The high cost of housing and commercial real estate in SF, NYC, Boston, DC, LA, London, ....all have the same underlying cause which was fixed in Japan by the Japanese federal government.
It is a market inefficiency caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status which creates a politically induced artificial scarcity in housing (scarcity = rising prices). These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump. It is wrong, and Japan has fixed the problem removing zoning density restrictions at the local level. The result, in 2014 there were 140,000 homes built in Tokyo compared with about 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC.
Economist David Ricardo wrote about this phenomenon of "rent-seeking" about 200 years ago related to the Corn Laws. Corn Laws taxed the import of all grains which benefited not farmers but landowners. Ricardo joined Parliament and managed to overturn the "rent-seeking" law.
The solution is a federal law in the US following the example of Japan.
I understand the desire to convert a discussion of homelessness to a discussion of high house prices, but homelessness is not caused by high house prices. 99% percent of the population cannot afford to buy a house in Manhattan. That doesn't mean that they are living on the streets there. They move to where they can afford to live, and the U.S. has many areas where housing is quite cheap. If you are able to maintain a steady income, then you can also maintain housing. But if you are not able to maintain a steady income, then there is no price at which you can afford to buy a house. Even if free, you would not be able to pay property taxes, maintenance, or utilities. San Francisco has a high homelessness problem because of the mild climate, large amounts of city services, and the liberal attitude.
The homeless people here expect and receive a steady income from people on the street as well city services. I remember the first time I was in San Francisco and someone came up to me and demanded money for food. He said "I don't eat meat!". I was stunned, both at a stranger coming up to me and asking for money and also about why they can be so picky about their diet. I gave him $1. He looked at me like I insulted him and said "Salads cost more than meat". The homeless in San Francisco are really quite aggressive in comparison to other cities, and just like the rest of my fellow San Franciscans, there is a strong feeling of entitlement. There is just no price at which the number of homeless will decrease -- only when we start paying the homeless to live in houses will that happen.
The only thing I can think of is fully funded group homes that are mandatory to live in -- basically prisons with nice amenities and educational programs that you can graduate out of based on demonstrating a track record of being able to provide for yourself. Because as long as we give people the option of living on the street, there is a certain small subset of the population that will prefer to do that over the other options available to them, and San Francisco will be home to an outsized share of that population.
but homelessness is not caused by high house prices.
I have had an actual college class on homelessness and public policy. There is no single cause of homelessness, but sky high housing costs definitely contribute to homelessness. There has been a serious and growing lack of affordable housing in the U.S. going back decades, about 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s at a time when they weren't really needed for demographic reasons but they were never replaced, and average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped. Meanwhile, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for years.
No, high housing costs do not single handedly and directly cause homelessness. But that's because there is no single cause of homelessness. But high housing costs are absolutely a contributing factor.
Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.
It's nice that you've took an actual college class on homelessness. I've logged about 10 years in volunteering for programs to feed the homeless, and have shared my home with homeless people for almost 7 years (until I stopped). I've talked to many, many homeless people and every single one of them could have stayed in a shelter but chose not to because of the restrictions on personal freedom. Every single one had some sort of serious mental issue, often compounded by physical disabilities, and was simply unable to care for themselves. Every single one had serious attitude problems to where they basically gave up on trying to make it in this society.
Here, I am talking about the chronic homeless, which are the root of the problem. Not families that may need to sleep in the car because they are in between housing or people crashing on couches while they straighten themselves out. I mean people with tents.
The one person I knew the longest was basically camping out around Palo Alto. The reason why you don't see so many homeless in the suburbs is because the Police are fairly effective at driving them out with beatdowns and destroying their property. This is the reality of not forcing them into group living situations -- let them live on the streets creating a lot of quality of life issues or have an unspoken policy of police brutality. So I would say that what we have now is dystopian.
The last homeless man I let live with me I ended up asking to leave, because he was unable to keep steady work. I just asked him to do something, anything -- it didn't have to be full time -- and he could keep the money himself. But he was able bodied and needed to work. I drove him to his job. At the end of the day, he was pretty blunt in telling me that at his age -- he was in his 50s -- he couldn't stand doing menial work and being ordered around by some kid. For him, it was either a high paying job or camping out. So I finally asked him to leave and he's been camping out (assuming he's still alive at this point -- it's been a while).
I think it's cute you took a college class and now understand the issue. But housing costs have nothing to do it. You can today find a place to live in the U.S. for a few hundred a month. No, not in San Francisco or Manhattan or Monaco, but most of the country is incredibly cheap.
Look at rent prices in the middle of the country. For example, in Phoenix, real rental costs have not increased for 30 years. They've been basically flat. But in Phoenix, the homeless don't have the same access to city services as in San Francisco, or NYC.
I have been homeless 5.5 years. I have a chronic illness and two special needs sons that are on the street with me.
We are getting healthier and I have been paying down debt. My student loan was paid off just days ago and things will start getting better for me in July because of that. In fact, they have been getting gradually, slowly better the entire time I have been on the street.
I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I have been interviewed by reporters on 3 different occasions because of it, though, so far, none of that has resulted in a published article promoting my work.
The class I took involved an internship in a homeless shelter in Vacaville and I continued to do volunteer work there after the class ended. I was instrumental in getting them a proper website set up.
I am sorry you are bitter and were never able to figure out how to effectively help people solve the root causes of homelessness in their lives. That is not evidence that I am clueless.
I am not bitter, but I have come to some realizations over the years, one of which is that society, in order to provide us with benefits such as division of labor and higher density living, also comes with obligations, such as paying taxes, obeying zoning laws, not being loud after a certain time, and yes, not sleeping on the street. I knew a woman who had problems with screaming and she ultimately got evicted and became homeless because she couldn't stop shrieking at night. She never understood why "being loud" -- such a simple and benign thing -- was enough to ruin her life. And yet it did, because people need to be able to sleep at night, and there are rules for high density living. People will call the cops, landlords will send notices and ultimately evict you for quality of life issues like shouting at night, if you do it all the time and refuse to get the help needed in order to stop.
There is a very small percentage -- basically 0.03% of the population are chronically homeless -- that are unable or unwilling to meet their obligations. There will always be some Bartlebys with us, who when presented with their obligations as members of a community respond with "I prefer not to". I prefer not to live in the shelter because it's unpleasant. I prefer not to move to where housing is cheaper because this is my home. I prefer not to live in a supervised environment because I like being in control of my life. I prefer not to take this medication that will stop me from screaming because I don't like how tired it makes me feel. And with these Bartlebys the choices are prison, banishment, and forced compliance -- institutionalization. Because a society is not a collection of isolated individuals, it's a web of obligations that are, at heart, mandatory. Some people view this as a dystopian nightmare. They are naive. It is living in a rooted world. From the beginning of civilization if you did not meet the obligations placed on you, the society expelled you, whether by death or banishment. What I don't understand is why people who have no problem enforcing laws banning camping in national parks or forcing people to pay taxes under threat of jail are unwilling to ban camping on the street in a high density city. If you want a nature preserve or other area outside of society in which all the individuals who are unable to comply with our rules can do whatever they want, that's fine. But you will find that with enough people filling up that area, a government will form, a society will form, and you will be back in trouble if you start violating the new expectations placed on you in that new society.
If you aren't bitter, then why the ugly comments like saying "It's cute" that I have taken a class on homelessness and public policy? (That's a rhetorical question. Given your lack of apology, I am not expecting a meaningful answer to it. Consider it food for thought.)
I don't disagree that we shouldn't allow people who are homeless to camp openly on city streets and generally be a public nuisance. I don't do either of those things, so I don't believe it is a given that being homeless must equate to such behavior.
Historically, the more desperately that governments try to control people, the more people find ways around it. This is the origin of Martial Arts. Governments denied the peasants access to weapons, so they learned to use their hands and feet and farming tools as lethal weapons. You couldn't reasonably deny them those things. They needed them in order to produce food for the nation.
I don't agree that imprisoning all homeless people merely for being poor is at all a humane solution. I also don't agree with general trends towards criminalizing behaviors in such a way as to be a kind of Jim Crow law for homeless people. You don't solve this problem by trying to get them to just leave your city and go elsewhere. All that does is shift it around. It doesn't get people off the street.
There is a tremendous housing crisis going on in the U.S. today. Evictions are at very high rates and young people are basically expected to live with roommates because there are almost no spaces suitable for a single, young person to live alone, like there once were. Returning to historical practices of making market rate housing available that single young people can afford on an entry level salary will not solve homelessness, but it will take some of the pressure off.
Homelessness occurs when someone has more problems than solutions. The more solutions we can make available, the more feasible it is for people to make their lives work, even if they have serious personal problems for which there are no ready solutions.
I was born with my medical condition. For many years, I was a full time wife and mom. This gave me a middle class role in society, even though I was actually too sick to hold down a paid position. At some point, I expect to return to a more conventional life. My condition is not curable, but that doesn't mean my life cannot be made to work. It did in the past. It will again in the future, at some point. As the number of problems I have shrinks and the number of solutions I have grows, at some point, it will cross some tipping point.
Let me stop here and thank you for being so generous for a decade of your life. I am sorry it has made you so very cynical. But I don't think your cynicism is actual evidence that more affordable housing cannot play a role in helping get this problem under control.
This is not true. Some homeless people have no money. Others have a social security check and nothing else or a military retirement check and nothing else. Some even have jobs. For people like me, if we could find a decent (not hell hole) place for $200, that would absolutely get us off the street.
I could afford about $400 a month in the near future. I am trying to find a way to get off the street now that my student loan is paid off and that frees up enough money where I could afford that much for shelter in the near future.
Not trying to be critical or anything just curious.
Why not get like a Van with a 300 dollar note?
At least you have shelter and can park near city services.
I'm sure you mean well, but one-off comments from internet strangers are not going to solve my problems. I am solving them. It is just much slower than I would like. I did not comment on my situation in order to solicit advice. I did so in order to make it clear what the basis of my opinions are.
No man I hear you about the homeless who have potential like yourself. Homelessness is a huge trap. I mean I feel like simply providing showers and some sort of basic amenities to help the homeless who are trying to work their way out of it would help enourmously.
But these homeless programs that just keep the homeless subsisting are better than nothing but sill aren't helping the ones who could escape.
I only went to homeless services when I was truly destitute for basically the first six months. If I can find another solution, I do. Most homeless services are incredibly crappy and often counterproductive.
I'm with you. I've been homeless before. I would never use a shelter. But if there had been free showers I would have used them lol. I had to use the shower bus riding around SF. Also, if there had been free toothpaste and soap that would have been nice.
Sorry, I mistook your original query. It was amongst a bunch of such comments and some seemed to not be getting made in good faith.
The super short version is that I don't want to live in a van because I no longer drive due to my medical condition. There are other factors, but that's a big one.
Since you used the word respectful I'll assume that your intent was respectful, but please don't post comments like this to HN.
Unsolicited personal commentary or life advice quickly crosses into incivility. Your comment is way into the red on that. Even if you don't mean such comments as personal attacks, they easily read like it—because of the underlying assumption that you know better about someone else's life than they do—and will almost certainly will land that way with the person(s) whose life you're prescribing. That's bad and leads to worse, so we should all just not do it.
Your knowledge, persoective, and experience are valuable. Overall I appreciate this comment. But condescending to someone who disagreed with you is uncalled for and detracts from the rest of what you're saying.
I'm 52, not 25. That class involved an internship at a homeless center. I did additional volunteer work there after my internship ended. I have been homeless for 5.5 years and I run at least two pertinent websites.
I took that class because I was pursuing a BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing. It was intended as preparation for a Masters in Urban Planning. I was studying in earnest to make a career of solving housing issues. I also have an Certificate in GIS, the equivalent of master's level work.
Contempt and condescension don't belong on Hacker News.
It's difficult to think of ways of combating homelessness. To get them on their feet, you might need to redefine what a job is. A normal job requires some common elements: a shower, the ability to be there on a regular schedule, some productive task to do. But homeless people don't really have the ability to do any of those, except perhaps show up during regular hours.
It's hard to shake the feeling that the only solution is to give them money, and that most of them will just spend it on drugs or alcohol. But that's too heartless of an outlook. Some people who fall into homelessness are just like you or me. When your family connections fail and you have a debilitating illness, homelessness tends to result. And those kinds of people could be pulled out, if only we could figure out how.
There are homeless people that are essentially unsalvageable, though, and it's hard to know what to do with them. No family, no home, but most critically no willingness to help themselves even when given a small opportunity. But they still have friends, and if we focus on helping their friends out of homelessness, they might want to follow.
Just because you can't imagine a solution does not mean there is none. Steve Jobs was homeless for a time. Richard Stallman was sometimes 'between apartments' while working on his open source stuff and had trouble getting a voter registration card because of it until some big publication listed his maker space as his address and then the registrar of voters was finally willing to accept that answer.
I am homeless and have had a class on homelessness and these are two of my websites:
I also started a Reddit recently called Housing Works and I have various related little blogs, like Project SRO. I am still kind of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, but the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide is a thing I started for myself in order to keep track of useful info I needed while homeless in downtown San Diego and I abandoned it after I left downtown. It was not updated at all for six months and then I realized it had organic traffic. It has the most organic traffic of any site I run because there is need for the info.
A lot of people who have spent time homeless are ashamed of that fact and don't volunteer that information normally. Even those who are not ashamed and not actively hiding it, well, you don't know just from looking at someone that they used to be homeless. Lots of people do get off the street. It is not a permanent situation for everyone.
However, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for some years now and it does concern me that there are larger forces at play here that are causing it to be more of an uphill battle than it used to be.
