At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.
At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.
The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".
Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
Median income goes towards old housing.
Ask anyone how to make cheap housing though. No one has a convincing answer. I'm convinced that it's the right question.
A U.S. default would spike interest rates, crash bond markets, trigger a credit freeze, and destroy consumer confidence. Mortgages would become unaffordable. Mass foreclosures and job losses would crush demand. Asset fire sales would follow. Housing prices would collapse.
This would also reshuffle assets, so speculators and highly leveraged people would be punished instead of being rewarded.
It will also cleanup the situation for future generations so kids won't have to be under extreme debt to pay back in some way to government, because the older people lived above their means.
My city is currently facing this where the interest rate hikes, build tax hikes and falling prices have created a perfect storm of vastly reduced housing starts.
This is saying "building is expensive because building is expensive". Why is it expensive and how do we address it to make it cheaper?
Build less and worse per unit. Share foundations, roofs, walls, and common areas. Build less square footage per unit. Build less fancy per square foot (cheaper kitchens and baths). Use all standard materials and finishes. Install low-end appliances and HVAC. Everything cookie-cutter; no per-unit changes. Use less land per unit (and maybe less expensive land overall). Have no private outdoor space (or just a tiny balcony).
That’s not well aligned to how to maximize profits from a given unit though (fairly obviously and by intentional design).
> Nashville home prices went up in May 2025, but not by much compared to last year.
> Average sale price $853.8K; median price stayed flat at $613K.
> But here's what's interesting: sellers had to drop their asking prices more than before. The average list price was $1.012 million, but homes actually sold for about $158K less than that...
> More Homes Available for Buyers: Active inventory jumped +29% compared to last year.
> Total inventory (including homes under contract) increased +16%
> Sales Activity Slowing Down -18%
[0]: https://www.nashvillesmls.com/blog/nashville-housing-market-...
[0]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.
There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.
I look at metrics to arrive at my opinions. Things like the difference between the number of new housing per capita in various cities in California compared to Austin, Texas. Things like the R^2 when you do a linear regression of the amount of new housing per capita against changes in rental inflation.
California is a bit embarrassing. We’ll see how the Builder’s Remedy and laws like SB 1123 play out, I suppose.
Care to explain why I either don't count or don't really exist?
NIMBYism is an economic issue, not a culture issue. It has far more to do with how much impact the new housing is expected to have on the value of people's property. Or more saliently, the equity they have in the property. If people expect that nearby housing will cut their $500k equity in half, they're likely to petition against it, regardless of whether their governor is a Republican or a Democrat.
NIMBY isn't red or blue, it's just fear and greed.
Increased housing nearby brings increased traffic, parking pressure, crowding, and noise, none of which are positives for current residents. Fear and greed don’t motivate renters to be NIMBY, yet we have NIMBY renters because of other factors.
Lmao
Is there a reason that the press is always making scapegoats out of tech nerds? The vast majority of people are not employed in tech, and are part of the same society and have very similar self interests.
Truly tired of everything being a criticism of Silicon Valley, as if everyone else are saints.
What you're seeing is a backlash to this influence, and the fairly disastrous consequences it has usually had.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/minutes-from-the-latest-...
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-westillwork-t...
All these replies missed my point. I’m not saying tech is blameless, rather that the press constantly criticizes tech for both doing too much and doing nothing and not fixing society. I would argue that this is toxic and ignores the agency of literally all other professions/people.
Further, to ignore the housing/etc lobbying by basically everyone else outside of tech and make it seem like SV giants control the housing crisis is just boring. Do note that most of the developed world is facing this, not just specifically SV/USA.
Clearly we're consuming different types of media, because on my estimation tech gets let off fairly light relative to the damage we cause.
As practitioners, we're not entitled to get angry about being criticised for the damage we cause at least until we've stopped it.
The "all opinions I don't like are not held honestly, it's a trick" meme is very tiring. In respect to your original point, no this isn't some unique critique that singles out SV. The SV disruptor is just a shorthand for the rich and landed that will always be opposed to new housing. This could be drop-in replaced with a mid-career NYC finance bro, or successful Texan oil & gas professional, just exchange some things for prayer and bootstraps.
They are the same because in all those cases their wealth (real o perceived potential) depends in housing value go only up.
Just my observation. Tons of overpriced apartments being built at 2x the price of the average renter.
Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.
Tax the purchase not the construction.
If you restrict or punish the purchase of housing via tax policy, you simultaneously restrict the sale of it by original constructors, which serves as an impediment to that original construction.
Of course, most of those who did own extra homes as an investment rented them out as well, so rental prices here has gone through the roof as landlords and common folk with an extra apartment or two has sold the homes.
As housing stock quality improves, everyone upgrades. Which leaves room at the bottom level to get on the ladder into lower quality cheaper housing.
Also supply and demand: if prices are increasing it is mostly because supply is not keeping up with demand.
Lastly, like all other products in a market, we should see a general improvement in quality, this isn't a bad thing (think how cars how 10x more reliable, comfortable and fuel efficient than they used to be).
It's generally much more illegal to build cheap housing, both in the direct sense that building codes require all new housing to be built to extremely high standards, and the indirect sense that in places without by-right development (which is most desirable cities sadly) your neighbours are going to fight a lot more against cheap houses getting built than they'll fight against expensive houses getting built.
> Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.
Already been happening for years.
[1] according to the communists at the world bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Still, I sincerely believe more people would choose to be homeless if they tried it, because there is nothing inherently bad in living in a tent if the climate allows it. It's just like tourism but with more amenities available due to urban infra + the stigma (that people mostly learned to ignore due to cultural conditioning of the 70s-today period).
Do you know this first hand? Have you tried it?
It's generally called "as fast as necessary", more focused on total journey lenght with the clock-face schedule across the whole country. Other countries certainly have faster trains.
EDIT: It's fascinating that I'm downvoted for this. I wonder if the voters also live in Dublin?
But it's also significant infrastructural deficits (water and power) that are downstream of incredible debt taken on by the government as a result of the 2007 crash (as well as a planning system where dogs have the right to object to planning applications).
... which Ireland proceeded not to do. Then the new prime minister went onto TV declaring what a great success all this was for Ireland (... while ignoring that this is literally stealing money from other EU countries), and how they intend to continue this and were putting some of the money into a new "Irish" sovereign wealth fund (isif.ie) that has since used the money to hire the zero-experience-and-suspiciously-young-for-such-positions-but-totally-awesome investement team [2] composed of members of his own party that have been tasked with investing in Irish x business (please replace x with "the taoseach's new business" when making investment decisions and leave it out when publishing in the paper)
For unknown reasons, there is nothing on the isif.ie site about what they effectively do: steal money from EU hospitals, schools, pensions ... to personally enrich large US companies, and of course themselves. This is also missing from the government speeches on how fantastic they are.
But do not worry. Meanwhile in Brussels and Strasbourg, the requisition for a meeting about the approval of the color of the bikeshed (so called because when you call the place where you park your armoured Audi A9 motorcade a bikeshed chances of reelection go up dramatically. It IS, of course, a garage that was built where a park with a playground used to be) where then the request for the beginning of the process to requisition a meeting room to discuss who will make the agenda for discussing a meeting room for the actual issue is making great progress!
[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-finance/press-releases/m...
Can you provide a source for this assertion? AFAIK, we've implemented the 15% rate (but the profit shifting part died in the US senate, which Ireland is not responsible for).
> the zero-experience-and-suspiciously-young-for-such-positions-but-totally-awesome investement team [2]
They all look to be 40+ from the linked page (except for one lady who looks to be late 20's/early 30s).
> omposed of members of his own party that have been tasked with investing in Irish x business (please replace x with "the taoseach's new business" when making investment decisions and leave it out when publishing in the paper)
I really hate Fianna Fail (the Taoiseach's party) but Micheal Martin has never been corrupt. He is literally the most boring person in the world, but he's not corrupt.
> For unknown reasons, there is nothing on the isif.ie site about what they effectively do: steal money from EU hospitals, schools, pensions ... to personally enrich large US companies, and of course themselves. This is also missing from the government speeches on how fantastic they are.
Look, I get that this is tax avoidance in some sense, but it's worth noting that most US tech companies are booking all non-US revenue in Ireland (taxed at 15%) rather than Bermuda (taxed at 0%) for about a decade now.
Do you think that Ireland should have had to bail out banks with a debt exceeding the country's GDP? Was this moral? And then basically be put into controls on the part of the EU (who are the people preventing them from burning the bondholders).
