I worked in the Texas Legislature last session and one of my bills was to help facilitate free market zoning reforms (HB 2989/SB 1120). My goal, working with advocates, was to try the exactly the political strategy you laid out in today's post.
A Democrat filed the bill in the Senate and a Republican in the House and we had an impressive cross-ideological stakeholder coalition behind it. We found there was very, very little appetite for reform from the Republican members. The House Committee hearing was a shitshow and the members were way more receptive to citizen's concerns about neighborhood character than high-minded ideas about the free market.
The Senate companion bill didn't even get a hearing, as the (very conservative) Republican Committee Chair opposed it. It became just another front in the anti-city culture war. Republicans were more willing to listen to a lobbyist hired by a Austin-based left wing activist who opposed zoning reform than they were willing to listen to the Realtors, Builders, and Habitat for Humanity.
The gist of the Republican opposition - which was never clearly defined - was that Austin's zoning reforms (which are currently tied up in court and would be allowed to move forward by the bill) are left-wing social engineering rather than free market deregulation. Also, free market rhetoric has become far less salient with Republicans in TX over the 7 years I worked in the Lege. I had many dereg-type bills that struggled.
I live in central Austin and am the president of a neighborhood association. In my experience there's no difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to zoning. People with BLM and Bernie signs/bumper stickers are vicious NIMBYs who fight any and every zoning change. And Republicans all live (or want to live) in gated communities with HOAs in the 'burbs. To enact zoning changes takes politicians willing to be voted out of office after making the commitment. Otherwise it's never going to happen. Most people just don't like change, no matter their political ideology.
Ideally YIMBYs should be able to make rhetorical arguments that appeal to both ideological positions. I think the progressive messaging predominates because left-wing cities are the biggest battlegrounds for zoning reform.
But our legislative strategy heavily emphasized the free market/economic messaging. It just didn't work, to some degree because Republicans no longer really care about free market principles and just want to own the libs.
As a millenial libertarian-leaning liberal, my boomer relatives are conservatives but never really cared about free markets (even pre-Trump) - rather, they just like low taxes and think rich people deserve to be rich. I think you saw this in the Obamacare debate, where nobody ever defended the pre-Obamacare healthcare market on free market principles but rather you saw National Review columnists say "my cardiologist is rich, and he deserves to be rich" without noting that 50% of American healthcare spending comes from the government or noting the barriers placed on nurse practitioner or physician assistant practice that are propping up physician incomes.
This is a case where free markets would disproportionately help younger people with lower incomes or wealth at the expense of decreasing the value of housing investments owned by the wealthy and elderly, so wealthy boomer conservatives are happy to go against free market principles to protect their wealth.
One distinction I would make is that the elected Republican class used to have a genuine belief in market-based solutions. Look at GWB's social security reforms, for example. Recently, they have become more aligned with their voters, who are just grievance-driven reactionaries with no real model or vision for how society should be arranged.
The ACA may be the inflection point, since it was genuine effort to build a functioning market-based universal healthcare system and Republicans rejected it en masse, sabotaged its market mechanisms (the exchanges), and never offered a real alternative.
The first step in the solution is mandatory pricing transparency. All prices need to be posted online.
Along with that, ban charging different payers different prices. It doesn't matter if you are a cash payer, an insurer, or the government you should all get the same price from the same provider for the same procedure.
Without pricing transparency competition can't work. And eliminating the payer price differences will also greatly enhance competition (and remove the hidden Medicare subsidy)
Next focus on increasing healthcare supply faster than demand (Obamacare focused on increasing demand, IE getting more people coverage).
If you increase supply faster than demand, and have price transparency, then the market will work to bring down total system cost.
Yes I agree, at least at the higher levels. Just noting what I'd seen from normie old school educated republicans (my conservative boomer relatives), who I think were following after an old school Reaganite veneration of rich people which sometimes codes as "free market" but really isn't. I think the post-Reagan Republican party misread their Reaganite base to the extent that they thought they cared more about "free markets" in the abstract as opposed to "rich people deserve to be rich" - I'm skeptical a genuine interest in free markets for their own sake ever percolated far beyond the intellectual libertarian class.
I agree that the ACA marked a possible inflection point - Romney I think actually cared about the free market and making it work as an MA governor, but couldn't run on that in 2012 and instead ran on "keep your government hands off my Medicare". I'd argue the Bush attempted social security reform was another inflection point, as it showed the conservative political class just how little broad popular support there ever was even in the conservative base for the social security reforms that excited the conservative intellectual class.
The legislation allowed cities to update zonings codes more easily to allow for more development. Industry and professional groups were lined up in support. I'm sorry but I don't understand what you're getting at?
Republicand have never cared about free markets except when this helps redistribute income upward. Since they can do that with tax cuts, who needs markets?
No, we did nearly exclusively "conservative" messaging about market-based solutions and lowering the cost of living. We located 2 Republicans to push the bill in the House. We assembled a stakeholder coalition of developers, industry groups, and professional associations. All of this fell on deaf ears.
You're responding to a comment where I said "our legislative strategy heavily emphasized the free market/economic messaging" - I'm really puzzled how you're characterizing that as progressive tropes.
If you interacted with Austin real estate much, I'm curious if any current council members were helpful. My read is that Harper-Madison, Renteria and Casar are pretty amenable to building, but the others aren't.
IIRC Casar was very supportive but we didn't want to make it seem like an "Austin thing" because the Republicans have been waging a war on Austin the Lege.
Not really. I think it genuinely represents the interests of reactionary homeowners in Austin. There are lefties involved with it. One of them called and threatened me after we filed the bill and told me "You will regret this!"
I personally don't understand why Republicans are opposed to development in central Austin. Maybe they're funded by developers in Austin suburbs who are trying to attract development there, and they see increased development in Austin as threatening?
It's dumber than that. They use the liberal government of Austin as a boogeyman to rile up their primary voters. This session they probably passed 10+ bills undoing actions by the Austin City Council. It's pure cynical "own the libs" partisan politics (which more and more is defining the TX Legislature).
1st mistake. Austin is expensive because its desirable. Homeless are attracted to Austin because it's desirable. Not all desirable and expensive cities have large homeless populations.
2nd mistake. Everyone who speaks about homeless conflates two completely different populations. The transitory homeless who get counted but we never see, and the visible homeless we do see.
3. The transitory homeless make up at least half of all homeless. These are people who get evicted, or lose a job, and are usually out of homelessness in a few weeks. They are the ones who will move from expensive places to less expensive places for jobs.
4. The visible or chronic homeless are the ones we see on the streets of San Francisco. They are there because of mental health issues and substance abuse. They are attracted to place with generous services, nice weather, and lax drug policies.
5. A significant portion of the chronic/visible homeless refuse housing. The success rates when in drug programs are less than 50%. And this is taking into consideration that the most addicted won't even attempt counseling.
Now, is housing part of the solution. Yes, obviously. But the real solution to homelessness is a combination of housing, treatment, and enforcement.
A fixation on lowering the costs of housing will help the transitory homeless, but to make dent on our visible homeless, some tough love is needed.
The long term homeless are hard cases. Some people are broken and cannot be fixed. One can warehouse them, but that generally requires a lock and key.
Transitory homelessness is a more fixable problem and dollars will have a greater marginal effect when applied to the transitory homeless. Most of those situations could be fixed with $3k, and society gets a productive worker out of the equation.
But you can’t mislead the public. You can’t say we’re going to fix the homeless problem with housing and eliminate the temporarily homeless while leaving the chronic homeless on the street.
“We’ve reduced homelessness by 50%!”
Public: “I still see the same number of homeless.”
“Oh, we just reduced homelessness among those you can’t see.”
Housing reduces chronic homelessness too, albeit less effectively. Some will become homeless again but because they'll be housed for a while in between, the total number of homeless at any one given time will go down.
"Housing First" acknowledges that you need treatment etc. too. The point is simply that housing has to be the first priority, both chronologically and in importance.
Treatment implies, at least to me, voluntary. If you’re on the street screaming obscenities at 3am treatment shouldn’t be optional. If you’re so drug addicted that you’re taking a dump in someone’s doorway treatment shouldn’t be optional.
I do not see what you are driving at. Call it what you want, but if you put chronically homeless people in housing, then more of them will receive mental health services/treatment/whatever than will be the case if they're on the streets, which in turn means that some (not all) will no longer be chronically homeless. Therefore, housing does in fact lead to a reduction in the visible homeless population as well as the invisible.
It seems the homeless driving the politics (encampments on the street) and the ones that are most likely to be helped by the policy (less chronically homeless) are different, and although it trickles down and is slow. The cities are under pressures to start sweeps like yesterday (they are underway in Los Angeles) and the homeless advocates don't seem to have policy proposals that work on the time frames the politics currently demand.
Exactly, this is almost an issue somewhat like immigration policy - there's the immediate law and order issue of enforcing the law, whether it be at the border or on the city sidewalk or bus, and then there's the more complex root causes issues that are less visible. You can't get credibility and space to address the second if you're not honest about the first.
I agree. But what people complain about. What people count. Are two different things.
And to further complicate the issue, some of the transitory homeless are there because of substance abuse issues as well.
People tend not to lose her job for no reason. Obviously there are exceptions.
Young family. Guy and girl with the baby. Guy dabbles in recreational drugs but still works. Eventually, after being laid a few times, showing up to work intoxicated, he is fired. Gets behind a little in bills, find another job, but the process repeats. Because the rent has gone up from a couple years ago, in the past he was able to manage this sort of lifestyle, but now he can’t. This happens to her three times, they get evicted.
They go stay on there parents house. But this doesn’t work out, complicated by the drug issues.
They move him to a shelter for a week or two. They are now homeless, but we don’t see them on the street. The guy gets a job, they save up a little money, get a little help, he gets a little bit of drug treatment which is easy, they move 20 miles away to a lower cost city. They are done.
Agree. In representing kids in family court in Philadelphia over the years, I've seen many families who fell into that second category - living paycheck to paycheck, mom or dad lost a job, maybe their fault, maybe not, fell behind on rent and ended up on the street and the kids got into the social system and foster care, where all it took was a judge to order some assistance from city social services to get them back in housing, and they were on their way again.
Totally different situation than hardcore homelessness from chronic mental illness or substance abuse, but more common and very closely tied to the availability of affordable housing.
If that’s the case (which I have no reason to doubt), that might be the best return for domestic investment in human capital available. Which organization is most successful in actually doing this work? If anyone knows I would love to support it.
Many of the same organizations that help the chronic homeless help these people. Normal progressive policies like a higher minimum wage, child tax credit, other social programs help these people as well.
If you think of poverty as a spectrum. With some people being poor having housing. Just on the other side of that fine line are the same people without housing.
When housing gets more expensive, more people fall off that line.
Higher minimum wages don't necessarily help them because if that new minimum wage is higher than the value of their work they become unemployed.
Moreover, higher wages will often lead to higher prices thus putting everyone back in the same position they were at the start, just their money is worth a bit less
1st mistake. Austin is expensive because its desirable. Homeless are attracted to Austin because it's desirable. Not all desirable and expensive cities have large homeless populations.
Possibly but... are Dallas, Houston, San Antonio so much less desirable for the homeless?
5. A significant portion of the chronic/visible homeless refuse housing.
I've always heard this is true of shelters.
But: Is this true of actual personal housing? (Even a small apartment that has a lock, and bathroom, and space that is undeniably yours)
In many cases they refuse because they are too mentally ill to even understand what’s going on. In other cases they can’t abide by the rules and get thrown out. The lady on the street screaming obscenities at 3am get moved to housing with the stipulation that you can’t scream obscenities at 3am or any other time either. Which, being so severely ill that she’s screaming obscenities at 3am, she obviously can’t control. So she gets thrown out.
