Thanks to Matt for tweeting to remind us about this excellent piece.
I've just learned via a NIMBY friend's Twitter that the United Kingdom apparently has a separate legal category of housing called "Purpose Built Student Accommodation", which allows for shared common facilities and other things that the building codes don't permit for ordinary flats. The city of Edinburgh is allowing some PBSA to be developed on what's now public land and of course the NIMBYs are opposing it, without asking where the students are supposed to live. (American NIMBYs sometimes do this with college dormitory projects, but the difference is that British students typically live off-campus.)
This isn't an ideal regulatory approach since access to the cheap housing is limited to a specific class of people, but it's a step in the right direction.
I agree with many other comments that there are two very distinct problems:
1) The invisible homeless, who are doubled up with family or friends, staying in a motel, or improvising some other temporary solution. Housing prices are their big issue.
2) People with mental illnesses, including addictive disorders. If nice apartments in the East Bay were $1 per month it would have no impact on these people in San Francisco's streets. They would never find their way to such housing on their own, it is illegal to force them into it, and if you did they would either be found dead there shortly thereafter or would wander out immediately, never to return.
There is at least one SRO in Tucson. An acquaintance, now dead, who was in the Vietnam war lived in one because the VA put him there. He had severe alcohol use disorder. He also had some general mental health issues. Was it better than living on the street? Yes, very much so. But there were lots of difficulties. He would get into fights with the other men living there (the facility was all men). One bathroom down the hall leads to fistfights when people with poor coping skills are all trying to share it. And since he wasn't the only one with a drug or alcohol problem, conflict and violence were pretty common. But it was still better than living on the street.
Oo, boarding houses! One of my weird little hobby-horses! There was a tremendous range boarding houses back in the day. Some were flophouses, some were a step up from flophouses, some were solidly middle-class, and some were quite elegant indeed. Sometimes entire middle-class families lived for years in a nice boarding house. Young women striking out on their own could move into a "respectable" boarding house with less social opprobrium than living on their own. Romances sometimes flourished. Friendships often did. Naturally sometimes there were enmities and ongoing fights.
My father, a Palo Alto native, moved into a boarding house in Palo Alto when he came home from WWII and was working for awhile before resuming college. He was working nights, so he missed the daily dinner, and his landlady would pack him a meal to take to work. He appreciated that.
Impoverished widows would sometimes open their homes to boarders. I know three divorced women, each in a different part of the country, who rent out a room or two in their homes on AirBnB to help make ends meet. I see a certain similarity there, though the owners/managers of old boarding houses were also expected to provide at least one daily meal. Oh, and complaints about the food were as common as complaints about dorm food back when I was in college.
I wonder if boarding houses are really what we should be talking about, though? It seems to me people's expectations have changed over the decades in several ways:
- People grow up with fewer siblings;
- Unmarried young adults expect to have active sex lives;
- People eat more often in restaurants and less often at home;
- People indulge in more solitary leisure activities (watching TV, surfing the internet) and fewer group leisure activities (card playing, going to church).
I think all those changes would tend to make the boarding-house lifestyle feel more oppressive and less nurturing than it did in the good old days. You'd want to get rid of whatever regulatory barriers prevent it from being a contemporary option, but I think what Matt is really pointing to here is the need for *lower minimum floor space requirements* in apartment buildings. Most people nowadays would probably prefer the micro-apartment option, even though they might also benefit from more communal space in their buildings.
People in their 20s live in housemate situations all the time which is functionally the same it's just arranged by the tenants rather than having the landlord rent out the building piecemeal. Even in an SRO you still have a private room to watch TV and have sex.
Yes, you're right about Matt's intent. I just went off on a tangent. Though it does seem to me that it can be companionable to just sit around surfing the web with others in the room doing the same. And people might eat at home more if the food were cooked by someone else and presented at the table. But the larger point is one I have believed in for a long time, and prompted part of my interest in boarding houses. Flophouses > nothing. That's been my observation for years. So I'm pleased that Matt wrote about it.
>>he biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos.<<
The words "medium term" are carrying an awful lot of weight here even as they remain undefined. While the rest of the post qualifies this remark, with emphasis on SRO- and rooming house-type facilities, I'm still stuck on the sentence above.
