not sure if its going to "fix" the housing market, but its a step in the right direction, away from nimbyism.

Fair point, perhaps I should have said "achieve a lower equilibrium price point." Maybe that would have been wordy and technical enough for HN?

My understanding is that California is short around a million housing units. Truly a staggering number that will take very long to catch up on. Not sure how many units are being allowed by builder's remedy but it surely isn't the full million.

It’s not short anything. Other states have housing.

Somehow we have grown a whole generation of people that thinks they are entitled to live wherever they want, when that has never been the case in world’s history.

I too want a penthouse in Manhattan, who do I need to mail to demand I am given a penthouse in Manhattan?

California clearly doesn’t have the capacity to serve the current population, let alone an increased population. All services are 3rd world quality, besides a few rich enclaves.

Somehow we have grown a whole generation of people that thinks they are entitled to tell their neighbors what they are allowed to build. I too want everyone around me to have a one story house so I can look over them from my balcony, but guess what, that would impede on their property rights. California absolutely has the capacity to serve the current population, they just need to fix the shit show that is their housing policy.

> reduce homelessness

Is the homeless problem due to the cost of housing? Or is it moreso due to fentanyl?

Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

> Over the course of the book, the researchers illustrate how absolute rent levels and rental vacancy rates are associated with regional rates of homelessness. Many other common explanations—drug use, mental illness, poverty, or local political context—fail to account for regional variation.

Homelessness is mostly due to lack of housing, and fentanyl crisis mostly due to addiction.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2356643-we-can-reduce-h...

Stats like these are only true because the general public and policymakers/NGOs mean completely different populations of people when discussing "the homeless."

Private market housing in SF will not get most of the very visible & mentally ill off of the streets, this likely requires services and some level of compulsion.

Note that homelessness is a constant flow of people. The services and compulsion removing people from the streets is currently happening. The problem is that the housing market is dumping more new homeless onto the street than our current system can handle. Turning off the faucet, so to speak, will make dealing with the existing homeless population a much simpler and more humane activity.

If you redefine "homelessness" to only include those with addiction or mental illness problems, then you might have a point. But that's not a terrible useful definition, and many of those addiction and mental illness problems stem from not having housing and the extreme difficulty of that situation.

Other areas with higher rates of addiction, but cheaper housing, have lower rates of homelessness. Cheaper housing really does allow people to get off the streets.

Expensive housing is also correlated with better provisioning of services which draws people here.

I am not redefining anything, I am describing to you what people are colloquially talking about and why these conversations oftentimes are just people talking past each other because they have different issues in mind. When people in SF say "homelessness is out of control", they are typically talking about the population I am mentioning - one that is unlikely to be helped by changes to housing costs at the margin.

It's not really going to help the people that most imagine when they think of their personal experience of homelessness. i.e. people sleeping in the streets or on the subway, or the "crazy people" you cross the street to avoid.

For example, in NYC, more than 95% of the homeless are actually sheltered (whether in the city shelter system, or in other temporary situations like doubling up with friends or relatives), and more than 80% of homelessness is situational rather chronic. 30% of homeless families have at least one employed adult. 60% of all shelter residents are families.

Most spending on combating homelessness is invisible to us; and most improvements in affordable housing are going to have little impact on the (predominantly) male, drug-using and/or mentally-ill street sleepers.

Well, we are going to find out. Something tells me everyone who's homeless isn't a fentanyl addict. Especially given housing costs.

> Something tells me everyone who's homeless isn't a fentanyl addict. Especially given housing costs

SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... because they're mentally ill.... because of drugs.

You should look at the often onerous restrictions that come with those programs, often including:

* No Pets

* No Visitors

* Curfew Time

* Limits on the number of people per unit (meaning, families and couples cannot always be accommodated together)

- and a host of others. Also in some places there is a requirement that you have a social worker, and/or receiving mental healthcare treatment - except there are long waiting periods.

For most long term homeless people telling them "you have to give up your dog" will keep them on the streets - its not "housing, no questions asked" its "housing with rules".

Building more housing will reduce the existing homeless population - because a significant portion of existing homeless are working poor, but more importantly, it will stall the creation of new homeless, the longer you're homeless the more likely you are to acquire an addiction, or other mental health issue.

