Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding
This is unfortunately all too true.
A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.
If no housing is built that’s good for landlords and property owners as rents and property prices rise. If no (affordable) housing is built in an area with strong economic growth that’s good for fundraising of some charities as the problem gets worse.
No economic incentive, more of a sense of responsibility to society and some nationalism. look at the UAE where the incentive is more political or for prestige.
Wait how is raising housing prices responsible for society or nationalistic? Shafting the youth, turning them against the system and reducing their economic output, seems the opposite.
Across the entire country, Finland had 3x fewer homeless people at its worst than San Francisco the city does. The problem is of such different magnitudes that it's unlikely Finland has much to teach.
And Finland is a country so there are less regional differences in policymaking. And Finland doesn't have balkanized healthcare systems. And Finland doesn't have suburban land use that sets a high minimum cost to participating in society. And Finland doesn't have open borders with Republican states which openly advertise that they bus indigent migrants with no work permits to sanctuary cities.
Science works best when you have controls that let you measure the consequences of changes precisely. Saying that results from a Nordic social democracy probably don't apply to a city with no administrative capacity and machine politics is not controversial. It's the null hypothesis!
> Republican states which openly advertise that they bus indigent migrants with no work permits to sanctuary cities.
Oh, those stupid Republicans! I can't believe they would ever send illegal immigrants that voluntarily want to go to a sanctuary city that has been proclaiming themselves as a safe harbor for criminals for over a decade, to said sanctuary city! Oh, the horror and atrocity!
The only reason the border is wide open is because we don't have sufficient border walls and border enforcement, all of which sanctuary city democrats have opposed and voted against.
If your going to go political, you probably should've just pointed to the open border problem, not target Republicans. But it's obvious whose causing an open border right now.
> The only reason the border is wide open is because we don't have sufficient border walls and border enforcement,
The bottleneck at the border is not physically policing the border, but the fact that migrants have learned to work the legal system by filing asylum requests. So the solution is legal reform, not building more walls. The 2023 border reform bill would have enforced a mandatory cap on the number of asylum requests processed (not just granted, but processed at all). Any migrant asking for asylum after that cap would have been turned away immediately.
> But it's obvious whose causing an open border right now.
I wouldn't say it's clear at all. It's true that the Democrats have historically turned a blind eye to the border. But over the past 12 months: First the GOP leadership said they wouldn't pass border reform unless it was bundled with Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan funding, then said they wouldn't pass border reform until it was unbundled, then they brought the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan funding back to the floor but not the unbundled border reform bill. For the first time in a generation, there were enough Democratic votes to pass significant border reform, and the GOP votes simultaneously vanished into thin air.
The vast majority of illegal immigration happens through legal ports of entry. Usually individuals just over stay a tourist visa.
Republicans have rejected the recent bipartisan board deal that would fund hundreds of new boarder patrol agents, and immigration ALJs to expand enforcement and processing capacity at the boarder. All because daddy Trump wants there to be a border crisis because it's a good election issue for him to run on.
Republicans don't care about governing, they just care about winning.
I made no value judgment about Republicans. That was your projection. The primary cause of border issues is dysfunction in the Senate that prevents asylum laws from being improved.
No I pointed out a list of ways Finland was different from San Francisco so we should not naively assume data from there should generalize. It’s not cherry picked since it was one in a long list of ways the two are different.
Street homelessness in San Francisco has little to do with immigration, and family homelessness has little to do with illegal immigration (families from South America are largely claiming asylum through the legal process).
HN is not the right forum for sports-team red vs blue politics, and that kind of mentality is not good for our nation as a whole. We are all one nation.
Then the OP shouldn't blame the issues sanctuary cities face on Republican states. If illegal immigration is a problem for sanctuary cities, then that is what should be said.
It's not red vs blue to point out an attempt to shift blame on Republican governors.
I was not assigning blame. I was making a factual statement that San Francisco’s recent increase is family homelessness is largely due to bussing policies of Republican run border states. Asylum applicants are in the United States legally while their claims are processed, so the status of sanctuary city has nothing to do with the treatment of asylum applicants. Non-sanctuary cities would treat these applicants in the same way.
Practically, to earn income in most parts of America, you need to own a car and pay rent on a single family home. That is a $800-$1000 additional expense versus living in a micro-studio and taking transit to work.
For someone on the margins, that is a huge and often insurmountable price of entry. Many can make do by, e.g., being housemates in a larger home to reduce the minimum expense. Folks on the margins are often not able to find others willing to live with them.
So... Finland, exactly, right? I assume that you already know that Finland is huge but only has a population of ~5.5M. Except for central Helsinki, the entire country is suburban or rural. I'll offer a counterpoint that people rarely consider: Most of the populated land in Japan in rural. Many people who live more than 50km from a major city drive. Almost all people who live 100km from a major city have 2x cars in their home. This shocks many people. Please stop assuming that the US is special or amazing. It has pockets of very dense cities and the rest is mostly suburban or rural... like other highly advanced countries in Europe or East Asia.
Most people in advanced countries are rich and can choose expensive lifestyles, but that has little to do with the options afforded to those who aren’t.
