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.
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.