California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working

Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by KennyBlanken on Friday June 02, 2023 @03:46PM (#36169917)

Add to that California's very high cost of living and tight/expensive housing market which making it very easy to fall from employment and housing to homelessness, coupled with the country-wide massive drop in home ownership, skyrocketing housing costs, near total stagnation of wages for lower classes, and unprecedented concentration of wealth.

I don't know why anyone is shocked that the US homeless population is skyrocketing. The powers that be seem hellbent on solidifying a peasant class.

Right now the housing market is being snapped up at lightning pace by corporations; it may not be long before it's nearly impossible to own a house outright that your family doesn't already own, but even keeping a house within a family might soon be very difficult as well....with the only option being to rent from a giant housing corporation.

And everyone thinks HOAs are bad...just wait.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by JohnFen on Friday June 02, 2023 @04:17PM (#36170186)

I don't personally mind the idea of not being able to buy a house. That's not a thing I'm interested in anyway.

But only being able to rent from large corporations? That's nightmare fuel right there.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by throwaway049 on Friday June 02, 2023 @04:28PM (#36170315)

The two things are fairly tightly connected. If ordinary citizens can't buy house, how does some other citizen (not corporation) buy one and offer it for rent to you?

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by JohnFen on Friday June 02, 2023 @04:39PM (#36170478)

Yes, absolutely true. I wasn't really saying that not being able to buy a house is a good thing, but I did speak before thinking here.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by dragonwriter on Friday June 02, 2023 @05:16PM (#36170851)

There are things besides individual citizens and corporations that could, in theory, own and rent housing.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by ajmurmann on Friday June 02, 2023 @05:52PM (#36171266)

There are a lot of individuals who buy investment properties. I have friends who use this as their primary retirement vehicle and own a bunch of rental properties. They are just successful small-business owners and the properties are their private property, unrelated to the business. From last time I saw statistics on this, most rental units were still owned by small landlords.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by throwaway049 on Sunday June 04, 2023 @02:14PM (#36187959)

Yes quite. But we were contemplating a future where small scale landlords were extinct.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by ajmurmann on Monday June 05, 2023 @11:37AM (#36197861)

Why would they go extinct though? This makes no sense.

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Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working by aidenn0 on Friday June 02, 2023 @04:45PM (#36170531)

I live in SoCal, and in the 20ish years I've lived here, it's gone from "Reasonable rent, but you can only afford to buy if you're a professional who's saved up for several years" to "Horribly expensive rent and you can only afford to buy if you are independently wealthy" I bought during the transition to this state, and made (on paper at least) almost as much money on housing appreciation in the past 10 years as I did from my software-developer job. It should be obvious that houses can't go up an average of 6-figures per year indefinitely. If I had rented for about 5 years longer, I would have been priced out.

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