If you're going to take the moral stand against the way border states handle their illegal migrants publicly and derisively while simultaneously declaring yourself as a safe haven for those migrants, you probably shouldn't be surprised when those states call your bluff.
That does not really describe what’s happening. The fix for asylum laws being abused is legislative, and in the last year fixes have been scuttled by Republican legislators.
Sanctuary city laws are pretty reasonable policy statements about when a city cooperates in deporting illegal immigrants who may otherwise be law abiding. This makes perfect sense as a policy when you operate in an immigration regime that makes legal immigration infeasible for all kinds of necessary labor, from farm workers to domestic help and even high skilled IT.
If Texas wanted to call California’s bluff on housing policy, it would also reject the middle and high income households moving to the Triangle from high housing cost California suburbs. But it’s not principled when it comes to that — their money is welcomed! Heck, even the Florida model where they check if businesses are indeed employing legal workers in labor intensive industries like construction would be a more faithful enactment of law and order values with respect to immigration. Anything short of that is its own form of sheltering.
I'm not really making a policy criticism of any of it really. I'm just saying, if you're going to publicly antagonize someone about they way they do something and imply your way is the enlightened way to score political points, don't be surprised when those people find a way to call your bluff, publicly.
Trucking migrants to sancutary cities has changed people's minds.
No, forcefully moving people around has not changed any minds and
> publicly antagonize someone about they way they do something and imply your way is the enlightened way to score political points, don't be surprised when those people find a way to call your bluff
Not sure how you frame a political stunt as a moral comeuppance.
> No, forcefully moving people around has not changed any minds
I disagree. I've seen poling and heard numerous stories of citizens of sanctuary cites that were not border cites and have a very negligible issue with illegal migration suddenly having to deal with it first that shows that trucking migrants has moved the needle.
> Not sure how you frame a political stunt as a moral comeuppance.
Dozens of stories in whatever news media you consume has nothing to do with whether there are serious policy conversations about revisiting sanctuary city laws in those cities.
"Changing minds" is what I said, not changing policy.
> Q. 26 Do you think New Yorkers should accept new migrants and work to assimilate them into New York, or New Yorkers have
already done enough for new migrants and should now work to slow the flow of migrants to New York? (Order of choices was
rotated.)
> DATE | ACCEPT/ASSIMILATE | SLOW THE FLOW | DON’T KNOW/NO OPINION
> Dozens of stories in whatever news media you consume has nothing to do with whether there are serious policy conversations about revisiting sanctuary city laws in those cities.
Ha, is AP news up to your standards[1]? How about a direct quote from the Mayor of New York City?
> Citing his “fundamental disagreement” with those laws, [Mayor] Adams, a Democrat, said the city’s police department should be free to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when a person is suspected of a serious crime, such as robbery or gang activity.
You can dislike it all you want but bussing immigrants has had a major effect on people's opinions in the sanctuary cities they are bussed to.
That was not the logic of my comment, and it seems like you didn't try very hard to consider what I meant. For example: the "interesting and thoughtful" article linked describes Finland's "Housing First" model adopted in 2008. Guess what: Housing First was first introduced as a policy idea in San Francisco in 1994, adopted as de facto city policy about ten years after that, and set as statewide policy in California ten years later. Ten years later, the problem is worse than ever!
Perhaps Finland and California are different enough that looking to Finland as a policy playground is a waste of time. This isn't physics; it's political economy.
Adopting policies is one thing, but is SF actually giving housing first to the homeless? Because my rough understanding is that the answer to that is "no".
Depends what you mean. All the subsidized housing available is operated under the housing first model with no sobriety requirement. Is there sufficient housing on offer? Clearly not. But SF expanded subsidized housing inventory substantially during the pandemic and has more such inventory than basically any other west coast city.
For political reasons having to do with the NPIC, the city does not invest much in shelter beds. So it’s a $750k-$1m apartment or bust.
There was no bad faith reasoning in my original comment. I, pretty evidently, understand the history of Housing First better than you do and am still convinced policy outcomes in Finland aren't very informative to San Francisco because the societies and challenges are very different.
Us is deeply anti social at the heart. The original reason it got away with it was the American dream aka upward mobility. That is dead for two generations now, and it has developed a corresponding "anti-system" movement the society refused to acknowledge and deal with beyond declaring them "deplorables". The day the leader dies, such movements are up for grabs and can spin on the proverbial ideological dime. Maga will go sendero, but there was just nothing to be done.
I don't really buy this doomerism. The USA passed the biggest COVID safety net, in absolute and relative terms. It's still one of the best countries to get ahead. Most of its problems are not framed through grand narratives about decline. They're more pedestrian issues related to mechanisms like common law, a dysfunctional Senate and two party system, and replacement of state capacity with nonprofits (as this article poorly discusses).
California also gets at least one countries worth of homeless shipped to it BECAUSE of the resources it provides (And political spite). This is the bad Nash Equilibrium in action, being punished for improving the situation.
Homelessness, especially in places such as the SF Bay Area, really doesn't boil down to just affordability. Yes, there are some folks who just faced economic headwinds and are living in a car while trying to find a way out. But there is also a huge population of people who couldn't function if given keys to a free apartment.
