Have you ever met a schizophrinic before? Its not like they're off the loony bin / completely off their rocker, its actually pretty similar to QAnon-style conspiracy theorists. They have some delusions and have difficulty accepting which facts are real or not. But that's not enough of a reason to prevent them from holding a stable job or house.

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Have you studied John Forbes Nash Jr.? A celebrated mathematician, the one who discovered "Nash Equalibrium"? He's literally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and never suffered from homelessness.

Its not like "bam, I'm mentally unstable, lol I don't want my house anymore". That's the stuff of crappy Hollywood stories, and has no basis in reality. In most cases, any person, be they crazy / delusional / schizo / mentally sick or normal, will want a warm place to sleep and the rain out of their clothes.

They'll need various amounts of care. Maybe a few drugs is sufficient to hold off their worst symptoms. Maybe socialization / keeping up with friends is what's needed. Hard to say exactly, I'm not a psychologist. But from what I've seen and experienced, mental illness is not an excuse for homelessness. Not at all.

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Homeless people, the ones I meet and interact with, are people who don't have enough money for a home. They've been kicked out of their apartment and don't know what to do.

Maybe they're crazy, maybe they're schizo as well. But even if they are, that doesn't change the fundamental issue (ie: their lack of money, their inability to afford a home right now).

Yes. And as a child I experienced homelessness on multiple occasions, though for all my mother's failings (alcoholism, poor choices in relationships) we never had to sleep rough. And in those types of social circles you also tend to meet all kinds of people, including people who regularly experienced homelessness (some occasionally by choice, if you call choosing alcohol or drugs over shelter a choice).

> Have you ever met a schizophrinic before?

Yes. Many times. Homeless and otherwise. And on several occasions as an adult I've endeavored to get to know them, if we crossed paths regularly. And also I've lived with adults who struggled with bipolar disorder. Indeed, one of the periods of homelessness was when my step father, lost in the bowels of severe depression, overdosed and killed himself. Not long afterward, I came home from school to the scene of the sheriff helping to toss all our belongings onto the curb.

One thing you learn growing up in circumstances that I did (and also something every decent economist would be quick to tell you) is that people say one thing but do another. (This is true of everybody, but even more so with people suffering from mental disorders.) Empathy to me means learning how to listen to people by watching what they actually do, not merely what they say. It was a skill I had to learn early on in order to make sense of my world. Learning how to "decode" adults kept me out of alot of trouble, yet also prevented me from becoming a resentful and angry person, something that happens to some people who grew up the way I did. We all struggle, some of us more than others; and specifically we struggle with competing and conflicting desires. But a just world doesn't require giving people a free pass to engage in anti-social behavior simply because they struggle and suffer. That's the sort of logic only the privileged could fashion.

No god or philosopher ever promised that figuring out how to thread the needle of treating people compassionately and humanely while maintaining a healthy social order would be easy or quick. We can't wait to "fix" social inequity or cure mental illness simply because we're too squeamish to recognize the truth of the human condition: that agency and rationality are largely fictitious, at least most of the time. Few people choose to be homeless in the normal meaning of the word. But the flip side to that coin is that exiting such circumstances (and the circumstances that led there) isn't a simple choice either. The choices that matter, good and bad, are made at moments often far removed from their consequences. For this reason, all people need to be incentivized (some more than others) to make the healthier choices. (For people who grew up in healthy homes and under secure financial conditions, these incentives are quietly inculcated as preferences.) Call it paternalism or condescension, but it's true all the same. Our society's obsession with individualism is at the root of many of our social pathologies. The very thing that induces economic inequality (individualism) is the same thing that makes us too squeamish to coerce people to obey the most basic and (for all but the most ideological) sane social norms. In both cases we simply throw our hands up because we're too wedded to the notion of individualism and "freedom".

That's far in excess of what an average person can be able to afford, let alone someone who is struggling with mental illness.

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That's why I'm saying the first step here is to make $50,000-ish housing units as a first step. It doesn't matter if they're low-end high-density condos or trailer parks, you need something cheap to solve the problem of homelessness.

The lack of money + the expensive houses cause homelessness directly. The issue of mental health is a diversion. Mental health complicates things but its certainly not the end-all / be-all of this situation. Its not even the most important issue.

Oakland's problem is fundamentally the the number of housing units available. If you don't have enough homes at low enough prices, homelessness will come around. You don't need to be mentally sick to become unable to live in a $749,000 home.

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This is a city completely devoid of low-income housing units (ie: trailer parks). Is it really that big of a surprise that people can't afford a home to degrees far greater than other cities?

I've seen autistic people, schizophrinic people, and bipolar individuals hold their own homes and be productive members of society. Mental health is no "excuse" for becoming homeless. I've also seen perfectly rational, 100% healthy people lose their homes and become homeless.

