Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market has to pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated market.
Consider that for many people in this situation, missing a few days of work to look for a new place to live might mean getting fired. Even if they don't get fired, the lost wages for missing those days of work could put them behind on their bills or make it difficult to buy food.
And even if they are able to spend time to find a new place to live without putting their finances in jeopardy, remember that they also have to find a new job in the new location, and doing that without further financial hardship could be difficult.
There are also other considerations: someone barely able to afford living in SF or NYC might not have a car, and walk or take transit to work and to do errands. Living in a lower-cost area might mean needing a car to do things like buy groceries or get to work. If you already can't save money, how are you going to afford a car before you move to the new area?
Many of us here can afford to take weeks or months off to take a break between jobs. Sometimes it's hard to understand that many people can barely take sick days without risking financial ruin.
I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net. The mechanism for that is charity. It's much harder nowadays with disconnected communities, but reaching out for help often works.
I myself spent years with belongings only as burdensome as I could carry (at worst case) or pack into my sedan. It made moving from one place to another easy, and I could always rent a cheap hotel to live in since I wasn't burdened by possessions.
It absolutely was. Government has grown into this leviathan we have today, and the world's drastically more complicated since the days of living in huts in villages but the underlying principal is we take care of our own.
Welfare is right there in the founding document, and a safety net is part of that.
What you are you are referring to is the following: “ Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”
First, “welfare” here means “the state of well being.”
Second, it is tied to the “United States” as a whole - not any given individual, especially because the Supreme Court has ruled the government has no duty to protect its citizens from harm (Deshaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 1989; and The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005).
Thus, if the Supreme Court has established that the government has no obligation to protect citizens from harm, it has no obligations to economically provide for citizens either. That’s called “charity” and it’s what churches have typically done by collecting revenue (tithing) from its congregants.
20th century governmental usurpation of charity by rebranding it as “welfare” is a distinctly modern concept, that also happens to be constitutional, insofar that the government collecting taxes to distribute benefits on a needs basis does not violate the Constitution, which is entirely different than being enumerated in the document itself, which you erroneously conflated.
The constitution should be ripped apart and rewritten — if it requires hordes of over-educated lawyers to faff about on what it actually means.
The supreme court was a mistake. Congress was a mistake. The executive office was a mistake.
The only thing all of these organizations do is further their own interests.
Here’s the one, let’s see if it renders:
Chinese jiong should be the only emoji allowed on HN, since it is a valid Chinese character, but then so is a swastika (in both directions, non-nazi Buddhist meanings of course).
Moving may be easier in that it doesn't have a high risk of death, but much harder in actually surviving at your destination. You don't just grab a plot of land and start building your own house these days. America did that hundreds of years ago and charges for it now. How are you paying a security deposit in another state on minimum wage, let alone the travel and job seeking?
https://www.ca-sba.org/california-exports-its-poor-to-texas-....
Many of my colleagues can still afford to live in SF because they have their parent's homes or something in that area, and thus pay no rent, or have way lower expenses in housing.
And even so many are doing it.
It creates new problems, including lack of a job.
I believe the biggest factor is mental illness. The addiction and homelessness are the symptoms/results. (Obviously not in every case)
We’re at record low unemployment. If you’re able and willing to work you can 100% make enough money to pay rent somewhere…it just might not be in SF.
Idk why people feel that everyone should be entitled to live in any specific location.
Also, FWIW the US homelessness rate is below 0.2% among the lowest in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pd...
It’s just objectively true that the US enjoys much higher living standards than the rest of the world…even if Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure…
> Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure
Not sure how you count that. For me it's 0.18% vs 0.05%, so US rate is over three times or 260% higher (or conversly Brazil's homelessness rate is 73% lower). I can't do anything about 2015 vs 2020, that's the latest data available for this report, I guess.
I'm not trying to "brag" about the US homelessness rate. I'm trying to point out that things are honestly pretty good here. You can get educated, find work, and build a beautiful life for your family. The median household income here is like 6-7x the global average. Despite the recent political polarization, our government is the oldest and most stable in the world.
To me, 0.18% is a reasonable rate and the long term trend is undeniably downwards. I hope you levy these same criticisms against the likes of Germany, France, Sweden, etc... because they all have higher rates according to your chart.
If we don't stop this silly conflict fueled by internal anti-american sentiment, our country may implode.
It's a United States problem.
Short review of the research can be found here:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-eviden...
There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
It's extremely hard to live without a car in the US and cars are a huge expense, plus our car-centric culture means lack of a car is a barrier to employment, both practically and because people are reluctant to hire you.
Medical expenses can be a factor in the US. Universal health coverage could help.
There's no one cause and the oft cited "addiction and mental health" is largely prejudice. In a nutshell, you wind up homeless when you have too many problems and not enough resources to handle them and the US doesn't provide a robust social safety net.
Is it a lack of affordable housing or is it a lack of wage growth compared to cost of living?
Personally, I've started to think it's the latter, because it explains why upper middle class non-millionaires are also getting pinched. They too often rely on income rather than capital gains.
