I have had an actual college class on homelessness and public policy. There is no single cause of homelessness, but sky high housing costs definitely contribute to homelessness. There has been a serious and growing lack of affordable housing in the U.S. going back decades, about 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s at a time when they weren't really needed for demographic reasons but they were never replaced, and average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped. Meanwhile, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for years.

No, high housing costs do not single handedly and directly cause homelessness. But that's because there is no single cause of homelessness. But high housing costs are absolutely a contributing factor.

Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.

Here, I am talking about the chronic homeless, which are the root of the problem. Not families that may need to sleep in the car because they are in between housing or people crashing on couches while they straighten themselves out. I mean people with tents.

The one person I knew the longest was basically camping out around Palo Alto. The reason why you don't see so many homeless in the suburbs is because the Police are fairly effective at driving them out with beatdowns and destroying their property. This is the reality of not forcing them into group living situations -- let them live on the streets creating a lot of quality of life issues or have an unspoken policy of police brutality. So I would say that what we have now is dystopian.

The last homeless man I let live with me I ended up asking to leave, because he was unable to keep steady work. I just asked him to do something, anything -- it didn't have to be full time -- and he could keep the money himself. But he was able bodied and needed to work. I drove him to his job. At the end of the day, he was pretty blunt in telling me that at his age -- he was in his 50s -- he couldn't stand doing menial work and being ordered around by some kid. For him, it was either a high paying job or camping out. So I finally asked him to leave and he's been camping out (assuming he's still alive at this point -- it's been a while).

I think it's cute you took a college class and now understand the issue. But housing costs have nothing to do it. You can today find a place to live in the U.S. for a few hundred a month. No, not in San Francisco or Manhattan or Monaco, but most of the country is incredibly cheap.

Look at rent prices in the middle of the country. For example, in Phoenix, real rental costs have not increased for 30 years. They've been basically flat. But in Phoenix, the homeless don't have the same access to city services as in San Francisco, or NYC.

We are getting healthier and I have been paying down debt. My student loan was paid off just days ago and things will start getting better for me in July because of that. In fact, they have been getting gradually, slowly better the entire time I have been on the street.

I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I have been interviewed by reporters on 3 different occasions because of it, though, so far, none of that has resulted in a published article promoting my work.

The class I took involved an internship in a homeless shelter in Vacaville and I continued to do volunteer work there after the class ended. I was instrumental in getting them a proper website set up.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-effec...

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I am sorry you are bitter and were never able to figure out how to effectively help people solve the root causes of homelessness in their lives. That is not evidence that I am clueless.

There is a very small percentage -- basically 0.03% of the population are chronically homeless -- that are unable or unwilling to meet their obligations. There will always be some Bartlebys with us, who when presented with their obligations as members of a community respond with "I prefer not to". I prefer not to live in the shelter because it's unpleasant. I prefer not to move to where housing is cheaper because this is my home. I prefer not to live in a supervised environment because I like being in control of my life. I prefer not to take this medication that will stop me from screaming because I don't like how tired it makes me feel. And with these Bartlebys the choices are prison, banishment, and forced compliance -- institutionalization. Because a society is not a collection of isolated individuals, it's a web of obligations that are, at heart, mandatory. Some people view this as a dystopian nightmare. They are naive. It is living in a rooted world. From the beginning of civilization if you did not meet the obligations placed on you, the society expelled you, whether by death or banishment. What I don't understand is why people who have no problem enforcing laws banning camping in national parks or forcing people to pay taxes under threat of jail are unwilling to ban camping on the street in a high density city. If you want a nature preserve or other area outside of society in which all the individuals who are unable to comply with our rules can do whatever they want, that's fine. But you will find that with enough people filling up that area, a government will form, a society will form, and you will be back in trouble if you start violating the new expectations placed on you in that new society.

I don't disagree that we shouldn't allow people who are homeless to camp openly on city streets and generally be a public nuisance. I don't do either of those things, so I don't believe it is a given that being homeless must equate to such behavior.

Historically, the more desperately that governments try to control people, the more people find ways around it. This is the origin of Martial Arts. Governments denied the peasants access to weapons, so they learned to use their hands and feet and farming tools as lethal weapons. You couldn't reasonably deny them those things. They needed them in order to produce food for the nation.

I don't agree that imprisoning all homeless people merely for being poor is at all a humane solution. I also don't agree with general trends towards criminalizing behaviors in such a way as to be a kind of Jim Crow law for homeless people. You don't solve this problem by trying to get them to just leave your city and go elsewhere. All that does is shift it around. It doesn't get people off the street.

There is a tremendous housing crisis going on in the U.S. today. Evictions are at very high rates and young people are basically expected to live with roommates because there are almost no spaces suitable for a single, young person to live alone, like there once were. Returning to historical practices of making market rate housing available that single young people can afford on an entry level salary will not solve homelessness, but it will take some of the pressure off.

