This is absolutely the right diagnosis. For instance, SROs used to be very affordable.[1] Placing someone into housing was well within the means of local governments and non-profits.
In Coppola's 1974 movie The Conversation, a large portion of the titular dialogue is about a homeless person Williams' character spots while walking around a crowded Union Square. That's how much homelessness stood out back then.
It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on housing, there would be less incentive to create artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land use policies.
This seems like an oversimplification. Speculation affects demand, so the amount of speculation is hidden within “relative scarcity”. If there is no speculation then demand is directly related to the needs and finances of potential occupants. If there is speculation then demand becomes connected to the buying power of the wealthy, and thus demand and prices are likely to be higher.
In particular, the wealthy investing class collectively have way, way more money than the renting class, so the finances of the wealthy class distort housing prices upward in ways which dwarf the supply and demand effects from actual renters moving in and out of an area.
We’ve all decided that it’s totally fine to artificially limit the supply of real estate. Speculation is the market (correctly, in most cases) betting that that will continue.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...
But yes, wealthy people have more capital and leverage to participate in time-displaced arbitrage. Gentrification is a bit more productive, since investors work at making their properties more valuable at least.
It’s that correct? Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached. The natural price, I think, is zero, but speculators push that price up based on the expected return from future buyers based on predictions of how the market will move. There are no other supply and demand effects, just speculation on sale. Of course there was a bubble but housing is more grounded in reality and real value. Still, it may demonstrate that speculation alone can raise prices.
> Gentrification is a bit more productive
In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities. Perhaps more productive and less destructive would be the approach to housing taken in Vienna. The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it, and once residents stabilize and their income goes up they get to stay in the housing so the buildings become mixed income and they’re pretty nice. Near where I live West Oakland is gentrifying with a wall of corporate owned housing that is replacing the front stoops and back yards of local residents with parking garages and Teslas. It seems almost as though the community is being slowly eaten alive.
Housing isn't comparable to NFTs, all logic goes out the door when something doesn't have intrinsic value.
> In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities.
Yes: whenever cities devote resources to "clean up" a neighborhood, they are also doing this. Slums are ugly, but they are also a source of cheap housing; old buildings might not use land very effectively, but they are also a source of cheap housing (and that new dense apartment building that they knocked down the old housing to build is no longer as affordable on a unit basis).
> The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it
This isn't a bad approach, though I'm not sure how it would scale to the USA. The problem with the US is that "affordable" is often a term that is applied to a few hot cities rather than in general. If all the affordable housing is in Mississippi, no one would be interested in taking it, if it is where people want to live, then we will have lots of lopsided unsustainable population movements, if we just somehow even it out affordable housing, then some people are still going to be left out of their preferred location for housing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...
For public housing, there is also the approach taken by Singapore. This article discusses both and may interest you. What I think matters most is we understand that it is possible to have more people in stable affordable housing, and we accept nothing less.
https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
This country's housing and immigration & temp. resident policies are absolutely out of sync, intentionally. In 2021 they've changed the rules to add hundreds of thousands of people overnight, but did not build anywhere close to the corresponding amount of housing. Then they did it next year again, and again, and again, and they're still doing it, and the next government plans to continue doing it.
This isn't mere speculation. This is deliberate policy to manufacture a housing crisis. To not only keep the pre-existing crisis going, but to deliberately and methodically escalate it. Politicians profit both from their own investment properties and from bribes (ahem campaign contributions, speaking fees, board positions, ...) paid to them by all kinds of businesses who profit from oversupply of labour and undersupply of housing.
"Speculation" implies taking significant risk, often in an under-regulated market. But the current situation is nothing like that – there is barely any risk, when both the supply (zoning & construction) and demand (population growth) sides of the market are heavily regulated with the intent to raise prices. Capital is all you need to reap the profits, pretty much.
Asking as someone not that familiar with Canadian politics, is this "the next government" as in the Liberal one that would replace Trudeau after his resignation, or the (likely) Conservative one that would be in power after the general election?
Much of the problem is that the bourgeois class wants to live in the popular neighborhood, bidding up rents and values in isolated sections of large cities. Meanwhile, large chunks of cities have relatively affordable, but not as attractive neighborhoods with homes that could be converted to house the homeless for a fraction of what it would cost to build new housing.
Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
[0] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/10/23/election-2022-measur...
[1] https://rentboard.berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documen...
The empty home tax is a great idea, but my guess is the tax/fee is not significant enough to change investor behavior. Or possibly it’s not being enforced at the level it should be?
Then they're too low. It's impossible there exist no X and Y where at $X and Y% this would make them sell.
It's not $ and % in Berkeley, its a fixed $3,000 for the first year the unit stands vacant for 182 days or more, $6,000 in the second and subsequent years.
