Homelessness is primarily a housing problem | Hacker News Reader

Homelessness is primarily a housing problem

noahpinion.substack.com

44 pointspaulpauper54 comments

Homelessness is primarily a problem created by the requirement to continuously upkeep your shelter financially or risk losing it.

The ability to perform this upkeep can be wrecked by any number of things, which there is not enough space to list here.

The overwhelming majority of people who fail at this upkeep are saved by their support network, so the actual problem is several orders of magnitude larger than any official statistics.

Most people who lose their shelter fall back on family and friends and may spend years living on couches, in closets, spare garages, cars, etc., without ever being picked up by the "homeless" statistics.

How or why this system came about is beyond the scope of this comment, but it is an iceberg most people only see the tip of. And it is not a necessity, nor is it a reality in many other places around the world.

Often times that support network, will for years sustain people in their own home too, before the couches and other forms (of defacto, but not statistical) homelessness take over.

Everyday life is a treadmill, a neverending ceaseless treadmill, and bad things happen if you fall off that treadmill. For some people, the treadmill is cake: so easy to keep up with it is almost bothersomely slow.

But... get a bit of a leg cramp, or lose energy, age a little, or get a bit of mental trauma, and that simple treadmill gets much more terrifying and ominous each day you have to run it.

As I get older, those nutso men that shutter away in some far flung cabin with no contact with the world ... gets more appealing. Or simply a van down by the river.

But what would be the effect on the amount of dilapidated housing, or "slum areas" without this maintenance requirement?

I think there would be more people living in poorly maintained buildings instead of not having any building to live in.

This seems pretty cut and dry to me.

Single Resident Occupancy units used to be incredibly common - from shared adult dorms to chicken-wire hotels. Now they are non-existent.

In 50 years this represented a loss of over a million housing units! Today there are 500k people living on the streets. I don't think it's a coincidence.

See Also: the ridiculous lot size requirements for single trailers and the de facto ban on trailer parks.

Urban Renewal/Beautification and NIMBYism to an extent killed both trailer parks and single occupancy units.

I'd also note the death of the boarding house between 1920 and 1970 as another issue contributing to things.

In the 50-100 years since then, you think we don't have the tech or capacity to have been able to "upgrade" trailer parks into even studio apartments?

Feels like a huge oversimplification to just say "all would be fine if we had trailer parks".

You say “trailer parks” I say “affordable housing”. Affordable housing solutions like dorms and bedsit apartment blocks aren’t feasible in many places like the USA where it’s literally illegal to build anything other than high rise apartments or standalone homes.

While I don't doubt the statistics brought up in this article, I am skeptical about how the underlying data was sampled. The majority of "homeless" people are not necessarily who everyone is talking about when they think "homeless" (e.g. people dressed in rags sleeping on the streets/doing drugs in public.) I personally suspect that there's quite a difference in that sub-population.

There’s a big crosstalk that happens because almost everyone is referring to the chronically homeless (or whatever the technical term is) whereas the vast majority are homeless for 6 months or less.

Yeah and even here we hear stats like 33% have serious mental illness, 20-40% have drug issues, etc. I'd bet those figures are even more skewed if we look at the long term homeless populations.

But it's true, we really do have to get more housing and the biggest problems there are permitting, NIMBY issues and inflation driving up costs. Ideally we'd work on all significant contributors to homelessness at the same time, though.

I believe firmly they are two different cohorts, and if you stay homeless longer and longer, you start to homogenize into the other cohort and pick up there comorbidities of that cohort.

We also make it very hard to climb back out of homelessness - if you've had an eviction, it's very hard to find a place to take you.

I have a friend in Portland, he's a single, male, with no kids, in Portland - and there is no program to help, hopefully you make 3x the rent and can save up first/last, and a months deposit.

What's worse, he has mental health issues, but he makes too much for medicaid and too little to buy insurance, so he can either work, or have healthcare, and those are the options - either way, the only place he can find to live is in a minivan.

Why should issues like homelessness be reducible to one 'primary' cause?

Highlighting housing costs as a significant contributing factor is an important point to make, but there's no need to undermine the other contributing factors through bad faith arguments and cherry picked statistics. Yes, homelessness clusters in cities with robust social programs, esp. those with temperate weather. These same cities are also the most expensive in the US, effectively creating homelessness traps.

