We're a country of 350,000,000 people. Leaving 500,000 outside simply because municipalities don't want them around is inexcusable.
Solution in two parts
1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)
2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside
There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.
The problem is that people in the U.S. so often only see homelessness through the lens of where they live. Homelessness is a unique problem in each city. For example, the west coast has favorable weather and a history of being a destination for people after they are released from prisons or mental facilities. In cities on the east coast there is more leftist-narrative style homelessness: people who were depending on family and their family died, missing a check and sleeping rough for a bit, etc.
There are also huge problems with treating the many different problems the same way. For example, California would probably benefit a lot more from building a mental health crisis center and Georgia might benefit more from temporary housing that actually gives you your own address (so that you can list it on job applications, cell service, etc).
But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.
The shelters _are_ unsafe and I wouldn't blame the average person for choosing a tucked away park over a hive of mentally ill and violent people. The solution is difficult though. I'm thinking we need some way to provide secure shelter. Something like those pod hotels where you get a private, lockable pod so you don't have your phone stolen or get raped in the middle of the night.
I've seen this first hand and its difficult to comprehend. Some people would rather sleep in dead cold winter than to be in shelters. That's worth investigating...
I worked on a shelter in Seattle for a year. The biggest reason people wouldn’t come in is because they needed to check in at a regular time every day, which is a ridiculous requirement. Other shelters were even more stringent, with no smoking (tobacco) or breathalyzer tests, needing to attend daily prayer, and/or daily social worker check-ins. The shelters are run like the residents are children.
The problem is that the rich people who give money to the shelter have moral stipulations along with their money, since they want to feel like they are “rehabilitating” people with the money they throw st the problem.
If I had to operate under the same requirements as the shelter to keep my apartment, I would be on the streets too.
This is spot on. My experience volunteering at shelters is very similar.
The worst one was also the largest. They had a waitlist (effectively). You had to sign up in the beginning of winter, arrive between 7pm and 8pm, and mandatory breathalyzer. If they suspected you of using, urinalysis was also mandatory. There was a 3 strike policy but generally they would give you the boot after 1 infraction.
The majority of the people I interacted with there were chronic homeless, owing to the bureaucracy around being at that particular shelter.
That, and the egos associated with most directors of homeless shelters and soup kitchens.
Violence is a huge factor why people avoid shelters here in New York. They are filled with people who should be on Riker's Island or were recently released who regularly prey on other shelter dwellers. Incompetent City Hall bureaucrats are unwilling to address the problem, waving their finger in the air and crying about abolishing prisons. Having the autonomy to come and go as you please and live the way you want in a shelter is important, but even more important is feeling relatively confident you won't be robbed, raped or stabbed.
I get the reasons for that, even ignoring the moral mission ones; it's too much effort to monitor for abuse and just easier to issue an outright ban.
A substantially different world if we had friendly AI to do that monitoring and maybe individual tiny-houses or apartments rather than a bunkhouse free-for-all like Squid Games.
who really cares about abuse at this point? if you demand that people who have ruined their lives through substance abuse quit on a dime before you let them in - you can't expect them to ever be ready to do that.
for me the real issue is that some of these people - users and not, are quite messed up, and can really end up doing horrible things to the staff and the other residents.
The west coast also has the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). It prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone. This is impossible given the number of homeless people so we're stuck with encampments everywhere.
I think it's exceptionally possible to build enough shelter space, and adequate funds for most large cities. However what makes it possible is the people who object to construction of new shelter space, who oppose the creation of safe parking spaces, and the creation even of encampments with basic services.
IMHO the impulse to keep people out of their city and their neighborhood results in encampments and generally worse conditions both for those with and without houses.
> I think it's exceptionally possible to build enough shelter space, and adequate funds for most large cities. However what makes it possible is the people who object to construction of new shelter space, who oppose the creation of safe parking spaces, and the creation even of encampments with basic services.
If you mean that it's possible except for the voters then that may be true but it's kind of irrelevant.
> IMHO the impulse to keep people out of their city and their neighborhood results in encampments and generally worse conditions both for those with and without houses.
It's entirely sensible to oppose encampments in my neighborhood.
Fires, crimes, and assaults are regular occurrences at encampments and homeless people in Seattle are effectively immune from prosecution.
I will repeat this every time someone uses “favorable weather” to explain California’s barbaric treatment of its homeless: nobody wants to die of exposure. You can die of expose at temperatures well above what housed people consider “comfortable.” The number of homeless people who would rather stay outside in your “favorable climate” versus being afforded the basic dignity of a roof and room is a rounding error.
Honestly spoken like someone who hasn’t been homeless or is close to anyone who has been homeless. A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.
And the complicating factor is the percentage of people like this depends on the city! Eg Utah’s approach to homelessness probably won’t work for Oregon.
I have spent my entire life around the homeless, in a city that has a universal shelter mandate. I’ve also spent the better part of a decade volunteering in food pantries and community kitchens.
> A lot of people are severely mentally unwell and do not want shelter.
No. What they don’t want is to be corralled like livestock into shared living spaces, with no privacy or protection for their property. That’s not because they’re mentally ill; it’s because it’s degrading. Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.
> Give mentally ill people the choice of dignity and they will overwhelmingly choose it.
The one's flashing their genitals and screaming at strangers?
The definition of "mentally ill homeless" is surely nuanced and varied, by this archetype is certainly what a lot of people are going to think of when they hear the term. It's hard for me to imagine degradation is relevant to them.
Emphasis on "overwhelmingly." One of the most pernicious problems in homeless advocacy is that the average person only remembers their worst encounters with mentally ill homeless people, not the tens of thousands of people who they've silently passed on the street.
That feels intentionally misleading though. If I ask you about the severely mentally unwell, and you refer to a guy with heavy depression while there's observable examples of people in literal states of lunacy, you may be technically correct, but obviously you will be misunderstood.
These aren't the "severely mentally ill" that the comment intended imo.
I'm not following. Here's the claim, as I interpreted it:
"Many homeless people do not want shelter because they are mentally ill."
Here's how I responded: first, there just aren't that many mentally unwell homeless people in the "naked and screaming" sense. Second, that those who are mentally unwell, to whatever degree, do not accept forms of shelter not because of that illness but because those forms of shelter are, by normal standards, extremely degrading. We would never dream of asking someone who hasn't otherwise been dehumanized to willingly subject themselves to constant surveillance, a living space shared with desperate strangers, and the complete absence of any guarantees around the security of their private property.
Put another way: being homeless doesn't make you lose your sense of dignity. Being mentally ill doesn't either, except in the worse cases. Treating the overwhelming majority like they're criminal timebombs is dehumanizing and just doesn't match the facts on the ground.
So again: what's being missed here? I'm interested in the 99% case, which includes a very large number of mentally ill homeless people. I'm not engaging in the 1% case, because I think it's a frivolous diversion from the needs of a great many suffering people.
It's not a caricature. These people are easy to find in many cities. They're not uncommon sights, even if they don't resemble the average homeless person.
The question was about the "severely mentally ill".
If the counterpoint is that it's rude to acknowledge the people who seem to be utterly insane, well I think that's kind of shit. If it's that these aren't the people we're referring to when we say "severely mentally ill", then I think that's just disingenuous.
A person can be severely mentally ill in many ways, not all of them are highly public and immediately offensive to passers by. So while the people you describe would indeed fall into that category, many readers would likely place other people with debilitating mental illnesses into that category as well.
That's true, but someone who is severely mentally ill in an invisible way is not going to be categorized as such by a passerby, so it's an obviously semantic ambiguity. Saying what is technically true but not understood is just distracting.
That's not necessarily true either. Someone who is catatonic might be noticed by a passerby but doesn't scream "this person isn't safe to have in a shelter".
