It's going to get worse before it gets better. The pyrrhic NIMBY victory over new housing development that might threaten the value of their investment has led to the country eating its young. It's not just homelessness, it's a crashing birth rate because young couples are making the decisions they're guided into by the market: not starting families.
Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style. Resurrect the Federal Works Agency and restore the powers of the Army Corps of Engineers to file eminent domain paperwork in the morning and roll bulldozers after lunch.
I don't think people understand how bad it is and far the effects of bad housing policy reach. I live in Western Massachusetts, about 2 hours from Boston. Boston's terrible housing policy has driven up housing prices here because literally 99% of people can't afford a house in Boston so they start moving outside the city. The suburbs were full decades ago so they're crazy expensive. With the rise of remote work people are moving 2-3 hours outside of Boston because they may have to go in once a quarter but otherwise don't have to day to day. So we have a situation where decades of bad housing policy to protect property values are literally raising the prices of houses hundreds of miles away. At this point, I couldn't even afford my own house with the rise in interest rates and prices, and I only bought mine in 2018. The phrase "the country eating its young" is such a perfect way to describe this, and many other problems with America right now.
It's even worse in Cali because of something called proposition 13: essentially rent control for property taxes. So you have not just a powerful NIMBY force, but nobody has any desire to sell. This creates a highly skewed market while the rent:buy ratio serves extremely cheap rent - people are happy to sit on these houses and enjoy dirt cheap taxes. It even used to be a heritable fixed tax / tax control but they stopped that -- people are salty because they inherit a house that their parents easily afforded taxes for with tax control, but suddenly the taxes are a gorillion dollars. Presumably in fact the taxes would be lower were these controls not in place, the newbies are paying the majority of property tax costs
> Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style.
I work for a Singapore company, and the issues my coworkers complain about are that houses are leased for 99 years, have a 6-8 year waiting list, and are very expensive.
This makes it difficult to live near your office because you can't easily move. Many coworkers have 1.5-hour commutes one way via MRT.
None have shared this with me, but a huge amount of your assets are poured into an apartment that is a lease with an expiration date. In the USA, you can rely on home equity in your retirement, but if your lease is ending in 20 years, it's not valuable.
I wonder if relying on home equity as an appreciating asset the cause of a lot of our problems in the US?
A 99 year lease is a kind of estate duty that restarts the opportunity clock each generation. This way the kids will inherit less and really have to work to create their own wealth. The only thing they are able to inherit is early life preparation like education. I’m sure there are other advantages parents pass down to their kids but by imposing limits, social mobility is preserved.
Right, and Singapore has the CPF system which entails mandatory contributions from employee and employer. This is supposed to be preventative of poverty in older age. So the 99 year lease isn’t an issue in practice.
We have social security in the US which isn’t quite the same. Not sure if the public will ever accept CPF type systems — might feel too paternalistic to Americans.
I think inherited wealth is downright cancerous to society.
Ideally, we want to promote the most talented people into the positions where they have the most power and can wield it wisely. With inherited wealth, we instead give huge advantages to, not the talented, but the lucky, and we end up with incompetent leadership who are able to simply buy power with an inconsequential fraction of their wealth. When power is bought and not earned, you end up with people who do idiotic things with power. Eventually the society rots from within and is toppled by more efficient groups.
Making 401K mandatory? With a minimum percentage? Yeah I wonder how that would go but if it meant you could opt-out of Social Security maybe it could work.
Public housing is housing owned and managed by the government. It could be the same copy paste apartment blocks but owned by your city or state government. Despite public housing always being connected to affordable housing, it does not have to be affordable housing to be public housing.
I'm talking about publicly subsidized housing construction, along the lines of Singapore model[1].
Public housing in the US is stigmatized because there's a focus on the deliberately ghettoized, designed-to-fail low income housing that was built in the 20th century. This is held up as the definition of public housing, but there are other version of it that were and are successful.
A high percentage of public housing is not the only solution to limit rent prices: any non-market housing is often enough to keep the prices down, although public housing is the most proeminent across the world, associative housing work very well, and can be taken from existing stock (friends of mine inherited 4 appartments and let them be rented by an association, a sort of 20 years free lease where the only obligation for the association is to take care of the renovations and keeping the appartments appliances up to date).
100%, Vienna would be my other example of how to do it right.
The US 'attempt' to do public housing is like your child, being told to wash the dishes, simply smashes all the dishes and says that this chore is impossible because look, all the dishes got broken. Meanwhile the kids next door have built an entire dishwashing machine in the time your child spent complaining it wasn't possible.
What would be a reasonable estimate of when it could start to “get better”? I find “country eating its young” to be a perfect metaphor and honestly I don’t see any hope, it’s sad to see.
I have been in the US for close to 15 years now, as a renter, and the insane rent increase driven by housing shortage is truly sour. Every year there’s a high probability that my rent will be dramatically jacked up, to the point where I have moved 11 times since I came here, in several instances directly driven by a 20% rent increase.
And I work in tech so generally can afford things due to high pay, I cannot even imagine how less fortunate professionals in other careers manage. Probably tons of roommates or accepting 2h commutes.
All this has definitely added a sense of instability to my life that certainly contributed to other downstream decisions, some serious like never having kids (not the only reason, but a factor nonetheless), and some trivial like never buying any nice furniture/tools because it’s just going to be an annoyance when I’ll have to move again in N months after the landlord says they can now get $4k on the market instead of my current $3.5k.
Fortunately I am a european citizen and most likely I see myself gravitating more and more there as I age. Europe has a lot of problems, including housing shortage in some pockets, but where I come from, which is a generally desirable urban/suburban metro, it’s easy to find affordable rentals on a 8 year contract, which makes it so much easier to plan your life and not live with the anxiety that in just 9 months a 20% increase will come your way.
Why would you think it's going to ever get better? The whole economy is set up to make the problem worse indefinitely. Wealth disparity and poverty are features not bugs.
You will get lots of resistance to things that significantly lower current values unless they are very widespread.
Consider my house. I paid $280k for it in 2007. Zillow estimates it is now worth $454k and Redfin estimates $498k. So on paper I've gained about $200k.
But since property tax is based on value I've also gained a quite a bit on my property tax bill. Same with house insurance. Until I actually sell the house I gain no benefit from the gain in value, except possibly I could take out a larger home equity loan than I would be able to otherwise.
When I do sell it then I've got a nice windfall right? Not really. Since houses have gone up all over the place if I buy another house the gains go into that.
How about if I instead rent an apartment? Rents are way up since 2007 too, so the money runs out roughly as fast as it would have if house prices and rent had stayed the same as they were in 2007.
So yeah, I'd be happy with the lower taxes and lower insurance that lower prices would bring, and would vote for measures that would bring that about such as more development. But only if whatever is done to lower prices in my region is also being done in the rest of the state and country.
The consequence is a rapidly aging society which is terrible for everyone. It's terrible for the huge undercared-for, neglected bloc of elderly. It's terrible for the smaller amount of overworked, overtaxed young people.
A few months back, the author of "Homelessness is a Housing Problem" gave a talk where I live and it's quite worth watching if you don't have time to read the book:
This article isn’t really useful. If we are dumping almost 100% of our homeless resources on drug addiction then the fact that this is only 20-40% of the population is more of a travesty than a “so what”. You can’t solve their homelessness problems without figuring out a way to stabilize them (or they just burn down the housing you give them), and the fact that this minority overwhelms our support systems (and it’s immoral to prioritize non-substance abuse cases), means that we are stuck in a rut of throwing tons of resources at cases ($10k+/month/person helped) that go way beyond just subsidizing or covering their rent.
If it were just a housing problem, it could be solved with more housing. But we’ve conflated it with drug addiction (at least here in Seattle) and it has become much less solvable as a result.
There are really two distinct homelessness problems:
1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
When laypeople talk about “homelessness”, they typically mean 2 as it’s more visible and disruptive to them.
This is a good point, but part of what the article is saying is that where housing is cheap, some of even those "at the margins of society" people with some drug problems can maybe stay housed. Which means fixing the drug part of their problems is easier than if they're moving around on the streets.
Ya, but isn’t that complete BS? I lived in Vicksburg MS, and while housing is definitely cheap, it’s not free, and you can’t really survive there if you can’t make any money at all. So you either die or move.
Yes, that’s totally true! I think this is a much more interesting problem when we get rid of the drug addiction component. It is just sad that drug addiction is consuming all of our social resources that could otherwise go into solving housing problems.
A lot of kids from Vicksburg also move to LA and don’t make it because of housing costs, so they move elsewhere. But should they have made it? Should LA be affordable enough for everyone who wants to live there to live there? If not, but we want to subsidize housing for some segment of the American population to live in LA, how do we prioritize? If yes, how much housing do we need to build to satisfy all American and international demand to live in LA?
This is based on the fact that we have finite resources. Any resources that go to housing drug addicts could have been used for something else. There is a real opportunity cost there.
> Also, why are people with a drug problem less deserving than people with housing problems.
There are a few issues with housing drug addicts:
1. Understand, these people aren't just run-of-the-mill addicts. They are so addicted to drugs that they'll live in unimaginably horrid conditions to support their addiction. Any housing they receive will be destroyed and made uninhabitable.
2. Housing them makes the system more miserable and undesirable for everyone else. If you're a parent with children and you're facing homelessness, are you really going to use a resource where close contact with heavy drug addicts is possible?
> Finally, what I understand from experts is that the first step to helping people with drug problems is to get them stable housing.
That's actually the second step. The first step is getting the addict to want to quit drugs. Many addicts don't want to stop using, and giving those people housing is not going to be an effective way to combat their addiction if they aren't first interested stopping their addictive behavior.
Again, what is that all based on? It disagrees with most of what I read from researchers and people on the ground, especially that quitting is the first step before housing.
I've seen where many people with those problems live, and the places aren't horrid, just lacking in money and social services.
It just seems like demonization of yet another group - this time, people who have drug addictions. Why is it important to demonize them?
> This is based on the fact that we have finite resources. Any resources that go to housing drug addicts could have been used for something else. There is a real opportunity cost there.
And anything spent on other things could have been spent helping people addicted to drugs. Why is one more important or deserving than the other, other than the demonization?
The problem with that is that they're also a problem when they're on the streets, sometimes even more of a problem. Someone who's not a problem and generally minding their own business is less of an threat than someone who's drug addiction is driving them to commit violence. We can't arrest them before they do anything violent, and after they've harmed someone else is too late.
> The problem with that is that they're also a problem when they're on the streets, sometimes even more of a problem. Someone who's not a problem and generally minding their own business is less of an threat than someone who's drug addiction is driving them to commit violence.
That applies to every criminal act, so why are we signaling out people addicted to drugs? Plenty of people on Wall Street commit crimes daily, stealing money from innocent people - do we worry about how to preemptively stop them?
The answer, IMHO, is that some have effectively demonized people with drug addictions and people who are unhoused, to legitimize hate and violence in our society (and to get rid of people they don't like). 'I hate/fear unhoused / mentally ill people, so it's ok to choke one to death or lock them away without trial.'
It's not only hurts and oppresses those individuals, but it lays the foundation for the next stages - progressive protestors, and soon mass detention of immigrants. It's either human rights for all or for none.