Once again, we have to distinguish between chronic and transitory homeless. To the drug addicted chronic homeless, Austin is more desirable.
Refusal of housing is depending on where that house is located.
If you build a bunch of housing out in the country outside of Austin, housing that included food and supplies, the chronic Homeless would turn it down.
You have to consider that people who are homeless have personal connections just like everybody else. Even if you are homeless and a lot of your resources come from foraging or asking strangers for money...you typically have a built in knowledge based about where you can do this more effectively that suddenly becomes completely useless if you are completely relocated to the other side of a city. I interact with a handful of the chronic homeless in my neighborhood. They typically have 5 - 10 people in the area who offer them some form of assistance. Some may provide money, or food...others may provide intermittent shelter (even if it's just hanging out under your patio when it rains), some may provide transportation or be your "designated representative" for SNAP benefits, etc. Some may provide you a place to wash your clothing...all based on each individual's comfort level (some people may not have more than an unoccupied room in a house they can offer up for a few days or so every few months). If you tell someone like this that all of a sudden you are going to move them miles across town, and just give them a house and some food...well that satisfies a good percentage of their needs...but a lot of their other needs (transportation, supplies, access to phones) are suddenly gone. One woman I interact with weekly has kidney problems and is incontinent. She is always asking for adult diapers. It's pretty clear that when any of these folks are out of town or out of contact with her, it's an extremely big disruption in her life. All of this weighs in to making people skeptical of just up and moving across town.
It’s interesting how the homelessness issue crosses party lines. I see folks on the left and the right who can’t accept that some people are so mentally ill they can’t care for themselves.
Obviously there is going to be some marginal relationship. The people who are most likely to become chronically homeless and addicted slide down the scale. But many of them the slide is not related to the cost of rent, it’s unfortunately a result of addiction issues. They most likely would’ve slid into that situation no matter what (No matter what, it’s not quite accurate… If there was carrot and stick approach to drug abuse… some would be prevented)
Well put comment by David. Fixing the transitory homelessness issue by more housing, both market rate and subsidized is the first step.
I work in downtown San Diego, which is not one of the emblematic concentrations of homelessness, but does have about 1000 unsheltered street homeless people on a regular basis. These are typically the chronic homeless not the transitory homeless. A large share are mentally disturbed and/or intoxicated. In addition, some of the people who you see on the street in mental health crisis may be housed. Some don't have any belongings with them, and there are still a fair number of small old school SROs around, so they may have a place to stay. The city policy is that people can camp or sleep on the sidewalk overnight but are supposed to be up by 5:00 am. On the fringes of downtown, this isn't enforced. How do you fix this?
For one thing, we do have an extreme housing shortage. It isn't normal to have home prices increase by 27% in one year. The new mayor and city council elected last year is one of the more pro-housing local governments in large California cities. Just yesterday they approved a 1200 unit multi-family development with 15% deed restricted affordable units on a closed golf course over strong NIMBY opposition and the opposition of the local council rep. but it will take years, even decades to dig out of the housing shortage hole we are in. While we desperately need more market rate housing, and revenue streams to support subsidized housing, that's not going to directly help those with severe behavioral problems as nobody is going to want to rent to them or live adjacent to them. So how do you fix it?
Definitely more SROs, but with support services, and not concentrated. More enforcement against sidewalk camping, which the 9th Circuit will only allow if there are shelter options. Organized camping sites can be a temporary solution. Stronger enforcement against drug dealing, while unfashionable, would certainly help, as chronic meth use doesn't make for good neighbors. Effective mental health services, law enforcement and SRO's with support services will cost a lot of money. It requires federal involvement, as the people in need here come from all over the country.
I think some of the complexity around homeless is that not only does the population vary by location, it also can relatively rapidly vary across time.
I've biked to work (pre-Covid) along the Guadalupe River Trail through Downtown San Jose for about 10 years. There have always been homeless along the trail, but for the first 5-6 years (roughly 2010-2015), it was mostly the core demographic that folks think of when they think of the homeless. I would see the same people day after day for years. Lots of muttering. It seemed stable, in that the folks living in the park were mostly people capable of living in the park for years, but also I would have agreed that the "average" homeless person was both mentally ill and, to a certain extent, wanted to be outside and away from authority.
In the last 5 years pre-Covid, that completely changed (and then it completely changed again with Covid). The homeless population has increased dramatically, from a few people intermittently along the trail to several quite large semi-permanent encampments, and the population is now younger, healthier, and often seems to have one foot in the normal world. I'm guessing many have some formal or informal job. Many seem to have at least partial access to a support network (bathroom, food, etc). With Covid and some changes in policy, many have now brought cars out onto the trail.
San Jose has a pretty active homeless support program that definitely believes in housing first and they would just say that the scale is too big for them to make much forward progress. That being said, I am quite comfortable with the idea that getting from current levels of homeless back to 2015 levels is basically just housing. If you want to get below 2015 levels, then it probably gets more complicated.
In 2015, California still had less housing per capita than most states. It just wasn’t as bad as it is now. The claim is that getting housing to where it was in 2015 would get homelessness to those levels, and getting housing to where Missouri or Ohio are at would get homelessness to the levels in those states.
This essay has some good arguments, but completely misses the fact that different cities have different political cultures, different attitudes towards vagrancy, differing availability of drugs as well as different infrastructures of welfare and NGOs. Conservative cities are generally less common, but along with cheap and easy building policies, we also see a greater willingness to crack down on chronic homelessness, more strictly enforced vagrancy laws, etc.
The end result is that people who suffer from addiction and mental health issues tend to migrate to places like Austin and Portland and SF. If NYC didn't have such a cold winter, I imagine the homeless population (of mentally ill people struggling with addiction) would dwarf that of the Bay Area.
It seems to me that a lot of this (in the USA) is due to the deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill which owes much of its popular support to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--a work of fiction--and the 1973 Rosenhan or "Thud" Experiment which turned out to have been mostly fabricated.
Of course all this also happened in the backdrop of increased societal tolerance for individual autonomy over group wellbeing, which is reflected in a legal apparatus in the that makes it almost impossible to institutionalize someone against their own will. I think a lot of this grows from the horror that many of us feel when we contemplate being (unjustly) institutionalized against our will, but of course we are forgetting how cruel and awful are the lives of those who really need support but end up leading lives of savagery on the streets.
If high real estate prices were the cause of homelessness--not the "I'm temporarily out of a job" variety, but the defecating on the street variety, why don't we look at the places with the most expensive real estate per square foot? Here's the list:
Monaco, Europe – $5,262.80 per sq ft.
Hong Kong, Asia – $4,392.81 per sq ft.
New York, USA – $2,465.57 per sq ft.
Tokyo, Japan – $2,265.05 per sq ft.
Geneva, Switzerland – $2,123.16 per sq ft.
Shanghai, China – $1,934.44 per sq ft.
London, UK – $1,891.75 per sq ft.
According to this list, Monaco and Hong Kong should have a lot more homelessness--and if Matt is right, it should be the drug addicted mentally-challenged variety. Yet the streets of Monaco are famously pristine, and Hong Kong has nothing like NYC's army of street people, to say nothing of the Bay Area. San Francisco, at $1,060 per sq. ft. doesn't even make the list, and I can think of few places in the rich world with as much disorder caused by the homeless.
None of this means that Matt is wrong--clearly a lot of cities in the USA are suffering from an excess of zoning rules that tie the hands of developers and lead to overly expensive real estate. But the idea that this will solve the problem of the mentally ill and drug-addicted population that are one of the primary drivers of urban chaos seems unlikely.
>>If Matt is right, it should be the drug addicted mentally-challenged variety.
Isn't he arguing that there's no correlation between housing costs and this type of homelessness (I believe the term in the literature is the "chronically homeless")? That's the upshot of the scatter plots as I understand it.
Also, the notion that the homeless migrate disproportionately to certain cities like SF is a myth that needs to be put to rest. See e.g. this VA study finding pretty much even net migration among veterans across the country (metro NYC and CA actually showed *negative* net migration:
tinyurl.com/77mw4ds). If anything, the migration flows here reflect the general migration patterns of people around the country towards the sunbelt, which goes to show that homeless people behave just like normal people and don't pick up and move across the country to replicate their same circumstances somewhere else.
Finally, average square footage (which I'm guessing you pulled from here: https://www.elitetraveler.com/property/most-expensive-property-markets-in-the-world) is a really bad proxy for housing scarcity. Since it's an *average,* the top of that list is necessarily going to be cities with extremely attractive high-end real estate markets, but that doesn't tell you anything about availability of housing for the average person; San Bernadino is never going to make the top of that list no matter how bad the housing situation is in metro LA. Conversely, Tokyo is famous for having stable rental housing costs while continuing to grow--housing is built easily, cheaply and densely, and because there's great mass transit, it's very easy for a normal person living on the outskirts to afford a home that's accessible to work. Rich people shelling out obscene sums of money to live in the Ginza neighborhood is an independent phenomenon.
These are excellent points, but a couple of replies:
1) A White House study from 2019 (reported on here: https://tinyurl.com/3chtm646) found that chronic homelessness was generally higher in coastal states (which happen to mostly be liberal) and also in warmer states, but not as high as would be expected in states like Texas and Florida. Now if Matt is right, this is because Texas and Florida generally have less restrictive zoning rules--see Austin v. Houston. But if I'm right, it's because Texas and Florida are red states and are therefore more inclined to enforce anti-vagrancy laws. While I don't think most chronically homeless people are boarding Greyhound buses from Mississippi to the Bay Area, it seems perfectly reasonable to move from Houston to Austin. In my time in Austin, it was my impression that many of the street people there were *not* born and raised in Austin-though I never did any sort of study as to where they came from. Still, isn't it worth asking: what *drew* them to Austin? Surely the culture of the city plays a major role, no? (FYI, your link was dead)
2) While it is true that the top of the market may seem to distort the salience of the average price per square foot, the argument of YIMBYs like Matt is that more housing will drop prices for everyone. If fact I remember him making an analogy here involving luxury cars in a previous column making this exact point. Why are the prices so high for luxury buildings? Price per square foot in Singapore is half that of Hong Kong despite the fact that Singapore is increasingly awash in new luxury housing. The top of the market is still the market, no? Anyway, we can all agree that housing is very hard to afford in HK, yet we see little to no chronic homeless there.
3) It just seems obvious to me, a 40+ year resident of NYC, that there is a population of very mentally ill and unstable people on the street, many of whom consistently refuse housing and prefer to roam the streets. While cheaper housing is a public good that I whole-heartedly support, the people on the streets who are defecating in the gutter and shooting up while leaning on my fence as I take my daughter to school and falling over dead-drunk on in the middle of streets are not there because they can't afford a studio apartment in the Bronx.
While this is surely part of it, the fact that Anchorage is the city with the 6th highest homelessness rate suggests that good weather and liberal governance policies aren't driving the high rates everywhere: http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.html
I would think that part of it is that while Anchorage is certainly a lot more conservative than Austin or SF, it's a lot more liberal than all the rest of Alaska. That and its size (still small, but bigger than all other Alaska cities) would mean the development of an infrastructure to accommodate the homeless population and also (presumably) a market for them to procure drugs. If you could magically teleport the city and government of Austin to Alaska and keep the culture of Anchorage the same, I suspect the homeless in Alaska would soon migrate to Austin, Alaska.
But even the whole population of Alaska is only about double the population of Anchorage. The other cities in the top five (and many cities far lower down - notably Salt Lake City, which doesn't even appear to make the list) have a "catchment area" that is far larger proportionally. It's probably true that *some* of the homeless in any city have come from a region around it, beyond its metro area. But if that was the main driver, then you would expect Salt Lake City to be high on the list.
