However, in San Fransicko and in other places it is pointed out that New York City, that also has astronomical housing prices and also doesn't build enough, has a fraction of the people sleeping rough that SF does.
NYC has lots of temporary shelter for people who are homeless. SF doesn't have enough.
From https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...
"New York has an extensive shelter network with over 748 locations that house more than 62,000 individuals and families experiencing homelessness every night. This extensive network means New York has an unsheltered homeless rate of 45 per 100,000 residents¹. San Francisco’s rate is 492 per 100,000 residents², almost 11 times as high."
"San Francisco, despite a shelter waiting list of more than 1,000 people, has fewer shelter beds than it did in 2004."
I'm most of the way through San Fransicko and would thoroughly recommend the book. It also does mention NIMBYs and YIMBYs but the focus is on the way that SF and other West Coast US cities have dealt very poorly with homeless people while NYC and other cities in the East have dealt much better with the problem.
NYC, prior to our current Democratic mayor, had aggressive law enforcement during Giuliani and Bloomberg terms. They would corral the homeless into specific areas (the poor neighborhoods) and push them out of sight (actual strategy to hide the homeless). You can be homeless in NYC, just not around areas where ‘decent’ folk live. Interpret that however you want.
If SF corralled the homeless to the ghettos, no one would notice.
Overall, if we take a census of the homeless, we’d easily learn that a good percentage of them are mentally ill and/or drug addicts. It’s much cheaper to build tents for them than provide institutional treatment (prolonged stay in clinics and mental health wards of hospitals). Generally these hospitals don’t have enough beds for everyone and constantly try to release everyone within 72 hours, no matter how severe the situation is. Plus, the cost of healthcare is immense (I’d say orders of magnitude over the tent housing solution).
These are forsaken people, we will never solve this. I would recommend SF hide their homeless and get them off the beaches and boardwalks, and put the tents out of sight somewhere desolate. We as a society don’t have a sustainable altruism to succeed here.
Yes, NYC housing is very expensive, but that's because Manhattan is the most densely populated island in the world having a population greater than 150,000 people. Yes, you can squeeze a few more people into NYC proper, but there are physical limits that cannot be overcome, and New York is as close to those physical limits as anywhere else in the world.
The New York metro area does not have those same physical limits, and is much more dynamic than California with regards to new construction and real estate sales—at all pricing levels—as a result. Yes, as you get closer to Manhattan things get more expensive. But Manhattan is not the only housing option for people—even for people who don't own a car.
I live and work in a town of ~25,000 people that is connected to Manhattan by rail. In the past few years we have seen several hundred rental units be constructed in the center of the town. This is not atypical. Similar buildings have been going up throughout the region for years (although most affordable options are connected by bus rather than by train).
I have to agree with GP's conclusion that California's problems primarily stem from its tax system—which is objectively ridiculous. If every time you move houses your tax rate resets and suddenly you are paying 10x (or more) in taxes than you did previously, why would you ever sell?
In the NYC metro area, most of the people who in California would be suburban NIMBY types live and work in high-property-tax areas in relatively big homes while they raise their kids and send them to public school (which are well-funded by high property taxes). It is very common that when their kids go to college they sell their homes and move to smaller places (or to, say, Florida). They are incentivized to do this because doing so will lower their tax bill. As a result, the real estate market is very liquid, with most homes turning over every 15 to 30 years.
In California the tax system works in the opposite manner, by disincentivizing sales. Even inherited property isn't sold, because doing so would result in a reduction in the net cash flow that the property can yield. Isn't it the case that most heirs typically sell property they inherit, in order to have access to liquid funds that they can use in a manner that is more consistent with their own personal needs and preferences? Not in California! In California, if you inherit a house, suddenly you are a landlord.
None of this is to say that there isn't political resistance to higher-density housing in the northeast. There certainly is. However, the way that this resistance is typically mobilized is through the use of zoning restrictions. Zoning restrictions can be amended—and have been amended—as the need for housing has grown.
If people are not willing to sell their properties—if the real estate market is not liquid enough in a certain area—then new development will not occur, regardless as to whether or not zoning ordinances are changed. In fact, the primary advocates for zoning changes are often developers who want to build specific projects. If there are enough properties for sale in an area to attract the interest of developers (and capital that legacy owners may not have access to), then it is more likely that there will be effective advocacy on a local level to amend zoning rules that will result in a more profitable use of those properties.
If no one is selling, however, and if no one is buying, then no one has any interest in changing anything with regards to how the land is used.