As for following in the footsteps of Houston, it's not nearly as feasible for these places. They have up to 10x the homeless populations and 2-3x the housing costs. Compare providing 5,000 units in Houston vs providing 70,000 in Los Angeles.

We should absolutely look to provide more subsidized housing to the needy, but it's clear we aren't aren't able to do it in the most in demand real estate markets in country.

EDIT: numbers

> We should absolutely look to provide more subsidized housing to the needy, but it's clear we aren't aren't able to do it in the most in demand real estate markets in country.

Who will you hold responsible when they can’t find jobs where they live?

We choose not to do it - and I dont believe its calls for subsidy alone, if you build 100,000+ market rate units in SF Bay, PDX, or SEA - the price for market rate housing will drop, by some measurable amount. You keep letting developers build housing until there is no more demand to build more, even if it's the foo-foo luxury apartments - they will put downward price pressure on the 3rd floor walkups.

You are assuming that the economics of house building is such that developers would do as many projects as they could if only they were allowed to, but even in the current market, property developers are still very picky and have to make sure they can make a decent profit; land costs are only one part of that. If you let developers build 100,000 market rate places in one city, (a) they actually don’t have the resources (labor, capital) to do that in some reasonable time frame and (b) they would pull back if sale prices began dropping below their costs plus profit margin.

First, I mentioned regions, and do be clear, I'm referring to regions - Thats the point, there is a point where is does reach equilibrium and the price of lower tier and less desirable housing starts to fall.

The Bay Area has 7m people in it, SF proper 800k, you could grow the number of housing units by 10% every decade, or less - and it's more than feasible. Seattle Metro is 4m people, and Portland is 2m. That works out to 700k housing units in SF Bay, 400k in Seattle Metro and 200k in Portland Metro - those while seemingly giant numbers are absolutely feasible to build.

Why do you think Houston is so cheap to live in? or for that matter DFW? one, we have 100 miles of prairie in every direction to build in, so building is cheap - two, we impose few structural barriers to prevent new construction.

They aren’t really though. Labor is limited, material production is limited, there is a lot of supply and demand going on that can drive up prices. You can’t magic away those costs.

Houston is cheap to live in because it simply isn’t a place that a lot of people want to live. Young people who dream of Texas dream of living in Austin, not Houston or Dallas. That puts growth on Austin, stoking supply and demand, whereas Dallas and Houston are growing much more slowly.

If you want affordable housing and are happy not living in a hot/popular location, things get much easier.

As far as I can tell based on the statistics I can find, both DFW and Houston have built around 50% more housing in a given year than Austin over a 20 year period.

The only data I can find is here, which is regional: https://theamericangenius.com/housing/big-data/these-50-us-c...

Austin is at 11 with 150k housing starts, Dallas is first at 320k starts for SFHs, 133k vs 233k for MFH. Austin is growing at 25%, Dallas at 15%. But Dallas area is 7.6 million vs Austin Area at 2.35 million. So while Dallas is building more in absolute terms, it isn’t in relative terms.

Both are growing their hosing stock by between 5-11% of their population.

How many more houses would Portland metro, Seattle or SF bay have to build to match?

Seattle is just behind Austin on the list, and ranks just above it in population (4 million). Seattle is already more than twice as dense as either Austin or Dallas (9000 per sqm vs 3000-4000 per sqm).

Bold and presumptuous title like we're a hivemind.

There are plenty of homeless people in America who are merely poor and nothing else: no drugs, not drunks, not criminally-antisocial, not crazy, and not desiring to sleep on hostile architecture bus benches. Some are too old to work and don't have a support system. There are no magic bootstraps to pull on and US social services rarely seek out to assist individuals.

The regressions presented on the graphs are misleading at best. The effect of outliers on the fitting looks fairly obvious as are the high density linear areas.

If the problem is housing, and some cities don't have homelessness problems because they have cheap housing... then why don't the homeless people in places with expensive housing go to the places with cheap housing? Is it maybe because they prefer living in the more expensive area even if it means sleeping outside? is there maybe some individual-level incentive playing a factor here? Something is not adding up. Some cities have cheap housing, and others have expensive housing. In theory people could relocate and avoid sleeping outside, at least a huge portion of them, yet instead we see increasing populations in places with expensive housing.