Doesn't Hong Kong have those weird rabbit-warren housing options? People in cages stacked on top of each other? I'm not saying that's better or worse than being homeless; I'm just pointing out that they have *someplace* to put the homeless.
According to this piece at least China is much more coercive, using facial recognition and DNA to return homeless people to their hometowns. Those who don't want to return stay off the streets in hiding during the day. https://westernindependent.com.au/2017/10/09/shanghais-hidden-homeless/
I think the frustration in California is that we have authorized our government to spend just insane amounts of money to fix the homelessness problem but it isn't resolving. I know the issue is complicated but a lot of people are of the mindset "look, I was fine with paying more taxes to fix this, what is going on?". There is a very general liberal idea here that we should all pony up some cash and then it will be fine but it's not happening. That's the sentiment I hear from peers.
This is increasingly a problem with the left/liberals/Democrats, the idea that there's a sort of funding lever you can push higher or lower that in turn relieves or exacerbates a social problem. The connection between spending and actual results is breaking down for a number of reasons and I worry it's going to give people the idea that government can't help solve problems (which, if you keep increasing funding without getting results, is sort of true).
Right. Few things are so simple that more money alone will fix it. If you have a program that functions, but has to turn down a substantial number of applicants due to lack of funding, then more funding may mitigate the problem, but probably won't eliminate it because you have people that don't apply in the first place, or don't qualify for other reasons.
If you don't have an existing program that functions and is just short on funds, then you're looking at creating a new program, and there's no guarantee that it will work initially. Maybe you can find a good example of a program to try to copy, but what works in Austin may not work in Madison, or vice versa.
It gets cold here, but some of us appreciate that, or at least drink enough that we don't mind.
Part of it is that the whole sentence here in CA is "look, I was fine with paying more taxes to fix this [by building somewhere other than my neighborhood], what is going on?"
A quote from a friend on this very point "Hey man, for what we are paying they could just build them their own city". The NIMBY crowd in my area is VERY into a tiny house city out in Palmdale or something.
Although amazingly in my SFH neighborhood of West LA, which hates hates hates denser housing, residents are all on board for the homeless veteran housing they're building in our area. Finally, "thank you for your service" actually means something when people say it.
The issue causing political tensions in California and Austin isn't homelessness, it's encampments. The idea that Echo Park or a park in Austin can be turned into a tent city and the city won't/can't do anything about it for months on end (this was pre-COVID as well) doesn't feel like a housing OR a mental health issue. It's easy to link large numbers of homeless to housing policy, but the size of the tent cities seems something else entirely, and that's what's driving the politics right now.
California has been fighting the NIMBYs for years and has had some success, but it is slow going. A political position that you can't sweep the encampments unless until you solve the housing crisis is simply unsustainable. The two councilmembers in LA who hold that view are both facing recalls and at least one seems likely to succeed.
I definitely doesn't *feel* like a housing issue, but it *is* a housing issue. You don't get these big encampments in places where housing is abundant.
Of course, by the time you have these encampments, you're so deep in the hole that it will take decades to build your way out of it.
The issue is that if you leave the encampments for those decades, you may lose the YIMBY political coalition. At least in LA, the loudest "please remove the encampments now" voices are ALSO NIMBY voices. Empowering those voices by leaving the encampments in place pending resolution of the housing issues seems incompatible with the slow boring of hard boards. Digging out of the housing hole may require removing the encampments first.
That's surely right. All these housing issues require some sort of short term action along with the long-term pro-housing regulatory environment. The question is just what sorts of short term actions are most effective and least cruel.
In Sacramento we have safe, city-run camping sites to act as large outdoor shelters. The NIMBYs are obviously fighting these tooth and nail while my argument is that they may be the quickest way to satisfy Bell vs. Boise and enforce ordinances. Of course, forcing acceptance of housing (especially those with city-enforced rules and even curfews) doesn't make me friends to my left but it really is the most consistent with a housing first approach.
It's amazing that lib-owning is the #1 core value for Republicans, but they'll make just one exception so as not to support dense housing construction. It's like when they said we should emulate Sweden on the lone issue of not trying to mitigate the spread of COVID in Spring 2020.
It's time for the nanny state to rev up and get the sick, chronically homeless off the street and into housing with mandatory treatment and a regimented lifestyle. People who are failing at basic activities of daily living aren't going to be helped by a little polishing and smoothing their clothes out.
One thing that I don't see Matt or anyone talk about is the zero-sumness of actually tackling homelessness. That is, if you are a city that starts to successfully tackle homelessness, other cities will send their homeless to your city, thereby maintaining your city's homeless problem. This is more or less what happened when Salt Lake City started providing housing to the homeless. I think this will also happen if land use/ zoning reform is done by one city but not the rest, as people will emigrate to areas with cheaper housing and high wages up until the point that the housing crisis will repeat itself in that city. If someone has some counter evidence to these ponderings I'd love to hear it.
“ Does the nice weather cause mental health issues?”
Would CA have fewer homeless with North Dakota’s climate? Of course it would.
I very much agree with the need to build more housing. And that will do wonders for the often temporarily homeless like the single mom sleeping in her car. But those with catastrophic mental health and substance abuse problems need mandatory treatment in a supervised (and in many cases) locked facility. The two populations are both homeless but the causes are different.
there’s a deep philosophical question here: should someone be locked up to keep them from peeing on a sidewalk and panhandling.
my first impulse would be to build more public toilets. i would be more comfortable with jail/commitment for peeing on a sidewalk if there were viable alternatives for the unhoused.
a key aspect of my middle class privilege is i can sneak into a bar or fast food restaurant when i need to relieve myself. without that privilege, i’d have committed a couple acts of public urination
I used to explain to people in NYC that there isn’t a shortage of public restrooms in Manhattan as long as you’re wearing a nice suit. There are lots of really nice hotels with really nice restrooms. And really nice seating areas if you want to just hang out after hanging one out.
Locked up implies punishment. You wouldn’t say (I don’t think) that your 88 year old grandmother should be locked up because of her dementia. But they do need to keep the door locked so she doesn’t wander out in her nightgown when it’s 20 degrees out. If someone is as debilitated by mental illness or drug addiction the same thing may need to happen.
I think well-maintained public toilets are well worth the expense, especially in any area that is supposed to be walkable and tourist friendly (the big box stores don’t police their toilet nearly as much as the small coffee shop).
-I don't think high property prices are the primary driver of homelessness. Big cities have high housing prices, and homeless people flock to big cities because they have to. All humans need food, fresh water, and shelter, in that order. If you depend on soup kitchens and some light dumpster-diving to keep yourself fed, then you can't live on the street in a small town. There aren't enough free resources to sustain you. And panhandling is a dead-end in a small city with low foot traffic. Smaller cities rarely offer the kinds of drop-in shelter they need; if there's a cold snap, there's nowhere to go. If you live rough in a large metro, you can go to lots of different shelters, or subway stations, or all-night businesses that will let you warm up for a bit before kicking you out. Smaller cities don't have those places. Finally, going to a city with a large homeless population is better if you want to stay under the radar. Being the only homeless person in a town of 8,000 means walking around with a target on your back for cops and bullies. Being one of 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco is a lot safer.
-There's also a cultural component. A lot of commenters here blame "liberal" city governments for large homeless populations. That's nonsense, but culture does matter. Hippie cities attract more homeless people. Athens, Georgia has a homeless rate twice the state average; its not (just)because of high home prices or a liberal city government, its because Athens (and San Francisco, Venice Beach, Seattle, Boulder, Austin, Bend, etc.) is a countercultural institution. There aren't a lot of squares living in homeless camps; many of the perpetually homeless/homeless-by-choice are "members" of the counterculture themselves.
I live in Missoula, which is officially the third-largest city in Montana. It is also a hippie town, and has the highest rate of homelessness in the state. Bozeman is more expensive (at least right now), and has fewer homeless, because its not a counterculture pitstop. Billings is twice the size of Missoula and has fewer than half the homeless, despite better employment opportunities and lower cost-of-living. Missoula's city government has tried "get tough" approaches, including arresting people for "blocking" the sidewalk, and moving the shelter from the heart of downtown to a busy four-lane artery far from any public greenspace, and it hasn't made an appreciable difference. Homelessness, writ large, is about housing prices, mental health, and addiction. Locally, its about the same three things, plus local culture.
In Austin, the problem is Abbott doesn't actually want more people to move there because it would accelerate the bluing of Texas.
Plus, GOP attitudes to homelessness are based on the disgust response not compassion for the homeless people themselves, so in practice proving the superiority of your housing policy by eliminating homelessness would be a poor way to "own the libs". Much better to keep dunking on dangerous liberal cities full of gross homeless people.
I think you should reconsider this perspective. A lot of people live in areas where they've been threatened and/or witnessed drug use, intoxication, public urination and defecation, and violence from chronically homeless folks. This is legitimately dangerous and scary, and most peoples' response to something like that is not going to be solely compassion, it's going to be "this has to stop/I need to get out of here", particularly if you've got kids. Are there other people who exaggerate this problem? I'm sure there are. But there's also legitimately a lot to criticize.
I live in DC and see/interact with chronically homeless people on a daily basis. It often makes me uncomfortable but it very rarely dangerous. Sure, disgust and fight-or-flight are natural, but I try to subordinate those impulses and see homeless people as humans worthy of dignity and compassion. Everyone should. What's worse, to see someone pooping in the street, or to have your options and resources taken away to the point that pooping in the street is your only option?
Of course there are some people who have severe problems that a housing-first agenda will not solve. Some prefer living on the streets and will not stay in housing even if you give it to them. This is a hard problem, and any solution will probably have to involve law enforcement and/or involuntary commitment in some cases. However, we are talking about a small fraction of the chronically homeless, who themselves make up a small fraction of the homeless. We are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Housing first will solve the vast majority of homelessness. Once that's implemented we can figure out how to fix the remainder.
Someone can be worthy of dignity and compassion, but when that person talks loudly about stabbing me, or gets close to me and curses at me for not giving him money when I'm with my kids, I'd be a fool to not get out of that situation as soon as I can and do my best to avoid it in the future. And that's true even if we're only talking about a small percent of interactions. Maybe if I were larger, childless, and male I would feel differently, maybe not.
However small of a group we're talking about, this is a big problem, and dismissing the feelings that most people - even liberals - have about this basically as "you should try harder to be a good person" is similar to the marginal and unpopular anti-police/anti-incarceration movement. Overwhelmingly, people want to feel safe walking down the street, and they think it's a big problem to see public defecation or to be harassed, and you're not going to talk them out of it.
What's incredibly frustrating it the political sentiment that we all have to suck it up on the greatly increased uncomfortable interactions with the unhoused unless (some day in the far future) the housing situation is solved.
Have you had those experiences? If so, I am really sorry, no one should have to experience this. My wife and daughter were racially targeted a few months ago.
I am a short middle-aged white dude who works in tech, but also an ex-paratrooper. For some reason no one ever fucks with me. I kind of wish someone would, tbh. I am usually armed (not with a gun, that's illegal).
I tracked down the guy who threatened my wife and made it clear in no uncertain terms what the cost would be if he repeated his behavior. He apologized and has not been a problem since. I heard he got a trip to the mental hospital soon after my visit. Maybe I pushed him over the edge. Sorry, not sorry.
There is a spectrum of safe -> not safe, it is not binary. Some people will never feel safe no matter how crime free a place is. Some are more like me, and not very concerned with personal safety. San Francisco has been sliding more to the *not safe* end and my 12 year old daughter has been bothered by it. The rest of the family, including my 15 year old punk rock daughter are not. No one should have to put up with being harassed.