Ireland is basically the most indebted country per head in the world at this point (the GDP looks better because of the tax dodging multinationals).
And lets be honest, the same multinationals would have found a different country to launder money through if Ireland wasn't there.
To answer the question above about properties in Dublin, this has a number of reasons:
1. post 2007 (the crash) housebuilding stopped for about a decade 2. Over the past decade, Ireland has seen significant immigration, particularly in the cities which has driven up prices 3. A zoning/planning system which is very similar to California and a culture where people object to the opening of an envelope 4. Lots and lots of investment in rental properties which pushes up house prices, which pushes up rents, which pushes up house prices.
Basically a lot of the above are problems of success, which Ireland is bad at dealing with because we've basically never had any success before.
https://www.google.com/search?q=current+tax+rate+for+multina...
> They all look to be 40+ from the linked page
Not really. 30, some even less. Average age is probably 40. So indeed, suspiciously young the positions they hold. How many leaders of a large investment fund are under 60 at least?
> Look, I get that this is tax avoidance in some sense, but
(it is)
> Do you think that Ireland should have had to bail out banks with a debt exceeding the country's GDP?
(yes, that is, after all, the promise a country or anyone makes when they borrow money. Alternatively you could NOT bail them out)
> And lets be honest, the same multinationals would have found a different country to launder money through if Ireland wasn't there ...
I couldn't make my point any better than you did here. This is stealing, simply because it is not Irish tax revenue.
> Basically a lot of the above are problems of success, ...
Enabling tax avoidance, especially after signing international treaties that you would do the opposite is not success.
From the second line of the AI overview. I mean, seriously?
So the 12.5% rate remains for irish headquartered companies, NOT multinationals. And personally I'm OK with that (cries as he pays 52% marginal).
> Not really. 30, some even less. Average age is probably 40. So indeed, suspiciously young the positions they hold. How many leaders of a large investment fund are under 60 at least?
You and I clearly have different ideas of what older people look like. They mostly look like the kind of middle-aged people I work with. And I think you're missing that most of those roles are pretty low-level, the investment fund is very very small by investment fund standards.
> (yes, that is, after all, the promise a country or anyone makes when they borrow money. Alternatively you could NOT bail them out)
So, the Irish government tried (repeatedly) to renegotiate those deals. The bondholders were (mostly) fine with it (as they'd bought the bonds later). The ECB and the IMF refused to allow this to happen, for fear of contagian. This lead to basically all capital projects (housing/water etc) being cut, and basically the entire public service taking massive pay cuts. And remember, at this point the multinationals were paying approximately zero tax, so people like me (higher rate taxpayers) funded all of this.
And as a result, we have huge infrastructural deficits and a housing crisis (where this thread got started).
> This is stealing, simply because it is not Irish tax revenue.
This is a ridiculous argument, who does the tax revenue "belong" to? If the US charges Shell taxes on their US activity is that stealing? If the Feds charge Shell tax revenue on their Texas activities is that stealing? If Shell pay all their corporate tax in Delaware is that stealing?
I'm making the assumption that you are Dutch (based on previous comments). Was the Dutch East India company stealing from India? Is that also against your moral code? Do you plan to make reparations to the Indians about this?
> Enabling tax avoidance, especially after signing international treaties that you would do the opposite is not success.
Again, on the assumption that you are Dutch, do you realise that most of the schemes avoiding all of the tax (the double irish with a dutch sandwich) involved your country? Was that OK? How come you haven't changed your tax laws?
Note: i think there's a really interesting question here around where revenue "should" be taxed so even if you're annoyed at the rest of the comment, I'd appreciate your thoughts on that.
https://www.joe.co.uk/news/swiss-city-offers-beggars-one-way...
As is the case with the n-word.
I'm not policing anything (obviously, since I'm not in any position of authority) - I am however pointing it out since I've come across people that truly didn't know.
What, you downvoted to disagree? Look:
"We asked many members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities how they preferred to describe themselves. While some find the term “Gypsy” to be offensive, many stakeholders and witnesses were proud to associate themselves with this term and so we have decided that it is right and proper to use it, where appropriate, throughout the report." Women and Equalities Committee, UK Parliament. 2019.
Of course that was six years ago, maybe it's a slur now. Or maybe it's a slur to you, but not to them. Or it won't be slur tomorrow, or it's a slur everywhere but not on Tuesdays and except in Scotland. Socially constructed, see? Not factual.
