The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression • Hacker News Board

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#721

Post by Exoristos » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

beretguy wrote: post #281

silenced_trope wrote: post #122

My mom was homeless for years, thankfully she got stable housing right before covid took off. - in shelters/churches-with-cots there would be crazed drug-users, she was threatened numerous times in them and the shelter can't do anything - I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing - she's entirely dependent on getting social s…

> My mom was homeless for years > I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing Ah… So… If you had a place to live couldn’t you let her live in that same place too, instead of her being homeless? My parents lost their jobs due to covid, and even though they treated me bad when I was a kid I still let them in my house. How can you…

Thanks for bringing this up. I was reading the GP open-mouthed, not sure how to process it. No, Americans don't generally let their parents sleep in the street. Maybe that's changing though?

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#722

Post by hotnfresh » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

rcarr wrote: post #669

hotnfresh wrote: post #562

Oh boy. Just wait for Gen X. It’ll be a retirement crisis. At-same-age savings levels for generations after the boomers start at “catastrophic” for X and are markedly worse for each generation after them. This’ll hit around the same time as we can no longer pretend our healthcare system isn’t a total disaster (keeps increasing in price faster than the rate of inflation—there exists a point at which it becomes a crisi…

I still hold out hope that Silicon Valley will take over the education system before then. I've recently started Math Academy and I'm quite impressed with it. Duolingo still needs work but it's improving. I think (hope?) tools like this will eventually take over - they're certainly better than the dire excuse for an education I received.

My expectation is that SV will siphon off quite a bit of money, but have little effect on outcomes. I expect it will be part of how some school districts try to deal with staffing shortages without significantly increasing wages—I think we’ll see several different tech-enabled attempts at fixes—but that all will basically fail. I do expect a few model schools will succeed with them, and be used to sell the rest, but it’ll be the usual story of unusually-competent leadership and above-average staff making something work well that does not work when those elements are absent, which is the usual case with school reform success stories.

But, a bunch of systems and a bunch of training seminars and manuals will be sold to a lot of school districts. Folks are gonna make money off this.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#723

Post by bobthepanda » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #639

jimt1234 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told since childhood that the main obstacle to inexpensive public transit in the the majority of US is racism - keep those people in their neighborhood . I've never done any sort of research or anything, and even though it's depressing, it sounds plausible.

I'm not a US citizen, and racism may be the issue. OTOH, given US's geography and culture of wide streets, suburbs, and driving around, it's pretty obvious that public transit is pricier than it is in Europe, similarly to broadband connection. As a European, I could also complain about terrible traffic congestion due to narrow streets in constant need of repair, or lacking parking space, which makes every car ride a…

The culture is manufactured though. It is hard or downright illegal to build traditional American towns or housing styles.

(It also dates back only to the postwar era.)

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#724

Post by kjkjadksj » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

breakyerself wrote: post #432

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

West Virginia didn’t outlaw new housing like Portland did. American cities largely rejected supply and demand over the last decades, as land-owning interests found alliance, variously, with renting incumbents and the economically naive. Charleston didn’t make better policy than Salem; it simply didn’t pass the bad ones.

I agree, but also think it's important to remember that the federal government didn't used to just leave it up to the private sector. The government used to be a major source of homebuilding. Had the federal government not abandoned the project of building public housing supply would be higher. They're much better equipped for overcoming local zoning limitations than a land developer.

Federal response used to also be much more in line with this being a housing crisis. They built a quonset hut village that held a couple thousand people in LA after WWII before postwar homebuilding caught up more. That could be done with a pen stroke again today and thousands could be housed tomorrow, but you can imagine the political footballing that would be involved with something like this.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#725

Post by jdechko » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #209

expertentipp wrote: post #3

It's "I got mine and don't care" until what you've got melts in your hand like an ice cube and then nobody cares.

Indeed, the perpetuators of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" are finding themselves short of said bootstraps.

If this were about the younger generations being unable to afford housing, the sentiment would be to stop ordering avocado toast and going to Starbucks all the time. Obviously the problem is much bigger and complex, and maybe something will finally be done to fix this for everyone.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#726

Post by cipheredStones » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #559

NathanKP wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an external garage building that I'd love to turn into a small ADU, but it's not allowed in my area. Additionally, if you look at historical cheap rentals of the past, you see things like tenement buildings, which were arguably horrible, but provided a cheap alternate to homelessness. You can also see examples of what low rent places look like today in Asian countries, such as Hong Kong tiny apartments. Many o…

In 2010, I had a $600/month rental with a kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, in apartment washing machine/dryer and a fairly large walk-in closet. With 13 years of inflation, that'd be $850/month. That apartment now goes for over $1200/month (Almost certainly hasn't been renovated). [1] The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever…

> The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever they like to rake in the profits.