I think this is great and look forward to more. But what it has to do with homelessness is precisely zero. It'll cut down on people's commutes, which is great for climate change, and eventually will cause rents to fall and filter down to more "workforce" people (like, I guess, script readers in the Culver City context). And in the medium term of about a hundred years it will have a discernible effect on the homeless, ceteris paribus.
I just think that the lack of affordable, market-rate housing and the homelessness problem are two very distinct issues and should be kept separate.
If the only thing wrong with the median homeless person in a premium city is that they missed their window to downgrade to a normal one, couldn’t we give them new windows for a couple thousand bucks a pop? That seems insanely cost effective for something that no one else is taking seriously.
I wish this was unlocked. I’ve been a housing advocate for years (essentially since I read “The Rent Is Too Damn High”) and serve on the board of our big local shelter. I really didn’t put those two things together until recently listening to a weeds episode. They seemed liked 2 distinct policy issues tangentially related to “housing” but not really interconnected. I wish I could share this article around to people.
Public housing projects failed miserably because of decay and disruptive behavior. Who’s going to actively manage this housing for down and liters to make sure that doesn’t happen again?
Did the boarding houses fail in this way? I think the claim is that they were working fine until they were legislated out of existence, and the public housing projects were the attempted replacement.
The question (well, a question) is whether one can solve encampments (but not homelessness) without changing broad housing rules. Looks like Austin is about to try.
I had the interesting experience of actually living in what was in effect a nicer SRO in East Lansing, MI while I was an undergrad at Michigan State. It was "nicer" because while the kitchen was shared for the whole building, I only shared a bathroom with my neighbor, a good friend, and I could afford to rent a room to myself rather than having roommates. (The rent was just over $300, which is insanely cheap even ten years ago in East Lansing--and it was especially so given that the building was close to campus and near the major bar streets.) It was my first place I could call my own and I really appreciated it. (I learned to cook there--though not in the kitchen, I used a slow cooker in my room.) It also kept me from going in with some other guys to rent out a house. I'm sure that a lot of the people in the building (it was pretty big, probably about 100 units) were in the same situation, so I suspect the building freed up some actual houses for families to rent and marginally cut the cost of housing in the area.
Completely off topic from homelessness and housing, but I recently saw The Day the Earth Stood Still and was struck by something else. To quote ikipedia:
"When Helen and her boyfriend Tom Stevens go out, Klaatu babysits Bobby. The boy takes Klaatu on a tour of the city, including a visit to his father's grave in Arlington National Cemetery; Klaatu learns that most of the deceased are soldiers killed in wars. They also visit the Lincoln Memorial."
I was struck that the movie would have it be perfectly fine for a single mom to leave her son in the care of a strange man who just showed up at the boarding house. Who would be willing to do that now except in grave emergency? And I don't know if we simply know more now, the world has actually changed that much, or most likely we're simply more risk averse, but it made me sad to think we've lost so much trust.
Yeah it is a real loss. I'm not sure what the reason is - mostly I think we are more risk averse. But it also kind of fits in with the core concept of the book "the abundant community": by professionalizing every kind of service, it's now assumed that regular people CANNOT provide those services. Eg you need a teacher to learn, you need a daycare to take care of young children, you need a psychologist to treat depression. As a teacher I'm not saying that teachers don't teach, nor would I dismiss mental health issues by saying "ignore the medical professional and just talk to your uncle". But I do tend to agree with the core idea: as professionalism increases, what used to be an everyday problem is now seen as outside the purview of your typical citizen.
That may be part of it, but not the biggest part. I think "News" tells us about all the terrible things that happen but don't provide any context of how likely something is to occur. So we hear about all the terrible things that people do to kids, but don't really appreciate that most people are reasonably fine and won't do those terrible things.
Its kind of like in Sweden, parents leave their kids outside in prams all the time, but if you do that in the US you would get arrested for child neglect because something bad could happen.
I also wondered the other day that this is where the size of America comes into play. If you look at all the awful stuff people do every day / week in Europe you might be able to compare it, but if you just look at country to country it's a bit of an apples to oranges situation.
The flaw in your argument is that there are two kinds of homeless. Homeless includes people living in their cars, couch surfing, homeless for several days or even weeks, etc. And then there are the long term chronically homeless. This is the group with the most serious drug and mental health problems.
