How California Homelessness Became a Crisis
npr.org
npr.org
I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build.
Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes up with it. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.
In one block where I was working in Mar Vista, four older homes have been knocked down to build McMansions in the past year. All four are owned by LLCs, and all four are vacant.
As for homelessness, we could solve a significant chunk of the problem by having decent healthcare/insurance available to people. I know two people - who had insurance - who ended up losing their houses due to healthcare expenses.
Of course, the above personal experience should be tagged as "anecdotal" not "evidential."
In my city NIMBYs are always making shit up about vacant buildings but it never turns out to be objectively true. One of their favorite targets that they always point to as "vacant luxury towers" is in reality 97% occupied. So, please don't throw out vacancy trutherism unless you are prepared to back it up.
The vertical space is the true vacancy. When people say the LA vacancy rate is higher than the homeless rate this implies A) apartments empty because they are switching leases or getting renovated are usable (they aren't) and B) also implies that everyone who wants their own housing has it (not true - plenty of young people are living at home and plenty of people are crammed into apartments with strangers they don't want to be).
Until you build enough housing for everyone who wants a house there isn't enough housing.
they should also consider that the Nordic countries also have those problems but much fewer homeless. We don't have resources to treat all people with mental illness.
The main difference to Denmark is that the city must find housing for homeless people (by law) and they get enough money to not descend into a hole they cannot get out of.
Calif can’t tell someone from Nevada or New Mexico, don’t come here. Regardless of origin, Calif is saddled with dealing with the homeless. Denmark can contain the issue.
That is pretty much what has happened. It is clear building more lowers the average. Keep in mind that homeless people may not have even been in "affordable housing" five years ago! Imagine how much better financial situation someone who lost their job last year would be in this year if they had been paying $1000 rent instead of $1400 for five years. Sure they would have spent slightly more in other areas - but they also would have saved more on average and have more fallback.
Now what happens if I build a million houses?
I understand induced demand can exist but this is a second order effect that is clearly far less impactful than the first order effect of supply and demand.
The ONLY way to make housing affordable to make market rate housing affordable. That means you need to build enough that they are forced to lower prices. Couple this with a vacancy tax to prevent manipulative property management tactics, and there is no logical reason why increased supply would not lower prices.
Here is a paper addressing many concerns of "supply skeptics" : https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf
Trailer parks get made fun of but they often cost only a few hundred dollars a month so a person can be in and out of work there to either save or as a stop-gap if they are running out of money. There is no option in California for those with no savings and whose problems have caused them to be out of work for awhile - other than rely on the generosity of others and the state.
But what happens is one person says “build more housing” and another person says “the park near me is full of people who intentionally live on the street!” And you just end up with these intractable conversations where everyone talks past each other.
Humans are bad at nuance
I'm also concerned that Newsom is planning spend $12 billion but barely make a dent in the problem itself; particularly when HUD puts the cost at solving homelessness in the United States as a whole at $20 billion. This is another "consultant giveaway" that Newsom and the state of California are particularly good at.
Meanwhile, the street that our company is on is literally _filled_ back to back with RVs, litter, crime and literal human waste running down the gutters. It's beyond frustrating.
If you buy an empty lot as an investment, and then the city grows and you want to sell that lot so that a developer can build a high-rise, you want to stop them? I mean unless you want to ban ownership of land then you are in a tricky resource. What if someone builds a lean-to in your hedge?
If anything, maybe we need to zone areas for improvised housing. Would make it easier to police for violence and to provide access to community resources.
This seems pretty obviously like a bad idea to me. What's to stop someone from erecting a large structure inside a public park, stealing the right to use that land from the public and taking it for themselves?
Having lived in Seattle until very recently, I can attest first hand that the answer to that question is: nothing. So your assertion here seems like it would lead to a state where the first person to create a structure on public land and live in it effectively converts that land into their own private property. To be frank, that is absurd.
I realize that we're talking about a situation where people are already living there and putting strains on those resources even if they don't have walls around them. And we do want them to have those walls, to keep them safe and make the city more livable for everybody.
But San Francisco especially is simply limited in where you can build more roads (and schools and playgrounds and other things). Even if we could create new housing with the snap of a finger, wouldn't the city still have enormous resource problems?
I'd expect a city that wants to build new housing would demand a charge to help cover those costs. That's going to make the housing more expensive. So would it actually end up solving any of the problems of homelessness?
(I do apologize that "just asking questions" often looks insincere. I don't live in SF and I'm not an expert on housing or homelessness. You seem to know what you're talking about and I'd be interested in filling in these gaps.)
If Jordan can accept 3 million people, so can California.
People are people. It is illegal to scan people for drugs on job interview. Taking dump and shower should not require drug scan.
If that's a serious risk, I don't know that the "solution" to this problem by committing people is worth it.
