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’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.