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.