I'm just saying there is something missing from the picture because if housing was the primary cause, relocating would be the obvious solution that most people would rationally choose. Instead it seems like people insist in staying in the expensive housing areas, because I assume the cheap housing areas are boring, and they might not have as many government programs.

It doesn't surprise me that government can't solve this problem, because they are unable to analyze it in the proper level of detail and instead use super high level statistical correlations which have not led to any results.

If I was down and out, I’d want to stay in the place my friends and family were, rather than pitching up in a whole new city, without a vehicle, funds, and without knowing how to get government assistance

You should also try to imagine that your friends and family want absolutely nothing to do with you also, and that would be a clearer picture of the problem.

In that scenario, why would you not live with a relative until you can find work and pay rent? If they're not helping you at that point, they're not worth that much as family, in my opinion. I would guess most homeless people have no one to rely on, and so a fresh start somewhere else should at least be an option.

If your SO or child got sick, and drove up multiple 6-figures, and you had to mortgage everything, and when they finally died, and the bank took your house, you hit despairing times, regardless of if it drives you to depression, drink, drugs, etc -- you couldn't cope, executive function went out the window and you ended up on the street.

Would you A. stick around, or B. Go some place foreign, say you already live in the cheapest part of America, so your options are go expat, maybe India, or Romania, or someplace with cheaper cost of living, but how do you afford to get there? What of other family, friends, etc? There's lots of things that tie people to a certain area.

My house isn't just my home, my entire community, city, etc is. Even being homeless, they could still consider where they do live to be their 'home', so why should they, or would they move?

If you can't afford even the cheapest housing in America, then housing isn't the problem, right? And if someone can't afford a bus ticket (or even come up with the money) chances are they need a lot more help and it's also not about housing. The point is how can it be housing when the rational thing to do is to relocate, and if you can't even do that, then you need way more help and it's not just housing.

The real solutions are different for each individual, since it has to do with keeping a job and being able to pay rent. Affordable housing is only a tangential problem at best.

"Let them eat cake." you say?

Homeless people don't have the funds to relocate.

The best place to be homeless is away from rich people because rich people are far stingier than average. I've mentioned this to homeless people panhandling in wealthier areas of the Bay Area: the Mexican grocery store down the way would be more productive than Whole Foods or Country Sun.

> Homeless people don't have the funds to relocate.

It's a trivial problem to solve given current government programs for food stamps, etc. Why is it even a limitation to begin with. If getting people housed is the objective, does it matter that much if it's in a different city? I understand if it's across the country, but there are plenty of cheap cities around SF, for example, yet SF is still attracting a lot of people that apparently cannot afford to live there.

I wonder how much mental illness and drug abuse contribute to staying in a place you can't afford a roof?

20 million Americans have a substance use disorder.

About half a million people in the United States are currently experiencing homelessness.

So the overlap in those populations is like 2%.

Source: couple lazy google searches.

What percentage of homeless have mental illness or drug abuse issues?

There are varying levels of tolerance of homelessness across the country. On the other side of the equation of tolerance are several factors, including politics but most especially rent prices.

People in cities with low rent prices are far less likely to tolerate homelessness than cities with high rent prices. Cities with high rents will use high rents as a scapegoat for inaction in solving the problem (i.e., “we need to build more housing!” as if that’s a perfectly tenable thing to do on a landlocked peninsula filled with extraordinary regulations on building).

If someone becomes homeless (or rather, is becoming homeless) because they can’t pay their rent, wouldn’t they… move somewhere cheaper? That is in fact what usually happens. Those who become homeless instead often do for reasons other than not being able to afford rent; these people are quitting society. Japan has Hikikomori, and we have the homeless.

It's increasingly getting harder to find a 'somewhere else' to move. I mean in the 90s you'd move across town, now you need to move east of the Mississippi.

The average home price in Utah was 350k 4-5 years ago. It is now 560k. I was close to being able to afford one, now I'm a decade out from it, and then maybe never. I'm more likely to buy some land and a tiny home, and call it a day.

We need to control the greed that is homeownership/rent-seeking, and put caps on things, or at least institute a land-value tax tied to rent : wages ratios.

You don't have to move across the country. Considering SF, you can just move to Modesto, which is 1.5hrs away and has a third of the cost of living.

"Homeless" refers to many things.

