15 ms·

Why housing shortages cause homelessness

90 points by apsec112 2y ago

mediumsmart 2y ago
I don't get it, does this headline say that when there are not enough houses some people are homeless because they did not get a house while there is not enough of them?
susiecambria 2y ago
Not mentioned in the comments I read is that the folks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are stressed and operating less than optimally. Every day is a struggle and any blip reduces functionality. As for behavioral health issues, a significant number of people experiencing homelessness have them. Some are fairly easily managed with stable housing. Others are not. And then to complicate matters, there are veterans who may have behavioral health challenges and are not being helped by the VA.
diogenescynic 2y ago
And yet as home prices have gone up the number of homeless remains pretty much about the same in California. So if the number of homeless don't really increase with the rise in home prices, then it makes me think there's really just always some % of the population that can't integrate and be productive in society regardless of the cost of housing or economic conditions.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  I feel like there’s a vast number of potential variables here. For example, maybe rent prices have not yet caught up.
  - diogenescynic 2y ago
    If you're on meth or fentanyl, it doesn't matter what the price of rent is--you can't afford it when you're using those drugs. I'm sure high rents don't help but pretending that homelessness is a housing issue is wrong--it's very clearly a mental illness and drug problem.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
      We know that only a large minority of the homeless abuse drugs routinely and that a similarly large minority are homeless due to mental illness. One would expect the two groups to overlap, so it seems reasonable to say that a large proportion of homeless people are neither mentally ill nor drug addicted, or at least that a large proportion aren’t homeless for this reason. Given that this is the case, you would expect a rise in the price of housing to correlate with a rise in homelessness. Since we don’t observe that, I’m guessing that there’s a variable we’re missing. Another potential explanation could be that people tend to move out of the high cost area before going homeless, so they don’t contribute to the homelessness statistics in the high cost area.
rooroo2 2y ago
The article mentions a housing shortage. It’s very important to differentiate between a “shortage” and “scarcity” Thomas Sowell explains really well how regulation such as rent control has lead to dramatically reduced supply of affordable housing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjxdH49JMc&pp=ygUddGhvbWFzIHNvd2VsbCBvbiByZW50IGNvbnRyb2w%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjxdH49JMc&pp=ygUddGhvbWFzIHN... Of course the elephant in the room is that there may be no price at which many “homeless” would be willing to pay for housing. They may choose to spend absolutely all available money on drugs, housing be damned.
- namaria 2y ago
  Surely then a worldwide militaristic repression of drug trade for a few decades should bring homelessness way down right?
reverius42 2y ago
“Why food shortages cause hunger”
ttonkytonk 2y ago
It would help if voucher programs were more flexible. E.g. if a $1000 voucher is available for an apartment, why not a $500 one for a relative's room?
cyberax 2y ago
[flagged]
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  IOW, the law of supply and demand is wrong. LOL.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    When it comes to housing? Yes. The naive version is wrong. I challenge you to find a counterexample. Go on. A large city (>200k population) that lowered housing prices by increasing density. The mechanism for this failure is also long known: induced demand.
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      Minneapolis. Built a lot more housing. Rents have fallen.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Housing doesn't induce demand in cities. Jobs induce demand in cities. And to a lesser degree, amenities and services. > A large city (>200k population) that lowered housing prices by increasing density. Tokyo, any city in China Overbuilding in Tokyo lowered prices so much the entire Japanese economy collapsed, and a similar thing seems to be happening in China now.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        [flagged]
        bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Tokyo before 1995. > And what do you think concentrates jobs in ever-densifying cities? It's the areas with the least available housing that get the most jobs, so the answer is "anything but housing". Ignoring China is a total cop out, because it's pretty much the only location in the world that currently has a significant housing surplus.
allears 2y ago
Well of course I didn't read the article cuz that would be cheating, but it's a bit like musical chairs, innit? If there aren't enough houses (at prices that are affordable to the majority), then somebody is gonna be left standing when the music stops.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  A lot of things in life are a lot like musical chairs, that’s why it’s a great game to play with kids when they’re young so they learn the lesson.
- thephyber 2y ago
  But, there generally is enough housing in the US. It’s just not proportionately distributed where people want to live and at prices people want to pay (for the location and price). There is a surplus of abandoned housing in Baltimore, Detroit, and lots of other rust belt towns. But buying an old abandoned house in Detroit means massive investment in maintenance, refurb, and utilities (Detroit utilities are provisioned+allocated+staffed for 2.5 million residents, but half of those left, leaving the remaining few paying 2x per capita). Meanwhile the residents of affluent suburbs threaten their city representatives/ staffers to make sure they don’t allow more residents to move there.
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    Yep, it turns out the revealed preference of US people as a whole is they really like infrastructure and living in places where there are good amenities to the point that they would rather share a rented apartment, than own something out of the way. I guess with a commute and dependents that's really the only way to make it work.
    - bsder 2y ago
      > rather share a rented apartment, than own something out of the way. Or is it simply the standard demographic problem of "the vast majority of population is in the cities so the vast majority of <pick any characteristic> is mostly in the cities"? In addition, if you are poor, owning a car is relatively expensive. Not owning a car is an option in some US cities; it's simply a non-starter anywhere suburban or worse. However, as the article points out, Houston has apparently done better than most simply because it has lots and lots of housing supply. Of course, the downside of that is that Houston is also the poster child for sprawl having not one, not two, not three but effectively four beltways around the city perimiters.