That said, it's a hard problem. I know it's extremely hard for people without a yuppie income to get mental health treatment in the United States. I know before I got a high-paying desk job, I realized I had some form of manic depression, wanted treatment, but also could not afford to see a therapist because my health plan did not cover mental healthcare and my job didn't pay particularly well. It became this chicken-egg problem: it was hard to find a better job because of the depressive episodes, but I couldn't treat them without getting a better job. I can only imagine that stuff like schizophrenia and drug addiction (which I luckily have not suffered from) is exponentially more difficult to deal with.
I'm not a fan of involuntarily committing people. But I do want to make it as easy (and as cheap) as possible to get good mental treatment if they need it. I've seen the results of good therapists, and it is no less impactful than a good surgeon.
There are free clinics for it, and of course those are good things and the doctors there are doing the lord's work, but they're extremely backed up. I looked to make an appointment at the time, and the soonest one was four months away. Compare this to the two-day wait I had when I finally did manage to get better insurance.
California decided it liked Obamacare and the idea of Medicare for all, so I think that's when they made Covered California available for people who couldn't otherwise afford it. It might actually save money because there are less emergency room visits.
That's a really old-fashioned concern. It used to happen in the 50's and 60's, but patient rights have come a long way since then. The most anyone can do in CA is 5150 a relative, which is a 72 hour hold. That's not done more often because in 3 days and they're out on the street again, refusing to take meds. Mental health pros need to be able to hold someone longer and force a 30 day injection of psych meds. Paranoid schizophrenics usually won't take their meds because they don't trust the system naturally. They are unable to make a rational choice (obviously) So we just abandon them and ignore them.
> extremely hard for people without a yuppie income to get mental health treatment in the United States
Not in California. Impoverished people have access to basic free health care with Covered California. The mental health people I talked to at the local hospital were very well qualified. Too bad I was too screwed up to listen to them.
For example, there's people for whom opioids do not provide any pain relief; but try getting a doctor to understand that you're one of those people. You'll get the opiate pills prescribed anyway, and noted as a foolish drug seeker to boot.
Drug addicts, who settle in the Bay Area because it is Paradise On Earth for drug addiction. Drugs are cheap and plentiful. Dealers transact unmolested in broad daylight in front of apathetic cops. Needles are provided by the government free of charge. Tents can be pitched on just about any sidewalk. Drug use does not even need to be discreet -- anyone who walks in SF for more than a few hours will run across someone injecting or freebasing. It's not just the Tenderloin either.
The mentally ill, who cannot take advantage of services that exist to help them. There are individuals who are so out of it, so schizophrenic etc., that the only way they will ever be helped is if someone physically forces them into an institution. And can you imagine the response of SF constituents if such a policy was enacted? Totally impossible. One cell phone video of a capture gone wrong and it's over.
And lastly, there are tons of people who are 100% content with living on the streets by choice. There have always been transients in society who adopt this lifestyle, in every era of history. It's basically urban camping! No job, no responsibilities. It's a beautiful place with amazing weather. If all of Earth could easily navigate to the Bay Area, you could fill this city to the brim with people who'd "hobo" it by choice.
There MUST be a fourth type. The person who is on the street due to financial misfortune, who had horrible luck and found themselves in a spot they couldn't get out of. Statistically this has to exist. And we need to make sure those people get a ladder somehow to climb themselves out. Absolutely.
But to pretend that this fourth type is all that exists? Or that it's the majority?
Not even close.
It's a notoriously difficult thing to study, but you can get some answers by looking at tangential studies to see correlation between housing prices and homelessness, e.g., https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-anderson-forecas... or studies showing a majority of the unhoused in California worked here before becoming homeless https://www.capolicylab.org/employment-among-la-county-resid...
Naive follow-up question: why does such a person need to live in the bay area? If you're living off disability, why would you try to do it in the most expensive place in the country? Is community that important?
I realize this line of inquiry sounds callous ("why can't they just save some money?"), but I genuinely don't follow why somebody with a regular income who's not tied to the bay area by a) drug addiction, or b) a job would put up with homelessness to stay there.
I find this confusing because you seem to imply that having an income makes you ineligible for social security retirement benefits. But as long as you are 65, you're eligible without income caps. There's no requirement that you're not working.
Social security disability checks do require that you're not working. Is that what you're talking about?
All of this is a cycle, of course. Drug addiction will lead to financial misfortune, as will mental health issues.
The solution to homelessness is to build free socialized housing, lots of it, with integrated mental health treatment.
First, You can shift classification over time. An example might be drug use inducing mental illness, moving from 1 to 2.
Second, I'd claim a lot (most? almost all?) of homeless spent time in group 4. I think if I exhausted my options, or willpower, I'd probably go all in on group 1, probably develop some group 2 characteristics and resign myself to group 3.
I think there's a desire to focus on group 4, because that's the cheapest and easiest to fix. The other groups are far, far more effort. It may not be an optimal strategy, but identifying and resolving group 4 quickly seems like a big win. Slows the rate of growth of groups 1-3.
"Making language clearer doesn't hurt"
Well, it does in this case, since it gives people the false belief that those who didn't update their language actually believes that homeless people can't be helped. That phenomena can then be studied by social scientists, creating articles about how some group views homelessness as a permanent state and that is the reason for all the problems...