There were more people living in Manhattan in 1920 than 2020 and the average building height was higher then too.
I didn't know that, but it makes sense, given the immigration and building patterns of the era. There were even more people living in Manhattan in 1910 than in 1920 (over 600,000 more than today).
I'm not sure if this does anything except support the point I am making, though. Can more people be squeezed into Manhattan than are currently living there? Sure. You might not even need to bring back the squalid tenement buildings.
But isn't the primary reason that there are fewer people living in Manhattan today because they tore down the tenements in order to build office towers? Although only 1.6 million people live in Manhattan, during the work day the population swells to almost 4 million when you account for commuting workers.
> and the average building height was higher then too.
I am honestly surprised to read this, and I have trouble believing that it is true. Do you have a source for this?
I live on Long Island where there are no property tax controls like California.
They’re building ‘luxury’ 1-3 br condos 750k-2,700k . No downward pressure on home costs here.
My town has lots of working class families, and many move when their children are grown and they reach retirement, because the taxes are so high. Right when you own your home, and your income is fixed, you’re faced with ever increasing taxes.
You can achieve the same and more by releasing unused housing back to market instead of sitting idle for speculative reasons.
Increasing property taxes seems like a first viable solution, but it has drawbacks. It can apparently br avoided in some cases and they wouldn't affect owners of empty lots or derelict ruins that need the release back to market the most.
This is solved by a tax on land value, not on propery value. Empty unused lots would get a massive tax, regardless of if there is a skyscraper on it or it is an empty space. High rise properties wouldn't get impacted much because the same tax would be amortized across many units. Properties outside of cities wouldn't get affected much, because land values outside of cities are low.
Land value tax is a mechanically brutally simple and effective solution to the problem of congestion in city centres. Politically completely infeasible, because if there is someone fighting tooth and nail against such policies, it is the nimbys who inherited at the right time - modern day aristocracy.
Even though there isn't a lot of free money to be had, that's because a small subset are grabbing the free money, not because everyone is grabbing it. Most don't grab it. Most just don't think about stuff like that and make terrible financial choices. That includes your local restaurant as much as your neighbor.
Thus businesses are efficient to the degree that competition forces them to be efficient. No more. Now in some industries, a few businesses that are really well run are able to take so much marketshare that they became huge megafirms. That happens with tradeables, but much less with restaurants, and much much less with landlords. That is why franchise chains and big property management groups are so successful -- they are so much better run and more professional than the typical small time landlord or family owned restaurant.
Btw, this is really the fatal flaw of communism and other communitarian economic approaches. It's not that the economic calculation problem is too hard -- yes, it's hard but you can get a good enough solution with linear programming approaches. But rather, there was no capital market that would remove capital from inefficient firms and give capital to new rivals. Look at Tesla's market cap and compare to the market cap of GM. In a planned economy, there are no Teslas, there is no force pressuring firms to maximize outputs per quantity of input, or to create products that appeal to people. All of that comes from competition and market pressure. Thus a capitalist economy with all products sold by monopolies devolves into a planned economy. But each house is a little monopoly.
So in those areas that are unconstrained, landlords can be driven out of business to some extent. In constrained areas, they cannot. So many stories of cat ladies sitting on huge mansions, slowly letting the mansions rot. Most of the housing stock in SF has water damage due to landlords not doing basic maintenance to protect their investment. This is because there is no one to drive them out of business.
Now the idea of a property tax is that a high tax rate will force them to put the property into good use or at least sell it to someone else who will. But for that to happen at scale, the tax rates would need to be pretty high - higher than is politically feasible. High enough so that you feel like you are only renting the land from the government, rather than owning it, which really takes away autonomy from all but the very rich.
Thus it will have a positive effect for more efficient land use, but that effect is very small unless those taxes are really high.
If homes are abundant in Charlotte, why do so many homeless people live on the streets in San Francisco instead, where there’s not even sufficient housing to support working middle class families?
When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. And over 90% of the chronically homeless placed in supportive housing there never move out. So what percentage of the nation’s chronically homeless population can be housed indefinitely at taxpayer expense on a tiny landlocked peninsula where seemingly everyone wants to live? This has become a statewide/nationwide problem and it needs solutions on a bigger scale than one city in isolation can provide.
Is it actually higher in SF than in NYC?
> When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street.
This is a fascinating idea. Does this mean that kicking one person out of housing somehow remove two from the street?
Or could it mean that three people end up homeless in the time that it takes to house one homeless person?