For one, drugs won the war on drugs, addiction is a big part of the problem, and we don't really know how to fix it; harsh punishments don't work, quasi-decriminalization isn't a success, and treatment for people who don't want to be helped is hard. We also don't like to institutionalize people anymore, so folks with severe mental illness often end up on the streets too.
I can’t speak for general solutions, but at least one portion of the addicted just have chronic pain; were prescribed extremely strong and addictive painkillers (as the only thing that would work!); and then got cut off from the medical system.
These people try and try to solve their debilitating chronic pain problem (which they still have, and likely will always have) through increasingly-desperate and illegal measures; and go through many harrowing things due almost solely of the illegality of acquiring these same drugs outside of medical channels: the difficulties of finding a source and potential for arrest; the income-eating expense (no insurance to cover costs, plus 10x risk markup); the heightened spike-dose addictiveness of street forms of these drugs, that leads to a quick fiending withdrawal and need to redose, leading in turn to loss of employment due to spending all your time on the street hunting for the next dose; and of course, the unpredictable dosing and potential for adulteration, leading into high potential for OD.
Most of this particular problem can (and in some trials, has!) been solved just by prescribing these people the drugs they need again. When you go from unpredictably doing random shots of freebase heroin/fentanyl/etc with a dirty needle alone in an alley, back to predictably being able to get precisely-dosed extended-release pills from a pharmacy and take them on a set schedule, a lot of “addict behaviors” for these chronic-pain “addicts” just evaporate.
This is definitely a problem. Turns out once you start getting to the "going to destroy your liver / stomach" levels of NSAIDs and Tylenol, there really isn't anything other than opioids for pain management. Unfortunately the war on drugs and America's latent puritan streak means that since some people in some places use opioids to get high, then all uses of opioids should be avoided whenever possible, and when they are used, they should only be used grudgingly and with extreme skepticism of the person receiving them. Surely nothing will be better for the health of an individual than barely managing their condition, constantly forcing them to stop effective treatment to make sure they're not growing tolerant of the medication and treating them as only slightly more trustworthy than a criminal conman.
Sure, opioids are addictive, and you might find yourself in a situation where you're stuck on them for life and that's not great. And ultimately we have to ask "so what?" There are many conditions and medications that are lifelong and we don't treat the patients or their conditions the same way. Imagine telling a person taking SSRIs that they can't have a higher dosage because they're getting "tolerant" of the medication. Imagine telling a diabetes patient that you're not going to give them metformin or insulin because they might be on it for life. There are huge amounts of chronic conditions for which the ongoing treatments suck and have a lot of negative side effects, but living with the condition un-treated is worse than the negative side effects. Chronic pain (and the conditions causing that pain) seem to be the only category that we don't accept the possibility of long term negative consequences as the price of dealing with the chronic condition.
And the hell of it is, I agree with concerns about pill mills. My family that has had to deal with this has had to deal with pill mills too. And it's bad just having higher and higher doses thrown at you. I agree that treatment needs to include more than just escalating opioid doses. But those same family members that were stuck in a pill mill were there for years longer than they needed to be because finding a way out was nearly impossible. If you want to change pain management doctors, 99% of them will not prescribe you opioids on your first visit. But you likely have a contract with your current pain doctor that says you won't go to other doctors for pain medications, so you can't see a different doctor while getting pain management from your current doctor. Then even if you could get them to prescribe your medications, they almost all want to start you from zero again. Imagine you want to change heart doctors but before they will treat you they want you to stop all your heart medications for a few months so that they can "get a baseline" for your condition. That would be an insane thing to ask for any other chronic condition, and yet that's a common thing to be asked of pain patients all the time.
Overall as a society we're terrible at dealing with the concept of a chronic condition. We don't really grok the idea that some folks just won't ever "get better", and our entire system is set up to assume you will. The sad reality is some people are going to be in constant pain for their entire lives, and there's nothing we can do to stop that from being the case. Restricting these people from being able to safely access treatments to manage that pain because they might get addicted is misguided, cruel and missing the forest for the trees.
> Unfortunately the war on drugs and America's latent puritan streak means that since some people in some places use opioids to get high, then all uses of opioids should be avoided
Where were you the last 30 years? This comment sounds like you fell into a time warp from 1988.
True the recent shift is itself reactionary and with its own problems, but this one isn’t because of Nancy Reagan.
American Puritanism would also not explain having the highest rates of opioid prescriptions of peer GDP/capita nations in the world.
> there really isn't anything other than opioids for pain management.
1. Not true. 2. There are plenty of cases where opioids are ineffective just the same as NSAIDs/Tylenol.
> We don't really grok the idea that some folks just won't ever "get better"
Yes, we do. If your oncologist doesn’t prescribe you appropriate analgesia or refer you to a palliative care practitioner then find a new one.
> and our entire system is set up to assume you will.
This is one of the more unusual and unhinged takes I’ve ever heard in this era of diabetes, A-fib and COPD medications advertised on TV and every street corner (none of which are curative).