For sure. It's not a regular occurrence, but it sticks with you. I'm pretty comfortable with city living, in part because I believe strongly in paying attention to my surroundings and walking away/crossing the street/switching metro cars when things get weird, which is something I think a lot of people don't trust their instincts enough to do. But the kid thing really complicates it, because you care more about your kids' safety than you do your own, and they don't have instincts yet.
You see retail theft daily? I am going to call bullshit on this claim. I have seen this a few times in 30 years.
These three incidents were over how many years?
Myself I got robbed at gunpoint once, saw a dude get stabbed on the 14 Mission (I rendered first aid) and got between a guy who was hassling a woman on Muni, again the 14. He tried to threaten me in Spanish but then quickly got off the bus when I cursed back and started laughing at him. So three sketchy incidents in 30 years.
Every place I have ever lived has been more violent than San Francisco. I grew up poor, both in cities and in rural areas but all were more violent than SF. I am curious what your background is.
I have something else to say, but it's not very PC so I will hold my tongue about it. Maybe have a good reason for not being able to stand up for yourself.
I think we agree that homelessness is bad, both for those experiencing it and those encountering it, and we should fix it. I can't tell from your replies whether or not you support housing first, but empirically it is the most effective intervention. In terms of actually solving the issue, I think the motivation for it doesn't matter all that much.
My cynical point earlier was that Matt's idea of tricking Greg Abbott into fixing Austin homelessness to own the libs won't work, because ending homelessness in Austin would actually just be a win for Austin.
I support housing first if there is enough funding and bureaucratic competency to get the folks off the street. If the money allotted is enough for shelter but not housing for bulk of the unhoused, or if the city is incapable of doing housing in anything resembling the budget, it should go to congregate shelters, especially in cities like Los Angeles that are under-sheltered. The good people of Los Angeles allocated enough money to shelter but not house the bulk of the unhoused population; I don't think it is appropriate to say "housing first and we need more money" in response to that.
One thing those simple reports of surveys miss is that, for instance, when you look at the 2018 exit poll for the O'Rourke-Cruz senate race - people who were born in Texas were very closely split, with a slight margin for O'Rourke, and while people who moved to Texas before 2008 had a huge margin in favor of Cruz, the people who moved to Texas between 2008 and 2018 had an equally huge margin in favor of O'Rourke. When you lump them together, it looks like "people who moved to Texas" slightly favored Cruz, but that hides that gap based on *when* they moved to Texas.
You can find the relevant two questions if you search for "Georgia" on this page, due to a pretty silly typo (I assume, that's what's going on). One question shows people born in Texas split 51-48 for O'Rourke and people who moved in split 57-42 for Cruz. The other shows people born in Georgia (I assume this is a typo for Texas?) split 51-48 for O'Rourke and people who moved to Texas earlier than 2008 split 63-36 for Cruz, and leaves the line for people who moved to Texas between 2008 and 2018 blank because it was only 10% of the electorate. But you can calculate that, in order for those numbers to add up, people who moved to Texas during those years must have split approximately 58-39 for O'Rourke.
I really wish there was something beyond the 2018 exit poll to double-check any of this, because a lot of people latch on to the one factoid you saw, and I'm pretty sure that this exit poll is hiding the other one I'm pushing, but I want more data to confirm or deny!
Oh, now I remember you brought this up before! I'm disappointed in myself now for parroting a factoid (even with my weak disclaimer) when I should know better by now!
Interesting finding, though it seems the largest studies report no statistical difference in partisan alignment between native Texans and those who move there. I would expect that, along the same lines, people moving to Austin will have similar politics to current Austin residents.
I wonder if YIMBYs and NIMBYs are talking past each other and missing a solution.
I live in an old line suburb of a mid sized city, defined by architecturally and aesthetically well designed single family living spaces (homes, parks, roadways) - all very well planned. A couple of miles away is a neighborhood plagued by post industrial urban desolation with huge empty tracts of land.
I am very much on team Matt when it comes to housing (and 1b Americans to boot). But I would struggle with indiscriminate density in my town. But what are the downsides of allowing for dense *planned* development of the post industrial tracts nearby? It would provide substantially similar access to jobs in the employment districts as my town. It would benefit from latest understanding we developed in what makes neighborhoods successful. It would allow for proper calibration of required transit intensity. And it would obviously help reinvigorate the overall metro.
You may say that most people don’t have vast tracts near employment districts. To which I say I have lived in Boston, Chicago, NYC, and have spent meaningful time in many other metros. They all have that. If you are able to link permitting to making sure that existing residents are provided with opportunities to participate / thrive in newly built environment (guarantee of housing, employment / education programs), I wonder if this would work?
Hey Andy - I live in Chattanooga, a small/mid size city with acres of post industrial urban desolation. In many ways, they've been able to build a ton of infill residential here and generally kept the character of the place(despite the usual pissing and moaning from the usual corners). One thing that makes something like this a challenge is what that land was previously used for. Here in Chatt, we have a ton of heavy industrial metal work stuff. The land under these blighted buildings is going to be toxic AF. It costs a *ton* of money to either clean these up or apply mitigation. Far more than a municipality could take on alone, and almost certainly more than a for profit developer could tackle. Not to say it can't be done, but it's pricey.
We're in the middle of turning an old GE/Alstom plant into a brand new neighborhood with all the usual mixed use bells and whistles. It's exciting. But it's slow and, again, the underlying environmental issues really drive cost and use.
Those who want guns to remain freely available also like talking about mental health. It’s a great way of deflecting. People who shoot other people often do have mental health problems. If these problems were magically fixed, there would be less gun violence. The catch is improving mental health is like improving lifespans. The ship turns slowly and even massive expenditures don’t always improve things very much. One can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars “treating” someone who is bipolar and, as soon as he is off his meds for a few days, the treatment has zero effect. The principle effect of therapy is the want/need for more therapy. Just like out of school factors drive educational outcomes, genetic and environmental factors dominate mental health outcomes.
and yet most murderers are young men whose biggest clinical problem might be anger management or impulsivity. the hard core mentally ill are annoying as fuck but not particularly violent
How well do you know that? I used to, and even still, browse the LA Times online homicide report. Homeless people murdering each other and occasionally others in the community is a frequent event. I don't know have the denominators of the 2 populations, ie "young men in LA" vs "homeless in LA", to compare rates properly, but I'm not so sure that the violence rate of the homeless would compare favorably.
On the face of it, I would also just guess that a hardcore mentally ill person could have as least as much difficulty with impulse or anger control as a typical 19 year old man.
i speak from my anecdotal experience as a criminal defense attorney and former public defender. the dudes with the biggest mental isues don’t overlap that much with the dudes with the heaviest charges.
i’m sure the average mentally ill person is somewhat more violent than the median person, but serious violence is concentrated in less than 5% of the young, male population
But you could make the same adjustment to the homeless population. 5% of the homeless with the most severe anger and mental issues might be 99% of the violence in that population.
The homeless in a place like Hollywood, CA (I mention because I used to live and work there) are "everywhere" because they are very visible. Yet they don't add up to a huge population in raw numbers. Maybe there are 1 or 2 thousand in that immediate area? And the vast majority are not violent, just like most young men aren't, even in bad neighborhoods.
But still - a few do murder someone almost every year. Just 1 homicide out of 1,000 people is already 20 times the base rate of the USA and higher than even the most violent city.
This is an interesting article about a move to make it easier to force treatment on the chronically homeless.
"For years, Diane Shinstock watched her adult son deteriorate on the streets. Suffering from severe schizophrenia, he slept under stairwells and bushes, screamed at passersby and was arrested for throwing rocks at cars.
Sometimes he refused the housing options he was offered. Sometimes he got kicked out of places for bad behavior. Shinstock, who lives in Roseville and works on disability issues for the state of California, begged mental health officials to place him under conservatorship—essentially, depriving him of his personal liberty because he was so sick that he couldn’t provide for his most basic personal needs of food, clothing and shelter.
But county officials told her, she said, that under state law, her son could not be conserved; because he chose to live on the streets, he did not fit the criteria for “gravely disabled.”"
To be competent you really only need to be able to tell an authority figure that you understand and appreciate all the dangers and challenges that will occur if you make a certain decision, but you wish to make that decision anyway. That is, you have some insight into the issues facing you.
When asked to explain your thought process, instead of saying you appreciate what’s going on, you say something like you’ll be fine because you’re the God Emperor of Arrakis, that’s when you’re going to be conserved.
I worked in the Texas Legislature last session and one of my bills was to help facilitate free market zoning reforms (HB 2989/SB 1120). My goal, working with advocates, was to try the exactly the political strategy you laid out in today's post.
A Democrat filed the bill in the Senate and a Republican in the House and we had an impressive cross-ideological stakeholder coalition behind it. We found there was very, very little appetite for reform from the Republican members. The House Committee hearing was a shitshow and the members were way more receptive to citizen's concerns about neighborhood character than high-minded ideas about the free market.
The Senate companion bill didn't even get a hearing, as the (very conservative) Republican Committee Chair opposed it. It became just another front in the anti-city culture war. Republicans were more willing to listen to a lobbyist hired by a Austin-based left wing activist who opposed zoning reform than they were willing to listen to the Realtors, Builders, and Habitat for Humanity.
The gist of the Republican opposition - which was never clearly defined - was that Austin's zoning reforms (which are currently tied up in court and would be allowed to move forward by the bill) are left-wing social engineering rather than free market deregulation. Also, free market rhetoric has become far less salient with Republicans in TX over the 7 years I worked in the Lege. I had many dereg-type bills that struggled.
I live in central Austin and am the president of a neighborhood association. In my experience there's no difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to zoning. People with BLM and Bernie signs/bumper stickers are vicious NIMBYs who fight any and every zoning change. And Republicans all live (or want to live) in gated communities with HOAs in the 'burbs. To enact zoning changes takes politicians willing to be voted out of office after making the commitment. Otherwise it's never going to happen. Most people just don't like change, no matter their political ideology.
“…left-wing social engineering rather than free market deregulation.”
Is that not true? The group Community Not Commodity certainly uses progressive tropes on its website.
Ideally YIMBYs should be able to make rhetorical arguments that appeal to both ideological positions. I think the progressive messaging predominates because left-wing cities are the biggest battlegrounds for zoning reform.
But our legislative strategy heavily emphasized the free market/economic messaging. It just didn't work, to some degree because Republicans no longer really care about free market principles and just want to own the libs.
As a millenial libertarian-leaning liberal, my boomer relatives are conservatives but never really cared about free markets (even pre-Trump) - rather, they just like low taxes and think rich people deserve to be rich. I think you saw this in the Obamacare debate, where nobody ever defended the pre-Obamacare healthcare market on free market principles but rather you saw National Review columnists say "my cardiologist is rich, and he deserves to be rich" without noting that 50% of American healthcare spending comes from the government or noting the barriers placed on nurse practitioner or physician assistant practice that are propping up physician incomes.
This is a case where free markets would disproportionately help younger people with lower incomes or wealth at the expense of decreasing the value of housing investments owned by the wealthy and elderly, so wealthy boomer conservatives are happy to go against free market principles to protect their wealth.
Well said.
One distinction I would make is that the elected Republican class used to have a genuine belief in market-based solutions. Look at GWB's social security reforms, for example. Recently, they have become more aligned with their voters, who are just grievance-driven reactionaries with no real model or vision for how society should be arranged.
The ACA may be the inflection point, since it was genuine effort to build a functioning market-based universal healthcare system and Republicans rejected it en masse, sabotaged its market mechanisms (the exchanges), and never offered a real alternative.