From this comment and below (and 99% vs 1% claim; I've heard very different numbers on addiction and debilitating mental illness), would you, or other people in the industry support my, "Housing First, OR ELSE" approach? Give homeless people SRO style housing with private rooms, purpose-built. No support, no wrap-around services - just housing and maybe food. They can stay there forever, or move out if they get it together. If the problem is really lack of dignity/etc., "99%" should accept it and get it together, right?
On the flip side, if you get housing, or refuse housing, and still commit violent/property crimes (/especially/ against your SRO mates, to ensure the housing quality is not compromised) - it's speedily prosecuted and you go to jail with 3-strike-style escalating penalties.
In my view it would solve homelessness in a few years, housing people between SROs (99%?) and jails (1%?). That is if entire billion-dollars-combined homeless budgets could be redirected to SRO construction.
Contrary to leftist belief just giving people a roof over their head doesn't magically fix things. Where it that easy.
A lot of homeless are mentally ill, drug users and or antisocial. You can't just drop these people in a neighbourhood and everyone lived happily ever after.
I didn’t say it “fixes” things, whatever that can possibly mean. All I’ve done is counter the normal excuse for the barbaric practice of not providing basic amenities to the most needy.
I don't know a single leftist who wants to just drop the homeless in housing and forget about them. Usually, when people talk about housing-first policies, they're advocating for flipping the script: don't make treatment, abstinence or work a prerequisite for housing; give them a permanent address, a climate-controlled shelter, and a secure place to store their belongings. And then, concurrent to that, you can help them get a job and treatment for illness or addiction.
Most people regardless of politics are simply NIMBY and assume because they haven’t been in the same situation but think they know better, it’s just like Emma/Clueless.
I know people who got section 8 housing and just lazed around, I remember one guy said he moved out to pay himself and I didn’t understand why someone would rationally do that, it’s similar to moving out of your parent’s home. It feels good to work for what you get, our struggles and pain are what drives our personal growth, rather than subsidizing symptoms and masking the problems like being beaten by your husband but the antidepressants and opiates are soothing enough to stay.
> But in all instances there is typically an oversupply of homeless shelters that people refuse to use (due to restrictions on substance abuse etc.) it’s a tough problem.
This is not correct. In most places, there is a wild shortage of shelters. For example King County has ~4000 shelter beds and ~12,000 people who need shelter.
AFAIK the only place where there are enough shelter beds is NYC where they are legally required to provide anyone with shelter.
#2 people won't let you build shelters where it's affordable to do so. Seattle's homeless shelters should be built outside Moses Lake, not where a studio costs $300k+. For the amount we already spend, every single chronically homeless person could be housed in dorms built out there and pay for the social workers. Since they aren't doing that, it's clear the real motivation is not to help the homeless.
Almost 75% have some chronic health problem. 15% have a traumatic brain injury.
That requires facilities for long term medical care. And it basically means universal healthcare.
Unfortunately this puts us back to "You know all those facilities that we closed back in the 70s? Yeah, closing them was a stupid idea and we needed to fix them instead."
It has been talked about ad nauseam that the closure of mental health facilities in the 70s has hurt us with chronic mental health issues today.
The problem is that even if we did re-open them today, staffing them would be a nightmare. There is a nearby mental health facility run by my state. They simply do not have enough employees and cannot fill positions and it’s an issue that has existed since before the pandemic.
It needs to happen, but it won’t be easy, so it probably won’t happen.
100% agree that we need a lot more mental health facilities.
It's not about fixing every problem, but we can make the problem less bad. The instability and insecurity of sleeping outside makes everything else worse.
There are also a lot of people that are functional, but end up homeless because housing is too expensive. Texas doesn't have better healthcare than California, but Houston has fewer homeless because housing is cheaper.
And? We don't feed Seattleites with food grown inside its jurisdiction or have landfills within its borders, or house all its prisoners, so why should that be a limitation for where to locate shelters?
There are quite a few farms out there which need labor. At the wage paid in Seattle, employers can get a more productive worker than someone who has been chronically homeless is capable of being.
Yes, but its not like most of the formerly-homeless sheltered individuals are getting a job in the urban core near the business district where many of the shelters are
In many cities, the transit is hub-spoke from downtown (which is mostly offices), so not a lot of opportunities.
> Are their jobs concentrated elsewhere?
Knowledge worker jobs are concentrated downtown, and jobs that are likely to look favorably upon someone homeless are probably not concentrated in any one area.
> 2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside
We used to allow SROs, like the classic YMCA you'd see where people down on their luck would live in old movies. These are now illegal to build in most places, and the existing ones are being closed down.
That seems to me to be a big mistake. People talk a lot about affordable housing but as far as I can tell they aren't talking about housing that would be affordable to build. People seem to only want to talk about subsidized housing in luxury developments, at least in the discussions I'm party to.
Of course only a few of these units get built in any development, after much wrangling from the city, and then the city and the developers pat themselves on the back while the lack of housing is hardly budged and the affordable housing advocates are unappeased. I think SRO-style housing is the only realistic way to make affordable housing widely enough available that people well below the median income for an area can be guaranteed housing.
This seems weird until you understand the mechanisms.
The "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. It's probably part of our inherent "human nature" sense of ethics.
The SRO landlord is seen as exploiting poor people by taking their money in exchange for pretty terrible housing. So we ban the SROs, and now these people have to sleep in the streets.
But that actually feels OK, because NOW THERE IS NO ONE EXPLOITING THEM!
We absolutely should build more homeless shelters. However many homeless people refuse to stay in current dorm style shelters because they don't allow drug use, or pets, or the other residents are dangerous.
This is a debate that comes up and I'm only familiar with the specifics in San Francisco. I won't claim it's the same anywhere else.
The shelters are full so the obvious problem is not people refusing to sleep in them.
At the same time, many of the "offers" of going inside are disingenuous. People giving up all of their belongings (specifically tent and camping stove), leaving loved ones, and the promised shelter is only guaranteed for a couple weeks.
When I say dorm style shelters I specifically mean each person has a door to lock and feel safe behind. Most current shelters are dozens of cots in a large room. I wouldn't feel safe there either.
I can bet, the shelter utilization is highly correlated with the cost of square foot in the area, which is a proxy for general desirability.
And the solution should be to increase the desirability of other areas, rather than making homelessness the new norm. As a nice side effect, this will solve the general housing availability issues as well.
Except, the public opinion is that we should somehow all stick to a handful of coastal megacities and join the race to the bottom in terms of square feet per person, noise and cleanliness. This certainly benefits big property developers, big vendors and big employers that wouldn't be economically viable in a much sparser area, but I genuinely don't understand why so many people are happy to voluntarily move into a hamster wheel.
> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)
People keep saying this, but it's just a flavor of trickle-down economics. The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live. That's such a huge stretch, especially in those areas you mentioned, with median home prices over a million dollars, with rental prices to match.
SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019. That is here the problem to solve: make housing for 5190 people. For reference, the largest shelter in SF --MSC-- houses 340 people. So you "just" need to build the largest shelter again -- 15 times. Basically, take 4-6 city blocks and dedicate them entirely to housing, is what this amounts to.
Trickle down economics is a Republican justification for cutting taxes for the rich. Building new homes under Prop 13 increases the taxes paid by rich people.
Between 2015 and 2019 SF built 19,000 new homes and added 60,000 new jobs. In what world does that not drive up prices? This obsession with developer profits is convenient rhetoric to justify a hunger games like housing market.
Even SRO rooms were going for $1,200 pre-pandemic. This is how struggling people become homeless. Houston doesn't have less homeless because Texas has a better safety net. It's because housing is cheaper.