The vast majority of non surgical medicine is about chronic disease management. Medical cures are the exception.
> The sad reality is some people are going to be in constant pain for their entire lives
The sad reality is that the medical industry was complicit in causing unnecessary suffering due to the legitimized medicalized misuse of opioids and this is the aftermath.
>True the recent shift is itself reactionary and with its own problems, but this one isn’t because of Nancy Reagan.
>American Puritanism would also not explain having the highest rates of opioid prescriptions of peer GDP/capita nations in the world.
I would argue that a non-puritan society would look at concerning rates of recreational opioid use and abuse and try to solve the underlying problems that are driving people into that instead of treating them as criminals for their choice of dug to abuse and putting policies and laws in place that make legal medical access to opioids increasingly ridiculously convoluted and scaring doctors away from prescribing them. That puritan streak is what underlies the societal revulsion to "drug addicts" and reacts with an attitude of "cut them off". It's what makes society view addiction as a moral failing on the addicts part, and it contributes to a lack of resources and help for people looking to escape that addiction. Sure if you're extra wealthy you could check yourself into a hollywood rehab center, but for the rest of us lowly schmucks, your average local rehab centers are cold places that will do the bare minimum to make sure you don't die, and then throw you back out into the world with no more resources or support than you had before, to face the same problems that drove you to your addictions again.
Or one could also look at the media and public reaction to Perdue's support for the concept of "pseudo-addiction". While the media and public mock this as laughable at best and dangerous overpromotion of drugs at worst, there's nothing unreasonable about the concept at all. The idea is really simple, that perhaps some people who exhibit addiction behaviors like "taking more pain medications than prescribed", "focus on when they can take their next dose", "moaning or vocalizing in pain", "demanding specific medications", "seeking to keep a extra supply" might not be addicts but might actually be - you know - in pain (due to an inadequate treatment regimen). And that seems obvious right? Like if you had someone who was being given say, 200 mg of ibuprofen every 6 hours for a broken leg, you might expect them to do some or all of those things right? I know I certainly would. And yet, switch from ibuprofen to opioids and all of a sudden people think this is ridiculous.
> 1. Not true
Fair enough, I should have say there isn't "much", and the things there are can have plenty of their own bad side effects even if they aren't "addictive". Steroids would be an option. Long term use of which can among other things raise your blood sugar contributing to diabetes, increase your chances of getting infections, increase osteoporosis, increase bruising and slow healing in general. Anti-epileptics can help if your pain is specifically nerve pain, and anti-depressants can help in some cases too, though again with their own non-insubstantial risks.
> Yes, we do. If your oncologist doesn’t prescribe you appropriate analgesia or refer you to a palliative care practitioner then find a new one.
Anyone with a chronic and disabling medical condition could probably give you a book worth of experiences where doctors, co-workers, family and friends became increasingly exasperated or frustrated by the fact that they do not in fact get better and continue to require accommodations. I'd also point out there are other conditions that cause high levels of chronic pain that aren't cancer and aren't terminal. Getting palliative care (or even someone to understand that you need palliative care that isn't also end of life care) in those circumstances is an uphill battle to say the least.
> The vast majority of non surgical medicine is about chronic disease management. Medical cures are the exception.
And one need only participate in any discussion about modern medicine and care to see how much people are against the idea of lifetime medications and treatment. See also recent sturm und drang over Wegovy for treating obesity. Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be "if you don't have a specific set of well recognized 'incurable' conditions, our society and medical system is set up to assume you will get better". It's especially bad if you have slow and largely "invisible" disabilities. My family member that had to deal with the pill mill doctor was in that situation because they were being passed from doctor to doctor to doctor all of them wanting something that some other could treat to "get better" first before they wanted to do anything. And the pill mill doctor was no different, kept throwing more pills at them until "your condition improves and then we can look at other options". It took us nearly 6 years to finally put together an actual team of doctors that were interested in coordinating and understood that this wasn't ever going to go away and that treatment was going to mean sometimes one thing or another would get worse while the other aspect was treated.
>The sad reality is that the medical industry was complicit in causing unnecessary suffering due to the legitimized medicalized misuse of opioids and this is the aftermath.
And how many thousands or millions of others will be put through more unnecessary suffering in our reactionary spasms of guilt in this aftermath? How many lives will we lose to suicide because the alternative is facing a life of poorly managed pain and being treated like a criminal for trying to get treatment? How many people will be drive to ever increasingly desperate measures to obtain illegal pain medications as their options for legal paths are closed or made more and more unworkable? How many people will we leave in pain because they "might get addicted" as if being addicted to a tolerated but effective medication is the worse then being in disabling levels of pain? How many innocent people will we allow to suffer, because we are unable or unwilling to punish only the guilty?
You completely extinguish the patient (and population) safety issue over some mealy mouthed allusion to American Puritanism while completely just ignoring unaddressed the main counter that most other industrialized nations never matched the high level of opioid uses or its skyrocketing growth in the 90s.
which in addition to hawking a number of questionable co-opted concepts is literally stating the equivalent of “risk of death from automobile ejection is now super low these days therefore seatbelts must not be necessary”, which is ballsy to put out there (or not so much if you’re retired).