In that sense I understand Newsom's position: if homeless are already migrating from all over the US due to life being easier in San Francisco, it might only get worse in the city if conditions improve for individuals. It sucks, but we can't expect SF to solve America's homeless problem alone.
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
Between wages and housing costs, it's unclear to me how ~half of SF isn't homeless.
I'm not sure people whose goal in life is living in a tent under the freeway exist in any significant numbers outside of the imagination of libertarians.
That it’s such a huge issue in 2 separate massive municipalities makes me agree - it’s a problem that needs solutions at a higher level (often by forcing lower levels to do what is necessary)
Homelessness may be a solved problem in Norway, but it does not mean that Norwegian solution is readily transplantable into San Francisco. Much like we failed to transplant modern way of life to Afghanistan.
Which attempt are you talking about. The 3 times the British empire invaded, the three times the Soviet Union invaded or the latest Nato-American invasion.
(Historically there was the Sikh, Mugal, Muslim invasions too, etc. etc.)
Possibly the locals got a poor view of western "civilization" by being on the wrong end of its armies multiple times.
Strangely, I agree with your general point, but possibly from the opposite direction.
For example, when Finland was doing its equivalent of the New Deal, I find it unlikely there were any Finn's that would try to use that as political leverage to delay anti-lynching laws and vice-versa.
Racists seem to be one of the most corrosively self-defeating forces in human society.
Its hard to pretend Afghanis' view of "civilization" was formed by the British "invasion" which was not permanent
I think someone invading you (3 times) is highly likely to give you an opinion about them and their ideals, even if they fail, but maybe the Afghanis are a bit more "forgive and forget" than most.
In biology, this is typically either the ability to eat or the ability to eliminate waste.
A city will always reach a limit. It could be water, transportation infrastructure, economically viable activities given the location, etc, or if you are lucky as a result of the location being desirable, physical space.
You can't build your way out of the San Francisco affordability issue even if you (for example) double the aid per homeless person and double the free housing.
There is an error in the common thinking about the homeless problem in San Francisco.
San Francisco has a homeless problem because it's affluent and provides services, not despite being affluent and providing services.
If San Francisco wanted to provide assisted living for members of society that can't support themselves, it would get the most bang for it's buck to provide food, shelter, clean bathrooms, trash services, electricity, and wifi in other willing cities in California. You could build a range of accommodations and shelters, all the way from campsites to cabins to resorts, and you could get user feedback from the residents to determine which operators to expand with and which facilities to shut down.
The idea of trying to build your way out of homeless problem in the most expensive and physically constrained city in California is madness. That's just enriching the interests that have become the San Francisco homeless industrial complex.
Article: "S.F. pays $61,000 a year for one tent in a site to shelter the homeless. Why?"
https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
But not to the middle class, no, just to the homeless. Then how many days do I need to survive on the street in order to get a free house? If it's a hundred days, and one of these places is 800K, then that's like paying me 8K per day -- it's a no brainer. For a free house, I'm even willing to mutter to myself and defecate on your porch. You are right, this would cause property values to plummet -- it's literally paying me to come into your neighborhood and be antisocial.
Just give me the date and time of the degradation olympics and there will be lots of people willing to participate. More people than SF can afford to build houses for.
You get more of what you subsidize, not less.
What I don't understand is why you think cities should provide shelter for people who don't contribute to them.
If you can't make a city a better place - you should have shelter, somewhere cheap and distant. If you get your life together there, you can come and try living in a city again.
Living in a city should be a privilege, not a right - cities take a lot of work and if you aren't doing your part - it's ok and you should live with dignity and respect (because we have plenty of food and electricity to go around, for now), but you don't get to live off of other people's efforts by insisting that you get to stay in a city because you were born in one or whatever.
Cities are like night clubs, if you don't get the ratio of men to women right, the night club sucks. The same applies to productive and unproductive citizens.
Just because we can let anyone into a night club, doesn't mean it won't make it suck for everyone involved.
Following the night club analogy, what needs to happen is we need to lower the barrier to opening up new night clubs. There is no reason why we can't build new towns that make use of modern technology that people would flock to - it is not a resource issue, it is an imagination, competence and regulation issue (implementing land value tax to get rid of rent seeking on land), much like everything else in human society.
There are no social benefits to forcing productive members of society to quietly tolerate and provide for unproductive members. It fosters resentment and tension.