Oakland's measure (which is older) is also a fixed dollar amount (varies by the specific kind of unit, either $3,000 or $6,000 per year), and only applies if the property isn't occupied for at least 50 days in a year.
San Francisco's new one (like Berkeley's, passed in 2023 and would have gone into effect for 2024 with payments in 2025) was struck down as a violation o both the Federal and State Constitution, so until and unless that decision is overturned on appeal, it effectively doesn't exist.
> I figured it would incentivize people to either rent or sell their unused properties which will house people and get rid of blight. Neither has happened much and these owners just take the hit.
Well, the only significant one that is in effect at all (Berkeley's) hasn't had much time to have an impact (it only applies to rental properties with units vacant for more than 182 days in a calendar year, and it went into effect Jan. 1, 2024, with the first payments due in 2025 based on 2024 vacancies.)
In places, like most countries in Asia, where crime rates are vastly lower, you'll see far greater levels of socioeconomic mixing with defacto mansions near rather modest houses. The same is also true to some degree in rural areas in the states, where you'll see a trailer on a couple of acres with a truck husk or two in the front yard right beside a house that you'd be more inclined to call an 'estate.'
If they are "relatively affordable, but not as attractive" they are probably largely housing people currently, and not available to house the homeless.
If they are "in total blight, with abandoned neighborhoods, with windows blown out", they've probably also been stripped, structurally compromised, and contaminated with hazardous materials, and already sheltering squattors, and would need to be cleared, cleaned up, demolished, and have new housing built, making it a more expensive (excluding whatever differences there are in land costs) effort to use that space for housing than other places which might still require demolition and new construction, but not the clearing effort.
> Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
I suspect if you research what the $100,000 covers, much of it is stuff that would still need to be done after buying the units. At least that's been the case most of the times I've seen comparisons like this.
Seems like you’re looking for any and all reasons to establish such a high standard for any housing for homeless people that literally sleep on the ground on top of a plastic bag that creating housing for them is too expensive.
In my opinion, this type of analysis is that the root of the problem. There is no perfect solution, but building high quality housing meeting the latest standards of the city planning committee for 1% of the homeless while leaving 99% out on the street is not a useful solution.
i.e. already providing housing to someone who would otherwise be homeless
This drives me nuts, because the goal should be for 100% of housing to be affordable. Stifling development or shifting the unaffordability to different areas of the income distribution do not solve the problem. More housing has to get built. This is a supply-demand issue, as anyone with basic economic knowledge can tell you. There are two ways out: people relocate, or more housing gets built.
In a world where everyone had housing, I wouldn't mind if Taylor Swift built a house for herself that wasn't "affordable."
It's worth pointing out that, on a country-wide level, Finnish housing prices have been remarkably stagnant for the last 20-30 years when compared to e.g. the United States or most other European countries. That is not true of the cities, obviously, and cities are where all the work is, but it is quite possible here to find very cheap housing in the "middle of nowhere".
Government subsidies don't change that dramatically between these different areas, so it's entirely possible to rent e.g. a studio apartment someplace like Kemi or Vaasa for 500€/month or lower and then just coast if you are willing to put in some effort. If you're willing to live with roommates, who may well be running the same strategy you are, it becomes even easier. (The downside is you then have to live there. Many of these areas have record high unemployment rates, for much the same reasons 3000 person towns in the United States do. Having done something like that for a year, I can report it felt like living in cryostasis.)
So there's arguably an oversupply of Finnish housing in these remote areas, and most of the country is correctly classified as remote (seriously, look at a map, Finland is huge for 5 million people). One interesting mechanism which might help curb that oversupply in the coming decades is the 15% inheritance tax - many people who live in these areas are older and don't want to hand down e.g. a $50,000 valuation home to their kids and then force them to somehow pony up 7.5k in liquid capital. That incentivizes them to sell sooner rather than later.
The more interesting question: Has Finnish housing supply growth in areas like Helsinki, Tampere and Turku kept up with demand growth? I suspect that no matter which country we're looking at, the one which answers that correctly today for their largest cities will be the best place overall to live 10 or 20 years from now. Personally I'll always prefer Finland's massive concrete suburbs to the endless, pointless sea of single family homes I grew up in in the States, and I hope we keep building more of them!
*"snow-where"
That being said, yes Helsinki has been a magnet for employment at least since the Nokia boom years, but its population has ebbed at least once in lulls since then when rental demand cannot meet overpriced supply.
Outlying regions do have a big overstock of housing. Even with low rents, I don't think you can keep any even moderately ambitious young person out in the sticks and away from Helsinki/Tampere/Oulu. Long ago one might think that maybe the country's policy of universal high-speed internet coverage might counter that tendency, but... no.
