Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 340 posts

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

#281

Post by CryptoPunk »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #231
techsupporter wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can appreciate that but, to be honest, that's why I'm asking someone who says he or she is currently homeless. I want to know if that position is theoretically true (that is, people who are housed think it is true) or if it really does have bearing on the day-to-day life of someone who is homeless. Put another way, I want to know what someone who's actually going through this would say because the question is sarca…

I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person. 1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere. There a…

>>But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute.

Like the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers.

Economic necessity has forced me to do very difficult things in my life. That's what people do, because becoming a burden on your family and the rest of society is a failing in every way.

Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm.

Life is tough. It doesn't get less tough when you redistribute the pain to make it more levelled. It just makes it less fair, by severing the link between responsibility and consequences, while creating unsustainable dependencies that will turn out badly for everyone involved in the long run.

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

#282

Post by ReptileMan »

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…

Build more highrises seems better solution. Asia builds them on the cheap and on conveyor belt. And they do fine.

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

#283

Post by collyw »

pascalxus wrote: post #172
cutler wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And this is exactly why the bay area is in such terrible conditions. Every bit of regulation you add, only decreases the housing available. more regulation is what got us into this mess. The less regulation we have, and less zoning, the more housing we'll have, it's that simple. We simply need more housing, lots more. once that happens prices will come down.

> We simply need more housing, lots more. once that happens prices will come down.

When the majority of politicians or their partners own second homes, that ain't going to happen.

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

#284

Post by masonic »

RoboTeddy wrote: post #268
spookthesunset wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> endless money pits The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area. The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But…

> Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area. I thought this too, but it turns out that despite San Francisco's relatively high expenditures on homeless, only 10% of the homeless population was living out of state at the time they became homeless. ( http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-SF-Poin... )

  only 10% of the homeless population was living out of state at the time they became homeles
That's purely from uncorroborated survey data with neither details nor verification.

A greater percentage of present-day homeless claim to have been housed in SF 10 years ago than the general non-homeless population!

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

#285

Post by axilmar »

deathanatos wrote: post #279
cutler wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demonstrably untrue. Spend some time in Vienna or Berlin.

> We find that landlords actively respond to the imposition of rent control by converting their properties to condos and TICs or by redeveloping the building in such as a way as to exempt it from the regulations. In sum, we find that impacted landlords reduced the supply the available rental housing by 15%. Consistent with this evidence, we find that there was a 20% decline in the number of renters living in impacted…

Doesn't it seem to you that the problem is those regulations that can allow the exemptions rather than rent control?

I mean, if it wasn't possible to exempt a building from the regulations, there wouldn't be an issue with rent control.

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

#286

Post by axilmar »

lubujackson wrote: post #220
cutler wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is so illogical. For one, who is going to build these properties for low-income people only? Costs will be almost the same, profits will be way less. So why would a developer bother? In fact, the recent change to require a higher percentage of low income units in new structures has killed the pipeline for new building starts. Even if it seems counterproductive to the goal of helping low income people, historical…

How about building new better houses for the rich or the richer, and so the old houses would be left for the poorer?

Why not deal with the problem by manipulating the supply side of the equation?

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

#287

Post by com2kid »

cutler wrote: post #254
lubujackson wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so illogical. For one, who is going to build these properties for low-income people only? Costs will be almost the same, profits will be way less. So why would a developer bother? In fact, the recent change to require a higher percentage of low income units in new structures has killed the pipeline for new building starts. Even if it seems counterproductive to the goal of helping low income people, historical…

You're thinking purely within a capitalist framework. There is no capitalist solution to this problem. The solution is unprofitable. I encourage you to think outside this framework as humanity itself is at stake not just profits.

Capitolist solutions exist to this problem, democracy keeps voting them down.

Remove the majority of zoning, and the free market will solve the housing problem quite quickly.

Sure houses will be up next to each other, and they'll be smaller, and the yards will cost even more than they do now, but housing will be affordable.

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

#288

Post by com2kid »

GabrielBen wrote: post #272
cutler wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking purely within a capitalist framework. There is no capitalist solution to this problem. The solution is unprofitable. I encourage you to think outside this framework as humanity itself is at stake not just profits.

Really, housing is where capitalism breaks down.

Zoning screws with the free market. Look into how Japan does zoning[0] to see evidence that weak zoning laws and strong enforcement of individual property rights work together to keep property prices low.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3...

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

#289

Post by CuriouslyC »

docker_up wrote: post #130
md224 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noah Smith's perspective on the necessity of a federal approach to homelessness: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-21/ending... Key graf: > About 3.5 million Americans will experience homelessness at some point in time, but only about a half-million are homeless at any given time, and roughly 87,000 of these are chronically homeless. By some estimates, housing a homeless person and providing them wit…

This is poppycock. $10,000 a person is a lie unless maybe if you moved all the homeless from the West Coast to the middle of nowhere in Midwest, but then you would have homeless activists and Midwest NIMBY activists saying that the government is shipping people out to solve the problem. The activists have politicized every direction of this issue to the point where it's easier to just forget about the homeless rather…

There are people living on a few dollars a day... You really think we can't provide a cot in the equivalent of a walk in closet with communal bathrooms, and simple meals like beans and rice with a few vegetables for $10k/year?

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

#290

Post by ryanmercer »

flaque wrote: post #166
spookthesunset wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> endless money pits The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area. The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But…

> Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area. This is just provably false. Utah solved it's homelessness problem by just giving people homes. And it was pretty effective.

>Utah solved it's homelessness problem by just giving people homes. And it was pretty effective.

Utah doesn't have a climate suited to living on the streets. When you're averaging just shy of 4 feet of snow a year and 3-4 months of freezing temps it's a lot different than say Seattle or San Francisco where the average low is above freezing all year.

Post reply on HN