"Dumping ground" implies other places did this to CA, which isn't substantiated by the article. As it says, the vast majority of CA homeless are from within the state.
In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.
I'm really not convinced that high housing costs accurately depict the source of the homelessness problem in CA. If it does, it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see.
Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be benefited by lower housing prices.
These people could not afford nor likely ever would afford, a house that cost literally anything. Most of these people suffer from a mental illness and/or a drug addiction which makes holding down a job unlikely to ever happen. What they need is publicly funded mental health hospitals, like the ones that were destroyed in the 80s.
Of course high housing costs are a huge problem, but I just don't think they tell the whole story when it comes to CA homelessness. There's an elephant in the room that far too many people don't want to address. It's the aforementioned population of people who either can't or won't work and the solution we have for them right now is the street.
> it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see.
What you see is highly unrepresentative of homelessness.
You never see the people trying to scrape by in their cars. You never see the people couch surfing. You never see the people struggling but also struggling to not be known as homeless.
Because once you hit that position of being clearly homeless in appearance, all sorts of doors slam shut and getting out of homelessness is an order of magnitude harder.
And being in the precarious state of being homeless, but still fully functional, makes it all the harder to get to jobs on time, harder to protect any assets, harder to keep clean and not look homeless. And all that takes a huge toll on a person's psyche, and that extended stress can bring up mental issues that would have been completely manageable without the additional stress of not having a home base to run all the essential parts of life.
For every clearly homeless person you see, with severe mental issues, there are easily 5-20 that you would never know are homeless without following them around and seeing that they don't go back to an apartment at night.
And this all comes down to housing costs. For all the people we kick off the economic ladder, that run out of money for housing and don't have enough to move to a cheaper area, they are left in a very difficult spot, with little way to get back into housing. I've known people in my town that have been willing to put down 6 months of rent, or even 12, ahead of time, and been unable to land an apartment lease. Even market rate housing has lines that go out the door, and more applicants than the landlord knows what to do with.
The investigations and surveys I have seen on the subject suggest that the homeless population you are describing makes up a minority of the overall homeless population. It is something in the range of 30%-50% depending on the source (it is notoriously difficult to get accurate numbers on homeless populations).
Your anecdote is a classic form of bias if you just take a step back and reexamine it. You identify most homeless people as being like that because those are the people you immediately recognize as being homeless. Someone who is homeless purely due to the high cost of housing probably isn't immediately identifiable as homeless on sight.
California already has a 1% income tax allocated just to mental health, and has collected $7.4 billion so far just from this tax[0]. How is that working?
Our government, either through corruption or incompetence, can somehow manage to spend billions in tax payer dollars with very little to show for it.
When I advocate for something like a mental health program, it assumes a government which is functional enough to actually implement it. What we currently have here in CA couldn't be further from that.
Correcting myself: California has corrected $7.4 billion _as of 2011_, after only six years of operation.
Note that the tax is not indexed to inflation: already, the million-dollar threshold is worth only $715k in 2005 dollars. After another ~17 years at 2% inflation, the same tax will be charged on earners of $500k+ in 2005 dollars.
The piece mentions Single-Room Occupancies (SROs), which used to be where a lot of people in similar situations would live.
I agree that this doesn't solve the problem for everyone, and there's also a place for publicly funded mental health hospitals. But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
> But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
I beg to differ. I've spent significant time around what could be broadly categorized as "the homeless" in California, specifically in LA and OC, over the last 13 years. As recently as 3 days ago, I was searching for a mentally ill and homeless family member in LA. Last I heard he was on the coast, but I wasn't able to find anyone who knew or had seen him. This is an annual or bi-annual occurrence for me. Sure I'm not out there every day, but I feel as though I am competent on the subject. I certainly have more time in rank than most people that speak up on this one.
If you offered an SRO to most of the people that I've come across in the last 10 years, they'd tell you to go fuck yourself.
Many of them prefer their perceived freedom living on the street vs. being placed into a living situation they didn't chose. In the handful of cases I am familiar with, including my brother in law, it's owed to untreated/neglected/self-medicated mental illness that manifests itself as a deep paranoia and distrust of authority types.
I agree with you, and I love what the Finnish are doing on multiple fronts, but I don't think you're going to learn too much by comparing Finland to the United States.
"But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice."
