Homelessness isn't just caused by someone not having a home. There is a massive overlap of mental illness and substance abuse/addiction.
Just giving a homeless person a house will not solve the underlying problems that caused them to be homeless in the first place. There needs to be movement on multiple fronts - mental health, physical health, rehab, job training, personal finance, etc.
If the solution was easy, someone would have done it. The uncomfortable truth is when you have someone who is addicted to heroin or fentanyl or meth who isn't really participating in society like everyone else..sometimes there's not much you can do for them. Overcoming addiction is incredibly challenging even for people with means and support systems. Without those, sadly the numbers are abysmal.
There's a compelling argument [0] that the biggest driver of homelessness is a shortage of housing. Mental illness and addiction can lead to homelessness, but homelessness can also lead to mental illness and addition. There are lots of places suffering severely from the fentanyl crisis, but where homelessness is less of a problem.
The solution may be simple, but it's not easy. (And it's not the entire solution either) Building large quantities of housing is a difficult problem, especially in California.
15% of the homeless in SF have a traumatic brain injury. That statistic means almost 1 in 5 right off the top need long term medical care. "Mere housing" won't do jack for those people.
Even more have mental health issues. Some have physical health issues. The number of homeless who are perfectly healthy and just need housing is vanishingly small--those homeless are generally hiding from someone and won't want to be part of a tracked program.
We know what needs to be done: long term healthcare that needs lots of money.
We know what happened in the past: those facilities were horror shows because of underfunding.
We know what the "solutions" were in the past: shut the facility down and throw those people out onto the streets and let the prision system deal with them.
The starting point for solving homelessness is universal healthcare. Nothing less. Without universal healthcare, everything else to "solve" homelessness is just rearranging the deck chairs.
If it was just a matter of house prices, why isn't California's homelessness solved by cheaper homes in Fresno or other parts of the state? I can't help but feel there's more to it than cheaper housing.
Strangely that's not what Finland[0] has found to be the case. By using a housing first approach they've been able to severely decrease the number of homeless people.
You are absolutely correct that other interdictions are needed as well.
I think the fallacy you're making is assuming all homeless have the same problems. There are definitely some homeless or near-homeless people where having a safe place to sleep, shower, and store their belongings will allow them to hold a job long enough to get back on their feet. There are others that need serious rehab. There are others that need mental health counseling. There are others that will never be able to care for themselves and need to be put in a care home.
So really there is no one-size-fits all solution. Individual treatment is needed, and early intervention always has the best outcomes.
The majority of people on the internet want housing to be affordable.
The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
(Caveat: California's state legislature is slowly clamping down. Regions which aren't submitting realistic plans to meet their projected housing needs are getting their zoning privileges taken away, which will help. However, this is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a teaspoon when it comes to the supply and demand mismatch that exists today.)
> The majority of people who vote in elections and show up to city council meetings want housing to be an investment that grows in value by 10% annually. Building more houses is a direct threat to that investment. Guess which group wins.
It isn't purely financial. After all, the most expensive land is in areas with higher population density. You want cheap housing? Go out to where nobody else lives. Tons of it available. Doubling the population of Phoenix would increase people's property values a bunch - look at the land owners in the Bay Area over the last 50 years. Developers don't build shit because they think it's gonna make their property worth less.
So, no, what people who don't want upzoning don't want is change. Change in traffic, change in privacy, change in noise, etc.
That's actually a much harder problem. If it was purely financial it would be easier to buy people out. But it isn't, which - at the extreme end - is how you get the tiny houses next to big skyscrapers and such.
> These are also great fig leaf talking points when your real reason to oppose new development is financial, but you don't want to sound greedy.
You could make the exact opposite claim that "my property values!!" is the fig leaf around "I don't want [certain people] to have the chance to move near me."
And that one agrees with the numbers of how property values go up with city growth and development, not down. Would the property values in Malibu be lower or higher if LA had taken Detroit's path?
> Everyone wants that solution. [Just building more houses]
I'm not sure I completely agree with that.
Suppose you wanted to build the maximum amount of free housing as quickly as possible. What would you do?
You'd pick someplace rural (where land is cheap, and there are fewer people to raise objections), buy a bunch of land and just build the homes (and services needed by the people who would live in them). You would then invite anyone who needed shelter to come live there for free.
But if you actually try to do that, "homeless advocates" will say all sorts of mean things about you and block the project. So I would argue that not everyone wants the solution of just building enough homes for everyone.
They want homes built in specific places, and those specific places happen to be highly desirable and very expensive places to build acquire land and build homes.
A year ago, there was a study about Denver spending anywhere from 42K to 102K per homeless individual. If I remember correctly, that was only a partial amount because they couldn't get all of the financial information. I think we all need to ask how much of this money actually reaches the intended population and how much is administrative overhead. It never pays to fix a problem. If the issue is an impossible scenario, the cash spigot is always running.
