there’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.

The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.” Those last two are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere. We’ve worked on Los Angeles Prop HHH proposals, and, despite that Proposition raising $1.2 billion for housing, not much has materially changed. Why? California makes building anything, anywhere, astonishingly difficult. Until we can increase the supply of housing, we’re going to see homelessness problems.

More drug addiction services are needed before we can really treat this problem. Even putting them up in hotels is incredibly expensive because the damage that has to be repaired.

People move to where they can make a decent living, which increasingly means big cities. Saying it’s induced demand makes it sound like it’s insatiable but really it just the ratio of housing to high paying jobs is way out of whack.

Does everyone have the right to live in certain popular cities? This is an important moral question I guess, because our housing crisis isn’t evenly distributed.

I don't see why some would have more of a right than others to live in a place on a baseline level and at the same time I don't think it would be right to force people out of their homes just to make it fair to everyone to have a chance to live there.

If a place is desirable, the people who were already there are more likely going to be the ones who have been contributing towards making it a desirable place to live than ones who were not already there.

Seattle is a destination not just for rich techies, but also for the unhoused. Spend any amount of time at the greyhound bus station and this will be obvious, or take a greyhound across country, people get on at prisons with an open bus ticket, if they have no where else to go, they will head toward one of the west coast cities to survive, and who can blame them?

So we have a net influx of professionals with money who want to live in a popular city, and unhoused people who want to live in a city with more generous social services and mild weather so living outside won’t kill them.

On top of that, you have the residents that were already there, feeling like they are being attacked on both sides: rich young professionals pricing them out of the housing market, and poor unhoused neighbors stealing their Amazon packages and pooping on the sidewalk.

So how does building more housing alone get us out of this cycle? The rich professionals will gobble up the new housing, and tell their friends in the Midwest to come move to where the fun is. The unhoused neighbors couldn’t afford that house anyways, but they might be lucky and eventually score a free apartment or tiny home from the various social services in the area. So they move from their camping spot, but someone else has just arrived on a greyhound to take their spot over.

I only think that there's usually a balance to things that sometimes require a lot of time to pass in order to correct.

Anyway, I appreciate all of your responses and your perspective.

In theory sure, if the supply approaches infinity then at some point an additional housing unit has zero value. But these are houses, which in practice are expensive to build so supply will never approach infinity.

Can you name at least one US city where housing used to be expensive and they built so much that it resulted in excess supply and a consequence it is now cheap to live there (and the city continues to thrive - not talking about bankrupt ghost towns)?

As far as I know (but curious to see if I'm wrong) there isn't any case where that point in the curve has been crossed.

The densest area in the country is Manhattan, not known for cheap housing. So if even the densest housing area has not crossed that point in the curve, it's an argument that maybe it's just not possible to do so in practice.

This holiday season, family members will be openly bragging about how their home is worth 1.7 million, which they purchased for 300k. The room full of apartment/roommate living student debt loaded will get very quiet.

How about to reduce risk, but reward lucky ownwes, a lot of houses too big for aging boomers, could have incentive payments to sell to HUD to convert into rooming houses, with lockable bedrooms rented separately, and the shared kitchens and bathrooms cleaned by HUD, and quick evictions for any troublesome renters. So more like renting at a YMCA or backpackers' hostel, ideal for the working poor.

The trick it uses is introducing a continuity with the "easier" term. There is no such thing in reality. If you have no income you won't be renting either $1000 nor $10000 apartment despite the former being "easier" to afford. And if you have income you will move to the housing you can afford and won't be hanging under an overpass just to piss off the landlords.

There is not enough empathy for those who are struggling.

Hey! Ned Nimby here, and I'd like you to know that I *AM* struggling!

You think it doesn't break my heart to know that as I admire the beautiful sunset over the SF bay while sipping the finest of imported Bordeaux my back porch, there are poor homeless people out there?

It breaks my heart!

And by golly, if someone were to build a bunch of cheap housing blocking my view of the bay, I don't think I'd be able to take it!

Have some empathy for me!

</parody>

;-)

I'm not trying to downplay the complexity of the situation - I'm just saying that you alienate more people than you think with this common format of sarcastic hatred based on the extreme example of the bay area.

I would like to say that, having lived in a city that built very outwards (Houston, Texas), and several denser cities (most notably Paris, France which is very dense), I prefer the quality of life in dense spaces. Being too spread out means that you have massive commutes to be able to get anywhere. Being built up means you can do everything on foot.

ADUs won’t fix the problem, but I guess it’s something.

Guess what happens next.

The rate of empty apartments is extremely low. This means that we have a supply shortage, not a pricing problem.

It's the land under the house that appreciates in value.

If you want to reduce that land value appreciation, here are two good ideas:

Land value taxes help to discourage the hogging of land while encouraging construction, which in turn dampens the price of land.

Removing restrictive zoning polices means that the demand for land is decreased, thus dampening the price of the land.

You can't compare a house and a car in terms of value.

Both require maintenance and both can decay to unusable if left abandoned too long. That much is similar.

But maintaining a car beyond the point where parts are available becomes very expensive since everything becomes a custom job. There are few 100 year old cars running around and those which exist are a labor of love, but from an economic perspective makes no sense. It would be far cheaper to just buy a new car.

This never happens with housing. You can maintain a house indefinitely, through many generations and it never becomes cheaper to buy a whole new house. (Barring some disaster to it, natural or human-induced, of course.)

