Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.

I originally left this comment a few months ago, but: CA especially has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one.

I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build.

Before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes concomitantly up. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs, and they're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.

The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform, and the removal of barriers to new housing, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or "neighborhood input" or "community input," both of which are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere.

Homelessness is mostly a housing problem: https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing. We can and should remove barriers to building new housing, and, until we do that, we're going to keep seeing these problems. CA SB-9 and SB-10 are steps in the right direction but they're very small steps. Tokyo's approach would be better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501. Even places like New York are proposing density reductions, insanely: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/coronavirus/202....