The first step in the solution is mandatory pricing transparency. All prices need to be posted online.
Along with that, ban charging different payers different prices. It doesn't matter if you are a cash payer, an insurer, or the government you should all get the same price from the same provider for the same procedure.
Without pricing transparency competition can't work. And eliminating the payer price differences will also greatly enhance competition (and remove the hidden Medicare subsidy)
Next focus on increasing healthcare supply faster than demand (Obamacare focused on increasing demand, IE getting more people coverage).
If you increase supply faster than demand, and have price transparency, then the market will work to bring down total system cost.
Yes I agree, at least at the higher levels. Just noting what I'd seen from normie old school educated republicans (my conservative boomer relatives), who I think were following after an old school Reaganite veneration of rich people which sometimes codes as "free market" but really isn't. I think the post-Reagan Republican party misread their Reaganite base to the extent that they thought they cared more about "free markets" in the abstract as opposed to "rich people deserve to be rich" - I'm skeptical a genuine interest in free markets for their own sake ever percolated far beyond the intellectual libertarian class.
I agree that the ACA marked a possible inflection point - Romney I think actually cared about the free market and making it work as an MA governor, but couldn't run on that in 2012 and instead ran on "keep your government hands off my Medicare". I'd argue the Bush attempted social security reform was another inflection point, as it showed the conservative political class just how little broad popular support there ever was even in the conservative base for the social security reforms that excited the conservative intellectual class.
Was it “free market/economic messaging” or free market in reality?
The legislation allowed cities to update zonings codes more easily to allow for more development. Industry and professional groups were lined up in support. I'm sorry but I don't understand what you're getting at?
What I’m getting at is in what way was it a “free market” reform?
Republicand have never cared about free markets except when this helps redistribute income upward. Since they can do that with tax cuts, who needs markets?
No, we did nearly exclusively "conservative" messaging about market-based solutions and lowering the cost of living. We located 2 Republicans to push the bill in the House. We assembled a stakeholder coalition of developers, industry groups, and professional associations. All of this fell on deaf ears.
You're responding to a comment where I said "our legislative strategy heavily emphasized the free market/economic messaging" - I'm really puzzled how you're characterizing that as progressive tropes.
Community Not Commodity is a NIMBY group I believe, and was bitterly opposed to CodeNext. I'm pretty sure they exist to solely to fight code reform.
They are affiliated with the Save Our City PAC, which is run by the head of the Travis County Republican Party.
If you interacted with Austin real estate much, I'm curious if any current council members were helpful. My read is that Harper-Madison, Renteria and Casar are pretty amenable to building, but the others aren't.
IIRC Casar was very supportive but we didn't want to make it seem like an "Austin thing" because the Republicans have been waging a war on Austin the Lege.
Cameron, would you consider Community Not Commodity an astroturf organization?
Not really. I think it genuinely represents the interests of reactionary homeowners in Austin. There are lefties involved with it. One of them called and threatened me after we filed the bill and told me "You will regret this!"
Well, they've tailored at least part of their argument to appeal to liberals, so they're fort of marketing themselves as progressive. CNC actually links to a Jacobin article from this webpage on their site: https://communitynotcommodity.com/2021/09/14/its-time-to-expose-the-biggest-myths-about-austins-land-development-code/
Although, maybe it's just us a real-world example of the horseshoe theory of political ideology.
I personally don't understand why Republicans are opposed to development in central Austin. Maybe they're funded by developers in Austin suburbs who are trying to attract development there, and they see increased development in Austin as threatening?
It's dumber than that. They use the liberal government of Austin as a boogeyman to rile up their primary voters. This session they probably passed 10+ bills undoing actions by the Austin City Council. It's pure cynical "own the libs" partisan politics (which more and more is defining the TX Legislature).
I am mystified with what it means to be a Republican anymore. They seem to have no agenda except getting on Fox News.
1st mistake. Austin is expensive because its desirable. Homeless are attracted to Austin because it's desirable. Not all desirable and expensive cities have large homeless populations.
2nd mistake. Everyone who speaks about homeless conflates two completely different populations. The transitory homeless who get counted but we never see, and the visible homeless we do see.
3. The transitory homeless make up at least half of all homeless. These are people who get evicted, or lose a job, and are usually out of homelessness in a few weeks. They are the ones who will move from expensive places to less expensive places for jobs.
4. The visible or chronic homeless are the ones we see on the streets of San Francisco. They are there because of mental health issues and substance abuse. They are attracted to place with generous services, nice weather, and lax drug policies.
5. A significant portion of the chronic/visible homeless refuse housing. The success rates when in drug programs are less than 50%. And this is taking into consideration that the most addicted won't even attempt counseling.
Now, is housing part of the solution. Yes, obviously. But the real solution to homelessness is a combination of housing, treatment, and enforcement.
A fixation on lowering the costs of housing will help the transitory homeless, but to make dent on our visible homeless, some tough love is needed.
The long term homeless are hard cases. Some people are broken and cannot be fixed. One can warehouse them, but that generally requires a lock and key.
Transitory homelessness is a more fixable problem and dollars will have a greater marginal effect when applied to the transitory homeless. Most of those situations could be fixed with $3k, and society gets a productive worker out of the equation.
But you can’t mislead the public. You can’t say we’re going to fix the homeless problem with housing and eliminate the temporarily homeless while leaving the chronic homeless on the street.
“We’ve reduced homelessness by 50%!”
Public: “I still see the same number of homeless.”
“Oh, we just reduced homelessness among those you can’t see.”
Housing reduces chronic homelessness too, albeit less effectively. Some will become homeless again but because they'll be housed for a while in between, the total number of homeless at any one given time will go down.
"Housing First" acknowledges that you need treatment etc. too. The point is simply that housing has to be the first priority, both chronologically and in importance.
Treatment implies, at least to me, voluntary. If you’re on the street screaming obscenities at 3am treatment shouldn’t be optional. If you’re so drug addicted that you’re taking a dump in someone’s doorway treatment shouldn’t be optional.
I do not see what you are driving at. Call it what you want, but if you put chronically homeless people in housing, then more of them will receive mental health services/treatment/whatever than will be the case if they're on the streets, which in turn means that some (not all) will no longer be chronically homeless. Therefore, housing does in fact lead to a reduction in the visible homeless population as well as the invisible.
How can they stay in housing if they can’t stop screaming obscenities at 2am?
It seems the homeless driving the politics (encampments on the street) and the ones that are most likely to be helped by the policy (less chronically homeless) are different, and although it trickles down and is slow. The cities are under pressures to start sweeps like yesterday (they are underway in Los Angeles) and the homeless advocates don't seem to have policy proposals that work on the time frames the politics currently demand.
Exactly, this is almost an issue somewhat like immigration policy - there's the immediate law and order issue of enforcing the law, whether it be at the border or on the city sidewalk or bus, and then there's the more complex root causes issues that are less visible. You can't get credibility and space to address the second if you're not honest about the first.
I was almost going to mention this as an example. But since immigration is awesome such a controversial issue, I didn’t want to bring that up.
So you are 100% right.
I agree with you.
I agree. But what people complain about. What people count. Are two different things.
And to further complicate the issue, some of the transitory homeless are there because of substance abuse issues as well.
People tend not to lose her job for no reason. Obviously there are exceptions.
Young family. Guy and girl with the baby. Guy dabbles in recreational drugs but still works. Eventually, after being laid a few times, showing up to work intoxicated, he is fired. Gets behind a little in bills, find another job, but the process repeats. Because the rent has gone up from a couple years ago, in the past he was able to manage this sort of lifestyle, but now he can’t. This happens to her three times, they get evicted.
They go stay on there parents house. But this doesn’t work out, complicated by the drug issues.
They move him to a shelter for a week or two. They are now homeless, but we don’t see them on the street. The guy gets a job, they save up a little money, get a little help, he gets a little bit of drug treatment which is easy, they move 20 miles away to a lower cost city. They are done.
This is a typical homeless story.
Agree. In representing kids in family court in Philadelphia over the years, I've seen many families who fell into that second category - living paycheck to paycheck, mom or dad lost a job, maybe their fault, maybe not, fell behind on rent and ended up on the street and the kids got into the social system and foster care, where all it took was a judge to order some assistance from city social services to get them back in housing, and they were on their way again.
Totally different situation than hardcore homelessness from chronic mental illness or substance abuse, but more common and very closely tied to the availability of affordable housing.
If that’s the case (which I have no reason to doubt), that might be the best return for domestic investment in human capital available. Which organization is most successful in actually doing this work? If anyone knows I would love to support it.
Many of the same organizations that help the chronic homeless help these people. Normal progressive policies like a higher minimum wage, child tax credit, other social programs help these people as well.
If you think of poverty as a spectrum. With some people being poor having housing. Just on the other side of that fine line are the same people without housing.
When housing gets more expensive, more people fall off that line.
Higher minimum wages don't necessarily help them because if that new minimum wage is higher than the value of their work they become unemployed.
Moreover, higher wages will often lead to higher prices thus putting everyone back in the same position they were at the start, just their money is worth a bit less
1st mistake. Austin is expensive because its desirable. Homeless are attracted to Austin because it's desirable. Not all desirable and expensive cities have large homeless populations.
Possibly but... are Dallas, Houston, San Antonio so much less desirable for the homeless?
5. A significant portion of the chronic/visible homeless refuse housing.
I've always heard this is true of shelters.
But: Is this true of actual personal housing? (Even a small apartment that has a lock, and bathroom, and space that is undeniably yours)
“But: Is this true of actual personal housing? ”
In many cases they refuse because they are too mentally ill to even understand what’s going on. In other cases they can’t abide by the rules and get thrown out. The lady on the street screaming obscenities at 3am get moved to housing with the stipulation that you can’t scream obscenities at 3am or any other time either. Which, being so severely ill that she’s screaming obscenities at 3am, she obviously can’t control. So she gets thrown out.
Once again, we have to distinguish between chronic and transitory homeless. To the drug addicted chronic homeless, Austin is more desirable.
Refusal of housing is depending on where that house is located.
If you build a bunch of housing out in the country outside of Austin, housing that included food and supplies, the chronic Homeless would turn it down.
There’s all sorts of other confounding issue.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/San-Francisco-offered-permanent-housing-to-15994868.php
Thanks for the link. Mostly I've heard about shelter refusal, interesting to hear about permanent housing refusal.
You have to consider that people who are homeless have personal connections just like everybody else. Even if you are homeless and a lot of your resources come from foraging or asking strangers for money...you typically have a built in knowledge based about where you can do this more effectively that suddenly becomes completely useless if you are completely relocated to the other side of a city. I interact with a handful of the chronic homeless in my neighborhood. They typically have 5 - 10 people in the area who offer them some form of assistance. Some may provide money, or food...others may provide intermittent shelter (even if it's just hanging out under your patio when it rains), some may provide transportation or be your "designated representative" for SNAP benefits, etc. Some may provide you a place to wash your clothing...all based on each individual's comfort level (some people may not have more than an unoccupied room in a house they can offer up for a few days or so every few months). If you tell someone like this that all of a sudden you are going to move them miles across town, and just give them a house and some food...well that satisfies a good percentage of their needs...but a lot of their other needs (transportation, supplies, access to phones) are suddenly gone. One woman I interact with weekly has kidney problems and is incontinent. She is always asking for adult diapers. It's pretty clear that when any of these folks are out of town or out of contact with her, it's an extremely big disruption in her life. All of this weighs in to making people skeptical of just up and moving across town.
Exactly!
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-12-18/need-for-new-laws-to-address-homelessness
Hey Bronx. Don’t we normally disagree. This is scary.