I don't know why Americans keep saying we look down on you for your "race problems," but we do not. Generally speaking, we look down on you for manufacturing race problems for politics as a team sport. We have our own race problems.
You border security and permit system kicks out anyone with even a remote chance to become homeless, you're welcome.
For at least a little while, a massive influx of supply of dwellings entirely eliminated rough sleeping in the UK, mitigating the harshest impacts of homelessness for thousands.
Do you remember that teacher in school who would sometimes lash out at a poorly performing student?
This made me feel like I was watching a frustrated lash out from someone who cares.
Captures the author's feelings; but fails as a piece of persuasion.
It is still an argument.
So yes if you are willing to live in areas :
- without jobs, - without healthcare - in ghost towns
1. They never had a home before so they kept living like that
2. They had a home before but then they couldn't afford it (or whatever other reason)
I doubt we have a lot of case 1 (born without a home). For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless. I doubt building more homes are going to solve the issues. For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
It's not always all or nothing - sometimes you might be able to afford rent if rent were cheaper.
> For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
"Build more homes" includes social aka public aka "affordable housing".
There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.
This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).
[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
Housing is in such brutally short supply (goes for major cities in North America as well as Europe) that not only can we not afford to be picky, but in terms of actual effect it doesn't matter: social housing is as effective as luxury housing. Sometimes it is _less_ effective at achieving social goals, if rich people are also trying to get their hands on the same housing stock, because there is not enough to meet demand at the top end of the market.
I think people misunderstand the state of the housing market: it is brutally expensive because of chronic, decades long undersupply, not building enough to meet _new_ demand each year, thus the "debt" in supply has compounded massively. This has strong and weird market effects, such that building lots of cheap housing at huge scale is only a partial solution (and the scale actually needed to alleviate the problem is much larger than anyone is actually willing to contemplate right now).
Not unless you force developers to build even when it's unprofitable (or not profitable enough)
Cheaper housing helps prevent this.
Of you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.
The problem is lack of a working welfare infrastructure. People become homeless because they're unlucky and once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up.. it's a failure of state at so many levels. Real estate development is the least of them
> Sry lack of new houses seems doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness. If you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.
This would only make sense if the smaller houses were reasonably priced as opposed to the bigger ones. This is not the case.
And creating more housing would absolutely be a step in the right direction in terms of reducing extreme housing prices. Unless you don't believe in demand and supply economics, that is.
> Once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up
Yes but that's partly because they can't afford to rent even basic lodging, let alone afford to buy one, and a basic roof over one's head is a pivotal basic need for most things one needs to do in life.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t also need things like better support and easily-accessible government healthcare, but we have to recognize that these things are all connected. Salt Lake City somewhat famously found immediately housing people helps with mental/substance abuse issues simply because all of the other problems in life are more approachable when you’re not sleeping on the street, missing appointments, and having your essentials stolen.
Honestly I think sometimes building (compassionate, 21st century) mental health "asylums" and treatment centres would do more to end homelessness.
And yes, as housing becomes less available, people with mental health issues are among the worst affected.
They cause disproportionate damage to cities and the cause of aiding homeless itself. It's asinine to conflate the two issues and waffle back and forth between "more houses" and nimby name-calling. Neither will help.
We should have 21st century asylums and more houses. I won't accept a false choice, we can do both. (I'd argue we also need subsidized job relocation programs so people don't get stuck in high CoL areas looking for minimum wage jobs. There are very affordable areas to live in USA that want workers, let's make this market more efficient).
But whatever you gotta tell yourself to excuse the mistreatment.
This isn't about American exceptionalism, because either A) other countries don't have this problem (great!) or B) they do and all the "do it like they do" was just proven wrong as a solution to both the problems or C) they did have this problem and it was solved by these policies - great! The immediate intervention of getting the worst offenders off the street is a temporary solution and housing policy wins long term.
But no matter what there's no reason to push back on two heterogenous solutions because it includes more than just your favorite one.
Like common, this does not passes the smell test. When housing is cheap, mentally ill can pay housing and have easier time getting support to get that housing. Their mental health issue do not escalate so quickly due to lack of sleep and constant danger.