This and your wall also just completely ignores the diversion issue. Ibuprofen may have harms but no one is selling it for $20 a pill or more to people that end up dead. The methods to avoid it at the end of the chain are laughably terrible, annoying or even harmful to legitimate users and not an impediment at all to diverters.
This is a complex medico-ethical-legal and public health issue, "hurr durr, those nasty right wing puritans" is uselessly reductionist.
Wrong on all points. The places with the most addicts (W. Virginia) have the least homelessness (W. Virginia again). There really isn't any more too it than supply and demand. The only reasons that is seems like all homeless are addicts are 1) only a small fraction of homeless are obviously homeless, and 2) addicts are less able to cope with high housing costs. But that's a marginal effect; plenty of drug abuse happens within the community of housed people.
> The only reasons that is seems like all homeless are addicts are...
The Point in Time count data indicate the vast majority of homeless people have issues with drug abuse. A substantial majority of those also have dual diagnoses.
Maybe you are trying to argue that drug abuse is not sufficient, or something, but you have not brought that nuance. The OP is more correct than you: drug abuse has a large role to play in the street homelessness of San Francisco.
(An alternative view: if rents were the primary causal factor, then why is the problem substantially worse than a decade ago when San Francisco rents peaked? Why did the problem get so much worse during COVID when nonpayment evictions were held for many years and low income renters got billions in cash transfers, increasing their aggregate income while rents dropped?)
Maybe you are trying to argue that drug abuse is not sufficient, or something, but you have not brought that nuance.
Millionaire rock stars go in and out of rehab repeatedly and don't end up homeless. There is no direct cause-and-effect relationship between drug abuse and homelessness. We only make that connection after the fact. I know of zero credible sources predicting homelessness based on "He's an addict! So it's inevitable!"
There are lots of problems with the stats we keep on homeless people and such people are by their very nature tough to track. There are political agendas driving how the questions get asked and the data gets framed, all of which contradicts my firsthand experience with homelessness and what I have heard for years from actual homeless people.
In a nutshell:
California has about 12 percent of the US population, 25 percent of the US homeless population and more than 50 percent of the nation's unsheltered homeless. I do not find it credible to claim these people are all "locals" and I firmly believe California is the dumping ground for the nation's homeless problem.
grapevine knowledge, but i have been told (and credibly, i think, given how adaptive humans are, and how they adapt for very specific parameters while devaluing others) that many homeless will go to great lengths to seek out new locales that seem willing to help sustain their needs without requiring wholesale change of their lifestyles. some people do indeed prefer it (or at least fear the alternative, i.e. “proper” integration into society and all that comes with that), as much as some people on this website cannot fathom that
I've seen you post here many times on this topic. I always enjoy your posts and learn something new. Thank you to share.
Your last "nutshell" paragraph: I have read similar from other sources. Deeper question: Why? My thoughts: The weather in California makes it possible to be homeless, full time (12 months a year), without shelter -- not great, but not death by freezing. What do you think? I wonder if Hawai'i and Florida also have very high proportion of homeless people for similar reasons.
Weather is absolutely a factor. It's temperate and dry in some parts of California, making it much easier to just camp in a tent than places with freezing temperatures, lots of rain and snow.
A lot of folks in Appalachia seem to live in conditions tantamount to a tent encampment. They're more spread out and not in the way of urbanites so we don't talk about it much.
I’m not sure if getting rid of the addiction would automatically make SF houses affordable. Certainly doesn’t help. But it’s also not SF’s job to house the entire nation’s homeless population.
Homeless services can’t discriminate based on previous residency, they aren’t even allowed to ask. HUD has some residency requirements, but they are only loosely enforced. A lifelong resident of SF are often competing for the same resources with ex-cons who just got off the bus after being released from prison in Texas given only an open bus ticket.
That being said, a resident of SF has many more other ways of avoiding the streets (and still be considered unhoused) vs that ex-con, so the numbers are going to be lopsided if we are just counting the visible homeless problem.
That's weird. I learned just last week that Palo Alto requires proof that you ever lived in Palo Alto with a piece of mail before they'll let you into their shelter. Also their shelter has bunk cots. not bunk beds, bunk cots, so the bottom person is inches away from the top person.
According to https://www.asaints.org/outreach/hotel-de-zink/, that is Palo Alto’s only homeless shelter and it doesn’t mention a residency requirement. It also doesn’t have the bunks you are referring to.
East Palo Alto is not the same as Palo Alto at all. I can definitely believe that is at least feasible then, although they do not list a residency requirement on their website. The only requirement is:
Must have a referral from a San Mateo County, or Santa Clara County Partner Organization to receive shelter.
They may be legally distinct, but we can agree that they're physically adjacent, and thus for someone who's unhoused in the Bay Area, they're both options on where to live. I don't think an invisible line that anybody can cross without any sort of border control really that important a distinction here.
I would never call them the same. East Palo Alto is much much poorer than Palo Alto; I think I would be laughed at when I was living in San Mateo if I ever tried to pass off a location in East Palo Alto as being in Palo Alto. One is full of Stanford kids and rich people, the other is full of poor people. Highway 101 isn’t a very invisible line.