It’s interesting how the homelessness issue crosses party lines. I see folks on the left and the right who can’t accept that some people are so mentally ill they can’t care for themselves.
This is one issue where I think conservatives actually have a better grasp on the causes, but not necessarily the solutions.
Liberals might be marginally better with solutions, but are completely naïve about the causes.
Obviously there is going to be some marginal relationship. The people who are most likely to become chronically homeless and addicted slide down the scale. But many of them the slide is not related to the cost of rent, it’s unfortunately a result of addiction issues. They most likely would’ve slid into that situation no matter what (No matter what, it’s not quite accurate… If there was carrot and stick approach to drug abuse… some would be prevented)
Well put comment by David. Fixing the transitory homelessness issue by more housing, both market rate and subsidized is the first step.
I work in downtown San Diego, which is not one of the emblematic concentrations of homelessness, but does have about 1000 unsheltered street homeless people on a regular basis. These are typically the chronic homeless not the transitory homeless. A large share are mentally disturbed and/or intoxicated. In addition, some of the people who you see on the street in mental health crisis may be housed. Some don't have any belongings with them, and there are still a fair number of small old school SROs around, so they may have a place to stay. The city policy is that people can camp or sleep on the sidewalk overnight but are supposed to be up by 5:00 am. On the fringes of downtown, this isn't enforced. How do you fix this?
For one thing, we do have an extreme housing shortage. It isn't normal to have home prices increase by 27% in one year. The new mayor and city council elected last year is one of the more pro-housing local governments in large California cities. Just yesterday they approved a 1200 unit multi-family development with 15% deed restricted affordable units on a closed golf course over strong NIMBY opposition and the opposition of the local council rep. but it will take years, even decades to dig out of the housing shortage hole we are in. While we desperately need more market rate housing, and revenue streams to support subsidized housing, that's not going to directly help those with severe behavioral problems as nobody is going to want to rent to them or live adjacent to them. So how do you fix it?
Definitely more SROs, but with support services, and not concentrated. More enforcement against sidewalk camping, which the 9th Circuit will only allow if there are shelter options. Organized camping sites can be a temporary solution. Stronger enforcement against drug dealing, while unfashionable, would certainly help, as chronic meth use doesn't make for good neighbors. Effective mental health services, law enforcement and SRO's with support services will cost a lot of money. It requires federal involvement, as the people in need here come from all over the country.
I think some of the complexity around homeless is that not only does the population vary by location, it also can relatively rapidly vary across time.
I've biked to work (pre-Covid) along the Guadalupe River Trail through Downtown San Jose for about 10 years. There have always been homeless along the trail, but for the first 5-6 years (roughly 2010-2015), it was mostly the core demographic that folks think of when they think of the homeless. I would see the same people day after day for years. Lots of muttering. It seemed stable, in that the folks living in the park were mostly people capable of living in the park for years, but also I would have agreed that the "average" homeless person was both mentally ill and, to a certain extent, wanted to be outside and away from authority.
In the last 5 years pre-Covid, that completely changed (and then it completely changed again with Covid). The homeless population has increased dramatically, from a few people intermittently along the trail to several quite large semi-permanent encampments, and the population is now younger, healthier, and often seems to have one foot in the normal world. I'm guessing many have some formal or informal job. Many seem to have at least partial access to a support network (bathroom, food, etc). With Covid and some changes in policy, many have now brought cars out onto the trail.
San Jose has a pretty active homeless support program that definitely believes in housing first and they would just say that the scale is too big for them to make much forward progress. That being said, I am quite comfortable with the idea that getting from current levels of homeless back to 2015 levels is basically just housing. If you want to get below 2015 levels, then it probably gets more complicated.
In 2015, California still had less housing per capita than most states. It just wasn’t as bad as it is now. The claim is that getting housing to where it was in 2015 would get homelessness to those levels, and getting housing to where Missouri or Ohio are at would get homelessness to the levels in those states.
This essay has some good arguments, but completely misses the fact that different cities have different political cultures, different attitudes towards vagrancy, differing availability of drugs as well as different infrastructures of welfare and NGOs. Conservative cities are generally less common, but along with cheap and easy building policies, we also see a greater willingness to crack down on chronic homelessness, more strictly enforced vagrancy laws, etc.
The end result is that people who suffer from addiction and mental health issues tend to migrate to places like Austin and Portland and SF. If NYC didn't have such a cold winter, I imagine the homeless population (of mentally ill people struggling with addiction) would dwarf that of the Bay Area.
It seems to me that a lot of this (in the USA) is due to the deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill which owes much of its popular support to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--a work of fiction--and the 1973 Rosenhan or "Thud" Experiment which turned out to have been mostly fabricated.
Of course all this also happened in the backdrop of increased societal tolerance for individual autonomy over group wellbeing, which is reflected in a legal apparatus in the that makes it almost impossible to institutionalize someone against their own will. I think a lot of this grows from the horror that many of us feel when we contemplate being (unjustly) institutionalized against our will, but of course we are forgetting how cruel and awful are the lives of those who really need support but end up leading lives of savagery on the streets.
If high real estate prices were the cause of homelessness--not the "I'm temporarily out of a job" variety, but the defecating on the street variety, why don't we look at the places with the most expensive real estate per square foot? Here's the list:
Monaco, Europe – $5,262.80 per sq ft.
Hong Kong, Asia – $4,392.81 per sq ft.
New York, USA – $2,465.57 per sq ft.
Tokyo, Japan – $2,265.05 per sq ft.
Geneva, Switzerland – $2,123.16 per sq ft.
Shanghai, China – $1,934.44 per sq ft.
London, UK – $1,891.75 per sq ft.
According to this list, Monaco and Hong Kong should have a lot more homelessness--and if Matt is right, it should be the drug addicted mentally-challenged variety. Yet the streets of Monaco are famously pristine, and Hong Kong has nothing like NYC's army of street people, to say nothing of the Bay Area. San Francisco, at $1,060 per sq. ft. doesn't even make the list, and I can think of few places in the rich world with as much disorder caused by the homeless.
None of this means that Matt is wrong--clearly a lot of cities in the USA are suffering from an excess of zoning rules that tie the hands of developers and lead to overly expensive real estate. But the idea that this will solve the problem of the mentally ill and drug-addicted population that are one of the primary drivers of urban chaos seems unlikely.
>>If Matt is right, it should be the drug addicted mentally-challenged variety.
Isn't he arguing that there's no correlation between housing costs and this type of homelessness (I believe the term in the literature is the "chronically homeless")? That's the upshot of the scatter plots as I understand it.
Also, the notion that the homeless migrate disproportionately to certain cities like SF is a myth that needs to be put to rest. See e.g. this VA study finding pretty much even net migration among veterans across the country (metro NYC and CA actually showed *negative* net migration:
tinyurl.com/77mw4ds). If anything, the migration flows here reflect the general migration patterns of people around the country towards the sunbelt, which goes to show that homeless people behave just like normal people and don't pick up and move across the country to replicate their same circumstances somewhere else.
Finally, average square footage (which I'm guessing you pulled from here: https://www.elitetraveler.com/property/most-expensive-property-markets-in-the-world) is a really bad proxy for housing scarcity. Since it's an *average,* the top of that list is necessarily going to be cities with extremely attractive high-end real estate markets, but that doesn't tell you anything about availability of housing for the average person; San Bernadino is never going to make the top of that list no matter how bad the housing situation is in metro LA. Conversely, Tokyo is famous for having stable rental housing costs while continuing to grow--housing is built easily, cheaply and densely, and because there's great mass transit, it's very easy for a normal person living on the outskirts to afford a home that's accessible to work. Rich people shelling out obscene sums of money to live in the Ginza neighborhood is an independent phenomenon.
These are excellent points, but a couple of replies:
1) A White House study from 2019 (reported on here: https://tinyurl.com/3chtm646) found that chronic homelessness was generally higher in coastal states (which happen to mostly be liberal) and also in warmer states, but not as high as would be expected in states like Texas and Florida. Now if Matt is right, this is because Texas and Florida generally have less restrictive zoning rules--see Austin v. Houston. But if I'm right, it's because Texas and Florida are red states and are therefore more inclined to enforce anti-vagrancy laws. While I don't think most chronically homeless people are boarding Greyhound buses from Mississippi to the Bay Area, it seems perfectly reasonable to move from Houston to Austin. In my time in Austin, it was my impression that many of the street people there were *not* born and raised in Austin-though I never did any sort of study as to where they came from. Still, isn't it worth asking: what *drew* them to Austin? Surely the culture of the city plays a major role, no? (FYI, your link was dead)
2) While it is true that the top of the market may seem to distort the salience of the average price per square foot, the argument of YIMBYs like Matt is that more housing will drop prices for everyone. If fact I remember him making an analogy here involving luxury cars in a previous column making this exact point. Why are the prices so high for luxury buildings? Price per square foot in Singapore is half that of Hong Kong despite the fact that Singapore is increasingly awash in new luxury housing. The top of the market is still the market, no? Anyway, we can all agree that housing is very hard to afford in HK, yet we see little to no chronic homeless there.
3) It just seems obvious to me, a 40+ year resident of NYC, that there is a population of very mentally ill and unstable people on the street, many of whom consistently refuse housing and prefer to roam the streets. While cheaper housing is a public good that I whole-heartedly support, the people on the streets who are defecating in the gutter and shooting up while leaning on my fence as I take my daughter to school and falling over dead-drunk on in the middle of streets are not there because they can't afford a studio apartment in the Bronx.
Here's the link (it's obnoxiously long): https://watermark.silverchair.com/milmed-d-15-00504.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAvEwggLtBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggLeMIIC2gIBADCCAtMGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMkduPrsq9oRDqmGz3AgEQgIICpMWHKbTtU3KwVdnbDzEMFfWZgv6cbjwBSmXwolhHy2SksyXhb2cdCGQn_FEAOD5c9nEozlKKWo0XHF2E_Qm1PqlGdkEKYDJLsLECSXBDuVcSvk2a8JyZYyeS-oXubw5qCGIAll5wx-LgGf9pK0CJHFYDc9ilvhCiklL9TTFZoRiKF4Om7tFUtq6KHOfHQuBiDWSYCJWFluYyynWJ7jiBjOyL6kli2TqF3fRqeVWLuzzDbe5Jw0ZQz1gk-tt-sVCL-Kz_Y6JFhyZ5dK95RODnn6QbDEbQH0QncB5PA2sgdlZTGqJJVH92ZMXoQAmg-faiRZjsaStZjA8adJt49Z7rcGCF79tAcHHLh-Vns4AnNcaJIFemzs24O8_gpmI_FZ08fOn1JSoMo6BM0iaAXcLUbf1CNAtpRkAzpU7CM9l-vgsKdDcpof7kNkg8yI-FXOHZJaFQLOAGOmMNfxedPj77Itmj6ymFv9ZizknKxWjqHVgy1h3hRAdQ1L7weSEdjqqqYDZiKQSiW5VJN9ttnBHDwfPrAww-2-C_KiY_N8Zo9UHqGwQBK6woT9j4yWO_FFk1v66Tv9Pq5AD5h8JzSQqPfpPhCyENwaEec0rwwOb3kpr66Y3cjTsBqts9lQYhwCCQq8fJYv8_N3ievz0qhKprqLYylvy1JoRNksYOzZP26pmMUQQKLGIYx5tThnbg8miUxqpS7q2uuJvQOvHePC6GzqP6eerBU9MO-6nrWZT8Hl17RiPCUM0oR_j2Z-j9OHwwCSQ9M6oNImsHeAu9q0O2p_V2ylmx_tWwWozpE_x4NTE3NXYSVaND-aiKvcJSAKqfLwXc1kWOZhPQ0HNpQMutmYPedrWh3I5jSgLwWKoaNSrkDtG8fyvLGN38e0B1Le8KRJX_3Og
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While this is surely part of it, the fact that Anchorage is the city with the 6th highest homelessness rate suggests that good weather and liberal governance policies aren't driving the high rates everywhere: http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.html
I would think that part of it is that while Anchorage is certainly a lot more conservative than Austin or SF, it's a lot more liberal than all the rest of Alaska. That and its size (still small, but bigger than all other Alaska cities) would mean the development of an infrastructure to accommodate the homeless population and also (presumably) a market for them to procure drugs. If you could magically teleport the city and government of Austin to Alaska and keep the culture of Anchorage the same, I suspect the homeless in Alaska would soon migrate to Austin, Alaska.