You see, 'social' includes everyone, not just those we re-allocate someone else's resources towards. There's this stupid idea that if someone's a 'victim', they deserve special treatment. No, that's not an axiom. It is only an axiom if you're stupid and haven't gone out of your way to ever really try and 'help' 'victims' - those that have, quickly realize what a bottomless pit it often is.
This feels a bit icky but is a recurring pattern. For example, when slaves were emancipated the previous owners were often compensated, because if not they would politically block it happening.
I feel it's going to get to a crunch in some places before people do anything about it but various places will start adopting variants of this to deflate the bubble.
Basically passing some of the land value tax onto the lucky current property owners as an annuity, and allowing them to move somewhere cheaper and decouple safely from the local property market.
Probably needs enough of a threat that they'll just be forced to pay the full tax before they'll cave though, so it's just politics at that point. Who has more power and/or propaganda will decide the outcome.
It is but I can 100% confirm that nobody in cali wants to solve that problem.
>The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force.
This solution isn't viable neither. The Cali government policy(ies) is increasing the rate of homelessness. Even if you were to round them all up and send all homeless out of the state, it isn't viably going to solve the problem.
>This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact.
It's worse than that. You might expect there's some benefit there but this mechanism itself is actually making the situation worse. Though it's certainly not popular to discuss that direction. Afterall what you're saying is road to hell is paved with good intentions.
>Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them.
Not quite accurate, they dont give away free homes. It's more like bomb shelters and such that the homeless can live in, but even that'snot quite accurate. The sole reason Norway has practically no homeless is because they have no actual minimum wage.
Charlotte, NC also has way more open space to expand than SF, which has none, surrounded by water on three sides and other cities to the south.
Plenty of places pretending they solved the problem by shipping people to jail or similar if they refuse to live somewhere the authorities demand they do.
That said, SF is pretty much a poster child for almost worst case homelessness (and if adjusted by regional per capita income may legitimately be the worst).
I guess part of the difficulty is what exactly the definition of ‘the problem’ in ‘the homeless problem’ means seems to vary a lot by person, and most of the plans or influence here are coming from people who are quite explicitly not homeless, which is the group being ‘helped’. Which sets up some serious moral hazards.
“ A lot of progress has been made. We now have the lowest number of homeless. Our present government has decided that the rest of the homeless should be halved within the next four years and completely end by 2027”
So we’d need 5 years before even the most gang busters assessment could say if it was solved or not. And it seems to be because it was decided, not because that is what projections show will happen? So if the last 10% don’t co-operate, then what?
2) Finland has only 5.5 million people in a massive land area, and one of the lowest population densities in the world. They also are remarkably ethnically consistent. They also have a incredibly hostile climate that will strongly discourage (or outright kill in the first month of winter) anyone who is unsheltered homeless. They also have socialized medicine. They are also very wealthy because of natural resources which almost no other country has.
For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area discussed earlier on it’s own has approximately 50% larger population than all of Finland all on it’s own in only 5% of the land area, and none of those other factors helping (add scare quotes depending on the factor).
That is pretty much the definition of a ‘toy population’ in this case, and even they aren’t saying it’s actually solved in that case yet, just that it totally will be at some point in the future.
While I think SF advocates have stopped trying to claim victory is possible or they’ll have it under control at some point in the future, there was a time that is what they said too.
2) Low population density seems like something that would make solving homelessness harder, not easier, as you seem to suggest. I don’t see how ethnic homogeneity has anything to do with this but I’d be interested in hearing why you think it does. I agree that a strong social safety net helps a lot with this problem and we need it in the US also. Your assertion that a smaller population makes the problem easier doesn’t make sense. Less housing needs to be built but the Finnish government also has much fewer resources than the US.
Regarding your other questions - Smaller populations are much easier to work with, and organizations that are working with them are easier to manage to a high quality. Socio-Religo-Ethno consistent groups also tend to be aligned more consistently on cultural values and behaviors among individuals, which allows doing interventions or even understanding patterns of problems is easier and more doable. There is also less ‘us vs them’ and more ‘we’ involved. So fewer diametrically opposed factions, less infighting, less corruption of core social infrastructure, less jockeying for position vs other factions required. The set of stakeholders is fundamentally lower and easier to deal with. For a counter example, see Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc.
Low population density is also a huge help with any sort of homelessness issue because there is little to no pressure on housing availability. If someone previously owned a house and lived there, as long as it didn’t burn down, buying out any loan (going to be a smaller amount) is just as effective as anything else probably because 1) it’s not going to be a huge amount of money, 2) there won’t be as much moral hazard as there would be in a less cohesive and higher density location as it’s less money, and the neighbors all know you and there is an incentive to not abuse it, 3) no one is moving in to just take a house and then doing whatever with no connection to the land or the area or the culture before hand.
