12 ms·

This is incredibly sad, and also very disappointing. Whatever we've been doing to solve the shortage of low-income housing in the US is not working. At all. W

• influx 3y ago
  In Seattle, there’s lack of housing, but the bigger driver appears to be easy access to drugs like fentanyl and no consequences to anyone involved in using or selling them.
  • hathym 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • bombcar 3y ago
      ship homeless instead?
      • kridsdale1 3y ago
        Russia is already trying to ship all its “undesirables” over the Finn border as a soft form of warfare against Europe.
  • jplasmeier 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • jedilord 3y ago
      Love how facts are right-wing agitprop now. lol
      • jplasmeier 3y ago
        Fact is the recently elected City council made public drug use illegal: https://crosscut.com/politics/2023/09/seattle-city-council-passes-law-prosecute-drug-use-possession https://crosscut.com/politics/2023/09/seattle-city-council-p... Murdoch and co. will have you believe Seattle is a fentanyl-ridden wastleland. Property values say otherwise.
        • sokoloff 3y ago
          In the spectrum of “things that have had an effect on Seattle’s homeless stats”, do you think this recently elected council’s recent decision has had time to have an effect? If not, doesn’t it seem likely that previous looking the other way has contributed to the current status?
        • achenet 3y ago
          while I agree that basically any news outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch is heavily untrustworthy, I'd like to point out that property values are not necessarily correlated with quality of life. Within a given city, yes, the nicer bits are more expensive. Between different cities, however, it is totally possible to find one city is both cheaper and nicer than another (with the possible caveat of being smaller, and perhaps if you can't WFH, not as many jobs). To use an example I know well, basically every city in France outside of Marseille is nicer to live in than Paris, but Paris has real estate prices that are 2-4x most other cites. I imagine you could find similar things in other countries as well - Amsterdam vs Eindhoven in the Netherlands, for example.
      • baby 3y ago
        Are you sure these are facts? I think it’s just bad engineering IMO. Send people to jail doesn’t solve any root issues.
      • confidantlake 3y ago
        I have no dog in this fight but saying "X" is a bigger driver than "Y" of some complex social phenomenon is not what I consider to be a "fact".
    • achenet 3y ago
      there was an article on the front page of HN recently about the flaws in the current drug policy in, if I'm not mistaken Portland. Basically, not throwing junkies in jail doesn't actually help them sober up if there isn't a proper plan in place, so they're stopping that approach in favor of a more strict approach where doing drugs in public is a crime. Before you make assumptions about my person opinions, I'm very pro-legalization, I think prohibition of basically anything is very misguided. If I were in charge, everything, including heroin and fentanyl, would be legalized, taxed, and regulated.
      • coldbrewed 3y ago
        While not inaccurate, this point is tangential. The lack of affordable housing in Portland drives homelessness; and being homeless pushes people to use meth during the night to stay awake so they can protect themselves and fentanyl so they can feel joy while living in truly wretched conditions. Keeping people off the street by building affordable housing and preventing people from despairing avoids a raft of social ills. That said, per your point decriminalization of possession and public intoxication, measure 110 was a poorly written law that should have decriminalized drugs after harm reduction, substance abuse clinics, and housing options were in place first. The current situation wasn't guaranteed to happen; unfortunately city and county leadership like to wear their pants on their head instead of actually getting work done. This was as much if not more of a failure of governance to execute as it was a failure of policy.
      • FireBeyond 3y ago
        It wasn't so much about the flaws in the current drug policy in Portland, as flaws in implementation. Portland planned to decriminalize a lot of things and put a bunch of other measures and support systems in place. COVID and other things hit, and all that got enacted was decriminalization with none of the guard rails or help mechanisms, with predictable outcomes.
    • justrealist 3y ago
      > easy access to drugs like fentanyl and no consequences to anyone involved in using or selling them. reply You can literally watch interviews with the homeless in SF and Seattle. They cite these facts straight-up as to why they live in SF and Seattle. You have to be actively lying to yourself to come to a different answer.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    There are tons of people doing hard drugs in Seattle that aren't being a menace to society. I'm not sure why you can't just criminalize the actual problem. I don't think we should be locking people up for years because they were minding their own business and being productive members of society and happened to run into the police at the wrong time. At the same time, it would be nice to do something with people who are fine to beg for money on the street, do nothing productive, and be high on drugs until they die. Most cities with these problems have resources for people who are willing to get help. Yet we let people refuse that because they'd rather continue doing drugs and not being productive and at the same time ruining all public spaces. Something needs to change. Hoping that those people will just change is a bad strategy. Leaving them be is an option - but it's growing less popular.