The issue is chronic homelessness, not people "in between jobs" or couch crashing. Those aren't the ones defecating on city streets and aggressively panhandling. We have data on this, so let's not conflate the issue with non-issues.
2/3 of the chronic homeless have mental or physical disabilities. 1/3 have drug problems. You are talking about 83,000 people in a population of 320 million, but these 83,000 people are creating huge quality of life problems in all of our major cities. In San Francisco, you have 300 million dollars spent fighting a problem created by 2,000 people. The non-profit and social services mafia employs more people to "care" for the homeless -- or more cynically exploit them -- than the actual number of chronically homeless.
I have a chronic illness and I am getting healthier and more productive while on the street. I have been homeless for 5.5 years. My father drank heavily for years and I have another close relative who used to snort $10k a year in cocaine up their nose back when $10k was real money.
First, we can go after the low hanging fruit of helping people who are more easily helped. More availability of actual affordable housing would help with this issue. Some people who are homeless do have income, just not enough to pay for a middle class American lifestyle.
Second there are things that work to help rehabilitate people with serious, entrenched personal issues. I raised and homeschooled my two gifted learning disabled sons, one of whom has the same medical condition I have.
I know quite a lot about this problem space and I see it as solvable. It will take time, but it can be done. Writing people off as hopeless does not help the problem at all. It just compounds it.
I realize it is complicated and has many moving parts. Perhaps it would help to think of it this way: We don't actually need comprehensive solutions like so many people are looking for. We just need a thread to pull to start unraveling it and begin to shrink the problem. And because there are many moving parts, there are many threads to pull. People can work on various parts of it, to good effect.
Just wanted to thank you, Mz, for continually expressing patience in the face of arrogance and condescension whenever the conversation on HN turns to homelessness. Your experience and perspective are hugely valuable, all the more so because you are able to use it to educate folks about the complexities/challenges of the homeless.
>average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped
I've read this many times, bigger houses have contributed a great deal to rising housing costs. But do we have any data on the cost of materials and labor now vs. then as well as the cost of land and regulations now vs. then?
I've always had an inkling that materials/labor costs haven't actually risen that much even as houses grew larger.
In addition to being larger, houses today are more lavish. In the 1950s, houses were around 1200 square feet, they had a kitchen and a bathroom but did not necessarily have a washer and dryer or air conditioner. They certainly did not have a microwave and probably did not have a dishwasher. They tended to have less insulation, less electrical wiring, etc.
Yes, there is data on such things. There are a number of reasons that housing has gone up in cost, but size inflation is absolutely a contributing factor.
The appliances you're describing are a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each. Maybe we could expect the full package to contribute $30k, or even $50k, of increased costs.
This could explain a jump from $200k to $250k. Not from $50k to $200k.
> Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.
I actually think his solution makes sense.
For the really impoverished people who are willing and capable to work their way up, this would be exactly what they want; for those who really don't want a roof over their heads, they should really be put into some sort of institution with restricted freedom and mental illness help.
If we have $300mil budget to help 10 thousand homeless, that's $30k per person, enough to support a decent standards of living in a cheap part of the country.
Workhouses were for debtors who could not repay debts. That's a very different situation from say, Reagan kicking the mentally ill out of institutions and onto the streets of our cities.
I've been working in SF for a year now. After working in Baltimore City and going to NYC multiple times, it's amazing just how bad it is in SF. But the vast majority of homeless people I've run into never ask for money but instead simply "exist", sleeping or walking around on the sidewalks. Many, maybe even most, have mental issues that make it harder to re-integrate.
While housing prices are a little different, zoning is most certainly an issue as many would much prefer to stay in any type of housing. You suggest making it a requirement but I contest that as that wouldn't actually be constitutional and most of the homeless here would love a place to stay. In NYC there are TONS of places for the homeless to stay but in SF, many shelters will have lines out the door well into the night and into the morning. There just isn't much shelter for them here. Attempting to build new homeless housing is always faced with NIMBY opposition.
My startup adventures have prompted many visits to San Fran and in turn I witnessed the plight of the homeless there. It does not exist on any scale like it does there whether it's in Baltimore or New York City where I lived a year after college.
There's not much you can do re: the homeless in San Francisco, but it bothers me and makes me feel bad.
Overall not a fan of San Francisco for a variety of reasons.
Sure, they would love a place to stay, as long as someone else took care of it and paid all the bills. But the same difficulty with life that causes them to be where they are -- whether mental, physical, or abuse related, is going to prevent them from being self-sufficient even if the rent they have to pay is zero. In terms of being unconstitutional, maybe it is, but it's the only solution to this problem. People who are unable to take care of their basic needs and defecate on the streets need to be forced into group home situations until they demonstrate an ability to handle the difficulties of managing self-care.
> In terms of being unconstitutional, maybe it is, but it's the only solution to this problem. People who are unable to take care of their basic needs and defecate on the streets need to be forced into group home situations until they demonstrate an ability to handle the difficulties of managing self-care.
You're advocating for in-prisoning people who cannot afford or, for whatever reason, can't live in a home. That's really awful and lacking in empathy. That's almost like debtors prison.
The vast majority of these people will actually stay in a home if you provide one. The majority of them in SF, however, do not have access to any type of shelter because the existing shelters are far too overcrowded and any attempts at building new shelters get held up for years by people who don't want homeless people in their neighborhoods.
The solution to helping someone is providing them with healthcare (preventative is far cheaper than reactionary care for the tax payer) and providing them with a place to stay. Currently we don't really do either, especially in SF.
Bingo! Some one with big enough balls to say the actually and undesirable reality of homelessness on the streets. The richer the city the greater the homelessness, because the homeless like every animal in the world (us included) goes where life is the easiest. And rich cities, have richer populations that then donate more money to homeless people.
In my hometown there are people that quite there jobs to panhandle, because they make more money doing it. It's not common, but it happens and it shows that it's not a simple issue.
FYI mental illness is also common in the homeless population and for them I'm very much in favor of looking at any solution that'll help them have the success they desire in their lives. *Just saying.
In my city the panhandlers are professionals. You can find open positions on Craigslist and there's set shifts at standardized locations. If you get up early enough sometimes you'll see a shift change. A cheap cargo van shows up, the guy gets in, and another hops out to take his place.
All of the nearby locations with panhandlers are setup this way, maybe a couple hundred spots in the city. Sometimes I wonder how many people there are running the system...
You're saying that the homeless people that approach you for money represent all or most of the homeless people that exist, and that simply isn't true. There are some people that choose a panhandling lifestyle, but there are many more who end up homeless and are too sick or proud to do that.
I think it is absolutely true that homelessness is much more nuanced than "housing is expensive." It is also pretty clear from the last 5 years that where SF is spending its money is not as effective as they would like. (it is called out in the article, millions more spent and the problem hasn't changed). There is also the issue that while you have population counts you can't really track individuals, so did last years money get 5,000 people into homes who have been replaced by 5,000 new people for a net change of zero, or was it just ineffective? Hard to say given the data sets available.
One of the observations is that homeless populations tend to self select into encampments. And part of the expense and challenge is that where they choose to camp does not facilitate maintenance (cleaning, services, etc). I have not found any papers or articles on municipalities that have built infrastructure that specifically designed for hosting a homeless encampment. Could you build a system that would support a locally hosted infrastructure? Passive sanitation systems, trash depositories and collection points, water supplies?
Maybe I look uncharitable, but I very rarely run into panhandlers in San Francisco.
Perhaps it depends on the neighborhood. In the Tenderloin and parts of SOMA, there is an abundance of drug addicts and people with mental health issues living on the streets. I'm randomly screamed at or verbally threatened, but they don't ask for money.
I used to think there were lots of panhandlers asking for money.
Then I realized that there are roughly four different people working BART station entrances along Market Street, who collectively account for 100% of the times I've been asked for money.
> The only thing I can think of is fully funded group homes that are mandatory to live in -- basically prisons with nice amenities and educational programs that you can graduate out of based on demonstrating a track record of being able to provide for yourself
Sounds like a great premise for a dystopian short story
As soon as someone starts pulling out anecdotes to generalize people, I don't read much past that.
And seriously, locking up people for not living in homes and working? We used to do that in my country back in the late 19th century, it was a very handy law for the government to dust off when you had to jail protesters or strikers in the street.
For what it's worth, 70% of SF's homeless population lived in SF in homes before they were on the street. It's probably fair to assume that if rents were lower, more of those people would still be in homes.
Source? SF's official stats have most of their homeless coming from outside of the city/county altogether with their sole SF "residence" being shelters and/or outdoors.
In NYC and not only Manhattan housing is expensive. Yet in NYC is where a lot of jobs are. Taking care of very poor populations who may indeed have very high medical costs are substantially reduced by giving them stable housing which is hard to do with zoning density restrictions that makes housing expensive.
I also know that health crises for homeless people tend to hard to resolve and cost a lot more than for people who are housed. Medical advice like "stay off your foot and soak it twice a day" simply cannot be complied with if you are homeless. The health issues of the homeless tend to compound and get incredibly expensive, in most cases.
Source: I have had a class on homelessness and public policy, I am homeless, I run a few websites pertinent to this problem space. (In essence, I am kind of a SME here.)
It us known in medical circles that take care of the poor. I am speaking of people that cost the medical system a huge amount of money. This is a great explanation.
For example the "it is known" premise that the ACA and Medicaid expansion would result in lower consumption of medical care overall. The opposite has happened.
Did you read the article? A number of people who have very expensive medical bills when given a home the bills went down substantially. Read the article.
I can't find where it says that or gives comprehensive hard numbers (or references to same) at all.
The relevant question is: is any resulting consumption of medical care dollars reduced by more than the cost of these frequent in-home care visits? Generally, personnel costs (especially in public agencies) far outweigh the cost of (mostly generic) meds.
I see no hard numbers for either statistic. What did I miss?
"After several months, he had recovered enough to be discharged. But, out in the world, his life was simply another hospitalization waiting to happen."
Hospitalizations can cost thousands of dollar per day. So this stay cost in the several hundred thousand dollar range.
[skipping some paragraphs]. He is given a stable housing environment:
"I spoke to Hendricks recently. He has gone without alcohol for a year, cocaine for two years, and smoking for three years. He lives with his girlfriend in a safer neighborhood, goes to church, and weathers family crises. He cooks his own meals now. His diabetes and congestive heart failure are under much better control. He’s lost two hundred and twenty pounds, which means, among other things, that if he falls he can pick himself up, rather than having to call for an ambulance."
The entire article is about this sort of thing and about many cases.
I saw this up close in Boston (really Cambridge MA). In most American municipalities, neighborhood groups have enormous power to shape development. All development has to get approved by the city, and the city listens to neighborhood groups. Those groups can also petition a landmark commission to landmark a building making redevelopment much more difficult. And they can sue. Even when these tactics don't work, they're extremely time consuming. I've seen one court case drag on for years even though the people filing literally submitted briefs written in crayon. So it is often better to just settle with neighborhood groups, but like patent trolls, that only encourages them.
One issue is that in the US, we treat housing as the primary source of wealth for middle class people. So everyone is expected to be a homeowner. A world where the price of your primary wealth asset is rising is good! And a world in which its value is flat or falling is disastrous. And so local laws get shaped so as to keep housing prices high; in practice that means choking the supply of new more dense housing. After all, any change might harm the value of your home!
If people would like to learn more about Japanese zoning (which isn't a lack of density zoning, but rather more of an "up to this" rather than "restrict to" zoning), there's this post on my favorite urban design blog: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
This was a fantastic read, thanks for sharing! Is there a piece you recommend that talks about the cons/rebuts "up to this" Japanese zoning laws just to see both sides?
Houston has a famously liberal, in the classic sense of the word, approach to zoning that results in an endless supply of cheap housing—and an ungodly amount of sprawl. Tradeoffs in everything.
That isn't true. If you shrink a metropolis the traffic moves slower and the roads take up more relative space, and more people live close to freeways. There is a relatively small time advantage when you squeeze a city's transportation system, and if you want quality air you do way better in a suburb or exurb than downtown.
New housing in walking distance of likely destinations (or high quality transit) generates fewer vehicle trips than housing that requires driving everywhere.
Who cares how much relative space the roads take up?
I agree, you personally will experience better air in the suburbs. Everyone in aggregate will experience worse air due to your drive between the city and suburbs.
I'd argue that shaving a few hundred feet of road off your journey is minuscule compared to shaving 20+mph off your speed.
The most bizarre thing about the Narrow Streets proposal is, how they hell are bikes or buses supposed to work at reasonable speed if the streets are choked with them (and pedestrians, who would apparently have right of way on the same paths as bikes and buses, rather than parallel sidewalks).
If you want the basics of an answer, there are plenty of sources, including a good Wikipedia article on sprawl.
The general response is "it creates problems" -- traffic, congestion, auto-centric neighbourhoods (which are poor places for children, the elderly, the disabled), and pollution.
I find more compelling the case laid out in the StrongTowns blog, by Charles Marohn, over several articles, that sprawl 1) costs more in the long term and 2) ultimately creates an unsustainable expenses-to-revenues balance.
Suburbs developed with cars, when cheap gasoline and asphalt made distance, rather than height (as in New York City) cheap. Homes were dropped on quarter-acre lots, retail centralised, and (in the US model) land use generally restricted to single-use: a lot is either commercial or residential, and industrial uses are kept widely separated.
Before that, cities were dense, because virtually all movement was on foot, by hand-cart, or, if you were wealthy, by a horse-drawn cart or carriage. Cities were also limited in size, because everything that went in had to come out, and that also generally happened by one or more of the above means -- no electrical sewerage pumping substations. Cholera and typhoid were killing tens of thousands of people per year in mid-19th century New York and London.