You said using, not possession, and after you've used it, it's no longer in your possession, externally. That distinction does not matter in New York, however, as it's not one of the places where it's illegal to posses but legal if you've just used it. (Unless it's weed.)
> There are really two distinct homelessness problems:
> 1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
> 2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
What is that based on? Do you have any data to support these categories as something real? It sounds a lot like, '1) people I like; and 2) people I hate.'
It's wrong to discuss human beings like animals, and as if they exist to please or displease you, and as if they can be treated like animals.
They are people with their own experiences, like you, sensations and emotions and lives, who matter just as much as you do and belong in public spaces just as much. I've spent lots of time in major cities; chronically homeless people are among the least disruptive, and I've talked to many and know a few people in that situation; people on opioids are in their own worlds, often in a dream.
The second category isn't just drug users. It's also people who are not mentally capable of keeping up the routine of decisions that keep them off the streets. Opposite of the "temporarily unhoused" category, they tend to be "temporarily housed".
It is a housing problem though. That is what the data show. That's why homelessness correlates so much with high housing costs. That's why places with serious drug problems like Ohio or West Virginia don't have such high rates of homelessness.
None of which is to say that drugs are not a problem, or to say that someone with a drug problem isn't more likely to become homeless.
All of that is explained in the article which you responded to without reading it, judging by the timestamp on your comment. Let alone the video, which goes into more depth and talks extensively about drugs.
Places like Mississippi don’t have high homeless problems because they lack services and good weather, so drug addicts who have burned their family/friend networks, at least, hop on a bus to somewhere they can survive (usually a west coast city with mild weather and a progressive voter base that is willing to throw lots of money at the problem). That segment of the problem is 100% mobile, and even self reporting surveys show cause (like 60% of king counties homeless population saying they had previous housing in pioneer square).
If you can’t afford housing anywhere, you just won’t survive very long in lots of places, so survival bias starts to show up.
> The overwhelming majority of homeless people surveyed were locals, not migrants from far away: 90 percent lost their last housing in California, and 75 percent lost it in the same county where they were experiencing homelessness. Of the 10 percent who came from elsewhere, 30 percent were born in California. Most of the others had familial or employment ties, or had previously lived in the state.
Again, those are self reported surveys with biased surveyors (who want to push the narrative you believe in) with very weird results. They are basically trying to convince us that the unhoused population is more local than the housed population, sometimes by an order of magnitude, and it really isn’t statistically possible. Something like 75% of the general population are transplants but only 25% of the unhoused population are?
In SF and LA those numbers are nowhere near to being 50%. And I guess the wording is important, since many people can crash on a couch for the first few months and then are considered previously housed by the self reporting survey question.
The survey was done across California -- not just SF and LA. Either way, wikipedia claims that 37.7% of SF residents were born in California which is slightly closer to 50% than the 25% figure you quoted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#...).
The survey also states that "Most participants (87%) were born in the United States. ... Two-thirds (66%) were born in California."
I still don't understand why the survey is statistically impossible.
I'm pretty sure the social safety were gutted when the US slipped right into company profiteering at all costs, busting domestic infrastructure and commerce and leaving people looking around with their hat in their hands wondering why no one can afford anything including houses. It's a capitol/labor split, but I don't love having to use that language.
The housing crisis is a bit more complicated than that particular situation you're describing though. Some very 'progressive' places are full of raging NIMBYism that prevents anything like enough housing from being built.
I agree it's more complicated, but I don't see NIMBYism as inherently 'progressive'/'not-progressive', I don't think it's as simple as "just build more housing, it needs to be something like, build more housing where it makes sense". Like if we turned Mill Valley into Kowloon City tomorrow, sure we would have more "housing", but no one benefits". That's extreme, but I think blaming NIMBYism completely doesn't cover the logical progression.
Lots of people would benefit if they had housing to live in. There's no need for it to be some extreme thing like your example.
NIMBYism is to blame for the lack of hundreds of homes here in the small city I live in, in Oregon, since I started tracking these things.
It's not the only factor, but things like interest rates are something our city councils and state legislatures can't control. Saying 'yes' to a new apartment building is very much something they can control.
If saying yes to a new apartment build is all it takes and doing so won't have any negative impacts on the community at all, and there is someone who can guarantee that and ensure that. Then sure, seems odd that a state legislature and city council wouldn't sign off.
It seems like maybe the issue is that people are saying "hey, I don't want to live next to or in high density housing, that's not why I live in a small city in Oregon"...well, ask them, hey would you be ok with this being a very tasteful, non-intrusive, home in your neighborhood with a quiet family that fits in well with everyone. They might say yes, which means likely people are not making enough money to live that way, so the real problem is that people don't want to have slums set up in the name of affordable housing.
So a big part of the problem is that we feel the need to give people a veto about apartments, but not single detached units. That's a decent portion of our housing crisis right there!
"Would we ask any of the same questions of a new single-family house in the same neighborhood?"
As someone who works in EMS in the PNW, while there absolutely are the "fentanyl-addicted zombies", I think a larger part of the drug+homelessness dark combination is our -appalling- state of mental healthcare.
I have seen people who have been brought in for mental health issues, actively seeking help, spend -four days- on a temporary gurney in an ER hallway before they are "seen".
That is hellacious. Even in an ER room, which is still not calm, you can at least close a door, pull a curtain and turn lights down low.
In the hallway, full light, 24/7, all the sensory overload of an overwhelmed ER, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go AND you're in a mental health crisis? People, equipment, chaos going by you every moment of the day and night?
I'm perfectly sane (or so I'd like to think), and that would drive me to the brink.
So you don't look for help and you're on the street. And the vicious cycle begins. Like you say, we've absolutely destroyed our social safety nets (and that's in the PNW, probably one of the better areas in the country for them, I can't imagine in the deep south).
If my life ends up being begging (actual begging), hunting for scraps, using alleys as toilets, I think I'd be using drugs in fairly short order to help numb the pain of that existence.
> If my life ends up being begging (actual begging), hunting for scraps, using alleys as toilets, I think I'd be using drugs in fairly short order to help numb the pain of that existence.
A lot of what I've read indicates that the causality runs that way in a lot of cases - people get high to escape the reality of their surroundings.
The south has lower rates of homelessness not because people are mentally healthier there, but because housing is cheaper.
With regards to the Maui fire, no one is talking abt the crisis that FEMA themselves created. They didn’t care about how much or how negligently the money was distributed, so FEMA would offer 2X current rates (upwards of $7000/month) to landlords which incentivized them to kick out existing tenants and cause a bigger problem but no one talks about it. It’s gross incompetence but the media is silent about it.
>> Places like West Virginia have way less homelessness than places with high housing costs like the west coast.
COLD towns without major homeless shelter capabilities always have lower rates of homelessness b/c the cold weather is literally life threatening.
Warm(er) regions, like most of the West Coast that isn't known for blizzards, have higher rates of homelessness b/c there is little risk of death if a homeless person camps out in the woods. Note that a lot of homeless folks in warmer regions didn't become homeless in those warm regions - they often become homeless in northern regions and migrate to warm regions prior to winter.
Comparing homelessness in WV to Cali doesn't seem fair since so much of the folks that become homeless in WV are forced to leave the state to survive.
Chicago, Milkwaukee, Boston all have major visible populations of street-living homeless people. I feel like this is a myth west coasters believe or something. I don't see how you could have spent time in a cold city and think it's true.
Parts of NYC and Philly give SF a run for it's money but the homeless in Chicago, Milwaukee and Boston are neither as ubiquitous nor as troublesome as they are in the big cities on the west coast.
Until recently (not sure about the current status), NYC had a "right to shelter" so that people could have a place to stay for the night. This meant that they still had a lot of homelessness, but it wasn't nearly as visible as, say, San Francisco.
I'm willing to bet that WV police have a less 'tolerant' attitude towards homelessness, even "non-problematic", and very a much a "move along/gtfo of our town" attitude.
Did you not read the part of my comment were I clarified "cities without major homeless shelter capabilities"? New York has major cities that have the infrastructure and resources to shelter homeless populations during major cold events. Plenty of Northern CITIES have those capabilities, but WV doesn't. WV doesn't have a single major city and doesn't have the capabilities to shelter a homeless population during major cold events.
A woman in a homeless camp north of Seattle died and her adult son’s spine was crushed last month when a large tree fell their tent during a windstorm.
The local graffiti says that ACAB includes Batman. I’m the son of a cop and grew up around cops. It’s probably more accurate to say TVMOCAB. The vast majority, probably around 90%, of cops are bastards, but there are a few Boy Scouts mixed in. It’s certainly inline with my interaction with cops over he past ~50 years. How could it be otherwise, in accordance with Sturgeon’s law?
>> COLD towns without major homeless shelter capabilities
"without major homeless shelter capabilities" is a key part of my original claim. Every city you listed is a major city that has the infrastructure and resources to shelter homeless populations during major cold events. Plenty of Northern CITIES have those capabilities. but WV doesn't have any major cities and lacks cities with the capabilities to shelter homeless individuals during major cold events.
Drug addiction has always been an excuse not to do anything about this. Many people think drug addiction causes homelessness and not the other way around, despite evidence.
Which will be passed straight to the renter. The solution is upping the zoned capacity in constrained cities. Theres already enough carrot where these cities are built out to the limits of their zoning already even with all the hoops and red tape for development.
The renters would move in and it would become their “primary residence” I think, and thus not be subject to 4x taxation. (It’s a poor choice of terms because we already talk about “primary” residence from the owner’s/landlord’s perspective, not the renter’s.)
renters already paying as much as they can be squeezed to pay. Raising prop taxes will push inventory to the market which will become primary residency.
It will make life hell for anyone who can’t afford to buy their own house yet. It will also make labor markets less fluid because they are now stuck to their house and can’t take much advantage of flexibility. We might as well implement a Chinese style hukou system while we are at it.
No it won’t! Ok, so you’ve gone and made rental housing economically unviable and only homeowners can have housing (everyone else is just homeless I guess). While you’ve made home ownership more feasible, you haven’t really made it feasible for a 19 year old working at McDonalds, or some guy stuck in a crap job in Mississippi who really should move to a better area with the more expensive housing to find a more suitable job (but they can’t since they own their house and they have to sell their house before they move and then be homeless for a while to accumulate more money to buy in that new area).
I lived in lots of places for a couple of years or less to take advantage of short term opportunities. You just made those impossible, since there is a lot of overhead in buying and selling a house, and you don’t do that if you are just in a place for two years.
> you’ve gone and made rental housing economically unviable
no, there are different slices here, tons of rentals are hyper-profitable now(acquired on much cheaper and with lower interest rates), they will still exist.
> you haven’t really made it feasible for a 19 year old working at McDonalds, or some guy stuck in a crap job in Mississippi
the point is that there will be cheap inventory for them too. Once real estate stopped being attractive investment vehicle, there will be huge outflow of capital which will crash prices, and this will actually put huge pressure on rental prices too.
Even if you get rid of all rental housing, the housing market will crash sure, but the labor market will crash at the same time. So that doesn’t help so much in the short term. Ok, when the labor market comes back, we still have N houses but not everyone can afford those houses, the bank holds them and eventually they fall apart due to maintenance issues (why buffalo NY has a housing shortage even though it has half the population it used to). So maybe we can solve them by just giving the houses away to people, I guess? Can they afford to maintain them? Since the market is inflexible, why should anyone build new ones?
There are jurisdictions that have done things like this. British Columbia is one that introduced a "Speculation Tax" that was largely a tax on empty homes, with the tax levy being very significant for secondarily owned homes being left empty.
A very good thing but notably this is mostly a one time increase in homes (though the tax continues to incentivize newly built condos to be rented).
So it's a good emergency sort of measure that absolutely helps with a supply shortfall, but in the long term there needs to be followthrough in more systemic policies to build more homes.
The influx of units is good. But imo the larger impact is that it’s harder to shop around for wealthier tenants that can pay bigger rents. It helps shift power back to renters.
Yes, but also we need some more direct incentive for new construction. Real estate as investment property at least used to drive supply. We need massive (tax/interest rate/zoning) incentives for high density construction, both in cities and towns/suburbs. Disincentivizing empty investment properties is the cheapest way for the government, but I think carrot and stick works best.
I live in a dense urban area and there are literally a dozen buildings that are empty and derelict because the property owners are just sitting on them hoping to flip them. They can't get the price they want so they will just let them sit empty and decay.
These buildings have been vacant for years and a few of them are on the market for an absurd price. I don't think they have ill intent. I'm sure in their mind what could be ill intentioned about waiting for someone to pay them the right price? Doesn't mean there aren't very real consequences for letting these buildings sit empty.
You've already doxxed yourself by writing hundreds of comments on your throwaway you fucking noodle (assuming that you've not been careful about scrambling your writing style to defeat sylometry).
> HUD officials say another key factor was the recent increase in asylum seekers coming to the U.S., often fleeing dangerous conditions in their home countries.
This feels like another "safe and effective" talking point.
It is literally impossible to satisfy infinite demand. Who is buying the houses? Figure that out and you can solve the problem. If we choose to ignore demand side, don't investigate what is driving demand, how it is distributed and so on, and continue to pretend real estate markets are perfect and we need merely deregulate to solve all problems, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (bubbles, collusion rings, fraud and wreckless speculation), it will not end well.
You don't want a maximally "efficient" vacancy rate (i.e. 0), because that makes it basically impossible for people to move around - and that gives enormous power to landlords to gouge tenants.
So what vacancy rate do you want, ideally? Not sure, but you'll notice from your own source that 6.9% is around as low a vacancy rate as the US has had since the turn of the millennium.
FWIW, looking at vacancy statistics across the whole of the country can be misleading. They include houses that are vacant for any reason - including properties that are condemned, under renovation, or in the middle of nowhere where there are no jobs.
That latter point is key. As more and more economic activity has moved to white-collar coastal cities and away from rural or suburban blue-collar middle America, it's no surprise there are going to be vacancies in regions where the economy's been hollowed out. So we can conjecture that the record low vacancy rate is even more problematic, because those vacancies are likely less equally distributed to areas that need them.
Assume 120 homes in an area, evenly distributed per month on yearly leases. If all renters switch every month and it takes a month to re-rent the unit, there is a vacancy rate of 8.3%
Obviously not every renter moves every lease end, but also some units are in places no one wants to live, others are mispriced, some need renovation or extensive cleaning, etc.
But from a cursory sanity check the 6.9% number is likely reasonable for a fairly tight rental market.
Places with a higher vacancy rate are correlated with lower rents and less homelessness e.g. Indiana and Texas have a higher rental vacancy rate than California and New York (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CuFs) so whatever causes a higher vacancy rate seems to be good for affordability (not sure what you mean by “efficient”).
I was trying to explain this to my wife the other day. She was complaining that I had all these clothes on the floor in the bedroom and that she couldn't get out of bed easily because it was so messy (because I efficiently store some electronics under the clothes) but I explained that most of the house was still empty, especially by volume (since the air above the clothes is completely unoccupied). Fortunately, because I am rational and have data on my side, she relented as she usually does.
> One bright spot was a decline in the number of unhoused veterans. This year that actually fell to a record low, after years of intense investment in subsidized housing and support services.
That decline was due to someone caring about the issue; planning, financing, and executing. But mostly, because someone cared about actually addressing the issue.
Why is the approach not scalable? In general, everyone has interests, whether part of a small group, a medium group, or a large group.
There's a homelessness issue amongst veterans. So, let's try subsidies and support to reduce the severity of the issue. It seems to work. What did we learn, and can we build on those lessons in general? It's better to use a bandaid than just bleed.
If there are 10 cookies and 12 people who want to buy them the price goes up and some people go without. Giving 2 people enough money to buy the cheapest cookie allows them to buy it, but at the expense of someone else being able to buy it who didn’t have that free money. You can try to give everyone money, but that just puts us back where we started and now the baker can further raise prices to extract that free money from everyone. When there isn’t enough to go around, the solution is to make more cookies.
Probably lack of housing. Fewer homeless in wv than you might expect with the depressed wages there because more people can afford housing. When you go to places like the rust belt its very hard to find homeless people at all. When you go to high rent/home price regions on the other hand, its hard not to see homeless people.
Lack of housing. The poorest states in the US (Mississippi, West Virginia) have low homeless rates. The poorest countries in the continent have low homeless rates. Because it's easy to find cheap housing.
If there are 100 houses and 110 people, (and there can't be room-mates), wages can go to infinity and the homeless rates won't be reduced.
People are also leaving both of those states for places where housing is less affordable. So we have 100 houses for every 90 people in Mississippi because 20 people had already left the state for Atlanta, Nashville, or Austin.
Everyone knows that housing problems locally can be solved by making the places less desirable to live in. But it’s not a solution that anyone is interested in pursuing (rightfully so).
Kind of both, if the money is the lubricant and the people are one gear and the other gear is all of the infrastructure needed to keep the other gear moving, once the money has been drained out of the assembly it stops working..
The people with the power (money) to do so have no incentive to do so because they hold real estate which keeps going up because of the shortage. Why work against yourself?
I think incentives are different on an individual level. Yes, if everyone built more housing then your property's value would not go up as much. But if a single individual builds housing that's very profitable, that'll way more than offset the tiny reduction to the values of that individual's other properties.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma where property owners as a class may not want more housing so that they are wealthier on paper, but any individual property owner will want to build housing because that'll grow their wealth faster.
Here in Oregon, we're making some progress on housing reform. The mayor of my city attended the YIMBYTown conference a few years back when she was a city councilor. Heck, the now-governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, spoke at it, and continues to work on housing policy.
Part of the puzzle is that reforms are better at the state level, where it's easier to say "yeah, we have a housing crisis, and these things will fix it" and you're not confronted by a local angry mob of NIMBYs intent on stopping homes from being built.
Crazy as there’s no shortage of land to build houses on. Of course there’s also not many great jobs in the empty west or endless fields of corn and soy (coated in cancer causing chemicals no less).
Mississippi has a low homeless rate for a reason. It isn’t just about absolute housing availability, but housing in areas where people want to or have to live. People also either die or leave if they can’t survive there, you simply can’t exist at all on the margin.
and most tech companies are making it clear they want your butt in a seat. I'm not saying full-remote jobs are a single cure for it, but it definitely moves the needle in the right direction, as well as reduces CO2 emissions.
Really hard to get a sense of scale from this article. It mentions 5,200 in shelters from the Maui fire, but there have been an estimated 8,000,000 net new immigrants over the past four years: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...
California has made it much easier to build ADUs partially with the intent that some would be rental housing. I'll be damned if I'm going to rent an ADU to somebody else in my backyard without an ironclad guarantee that I can get rid of them quickly if they turn out to be a nightmare.
So yes, making it hard to evict people reduces the supply of rental housing and that will raise rents and increase homelessness.
if we were to provide sensible landlord/tenant laws this idea could be helpful. BUT (big BUT) I lost faith than a senisble laws can be enacted in the USA. In more liberal places the laws are written so extreme that it makes you question your sanity if you are a landlord. in other more conservative places - the landlords are true Lords!
I am a landlord in a place which is liberal. I will keep my place vacant for months against a mountain of applications until I find someone which I feel comfortable with signing a lease (that bar is HIGH). My place is dirt cheap, I have 3% interest on a place I bought after real estate crash and I only charge enough to cover my mortgage and condo fees (could easily charge additional $1.5k/month). I would be 100% more open to signing a lease with someone who needs an afforable place A LOT more than my current and former tenants but with the present laws I have to deal with there is absolutely no way that will ever happen
The perspective is understandable to me. It's easy to imagine rationally leaving a place vacant for longer if you're very picky about who you rent to. It's a timed binding commitment you make with your tenants, that puts you both on the same raft at least a little.
That said, you're saying that you could charge 1.5k more for the place, but don't because you value other qualities in a tenant more, right?
On mass, I'd bet dollars and donuts that what we'd find is people being evicted, or threatened with eviction, in order to raise rents. Situations like "property values have gone up 10% this year and I was too low to begin with. they've got 6 months left on their lease, but if I evict them I bet I have more cache to keep the deposit and I can ~fix my prices~. Business!"
Maybe your principles wouldn't have you do that, but people statistically make self interested decisions like that more often than compassionate ones.
Balance compassion for self and others oughta be the guide.
100% agree with everything you said! Yea, I didn’t really want to be a landlord, my wife got pregnant and requested a mandatory move to the suburbs. Bought a place and while I was moving two high school teachers approached me about renting it (this was in 2012). My wife and I decided to let them rent. we never wanted to make any money from it, the place itself, as you can imagine appreciated in value over the years, and we just take whatever money we need to cover the mortgage and condo fees. several friends that are landlords have had horror stories and I would
rather not make more money I don’t need for a extra headache.
what you are saying though is a core problem with writing sensible laws, if they are landlord-leaning the landlords will be evicting left and right to make a few extra bucks. if they are tenant-leaning you get families moving from minnesota do east coast that pay sec deposit and first month’s rent and then live in your place for 18 months without possibility of eviction (some covid laws are still in place…)
I am speaking from personal experience. there may not be a shortage of landlords somewhere (say ATL where rental properties have been fully taken over by large corps) but this isn’t true on the whole. additionally, even if there isn’t a shortage of landlords the prices are skyhigh pricing out large percentage of population, especially in urban areas
Yes. Do you think more or less people would rent out homes if eviction were simply illegal? What about 1 year grace period? 30 days? None? Clearly there will be differences in the propensity to rent given the ease to undo mistakes or reclaim possession.
If it were completely illegal to evict, it would be riskier to rent your property out for sure!
I think I like this suggestion more. If that law were passed tomorrow a lot of landlords would want out of the business. Flooding the market with cheap housing seems more likely to reduce homelessness than making it easier to evict tenants.
No, they would just stop accepting poor people, as renting is inherently useful.
Oh, this is already what happens.
Also, I’m not sure why people continuously believe that getting rid of property owners will somehow be good for renters, or that the price would be reduced to an amount where poor people can buy it. Empirically never has happened.
> No, they would just stop accepting poor people, as renting is inherently useful.
Not at all? Not a single landlord would want out of the business? If you couldn't even evict if somebody never paid a single dime of rent, I think that would cascade and destroy the whole industry. An extreme measure that I didn't suggest, you did.
> I’m not sure why people continuously believe that getting rid of property owners will somehow be good for renters.
I don't want to get rid of property owners. I inherently believe it's better to own a home than rent. I do believe converting renters into home owners is good for the ex-renter.
How many of these are newly illegal immigrants? May be heartless to say that, but one cannot take them all. Obviously winter time and we should have mercy. But there are limits.
We have enough space, but refuse to build affordable housing, for our citizens or for immigrants/asylum seekers. It's a fake problem conjured entirely from broken incentives and an utter lack of political will to fix them.
In point of fact the country is -littered- with affordable housing, frequently sitting unoccupied in places people were perfectly happy to live before all of the economic opportunities in rural America were gutted. How sure are we the current crisis actually involves housing?
99% sure that it's caused by lack of housing. Housing in places people don't want to live in anymore whether due to job availability or etc isn't that useful. Although possibly improving transportation to places with lots of job opportunities might partially reverse that
You're certain that issues affecting the geographic majority of the country, that are demonstrably the effects of bullshit trade policies and overconsolidation, are resolvable by building houses in high cost markets? Neat take.
Many cities have overly-restrictive building codes that prevent adequate housing from being built, which raises housing costs.
Our immigration rate is too high for the amount of new housing units we build, which raises housing costs.
Many businesses have taken a hardline stance against remote work, even for jobs where it would make sense. That forces people to live in areas with inadequate housing, which raises housing costs.
Existing housing is being increasingly purchased by multibillion dollar companies for rent-seeking purposes, which raises housing costs.
There's really no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, but slightly reducing the immigration rate, limiting corporate ownership of detached single family homes, incentivizing remote positions, and forcing cities to approve more new units would almost certainly improve the situation.
I participate in local politics, it's not just housing. Housing means more people which means more infrastructure, schools, fire, police, roads and so forth. All of that costs money and immigrants/asylum seekers tend to be at bottom of economic scale which means any taxes they pay are extremely likely not to cover their share of cost. This is why many communities are against it and it's massively impacting local services the community provides. In particular, we got influx of asylum seekers and schools had to made massive cuts to many programs because budget was being poured into education programs for the asylum seeker kids and support services for their parents. This is required by law. This is why my county went for Trump in a way it hadn't seen since Bush.
Before you go posting links about Social Security and Federal Taxes, it doesn't matter to local governments, they don't see that money. Also worth noting, Local Governments don't work like Federal Government, any debt they take on must be repaid on time or go bankrupt which is not good.
> immigrants/asylum seekers tend to be at bottom of economic scale which means any taxes they pay are extremely likely not to cover their share of cost.
I understand that people are worried about this – and it's certainly an intuitive idea –, but is it true? I would count taxes on the total economic output / labour, not just the taxes from what is captured as salary (after all, underpaid workers make the world go 'round), but any analysis would do.
I've searched for sources that break it down instead of just looking at United States GDP but also remember, states/counties can only capture income from sources that fall under that state/county. For example, immigrant worker enables bigger salaries for Tyson Food HQ people in Springdale, Arkansas but Tyson Food Plant in upstate New York means county/state in New York is absorbing that burden without getting taxes from Springdale, Arkansas people.
So sure, the entire US GDP and thus taxes is extremely reliant on these workers but who sees the benefits is not uniform throughout the country and thus the friction around immigration.
This explanation is even better than what I asked for! Do you know if increasing the minimum wage would stop people being so upset? I imagine this would funnel enough of the value immigrants are creating to the immigrants that they can pay tax in their local area, thus avoiding the "we're subsidising other parts of the country" problem – but I'm no economist. (The whole "pay a fair wage" thing has other benefits, but it might not solve this problem.)
Increasing the minimum wage might help but it's still a sticky problem. It probably requires some federal solution which is to say, it's not going to happen.
I don't know the solutions, I'm just aware of the problem.
In my area (Seattle), almost none of the visible homeless are illegal immigrants. Granted, these are mostly drug addicts (otherwise you wouldn’t notice them!), but I get the feeling that they have living arrangements somehow given that they are here to make money and not do drugs (it has to pay off for them, and I can’t see that happening if they live in the streets). It might not be very great housing though (think 4 men sharing a room).
The “illegal immigrants” are homeless thing feels like a meme to me, but I live far from the southern border so maybe it’s worse down there?
We don't know. The best we can do is model it as a random variable based on what little data we do have. What data do we have? Well over 2 million border encounters for 2023 and 2024. For a nation of over 350 million that doesn't sound like much but remember, housing is an inelastic good where a 1% fluctuation in the supply can be an absolute shock to the system.
These people have to live somewhere — and whether they're taking up a single bedroom or an entire residence, they're living somewhere. So I don't think you should be downvoted. There's nothing wrong with asking about how an uncountable yet sizable population will affect the dynamics of an inelastic good.
11 million crossing doesn't mean 11 million people (multiple crossing attempts) and it doesn't those people are still in the US. Unfortunately there's a lot of FUD about immigrants and immigration. Most estimates don't go above 12 million unauthorized immigrants *TOTAL* a large percentage who have been here a long time. And that this is probably slightly below a peak unauthorized immigrant population around 2008.
* Since some people tend to often claim people who are here legally are "illegals" it's important to note that asylum seekers are here legally as are those granted TPS.
You're implying you have a conscience but your first thought is that the affordable housing shortage is aggravated by nebulous "illegal" immigrants rather than profit-seeking corporations?
Or could we say, during this Congress? They even worked out some laws, but then one party refused to pass them, openly saying they wanted to undermine their opponents.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. The pyrrhic NIMBY victory over new housing development that might threaten the value of their investment has led to the country eating its young. It's not just homelessness, it's a crashing birth rate because young couples are making the decisions they're guided into by the market: not starting families.
Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style. Resurrect the Federal Works Agency and restore the powers of the Army Corps of Engineers to file eminent domain paperwork in the morning and roll bulldozers after lunch.
I don't think people understand how bad it is and far the effects of bad housing policy reach. I live in Western Massachusetts, about 2 hours from Boston. Boston's terrible housing policy has driven up housing prices here because literally 99% of people can't afford a house in Boston so they start moving outside the city. The suburbs were full decades ago so they're crazy expensive. With the rise of remote work people are moving 2-3 hours outside of Boston because they may have to go in once a quarter but otherwise don't have to day to day. So we have a situation where decades of bad housing policy to protect property values are literally raising the prices of houses hundreds of miles away. At this point, I couldn't even afford my own house with the rise in interest rates and prices, and I only bought mine in 2018. The phrase "the country eating its young" is such a perfect way to describe this, and many other problems with America right now.
It's even worse in Cali because of something called proposition 13: essentially rent control for property taxes. So you have not just a powerful NIMBY force, but nobody has any desire to sell. This creates a highly skewed market while the rent:buy ratio serves extremely cheap rent - people are happy to sit on these houses and enjoy dirt cheap taxes. It even used to be a heritable fixed tax / tax control but they stopped that -- people are salty because they inherit a house that their parents easily afforded taxes for with tax control, but suddenly the taxes are a gorillion dollars. Presumably in fact the taxes would be lower were these controls not in place, the newbies are paying the majority of property tax costs
> Build mixed income public housing, Singapore style.
I work for a Singapore company, and the issues my coworkers complain about are that houses are leased for 99 years, have a 6-8 year waiting list, and are very expensive.
This makes it difficult to live near your office because you can't easily move. Many coworkers have 1.5-hour commutes one way via MRT.
None have shared this with me, but a huge amount of your assets are poured into an apartment that is a lease with an expiration date. In the USA, you can rely on home equity in your retirement, but if your lease is ending in 20 years, it's not valuable.
I wonder if relying on home equity as an appreciating asset the cause of a lot of our problems in the US?
A 99 year lease is a kind of estate duty that restarts the opportunity clock each generation. This way the kids will inherit less and really have to work to create their own wealth. The only thing they are able to inherit is early life preparation like education. I’m sure there are other advantages parents pass down to their kids but by imposing limits, social mobility is preserved.
Many people are terrible at saving. This is a problem for society, because a bunch of unhoused older people will cause big problems.
societal tools that force people to save (Social Security, mortgages, opt out 401k) are great for addressing this issue.
Right, and Singapore has the CPF system which entails mandatory contributions from employee and employer. This is supposed to be preventative of poverty in older age. So the 99 year lease isn’t an issue in practice.
We have social security in the US which isn’t quite the same. Not sure if the public will ever accept CPF type systems — might feel too paternalistic to Americans.
My issue with the 99 year lease, is it’s harder to pass down wealth to your kids, as there would be no home to give..
Maybe as a society, less generational wealth is a good thing.
I think inherited wealth is downright cancerous to society.
Ideally, we want to promote the most talented people into the positions where they have the most power and can wield it wisely. With inherited wealth, we instead give huge advantages to, not the talented, but the lucky, and we end up with incompetent leadership who are able to simply buy power with an inconsequential fraction of their wealth. When power is bought and not earned, you end up with people who do idiotic things with power. Eventually the society rots from within and is toppled by more efficient groups.
Making 401K mandatory? With a minimum percentage? Yeah I wonder how that would go but if it meant you could opt-out of Social Security maybe it could work.
They changed the law for 2025 so that new 401k by default are 3%.
You can opt out tho
We don't even have to copy Singapore. Just let people build buildings on land that they own.
Copy Iowa, not Singapore. Kick the knowledge industries (tech, finance, law, media) out of the state. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
> mixed income public housing
Maybe its just my country and the way we do things but these words dont make sense in this order. What do you mean by public housing?
Public housing is housing owned and managed by the government. It could be the same copy paste apartment blocks but owned by your city or state government. Despite public housing always being connected to affordable housing, it does not have to be affordable housing to be public housing.
I'm talking about publicly subsidized housing construction, along the lines of Singapore model[1].
Public housing in the US is stigmatized because there's a focus on the deliberately ghettoized, designed-to-fail low income housing that was built in the 20th century. This is held up as the definition of public housing, but there are other version of it that were and are successful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
A high percentage of public housing is not the only solution to limit rent prices: any non-market housing is often enough to keep the prices down, although public housing is the most proeminent across the world, associative housing work very well, and can be taken from existing stock (friends of mine inherited 4 appartments and let them be rented by an association, a sort of 20 years free lease where the only obligation for the association is to take care of the renovations and keeping the appartments appliances up to date).
Singapore also has "draconian" laws, so it may not be as easy to replicate.
Vienna has great public housing and is probably closer to the US culturally in some ways.
100%, Vienna would be my other example of how to do it right.
The US 'attempt' to do public housing is like your child, being told to wash the dishes, simply smashes all the dishes and says that this chore is impossible because look, all the dishes got broken. Meanwhile the kids next door have built an entire dishwashing machine in the time your child spent complaining it wasn't possible.
Which housing related laws are "draconian"?
> It's going to get worse before it gets better.
What would be a reasonable estimate of when it could start to “get better”? I find “country eating its young” to be a perfect metaphor and honestly I don’t see any hope, it’s sad to see.
I have been in the US for close to 15 years now, as a renter, and the insane rent increase driven by housing shortage is truly sour. Every year there’s a high probability that my rent will be dramatically jacked up, to the point where I have moved 11 times since I came here, in several instances directly driven by a 20% rent increase.
And I work in tech so generally can afford things due to high pay, I cannot even imagine how less fortunate professionals in other careers manage. Probably tons of roommates or accepting 2h commutes.
All this has definitely added a sense of instability to my life that certainly contributed to other downstream decisions, some serious like never having kids (not the only reason, but a factor nonetheless), and some trivial like never buying any nice furniture/tools because it’s just going to be an annoyance when I’ll have to move again in N months after the landlord says they can now get $4k on the market instead of my current $3.5k.
Fortunately I am a european citizen and most likely I see myself gravitating more and more there as I age. Europe has a lot of problems, including housing shortage in some pockets, but where I come from, which is a generally desirable urban/suburban metro, it’s easy to find affordable rentals on a 8 year contract, which makes it so much easier to plan your life and not live with the anxiety that in just 9 months a 20% increase will come your way.
Why would you think it's going to ever get better? The whole economy is set up to make the problem worse indefinitely. Wealth disparity and poverty are features not bugs.
You will get lots of resistance to things that significantly lower current values unless they are very widespread.
Consider my house. I paid $280k for it in 2007. Zillow estimates it is now worth $454k and Redfin estimates $498k. So on paper I've gained about $200k.
But since property tax is based on value I've also gained a quite a bit on my property tax bill. Same with house insurance. Until I actually sell the house I gain no benefit from the gain in value, except possibly I could take out a larger home equity loan than I would be able to otherwise.
When I do sell it then I've got a nice windfall right? Not really. Since houses have gone up all over the place if I buy another house the gains go into that.
How about if I instead rent an apartment? Rents are way up since 2007 too, so the money runs out roughly as fast as it would have if house prices and rent had stayed the same as they were in 2007.
So yeah, I'd be happy with the lower taxes and lower insurance that lower prices would bring, and would vote for measures that would bring that about such as more development. But only if whatever is done to lower prices in my region is also being done in the rest of the state and country.
Lowering birth rates is a good thing though
Landing the plane is a good thing.
Landing the plane by going nose-down into the ground is not.
The consequence is a rapidly aging society which is terrible for everyone. It's terrible for the huge undercared-for, neglected bloc of elderly. It's terrible for the smaller amount of overworked, overtaxed young people.
Good for the planet, bad for the economy.
and betting the farm based on models with infinite expansion as their core axiom is dicey within relatively short time frames
Bad for society. Lots of old people and few children and young people makes for a pretty fucked up social situation.
A few months back, the author of "Homelessness is a Housing Problem" gave a talk where I live and it's quite worth watching if you don't have time to read the book:
https://youtu.be/W4rBe1fGPZU?si=xV2Ai789WXZ548nG&t=442 (linked to where he's about to start talking to skip all the intros and thanks and so on)
There's this article, also, with the main points: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
We need to build a lot more housing - of all shapes and sizes - in the places where people want to live.
This article isn’t really useful. If we are dumping almost 100% of our homeless resources on drug addiction then the fact that this is only 20-40% of the population is more of a travesty than a “so what”. You can’t solve their homelessness problems without figuring out a way to stabilize them (or they just burn down the housing you give them), and the fact that this minority overwhelms our support systems (and it’s immoral to prioritize non-substance abuse cases), means that we are stuck in a rut of throwing tons of resources at cases ($10k+/month/person helped) that go way beyond just subsidizing or covering their rent.
If it were just a housing problem, it could be solved with more housing. But we’ve conflated it with drug addiction (at least here in Seattle) and it has become much less solvable as a result.
There are really two distinct homelessness problems:
1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
When laypeople talk about “homelessness”, they typically mean 2 as it’s more visible and disruptive to them.
This is a good point, but part of what the article is saying is that where housing is cheap, some of even those "at the margins of society" people with some drug problems can maybe stay housed. Which means fixing the drug part of their problems is easier than if they're moving around on the streets.
Ya, but isn’t that complete BS? I lived in Vicksburg MS, and while housing is definitely cheap, it’s not free, and you can’t really survive there if you can’t make any money at all. So you either die or move.
It's kind of helpful to think of the world in percentages, rather than "1 or 0, black or white".
Some people with drug problems are able to hold down some minimum wage work or part time jobs or something that brings in money.
In Mississippi, that might be enough to keep you housed. In Los Angeles, it's not.
Also you're more likely to be able to stay with a friend or relative with some extra space if housing isn't so tight:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...
Yes, that’s totally true! I think this is a much more interesting problem when we get rid of the drug addiction component. It is just sad that drug addiction is consuming all of our social resources that could otherwise go into solving housing problems.
A lot of kids from Vicksburg also move to LA and don’t make it because of housing costs, so they move elsewhere. But should they have made it? Should LA be affordable enough for everyone who wants to live there to live there? If not, but we want to subsidize housing for some segment of the American population to live in LA, how do we prioritize? If yes, how much housing do we need to build to satisfy all American and international demand to live in LA?
> drug addiction is consuming all of our social resources that could otherwise go into solving housing problems
What is that based on? Also, why are people with a drug problem less deserving than people with housing problems.
Finally, what I understand from experts is that the first step to helping people with drug problems is to get them stable housing.
Not OP, but
> What is that based on?
This is based on the fact that we have finite resources. Any resources that go to housing drug addicts could have been used for something else. There is a real opportunity cost there.
> Also, why are people with a drug problem less deserving than people with housing problems.
There are a few issues with housing drug addicts:
1. Understand, these people aren't just run-of-the-mill addicts. They are so addicted to drugs that they'll live in unimaginably horrid conditions to support their addiction. Any housing they receive will be destroyed and made uninhabitable.
2. Housing them makes the system more miserable and undesirable for everyone else. If you're a parent with children and you're facing homelessness, are you really going to use a resource where close contact with heavy drug addicts is possible?
> Finally, what I understand from experts is that the first step to helping people with drug problems is to get them stable housing.
That's actually the second step. The first step is getting the addict to want to quit drugs. Many addicts don't want to stop using, and giving those people housing is not going to be an effective way to combat their addiction if they aren't first interested stopping their addictive behavior.
Again, what is that all based on? It disagrees with most of what I read from researchers and people on the ground, especially that quitting is the first step before housing.
I've seen where many people with those problems live, and the places aren't horrid, just lacking in money and social services.
It just seems like demonization of yet another group - this time, people who have drug addictions. Why is it important to demonize them?
> This is based on the fact that we have finite resources. Any resources that go to housing drug addicts could have been used for something else. There is a real opportunity cost there.
And anything spent on other things could have been spent helping people addicted to drugs. Why is one more important or deserving than the other, other than the demonization?
The problem with that is that they're also a problem when they're on the streets, sometimes even more of a problem. Someone who's not a problem and generally minding their own business is less of an threat than someone who's drug addiction is driving them to commit violence. We can't arrest them before they do anything violent, and after they've harmed someone else is too late.
> The problem with that is that they're also a problem when they're on the streets, sometimes even more of a problem. Someone who's not a problem and generally minding their own business is less of an threat than someone who's drug addiction is driving them to commit violence.
That applies to every criminal act, so why are we signaling out people addicted to drugs? Plenty of people on Wall Street commit crimes daily, stealing money from innocent people - do we worry about how to preemptively stop them?
The answer, IMHO, is that some have effectively demonized people with drug addictions and people who are unhoused, to legitimize hate and violence in our society (and to get rid of people they don't like). 'I hate/fear unhoused / mentally ill people, so it's ok to choke one to death or lock them away without trial.'
It's not only hurts and oppresses those individuals, but it lays the foundation for the next stages - progressive protestors, and soon mass detention of immigrants. It's either human rights for all or for none.
> We can't arrest them before they do anything violent
Why not? Using drugs is illegal.
Where are you? Surprisingly that's jurisdiction dependent and it's often not.
I'm in NY. Possession of a controlled substance is a class A misdemeanor here[0], which can carry a maximum prison sentence of 1 year.
0: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/220.03
You said using, not possession, and after you've used it, it's no longer in your possession, externally. That distinction does not matter in New York, however, as it's not one of the places where it's illegal to posses but legal if you've just used it. (Unless it's weed.)
I feel like we're talking about semantics here. You must posses drugs before / while actively using, and heavy addicts use multiple times a day.
> There are really two distinct homelessness problems:
> 1. The “temporarily unhoused”. These are people who have fallen on hard times and need temporary assistance to get back on their feet. These people live out of their cars and are largely invisible.
> 2. The chronically homeless. These are drug users who infest public spaces and are highly visible and disruptive.
What is that based on? Do you have any data to support these categories as something real? It sounds a lot like, '1) people I like; and 2) people I hate.'
It's wrong to discuss human beings like animals, and as if they exist to please or displease you, and as if they can be treated like animals.
They are people with their own experiences, like you, sensations and emotions and lives, who matter just as much as you do and belong in public spaces just as much. I've spent lots of time in major cities; chronically homeless people are among the least disruptive, and I've talked to many and know a few people in that situation; people on opioids are in their own worlds, often in a dream.
I'd recommend a quick Google search for "types of homelessness" or "chronic homelessness" before proffering any personal attacks.
If you are making the claim, it's up to you to support it. I'm not doing your research.
I'm not asking you to do research, I'm asking you to look up definitions you don't understand. There's a difference.
The second category isn't just drug users. It's also people who are not mentally capable of keeping up the routine of decisions that keep them off the streets. Opposite of the "temporarily unhoused" category, they tend to be "temporarily housed".
It is a housing problem though. That is what the data show. That's why homelessness correlates so much with high housing costs. That's why places with serious drug problems like Ohio or West Virginia don't have such high rates of homelessness.
None of which is to say that drugs are not a problem, or to say that someone with a drug problem isn't more likely to become homeless.
All of that is explained in the article which you responded to without reading it, judging by the timestamp on your comment. Let alone the video, which goes into more depth and talks extensively about drugs.
Places like Mississippi don’t have high homeless problems because they lack services and good weather, so drug addicts who have burned their family/friend networks, at least, hop on a bus to somewhere they can survive (usually a west coast city with mild weather and a progressive voter base that is willing to throw lots of money at the problem). That segment of the problem is 100% mobile, and even self reporting surveys show cause (like 60% of king counties homeless population saying they had previous housing in pioneer square).
If you can’t afford housing anywhere, you just won’t survive very long in lots of places, so survival bias starts to show up.
This is a great narrative, but it turns out that it's not true.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/california...
> The overwhelming majority of homeless people surveyed were locals, not migrants from far away: 90 percent lost their last housing in California, and 75 percent lost it in the same county where they were experiencing homelessness. Of the 10 percent who came from elsewhere, 30 percent were born in California. Most of the others had familial or employment ties, or had previously lived in the state.
Again, those are self reported surveys with biased surveyors (who want to push the narrative you believe in) with very weird results. They are basically trying to convince us that the unhoused population is more local than the housed population, sometimes by an order of magnitude, and it really isn’t statistically possible. Something like 75% of the general population are transplants but only 25% of the unhoused population are?
It's unclear to me why this is isn't statistically possible. Could you please explain?
But anyways, this article (paywalled) claims that 48% of California adults were born in the state as of 2022: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2024/california-populat...
In SF and LA those numbers are nowhere near to being 50%. And I guess the wording is important, since many people can crash on a couch for the first few months and then are considered previously housed by the self reporting survey question.
The survey was done across California -- not just SF and LA. Either way, wikipedia claims that 37.7% of SF residents were born in California which is slightly closer to 50% than the 25% figure you quoted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#...).
The survey also states that "Most participants (87%) were born in the United States. ... Two-thirds (66%) were born in California."
I still don't understand why the survey is statistically impossible.
The article is useful and the author specifically goes into the case of why drugs are not the reason.
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I'm pretty sure the social safety were gutted when the US slipped right into company profiteering at all costs, busting domestic infrastructure and commerce and leaving people looking around with their hat in their hands wondering why no one can afford anything including houses. It's a capitol/labor split, but I don't love having to use that language.
The housing crisis is a bit more complicated than that particular situation you're describing though. Some very 'progressive' places are full of raging NIMBYism that prevents anything like enough housing from being built.
I agree it's more complicated, but I don't see NIMBYism as inherently 'progressive'/'not-progressive', I don't think it's as simple as "just build more housing, it needs to be something like, build more housing where it makes sense". Like if we turned Mill Valley into Kowloon City tomorrow, sure we would have more "housing", but no one benefits". That's extreme, but I think blaming NIMBYism completely doesn't cover the logical progression.
Lots of people would benefit if they had housing to live in. There's no need for it to be some extreme thing like your example.
NIMBYism is to blame for the lack of hundreds of homes here in the small city I live in, in Oregon, since I started tracking these things.
It's not the only factor, but things like interest rates are something our city councils and state legislatures can't control. Saying 'yes' to a new apartment building is very much something they can control.
If saying yes to a new apartment build is all it takes and doing so won't have any negative impacts on the community at all, and there is someone who can guarantee that and ensure that. Then sure, seems odd that a state legislature and city council wouldn't sign off.
It seems like maybe the issue is that people are saying "hey, I don't want to live next to or in high density housing, that's not why I live in a small city in Oregon"...well, ask them, hey would you be ok with this being a very tasteful, non-intrusive, home in your neighborhood with a quiet family that fits in well with everyone. They might say yes, which means likely people are not making enough money to live that way, so the real problem is that people don't want to have slums set up in the name of affordable housing.
So a big part of the problem is that we feel the need to give people a veto about apartments, but not single detached units. That's a decent portion of our housing crisis right there!
"Would we ask any of the same questions of a new single-family house in the same neighborhood?"
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/2/28/new-apartments...
I'm not sure that's unreasonable, as there's a fairly large difference between a house and an apartment - usually on the scale of several floors.
The entirety of the state of California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
The only thing holding back California from having an economy larger than the rest of the United States combined
As someone who works in EMS in the PNW, while there absolutely are the "fentanyl-addicted zombies", I think a larger part of the drug+homelessness dark combination is our -appalling- state of mental healthcare.
I have seen people who have been brought in for mental health issues, actively seeking help, spend -four days- on a temporary gurney in an ER hallway before they are "seen".
That is hellacious. Even in an ER room, which is still not calm, you can at least close a door, pull a curtain and turn lights down low.
In the hallway, full light, 24/7, all the sensory overload of an overwhelmed ER, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go AND you're in a mental health crisis? People, equipment, chaos going by you every moment of the day and night?
I'm perfectly sane (or so I'd like to think), and that would drive me to the brink.
So you don't look for help and you're on the street. And the vicious cycle begins. Like you say, we've absolutely destroyed our social safety nets (and that's in the PNW, probably one of the better areas in the country for them, I can't imagine in the deep south).
If my life ends up being begging (actual begging), hunting for scraps, using alleys as toilets, I think I'd be using drugs in fairly short order to help numb the pain of that existence.
> If my life ends up being begging (actual begging), hunting for scraps, using alleys as toilets, I think I'd be using drugs in fairly short order to help numb the pain of that existence.
A lot of what I've read indicates that the causality runs that way in a lot of cases - people get high to escape the reality of their surroundings.
The south has lower rates of homelessness not because people are mentally healthier there, but because housing is cheaper.
A lot of drug cases are mistaken for mental illness also, which further bogs down the system since the treatments for each are very different.
Causes, according to the article:
- High rent
> Research finds that where rents go up, so does homelessness
- Illegal border crossings
> HUD officials say another key factor was the recent increase in asylum seekers coming to the U.S.
- Extreme weather & Maui fire
It does not mention the opioid crisis.
With regards to the Maui fire, no one is talking abt the crisis that FEMA themselves created. They didn’t care about how much or how negligently the money was distributed, so FEMA would offer 2X current rates (upwards of $7000/month) to landlords which incentivized them to kick out existing tenants and cause a bigger problem but no one talks about it. It’s gross incompetence but the media is silent about it.
I had no idea about this, but did manage to find an article from this summer on it: https://abcnews.go.com/US/maui-strong-808-maui-fire-survivor...
You're right though, not much mainstream media traction on this story.
> FEMA has allocated $197 million to three companies, none of which are based in Hawaii, to administer the Direct Lease program
Smells of borderline corruption from the get-go. What a shit show.
> It does not mention the opioid crisis.
Places like West Virginia have way less homelessness than places with high housing costs like the west coast.
Homelessness is a housing problem. Drugs make it worse, but are not the primary cause.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...
>> Places like West Virginia have way less homelessness than places with high housing costs like the west coast.
COLD towns without major homeless shelter capabilities always have lower rates of homelessness b/c the cold weather is literally life threatening.
Warm(er) regions, like most of the West Coast that isn't known for blizzards, have higher rates of homelessness b/c there is little risk of death if a homeless person camps out in the woods. Note that a lot of homeless folks in warmer regions didn't become homeless in those warm regions - they often become homeless in northern regions and migrate to warm regions prior to winter.
Comparing homelessness in WV to Cali doesn't seem fair since so much of the folks that become homeless in WV are forced to leave the state to survive.
Chicago, Milkwaukee, Boston all have major visible populations of street-living homeless people. I feel like this is a myth west coasters believe or something. I don't see how you could have spent time in a cold city and think it's true.
Parts of NYC and Philly give SF a run for it's money but the homeless in Chicago, Milwaukee and Boston are neither as ubiquitous nor as troublesome as they are in the big cities on the west coast.
Until recently (not sure about the current status), NYC had a "right to shelter" so that people could have a place to stay for the night. This meant that they still had a lot of homelessness, but it wasn't nearly as visible as, say, San Francisco.
Have you been to those cities? I've been to some of them and that hasn't been my observation or what I've learned.
Did you not read that part of the article where he discusses that very concept with actual data to back it up?
New York has higher rates of homelessness than West Virginia.
The part of Oregon where I live has a pretty extreme climate, and has way too much homelessness.
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/or/bend - this is not a climate people move to because it's comfortable and easy like Los Angeles.
I'm willing to bet that WV police have a less 'tolerant' attitude towards homelessness, even "non-problematic", and very a much a "move along/gtfo of our town" attitude.
Did you not read the part of my comment were I clarified "cities without major homeless shelter capabilities"? New York has major cities that have the infrastructure and resources to shelter homeless populations during major cold events. Plenty of Northern CITIES have those capabilities, but WV doesn't. WV doesn't have a single major city and doesn't have the capabilities to shelter a homeless population during major cold events.
Cold and services are both covered in the article. Here's the section on 'policy' (shelters and such)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/106265050/claim-homelessness-i...
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A woman in a homeless camp north of Seattle died and her adult son’s spine was crushed last month when a large tree fell their tent during a windstorm.
https://komonews.com/news/local/lynnwood-woman-bomb-cyclone-...
The local graffiti says that ACAB includes Batman. I’m the son of a cop and grew up around cops. It’s probably more accurate to say TVMOCAB. The vast majority, probably around 90%, of cops are bastards, but there are a few Boy Scouts mixed in. It’s certainly inline with my interaction with cops over he past ~50 years. How could it be otherwise, in accordance with Sturgeon’s law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
>> COLD towns without major homeless shelter capabilities
"without major homeless shelter capabilities" is a key part of my original claim. Every city you listed is a major city that has the infrastructure and resources to shelter homeless populations during major cold events. Plenty of Northern CITIES have those capabilities. but WV doesn't have any major cities and lacks cities with the capabilities to shelter homeless individuals during major cold events.
Yeah, the homeless pool would automatically prune every year. Giving people also the incentive to be not homeless.
Do you think people choose homelessness because it's insufficiently dangerous?
Hate to be macabre, but with 70k+ deaths _per year_ by opiates in the US, it probably helps decrease the demand for housing :(
Drug addiction has always been an excuse not to do anything about this. Many people think drug addiction causes homelessness and not the other way around, despite evidence.
One way or the other, ~90% of the homeless people I see here in Calgary are bent over in the fentanyl flop or lighting crack pipes.
Some of them would need years of physical therapy to fix their limping, if that is even possible.
Quadruple property taxes on any residential property that is not an active primary residence.
Which will be passed straight to the renter. The solution is upping the zoned capacity in constrained cities. Theres already enough carrot where these cities are built out to the limits of their zoning already even with all the hoops and red tape for development.
The renters would move in and it would become their “primary residence” I think, and thus not be subject to 4x taxation. (It’s a poor choice of terms because we already talk about “primary” residence from the owner’s/landlord’s perspective, not the renter’s.)
renters already paying as much as they can be squeezed to pay. Raising prop taxes will push inventory to the market which will become primary residency.
It will make life hell for anyone who can’t afford to buy their own house yet. It will also make labor markets less fluid because they are now stuck to their house and can’t take much advantage of flexibility. We might as well implement a Chinese style hukou system while we are at it.
I don't understand why do you think so, more cheaper inventory on the market will move things in exactly opposite direction to what you described.
No it won’t! Ok, so you’ve gone and made rental housing economically unviable and only homeowners can have housing (everyone else is just homeless I guess). While you’ve made home ownership more feasible, you haven’t really made it feasible for a 19 year old working at McDonalds, or some guy stuck in a crap job in Mississippi who really should move to a better area with the more expensive housing to find a more suitable job (but they can’t since they own their house and they have to sell their house before they move and then be homeless for a while to accumulate more money to buy in that new area).
I lived in lots of places for a couple of years or less to take advantage of short term opportunities. You just made those impossible, since there is a lot of overhead in buying and selling a house, and you don’t do that if you are just in a place for two years.
> you’ve gone and made rental housing economically unviable
no, there are different slices here, tons of rentals are hyper-profitable now(acquired on much cheaper and with lower interest rates), they will still exist.
> you haven’t really made it feasible for a 19 year old working at McDonalds, or some guy stuck in a crap job in Mississippi
the point is that there will be cheap inventory for them too. Once real estate stopped being attractive investment vehicle, there will be huge outflow of capital which will crash prices, and this will actually put huge pressure on rental prices too.
Even if you get rid of all rental housing, the housing market will crash sure, but the labor market will crash at the same time. So that doesn’t help so much in the short term. Ok, when the labor market comes back, we still have N houses but not everyone can afford those houses, the bank holds them and eventually they fall apart due to maintenance issues (why buffalo NY has a housing shortage even though it has half the population it used to). So maybe we can solve them by just giving the houses away to people, I guess? Can they afford to maintain them? Since the market is inflexible, why should anyone build new ones?
There are jurisdictions that have done things like this. British Columbia is one that introduced a "Speculation Tax" that was largely a tax on empty homes, with the tax levy being very significant for secondarily owned homes being left empty.
The net result is that it added thousands of rentals onto the market! https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/metro-vancouver-rental-housi...
A very good thing but notably this is mostly a one time increase in homes (though the tax continues to incentivize newly built condos to be rented).
So it's a good emergency sort of measure that absolutely helps with a supply shortfall, but in the long term there needs to be followthrough in more systemic policies to build more homes.
The influx of units is good. But imo the larger impact is that it’s harder to shop around for wealthier tenants that can pay bigger rents. It helps shift power back to renters.
Yes, but also we need some more direct incentive for new construction. Real estate as investment property at least used to drive supply. We need massive (tax/interest rate/zoning) incentives for high density construction, both in cities and towns/suburbs. Disincentivizing empty investment properties is the cheapest way for the government, but I think carrot and stick works best.
Why? Taxes shouldn’t be punitive. Remove barriers to building. The end. People are willing to try everything other than the solution…
Taxes should absolutely be punitive for socially destructive behaviors.
I live in a dense urban area and there are literally a dozen buildings that are empty and derelict because the property owners are just sitting on them hoping to flip them. They can't get the price they want so they will just let them sit empty and decay.
Labor is expensive. Maybe they can’t front the money to renovate them so people could live there.
Interest rates are high. Maybe no one is willing to buy and renovate those lots because the cost of acquiring enough capital to do so is prohibitive.
There can be lots of reasons why houses sit vacant. I don’t think we should assume ill intent.
These buildings have been vacant for years and a few of them are on the market for an absurd price. I don't think they have ill intent. I'm sure in their mind what could be ill intentioned about waiting for someone to pay them the right price? Doesn't mean there aren't very real consequences for letting these buildings sit empty.
Which urban area?
At the risk of doxxing myself I very intentionally left it in vague. Lets say an urban area in the US west :)
"I live in Riverside" really isn't a dox.
But aside from Riverside it looks like buildings in the US West are used very efficiently
https://infogram.com/1p0yj9xynd96qziegpjkewmd7munpjp66l2
I can tell you my city isn't in this report.
You've already doxxed yourself by writing hundreds of comments on your throwaway you fucking noodle (assuming that you've not been careful about scrambling your writing style to defeat sylometry).
> HUD officials say another key factor was the recent increase in asylum seekers coming to the U.S., often fleeing dangerous conditions in their home countries.
This feels like another "safe and effective" talking point.
It is literally impossible to satisfy infinite demand. Who is buying the houses? Figure that out and you can solve the problem. If we choose to ignore demand side, don't investigate what is driving demand, how it is distributed and so on, and continue to pretend real estate markets are perfect and we need merely deregulate to solve all problems, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (bubbles, collusion rings, fraud and wreckless speculation), it will not end well.
It appears that %6.9 of the houses for rent in USA are vacant: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
Is this efficient?
You don't want a maximally "efficient" vacancy rate (i.e. 0), because that makes it basically impossible for people to move around - and that gives enormous power to landlords to gouge tenants.
So what vacancy rate do you want, ideally? Not sure, but you'll notice from your own source that 6.9% is around as low a vacancy rate as the US has had since the turn of the millennium.
FWIW, looking at vacancy statistics across the whole of the country can be misleading. They include houses that are vacant for any reason - including properties that are condemned, under renovation, or in the middle of nowhere where there are no jobs.
That latter point is key. As more and more economic activity has moved to white-collar coastal cities and away from rural or suburban blue-collar middle America, it's no surprise there are going to be vacancies in regions where the economy's been hollowed out. So we can conjecture that the record low vacancy rate is even more problematic, because those vacancies are likely less equally distributed to areas that need them.
From a quick spot check… yes?
Assume 120 homes in an area, evenly distributed per month on yearly leases. If all renters switch every month and it takes a month to re-rent the unit, there is a vacancy rate of 8.3%
Obviously not every renter moves every lease end, but also some units are in places no one wants to live, others are mispriced, some need renovation or extensive cleaning, etc.
But from a cursory sanity check the 6.9% number is likely reasonable for a fairly tight rental market.
Places with a higher vacancy rate are correlated with lower rents and less homelessness e.g. Indiana and Texas have a higher rental vacancy rate than California and New York (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CuFs) so whatever causes a higher vacancy rate seems to be good for affordability (not sure what you mean by “efficient”).
I was trying to explain this to my wife the other day. She was complaining that I had all these clothes on the floor in the bedroom and that she couldn't get out of bed easily because it was so messy (because I efficiently store some electronics under the clothes) but I explained that most of the house was still empty, especially by volume (since the air above the clothes is completely unoccupied). Fortunately, because I am rational and have data on my side, she relented as she usually does.
Likely a chunk of that is in cities or places in the countryside that have seen depopulation
american housing is optimized for investment, not living
Land Value Tax would solve it
Land value taxes alone don’t do crap. You need a high enough tax burden to compel people to change, and those levels are extremely unpopular.
Land is already taxed on value
There's no federal tax on Land. States often don't tax on current market value (Prop 13 for example)
Voters should remove that - California has more renters than owners.
Absolutely.
The opposition is strong and well organized. But the population is suffering.
A bright spot.
> One bright spot was a decline in the number of unhoused veterans. This year that actually fell to a record low, after years of intense investment in subsidized housing and support services.
That decline was due to someone caring about the issue; planning, financing, and executing. But mostly, because someone cared about actually addressing the issue.
Subsidized housing doesn’t address the issue except for small interest groups. It just puts a bandaid on it.
Why is the approach not scalable? In general, everyone has interests, whether part of a small group, a medium group, or a large group.
There's a homelessness issue amongst veterans. So, let's try subsidies and support to reduce the severity of the issue. It seems to work. What did we learn, and can we build on those lessons in general? It's better to use a bandaid than just bleed.
If there are 10 cookies and 12 people who want to buy them the price goes up and some people go without. Giving 2 people enough money to buy the cheapest cookie allows them to buy it, but at the expense of someone else being able to buy it who didn’t have that free money. You can try to give everyone money, but that just puts us back where we started and now the baker can further raise prices to extract that free money from everyone. When there isn’t enough to go around, the solution is to make more cookies.
Service guarantees housing!
Lack of affordable housing or depressed wages?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
Probably lack of housing. Fewer homeless in wv than you might expect with the depressed wages there because more people can afford housing. When you go to places like the rust belt its very hard to find homeless people at all. When you go to high rent/home price regions on the other hand, its hard not to see homeless people.
Lack of housing. The poorest states in the US (Mississippi, West Virginia) have low homeless rates. The poorest countries in the continent have low homeless rates. Because it's easy to find cheap housing.
If there are 100 houses and 110 people, (and there can't be room-mates), wages can go to infinity and the homeless rates won't be reduced.
People are also leaving both of those states for places where housing is less affordable. So we have 100 houses for every 90 people in Mississippi because 20 people had already left the state for Atlanta, Nashville, or Austin.
Everyone knows that housing problems locally can be solved by making the places less desirable to live in. But it’s not a solution that anyone is interested in pursuing (rightfully so).
Kind of both, if the money is the lubricant and the people are one gear and the other gear is all of the infrastructure needed to keep the other gear moving, once the money has been drained out of the assembly it stops working..
The answer is both.
Build more housing.
The people with the power (money) to do so have no incentive to do so because they hold real estate which keeps going up because of the shortage. Why work against yourself?
I think incentives are different on an individual level. Yes, if everyone built more housing then your property's value would not go up as much. But if a single individual builds housing that's very profitable, that'll way more than offset the tiny reduction to the values of that individual's other properties.
It's like a prisoner's dilemma where property owners as a class may not want more housing so that they are wealthier on paper, but any individual property owner will want to build housing because that'll grow their wealth faster.
Eh, this is just a cynical excuse to not try.
Here in Oregon, we're making some progress on housing reform. The mayor of my city attended the YIMBYTown conference a few years back when she was a city councilor. Heck, the now-governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, spoke at it, and continues to work on housing policy.
Part of the puzzle is that reforms are better at the state level, where it's easier to say "yeah, we have a housing crisis, and these things will fix it" and you're not confronted by a local angry mob of NIMBYs intent on stopping homes from being built.
some politician can make it as part of platform, and win +20% of votes for example.
This is wrong - search any major city and “blocked development” and you’ll see.
Why? Housing shortages are an obvious "the worse for you, the better for me" benefit for the haves.
Because it's the only way we'll ever get out of this mess.
When can we bring bulldozers to your block to start?
YIMBY’s get really angry when I suggest developing Dolores Park.
Today.
I'm willing to be inconvenienced for the greater good; are you?
Oh, it would be great to add a floor and airbnb it. Or sell it for $1.5M. Maybe your program would give me a 0 interest loan.
And I’d have the warm fuzzy doing a “greater” good. All the way to the bank.
To house people who can’t pay? That’s the governments job, and they care more about fighter jets. Sorry.
To lower the cost for everyone, including for those of limited means.
Crazy as there’s no shortage of land to build houses on. Of course there’s also not many great jobs in the empty west or endless fields of corn and soy (coated in cancer causing chemicals no less).
Mississippi has a low homeless rate for a reason. It isn’t just about absolute housing availability, but housing in areas where people want to or have to live. People also either die or leave if they can’t survive there, you simply can’t exist at all on the margin.
and most tech companies are making it clear they want your butt in a seat. I'm not saying full-remote jobs are a single cure for it, but it definitely moves the needle in the right direction, as well as reduces CO2 emissions.
I'm pro remote work any day, but isn't there a case to be made for increasing gentrification due to remote work? I'm seeing this here in Oregon.
We need to move zoning to the federal level like Japan
We must decide whether we’ll be a civilization that bows to NIMBYism and stays stuck in squalor or allow building the future.
Really hard to get a sense of scale from this article. It mentions 5,200 in shelters from the Maui fire, but there have been an estimated 8,000,000 net new immigrants over the past four years: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...
Another factor is that it’s too hard to evict people. So you’re not going to give chances to those on the margins.
Am I understanding you right that you believe that homelessness would decrease if it were easier to evict people?
This strikes me as one of those gasoline on the fire suggestions. Made me laugh though! I never get perspectives like this anywhere but HN.
I think self interest being what it is, easier evictions would raise rents.
California has made it much easier to build ADUs partially with the intent that some would be rental housing. I'll be damned if I'm going to rent an ADU to somebody else in my backyard without an ironclad guarantee that I can get rid of them quickly if they turn out to be a nightmare.
So yes, making it hard to evict people reduces the supply of rental housing and that will raise rents and increase homelessness.
if we were to provide sensible landlord/tenant laws this idea could be helpful. BUT (big BUT) I lost faith than a senisble laws can be enacted in the USA. In more liberal places the laws are written so extreme that it makes you question your sanity if you are a landlord. in other more conservative places - the landlords are true Lords!
I am a landlord in a place which is liberal. I will keep my place vacant for months against a mountain of applications until I find someone which I feel comfortable with signing a lease (that bar is HIGH). My place is dirt cheap, I have 3% interest on a place I bought after real estate crash and I only charge enough to cover my mortgage and condo fees (could easily charge additional $1.5k/month). I would be 100% more open to signing a lease with someone who needs an afforable place A LOT more than my current and former tenants but with the present laws I have to deal with there is absolutely no way that will ever happen
The perspective is understandable to me. It's easy to imagine rationally leaving a place vacant for longer if you're very picky about who you rent to. It's a timed binding commitment you make with your tenants, that puts you both on the same raft at least a little.
That said, you're saying that you could charge 1.5k more for the place, but don't because you value other qualities in a tenant more, right?
On mass, I'd bet dollars and donuts that what we'd find is people being evicted, or threatened with eviction, in order to raise rents. Situations like "property values have gone up 10% this year and I was too low to begin with. they've got 6 months left on their lease, but if I evict them I bet I have more cache to keep the deposit and I can ~fix my prices~. Business!"
Maybe your principles wouldn't have you do that, but people statistically make self interested decisions like that more often than compassionate ones.
Balance compassion for self and others oughta be the guide.
100% agree with everything you said! Yea, I didn’t really want to be a landlord, my wife got pregnant and requested a mandatory move to the suburbs. Bought a place and while I was moving two high school teachers approached me about renting it (this was in 2012). My wife and I decided to let them rent. we never wanted to make any money from it, the place itself, as you can imagine appreciated in value over the years, and we just take whatever money we need to cover the mortgage and condo fees. several friends that are landlords have had horror stories and I would rather not make more money I don’t need for a extra headache.
what you are saying though is a core problem with writing sensible laws, if they are landlord-leaning the landlords will be evicting left and right to make a few extra bucks. if they are tenant-leaning you get families moving from minnesota do east coast that pay sec deposit and first month’s rent and then live in your place for 18 months without possibility of eviction (some covid laws are still in place…)
> In more liberal places the laws are written so extreme that it makes you question your sanity if you are a landlord.
And yet, despite the complaints, the evidence says otherwise: There is no shortage of landlords. Property is in very high demand - prices are extreme.
I am speaking from personal experience. there may not be a shortage of landlords somewhere (say ATL where rental properties have been fully taken over by large corps) but this isn’t true on the whole. additionally, even if there isn’t a shortage of landlords the prices are skyhigh pricing out large percentage of population, especially in urban areas
Where is there a shortage of landlords? I've never heard of it, but it would be an interesting phenomenon!
A shortage of landlords is not possible - the properties scale with management the way construction happens in the USA
There could be a shortage of rental property - oh that’s exactly what the article is talking about.
I believe there seldom could be a shortage of rental property but often shortage of afordable rental property
Yes. Do you think more or less people would rent out homes if eviction were simply illegal? What about 1 year grace period? 30 days? None? Clearly there will be differences in the propensity to rent given the ease to undo mistakes or reclaim possession.
If it were completely illegal to evict, it would be riskier to rent your property out for sure!
I think I like this suggestion more. If that law were passed tomorrow a lot of landlords would want out of the business. Flooding the market with cheap housing seems more likely to reduce homelessness than making it easier to evict tenants.
No, they would just stop accepting poor people, as renting is inherently useful.
Oh, this is already what happens.
Also, I’m not sure why people continuously believe that getting rid of property owners will somehow be good for renters, or that the price would be reduced to an amount where poor people can buy it. Empirically never has happened.
> No, they would just stop accepting poor people, as renting is inherently useful.
Not at all? Not a single landlord would want out of the business? If you couldn't even evict if somebody never paid a single dime of rent, I think that would cascade and destroy the whole industry. An extreme measure that I didn't suggest, you did.
> I’m not sure why people continuously believe that getting rid of property owners will somehow be good for renters.
I don't want to get rid of property owners. I inherently believe it's better to own a home than rent. I do believe converting renters into home owners is good for the ex-renter.
> Renter, property owner. We're all people.
There’s no point in continuing the discussion, since the current status quo is silly laws - see sibling post who leaves their property vacant.
Direct link to the report's PDF: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...
Thank you for sharing this information...
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How many of these are newly illegal immigrants? May be heartless to say that, but one cannot take them all. Obviously winter time and we should have mercy. But there are limits.
We have enough space, but refuse to build affordable housing, for our citizens or for immigrants/asylum seekers. It's a fake problem conjured entirely from broken incentives and an utter lack of political will to fix them.
In point of fact the country is -littered- with affordable housing, frequently sitting unoccupied in places people were perfectly happy to live before all of the economic opportunities in rural America were gutted. How sure are we the current crisis actually involves housing?
99% sure that it's caused by lack of housing. Housing in places people don't want to live in anymore whether due to job availability or etc isn't that useful. Although possibly improving transportation to places with lots of job opportunities might partially reverse that
You're certain that issues affecting the geographic majority of the country, that are demonstrably the effects of bullshit trade policies and overconsolidation, are resolvable by building houses in high cost markets? Neat take.
I mean, it's a little bit of everything.
Many cities have overly-restrictive building codes that prevent adequate housing from being built, which raises housing costs.
Our immigration rate is too high for the amount of new housing units we build, which raises housing costs.
Many businesses have taken a hardline stance against remote work, even for jobs where it would make sense. That forces people to live in areas with inadequate housing, which raises housing costs.
Existing housing is being increasingly purchased by multibillion dollar companies for rent-seeking purposes, which raises housing costs.
There's really no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem, but slightly reducing the immigration rate, limiting corporate ownership of detached single family homes, incentivizing remote positions, and forcing cities to approve more new units would almost certainly improve the situation.
I participate in local politics, it's not just housing. Housing means more people which means more infrastructure, schools, fire, police, roads and so forth. All of that costs money and immigrants/asylum seekers tend to be at bottom of economic scale which means any taxes they pay are extremely likely not to cover their share of cost. This is why many communities are against it and it's massively impacting local services the community provides. In particular, we got influx of asylum seekers and schools had to made massive cuts to many programs because budget was being poured into education programs for the asylum seeker kids and support services for their parents. This is required by law. This is why my county went for Trump in a way it hadn't seen since Bush.
Before you go posting links about Social Security and Federal Taxes, it doesn't matter to local governments, they don't see that money. Also worth noting, Local Governments don't work like Federal Government, any debt they take on must be repaid on time or go bankrupt which is not good.
> immigrants/asylum seekers tend to be at bottom of economic scale which means any taxes they pay are extremely likely not to cover their share of cost.
I understand that people are worried about this – and it's certainly an intuitive idea –, but is it true? I would count taxes on the total economic output / labour, not just the taxes from what is captured as salary (after all, underpaid workers make the world go 'round), but any analysis would do.
I've searched for sources that break it down instead of just looking at United States GDP but also remember, states/counties can only capture income from sources that fall under that state/county. For example, immigrant worker enables bigger salaries for Tyson Food HQ people in Springdale, Arkansas but Tyson Food Plant in upstate New York means county/state in New York is absorbing that burden without getting taxes from Springdale, Arkansas people.
So sure, the entire US GDP and thus taxes is extremely reliant on these workers but who sees the benefits is not uniform throughout the country and thus the friction around immigration.
This explanation is even better than what I asked for! Do you know if increasing the minimum wage would stop people being so upset? I imagine this would funnel enough of the value immigrants are creating to the immigrants that they can pay tax in their local area, thus avoiding the "we're subsidising other parts of the country" problem – but I'm no economist. (The whole "pay a fair wage" thing has other benefits, but it might not solve this problem.)
Increasing the minimum wage might help but it's still a sticky problem. It probably requires some federal solution which is to say, it's not going to happen.
I don't know the solutions, I'm just aware of the problem.
We cant even have affordable healthcare. Affordable housing is a pipe dream.
We absolutely can afford health care, we spend more than twice anyone else, we merely structure our healthcare to be unaffordable.
Our doctors and surgeons are paid roughly double what they make in countries like Sweden. Who’s going to convince them to take a pay cut in USA?
Who convinces people in other industries that change? Big shifts affect blue collar and professional workers all the time.
When’s the last time we’ve moved an entire industry from private to public ownership
In my area (Seattle), almost none of the visible homeless are illegal immigrants. Granted, these are mostly drug addicts (otherwise you wouldn’t notice them!), but I get the feeling that they have living arrangements somehow given that they are here to make money and not do drugs (it has to pay off for them, and I can’t see that happening if they live in the streets). It might not be very great housing though (think 4 men sharing a room).
The “illegal immigrants” are homeless thing feels like a meme to me, but I live far from the southern border so maybe it’s worse down there?
This is only a distraction. There is literally no reason other than keeping the prices up for the government to build more and more housing.
we have a decent amount of housing that sits vacant, lots of houses eventually go derelict...
The report mentions that as a contributing factor.
We don't know. The best we can do is model it as a random variable based on what little data we do have. What data do we have? Well over 2 million border encounters for 2023 and 2024. For a nation of over 350 million that doesn't sound like much but remember, housing is an inelastic good where a 1% fluctuation in the supply can be an absolute shock to the system.
These people have to live somewhere — and whether they're taking up a single bedroom or an entire residence, they're living somewhere. So I don't think you should be downvoted. There's nothing wrong with asking about how an uncountable yet sizable population will affect the dynamics of an inelastic good.
~11 million illegal crossings since 2020, more than the combined populations of several states.
The states comparison is just rhetoric. Around a half-dozen states don't even have 1 million residents.
Illegal crossing does not mean there are 11 million immigrants in the US. Biden has also done a record number of deportations in his presidency.
You're absolutely right. Crossing != net new person in the US.
Total net migration is probably 8 million over the past 4 years: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...
11 million crossing doesn't mean 11 million people (multiple crossing attempts) and it doesn't those people are still in the US. Unfortunately there's a lot of FUD about immigrants and immigration. Most estimates don't go above 12 million unauthorized immigrants *TOTAL* a large percentage who have been here a long time. And that this is probably slightly below a peak unauthorized immigrant population around 2008.
* Since some people tend to often claim people who are here legally are "illegals" it's important to note that asylum seekers are here legally as are those granted TPS.
Those people are an outsized factor in the production of needed housing as well - they don't just consume it, they help build it.
You're implying you have a conscience but your first thought is that the affordable housing shortage is aggravated by nebulous "illegal" immigrants rather than profit-seeking corporations?
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landlord pays for water
the army is rising
we formed a new religion
lol
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Or could we say, during this Congress? They even worked out some laws, but then one party refused to pass them, openly saying they wanted to undermine their opponents.
You fell for the propaganda. The bill had funding for Ukraine and Gaza which is why it was DoA for Republicans.
so did you if you think it was about Gaza and Ukraine ;-) GOP loves war in Ukraine more than a fat kid loves cake
>so did you if you think it was about Gaza and Ukraine ;-)
I fell for reality and facts, not propaganda.
>GOP loves war in Ukraine more than a fat kid loves cake
Not the current GOP, maybe prior ones, like the GOP of Dick Cheney, who supported... checks notes, Kamala and the current pro-war party.
start here and then see where it takes you… https://youtu.be/slgsZnYnF3k?feature=shared
you are almost too funny but I needed a laugh on this fine Sunday
The GOP supported it, then Trump told them not to vote for it because it would help Biden, and then they followed his instructions.
It wasn't DOA for the Republicans; they negotiated the bill.