Terr_ 2y ago
Hmmm, so in other words the author is saying that high housing prices matter but in more of an indirect way than just making studios out of reach, instead it reduces how much family and friends can/will host people in need.
cat_plus_plus 2y ago
Could it be for the same reason as lack of water causing draught or defunding police causing crime? Nope, I must be too much of a simpleton. I am sure actual explanation is a work of pure genius.
aaron695 2y ago
We recently offered a family camping having to move every week (campground restrictions) a camp location. Unviewable by the public, rural-esk location close to their work and school, a stable safe base. Government restrictions mean we can't install a externally accessible toilet (our bio-cycle system can handle it) because of this it didn't work. Never forget homelessness is because the Left made gentrification a dirty word. The Left want other people to share, but no high rises in their suburb. The Left gets the 'character' they want and they use paperwork to stop change. Quick (spherical cow) math, if you have 1/100 chance of homelessness in a year, you probably will get stuck in the cycle. If you have a partner and they are the same it's 1/10,000 years.
- screye 2y ago
  Not sure about how gentrification goes into homelessness, but I agree that it isn't a dirty word. Gentrification is amazing. It has bad outcomes when a neighborhood has low ownership numbers, but it's well within known risks for yearly renters. There are egalitarian ways to do gentrification ( mandatory affordable housing with low interest dibs for long term renters, x% new housing is rent controlled for 10 years so existing renters get a decade to plan their next move). Done right, it can be a win-win-win for new transplants, homeowners and long term rentals.
godelski 2y ago
> YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) advocates… This is why non-YIMBY progressives … and non-YIMBY conservatives Non-YIMBY… there’s got to be a better term for this…
- Terr_ 2y ago
  I read it as trying to include the middle-ground, the maybes and the kindas and the it-depends-ers. NIMBY would would be a more-exclusive label indicating a smaller subset.
  - deprecative 2y ago
    If you're not a YIMBY you're a de facto NIMBY.
    - dagw 2y ago
      That is obviously too reductive. I liked to think of myself as a YIMBY. When they wanted to build two 17 story apartment buildings in my neighbourhood I thought it sounded like a great idea, even though they would be much taller than any existing buildings there. Whenever anybody suggests tearing down some old buildings in a certain 'historic' (or dilapidated as some might say) part of my town and building actually useful housing there, I'm all for it. But when I found out that the city had plans to bulldoze this one park and playground I took my daughter to almost every day, and build student housing there, I quickly realised that I was also quite the NIMBY when things are happening in my actual back yard.
      - screye 2y ago
        No, you're a NIMBY. The city had to bulldoze the park, because it was probably the only piece of public property it could acquire. It is a response to NIMBYs leaving them no option. If the city could buy 4 adjacent SFH lots and build a tower on it, then parks wouldn't need to be destroyed. YIMBYism doesn't mean bad urban design. It means more options. Manhattan has plenty of walkable parks. Clearly density and parks aren't at odds with each other. The fact that the city had to build a massive out-of-proportion tower for students means there was long term unmet demand in the neighborhood. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make (metaphorically) violent revolution inevitable." -jfk
ripberge 2y ago
Here's a recent statistic from San Francisco: "City officials said that 40% of the unhoused population surveyed in San Francisco came from another California city or even from out of state, increasing from 28% in 2019." Source: https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-required-be-offered-before-shelter-new-mandate https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-requ... This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%. A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered". I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society. The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use. The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services. Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts. https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136
- abhiyerra 2y ago
  The book San Fransicko covers this. Apparently, housing doesn’t really reduce the drug dependence and makes it worst because of isolation.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  Have you heard of the game musical chairs? Anyway let’s say 10 kids are playing musical chairs. There are 9 chairs available. One of these kids had broken their leg a few days ago. Let me ask you this, after the first round which one of the kids is likely going to be the kid without a chair? So yeah, substance abuse is in fact a problem. However even if you remove all drugs from society, you’ll still have people left without chairs. Just the profile of those people will change.
levocardia 2y ago
First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.) Second, the essay's argument matches up pretty well with my experiences living in a variety of poor (by American standards) areas: most poor people get by ok on a broad network of informal favors, workarounds, and grey-economy gigs. Cash and no-questions-asked for a room in a ramshackle roachhouse, swapping cable box discounts for rides to the grocery store, Greg the wheelchair-bound erstwhile addict who watches your place at night in exchange for dinner, etc. High COL areas make these relationship networks harder (as do strict regulations and government oversight). But personal destructive tendencies make these relationships harder too: Greg gets free dinner, but his buddies who just show up to smoke crack on your porch get their ass kicked by your angry housemate. And so they go somewhere else (the local train station, perhaps). So I wish the article had addressed the social causes of "informal economy breakdown," as well as the economic ones. All the anecdotes above are real, by the way.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.) It is generally not legal to fail to provide housing for minors you are the parent of. That would be child neglect. So you can kick them out, but only if you arrange for an alternative.
  - isk517 2y ago
    The 'child neglect' is the key here. Diona was trying to avoid having her baby taken from her and put in the system. In order to take any action against her own mother she would risk having action taken against her.