And also since it’s a smaller population, your overall number of folks being involved is much smaller, and there are fewer really problematic outliers.
Also because of the smaller population, more homogenous groups, and stronger ethnic identity, it’s not as likely someone is going to be able to even start throwing wrenches in the works for whatever disingenuous reason like happens here in the cities very often. Judges would just go ‘what are you doing, get out’ if someone tries.
Here, it would tie the agencies involved or property owners up for years or decades.
Does that answer your question?
It’s also why New Zealand was able to stop Covid coming in (for awhile) and others couldn’t, that and a lot of ocean. There was strong buy-in across the population, and a consistent set of values folks could agree on and feel like they were working together with others on.
Could you tell me where you got your data on this? Not because I want to pick it apart, but because I'm in the process of figuring out where I want to live long-term now that I've decided to leave Texas for good, and rate of new home construction is one of the data parameters I'm looking at in hopes that it'll be at least one positive indicator of realistic housing costs in the area.
I'm looking at TONS of other factors as well, but this is a critical one since housing is by far the most expensive line item in any family or individual budget these days. Thanks!
So I don't think the extra space and houses is doing much.
Can you link to the details of the program in Charlotte?
As somebody who is from NC, most home building is driven by for profit developers and it actually increases demand. They target higher end construction since the margins are higher. This is a feedback loop since the increased density of wealthy residents results in areas gaining even more amenities that the higher density will support, and thus becoming more attractive places to move for people in higher col areas out of state.
Building wealth by ensuring new units end up in the hands of low income people is a wonderful idea, but around here it seems to be the opposite occurring.
Is there data supporting this claim? It seems quite extraordinary that supply would create more demand than it satisfies. That's just not how economics usually works.
If affluent people from around the country are moving to Charlotte, I would think they're likely drawn by other factors, such as their jobs or family roots bringing them there, not by the mere existence of fancy housing and gentrified neighborhoods. If the new development didn't exist, those people would still be moving but would end up choosing slightly lower-end housing -- forcing up the prices and thus forcing out existing residents.
This "making fancy houses only increases home prices" argument seems like a rationalization invented by people who are looking for a reason to block such development. It seems highly unlikely to me that this would actually be true.
Politically, it's easy to be angry at developers for only building high-end housing, when it seems like the real problems are at the low end of the market. However, in reality, you can't expect it to be any other way -- and that's OK, because building high-end homes actually does help the low end of the market too.
New construction is inherently high-end. It's actually hard to build a new house or apartment building that isn't desirable to affluent people -- you'd have to go out of your way to use old design standards and bad materials that don't cost any less but make the home less desirable. This isn't economically viable for developers. So of course developers are always going to target mid-to-high end.
But that's fine, because when you build more high-end housing, then people move up from slightly lesser housing, making that housing available for people to move up to from even lower-end housing, and so on. This eventually makes housing available at the low end of the market for people who couldn't previously afford housing at all -- or perhaps for the government to rent on behalf of homeless people at an acceptable cost.
San Francisco is bizarrely full of terrible 100+-year-old apartments with high-income techies living in them, just because there's nowhere else for them to live. This is a failure. That should be low-end housing, but it's not because there's not enough high-end housing for all the affluent people.
This doesn't happen here in the South. I'm aware things are different elsewhere.
What happens is that the historical small / older single family units (i.e. ~50-100 y.o., 1500 SF) are demolished one by one to make room for the highest end housing that can be sold. This occurs across the board. You have teardowns of recently renovated houses that are replaced either by multiple copies of "tall skinny" units (larger size, and upfitted with all the granite etc) or, if the lot can't be carved (or if the area is especially high end) you end up with mega-houses that take on the entire footprint of the lot and go for well over $1M
In all cases the new units go for multiple times what the old house would have gone for a few years ago.
I know why people want to live in places like this. As the density increases amenities are added that make it walkable and pleasant. Now grocery stores can be supported, coffee shops, breweries, etc., which are close enough either to walk to or a short drive. These are the sorts of businesses wealthy out of staters crave. They were not supported by lower income, less dense single family housing.