Giving a locking door to an addict is a death sentence. As countless experiments have proven, unsupervised shelters all over California have been literally destroyed by addicts and the mentally unwell. I'm talking faeces on the walls, blood and urine everywhere, horrific attacks in the units, and eventually the place just gets burnt down. So these people need supervised shelter. In a facility. Where they're prevented from harming others and themselves. De-institutionalisation was a huge mistake. There were abuses and they needed reform, but throwing schizophrenics and addicts into the street was not kind or humane, and leaving them there is just as immoral.
Weird.
Rounding all the homeless up into an asylum is just sweeping the problem under the carpet.
There really aren't many ways to meet halfway - to have living spaces where you can live up to your abilities and have safety nets for the areas where you struggle. We have "halfway houses" to help people re-enter society after crashing, but not much to catch people before they fall.
(We do have some programs that try to help, but they are swamped, or inefficient, either expensive or under-funded, or some combination of those things. )
And who the hell wants a poor person as a neighbour.
>San Rafael law prohibits smoking in all apartment and condo complexes (if your home shares a wall with another home – you can’t smoke there). A housing complex is only allowed to create outdoor smoking areas if they meet certain criteria. Landlords and property managers are required to enforce this law through lease agreements. For more information about this, check out this handbook:
>https://www.cityofsanrafael.org/documents/san-rafael-smoke-f...
But every fucking day marijuana. Every public park; marijuana. Sports events; marijuana. Just sitting in traffic; marijuana. Waiting in fucking line at my kids' after-school pickup, marijuana.
It's a little ridiculous at this point.
I am a huge proponent of legalized marijuana, but for real. The people that do this are ruining it for the rest of us. Luckily it makes SO MUCH MONEY that I don't think we'll ever see it outlawed again, but. This is exactly what the pearl-clutching anti-pot people said would happen.
This seems like a no-brainer, and I will continue to vote and advocate against these policies, to the extent that I need to because most of the people I live near agree with me. Thanks all.
It's not poor people that are smoking more pot, sorry for the bad news.
> sorry for the bad news
Sorry you didn't realize that supporting legal pot would make you smell more pot.
I guess I thought better of my fellow citizens. You don't really see people drinking a beer in line at school, or sitting in traffic. I assumed it would be the same with pot, and I'm genuinely confused on what is different in peoples' minds.
The original point I responded to was that if you have homeless people around you, you'll have the smell of pot. The point I'm trying to get across is that it isn't homeless folks or poor folks. It's everyone.
In your case, don’t worry; nobody wants an asshole as a neighbour.
Reducing the price of rent can prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
Is your plan simply to imprison all poor people?
Mundane actually. I want my children to play outdoors without interacting with drug users. Your perspective is skewed.
> Is your plan simply to imprison all poor people?
No, and this doesn't follow.
Well, maybe you should just give them judgmental glares until they realize that being poor is a bad choice and stop it!
Or maybe you should move, since you apparently have such stringent standards for what's "allowed" to be around you and your children.
Yes, I know the talking point that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but for the sane homelessness is usually a temporary condition, for the insane it is chronic.
Also, of course nobody wants to live with poor people. I don't buy this romantic image of poor people being fair citizens failed by the rest of the society. I moved into a poor neighborhood and immediately had my bike stolen, literally living the meme. Real estate prices are lower here exactly because it's a black immigrant neighborhood full of poor people.
And nobody wants to see their real estate property decline in value…
The homelessness problem is also visibly the worst it's been in my lifetime.
I'm genuinely doubtful the problem is lack of housing alone. The person curled up under the bridge, the person screaming on the corner, they need more than another apartment they still can't afford added to the world. That doesn't help them.
No matter how many of these luxury apartment buildings you build, these people can't afford the rent. The owners of the buildings would seemingly rather see them sit at quarter occupancy than lower rents, and it's kind of understandable.
We're drowning in unaffordable housing and people are still homeless.
The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unrestricted space to develop a couple miles away in the next town.
It's a tough problem.
This makes sense to me, and I hear it all the time, but when was it ever in a builder's interest to make affordable housing? Why does this perverse incentive seem like a recent thing?
And to say "just build so much that supply > demand and prices will drop" doesn't work, because private developers won't build housing they can't make a tidy profit on.
So no hate to the author but this feels like pointless political posturing
You might be interested in this podcast Bad Faith: Episode 478 - The Abundance Conspiracy (w/ Sandeep Vaheesan, Isabella Weber, & Aaron Regunberg)
Episode webpage: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130189560
Sometimes the need to overcomplicate is itself irrational.
