Little story from Los Angeles today. Apparently here in West LA (Venice, etc.) a new solution to homeless encampments has been to hire folks to clear encampments when LAPD is non-responsive. LAPD is, of course, quite laconic about these illegal cleanups. At tonight's all-Westside neighborhood council meeting, there was a motion to condemn these illegal cleanups (basically we recognize you are impatient but it's not okay to hire goons to do it instead). Motion to condemn voted down; vigilante enforcement, a-ok with the neighborhood councils. So yeah, that's where we are.
"homelessness is caused by high housing costs" is clearly empirically true at some level, but there's still a lot of local variability that this hypothesis doesn't explain at all. For example, I live in the Oakland/Berkeley area and according to Alameda county's 2019 point in time count Berkeley had 835 unsheltered people, while Albany had 35, Dublin had 8, Piedmont had zero and Newark had 59 (these are other cities around Berkeley and Oakland in Alameda County). Piedmont has the highest housing costs of any of those cities, followed closely by Berkeley and Albany (which are likely very similar), with those other cities not too far behind. How does the "high housing costs cause homelessness" hypothesis explain the massive discrepancies between these East Bay cities and how is this hypothesis actionable for these individual cities, which is the level at which most impactful decisions about homeless get made?
It takes *two* factors to render a person homeless: inability to afford housing in the area where they live, and inability to move somewhere cheaper. Given the choice between moving and becoming homeless, people will almost always choose to move. It's when the choice to move is blocked that people become homeless.
Inability to afford comes straightforwardly from housing scarcity and lack of money, but inability to move has another root. Moving house is a major logistical undertaking, and the farther you are moving, the harder it is. Adults without mental health problems can generally manage it, but those whose executive function is impaired by mental illness or substance abuse often cannot. That's why this group is the most vulnerable to becoming homeless, alongside those who are too poor even to afford a moving truck.
Ah, makes sense. I hope Matt gets to correct this in the post itself for future readers' benefits, in which case he could delete these comments.
If Matt is prone to making this type of mistake -- i.e using his"/publish/post" link instead of the "/p" link -- he should put something on the main page or whatever as a "mea culpa" to readers because it makes for an annoying end-user experience. I was looking at the main slowboring page to see if Matt had a tiered system of benefits with certain "goodies" only for the highest paying subscribers, and maybe this destination page was in that tier!
This isn't like typos (which Matt is also prone too, likely because he is a prolific writer) which are easy for me to self-correct, this type of mistake fundamentally prevents his paid subscribers from reading his stuff.
The destination says it is a "private page", and asks me to let the writer (presumably Matt Yglesias) know this. I wouldn't normally post this here, but I did not see any place in the support page to submit a question, and this issue is not listed there.
Matt -- If you want to have any credibility on this topic, you desperately need to spend the afternoon walking through SOMA in SF and meeting and talking to the people there living on the street.
Your claims of "it's about housing prices" are ill-informed.
Or start by following the twitter feed of a guy with a big heart who has been running a sandwich shop in the middle of soma for the last 10 years: https://twitter.com/bettersoma
-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.
I live in Brooklyn. Mike Bloomberg, despite his many faults, did our borough a huge favor in upzoning the Brooklyn waterfront from Greenpoint to Williamsburgh, downtown Brooklyn, and the Fourth Avenue corridor. There remains a lot of low hanging fruit though, and DeBlasio after almost 8 years in office has made almost no progress and hasn't shown any interest. Gowanus, which is within easy reach of mass transit, hasn't been rezoned for denser housing, or housing at all for that matter. What's built there are mini warehouses and cheap hotels. The borough is full of depression era housing projects, many of them 3-6 stories tall in Corbusian garden settings, which should all be torn down and replaced with 50-100 story towers. Of course the longtime residents would scream 'gentrification'. Can't blame nymbyism solely on rich white people. Re homelessness, I recently visited my daughter in DC and was struck by how widespread the homeless encampments there are compared to Brooklyn. What are the two cities doing differently? I'm sure the rates of addiction and insanity can't be that different, and if anything the cost of housing here is higher. Can Matt and Milan please explain.
As always nice work here. It’s always funny to me why people feel the need to complicate this issue. It’s literally right there in the name: “homeless” meaning without a home. Completely impossible to address other issues when a person has no refuge or safe place. You know, like a home.
