I'd be interested to hear how homelessness can be meaningfully addressed in a humane way by the federal government (especially if it is constitutional).
I’ve been in SF for about 7 years and became homeless in June. The #1 thing that helps me is cash in my pocket, from day labor (odd jobs) and boosters from family and friends who know I’m not a drug addict/alcoholic. Obviously the latter can’t be offered by a gov because it would be abused, but work for cash saved my life. IME cash in hand is the biggest help.
#2 by far is bathroom access... followed by water and food. Anything beyond that feels too permanent for a healthy able bodied person.
The way people treat me when showered is night and day. And then going to places with opportunity/wealthy people and away from homeless populations is essential.
I have a truly genuine question and I swear on my prized and treasured EdgeRouter that I have no ulterior motive except for having a real answer to give to people whenever they also ask this question (often, in my opinion, in bad faith). So, with that, here goes:
Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?
(I won't reply and debate your answer; I'm simply curious and looking to educate myself.)
Why do you not leave San Francisco for some place cheaper or with more available housing? If it is simply due to lack of funds, would you relocate if money was offered to you for that purpose?
Relocating to a place where you don't have a job makes you even more homeless.
Remember that a significant percentage of the homeless are also employed. Many full time. Some as developers.
It's easy to relocate to an unfamiliar place with no family or safety net if you have a job and savings. But if you're just going in the hopes that maybe there's a job, and maybe you'll find a place to live in that requires no deposit, and maybe there's a market for your skills in that place, you're just going to end up on the streets again.
I can appreciate that but, to be honest, that's why I'm asking someone who says he or she is currently homeless. I want to know if that position is theoretically true (that is, people who are housed think it is true) or if it really does have bearing on the day-to-day life of someone who is homeless.
Put another way, I want to know what someone who's actually going through this would say because the question is sarcastically asked so often but I rarely read replies from people who are actually in this situation.
I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person.
1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere.
There are parts of the US where the only road through there is a highway and it is illegal to walk on it. If you leave on foot, you are trekking into territory you aren't familiar with where there may be no readily available bathrooms or eateries etc. Think about how awful it is to travel by car into unknown territory, be in need of a bathroom and have no idea how long until you find one. Then multiply that by at least 100.
You can also die of exposure or run into other seriously scary stuff when traveling by foot. People can wind up homeless with zero prior experience with camping, hiking, etc. Being suddenly without housing in no way guarantees that you are prepared for hiking long distances to go elsewhere.
2. It's vastly easier to find food, bathrooms, support etc in familiar territory.
Being destitute and homeless is scary and problematic enough in familiar territory. Being destitute and homeless in unfamiliar territory is just mind bogglingly more challenging.
3. It's hard to get a job elsewhere first before moving under the best of circumstances.
Going someplace new while homeless to then look for work looks about as fun as jumping off a cliff not knowing what will be at the bottom. Maybe it's a river and you will be okay. Maybe it's jagged rocks.
4. Some homeless people are in the city they have lived in their entire life. They would find it intimidating to go elsewhere under good circumstances. It's too much to contemplate while destitute.
5. Adjusting to a new city is hard under the best of circumstances. It's unthinkable for some homeless individuals who are not only destitute, they may also be physically or mentally ill.
6. The OP seems to have some friends and family helping out. Moving may mean losing what remains of their support network.
7. They can have ties to the local community that are a barrier to leaving, such as having a child with an estranged partner and leaving would mean not seeing their kid again, or they have a job or they are on probation and forbidden from leaving, as just a sampling of issues that can be a barrier to leaving.
I managed to pull off relocating to get back into housing someplace cheaper because I have portable unearned income, I intentionally sought to develop portable earned income on top of that, I'm a former military wife who is no stranger to moving around, and I spent like three years researching where I could go to try to put my life back together. And that's just some of the obvious factors I can list.
I try to encourage homeless people to move someplace cheaper if they can. I try to provide useful information to support such moves and support other solutions.