To fix the first group you need more housing. To fix the second you need serious intervention in their lives. Mandated treatment, confinement, etc. Now you might say that's terrible. Well...if a little old lady with dementia thinks it's still 1978 and she has to get to her job at the phone company - we put her in a memory care unit. If someone is equally disabled by mental illness we just let them wander the streets. That's not right.
I basically agree with your second paragraph, but the issues are:
Court decisions since the 70s have made it much harder for the authorities to just forcefully institutionalize people. Check out O'Connor v Donaldson. There would have to be an actual legal process, perhaps extended, do-gooders and public interest attorneys would endlessly sue the city and make it extremely expensive, etc.
And, there are some pretty legitimate civil liberties concerns around letting the authorities simply lock up folks who are a nuisance. My understanding of psychiatry is that they mostly can't cure serious issues, but they can certainly drug people indefinitely and prevent them from causing issues or really having a personality. Some pretty dark stuff is possible when you just start locking up the inconvenient, especially without a defined process to be able to leave
Yeah, but even if you have a terrible addiction and a lot of problems and you live in Mississippi you can pay rent with a disability check, which is why Mississippi doesn't have high chronic homelessness.
Sure but if it solves the problem for the first group, and makes a small dent in the problem of the second group, then I'd say we're making great progress
But if you say your plan will help the “homeless” and people still see just as many mentally ill, drug addicts, etc on the street the public will say your plan failed.
I guess that could be true but if lots of people are quietly housed that should count for something, even if the optics are no worse than before. But even so, some percentage of the more troubled homeless will be housed.
I lived in LA for most of the last decade and saw 1) rents and house prices spiking rapidly 2) the homeless population, tent cities and encampments growing rapidly. I think the two trends were connected, even if the most "Moon Boots" of the mentally ill had been homeless the whole time.
To your point - I think a big lesson we should recognize is that if you have policies that are doing good things, but the public doesn't seem them working, then its very unlikely they'll sustain over time.
Sorry for the duplicate comments. Mobile is not great on here. If that’s true then you should lead with that. “Homelessness” is not the problem then, it’s addicts living on the street that’s the problem. Then people can come up with solutions that directly address that, rather than just true homelessness.
I think the housing debate would be more sensible of more people would understand that new housing is like new cars—it’s going to be aimed at customers of above-average means, while “used” stock fills in the rest of the market. Housing even has a much longer useful life than cars.
This recent increase in the price of used cars is bad, but imagine what would have happened to the market if people could stop manufacturers from making as many new cars as the market could bear.
(I do agree with many of the commenters that a housing-affordability strategy is more useful for the rent-burdened, those who are in crowded homes, and those who are transitionally homeless than the chronically, visibly homeless—but that’s a huge population. And if they are better able to help themselves social services can concentrate on people who couldn’t manage to make rent however cheap.)
My concern about legalizing boarding houses and other such housing is that it will create a race to the bottom in high demand cities where most new development is either luxury condos or high density dorms. Thus, middle class people who today can still afford normal apartments today will be forced by a lack of supply into crappy dorms.
Right now new development is either luxury condos or nothing. Are you thinking that there are currently middle class people who afford luxury condos, who would be forced into high density dorms because fewer luxury condos will be produced? Or are you thinking that a large amount of middle class housing will be demolished to make way for high density dorms? Increasing supply at multiple price points shouldn't end up with people occupying housing that would be at a lower price point than their current option, except in unusual circumstances. Rather, it should be the opposite - prices at many levels come down, so that people can occupy housing that would be at a higher price point than their current housing.
I’m not necessarily assuming that dorms being legalized will be paired with denser zoning. So instead I imagine property owners and developers maximizing profits by either catering to the rich or cramming as many people as possible into the places where density is allowed, including renovating currently middle class apartments into boarding houses.
I’m not sure how realistic this scenario is but it gives me pause.
Thanks to Matt for tweeting to remind us about this excellent piece.
I've just learned via a NIMBY friend's Twitter that the United Kingdom apparently has a separate legal category of housing called "Purpose Built Student Accommodation", which allows for shared common facilities and other things that the building codes don't permit for ordinary flats. The city of Edinburgh is allowing some PBSA to be developed on what's now public land and of course the NIMBYs are opposing it, without asking where the students are supposed to live. (American NIMBYs sometimes do this with college dormitory projects, but the difference is that British students typically live off-campus.)
