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

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

#271

Post by majormajor »

WalterBright wrote: post #225
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…

> You can also increase demand by building The solution to high housing prices, obviously, is to demolish whole blocks of housing.

Obviously the extremes are stupid, but hey...

Think about it - that works just as well if you take it to the extreme as "rebuild the entire city denser" - once you knock down the entire city, that land is gonna be worth a lot less.

And the demolition approach has the advantage of costing less than rebuilding everything after you demo it!

It's also a good way to force demand to move around, right?! Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...

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

#272

Post by braingenious »

The wording for this is hilariously bad. “Poverty” isn’t the real driver of homelessness so long as you define poverty in a way that it’s unrelated to your ability to shelter yourself!

This sort of tired, pointless game of “if you define words differently, sentences have different meanings!” is so oddly popular on here, especially when it comes to housing.

I personally go by the dictionary definition of poverty:

1 a : the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions

If the landlords in your city use some scummy software (1) to provide cover for them deciding that they should help themselves to 110% of your paycheck and that results in your inability to live indoors, you’re functionally impoverished.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/26/23479034/doj-investigati...

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

#273

Post by danjac »

wolverine876 wrote: post #153
danjac wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere. Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to mov…

> There's nothing magic about SF's geography It includes two of the world's top ten universities, incredible natural beauty there and nearby, excellent weather (locals complain, as locals do, but it's wonderful), and all the resources and people are gathered there. It's hard to imagine the return on investment of moving.

Universities are institutions made of people. If SF becomes to expensive for those people to work and study in, they'll face the same problem of housing costs. And universities rise and fall over time: a great CS department one decade might slip down the ratings the next.

There are many places on Earth with nice weather and scenery (depending on taste). There are many cities with great night life for younger people, or good schools for families. None of these things are unique selling points intrinsically required for a tech hub. And if remote work becomes the norm (and yes I know all the arguments for and against) you can live in your dream town with the right mixture of scenery/weather/nightclubs/schools without paying the premium.

The one thing SF has is inertia : tech happens there because it happens there. But Detroit used to have inertia, too.

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

#274

Post by atdrummond »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #91
atdrummond wrote: post #11

I’ve lived on the streets and worked with homeless charities for years and years. I am extremely skeptical this is case and for those whom it is true, I expect them to fall into the class of “transient homeless” who experience it for a short period.

Transient homeless (those who have fallen upon hard times, and may still have a job, but no longer have a place for their family to live) make up around 80% of the homeless population. Solving that would be a huge win for society.

It’s the non-transient population that cause the vast majority of externalities associated with homelessness. We’re not talking about Jeff who is homeless because he’s crashing on Aunt Karen’s couch for a month.

Put another way:

It is undesirable to be impermanently homeless.

The permanently homeless make it undesirable for you.

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

#275

Post by luckylion »

glass3 wrote: post #223
luckylion wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be "plan & build it within 12 months, and don't worry about anything but apartment buildings". It's not a new problem, it's been a constant topic (here, in Germany) for at least 15 years, with every year ending with "we have 2000 new apartments, but we need 20000 a year to keep up with demand". And city planners put their hands into their pockets and say "well, you can't rush these things..." What…

Neither. Why would significant further growth happen in Western (European) cities if cheap solar energy and space is available in North Africa?

A very practical reason: most of that available space is a desert, and people tend to prefer not living in a desert.

And also because European nations are much more developed, have much stronger economies, allow much more freedom etc etc. There's a reason why migration is a one-way-street.

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

#276

Post by ryukafalz »

majormajor wrote: post #209
zozbot234 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I can tell, the Manhattan case tells us that we aren't even close to the "building more will cause prices to fall" point anywhere in the US. And because of that, building more where it's cheaper is a better strategy for controlling costs than building more where it's already expensive . Manhattan was brought up to mock the idea that construction could make prices worse for existing residents, I don't think…

> Is it any wonder that "you're dumb, building more will lower prices" hasn't been a persuasive argument to people who've seen construction push up prices around them for decades without the promised lowering of prices yet?

You're making an assertion about causality that often gets thrown out, but typically without being backed up.

Certainly construction often correlates with prices rising. However, the arrow of causation could run in either direction. It's possible that construction itself increases demand in the area enough to raise prices. However, it's also possible that increased demand (due to agglomeration effects, etc) raises prices and results in construction to meet that demand, which lowers prices in the area relative to what they would have been without the construction.

Most research I'm aware of that has attempted to determine the causality of that relationship has determined that it's the latter. For example: https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/do-new-housi...

This doesn't necessarily mean that construction will lower housing prices, but it does mean that without it prices will be even higher, because the construction is attempting to meet new demand that's already there regardless.

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

#277

Post by xapata »

majormajor wrote: post #271
WalterBright wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can also increase demand by building The solution to high housing prices, obviously, is to demolish whole blocks of housing.

Obviously the extremes are stupid, but hey... Think about it - that works just as well if you take it to the extreme as "rebuild the entire city denser" - once you knock down the entire city, that land is gonna be worth a lot less. And the demolition approach has the advantage of costing less than rebuilding everything after you demo it! It's also a good way to force demand to move around, right?! Hell, if you demoli…

> Hell, if you demolished Manhattan and everyone there moved to other cities in the US, I wonder if the average rent and/or mortgage payments of the displaced people would go down...

Is that a rhetorical question?

You've asked the wrong question. It should be whether the sum that everyone in the world spends on housing will increase or decrease, not only the displaced Manhattanites.

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

#278

Post by xapata »

adasdasdas wrote: post #216
wolverine876 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Those tech workers, once they move, are not customers, they are the city. It's their city as much as anyone's, any failures or successes are theirs; what have they done?

They made it easier/more profitable to develop land by driving prices up

Not in the places they left.

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

#279

Post by 1024core »

janalsncm wrote: post #196
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…

> it shouldn’t go unchallenged.

Well, you should talk to the homeless people then. I live in SF and am on first-name terms with close to 20 homeless people. All but one of them came from outside SF.

You'll often hear of "point in time" surveys which claim that 70% of homeless people lived in SF when the became homeless. But this is a self-reported survey, without any proof, and the definition of "lived" is very loose: even if you were living in a homeless shelter and got evicted, you'd be classified as having "lived in SF when you became homeless".

I read an interview of a homeless woman from Minnesota, who explicitly said: I had a choice: would I rather be homeless in Minnesota, or homeless in San Francisco; so I hopped on a bus and came to SF.

SF has a very permissive culture, and an open drug scene, so it is attractive to anybody who's homeless.

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

#280

Post by shanty »

jmyeet wrote: post #203

There are levels of homelessness. The first level is one where you don't have permanent shelter. Maybe you're staying on a friend's couch or in your sibling's basemenet. But not long term. You may have several such situations and bounce between them. These arrangemenets tend to be temporary and are triggered by the loss of a job or rising rent or divorce or a number of other factors. These people are larely invisible…

This premise is interesting in that you are basically saying that homelessness is progressive. I am not sure that your levels encompass all types of homeless out there, given that the data is so scant. By that I mean there are a number of individuals who may refuse offers of shelter or homes (de facto homeless by choice). How do most homeless end up homeless and in places where resources ARE readily available, why do some choose not to use them?
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