Okay, but help me understand... San Francisco and LA are incredibly expensive places to live. So are you proposing to build so many new apartments in SF or LA that rent drops by over 1,000 a month?

It definitely strikes me that there are a million places to live in this country that are dirt cheap, and there's a 0% chance SF becomes one of them. Maybe there's some data I'm missing about homeless people who can afford $2500 in rent but are on the street because they can't afford $3000, otherwise it just seems the two issues really aren't as connected as people tend to claim.

Part of me wonders if the "angry about rent prices for the homeless" people on HN happen to be angry about rent prices that THEY have to pay...

> So are you proposing to build so many new apartments in SF or LA that rent drops by over 1,000 a month?

Don't want to speak for OP, but I definitely do.

Government would not have to build anying, only get out of the way of people who want to build on their own land.

The Bay Area could easily be a world class metro area with 20 million people, all sleeping indoors.

> Don't want to speak for OP, but I definitely do.

Yes, ditto, moi aussi.

Do you know of any cities of 20 million+ people with no homeless? Or even one million?

This is an excellent observation, and very very true.

But I would pair it with a potential solution that hasn't been truly tried: universal basic income paid for by taxing away the profits of rentiers, a full land value tax, that makes the exchange value of land zero:

http://progressandpoverty.org/

This is unfortunate a very politically fragile solution. The first thing that property rentiers do is eliminate their taxes, such as with Prop 13 in California. But, with enough economic education, maybe it will work...

The closest enactment of this that I know of is in a conservative government, Singapore. Nearly all land is public, and only leased. Only structures can be owned on public land. It's not perfect, and the waiting lists for housing for citizens are still too long, and non-citizens are thrown into a private market, but the outcomes are still amazing compared to a similar place such as Hong Kong.

>This is unfortunate a very politically fragile solution. The first thing that property rentiers do is eliminate their taxes, such as with Prop 13 in California. But, with enough economic education, maybe it will work...

The fundamental problem is that home owners and landlords both pay the tax. If everyone rents then tenants will obviously vote for higher property taxes to squeeze landlords. If everyone owns their house they obviously want to pay zero taxes on the land. When you have a mix of both then home owners will vote for the interests of landlords who get to squeeze money out of tenants without paying taxes.

I've seen this pattern literally applied to almost every tax situation. Huge oil corporations should stop polluting? It's obviously a case of CO2 taxes but then the small man doesn't want to pay his tiny portion of the tax. They will always pick out the exception on either end. I.e. a poor polluter paying excessive CO2 taxes because he uses some absurdly inefficient way of heating vs a model rich person that managed to get to 0 emissions because he put hundreds of thousands into reducing his CO2 footprint. The vast majority of people do not fit either stereotype.

OK, I shouldn't have said "all" :)

But I'm very unimpressed with the Bay Area Patriot argument that there are homeless in every big city, so SF is not special.

It reminds me of the eternal Onion headline "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens".

Well, and I didn't exactly mean no homeless. A more relevant question might have been, "do you know of million+ cities in the western hemisphere without a large and growing homeless population?" Or something like that.

To me, the answer is more valuable as way to set expectations, rather than a binary verdict on whether the problem is solvable. Is it reasonable to shoot merely for a more manageable homeless population, rather than a complete fix that may not be attainable outside of Japan?

Manageable meant in contrast to out of control with no end in sight.

EDIT:

Will someone kindly upvote the parent comment? I've lost voting privileges.

> "do you know of million+ cities in the western hemisphere without a large and growing homeless population?"

Well that’s convenient, because all the examples I want to emulate are in the eastern hemisphere.

That's fair, but I have doubts about whether we can emulate anything significant from such vastly different societies. Hope I'm wrong.

Zero might be ambitious, but Tokyo has a metro population of 14 million and only about 2500 homeless. Compare the Bay Area city of Berkeley that has 120 thousand people and 1100 of them homeless. That's a lot of room to improve.

I feel like the answer to lot of unanswerable questions involves how they do things in Japan. Seoul has low rates of homelessness as well.

I'm one hundred percent convinced that America can't hope to recreate the institutional successes of Japan/Korea/Singapore in this area, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

Fun fact Japan homelessness peaked during their asset bubble in the 90s and has been declining since.

Also in so many parts of America the “lowest rung” of housing is extremely expensive relative to incomes, which is not something that is true in many cities around the world. Add in the American rejection of urbanism and the services that come with it…

That's a really interesting example. I wonder what we can learn from Tokyo.

Do they have some special affordable housing setup in Tokyo? Or is there some cultural component (it does strike me that even in the us asians are very underrepresented among the homeless)?

Japan has national zoning policies that allow for much greater housing density and incredible public transit in comparison to the US.

I’ve heard there’s also some cultural component where older houses aren’t valued at highly but I can’t really speak to its validity.