My personal conspiracy theory, and I admit it's a conspiracy theory, is that land owners are the ones centering popular conversation and data around affordable housing rather than wage growth. It opens doors for rental assistance, a multitude of rental-based density expansions, and other programs that put more money in their pockets rather than expanding the money income-based people make and keep via ownership.
In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200 sq.ft. Post 2000, it was over 2400 sq.ft. and held on average one less household member. We've also torn down a million single room occupancy units in recent decades.
My house was built in the 1950s at around 1200sq ft. It's since expanded to over 2000, mainly from finishing a basement and expanding the top level. I'd be curious to see the data you base that on, because the people I bought it from passed this down generation to generation and had their entire family living in it. The house I grew up in has a similar story.
Another anecdote is that about half of the 1950s homes on my block were bulldozed and replaced with single units that have largely gone vacant. My cities issue is that we have plenty of housing, but even the bottom line single units are too expensive compared to wages because permitting and building costs are through the metaphorical roof.
Between 1955 and 2013, almost one million SRO units were eliminated in the US due to regulation, conversion or demolition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
I'm pretty sure the stats on 1950s housing vs. post 2000 housing were federal stats, but I don't have a citation handy. I've been talking about housing issues a lot of years.
In Texas I don't remember seeing much if any SROs. I've only seen them in abundance since I've lived in Portland.
Land owners aren't really incentivized that much to talk about affordable housing. Housing developers would like to fix the problem by building market-rate housing - as supply goes up, demand begins to be satiated and prices can come down over time. All the while, developers make more money.
But building dense and inexpensive housing is often blocked by leftist-type politicians for being unsuitable for living, and NIMBYs of all sorts of political spectrum block it on wholly different grounds.
More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
> More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
Last caveat that I'd add to this is also more diverse housing street by street. Having space for single family homes alongside dense housing isn't just a good vibe, I think it also incentivizes a normalization of value. Combine that with shopping/retail and I think you can build some pretty equitable places with shorter commutes.
Something like ~97% of people live on ~3% of the land.
My target housing costs for getting off the street was $400. I searched half the country to find it and moved a long distance to get it.
I've heard from other homeless people that they could be off the street if they could find a place for $500 or $600 and they were willing to move to get it on the condition that it was real and could be counted on.
Additionally, I live without a car. So a hypothetically cheap place without bus service that's in the country where I would need to buy a car, pay monthly insurance, gas and maintenance adds X amount to the cost of living there on top of the direct housing costs, which makes a lot of those "cheap" places a lot less cheap. (That's just thinking of cost, overlooking the minor detail that I can no longer drive.)
This is evident, for example, if you look closely into the studies saying stuff like "most homeless people in the Bay became homeless in the Bay area", etc.
"Why am I paying rent for myself and rent for the drug addict on the corner (through taxes) while I cannot afford to pay for my son's college/medicine/whatever?"
Living in a country with virtually no drug use (besides heavily abuse of alcohol ofc) it feels that while drugs are not the main problem for many, they are for some, and definitely make other problems worse.
Easy fix: Give them a free apartment, too. Let them see what it's like. If they do better there than paying rent or mortgage, great. But I bet they won't last more than a day or two before turning that key back in. They think a free apartment is some great thing to have, as if their neighbors won't be all the people they didn't want to be around in the first place.
I'm sure established families wouldn't actually go through with that plan, but they are also older and more likely to vote against those programs. the youth would take the most advantage of it and may even put up with it due to alternatives for housing being 2K/month into their college loans and the idea that it's a temporary discomfort. And we all know that the 18-29 demographic doesn't turnover nearly as much as that 50+ bracket.
A lot of people seems to accept tax cuts for billionaires much higher than anything spend on the poor. It is all about framing and repetition.
Humans like to help other humans. The problem is that there is a push towards selfishness from the people that has the most and profits more out of it.
The only defense is electing people that stop the bleed and force the government to prioritize what they spend on. Talk amongst yourselves and decide if building a new park or helping homeless people is more important.
And much of it is effectively subsidizing Walmart and friends anyway.
Drug use may be a symptom in some cases, but very often is the cause. Either way, it isn't good.
All you need to do is walk down almost any street in San Francisco and take a secondary glance at the homeless people you see, and its obvious that "can't afford a home" is just one of their many problems. Most of these people couldn't hold a job because they're addicted to really hardcore drugs (you might even get an opportunity to watch them smoke or inject some during this secondary glance), and often severely mentally ill. "Homeless" is to a great extent besides the point, this is a mental illness / drug addiction problem.
Even if you could find a solid place for $800/mo in SF, these people wouldn't be in it because the vast majority of them are unfit for employment. If that was really the issue then we could solve all this by just sending them to Omaha.
But this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality most people have is ludicrous; it simply isn’t that easy, when you have either mental health problems, or, quite simply, no hope.
This is just confirmation bias because the only people you immediately identify as homeless are the people with these issues. The people who are only homeless because they can't afford a home don't look homeless. For example, imagine a person who has a job but fell behind on rent due to some emergency medical expenses. Now they spend their nights in a shelter while slowly amassing savings from their minimum wage job in hopes to eventually be able to afford a home again. How would you visually identify this person while passing them on the street?
