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The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

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Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#151

Post by harlanji »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #120
coliveira wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases, drug addiction and mental issues come as a result of homelessness itself. There is a severe mental toll inflicted on human beings that are required to live as outcasts in their own city.

I mean, I see why that would be possible, but considering cause and effect, one is more likely to burn out their support network by having a drug addiction and mental issues than the other way around.

My support network flew away when I lost jobs, quit jobs, and finally became homeless. They get frustrated by various things and call it being negative or difficult or similar. There’s a strong unwillingness to empathize. I realized some things I did/didn’t do to attract parasitic people to my life, but I’ll digress there. Ymmv of course, but in general people are made very uncomfortable by the situation and may jump ship on a totally sober person.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#152

Post by rivp931 »

iamdave wrote: post #67
InclinedPlane wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some merit to this but I'd say it's still a little off the mark. Homelessness is a condition, how people got there is one thing, the main tools to "fix it" are fairly straightforward: give people housing. Dealing with everything else (mental health issues, drug addiction, etc.) can be dealt with separately, and will be vastly easier without having the fundamental problem of homelessness.

how people got there is one thing, the main tools to "fix it" are fairly straightforward: give people housing The solution sounds straightforward, the path to get there looks like a Gordian knot. How do you pay for it? How do you get that funding source to go along with your plans to pay for it? Etc.

Pay for it in taxes, let the government set up an agency providing assistance. Would require big changes in the system you have in the US though, ugly bureaucracy, and whispering some forbidden words like "socialism".

But it's reality, not fantasy: https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance-overview

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#153

Post by techsupporter »

biztos wrote: post #91
TomMckenny wrote: post #37

A big part of the problem is the use of Revenue Management Software to set prices. This obviously ends up working like a cartel. I note that: -Even when nation wide vacancies were at their highest in 30 years, rental price rose. -Even as home prices plummeted, rental price rose. -Rent has risen 30% _nation_ wide just since 2013 so zoning an limits on building can't be the main cause. https://www.census.gov/housing/hv…

I've never heard of Revenue Management Software. What effect does it have exactly? If you own some apartments, wouldn't you just check the local advertised prices and set your prices similarly, possibly also using whatever your social network of landlords can tell you?

RMS is what airlines use to price tickets and have done almost since the automated calculating computer was invented. Use of that kind of software has spread to all kinds of industries.

Large rental property management companies absolutely use RMS. You can see it in action if you go to the rental sites for a large apartment development (if you want one in real life, search for "Thorton Place Apartments" in Seattle). Every possible amenity or detail about the apartment is factored into the overall rent, including which direction it faces, floor, whether it's recently been painted, along with how many of this particular type or in this building are left over, and then your particulars like how long of a lease you want, whether you're bringing a pet[0], and even what employer you work for.

That all gets crunched and a number falls out that sometimes has a relationship to what the glossy marketing copy also had printed on it. Rents for each unit can and will vary day-by-day as apartments are rented and notices handed in.

0 - Thorton Place doesn't do it but another apartment building in Lake City absolutely does bump up the base rent by around $17 if you pick "with pet" versus "without pet," in addition to lumping in a $45 "pet rent" fee.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#154

Post by Tokkemon »

paxys wrote: post #147

The only way to fix the housing crisis is to build more houses. It isn't rocket science, but every conversation or debate about this issue seems to go on and on in every direction without people actually facing this fact. The same people who vote to increase taxes to fix homelessness will simultaneously vote down every new housing project. Just seems so bizarre to me.

You can build them all day long, but then you have to have people who can live in them and pay for the cost of building that house, either through mortgages or taxes to the government.

And we all know how well the public housing projects went and still go to this day...

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#155

Post by thoughtexplorer »

noobermin wrote: post #60
sharkweek wrote: post #9

Long-time Seattle resident here who volunteered for several years in the homeless community. Homelessness has always been a thing in Seattle, but has definitely become a much larger issue in the past five years. I'll spare my thoughts on any number of reasons as to why we got here as a city, but will say I think we are doing a terrible disservice to actually finding a solution by lumping "anyone who doesn't have a ho…

>Unfortunately, a lot of the solutions are expensive and frankly politically toxic. At the end of the day, everything is political. Instead of shying away from it engage with it because it is the only way you'll change society.