Here's a simple fact: we need to have enough homes for everyone that works here, retired in place, and that's growing up here. We do not have that right now. Luckily building large residential buildings is something humanity has known how to do for the last 100 years. We "just" need the political will to do it.
"Trickle-down economics" is not a well-defined term.
If all you're doing is giving money to Zuckerberg so he can buy more yachts and mansions, that money is not going to end up in the hands of regular people, and now he's bidding against them for scarce real estate.
If you give tax cuts to small business owners so they have more money to expand their businesses and make it easier to go into competition with incumbents so that consumers have more choices and competition drives down consume prices, that money is going to end up in the pockets of regular people.
> SF had 5190 unsheltered in 2019.
In areas with a massive housing shortage, alleviating it would require building a massive amount of housing. So... build a massive amount of housing. There is no law against it, once you get rid of the law against it.
> The idea that if we just let developers build out more (sure, yes they should) that then housing prices would drop and cascade down to where homeless people could afford a place to live
Its obviously not true. Its a working theory - the more housing available, the lower the cost - is true. But SF has such a high demand you can probably double housing in SF and demand would not satiate. That said, seattle has built tons of housing, and stalled some of the exploding costs of housing.
There is probably no good solution to SF's issue - its so out of hand and so expensive that even if you doubled the city you wouldn't solve the issue. Like you said - 6 blocks just to homeless shelters is a lot (doable, but a lot). Especially for a city so geographically constrained.
It's the ratio of homes to jobs. "How many homes does SF need?" is hard because it's a moving target as the city permits new office construction.
I ballparked the housing gap a while back by comparing the ratio of employment/residents with 30 years ago and came up with ~80,000 missing homes. That's in a city of 400,000 homes right now.
An imperfect measure for sure, but I think affordability is achievable if we stop prohibiting the solutions.
> And just like building bigger highways induces demand so will building more shelters in SF.
"Induced demand" is a fallacy. The demand isn't induced, it was there the whole time and being suppressed by high prices (or, in case of highways, congestion). If there is very high demand, the amount of supply needed to satisfy it is equally high, but that is by no means the same as being infinite and impossible to do.
There are also ways to satisfy the demand for "highways" other than building more highways. Like building more housing closer to where jobs are so people don't have to drive such long distances.
Often these alternatives are better, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your problem is actually that your highway doesn't have enough lanes. This isn't a question you can answer in the general case without looking at the specifics.
> Not sure why we’d aim to building housing for homeless in the most expensive city in the US
Because that's where a lot of the homeless are because they can't afford the price of housing there. There are literally people in San Francisco who are homeless despite having a full-time job.
Also, it's not "housing for the homeless," it's just housing. Build enough and the price comes down. Then people can afford it instead of being homeless. There is obviously also a benefit to be had for the person who isn't homeless but is spending 60% of their income on an apartment the size of a parking space.
Induced demand for housing is a fallacy. There's only a very very small range of living space that people want.
Induced demand for highways definitely is not a fallacy. People can go from needing zero highway miles a day, up to 60-90 highway miles a day, depending on where they live. This sort of range is an order of magnitude higher than what could potentially be induced by having access to, say, cheaper construction methods.
In fact, for housing, the opposite seems to occur. When there are more people in an area, people tend to take up less individual space. It's only when people live far away from anything that they seems to expand to 1000+ square feet/person.
You’ve got cause and effect backwards. More people in an area take up less space because it’s more expensive and vice versa when living far away.
And of course you can induce demand with housing. If suddenly you could find $1,000/month 1 bed apartments in SF how many people you think would move there?
You're conflating pent up demand with induced demand. People want housing in SF because they work here. The jobs are the cause. In other words, office construction in a hot economy creates demand for housing.
It is a fallacy. The demand is there either way. It's just a regular supply and demand curve, where there is more demand at a lower price (and "price" includes the time cost of sitting in traffic congestion).
The heart of the fallacy is the assumption that the demand is infinite and it's impossible to ever satisfy it. It's not. It's just non-linear.
> And we’re not building housing here we’re building shelters.
Shelters are housing. But also, why aren't we building housing? Build a lot more housing and fewer people will be homeless or need "shelters" because housing will cost less.
> Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)
Sorry this is BS. Better solution is move people to where the homes are. Lots of cheap empty houses in America, just not on California beaches. Yeah I'd rather live in a tent on Venice beach than a run down house in Ohio too, but homeless dont have a right to live anywhere.
There’s empty houses in SF. Your point? The rent controlled 5 bedroom that has the same price in 1999 for the single renter doesn’t feel burdened, if they could use the existing housing and rent at market value, more people will have housing and the government will save money.
You’re assuming homeless who want to live in homes don’t know how to find cheaper housing and must be able to walk to work or that they can commute to work.
Not everyone that works in NYC lives there, and you haven’t been to Detroit recently, you’re very unfair to its recent astronomical changes, it’s a lot more expensive than you’re probably inferring from decades old movies.
If I may call BS myself: there's a combination of greater opportunity on the coasts and lack of landowner rights, so that it would make sense to work on both at the same time. Make building housing a right that landowners have, and we'll have more homes in areas of greater opportunity. It doesn't have anything to do with protecting someone's right to live on the beach. On the contrary, it's common sense that building more on the coasts has a greater cost-benefit ratio. There's so much more untapped value in our cities, and at least personally I'd prefer to avoid over-developing rural areas. That risks ruining what makes more natural areas unique.
The only way I would ever support this is if the people who say "no more people after me, this place was perfect when I moved into my current place" pay for the complete construction costs of the née places elsewhere.
Everybody moved at some point, whether it was when they were born and they stayed in the same house their entire life, or when they moved out from their parents house, or when they moved out of the studio apartment after getting married and settled down.
If people want to keep others away, they need to pay for that privilege. Otherwise they are just leaches on society.
> When all of the available shelters are full this is not a relevant question.
It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it?
> Near transit so people that can't afford a car can get around. There's not a shortage of underutilized land in west coast cities.
Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?
> no, none of those situations are improved by leaving someone outside.
Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?
> There are complex problems in our society, but not having enough bedrooms has a simple solution: build more bedrooms.
Actually providing public housing isn't simple though. We have a long history of trying all kinds of approaches that didn't work for whatever reason. There's no simple answer.
> Someone is going to have a better chance finding a job if they get a good night sleep and have a place to shower.
All of the shelters where I live are full. The article describes increasing chronic unsheltered populations in west coast cities. Do any of these have empty shelter beds? SF and LA do not.
"Underutilized land near transit? What do you do about the NIMBYs?"
Tell them to take a hike. The state needs to get more involved with objective rules so we don't have a game of each neighborhood screaming NIMBY.
> Of course, but do you want to live in a shelter with people doing drugs? Should there some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?
I don't know the answer to this. When we have enough shelters and people have a locked door to sleep behind this will probably be the next problem to solve.
> Actually providing public housing isn't simple though.
Shelters and public housing are different. Any kind of shelter has to be fully maintained with public funds because the people sleeping in them are broke.
There's a countries with large amounts of successful public housing. The theme is that it's well maintained so it's actually desirable for stable, normal people. Allowing a wider range of incomes to move in so that rent can cover operations and maintenance makes it less dependent on the whims of local pols.
Telling NIMBYs to take a hike isn’t simple. How do you actually achieve that?
The question is not if we have enough shelter space. The question is if there are homeless who do not want shelter space. In other words do we have another problem to focus on in parallel.
California had a lot of success with Project Home Key that acquired existing hotels and converts them to supportive housing. It worked well because it was quick and often required only one vote by local authorities. In contrast, building new shelters is too easy to drag out and kill with a thousand paper cuts. Some SF Supervisors have spent years saying they want a homeless shelter in their district, but just can't find a place to put it. Others propose a site and then drag out funding forever.