  • baby 3y ago
    Putting people that need help in jail is the dumbest solution one can think of. You’re not solving ANYTHING. You’re just swiping what looks bad under the rug. The US prison system has already imploded.
• bluejekyll 3y ago
  What have we been doing? As far as I can tell, at least in the Bay Area, we have so many NIMBYs blocking everything that we’re practically doing nothing. There is not enough empathy for those who are struggling.
  • achenet 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • happytoexplain 3y ago
      There are many people who are not comically wealthy San Franciscans, who have worked their whole lives to live in middle-class communities across America that are being ruined by a sudden focus on density instead of building outward, driven by landowners who "don't give a shit about the people of <insert community name here>" (actual quote from personal experience), enabled by laws and policies that have noble goals but were written in an unthoughtful, easily-exploited way and put in place by partisan bodies. I'm not trying to downplay the complexity of the situation - I'm just saying that you alienate more people than you think with this common format of sarcastic hatred based on the extreme example of the bay area.
      • achenet 3y ago
        thanks for pointing that out ^_^ I would like to say that, having lived in a city that built very outwards (Houston, Texas), and several denser cities (most notably Paris, France which is very dense), I prefer the quality of life in dense spaces. Being too spread out means that you have massive commutes to be able to get anywhere. Being built up means you can do everything on foot.
  • coding123 3y ago
    In CA you can literally build a house in a backyard now with a max wait of 60 days for approval. No one can literally stop it.
    • 3y ago
• 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.” Those last two are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere. We’ve worked on Los Angeles Prop HHH proposals, and, despite that Proposition raising $1.2 billion for housing, not much has materially changed. Why? California makes building anything, anywhere, astonishingly difficult. Until we can increase the supply of housing, we’re going to see homelessness problems.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Seattle has a lot more construction than LA and SF, and it’s zoning is a lot more flexible (no parking minimums), yet we have an outsized share of the unhoused problem (on a per capita basis, larger than LA or SF). I’m not saying housing policy isn’t a blocker, but it can’t be the only one, we can’t seem to build our way privately out of the problem at least here. More drug addiction services are needed before we can really treat this problem. Even putting them up in hotels is incredibly expensive because the damage that has to be repaired.
    • mrbgty 3y ago
      Does that mean there's a lot of empty houses in Seattle?
• candiddevmike 3y ago
  Until we remove real estate as a form of investment and enshrine right to shelter laws, this problem will never be fixed.
  • konschubert 3y ago
    If you remove real estate as a form of investment, no new apartment buildings will be built. Guess what happens next. The rate of empty apartments is extremely low. This means that we have a supply shortage, not a pricing problem.
    • toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Government can build if private industry will not. If you argue "we can only fix this with the private sector and private investment", welp, we tried that and we're plain ol' fucked at the moment. Vienna is a great example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)
      • JKCalhoun 3y ago
        I thought we also tried government housing and got "the projects" instead.
        • toomuchtodo 3y ago
          Define we. My example shows government housing can be done. Swap out people and policy if needed. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Einstein
        • klyrs 3y ago
          Having grown up in the projects, they were a million times better than tent cities.
    • 3y ago
• greenie_beans 3y ago
  to start, we need to repeal the faircloth amendment.
• AniseAbyss 3y ago
  [dead]
• grecy 3y ago
  Housing can not simultaneously be affordable and a good investment.
• throw__away7391 3y ago
  I don’t know what makes people think that this is a difficult problem to solve or that the government is trying to solve the problem. It’s quite the opposite, nearly all governments are trying to increase property values. This is both to win support from older voters who own property and to increase their tax revenue. Actually lowering home prices will upset their constituents and disrupt their budgets, a lose/lose proposition. Meanwhile most young people do not really understand what is going on and are easily convinced that the these same leaders are doing everything they can and it is all the fault of some greedy investors/banks/etc. for which the government is powerless to oppose. In my opinion a lot of the push to put ever more emphasis on “social” issues we have seen lately is to distract the growing number of young voters from economic issues so that these efforts can continue.
• chung8123 3y ago
  Part of the problem is the problem statement. Low-income housing seems to be secondary as to how we are spending the money. A lot of the money is going to homeless programs and shelters vs trying to figure out how to lower the price of homes in a sustainable way.