Space means you need more of everything: power lines, water mains, sewer lines, gas, cable, internet, streets, ... And maintenance for all of the above. At the same time, densities are too low to support intensive use -- think factory or even office jobs, or dense retail. Reliance instead is on moving people to retail centres -- built at a remove from either housing or city centres.
If you've got the resources (and cheap fuel), the spread-out life is ... relatively pleasant. If you cannot afford a car, or have had your licence revoked (drink driving, tickets, in some cases a penalty for failure to pay child support, or miscellaneous infractions), or can no longer drive (blind, disabled, epilepsy, ...), not so much. Transit options are almost always poor, and options such as walking or cycling not well supported.
> These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump.
Out of the millions of property owners in the US who benefit from artificially propped-up real estate prices, you chose to single out this individual why?
He Is perhaps the most famous real estate developer worth billions with a lot of holdings in Manhattan. While a lot of Democrats claim to hate him, they are usually the ones on city council that pass these rent-seeking laws that are a regressive tax that gives Trump huge sums of money at the expense of working people.
I've lived in the Bay Area for a little bit and another issue is the "not in my backyard" problem. What I understand of this issue is that the richer communities want to use rent-prices as a wall to keep low income and homeless away from those areas and out their school systems. None of them want to be the first to take a risk on the "value" of their neighborhoods at the expense of everyone else. Would the federal law you mention address an issue like this?
I'm a layperson on these issues, but how would privatizing k-12 specifically solve the NIMBY issue? Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.
>I'm a layperson on these issues, but how would privatizing k-12 specifically solve the NIMBY issue?
If schools were voluntary and private then it wouldn't matter which school district your house is in. The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.
>Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.
I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.
> The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.
anecdotally i went through almost all of my k-12 in public school and it seems like the opposite: that areas with more expensive houses pay more in local taxes which fund nicer schools and governments. meaning the "quality" of the local government is a function of the wealth held by its residents. this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families. i don't see why privatization would be a better alternative.
> I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.
saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.
You must be a rich family to afford a home in a good school district. As your children perform well in school, the school rankings get better and the housing gets more valuable. These self-reinforcing pockets of wealth are great for those on the inside of the virtuous cycle, but further segregate them from those on the outside.
Decoupling property values from school quality has a lot of liberal appeal. SFUSD does it. Unfortunately, SFUSD's experiment has largely failed because parents who draw bad schools in the lottery system opt out and move to the East Bay, where they can reliably buy their way into good school districts.
(If they stayed, their children would likely turn those bad schools into good schools, or at least okay schools).
Privatizing education wouldn't remove school quality as a function of wealth, but it would let you pay directly for school quality, and disentangle it from the real estate market.
>this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families.
I think you are arguing that school quality is a function of the kinds of students that attend the school, rather than the value the school itself adds. In that case I agree with you.
>saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.
My hypothesis is that schools could be run much more cheaply and be as effective as they are today. Therefore the money not spent on public schools (or on expensive homes in good school districts) could be gainfully invested elsewhere in the economy which would make everyone more wealthy.
>It is a market inefficiency caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status which creates a politically induced artificial scarcity in housing (scarcity = rising prices).
Then it is a government inefficiency, not a market inefficiency
In microeconomics is is called market inefficiency or market failure caused by special interests who influence passing laws. The terms are market inefficiency or market failure.
Pick up a microeconomics book and it will explain. In microeconomics market inefficiencies or market failures have 3 causes: 1) rent-seeking, 2) negative externalities, 3) information asymmetry.
As I explained somewhere else in this post, Economist David Ricardo first discussed this problem of rent-seeking about 200 years ago. In this case, the wealthy landlords work to pass laws that give them wealth paid for by society or in this case renters.
David Ricardo first discussed rent-seeking with the Corn Laws of Britain which had a tariff on all grains which increased the wealth of landowners at the cost of other members of society.
I mean, this isn't by accident. Powerful people can advocate for their interests to change laws. It's the market ad extremum. It's only government inefficiency in the sense that lawmakers are vulnerable to influence, rather than bureaucrats imposing centrally planned government programs.
It appears you are unfamiliar with public choice theory[1]. It turns out you are correct in a theoretic sense that very rarely works out in practice. Blaming 'the many' for failing democracy might be satisfying, but doesn't do any good.
It's not that simple and it's not just about greed.
The Asian cultures have centuries more experience dealing with high density people situations. Violence is not as legitimized as a method of boundary enforcement for example because people have learned to deal with each other without killing each other. Sure it creates super thick-skinned rudeness (China/NYC/India) or super thin-skinned rule following (Japan) but boundary enforcement based on things like status markers(Like LV bags and iPhones) or rules or much better than those based on violence.
The U.S. is unique in its sheer mix of cultures but also because of the presence of its youngest culture (African American culture) that is today still reeling from the shock of being torn from its mother culture in Africa. Racism and the lack of a reliable justice system for them has forced their culture to rebuild from 0, going through stages where each person had to have the ability to dole out personal-justice/violence.
What's normal in China becomes rude in the U.S. What's justice in one culture is violence in another.
The locals who call a place home see this and want to preserve their own culture. Despite economic incentive allowing them to move anywhere else, their dollar is limited by their software in what it can do. It's like a project that has github dependencies forced to only use dependencies on some other place like gitlab. The project might as well die and start over. And though projects and start over, people can only die, and they will go down swinging.
Younger and newer cultures learn to be more flexible and adaptable. The software/culture limitation that prevented their parents from living like kings in Thailand is removed because their dependencies aren't as rooted. Some are even completely standalone and super flexible at the cost of having no way of influencing things. (eternal vagabonds w/ no long relationships)
Meanwhile new dense hardware developments can only be populated by software that can deal with the density and find it worthwhile. Thus you get H1B 'slave houses' filled with Indians/Chinese.
I think your comment is pretty good, and I don't know what's up with the downvotes :welp:
That said, as good as your point is about African American culture, it's far from our youngest; there's also the Chinese and Italian migration waves, the Armenian refugee wave... On the west coast, you would definitely also have to consider the effects of Japanese internment during WWII. That might be the most recent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was another wave between now and then.
This doesn't detract from your overall point, or the severity of the effect on specifically African American culture, but I don't think you can call that America's youngest culture.
Those cultures are still connected to their mother cultures though. Though they start to become unique as they mix with American/other cultures the link and the advantages it confers have stayed whole. The studiousness of Chinese immigrants for example is a downstream effect from the exam based society of ancient China and is a feature that took hundreds if not thousands of years to develop. It's also not a perfect feature despites its evolution, it often trades max top speed for stronger initial acceleration.
Japanese internment during WWII is laughably incomparable to the damage inflicted upon African Americans over the last few hundred years or so. I think the OP meant age-range, or at least that was how I initially interpreted. Though I'm not sure that's true either. Even if OP meant something different, there are waves of Cubans, Chinese, Hmong, and many others. Who knows?
To borrow some momentum from modern pop culture via Bane from Batman. Japanese-american culture resisted the influence of darkness inflicted by the american culture that was consumed (temporarily) by the darkness. African American culture was seeded in that darkness. One culture resisted hate due its experience with hate, for the other, hate is all it knew.
I don't think that African Americans are the youngest culture in America but rather one of the oldest, considering the slave ship theory they've been here quite a while. However I strongly agree that they're still very wounded and needing healing.
Further, there's evidence being brought out that there actually were aboriginal Americans that we would call black.
What I mean by age is age of connection to older cultures. Almost all western countries have wealth, either literal or cultural from Greek and Roman civilizations. Asias subcultures have roots in Chinese culture. African American culture was fully severed from the mother culture in Africa so it's age is much younger compared to the thousands of years other cultures have evolved over. One example of a cultural strength, appreciation for education, is often taken for granted. Racism is the idea the blacks have an innate disdain for education but it's actually an ubiquitous cultural strength common to all cultures EXCEPT slave/severed cultures. Affirmative action is unfair from the lens of the present, but it is basically compensation from the lens of history, speeding up development of this basic cultural strength. Affirmative action that doesn't heal this rift annoys me as the compensation is not going to the victims. The vanity metric of black skin is often achieved by pulling from Africa where the ancestral culture links had stayed intact.
Trying to assign 100% of the differences between people(s) to their ancestral cultures is a grossly oversimplified post-modern mythology and unsupported by facts or a contemporary understanding of the science of human populations, and I'm fairly sure many Asians and Asian-Americans would be quite offended by the statement that their ephemeral "roots in Chinese culture" are what lead them excel where others struggle.
Don't be blind. Culture definitely provides tailwinds and headwinds in certain areas. Ignoring your attack on the strawman of 100% explanatory power the actual degree of effect may be very small but compounded over time.
A simple example is being good at multiplication in kindergarten. This small advantage can become a desire for continuous academic excellence via courage towards math. If a child's parents are stereotypically prudish, another "advantage" is the ability to sidestep distractions of athletics/sex.
If the natural momentum a culture can build isn't appreciated, people become shallow and hoarding. In my family for example, the idea that Asians are naturally smarter and Blacks dumber is common and was the impetus for my thoughts in this area. I see a greed and lack of empathy developing that is difficult to watch.
The most common actual real world usage I get out of explaining this model is more support for affirmative action. Perhaps other people can see it as having other value. No need to trash it. All models are simplifications of reality and thus "wrong".
Hey New Yorkers aren't rude but we are intense, quick walking, quick talking, and impatient.
Most of Manhattan is not dense at all and is covered with brownstone instead of high rises.
Scarcity results in rising prices. In general wealth creation comes from productivity. There are many in society including special interests that are not interested in creating wealth but taking it for themselves while harming society as a whole. That includes not only wealthy landlords but many other groups of people don't want competition.
Another example is limits on taxicab medallions (which we have in NYC) so that medallions in NYC were valued at $1.2 million each and higher fares for passengers but that scarcity was fixed by competition from Uber/Lyft so that now medallions are only worth $700,000 or less and fares are less expensive than they were.
Another example is labor unions. Various forms of tariffs also create scarcity benefiting the special interests over the needs of the general population. Many jobs have extraordinary educational or licensing requirements to create scarcity and limit competition.
When it comes to housing wealthy landlords want their land to appreciate so they lobby politicians to pass these regressive laws. Without spending a cent, simply reversing the artificial scarcity in housing means that renters pay less for rent and more for goods and services, the construction trades have jobs, etc.
It's a simple math of demand and supply. Density restrictions keep supply in check it keeps it constant, but demand grows exponentially over time, due to immigration and population growth. Thus price grows astronomically high. If you remove restrictions and with the right technology you could create housing that keeps up with the demand growth. SF homelessness is really about incompetence of city politicians, bureaucracy, and the lack of good talent in public service. Why would I want to work for the city to make it a better place when companies inside my city or just further down to the south pays me 3x or 4x what they're offering.
Dezoning most American cities would be quite a good thing. We massively subsidize parking thanks to our zoning requiring parking minimums (such that buildings are only able to rent parking for low $0.xx/sqft a month, versus $x/sqft a month for housing in the same building), and we also block or kneecap larger buildings by restricting their size and the number of units within them.
These restrictions (nearly all carried out as zoning) could easily be removed and allow a wave of development to occur, lowering housing costs and keeping many people from ending up homeless in the first place.
As with any political matter, binary assertions like this oversimplify issues. A counter argument in this case is that strict zoning laws serve to control an influx of citizens to a location. Those influxes can fundamentally change the culture for the present residents.
Is that a bad thing? I think it's worthy of debate. But blanket statements risk dismissing reasonable arguments before they are even presented.
Except it doesn't really work that way. Strict zoning and building rules prevent the built environment from changing, they don't prevent the people from changing. Witness the decried gentrification in San Francisco, most of which has built very little over the past several decades.
It would seem that strict zoning and building rules hasten and encourage gentrification. Without more density, and with more people wanting to live in the same area, rents rise more and the ones who win out are the wealthier renters. If some buildings were replaced with more density, then the housing supply reaches further down the demand curve to those with less money.
In the absence of rent control, you're right. To stop a neighborhood from changing, you need both low density zoning (minimize incentive to tear down buildings) and ironclad rent control (make it impossible to dump existing tenants in favor of wealthier ones in existing buildings).
San Francisco has not managed the ironclad rent control part, and as you'd expect, landlords found various ways to get rid of low-rent tenants in favor of high-rent tenants. When you have the ability to drag your feet on repairs, the mechanism is obvious. When your tenants are poor and you're constantly forgiving them for being late/short with the rent, all you have to do is stop doing that.
Zoning by itself is just destructive. Zoning and rent control could theoretically work, though I'm not sure it ever has, because landlords are so much more clever about getting rid of tenants than cities are about designing rent control laws.
I don't think it's really a cleverness issue. It's that "ironclad rent control" is an expropriation of private property that our legal system would not permit.
Sorry, how in the world does this shut down debate? One should be able to say "Because of X, Y and Z, it is wrong," without worrying that somebody else won't even respond with "but what about A, B, and C, which mitigate the wrongness?" Or "but it is not wrong because D E F."
Your blanket statement seems to shut down debate far more than OP's original comment.
Yes, it's wrong to (try to) stop an influx of citizens to a location.
It feels weird to invoke patriotism here, but if there's an influx of citizens to a location, the individuals within it are doing the most American thing you possibly can: chasing opportunity.
To lock the doors, to hoard the opportunity for yourself because you were born in the right place or got there first, is the most deeply un-American thing you can possibly do.
We should be celebrating, encouraging, and facilitating the largest possible influxes we can get to our ascendant cities.