The roads in these older neighborhoods are ill prepared for increased density, and of course traffic bottles up. This makes it even more imperative that, if you work in a physical office and desire a short-ish commute, you need to buy expensive units that are centrally located. Remote working white-collar and tech workers (with full pockets from selling their homes in even higher value areas) move near the city centers even though they don't have to commute anywhere simply because they want the amenities involved.
Wages for "normal" people who grew up in the region, meanwhile, stagnate. Places that are near the physical locations they go to work are now occupied by wealthy out-of-towners. For locals without the means, they are increasingly pushed to the outer limits of the sprawl, which develops in increasingly distant rings around the urban centers. Commute times start to become stratospheric.
Southern cities almost universally hate public transit, so the congestion builds upon itself, making the QOL consistently worse for the people forced to move further and further out.
I don't have data about how adding more housing designed for rich people enhances this cycle, but I bet you have no data on how adding more housing designed for rich people will do anything to mitigate it, either.
More units are good theoretically, but almost universally people latch onto the deregulation component and fail to advocate for affordability requirements tied to it. If one out of every four "tall skinny" houses was made available at well under market rate to local, low income renters (think something like Habitat for Humanity) then maybe you start getting somewhere.
> The roads in these older neighborhoods are ill prepared for increased density
Infrastructure is a problem. Many American cities seem to be stuck on 50-year-old (or more) infrastructure and unwilling to fund anything new. But blocking development isn't the right answer, investing in better infrastructure is. Build a damned light rail network, like Minneapolis (my home town) is doing. Rail commutes are nice, you can read or play video games. Then it doesn't matter if you can afford to live in the city center.
> If one out of every four "tall skinny" houses was made available at well under market rate to local, low income renters
This is a popular idea but I think it's naive. How are you supposed to decide which low-income renters get lucky and get to live in a much nicer house than their peers? And who pays for it? If you're going to tell developers to foot the bill then that discourages development which ultimately makes the housing shortage worse.
There are a surprising number of homeless people who live off of their disability benefits. If they could find such an arrangement as described above, they wouldn’t be homeless anymore. But landlords have no incentive to take that risk with them, and they won’t pass any of the income screening processes that are baked in to the apartment rental process today. As the worst of our housing stock disappears, the fraction of the overall housing market that remains accessible to people like that becomes ever smaller.
Worse, it’s a ratcheting effect: it only works in one direction. Sure, as the new high end units go up, the previously acceptable ones look less desirable, but it takes a long time for a unit to reach the bottom rung. Plus, even if it’s now the least desirable building in town, if it belongs to a landlord unaccustomed that to renting to the poorest segment of society that can technically afford housing, it’s likely that landlord will not want to change their requirements and policies to begin renting to them. The landlord is likely to preferred to sell the property instead, which greatly increases the chances it will be redeveloped into luxury housing, and so on.
Norway is cold. Show me a city where people can sleep outdoors year round without dying that doesn’t have homeless and then we can see what an effective solution looks like.
[1] https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/need-help/homelessness-supp...
In any event, it doesn’t take very many homeless by the colloquial definition to make a city unpleasant. I don’t know whether or not Sydney has a homelessness problem and that link doesn’t tell me.
Doesn't that make the tax percentage very low when prices have risen so much? And in addition the percentage varies from unit to unit, even if they are identical in all aspects (including their value) except when it was last sold. What a weird system.
Perhaps you advocate for removing these zoning laws and then letting the market clear?
When this happens in real life they can apply to the government for an easement, but that's practically communism, so we wouldn't allow that in this thought experiment.
1350 sf for $599,000 thats $450/sf - wtf. in the ghetto in SF. and the home is a ghetto looking home on the outside with zero land.
I LOVE Joe Rogan shitting all over LA and SF.
The podcast with the author is fantastic to have in the background and listen to.
again, I want to help the homeless with 'Care Fleet' -- See my other comment on that.
SF residents don't want the solution.
Real estate is the primary wealth building asset class of long-term residents who bought property ages ago or inherited it.
In California property taxes as assessed at time of sale, so you hold onto properties realistically valued at multiple millions while paying taxes at rate appropriate to tens of thousands.
Bulldozing a single family home to build a multi-family unit has an enormous cost on the back end given re-assessment.
Any potential drop in property values has massive protest. It's such a nice free-ride you will fight tooth and nail for.
These residents just want the homeless population "dealt with".
The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force.
This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact.
Consider that between 2010 and 2020, SF built ~25,000 new housing units.
Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units.
Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them.
That would cause property values to plummet. Many long-term residents would have to seek employment after a lifetime of living off rents.