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Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

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Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#271

Post by tshaddox »

dionidium wrote: post #264
tshaddox wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but surely there ought to be some limit on how unsafe a rental property can be, right? For one thing, at some point it actually won't even be true that "it's better than sleeping on the street." When the cheap electrical wiring causes a fire that burns down the apartment building and kills a few dozen people, that probably wasn't better than if the victims had slept on the street that partic…

To be clear, I'm not an ideological libertarian. I just happen to think these are genuinely difficult problems and the tradeoffs aren't always obvious. In some cases, we won't like any of the options. So, yes, I agree with you. Surely there must be some limit. But what's optimal?

I don't claim to be able to draw up very specific legal code here, or even that there is some "objectively optimal" answer. I just don't think "it's better than sleeping on the street" is a great mode of argument, because 1) it might not even be true if people were fully informed of the risks associated with every rental unit and 2) even if it is true, society might not be willing to allow landlords to earn unrestricted profit from renting units that are infinitesimally "better than sleeping on the street."

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#272

Post by worik »

I do not understand the cost breakdown.

So a developer wants to build a hundred basic units (350 square feet/30 square metres) in a block and the cost is costing eighty million dollars?

We can do much better. Where are the factories building the prefabricated units to build apartments from?

I have a friend from East Germany who's parents grew up in the Stalinist apartments. They solved this exact problem in the early 1950s. What is wrong with LA?

And not to pick on LA. This is a problem throughout the West as far as I can tell. What is wrong with us? Why can we not efficiently build housing?

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#273

Post by djrogers »

closeparen wrote: post #217
999900000999 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first apartment didn't have a kitchen. And it was fine, we are talking about a homeless shelter. You do not need to have stainless steel appliances, it should be a short-term stopgap until you find a better solution. Historically lower income people had to share common amenities like a shower. Just because it would be nice for every single person to have a big apartment with brand new appliances doesn't make it fe…

No, we are not talking about a homeless shelter or a temporary stopgap, these kinds of units are the "something better" that people in homeless shelters and other temporary stopgaps are in a holding pattern waiting for. Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.

> Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.

Why? Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times rather than junkies who moved in for better weather and benefits, shipping them out seems completely reasonable.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#274

Post by djrogers »

2c2c2c wrote: post #242
Dig1t wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're talking about this in pretty black/white terms and the partisan framing doesn't do much. Prop 13 is a double edged sword IMO. It does have the problem you describe of landed gentry not getting hit with high property taxes, but also it does protect middle class people from getting kicked out of their homes due to the popularity of the area they live in. My parents are the perfect example of this, my dad…

always fun to see prop13ers turn themselves into victims over the idea of having to sell their 300% ROI property

It's not about selling the house, it's about being forced to move out of a city / neighborhood they've been in for decades, simply because it got more popular and they can't afford a property tax bill several times higher than their largest mortgage payment ever was.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#275

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rhizome wrote: post #260
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The city isn't spending $837K to house one homeless person, they've spent that on housing the first homeless person in that unit. Unless they are housing functioning tenants (the easier homeless cases that don't involve mental illness or substance abuse, the ones that can get back on their feet with some help), those units are likely to get damaged quickly and require extensive refurbishment within a year or two. H…

An effective homeless program probably has to include rehab, occupational therapy, and related services, yes.

There is a fallacy here: it is not just "one homogenous group of homeless" that you can help with the same turnkey solution. No, there are easy cases (people living out of their cars, still capable of holding down jobs, they just need help) and there are hard cases (people who lost their jobs and housing because they got addicted to drugs or couldn't stop drinking, or fell into mental illness), and probably many cases in between. We should throw lots of resources at easy cases: get them housing, make sure they can continue working or get them work, subsidize their rent but don't just give them a place (because people will value what they have to pay for vs. what they are given).

Hard cases...I'm not sure if many of them are ever going to be normal again. Many people with fentanyl addictions are just really messed up, and there isn't much we can do to solve their addictions. Same to a lesser extent for alcoholism, and mental health problems. Housing first also doesn't work well for them, because their addictions are so strong that they trash housing given to them, sell what they can, and wind up on the streets again because it is the best way to support their addiction.