But even the whole population of Alaska is only about double the population of Anchorage. The other cities in the top five (and many cities far lower down - notably Salt Lake City, which doesn't even appear to make the list) have a "catchment area" that is far larger proportionally. It's probably true that *some* of the homeless in any city have come from a region around it, beyond its metro area. But if that was the main driver, then you would expect Salt Lake City to be high on the list.
Doesn't Hong Kong have those weird rabbit-warren housing options? People in cages stacked on top of each other? I'm not saying that's better or worse than being homeless; I'm just pointing out that they have *someplace* to put the homeless.
According to this piece at least China is much more coercive, using facial recognition and DNA to return homeless people to their hometowns. Those who don't want to return stay off the streets in hiding during the day. https://westernindependent.com.au/2017/10/09/shanghais-hidden-homeless/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-9wo_apQ1s
RIP Norm
A true legend.
He saved his most ingenious performance for Mr. Saget so Mr. Saget account could post it here. Comedy metalegend.
I think the frustration in California is that we have authorized our government to spend just insane amounts of money to fix the homelessness problem but it isn't resolving. I know the issue is complicated but a lot of people are of the mindset "look, I was fine with paying more taxes to fix this, what is going on?". There is a very general liberal idea here that we should all pony up some cash and then it will be fine but it's not happening. That's the sentiment I hear from peers.
This is increasingly a problem with the left/liberals/Democrats, the idea that there's a sort of funding lever you can push higher or lower that in turn relieves or exacerbates a social problem. The connection between spending and actual results is breaking down for a number of reasons and I worry it's going to give people the idea that government can't help solve problems (which, if you keep increasing funding without getting results, is sort of true).
San Francisco is going to triple spending on homelessness over the next two years. We better see some results.
Right. Few things are so simple that more money alone will fix it. If you have a program that functions, but has to turn down a substantial number of applicants due to lack of funding, then more funding may mitigate the problem, but probably won't eliminate it because you have people that don't apply in the first place, or don't qualify for other reasons.
If you don't have an existing program that functions and is just short on funds, then you're looking at creating a new program, and there's no guarantee that it will work initially. Maybe you can find a good example of a program to try to copy, but what works in Austin may not work in Madison, or vice versa.
It gets cold here, but some of us appreciate that, or at least drink enough that we don't mind.
Part of it is that the whole sentence here in CA is "look, I was fine with paying more taxes to fix this [by building somewhere other than my neighborhood], what is going on?"
A quote from a friend on this very point "Hey man, for what we are paying they could just build them their own city". The NIMBY crowd in my area is VERY into a tiny house city out in Palmdale or something.
Although amazingly in my SFH neighborhood of West LA, which hates hates hates denser housing, residents are all on board for the homeless veteran housing they're building in our area. Finally, "thank you for your service" actually means something when people say it.
The issue causing political tensions in California and Austin isn't homelessness, it's encampments. The idea that Echo Park or a park in Austin can be turned into a tent city and the city won't/can't do anything about it for months on end (this was pre-COVID as well) doesn't feel like a housing OR a mental health issue. It's easy to link large numbers of homeless to housing policy, but the size of the tent cities seems something else entirely, and that's what's driving the politics right now.
California has been fighting the NIMBYs for years and has had some success, but it is slow going. A political position that you can't sweep the encampments unless until you solve the housing crisis is simply unsustainable. The two councilmembers in LA who hold that view are both facing recalls and at least one seems likely to succeed.
I definitely doesn't *feel* like a housing issue, but it *is* a housing issue. You don't get these big encampments in places where housing is abundant.
Of course, by the time you have these encampments, you're so deep in the hole that it will take decades to build your way out of it.
The issue is that if you leave the encampments for those decades, you may lose the YIMBY political coalition. At least in LA, the loudest "please remove the encampments now" voices are ALSO NIMBY voices. Empowering those voices by leaving the encampments in place pending resolution of the housing issues seems incompatible with the slow boring of hard boards. Digging out of the housing hole may require removing the encampments first.
That's surely right. All these housing issues require some sort of short term action along with the long-term pro-housing regulatory environment. The question is just what sorts of short term actions are most effective and least cruel.
In Sacramento we have safe, city-run camping sites to act as large outdoor shelters. The NIMBYs are obviously fighting these tooth and nail while my argument is that they may be the quickest way to satisfy Bell vs. Boise and enforce ordinances. Of course, forcing acceptance of housing (especially those with city-enforced rules and even curfews) doesn't make me friends to my left but it really is the most consistent with a housing first approach.
100% agreed. Same thing in Seattle and Portland as well.
It's amazing that lib-owning is the #1 core value for Republicans, but they'll make just one exception so as not to support dense housing construction. It's like when they said we should emulate Sweden on the lone issue of not trying to mitigate the spread of COVID in Spring 2020.
Warehousing. Not housing.
It's time for the nanny state to rev up and get the sick, chronically homeless off the street and into housing with mandatory treatment and a regimented lifestyle. People who are failing at basic activities of daily living aren't going to be helped by a little polishing and smoothing their clothes out.
One thing that I don't see Matt or anyone talk about is the zero-sumness of actually tackling homelessness. That is, if you are a city that starts to successfully tackle homelessness, other cities will send their homeless to your city, thereby maintaining your city's homeless problem. This is more or less what happened when Salt Lake City started providing housing to the homeless. I think this will also happen if land use/ zoning reform is done by one city but not the rest, as people will emigrate to areas with cheaper housing and high wages up until the point that the housing crisis will repeat itself in that city. If someone has some counter evidence to these ponderings I'd love to hear it.
This implies a real need for a federal effort on homelessness.
“ Does the nice weather cause mental health issues?”
Would CA have fewer homeless with North Dakota’s climate? Of course it would.
I very much agree with the need to build more housing. And that will do wonders for the often temporarily homeless like the single mom sleeping in her car. But those with catastrophic mental health and substance abuse problems need mandatory treatment in a supervised (and in many cases) locked facility. The two populations are both homeless but the causes are different.
there’s a deep philosophical question here: should someone be locked up to keep them from peeing on a sidewalk and panhandling.
my first impulse would be to build more public toilets. i would be more comfortable with jail/commitment for peeing on a sidewalk if there were viable alternatives for the unhoused.
a key aspect of my middle class privilege is i can sneak into a bar or fast food restaurant when i need to relieve myself. without that privilege, i’d have committed a couple acts of public urination
I used to explain to people in NYC that there isn’t a shortage of public restrooms in Manhattan as long as you’re wearing a nice suit. There are lots of really nice hotels with really nice restrooms. And really nice seating areas if you want to just hang out after hanging one out.
Locked up implies punishment. You wouldn’t say (I don’t think) that your 88 year old grandmother should be locked up because of her dementia. But they do need to keep the door locked so she doesn’t wander out in her nightgown when it’s 20 degrees out. If someone is as debilitated by mental illness or drug addiction the same thing may need to happen.
truth be told, i see little point in keeping the demented from wandering off. going out and freezing in the cold might be a positive good
At this point, I've come to the conclusion that David Abbott is just a troll trying to make conservatives look like heartless bastards.
false. i pan to kill myself before i am a useless burden
*plan
But it might not be cold enough and then they end up a public nuisance.
which is merely a nuisance and is fine.
I think well-maintained public toilets are well worth the expense, especially in any area that is supposed to be walkable and tourist friendly (the big box stores don’t police their toilet nearly as much as the small coffee shop).
Some general notes:
-I don't think high property prices are the primary driver of homelessness. Big cities have high housing prices, and homeless people flock to big cities because they have to. All humans need food, fresh water, and shelter, in that order. If you depend on soup kitchens and some light dumpster-diving to keep yourself fed, then you can't live on the street in a small town. There aren't enough free resources to sustain you. And panhandling is a dead-end in a small city with low foot traffic. Smaller cities rarely offer the kinds of drop-in shelter they need; if there's a cold snap, there's nowhere to go. If you live rough in a large metro, you can go to lots of different shelters, or subway stations, or all-night businesses that will let you warm up for a bit before kicking you out. Smaller cities don't have those places. Finally, going to a city with a large homeless population is better if you want to stay under the radar. Being the only homeless person in a town of 8,000 means walking around with a target on your back for cops and bullies. Being one of 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco is a lot safer.
-There's also a cultural component. A lot of commenters here blame "liberal" city governments for large homeless populations. That's nonsense, but culture does matter. Hippie cities attract more homeless people. Athens, Georgia has a homeless rate twice the state average; its not (just)because of high home prices or a liberal city government, its because Athens (and San Francisco, Venice Beach, Seattle, Boulder, Austin, Bend, etc.) is a countercultural institution. There aren't a lot of squares living in homeless camps; many of the perpetually homeless/homeless-by-choice are "members" of the counterculture themselves.
I live in Missoula, which is officially the third-largest city in Montana. It is also a hippie town, and has the highest rate of homelessness in the state. Bozeman is more expensive (at least right now), and has fewer homeless, because its not a counterculture pitstop. Billings is twice the size of Missoula and has fewer than half the homeless, despite better employment opportunities and lower cost-of-living. Missoula's city government has tried "get tough" approaches, including arresting people for "blocking" the sidewalk, and moving the shelter from the heart of downtown to a busy four-lane artery far from any public greenspace, and it hasn't made an appreciable difference. Homelessness, writ large, is about housing prices, mental health, and addiction. Locally, its about the same three things, plus local culture.
Billings is a lot of things, but I think the number of people who dream of living there is quite low.
Though it does actually look like a nice place to live.
In Austin, the problem is Abbott doesn't actually want more people to move there because it would accelerate the bluing of Texas.
Plus, GOP attitudes to homelessness are based on the disgust response not compassion for the homeless people themselves, so in practice proving the superiority of your housing policy by eliminating homelessness would be a poor way to "own the libs". Much better to keep dunking on dangerous liberal cities full of gross homeless people.
I think you should reconsider this perspective. A lot of people live in areas where they've been threatened and/or witnessed drug use, intoxication, public urination and defecation, and violence from chronically homeless folks. This is legitimately dangerous and scary, and most peoples' response to something like that is not going to be solely compassion, it's going to be "this has to stop/I need to get out of here", particularly if you've got kids. Are there other people who exaggerate this problem? I'm sure there are. But there's also legitimately a lot to criticize.
I live in DC and see/interact with chronically homeless people on a daily basis. It often makes me uncomfortable but it very rarely dangerous. Sure, disgust and fight-or-flight are natural, but I try to subordinate those impulses and see homeless people as humans worthy of dignity and compassion. Everyone should. What's worse, to see someone pooping in the street, or to have your options and resources taken away to the point that pooping in the street is your only option?
Of course there are some people who have severe problems that a housing-first agenda will not solve. Some prefer living on the streets and will not stay in housing even if you give it to them. This is a hard problem, and any solution will probably have to involve law enforcement and/or involuntary commitment in some cases. However, we are talking about a small fraction of the chronically homeless, who themselves make up a small fraction of the homeless. We are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Housing first will solve the vast majority of homelessness. Once that's implemented we can figure out how to fix the remainder.