90 points by apsec112 2y ago

I don't get it, does this headline say that when there are not enough houses some people are homeless because they did not get a house while there is not enough of them?

susiecambria 2y ago

Not mentioned in the comments I read is that the folks at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder are stressed and operating less than optimally. Every day is a struggle and any blip reduces functionality. As for behavioral health issues, a significant number of people experiencing homelessness have them. Some are fairly easily managed with stable housing. Others are not. And then to complicate matters, there are veterans who may have behavioral health challenges and are not being helped by the VA.

diogenescynic 2y ago

And yet as home prices have gone up the number of homeless remains pretty much about the same in California. So if the number of homeless don't really increase with the rise in home prices, then it makes me think there's really just always some % of the population that can't integrate and be productive in society regardless of the cost of housing or economic conditions.

BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
I feel like there’s a vast number of potential variables here. For example, maybe rent prices have not yet caught up.
- diogenescynic 2y ago
  If you're on meth or fentanyl, it doesn't matter what the price of rent is--you can't afford it when you're using those drugs. I'm sure high rents don't help but pretending that homelessness is a housing issue is wrong--it's very clearly a mental illness and drug problem.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    We know that only a large minority of the homeless abuse drugs routinely and that a similarly large minority are homeless due to mental illness. One would expect the two groups to overlap, so it seems reasonable to say that a large proportion of homeless people are neither mentally ill nor drug addicted, or at least that a large proportion aren’t homeless for this reason. Given that this is the case, you would expect a rise in the price of housing to correlate with a rise in homelessness. Since we don’t observe that, I’m guessing that there’s a variable we’re missing. Another potential explanation could be that people tend to move out of the high cost area before going homeless, so they don’t contribute to the homelessness statistics in the high cost area.

rooroo2 2y ago

The article mentions a housing shortage. It’s very important to differentiate between a “shortage” and “scarcity” Thomas Sowell explains really well how regulation such as rent control has lead to dramatically reduced supply of affordable housing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjxdH49JMc&pp=ygUddGhvbWFzIHNvd2VsbCBvbiByZW50IGNvbnRyb2w%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjxdH49JMc&pp=ygUddGhvbWFzIHN... Of course the elephant in the room is that there may be no price at which many “homeless” would be willing to pay for housing. They may choose to spend absolutely all available money on drugs, housing be damned.

namaria 2y ago
Surely then a worldwide militaristic repression of drug trade for a few decades should bring homelessness way down right?

reverius42 2y ago

“Why food shortages cause hunger”

ttonkytonk 2y ago

It would help if voucher programs were more flexible. E.g. if a $1000 voucher is available for an apartment, why not a $500 one for a relative's room?