I think because hard cases are so hard to solve, we should devote almost all of our resources on (a) kids (so they can avoid this fate) and (b) easy homeless cases so we can prevent them from becoming hard cases.

Many homeless advocates seem to want it both ways: that not every homeless is an addict (true), but that we should throw the exact same resources at addicts as we do at people who just couldn't pay rent (false). I don't understand why they do this, it doesn't help their cause (and they don't make progress because their solutions are not well matched to the problems they are solving).

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#276

Post by mhb »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #197
legitster wrote: post #66

In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over 1 million SROs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy ) in an effort to remove slums or just neglect at increasing property value. There are now over half of a million homeless. It's honestly impressive the number is not more. For the 1.2 billion dollars they are spending, if all of the apartments were built to the spec of a roadside mote…

This...is not wrong. Pioneer Square in Seattle used to have a lot of flop houses, part of it being the original "skid row" (logs skid to the saw mill, really muddy and not a desirable place to live). My grandfather in Spokane unwittingly ran a rooming house we cousins called the "empty arms" (inherited from his sister), which housed a lot of people who were just barely getting by. Seattle's flop houses are mostly gon…

How do you unwittingly run a rooming house?

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#277

Post by sfe22 »

renewiltord wrote: post #246
sfe22 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So CA is too democratic in your opinion? It should slide more towards tyranny?

That's exactly it. One of the reasons that the US (and other representative democracies) have limits on direct voter rule explicitly to prevent a "too democratic" situation yielding "mob rule" outcomes.

Sounds like a reason to justify tyranny to me. What do you mean mob rule. In a (true) democratic society just a small group can change something the majority disagrees with because they got together? The majority is also together in the same matter isnt it?

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#278

Post by narrator »

Homelessness, like healthcare reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns where the problem just gets worse when more money is spent on it. If there was a hard upper limit on spending and then the government just had to get creative on doing things efficiently, things would work out better.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#279

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

holbrad wrote: post #265
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is real free markets. A ludicrous suggestion. The "free market" optimizes for one single thing: Profit. Providing housing for homeless people is not profitable, and so a free market would never do it. > Constant government intervention in the housing market, the stock market, education, healthcare, and everything else under the sun has led us to where we are today. Health care is in the same boat. If a…

Optimising for profit can lead to both massive positive and negative effects. So the obvious question is how you balance those negative effects against the positive. This is where regulations and governments have to step in, though that certain has it's own massive issues. Health care has a lot of unsolved problems, from my perspective no group is actually doing well (Just varying shades of bad, I'm from the UK). The…

Optimizing for profit greatly incentivizes innovation as corporations compete, I'll definitely give you that.

But it also leads to a poorer customer experience (long hold times as call centers are understaffed, cheap and flimsy materials, I could go on...), exploitative dark patterns, rent-seeking, and more.

And then there's the fact that corporations would happily dump toxic waste into rivers to save a few dollars if the EPA didn't exist to stop them. They will gladly burn the atmosphere in order to show growth on their quarterly report.

> So the obvious question is how you balance those negative effects against the positive. This is where regulations and governments have to step in, though that certain has it's own massive issues.

Agreed. Corporations can't be free to do whatever they want, but finding that happy medium of reining them in without stifling them is hard.

It doesn't help that our politicians are for sale. Corruption runs rampant.

Re: Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless person

#280

Post by cool_dude85 »

legitster wrote: post #256
slg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember these are new units and those median prices are for all units regardless of age and condition. It is really impractical to build new units in the 1st percentile. Those are almost always going to be old units that are poorly maintained. You also can't just give this money to homeless people and let them buy or rent their own places because the fundamental problem is a lack of supply. Simply giving them money…

This is that classic "you can't grow old forests" problem. If someone needed a car to get to work, you would never think of providing them with a brand new one. But we are kind of in that situation with housing. I think the city could have saved a bunch of money here sourcing existing housing, then putting the savings into funding general new construction. But a $100 million kickback to a developer to add 1500 units…

>But a $100 million kickback to a developer to add 1500 units is somehow less politically popular than $1 billion dollars for 1200 units.

Even assuming this is true, there are plenty of reasons this might be a good deal. One is greater control over construction, alignment of incentives (i.e., the developer incentive is to put up the worst pieces of junk they can get away with), long-term ownership if this is to be a long-term program, etc.

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