Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness • Hacker News Board

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#191

Post by trynewideas » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:36 PM UTC

slibhb wrote: post #53

When people talk about "homelessness," they're often referring to street people. Most technically homeless people aren't street people, they're between jobs or living in their car or something like that. It seems clear that lower rent/housing prices would help with homelessness but I don't think it would help street people.

US HUD segments homeless populations into three dimensions:

- sheltered vs. unsheltered homelessness

- chronic homelessness, where "chronic" is defined as a person with a disability who is "continuously homeless for one year or more, or has experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the last three years where the combined length of time homeless on those occasions is at least 12 months."

- individuals ("households that were not composed of both adults and children") and families

As of mid-December, the US point-in-time counts of those were:[1]

233,832 total unsheltered homeless

348,630 total sheltered homeless

-

216,495 unsheltered individuals

204,897 sheltered individuals

-

78,615 unsheltered chronically homeless individuals

49,153 sheltered chronically homeless individuals

-

More than half of all counted unsheltered chronically homeless individuals in the United States in December were in California (44,120 of 78,615; 56% of total unsheltered chronically homeless, 7.6% of total US homeless).

1: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-...

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#192

Post by majormajor » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:37 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #161

majormajor wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan! How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is? The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from f…

The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia. (But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wr…

I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic.

I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Manhattan is much more intense, construction-wise.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#193

Post by duped » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #154

slibhb wrote: post #53

When people talk about "homelessness," they're often referring to street people. Most technically homeless people aren't street people, they're between jobs or living in their car or something like that. It seems clear that lower rent/housing prices would help with homelessness but I don't think it would help street people.

How long do these temporary displaced people stay in that state before eventually becoming "street people" themselves?

The term "chronically" homeless refers to an individual who has been unhoused for longer than a year.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#194

Post by majormajor » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:40 PM UTC

novok wrote: post #145

majormajor wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change. Sometimes poor established renters also don't want change. In the 20th century a lot of cities grew practically 'out of nowhere'. Why has that stopped? That's a great pressure relief valve and gets new buyers/renters out of a vicious feedback loop caused by the tendency of already cash-or-pro…

Cities out of nowhere do exist in function in the USA, there are plenty of cities where people can buy for cheap. New settlements get started due to something unique about the place, be it ports, resources, trade route nexuses, and so on. The USA was a frontier and thus these cities were established. You'll notice in western europe you don't see many new towns either for 100s of years, because it's frontier was settl…

Sure, but we explicitly tried to counter those forces in the US, including through government policy to build industry in areas where it wasn't before.

Moving the defense industry to be less-concentrated in Los Angeles was deliberate and wasn't moving to "frontier" towns. It was moving to towns that were created for one purpose but had been somewhat "skipped over" after that in favor of the biggest cities.

I think it's probably worth trying to incentivize that more today. It still happens organically some (big companies moving HQs out of expensive areas, for instance), but probably could stand to happen more.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#195

Post by NotYourLawyer » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:40 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #162

exolymph wrote: post #27

The non-visible homeless (people down on their luck, to an approximation) get mentally sorted into the vast category of "that's unfortunate but it doesn't affect me directly," which might influence people's votes or charitable donations, but doesn't arouse much passion for most of us. By contrast, the visible homeless are a visceral inconvenience, even a danger, so people feel strongly about how that problem is addre…

I'm guessing that you misunderstand the threats, and are much more likely to be hit by someone in an SUV. I've spent lots and lots of time in cities; I've never had a problem with a homeless person.

How many SUVs have you been hit by?

(Don’t even answer, it’s irrelevant anecdata.)

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#196

Post by janalsncm » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #178

> There are a lot of poor people in Utah, there are a lot of poor people in Detroit and Philadelphia, but we don't see the kinds of homelessness that we do in Los Angeles, San Francisco,... Because where would you rather be if you're poor and homeless? Detroit or San Francisco? Philly or La? I know where I'd rather be in such a situation! Add to poverty drug addiction and poor life choices and you have basically nixe…

I have heard this line a lot, and it shouldn’t go unchallenged. Most homeless people don’t plan to be homeless anywhere, and certainly don’t plan to move from Detroit to LA to be homeless. Many poor but non-homeless people have never left their state, so it’s pretty hard for me to imagine a homeless person gathering enough money for a cross-country trip to supposedly homeless Mecca. And most homeless people are only temporarily homeless.

Many people also aren’t aware of the fact that a sizable percentage of homeless people have jobs. So “poor life choices” can prevent a person from having a roof over their head, but apparently not from working.

No, what is clear is that there is a direct relationship between an influx of people, lack of new housing, and an increase in homeless people. Did people suddenly become more predisposed to mental illness and drug addition when housing demand went up? Of course not. Most of the homeless people in a city are from that city.

In places with Housing First, there is a huge decrease in homelessness of course, but also in other associated problems like mental illness and drug addiction.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#197

Post by pwinnski » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:43 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #147

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly throwing up cheap mass housing without also organically growing the services and rest of the community is how you get food deserts and ghettos though. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just pointing out where it's gone wrong in the past and why people may be hesitant to try again.

Food deserts are the result of theft driving away low margin businesses that don't want to absorb the hit.

This is a popular trope, but companies have already begun walking back their claims of rampant theft[0].

There are increased profits when building in more prosperous areas, so one might understand why companies choose to do so given limited resources. But lower profits in inner cities are not always about theft so much as a lack of cash.

0. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/walgreens-may-have-cried-t...

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#198

Post by janalsncm » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:43 PM UTC

toofy wrote: post #51

i’m confident that someday in the future we’ll look back at our insistence on profiting off housing as a huge miscalculation.

It should be seen as a blight on leadership, a catastrophic failure of the free market due to seeing homes as a commodity rather than a necessity.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#199

Post by cjwilliams » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:43 PM UTC

shoo wrote: post #184

johnpublic wrote: post #152

A friend of mine who recently moved to the US from the UK put it to me like this: "imagine one state says they will pay out benefits without a permanent address. Where do you think the homeless are going to move to?"

The "The Obvious Answer to Homelessness" by Jerusalem Demsas, published by The Atlantic (linked in another comment by thamer) argues that this hypothesis is falsified, and can cite research: > Few Republican-dominated states have had to deal with severe homelessness crises, mainly because superstar cities are concentrated in Democratic states. Some blame profligate welfare programs for blue-city homelessness, claimin…

These self reported studies are not good measures. They need to find out where these people were last employed or attending school.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#200

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 9:44 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #192

zozbot234 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effective demand for places like Manhattan comes from the highly productive economic activity that can be pursued in such places. So if the demand for places like Manhattan (or Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai etc.) really was that boundless, that would be plenty of reason to build as many of them as possible and speed towards that post-scarcity techno-utopia. (But the ghost cities of China actually show how this can go wr…

I don't think the demand is literally boundless, but I think the idea that we could easily outpace demand with construction to dramatically increase affordability is wildly optimistic. I'd rather build new Dallases, or denser Dallases, than try to double the density of Manhattan, because it will both be easier to find/acquire un-utilized land to use, and because the amount of work required to double the density of Ma…

Of course density should be pursued wherever it's cheapest to do so. The point of thinking about the Manhattan case is that this is the natural endpoint of any sort of "more housing and higher density always leads to higher prices" argument. It clarifies to what extent that argument can possibly work, as a matter of basic logic.