It can refer to a person living in a car, a person living in a shelter, a person living a tent, a person living in a homeless camp, a person living under a piece of cardboard, etc.

Some people become homeless at a point and manage their way out, others stay homeless.

If you are an alcoholic, or a drug addict, and want to get drunk or high or both in a regular basis, you don't like the rules at the shelter... what place is best for you? a shelter with strict rules where you can't drink or get high, or a homeless camp? The homeless camp.

The problem with people like the article author is that they try to monopolize common sense.

A person working at Walmart, earning minimum wage while living in their car, has a very different reality to a drug junkie living in a homeless camp. The term "homeless" refers to both. I would not try to begin a serious analysis by mixing such different things.

A homeless shelter is not solving homelessness -

Furthermore - lets just look at some of the common rules imposed on the homeless seeking housing -

* No Pets

* No Visitors

* Curfew Time

* Limits on the number of people per unit (meaning, families and couples cannot always be accommodated together)

- and a host of others. Also in some places there is a requirement that you have a social worker, and/or receiving mental healthcare treatment - except there are long waiting periods.

For most long term homeless people telling them "you have to give up your dog" will keep them on the streets - we need "housing, no questions asked" rather "housing with rules". Most short term homeless do not qualify for these programs - it turns into a kind of License Raj to try to get in, and maintain your status in these programs.

If you want to impose your moral vision on people, thats fine and dandy, the jesus-people have been doing it for decades with their missions on skid row, but that wont solve homelessness.

I believe there is no such thing as 'unworthy poor' all poverty is worth solving, because the broader societal costs in not solving poverty is corrosive on wider society - and the first step to solving poverty is attacking the homelessnes problem.

> we can build an ample supply of housing and subsidized housing.

Sigh. That’s the conclusion? Land is cheap. Literally most of the US is empty. Housing is stupid cheap. Housing is crowded coastal cities is not.

What the article did highlight really well (maybe accidentally) that homelessness sticks around for multiple reasons: 40% substance problem, mental illness problem, etc. maybe there’s always two factors, maybe that’s why efforts aren’t ending it?

There are no jobs in those places, and if there are, little housing, or little way for the people sleeping in a tent somewhere to go there. Furthermore people are afraid of moving to places they know no one, further away from their support network and familiarity - so they dont.

That is _definitely_ also not true

Isn't it?

When you say cheap I'm thinking cheap, not merely inexpensive

> And, at long last, we have arrived at the actual root cause of homelessness: housing costs.

To prove this point the author shows 4 graphs with R^2 values of 0.55, 0.27, 0.24, and 0.28. That's a tough sell, especially when the non-underlined portion of the abstract he showed reads:

> most people with substance-abuse issues remain homeless for 12 months or longer.

This dude looks like another “content creator” mission on putting out click optimized links with no substance, no data and no real research. These amature opinion distributors are cancer to information society.

Information Society, great band. They still play I think.

Also homelessness is a housing supply issue.

Ok the article was a guest post on the blog by a guy named Aaron Carr which I take is this guy https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroncarrny/

who seems to be some sort of reasonable expert on homelessness, the article has a lot of sections with stuff like this

>Furthermore, if mental health were the main driver of homelessness, places with the most mental illness would have the most homelessness. However, the data shows the exact opposite:

followed by a scatterplot graph Rate of Serious Mental Illness Versus PIT Count (per capita)

with links to the source of the graph for example this https://www.sightline.org/2022/03/16/homelessness-is-a-housi...

So, what is your actual problem with 'this dude'? Or the 'content' that has been 'created'?

on edit: I could totally understand (without necessarily agreeing) if your post was "this guy looks like someone trying to increase funding for their organization by cherry-picking stats to support a tenuous case"

I have been studying the homeless problem. In Lansing the problem has exploded 4-5X in the past twenty years. I am looking for a way locally that my tech skills can help, even in a small way.

It was suggested that I learn about the efforts of Celebrity Rehab Dr. Drew who is outspoken on the homeless problem. He wants permission to treat the homeless who are mentally ill. He believes not only can they be helped but returned to productive members of society. But he is opposed by L.A. politicians who have blocked him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRrlIpQ-Hk (9 minutes)

With respect consider setting aside your laptop and volunteering with Habitat For Humanity or similar. You'll learn valuable skills and have a direct measurable impact in your community.

Dr drew is a fraud and a grifter unfortunately

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