There is a difference between the technically "homeless" and the visibly homeless who camp out on sidewalks etc. which is what most people are talking about when the "homeless problem" is mentioned.
Handful of interesting/data-driven organizations in the Bay Area dispel exactly this. It was eye opening to me to attend some of their public events where they run through their data.
> But I also don't think everyone who is currently homeless in CA is in as bad shape as the ones you most notice.
The low hanging fruit is usually picked first. So let’s focus on picking the low hanging fruit if we aren’t already (they might already do a good job here), while the chronic homeless problems will be tough to solve.
High housing costs aren't the totality of what OP is talking about. Zoning laws prohibiting construction of lower cost housing options make alternatives in a given locale unobtainable, regardless of cost. This is done to protect the valuation of SFHs, often enough. Designating districts as 'historic' or zoning shenanigans can do this. It's fundamentally a NIMBY problem, which is very different than the issue of regulatory burden for construction (environmental assessments, permitting, etc.). Both of these factors contribute to the problem though.
You do need to own a house to suffer the consequences of bad zoning policies, if owning prices go up, rent goes up as well.
Not to mention that when owning prices are high, there’s a bigger incentive for local governments to use every opportunity to help other people who might not need as much help but have more consistent voting habits
If one of your top complaints about the homeless is that they poop (an unavoidable bodily function you might be familiar with), then I'm not sure I trust your judgment about policy matters.
I took a greyhound across the south west in the early 90s. The bus would stop at each prison along the way from Texas on, everyone that got on was going to LA where they could live rough.
Whenever they do these investigations of how many of the chronic homeless are local or imported problems, they ask questions like “where did you become homeless?” (Crashing on a friends couch doesn’t count) and always avoid the question “when did you move here?” (So someone moving in a year ago to make it big and became homeless 3 months in would count as a local also).
They did a study in Seattle that found that most of the homeless there were previously housed in Seattle, but also that most were housed in … pioneer square. That would be like someone in LA saying they were last housed in skid row.
Regulatory burden doesn’t help, but I don’t think you should overlook the superabundance of cheap credit as a causal factor. If goods can be purchased with money borrowed far below market rate (like a mortgage) because rates are not determined by a profit motive (ie political or social-engineering reasons), then the long term effect is inflation of said good’s cost. You see this same phenomenon in higher education (subsidized). You do not see it in automobiles (to my knowledge, there are no direct subsidies for auto loans).
“The bay” has a particularly close proximity to cheap money for reasons so numerous they deserve their own book.
California largely has weather that you can survive outdoor in year round and social programs that provide for and policies that show empathy for homelessness.
I believed this when I lived in California. Now I’m not so sure: it is true that people without shelter can easily die in much of the country, but California isn’t the only place with mild winters. Why don’t Arizona, New Mexico, large parts of Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, etc. have the same problem?
Assuming that California will just naturally have a larger homeless population than everywhere else means that nobody will spend much effort trying to solve the problem. Is it possible that California is just unusually bad when it comes to handling homelessness?
Coastal California is typically cooler than all of the states you mentioned in summer and warmer in einter. The other states have their own homeless populations- even Minneapolis get encampments that last into winter- but none are as favorable to outdoor survival and comfort as the southern Pacific Coast.
Also, california spends much more than all of the other states on providing assistance to the homeless, and is far more tolerant of bad behavior (public drug use, drunkeness, defecation, etc).
California isn't bad at handling the homeless so much as it is bad at getting the homeless to become housed, mentally and financially stable.
I think its the second part of the last sentence you missed. California has empathetic social services. But also 4 of those states have harsh summers. Some just have small populations in general. The biggest city in alabama has only 200k people. California has multiple major city areas
Honest question: Are you claiming that "liberal" has something to do with it?
If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this. If so, maybe you can elaborate on what you mean. Are there non-liberal high-cost cities in the US in a better state? Furthermore, it's worth noting that the other high-cost cities worldwide almost universally seem to have more left-leaning (or US liberal) policies on most issues than most high-cost cities in the US. I'm not sure I see the connection between the political alignment and the state of decay, homelessness, and crime in high-cost cities.
Look at that graph and then ask yourself what changed in 2013. Hint, 1994-2001 they had a republican mayor. 2002-2013 they had a moderate republican who turned into a moderate democrat. And 2014 - now they've had a radical progressive.
In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.