But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Suggesting it for someone who is destitute utterly strips them of their humanity and completely ignores that they are a complex person with more facets to their life than their income and it really just does not work. Doing that tends to just make problems worse.
(This comment is not comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination.)
Thanks for this comment. It's not too usual to see a perspective this clear and well thought out.
Some other points:
"Moving" without a car is not so simple. You can hitchhike, with the success of that depending on how you're able to present yourself and the culture of the local area. You can walk, but only so long as the nearest places are spaced in small distances, and if not you would need overnight gear. The weather is also a major factor here.
Knowing where to go is also another factor. Even for someone with a phone and internet it can be a challenge. First there's so many places. But how would you know that where you're going is any better than the place you're at? It represents a gamble that could result in you depleting already limited resources without any gain. Even if your current area is expensive at least you already know where the community food pantries are located, where and from who to get free/inexpensive clothing, good places to stealth camp... Moving to a completely new area puts you in a place of zero knowledge in exchange for only the possibility of finding work.
There is a hump you have to crest to acquire long-term housing. You need (depending on where you live) at least several hundred dollars to put in a security deposit. You need several hundred more to cover the next few months of rent. You need a job. You need to feel secure that you'll still have that job in a few months or at least have a replacement ready. You probably need a vehicle. You need for it to be dependable. You need to be presentable before being able to acquire that job. You might need references for either the job or apartment. You might need some sort of rental history.
Not to mention if you've been living on the edge for years it might have changed you. For some people it puts on them a character of supreme humbleness, for others it makes them very outwardly resentful against those who apparently have so much. Sometimes those changes are too visible to hide and in a way frames you to people living in normal and casual society as "other."
Getting over that hump when you have next to nothing is difficult.
>>But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute.
Like the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers.
Economic necessity has forced me to do very difficult things in my life. That's what people do, because becoming a burden on your family and the rest of society is a failing in every way.
Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm.
Life is tough. It doesn't get less tough when you redistribute the pain to make it more levelled. It just makes it less fair, by severing the link between responsibility and consequences, while creating unsustainable dependencies that will turn out badly for everyone involved in the long run.
Your idea that these laborers are victims of "homeless crack addicts manipulatively employing the victim narrative" is such an extreme miscalculation that I wonder if you even looking at the data honestly.
The amount of money that actually goes to homeless people is extremely low, and most of those meager funds are used to give them food and temporary shelter so they don't literally die outside. And even then, the amount of taxes that "low wage laborers" earn is slim. Why can't those with vast excessive wealth give some of it to services that can rehabilitate the homeless, or create unskilled or low skill jobs that pay enough to keep people indoors?
If a homeless addict is smoking crack outside, what he needs is a shelter that can rehabilitate him, get him off drugs and get him employed somewhere where he can make meaningful contributions and connections to his society. Services like these barely exist, and are in desperate need of the money that we for some reason insist on giving to the wealthiest mega billionaires who keep it in offshore accounts and refuse to give to the people they are directly responsible for putting on the streets via critically unsustainable low wages.
To assume that the homeless are homeless because of "responsibility and consequence" is to totally ignore any systemic circumstance outside of their control that may have led them to become homeless or jobless in the first place.
What would you suggest? Homelessness is not a punishment society forces onto people. It's an issue for all of society and affects everyone. Pointing fingers and shunning and saying that these people are worthless and deserve everything that get, even if true, isn't a solution to the issue. It seems that if it were possible you would prefer to just eradicate every homeless person out there. Of course that's not possible, so realistic solutions have to be tried.
In a sense the vast majority of us are a drain on society at small and large. The people doing the work of growing food, maintaining and building infrastructure, providing medical care, pursuing scientific advancement are a small number. My sense is that most people living in developed countries are doing so on the backs of others. It's easy to point at homeless and say they need to "earn their way," but did we really "earn" that car or earn that house. Did you "earn" your vaccinations. In the sense that you purchased it, did you earn it. How much did sitting in an office or stacking bricks or breaking concrete go towards actually earning the invention of that piston engine or the discovery of the measles vaccine? How much does the effort of sitting in a cubicle translate to the effort of constructing a house or growing a garden.
