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LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

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Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#291

Post by mikepurvis »

ajmurmann wrote: post #187
mikepurvis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes there are market incentives to actually fill the housing that is built. What about when buildings of hundreds of luxury condos are built and they just sit empty, either owned by disinterested "investors" or unwilling to be sold for the market-directed price? Someone who studied this in Toronto by overlaying nighttime photos to find units where the lights are literally never on: https://www.movesmartly.co…

If you build more prices will come down and these "investments" will become nonviable.

Maybe, but that is difficult when a) the "investors" are split between connected, powerful people who really don't want to see their investments go negative; and families just getting started who could be utterly ruined by an underwater mortgage, and b) the fact that the housing situation is a crisis now; there isn't time to faff around and hope that ten to twenty years the invisible hand of the market does this or that.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#292

Post by sp332 »

tylerhou wrote: post #254
sp332 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vancouver: "condominiums that are owned and not available for rent had a whopping 12.5 per cent vacancy rate" The Manhattan article links to https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/realestate/new-york-decad... which says "Nearly half of new condo units in Manhattan that came to market after 2015... remain unsold, according to a December analysis of both closed sales and contracts" and "7,050 new condo units available for…

Vancouver: "City housing planner Matthew Bourke said there doesn't appear to be a correlation between empty homes and housing prices, given that the vacancy rate remained flat while prices skyrocketed.... Bourke told council that about 70 per cent of single-family homes marked as vacant in 2014 were found to be waiting for a renovation permit." 12.5 * 0.7 = 3.75% (this can't be directly compared to other vacancy numb…

"Came to market" clearly means they were not renting directly.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#293

Post by fastball »

mmcwilliams wrote: post #279
fastball wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is well and all, but seems like a bit of a distraction from the OP. While 2/3 of homeless may be transient homeless, it seems incredibly unlikely that most of the people living in tents fall into that category rather than into the chronically homeless camp.

Wouldn’t the fact that the population is split 2/1 mean that it is very likely that unhoused people living in those tents do fall into that category? I believe that’s what the GP is referring to when they say that people have a warped view about homelessness; that the situation “seems” one way because of anecdotal experience and media representation.

No, as pointed out by the GP, there are a lot of "homeless" people who are living out of their car / crashing on a friend's sofa / etc. While these people are technically homeless, I wouldn't say the general public as a skewed view of homelessness – it's just when people say homeless they're not usually talking about people crashing on a friend's sofa. People in tents almost by definition are not the kind of homeless that will crash on a sofa / live out of a car. And are generally the type of homeless that are panhandling, which is of course the most visible group.

It's similar to how there is a disconnect in how people talk about "mass shootings" and what the public think that means. The public thinks of a mass shooting as what the FBI calls an "active shooter" event, where someone is just opening fire on random people, while in stats and things it's just any shooting where 3+ people get shot, which can include gangland-style violence. People aren't "confused", we're just using two different definitions.

My point is of course not that the transient homeless don't need help or anything like that. It's just strange to bring them into it when presumably they are not a large percentage of the "habitually living in tents" homeless, which should of course be handled differently.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#294

Post by koheripbal »

darth_avocado wrote: post #35

I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions. Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartmen…

It reminds me of the programs that some cities have to buy bus tickets for homeless people to send them to other cities/states just to get rid of them.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#295

Post by Tiktaalik »

BurningFrog wrote: post #172
Tiktaalik wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but we have a crisis now which means that we need both regular market housing now and affordable housing now. We do not uh have the luxury of building luxury housing only then waiting 40 years for it to eventually become affordable.

If you build enough luxury housing it will become cheap right away. San Francisco has ~400k housing units. If you build a million more, prices will go down very sharply. When there is more housing units than people who want to live there, prices go towards zero, whether they're "luxury" or not.

This is all true if we're talking about supply demand lines on a graph, but when on earth in real life is a for-profit company gonna whoops accidentally build so much that they have to take a loss and then keep building? lol.

I mean the idea is correct, but I don't think we can depend on the private market to deliver on this concept.

Don't get me wrong SF badly needs more housing and needs to approve tons more, I'm just saying there are limits to the outcome. At some point for profit developers will not build because they can't make a return.

Now if we had a not for profit government agency that steadily built housing regardless of the market conditions, say they were working toward a vacancy rate goal, now that could create surplus housing.

You might see friction there though in the private market would pull back.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#296

Post by slg »

tylerhou wrote: post #257
slg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons. First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone…

> Adding in a new road can actually increase traffic as it ends up encouraging more people to drive who otherwise wouldn't have. You're alluding to "induced demand," which does not claim that adding a new road increases traffic. When it becomes "cheaper" (in terms of time) to drive, more people will start driving, but the cost of driving (time to get from A to B) still goes down. This is basic economics, except with…

Your logic is present in a lot of economic thinking, but it is flawed as it assumes people are purely rational actors that make decisions at the margins. That is a classic Economics 101 assumption that turns out to only be true in theory.

In reality people are stubborn. We chase sunk costs and we repeat inefficient behavior because it is habit. People therefore won't necessarily choose to drive based on an evaluation of that individual trip. They will base it on things like whether they own a car, whether they have an unlimited pass for their local mass transit system, and simply what they did the last time they made the same trip. Therefore traffic can actually exceed where it was before as new and improved roads can lead to people buying more cars and people being less reliant on public transit.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#297

Post by koolba »

jollybean wrote: post #156
koolba wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promoting an author who’s book is literally titled, “In Defense of Looting”[1] isn’t progressive. It’s promoting the breakdown of the rule of law. That wasn’t an accident either. [1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...

The title of the piece is: "One Author's Controversial View: 'In Defense Of Looting'" To the extent that they identify that the view is labelled with the editorially appropriate moniker: 'Controversial' - I'm glad that people have a chance to speak their minds. 'Covering' a book or a perspective is not overtly 'promoting' it. If they're drawing from a wide perspective (they don't quite though), then this would be a g…

Even NPR had to admit that it was wrong to publish that story, or at least do so without calling it out as factually inaccurate:

> This Q&A with a provocative author did not serve NPR’s audience. You and several other NPR fans pointed out that NPR’s own prior reporting contradicted some of the things this author was saying. On top of being wrong about recent events, the author’s characterization of the Civil Rights Movement is a distortion and oversimplification.

http://view.nl.npr.org/?qs=7c7fd141a65180ed1dafb8fed91fa4fa3...

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#298

Post by lightgreen »

paulcole wrote: post #100
lightgreen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is part…

How much of this comment is based on data and how much is you extrapolating from a single person you know? This article seems to suggest that giving out access to housing is in fact effective: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housi...

I'm extrapolating it from various personal encounters, but I have no data.

Vox doesn't have data either. They are stating that government spends money very inefficiently at homeless and assumes it would be more efficient to hand out homes. This is wrong because:

* government will hand out homes also very inefficiently

* handing out homes might be cheaper than policing homeless people, but it does not guarantee that it fixes homeless problem for reasons I described and for other reasons (like some people might consider declaring themselves homeless to get free apartments)

I'm not saying Vox is wrong, I'm just saying that Vox is correctly writing about different aspect of the issue, but does not explain how to solve homelessness.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#299

Post by andy_jensen »

BurningFrog wrote: post #290
andy_jensen wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock. Where I live the housing prices are expected to go up roughly 15% this year. So someone buying a house for 600k can expect to sell it for 690k making 90k. That is 7500 USD a…

My point is you can do both. Make $7500/month from house value increase, and also, say, $4k from rent. This increases the resale value since the house is generating income to the buyer.

Homeless people of people with low income cannot afford $4k rent. Also I find it preposterous that people can make $7.5k/month in the first place from just house value increase. At the rate at which housing get more and more expensive we will soon reach a point where new home owners will never be able to fully pay a mortgage back

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#300

Post by __app_dev__ »

dnautics wrote: post #139
spfzero wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, buying a house and leaving it vacant most of the year doesn't seem like a very good investment. In my experience when people I've known bought an investment property the number one thing on their minds was occupancy, and if they thought it would lie vacant for more than a month or two, they wouldn't buy it. I do see your point about foreign investors though, they will view the house as a bank account, one that w…

If it's not occupied isn't it losing money at least by bleeding to property taxes?

In CA (at least Los Angeles) there are some tax laws in place that allow a home owner to make more in tax breaks by not renting a house or building vs renting it out.

I don’t know the details as I'm a renter but from speaking with a few Realtors they mentioned the companies the worked at did this.

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