I wouldn't call them the same either, but the context here is being unhoused in the Bay Area. I'm not, thankfully, but when I was living in PA I definitely met a few people who dropped East when referring to where they live. Anyway, it's too late to edit my original comment.
It's very unlikely that former residents (in the sense of paying for housing for extended periods of time with their own wage income) comprise a significant portion of San Francisco's street homeless.
It's possible that many frequent flyers to emergency rooms have been dumped from other communities. But most homeless people are just that, people who have lost their homes in their community. And anyway, how could it really be any different?
> with their own wage income
Of course poverty is the number one reason they are becoming homeless. Why are you talking about wage income. They have too little income. Who the hell wants to live on the street!
First of all, you cite data about Oakland when I was talking about San Francisco. The cities are different enough that it's worth noting. I will also state that I am well-informed about the matter and have few "misconceptions" in the obvious sense.
> Nearly 8 out of every 10 unhoused people in Oakland were living in Alameda County when they lost their housing.
That's not what the Point in Time count asks or tries to measure. The statistic reported is the location of last known shelter. So, as an example, someone who moves to San Leandro from Fresno to crash on a friend's couch for two weeks and then is asked to find a different place to stay would count as "living in Alameda County" for the purposes of the statistic. Another example: a longtime homeless person who has cycled in and out of shelters in the region for decades counts as "living in Alameda County" even if they first lost their home in Kern County or out of state.
> Primary Cause of Homelessness (Top five responses, Fig. 19)
This is silly data to cite. Drug use is correlated with money issues, interpersonal relationship problems, eviction, foreclosure, inability to keep a job, and more. Maybe if the survey had a multiple response design, the distribution would be relevant.
> And anyway, how could it really be any different?
Greyhound bus stations. If you’ve ever taken a bus across country before, they pick up a lot of people at prisons and they stay on until some west coast city (LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle). That accumulates, and once they stick around for at least a year, they are considered resident (for some definition of housing lost, that means even if they were housed in a hotel once, or couch surfed at the start). Surveys that rely on self reporting are incredibly inaccurate. One was done in Seattle, and found out that 80% of King county’s homeless population was previously housed in pioneer square, an absurdity that put the entire survey in doubt.
It really is in the self interest of homeless oriented agencies and NGOs to present the problem as local as possible. If it isn’t local, then giving out housing will only make the local problem worse (people will start arriving for their free housing from other areas of the country), you can judge your success by how much worse the problem gets, which isn’t popular with local voters.
Without good information, at any rate, it isn’t weird that we are seeing the problem get worse for every billion we throw at it. Eventually the popular cities will just give up trying very hard because they never had the power to fix it in the first place.
Is this some kind of joke? Do you really think people who get evicted for not paying bills automatically get sent to a different city? How do you propose your magic mechanism to send people from SF away the moment they become homeless? Someone who ends up homeless is going to stay in a place that is familiar to them.
> Do you really think people who get evicted for not paying bills automatically get sent to a different city?
When did I say that?
> How do you propose your magic mechanism to send people from SF away the moment they become homeless?
What does this have to do with anything? The vast majority of tenants evicted in San Francisco receive both legal representation and relocation fees starting at ~$7k per person and more if you claim disability, which most do.
There are ~80 nonpayment evictions in the city annually, and there were ~0 from 2020-2023.
> Someone who ends up homeless is going to stay in a place that is familiar to them.
Probably true of the average homeless person, but there are many more homeless people outside San Francisco than in it, so you only need to believe a small percentage of, say, California's homeless population ends up in the city for local homelessness to be dominated by folks who lost their last stable shelter outside the city.
It doesn’t just boil down to affordability, but how many people got down in the dumps struggling to afford their expensive apartment, got stressed out and depressed, caused relationship issues and drug use, and led to a downward spiral where they ended up in a place with severe mental illness and couldn’t function with free keys after 5 years of that?
Lack of affordable housing may be an issue, but there is a lot of opposition to a very simple solution to that. Assist the homeless in moving to a location with cheap housing. Not everyone has a right to live in the expensive area of San Francisco. If someone can't pay for housing, we don't want to forsake those people. But giving them cheap housing in a very desirable place is hard.
Unfortunately, the issue with that is that there will still be people who would prefer to live in the expensive city, even if they don't have a house.
But no state has enough affordable housing. Some states have a bigger shortage than others, but all states lack sufficient amounts of affordable housing.
> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.
Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking
I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth.
My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.
Rental also enables economic and educational mobility, and provides (some) shelter against severe economic losses that are risks when you own property. For my own part, renting enabled me to move across the country as an 18 year old for a higher education. Even if "affordable" housing could have been owned at that point in my life, I had no idea if I was going to stay in that area or move. And it turns out I did move, quite a lot. I moved almost every 1-2 years, sometimes chasing lower rent, sometimes to move closer to a new job (allowing me to save money and time on commuting). Having to sell a house or even a condo every 1-2 years would have been a nightmare at best.
