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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

#241

Post by electricslpnsld »

partisan wrote: post #149

I was walking through Manhattan on Sunday along Broadway north of Union Square Park and I saw at least 2-3 homeless or panhandlers _per block_ along the way. I was directly asked for money a few times as well. I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it. There is no cushion for people living on the margins of society anymore. Not here, at least. When I was a kid, m…

> I grew up in NYC. I spent high school and college in Manhattan. This is the worst I have seen it.

What up, Astoria native (then Stuyvesant then Columbia) checking in. The current level of (visible) homelessness in NYC is nothing compared to NYC in the early 2000s, let alone the 90s. Even in the late 90s the parts of upper Manhattan I frequented had burned out car husks and people shooting up in the streets. Hell, when I was in school you couldn't walk through Morningside or Riverside park without tripping over homeless people. Manhattan is downright bucolic compared to they way it used to be. The state of things isn't perfect, now, but it is orders of magnitude better than it used to be.

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

#242

Post by sien »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #211
jahaja wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIMBY/YIMBY arguments seem just too convenient an excuse for me. It's almost if one has actively tried to find something that can plausibly explain the housing crisis but does not challenge the status quo of structural/systematic problems in any way shape or form. In Sweden the seemingly prime effect of these movements is to remove democratic influence to the benefit of construction companies, even though that only r…

I recommend you look at the economic research on the issue of zoning restrictions on housing supply: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images...

Thanks for posting that report.

You might be interested in this report by the Australian Reserve Bank about Australia's housing price problems.

https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/2018/pdf/rdp2018-03....

It uses the cost calculation of zoning that was worked out by Ed Glaeser and applies it to Australia.

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

#243

Post by tomrod »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #205
reaperducer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mormon Church played a big role in it because that organization is involved in its community. But it's not like it only helped Mormons. Everyone was helped, regardless of religion or lack thereof. Why can't the Utah success be replicated elsewhere? There are no religion-specific aspects to the Utah plan. Are you implying that atheists are incapable of compassion, generosity, or the need to help their fellow man?

I didn't say it only helped Mormons. From what I gather, the Mormon church has a very complex and well developed infrastructure for deciding who gets help, what kind of help they get, etc. This seems unlikely to be readily and easily replicable without the Mormon church. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in god. It has to do with social infrastructure.

I wouldn't say it's well developed. It's set up to get people on their feet temporarily. That covers many cases. It's less helpful for cases where chronic issues require ongoing help. Source: former Mormon, used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership, saw the inside baseball, politics, sausage-making, etc.

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

#244

Post by toomanybeersies »

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…

> that to bulk "people without permanent housing" all under the umbrella of "homeless crisis" is not going to get us anywhere

It's interesting that you raise that point. I was technically "homeless" for about a year once, as I wasn't living in permanent accomodation, but rather in a backpackers hostel in my home country.

I was actually pretty happy with my living situation, and had no desire to move into permanent accomodation. It was also a massive advantage when I decided to quit my job and move countries, I didn't have any contracts to cancel or work my way out of. I simply handed in my notice, booked a flight, and 3 weeks later I was in a new country.

These days I'd be much more hard pressed to do that. I'm on a 1 year lease, I have a 2 year contract with my ISP, I have has gas bills, water bills, and power bills in my name, I own an entire house worth of furniture. It actually makes me a bit sad that I'm immobile, I enjoyed the freedom of the concept that I could pack up and leave at a moments notice (which I eventually did).

