Trad homeowners with solar, grid connection could offer cheap power to help recharge faster.
This is only becoming a problem because local communities are using their legal weight to prevent enough condos & apartments from being built to satisfy demand. So now we have more homeless people and high rent problems.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-per-prisoner-in-us-sta...
Arkansas is the lowest-cost state and still spends $23,000/prisoner/year. The median is $65,000/prisoner/year. 11 states spend over $100k/prisoner/year.
Edit:
$100k/prisoner/year
That's crazy. Regular people don't live on that yearly.
I think you are on to something though. Get rid of the bad parts of prison and they are accommodation and a car-free city within.
I feel as though there would be a different tenant in the modern era. Some would be migrant young men trying to save every dime, but many would be those suffering mental illness, and they'd fill the unit with tons of stuff. Can you imagine how much more stuff Americans have these days than they did back in say 1900? I genuinely think that the volume of stuff/garbage would be a legitimate fire or structural hazard. No landlord would want that. Back in the old days landlords had a lot more ability to force out any tenants they didn't want.
Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space. Our city has tried "housing first" and it's been a disaster. The units are filthy, damaged, and the buildings don't pass minimal standards when the housing department inspects them because the "tenants" and their associates have destroyed them.
I do believe most SROs had a "no visitors" policy so that might help somewhat but there would have to be strictly enforced requirements about not trashing or abusing the property.
Dirt is brown.
Therefore, dirt is a cow.
First, I'm challenging the statement:
> Drug-addicted and mentally ill people do not know how to keep even a moderately organized living space.
Which is nonsense and a damaging stereotype. Drug addicts and mentally ill people exist in all areas of life and many are successful - more so than you or I.
Secondly, I'm challenging you on:
> The theory is the crazy people on the street will suddenly be not-crazy when they get an apartment
Because in fact there is now a great body of evidence that shows that housing-first, that is providing housing with no pre-conditions, is in fact extremely effectively at treating both uncontrolled addiction and untreated mental illness.
Proposed housing units are literally for them.
Single-room units would bring down the cost of housing for everyone, but those with influence and money have decided that we don't want it in our community.
At this price point, you're essentially only going to be renting to people who are currently homeless, which is great from a societal standpoint. However, you can't ignore the fact that substantial portions of the homeless community, and therefore your potential tenants, are either drug addicts and mentally ill people.
1 out of every 10 of those people will cause more property destruction than could ever be recouped in rent from the other 9. It just doesn't work for private landlords.
Give it another couple years and I’m sure the courts will dismantle the FHA. Then landlords will have to find something else to complain about.
Not saying it isn't worth a shot, all for it. I just don't know if this eats up that much demand / houses that many people these days.
In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.
Here's just one source I found on: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...
I got a tour of a homeless shelter a few months ago and the folks running it mentioned that one of their jobs is to wake up specific people at 6am, 7am etc so they can make it to work in the morning.
Single room with bed and desk, bathroom down the hall, shared cafeteria on the first floor with breakfast and dinner served every day (lunch expected to be eaten at the office).
Not a bad set up for a young single person. Especially considering a lot of the dorm residents left early in the morning and didn’t return until the last train home.
Of course, the dorm room setup is less vulnerable to exploitation if the dorm is rented or purchased separately from one's employer, otherwise you not only risk losing wages (and, in the US, access to health insurance) but also your home if you're laid off.
GP comment was obviously referring to Anatole France, who wrote sarcastically in 1894:
> Cela consiste pour les pauvres à soutenir et à conserver les riches dans leur puissance et leur oisiveté. Ils y doivent travailler devant la majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
The elderly (or the lazy) would also benefit from this kind of living arrangements.
Not Tokyo, not Moscow, not Austin.
First one I clicked, $600 a month
https://suumo.jp/chintai/jnc_000099304610/?bc=100450374320
I can find cheaper
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
Math has to take into account that if 30k people want to move to a city, and you build 40k houses ( to drop prices), well now maybe 50k people want to move to the city and prices will still go up!
Build more houses per year than people who want to move to the city. Prices will decrease.
NYC did this over 100 years ago, it became one of the world's most important cities.
SF did the same thing, it became a tier 1 world city.
Same for Chicago.
Then they stopped doing it.
Then no other city in America even bothered trying.
Also housing prices don't go down immediately with new construction, there is a latency. More so, sometimes prices just stabilize, but if prices stay the same for 5 years, and inflation and wages go up, that means the effective price of housing went down. If you keep building and prices stay the same for a decade, all of a sudden houses are affordable.
SF
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
> A massive apartment building boom in the Austin-Round Rock region has driven rents downward, real estate experts and housing advocates have said.
Why do you even think this?
The evidence is screaming that we are clearly in a massive housing shortage.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/26/apartment-rents-denver-fa...
For example - SF's row houses. You can't build anything like those due to rules about stairs, environmental laws about multiple family dwellings with internal stairs, and building codes that have such strict environmentally friendly rules that people cannot afford to live indoors.
