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

Really, housing is where capitalism breaks down.

Or just stop subsidizing them. In the short term, it's more suffering for the poor, but in the long run, it's fewer people born into multi-generational poverty traps and into communities where they learn to become dependent and game government programs, because the dominant source of income is unconditional social assistance programs provided at the taxpayer's expense.

Here's an excerpt from the executive summary:

>>Over the past three decades, local barriers to housing development have intensified, particularly in the high-growth metropolitan areas increasingly fueling the national economy. The accumulation of such barriers – including zoning, other land use regulations, and lengthy development approval processes – has reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to growing demand. The growing severity of undersupplied housing markets is jeopardizing housing affordability for working families, increasing income inequality by reducing less-skilled workers’ access to high-wage labor markets, and stifling GDP growth by driving labor migration away from the most productive regions.

Other relevant excerpts:

>>Researchers examining proxy measures – including the prevalence of zoning and land use cases in state courts, which correlate strongly with static indices of housing barriers and supply constraint surveys – have found that barriers to housing development increased rapidly from 1970 to 1990, and continue to increase through the present day. 2

...

>>Though popular coverage of these challenges has been most focused on the Bay Area, Seattle, and major East Coast cities, Los Angeles provides a clear illustration of the impact of the primary barrier to development – restrictive zoning. In 1960, Los Angeles was zoned to accommodate 10 million people; after decades of population growth and increased demand, the city is today zoned for only 4.3 million people.9

...

>>In just the last 10 years, the number of very low-income renters paying more than half their income for rent has increased by almost 2.5 million households, to 7.7 million nationwide, in part because barriers to housing development are limiting housing supply.11 Since 1960, the share of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income for rent has more than doubled from 24 percent to 49 percent.12 And over that time, real household income increased by 18 percent, but inflation adjusted rents rose by 64 percent.

...

>>A recent study noted that in theoretical models of mobility, economic research suggests our Gross Domestic Product would have been more than 10 percent higher in 2009 if workers and capital had freely moved so that the relative wage distribution remained at its 1964 level. 21 Most of this loss in wages and productivity is caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high- productivity regions, including zoning regulations and other local rules.

So to summarize, economists have observed an increase in zoning/land-use restrictions since about 1970. They attribute the rise in the proportion of income consumed by rent to these restrictions on housing supply growth.

They conclude that absent zoning and other restrictions on housing supply expansion, the US would have less income inequality and a significantly higher GDP.

Why did you quit jobs?

Economics has come to explain and attack the particular problem of homelessness amongst rich areas in the late 1800's, with Henry George's Poverty and Progress.

The economic field definitely has a simple recipe to attack the root cause of this issues, but its one that, in my opinion, is politically unfeasible, as it goes mostly against the middle class, and retired people as well as the rich.

The solution is called LVT, land value tax, and its popular since adam smith, to modern day left-leaning econs like stiglitz, or right-leaning like Milton friedman.