6 ms·

California has close to the worst per capita housing supply of any state in the US. From https://www.vox.com/cities-and-urbanism/2018/2/23/17011154/sb827-califo

by rnburn 3y ago

California has close to the worst per capita housing supply of any state in the US. From https://www.vox.com/cities-and-urbanism/2018/2/23/17011154/sb827-california-housing-crisis https://www.vox.com/cities-and-urbanism/2018/2/23/17011154/s...: "The state’s population has steadily grown, but it hasn’t been building new places for people to live at anything close to the same rate. It now ranks 49th in housing units per capita." There's a lot that can be done locally to improve homelessness.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
The article you are quoting is from 2018. An article from 2019 says: For this map, we analyzed the states with the most available housing based on population. We divided the number of housing units available in 2019 by the state’s population in order to determine the states with the most available housing per capita. By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita. https://www.deedclaim.com/states-with-most-housing-growth/ https://www.deedclaim.com/states-with-most-housing-growth/ A favorite quote of mine: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. It's often attributed to Mark Twain, who popularized it. He attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist... I'm sure your comment is made in good faith, but it doesn't actually rebut my statement that this is not a problem that is likely to be solved by solely local efforts. Adding more lanes to a freeway tends to not solve the problem of congestion. If you want fewer cars on the road, you need to make it feasible for more people to get where they want or need to go some other way: walking, cycling, public transit. Our current financing mechanisms, housing policies and general expectations for what constitutes good housing are rooted in policies developed post World War II to help solve the housing crisis of that era and it gave birth to the modern suburb. We now have policies and practices that make it hard to build and finance anything other than single-family detached homes and various trends have pushed up average size of new homes while the average number of people living in such homes has shrunk. Does California need more affordable housing? Absolutely. So does every other state in the US. And other states are generally more affordable than California, so if other states will also address their housing issues, you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  I tried to understand what that deedclaim.com article was saying and completely failed. There are obviously not 2.75 houses per person in California. I have no idea what that number is trying to indicate.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I'm not sure either. It really only is intended to support the point that this isn't a good way to try to "rebut" my statement and I didn't try hard to find a highly reliable source, which is generally a bad idea, especially when posting to HN. Here is another figure: California ranks among states with the lowest vacancy rates, according to a new report by LendingTree. But because California is so large, it still has the second-highest number of vacant homes - about 8.7% according to the report, or around 1.2 million empty homes. https://www.foxla.com/news/california-housing-vacancy-rate https://www.foxla.com/news/california-housing-vacancy-rate There are lots of empty homes in the US and lots of homeless people on the streets and lots of people with modest incomes struggling to find housing they can afford that works for them financially and in other ways. The empty homes are often not homes that would serve the needs of homeless people well. You can have a lot of empty homes and still have a lot of people on the street and California does have both. I tend to talk about walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods rather than affordable housing because the phrase "affordable housing" is a hot-button phrase and most people seem to think it means either government projects or poverty housing (or both). It's a really tough topic to communicate well on and I have been absent from HN in recent weeks, as is common for me around the holidays, and I'm probably making a mistake trying to discuss this at all. It's not really a central topic of focus for the forum and it's endlessly frustrating trying to do that Vulcan mind meld "my mind to yours" and convey what I am thinking by little black characters on a light background. It routinely gets very wildly misconstrued and it's very unusual for people to actually care to understand my point. Most are just waiting to shoot it down and reassert whatever they already believe is true, which often boils down to "Let's just round up homeless people and throw them in jail!"
- rnburn 3y ago
  > By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita I don't know how deedclaim computed those numbers, or the reliability of the source; but California most definitely has a shortage of housing. The numbers I quoted come from the McKinsey Global institute study: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Global%20Themes/Urbanization/Closing%20Californias%20housing%20gap/Closing-Californias-housing-gap-In-Brief.ashx https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckin... And local policy is very much a problem. Briefly as described in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY, California has a lot of housing restrictions, a high cost of construction, and processes that make it easy for housing opponents to block new developments. And your statement "you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing." is not an accurate characterization. Most of the homeless in California are Californians. Quoting from 2023 UCSF homeless study (https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CASPEH_Executive_Summary_62023.pdf https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...): "People experiencing homelessness in California are Californians. Nine out of ten participants lost their last housing in California; 75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing"

