I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem • Hacker News Board

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#111

Post by proc0 » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:07 AM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #72

proc0 wrote: post #66

How can it be housing when there are so many vacancies? I honestly don't understand this. Obviously they can't afford it, but that's how markets work. When there is high demand, prices go up. It seems to me the solution is just for people to go elsewhere... again, the housing is there, plenty of rentals everywhere, except too expensive for someone who is living on the streets to, all of a sudden, start paying for, ye…

Most areas (pre-pandemic) did not have enough vacancy to put pressure on the housing market. Most of the vacancy was caused by units being renovated/fixed, places waiting for a leaseholder to move in, etc. This is even true of low-income housing and shelters. Occasionally people will gripe about shelter vacancies, without realizing it’s really difficult to maintain 100% housing utilization without denying some people…

Right, but is this in the high demand areas only? Are there no other nearby cities with cheaper rent and also potential jobs? I still blame the authorities for allowing areas with high concentration of homeless people, since that discourages them to find solutions and instead enables them to settle down with other people outside, when perhaps they could try their luck in a less expensive, less dense area.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#112

Post by issa » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:07 AM UTC

Schnitz wrote: post #26

> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?" Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged)…

You are assuming that having low income housing somehow impacts the price of higher end housing, and I am not sure that this is true. Would a person with a million dollar house be hurt if we built 100,000 more million dollar houses? Yes. Would that same homeowner be hurt if we built 100,000 cheap rental apartments? It certainly doesn't seem like it. However much property values fall due to less people looking for low-end housing, you would think they would go up due to not being surrounded by homeless camps.

I would say the people who are incentivized to oppose cheap housing are the lower-end landlords.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#113

Post by epistasis » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:10 AM UTC

austinheap wrote: post #57

sombremesa wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lazily Googled and disproved you in five seconds: > San Francisco and the East Bay should see 7,872 new apartments open in 2021, an increase of 36% from the previous year. It's the highest number of apartments — 13,497 units — added to the region in the last five years. Surprised?

We can’t solve mental illness with more quarter million dollar condos. I don’t know why this is still being peddled.

Housing First policies are a huge boon to helping people out of homelessness who are dealing with mental illness.

What you derisively call "quarter million dollar condos" are of course helpful for this. It is either from directly housing the currently homeless with mental illness in these homes.

And if these homes do not directly house the homeless, new additional homes, where people's rent goes towards construction and labor rather than merely the pockets of a rentier landlord that just sees their rents ever increase is a huge help. Productive creation of new housing, especially if it increases the vacancy rate, is crucial to reigning in the housing market, a market which is failing our people, and in which landlords and homeowners are profiting from people's misery through perpetual shortages.

And if vacancy rates are not increasing, then we haven't built enough of those "quarter million dollar condos." Keep on building them until there's a surplus and they government can buy them on the cheap and provide housing as a human right.

Anybody who says that we do not need more housing is the very source of our homelessness problem. More housing makes everything easier, and the only cost is that some busybodies don't want to see it. Why pay attention to those people at the cost of helping everybody else?

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#114

Post by issa » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:12 AM UTC

autokad wrote: post #101

Schnitz wrote: post #26

> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?" Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged)…

I don't think housing prices are an issue. one part of the homeless are mentally ill. This is a very hard problem and I don't think anyone has the answers for yet, but its not home prices. Another major group of the homeless is drug addicts. Again, home prices isn't going to change that. I think its very rare someone goes homeless because their rent went up. if they can't afford it, they usually move. I'll get down-v…

The people who become homeless because their rent went up certainly exist. These people tend to be homeless for a short amount of time because they are able to eventually find new housing. Maybe they live in their car for awhile. Maybe they couch surf. But it's a good point that there are people with mental health / drug problems that have issues beyond housing cost. Both can be true at the same time.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#115

Post by epistasis » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

austinheap wrote: post #79

jdavis703 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of folks enter into mental health crisis from the stress, sleep deprivation and other issues caused by being homeless. Certainly not all. But having gone through a time period dealing with stress and sleep deprivation from the comfort of my home, I can empathize.