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

#245

Post by DoreenMichele »

dredmorbius wrote: post #239
DoreenMichele wrote: post #44

I fairly often comment on the topic of homelessness. I am routinely told on HN that the high cost of housing is unrelated to the rise in homelessness. This article states otherwise and I quoted it here: https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c... Some things I routinely talk about: This country tore down up to 80 percent of SROs over the course of a couple of decades, probably because the Baby Boo…

Doreen, question for you or others: why did homelessness explode as a problem over the 1970s and as an issue in the 1980s? Google's Ngram Viewer isn't a perfect reference, but it does show that various mentions of "homeless", "homeless person", and "homelessness" exploded in the 1980s. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homeless%2Chom... I've previously gone through earlier references, and noted that up th…

I don't actually know The Answer to your question. But:

The United States saw a decrease in single room occupancy housing during the period of 1960s and 1970s urban decay. For example, in Chicago 81% of the SRO housing stock disappeared between 1960 and 1980.[1]

My general belief is that we probably tore down SROs (and generally got rid of other low cost housing, such as boarding houses) because when the Baby Boomers came of age, they were unusually well off and didn't need dirt cheap housing of that sort. They moved from their parent's home to something relatively middle class.

Then the generations after them weren't so well off, the cheap housing we had torn down did not get replaced as need for it ramped up and this left poor people few to no viable housing options.

New housing tends to be built for wealthier people and it trickles down to the poor as it ages. I am not aware of a good means to suddenly supply large quantities of inexpensive housing once it has been destroyed. That doesn't seem to be how things get done.

I'm hoping to figure out some solutions. But I don't yet have a clear idea what they might be.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

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

#246

Post by dredmorbius »

newnewpdro wrote: post #232
dredmorbius wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

References requested.

References? It's rather simple and obvious math. If your city's population doubles, and the homeless portion started at 1%, and ended at 1%, your number of homeless people on the streets doubled. We like to focus on per-capita figures/%ages because they can make us feel good about ourselves. Except the problems you see on the street are not constant when their incidence %age stays constant, as the population grows. F…

Actually I was referring to the homelessness increasing as population increases.

The periods of most rapid population growth in the US were the decade of the 1810s, with a subsequent peak in the 1850s. In the 20th century, the peak decades were the 1900s and 1910s (21% each), then the 1960s (18%). Rates of growth have fallen consistently since the 1960s, with the exception of the decade of 2000 - 2009.

As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, use of the term "homelessness" took off in the 1980s, during a period of modest population growth, by historical standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_State...

See also: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/population

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

#247

Post by bassman9000 »

jakelarkin wrote: post #8

"Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them."

Any solution that doesn't involve allowing the market to make housing more affordable, and relies only of funneling taxpayer money to public housing, is doomed to be crushed under the perverse incentives it creates.

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

#248

Post by DoreenMichele »

tomrod wrote: post #243
DoreenMichele wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it only helped Mormons. From what I gather, the Mormon church has a very complex and well developed infrastructure for deciding who gets help, what kind of help they get, etc. This seems unlikely to be readily and easily replicable without the Mormon church. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in god. It has to do with social infrastructure.

I wouldn't say it's well developed. It's set up to get people on their feet temporarily. That covers many cases. It's less helpful for cases where chronic issues require ongoing help. Source: former Mormon, used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership, saw the inside baseball, politics, sausage-making, etc.

From what I gather from reading stuff on the internet, it appears to be "well developed" relative to what is generally happening elsewhere. Given the state of things elsewhere, it absolutely doesn't surprise me to hear that's a low bar to meet and the perspective from inside seems less than impressive.

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

#249

Post by hackeraccount »

cutler wrote: post #164
Alex63 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to hear how homelessness can be meaningfully addressed in a humane way by the federal government (especially if it is constitutional).

Simple. Put a ceiling on rents. Allow no-one to own more than one home and insist they live in the one they own. In the UK we have a "bedroom tax" but it is aimed at the poor, not the rich as it should be. Make it illegal to discriminate against anyone based on their income source or the state of their health. Build housing exclusively for low-income occupants instead of throwing everything onto the insidious propert…

Regulations increase the value of goods and services by creating predictability. Competition reduces the cost of goods.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

pastor_elm wrote: post #143

For most of industrialized history in the West, poor people lived crammed in tenements and multi-family apartments where they didn't get much beyond a room. This is still the case in much of the developing world. Has it ever occurred to anyone that spacious living spaces for everyone in every city simply isn't tenable? It worked for a couple decades, but that was a different time and these cities were different place…

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