How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

Short answer: CA 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.

Edit to add: 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 up with it. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.

"California homeless are crazy" narrative is tiring and excuse. They are still people and need basic life necessities: toilet, shower and food. Periodic showers improve mental health, there are studies to prove it! After that is solved, we can focus on other issues. And frankly California invented drug culture, it glorifies drugs, why shame homeless?

If Jordan can accept 3 million people, so can California.

I don’t think this phrasing is the worst progressive “improvement” in language (that award goes to “Latinx”, seriously please stop using this), but it is kind of awkward and the standard is not applied evenly. We don’t say someone is “experiencing hunger”, we say they’re hungry, despite hunger typically being a temporary condition.

Edit: your point about the need to understand the background level of housing instability in less well off population is completely valid. I don’t think people understand the extent to which large portions of the working poor continually cycle through housing crises.

Edit 2: My broader point is that if you do consider educating people about the true facts/nature of homelessness in US cities, you should seriously question how much using the preferred progressive phrasing actually accomplishes that goal vs just making you sound elitist. Even under the most generous interpretation, there is nothing in the plain language of the phrase “experiencing X” as compared to the adjective form of X that even attempts confer any information as to whether X is a temporary or permanent condition. This is an an attempt to use language as a form of persuasion that does not even try to engage with the basic reality of how people are going to respond to that language. There are already predefined ways in English to denote temporary vs permanent, “chronic “ and “acute” would be appropriate in a scholarly context, “short-term”/“temporary” and “long-term”/“permanent” work perfectly fine in casual conversation.

I'm not going to pretend I know a solution to this, but wasn't part of the reason it became hard to involuntarily commit people because it was being abused? Like, fathers were getting their daughters committed for being "too promiscuous"?

If that's a serious risk, I don't know that the "solution" to this problem by committing people is worth it.

That said, it's a hard problem. I know it's extremely hard for people without a yuppie income to get mental health treatment in the United States. I know before I got a high-paying desk job, I realized I had some form of manic depression, wanted treatment, but also could not afford to see a therapist because my health plan did not cover mental healthcare and my job didn't pay particularly well. It became this chicken-egg problem: it was hard to find a better job because of the depressive episodes, but I couldn't treat them without getting a better job. I can only imagine that stuff like schizophrenia and drug addiction (which I luckily have not suffered from) is exponentially more difficult to deal with.

And yet we also have a massive under-occupancy in some areas of LA cough Venice Beach cough Mar Vista cough where a lot of homes are owned by corporations for occasional use by traveling employees, people in other countries parking finances here, or people who AirBnB them for 180 days/year.

In one block where I was working in Mar Vista, four older homes have been knocked down to build McMansions in the past year. All four are owned by LLCs, and all four are vacant.

As for homelessness, we could solve a significant chunk of the problem by having decent healthcare/insurance available to people. I know two people - who had insurance - who ended up losing their houses due to healthcare expenses.

Of course, the above personal experience should be tagged as "anecdotal" not "evidential."