This isn't an ideal regulatory approach since access to the cheap housing is limited to a specific class of people, but it's a step in the right direction.
Happy Birthday, Matt!
I agree with many other comments that there are two very distinct problems:
1) The invisible homeless, who are doubled up with family or friends, staying in a motel, or improvising some other temporary solution. Housing prices are their big issue.
2) People with mental illnesses, including addictive disorders. If nice apartments in the East Bay were $1 per month it would have no impact on these people in San Francisco's streets. They would never find their way to such housing on their own, it is illegal to force them into it, and if you did they would either be found dead there shortly thereafter or would wander out immediately, never to return.
There is at least one SRO in Tucson. An acquaintance, now dead, who was in the Vietnam war lived in one because the VA put him there. He had severe alcohol use disorder. He also had some general mental health issues. Was it better than living on the street? Yes, very much so. But there were lots of difficulties. He would get into fights with the other men living there (the facility was all men). One bathroom down the hall leads to fistfights when people with poor coping skills are all trying to share it. And since he wasn't the only one with a drug or alcohol problem, conflict and violence were pretty common. But it was still better than living on the street.
Oo, boarding houses! One of my weird little hobby-horses! There was a tremendous range boarding houses back in the day. Some were flophouses, some were a step up from flophouses, some were solidly middle-class, and some were quite elegant indeed. Sometimes entire middle-class families lived for years in a nice boarding house. Young women striking out on their own could move into a "respectable" boarding house with less social opprobrium than living on their own. Romances sometimes flourished. Friendships often did. Naturally sometimes there were enmities and ongoing fights.
My father, a Palo Alto native, moved into a boarding house in Palo Alto when he came home from WWII and was working for awhile before resuming college. He was working nights, so he missed the daily dinner, and his landlady would pack him a meal to take to work. He appreciated that.
Impoverished widows would sometimes open their homes to boarders. I know three divorced women, each in a different part of the country, who rent out a room or two in their homes on AirBnB to help make ends meet. I see a certain similarity there, though the owners/managers of old boarding houses were also expected to provide at least one daily meal. Oh, and complaints about the food were as common as complaints about dorm food back when I was in college.
I wonder if boarding houses are really what we should be talking about, though? It seems to me people's expectations have changed over the decades in several ways:
- People grow up with fewer siblings;
- Unmarried young adults expect to have active sex lives;
- People eat more often in restaurants and less often at home;
- People indulge in more solitary leisure activities (watching TV, surfing the internet) and fewer group leisure activities (card playing, going to church).
I think all those changes would tend to make the boarding-house lifestyle feel more oppressive and less nurturing than it did in the good old days. You'd want to get rid of whatever regulatory barriers prevent it from being a contemporary option, but I think what Matt is really pointing to here is the need for *lower minimum floor space requirements* in apartment buildings. Most people nowadays would probably prefer the micro-apartment option, even though they might also benefit from more communal space in their buildings.
People in their 20s live in housemate situations all the time which is functionally the same it's just arranged by the tenants rather than having the landlord rent out the building piecemeal. Even in an SRO you still have a private room to watch TV and have sex.
Yes, you're right about Matt's intent. I just went off on a tangent. Though it does seem to me that it can be companionable to just sit around surfing the web with others in the room doing the same. And people might eat at home more if the food were cooked by someone else and presented at the table. But the larger point is one I have believed in for a long time, and prompted part of my interest in boarding houses. Flophouses > nothing. That's been my observation for years. So I'm pleased that Matt wrote about it.
>>he biggest thing we could do to take a bite out of homelessness in the medium term is build more luxury condos.<<
The words "medium term" are carrying an awful lot of weight here even as they remain undefined. While the rest of the post qualifies this remark, with emphasis on SRO- and rooming house-type facilities, I'm still stuck on the sentence above.
Just recently, a massive new housing development was opened here in the LA area right next to the Culver City light rail stop. Culver City, with lots of new entertainment jobs, is a very attractive place for such development, and the rents reflect that, starting at $3000/month and peaking at over $9000/month (!). (https://www.ivystationculvercity.com/#:~:text=Ivy%20Station%2C%20a%20highly%2Danticipated,for%20residents%20and%20visitors%20alike.)