Up here in Seattle I was inquiring about extending my roof out to convert my cape code into a salt shaker style house, basically giving me two more bedrooms on the same lot. From an environmental perspective this is great, my house is over 70 years old, it is a sunk cost in terms of building material, and it was already updated with modern insulation years ago. I had an energy assessment done with I first moved in, and basically was told there isn't much I can do except fix the duct work but sadly no one does duct work anymore (I tried to find someone!)
So anyway, my roof extension? The city would want me to replace my roof with larger wood so I could put in more insulation. An expensive undertaking that would have ZERO benefit to the house's energy profile. If they wanted me to paint the roof white, sure, that'd make sense and help more than $30k extra of roof work.
Another example is how the electrical code keeps getting more and more strict, such as having outlets every few feet in kitchens. That adds a lot to costs, with little to no benefit. If you add up all the incremental safety rules since the 90s, we're paying a ton for a very very small margin of improvement in safety.
And none of these rules are making houses better! "Home inspector discovers entire subdivision has leaking walls" is an entire sub-genre of video on YouTube.
So we're paying a lot small things we don't need (kitchens with a dozen outlets, AFCI breakers everywhere, 30k of lumber to save $5 a month on cooling) while the important things (walls that don't leak) are being ignored.
Hence why we are down to moving outlets over a inch every version
> Why Can’t American Cities Build 3-Flats Anymore?
With this level of wealth inequality and these seeming like a good idea, I'd say we're gearing up for a bloody good time, to say the least.
The lowest-cost housing is not in dense slums. It's in the rural areas and smaller cities. There you can buy a small single-family home for the cost of an SRO in NYC.
By adding more SROs the city housing will get MORE EXPENSIVE in the end. They won't solve anything, they'll just create more misery.
Yep. Exactly. With the caveat: the increase happens by increasing the _density_.
> Seems like that turns standard econ on its head, so can you help me understand who you reached that conclusion?
Here's another example. Suppose you give a billion dollars to everyone. Will everyone just become rich?
Housing is similar. When you build denser housing, it increases the attractiveness of the area for employers. They get access to a larger labor pool, so companies near dense housing are long-term more competitive.
This in turn increases the housing price, as workers want to live closer to employers.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
The end result: no large city managed to lower down housing costs by increasing density. It's a simple verifiable fact.
Edit: I checked data for Western Europe, Russia, US, Japan. It's possible that some citi in India or Malaysia managed to do that. But I don't have data for them.
But cities don't exist in vacuum. And building new housing is always slow, so you can feasibly grow housing stock in a large city only by single-digit percentages YoY.
You can buy houses in rural New York for $100k-$150k. In St. Paul, it's not hard to find a house for $300k.
Yet most of the discussion revolves around fixing the situation in coastal cities, instead of working on incentives or infrastructure that would encourage people to see what's available in the hundreds of counties and smaller cities that have ample affordable stock.
This is exactly what I rented when I moved to NYC two years ago. It was a month-to-month single room in a six-bedroom apartment. I’m not sure how legal it was, but I rented from a company with a web site, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ That said, it was substantially more than $300/month - something like 4-5x
> "Japan, particularly in dense cities like Tokyo and Osaka, allows and builds extremely small private apartments, often between 100–200 square feet. Despite their size, these units almost always include a private bathroom and kitchenette."
In the US we call it a Bed and Breakfast and some people pay a premium for such accommodations!
Even if you are only completely motivated by selfish desires, we want these people off the street for our benefit. It make cities nicer and America safer.
Yes, these places are going to be drug infested slums. But it's still a good idea and I want my tax dollars to go towards it.
And if we can add in some market-based options and give down-and-out humans the option of self-selecting to nicer facilities and working their way up to something better in life, all the better.
I very much doubt this is the case.
This oft-reported statistic is wrong. It's based on a survey that simply concluded that they wouldn't necessarily pull that amount from savings to meet an emergency expense. That doesn't mean they can't afford it or don't have more savings than that.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saving-money-emergency-expenses...
There is no support system in this nation. Support of the most basic kind is predicated on impossible things, like giving up addictions or proving you're worthy of Jesus' love. It's conditional on race, religion, sexual orientation, you name it.
And so many, SO VERY MANY are just right at the edge of having a Michael Douglass-in-Falling Down kind of day. People that think like you do clearly haven't dealt with the active and ongoing bullshit of living day to day, hand to mouth, without shelter, without being clean.
Honestly I don't care about your opinion, but I will take one more opportunity to say fuck you.
The "one missed paycheck away" is cited a lot, but it's not entirely false, if a bit of a hyperbole.
The majority of Americans (recent estimates I believe are around 60%) have no savings, and live paycheck to paycheck. So while not exactly "one missed paycheck away" it's pretty close. More accurate would be to say "Most Americans are one crisis away..."
Median weekly earnings for full-time workers in the US was $1,196 in Q2 - so, half of Americans make even less than that (~4,700/month). That's not a lot, and in a lot of areas of the country, that doesn't leave much room to save much of anything, especially if you have kids and need childcare.
Going off the BLS consumer expenditure survey from 2023 (most recent one I could find), average spent on housing was $25k/year or 2119/month, almost half the median monthly earnings. Just housing. Factor in food, transportation, healthcare, utilities and it's not hard to see how people can, and are, struggling, and are effectively one mishap from falling too far behind to catch up.