My ideal solution would be a state agency that funds and builds shelters, supportive housing, public housing etc. Each municipality gets a list of how many beds it needs and can pick the locations. BUT if they refuse to pick sites then the state does it for them. Then the state builds it without any more bottlenecks on local politicians.
imo the key is allowing local choice, but not to say no.
If we make shelters a realistic option and a large number of people won't take them we'll have another problem. But we haven't gotten to that bridge yet.
Being a resident of Seattle I'm not thrilled about the state of Washington making decisions about what happens in my city. I can get behind something like gating funding based on results but I'm not thrilled about the state dictating how the city spends money. I could also get behind the idea of a state-owned-and-operated shelter network which happens to have locations in cities. But in general I have a preference toward local government having responsibility where possible.
I'm not opposed to building more shelters. But it's not a complete solution. So what is the rest of the solution?
I might not be thrilled with state intervention either, but I do not doubt its necessity. Here in California the state has a new housing target that is allocated to regions. The regions then allocate new housing targets to cities. And pretty much every single one of the cities in the Bay Area is having to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to meet those targets. My own city is having to violate its own low-density regulations to get it done.
If it were not for the state promising heavy financial consequences for cities failing to plan appropriately for growth, the cities wouldn’t be doing squat about the problem, and things would continue to get worse. How do we know? Because that’s exactly how the last couple of cycles have gone.
Rent controlled housing is intervention that drives the rest of it up, and causes hoarding where they want to keep the old prices in a multi bedroom apartment, higher prices for others that cause long vacancies, they’re dreading building a certain amount of affordable housing from upper bureaucrats, that prescribed only one solution that doesn’t fit into the data, so the problems of intervention are being solved with the same intervention that caused it.
Rent control has only existed in a handful of CA municipalities, but the exorbitant housing costs are everywhere in the SF, SV, LA regions.
To your point, CA's regional housing needs assessments are state level intervention to undo city level interventions (zoning, permitting) that prohibit housing.
Aren’t those the most important areas that need housing? Isn’t rent control being used as the proposed solution for affordable housing? Wouldn’t removal help? The cost is also less nature and it can lose attractive characteristics, like how gentrification changes environments.
The state mandates that some of the allocation go too "affordable housing" and that the placement of said housing is not obviously redlined (e.g. you can't just dump some flophouses on an abandoned military base and call that an affordable housing solution). The state does not mandate rent control, and not all cities with huge housing needs pursue rent control. So yes, there's a shape to the stare-level intervention, but nothing as draconian as you describe.
Depends on how broadly you define the problem. My points here are not that there's a complete solution so much as there's straight forward steps that do a lot of good. There will definitely still be problems after solving these.
Ohh come on! Yes, some of these questions are relevant, theoretically.
> Why build something if people won't use it?
We know some people will use it since the ones already built are full. If we look at other cities - eg. NYC we see the ratio sheltered to unsheltered are different from SF. The difference? Availability of shelter. SF has hundreds of beds and thousands of homeless. Surely a few hundred more beds would be used.
> Should there be some that are drug friendly and some that aren't?
The article illustrated that the majority of the growth was with people that are not drug users, so this is a big issue, but you can exclude drug users and still make a difference without dealing with this question. (but maybe you should find a way to help them too).
> This assumes they want to find a job though.
Surely some do. If not, they're still a person and we should help them.
You seem to be interpreting "what do you do with people who won't stay in shelters" as "we should not build more shelters", which is not an argument that is being made. I am simply asking what do you do with the people who don't want to stay in shelters? What can we do for them?
I do not believe that we should ignore any group of homeless just because there is a simple solution for some of it.
Maybe there is an argument for building different types of shelters. Maybe some of them are not voluntary. Maybe some allow drugs and some do not.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. Pretending this is simple is doing a disservice to everyone involved.
I don’t doubt we need more space now. Vacancies in shelters would suggest we created too much supply, which would be a waste of resources. I prefer to take the approach of understanding the current needs and working to address all of those needs.
If that’s true, do houses with years long vacancies in NYC or LA mean that housing is too high in supply?
Having been homeless, the needs are best served with a reliable friend network, an emergency place you can stay at that is a step above a shelter/church I never been to a woman’s only shelter, I heard they suck too though.
I prefer staying with friends but hidden spots are fine like hammock in a park, storage units, amenities like showers at the gym, or houses, and a feeling of purpose, growth and not failure. Brahmins take an oath of poverty and are respected, as are monks who beg for food. If you can, understand the needs from dogfooding.
I asked up-thread if dorm style housing should have restrictions. That's a genuine question. I don't have the answers.
It is not acceptable that we have any number of people sleeping on the street. I realize we can't simply prohibit that. But if we are going to reclaim our public spaces we need solutions that work for everyone. There is never going to be one simple solution to that.
So yeah, build more housing. But what kind? Some of it should simply be affordable housing for gainfully employed people. Some should be dorm style for emergency stays. Some should have a focus on rehab. Some should have a focus on finding employment. There's probably a need for a mix. But we definitely need some places that are safe for vulnerable populations which have more restrictions and different resources than low-barrier-to-entry based shelters or housing.
Should we try to put addicts on a rehab path? Are we willing to ignore that problem to solve homelessness? I don't know. I think it's worth having a conversation.
> What do you do if someone wants to sleep on the street?
This describes an incredibly miniscule number of people. There are a lot of problems with existing shelters (as mentioned quite a few times in thia thread) so currently it's hard to disentangle "wants to sleep on the streets" from "doesn't want the available alternatives." Yeah, there probably are a few folks like this. Having an oversupply of 1% isn't going to break the bank.
That doesn’t answer the question. I’m not opposed to building more shelter space. But what do you do with the people who don’t want to stay there?
Do you make it non-optional? Do you just accept that there will always be some people living on the street? At what point can a camping ban in public parks be reinstated and enforced? Can it ever be? Should it?
You're on hacker news. The first rule of optimization is to /benchmark and profile first/ and then work on the part of the problem that will give you the biggest wins. Don't just work on the imagined problem, because you will usually be working on the wrong thing.
I think that camping should be legitimized and allowed.
For example, I saw in LA camping areas being cleaned by city workers peacefully (with a token police car watching over) and it seemed like a nice middle ground.
Honestly, I don't know exactly. I haven't thought this through in detail.
I just think that living without being involved with a building and such is valid, and I'd like to see it recognized.
I believe in harmonious co-existence, so I guess I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way", which is what I've practiced for lack of a better option, though I usually don't use a tent in the city.
I think it is legitimate and valid for an individual to exist and live without being involved in paperwork, joining some kind of program, etc.
> I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way"
I think that's a reasonable take.
I don't think that living in a public park is a valid lifestyle choice. Those places can't serve their purpose as public areas for recreation if they are also someone's home. I understand that people do it now because they are desperate. We should provide them with better options. Or at least acceptable options that allow the rest of the citizens of the city to also live their lives.
I am not opposed to dedicated property or areas for tent living, but it can't be in existing parks or other public spaces like sidewalks and transit facilities. And there have to be amenities such as showers, bathrooms and trash service. Essentially a state campground in the city.
I’m not opposed to sleeping in parks. Like, sure, take a nap. But no, you can’t live there.
Take a look at the homeless camps in Seattle parks and greenbelts. That’s not staying out of anyone’s way. There’s nothing harmonious about it.
Basic services are mandatory in camping areas. Without bathrooms we get human waste accumulation and runoff. Without trash service we get fires. This isn’t hypothetical. Go look around Seattle.