So a house can't become a depreciating asset. A roof over your head will always have value (that's why this whole discussion exists, everyone agrees there is value to a home) and since that house will last essentially forever, it can't possibly become worthless.

Most people would prefer a regular house or apartment, given the option.

It’s pretty clear that treating housing as an investment and not as a fundamental right has led us here.

Unless you’re invested in real estate in which case your incentives are to keep the system in place.

That's the hard part. I imagine most homeowners are of the idea "I got mine, who cares about anyone else?" We see this line of thought in many parts of politics. Honestly, I'll take a bath on my home value if it means my kids, their friends, my niece, etc. get to secure housing. I don't care. Hell, I might find myself in a hard spot in the future and I don't want housing to be an issue. Housing is so important to one's dignity, ability to work/access some services and safety. There's no reason people should be collecting houses like baseball cards.

No, it's pretty clear that insufficient supply in certain areas has led us here. Treating housing as an investment is just a symptom (it's really unavoidable if the good is scarce).

We need to limit land value increases.

A land value tax helps with that. Increasing supply by upzoning might help even more.

This conspiracy theory that people who own real estate are limiting supply so their investments go up is not reality. People indirectly want to limit supply because they enjoy their neighborhood the way it is. It turns out what they enjoy about their neighborhood others enjoy about the neighborhood so the price goes up. It doesn't mean that they are overall goal is to increase the value of their house. The evidence is that adding public transport and rezoning to higher densities and commercial use would increase the value of their property a lot but most oppose that because that is not why they bought in the neighborhood.

this isn't true. vienna's social housing program is a good example of how this works. and they have cheap median rent in 2023 compared to other cities their size.

And this is putting it mildly.

I also think that the kind of housing that results from Communism isn't very desirable.

Regarding Vienna: They still allow private investment into real estate.

and did i ever say anything against private investment into real estate? no. this black and white thinking is part of the problem.

> I also think that the kind of housing that results from Communism isn't very desirable.

what is undesirable about cheap housing with good urban planning on a decentralized, local level like they did in vienna?

> Until we remove real estate as a form of investment

That’s what I was responding to. I see now that this isn’t your opinion.

You think those are different things?

If prices go up because demand is high and supply is low, then the way to fix this is by increasing supply.

If you cap the prices, supply will be even lower and you get shortages.

A pricing problem is when you have sufficient supply, but the sellers in the market are colluding to fix high prices. This can be fixed by trust breaking and/or price controls, but this isn't what's happening in real estate. Real estate is an extremely competitive market.

I don't see clothes as investments but I still buy them, same as food. And industries are there to provide and profit over it.

If somehow magically houses stop being "investments" to hoard and rent away, people would still build houses, you know, to live in them.

In the same way, real estate investors are necessary to build apartment buildings.

You are right that a piece of clothing is a depreciating asset. And maybe what you mean is that a house should also be a depreciating asset.

Well, we can make it so by properly taxing the land value.

Maybe that's what you mean, and in this case I'd say we agree!

Vienna is a great example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41VJudBdYXY (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)

its call prison, lets start opening more up

In my opinion a lot of the push to put ever more emphasis on “social” issues we have seen lately is to distract the growing number of young voters from economic issues so that these efforts can continue.

I don't think we should be locking people up for years because they were minding their own business and being productive members of society and happened to run into the police at the wrong time.

At the same time, it would be nice to do something with people who are fine to beg for money on the street, do nothing productive, and be high on drugs until they die.

Most cities with these problems have resources for people who are willing to get help. Yet we let people refuse that because they'd rather continue doing drugs and not being productive and at the same time ruining all public spaces.

Something needs to change.

Hoping that those people will just change is a bad strategy. Leaving them be is an option - but it's growing less popular.

Before you make assumptions about my person opinions, I'm very pro-legalization, I think prohibition of basically anything is very misguided. If I were in charge, everything, including heroin and fentanyl, would be legalized, taxed, and regulated.

The lack of affordable housing in Portland drives homelessness; and being homeless pushes people to use meth during the night to stay awake so they can protect themselves and fentanyl so they can feel joy while living in truly wretched conditions. Keeping people off the street by building affordable housing and preventing people from despairing avoids a raft of social ills.

That said, per your point decriminalization of possession and public intoxication, measure 110 was a poorly written law that should have decriminalized drugs after harm reduction, substance abuse clinics, and housing options were in place first. The current situation wasn't guaranteed to happen; unfortunately city and county leadership like to wear their pants on their head instead of actually getting work done. This was as much if not more of a failure of governance to execute as it was a failure of policy.

Portland planned to decriminalize a lot of things and put a bunch of other measures and support systems in place. COVID and other things hit, and all that got enacted was decriminalization with none of the guard rails or help mechanisms, with predictable outcomes.

You can literally watch interviews with the homeless in SF and Seattle. They cite these facts straight-up as to why they live in SF and Seattle. You have to be actively lying to yourself to come to a different answer.

Murdoch and co. will have you believe Seattle is a fentanyl-ridden wastleland. Property values say otherwise.

If not, doesn’t it seem likely that previous looking the other way has contributed to the current status?

Within a given city, yes, the nicer bits are more expensive. Between different cities, however, it is totally possible to find one city is both cheaper and nicer than another (with the possible caveat of being smaller, and perhaps if you can't WFH, not as many jobs).

To use an example I know well, basically every city in France outside of Marseille is nicer to live in than Paris, but Paris has real estate prices that are 2-4x most other cites.

I imagine you could find similar things in other countries as well - Amsterdam vs Eindhoven in the Netherlands, for example.