Even if it's true that a few large businesses own most rentals, that kind of oligopolistic behavior should be undercut by new people entering the market by building more apartments - unless there's a big barrier to entry, like the difficulty in building things when there's restrictive zoning!

> There's no federal zoning laws, so why would everywhere from California to Idaho see the same drastic spikes in home prices?

The incentives that produce NIMBYs - wanting to keep supply low so that housing prices stay high, and not wanting to deal with any of the annoyances of increased density - are the same everywhere.

> Why are existing units that have existed since at least 2010 (and I believe back to 2005) commanding $400 premiums over what inflation would dictate? Do you think back in 2010 they were losing money renting to me?

No, but now there are more people who want to live there and they haven't built enough housing to keep up, so the bidding is more intense.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#727

Post by dkarl » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

gottorf wrote: post #636

denimnerd42 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people mean a more irrational feeling of safety, rather than hard statistics. They don't want to see or be near those antisocial behaviors when they're taking transportation. Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

"Irrational" is a strange way to describe it. People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person). And especially when the cost of making the wrong judgment is high, it's entirely rational to wan…

> People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person)

So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange? Lots of human behavior is irrational. It doesn't have to be unusual to call it irrational.

Overestimating the risks of one choice and therefore not getting the benefits of it, and incurring the higher risks of alternatives instead (for the elderly, being socially isolated at home or driving with impaired abilities) is the kind of irrationality that people would benefit from correcting, through education and changing social assumptions.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#728

Post by Exoristos » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #196

mensetmanusman wrote: post #40

There are five workers supporting every retiree, and this is still happening. If you are approaching 40, there will be about two workers supporting you when you retire. I’m thinking this is the start of something much bigger.

Aren't we supposed to be incredibly productive compared to a century ago? "We" (not me) certainly have more megayachts and private jets traversing the Earth than we did. You'd think we could afford some housing to go around, but I'm far from naive enough to believe that we'll solve this or any problem facing us at this point.

It's perfectly possible to solve all society's problems. We simply lack the political will and moral fortitude.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#729

Post by OkayPhysicist » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

brandall10 wrote: post #658

hifromLA wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychological safety matters just as much as physical safety. If you think that you won’t see some shit on public transit I welcome you to come to LA and take the red line for a day.

Having spent 6 months in NYC over the past year, you see shit on the subway lines all of the time, but normal people use it all the time. I think the latter is the important thing. It's not normalized as a viable means of transport in the land of the automobile.

BART's (the Bay's commuter rail) problem is that post-covid there aren't enough normal people to dilute the deranged ones. I've got a couple friends in SF, so I'll occasionally ride BART into the city for a night out on the town. Problem 1. is that the hours on BART don't really allow for that. Last call is 2 hours after the last train, so either I'm calling it short or crashing on a couch. This heightens number 2: There's not a lot of people using BART like that, so when I'm riding maybe 1 in 5 of my fellow passengers are noticeably up to something strange, whether it be actively smoking bud cannabis on the train (I'm no prude, smoking on the platform or using a pen or something I would find odd but not in a "I can't trust this person because they're clearly willingly to completely ignore the social contract" sort of way), leaving all their clothes save a baseball cap and a hypodermic needle tucked behind their ear on the platform, vandalizing the train car with a sharpie (including scribbling over the cameras, which was my cue to find a different car), or merely reeking due to not having bathed in far too long.

If it was closer to 1 in 100 people on the train displaying unusual behavior, it'd be a far less unnerving experience.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#730

Post by kjkjadksj » Mon, Sep 25, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #384

zenkat wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is cheap in West Virginia because it's currently experiencing the largest population exodus in the US. https://apnews.com/article/al-state-wire-west-virginia-lifes...

So perhaps the solution is more affordable senior housing built in lower cost of living areas? If we’re subsidizing the housing, medical care (Medicare), income (Social Security or a bridge to it), you don’t need to build in expensive urban cores; location is not as important. Suburban cores are probably fine if the land cost is reasonable and close enough to public transit.

Connections to your community, family, and friends are important. No one wants to go die somewhere far from everyone they know because they can’t afford otherwise. Plus in California you’d have to go remarkably far before apartment prices actually significantly dent. Go way out to lancaster in la county and you still pay high rents, nv and az aren’t too much cheaper now either, so whats left then in the southwest, tijuana?