Unfortunately, I think this is a 'tragedy of the commons' kind of situation. Existing landowners (or at least groups of them) are incentivized to hoard the land-wealth by vetoing construction on their valuable land. What those landowners are missing is that everyone would be better off if land could be put to its most profitable use.
The resulting higher density of land-use would likely result in each landowners property becoming even more valuable. Imagine owning a single-family-housing-sized lot in the middle of New York City, for example.
It's the responsibility of the writer to connect the dots on why it's wrong, not the reader. Throwing out a blanket statement like "it's wrong" and expecting your audience to figure out why (or not and simply agree, since that would be more convenient) is poor communication at best, and intellectually lazy at worst.
I think it's more that “if you wish to convince people of your point, you can't ask them to go find the supporting evidence and reasoning, you need to provide the reasoning and identify the evidence.”
It is a regressive "tax" and it creates more greenhouse gas since people have to commute farther, and it contributes to income inequality. It enables special interests to take a share of wealth without creating it through innovation by created by others through innovation.
These four items are deemed by society as wrong or bad and therefore it "wrong" as you say.
Somebody asked why it was wrong and I explained the reasons which are factually correct so if you're going to down vote discuss which fact you disagree with.
More like 3X the area and 15X the population (Tokyo metropolis vs SF city and county) or 1.5X the area and 8X the population (Tokyo metropolitan area versus SF metro) -- all figures gleaned from Wikipedia.
I don't know if a 300sqft apartment is big or small because we use the metric system here, but if you're talking down small apartments, wouldn't the market partially sort that out? If an apartment is too small, people wouldn't buy or rent it. Or if they did, maybe it's all they could afford or a sacrifice they were willing to make?
I've read stories on HN of start-ups living or operating out of literal closets because they can't find or afford an alternative. Surely there's some size which is safe and liveable, but smaller than what is available now? And can be designed in a way that isn't a charmless, stifling box?
Well, the market is sorting things out right now isn't it? Rent is really high and there are long commutes. So how exactly does turning SV into a Tokyo solve this problem?
It doesn't. There are far more people who want to live in the Valley than there are homes and building homes won't solve that problem. If anything, they need to stop building so people are forced to relocate to other parts of the world. The insane concentration of technologists in one area is not good for the world.
Is it though? From afar, I thought the general criticism was that regulations were impairing development? Or is the NIMBY reaction from existing owners considered part of the market in a situation like this? (Honestly don't know.)
Bringing some Tokyo public transport wouldn't hurt, right? That would help with the commutes and make living further out viable.
Well you won't find any argument from me with respect to public transportation. It needs a massive improvement nationwide.
I just don't like the knee-jerk reaction from others (not you necessarily) who just call everything NIMBYism as if people who own property have 0 rights or concerns. I own and live in a small condo. Like under 100k in value. I have a cool little view of the city, nothing special. I bought it because of that and other factor. You're damn right I would be upset if somebody wanted to build a skyscraper blocking my view, it literally affects the quality of my life. Now, that certainly isn't justification in itself to block construction, but on the other end it very much seems as though, from the other end of the discussion, that my concerns would be deemed irrelevant.
How would you (not you specifically) if people started tearing down trees in your neighborhood to turn it into a strip mall so cars could get through? How bullshit is that?
Overall I just want to see a more balanced discussion, so I call out what I see.
It is wrong, and Japan has fixed the problem removing zoning density restrictions at the local level. The result, in 2014 there were 140,000 homes built in Tokyo compared with about 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC.
Well, there's also the fact that, unlike NYC and SF much of that city was destroyed during what Wikipedia calls "the single most destructive bombing raid in human history". So it's not like they had all that much historic architecture to protect, anyway.
Apples and oranges, in other words.
These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump.
Oh please. The Trumps made their money through, first, being notorious slumlords; then through mob connections and tax loopholes; and finally, as money launderers for the post-Soviet elite.
Not through the "overuse of historic landmark status", by even the most fantastic stretch of the imagination. (As an illustration, look into the history of the building that preceded Trump Tower at the same location).
Right, but it was rebuilt in era when humans still knew how to design solid-standing, aesthetically-pleasing buildings for just about any purpose (unlike virtually all of the crap built in the past 60 years). That's why much of its architecture counts as "historic", and preservation-worthy.
Much of the post-fire development used unreinforced masonry and was built on poor-quality fill. We saw the effects of this during the 1989 quake in areas like the Marina district.
The preponderance of fill (and depth to bedrock) in the densest areas of SF is well-illustrated by the Millennium Tower fiasco[0]. The MT's pilings do not even reach bedrock!
Much of the post-fire development used unreinforced masonry and was built on poor-quality fill.
Also, the issue of some buildings being built to (allegedly) inadequate standards is a red herring. If that were the case, the city would be more than happy to have them condemned, and all manner of more useful structures (for affordable housing or otherwise, put in their place).
I interviewed a few homeless for a project for this social justice class I took as an undergrad requirement. Bought em' a meal and asked them to tell me their life stories.
Yes there was drinking, drugs and mental health issues, but there was also this sort of resignation where once they'd got used to sleeping and defecating in the street and they knew where they could get food and maybe some cheap liquor they kind of stopped caring about improving their lives. They didn't want to move into a shelter with dangerous people who would steal their meager posessions or attack them. They had basically accepted they had failed at life and had come to terms with an existence of scraping along the bottom of city existence.
I think the main thing that attracts them to San Francisco is the nice climate, progressive politics that doesn't persecute them and that they can walk to services, walk to begging spots, walk to the liquor store, and walk to where they sleep. Notice how there are no homeless up at the top of hills in S.F?
I’ve been homeless for six years now. If there’s such a thing as an effective homeless man, then I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use their bathrooms. And I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden behind the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of this, but it means a lot to me, being trustworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.
It's true, the less money you have the more time you have to spend on the basics. As much as I love laundry and housekeeping services, if I'm not making income they're gone and there's 4 hours a week I now have to spend to be clean. No credit card? No Amazon Prime delivery, needs more time to go to the market +1hr/day. No money for quality restaurant food? Time to start going to farmers' markets and learning to cook, +2hr/day... etc. Car service? LOL. No cash to load Clipper? Hours of travel time. Medical care? I pity the fool.
Was this comment actually downvoted? It is important to recognize that survival is a full time endeavor to many people and will directly impact their ability to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".
Well, to be fair, the tops of the hills are where the wealthier people live (with a few small exceptions), so the residents there would likely notify the police that homeless persons had penetrated their sanctums and should be removed, post haste.
The only 2 hilly neighborhoods that support your theory are Pac Heights and Russian Hill, but that has less to do with the hills and more to do with the historical housing in those areas.
If you look at Nob Hill, Potrero, Twin Peaks, Bernal Heights, and Telegraph Hill, they really aren't any more expensive than the surrounding areas. In a lot of cases (SoMa, Dog Patch) the flat parts of town are even more expensive.
Yea in SF the bottom of the hill (Mission dostrict) is just as pricy if not more. Also SOMA is probably the lowest and flattest and most expensive area.
A huge, unmentioned part of the problem is that SF has settled on housing policies that makes low-end housing unavailable or unaffordable. The people who can only afford to live in a single-room occupancy aren't going to magically disappear when you restrict the number of SROs available. They're going to go onto the street.
Yes, it's bad that someone can only afford a 60 square foot room to live in. The solution isn't to make it illegal to let out a 60 square foot room to them, or to force market-rate housing to subsidize a few lucky winners.
The policies that would solve the supply/demand problem are things people don't want. The cities aren't priding themselves on unaffordable housing, it's the NIMBYs that are the problem.
A 10 story building blocking MY view? No way!
You want to add 1,500 more cars to the street in front of my house? But my children play in the front yard!
We can't tax or deny foreign ownership of property! That unfairly targets immigrant entrepreneurs!
(I'm not saying these arguments aren't valid in some peoples minds, but they are the root of the problem)
So true. I have thus far, seen the following comments in my (Mountain View) NextDoor feed, made by the anti-growth brigade:
-Complaints about the removal of trees to accommodate bicycle lanes
-Complaints about restriping/widening of bicycle lanes
-Complaints about how the architecture of new apt buildings on El Camino Real is ruining the character of MV
-Complaints about how the removal of historic buildings in downtown MV (by their landlords, who can no longer afford to maintain them) is also ruining the character of MV
-Complaints about why are there so many RVs and campers parked on Shoreline
-Complaints about why so many restaurants in downtown MV have a hiring shortage and quick turnover
-Complaints about why the checkout lines in Safeway are so long and there aren't enough checkers
-Complaints about the traffic on Shoreline (i.e. near Google)
-Complaints about Google's attempt to add pre-fab housing
And of course, if you imply that they should sell their $$$ house and move elsewhere, it becomes a discussion of how "my family has lived in MV for 3 generations, etc, who gives you the right to tell me how/when to move"
> Complaints about how the architecture of new apt buildings on El Camino Real is ruining the character of MV
That's bizarre to me. The "architecture" on El Camino in MV is strictly of the suburban-strip-mall variety. Even identikit glitzy new apartment buildings are an improvement over that, even without taking into account how they can help alleviate the housing crisis.
Agreed. That ship has sailed. Meanwhile, I drive by this house (http://tinyurl.com/yblhpelz) every day. The property has been boarded up and abandoned for at least 2 years. It's within walking distance to the Caltrain, and biking distance to Google and dozens of other tech companies. Yet there it remains.
One contrast is the Two Worlds development on El Camino. It mixes ground-floor business fronts with upper-floor residential... and it was built thirty-two years ago.
A Great Moment in Mountain View NIMBYism was when the former Emporium property at CA 85 and El Camino was optioned by Home Depot to build a store there. It would have brought millions of dollars in local tax revenue shares.
An initiative vote overturned the Planning Commission's approval -- "Big Box" stores were unwelcome (Ironically, a Best Buy now sits on the adjacent parcel).
The site became a residential care facility. Sunnyvale and East Palo Alto get that tax revenue instead.
> -Complaints about the removal of trees to accommodate bicycle lanes
I would absolutely complain about that. Remove road lanes instead. Why would you remove trees? Are they idiots?
The rest of the stuff (ruining the character, etc...) are fine. There's no reason people can't be upset that this area they moved in to is changing because everybody else wanted to follow suit. I wouldn't want to have moved to Mountain View then all of a sudden Google shows up and now I'm dealing with all this bullshit traffic. Send Google somewhere else. They don't need to be on the coast.
You guys act like people don't have any right to wish to have their way of life preserved. Ridiculous.
>I would absolutely complain about that. Remove road lanes instead. Why would you remove trees? Are they idiots?
Do you currently have a commute that involves Mountain View? Ever driven on Shoreline when there's both a concert and an accident on the 101? Ever gotten stuck on Rengstorff or Castro when there's a Caltrain incident?
Sure, let's remove a road lane. Then all the traffic will back up and clog the residential streets.
Ok so what do you think happens if you keep adding lanes?
Hint: traffic never gets better. It's called induced demand. I for one also don't want my world turned into a mega highway for the suburbs. Once traffic gets bad enough, people will have to find alternatives, like biking, taking the bus, or simply moving to other areas.
I never said anything about adding additional car lanes. My point was, that removing trees to add a bike lane can be a good thing. Yes, it is unfortunate to remove a historical tree, but if it makes bicycling safer and takes more cars off the road, why not?
Don't forget that these are enforced by continual lawsuits. Neighbors sue each other for violating HOA regulations in my neighborhood. Don't even try to change the roofline on your crappy-looking 50s stucco house.
If what everyone actually fights for is a conservation approach to the legacy housing market, is it really any surprise that we get a conservation approach to it? The sad thing is that the city otherwise has good policies, but housing is a morass of entrenched self interest.
From the transcript, and yes, this is a long quote, but I really love Tyler, and what he says always is considered and interesting, and the full quote is deserved:
COLLISON: Restrictive urban construction and land use regulations.
COWEN: They’re terrible. We should allow much more building. Much more of this country should be like Houston and parts of Texas. But that said, I’ve become a slight contrarian on this lately. I wonder if the Bay Area isn’t the one place in the world where building restrictions might make some sense because most of you want the restrictions. Even if not you in the room, you out there in this area. So removing the restrictions would be a tax. It would be great for the people who moved in.
But if you’re all producing these amazing global public goods, and the federal government is going to raise taxes on you anyway, I promise this. I don’t care who wins the next five elections, your taxes are going up. State, city, local, whatever. And then we put this new tax on you and you all are the Atlases out there. I don’t know if loosening building here would tax your productivity or increase it. But I’d at least consider the notion. This is the one place in the world where we shouldn’t loosen building restrictions.
COLLISON: Can you apply that argument in reverse? Do you think Silicon Valley would be better off if it had half the population?
COWEN: I don’t live here. I don’t know how bad the traffic is, and I suspect the people who are the most productive have workarounds. They can afford to live where they want, for instance.
COLLISON: I think a lot of us spend a lot of time in traffic.
COWEN: But it seems to me, it’s a pretty finely honed structure. It’s evolved the way it has and to cut it in half or shrink it, it’s probably a big mistake.
COLLISON: Just to make sure I understand, you’re saying the tax would be the other people around us? Our personal experiences of the area would somehow be diminished?
COWEN: The general culture would change; it would be less intense. It would be like taking Florentine Renaissance and injecting into it 50,000 people from Naples. Nothing against Naples. I love Naples, in fact, more than Florence. But I suspect that would have been a mistake back then. So I worry, if you have too many people move into this uniquely weird, diverse monoculture, you could wreck it. Just a cautionary note, I’m agnostic, but I’ve started having this worry lately.