Dictating what is done with public spaces is absolutely valid. That is how civilization works. It’s why we even have public spaces.
Without rules on what’s allowed in parks they’d be developed into something else.
> I believe in harmonious co-existence, so I guess I see it as "anywhere it's not in someone's way", which is what I've practiced for lack of a better option, though I usually don't use a tent in the city.
There's a city in the Vancouver area which has a radically different approach, that I'd describe as YIMFY. Food bank, needle exchange, shelters, etc are in an otherwise affluent part of town (not coincidentally, there's a police precinct right there too). They don't want to hide the homeless, they want to keep an eye on the problem. And by keeping it in the public view, voters consistently fund the programs to get people help.
_What if they want to sleep on the street?_
Let's start by sheltering as many people as we can, and when our problem becomes "too many empty beds", then we can move on to that problem.
_Where do we build them?_
I bet there are choices we can make that house 100+ people for every 1 person who is mildly inconvenienced.
_Are there barriers to living in these dorms?_
No.
Homelessness is not a single problem. We can't pretend there is a single solution. Reality is more complex than just saying "build beds" and not adding any rules or guidelines.
Why should recovering addicts be forced to live in a setting where they are tempted by drugs? Why shouldn't they be given a chance to live in a drug-free setting?
Why should victims of abuse be forced to live near potential abusers? Shouldn't we consider their needs?
Clearly we need shelters suited to the needs of individuals.
But what are those needs, and what do we do if someone refuses the opportunity? I don't think "ignore them" is a satisfactory answer.
Nobody in these threads is saying that housing them is the silver bullet. But shelter is part of the foundation of a human's hierarchy of needs, and being anything but single-minded about people's right to shelter distracts from helping them obtain it.
Removing subsidies from people who got a lower rate with 3 bedrooms before and applied for price freezes would help, they have no reason to move. The rich not wanting their views obstructed with larger buildings or taking away cultural landmark statuses where housing can be built would help, but what about building codes and safety, since earthquakes are a fear?
Anyone who can’t afford housing where they’re at and wants to have housing moves, it’s often ignored that homeless people might be fine being homeless and prefer it to being housed in another area they can afford. I agree there should be housing for people who want it, but I don’t decide I want to live in Beverly Hills and demand affordable for me housing and refuse to leave. If only I could enjoy Echo Park or the Bay Area without paying for housing somehow...
> neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.
Neither is improved by giving them housing. Housing should be modest, and it should be preceded by forced rehab. Instead, in Seattle, for example, they're giving the homeless hotel-style housing without requiring them to get addiction treatment and without a requirement to do anything job-wise. Seattle's King county projects that such valiant (and extremely expensive!) efforts will triple the already sizable homeless population in 10 years, yet they are continuing down this path anyway, just like SF did many years ago. Why? Because it's already a billion dollar industry in the state, and as such it'll continue to metastasize, just like any other government "service".
So solution needs to have 3 parts at least, and part zero should be "forced rehab". Without that no other part will ever work. There needs to be a part about employment in there somewhere for people who are able to work. I don't care that they don't wanna.
The huge decrease in homelessness in North Dakota is probably due to the end of the fracking boom. The map compares the homelessness rate from 2015 to 2020, and 2015 was just a few years after the height of the boom. During the early 2010s rents in North Dakota shot up enormously as tens of thousands of workers poured into the state to support the industry. There wasn't enough existing housing to support the newcomers so there was a lot of crowding into trailers etc. and it's no surprise that a lot of people ended up homeless.
Fracking has leveled off for the past few years and many of the workers have moved back to other oil fields so homelessness has decreased dramatically.
Excellent breakdown of data on homeless populations across the US. It could use a better title. This is worth looking at. It is not your usual opinion piece on the topic. It's all data and it's very good.
This data is interesting because it illustrates how few chronic homeless people there are, and yet people who live in cities with large homeless populations will tell you how disruptive they can be. In NYC, a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire ride. This tiny portion of the population has an outsized impact on everyone else. For this reason, among others, society should find some help for these people.
Definitely. As an example, say you walk in your neighborhood to the transit station. A single encounter with someone with a mental health issue will be enough to give you the impression that things are worse than they are. One isolated instance of feeling unsafe had an outsized impact on how you feel about the neighborhood in general. It’s just human!
And unfortunately, in west coast cities, it’s not even that isolated. If there is a camp near-ish your neighborhood for some time, there will be a lot of instances. And as you go into the city, the more dense “downtown” parts are areas where people might not live all the time, but a lot of different people do experience them frequently, and a lot of homeless people may be there too. So thousands of people might get a subconscious feeling of being unsafe, just from a small number of people who might not even be acting in unsafe ways.
That’s why people see it as a crisis: a lot of people in west coast cities feel increasingly unsafe. That’s partly founded (because violent crimes are increasing), and partly unfounded (just someone’s impression of a different person they aren’t comfortable around). So there is a huge emotional response.
Personal anecdata is most definitely an issue, and a very hard one to solve.
For example - the greater LA metro area has roughly 19 million people (as of 2019 believe it's higher now)
19 million people is the equivalent of the populations of the 13 lowest population states. Including for example, South Dakota.
The last time I looked into this, roughly a year ago (and at 2019 numbers) the entire state of South Dakota has the same amount of crime as Los Angeles. However, the entire state of South Dakota is roughly 1/20th the population of Los Angeles.
We also have decades of data showing that people who grew up in or have lived large metropolises are at roughly 20%-25% greater disposition to severe mental illness such as schizophrenia. Simply for living in that environment.
So, that being said - I think somewhere like Los Angeles is doing pretty damn good for itself. It's an undeniably slightly crazy place to be living or growing up in, and their general crime levels are only at the level of a place with 1/20th of it's population, that is much less dense. In my eyes, it seems like a place with less population density would be less prone to crime.
Most people don't take any amount of time to become aware of information like this though... thus we get nowhere in solving issues.
>That’s why people see it as a crisis: a lot of people in west coast cities feel increasingly unsafe.
It's certainly not just west coast cities where this is happening.
>So thousands of people might get a subconscious feeling of being unsafe, just from a small number of people who might not even be acting in unsafe ways.
In large part, it is a small number of people who make the masses feel unsafe. The issue recently has been the unwillingness or inability of authorities on every level of government to deal effectively with the small number of people causing the problems. Here in New York a series of actions have worked to make these problems far worse. Among other things, "bail reform" was passed, which eliminates holds on all but the most violent of criminals. This means that instead of removing the relatively small number of people on the street engaging in violent, anti-social and predatory behavior, they are able to roam free and remain a menace. You can't have a functional society if violent and/or mentally ill people are free to roam the streets and assault random passersby. You can't have a safe society when people caught possessing and using illegal firearms are simply released back onto the street. You can't have a decent society when street gangs are battling on the corners to control the open-air drug markets that have sprung up all over the city. And instead of dealing with, or even acknowledging these problems, officials in Albany and city hall spew rhetoric about mass incarceration and white supremacy.
The most basic and important job for any government is so maintain a basic, minimum level of public safety. Without that, nothing else they do much matters.
> The most basic and important job for any government is so maintain a basic, minimum level of public safety. Without that, nothing else they do much matters.
Look, I agree that this is a problem - but I think it is laughable to suggest our current government doesn't provide this basic, minimum level.
Not sure what your meaning of disruptive is but I would define "ruins the entire ride" as making the entire car smell like urine and feces. I've also gotten on buses where it is plainly apparent someone peed on the bus floor.
I'm sure you can find a few anecdotal counter examples but generally speaking people don't behave that way on the east coast, homeless or not. And when they do it's more likely to be a drunk on game day than a homeless person.