OK I would also choose the streets before giving up my animals, I definitely aint judging here if someone chooses to live on the streets. But other than the curfew I've seen all these apply to actual paid rental units I've rented in the past.

At the end of the day you're getting housing on somebody else's dime. Follow their rules, buy them out and put the property in your name, or GTFO.

I'm sure it can't be this simple, but I would love to hear what the problems are with building large apartment complexes on cheap land in the outskirts of cities, staffing them with security, social workers, medical workers, etc. and then letting people live there no questions asked.

You would of course still need some rules in these places and there would certainly be various issues and difficulties, but it seems a whole lot better than what we have happening now in city centers?

I want to predicate this with a statement, I believe there is no such thing as 'unworthy poor' all poverty is worth solving, because the broader societal costs in not solving poverty is corrosive on wider society. Poverty is at the roots of some of the causes of homelessness, but not all of them.

So, a generation ago, we warehoused people who had an inability to thrive in society in mental hospitals, now we do it with jails, or just leave them on the streets. I think it's a thought that upsets people (and runs into ideological issues across the spectrum), but essentially, there is some percentage of the population, that no matter the supports they are given, will fail to thrive. If we try to jail them all, or just ignore the problems, it creates a great number of externalities which effect all of us in a myriad of ways.

To further drill down, it's a spectrum of behaviors, some folks have enough problems that cash benefits and subsidized housing are not enough to allow them to follow the rules in general society.

In any case, to circle back around, it essentially creates an second class citizen and nuisances around these places, thats a solvable problem though, but rather authoritarian in how you'd have to solve it.

I've had extensive conversations for this with friends, and we've come to the conclusion (reluctantly) that the only complete fix for homelessness would be something the equivalent of civil commitment to a 'guided living' community, you'd have a large community on the edge of town, it'd have a mix of halfway houses, group living and individual apartments and has centers for mental health, social work, as well as sources of employment, shops and communal spaces.

The idea is, if simple housing supports wont get you out of homelessness, you could be sent there - there would be a way to graduate out of the program, but for some they would go and might never be able to leave.

Thanks for the very thoughtful comment. The solution you describe strikes me as so common sensical that I feel I must be missing something or else it would have already been implemented, considering how universally everyone seems to agree that the status quo is urgently unacceptable.

It's clear, as you say, that we need something that is not prison or a psych ward, but also not the streets of a city center.

It definitely seems that we're letting perfect be the enemy of good on this. It's like there's a burning building and everyone's standing around arguing about what the pH level of the water from the hoses should be rather than putting the damn thing out.

And while I agree with the concern about creating second class citizens, I'd say these people are in a worse situation than that currently, and they are bringing entire neighborhoods full of innocent people down with them.

There are a couple of factors I think in the way of adopting the solution I've outlined -

* It's incredibly authoritarian, ripe for abuse (as the commitment to mental hospitals was), and requires an evolution in legal thinking about what civil commitment can be used for.

* It offends a wide swath of people in an ideological way. No one really want to believe that some people cannot help themselves improve enough to exist in wider society (liberals assume everyone can if given proper support, conservatives just assume people need to tug harder on those bootstraps). Similarly everyone on some level I've talked to about it is offended by the authoritarian nature of - it bothers people of all stripes once they think about it a little (including myself as a liberal with a general libertarian lean). Conservatives also object to spending money on such a venture (why should those people who contribute nothing to society eat better than I do?) for pretty obvious and consistent reasons.

* No one knows how to fund it, you need to either create new sources of revenue or deallocate money from someplace else, now, yes perhaps you could reduce funding allocated to policing - but there are existing stakeholders who will fight ardently to prevent it.

* Finally, there are existing stakeholders (the homeless industrial complex, as I glibly descried them) who want the status quo to persist for various reasons (for many organizations it is raison d'être - either for religious reasons, or more basal ones - money, they have workforces who are paid, and are a consumer of taxpayer grants).

I agree broadly with you, that the current illness is worse than the cure, but the cure isn't without its own side effects.