Cowen's really illustrating how the upper-middle-class elite will fight savagely for their interests, regardless of what it means for their principles. Affordable housing is good _except for us_, high taxes are good _except for us_, immigration is good _except for us_, diversity is good _except for us_.
I particularly can't get over his outright xenophobia at the end: "Keep the dirty foreigners out, but I still hate Trump!" He can't have it both ways; either live with immigration and learn how to make it work well (which is probably the better idea), or allow everyone else to be raging xenophobes just like he is.
You easily can do it both. I love immigrants and different cultures, but I have no desire to turn the United States into Bangladesh. How long before you can't drive to Yosemite or you have to wait years for a permit or some other stupid shit?
Glad I was lucky enough to be born here, too bad if you weren't. I do not want the population in this country to continue to rise. It certainly doesn't need any help. Move to Canada or Russia instead.
That's a little uncharitable. NIMBYism is bad, sure, but it might enable building massive tech companies that provide massive consumer surpluses. How much you value "area supports the next Google" versus "area has 500k additional residents at reasonable housing costs", along with how much these trade off against each other, is an open question.
There are quite a few skyscrapers in SF, actually. A new huge one was built for Salesforce recently. Building affordable housing isn't a priority, though, apparently.
But why should it be? Why is creating low cost housing in the bay area better than spending that money in, say, Sacramento? What are the individual, societal and area benefits of doing it on the bay area vs anywhere else in the state of California?
I am being contrarian to be sure, Full disclosure: Australian with no dog in this fight.
So I ask because Tyler Cowan (https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/patrick-collison...) made the point that the Bay Area makes a lot of great global goods, and loosening housing regulation is effectively a tax on the current, extremely productive people that live in the Bay Area.
Given that these people pay taxes in California, why not find somewhere else to house less well to-do people? Somewhere less expensive, less productive and less likely to be problematic for the residents, would seem ideal.
$1,000,000 in SF buys sweet FA, but that would 3 median priced houses in Sacramento, and it is less than 100 miles away.
So I just wonder what the correct level is to do these things at: country, State, City, Suburb or street? I just think there are only so many dollars, why is the argument about where they are spent, rather than how effectively?
Because the cost is in satisfying local rent-seeking, rather fundamental physical restrictions. If the cheapest housing unit costs three times as much in SF because of earthquake-proofing, HVAC, and density, then sure, build in Sacramento instead. However, roughly speaking, the price differential is because people in SF voted to have houses that cost three times as much (because they own houses and get to make those decisions consequence-free).
It's not my claim, it is Tyler Cowan's claim. In case you are unsure who he is, pretty much everyone who is anyone holds Tyler as a hero, Malcolm Gladwell for one.
So not ridiculous, not held by a random internet nobody, but thanks for your input ;)
>Building affordable housing isn't a priority, though, apparently.
Man, this is infuriating. San Francisco isn't under a magic spell that makes affordable and market-rate housing distinct. They can be the same, like they are in the rest of the country, with enough housing.
But people spouting this line will never let that happen, because the proposed projects aren't immediately cheap.
Sure, in the downtown commercial areas. Every city I know of does not allow those skyscrapers to have apartments for rent, it is all for offices. (this is one of the reasons nobody in the US walks to work: there is no legal way to get a place to live near work for most people)
Note that a skyscraper is probably expensive enough to build that they would not put tiny apartments in it anyway, but the more moderate sized buildings downtown could be a mix of apartments and offices resulting in a usable city.
Yeah homeless people are not the same people that could afford any type of home most of the time. They're overwhelmingly people with mental and/or drug issues that prevent them from holding a job. Much more likely is that SF has many factors that make it a nice place to be homeless so these people migrate to it.
I disagree. I think there are certainly people who need mental health/drug counseling but for those that seek it is has to be impossible to get on your feet. I can see a spiral where you seek help, get better, but then you can't afford a place to live. You can't find a job since you don't have an address or you do find a job but can't save fast enough to afford an apartment. So, you go back to living on the streets and you slide back down.
> They're overwhelmingly people with mental and/or drug issues that prevent them from holding a job
Citation needed.
Homeless people with drug problems or mental illness are the most likely to be visibly homeless, acting out, and/or harassing people so perhaps confirmation bias makes you believe they represent the majority? In reality a minority of homeless people (~35%) have drug, alcohol, or metal problems.
The majority of homeless people are depressed and ashamed of being homeless and trying desperately to get off the streets. They lose their job or get evicted and don't have any family they can turn to, causing a downward spiral. Even if you have the money to rent an apartment you're fighting people who can pre-pay a year's worth of rent (thanks to large signing bonuses).
I don't know the breakdown but it is undeniable that some portion of the homeless in the Bay Area are homeless as a direct result of housing being so unaffordable.
>Much more likely is that SF has many factors that make it a nice place to be homeless so these people migrate to it.
That's wrong; 70%+ were residents of SF when they became homeless. Only 10% are from outside California and most of them said they came here on promise of a job, to find family, etc.
I've heard some statistic that the non mentally ill homeless tend to get back on their feet in about a year on average in SF. The mentally ill chronic homeless that everyone can see need mental health services.
> In reality a minority of homeless people (~35%) have drug, alcohol, or metal problems.
Citation needed.
In reality, when people are complaining about homelessness, it's the chronic homeless, not temporarily homeless. 1/3 have drug problems and 2/3 have mental or physical disabilities. Those 1/3 and 2/3 pools don't perfectly overlap, so the amount of people who have neither drug nor disabilities is very small.
I can't help but wonder if 275M would be better spent by the city if they created a facility somewhere - anywhere - that is cheaper than the SF Bay.
I'm not saying ship the poor away and make them someone else's problem. I mean caring for people in a more cost-effective manner, and in a way that isn't just treating the symptoms.
There are 6,686 homeless people in SF [1]. With a budget in the hundreds of millions, it is conceivable that all of these people can be housed and treated in an inland community in perpetuity. Many homeless suffer from mental disorders that require treatment, not just housing and food.
> I can't help but wonder if 275M would be better spent by the city if they created a facility somewhere - anywhere - that is cheaper than the SF Bay.
Probably not.
> I'm not saying ship the poor away and make them someone else's problem.
But you are saying “ship the poor away”. Which is problematic, historically, to implement even locally, which is why much of that money is spent reaching then in the community.
> I mean caring for people in a more cost-effective manner, and in a way that isn't just treating the symptoms.
If you want to treat more than symptoms of poverty, you need to restructure the economy and society, not move the victims.
> There are 6,686 homeless people in SF [1]. With a budget in the hundreds of millions, it is conceivable that all of these people can be housed and treated in an inland community in perpetuity.
The number (and, even moreso, the identity of the individuals that are homeless) isn't static. Though forced relocation without any clear plan for improving the ability of people to escape homelessness will probably make the condition stickier.
I'll concede that it does indeed sound like "shipping the poor away". Historically, it meant making it someone else's problem (1-way ticket to SF) which I agree is indeed problematic, and is not what I'm advocating for.
I do want to treat more than just the symptoms, but I don't think handwaving for socioeconomic restructures is a realistic way get anything done. I'm advocating for a way to make the ~30K/person go farther by not being in one of the most expensive areas of the country.
Many of these people need long term mental healthcare, and is the main reason they are homeless. Our current system is not well suited at helping people with mental disorders.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed and I don't pretend to have the answer, but evidenced by the fact that homelessness is a growing problem despite throwing more and more money at it. I do think we need to try another approach.
I'm with you in thinking that at least a trial of something similar would be worth it, given the amounts being spent. e.g., create a community/farm in a regional area with easy tasks for those who didn't want to idle, and various drug and mental-health support services. Give people a chance to trial it and then return if they didn't like it. Allow them to trial it in groups so they weren't leaving behind friends.
Completely optional but hopefully a better life for those who tried and liked it. If their peers were there and the weather wasn't problematic, surely something could be superior to a life on the streets.
If other states were shipping people in to take advantage of it, pool resources.
A cursory google search reveals that 1 in 4 of those in homeless shelters have a severe mental disorder. Nearly 1 in 2 have severe mental disorders and substance abuse problems.
These numbers do not paint a small minority that could benefit from institutionalization or other forms or long-term care, and our current system is poorly setup to handle these issues.
I see this opinion brought up a lot but what would the logistics be? You can't just cut or move the full 275M immediately because surely some of those funds are absolutely crucial, i.e. keeping the lights on at shelters or funding hospitals who otherwise would foot large bills.
I don't think the logistics should be too hard, once you have some idea of how to do this in an ethical manner; start with a pilot program that addresses maybe 100 homeless individuals, see if it works, and if so, slowly increase the number of participants, while decreasing the scope of the current measures. In the end, even if providing services at another location is effective, you need to provide some services directly in the community anyway; and I don't think the proportion is predictable, you would need to try and see what works.
One success story in homelessness has been Utah's Housing First program [1]. Is there any effort to do something similar here?
At first glance it appears very affordable. Rents in the city center appear to be about $5 per square foot per month judging from a quick perusal of craigslist listings. So to give all 7500 homeless in the city a 100 sq foot efficiency would have plausible annual expenses of about $45 million -- a small fraction of the $300M plus mentioned in the parent article. Obviously there are many problematic details, such as there are almost no appropriate apartments currently available, but ultra-small units do exist [2] and seem to be a favorable alternative to sleeping on the street.
Real estate prices (buying) in the city range from $400 to $1000 a sq ft. That's probably a better estimate, as you'd have to create new spaces. Taking the average of that range, you get $700 * 100 * 7500 = $525M.
I'm all for just setting the more salvageable homeless up in a 900 sq ft condo, and subsidizing it for them (i.e. free), then let them sell it in 3+ years. They can pay back the subsidies, and take the equity and move elsewhere. There would be other requirements as well (attending substance abuse programs, staying out of jail, etc)
You're calculating the cash flow of an all-cash financing scenario, but not the real cost. Since the buildings are durable you need to amortize their benefit over the life of the structures. Using the standard depreciation schedule on the $525M gives only $18M per year + maintenance & tax -- close to the figure derived from rents.
I started getting off at Powell station and I can attest to this article. I've commuted to NYC stations for over 4yrs and even though i've seen my share of homelessness inside the NYC subway stations, it's nowhere as bad as SF BART station (Powell).
Every day I see some weird stuff going on (it's at a point where it's no longer weird to me).
I moved to SF from New York a couple years ago. A huge difference in the homeless populations for me has been the aggressiveness of the SF homeless. I can't recall a single time in New York where a homeless person got in my face or yelled at me or anything of the like. Since being here I've had a full cup of (hopefully) soda thrown on me and been yelled at from a 3ft range multiple times. It's a surreal experience. I'm not sure what led to cultural difference.
"Bryant Park, in the heart of midtown and adjacent to the New York Public Library, was an open-air drug market; Grand Central Terminal, a gigantic flophouse; the Port Authority Bus Terminal, “a grim gauntlet for bus passengers dodging beggars, drunks, thieves, and destitute drug addicts,” as the New York Times put it in 1992."
NYC's "solution":
"In sum, a diverse set of organizations in the city—pursuing their own interests and using various tactics and programs—all began trying to restore order to their domains. Further, in contrast with early sporadic efforts like Operation Crossroads, these attempts were implemented aggressively and persistently. Biederman, for example, worked on Bryant Park for 12 years. When Kiley was struggling to restore order in the subway, he had to withstand pressure from powerful opponents: the New York Civil Liberties Union, the mayor’s office (which had suggested bringing portable kitchens and showers into the subway for the homeless), the police commissioner, and the transit police. In fact, it was after the transit cops resisted Operation Enforcement, Kiley’s first effort to restore order, that he hired Bratton.
By the early 1990s, these highly visible successes, especially in the subway, had begun to express themselves politically. Better than any other politician, Rudy Giuliani understood the pent-up demand for public order and built his successful 1993 run for mayor on quality-of-life themes. Once in office, he appointed Bratton, who had orchestrated the subway success and understood the importance of order maintenance, as New York’s police commissioner.
Under Bratton, the NYPD brought enormous capacities to bear on the city’s crime problem—particularly Compstat, its tactical planning and accountability system, which identified where crimes were occurring and held local commanders responsible for their areas. Giuliani and Bratton also gave the force’s members a clear vision of the “business” of the NYPD and how their activities contributed to it. In short, a theory previously advocated largely by elites filtered down to—and inspired—line police officers, who had constituted a largely ignored and underused capacity."
From what I've seen, there are a lot of confounding factors in the studies that both back up and refute broken-windows policing. It can be hard to tell what actually works.
Objections aren't so much suggesting that it doesn't work, but that it was unjust, and New York should have been kept as it was in the 80s because the human cost of the cleanup was so high.
It was somewhat challenging to find good information online on crime at the PABT, but I found a few things that give some indication of how it has changed over time.
I would appreciate it if anyone can find better data or spot-check these numbers against other reports, because of course an order of magnitude is very large.
What would happen if you threw a cup of soda on someone in NYC or Boston, Trenton or Baltimore? I think you'd learn very quickly not to do that. Cultivating a culture where that sort of response by the person on which soda is thrown is frowned upon certainly doesn't help.
A homeless woman spit on me in SOMA a few months ago for no apparent reason. Just walked up to me squawking like a bird and spit on me. Probably was on something.
My immediate reaction was to jump out of my chair and aggressively move towards her - I'm actually not sure what I would've done next because it all happened so quickly. Probably shoved her? That seems like a legitimate response to someone walking up and spitting on you. Thankfully I was with a few friends and they restrained me before I could do anything and the woman ran away unscathed.