FWIW some stats on population age by region here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/529458/average-age-of-po...
This is maybe the biggest difference between America and other developed countries when it comes to this subject. You'll find that a fifth-percentile priced home in Spain, Korea, or Australia will be in a rural area with not a lot of economic prospects, but in the US you'll have the additional burden of finding a meth lab next door or being a homicide victim.
Housing is one of the areas I do not see any problems with oversupply.
Typically, “housing” implies those amenities nearby. Obviously, a little bit extra doesn’t hurt, but building out and maintaining infrastructure is not cheap.
I imagine the calculations get even tougher when 50 year projections are for smaller populations.
Oversupply is almost definitionally a bad thing because it means 10 families are trying and falling to offload their $20,000 home for $80,000, and for whatever reason none of them are willing to lower their price to the sane level. That's an obvious market failure, even if its causes aren't well understood. And when I say "curb the oversupply" I actually mean "put or rent these properties on the market at prices where they will actually get used."
That is true for consumer goods where demand can shift to substitutions easily
It is not true for infrastructure goods such as housing. (Housing is infrastructure)
There is a measurable need that can be under or over supplied.
They may have good reasons to want to live there, including "My job is here", "My family is here", and "The only doctor in the world who can treat my exceptionally rare illness lives here". But God will not smite them if USPS starts delivering their mail to a different address. They have many options for figuring out a different place to live, either locally in Pierre, or farther away in a different state or continent.
The fact that the supply and demand curves seemingly move slower in the housing market compared to e.g. the electricity or food markets, which are arguably much more basic "infrastructure goods" (you can survive being homeless if you have food - you can't survive living in a mansion with nothing to eat), doesn't mean they stop being subject to the laws of supply and demand. At worst it means "Plan carefully, because if you miss the mark you will lose a lot of money for a long time." At best it means "Sweet - I wonder if I can make these markets more dynamic with a new company?"
If by detention you mean incarceration, that is still shy of half of the US rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Compare the decision not to let your five year old have pudding because she hit her brother and refused to apologise, versus the decision not to let her jump into the tiger pit because she might die. These are both restraints on this kids' freedom, but they come from very different places.
To the extent that people have a natural right to exist and society does not I think it should be contingent on administrators to prove the standard they're applying is actually reasonable and non discriminatory.
If you're not quite sure what I'm getting at then you should examine the practice of institutionalization that used to occur in the United States and all the many great reasons we have not continued with it. Or the many famous examples of writers attempting to become involuntarily committed so they can detail just how difficult it is to get out and prove to these often unaccountable organizations that you are not, in fact, "severely mentally ill."
I wonder about the jurisprudence of other nations that use these practices in ways which a US citizen might find decidedly uncomfortable, as was pointed out by the OP, particularly when it comes to the nature of involuntary patient /treatment/ and not just simple social separations for the good of the community.
We’re talking about people walking around shoeless covered in dirt and open sores talking to themselves or screaming obscenities in public while walking into traffic. They are public safety risks - to the community and themselves. Not to mention it truly is inhumane to let them live like this.
You have to realize in threads like this you are likely talking to people that live in a community plagued by this extreme of circumstances. Living in San Francisco I saw what I just described just this afternoon outside my own window…
Are you suggesting state guardianship is not warranted in situations like I have mentioned above? Or are you just not aware that in many US cities things truly are this bad?
> In 24 states-accounting for 51.9% of the U.S. population-591,402 emergency involuntary detentions were recorded in 2014, the most recent year with most states reporting, a crude rate of 357 per 100,000.
Notably, California with 400/100k. Florida with 900/100k. I think the why would make these numbers more interesting. How many are drug detox/recovery?
[1] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/appi.ps.201900...
The problem is that there are very different groups of people we're talking about, so much so that throwing them all under the "homeless" umbrella doesn't make sense. It's like saying car accidents are a traffic design problem, not an alcohol problem. Sure, both things can lead to traffic accidents, but they're pretty different problems.
People who temporarily need some assistance to get back on there feet are in a categorically different group than the people who are currently unable to function in society. These are fundamentally different problems.
I've seen how D.C. has tried housing first. It's given thousands of individuals free apartments, for life as far as I can tell, some in very expensive areas. It's been an enormous failure, since housing doesn't actually solve the very serious underlying problems that many of these people have. A lot of long-term residents to flee places that were once (comparatively) affordable because of rising crime and violence. The Washington Post has occasionally covered this [1][2].
I watched a neighborhood meeting recently about the issue. The city does wellness checks on the people in the program - but they can just completely ignore them, and nothing happens. Long term residents have been forced out after people in the program have attacked them or threatened to kill them and the city doesn't do anything, and doesn't even remove them from the program. A councilmember was taking part in the meeting, and had nothing to say other than he was looking into ways that the city could provide more help to people in the program.