Yes, well spotted. The US on average likely has enough housing. It's certain specific areas do not have sufficient housing. If you live somewhere with high land prices, property values, etc, the low wage jobs in the area still need to be filled and those people still need somewhere to live.
can you point to an example where they built homes and the infrastructure to support those homes where people blocked the project for reasons other than 'not in my neighborhood, or 'not with my tax dollars', but more of what you seem to imply "It's not good enough?"
They do. The problem is drug addiction. If you give drug addicts free houses, eventually the word gets out, and then even more drug addicts move to your state. Eventually you find yourself like California - spending an immense amount of money of an immense number of drug addicts mixed in with a few people who are down on their luck.
It's a lot of money but there's also a lot of people and a lot of costs in order to build.
Setting aside that you can have both vacant residential properties and homelessness, let's say the government decides to just build a bunch of units and force people to live in them:
Where do you put them?
For lots of the cities in CA you'd be looking at a million bucks or more for the lots of land alone in order to build like 4+ or 6+ multi-unit buildings. But let's be generous and call it a million (some property is already controlled by cities and such, after all).
So you're gonna have to settle for less than 17,000 buildings, since that's the land cost alone for 17B.
But ok, 115,000 unsheltered homeless in California, you can build denser. Too dense of just bottom-of-the-economic-ladder housing is going to lead to a lot of problems though, look at the history of housing projects. Let's do a 20 person per building one to try to get the costs down: 5750 buildings. Applying that same "million dollar lot" means we're at 5.75B for the land, now we need to construct 5750 buildings for 11.25B, about 2 million for construction per project... that's gonna be tough without getting more contractors into the market and driving down the costs of construction too in those cities. Cause otherwise having a bunch of new construction projects is gonna drive up the cost of construction, not down, unless you expand the supply.
And the more you try to push the density the more opposition you run into from both people who live and work nearby the sites and advocates wanting better housing. The latter is a problem IMO but it's not like getting rid of it would make the former go away immediately.
And you still need a large agency of operations around trying to find people in those units jobs so that you can get them out of the units before other people need them, etc.
Hell, why not just give about 100K to each of the unsheltered and spend the rest on relocation assistance to cheaper parts of the country? Sure, you could just try to bus people to cheaper areas without this, but that's gonna result in some deaths to do worse weather, fewer local resources and people to live off of, etc, so... it's unclear to me that even the cities in red states that love to make fun of CA homelessness would pull the trigger at that scale if they actually had to. There are a lot of problems they don't have to face because they don't have the scale of demand for land or the hospitable climate.
I mean, the elephant in the room is that we easily build enough housing for 115k people for much less than $17B if we simply allowed it to be built outside an existing city in the Central Valley. There's plenty of relatively cheap land to build mid-density housing and all the services the population would need (hospitals, substance abuse assistance, public safety, etc).
It would be like having two new cities the size of Merced.
I think the tricky thing with that scenario is doing this in a way that isn't just a fancy name for forced imprisonment, now that we're not only saying "you have to get off the street" but also shipping people to this new mega-complex.
It's not just an image problem either: let's say you kick the substances, get over some of the trauma from your time on the street, and want to get back into the world. Are the only local jobs "administration for the complex"? Is there no way to try to do something beyond that without having to travel a couple hundred miles and lose the support network and any social connections you'd made?
San Francisco put the homeless in vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic. They destroyed the hotel rooms. The two main problems facing the homeless are substance abuse followed by mental health.
I think this is a misleading description of the situation.
Yes, people were indoors in hotels, but in some cases the way these SIP hotels were run was bordering on extra-judicial solitary confinement.
> many of the the nearly 600 unhoused individuals in the Project Roomkey program were forced to remain confined in isolation. People were not allowed to leave the hotel unless they had a medical appointment or were being transported by a provider. They could not go for walks, exercise outdoors or do any of the things that health officials told the public to do for their mental health.
> “People started entering the motels in April and they were quarantined all the way through October,” Garrow continued. “People were having mental health breakdowns. People told me they were having suicidal thoughts.”
I don't think the program failed. It did get a significant number of people off the streets, and most were able to exit to long term housing, according to the city.
Do you have a different source that refutes or denies the claim that at least some people in the SIP hotel system were in an extended quarantine? I actually think it's understandable in context that they would be concerned about people coming and going early in the pandemic, when the whole point of the program was to reduce spread. However, I also think it's understandable that this would exacerbate mental health outcomes. But perhaps then the SIP hotels are not a good indicator of how actual housing first policies would play out.
Also, I've seen some numbers quoted about the dollar cost of property damage at some hotels. I had not seen any claim about the proportion of rooms that had property damage, or how the extent of damage was verified. You're portraying it as if all the rooms were wrecked and I wonder whether hotel owners are perhaps also rounding up.
You think it's reasonable to think they imprisoned people in hotel rooms? You are also willing to take some "advocates" word for it? How about you provide evidence it did happen. It certainly did not. And what does that mean the majority were able to exit into long term housing? Having a bunched of wrecked property and then moving people to new property to destroy is not a success.