I think this is great and look forward to more. But what it has to do with homelessness is precisely zero. It'll cut down on people's commutes, which is great for climate change, and eventually will cause rents to fall and filter down to more "workforce" people (like, I guess, script readers in the Culver City context). And in the medium term of about a hundred years it will have a discernible effect on the homeless, ceteris paribus.
I just think that the lack of affordable, market-rate housing and the homelessness problem are two very distinct issues and should be kept separate.
So what you are saying is: NIMBYs straight to gulag, yes?
If the only thing wrong with the median homeless person in a premium city is that they missed their window to downgrade to a normal one, couldn’t we give them new windows for a couple thousand bucks a pop? That seems insanely cost effective for something that no one else is taking seriously.
I wish this was unlocked. I’ve been a housing advocate for years (essentially since I read “The Rent Is Too Damn High”) and serve on the board of our big local shelter. I really didn’t put those two things together until recently listening to a weeds episode. They seemed liked 2 distinct policy issues tangentially related to “housing” but not really interconnected. I wish I could share this article around to people.
If you got the e-mail, you can forward the e-mail to them - Matt has said that's fine.
Public housing projects failed miserably because of decay and disruptive behavior. Who’s going to actively manage this housing for down and liters to make sure that doesn’t happen again?
Did the boarding houses fail in this way? I think the claim is that they were working fine until they were legislated out of existence, and the public housing projects were the attempted replacement.
The question (well, a question) is whether one can solve encampments (but not homelessness) without changing broad housing rules. Looks like Austin is about to try.
I had the interesting experience of actually living in what was in effect a nicer SRO in East Lansing, MI while I was an undergrad at Michigan State. It was "nicer" because while the kitchen was shared for the whole building, I only shared a bathroom with my neighbor, a good friend, and I could afford to rent a room to myself rather than having roommates. (The rent was just over $300, which is insanely cheap even ten years ago in East Lansing--and it was especially so given that the building was close to campus and near the major bar streets.) It was my first place I could call my own and I really appreciated it. (I learned to cook there--though not in the kitchen, I used a slow cooker in my room.) It also kept me from going in with some other guys to rent out a house. I'm sure that a lot of the people in the building (it was pretty big, probably about 100 units) were in the same situation, so I suspect the building freed up some actual houses for families to rent and marginally cut the cost of housing in the area.
Interesting! Do you know whether it’s still there?
I just looked on Google Maps and it seems to be!
Completely off topic from homelessness and housing, but I recently saw The Day the Earth Stood Still and was struck by something else. To quote ikipedia:
"When Helen and her boyfriend Tom Stevens go out, Klaatu babysits Bobby. The boy takes Klaatu on a tour of the city, including a visit to his father's grave in Arlington National Cemetery; Klaatu learns that most of the deceased are soldiers killed in wars. They also visit the Lincoln Memorial."
I was struck that the movie would have it be perfectly fine for a single mom to leave her son in the care of a strange man who just showed up at the boarding house. Who would be willing to do that now except in grave emergency? And I don't know if we simply know more now, the world has actually changed that much, or most likely we're simply more risk averse, but it made me sad to think we've lost so much trust.
Yeah it is a real loss. I'm not sure what the reason is - mostly I think we are more risk averse. But it also kind of fits in with the core concept of the book "the abundant community": by professionalizing every kind of service, it's now assumed that regular people CANNOT provide those services. Eg you need a teacher to learn, you need a daycare to take care of young children, you need a psychologist to treat depression. As a teacher I'm not saying that teachers don't teach, nor would I dismiss mental health issues by saying "ignore the medical professional and just talk to your uncle". But I do tend to agree with the core idea: as professionalism increases, what used to be an everyday problem is now seen as outside the purview of your typical citizen.
That may be part of it, but not the biggest part. I think "News" tells us about all the terrible things that happen but don't provide any context of how likely something is to occur. So we hear about all the terrible things that people do to kids, but don't really appreciate that most people are reasonably fine and won't do those terrible things.
Its kind of like in Sweden, parents leave their kids outside in prams all the time, but if you do that in the US you would get arrested for child neglect because something bad could happen.
I also wondered the other day that this is where the size of America comes into play. If you look at all the awful stuff people do every day / week in Europe you might be able to compare it, but if you just look at country to country it's a bit of an apples to oranges situation.