The linked article is bordering on misinformation by not mentioning Finland's compulsory commitment, and also ignoring the failures of housing first in the U.S. like D.C.'s that haven't included that aspect. That's why a lot of these programs end up failing - people try to pick and choose the elements that they want, and ignore necessary elements that they find inconvenient. In the end, that doesn't help anyone.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-t...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/08/dc-paid-h...
An actual effective policy would mean the privileged giving up some of their privile. Keeping one's privilege is a far stronger motivator than ending someone else's suffering or doing good.
As long as there is steadfast refusal to recognize what got us here, and instead focus on red herrings like speculators and crisis counselors, we’re going to be stuck with the problem.
Don’t feed the pigeons.
Wow those numbers seem high if they're counting unique people and not admissions and re-admisisons.
There is the brutal reality that the climate in Finland and being homeless are not a great combination in the winter. And the summers are short. Getting people off the streets saves lives. If it's -20 during the night you can either lock people up or collect their corpses in the morning. Most people will seek shelter by themselves or not reject shelter when it is offered to them. But people with serious psychiatric issues, that are maybe a bit self destructive and under the influence of alcohol or drugs are going to have trouble doing rational things. So, yes, Finland does the pragmatic thing here. I don't have good statistics on this but I bet there are more than few corpses being collected in the US and the UK on a yearly basis.
I've lived in Finland for a few years. It's a friendly place that is mostly safe and nice to be. There's a level of pragmatism and compassion with much of what they do that other countries could learn from. Including the business of incarcerating people. The US and UK are maybe a bit lacking with that. Finland has prisons and psychiatric wards (not the same thing) of course. But people don't stay in those endlessly. Prison sentences are generally short, and rehabilitation is something they put a lot of effort on. Most crime there relates to people doing stupid shit because they are drunk, mentally ill, etc. The solution usually includes addressing those issues after they serve their shortish prison terms. And with some level of success.
Or put floor heating under the streets like they did in Jyväskylä!
Anyway, sleeping rough in Jyväskylä sounds like it would be tough. Although you might have enough material (snow) to try to make an iglo. Some people do that for fun even. Of course technically if you make an iglo your home are you still homeless?
Note, this was 20 years ago, maybe it all changed, either the system or the reasons. I can imagine that if you have a zero homeless strategy, it's weird to say that the street heating is for the homeless.
My experience with Finnish people is that it can be hard to tell when they are joking and they have a dark sense of humor. Great poker players too.
I'm not personally a fan of that, but it's quite common in post-soviet countries and very normalized (people are actually surprised when I tell them that not every country does that)
[1] Ultimately for their own good, not as a punitive measure. They are watched by medical personnel and don't risk dying of hypothermia. Still it's not something I'd like to experience.
In San Francisco studies of their populations revealed lots of segments of homeless people
The one that stuck out to me the most was the most distressing: people that were homeless within last 12 months of the study, a huge percent of them were just people that left a relationship. That was a housing price problem.
I knew so many people that had broken up but still living together, and its crazy that the ones on the street were “the strong ones” that actually left
(Since I was not poor and exempt from consequence, I ended that relationship immediately and got a place I actually liked. we had done all the talking I was over it.)
What do mean, that other single professionals will better succeed renting in Berlin or Munich, or afford renting in Warsaw or Prague? My experience is that even less so.
> It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared house/apartment as a single person
In Berlin or Munich absolutely not, even shared accommodation have some absurd castings. Some people really smell their advantage and squeeze every drop of humiliation they can.
It has its issues and is definitely not ideal, but whether you accept these has less to do with age and more to do with culture and economics.
I've shared a house with people in their 40s (or more) when I was in my 20s in London. I'm sure they would have preferred their own place, but it was much, much cheaper for them to share.
https://freopp.org/whitepapers/reimagining-the-policy-approa...
Scroll down to "The Homeless Have Moved from Hospitals to Prisons"
The graph in the linked article shows a reduction in homelessness from about 17,000 to about 4,000, a reduction of approximately 13,000 people.
So I think it's fair to say that Finland's mental health changes have been responsible for the overwhelming majority in the reduction of Finland's homelessness problem. This is consistent with the point that I was trying to make elsewhere in this thread [1].
> Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy.
> If at the end of the 3-month period it is considered likely that detention criteria are still fulfilled, new recommendations MII and MIII are filed and the renewed detention is then valid for 6 months. However, this second period of detention has to be immediately confirmed by a local administrative court.
edit: I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the housing market than mental illness: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/homelessness-is-a-housing-prob... , https://www.nahro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NAHRO-Summi...