Homelessness occurs when someone has more problems than solutions. The more solutions we can make available, the more feasible it is for people to make their lives work, even if they have serious personal problems for which there are no ready solutions.

I was born with my medical condition. For many years, I was a full time wife and mom. This gave me a middle class role in society, even though I was actually too sick to hold down a paid position. At some point, I expect to return to a more conventional life. My condition is not curable, but that doesn't mean my life cannot be made to work. It did in the past. It will again in the future, at some point. As the number of problems I have shrinks and the number of solutions I have grows, at some point, it will cross some tipping point.

Let me stop here and thank you for being so generous for a decade of your life. I am sorry it has made you so very cynical. But I don't think your cynicism is actual evidence that more affordable housing cannot play a role in helping get this problem under control.

You might focus more on what you're sure you know, and not what you think someone else does, doesn't, or ought.

I could afford about $400 a month in the near future. I am trying to find a way to get off the street now that my student loan is paid off and that frees up enough money where I could afford that much for shelter in the near future.

But these homeless programs that just keep the homeless subsisting are better than nothing but sill aren't helping the ones who could escape.

The super short version is that I don't want to live in a van because I no longer drive due to my medical condition. There are other factors, but that's a big one.

Unsolicited personal commentary or life advice quickly crosses into incivility. Your comment is way into the red on that. Even if you don't mean such comments as personal attacks, they easily read like it—because of the underlying assumption that you know better about someone else's life than they do—and will almost certainly will land that way with the person(s) whose life you're prescribing. That's bad and leads to worse, so we should all just not do it.

I took that class because I was pursuing a BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing. It was intended as preparation for a Masters in Urban Planning. I was studying in earnest to make a career of solving housing issues. I also have an Certificate in GIS, the equivalent of master's level work.

Contempt and condescension don't belong on Hacker News.

There's a Star Trek episode that explores this idea. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District

It's difficult to think of ways of combating homelessness. To get them on their feet, you might need to redefine what a job is. A normal job requires some common elements: a shower, the ability to be there on a regular schedule, some productive task to do. But homeless people don't really have the ability to do any of those, except perhaps show up during regular hours.

It's hard to shake the feeling that the only solution is to give them money, and that most of them will just spend it on drugs or alcohol. But that's too heartless of an outlook. Some people who fall into homelessness are just like you or me. When your family connections fail and you have a debilitating illness, homelessness tends to result. And those kinds of people could be pulled out, if only we could figure out how.

There are homeless people that are essentially unsalvageable, though, and it's hard to know what to do with them. No family, no home, but most critically no willingness to help themselves even when given a small opportunity. But they still have friends, and if we focus on helping their friends out of homelessness, they might want to follow.

I am homeless and have had a class on homelessness and these are two of my websites:

http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I also started a Reddit recently called Housing Works and I have various related little blogs, like Project SRO. I am still kind of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, but the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide is a thing I started for myself in order to keep track of useful info I needed while homeless in downtown San Diego and I abandoned it after I left downtown. It was not updated at all for six months and then I realized it had organic traffic. It has the most organic traffic of any site I run because there is need for the info.

A lot of people who have spent time homeless are ashamed of that fact and don't volunteer that information normally. Even those who are not ashamed and not actively hiding it, well, you don't know just from looking at someone that they used to be homeless. Lots of people do get off the street. It is not a permanent situation for everyone.

However, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for some years now and it does concern me that there are larger forces at play here that are causing it to be more of an uphill battle than it used to be.

2/3 of the chronic homeless have mental or physical disabilities. 1/3 have drug problems. You are talking about 83,000 people in a population of 320 million, but these 83,000 people are creating huge quality of life problems in all of our major cities. In San Francisco, you have 300 million dollars spent fighting a problem created by 2,000 people. The non-profit and social services mafia employs more people to "care" for the homeless -- or more cynically exploit them -- than the actual number of chronically homeless.

First, we can go after the low hanging fruit of helping people who are more easily helped. More availability of actual affordable housing would help with this issue. Some people who are homeless do have income, just not enough to pay for a middle class American lifestyle.

Second there are things that work to help rehabilitate people with serious, entrenched personal issues. I raised and homeschooled my two gifted learning disabled sons, one of whom has the same medical condition I have.

I know quite a lot about this problem space and I see it as solvable. It will take time, but it can be done. Writing people off as hopeless does not help the problem at all. It just compounds it.

Your endeavors seem promising.

Best.

I've read this many times, bigger houses have contributed a great deal to rising housing costs. But do we have any data on the cost of materials and labor now vs. then as well as the cost of land and regulations now vs. then?

I've always had an inkling that materials/labor costs haven't actually risen that much even as houses grew larger.

Yes, there is data on such things. There are a number of reasons that housing has gone up in cost, but size inflation is absolutely a contributing factor.