The flaw in your argument is that there are two kinds of homeless. Homeless includes people living in their cars, couch surfing, homeless for several days or even weeks, etc. And then there are the long term chronically homeless. This is the group with the most serious drug and mental health problems.
To fix the first group you need more housing. To fix the second you need serious intervention in their lives. Mandated treatment, confinement, etc. Now you might say that's terrible. Well...if a little old lady with dementia thinks it's still 1978 and she has to get to her job at the phone company - we put her in a memory care unit. If someone is equally disabled by mental illness we just let them wander the streets. That's not right.
I basically agree with your second paragraph, but the issues are:
Court decisions since the 70s have made it much harder for the authorities to just forcefully institutionalize people. Check out O'Connor v Donaldson. There would have to be an actual legal process, perhaps extended, do-gooders and public interest attorneys would endlessly sue the city and make it extremely expensive, etc.
And, there are some pretty legitimate civil liberties concerns around letting the authorities simply lock up folks who are a nuisance. My understanding of psychiatry is that they mostly can't cure serious issues, but they can certainly drug people indefinitely and prevent them from causing issues or really having a personality. Some pretty dark stuff is possible when you just start locking up the inconvenient, especially without a defined process to be able to leave
How does that dark stuff compare with life on the streets?
Yeah, but even if you have a terrible addiction and a lot of problems and you live in Mississippi you can pay rent with a disability check, which is why Mississippi doesn't have high chronic homelessness.
Sure but if it solves the problem for the first group, and makes a small dent in the problem of the second group, then I'd say we're making great progress
But if you say your plan will help the “homeless” and people still see just as many mentally ill, drug addicts, etc on the street the public will say your plan failed.
I guess that could be true but if lots of people are quietly housed that should count for something, even if the optics are no worse than before. But even so, some percentage of the more troubled homeless will be housed.
I lived in LA for most of the last decade and saw 1) rents and house prices spiking rapidly 2) the homeless population, tent cities and encampments growing rapidly. I think the two trends were connected, even if the most "Moon Boots" of the mentally ill had been homeless the whole time.
To your point - I think a big lesson we should recognize is that if you have policies that are doing good things, but the public doesn't seem them working, then its very unlikely they'll sustain over time.
Because that’s what the public cares most about.
Sorry for the duplicate comments. Mobile is not great on here. If that’s true then you should lead with that. “Homelessness” is not the problem then, it’s addicts living on the street that’s the problem. Then people can come up with solutions that directly address that, rather than just true homelessness.
I think the housing debate would be more sensible of more people would understand that new housing is like new cars—it’s going to be aimed at customers of above-average means, while “used” stock fills in the rest of the market. Housing even has a much longer useful life than cars.
This recent increase in the price of used cars is bad, but imagine what would have happened to the market if people could stop manufacturers from making as many new cars as the market could bear.
(I do agree with many of the commenters that a housing-affordability strategy is more useful for the rent-burdened, those who are in crowded homes, and those who are transitionally homeless than the chronically, visibly homeless—but that’s a huge population. And if they are better able to help themselves social services can concentrate on people who couldn’t manage to make rent however cheap.)
My concern about legalizing boarding houses and other such housing is that it will create a race to the bottom in high demand cities where most new development is either luxury condos or high density dorms. Thus, middle class people who today can still afford normal apartments today will be forced by a lack of supply into crappy dorms.
Right now new development is either luxury condos or nothing. Are you thinking that there are currently middle class people who afford luxury condos, who would be forced into high density dorms because fewer luxury condos will be produced? Or are you thinking that a large amount of middle class housing will be demolished to make way for high density dorms? Increasing supply at multiple price points shouldn't end up with people occupying housing that would be at a lower price point than their current option, except in unusual circumstances. Rather, it should be the opposite - prices at many levels come down, so that people can occupy housing that would be at a higher price point than their current housing.
I don't necessarily understand why the market would undervalue middle-income housing in this situation?
I’m not necessarily assuming that dorms being legalized will be paired with denser zoning. So instead I imagine property owners and developers maximizing profits by either catering to the rich or cramming as many people as possible into the places where density is allowed, including renovating currently middle class apartments into boarding houses.
I’m not sure how realistic this scenario is but it gives me pause.