You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system.
But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty.
And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something.
There are so many steps before people literally have to sleep on the streets. They stay out of sight. You surely have noticed all the camper vans on some streets in SF. I'd bet that for every person actually on the street there are 10 who are effectively homeless but managing it in a way you can't see. Living at their place of work or study, living in a vehicle, couch-surfing, illegal sublets, and things I'm happy to never have to imagine.
The article the OP posted details many stories of people who are competent to hold down a job, even multiple jobs, but cannot find anywhere to live.
Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.
Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.
Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.
Some people want to fix homeless because of empathy while others want to fix it because of selfishness. Your comment reveals that you are in the latter group. You don't actually want to get homeless people into homes because you empathize with how horrible their lives must be without one. You just want to the minority of homeless people who are a nuisance to stop bothering you and people you actually do empathize with. All those other homeless people who aren't attacking the elderly or shitting on the street can keep on living the same invisible life of suffering because their suffering is not actually a problem in your eyes.
And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Fixing part of the problem is a good thing. Different strategies might solve different parts of the problem. Objecting to progress isn't helpful and isn't compassionate, it's the way we got our current harm-maximization policies.
I certainly didn’t.
> Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?
Because your counter to the idea of the invisible homeless population was to complain about the nuisance homeless population.
> And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Because you are the one prioritizing the suffering of one group over another.
But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.
Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.
I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.
In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.
If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.
I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.
Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immoderation as some kind of protection racket.
Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing them.
Also not saying that it isn't a problem which should be solved, because it absolutely is. But if you did solve it, and you told people that homelessness was down by 90%, they would look at you like you were crazy, because it's only the other 10% they were complaining about in the first place.
Similarly most mentally ill people are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors.
Let’s agree that nothing about drug addiction or mental illness precludes living indoors.
The increase in homelessness seems as though it corresponds almost exactly to California’s housing crisis and unaffordable rents. Heroin has been around for a long time. It cannot be the explanation for a sudden increase in homelessness. Mental illness is a constant more or less, so it cannot be the explanation either.
What changed over the past decade, and especially changed in the past few years? Housing prices and rents.
I’d love to hear other explanations for the rapid increase of homelessness in California this past decade or two. It cannot be attributed solely to drugs or mental illness.
You are, presumably unintentionally, using a blanket descriptor "mentally ill" and "drug addicted" to describe an extremely wide spectrum of expressions.
"Serious Mental Illness" definitionally requires substantial interference with or limiting of one or more major life activities (including maintaining a safe house, and maintaining employment).
You are conflating people's common use of the term "mental illness" - yes, we can agree that most people with say, seasonal depression, can hold down a job and maintain a house. This is not what San Francisco's visible homeless "mental illness" is referring to. They are suffering from Serious Mental Illness.
No, we cannot agree that most folks with Serious Mental Illness are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors, definitionally.
Again, "drug addiction." There is an appreciable difference between the character of the drug, and the addiction - aka "Chronic Substance Abuse."
That is, once again, I do not agree that someone with open meth sores on their face is going to hold down any sort of a job and/or be able to muster a safe home environment.
Next, you ask what has changed in the past few years? Then conclude only two things have changed in 10 years - "housing prices and rents."
While there may be a correlation, possibly even a causation, this is still an oversimplification of the problem. There are other cities, even in the US that have seen an increase in housing prices and not the corresponding inhumane treatment of both the housed, and unhoused in SF particularly.
I wonder if anything else has changed in SF in 10 years that makes it uniquely inhumane to the homeless, and also disproportionately affecting the entire character of the city? Could it be policies? Complete lawlessness and availability/encouragement/facilitation of new drugs and drug addiction?
There are at least two obvious problems that are unique to the West Coast, perhaps namely SF, 1) an overall increase in homelessness caused by certainly a multitude of factors that include much more than "rent," such as the bifurcation of particularly the SF labor market and the educational/cognitive barriers to "information technology work" versus the alternatives. That is to say, the problem isn't necessarily inherently that rents went up, the corollary is true that pay didn't go up for those experiencing homeless who were happily housed and paying rent before. Ought they move? Ought we relocate them? Ought we pay, say, fast food workers similar to MAMAA developers? It seems you suggest affordable government project housing? And 2) policy that makes it such that those who do suffer from Serious Mental Illness/Chronic Substance Abuse (by some counts, the majority of those experiencing homelessness) that does everything it possibly can to ensure they maximally suffer, while having the greatest possible negative impact to the bystanders, often other people experiencing homelessness, but also the housed, and business owners. That is to say, SF policies it as absolutely easy as possible to stay addicted, and as difficult as possible to overcome the addiction, while simultaneously pretending severe mental illness is not a thing (i.e. you [paraphrasing for emphasis] "most mentally ill people can maintain a house and a job".)
It seems our conceptualization "homelessness" is corrupted by inadequate, and inconsistent use of nomenclature.
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.