Why must the solution involve more than that?
Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.
Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.
I think a more common situation is that they are on the street because they are unstable, but being on the street makes it much worse.
See e.g. https://www.statista.com/chart/32585/change-in-median-rent-a...
The actual materials cost of a house, you can build one for $60k no problem and absolute shit-tons of cheap land near jobs (ex: unemployment extremely low in the Dakotas, cheap land, high demand for homeless-tier labor in the fields in bumfucklandia as ICE deports illegals making farmers desperate for anybody).
You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.
Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?
I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.
This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.
I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.
As far as going somewhere else, the problem is accessibility of resources for the unhoused. Many municipalities don't like the idea of random people going to their town and using the benefits from that town, you have to have lived in that town for many years and ostensibly contributed taxes while you were able to work. So if you were previously housed in LA/NYC, your best bet to getting services is to stay there because having been housed there previously gets you moved up on the list for housing.
- not have any family
- not have any friends
- not have any savings
- not have anything they could sell
- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?
This is largely true [0].
> - not have any savings
Americans basically don't have savings; median is $8k [1]. People of color save less, as do people in urban areas, as do poorer people [2], all of which is in line with who is more likely to be homeless.
> - not have anything they could sell
If you think about what one might go through on the path to foreclosure or eviction, you probably sell/lose a lot of things trying to keep your home. Maybe selling your car bought you a few months, maybe you needed it for your job(s) and it got repossessed. There are a lot of circumstances where this can happen: a partner dying, moving out to avoid intimate partner violence, health care costs, etc. This is a "slowly and then all at once" type of thing.
> - not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
Most of the time they're already working; 53% of homeless and 40% of unsheltered homeless are employed [3].
> - Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
Moving is very expensive in both a time and money sense:
- find time to pack
- find a new place
- maybe find a new job(s)
- put down deposits on everything
- purchase packing supplies
- either hire movers or do it yourself (if you're able)
- find time to move
- find time to unpack
This might seem like a ridiculous and petty list, but when you have very little time and money you think like this. It's also super stressful to think like this.
> - Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
US/US State social programs have huge paperwork burdens, onerous anti-fraud requirements, and don't even give you enough money to make rent after all that (the frenzied shouts of "housing subsidies?! do you want housing prices to get even higher?!" are responsible here, also--as always--a healthy amount of racism).
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#:~:text=Most%2...
[1]: https://archive.ph/pOOk1 (MarketWatch)
[2]: https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/how-where-you-l...
[3]: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...
Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).
Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.
The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.
Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.
There is a well demonstrated and strong correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. There are absolutely cases where the root cause is pre-existing mental health issues or substance abuse but it is simply not true to say that housing costs are rarely the problem.
Further, homelessness can cause substance abuse and mental health issues. So even if you can look at somebody today and say "wow that person has a massive addiction to meth and clearly just giving them a roof won't solve everything" this does not mean that the reason they became homeless in the first place was a substance addiction.
Building more housing will not solve all homelessness. Frankly, so what? Almost no problem on the planet is solved by a single thing. It'll solve a substantial portion of homelessness. That's still good.
This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.
For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.
Normally when we talk about “humanizing” a problem it’s one that doesn’t have a directly visible human element. But everyone has seen actual homeless people. It’s not something that we are just aware of as an abstract problem.
What exactly is the cultural barrier to seeing what ought to be very obvious? I.e. that homeless people are regular people who are down on their luck, or who are victims of broader societal failings.
This cultural background makes it very easy for people to look at their own lives and see their successes as their own work, and their failures as bad luck—but then look at other people's lives and see both success and failure as being 100% a product of their own deserving. (When in reality, everyone's successes and failures are a blend of luck and merit, with a pretty heavy emphasis on the luck, especially the luck of what family you were born into.)
It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.
Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.
It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.
Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.
https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...
As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).
https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...
I'm saying of sound mind not as pejorative to be clear but I think for most people of "sound mind" they could figure something out that's not living on the streets (getting roommates, moving somewhere cheaper etc)
Remember that 25% of unauthorized immigrants live in California, mostly in the south. Last year, California made them eligible for Medicaid for health care (MediCal). It probably is attractive that people there can get health care and providers can get reimbursed.
People do live in LA, and they expect to be able to do things like shop at a grocery store and buy their coffee at a Starbucks.