The entire experience left me so confused. I am legitimately concerned that if I had shoved her I would've been considered the 'bad guy' here be the absurd SF hyper liberals and could've ended up in jail been fired if my employer found out.
What are you supposed to do in this situation? There needs to be some sort of disincentive to this behavior but it seems like the way things are in SF it's actually socially acceptable behavior.
In many southern tech cities corning someone and yelling at/assaulting them with unknown fluids is a great way to get shot. We recently hired a CA transplant to the dev team and he was shocked how many of us carried.
If I'm cornered by a crazy man who's shouting and dousing me - if it hits me in the face, quite literally inoculating me - with God knows what? Even here in duty-to-retreat Baltimore, you'd have a hard time calling that other than self-defense.
In other cities I think the government has your back. The SF police will not respond not a non violent encounter because the court system heavily sympathizes with non violent offenders in SF, to the point where they don't even prosecute. I am at a loss as to what I, as an individual, can do to curb the aggressive behavior.
during my normal commute hours at Civic Center I've seen ...
- used needles strewn about in busy areas
- someone defecate on the station floor in broad daylight
- meth/heroin deals
- a dealer shaking down a high junkie for money owned on the platform
- entire hallways/stairways that were no-go because of strung out transients
- pretty much a third of BART cars have a homeless person sleeping off their high in them.
I feel stressed and not safe during my commute, can't believe I pay $9/day for the privilege of commuting via a cesspool of human misery. Not being on Civic Center or Powell station or being able to take Transit Bus will definitely be a consideration for my next job hunt.
Cleaning staff should remove the needles. Security or police arrest the dealers, and remove people loitering on stations or trains.
Is it a lack of funding, laws, sympathy for the homeless, or ... what?
I lived in London for ten years, and homeless people, or beggars, were extremely rare on public transport vehicles, and even rarer within stations. I don't know what combination of law and enforcement is used, and there are homeless people on the streets, but something prevents them from overtaking the transport system.
I'll offer up this explanation from arch-conservative James Burnham (so please don't downvote the messenger) just for consideration on the idea that the "doing something about this", as SF tries so mightily, can make the problem worse. This is from 1964:
But what exactly is Skid Row? In reality it is not, other than incidentally, a spatial concept, but a functional one. . . Skid Row is the end of the line, and there must be an end of the line somewhere. ... The whole [reform] operation has proved to be, inevitably, an ideological illusion. Since Skid Row is not a static place, it cannot be abolished or rubbed out. The most noticeable consequence of this anti-Skid Row campaign has been merely to diffuse Skid Row, for a while, throughout the City.
I've elided a lot of supporting argument, the gist of which is that the denizens of Skid Row tend to form networks of support & attract institutions that maintain them. And while that level of maintenance looks (and is) rather squalid and miserable to outsiders, breaking it up is just replacing an organic support network with an artificial one which looks at the symptoms more than the roots.
I can't speak to London except that I guarantee London has a Skid Row, even if it's not physically located in London, if that makes sense.
Final disclaimer that I don't claim to have the answer, just pointing out one point of view that seems rather pertinent to 2017 SF despite being written 53 years prior, whatever moral valence you assign to the author & his politics.
I'm not suggesting solving the whole problem. London hasn't -- see, for example, the events that led to the fire and many deaths in Grenfell Tower last week. I'm out of touch, but I think that building was one step above Skid Row.
What I am suggesting is removing the homeless people from the public transportation network, so it's kept cleaner and feels safer for the users.
I think the difference is that the US has abject poverty at levels that call into question its status as a proper first world country. So many of these people probably simply require some basic mental health/rehab services, but they just have too many hoops to jump through to get them (assuming they qualify for Medicaid or other assistance, which isn't necessarily a given). It's not surprising that a country like Britain with reasonably accessible social services has way fewer people in this condition.
To your question about why they've taken over public transit in particular - I think the situation is just that out of hand. Libraries and parks are similarly full of homeless people, probably just due to the fact that they're public.
SF attitudes towards certain behaviors make hard to do what most cities do, which is arrest these people and make them go somewhere out of sight.
There are cleaning staff going through the area cleaning stuff up. But people still are doing their crap and the laws are unenforced because of those political reasons.
I also think SF police & the city decided the tenderloin was the homeless containment zone long time ago with SROs being there. That is also where the civic center station is.
I'm sure they clean the Civic Center station area daily. If they didn't, it would be knee deep in filth.
That's just where they've decided to gather. I'm not entirely sure what attracts them there, other than the burger king with the huge "EBT Cards Accepted" poster.
all of the above; plus a janitor or a police officer cost $200k+/year each when you factor in pay, benefits, overtime. So you can imagine they might be a little thinly staffed.
The UK has a population of 60 million people. There are only about 4500 rough sleepers.
This figure has risen every year for the past 6 years, and it's likely to keep rising. Removing the single room supplement / imposing the bedroom tax, freezing housing benefit, cuts to local authorities (and thus cuts to drug and alcohol services, and to some mental health provision, and to some housing provision) all mean that rough sleeping is going to increase.
And that number doesn't include people who are in temporary accommodation or vulnerably housed or sofa surfing.
Every complaint I've seen on this topic is about how repulsive or unsafe it feels for someone commuting to their job in SF. No one talks about these thousands of people who are suffering from drug addiction, mental disorders, socioeconomic injustice, and all kinds of abuse. No one's complaint is: "how can we, as society, allow these conditions to persist, why aren't we helping these people in a meaningful way?" It's the apathy of the population in general that allows this kind of situation to come about and then persist despite the best efforts of "they" who are supposed to "do something about it."
Millions of homeless people in hundreds of other cities around the world suffer from the exact same conditions you've described. Yet nowhere but the Bay Area have I seen those conditions caused those people to behave the way they do in SF. The city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on safe injection sites, needle disposals, and public restrooms, and yet still must continue to spend money to pay city employees to clean up needles and human waste from the streets and transit stations.
Homelessness is a massive problem in SF, but the attitude that they behave this way "because of the situation they're in" is untrue and counterproductive.
I disagree with that strongly. There are loads of people describing what they see of the homeless issue, and proposing or discussing potential solutions in a generally respectful way. For the most part, the evidence is described more as remarkable than repulsive. Whenever the topic comes up on HN, I think the discussion is very reasonable and considerate, and I always find it an interesting read.
I get off at Civic Center and it's astonishing how many used syringes I see on the ground by the escalators. Those needle tips are extremely dangerous and could be life changing if you happened to get punctured by one.
I'm in Australia and don't mind if there are sharps bins. They're easily ignored and generally placed high enough that curious kids don't get themselves in trouble. Whatever community/health experts deem best is fine by me.
I don't think it's an issue for most people. The sharps bins look very medical so it is easy to forget that the users are potentially throwing away things other than insulin needles, especially if you're not wandering around looking to be angry about the fact that people inject drugs.
I don't know when you lived in NYC, but it has certainly gotten worse in the last few years. I'm tempted to date it from the start of the de Blasio administration but I couldn't swear to it.
In addition to what others have said, NYC is legally mandated to, and mostly does, provide sufficient shelter beds. Some homeless people for a mix of reasons, some quite rational, avoid these shelters. However on the coldest nights of the year they are an option even for people that would usually rather avoid them. A similar story applies for Rikers Island (jail) or the public hospital system.
Some can find shelter. Sometimes open vent grates on the ground provide heat (until they start putting spikes on those). Sometimes you can make fire someplace. Sometimes you have to migrate away. Or, you freeze to death...
Does anyone know why enforcement hasn't been stepped up at the Market St. BART/MUNI stations? Powell is literally the core of our tourism market (Yes, Pier 39, which everyone gets to from Powell or Embarcadero), and all of the downtown business/banking. The two things SF can't afford to lose...
I think it was Deming who said "your system is set up perfectly to produce the results you are getting." SF has:
- a mild climate (attractive if you don't have shelter)
- our society has no place for mentally ill. They may not ever be able to live life by themselves.
- a $250 million of subsidies for being homeless, apparently
- a culture of spending money on the symptoms rather than solving the problem. For instance, a number of comments here suggest paying for them to live in a house/apartment somewhere. Now you're stuck paying their rent forever, because the underlying problem of they aren't making enough money to live is still there. Plus, if I'm homeless, now SF looks like a good place to move, because they'll pay for my apartment!
- a culture of permissiveness. Why do homeless people get to act with different standards? If a "homed" person defecated on their neighbor's sidewalk they would call the police, but it's okay for the homeless to do it? If a "homed" person throws liquids at you, it's probably grounds for charging them with assault. But it's okay for homeless people?
- persistent lack of housing, which means that some people who might not be homeless can't afford housing. Combined with the above, there isn't much incentive to move to a place they could afford.
I think the attitude of entitlement by some of the homeless (see rsj_hn's comment, for instance) suggests that SF's structure is enabling homelessness, rather than caring for the homeless.
I have come to the realization that SF's homeless problems cannot be solved. It is simply because this is probably the only city in America that is willing to not unleash the police on homeless population and tries to take care of them. After all they are citizens of this country as well. In my suburban city in the Bay Area, homeless people are not tolerated in any of the neighborhoods. In a way I applaud that SF is doing something to help poor and mentally ill folks, but the price is degradation of quality of life for everyone else.
The Bay area is royally fucked by zoning, full stop. You can drive around suburbs like the one you reside in and see the (high priced) slum, where taller & larger buildings have effectively been banned.
Dezoning California so appropriate development can take place would allow for much of that homeless population that your police dept. chases into SF to actually be housed and perhaps take an active role in society. Housing First should be our priority, not chasing the poorest members of our society out of the ghettos that surround the average city in the US.
I see SF cops interacting with the homeless regularly. And, what I've personally seen has been overwhelmingly positive. I see friendly conversations on street corners. I see cops checking up on people who in especially bad shape. Lately, I've several times seen cops driving by sidewalk-sitters where both yell back and forth to each other. It looks angry if you don't pay close attention. All parties are smiling.
This is absolutely wonderful to hear. Constant harrasment by angry police officers (as I've seen in other locales) can be very damaging to the psyche if those who already have so much to deal with.
I've seen estimates that it costs up to $80k/year in the Bay Area to give a homeless person housing and treat their underlying mental illness, substance addiction and other health issues. So for 8,000 homeless we're taking about $700million per year liability. You can't solve homelessness in the Bay Area by throwing money at the problem. The underlying issue is the cost of housing, health care and law enforcement or how those things are applied - all are deep political issues.
My own running list of root problems that underly the homeless epidemic in California:
- zoning. we have technology to build inexpensive micro-apartments, theres just no cost-effective way to gain approval for tens thousands of them convenient to health care facilities and economic opportunities.
- building codes. to build cheap micro-apartments, they need to be prefabricated. building codes enforce customized busy work for individual plumbers, electricians, inspectors and other contractors on each installation. The systems resists pre-fabrication which would be safer and much cheaper overall.
- local attitudes about state power. police use of force. crimes of poverty aren't often prosecuted. City attorneys/prosecutors are highly disincentivized to tackle quality of life crimes. cost of jury trials.
- high cost and poor state of prisons
- lack of police headcount, expense of police salaries/benefits.
- high cost of health care & related labor. regulatory capture by licensed professionals, hospital companies, drug/equipment companies. cost of healthcare liability insurance.
- lack of regional coordination between low-cost and high-cost areas within the state
- lack of state-wide mental health and drug abuse treatment policy
- lack of money for preventative care and early intervention for new homeless - don't tackle problems till its far too late and more costly / impossible to fix
I hold what could be an unpopular opinion and what some might call irrelevant, but I think a big factor here is tech. To preface what I'm about to state, I work in tech myself and I know many of you are, and I'm not blaming tech from an outsider point of view.
There is a disproportionate amount of companies starting or moving into SF over even just the past 5 years. Before, if you're starting a tech company, it could be equally common to start it in the peninsula (maybe even more so), say Palo Alto or Mountain View and the like. Nowadays, the default choice is SF and that's majority of the cases by far.
I think collectively, the whole environment is pushing towards building SF into the New York of the west, except instead of banks and the financial industry filling up the town, it's tech companies. I'm not saying it's the agenda of anyone in specific (in government or otherwise) to build out SF that way, I'm saying it's what we're all collectively doing, whether intentional for some of us or simply riding the waves for others.
SF is a city that used to support many industries. Tech is obviously the one industry that is almost the top earner overall (or might even be the absolute top earner by industry). It seems like an obvious factor (and a big one) that's driving anyone not in tech away. In some cases, at the lowest end of the income spectrum, they might not have anywhere to be driven away to other than to the streets. Another anecdotal point is that recent popular article about how <$105k is considered low income in SF.
If this is indeed a factor, one of the things we collectively as part of the tech industry can do, is to intentionally spread ourselves away from SF, into other areas of the bay area. I get it that people want to live in the bay area for its climate and all the conveniences. There's no reason why there can't be tech companies HQ'ing in East Bay, for example. (and I'm not talking about just Oakland, but everywhere from San Leandro down to Fremont, or further east like Pleaston, Livermore, Walnut Creek, etc.)
> If this is indeed a factor, one of the things we collectively as part of the tech industry can do, is to intentionally spread ourselves away from SF, into other areas of the bay area.
Trouble is, the hot young talent often want to live right in SF and walk/bike to work. So it becomes hard to recruit successfully if your company does not have an office in SF, and you are not Apple, Facebook or Google. My company is in Redwood City (about 30 minutes south of SF) and we experience this problem.
A lot of my peers around my age (mid thirties) have been actively moving out of SF specifically. I think it might be a matter of targeting the right pool of candidates to look at.
People in their mid thirties don't want to work at startup lottery anymore. And not many south bay startups are offering something materially different than working at google.