For what it's worth the example that I use of some people not being able to improve themselves is the Vanderbilt family, One of Cornelius Vanderbilt's great grandchildren was born into poverty. No matter what advantages afforded, some people will fail to thrive. (See https://www.amazon.com/Fortunes-Children-Fall-House-Vanderbi... for more information)

I agree with you, everyone is very busy arguing about either the PH of the water, the color of the water spout or if you should spray the base of the fire, or the top of the fire, and the fire rages further consuming people in its path and we never quite get around to putting the fire out.

There are a whole host of issues in society that are like this - where the optimal solution will never get significant political support behind it without the problem being perceived by voters as much worse than it is perceived now.

Some of these are:

* End of Life Care (from old age, chronic illness, etc)

* Cigarette Regulations (There are a ton of stakeholders who want to preserve the status quo of regressive taxes with general availability, when lower taxes with a gradually increasing age of purchase would be better for society)

* Overemphasis on safety in automobiles and other things (I did a cost benefit analysis on backup cameras, and it came out to something like 15,000 dollar per life saved, and most of these added burdens end up on the poor)

Perhaps a less authoritarian option than civil commitment could be to create this type of housing then incentivize it in various ways.

The biggest one is: if you’re going to have zones where hard drugs are de facto legalized, it should be in one of these places that are out of the way and designed to handle the externalities as well as possible rather than in the middle of cities.

It would also give police a place to take people who are creating quality of life issues for residents (tents, screaming, littering, using streets as toilets, etc.). Instead of the “bus out of town” or simply moving people around in the city, they could keep bringing people back to these facilities. Perhaps not all would stay, but I imagine many would.

I dont know that you can get people to stay without more.. coercion, particularly those who are homeless by choice. In some ways, they're the most libertarian of the libertarians, they dont like being told to what to do, they often (but not always) have various addictions - and move around. They're also the homeless who are least likely to cause trouble, leave a mess, they vary from addicts who are on the streets to 'urban campers'.

I think at least trying it would be better than what we're doing now, and I think we're on the same page about that.

You win victories against great social ills by convincing one person at a time that we need to try something different. I believe firmly that most of the ills our society has are caused by poverty, if we can solve 3/4 of poverty, we will end up with a richer, safer and happier world.

That's pretty much right on the nose when it comes to 'Housing First' approaches to the homeless. Most localities refuse to do that for political reasons more than practical ones: too many people take to crab-bucket complaining as soon as you just give homeless people homes.

There is opposition to it across the ideological spectrum, the right doesnt like it, because they feel people should do for themselves, parts of the left doesnt because of one of two reasons A) it doesnt provide an acceptable enough standard of living for those pushed into it B) it doesnt provide the 'comprehensive care' required to really help people (as seen from folks inside the homelessness industrial complex, which is to say, anyone with a vested interest in continuing the status quo).

In reality housing first solves a great many problems, and creates some others - but its better than anything else we're currently doing.

The provision of housing to the homeless can be refused for a lot of reasons. One being that the housing might be in a place where the person has no access or restricted access to other social programs such as food or jobs programs. The housing might make them feel unsafe, such as being crammed into a shelter. The housing might be overly restrictive, such as refusing to allow them to bring their pet which may be the only thing keeping them going emotionally. They may feel they don't have adequate support to transition to housing, if the housing demands they get off an addictive substance first (chicken and egg problem, because its much harder to get off an addiction if one is currently in crisis like being homeless).

Lots of SROs in SF have burnt down trying the "let them house first, then kick the addiction" approach.

That said, the idea that you can just go up and get housing if you're homeless is laughably wrong. There are massive waitlists.

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong:

- They're homeless

- Because they're mentally ill

- Because they're on drugs

- Because they're mentally ill

- Because they're homeless

To be clear, I'm not suggesting a drug problem is a character defect nor am I implying that these people don't deserve a huge amount of empathy.

I'm just unsure if the root cause is the price of housing (despite there meaning numerous problems to house & relocate them) or if it's due to the drug addiction.

Anyway, obviously I'm for more housing to reduce the price of rent.

