> 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.

This assumes they want to find a job though.

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.

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

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.

Removing rent control does not address the housing shortage.

The city built office space for more jobs and prohibits housing for those new workers. That's the problem to solve.

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.

> It is relevant when we are talking about building more housing. Why build something if people won't use it?

If the shelters are full, it's clear people are using them. If we start seeing vacancies in shelters, then we can worry about this.

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 prefer to take the approach of understanding the current needs and working to address all of those needs.

So what is your proposed solution?

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.

It's complicated and messy and unclear.