As a former NYC resident: I experienced this a hell of a lot, riding the subway multiple times per day. Worse when I rode the 6, but it’s bad on all lines. Not sure what world this person lives in where they don’t experience that as much as I did just a couple of years ago.
>yet people who live in cities with large homeless populations will tell you how disruptive they can be. In NYC, a homeless person getting in your subway car ruins the entire ride.
I dunno man.
I've ridden Boston and DC light rail systems pretty extensively (and NYC to a small extent) and never had an obviously homeless person ruin my ride. Heck, I can't even think of a specific instance where one did anything of note.
“Excuse me everyone. I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Mark and I’m homeless. I’m between jobs right now and I have two kids. If anyone could spare a few cents or even a dollar, then I would really appreciate it. God bless you.”
Not parent, but I’ve been approached by homeless people plenty of times and most of the time they’re just ready to move onto the next mark if you decline to assist them, but occasionally they will accost you for your perceived lack of empathy. The situations can be tense and make you feel uncomfortable. So yes, bring approached by a homeless person would definitely ruin a commute.
These are quite minor and (IMO) verging on acceptable.
Try someone shouting in your face about how they're going to kill you and your family and that is closer to the experiences I've had with BART and homelessness.
Yes because an entire car of people are sitting there, minding their own business, and someone approaches them and violates their personal space. If someone grabbed you with the intention of disturbing you, would that not ruin your ride? How is someone entering your personal space by being loud and obnoxious any different?
Not sure I understand your point? They’re not talking to you. They’re yelling in a crowded subway car. Can you explain how yelling at you vs. touching you are fundamentally different? What if they smell really bad? Would you consider making you smell a foul smell a violation of your personal space? What if they could somehow make you taste something against your will, would that be a violation of your personal space? Not sure why you’re treating ears differently than the rest of the body.
> There are some exceptions. For one thing, despite being close to California, Nevada and some of the Montana-esque states saw big decreases in certain categories.
Someone people would look at this and go wow, Nevada and the rest did a great job providing shelters and help to their homeless.
I think a more realistic answer is that they just shipped them to California.
The data doesn't really seem to support this, and my personal experience doesn't either. Most homeless people in my Californian town were living nearby when they became homeless. And though I didn't go to high school here, friends who did recognize people they grew up among the homeless.
There's a far bigger difference between California and its neighbors: housing costs and availability of housing even for those with money. I have known many well employed people in my town that have not been able to get an apartment even after applying for upwards of 20 apartments. When paired with application fees, that means that these people spend $500-$1000 merely on application fees before they finally get into an apartment.
That awful situation doesn't happen in Montana or Nevada, as far as I know.
Yikes, application fees are illegal where I live. That's some pretty absurd rent-seeking. Is there a limit, or could an unscrupulous "landlord" post an ad with very low rent for a room, and live off the application fees without ever accepting an application?
There is never going to be official data on this by design, but there is evidence of it happening all over the country, and "friendly" places like California being on the receiving end of it (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvg7ba/instead-of-helping-ho...).
Statistical anomalies are a proven way of identifying cheating in a wide variety of scenarios like elections, standardized tests and sports. It isn't conclusive evidence, sure, but still a good place to start looking.
There is official data and it's these reunification programs. Plenty of rich cities will give you a bus ticket to live with friends and family. Most of the time it works out. Sometimes it doesn't and that unsheltered person is right back in the same place they left. But the person has to agree to house them before a bus ticket is purchased. They simply don't put them on the bus and let them figure it out.
San Francisco absolutely has this data, and most people that were homeless were in SF already before. Unfortunately their most recent report is 404ing on their website, but I posted it to HN just about a month ago.
These bus tickets would presumably come out of municipal budgets, right? So not only would such data exist, it would also have to be publicly accessible.
How long were they in California before they became homeless? If they were living in a center for transients or were on a couch for a year before being homeless (but were relatively destitute in Nevada prior to this), then the data absolutely supports it.
if you read the article you would know that the majority of the homeless population in nyc are sheltered as a 1979 class action lawsuit found that it was a constitutional right for the homeless to be sheltered.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." —- hn guidelines
I don’t really know what was meant by this link, but I can say someone I work with does this and it is infuriating. I never know if he is pretending or not when he asks for help. I can’t trust him.
NYC is probably a local maxima, where everywhere around it is more expensive to live with less opportunity for panhandling / social services, and it is a long uncertain hike from there to somewhere that has weather as mild as the San Francisco bay. I also imagine that the social services in the south east are less desirable because of their politics around taxing less / spending less
From what I've seen, it's more likely that it's because it's easier and cheaper to building housing in Nevada than in California. The states where homelessness has improved are generally business-friendly and low-regulation states.
And also make homelessness a crime. But conveniently they push you toward places that help with people on the verge of homelessness. All things combined with yours that these coastal places do not. If people are threatened with jail for being a vagrant, they'll eventually take the path of least resistance and get a job.
> If people are threatened with jail for being a vagrant, they'll eventually take the path of least resistance and get a job.
I'd love to see the data to back this up. Sounds like you're coming from some idea that most homeless want to be lazy and not work and stay homeless, and if jail were threatened, that all of the sudden they'd get a job and re-integrate into society. That's extremely disconnected from reality.
I've never met a homeless person that actually wanted to get out of homelessness to not do so. Almost all homeless people I've ever run into are the severely mentally ill and drug addicts. It's awful to say this, but they are not worth devoting resources to if they can't fix themselves. They are lost causes until they decide themselves that they are not. It'd be great if we could help them, but it's an utter waste of time to devote resources to these people who just don't want to change. If they want to prove us wrong, they need to show us they want to change. We're not gonna be some sort of saviors to them to foster an enabling environment for them to just abuse.
Evidence? I've read articles talking about homeless being shipped both out of CA and into CA, but no solid reporting that quantifies the gap between those two flows.
I live in Denver, like any other metropolitan area there has always been a homeless population. What has been different is since 2016 there has been a staggering growth in the number of tents and so called tent cities. This isn't a problem just downtown either even if it is most visible there. The issue has expanded outside downtown and is filling in vacant properties in suburbia as well. Places like Aurora, almost every open space park, bike paths, bridges, everywhere you can fit a tent is turning into a homeless encampment. The worse part is I feel helpless, I'm making good money and barley able to pay rent. I feel powerless to help even if I could.
> I'm making good money and barley able to pay rent.
How can this be both true? If you can barely make rent, it must be that you're not making good money. Surely good money means you have excess after paying all necessities.
If you mistakenly believe you're making good money, but is in actual fact struggling, you must start looking for a higher paying job, lest you end up homeless due to a sudden economic shock or accident causing you to lose your income.
The apartment I rented for $1400 a month in 2015 is now $2200. It's still the cheapest in my neighborhood. Meanwhile I'm still making the same amount of money, I've hopped a couple jobs but the wages are stagnant. Also I don't like the tone of your voice you seem to be accusing me of some sort of moral failing for not making enough money. I make what's average for a developer in Denver. I'm putting as much as I can into my savings account but even then I have had to put less in each year to make up for the deficit I lose in rent.
I don't mean to accuse you of any failings (moral or otherwise). I meant to argue that a lot of people may mistakenly believe they're well paid, because in the past when they started their job, they were indeed well paid. But as time goes by, the situation changes, but the person doesn't make any changes and thus, get into a situation where they cannot fix themselves.
So diagnosing a problem early, and making corrections early, before the problem becomes insurmountable, is the right way to fix it.
Of course fault matters, cost of rent going up so high no one can afford an apartment. Do you blame the residents, like chii is doing, for not making enough? Or do you blame the fucking assholes raising the god damn rent?