They have done the math and realized that %99 of the time even with an exit, they will make more at google.
If you want to walk/bike to work, why would SF be your choice? About the only good thing is temperature. The hills... OMG the hills. It's also a decent-sized city, so not safe to be exposed to crime like that. One needs a car, not that there is parking.
There are apartments in Redwood City. Get one, and the walk/bike experience should at least beat SF. I may be wrong, but the place seems flatter at least.
I'm out in Indialantic, FL. It's hot but flat, and houses near work are affordable. I walk 0.9 miles to work, and that's only because I wanted a 4-bedroom on almost half an acre.
Maybe the problem is the desire you have for "young". That ought not be a job requirement. If all the young want to live in SF, you can still hire old people.
I want to voice an opinion that I've held in secret, I'm curious if you think that this is completely overboard...(downvotes are appropriate here, people).
While a lot of these startups might be useless Tinder clones or Uber for X, there are also startups that quite literally change the world ~for the better~ in objective ways. Don't we have a moral imperative to cater to these companies at the expense of all else? Isn't it better for the long term to ensure they have all the resources available?
Yes, some of the startups are scum money grabs, but for every cancer researching, ag developing, energy innovation startup shouldn't we extend them every benefit possible?
I'm homeless. I have been for 5.5 years. I am author of the blogs "What helps the homeless" and "San Diego homeless survival guide."
I have a bunch of blogs because of the free service BlogSpot. I have an earned income because of an online writing service. I have social contact and an intellectual outlet because of free forums, like Hacker News. I do most of my banking online. I am paying down debt and my earned income is gradually going up.
I could really use more traffic for my websites, more customers for my resume editing service and access to decent basic housing that doesn't cost an insane amount. If I could find a simple 2 bedroom place for about $400/month, I could get off the street in the very near future. I can't seem to find that. I am in the Central Valley, not SF and I am willing to potentially move to another state, though not just ANY state. I am still finding it incredibly hard to locate a potential viable housing solution for me.
While I agree that some things add more value to the world than others, there aren't really any clear cut boundaries. Some of the people on the street are, for example, cancer survivors who are broke in part because they got treatment that saved their life (so far) but it cost a helluva lot. We really need a few more basic things solved, like universal access to basic healthcare. More cancer solutions can potentially just put more people on the street. It doesn't necessarily fix this problem.
Homelessness isn't a simple problem space to solve. There is no one thing that causes it. Some things that would help enormously:
More affordable housing, which has been in short supply for decades and getting worse.
More middle class employment options. These seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.
Single payer health care system to provide universal coverage.
Why are you unwilling to move to certain states? I know that in kentucky, for example, you could find a 2 bedroom for 400 a month fairly easily- I know that because I lived there.
I have serious health problems that are significantly impacted by things like climate and local vegetation. It is vastly cheaper and more cost effective for me to not be deathly ill. Most homeless people have challenging personal problems of that sort. It is a significant contributing factor to homelessness and it doesn't help when people act like we are just being unreasonable or something.
I'm not sure of the specifics and it may not be very easy to get there, but I know Hawaii has a single payer system and a similar climate. It might be something to look into.
Hawaii is very expensive. It would require airfare to get there. Volcanos emit sulfur, to which I am allergic, and other fumes, which are contraindicated for my respiratory condition.
I am looking basically at West Coast states and other Western states. Nevada and Idaho are two I am looking at very closely at the moment. I am inclined to simply leave California for various reasons, but I also am looking at the possibility of finding something here.
How do you propose "picking" these world changing startups? Either you codify some rules that will inevitably be gamed, or you have some sort of discretionary body that will enact their own biases and possibly pick companies out of nepotism/corruption/etc.
It's also hard to tell what startups are world changing. Theranos probably seemed like a real life saver to 100s of millions globally. An Uber for home nurses might save that many lives, or it might be yet another scummy Hospice company that does everything it can to steal money from Medicare. Other businesses could have amazing effects that are hard to quantify: Google has certainly saved thousands of lives indirectly by providing easy access to information (due to the speed increases in research this allows as well as allowing people to treat/identify acute symptoms more easily), but how do you measure and predict this?
On the other hand, you have "vertical agriculture" companies that talk all about saving the world through a second agricultural revolution. But they're really only economical viable for growing marijuana.
I don't think its a matter of picking some chosen out of a crowd, I mean to say that the Bay Area should focus all policies on being pro-business to attract startups of any type.
I specifically mentioned crap startups because I'm sure its the first rebuttal to my suggestion (tax breaks for uber for party cups?!?!)
Why is this the responsibility of the Bay Area? Are there not other tech hubs out there? Are there not other cities willing to attract startups and to become tech hubs? Isn't the promise of tech the ability to do business anywhere on the globe?
You assume the East Bay wants tech companies, and that we shouldn't be building the New York of the West. Trying to resist becoming what it could become is (finally) killing San Francisco, and the gentrification of Oakland is already even more intense. New York is extremely productive, effective and has low environmental impact per person. There are enormous advantages of living in a city, which is why people want to live in one. The problem is landowners who benefit from soaring prices, don't have any pressure to move thanks to frozen property taxes, and have a disproportionate impact on zoning.
The best thing tech could do is get involved in local politics, show up reliably to local meetings, and advocate for zoning and taxation policies that would support building enough housing so anyone who wants to live in these places can live there. Not just in SF either: it's even more important that Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino start being willing to build housing for the people employed there. The suburbs could be significantly more dense than they are, which could support better public transit options.
The solution isn't to try to convince people not to live where they want to live; it's to stop letting Boomers decide where housing should get built, which requires Millennials to start showing up for ourselves.
That would presumably raise rents in surrounding counties, which might actually make things worse. A big hunk of the homeless come from other counties, and went to SF after the fact:
"Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported they were living out of state at the time they lost their housing.
Nineteen percent (19%) reported they were living in another county in California. Six percent (6%) reported
they were living in Alameda County at the time, 3% San Mateo, 2% Marin, 2% Contra Costa and 1% Santa Clara
County."
I don't even think that's particularly controversial. The concentration of tech startups in SF has been devastating for the city, and has distorted every aspect of early-stage tech startups for years. And frankly, YC bears a rather large proportion of the blame for this.
I wouldn't be so quick to blame YC. YC actually encourages founders to be smart about their funding money and not spend a premium just to HQ in SF if at all possible. Problem is a lot of founders just feel so inclined to work in SF.
That sounds so obvious - these funds have to be used to deter people from becoming homeless or squeeze them out of city if they became so - but they seem to be used to make life of bums more comfortable, obviously you have more and more of them.
I guess experience of Belarus in eliminating bums should serve as example. There are no bums in Belarus. Why? You aren't supposed to ask, they won't tell you. People are happy, and the government is doing its job. Everyone knows that wandering in the street dressed and smelling like a bum is a bad idea and won't last for long.
Homeless people don't defecate on the streets; alcoholics, drug addicts and mentally ill people do. Those people need help, not to be sent off so they're out of sight.
They are supposed to be sent to forced labor to chemical plants and other harmful conditions work (Belarus also has a lot of work to do on contaminated Chernobyl lands, so maybe there as well).
Thing is, bumming is a crime. As far as i know, it is a felony in just about every country. It is just that cops are closing their eyes on this crime so frequently that most people even forgot that it was against the law.
This is nuts. $275M and no results? Seriously? The city really needs to rethink this.
The homeless in SF are disgusting. Why does the city dump so much money into them? Is it really worth the amount spent per person? Why not spend that money on improving public schools, the efficiency of public transit, and things that useful members of the society would actually benefit from?
I wonder what the editorial reasoning is behind publishing a story spurred by a recent homeless count, and omitting the number of homeless counted.
Instead, we get numbers about how expensive programs are, how many needles have been cleaned up, and how many complaints made about the homeless on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis with a map, with a special highlight of human excrement complaints.
If I were cynical, I'd say that this is an anti-homeless piece with the summary: "Our spending is going up 10% a year, and homelessness is barely going down (take our word for it.)"
My cynical take on why the number of homeless was omitted: it's 7,499. $275MM/7,499 = $36,700 for each homeless person. This is obviously more than enough to house every homeless person directly, but the money is being drained away by subcontractors and salaries. Instead, the paper is implying that more money isn't the answer, policing is (notably not implying that spending be reduced, either.) Shifting emphasis to more policing of the poor will create a material benefit for the people who've decided to live in a gated community but forgot to put up a gate, while maintaining spending will keep up the flow of money that is going to a network of graft that results in little material gain for the supposed object of that spending.
San Francisco took this thinking to its logical conclusion years ago. "We're spending tens of thousands on services for homeless people. Why don't we just give them the money and let them buy what they need?"
So the city got rid of the "subcontractors" and started handing out cash. The homeless people (as a group - I'm sure there were exceptions) pretty much treated the assistance as extra money for booze and drugs. Also, you can imagine what happened when homeless people living in other cities learned about cash benefits.
Gavin Newsom rose to prominence by changing the system back to what it had been before cash assistance. So we're back to having bureaucrats administering services, because it turns out a whole lot of homeless people are homeless for reasons that go beyond bad luck.
I used to live in SF near a camp at 10th and mission. I saw the homeless daily; it's very sad to see and people just walk around them. I moved out of SF because it is so damn expensive and I didn't have to be there.
$275 million is a lot of money. Instead of trying to help the homeless survive in SF, why not help them relocate somewhere more affordable. There's lots of space in the country and almost all of them are cheaper than SF. 275 million goes a very long way to help people resettle and their quality of life would surely go up.
Disclosure: To be clear, I did just what I'm suggesting: I relocated due to the high cost to somewhere more affordable for me. I've met many others over the years that have as well.
Giving the homeless a one-way ticket to the city of their choice is a very effective homeless removal strategy that a lot of cities employ. Guess where a lot of homeless people choose to go. SF would literally be paying to ship the Horne less away to a city that will simply ship them back.
Looking online, it seems like there are around 7000 homeless in SF. 300 million is over 42k per person per year.
Housing is certainly the problem. If there was a glut of housing, the city could just hand out 30k per person, save a lot of money, and the homeless could just rent a place. With the remainder of the money, people could get back on their feet. Give people back hope.
Fund an infinite supply of government make-work jobs with included housing, legal drugs, and okay pay.
Model the make-work towns off of coal towns of old. On cheap land so housing is cheap.
Have a minimum age of 30 to prevent kids/teens/young adults from moving to these towns and being employed at these subsidized (read: un-profitable for the government) jobs.
I'm sure that more than 10% of the homeless are under 30. Some random stats I looked up on google - 650k recorded homeless in a study in 2014, 130k were children, and another study says the mode age ranges from 21-23.
It isn't just people who fall through the cracks when they lose their jobs, its also those who never could get a start to begin with.
Make the minimum age 25 then. A minimum age may not even be necessary, but we should have some incentive to not be in these make-work towns. But we don't want the incentive too high that the homeless don't want to go to them.
The promise of these towns for the homeless should be legal drugs, guaranteed income, and something to do.
If an infinite supply of jobs deals with only 90% of the problem, does this imply that any finite supply deals with 0% of the problem?
Also, if you want make work jobs modeled on coal towns on cheap land, maybe we could have them in coal country, digging not-coal out of ground. Then we could deal with the death of coal mining as well as 90% of homelessness, using that infinite supply of not-jobs.
Having a property or house should be our natural birthright, period. Once you die this property or house should be released and made available in a system where you can move to another/better place when it's available.
But, as it is now you don't even get a square inch. Everything is owned by government, landlords, businesses etc.. The result is that once a man starts to earn a little money, it all flows back to the owners. Earning enough to buy and really own a property yourself is only for the lucky few. Even after 20 or 30 years of hard work you can end up in the streets if you lose your job. And if you are unlucky enough having a (mental) illness, your chance to succeed is near zero.
Homeless are a product of the system we live in. And the best way to describe this system is a pyramid game. In the end there will be a few owning (and controlling) almost everything. It is sad to see that democracy totally fails to address this problem.. Maybe even more sad is that most children are not properly educated, especially when it comes to the system we live in and homelessness. I learned in primary school that homeless people are just lazy, and being on the streets was their own punishment.
It would be a miracle if a new generation really understands the problem and can solve it politically by changing the system we live in.
The system I propose does not exist yet and needs to be designed properly, just as we design a software system. It should of course be flexible enough to allow for people moving to another place.
As the situation with property and ownership is now, it is random chaos. Even a rudimentary design has never been made. A financially successful billionaire (who says not by criminal act) can buy and own thousands of houses forever, and the income from that will grow tremendously, which allows him/her/progeny to buy even more property. This is just insane, how can this ever scale for the benefit of all people considering the greed we all have built in?
See the reasons listed in the other responses. Another one, which used to be much more significant, is the dark side of the west coast culture's radical acceptance ethic.
Port cities were all about radical acceptance once upon a time, because they needed laborers. It didn't matter who you were or what you did: if you could carry goods off a ship, you had a place as a dock worker. And if you couldn't, you could still cook or launder for dock workers. So radical accpetance predates the 60's, though it became more of a thing afterwards.
Well, it's nice to know you have a city to go to if your home town cannot accept you. If you're gay, or bookish, or artsy, et cetera.
But if what the people around you are not accepting is the erratic behavior that your incipient schizophrenia is getting you to engage in (or the lack of acceptance is actually a delusion induced by it, and your family does still accept you), and you've heard of San Francisco, well, you go there. You cut off ties to your home. And then the schizophrenia kicks in full blast.
A nice thing about social media is that people having mental breakdowns tend to make it obvious on Facebook and invite intervention. And, it makes it harder to cut your old ties, when once upon a time it was harder to maintain them.