Are they? Happy enough for what, exactly?
"Happy enough" that housing that excludes queer people, men (or people who look like men), people who need to not have their names be public information because they're hiding from abusive prior partners/parents, pets, people who are currently addicted to drugs (and thus cannot realistically never have drugs around), or any of a host of other restrictions, will not be something they consider an option.
(Note that these restrictions are a) from separate sources, not all on the same thing, and b) things I've heard about in the context of shelters, rather than low-income housing; however, it would not surprise me in the least if similar restrictions were placed on various programs to help house the homeless.)
There are cases where the street is safer or has more autonomy, like you say. Solutions need to offer similar things, so privacy, the ability to indulge in some little pleasures, to come and go at your own schedule are basic table stakes.
A housing unit that lets you stay there indefinitely, for free, in an apartment that you can have to yourself—but doesn't allow alcohol, or is sex-segregated, or where you're mandated to come out and work for a specified period every day, or even that gets regularly searched for drug paraphernalia, is not going to work for a lot of people.
Basically, housing for people like this needs to have, if anything, fewer restrictions on its use than housing for the general public. Give them the space to fuck up and to heal at their own pace, and not have to worry that those very normal kinds of problems will leave them worse off than before (eg, because if you're kicked out, your stuff gets confiscated—or even just because with these projects in place, there's less of a community of homeless people to support each other for those who still don't "fit").
Even for the "long-term" housing programs you have a lot of rules you have to follow and can easily fall out if you commit a minor crime.
If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
WTF are you even talking about.
There's a great Conversations with Tyler where he interviews a prominent homeless person in the DC era and one of the topics he brings up is specifically stratification amongst these groups:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-gr...
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
Humans build permanent houses pretty much the moment they could. The nomads were nomads because they had to.
Obviously crime is constantly a worry in a tent, but theft is rampant in shelters.
100% of the land was not owned by people with the ability to enforce it constantly then.
If a vagabond or drug user can keep their habit from interfering with my safety and health, they are more welcome to do as they please.
> their habit from interfering with my safety and health
Needing to shit isn't a habit. If you wren't aware, its a basic life function, like eating and breathing.
Its telling that you're piggybacking that on to your complaints about drugs (and also ignoring the untreated/poorly treated mental illness and straight up poverty legs of the homeless tripod).
But we have to acknowledge that the instant you make a bathroom "public", it becomes a place to do drugs, turn tricks, and sleep. Even if you're fine with a bathroom being occupied for hours for non-bathroom tasks, it makes the public bathroom a toxic area, with drug paraphernalia (including needles and other waste products) and used condoms as discarded litter at best, and clogged infrastructure at worst.
We need to provide these services for any human who needs a toilet, *and also* figure out ways besides incarceration to effectively deal with uncooperative drug users.
My point is even if you entirely self-motivated, it's still something you should support for selfish reasons.
That said, streets and parks are public spaces meant for the enjoyment of all. Public urban camping robs civic value and turns public property into private spaces. Excessive tolerance of it is a failure of policy, not actual policy.
This must be one of the most brain-dead things I've read on this site. It's "not even wrong".
My guess is as the asset bubbles pop, the marginal 70s-90s apartment complexes and second ring suburbs will be the new slums. People aren’t going to be able to afford cars as policy changes accelerate cost increases and wages continue to erode. City and near suburbs will be more attractive and expensive.
You already see this happening in larger metro areas to some extent.
So the greedy landlords are the would-be heroes of the story and the politicians are the bad guys?
1. The "homeless problem", that is, the problem of mentally deranged or violent vagrants that make public spaces less usable or unwelcoming. This is difficult to impossible to measure, both in impact and in extent.
2. The "transient homeless", that is, the down-on-their-luck or otherwise situationally homeless people. This is easy to measure because these people will attempt to secure housing and services to get back on their feet.
Fixing #2, while worthwhile in itself, does nothing to fix #1. But well-intentioned people trying to fix "homelessness" find it much easier to address #2 because there are measurable outcomes, and no messy compromises to be made about civil liberties or individual freedom vs civil order. And this relies on the fact that since the same word is used, that it carries the same connotations. People hear "reduce homelessness" and they think that this means fewer people screaming about brainwaves and starting fights on the subway, but that's a completely separate issue.
EDIT: removed discussion of SROs to another top level comment to avoid confusing discourse here
3. Transient homeless that tried to get back on their feet but was met with the notion that all the options were eventually exhausted (they lived on their friend's couch until he got married). They even had dishwasher jobs, but inevitably, because rent was $2000 more than they would ever have - they decided to do drugs and live on the street because no amount of work at the wage they would be paid would ever make their life meaningful.
Imagine struggling with addiction or mental health issues. Now imagine doing it without a safe and secure place to even sleep at night.
Curious to know about how homeless correlates to city / town / urban / suburban ect.
I don't encounter homelessness in expensive towns, but I do encounter it in expensive cities.
To be quite blunt: Someone who's making an SRO unlivable is mentally ill, and needs to be in a place that's appropriate to handle their needs.
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