by rnburn 3y ago

DoreenMichele 3y ago

The article you are quoting is from 2018. An article from 2019 says: For this map, we analyzed the states with the most available housing based on population. We divided the number of housing units available in 2019 by the state’s population in order to determine the states with the most available housing per capita. By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita. https://www.deedclaim.com/states-with-most-housing-growth/ https://www.deedclaim.com/states-with-most-housing-growth/ A favorite quote of mine: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. It's often attributed to Mark Twain, who popularized it. He attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist... I'm sure your comment is made in good faith, but it doesn't actually rebut my statement that this is not a problem that is likely to be solved by solely local efforts. Adding more lanes to a freeway tends to not solve the problem of congestion. If you want fewer cars on the road, you need to make it feasible for more people to get where they want or need to go some other way: walking, cycling, public transit. Our current financing mechanisms, housing policies and general expectations for what constitutes good housing are rooted in policies developed post World War II to help solve the housing crisis of that era and it gave birth to the modern suburb. We now have policies and practices that make it hard to build and finance anything other than single-family detached homes and various trends have pushed up average size of new homes while the average number of people living in such homes has shrunk. Does California need more affordable housing? Absolutely. So does every other state in the US. And other states are generally more affordable than California, so if other states will also address their housing issues, you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago
I tried to understand what that deedclaim.com article was saying and completely failed. There are obviously not 2.75 houses per person in California. I have no idea what that number is trying to indicate.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I'm not sure either. It really only is intended to support the point that this isn't a good way to try to "rebut" my statement and I didn't try hard to find a highly reliable source, which is generally a bad idea, especially when posting to HN. Here is another figure: California ranks among states with the lowest vacancy rates, according to a new report by LendingTree. But because California is so large, it still has the second-highest number of vacant homes - about 8.7% according to the report, or around 1.2 million empty homes. https://www.foxla.com/news/california-housing-vacancy-rate https://www.foxla.com/news/california-housing-vacancy-rate There are lots of empty homes in the US and lots of homeless people on the streets and lots of people with modest incomes struggling to find housing they can afford that works for them financially and in other ways. The empty homes are often not homes that would serve the needs of homeless people well. You can have a lot of empty homes and still have a lot of people on the street and California does have both. I tend to talk about walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods rather than affordable housing because the phrase "affordable housing" is a hot-button phrase and most people seem to think it means either government projects or poverty housing (or both). It's a really tough topic to communicate well on and I have been absent from HN in recent weeks, as is common for me around the holidays, and I'm probably making a mistake trying to discuss this at all. It's not really a central topic of focus for the forum and it's endlessly frustrating trying to do that Vulcan mind meld "my mind to yours" and convey what I am thinking by little black characters on a light background. It routinely gets very wildly misconstrued and it's very unusual for people to actually care to understand my point. Most are just waiting to shoot it down and reassert whatever they already believe is true, which often boils down to "Let's just round up homeless people and throw them in jail!"
rnburn 3y ago
> By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita I don't know how deedclaim computed those numbers, or the reliability of the source; but California most definitely has a shortage of housing. The numbers I quoted come from the McKinsey Global institute study: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Global%20Themes/Urbanization/Closing%20Californias%20housing%20gap/Closing-Californias-housing-gap-In-Brief.ashx https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckin... And local policy is very much a problem. Briefly as described in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY, California has a lot of housing restrictions, a high cost of construction, and processes that make it easy for housing opponents to block new developments. And your statement "you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing." is not an accurate characterization. Most of the homeless in California are Californians. Quoting from 2023 UCSF homeless study (https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CASPEH_Executive_Summary_62023.pdf https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...): "People experiencing homelessness in California are Californians. Nine out of ten participants lost their last housing in California; 75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing"