And who the hell wants a poor person as a neighbour.
Imprisoning homeless people is not an acceptable solution, because imprisonment costs taxpayer money.
A better solution is to let the market work. If you can't afford the rent for a city, you shouldn't be allowed to be in that city at all, even in a prison cell. People who can't afford to live in an inhabited area should be permitted to camp in the wilderness.
Yes, I know the talking point that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but for the sane homelessness is usually a temporary condition, for the insane it is chronic.
Also, of course nobody wants to live with poor people. I don't buy this romantic image of poor people being fair citizens failed by the rest of the society. I moved into a poor neighborhood and immediately had my bike stolen, literally living the meme. Real estate prices are lower here exactly because it's a black immigrant neighborhood full of poor people.
Reducing the price of rent can prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
Sweetheart, I don’t expect you to pick up a hammer and some nails nevermind build a home.
All to live in a place I'd need to buy a gun for a security.
This is in a small Midwestern city. Someone ran down, but overall maybe only a little worse than other small cities I've lived.
I've been trying to find a place for over a year now. I don't have the credit, but have the income. My gf has the credit but not the income. We're basically pariahs.
At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.
At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.
The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".
Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
Is there a reason that the press is always making scapegoats out of tech nerds? The vast majority of people are not employed in tech, and are part of the same society and have very similar self interests.
Truly tired of everything being a criticism of Silicon Valley, as if everyone else are saints.
The homelessness problem is also visibly the worst it's been in my lifetime.
I'm genuinely doubtful the problem is lack of housing alone. The person curled up under the bridge, the person screaming on the corner, they need more than another apartment they still can't afford added to the world. That doesn't help them.
No matter how many of these luxury apartment buildings you build, these people can't afford the rent. The owners of the buildings would seemingly rather see them sit at quarter occupancy than lower rents, and it's kind of understandable.
We're drowning in unaffordable housing and people are still homeless.
So yes if you are willing to live in areas :
- without jobs, - without healthcare - in ghost towns
In reality it's always the fault of the politician who refuses to make necessary change because it will hurt their personal career. This entire article reeks of christian self flagellation.
Massachusetts passed a law mandating upzoning in communities well served by public transit:
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/multi-family-zoning-requir...
And town voters in certain communities have instead consistently voted down plans to move into compliance, and instead choose to endlessly sue the state to delay it:
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/27/timeline-t...
These voters aren’t hypothetical scapegoats - they’re real.
Most of the people being ridiculed are not homeowners looking down their nose at the homeless, they are basically renting from the banks and chained to mortgages. They will become homeless themselves if the value of housing drops too far from what they borrowed.
It will also have ripple effects in the form of banks going under, retirement funds being depleted, and the economy as a whole tanking. If homes become cheaper too quickly the result will be a lot more homeless, not fewer.
In short, there are very valid non-selfish reasons why people, corporations and politicians don't want to make homes lose value too quickly. It's not malice against the homeless.
This is a systematic problem in many western nations and it doesn't have a simple solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods
Now, if the risk was assessed reasonable, the risk would be priced into the housing in those regions and industrial activities in these regions. Austria, germany and some other regions would see significant drops in value. Same goes for florida and california, with forrest fires and hurricanes. The market can not be rational, if your lifelihood and pension depends on it.
1. They never had a home before so they kept living like that
2. They had a home before but then they couldn't afford it (or whatever other reason)
I doubt we have a lot of case 1 (born without a home). For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless. I doubt building more homes are going to solve the issues. For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
Of you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.
The problem is lack of a working welfare infrastructure. People become homeless because they're unlucky and once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up.. it's a failure of state at so many levels. Real estate development is the least of them
> Sry lack of new houses seems doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness. If you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.
This would only make sense if the smaller houses were reasonably priced as opposed to the bigger ones. This is not the case.
And creating more housing would absolutely be a step in the right direction in terms of reducing extreme housing prices. Unless you don't believe in demand and supply economics, that is.
> Once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up
Yes but that's partly because they can't afford to rent even basic lodging, let alone afford to buy one, and a basic roof over one's head is a pivotal basic need for most things one needs to do in life.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t also need things like better support and easily-accessible government healthcare, but we have to recognize that these things are all connected. Salt Lake City somewhat famously found immediately housing people helps with mental/substance abuse issues simply because all of the other problems in life are more approachable when you’re not sleeping on the street, missing appointments, and having your essentials stolen.
Still, I sincerely believe more people would choose to be homeless if they tried it, because there is nothing inherently bad in living in a tent if the climate allows it. It's just like tourism but with more amenities available due to urban infra + the stigma (that people mostly learned to ignore due to cultural conditioning of the 70s-today period).
Do you know this first hand? Have you tried it?
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/minutes-from-the-latest-...
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-westillwork-t...
What you're seeing is a backlash to this influence, and the fairly disastrous consequences it has usually had.
All these replies missed my point. I’m not saying tech is blameless, rather that the press constantly criticizes tech for both doing too much and doing nothing and not fixing society. I would argue that this is toxic and ignores the agency of literally all other professions/people.
Further, to ignore the housing/etc lobbying by basically everyone else outside of tech and make it seem like SV giants control the housing crisis is just boring. Do note that most of the developed world is facing this, not just specifically SV/USA.
Clearly we're consuming different types of media, because on my estimation tech gets let off fairly light relative to the damage we cause.
As practitioners, we're not entitled to get angry about being criticised for the damage we cause at least until we've stopped it.
The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unrestricted space to develop a couple miles away in the next town.
It's a tough problem.
i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?
When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.
And to say "just build so much that supply > demand and prices will drop" doesn't work, because private developers won't build housing they can't make a tidy profit on.
There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.
This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).
[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
Cheaper housing helps prevent this.
It's not always all or nothing - sometimes you might be able to afford rent if rent were cheaper.
> For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
"Build more homes" includes social aka public aka "affordable housing".
i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?
When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.
There will always be people who misinterpret this kind of writing. That doesn't make it bad writing; some people are just a little dumb. The writing isn't for them.
But how do you achieve this when there are a significant number of real people willing to write even more absurd things with no irony whatsoever?
This makes sense to me, and I hear it all the time, but when was it ever in a builder's interest to make affordable housing? Why does this perverse incentive seem like a recent thing?
Housing is in such brutally short supply (goes for major cities in North America as well as Europe) that not only can we not afford to be picky, but in terms of actual effect it doesn't matter: social housing is as effective as luxury housing. Sometimes it is _less_ effective at achieving social goals, if rich people are also trying to get their hands on the same housing stock, because there is not enough to meet demand at the top end of the market.
I think people misunderstand the state of the housing market: it is brutally expensive because of chronic, decades long undersupply, not building enough to meet _new_ demand each year, thus the "debt" in supply has compounded massively. This has strong and weird market effects, such that building lots of cheap housing at huge scale is only a partial solution (and the scale actually needed to alleviate the problem is much larger than anyone is actually willing to contemplate right now).
Not unless you force developers to build even when it's unprofitable (or not profitable enough)
The "all opinions I don't like are not held honestly, it's a trick" meme is very tiring. In respect to your original point, no this isn't some unique critique that singles out SV. The SV disruptor is just a shorthand for the rich and landed that will always be opposed to new housing. This could be drop-in replaced with a mid-career NYC finance bro, or successful Texan oil & gas professional, just exchange some things for prayer and bootstraps.
They are the same because in all those cases their wealth (real o perceived potential) depends in housing value go only up.
>San Rafael law prohibits smoking in all apartment and condo complexes (if your home shares a wall with another home – you can’t smoke there). A housing complex is only allowed to create outdoor smoking areas if they meet certain criteria. Landlords and property managers are required to enforce this law through lease agreements. For more information about this, check out this handbook:
>https://www.cityofsanrafael.org/documents/san-rafael-smoke-f...
But every fucking day marijuana. Every public park; marijuana. Sports events; marijuana. Just sitting in traffic; marijuana. Waiting in fucking line at my kids' after-school pickup, marijuana.
It's a little ridiculous at this point.
I am a huge proponent of legalized marijuana, but for real. The people that do this are ruining it for the rest of us. Luckily it makes SO MUCH MONEY that I don't think we'll ever see it outlawed again, but. This is exactly what the pearl-clutching anti-pot people said would happen.
This seems like a no-brainer, and I will continue to vote and advocate against these policies, to the extent that I need to because most of the people I live near agree with me. Thanks all.
It's not poor people that are smoking more pot, sorry for the bad news.
At least in the state I live in, the only legal place to smoke is on your own property.
So, if you dont want to smell it, you are basically arguing for it to become fully illegal again so you can call the cops on your neighbors. Thats a legitimate position to have but definitely not everyone agree with you.
(personally I am far more bothered by nasty exhaust fumes from vehicles and gardeners and I'm pretty sure they are worse for health too)
Is your plan simply to imprison all poor people?
Mundane actually. I want my children to play outdoors without interacting with drug users. Your perspective is skewed.
> Is your plan simply to imprison all poor people?
No, and this doesn't follow.
Well, maybe you should just give them judgmental glares until they realize that being poor is a bad choice and stop it!
Or maybe you should move, since you apparently have such stringent standards for what's "allowed" to be around you and your children.
My experience is the opposite, I have family who do streetworking.
Yes, there are homeless people with pre-existing substance abuse problems. But so many people have this idea that somebody has their life together and then they try meth and then they end up homeless and that's how most homelessness works. This makes the "well, they deserve it and there is nothing to be done" position stick.
Not that I care much. Me and my children will live as far from addicts and the homeless as I can manage, thank you very much.
> But so many people have this idea that somebody has their life together and then they try meth and then they end up homeless and that's how most homelessness works
Usually people who are on drugs have their life fall apart, which ultimately ends in homelessness.
> sorry for the bad news
Sorry you didn't realize that supporting legal pot would make you smell more pot.
I guess I thought better of my fellow citizens. You don't really see people drinking a beer in line at school, or sitting in traffic. I assumed it would be the same with pot, and I'm genuinely confused on what is different in peoples' minds.
The original point I responded to was that if you have homeless people around you, you'll have the smell of pot. The point I'm trying to get across is that it isn't homeless folks or poor folks. It's everyone.
Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.
What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.
It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".
Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.
I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.
I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.
I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
There's an Australian quote from the 80s I can't recall the source of right now, but it's something along the lines of "we're a country of people serving each other flat whites", indicating that the primary spend in economy is local service based.
I suspect that's true in most western countries - cafes, supermarkets, dog grooming services, dentists, hairdressers, etc. Many jobs exist where people are, and if a new suburb or city were to crop up, commercial areas would be planned and a smart council could incentivise by discounting rent for the first X years or similar programs.
These towns often have a bit of a reputation for being full of, well, 1960s architecture and being a bit dated and unexciting, but frankly that's just a lot of the UK. Functionally, I have been to a few of them and they are just fine, if a little boring, places to live.
> [is it] okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
I mean, happens all the time with infrastructure projects - roads, railroads, power plants.
Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%.
I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth
So no hate to the author but this feels like pointless political posturing
https://www.joe.co.uk/news/swiss-city-offers-beggars-one-way...
You border security and permit system kicks out anyone with even a remote chance to become homeless, you're welcome.
But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.
This does NOTHING to help homelessness...
hint: its not the fiscal conservatives, billionaires or private equity firms.
Those guys will say, "Hey, thanks for getting these poor folk to vote against their interest. We'll take it from here and proceed to build the luxury buildings that were too annoying to build before instead of those unseemly affordable housing projects."
0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb5.html the 2024 "crime bill".
People living in their cars is a kind of shadow population that is almost impossible to count. I lived in a small-ish town with literally a handful of the type of homelessness we normally think of, yet at least once per month I would see someone getting gas that was clearly living in their car, and this was at a really cheap gas station nowhere near the interstate, so it was locals who knew where to get gas.
Honestly I think sometimes building (compassionate, 21st century) mental health "asylums" and treatment centres would do more to end homelessness.
And nobody wants to see their real estate property decline in value…
For at least a little while, a massive influx of supply of dwellings entirely eliminated rough sleeping in the UK, mitigating the harshest impacts of homelessness for thousands.
Maybe in the US it is about building houses, but at some point it isn't anymore. I once wrote this here: [0]
Starting a new home construction in a location with falling housing prices isn't an obviously winning business strategy.
Ideally you want the only competition for housing land to be multiple humans wishing to live there. The homogenity of human wants and needs will ensure you don't get ridiculously unpredictable outcomes. You will also benefit from network effects.
However, BlackRocks use for land is completely different. So many things stop mattering when the land is being pieced up and the risk distributed to a million retirement accounts.
Over-financialisation hurts the intended use of scarce resources. Today, no human has the ability to consider it important owning independent personal access to scarce resources such as farmland and water bodies. Similarly, I predict, people will be forced to stop wanting personal housing land. When, is the question.
Will the same happen for housing? Everyone starts out naturally "short" one unit of housing. To gain housing, you can rent or buy it. Buying it puts you "even" in the same way as above: your ownership and your usage is in balance.
I don't see the factor that would cause people to stop wanting personal housing land.
Do you remember that teacher in school who would sometimes lash out at a poorly performing student?
This made me feel like I was watching a frustrated lash out from someone who cares.
Captures the author's feelings; but fails as a piece of persuasion.
[1] according to the communists at the world bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Whether we do that by gigantic public housing projects, non-profit coop developments, or markets building housing for profit is almost irrelevant to the point that it's currently effectively illegal to build housing in the vast majority of cities.
We should be looking to Vienna, which has had the most success at keeping urban housing affordable and available. They did so by always building more housing all the time. They're doing basically the opposite of what we do in CA where we fight about which type of housing we should build one or two buildings of. We need to just legalize and fast track housing of all kinds.
When a shiny new 2 bedroom apartment is priced at $4200/month, it isn't going to do ANYTHING to resolve homelessness.
Outlaw AirBnB! Outlaw empty "investment" properties. There are a lot of things that could actually help. Empowering the California real estate mafia won't do anything for anyone here except the developers.
Houses are deteriorating assets that only gain their wealth because of the land value appreciation. If you can just build new housing, there is no reason to hoard the existing housing, because your neighbors might try and capture that value before you can.
Just my observation. Tons of overpriced apartments being built at 2x the price of the average renter.
Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.
In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.
It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas
Sure, this is what I'm talking about when I say there is a gradient. But for argument sake/illustrative purposes though - what would housing have to cost to end homeless? And bonus question - what would zoning laws have to look like to get to this price?
I imagine the answer would have to be "free" but we know for a fact that wouldn't end homelessness because homeless shelters exist that cost $0 and homelessness still exists (yes, even where there isn't overcrowding).
And sure yes, I'm sure there are people that are hanging on by their finger nails - if rent goes up $100/m they'd have to live in their cars but I'm skeptical that zoning law reform is the thing that's going to save them (or end homelessness as the OP suggests)
Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.
Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.
I think a more common situation is that they are on the street because they are unstable, but being on the street makes it much worse.
Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).
Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.
The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.
Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.
Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?
I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.
This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.
I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.
The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.
The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)
- not have any family
- not have any friends
- not have any savings
- not have anything they could sell
- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?
You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.
It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.
Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.
https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...
As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).
https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...
I'm saying of sound mind not as pejorative to be clear but I think for most people of "sound mind" they could figure something out that's not living on the streets (getting roommates, moving somewhere cheaper etc)
It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.
Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.
What you are seeing is that when the cost of housing goes up it's the people on the margins of society who are pushed onto the streets first and have the hardest time getting back into stable housing. That doesn't mean the cost of housing wasn't the driving force.
This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.
For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.
Normally when we talk about “humanizing” a problem it’s one that doesn’t have a directly visible human element. But everyone has seen actual homeless people. It’s not something that we are just aware of as an abstract problem.
What exactly is the cultural barrier to seeing what ought to be very obvious? I.e. that homeless people are regular people who are down on their luck, or who are victims of broader societal failings.
I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.
While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.
I don't disagree that many people disregard the problems of the homeless however I want to be abundantly clear that that I'm arguing against
> by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore.
It's not simply that, things have to be going wrong in your life (not necessarily your fault) that losing your income puts you on the streets. Which goes back to the gradient - for some people losing their income will have no visible impact, for some they'll be under a bridge but which one it ends up being will depend on other factors in your life (having savings, friends, etc)
For example, there is a rental cartel operating in the USA.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
AirBnB is a factor.
The bulk of homelessness is a housing problem [0]. Per-capita rates are the highest in the most expensive places to live. This isn't because homeless people migrate to the places w/ the best homelessness programs either: they're largely long-term residents of their cities [1]. Homelessness is increasing because incomes are not keeping up with housing costs [2]. Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%. While severe illness can lead to homelessness, it also works the other way around [3]. There are many homeless families, often headed by women but many are also "intact" families [4]. People of color are also dramatically overrepresented: Black Americans are 13% of the population but 40% of the homeless [5]. It's hard to imagine Black Americans are 3x more likely to have severe mental illness or addiction problems.
I think it's pretty conclusively a housing cost problem. Maybe not entirely, maybe not everywhere, but it does seem like we'd take care of most of the problem in most places by bringing down housing costs.
(n.b. the NIH book source is from 1988, but I found most of its basic findings were corroborated by more recent sources)
[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex....
[2]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[3]: https://community.solutions/research-posts/the-costs-and-har...
[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex...
[5]: https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/raci...
Horrible, but despite those increases, there are not rental units going unoccupied in any large number. Cutting prices will not house more people, if all the rentals are already full.
What is supposed to happen is that as rental prices go up, supply is increased to capitalize on it. But that's not happening, in most areas, for various reasons.
The core problem is the curve of population growth versus the curve of housing units. Prices are an consequence of that, not the cause.
Which is to say a family who lost their home and is living with a friend while supportive housing services is getting them accomodations is considered as 'homeless' as the crazy man who sleeps under the bridge and exposed himself to young girls.
Everyone is supportive of the former and by and large this group is helped and gets housed.
The latter... No one needs that
There is a well demonstrated and strong correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. There are absolutely cases where the root cause is pre-existing mental health issues or substance abuse but it is simply not true to say that housing costs are rarely the problem.
Further, homelessness can cause substance abuse and mental health issues. So even if you can look at somebody today and say "wow that person has a massive addiction to meth and clearly just giving them a roof won't solve everything" this does not mean that the reason they became homeless in the first place was a substance addiction.
Building more housing will not solve all homelessness. Frankly, so what? Almost no problem on the planet is solved by a single thing. It'll solve a substantial portion of homelessness. That's still good.
You might be interested in this podcast Bad Faith: Episode 478 - The Abundance Conspiracy (w/ Sandeep Vaheesan, Isabella Weber, & Aaron Regunberg)
Episode webpage: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130189560
Sometimes the need to overcomplicate is itself irrational.
Why must the solution involve more than that?
They cause disproportionate damage to cities and the cause of aiding homeless itself. It's asinine to conflate the two issues and waffle back and forth between "more houses" and nimby name-calling. Neither will help.
We should have 21st century asylums and more houses. I won't accept a false choice, we can do both. (I'd argue we also need subsidized job relocation programs so people don't get stuck in high CoL areas looking for minimum wage jobs. There are very affordable areas to live in USA that want workers, let's make this market more efficient).
Rounding all the homeless up into an asylum is just sweeping the problem under the carpet.
There really aren't many ways to meet halfway - to have living spaces where you can live up to your abilities and have safety nets for the areas where you struggle. We have "halfway houses" to help people re-enter society after crashing, but not much to catch people before they fall.
(We do have some programs that try to help, but they are swamped, or inefficient, either expensive or under-funded, or some combination of those things. )
It is very obvious that the housing availability is a major factor.
Of course, who will pay for it? There's plenty of money but it's all in corporations and shareholders.
And yes, as housing becomes less available, people with mental health issues are among the worst affected.
Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.
There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.
California is a bit embarrassing. We’ll see how the Builder’s Remedy and laws like SB 1123 play out, I suppose.
NIMBYism is an economic issue, not a culture issue. It has far more to do with how much impact the new housing is expected to have on the value of people's property. Or more saliently, the equity they have in the property. If people expect that nearby housing will cut their $500k equity in half, they're likely to petition against it, regardless of whether their governor is a Republican or a Democrat.
NIMBY isn't red or blue, it's just fear and greed.
Lmao
[0]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
> Nashville home prices went up in May 2025, but not by much compared to last year.
> Average sale price $853.8K; median price stayed flat at $613K.
> But here's what's interesting: sellers had to drop their asking prices more than before. The average list price was $1.012 million, but homes actually sold for about $158K less than that...
> More Homes Available for Buyers: Active inventory jumped +29% compared to last year.
> Total inventory (including homes under contract) increased +16%
> Sales Activity Slowing Down -18%
[0]: https://www.nashvillesmls.com/blog/nashville-housing-market-...
Median income goes towards old housing.
Of course, most of those who did own extra homes as an investment rented them out as well, so rental prices here has gone through the roof as landlords and common folk with an extra apartment or two has sold the homes.
As housing stock quality improves, everyone upgrades. Which leaves room at the bottom level to get on the ladder into lower quality cheaper housing.
Also supply and demand: if prices are increasing it is mostly because supply is not keeping up with demand.
Lastly, like all other products in a market, we should see a general improvement in quality, this isn't a bad thing (think how cars how 10x more reliable, comfortable and fuel efficient than they used to be).
It's generally much more illegal to build cheap housing, both in the direct sense that building codes require all new housing to be built to extremely high standards, and the indirect sense that in places without by-right development (which is most desirable cities sadly) your neighbours are going to fight a lot more against cheap houses getting built than they'll fight against expensive houses getting built.
> Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.
Already been happening for years.
Where I live the majority of affordable housing has been bought up and turned into investment rentals or vacation rentals. They will leave the houses empty instead of lowering rent.
Current average rental cost is 3x what the average renter makes. More apartments are being built (very cheap, inefficient designs) but the cost is still above what the average renter makes.
Collusion is a bigger issue than new builds.
Just my observations from my area.
But more seriously, you can talk to Jessica Preheim formerly of the Houston Coalition for the Homeless.
This is largely true [0].
> - not have any savings
Americans basically don't have savings; median is $8k [1]. People of color save less, as do people in urban areas, as do poorer people [2], all of which is in line with who is more likely to be homeless.
> - not have anything they could sell
If you think about what one might go through on the path to foreclosure or eviction, you probably sell/lose a lot of things trying to keep your home. Maybe selling your car bought you a few months, maybe you needed it for your job(s) and it got repossessed. There are a lot of circumstances where this can happen: a partner dying, moving out to avoid intimate partner violence, health care costs, etc. This is a "slowly and then all at once" type of thing.
> - not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
Most of the time they're already working; 53% of homeless and 40% of unsheltered homeless are employed [3].
> - Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
Moving is very expensive in both a time and money sense:
- find time to pack
- find a new place
- maybe find a new job(s)
- put down deposits on everything
- purchase packing supplies
- either hire movers or do it yourself (if you're able)
- find time to move
- find time to unpack
This might seem like a ridiculous and petty list, but when you have very little time and money you think like this. It's also super stressful to think like this.
> - Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
US/US State social programs have huge paperwork burdens, onerous anti-fraud requirements, and don't even give you enough money to make rent after all that (the frenzied shouts of "housing subsidies?! do you want housing prices to get even higher?!" are responsible here, also--as always--a healthy amount of racism).
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#:~:text=Most%2...
[1]: https://archive.ph/pOOk1 (MarketWatch)
[2]: https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/how-where-you-l...
[3]: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/employed-and-experiencing-h...
Habitat for Humanity is doing great work.
According to this outlet [1], Argentina seems to have experienced a recent spike in homelessness.
As I said, it's foolish thinking you can fix everything with this "one simple trick". Housing is expensive because the market is gamed, deregulating it further won't fix shit. Those who make it expensive will always succeed in keeping it this way, if we don't take away their power and try to make the game fairer.
[1] https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/argentina/quarter-of-rough-s...
Increased housing nearby brings increased traffic, parking pressure, crowding, and noise, none of which are positives for current residents. Fear and greed don’t motivate renters to be NIMBY, yet we have NIMBY renters because of other factors.
Then there’s the batshit crazy dude who’s living under the bridge who’s staring off into the trees and can’t hold a coherent conversation. This poor soul is not homeless because his landlord raised his rent from $2000 to $2200 and he just can’t eke by.
However the mother in case 1, could absolutely benefit from:
1. Better health insurance 2. Better financial education 3. A credit on housing or whatever.
This is why no one can agree on homelessness because half the population imagines the “noble” woman scenario and the other half imagines the bat shit dude with his pants around his ankle.
The solutions to each are drastically different. So you sound like an idiot when you say “we just need more homes” when you’re picturing scenario 2. But equally people sound like idiots when you say “we just need more mental institutions” but the listener is picturing scenario 1.
We’re talking in circles and English needs more words to describe these two drastically different types of people.
We don't really need more words to describe the scenarios. It's all politics, we know what the game is. Whether you see homeless as primarily category 1(/3) or primarily category 2, seems to align overwhelmingly with your preferred brand of politics. And as such, in the current social milieu, there's effectively no constructive conversation that can happen. It's just political extremists being handed their moral justification for their position, refusing to accept any other version of reality that conflicts with it.
It's generally called "as fast as necessary", more focused on total journey lenght with the clock-face schedule across the whole country. Other countries certainly have faster trains.
In the past, the population was growing even while net migration was negative. This means people were having babies. This trend reversed in the '80s and migration has made up somewhere between 37% and 128% of annual population growth since then.[1]
There'd have to be some incredible innovation to overcome increased regulation around zoning and dwelling construction generally, NIMBYism, financialization of everything, and a preference shift towards living in land-scarce cities (urban population up ~145% since 1950).
1: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...
Meanwhile the baby is essentially a net drain on productivity, whereas an immigrant is not.
To your point about phase-shifting though, I think that's a definite possibility, but relies on preferences of each community, and how they change by generation.
Urbanization is not solely driven by immigrants, but how likely are immigrants to move into lower density housing when they have kids? What about their kids? And their kids, etc? And compare that to non-immigrant (or non-recently immigrated) preferences.
The relative productivity of babies and immigrants is not of interest to me in talking about housing preference, but you're correct that babies don't directly add much to GDP for the first two decades.
You take half the land left in the county for construction and build 5 mil mansions with ridiculous garden acrage instead of more affordable houses. You've now constrained yourself in the number of affordable homes you can build in your county in the future, as land is finite. Maybe you took a few k's off the 10 mil mansions for a short while. Congratulations.
We only build high-end housing in CA because it's wildly expensive to build housing at all. It's especially expensive exactly because the cost of the "affordable" (subsidized) housing that is required for most of these developments has to be passed to the home buyers, not the general public (who should be funding subsidized housing), which means the housing will be wildly expensive regardless.
Again, the idea that building "high end" (market rate) housing does nothing is just wrong. It's part of an approach that honestly deals with the problem of public housing funding, as will as market rates. The if we want the market to start producing housing for the middle class (and we should want that), we'll need to make it inexpensive and accessible to build so that normal people can redevelop their homes, we take the delta in property values, and use that money to fund public housing for those people most in need.
Not sure anyone said this. The parent said it does nothing to solve homelessness and unless the homeowners are housing homeless people in their mansions, I think they're by and large correct. And you still have to contend with the luxury homes taking away future building potential by occupying a ridiculous amount of finite land that a county has available.
People call it a housing crisis for a reason. You don't solve a crisis by championing something by arguing "hey, it's not nothing" anymore than you would attempt to solve a famine crisis by dripping a couple of drops of water in a few malnourished kids' mouthes.
I look at metrics to arrive at my opinions. Things like the difference between the number of new housing per capita in various cities in California compared to Austin, Texas. Things like the R^2 when you do a linear regression of the amount of new housing per capita against changes in rental inflation.
The housing I was describing as plentiful is a mixture of existing housing as either standalone or fewer than 5 units.
$60k for a house, near jobs, USA. Anybody with half a brain and a little brawn can do what I did, if they can come up with what would be a down-payment on a house in a coastal area. Although I admit, it would be much easier for most just to whine on the internet while watching others do what they say is impossible .
And people discover why CA's building codes are so onerous after the first earthquake knocks over their self-built house. Homes and offices built to current codes are designed to survive a Ritcher 7.0 earthquake with minimal to no damage. People don't even get out of bed for anything below a Ritcher 5. According to Caltech's earthquake tracker (https://scedc.caltech.edu/recent/Maps/Los_Angeles.html, L.A. has had almost 3 dozen earthquakes in the last 3 days alone (the biggest was a 2.8)...and nobody noticed. (For comparison, a 5.x earthquake caused several billions in damage in Washington D.C.; comparable earthquakes have caused so little damage in SoCal it's impossible to find numbers. Fracking-related 2.x earthquakes have caused hundreds of millions in damage in the Midwest, but in L.A., even pets sleep through something that weak.)
> $60k for a house
Where did you build the house? Presuming it's on land you own, how did you come to own the land? If you purchased it, the purchase amount should be included in the cost. If you did not purchase it, consider how lucky you are.
Edit to reply to the dead reply:
I do see the context of this being on already-owned land so my point is moot. Apologies for that. (For what it's worth, I'm not really convinced by the fact that you can get free land where nobody wants to live but that's another matter.)
Remember that 25% of unauthorized immigrants live in California, mostly in the south. Last year, California made them eligible for Medicaid for health care (MediCal). It probably is attractive that people there can get health care and providers can get reimbursed.
People do live in LA, and they expect to be able to do things like shop at a grocery store and buy their coffee at a Starbucks.
Therefore, there's a need for people to work at such jobs.
If those jobs don't pay enough to afford to live in LA, that means there's a structural problem that needs to be solved, one way or another, and individual choices (like "I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.
There's a huge gap between "I can't afford to buy a $700,000 house" and "I live on the streets" though. Renting is an option, renting (or buying) and having room mates is an option. Not living in Beverly Hills is an option etc.
> I will move away from LA") will never be enough to fix it.
I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is. People want to be a hair stylist in LA instead of North Dakota because of the high population density and general wealthiness of the population. During covid, we saw an exodus of people out of the HCoL areas *because* the "non essential" jobs they relied on also moved out (not clear which came first, but the point remains). So generally yeah, if you can't get your hair cut in LA because all the stylists moved out of the city, you'll either commute, or move where everyone else did (which I guess is gentrification in a nutshell)
Either way. I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here
Sure. But that's not what I was talking about. I'm saying if it is very difficult or impossible for an average grocery store clerk to find an apartment in LA where they can live what most people would consider a fairly normal life—ie, living alone or with a small number of roommates, each with their own bedroom or sharing one with an actual partner—then that's a systemic failure, not an individual one.
> I disagree - people generally go towards where the money is.
Right. That's part of the system that we're working within.
What I'm saying is that individual choices, like "LA is too expensive; I'll move somewhere else" do not solve the problem. As in, yes, that individual is no longer dealing with the unaffordability of housing in LA, but housing in LA is still unaffordable.
> I don't think the author is talking about the average starbucks employee here
I mean, the author is clearly satirizing the position of an upper-middle-class person, but the problem they're highlighting is absolutely one that Starbucks workers in high-cost-of-living areas face.
This is one of the key underlying problems that doesn't get enough attention. And the current Admin's policies are only making it worse.
The next false argument is saying ”by the time the 50s babies were moving out, the population was higher so the ratio of new homes needed was not as dire”, as if the infants of the 1970s could provide construction labor
Ask anyone how to make cheap housing though. No one has a convincing answer. I'm convinced that it's the right question.
A U.S. default would spike interest rates, crash bond markets, trigger a credit freeze, and destroy consumer confidence. Mortgages would become unaffordable. Mass foreclosures and job losses would crush demand. Asset fire sales would follow. Housing prices would collapse.
This would also reshuffle assets, so speculators and highly leveraged people would be punished instead of being rewarded.
It will also cleanup the situation for future generations so kids won't have to be under extreme debt to pay back in some way to government, because the older people lived above their means.
With zero zoning, there's no telling how bad the capsule to bathroom ratio would be, which would make them unlivable, but as a thought experiment, it says that there is some price point where it's possible, so the real question is to find what's practical. If the choice is between a plastic tent exposed to the elements with no water, sewage or heating/AC, electricity, and an uncomfortably small hotel room with a shared bathroom, I'd rather the hotel room.
You can police things, but it’s not an easy problem. Where do you draw the line? Zero tolerance? As soon as someone has an angry outburst, or is caught with drugs, they’re back on the streets? Then you get back where you started pretty quickly.
Lots of people that went to shelters prefer the streets because of several issues with people in the shelter. Violence, substance abuse, theft, etc. It's not like they prefer to be on the streets but sometimes that's the best option.
I'm not saying that this is the case for everyone on the streets; I'm saying that it is a fact that it happens and some people prefer the streets over shelters because of that.
For instance, move to Cleveland Ohio. Median home price is $173k. Rent is also cheap.
I don't know, make it work. Whats the alternative? Stay in a city and sleep on the street because you don't want to figure out a bus schedule?
Not to mention your entire support network and your friends are still there.
If you've already been evicted then getting anybody to rent to you is extremely difficult. You are going to need not only the first month of rent but also a deposit at this rental in some other city. And it is going to be hard to get a job right away in your new city. Oh, and maybe you have kids who need to be fed.
Where is this bridge money coming from to make this move work? And what happens if it doesn't work?
As far as going somewhere else, the problem is accessibility of resources for the unhoused. Many municipalities don't like the idea of random people going to their town and using the benefits from that town, you have to have lived in that town for many years and ostensibly contributed taxes while you were able to work. So if you were previously housed in LA/NYC, your best bet to getting services is to stay there because having been housed there previously gets you moved up on the list for housing.
See e.g. https://www.statista.com/chart/32585/change-in-median-rent-a...
I guess this is the heart of the debate though - is homelessness caused literally by not having a home? And bonus question - would changing zoning laws as OP suggest solve this?
I'm arguing no - more often than not there are contributing factors other than mental health/abuse/drugs that cause homelessness to be your only option that wouldn't be solved by someone giving you keys. Most obviously - food, utilities, is the house close enough to work that you can walk there, who is paying for maintenance of the house, will you be housed with people that are actually homeless because of mental health issues - and will they do things that cause your own mental health to be impacted etc.
There's certainly land within close proximity to Toronto that could be used if there were political will. Georgetown is closer than Bletchley Park and already has a (terrible) train connection. Nobleton is like 10km from Vaughan, well within easy reach.
If you look at other Canadian cities there are even easier wins. Calgary has empty land (not parks, not reservation) within 8km of downtown. Winnipeg is practically a model city for this kind of treatment. Vancouver and Montreal are the only obviously difficult ones due to their geography.
You have to build something self sustaining and that requires jobs in the new city. You can't just have a connection to an existing city. You need an industry or institution or something there to attract workers and the workers to support those workers.
People commute from Canterbury to London, which is > 50 miles. But they have over 100 trains a day, many of them high speed.
Reasonable commute has a different definition for different people. Some people don't commute for work, so two hours to city center is fine if they only go a few times a year. Some only commute for work a couple times a week and an hour and a half sucks, but is doable if the housing is better enough on whatever dimension. Some will be able to move their job to the new location.
If the new town has appropriate zoning and desires, a handful of companies in the city center may setup offices there to reduce office costs and attract workers that are in the periphery, instead of making everyone go into the city center.
This definitely happens around Toronto, just from looking at the density of roads on Google Maps. There's plenty of pockets of density in lines out from Toronto, and there's also several named places where there's no clear boundary between the names (there probably is at other levels of detail).
The actual materials cost of a house, you can build one for $60k no problem and absolute shit-tons of cheap land near jobs (ex: unemployment extremely low in the Dakotas, cheap land, high demand for homeless-tier labor in the fields in bumfucklandia as ICE deports illegals making farmers desperate for anybody).
I don't know why Americans keep saying we look down on you for your "race problems," but we do not. Generally speaking, we look down on you for manufacturing race problems for politics as a team sport. We have our own race problems.
Which we don’t do.
What you need to understand is that race problems in the US are very complex because of our history and diversity. We have people from all over the world here, truly. And it’s not small percentages.
In comparison, most European nations are much more homogeneous. And, no offense, but y’all are not handling it as well as you should be given your position. The amount of extreme racism I hear from Europeans especially in regards to immigration is repugnant. Immigration which is comparatively quite low.
As is the case with the n-word.
I'm not policing anything (obviously, since I'm not in any position of authority) - I am however pointing it out since I've come across people that truly didn't know.
I don't think it's a cultural barrier. It's how many humans are generally wired. There are so many problems in the world that if you concern yourself with all of them, you'll be mired in inaction anyway. When you don't have time to help homeless people, you ignore them because to do otherwise would make you feel like a bad person. Pretty simple?
Besides, I don't think it's so simple. Yes, there is an element of luck and society, but there's is also an element of personal responsibility. And only one of those is in the control of the "victim", so I still believe it's harmful to encourage that victim mentality, even when there is truth to it.
What is your personal view on the homeless? What do you do when you see homeless people in the streets?
My view is that we need more housing and cheaper housing. This would do more to help than encouraging homeless people to take “personal responsibility”, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. Is housing only for responsible people? If so, should I be required to leave my apartment and live on the street as due punishment for the irresponsible things that I do on a daily basis? Is there some kind of moral bar you have to pass before you can have a roof over your head? This is nuts. Everyone should have somewhere to live.
When you ignore a homeless person, you are depersonalizing them on some level. If you saw every homeless person as a some or a daughter, a mother or a father, a best friend, a laughing child, a person doing their best, could you really walk by? Probably not. And they were all these things at one point, perhaps not too long ago.
This cultural background makes it very easy for people to look at their own lives and see their successes as their own work, and their failures as bad luck—but then look at other people's lives and see both success and failure as being 100% a product of their own deserving. (When in reality, everyone's successes and failures are a blend of luck and merit, with a pretty heavy emphasis on the luck, especially the luck of what family you were born into.)
I believe that some form of this is pretty common in general simply because that's how people cope with the very fact that homelessness exists in the first place. Like, it's either a massive injustice that pretty much demands that you, personally do something significant about it... or it's "just the way it is", and you can look away. But this latter outlook requires some amount of dehumanization, so people rationalize that the best they can.
The end result is that we’re forced to view the homeless as lesser. We typically throw around words like addict, because we have to. If we admit that there’s homeless people out there who got so based purely on bad luck, that destroys the promise of America.
This isn't about American exceptionalism, because either A) other countries don't have this problem (great!) or B) they do and all the "do it like they do" was just proven wrong as a solution to both the problems or C) they did have this problem and it was solved by these policies - great! The immediate intervention of getting the worst offenders off the street is a temporary solution and housing policy wins long term.
But no matter what there's no reason to push back on two heterogenous solutions because it includes more than just your favorite one.
Like common, this does not passes the smell test. When housing is cheap, mentally ill can pay housing and have easier time getting support to get that housing. Their mental health issue do not escalate so quickly due to lack of sleep and constant danger.
Giving a locking door to an addict is a death sentence. As countless experiments have proven, unsupervised shelters all over California have been literally destroyed by addicts and the mentally unwell. I'm talking faeces on the walls, blood and urine everywhere, horrific attacks in the units, and eventually the place just gets burnt down. So these people need supervised shelter. In a facility. Where they're prevented from harming others and themselves. De-institutionalisation was a huge mistake. There were abuses and they needed reform, but throwing schizophrenics and addicts into the street was not kind or humane, and leaving them there is just as immoral.
Weird.
Tax the purchase not the construction.
If you restrict or punish the purchase of housing via tax policy, you simultaneously restrict the sale of it by original constructors, which serves as an impediment to that original construction.
It's literally what the person I was responding to said:
>>But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.
>>This does NOTHING to help homelessness...
Given the Prop 13 tax environment. Building expensive homes is a necessary condition to facilitate local tax revenues necessary to build public housing.
I would never argue that just allowing high-end homes is enough. I'm saying that allowing high-end homes is also part of the holistic solution. OP is the one saying that it does nothing. It does not do nothing. It's not a "one or another" thing... we need to build more homes at every income level, and there is no way to do that without largely deregulating the housing environment so that developers cannot simply all target the luxury market.
This is funny, I literally quoted the exact line you quoted.
In good faith, let me perfectly clear:
As I said in my previous comment and you requoted: Their original comment said it does nothing to help homelessness (my emphasis, again).
They did not claim it does absolutely nothing at all to help the housing pool in some little way, which I believe are the words your are putting in their mouth.
You implied in your original comment that they were also saying the latter, and by doing so, you moved the discussion from homelessness to whether or not an action helps in some small way to bring home prices down. The latter may help the upper middle class housing situation perhaps but is not guarenteed to allieviate homelessness in anyway and may in fact do nothing to help it, or at least, that point still has to be argued. That is the distinction.
>I'm saying allowing high-end homes is part of the solution.
Yes I understand that. Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.
Also in good faith. My entire point is that housing is an ecosystem. To say that "homelessness" is somehow independent of this housing ecosystem is to focus on the blemish, not the disease.
If we literally build enough houses to house the current homeless people and did nothing else, in a few years time we would have more homeless people to house.
>Somehow though the luxury homes that were promised are always built, but if anything fails to materialize it's the affordable housing that was promised--the very thing the high-end homes were supposed to finance.
I mean, this is an easy thing to say, but is a very complicated in actuality, and I go to the meetings in SF and I know exactly what is happening.
The "luxury homes", really, mostly just market-rate homes (if you want real luxury homes in San Francisco, go to Pacific Heights where you will bay $10M, not $1.5M), they are allowed to be built, and the vast majority of the do have deed restricted "affordable" homes attached, these are quickly distributed via lottery. However, one of the reason why these "luxury" homes are so expensive as that the costs of those deed restricted homes must be included in the market rate homes. This is just how it's done in CA.
The public housing in SF is constantly plagued by both funding problems and political problems. The funding problems are mainly that (1) for the reasons in Ezra Klein's Abundance, since they are public projects, the cost at least twice as much to build as private developments, and (2) the cities promising these homes have not secured funding when the promises are made, and finally (3) while financing is being secured, the spaces get put to alternative use that local residence value and then when it comes time to actually build the housing, it is not politically viable because they residents will lose the fun thing they have had since the project started.
I feel I don't need to explain point (1) because Ezra Klein literally just wrote a book about it.
Point (2) is just a regular part of politics, and in SF it's an insane political position, where the Progressive candidates both promise housing without securing financing and then blame Moderate politicians (especially at the state level) for not carving out state funding for SF specific projects. This is just good politics when you're looking for a villain, because you get to win both with the promises, and the broken promises. It's also the reason I kick and scream so much about how actual luxury housing is extremely effective at bringing in new revenues for public housing because even with insane laws like Prop 13 that are slowly starving our cities of tax revenue, building new, dense high cost housing dramatically increases revenues that can be used to develop public housing that can otherwise not be built. Talk is cheap, tying new property tax revenue to public housing development actually gets things done.
Point (3) refers to the iconic failure that is San Francisco's "Biergarten" housing site. The city delayed development of the housing site, and leased the land for alternative use, in this case, the Biergarten outdoor bar was started and became successful. Fifteen years later there is no housing and the bar is still there. Why? Because closing the bar to build housing, public or otherwise, is too politically unpopular now because while the housing is needed, it is effectively a net loss for existing residents. I specifically fought against a similar proposal for 730 Stanyan public housing project at neighborhood meetings where residents were kicking and screaming that we should put the land to "good use" while the development stalled, specifically because the site was promised for housing without any financing in place. Thankfully the proposals were rejected, and the public housing project will soon be open to the public.
I'm extremely passionate about housing policy. Housing should be approaching the cost of production of housing, like in Vienna. Instead, because we treat housing as a kind of piecemeal project where the whole goal is to solve some specific need, we miss the point entirely. We should be building as much housing as is practically possible, specifically to drive the cost of housing as close to the cost of production. We can have aesthetic concerns here, but folks who want low density should not be rent-seeking in major cities. That's exactly what suburban environments are there to serve. If we care about the welfare of our middle-class, lower-classes, and homeless, we need to prioritize every aspect of the housing ecosystem, and the means we must build luxury housing to fund public housing. We should be approving every single luxury housing project.
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Biergarten project background (from 2015!): https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing-crisis-pits-hayes-va...
Similar proposal from HANC for 730 Stanyan: https://www.hanc-sf.org/meetings/24-home/623-hanc-continues-...
What, you downvoted to disagree? Look:
"We asked many members of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities how they preferred to describe themselves. While some find the term “Gypsy” to be offensive, many stakeholders and witnesses were proud to associate themselves with this term and so we have decided that it is right and proper to use it, where appropriate, throughout the report." Women and Equalities Committee, UK Parliament. 2019.
Of course that was six years ago, maybe it's a slur now. Or maybe it's a slur to you, but not to them. Or it won't be slur tomorrow, or it's a slur everywhere but not on Tuesdays and except in Scotland. Socially constructed, see? Not factual.
Possibly nothing? If you have free housing for anyone who wants it then you'll have some residue of homeless people, but not nearly as many as there are now.
I wouldn't mind working in e.g. Ireland if a furnished apartment was part of the offer.
... which Ireland proceeded not to do. Then the new prime minister went onto TV declaring what a great success all this was for Ireland (... while ignoring that this is literally stealing money from other EU countries), and how they intend to continue this and were putting some of the money into a new "Irish" sovereign wealth fund (isif.ie) that has since used the money to hire the zero-experience-and-suspiciously-young-for-such-positions-but-totally-awesome investement team [2] composed of members of his own party that have been tasked with investing in Irish x business (please replace x with "the taoseach's new business" when making investment decisions and leave it out when publishing in the paper)
For unknown reasons, there is nothing on the isif.ie site about what they effectively do: steal money from EU hospitals, schools, pensions ... to personally enrich large US companies, and of course themselves. This is also missing from the government speeches on how fantastic they are.
But do not worry. Meanwhile in Brussels and Strasbourg, the requisition for a meeting about the approval of the color of the bikeshed (so called because when you call the place where you park your armoured Audi A9 motorcade a bikeshed chances of reelection go up dramatically. It IS, of course, a garage that was built where a park with a playground used to be) where then the request for the beginning of the process to requisition a meeting room to discuss who will make the agenda for discussing a meeting room for the actual issue is making great progress!
[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-finance/press-releases/m...
Can you provide a source for this assertion? AFAIK, we've implemented the 15% rate (but the profit shifting part died in the US senate, which Ireland is not responsible for).
> the zero-experience-and-suspiciously-young-for-such-positions-but-totally-awesome investement team [2]
They all look to be 40+ from the linked page (except for one lady who looks to be late 20's/early 30s).
> omposed of members of his own party that have been tasked with investing in Irish x business (please replace x with "the taoseach's new business" when making investment decisions and leave it out when publishing in the paper)
I really hate Fianna Fail (the Taoiseach's party) but Micheal Martin has never been corrupt. He is literally the most boring person in the world, but he's not corrupt.
> For unknown reasons, there is nothing on the isif.ie site about what they effectively do: steal money from EU hospitals, schools, pensions ... to personally enrich large US companies, and of course themselves. This is also missing from the government speeches on how fantastic they are.
Look, I get that this is tax avoidance in some sense, but it's worth noting that most US tech companies are booking all non-US revenue in Ireland (taxed at 15%) rather than Bermuda (taxed at 0%) for about a decade now.
Do you think that Ireland should have had to bail out banks with a debt exceeding the country's GDP? Was this moral? And then basically be put into controls on the part of the EU (who are the people preventing them from burning the bondholders).
Ireland is basically the most indebted country per head in the world at this point (the GDP looks better because of the tax dodging multinationals).
And lets be honest, the same multinationals would have found a different country to launder money through if Ireland wasn't there.
To answer the question above about properties in Dublin, this has a number of reasons:
1. post 2007 (the crash) housebuilding stopped for about a decade 2. Over the past decade, Ireland has seen significant immigration, particularly in the cities which has driven up prices 3. A zoning/planning system which is very similar to California and a culture where people object to the opening of an envelope 4. Lots and lots of investment in rental properties which pushes up house prices, which pushes up rents, which pushes up house prices.
Basically a lot of the above are problems of success, which Ireland is bad at dealing with because we've basically never had any success before.
EDIT: It's fascinating that I'm downvoted for this. I wonder if the voters also live in Dublin?
But it's also significant infrastructural deficits (water and power) that are downstream of incredible debt taken on by the government as a result of the 2007 crash (as well as a planning system where dogs have the right to object to planning applications).
Please don't kid around, we know exactly how the government facilitates the migrations. If it weren't a biggie, why are there protests happening on the streets of Dublin?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_anti-immigration_prote...
As it happens, I am building a house now, and an subject to all those regulations. It added maybe 10% to the total. But in real terms housing price has gone up far that that more since the 1970's.
Why? The reason is fairly mundane really: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s... Combine that with modern houses being air-conditioned, need to garage 2 cars, have stone benches and multiple TV's (none of which are mandated by regulation), and you get to the real reason.
It has nothing to do with the regulations, yet people blame it anyway.
We just need to build affordable housing. You would think given there is a demand for it, capitalism would make it happen. Yet it isn't happening. If you want to blame the government for something, not putting the regulations in place to create a market place to ensure it does happen would where I'd be looking. I doubt they would have much to do with reducing building safety, or opening up unsuitable land, and more to do with somehow arranging the financing so that it becomes attractive to build smaller, plain, boring looking cookie cutter houses.
* 88% of California jurisdictions have a minimum lot size of 5,000 sq ft or more
* Prior to 2024, jurisdictions in California required a minimum of two spots per single family home, or one to two spots per unit in a multifamily. California created a law to address this in 2024, but jurisdictions in most states still have similar requirements.
* Most jurisdictions in the US have restrictions around density - many only allowing single family homes or strictly limiting the number of multifamily units.
Other countries, including Australia, have similar restrictions. Google says the cost of adding central AC to a home is between $7k and $12k, so likely not a primary driver of the increase in cost of housing. "Multiple TVs" are definitely not a significant driver in increased housing costs.
And two parking spots per single family home sounds in line with a California household having close to 2 cars. Again, 2 cars is overkill in the city, but in suburbs with both parents working it's almost a necessity.
Your final point has no figures to back it up at all.
While TV's, AC, plantation blinds, stone bench tops, multiple shower roses, 2 dish washers, plumbed in fridge, and so on each don't add much individually the a modern house today is downright opulent compared to the one I grew up in decades ago. Add that to them doubling in floor area per person housed, and you get to the real reason why costs have more than doubled.
All of that follows from one thing - only rich people have the money to build homes, and they build homes rich people like. Those houses are big. They sit on large green lots. They are fenced. They can garage at least 2 cars. They are expensive, and they want similar houses around them, so they, the people who live there, petition for laws like the ones you mention. And they get them, reasonably enough.
To me it looks like you're blaming the government for delivering what the constituents asked for. Blaming a democratically elected government for passing laws the majority wants isn't going to stop the majority from re-electing them next year. You need to do something more constructive - like come up with reasons why it's in everyones interest (rich and poor alike) to ensure a single mother with 2 can be housed, and them work on solutions for that.
This infatuation in the USA for blaming the government they elected for all their woes is downright odd. Blame generally doesn't get you very far.
My city is currently facing this where the interest rate hikes, build tax hikes and falling prices have created a perfect storm of vastly reduced housing starts.
This is saying "building is expensive because building is expensive". Why is it expensive and how do we address it to make it cheaper?
Build less and worse per unit. Share foundations, roofs, walls, and common areas. Build less square footage per unit. Build less fancy per square foot (cheaper kitchens and baths). Use all standard materials and finishes. Install low-end appliances and HVAC. Everything cookie-cutter; no per-unit changes. Use less land per unit (and maybe less expensive land overall). Have no private outdoor space (or just a tiny balcony).
That’s not well aligned to how to maximize profits from a given unit though (fairly obviously and by intentional design).
Care to explain why I either don't count or don't really exist?
I mean, I guess that's a position you could take, but it seems like a pretty extreme one.
Can we stop calling reform abolishment? I know it's more fun to call it abolishment because it triggers the people you disagree with, but it's entirely counter-productive.
I'm just getting so tired of these constant motte and bailey fallacies in US political discourse.
People talking about "prison abolition" aren't talking about reform when they do.
Some people talking about prison abolition (but far from all, or even the majority) might also be willing to accept reform as an intermediate step or compromise, and might engage in discussion about the shape of reform that might be acceptable in that role, but that's secondary too, and not the focus of, their advocacy for abolition.
You may not respect it enough to take it seriously, but it is a position that some socialists hold.
Of course, one does have to be careful with one's definitions when talking about "capitalism", because I've seen people mean everything from "the current, specific, late-stage capitalist system and nothing else" to "the basic concept of exchanging currency for goods and services" and everything in between. Personally, I'm in favor of abolishing the former and some of the stuff in the middle, but I'm skeptical that even in a fully post-scarcity society we would abandon the need for the latter.
As for US hegemony...I think that the current situation demonstrates very well why it's a serious problem. We're a single point of failure, and the polarization here has been rising for decades, leaving something like this all but inevitable. Indeed, even if someone like Trump had not come along and normalized hatred and fascism, we would still have likely been in a situation where every 4-8 years the US's policies on a wide range of things flipped violently back and forth.
No; while I fear that the transition will be very rocky, the world will be better off if a broader coalition of nations can collectively take up the role of attempting to enforce the notion of universal human rights across the globe. While they're at it, maybe they'll finally be able to get the US to agree to things like the UN Convention on Rights of the Child, and the authority of the International Criminal Court.
But whatever you gotta tell yourself to excuse the mistreatment.
https://www.google.com/search?q=current+tax+rate+for+multina...
> They all look to be 40+ from the linked page
Not really. 30, some even less. Average age is probably 40. So indeed, suspiciously young the positions they hold. How many leaders of a large investment fund are under 60 at least?
> Look, I get that this is tax avoidance in some sense, but
(it is)
> Do you think that Ireland should have had to bail out banks with a debt exceeding the country's GDP?
(yes, that is, after all, the promise a country or anyone makes when they borrow money. Alternatively you could NOT bail them out)
> And lets be honest, the same multinationals would have found a different country to launder money through if Ireland wasn't there ...
I couldn't make my point any better than you did here. This is stealing, simply because it is not Irish tax revenue.
> Basically a lot of the above are problems of success, ...
Enabling tax avoidance, especially after signing international treaties that you would do the opposite is not success.
From the second line of the AI overview. I mean, seriously?
So the 12.5% rate remains for irish headquartered companies, NOT multinationals. And personally I'm OK with that (cries as he pays 52% marginal).
> Not really. 30, some even less. Average age is probably 40. So indeed, suspiciously young the positions they hold. How many leaders of a large investment fund are under 60 at least?
You and I clearly have different ideas of what older people look like. They mostly look like the kind of middle-aged people I work with. And I think you're missing that most of those roles are pretty low-level, the investment fund is very very small by investment fund standards.
> (yes, that is, after all, the promise a country or anyone makes when they borrow money. Alternatively you could NOT bail them out)
So, the Irish government tried (repeatedly) to renegotiate those deals. The bondholders were (mostly) fine with it (as they'd bought the bonds later). The ECB and the IMF refused to allow this to happen, for fear of contagian. This lead to basically all capital projects (housing/water etc) being cut, and basically the entire public service taking massive pay cuts. And remember, at this point the multinationals were paying approximately zero tax, so people like me (higher rate taxpayers) funded all of this.
And as a result, we have huge infrastructural deficits and a housing crisis (where this thread got started).
> This is stealing, simply because it is not Irish tax revenue.
This is a ridiculous argument, who does the tax revenue "belong" to? If the US charges Shell taxes on their US activity is that stealing? If the Feds charge Shell tax revenue on their Texas activities is that stealing? If Shell pay all their corporate tax in Delaware is that stealing?
I'm making the assumption that you are Dutch (based on previous comments). Was the Dutch East India company stealing from India? Is that also against your moral code? Do you plan to make reparations to the Indians about this?
> Enabling tax avoidance, especially after signing international treaties that you would do the opposite is not success.
Again, on the assumption that you are Dutch, do you realise that most of the schemes avoiding all of the tax (the double irish with a dutch sandwich) involved your country? Was that OK? How come you haven't changed your tax laws?
Note: i think there's a really interesting question here around where revenue "should" be taxed so even if you're annoyed at the rest of the comment, I'd appreciate your thoughts on that.
> So the 12.5% rate remains for irish headquartered companies, NOT multinationals. And personally I'm OK with that (cries as he pays 52% marginal).
And what IS a "multinational"? It is a collection of country-limited companies owned by a single global entity. So in other words, these days almost EVERY multinational IS an "Irish headquartered company". Meta (Facebook) Ireland is the European headquarters. Amazon Ireland is ...
And if you look at the stats, the 12.5% is exactly what Ireland charges multinationals, because of the above reason. If you look at who pays this, it's American pharma companies, US internet companies, ... it's multinationals.
> You and I clearly have different ideas of what older people look like
Yes we do seem to. When it comes to leadership of large funds, the people usually look like mummies.
> The ECB and the IMF refused to allow this to happen, for fear of contagian ...
Actually true, kind of. Ireland demanded the whole EU lowers it's corporate tax rate, together with Ireland and the whole EU said "fuck off". Then Ireland just ignored it's obligations, made a lot of money off that, and called it a success.
As a result, the future seems to be that all payments will be taxed when they happen. Any kind of payment, across any border. You want to send 5$ to another EU country? You have to declare what for and it will be fully taxed during the money transmission, in 20 different ways at least. Right now that happens for VAT, but it will happen for VAT, various taxes, company tax, profit tax, "top up" tax, ... That's what they're negotiating, that's what's coming. It will be a total disaster, but if Ireland (and others, true) keep just violating treaties everyone will violate treaties (not just tax treaties) and there is simply no other choice.
> And as a result, we have huge infrastructural deficits and a housing crisis ...
Which Ireland is solving by causing an even bigger problem everywhere else in the EU.
> who does the tax revenue "belong" to?
The consensus of everyone, including the Irish state is that income should be taxed where it is earned. Which is the same reason most financial analysts call Ireland's revenue "artificial": it has nothing to do with Ireland. It comes from the large EU economies, and the UK. France, UK, Germany, Italy. THAT is where Irish GDP is produced, and it is taxed in Ireland, which goes against international treaties Ireland signed. That's the point.
So Ireland's government has signed (more than once) that this is illegal ... and does it anyway.
> Was the Dutch East India company stealing from India?
In my opinion, yes. EVEN by the standards of the time they were. Also from the Dutch citizens btw: they paid no tax, because they were owned by the royal family. But it happened a long time ago ...
They crashed and burned, by the way, the Dutch East India company, by the way, crashed and burned when foreign states started "enforcing tax" (well ... really just outright preventing the system the Dutch East India company operated under through outright military force, which resulted in Wars, that of course were NOT paid for by the company, or the royal family for that matter. We paid for them. Not even just the Dutch)
> Dutch tax law ...
Dutch tax law still follows the treaties the Netherlands signed. Corporate tax in the Netherlands is pretty high (26%, and because dividends are taxed, the effective tax rate is closer to 40%)
Houses are also around 1.5 times the size with more bathrooms per bedroom in 2025 vs 1975, so “build less square footage and less fancy per square foot” isn’t at all “giving up so much that was standard 50 years ago”, but rather returning toward the standard of 50 years ago.
However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.
Some form of restriction of movement will be required for frequent violent offenders. You may abolish the old system since you believe it's rotten to the core and you may call whatever replaces it something other than prison, but it will still be prison.
"Prison" (carceral punishment) does not encompass all possible restrictions on personal freedom and movement. Even in systems with carceral punishment, other restrictions on freedom and movement are used for some situations, that do not involve incarceration.
It does not help your cause to adopt a motto that espouses a more extreme position than you actually hold and both your supporters and detractors will feel betrayed when they learn your position is actually more moderate.
Land cost depends on the location. You can find an acre of rural land for $1K. Or an 1/8th acre for $1M or more in a city.
For a cheap parcel of land in an unincorporated area with no building permit process, but with existing grid power, you can buy and build quite reasonably. (There are several YouTube channels covering builds like this.) In these areas, I wouldn’t overlook existing properties as well.
So what? You say "DEI" or "woke" and people assume you mean racism against white people. You say "toxic masculinity" or "feminism" and people assume you hate all men. "Pro choice" means you choose to murder babies. Transgender people are pedophiles and fetishists. Immigration is invasion. Atheists are incapable of morality. Opposition to Israeli Zionism is antisemitism. Any economic system besides free market capitalism is socialism, all socialism is communism and all communism leads to the death camps. Democracy is the worst system except for all of the others. By the way did you the Nazis were socialist, and BLM was a violent Marxist army that burned entire cities to the ground?
Most people (especially Americans) have been indoctrinated by society to be unable to interpret any radical or leftist concept in any but the most extreme bad faith way possible, so they don't have to take it seriously. Their minds are protected by a cloud of thought-terminating cliches. Despite this, one doesn't let the opposition control one's language or police one's tone, because that just leads to one's own argument being co-opted and undermined.
The position being described here begins with "abolish the prisons," it just doesn't end with that. But that isn't reform, and if one called it "reform" just to be civil, no one would even bother to listen. Even getting people to consider the nature of the systems they live within and benefit from enough to say "abolish the prisons? That's crazy talk" is getting them to examine their biases more deeply than they probably have in their entire lives.
That is true, there is a concerted effort to control the narrative and define terms that are left vague with the most unfavorable or extreme interpretation. This is possible is because these terms are left so open to interpretation, however the vagueness is not an accident rather it is fully intentional.
The real reason that slogans like "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" are so vaguely defined is because America's two-party system demands "big tent" politics. Both parties need slogans that will unite both extremists and moderates on their side of the political spectrum. The fact that "prison abolishment" can be interpreted as both "fundamental reform" and "all prisoners go free" is a feature, not a bug.
Most politicians will actively avoid giving a solid definition to these slogans, because they know that when they do they will a lose voters. So be aware that adopting vague slogans is to your own detriment too, because the people you think support your position may not actually share your interpretation.