There's a youtube channel called Invisible People that interviews homeless people on the streets and the story is very frequently

had job -> got on highly addictive drugs -> everything is about getting another hit -> tried rehab multiple times and want to go to rehab again

And yeah I mean, heroine/meth/whatever is obviously super dangerous & addictive so you can't really blame them.

so i am dealing with this issue with a good friend of mine right now, who is homeless in the city of san francisco. No, this isnt true , theres a very very long waitlist for assistance. His credit is shot and he cannot find a new rental. so, hes been living in a hotel. Hes paying the daily, so he has money.

Homeless population by state is more or less a map of housing cost: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/homeless-po...

This might just be because homeless people prefer to live in the same places everyone else does though, which is why those places are expensive.

You would then expect the percent of homeless per state to be roughly similar, when it in fact varies tremendously: https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate...

NYC, HI, CA >40 per 100k homeless in 2020 (higher now)

States with lots of poverty but also extremely cheap housing at the bottom with a 5x lower rate of homelessness: LA, AL, MS

Similarly, WV very low on the list despite being high on all of the other supposedly causal factors such as mental health and drug problems

Poor people with mental health and addiction problems can still live with a roof over their head as long as they're not competing with tech salaries to buy any kind of shelter.

> You would then expect the percent of homeless per state to be roughly similar

No, I would expect the opposite. All the would be homeless in unappealing states leave and go to california or NYC because if they're not paying for housing they figure might as well go to the nicest area.

That's a very different model than 'prefer to live in the same places everyone else' -- you're saying that wherever housed people want to live, the homeless want to live there even more.

Not obvious that there's evidence for that

There are confounding factors at work here - for example, since 1979, people in NY have a legal right-to-shelter founded on the state constitution which does tend to generate a more encompassing homelessness policy than in, say, PA.

Why not both? And if the law fixes the prior, it will reduce overall homelessness. I'll take the progress and we can deal with the fentanyl issue in parallel for its own reasons.

It's three main things: lack of housing, lack of support for the mentally ill, and drug addiction. The proportion of each varies in different cities.

Lack of opportunity at the lower rungs as well. No factory/construction jobs means it's service or bustwithout a college degree.

Homelessness also makes people get addicted to alcohol and drugs too.

People enter homelessness and drug use from both directions. Many homeless are not addicts and more affordable housing will help get those off the street and keep more people at the margin in more stable housing situations. This will in turn help make services more available for the drug using homeless.

Someone who takes fentanyl but has a home isn't homeless; while someone who does not take fentanyl but does not have a home is. So.

Depends on what you mean by homeless. Regular people mean people living on the street. Policy types mean them but also people living in overcrowded conditions.

If they had homes, it wouldn't be called homelessness. You can take fentanyl in an apartment.

It's a lot more comfortable to take drugs at home, too. They would take homes if they could.

SF/LA has numerous programs that will give you housing if you're homeless. The issue is that many of the homeless refuse to take up these programs and insist on staying in their tents.... so... no?

no, dealing with this issue with a friend in SF right now, theres a waitlist and its long.

I'm from Vancouver so I'm pretty familiar with this issue. They give you housing but don't allow drugs. Being able to own your own place where you can do drugs helps.

These people are addicts and homeless. We can cure homelessness with more homes, but we also need to help them get rid of addiction.

it's due to the cost of housing, as evidenced by lower homelessness rates in places where housing is cheaper.

Other people have linked good articles, but a good way to think about it is in Japan and West Virginia they have almost no homelessness and in both those places its very easy to rent a studio for under 300$ a month. Even for someone addicted to drugs you can see how its possible to manage 300$ a month (or for say a charity or city organization to come up with the money) without solving the underlying issues.

First one and then the other.

Fixing homeless requires removing homeless, not adding homes. It's a law enforcement problem, not an economic problem.

I mean, it stands to reason that there also need to be homes for those people to live in. Unless you're planning on executing or imprisoning them instead.

you know that's the plan

I think large-scale, cheap to maintain, gulag-style camps are the best solution to homelessness.

Remove them to where?

I suppose, through a certain carceral and inhumane viewpoint, your approach works too.

I assume you have a FINAL solution?

As long as Prop 13 is on the books we're pretty fucked but yes this is huge

I think another attempt to reform prop 13 will happen in 2024.

Yes but I don't think it'll affect residential.