My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out today.
Are you defining a unit with a kitchen and bathroom as a 'luxury apartment'? Would you live without them?
I don't know about you, but given the choice between sleeping on the streets or having to share a shower with a reasonable number of other people, I'd share that shower.
Instead LA built a bunch of vanity projects which provide no real help to the vast majority of homeless people. The only thing you can really do is move your feet, which is what I did .
Anyone struggling to find affordable housing in LA should get out. You can move to Vegas and drive in every other week to see your friends.
Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.
Why? Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times rather than junkies who moved in for better weather and benefits, shipping them out seems completely reasonable.
And where will you ship them to? Smaller cities don't want them and they'll be inhospitable enough they won't want to be there either - they'd rather ship themselves back where they can stay close to their drug sources and still rotate with their panhandling around enough that the locals don't get too familiar with them.
So if you want to do something about the vagrant encampments being in the city you live in, the most effective thing that you can do is move to where they aren't, which is what everyone else who cared that much about it already did long ago.
Morality and optics of forced relocations aside, because it leads to cycles of retaliation by the places they are shipped to.
> Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times
I don't know about LA, but this has been studied for SF, repeatedly, and they are.
My friends who couldn’t afford Santa Monica moved east. Riverside, San Bernardino, etc. They bear horrible commutes but did what they needed to do to afford housing for their families.
Why do we just assume that homeless have some god given right to be housed precisely where they happen to be sleeping. Regular people migrate all the time to accommodate their own economics. Let’s build homeless some cheap housing. And let’s do it somewhere in the middle of no where where land is cheap and building costs are low.
I fail to see how this is controversial if it isn’t controversial for my friends who voluntarily do the same.
Some of the best times in my life.
For my senior year I moved into an apartment with my own bathroom and kitchen. It turned out to be a step down.
The problem is that not everyone has a well-paid IT job, and some people barely make ends meet. These people need a place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with many corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to build and maintain. It's still much better than living in a tent as your primary residence!
That's a big "if." Surely not a significant portion of this $800k or the cost of any "luxury" apartment is due to it having a kitchen and bathroom.
> If the other option is living on the street, why not?
Those aren't our only choices.
> some people barely make ends meet. These people need a place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with many corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to build and maintain.
And they also, like other humans, need kitchens and bathrooms. Also, kitchens save a lot of money - cooking is by far the least expensive way to eat.
But it's better to have one kitchen for several units ("single rooms"), than none at all, and not even a single room.
Back to the beginning: I don't think that decrepit SRO buildings had to be perpetuated. But I suppose that moving people out of them should have included an offer of some other affordable housing, back in the time they were being removed, I need to find out what has been done.
I guess, but I wonder if kitchen construction is really holding back affordable housing.
> I suppose that moving people out of them should have included an offer of some other affordable housing, back in the time they were being removed, I need to find out what has been done.
I know that in the mid-20th century, in at least some cities, when the governments cleared African-American neighborhoods for freeways, white developments, etc., there were some promises but mostly people were left high and dry. Also, remember that black people couldn't get loans- direct policy of the Federal government and New Deal - or even decent-paying jobs (or an education to get jobs ...), so they didn't own the properties where they lived (they rented) and wouldn't have received that compensation.
I don't think those would be allowed in most (American) cities either, I don't think 20 sqm is rentable.
Ideally I'd have had a slightly smaller room, but with a private toilet (there was certainly enough space in the footprint for a 2m*1m toilet/sink/shower), but apart form that it was great (given the cost - about half my net income), far better than sharing a house. As a young person needing to be close to a London office but without the luxury of having parents giving me a free room.