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LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

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Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#281

Post by imtringued »

lightgreen wrote: post #70
morpheuskafka wrote: post #63

Monthly rent for a furnished apartment at my university (i.e. already overpriced and in demand) is $1049. Why not buy these people a ticket and a year's prepaid rent to somewhere with a much, much cheaper cost of living. It would save the city money and these people would have a real place to live (i.e. not homeless anymore, instead of homeless in a tent).

Problems with homeless is deeper than finding a place to sleep. For example, some homeless people voluntarily choose to sleep on the street even when they have homes (like one man I knew who refused to go home after his wife death after many years of struggling with cancer). Some people would destroy that property that would be given to them, and will be thrown out by the building administration. Homelessness is part…

If all homeless people were like that then the world would be a much better place, because there would be less of them.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#282

Post by imtringued »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #38
sixdimensional wrote: post #28

I'm super impressed by what Pallet[1] is doing in this space. I think LA is talking with Pallet to implement their temporary housing, which would be amazing. [1] https://www.palletshelter.com

I don't want to diminish the link above and it's efforts but how a first world society has to resort to stuff like this is just mind-boggling. I'm an expat in a developing country and even for the poorest people a roof over their heads is affordable. Everytime I go back to Australia or visit Europe I'm always shocked at the level of homelessness, it's just not right. Why are dirt-poor countries able to house their ci…

It's not mind boggling, homeless shelters in repurposed halls are mind boggling.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#284

Post by ultrastable »

texaswhizzle wrote: post #263
ultrastable wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why wouldn't you rent to it?

Way too risky. It would have to be significantly above market rate before I would consider it. Risk of damage to the property.

so you're saying you wouldn't rent to someone purely because they were homeless? w/ attitudes like this it's not surprising there's so many people living on the street

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#285

Post by thealienthing »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #57

Posting this because most people in HN have a warped view of what homelessness is, especially in california. First of all, when most people think homeless they think "fentanyl addict out of his mind living in squalor" and while there are certainly a bunch of those people in the homeless population, they aren't even a majority of the homeless. In general, about 2/3 of the homeless are transiently homeless. They will b…

I haven’t heard this side of the story. Would you mind sharing any sources you have on the proportions of people who are transiently homeless and those who are homeless permanently?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#286

Post by Kneecaps07 »

browningstreet wrote: post #209

Last year I went from making $20K/mo to I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options. Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me vi…

When you were making $20k/mo did you not put some aside in an emergency fund? What were you doing with all of that money while you were making it?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#287

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

darth_avocado wrote: post #35

I think the main takeaway here is government, as usual, thinking short term and spending more money on bandaid solutions. Yes, the $2600 gets you services, meals, sanitation and staffing. But in reality, you can get a decent 1BR apartment for $1500 that is waaay bigger than a tent, sanitation for free since it is an apartment, and have almost $1000 for groceries left over. And, you can fit more people in the apartmen…

Or you could make vagrancy a crime and deter people from thinking that behavior is okay. Sure somewhat cruel, but so is making average citizens feel unsafe because there are thousands of people with nothing left to lose hounding them.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#288

Post by TchoBeer »

nerfhammer wrote: post #174
TchoBeer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More luxery houses would lower prices for luxery housing, but not necessarily for affordable housing. I don't know how much those are competing markets

New housing is always relatively "luxury" because newness is itself a luxury. Much of what is relatively affordable now was relatively "luxury" when it was built. But if you stop building anything new it would be like trying to keep the price of cars down by banning new cars – what will happen after a decade or two if you did that?

To use your car analogy- just because a new car will be worth more than a used one (and this is much more true of cars than houses), that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a luxery car. Sure, newness is a type of luxery (I'm not sure how much housing price depreciates with time, but I'll believe you on this one), but new houses can be built to cater to wealthy buyers or to cater to lower income buyers.

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#289

Post by pas »

tboughen wrote: post #230
slg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This generally doesn't happen for two primary reasons. First cities are not closed systems. Places like LA and the Bay Area have a built up demand that exceeds housing. The new housing would have to be added at an extremely high right to keep up with that demand otherwise the city just grows rather than becomes cheaper. When a city simply grows, the cheaper units never flow down to the bottom of the market as someone…

This may be true if the housing market has sufficient capacity to build homes at the required rate. The UK’s experience over the past 50 years is that the private sector has built around 170k homes per year, but the rate of household formation suggests we need around 300k extra each year. The U.K. hasn’t built 300k+ homes per year (or anything like that) since the government stopped building houses - the private sect…

What's the bottleneck? Obviously the demand is there, right? What's constraining the private supply side to expand? (More explicitly: what happened when the public sector building shrunk, why private sector did not pick up the slack?)

Is the difference that council housing is in a large part publicly funded? Difference in the permitting process?

Re: LA pays $2600 per homeless tent, per month

#290

Post by BurningFrog »

andy_jensen wrote: post #229
BurningFrog wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated by how widespread this weird idea is. Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock. Why can't you do the same trick with existing housing?

>Even if we buy the exotic premise that investors would buy houses and leave them empty - generating zero rental income for these greed driven people - as an investment, we still have to explain why they would only do this with new housing stock. Where I live the housing prices are expected to go up roughly 15% this year. So someone buying a house for 600k can expect to sell it for 690k making 90k. That is 7500 USD a…

My point is you can do both.

Make $7500/month from house value increase, and also, say, $4k from rent.

This increases the resale value since the house is generating income to the buyer.

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