser will only hurt low income earners who want to live there even more. The reality is if we want low income families to be able to live in desirable places the only solution is public subsidization. Just handing this problem to the land developers and removing all zoning restrictions is not going to fix anything in the long run.
- jseliger 3y agoI can't accept the logic that just "building more housing" is the solution here Read the book, and look at the evidence rather than trying to reason from random feelings.
- c22 3y agoThanks, I will read the book, and I have looked at a lot of evidence. However, keep in mind that books are written by people and people make mistakes. There is nothing wrong with using your brain to reason from first principles. Sure if we can indefinitely add huge amounts of housing everywhere year over year we will have "solved" this problem, as the evidence shows! However, I can't imagine this is the best use of our time and resources. I'd rather look for more sustainable solutions.
- gmarx 3y agoThe only way to arrive at this conclusion is to group the short term and long term homeless together. I concede it might have changed since I last read up on the topic, but the short term homeless are the great majority and these are regular people who have lost their jobs or roommate situation and end up living in cars or shelters short term. The article is clearly about the minority of homeless who are long term drug abusing street dwellers. Different problem, different solution. Very high profile efforts to put the latter in free housing have failed. On the other hand I have a friend (who is incidentally also a drug user but not so far gone that she couldn't stop when forced to wear a drug detecting patch to get her kid back) who became homeless. She immediately got into a shelter and now months later is moving into an apartment with her rent (I think) paid at least partly by the city. So anecdotally (and from some reading) the former group already has working solutions