Couple of questions for you, since you seem to be expert on refractory homelessness:

- How do you propose to prevent severely mentally ill and drug addicted people from destroying the $50,000 homes they're allowed to live in free of charge?

- Are you aware of the strict screening and eligibility requirements that homeless applicants undergo to qualify for existing housing-first programs? Why do you suppose things are done this way? Are you familiar with the cost of maintaining the housing in these programs, even with the strict screening in place? What solutions do you propose for many homeless folks who don't pass these screenings? Or for the many others who do pass initially, but relapse into the addictions, illnesses, and crimes that brought them here to begin with, and bring those problems into the communities you've put them in?

- Exactly how do we go about building your $50,000 dwellings near any big city in California, let alone the bay area? Detailed steps, please. Keep in mind that your super affordable housing must actually be in these cities, enough to provide even remotely affordable intensive mental health and addiction treatment services and high frequency wellness and maintenance checkups that these folks will require, often indefinitely. So... where will the land come from? What's your budget for that land, and for the necessary improvements like grading, sewer, water, and electric? What is your budget for condemning or buying out existing housing in the most expensive cities in the country?

But we (San Francisco, Oakland, etc) can't build ourselves out of the homeless problem. Our problems and their causes are multifaceted. In 2004 Mayor Newsom committed San Francisco to that very solution with a 10-year plan, and by 2014 it had acquired or built a long-term residence for every chronically homeless person in 2004. Approximately 3,000 units for 3,000 people. See https://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents... Chronic homelessness was near a nadir. However, over the next several years homelessness exploded even though in terms of economic inhospitableness nothing had appreciably changed since 2014.

As a child we moved all over the place, town to town, state to state, chasing better jobs and cheaper living, with varying degrees of success. Poor people, even with empty pockets, are resourceful and somehow manage to get around. Some are better at it than others. This phenomenon is especially stark in accounts of genocide, where some people are seemingly unable to fathom relocating even when they have the economic and physical means and despite knowing their death is imminent. But the operative word is some; some can't, but some can. (Neither the poor nor even the homeless are a homogenous group, and much is lost in our--including my own--reductive aggregations.) It would be patently inhumane and unreasonable to pick any homeless person on the street and demand that they move away. On the other hand, policies that assume as a general matter that the poor or homeless can't, won't, or shouldn't relocate in search of better opportunities or conditions are sorely misguided, not to mention doomed to failure when adhered to at such a local level.

Moreover, from a purely accounting perspective, neither San Francisco nor Oakland have the resources to mitigate all the economic pressures for housing. For definitions of "affordable" bandied about by many on the far left, if you crunch the numbers (e.g. $500k per unit, which is somewhat conservative) San Francisco would need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build enough subsidized housing, and that's if the situation remained static. That's not remotely realistic even though the City of San Francisco already enjoys the highest revenue per capita of any major American city. To think Oakland, a far less wealthy city, could merely build its way out of the current problem using public funds and without displacing anybody is even less realistic, to say the least.

Now we have a multifaceted problem for sure. The people who own homes don't want their homes losing value. We need to build new homes without destroying the value of the older homes.

_THAT_ is the problem. A neighborhood that currently is filled with $700k to $2mm homes attracts a certain clientele. Filling it up with a trailer park is going to be rejected by the local boards / NIMBYism.

For good measure. I personally wouldn't want my $1mm investment to go down the drain to fix the housing issue.

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But that doesn't change the fundamental problem at play here. The price of current homes is too high, and that's largely because the bay area doesn't have enough homes. Either now, nor being built.

> To think Oakland, a far less wealthy city, could merely build its way out of the current problem using public funds and without displacing anybody is even less realistic, to say the least.

A trailer park is cheap as hell. The issue isn't about building it. Its about the NIMBYism revolving around home prices, and how that kind of addition would lower the value of properties.

I'm not demonizing NIMBYism. I understand it. But you gotta understand that political issue as well to see how it affects the greater region.

So you keep saying. Care to put some numbers to that? Try ballparking the per-unit cost of land, improvements, and construction for what is essentially single-family development in and around the bay area. Then let us know who's going to pay for it.

> But that doesn't change the fundamental problem at play here. The price of current homes is too high

Literally not a single person here would disagree with that. You're not saying anything new or revelatory. You think you have some kind of nuanced perspective, but you're just repeating what everyone else has said here for years; runaway housing inflation, nimbyism, etc. Yes, true, very good.

I don't think anyone who believes the solution to homelessness involves building "cheap as hell" trailer parks in the most expensive areas of the country can have thought about this too deeply.

$90,000 for the lot. Place maybe 2 or 3 trailer-homes onto the property + a driveway to access the trailer-homes. Maybe $300k for 3 family units.

The issue isn't the price of land or the price of trailer-homes ($20,000 per trailer home). Its the NIMBYism, the neighbors who will run you out of the neighborhood for bringing down the value of their homes.