This could explain a jump from $200k to $250k. Not from $50k to $200k.

I actually think his solution makes sense.

For the really impoverished people who are willing and capable to work their way up, this would be exactly what they want; for those who really don't want a roof over their heads, they should really be put into some sort of institution with restricted freedom and mental illness help.

If we have $300mil budget to help 10 thousand homeless, that's $30k per person, enough to support a decent standards of living in a cheap part of the country.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-new-count-shows-h...

While housing prices are a little different, zoning is most certainly an issue as many would much prefer to stay in any type of housing. You suggest making it a requirement but I contest that as that wouldn't actually be constitutional and most of the homeless here would love a place to stay. In NYC there are TONS of places for the homeless to stay but in SF, many shelters will have lines out the door well into the night and into the morning. There just isn't much shelter for them here. Attempting to build new homeless housing is always faced with NIMBY opposition.

My startup adventures have prompted many visits to San Fran and in turn I witnessed the plight of the homeless there. It does not exist on any scale like it does there whether it's in Baltimore or New York City where I lived a year after college.

There's not much you can do re: the homeless in San Francisco, but it bothers me and makes me feel bad.

Overall not a fan of San Francisco for a variety of reasons.

You're advocating for in-prisoning people who cannot afford or, for whatever reason, can't live in a home. That's really awful and lacking in empathy. That's almost like debtors prison.

The vast majority of these people will actually stay in a home if you provide one. The majority of them in SF, however, do not have access to any type of shelter because the existing shelters are far too overcrowded and any attempts at building new shelters get held up for years by people who don't want homeless people in their neighborhoods.

The solution to helping someone is providing them with healthcare (preventative is far cheaper than reactionary care for the tax payer) and providing them with a place to stay. Currently we don't really do either, especially in SF.

In my hometown there are people that quite there jobs to panhandle, because they make more money doing it. It's not common, but it happens and it shows that it's not a simple issue.

FYI mental illness is also common in the homeless population and for them I'm very much in favor of looking at any solution that'll help them have the success they desire in their lives. *Just saying.

All of the nearby locations with panhandlers are setup this way, maybe a couple hundred spots in the city. Sometimes I wonder how many people there are running the system...

One of the observations is that homeless populations tend to self select into encampments. And part of the expense and challenge is that where they choose to camp does not facilitate maintenance (cleaning, services, etc). I have not found any papers or articles on municipalities that have built infrastructure that specifically designed for hosting a homeless encampment. Could you build a system that would support a locally hosted infrastructure? Passive sanitation systems, trash depositories and collection points, water supplies?

Perhaps it depends on the neighborhood. In the Tenderloin and parts of SOMA, there is an abundance of drug addicts and people with mental health issues living on the streets. I'm randomly screamed at or verbally threatened, but they don't ask for money.

Then I realized that there are roughly four different people working BART station entrances along Market Street, who collectively account for 100% of the times I've been asked for money.

Sounds like a great premise for a dystopian short story

And seriously, locking up people for not living in homes and working? We used to do that in my country back in the late 19th century, it was a very handy law for the government to dust off when you had to jail protesters or strikers in the street.

For what it's worth, 70% of SF's homeless population lived in SF in homes before they were on the street. It's probably fair to assume that if rents were lower, more of those people would still be in homes.

  very high medical costs are substantially reduced by giving them stable housing

I also know that health crises for homeless people tend to hard to resolve and cost a lot more than for people who are housed. Medical advice like "stay off your foot and soak it twice a day" simply cannot be complied with if you are homeless. The health issues of the homeless tend to compound and get incredibly expensive, in most cases.

Source: I have had a class on homelessness and public policy, I am homeless, I run a few websites pertinent to this problem space. (In essence, I am kind of a SME here.)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotter...

For example the "it is known" premise that the ACA and Medicaid expansion would result in lower consumption of medical care overall. The opposite has happened.

One example, with data:

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/21/emergency-room-visits-...

The relevant question is: is any resulting consumption of medical care dollars reduced by more than the cost of these frequent in-home care visits? Generally, personnel costs (especially in public agencies) far outweigh the cost of (mostly generic) meds.

I see no hard numbers for either statistic. What did I miss?

"After several months, he had recovered enough to be discharged. But, out in the world, his life was simply another hospitalization waiting to happen."

Hospitalizations can cost thousands of dollar per day. So this stay cost in the several hundred thousand dollar range.

[skipping some paragraphs]. He is given a stable housing environment:

"I spoke to Hendricks recently. He has gone without alcohol for a year, cocaine for two years, and smoking for three years. He lives with his girlfriend in a safer neighborhood, goes to church, and weathers family crises. He cooks his own meals now. His diabetes and congestive heart failure are under much better control. He’s lost two hundred and twenty pounds, which means, among other things, that if he falls he can pick himself up, rather than having to call for an ambulance."

The entire article is about this sort of thing and about many cases.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-e...