But when you see 50 year olds in the streets around the Mission, holding debates with the voices in their heads, well, this is how they got there.
You can live outside year round. It gets kinda tough in the winter, but at least you won't freeze to death.
Also super homeless friendly rules and laws. For example, in the city of Berkeley, you are required to have the front door of your commercial establishment set back from the street and covered, and the police won't remove homeless people while your business is closed. In other words, you must provide covered shelter each night to the homeless if you own a business there.
Because the middle of the country has zero tolerance for homeless once they start to become a burden, and bus them to the west coast. Nevada finally settled a SF lawsuit a year or two ago because they shut down a metal health facility and gave them all bus tickets to California.
Combine that with the moderate climates (read: you aren't sleeping in 4 foot of snow) and we just end up with an uneven distribution.
Yea, you can see this in Denver. I just moved to sf and it's like night and day. The emphasis in denver is entirely in clearing homeless camps, not in attempting to find somewhere that can handle their needs.
It was pretty eye opening to see people shooting up on the street at 10am in front of cops in SF.
First, housing in SF is insane. I have seen lots of articles about how bad it is and that $50k or even $100k is considered "low income" in these parts.
Second, the weather in the Bay Area is very homeless-friendly. If you need to sleep outside year-round, it is best to be someplace where you will neither die from the heat in summer nor from the freezing cold in winter.
Third, homelessness is on the rise nationwide. Homeless people can relocate relatively easily due to not having to give notice at their apartment and having lost most or all of their material possessions. So, the odds are good that some people are simply coming out here for the weather.
Fourth, big cities like SF tend to have more services for the homeless. There are meal kitchens and the like. If you are completely destitute, you go to where you can get free meals and other services. I know because that is exactly why I went to downtown San Diego for six months as a homeless person. I left and went elsewhere when I was no longer outright destitute and did not need access to things like soup kitchens to have any hope of surviving.
So, I think if you want to solve homelessness in SF, you need to work on homelessness across the nation.
That's incorrect according to "The 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress" at https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2016-AHAR-P... . Page 8 has a graph of all homeless people, which has been on a downward trend from 2007 to 2016.
Thank you for the source. I will look at it some more when I have time. But on initial skim, it is a count for a single night in January from which they extrapolate for the whole year. Furthermore, it outright states that actual unsheltered people has risen by 2%. What has gone down is people in the shelter system.
I have been seeing a lot of articles about the rise in evictions, among other things, and I left downtown San Diego when I did in part because homeless services were suffering distress and were less and less useful to me because they were overwhelmed. But I will dig into this and see if I can come up with a more nuanced and accurate means to convey my point.
We have a very serious housing crisis on our hands. People who are homeless per se are merely the tip of the iceberg.
How in the hell did they blow through three hundred million dollars in one year on this? According to figures they have to provide the Federal government for assistance this is for a population of approximately 7500. Seven thousand five hundred.
Utah took a decade but slashed their numbers by making sure the homeless had an apartment and phone. For the amount of money SF is spending they could buy them homes. The real crime here is the wasteful spending. They are burning close to 40k per person. People harp about wasteful spending on incarceration need to start looking here.
So how is that for even a third of this they cannot house the thousand that still need a bed each night? That number should have been taken care of in the first few months. Sorry for the hyperbole but if we want an example of a government needing a expose on waste and bureaucracy this is an ideal candidate.
Hard numbers as provided by the city.[1].
7,499: 2017 total homeless population
7,539: 2015 total homeless population
(The number was 6,436 in 2013, and 6,455 in 2011.)
5,518: 2017 single homeless adults
5,342: 2015 single homeless adults
The 2016 Utah report doesn't have the same graph showing the homeless population in state over the decade (it did not show a slashing of the homeless population in 2015 just a slight downward trend) but it does show the cost for housing a homeless person across the country - it's roughly 40,000-50,000 per year almost everywhere they surveyed.
It seems unlikely to me that the homelessness problem in SF has anything at all to do with high housing prices. It's certainly not software engineers living on the streets, and I'd bet that even the people that work at Starbucks in SF have homes, even if they're crappy apartments shared with roommates outside the city.
How do you get a job at Starbucks starting as a homeless person though? It could be a hill too high to climb out of, not only purely economically, but socially. For example, how do you convince an employer or prospective roommate to give you a chance when you're a homeless alcoholic without an address?
The thing is, it's not just giving someone a chance, it's giving someone a chance at the expense of someone else. It's simple to hire the optimal person, it's impossible to decide who should get to be employed in the grand scheme of things.
Doesn't it seem likely though that if your landlord only has a $50/mo mortgage, it would be more likely that even really poor people could afford the rent.
I work in the tenderloin and it seems that quality of life would increase dramatically if they would get mental health and medication, seems pretty obvious to me. How about spending all of those millions on free healthcare for the bottom 5% ?
I really don't buy the "cost of living" explanation. Are we suggesting that these homeless people can't afford $1800 a month per rent, but are somehow going to get a more reasonable $1000/month apartment?
Exactly what job are you going to get if you smell, are missing teeth, have an alcohol problem, don't own clean clothes, and potentially have mental health issues?
I think we need to think outside the box on this one.
You seem to think that you wake up one day and you are a stereotypical 'high visibility homeless person'. Plenty of homeless people are struggling on the edge of normality (especially women) and are sleeping in cars, looking relatively clean and well-behaved.
Aside from the hard-core mentally ill, a lot of people might be relatively easily intercepted before they wind up looking/acting like the person you describe.
Cheaper? They're homeless, the cost of living in SF doesn't mean much if you have no money and live on the streets.
As the article mentioned, homeless like SF because of how much the city spends on them:
> The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before. Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.
Also the moderate climate, and there's so much wealth it's excellent for panhandling.
Are there reports on the manner in which the funds are being used by the various organizations whose mission it is to reduce/end homelessness and and analysis on the effectiveness of each of the avenues and levers they are using?
Personally, my goal is that homeless people can get access to great health care, which usually means housing, mental health care, and job placement, among other things, so that they can quickly get back to work.
All the things you described (besides crack and meth) are a good start. We're missing key pieces, but your apparent solution (make their lives harder until they are driven to a slightly less bad place) is just pushing the problem onto someone else.
That's fine if you only care about your neighborhood, but it's obviously not a solution if your goal is to stabilize society.
I think the issue is that SF is the only one doing these things, thus attracts homeless from all over North America. When I did some volunteer work in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside, several times I heard homeless folk speak of their dreams of sneaking across the order to be homeless in SF.
Its cheaper to house and feed them in the minimum than have to pay to jail them or repair the damage they do on the street.
If society weren't so hostile to some people, maybe they wouldn't shut off to participating in it. And even for those that don't - it makes financial sense to macroeconomically attempt to minimize the frequency of economic drop-outs but microeconomically it is much better to not just ignore the ones you have and force them on the street, because they cause a lot of property damage, which lands them in jail, where they got over a hundred thousand a year to keep imprisoned.
I'd agree on the benefits of providing housing, but you're probably not going to want to make it mandatory (what's the alternative? jail? that's wasteful) and you can damage a lot of property in a housing situation too (if not more).
So economically, there has to be a recognition that some people are going to give up on the system and decide to stop trying to please a brutal economic machine, and that some of them may even become bad actors, in order to develop a realistic plan.
$250,000,000 a year for an industry that is at least partially responsible for importing 1 in 5 of San Francisco's homeless from the rest of the state and country and dumping them on the streets isn't compassion - it's trafficking in human misery.
I'll post my source (a SF gov census) later today, when I'm not on my phone.
That may be closer to the current number of 'non-resident' homeless. The figure I had for that is 23% - 1 in 4 - from 2015.
1 in 5 is the number of homeless (from the same survey) whose first place of residence in San Francisco was a homeless shelter. It's buried under figure 16 in this survey:
So 1 in 4 ( or 1 in 3) people are coming here directly to use the services. The 1 in 5 figure is significant because it strongly suggests that homeless nonprofits are actively seeking referrals from other parts of the state and country. We know that in some cases people are literally being sent here:
Yes, that was found to be illegal and some wrists were slapped. I find it hard to conceive that this is the only homeless bussing program - there's no other conceivable way that so many of them are arriving, and immediately finding places in homeless shelters that typically have waiting lists, and definitely have plenty of underserved former tenants.
Ultimately, the organizations involved have no incentive to stop referrals from other parts of the country. The more people they serve, the more money they can ask for from the city, and the more 'successful' they are as a non-profit business.
And just as serving more people is in their interests, so is dumping the most troubled, and consequently, most costly onto the streets in order to serving another round of newcomers. Once they've outstayed their welcome, or become too costly, they are shunted onto the streets. And the worse the crisis gets, the more money they can ask for from the city.
I'm not suggesting that this is some kind of intentional human trafficking. I am sure that (almost) everyone involved is doing so because, in a small minded way, they think that they are improving the world. However, the end result is a travesty.
My thesis is that our current environment is is the result non-profits being run in a capitalist business environment, with a capitalist, MBA-style mindset. Eventually, the business model achieves stasis with it's environment, which, in this case, involves letting the city be a dumping ground for human tragedy, and letting the city's tax payers pay $250 million dollars a year for the privilege. The crisis is the side effect of this expanding bureaucracy achieving homeostasis and justifying its existence.
You think taking care of your fellow citizen is hilariously wrong ? At least one city is doesn't treat homeless people like trash and recognizes that they are humans.
Yes, it's something of a Fox Butterfield headline. If you're going to be homeless, SF isn't a bad place for it and as a result we get people from all over the country.
I have no idea if weather is a thing with this but I always thought you'd see a much larger population in LA, San Diego, and other places which pretty much have perfect weather all year. And although you see homelessness in those So-Cal cities it isn't rampant like it is in SF, Seattle and Vancouver.
SF stays manageably temperate, while LA & SD get really hot for several months. If SF is too cold for a day, you can go hop a ride on bart and hang around the warmer east bay for however longer you want to.
Getting only down to 50F max and having a 60F avg temp is easily solved by a sweater. 80F+ is solved by an AC, which is a lot more work.
The weather is nicer in Southern California, but you pretty much need a car to get around. SF is only seven miles wide, so you can pretty much get anywhere in the city within a couple hours on foot. I assume that makes things like collecting benefits and checking mail much more convenient.
You make homelessness like a super awesome thing, do you think people will be tempted to quit their jobs and give up their homes for a taste of this?
But wait, since being homeless is one the worst experiences a human being can have this can only be the flippant perspective of someone who has no clue about homelessness and no interest to learn.
>SF hilariously always takes the wrong approach to things.
I agree. IMO, we should have doubled down on the war on drugs approach. The free access to drugs and lax enforcement is the undeniable sole reason for SF's homelessness problem. I don't why SF has taken an opposite approach, as the war on drugs has been an unquestionable thriving success in the rest of the country.
I'm willing to bet that this will not get better. It's going to get worse. Much, much worse. As mass employment disappears, you're going to have millions of people become destitute across the country, and many rural, semi-rural and suburban settlements will simply no longer be viable. Some families will return to subsistence farming, but many others will flee to the larger cities. The current homeless camps will expand into large slums and shanty towns, while gated communities connect into upper class enclaves. When you see in Powell Station will be the general situation across all US cities in twenty years.
This has been feared with every technological advancement for a couple of centuries now, from textile automation in the late 1700s to the 'robots' in the 80s and more. The thing is, it has yet to come true - not even close.
Most of the jobs being done by the people reading this weren't even invented when they were born...
That's fair, but on the other hand, none of those other waves of automation have empowered machines to do knowledge work, the last refuge of human productivity. That's the barrel our generation is staring down.
My wife and I moved to the Midwest 23 years ago because the homelessness and - less importantly - the traffic (in SF) were getting bad back then (relative to the previous ten years).
One of the changes at that time was having to pay a homeless person to 'watch our car for us' when we went to get a bite or see a band south of market.
Awfully sad scenario and well-documented in this article.
There are basically two types of homeless people. Those who are healthy enough to work but cannot keep up with expenses and those who have serious enough issues that they can't support themselves.
The first type can be helped by better job opportunities and cheaper housing. All the cheap housing in the world cannot help the latter group because they can't function in society even if you make it that much easier.
We do need a federal (or at least statewide) solution for the latter group, though, because with local control it's too easy to for the "solution" to be giving the homeless person a free bus ticket out of town.
Homelessness comes from high cost of housing. It is emotionally convenient to blame other causes, but there is still mental health support in cities through federally funded community health centers.
Housing definitely helps the working class and mentally healthy people who are trying to work themselves out of homelessness. I fail to see how the housing crisis will help severely mentally ill people with addiction issues, schizophrenia, etc. Such people need long term
hospitalization. The de-institutionalization of mental health care was exacerbated by, but did not originate with Reagan. Personally I think it has to do with an over correction against the abuses of early/mid 20th century psychiatry, and the mania for freedom from the 60s onward. A lot of mental health professionals, even in liberal west coast cities, sound downright libertarian when describing patient freedom. The freedom to die in prison or on the streets if you ask me.
It is a market inefficiency caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status which creates a politically induced artificial scarcity in housing (scarcity = rising prices). These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump. It is wrong, and Japan has fixed the problem removing zoning density restrictions at the local level. The result, in 2014 there were 140,000 homes built in Tokyo compared with about 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC.
Economist David Ricardo wrote about this phenomenon of "rent-seeking" about 200 years ago related to the Corn Laws. Corn Laws taxed the import of all grains which benefited not farmers but landowners. Ricardo joined Parliament and managed to overturn the "rent-seeking" law.
The solution is a federal law in the US following the example of Japan.