Someone can be worthy of dignity and compassion, but when that person talks loudly about stabbing me, or gets close to me and curses at me for not giving him money when I'm with my kids, I'd be a fool to not get out of that situation as soon as I can and do my best to avoid it in the future. And that's true even if we're only talking about a small percent of interactions. Maybe if I were larger, childless, and male I would feel differently, maybe not.
However small of a group we're talking about, this is a big problem, and dismissing the feelings that most people - even liberals - have about this basically as "you should try harder to be a good person" is similar to the marginal and unpopular anti-police/anti-incarceration movement. Overwhelmingly, people want to feel safe walking down the street, and they think it's a big problem to see public defecation or to be harassed, and you're not going to talk them out of it.
What's incredibly frustrating it the political sentiment that we all have to suck it up on the greatly increased uncomfortable interactions with the unhoused unless (some day in the far future) the housing situation is solved.
Agreed. It's an urgent problem! Amazing how some people tie themselves in knots until they're arguing that "tent cities are good actually"
Have you had those experiences? If so, I am really sorry, no one should have to experience this. My wife and daughter were racially targeted a few months ago.
I am a short middle-aged white dude who works in tech, but also an ex-paratrooper. For some reason no one ever fucks with me. I kind of wish someone would, tbh. I am usually armed (not with a gun, that's illegal).
I tracked down the guy who threatened my wife and made it clear in no uncertain terms what the cost would be if he repeated his behavior. He apologized and has not been a problem since. I heard he got a trip to the mental hospital soon after my visit. Maybe I pushed him over the edge. Sorry, not sorry.
There is a spectrum of safe -> not safe, it is not binary. Some people will never feel safe no matter how crime free a place is. Some are more like me, and not very concerned with personal safety. San Francisco has been sliding more to the *not safe* end and my 12 year old daughter has been bothered by it. The rest of the family, including my 15 year old punk rock daughter are not. No one should have to put up with being harassed.
For sure. It's not a regular occurrence, but it sticks with you. I'm pretty comfortable with city living, in part because I believe strongly in paying attention to my surroundings and walking away/crossing the street/switching metro cars when things get weird, which is something I think a lot of people don't trust their instincts enough to do. But the kid thing really complicates it, because you care more about your kids' safety than you do your own, and they don't have instincts yet.
You see retail theft daily? I am going to call bullshit on this claim. I have seen this a few times in 30 years.
These three incidents were over how many years?
Myself I got robbed at gunpoint once, saw a dude get stabbed on the 14 Mission (I rendered first aid) and got between a guy who was hassling a woman on Muni, again the 14. He tried to threaten me in Spanish but then quickly got off the bus when I cursed back and started laughing at him. So three sketchy incidents in 30 years.
Every place I have ever lived has been more violent than San Francisco. I grew up poor, both in cities and in rural areas but all were more violent than SF. I am curious what your background is.
I have something else to say, but it's not very PC so I will hold my tongue about it. Maybe have a good reason for not being able to stand up for yourself.
I think we agree that homelessness is bad, both for those experiencing it and those encountering it, and we should fix it. I can't tell from your replies whether or not you support housing first, but empirically it is the most effective intervention. In terms of actually solving the issue, I think the motivation for it doesn't matter all that much.
My cynical point earlier was that Matt's idea of tricking Greg Abbott into fixing Austin homelessness to own the libs won't work, because ending homelessness in Austin would actually just be a win for Austin.
I support housing first if there is enough funding and bureaucratic competency to get the folks off the street. If the money allotted is enough for shelter but not housing for bulk of the unhoused, or if the city is incapable of doing housing in anything resembling the budget, it should go to congregate shelters, especially in cities like Los Angeles that are under-sheltered. The good people of Los Angeles allocated enough money to shelter but not house the bulk of the unhoused population; I don't think it is appropriate to say "housing first and we need more money" in response to that.
Housing first is cheaper than shelters, by something like 50%. See this RCT, cost data shown in Table 2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10935-007-0093-9
Yes, of course: Bad people join the Republican Party because it’s the party of evil.
It's what's called a vicious cycle, or, in these parts, a vicious flywheel.
Well, if there’s one thing that conservatives should always and everywhere be for conserving, it’s angular momentum.
Exactly. Glad to see you're coming around, Ken!
“Breathes through mouth”!
I'm not going to check the crosstabs, but at least the polls I've seen show people moving to Texas are more conservative than the natives: https://www.texaspolicy.com/new-poll-finds-all-those-people-moving-to-texas-arent-going-to-be-voting-for-democrats/
One thing those simple reports of surveys miss is that, for instance, when you look at the 2018 exit poll for the O'Rourke-Cruz senate race - people who were born in Texas were very closely split, with a slight margin for O'Rourke, and while people who moved to Texas before 2008 had a huge margin in favor of Cruz, the people who moved to Texas between 2008 and 2018 had an equally huge margin in favor of O'Rourke. When you lump them together, it looks like "people who moved to Texas" slightly favored Cruz, but that hides that gap based on *when* they moved to Texas.
That will teach me to not look at the crosstabs!
The problem is that the relevant crosstab is even hidden!
https://www.cnn.com/election/2018/exit-polls/texas/senate
You can find the relevant two questions if you search for "Georgia" on this page, due to a pretty silly typo (I assume, that's what's going on). One question shows people born in Texas split 51-48 for O'Rourke and people who moved in split 57-42 for Cruz. The other shows people born in Georgia (I assume this is a typo for Texas?) split 51-48 for O'Rourke and people who moved to Texas earlier than 2008 split 63-36 for Cruz, and leaves the line for people who moved to Texas between 2008 and 2018 blank because it was only 10% of the electorate. But you can calculate that, in order for those numbers to add up, people who moved to Texas during those years must have split approximately 58-39 for O'Rourke.
I really wish there was something beyond the 2018 exit poll to double-check any of this, because a lot of people latch on to the one factoid you saw, and I'm pretty sure that this exit poll is hiding the other one I'm pushing, but I want more data to confirm or deny!
Oh, now I remember you brought this up before! I'm disappointed in myself now for parroting a factoid (even with my weak disclaimer) when I should know better by now!
Interesting finding, though it seems the largest studies report no statistical difference in partisan alignment between native Texans and those who move there. I would expect that, along the same lines, people moving to Austin will have similar politics to current Austin residents.
I wonder if YIMBYs and NIMBYs are talking past each other and missing a solution.
I live in an old line suburb of a mid sized city, defined by architecturally and aesthetically well designed single family living spaces (homes, parks, roadways) - all very well planned. A couple of miles away is a neighborhood plagued by post industrial urban desolation with huge empty tracts of land.
I am very much on team Matt when it comes to housing (and 1b Americans to boot). But I would struggle with indiscriminate density in my town. But what are the downsides of allowing for dense *planned* development of the post industrial tracts nearby? It would provide substantially similar access to jobs in the employment districts as my town. It would benefit from latest understanding we developed in what makes neighborhoods successful. It would allow for proper calibration of required transit intensity. And it would obviously help reinvigorate the overall metro.
You may say that most people don’t have vast tracts near employment districts. To which I say I have lived in Boston, Chicago, NYC, and have spent meaningful time in many other metros. They all have that. If you are able to link permitting to making sure that existing residents are provided with opportunities to participate / thrive in newly built environment (guarantee of housing, employment / education programs), I wonder if this would work?
Hey Andy - I live in Chattanooga, a small/mid size city with acres of post industrial urban desolation. In many ways, they've been able to build a ton of infill residential here and generally kept the character of the place(despite the usual pissing and moaning from the usual corners). One thing that makes something like this a challenge is what that land was previously used for. Here in Chatt, we have a ton of heavy industrial metal work stuff. The land under these blighted buildings is going to be toxic AF. It costs a *ton* of money to either clean these up or apply mitigation. Far more than a municipality could take on alone, and almost certainly more than a for profit developer could tackle. Not to say it can't be done, but it's pricey.
We're in the middle of turning an old GE/Alstom plant into a brand new neighborhood with all the usual mixed use bells and whistles. It's exciting. But it's slow and, again, the underlying environmental issues really drive cost and use.
Those who want guns to remain freely available also like talking about mental health. It’s a great way of deflecting. People who shoot other people often do have mental health problems. If these problems were magically fixed, there would be less gun violence. The catch is improving mental health is like improving lifespans. The ship turns slowly and even massive expenditures don’t always improve things very much. One can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars “treating” someone who is bipolar and, as soon as he is off his meds for a few days, the treatment has zero effect. The principle effect of therapy is the want/need for more therapy. Just like out of school factors drive educational outcomes, genetic and environmental factors dominate mental health outcomes.
and yet most murderers are young men whose biggest clinical problem might be anger management or impulsivity. the hard core mentally ill are annoying as fuck but not particularly violent
How well do you know that? I used to, and even still, browse the LA Times online homicide report. Homeless people murdering each other and occasionally others in the community is a frequent event. I don't know have the denominators of the 2 populations, ie "young men in LA" vs "homeless in LA", to compare rates properly, but I'm not so sure that the violence rate of the homeless would compare favorably.
On the face of it, I would also just guess that a hardcore mentally ill person could have as least as much difficulty with impulse or anger control as a typical 19 year old man.
i speak from my anecdotal experience as a criminal defense attorney and former public defender. the dudes with the biggest mental isues don’t overlap that much with the dudes with the heaviest charges.
i’m sure the average mentally ill person is somewhat more violent than the median person, but serious violence is concentrated in less than 5% of the young, male population
But you could make the same adjustment to the homeless population. 5% of the homeless with the most severe anger and mental issues might be 99% of the violence in that population.
The homeless in a place like Hollywood, CA (I mention because I used to live and work there) are "everywhere" because they are very visible. Yet they don't add up to a huge population in raw numbers. Maybe there are 1 or 2 thousand in that immediate area? And the vast majority are not violent, just like most young men aren't, even in bad neighborhoods.
But still - a few do murder someone almost every year. Just 1 homicide out of 1,000 people is already 20 times the base rate of the USA and higher than even the most violent city.
violence equals base rate times population
and it’s complicated be she’s normal, healthy people become violent if exposed to enough violence
*because
Sociopathy?
This is an interesting article about a move to make it easier to force treatment on the chronically homeless.
"For years, Diane Shinstock watched her adult son deteriorate on the streets. Suffering from severe schizophrenia, he slept under stairwells and bushes, screamed at passersby and was arrested for throwing rocks at cars.
Sometimes he refused the housing options he was offered. Sometimes he got kicked out of places for bad behavior. Shinstock, who lives in Roseville and works on disability issues for the state of California, begged mental health officials to place him under conservatorship—essentially, depriving him of his personal liberty because he was so sick that he couldn’t provide for his most basic personal needs of food, clothing and shelter.
But county officials told her, she said, that under state law, her son could not be conserved; because he chose to live on the streets, he did not fit the criteria for “gravely disabled.”"
https://calmatters.org/health/2018/08/california-homeless-mental-illness-conservatorship-law/
"He chose..."
1. Why is he allowed to chose to be a public nuisance?
2. To what degree is his choice morally valid?
3. How can he be deemed to be competent?
To be competent you really only need to be able to tell an authority figure that you understand and appreciate all the dangers and challenges that will occur if you make a certain decision, but you wish to make that decision anyway. That is, you have some insight into the issues facing you.
When asked to explain your thought process, instead of saying you appreciate what’s going on, you say something like you’ll be fine because you’re the God Emperor of Arrakis, that’s when you’re going to be conserved.
Right, those are what the rules are. The question is what the rules should be.