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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

#261

Post by tshaddox »

dionidium wrote: post #252
tshaddox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody can make a profit selling flophouses to indigent single men if they're required by law to make them as nice as middle-class apartments. What exactly do you mean when you say "as nice as middle-class apartments"? Are you talking about how nice the carpeting and hardwood flooring is? How nice the building looks from the outside? How likely the roof is to leak or collapse? How safe the electrical wiring and fir…

What if it's closer to the latter? Like, what if the building doesn't have GFCI outlets in the kitchens? And maybe the roof in one of the bathrooms leaks and there's been a bucket under it for the last few months? And maybe the heat was out for 12 days last month? What then? What if the price of saying, "sorry, that's unacceptable" is that those men sleep on the street, instead? In the West that's exactly what we've…

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 particular night. So if your landlord is selling you a nightly probability that you'll be safer than if you had slept on the street, this "better than the street" sound bite sounds a little less appealing. Not to mention that the rentees probably aren't properly informed of these probabilities.

Secondly, I think it's a false dichotomy in practice. I find it very hard to believe that basic safety codes alone cause the difference between SRO-style buildings and "luxury" or even "middle-class" apartments. What percentage of that $800k was spent on the GFCI outlets in the kitchen?

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

#262

Post by honkdaddy »

richardfey wrote: post #212
nine_k wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, referendum-soaked Switzerland is governed somehow more sanely.

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Switzerland

If you somehow could swap the US population with the Swiss (times 30, of course), I imagine our homeless problems would evaporate within a few years. I believe homelessness represents a social issue in North America, not a political one. I live in New York and I don't think any amount of affordable housing, handouts, or government intervention solve fix the problems of the people I walk past every day, nor will they stop the pipeline of people soon to be in the same position.

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

#263

Post by byw »

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…

As a single guy and a software engineer, I would pay full price for a pod housing if the area is safe convenient. I'd rent a co-working desk nearby and save a ton of money.

These types of housing just aren't available in Vancouver (or NA in general), but I can totally see a market for it.

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

#264

Post by dionidium »

tshaddox wrote: post #261
dionidium wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's closer to the latter? Like, what if the building doesn't have GFCI outlets in the kitchens? And maybe the roof in one of the bathrooms leaks and there's been a bucket under it for the last few months? And maybe the heat was out for 12 days last month? What then? What if the price of saying, "sorry, that's unacceptable" is that those men sleep on the street, instead? In the West that's exactly what we've…

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?

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

#265

Post by holbrad »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #229
dealforager wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is real free markets. 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. It always feels nice for a bit when the government bails you out, but the long term consequences are always much more severe. Prices are information and when all the information is polluted, it becomes very difficult to…

> 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). There are so many ailments that can't currently be treated well (Despite having spent decades studying them, though that seems to be a systematic failure of academia)

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

#266

Post by MisterBastahrd »

nate_meurer wrote: post #213
wolverine876 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I'm confusing my programs, Section 8 is a voucher that is used to rent market units.

Correct. I have section 8 tenants in one of mine. They pay around fifteen percent of their rent, and the government pays the rest. There are advantages and disadvantages, but we're three years in and they're good tenants. Ten times better than the colleges students I always had in there before.

That's the dirty secret that some don't want to acknowledge: there are plenty of people for whom life has just been unkind to and they aren't slobs just because of their income level. This is doubly true for most poor immigrant families... of all the homes I've been in which were owned by Spanish speaking families, I've rarely ever seen one that wasn't spotless, much less organized. I helped a few neighbors move out of their homes and after we got done moving the furniture, they literally just had to sweep the dust that had accumulated underneath the furniture and they were done with cleaning on move-out.

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

#267

Post by worik »

richardfey wrote: post #209
vasco wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if SROs would be slums, they would be better than the street slums of LA. How is a tent city better than a decrepit building?

The tent cannot fall on your head? But I get what you mean.

> The tent cannot fall on your head?

That is a good point.

Tent cities are preferable to poorly built dangerous masonry.

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

Shuang1 wrote: post #228
nimbius wrote: post #17

the fact that any housing is getting built is frankly a refreshing turn of events. for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast on a bubble of six-fi…

Republicans caused all the problems in a city that they haven't controlled since 2001, in a state they haven't controlled since 1987? That really is incredible! I wonder how they accomplished that.

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by caddemon »

byw wrote: post #263
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a single guy and a software engineer, I would pay full price for a pod housing if the area is safe convenient. I'd rent a co-working desk nearby and save a ton of money. These types of housing just aren't available in Vancouver (or NA in general), but I can totally see a market for it.

Yeah I'm past this point in my life but there was nearly a decade post-college where I would have really enjoyed continuing to live in dorm-style housing with other people at a similar stage of life. Saving money on top of it would've made that a no brainer. It's a bit tangential to the discussion on SROs to address homelessness, but I wish that SROs were a more acceptable housing style for a variety of use cases.

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

#270

Post by logifail »

(I apologise in advance for my apparent ignorance on this) but are we sure we properly actually understand why people are homeless?

Is there a proportion of homelessness that is to some extent - although I hesitate to use this word - "voluntary"? Is there really nowhere else to go other than to sleep on the streets?

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