And that doesn't account for all the economic risk that comes from owning property. When I was renting there was no way I would have been able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars I've had to outlay as a homeowner for everything from water main replacements, roof replacements, plumbing repairs, mold remediation and remodels, HVAC repair / replacement, appliance replacement, tree removal etc. As a renter, all of that is mandated to be repaired by your landlord. Sure, it's possible (and even likely) that your rent will go up next renewal if your landlord is outlaying $20k+ for an emergency roof replacement, but the best part of renting is you can just leave and go somewhere else. Where as if you own property, even if you put the roof repair on credit so that you have a similar "rent" increase, you can't just up and leave if you can't afford the rent anymore. That debt stays with you, not the property, and it just got harder to sell if you used the property as collateral for the loan.
Oh and that changing rent payment, yeah my mortgage payment is 50% higher than when I started. No it's not an ARM, thats just the increase from property taxes and insurance (see aforementioned emergency roof replacement and tree removals). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love owning my own home, and there have been times in the last handful of years that being in a stable location without needing to move or (mostly) worry about significant rent changes has helped me through some situations that would have sucked as a renter. But equally having been a home owner, I absolutely look back on my time as a renter and laugh at how naive I was to think that owning would have been a better deal for me. Renting enabled a degree of flexibility I no longer have. I don't necessarily need that flexibility as much as I did, but I also accept a commute that I previously would have considered moving to reduce.
If houses were just a commodity to be bought and sold we'd have much less of a problem. There were very few homeless a hundred years ago. Efforts to ban residential hotels aka "flophouses" were mostly an effort to remove undesirable people from their communities by making it impossible for them to find housing there they could afford. And the fact that many if not most voters don't want housing for what they consider undesirables in their neighborhoods is a huge problem for the construction of homeless shelters and affordable housing to this day. So I don't think that even completely socializing housing would do all that much to help with the problem.
What percentage of homeless are indigent and dealing with crippling mental health and addiction issues. Maybe they would qualify for SSI but that is a completely untenable income to also pay rent out of. There is really no “affordable” housing that would work for that population.
We should make it easy to build large amounts of affordable market rate housing, and build social housing/expand housing vouchers for the bottom quartile who the market may not provide for sufficiently.
> We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.
Why the 'not'? Those options are not mutually exclusive and are in fact complementary. Liberalising overly restrictive zoning laws across the USA can improve supply from all three sectors: for-profit, non-profit and local government, thus encouraging market-rate affordability.
For over 20+ years I've been hearing people and politicians talking about "affordable housing" and in that time, the gap between housing price increases and wage increases has only gone up, along with wealth inequality, that I'm tired of hearing even more talks, as I already know where this is going: nowhere.
Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes.
I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.
Right, you can't increase wages, because that would cause inflation! Nevermind the grocers, oil cartels and landlords hiking prices year after year. That's just good business sense, hampering that would destroy prosperity!
It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places).
Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
> It was already solved though (in Singapore and many other places).
I feel like people saying this don’t understand how radical Singapore’s housing solution is. It starts with the government repossessing most of the land in the city to develop housing. I think that’s alone is a non-starter pretty much anywhere in the United States.
It’s also far from perfect - I could for example talk about how construction in Singapore is for the most part only viable because of cheap labor from surrounding country, the ticking time bomb that is the 99 year lease or the fact that prices have slowly but surely ticked up in recent years, far in excess of inflation.
In addition I'd add that homelessness still exists in Singapore, albeit at a very low level, estimated at about 1,000 people out of a population of 6 million. ChannelNewsAsia did a feature on homelessness here a while ago:
Shift the Overton window and propose projects to eminent-domain the shit out of everything everywhere until eminent-domaining just the empty Sears store to put up housing seems more than reasonable.
Solving housing affordability may first require solving culture, and Singapore is a major historical outlier in that regard because of one Human: Lee Kuan Yew
If people can only name Singapore, Tokyo and Vienna as examples where "housing was fixed", then it's proof that it hasn't been fixed when there's the other millions of cities worldwide left.
it proves it's a solvable problem, so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem.
The first atomic bomb was hard, because it wasn't known if it was even possible. The second one was still really hard, but once the Americans proved it was possible, everyone else knew it was possible.
>so the other 10,000 or so cities (there aren't millions of them) just aren't properly motivated to solve the problem
Civilizations, human settlements, people's homes and communities aren't fungible commodity widgets solvable and movable through copy-paste solutions like technical challenges, no matter how much HN insists every world challenge from housing to world peace, is as easily solvable as those at their tech jobs.
Just because you can 1:1 reverse engineer a bomb design and have it work the same, doesn't mean you can just take a housing policy that worked in the demographic, geographical, historical and cultural context of one country and just drop it in another country with a completely different context and background, and expect it to just work the same.
This is the tech equivalent of: "well, it was working on my machine".
“Building enough housing” is actually a concept that we can apply everywhere in the world. My city has a million fewer people than it did 50 years ago and inflation adjusted rents are an order of magnitude higher. It’s not because the ability to build enough housing was lost to the sands of time.