> At the end of the day, everything is political.

It only is if you view everything through a political lens. Science and psychology, for example, are not political.

Plus you can affect change without the political system. Starting with improving oneself. Then family members. Then local community. If enough people did that, that would be a societal change and maybe we wouldn't have such a crisis in the first place.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#157

Post by prostoalex »

gre wrote: post #86

I stayed a night in LA a few weeks ago at an AirBNB in a condo in a prime location near Little Tokyo and can't stop thinking that society would be better off if this condo were owned and occupied by a family instead of being basically a for-profit hotel. I don't know how to stop this de facto rezoning except by imposing huge taxes on housing that is not the owner's primary residence and closing all the loopholes that…

It’s ironic considering that DTLA of all Los Angeles sub markets is the one with virtually no zoning restrictions and has some of the highest numbers of construction cranes in the nation.

But before we all go onto AirBnB rampage, have you looked at any available properties in that zip code? The schools are complete garbage (an elementary school kid was recently stabbed by a homeless drug addict), the crime rate is high, public transport is next to non-existent, and there’s feces of various origins in the plain view on the sidewalk.

Downtown LA officials have been trying to revitalize the neighborhood by expanding the convention center, permitting more hotel rooms, making business rent cheap and attracting more visitors like yourself, not pitching the neighborhood that’s adjacent to Skid Row to a suburban nuclear family with 2.2 kids.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#158

Post by PHGamer »

i remember cases where some guy tried to build tiny homes for the homeless in LA and the government shut him down. I know here in another part of the county, there was some land freed up for new development but a preservation society sued to prevent development unless certain conditions were met. Less housing ending up happening as they could demolish everything. Government is getting in the way of cheap housing.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#159

Post by techsupporter »

blang wrote: post #41
sharkweek wrote: post #9

Long-time Seattle resident here who volunteered for several years in the homeless community. Homelessness has always been a thing in Seattle, but has definitely become a much larger issue in the past five years. I'll spare my thoughts on any number of reasons as to why we got here as a city, but will say I think we are doing a terrible disservice to actually finding a solution by lumping "anyone who doesn't have a ho…

I think you have hit many things amazingly well with Seattle homelessness. I think one of the reasons why we get very "every person for themselves" when the price tag comes up is it's hard to think of the single mother living in her car while working every day because the most visible members are the addicts sitting in the alley passed out in their own feces next to your stolen bicycle. Also it's hard to get data on…

> it's hard to think of the single mother living in her car while working every day because the most visible members are the addicts sitting in the alley passed out in their own feces next to your stolen bicycle

I think this is what's going to result in a rather massive upheaval in the next city council elections in Seattle. There seems to be a belief--right or wrong[0]--that "the vagrants are taking over, the community is sick of it, and our generosity is at an end." (In quotes because it's a characterization.) There has already been one candidate for council in district 6 (Ballard, Crown Hill, Northwest Seattle), who subsequently dropped out because of other political drama, that made his main plank that he was going to do nothing except push to roll back spending at every opportunity and get ordinances passed requiring the police to actively go after "vagrancy."

He didn't get very far, mostly because of the aforementioned drama, but that he got as much attention as he did is telling. I think if a more viable, or at least level-headed, candidate starts to challenge the district 6 incumbent (I'm picking on district 6 because a lot of the noise about this problem has been coming from there and 6 includes Aurora Ave N) on the basis of this belief that the problem is too far out of control and must be stopped with a big hammer, the divide between the two groups will become pretty stark. And if that challenger doesn't win, it'll be a pretty close race.

0 - I happen to think this belief is wrong.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#160

Post by Retric »

ddingus wrote: post #131
Retric wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you estimate ~20k per homeless person per year * 550,000 homes in the US you get on the order of 11 Billion dollars per year out of something like 7,150 Billion of total government spending. On the other hand if you look at social security as one way to reduce homelessness it’s vastly more expensive.

Neither one of those actually speaks to our spend.

I was more acknowledging it's not that easy to put a single number on that spend. The low number is a little over half that 11 billion I mentioned, but you can easily come up with other metrics which provide vastly larger figures.
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