Sure it does. When you or anyone performs an action there is a consequence. Consequences can be good or bad. When you raise the rent the consequence is people pay more for rent. The people who performed the action of raising the rent are responsible for their actions. Those actions also have the consequence that fewer people can afford rent. The increase in people that can't afford rents cause a crisis, that crisis is that people that cannot afford to live in an apartment live on the street. That has everything to do with who is responsible. The people that are responsible are the people that raise the rent. How is that not obvious?
It's possible because pay rates in Colorado haven't risen in line with housing costs going up. Colorado has suffered more than most states with an absolute influx of people moving there from California and driving up housing costs. Often not discussed when talking about homelessness is that the alternative for many people who can no longer afford to live in a particular area isn't to end up on the street, but to go elsewhere which if done in large enough scales can displace residents there in a cyclical path.
California has had net outflows of US citizen residents for many years, but net inflows overall due to high levels of immigration. As the housing shortage becomes even more of a crisis in California, it's driving many people out to other states, and this mostly people who are fully employed, not at risk of living on the street, but also not able to afford housing at a reasonable percentage of their income in California. Colorado housing costs now average roughly half what Bay Area housing costs, when a decade ago it was closer to 1/6th. Some cities in Texas like Austin are experiencing this as well. The population between 2010 and 2020 in Austin QUADRUPLED, and the vast majority of new residents came from California. Housing prices also have nearly quadrupled at the same time, but not quite thanks to it being very easy to build in Austin and lots of new housing being constructed. What you could buy for $250k in 2010 now costs closer to $650k in Austin. What you could buy in the Denver metro for $400k in 2010 now costs around $1M.
So it is absolutely true that in raw dollars, compared to median household income in the US, you could be "making good money" and now be barely able to pay rent if you live in a place that's had a mass influx of Californians over the last decade causing housing costs to skyrocket.
Homelessness expert here. This data set is garbage. HUD data only includes those in the federally mandated HMIS (Homeless Information Management System). This data excludes 1) people who don't access services; 2) people who access services from private, non-federally funded programs (like faith-based groups); and 3) typically undercounts those with SUD, mental-health issues, and especially people of color.
A recent BGC study estimates that, in Seattle, for example, HMIS data doesn't include up to 40% of people in encampments.
Garbage In -> Garbage Out. Pretty sweet effort, though. Wish the feds were smart like this.
Do you have a reference for that study? Also, what's your impression of how correlated this data is with the true numbers? Does a rise in the counts indicate the true numbers are also probably going up, or could it just be an artifact of more people being in the HMIC system or something?
One piece of analysis I'd be interested to see is whether the transition probabilities among the 4 categories along with the implied 5th category of "not homeless" have changed.
This is harder to get good data for because it would require tracking individuals across time. The payoff is that it would likely reveal evidence of structural changes if such changes exist.
At the population level it is hard to tell whether and where changes are happening. Getting the transition probabilities would allow for more effective targeting of interventions (though most of the folks who work on this already know which transitions are the hardest to recover from).
I think the articles problem is the lack of a definition of "crisis", and that leads to a bad mismatch between the headline and what is a reasonable look at the data.
My issues with the article are:
It starts from a too high aggregation level - almost no one is homeless in California, they are homeless usually in a very narrow area e.g. within 500 metres of bridge X.
Percentage change in raw numbers are not a good way to measure "crisis", and especially not at a state or city aggregated level. It seems more like traffic to me. Even in peak hour traffic, many roads are free of traffic, and the worst affected roads are those where the level of cars exceeds the roads ability to cope. That happens in a thin range of total cars per minute for specific roads, not due to X% increase overall. The same is true of homelessness in a city vs ... let's call them "hotspots".
Perhaps even more important than numbers in specific areas is the actual conditions homelessness creates in those areas. "Bad conditions" could be everything from human faeces on the street increasing, to murders, over doses, disease and unsanitary conditions, and it is possible for "bad conditions" to decrease and homeless numbers go up, or visa versa. That is harder to measure for sure, but probably closer to what most people mean by crisis.
It's really good to see the breakdown into the four broad classes. The big question: should we as a society be allowed to force permanently unsheltered people with substance abuse and mental illness into some kind of facility for treatment? Most people who even want to do anything about these problems would probably say no but I think it's at least worth asking.
I would say no, absolutely not. You should build optional facilities and if people don’t go maybe it’s because your facility sucks. For example lots of places require you to be in at a certain time every night and vacate early in the morning. This may seem fine but it leads to problems for anyone who wants to work a night job or socialize with friends after a day shift.
It seems that housing-first is the way to go. Give someone keys to their own place they can come and go from any time. Offer medical and mental health services nearby. This gives people the time and space to get well and stabilize their life. Using cops to throw someone in to a facility is just one more difficult and disruptive challenge that makes people’s lives worse, not better.
Addicts (homeless or not) frequently make decisions that are not in their best interests. Decisions they would not make if they were not sick, including actively resisting help.
I'm not saying that help should be forced upon huge swaths of people (there are reasons to be against that in principle) or that they don't deserve a bed. I am just skeptical that housing-first would lead to much change in the mental health of that population. Addiction recovery rates are really not good even when looking at a much more financially comfortable population or people with family members that are trying their best to keep on top of them.
For many addicts, it is also difficult to recover and remain sober unless they stop spending time with others that are using. If only a minority of a dorm-style housing unit were serious about wanting to get clean this could make it even harder for them.
There is mostly a housing crisis, with homelessness downstream of housing.
I originally left this comment a few months ago, but: CA especially has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one.
Before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, 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, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes concomitantly up. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs, and they're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.
The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.
I don't buy it. In Toronto, there are new condo buildings going up seemingly on every block, but there are still 10,000 homeless[1].
The inconvenient truth is that building low-income housing is not very profitable and no entity driven by the profit motive wants to do it. The margins on luxury condos are much better.
See https://fullstackeconomics.com/how-luxury-apartment-building... for the empirical research refuting that point and agreeing with the basic supply-demand issue. The issue in Toronto is not just the anecdotal "new condo buildings" but how much housing Toronto has built per capita for the last several decades, which is almost certainly "too little." See the link in my original post to data from Tokyo, which is one of the few cities to have done housing right.
> See [...] for the empirical research refuting that point and agreeing with the basic supply-demand issue
The issue I have with this analysis is where does it end? For example, if you assume most people eventually want to live in a townhome or similar, packing people in like sardines in the name of housing affordability is a kick-the-can solution. The unstated assumption of these researchers is it’s perfectly fine for every major urban area to morph into Hong Kong given a long enough time frame.
The people buying luxury condos are usually single professionals who previously lived with their parents. Them moving out of their parents homes don't add more housing supply to help the homeless.
First, I'd love to see the data to support that. It's hard to imagine a single professional doesn't rent first and goes straight to buying a condo, especially in the North America where people generally move out at 18.
Second, if they're buying a condo versus paying rent, that's still good because it leaves less price elastic renters in the market. You can to get those who are willing to pay much more into something higher end versus them taking the bottom and increasing its price (which is what's happened in SF).
> Before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed.
This is assuming wrongly all people want to live in homes. #Vanlife, digital nomads, couch surfers can afford it and don’t want to. You’re ignoring that there’s a beautiful freedom people like, have you ever been homeless? Do you know what it’s like? It’s nice not to pay monthly utility bills, taxes if you own, do maintenance, and deal with neighbors, HOAs (the worst) and being able to leave somewhere without worrying about your lease expiring stress between jobs and paying for the apartment or landlord not fixing problems. If people really wanted to live in homes, they can move to where they can afford it, but they choose to stay and not live in a home. That is not an irrational decision, they are not ignorant cheaper houses elsewhere exist.