cyberax 2y ago

[flagged]

bryanlarsen 2y ago
IOW, the law of supply and demand is wrong. LOL.
- cyberax 2y ago
  When it comes to housing? Yes. The naive version is wrong. I challenge you to find a counterexample. Go on. A large city (>200k population) that lowered housing prices by increasing density. The mechanism for this failure is also long known: induced demand.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    Minneapolis. Built a lot more housing. Rents have fallen.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Housing doesn't induce demand in cities. Jobs induce demand in cities. And to a lesser degree, amenities and services. > A large city (>200k population) that lowered housing prices by increasing density. Tokyo, any city in China Overbuilding in Tokyo lowered prices so much the entire Japanese economy collapsed, and a similar thing seems to be happening in China now.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Tokyo before 1995. > And what do you think concentrates jobs in ever-densifying cities? It's the areas with the least available housing that get the most jobs, so the answer is "anything but housing". Ignoring China is a total cop out, because it's pretty much the only location in the world that currently has a significant housing surplus.

allears 2y ago

Well of course I didn't read the article cuz that would be cheating, but it's a bit like musical chairs, innit? If there aren't enough houses (at prices that are affordable to the majority), then somebody is gonna be left standing when the music stops.

deadbabe 2y ago
A lot of things in life are a lot like musical chairs, that’s why it’s a great game to play with kids when they’re young so they learn the lesson.
thephyber 2y ago
But, there generally is enough housing in the US. It’s just not proportionately distributed where people want to live and at prices people want to pay (for the location and price). There is a surplus of abandoned housing in Baltimore, Detroit, and lots of other rust belt towns. But buying an old abandoned house in Detroit means massive investment in maintenance, refurb, and utilities (Detroit utilities are provisioned+allocated+staffed for 2.5 million residents, but half of those left, leaving the remaining few paying 2x per capita). Meanwhile the residents of affluent suburbs threaten their city representatives/ staffers to make sure they don’t allow more residents to move there.
- antisthenes 2y ago
  Yep, it turns out the revealed preference of US people as a whole is they really like infrastructure and living in places where there are good amenities to the point that they would rather share a rented apartment, than own something out of the way. I guess with a commute and dependents that's really the only way to make it work.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > rather share a rented apartment, than own something out of the way. Or is it simply the standard demographic problem of "the vast majority of population is in the cities so the vast majority of <pick any characteristic> is mostly in the cities"? In addition, if you are poor, owning a car is relatively expensive. Not owning a car is an option in some US cities; it's simply a non-starter anywhere suburban or worse. However, as the article points out, Houston has apparently done better than most simply because it has lots and lots of housing supply. Of course, the downside of that is that Houston is also the poster child for sprawl having not one, not two, not three but effectively four beltways around the city perimiters.

Terr_ 2y ago

Hmmm, so in other words the author is saying that high housing prices matter but in more of an indirect way than just making studios out of reach, instead it reduces how much family and friends can/will host people in need.

cat_plus_plus 2y ago

Could it be for the same reason as lack of water causing draught or defunding police causing crime? Nope, I must be too much of a simpleton. I am sure actual explanation is a work of pure genius.

aaron695 2y ago

We recently offered a family camping having to move every week (campground restrictions) a camp location. Unviewable by the public, rural-esk location close to their work and school, a stable safe base. Government restrictions mean we can't install a externally accessible toilet (our bio-cycle system can handle it) because of this it didn't work. Never forget homelessness is because the Left made gentrification a dirty word. The Left want other people to share, but no high rises in their suburb. The Left gets the 'character' they want and they use paperwork to stop change. Quick (spherical cow) math, if you have 1/100 chance of homelessness in a year, you probably will get stuck in the cycle. If you have a partner and they are the same it's 1/10,000 years.

screye 2y ago
Not sure about how gentrification goes into homelessness, but I agree that it isn't a dirty word. Gentrification is amazing. It has bad outcomes when a neighborhood has low ownership numbers, but it's well within known risks for yearly renters. There are egalitarian ways to do gentrification ( mandatory affordable housing with low interest dibs for long term renters, x% new housing is rent controlled for 10 years so existing renters get a decade to plan their next move). Done right, it can be a win-win-win for new transplants, homeowners and long term rentals.

godelski 2y ago

> YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) advocates… This is why non-YIMBY progressives … and non-YIMBY conservatives Non-YIMBY… there’s got to be a better term for this…