Very little anyone possesses is individually earned. We're all profitting from centuries of technology and advancement we had no part in. The humane thing to do is share what we did not reap with people less advantaged.
So as long as there are societies there will always be people living on the fringes of those societies. There will always be elderly, babies, children, criminals, mentally ill, physically handicapped, low income earners, etc. Nonetheless those people are also apart of society. Supporting people on the fringe is an act society does to support itself.
The solution is to end social welfare programs, institute anti-vagrancy laws that force the drug addicts to work for a living, and end illegal immigration to create jobs for unskilled legal residents.
There will still be aid to the poor, but it will be in the form of charity, which is more sensitive to those abusing the aid.
Ending all unconditional government safety nets will undoubtedly cause more suffering for the poor in the short run. But in the long run, it means fewer single women having childen that they need government aid to support (welfare is a major contributor to increasing rates of single parenthood), and who are far more likely to end up in poverty as adults.
It also means fewer people who are able-bodied becoming a drain on society from a life of irresponsibility (partying with their friends while living on welfare). Forcing a structure and discipline on these people's lives is in the interest of society, because it means they become contributors to the economy instead of a drain.
The long term effect of a more efficient economy is a substantially higher standard of living for all classes, including the poor.
There are countries in the world that have much lower levels of homelessness and drug-abuse, and much higher rates of economic growth, than the US. You're pretending there is no alternative to the current path except genocide (which you accuse me of supporting), and that's very disingenuous.
We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever.
> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."
I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)
Our families chose to have us. In the vast majority of families, children are biological progeny of the parents, and so carry their parents genes into the future.
The fact that you're trying to compare disjointed people within a nation to a family where parents support their own children really shows the amount of non-voluntary collectivism you want to impose on society.
>>I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF?
I realize that not all homeless are loitering drug addicts, but they form a significant percentage of the chronically homeless, and a situation where no-strings-attached aid is provided to them at the expense of the taxpayer, while others make the sacrifices to be independent through back-breaking work, is unjust.
It's not just a matter of competence. It's also a matter of choice. Some people choose to take responsibility. Some don't.
> About 3.5 million Americans will experience homelessness at some point in time, but only about a half-million are homeless at any given time, and roughly 87,000 of these are chronically homeless. By some estimates, housing a homeless person and providing them with a caseworker to see to their needs costs about $10,000 a year. That means for less than a billion dollars a year, chronic homelessness could be ended in the U.S. If temporarily homeless people were housed in temporary housing, and if each temporary residence were occupied half the time, homelessness of all kinds could be eliminated for about $10 billion a year. That’s less than a seventh of what the government spends on food stamps.
$10,000 a person is a lie unless maybe if you moved all the homeless from the West Coast to the middle of nowhere in Midwest, but then you would have homeless activists and Midwest NIMBY activists saying that the government is shipping people out to solve the problem.
The activists have politicized every direction of this issue to the point where it's easier to just forget about the homeless rather than try to solve the problem. Most homeless need mental health care and should be forced into mental wards but then you have mental health activists that will protest against this. Other activists would complain that they are gentrifying SF and kicking out all the poor people.
Basically anyone who tries to solve this problem politically can't win because there will be some activist that protests against it to make a name for themselves and it turns into a hotbed issue by the media.
There are people living on a few dollars a day... You really think we can't provide a cot in the equivalent of a walk in closet with communal bathrooms, and simple meals like beans and rice with a few vegetables for $10k/year?
Only if you ship them to a very low cost area, and then you immediately run into political issues as I mentioned, like shipping away your poor and gentrifying the area for rich people. Beans and rice? That's a terrible, unhealthy meal! You need to give them a balanced diet! How could you kill these poor people? Communal bathrooms? That's for criminals and it spreads disease! A walk in closet? These are human beings we're talking about! They're not prisoners, don't treat them like that! They need space!
And that's how it becomes an unsolvable problem. Activists with agendas.
> Most homeless need mental health care and should be forced into mental wards but then you have mental health activists that will protest against this.
