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How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

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Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#81

Post by comodore_ »

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #5
comodore_ wrote: post #2

When was "experiencing homelessness" term established as the norm? what's wrong with just "homeless"?

My guess is the phrasing is meant to de-emphasize the permanency of homelessness - a lot of working class people drift in and out of homelessness. In order to better the situation you need to have it properly understood and analyzed. I think the term "unhoused" had a similar goal but avoided the immediacy of "homeless" and was thus ineffective.

Doesn't that put a label on temporarily homeless people, like people with experience in homelessness, which they can't get rid off. Being homeless ends the second you're not homeless anymore.

the term "unhoused" suffers from the same thing, it's just not precise.

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#82

Post by mtrovo »

jlmorton wrote: post #70

There is a basic accounting truth at the heart of this: If land and housing are good investments -- that is, they return any amount greater than wage growth -- then at some point in the future, wage income workers will not be able to afford housing. There is no getting around this truth. If housing and real estate are a good investment, eventually all wage income workers will be homeless, or will be forced to leave a…

In general I agree with you. IMHO there's a big disconnect on how we approach housing based normal market dynamics with the reality where land is a resource that not only is scarce but also keeps getting more scarce over time when you account for population growth and immigration dynamics.

It's crazy how we normalized just sitting on a empty land downtown as a way to accumulate wealth. And not just that, we encourage it as this could very easily outrun any gain you would have by doing constructions on that plot of land. And the cherry on top is that this "investment strategy" is good not just for the owners of the plot of land, but also for all the neighbors that also own land around the area, which make their NIMBY argument a very conflicted one. So I agree that making sure there's no money to capture on this situation is really important.

Another thing that's important to understand is that the use of land also should be adjusted according to the population growth expected. It's ok if you could have a single family home downtown with a huge backyard 50 years ago, it's not ok to have it now while people on the top 1% income struggle to find a place to live with a commute time lower than 60 minutes. If you do want to maintain it you should probably have to pay the difference on taxes based on whatever could be built on that area. You want to have a small house on a place where a 40 apartment building could be built? Fine, pay a property tax for 40 apartments and you're good to go.

Overall I think we approach home ownership as something that should never change after you built it but the very simple fact that lots of these plots of lands we know live on were one day just farms tell you how this is simply not true.

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#83

Post by jfengel »

jseliger wrote: post #11

Short answer: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years ( https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ ) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" ( https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... ) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and o…

A thing I haven't heard addressed: housing is more than walls. Building houses also requires more utilities, more schools, and above all more roads. San Francisco currently has the 7th worst traffic in the US. If you build more walls for people to live in, will the rest of the city's resources be able to keep up?

I realize that we're talking about a situation where people are already living there and putting strains on those resources even if they don't have walls around them. And we do want them to have those walls, to keep them safe and make the city more livable for everybody.

But San Francisco especially is simply limited in where you can build more roads (and schools and playgrounds and other things). Even if we could create new housing with the snap of a finger, wouldn't the city still have enormous resource problems?

I'd expect a city that wants to build new housing would demand a charge to help cover those costs. That's going to make the housing more expensive. So would it actually end up solving any of the problems of homelessness?

(I do apologize that "just asking questions" often looks insincere. I don't live in SF and I'm not an expert on housing or homelessness. You seem to know what you're talking about and I'd be interested in filling in these gaps.)

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#84

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

barathr wrote: post #34
evancox100 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this phrasing is the worst progressive “improvement” in language (that award goes to “Latinx”, seriously please stop using this), but it is kind of awkward and the standard is not applied evenly. We don’t say someone is “experiencing hunger”, we say they’re hungry, despite hunger typically being a temporary condition. Edit: your point about the need to understand the background level of housing instabil…

In some romance languages "having hunger" is literally how one expresses that someone is hungry...

German too: "Ich habe hunger."

You could say "Ich bin hungrig." (I'm being hungry) but nobody does that.

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#85

Post by baumy »

throw737858 wrote: post #48
jseliger wrote: post #11

Short answer: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years ( https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ ) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" ( https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... ) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and o…

Most homeless people can build their own houses/shelters. But cities should provide access points for water, electricity and other utilities. And it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives!