Terr_ 2y ago
I read it as trying to include the middle-ground, the maybes and the kindas and the it-depends-ers. NIMBY would would be a more-exclusive label indicating a smaller subset.
- deprecative 2y ago
  If you're not a YIMBY you're a de facto NIMBY.
  - dagw 2y ago
    That is obviously too reductive. I liked to think of myself as a YIMBY. When they wanted to build two 17 story apartment buildings in my neighbourhood I thought it sounded like a great idea, even though they would be much taller than any existing buildings there. Whenever anybody suggests tearing down some old buildings in a certain 'historic' (or dilapidated as some might say) part of my town and building actually useful housing there, I'm all for it. But when I found out that the city had plans to bulldoze this one park and playground I took my daughter to almost every day, and build student housing there, I quickly realised that I was also quite the NIMBY when things are happening in my actual back yard.
    - screye 2y ago
      No, you're a NIMBY. The city had to bulldoze the park, because it was probably the only piece of public property it could acquire. It is a response to NIMBYs leaving them no option. If the city could buy 4 adjacent SFH lots and build a tower on it, then parks wouldn't need to be destroyed. YIMBYism doesn't mean bad urban design. It means more options. Manhattan has plenty of walkable parks. Clearly density and parks aren't at odds with each other. The fact that the city had to build a massive out-of-proportion tower for students means there was long term unmet demand in the neighborhood. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make (metaphorically) violent revolution inevitable." -jfk

ripberge 2y ago

Here's a recent statistic from San Francisco: "City officials said that 40% of the unhoused population surveyed in San Francisco came from another California city or even from out of state, increasing from 28% in 2019." Source: https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-required-be-offered-before-shelter-new-mandate https://www.ktvu.com/news/tickets-outside-san-francisco-requ... This guy's article would lead you to believe that number is closer to 8%. A problem with this whole discussion is that "homeless" means people that are sleeping at friends' houses etc, but to the average citizen when they're complaining about quality of life issues caused by the homeless they are referring to the subset of homeless people that are "unsheltered". I don't believe these papers/studies, etc. that continue to purport the plague of the unsheltered is caused by the cost of housing. All I have to do is walk down the streets in Los Angeles and it's very obvious the vast, vast majority of the unsheltered here have a substance abuse problem. Another smaller minority have serious mental illness and some seem to be just anti-social who want to live outside the bounds of society. The reason these people are not living with relatives isn't "explained by the inability of the family and friends of potentially homeless people to afford extra living space." It's because they have burned through all ties with friends and family as a result of their drug use. The unsheltered go where they can do their drugs unbothered and even get a lot of free services. Los Angeles LAHSA (the department tasked with tackling homelessness) budget has ballooned from $75 million in 2016 to a whopping $875 million in 2024. Anyone with a pair of eyeballs can see how all that spend has actually made the unsheltered problem worse based on our existing policies and likely is just attracting a lot more drug addicts. https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15136

abhiyerra 2y ago
The book San Fransicko covers this. Apparently, housing doesn’t really reduce the drug dependence and makes it worst because of isolation.
aaomidi 2y ago
Have you heard of the game musical chairs? Anyway let’s say 10 kids are playing musical chairs. There are 9 chairs available. One of these kids had broken their leg a few days ago. Let me ask you this, after the first round which one of the kids is likely going to be the kid without a chair? So yeah, substance abuse is in fact a problem. However even if you remove all drugs from society, you’ll still have people left without chairs. Just the profile of those people will change.

levocardia 2y ago

First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.) Second, the essay's argument matches up pretty well with my experiences living in a variety of poor (by American standards) areas: most poor people get by ok on a broad network of informal favors, workarounds, and grey-economy gigs. Cash and no-questions-asked for a room in a ramshackle roachhouse, swapping cable box discounts for rides to the grocery store, Greg the wheelchair-bound erstwhile addict who watches your place at night in exchange for dinner, etc. High COL areas make these relationship networks harder (as do strict regulations and government oversight). But personal destructive tendencies make these relationships harder too: Greg gets free dinner, but his buddies who just show up to smoke crack on your porch get their ass kicked by your angry housemate. And so they go somewhere else (the local train station, perhaps). So I wish the article had addressed the social causes of "informal economy breakdown," as well as the economic ones. All the anecdotes above are real, by the way.

aidenn0 2y ago
> First, Diona's mom sucks (is it legal to kick out a 17-year-old child? Then again, maybe you don't want to live with a mom who is so disagreeable she'd kick out her single-mom daughter and baby.) It is generally not legal to fail to provide housing for minors you are the parent of. That would be child neglect. So you can kick them out, but only if you arrange for an alternative.
- isk517 2y ago
  The 'child neglect' is the key here. Diona was trying to avoid having her baby taken from her and put in the system. In order to take any action against her own mother she would risk having action taken against her.