Therefore, there's a need for people to work at such jobs.
If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA, that means there's a structural problem that needs to be solved, one way or another, and individual choices (like "I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.
This is one of the key underlying problems that doesn't get enough attention. And the current Admin's policies are only making it worse.
There's a huge gap between "I can't afford to buy a $700,000 house" and "I live on the streets" though. Renting is an option, renting (or buying) and having room mates is an option. Not living in Beverly Hills is an option etc.
> I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.
I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is. People want to be a hair stylist in LA instead of North Dakota because of the high population density and general wealthiness of the population. During covid, we saw an exodus of people out of the HCoL areas *because* the "non essential" jobs they relied on also moved out (not clear which came first, but the point remains). So generally yeah, if you can't get your hair cut in LA because all the stylists moved out of the city, you'll either commute, or move where everyone else did (which I guess is gentrification in a nutshell)
Either way. I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here
The bulk of homelessness is a housing problem [0]. Per-capita rates are the highest in the most expensive places to live. This isn't because homeless people migrate to the places w/ the best homelessness programs either: they're largely long-term residents of their cities [1]. Homelessness is increasing because incomes are not keeping up with housing costs [2]. Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%. While severe illness can lead to homelessness, it also works the other way around [3]. There are many homeless families, often headed by women but many are also "intact" families [4]. People of color are also dramatically overrepresented: Black Americans are 13% of the population but 40% of the homeless [5]. It's hard to imagine Black Americans are 3x more likely to have severe mental illness or addiction problems.
I think it's pretty conclusively a housing cost problem. Maybe not entirely, maybe not everywhere, but it does seem like we'd take care of most of the problem in most places by bringing down housing costs.
(n.b. the NIH book source is from 1988, but I found most of its basic findings were corroborated by more recent sources)
[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex....
[2]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[3]: https://community.solutions/research-posts/the-costs-and-har...
[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex...
[5]: https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/raci...
Which is to say a family who lost their home and is living with a friend while supportive housing services is getting them accomodations is considered as 'homeless' as the crazy man who sleeps under the bridge and exposed himself to young girls.
Everyone is supportive of the former and by and large this group is helped and gets housed.
The latter... No one needs that
In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.
It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas
Sure, this is what I'm talking about when I say there is a gradient. But for argument sake/illustrative purposes though - what would housing have to cost to end homeless? And bonus question - what would zoning laws have to look like to get to this price?
I imagine the answer would have to be "free" but we know for a fact that wouldn't end homelessness because homeless shelters exist that cost $0 and homelessness still exists (yes, even where there isn't overcrowding).
And sure yes, I'm sure there are people that are hanging on by their finger nails - if rent goes up $100/m they'd have to live in their cars but I'm skeptical that zoning law reform is the thing that's going to save them (or end homelessness as the OP suggests)
I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.
While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.
Maybe in the US it is about building houses, but at some point it isn't anymore. I once wrote this here: [0]
Starting a new home construction in a location with falling housing prices isn't an obviously winning business strategy.
Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.
What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.
It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".
Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.
I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.
Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%.
I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth
I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.
Ideally you want the only competition for housing land to be multiple humans wishing to live there. The homogenity of human wants and needs will ensure you don't get ridiculously unpredictable outcomes. You will also benefit from network effects.
However, BlackRocks use for land is completely different. So many things stop mattering when the land is being pieced up and the risk distributed to a million retirement accounts.
Over-financialisation hurts the intended use of scarce resources. Today, no human has the ability to consider it important owning independent personal access to scarce resources such as farmland and water bodies. Similarly, I predict, people will be forced to stop wanting personal housing land. When, is the question.
Will the same happen for housing? Everyone starts out naturally "short" one unit of housing. To gain housing, you can rent or buy it. Buying it puts you "even" in the same way as above: your ownership and your usage is in balance.
I don't see the factor that would cause people to stop wanting personal housing land.
People living in their cars is a kind of shadow population that is almost impossible to count. I lived in a small-ish town with literally a handful of the type of homelessness we normally think of, yet at least once per month I would see someone getting gas that was clearly living in their car, and this was at a really cheap gas station nowhere near the interstate, so it was locals who knew where to get gas.
Sweetheart, I don’t expect you to pick up a hammer and some nails nevermind build a home.
dkga•5h ago