Sure. In some company cultures, the developer throws the code over the wall and it's up to the operations team to make it work, so "well, it was working on my machine" is basically saying "go fuck yourself". There are other ways to work though, and so an alternate culture is for SREs to be engaged from the start of the project, so the developer doesn't just throw the code over the wall, and "well, it was working on my machine" is followed by a pairing session with the SWE to figure out the differences between the two as to why it's not working. Of course, modern tools aka Docker make that less of a problem these days, but as with all things, half the side of tech is culture and not the technology itself.
Back to the point though, I didn't claim it's at all easy to solve the housing crisis everywhere in the world, but that there are cities without a housing crisis. However they solved it won't be directly applicable to cities on a different continent in a difference country with a totally different culture, zoning laws, building codes, and entrenched interests.
But it proves it's possible. "All" that has to happen is the right person with sufficient political capital to get it to happen. Such a leader or team doesn't exist in most places, unfortunately, but, again, the point is if there was such an individual, they're not trying to do the impossible, since it's been proven it's possible.
while important, the fiat currency is a second-order issue, imho. the root is self-serving corruption facilitated by an intricate apparatus based on bureaucratic capture. to even appear as a choice on the ballot, one must either be part and parcel of this widespread corruption, or one must take the system by surprise with vast amounts of money and bluster (trump trump something something, fat lot of good that did, though). one of the biggest issues we have is that so much “shadow money” is allowed to influence politics. if the government was originally supposed to be a “check and balance” against accumulation of corporate power against regular people, phenomena like Citizens United et al have guaranteed the undoing of that guardianship. it is a society of grift now, through and through. and of course, being adaptive creatures, we learn from example, and we learn from our enemies, so anyone who once played the “good guy” role is stooping as low as his opponent now. surveying the political landscape, it’s often hard to find anyone spending more time trying to solve problems as opposed to maximizing instagram likes and chances for reelection
NB: there’s that whole discourse about “how are you all multi-millionaires when the pay for senator/representative is at most a few hundred thousand a year?”
Where would that be that's nice to live, safe, good infrastructure, good jobs AND by some miracle still allows you to buy affordable housing?
Plus, if you move to a low-CoL area with a high-CoL job then you're not really solving housing, you're just moving your problem elsewhere onto other people making housing unaffordable for them. How many former cheap places to live have been gentrified into oblivion in a short amount of time?
The goal is to make housing affordable AND help preserve local communities and culture(even though that might be contradictory to a degree), not to keep gentrifying and uprooting them in a musical chairs style game and then wonder why communities are dying, family units are dying, birth rates plummet, family support networks are dying, mental illnesses are up, loneliness is up, etc.
You seem to assume a free market for housing, that would be at least partially incorrect. The free market is a cause of long term (timeframe of decades) housing unaffordabilty because the haves treat housing as investment while the have-nots live under bridges or in cars which puts them in an unemployment/debt spiral.
The free market could work if housing was a depreciating asset like cars. Too many people in the west would be pissed off if that happened, though. It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
Given the numerous government regulations, as well as regulatory capture and NIMBYism, housing is not a particularly free market. Zoning and building codes (only some of which are important for not making death traps) as well as low income units lead to prohibited or high costs of construction.
>It will come to some countries with collapsing demographics and that won’t be a pretty sight.
Except that's not how it happens. Demographics have been collapsing in many EU countries for a while now and prices have been going nowhere but up at rates beyond wage growth.
Internal migration from rural to urban, and external migration from war torn and impoverished nations also to urban centers, keep pushing demand up regardless of local reproduction numbers.
Sure, you can now buy cheap properties in some empty towns in the south of Italy for example, but to what end if there's no jobs there?
>At some point we run out of people in rural areas to migrate to urban
But you won't run out of external migrants due to wars, climate change and poverty who want to leave their countries and move to the western developed ones.
Gentrification is based. Unless you want to stop people immigrating you'll never "preserve the character of your neighborhood" while keeping prices down. The only solution is to build more housing.
Exactly this. It's why the former communist countries had nothing to do with Karl Marx's communism and why people say "real communism has never been tried".
Those "communists" who came to power there didn't distribute the wealth to the people, but came to power to pocket it themselves by replacing the monarchies who had all the wealth and power previously to them, but still kept the folk enslaved at gunpoint. You basically switched one undemocratic oppressive regime with another and the average folk kept getting the short stick both times.
So be careful when you wish for major revolutions. Doesn't necessarily mean that with new management, things will always turn out better for you this time. Doesn't mean you should stick to the status quo and never try to change things either.
The beauty of this is that we can do terror and violence to the enemy by just existing peacefully, as queer people. The enemy is literally just that cowardly, we could say "boo, I exist" at them, and we don't have to kill anyone.
Automating things, making those automations queer inclusive, and maintaining control of the things that we automated, by making them open source, is how we ram that victory home.
Tada! Queer automated open source communism for the win. Now you either want to work for the revolution, are terrified of it like bonkers because I said queer as if I'm proud of it, or you have critical ideas about how to improve it! And that's exactly how a revolution should be!
Viva! We can be gay! We can do crimes! We can automate the things! And we can win!
This is unfortunately all too true.
A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.