Because conservatives destroyed mental health care in this country.
Not that it was ever good, but it used to exist, until it was systematically dismantled in the 1980s and all the patients were sent out to become … take a guess … that's right … our current chronic homeless population!
Start by (re)building an actual mental health care system if you want to go that route.
How federal involvement will help? Article doesn't detail what powers exactly federal govt possesses that would help, aside from moving spending from local to fed level.
I'd also argue, that having feds in this business would even worsen the situation: now locals could be taken completely out of the loop for decisions like where to place shelters. Like, "oh you don't like shelter in this neighborhood? take a walk - it's a federal decision, live with it."
Funding for mental health / universal health care would take the riskiest cases off the street. This would allow the existing safety nets to function better. Also, basic income.
There aren't good solutions, only ugly ones that we've gotten rid of in the name of free will and self-reliance.
To start, Reagan gutted the mental health system so that people who need life-long mental health support were more or less dumped on the streets. It also meant people who could get jobs and have a normal life with some support began to end up on the streets when things broke wrong for them.
So bringing back mental health services would take a lot of stress off of police and hospitals and ultimately cost taxpayers much less and help many people. The negative is that there are no clear boundaries around who should be involuntarily admitted to a mental health facility. But having zero services clearly isn't a great solution.
Secondly, drug users are either criminalized (very expensive) or minimally-aided to avoid immediate problems (with things like clean needles and safe spaces). Detox can be expensive and require considerable long-term support on top of personal will. There really isn't a good solution to tackle this, but there are some obvious solutions. Like a voluntary detox program where at the end you are enrolled in the military for 2-4 years. That starts to get some "indentured servitude" vibes but it is hard to find a decent way to deal with such a difficult issue.
The military doesn't want such people anymore. Most recovering addicts can't pass current physical, mental, and educational standards for recruiting. But some kind of non-military jobs program would be helpful.
I think we need to restructure tax incentives related to housing and diversify our policies and finance mechanisms related to housing.
In a nutshell, the vast majority of our policies and programs related to housing are designed to support single family detached housing designed for a nuclear family or rentals that mirror that to a large degree. We created such systems practically overnight at the end of WW2. We have fleshed it out and tweaked it since then, but the underlying assumptions and mental models have remained largely the same. Meanwhile, reality has changed and what worked for the famines that became the parents of the Baby Boomers no longer really works, yet we aren't adapting.
(Source: I was specifically studying housing and housing policy and history in hopes of becoming an urban planner when life got in the way.)
In comparison to SF/LA/NY etc. we have very few homeless people in Scandinavia. If I were to speculate then I think our extensive social security systems (free healthcare & education etc.) is the reason why. But then we all pay 30-55 % tax on our income to fund that social security.
Another reason is the very strong motivation provided by your winter. Being homeless results in death, which explains why you have very few homeless people in Scandinavia.
People of Scandinavian descent in the US have much lower levels of homelessness as well, so I think it's far more likely a socio-cultural cause, rather than political.
Maybe not addressed in a prescriptive policy way but a financing way. Let cities do what works best for that city, but all the funding should come from federal grants. It isn't fair to financially burden individual municipalities with what amounts to a systemic, country wide problem.
Simple. Put a ceiling on rents. Allow no-one to own more than one home and insist they live in the one they own. In the UK we have a "bedroom tax" but it is aimed at the poor, not the rich as it should be. Make it illegal to discriminate against anyone based on their income source or the state of their health. Build housing exclusively for low-income occupants instead of throwing everything onto the insidious property market. Ban property markets altogether and replace them with government-regulated allocation. No. Thought not. No-one is really serious about solving the world housing crisis. So long as politicians rely on the comfortable middle-class for their survival nothing will change.
And this is exactly why the bay area is in such terrible conditions. Every bit of regulation you add, only decreases the housing available. more regulation is what got us into this mess. The less regulation we have, and less zoning, the more housing we'll have, it's that simple. We simply need more housing, lots more. once that happens prices will come down.
