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> In brief, our city has a housing shortage and a homelessness problem I've never understood why people try to connect these issues. They're wholely unrelated.

• exolymph 2y ago
  "homeless" is a larger category of which visible street people are but one subset. others are living in their cars or couch-surfing or what-have-you
• pushcx 2y ago
  People try to connect these issues because they are connected. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/08/22/how-housing-costs-drive-levels-of-homelessness https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
• neongodzilla 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • porkbeer 2y ago
    If people value living in an area, the price goes up until supply and demand are similar. Those with less to spend have many other options. Nobody is owed a specific home. To say otherwise would ignore the huge benefit of immigration.
    • jumhyn 2y ago
      But this doesn’t offer any justification for why, for locations that people highly value living in, we as a society ought to do anything other than maximize the number of people living there.
      • happytoexplain 2y ago
        You shouldn't maximize the number of people anywhere - it creates sadness and kills communities. It's also not the only solution.
        • jumhyn 2y ago
          Sure, but it is an option (as well as everywhere along the spectrum up to maximization), and so ‘people want to move there’ is not on its own a justification for ‘prices must go up’.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • dghlsakjg 2y ago
      > Those with less to spend have many other options. That's where you are very much making bad assumptions, or showing your complete lack of experience I know a single mom with a kid who needs a regular scheduled experimental treatment only available in one hospital in the province. She can move to a lower cost area, where there aren't many jobs, and none that would pay enough for her to regularly travel to the city and get a hotel. She can't find a cheaper place to live in the city, because even a shared place is going for $1k+ for a bedroom, and no one wants a shared place with a kid. She could move farther away from the city and commute, but the rent savings wouldn't cover the cost of public transit, let alone a reliable car. The line for affordable housing is years long. She is one of thousands with a story like that. There are a million and one scenarios where 'other options' just don't exist. To suggest that people opt to be unhoused/live in a car/couchsurf even though they have the option to be housed is wild. Nobody is owed a specific home, but it is cruel, inhuman and immoral to suggest that people aren't entitled to a shelter of some sort, especially in a country where we have more than enough resources to solve the problem.
      • blinded 2y ago
        super solid point.
      • happytoexplain 2y ago
        This is very hard to give the benefit of the doubt - nobody has implied "just be homeless". You're calling an imaginary enemy "cruel, inhuman and immoral", but you're addressing a real person.
        • dghlsakjg 2y ago
          They said there were other options. They said they shouldn’t live in a region if they get priced out of it. What are the other options? “You can’t live in this city, regardless of reason, unless you have enough money” is cruel and inhuman in the real circumstance I described. It may be that they don’t have the experience or knowledge to realize that things are the way they are, but “you aren’t entitled to live anywhere near where you need to live to keep your child alive” is the reality of their position.
  • happytoexplain 2y ago
    Why act like this? Sarcastically dismissing what people value only aggravates the problem and antagonizes the honest people who disagree with you.
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      Why don’t you put this comment on GP, who is saying blatantly false stuff in order to construct a blatantly false narrative about an issue that people care about?
      • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        Being wrong isn't against the site guidelines. Attacking others, calling them a bot, and similar things are against the site guidelines.
• jumhyn 2y ago
  There are many homeless people who are not living on the streets: those living in shelters, or cars, or who are frequently moving between temporary living situations with friends or family. And they may even be holding down a job, and/or relying on local support systems for, say, child care, which could make ‘move where it’s cheaper’ an untenable or very risky option.
• happytoexplain 2y ago
  Yes. People are flooding desirable areas, and developers (and some politicians) would like to keep trying to fight the locals to get a piece of that pie, even if it means harming those areas, rather than developing outward and stopping foreign buying. Then the resulting house-price crisis is pointed to as the reason they should be given free reign, but that's circular reasoning. That's "negotiating with terrorists". After that, the next thing blamed is the issue of wealthy Americans using housing as an investment in high-profile areas, which takes up the public consciousness despite being such a small part of the problem. The homelessness crisis is mostly unrelated, and the subset of it that is related is not related in the ways for which people use it as an argument. Again: Build outward. Get businesses to spread out.
  • 7jjjjjjj 2y ago
    Building outward causes many serious harms.
• dghlsakjg 2y ago
  There is a lot of data indicating that you are dead wrong. This is one of many studies that took less than a minute to find if you need a citation: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/08/22/how-housing-costs-drive-levels-of-homelessness https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/... Here's one from California explaining the causal relationship between rising rents and homelessness: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-...
  • m463 2y ago
    There's also a more direct logical connection, solely due to the definition of the words "housing shortage" and the word "homeless". Sort of like the connection people who never leave their house and never seem to meet someone.
• WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > The homeless aren't homeless because housing is expensive where you are. There are places within reach where housing is cheap. This is about as disconnected from reality as it gets. We beat out >50 applicants for our current rental by offering 6mos up front. That ad was up for less than 2 hours. Other landlords we talked to were working through 400 applications per day. We're paying just over double for the same sq ft, in the next county out. We beat long odds for the privilege. People all around the region - with steady gov jobs and money in the bank - moved into dodgy hotels or their cars because they had nowhere to go.
• twojacobtwo 2y ago
  Two of my coworkers are homeless and in just that situation. I'm somewhat astounded that you can't see any reasons why people don't want to just pick up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else.
  • nradov 2y ago
    My grandparents picked up their lives and cut all ties to go somewhere else. It was hard but they were better off for it. I have little sympathy for those who are unwilling to take similar steps to improve their own lives.
    • atlas_hugged 2y ago
      Nice, taking credit for an extraordinarily difficult decision your grandparents made to trivialize the difficulty. Do you hear yourself?
      • deleted 2y ago
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  • 6510 2y ago
    Perhaps it needs to be made easier.
    • 6510 2y ago
      What would you need to ease the transition? I would like a trial job and a trial house for 6-12 months. Ill find something myself. It should probably involve a schedule with social interactions and someone to monitor the progress. Other people who just relocated are probably interesting to talk with.
• deleted 2y ago
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