“Unhoused” — esp families — are rapidly rehoused in SF. Those experiencing “chronic homelessness” (the ‘visible’ humans, who deserve the same amount of love and respect) are more often tied to mental health…just different things are helpful for the different groups.

Even the chronically homeless with mental health issues benefit greatly from having housing. The key is to make it housing they actually can use, let them have their belongings, their pets foe support, let people come and go as they please so they are not prisoners, and don't force people out of the housing everyday.

A lot of the existing housing solutions for the chronically homeless have terrible terrible restrictions that make the housing not work for people, sadly.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#116

Post by proc0 » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #107

proc0 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, yeah the lack of walkable cities does make sense. Almost all cities require cars even with cheap housing, and large cities provide better job opportunities. I still feel we're not factoring in people's motivation for living on the streets, and authorities seem to provide incentives which encourage it. I'm sure there is a percentage of people that could find alternatives like living with a friend or relative, if t…

I was homeless for nearly six years. I hated it. It wasn't actually anything I wanted. Most people on the street don't want to be there. The research points to housing as the primary root cause.

I mean the housing IS there, just maybe not in the high demand areas. Is is that we need to have a bunch of excess housing so it lowers in price?

I had a couple friends who were homeless in SF, and slowly got out of it. Places like SF are just limited in square footage, it's like an island basically, yet people are living on the streets there for decades... shouldn't they try a different city if they really didn't want to be on the streets? I mean years outside in the same city seems suspicious to me that it's really housing.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#117

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

issa wrote: post #114

autokad wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think housing prices are an issue. one part of the homeless are mentally ill. This is a very hard problem and I don't think anyone has the answers for yet, but its not home prices. Another major group of the homeless is drug addicts. Again, home prices isn't going to change that. I think its very rare someone goes homeless because their rent went up. if they can't afford it, they usually move. I'll get down-v…

The people who become homeless because their rent went up certainly exist. These people tend to be homeless for a short amount of time because they are able to eventually find new housing. Maybe they live in their car for awhile. Maybe they couch surf. But it's a good point that there are people with mental health / drug problems that have issues beyond housing cost. Both can be true at the same time.

Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#118

Post by issa » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #85

dragonwriter wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to others, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead. Equity can be leveraged meaningfully without selling, so that's not true.

Besides HELOCs, what are you referring to? A HELOC is just a tool for getting lower interest rates on another loan, which only would make you wealthier if you happened to invest it in some other appreciating asset with an extremely high ROI.

A HELOC is, literally, a line of credit. You can do anything you want with that money: start a business, go to college, buy bitcoin, buy another property, etc.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#119

Post by zdragnar » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

maxlybbert wrote: post #73

rigata wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been a known problem for a while now. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/21/nevada... South Park made an episode about it with the song “California loves the homeless”. https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/California_Loves_the_Homel... California largely has weather that you can survive outdoor in year round and social programs that provide for and policies that show empathy for homelessness.

I believed this when I lived in California. Now I’m not so sure: it is true that people without shelter can easily die in much of the country, but California isn’t the only place with mild winters. Why don’t Arizona, New Mexico, large parts of Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, etc. have the same problem? Assuming that California will just naturally have a larger homeless population than everywhere else means that nob…

Coastal California is typically cooler than all of the states you mentioned in summer and warmer in einter. The other states have their own homeless populations- even Minneapolis get encampments that last into winter- but none are as favorable to outdoor survival and comfort as the southern Pacific Coast.

Also, california spends much more than all of the other states on providing assistance to the homeless, and is far more tolerant of bad behavior (public drug use, drunkeness, defecation, etc).

California isn't bad at handling the homeless so much as it is bad at getting the homeless to become housed, mentally and financially stable.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#120

Post by Waterluvian » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 3:16 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #74

Waterluvian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part this is an important point. But there is a minor perk that a greatly appreciating house gives you considerably more equity to act as a large rainy day battery via a home equity line of credit or traditional loans backed by home equity. My home appreciated 20% last two years and while I hate the condition of the housing market, this unlocked a lot of equity years earlier than I expected it to.

A HELOC just lets you unlock lower interest rates for accruing additional debt. It’s very different from actually having that additional money in your pocket.

Yep. But it’s still a valuable tool and the tool is made more powerful with this ridiculous market.