> it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives!

This seems pretty obviously like a bad idea to me. What's to stop someone from erecting a large structure inside a public park, stealing the right to use that land from the public and taking it for themselves?

Having lived in Seattle until very recently, I can attest first hand that the answer to that question is: nothing. So your assertion here seems like it would lead to a state where the first person to create a structure on public land and live in it effectively converts that land into their own private property. To be frank, that is absurd.

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#86

Post by km3r »

jfengel wrote: post #83
jseliger wrote: post #11

Short answer: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years ( https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ ) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" ( https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... ) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and o…

A thing I haven't heard addressed: housing is more than walls. Building houses also requires more utilities, more schools, and above all more roads. San Francisco currently has the 7th worst traffic in the US. If you build more walls for people to live in, will the rest of the city's resources be able to keep up? I realize that we're talking about a situation where people are already living there and putting strains…

SF being the tech capital of the world is going to have a very high amount of workers who are now remote. This creates a unique opportunity to build more housing that can use the existing now less utilized infrastructure. The then higher ratio of workers paying taxes to infrastructure should allow additional improvements to that infrastructure.

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#87

Post by throw737858 »

baumy wrote: post #85
throw737858 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most homeless people can build their own houses/shelters. But cities should provide access points for water, electricity and other utilities. And it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives!

> it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives! This seems pretty obviously like a bad idea to me. What's to stop someone from erecting a large structure inside a public park, stealing the right to use that land from the public and taking it for themselves? Having lived in Seattle until very recently, I can attest first hand that the answer to that question is: nothing. So your assertion here seems…

No, they would not live there indefinitely. California has eviction process for tenants.

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#88

Post by km3r »

istillwritecode wrote: post #32
jseliger wrote: post #11

Short answer: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years ( https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ ) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" ( https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... ) is the only reasonable one. I've worked on Prop HHH and o…

I don't buy the "just build more" approach. More market rate housing isn't guaranteed to make it affordable, and there is even evidence to suggest otherwise. The principle of induced demand seems to occur here. One way that supply and demand helps the problem is that some move elsewhere for better opportunity.

Please show me that evidence, because I have seen otherwise, and a basic understanding of supply and demand leads to the default assumption that increased supply will lower costs.

The ONLY way to make housing affordable to make market rate housing affordable. That means you need to build enough that they are forced to lower prices. Couple this with a vacancy tax to prevent manipulative property management tactics, and there is no logical reason why increased supply would not lower prices.

Here is a paper addressing many concerns of "supply skeptics" : https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#89

Post by username90 »

slg wrote: post #4
comodore_ wrote: post #2

When was "experiencing homelessness" term established as the norm? what's wrong with just "homeless"?

Nothing is really “wrong” with it. However the change reframes homelessness as a temporary state a person experiences rather than a persistent identity of the individual.

Nobody thinks that homeless is something that can't be changed. The only reason to update language like this is to divide people and induce us and them behaviour.

"Making language clearer doesn't hurt"

Well, it does in this case, since it gives people the false belief that those who didn't update their language actually believes that homeless people can't be helped. That phenomena can then be studied by social scientists, creating articles about how some group views homelessness as a permanent state and that is the reason for all the problems...

Re: How California Homelessness Became a Crisis

#90

Post by metalforever »

mycologos wrote: post #51
metalforever wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Bay Area and I have multiple friends that are homeless so let me comment here. A lot of the homeless are on disability due to some physical issue that prevents working , or are seniors. The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks. The section 8 waitlist is years long and you have to “scam” yourse…

> A lot of the homeless are on disability due to some physical issue that prevents working , or are seniors. The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks. Naive follow-up question: why does such a person need to live in the bay area? If you're living off disability, why would you try to do it in the most expens…

The explanation I got was that you can't live outside in many other locales and that the cheaper places cut the social security low enough that it's hard to live there too. The social services and weather situation here is such that from a healthcare and social security check perspective it works out better and is less risky to the tenuously housed.
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