You talk as if you haven’t been homeless. You are assuming a lot of inaccurate things and I encourage you to live it to see what the real problems are such as consistent showering (doable with a gym membership), heat (living in a warm place fixes it), theft of valuables (stashing with friends and family or storage units), parking if you drive (Walmart parking lots are free), and nice socks (for the walking you’ll be doing or warmth) off the top of my head. Then I got a girlfriend and she wanted those things.
"To eliminate poverty it was necessary to conceive of an industrial system more productive than our own. Such will be universal harmony which will produce at least triple — yes, without exaggeration — at least triple the yield of the civilised system in a well-cultivated empire. Accordingly, while Harmony will greatly increase the wealth of the well-to-do, it will bring about an excessive increase in that of the people, to whom it will guarantee a salary or in old age a decent minimum below which they cannot fall. This beneficence will be all the more simple in that humanity will reproduce much less in Harmony than in civilisation.
This is far removed from the theories of the philosophers, some of whom, the Demagogues, seek to rob the rich to provide for the poor. The others, who are called the Economists, do not have the welfare of the people in mind. They think only of enriching empires without worrying themselves about the fate of the individual. Thus the theories of the Economists have greatly enriched England without enriching the English. According to the Tableau de Londres you can find 115,000 paupers, prostitutes, thieves, beggars and unemployed in the city of London alone; the workers of Scotland live in a frightful state of misery. This is nonetheless the consequence of the modern systems which claim to alleviate the suffering of the people."
The article like most people that haven’t been homeless don’t know anything about homelessness aside from inferring from statistics and knowing what is the problem without actually talking to homeless people. #Vanlife people enjoying parking at the beach are chronically homeless and unsheltered.
It’s a great way to dehumanize people’s desires and motivations with wrong assumptions by lying with statistics.
Great piece! One thing to add is to look into why the anecdotes are pervasive.
This data does a great job at distinguishing between the unhoused population and the sheltered homeless population.
Where the unhoused are visible drives the perception.
In California, the same is true, with unhoused being just the tip of the iceberg in the homeless population, the difference is where the unhoused are. In favelas and bazaars in the middle of very expensive areas.
Strolling through highly trafficked areas of NYC you wouldnt make the broad reductive assumption that “New York has more homeless people”, whereas strolling through highly trafficked areas of SF/LA would be a complete culture shock.
It is an interesting topic as it’s not clear how much people know everytime the topic comes up. Is a prologue about distinguishing between unhoused/sheltered before engaging further really useful? Hard to say
A lot of people through no fault of their own just cannot 'get it together'. Either they lack the skills to be employable, do not make or save enough money to afford a permanent residence, or cannot hold down a job for a variety of reason.
Another great reason to not live in LA, homelessness exploded there since rent shot up.
Rent effectively doubled from 2009 to 2019. You can ether stay in Mayor Garcetti's fun house or leave. Factor in even if your able to starve off homelessness yourself, your still wasting money that's better saved. I'm happy to know America is full of functional cities where it's still possible to make it. No this doesn't mean you can afford a 2 bdrm on minimum wage, but you can find a room.
This is great work, data I've been very interested in. It would be really fascinating to get to county and city level, where I live there's been a crazy increase in people living in tents with severe mental and/or substance abuse problems. It does reflect at the state (Oregon) level but I think it's a bit misleading because it feels like there are magnet areas where all the increase happens in one spot.
In addition to what's mentioned here[1], I like that "unhoused" implies that this is more of a societal problem, opposed to "home-less" which implies a deficit in certain individuals.
Great article, but I didn't see (maybe I missed it) a notice of the fact that homelessness can be correlated with meth, mental illness, etc. with the causation working in either direction. Homelessness could be caused by, or increase the chances of, any of those other factors (or both).
It would be interesting to see these rates alongside housing costs. Here in Seattle the median house price has tripled in the last 10 years and homelessness has shot up along with it.
If we want to know the magnitude of states shipping homeless people away, we need to start measuring how many had been supporting themselves. I’ve seen studies about California homelessness where a participant was counted as in-state if they bussed here and crashed on a friend’s couch for a little while.
Look, I don't know the actual numbers, but the GP cited "red states busing their homeless population" and then cited a NYT article about this very issue where the numbers presented contradicted that claim. If you do know of studies which have more actual data on this issue, please link to them so we can all learn more - this seems to be one of those issues where there's a lot of emotion but far less actual data!
I still have a difficult time understanding how increased homelessness is not a direct result of increased taxes and regulations. The data presented corroborates as much and though correlation doesn’t mean causation, correlation certainly doesn’t indicate a lack of causation either. We go to great lengths to justify the results when the simplest explanation is staring right at you.
I still have a difficult time understanding how increased homelessness is not a direct result of the number of comedy clubs per capita. The data presented corroborates as much and though correlation doesn’t mean causation, correlation certainly doesn’t indicate a lack of causation either. We go to great lengths to justify the results when the simplest explanation is staring right at you.
Given that the title was changed after my comment, I'd say that the comment was substantive, and contributed to the conversation.
Questioning that there's a homeless crisis when the data shown in the submission states that there's north of 500,000 homeless in the US is an absurd starting point for a conversation.
That is, _there is no conversation to be had about that question_. And any debate held by HN on that would be astoundingly privileged.
You posted your comment and I posted my reply before we changed the title. It was clearly a snarky and informationless comment, which you shouldn't have posted. A title change doesn't retroactively reverse that.
Of course, if you had posted a substantive comment about homelessness in response to specific things in the article, that would have been fine. That's very much not what you posted.
As for "there is no conversation to be had"—this is the sort of categorical putdown that tends to go along with unsubstantive posts in the first place. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? We're looking for curious conversation here, not position-hammering. There's a big difference between those, even if all of your views are 100% correct. Launching straight into a flamewar when the thread is brand new is definitely not the intended use of this site.
So you'll allow a title that ask a question.. and then someone answers it and you have an issue with their answer? How do you pretend to claim to know that there isn't a homeless criss?
Of course they didn't answer the question—that would require relevant information. A substanceless oneliner (and in the form of an internet trope, even) is not that.
Surely it isn't hard to understand that "Yes. Yes there is." is an unsubstantive comment. This is not a borderline call.
Even so it’d be nice to know if this number is acceptable at a given level of economic maturity as well as level of employable skills. If there is a skills gap or a mental health gap, are those comparable to similar economies or worse or maybe better?
Another attempt to convince you that your personal observations must be incorrect because someone found a stat from a study somewhere.
LA, Portland & SF– are obviously measurably worse over the past decade. Portland is a case of going from beautiful downtown to cesspool in that timeframe.
There are a lot of reasons that stats are misleading. Noise in the data, biases, trivial statistics, incorrect measurement, poor geographic approaches.
Please don't sit at your desk and tell me what I see out my window doesn't exist.
Did you even read the article? The last two sentences are: "Still, I think we can see why people in Seattle might feel there’s a crisis. Maybe anecdotal knowledge ain’t so bad."
The whole point of the article is that things vary widely across different locales. In some places homelessness is increasing by a little bit; in other places homelessness is increasing by a lot; in other places it's decreasing. The article also makes the useful point that perceptions of "crisis" are often related to whether unhoused folks are sheltered or unsheltered. We don't hear a lot about the homelessness crisis in New York even though its homelessness rate is statistically the highest in the nation.
Seems like you didn’t read the article to the end. It discusses the spike in unsheltered chronic homelessness on the west coast, which is the most visible type.
Solution in two parts
1. Make it legal to build homes where people live (looking at you California, specifically LA, SF, SV)
2. Build dorm style shelters for anyone that would otherwise sleep outside
There's complicating issues like not enough addiction treatment and mental health facilities, but neither of those is improved by leaving people to sleep on the street.