For one, who is going to build these properties for low-income people only? Costs will be almost the same, profits will be way less. So why would a developer bother?
In fact, the recent change to require a higher percentage of low income units in new structures has killed the pipeline for new building starts.
Even if it seems counterproductive to the goal of helping low income people, historically new building starts have always been aspirational. Which makes sense - everyone wants a new car, but if you have little money you are better off getting a reliable used car. It is exactly the same for housing. When someone moves into a new condo that opens up a unit (and lowers the price incrementally) for someone who has less to spend.
Would it make sense to force carmakers to build cheap cars that only low-income people are eligible to buy?
You're thinking purely within a capitalist framework. There is no capitalist solution to this problem. The solution is unprofitable. I encourage you to think outside this framework as humanity itself is at stake not just profits.
Remove set backs, get rid of minimum yard requirements, loosen height restrictions.
The rest of the world has houses right next to each other, as do America's most prosperous cities.
Manhattan, the dense parts of SF, Boston, Chicago, etc.
The regulations about minimum grass and 4 foot of set back and no more than 1 or 2 stories, have nothing to do with fire regs and everything to do with long disproven ideas about suburban design that hark back to 1950s ideals.
Visit a modern dense city, Tokyo and London don't have massive fire outbreaks (sprinklers and modern fire codes still work even at density), but they do have an insane about of economic activity in the dense neighborhoods.
Want to solve the housing crisis and get people off the streets? Dump 50% more houses on to the market, heck have cities subsidize their construction if need be, and watch housing prices plummet. Watch mass transit become the life blood of a city, and watch entire new types of jobs become available. (People in NYC may be annoyed at bike messengers, but it is a job created by density!)
Ok, so I could imagine rent control would work fine in (e.g.) the bay area if there was also
(1) Government-built (or heavily subsidized) housing to get around the fact that rent control limits the capitalist demand for new housing
(2) Strong central government to force out NIMBYs for the greater social good
In this context, would you agree that rent control seems counterproductive unless we were to switch to a socialized economy overall?
> There is no capitalist solution to this problem.
I'm curious if others here would agree with this; I don't have a strong opinion yet.
Zoning screws with the free market. Look into how Japan does zoning[0] to see evidence that weak zoning laws and strong enforcement of individual property rights work together to keep property prices low.
Sorry, but this is the worst possible solution. Source: basic economics.
Rent control is one of the most dangerous "solutions" to high housing costs people ever toss out. It would destroy the housing market and make it vastly more expensive than it is now.
> We find that landlords actively respond to the imposition of rent control by converting their properties to condos and TICs or by redeveloping the building in such as a way as to exempt it from the regulations. In sum, we find that impacted landlords reduced the supply the available rental housing by 15%. Consistent with this evidence, we find that there was a 20% decline in the number of renters living in impacted buildings, relative to 1990-1994 levels, and a 30% decline in the number of renters living in units protected by rent control.
> These results highlight that forcing landlords to provided insurance against rent increases leads to large losses to tenants
—The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco[1]
The study largely fins that, in addition to rent control causing the available supply to decrease, and tenant mobility/freedom to decrease, it largely harms new renters, and results in a wealth transfer to existing renters.
It does not solve the problem, and it does not on the whole benefit society.
When you don't allow exemptions from rent control, you get something like the Bronx in the 1970s, where landlords set fire to their own buildings to collect insurance money rather than rent them out. [1] There's always an exemption - if you don't provide a legal one, people will find an undetectable illegal one.
The article you posted does not say anything about fire (I searched for the word 'fire').
Even in that case though, what was the percentage of buildings burnt because of rent controls? if it was extremely low (as in less then 0.01%), then there is no real problem.
There was a photo-essay of the devastation (seriously, it looked like a war zone) posted on HN about a month ago. I can't find the link now, but if you Google "pictures of 1970s Bronx", the Image Search links give you a sense.
Marx believed that capitalism tends to self-destruct which is diametrically opposite to Adam Smith's belief in capitalism's self-correcting Invisible Hand. I don't get where you're coming from.