I think the term "unhoused" had a similar goal but avoided the immediacy of "homeless" and was thus ineffective.
Edit: your point about the need to understand the background level of housing instability in less well off population is completely valid. I don’t think people understand the extent to which large portions of the working poor continually cycle through housing crises.
Edit 2: My broader point is that if you do consider educating people about the true facts/nature of homelessness in US cities, you should seriously question how much using the preferred progressive phrasing actually accomplishes that goal vs just making you sound elitist. Even under the most generous interpretation, there is nothing in the plain language of the phrase “experiencing X” as compared to the adjective form of X that even attempts confer any information as to whether X is a temporary or permanent condition. This is an an attempt to use language as a form of persuasion that does not even try to engage with the basic reality of how people are going to respond to that language. There are already predefined ways in English to denote temporary vs permanent, “chronic “ and “acute” would be appropriate in a scholarly context, “short-term”/“temporary” and “long-term”/“permanent” work perfectly fine in casual conversation.
You could say "Ich bin hungrig." (I'm being hungry) but nobody does that.
the term "unhoused" suffers from the same thing, it's just not precise.
I'm overweight. To describe me as overweight is accurate, and I wouldn't think you were saying that it's my identity. To describe me as "experiencing obesity" just sounds silly and changes absolutely nothing.
There is no getting around this truth. If housing and real estate are a good investment, eventually all wage income workers will be homeless, or will be forced to leave a region. So we need to make sure as a society that housing and real estate are _not_ good investments.
Prior to the 1980s, real estate was not a very good investment. There might be areas that were great investments, but there was no generalized appreciation in land and housing.
In particular, it's an obvious sign of a broken market when structure prices are appreciating. In a functioning market, structure prices should largely decrease in value over time, with the only exceptions being actual improvements to the property.
All of this is the same point as the article, that the basic issue is supply and demand of housing, and that supply problems are exacerbated by homeowners that have a large financial interest in restricting supply, and lots of tools at their disposal to prevent new housing.
Another important point is that while individuals might be responsible for improvements to structures which increase their utility, aesthetics, or value, in almost every case _land_ value increases are the result of large-scale societal factors, and nothing at all to do with any individual actions.
The question becomes, why as a society should we allow land value increases to be captured by individuals? The land has gained value because of societal changes.
If a new light rail line is developed by local government, land values soar within 4 blocks of the new rail line. Why do we allow that value to be captured by individuals?
If a region has great public universities, and high-paying companies flock to the area to hire those workers, land values soar. Why should individuals capture that value?
Rather than taxing property, we should tax land. Taxing structures creates a perverse incentive against improving structures. And land is the thing that is actually scarce. Taxing land would naturally encourage landowners to build higher densities where land values and demand are high.
And when land is sold, we should tax a very large amount of the appreciation in that land value, perhaps 90%. Society is what earned those gains, and society should reap the reward. Individuals can capture the value of increases on improvements to structures, but there's no reason they should earn a windfall from the societal actions that increased the value of the land.
It's crazy how we normalized just sitting on a empty land downtown as a way to accumulate wealth. And not just that, we encourage it as this could very easily outrun any gain you would have by doing constructions on that plot of land. And the cherry on top is that this "investment strategy" is good not just for the owners of the plot of land, but also for all the neighbors that also own land around the area, which make their NIMBY argument a very conflicted one. So I agree that making sure there's no money to capture on this situation is really important.
Another thing that's important to understand is that the use of land also should be adjusted according to the population growth expected. It's ok if you could have a single family home downtown with a huge backyard 50 years ago, it's not ok to have it now while people on the top 1% income struggle to find a place to live with a commute time lower than 60 minutes. If you do want to maintain it you should probably have to pay the difference on taxes based on whatever could be built on that area. You want to have a small house on a place where a 40 apartment building could be built? Fine, pay a property tax for 40 apartments and you're good to go.
Overall I think we approach home ownership as something that should never change after you built it but the very simple fact that lots of these plots of lands we know live on were one day just farms tell you how this is simply not true.
However, just saying "gotta be clean to be in this shelter" doesn't solve the problem. There need to be adequate treatment programs available for drug and alcohol rehab. Those programs have been cut, and private centers cost far more than most unhoused people can afford.
Furthermore, there's a positive feedback loop that needs breaking. The experience of being unhoused can lead to people escaping into drug use, just as excessive drug use can lead to homelessness.
— UC San Diego sociologist Neil Gong
They manage to name the two contingents that are out of power and have nothing to do with the crisis, libertarians and advocates of austerity, while leaving aside those who created the situation: progressives.
That being said there are also people who are just down on their luck, but the solutions to their problems are very different then the long term homeless. Job programs, transition housing, actually building enough housing to meet demand, and UBI will help them.
Housing prices _are_ raising, and homelessness is getting worse, but I think the assertion that it's the primary cause (instead of mental health and substance abuse) is disingenuous.