Housing is cheap in Tokyo. They just build a lot of it. And, contrary to vestigial American beliefs about tiny Japanese apartments, the typical Tokyo apartment is now more spacious than those of major American cities like New York. And, because they build so much, the typical apartment there is new and nice, instead of old and busted.

>Housing is cheap in Tokyo.

Eh, it's 400k for a small 1 br on average. That's cheaper than SF or NYC but not cheaper than Chicago or Dallas or Atlanta.

I can’t overstate how poor quality and lacking in amenities American condos are when one compares them to ones in Asia. Upper middle class condos in most of Asia are the equivalent of 1%er condos in America.

And the best part is often you buy a condo unfinished and literally get to build it out to your specifications and choose materials. Have never seen that in the US for non yacht owning individuals.

Homelessness as a symptom in every major city doesn’t mean it can’t be solved or improved. Do you believe that the current situation in major cities should be left as is?

I don't know about zero homeless, but there are plenty of cities where the weather gets bad enough that if you don't have shelter the only reasonable choices are to go somewhere else or die.

>So are you proposing to build so many new apartments in SF or LA that rent drops by over 1,000 a month?

That would be great and I think it would be good for the cities overall, but that isn't really the problem that is causing homelessness.

Housing is not a single market. People on the street generally aren't choosing between a 800 sqft 1 bedroom and a tent. However when we build housing we often focus on the top of the market with luxury condos that come with dishwashers, central air, washer/dryers, and parking spaces. Building those doesn't help homeless people. We need new construction across the entire spectrum of housing including single room occupancy that often serves as a last option before someone is forced onto the street. Living in a 100 sqft home with a communal bathroom isn't great, but it sure beats living on the street.

And I comfortable knowing that increasing the supply of that SRO housing isn't going to make my rent any cheaper.

The reason that we "focus" on the expensive high end housing is the same that prices are high: in scarcity, those with the most money get served first.

That and new SROs have been banned; they might be profitable but they are illegal to build in most jurisdictions. My town recently made them legal again, but the anti-growth crowd has paradoxically started opposing them in full force because they are "unaffordable" despite being far more affordable than other options.

Also, SRO construction could make your rent cheaper. Pressure on supply comes from both directions, and as 2-bedroom apartments that house 8 people start to have fewer people due to SROs, is helps everyone. Or due to any affordable housing, honestly. I'm of the opinion that all supply is good, from deeply subsidized deed-restricted below market rate units, to luxury that is used only as a second or third house. (Those luxury units pay big impact fees and lots of property taxes, and prevent the luxury unit tenant from taking a more affordable unit).

>That and new SROs have been banned; they might be profitable but they are illegal to build in most jurisdictions.

I am more familiar with the LA market than SF, but they are legal in LA and a few are in the process of being built[1]. The developer for those is a non-profit though which leads back into your first point. We build at the top of the market because that is the most profitable. I believe there needs to be government incentives or regulation to spur construction across the full spectrum of housing

[1] -http://www.srohousing.org/index.html

Agreed that there should be changes in regulation, but most of that is allowing a lot more construction.

Right now we allow neighbors, particularly wealthy and powerful neighborhoods with the most amenities and the most demand for housing, to stop new housing. This is the core problem.

Housing markets have never delivered for all of society, but right now by constraining them heavily, we are in the worst possible situation. I personally support a robust system of public housing, for all income levels that uses cross subsidy to expand the public housing system and provide for all income levels.

However, being more politically realistic, even allowing young professionals to pay laborers to build new housing, rather than forcing them to pay landlords and drive out lower income people, would be a big improvement over our current system. But even this small change seems politically intractable, unless we move zoning and permitting responsibility to the state level rather than city/county level. This is how Japan has made housing much more affordable, by not local power brokers and land owners act as rentiers.

Building luxury apartments helps because it keeps all the rich people out of the affordable apartments meant for the non rich.

And yet, people keep coming to San Francisco, LA, and other cities because there is work there. You can't look at housing costs divorced from other costs of living, either: for example, moving to places that are "dirt cheap" in housing will likely come with a reduction in income as well as a rise in other costs. Replacing mass transit with an car-required lifestyle is expensive (and if you can't afford rent, it's somewhat likely you won't be able to afford a car, insurance, etc.).

Additionally, an important factor in most of these cases is that they have some amount of debt, perhaps significant. So even if they could be marginally better off if they reduce income by some and reduce costs by enough where they can afford rent in a cheaper place, their existing debt doesn't shrink and becomes effectively unpayable over any period of time.

In short, yes, the real proposal is to build so much new housing that rent drops by over a thousand a month. There's very few places in the country where that wouldn't be a great idea, not just in California... even those "dirt cheap places to live in this country" aren't dirt cheap anymore, things have changed quite a bit in the past few years.