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.
Public camping in cities seems to have sprung up during the period when massive decreases in crime rates were happening in cities all over country--the 2010s basically. It really makes you wonder if the increasing safety of cities somehow contributed to the whole phenomenon of public camping, and a rise in urban crime could paradoxically lead to less public camping.
While I want to agree with this article, I see one possible flaw in the premise. If the problem for the non-mentally ill homeless was the cost of housing, they generally would flock to where the cost of housing is affordable rather than staying in really expensive cities. Put another way, which is more likely when a person becomes homeless: (1) leaving the suburb/exurb for the city; or (2) leaving the city for the suburbs and exurbs. I suspect (but don't know) that it is #1.
And it is perfectly rational for homeless to congregate in large expensive cities if that's where they find better services, less police harassment, etc.
If people who become homeless leave a lower cost housing area to be in a city with higher housing costs, more housing alone is not the answer. Other commentators have noted the problem of "subsidizing" homelessness, which is a phrase I don't care for. But any solution to the homeless problem that focuses on providing homeless housing will need to address that issue.
I agree on housing, but I'd point out that mental health issues and addiction makes housing first for people affected by these ills difficult politically, at least by treating them as just one more person who needs subsidized housing. And my guess is that we could make a lot of progress on harmlessness with housing first (supplemented with other services) without doing much to reduce the high cost of housing that stands in the way of substantially increasing populations of high-productivity cities.
Neo-liberal (general growth promoting) reforms generally ameliorate a lot of other problems, but it's probably a mistake to try to sell them for their secondary benefits.
Little story from Los Angeles today. Apparently here in West LA (Venice, etc.) a new solution to homeless encampments has been to hire folks to clear encampments when LAPD is non-responsive. LAPD is, of course, quite laconic about these illegal cleanups. At tonight's all-Westside neighborhood council meeting, there was a motion to condemn these illegal cleanups (basically we recognize you are impatient but it's not okay to hire goons to do it instead). Motion to condemn voted down; vigilante enforcement, a-ok with the neighborhood councils. So yeah, that's where we are.
I really wish this post were public so I could share to all friends and family
"homelessness is caused by high housing costs" is clearly empirically true at some level, but there's still a lot of local variability that this hypothesis doesn't explain at all. For example, I live in the Oakland/Berkeley area and according to Alameda county's 2019 point in time count Berkeley had 835 unsheltered people, while Albany had 35, Dublin had 8, Piedmont had zero and Newark had 59 (these are other cities around Berkeley and Oakland in Alameda County). Piedmont has the highest housing costs of any of those cities, followed closely by Berkeley and Albany (which are likely very similar), with those other cities not too far behind. How does the "high housing costs cause homelessness" hypothesis explain the massive discrepancies between these East Bay cities and how is this hypothesis actionable for these individual cities, which is the level at which most impactful decisions about homeless get made?
Great article!
It takes *two* factors to render a person homeless: inability to afford housing in the area where they live, and inability to move somewhere cheaper. Given the choice between moving and becoming homeless, people will almost always choose to move. It's when the choice to move is blocked that people become homeless.
Inability to afford comes straightforwardly from housing scarcity and lack of money, but inability to move has another root. Moving house is a major logistical undertaking, and the farther you are moving, the harder it is. Adults without mental health problems can generally manage it, but those whose executive function is impaired by mental illness or substance abuse often cannot. That's why this group is the most vulnerable to becoming homeless, alongside those who are too poor even to afford a moving truck.
I am a paid subscriber to slowboring but the link to the conservative backlash from Tucker Carlson and others is not accessible: https://www.slowboring.com/publish/post/35841942
This is at least the second time Matt's done this - use his author link instead of the public-facing one: https://www.slowboring.com/p/populists-housing
(You can get there by replacing the text in a normal link with the code.)
Thanks James -- but how did you know what the correct link was? Matt's link points to that number link, not to anything named "populists-housing".
It's what this resolves to: https://www.slowboring.com/p/35841942
I assume the number is how it's kept track of in substack's database.
Ah, makes sense. I hope Matt gets to correct this in the post itself for future readers' benefits, in which case he could delete these comments.
If Matt is prone to making this type of mistake -- i.e using his"/publish/post" link instead of the "/p" link -- he should put something on the main page or whatever as a "mea culpa" to readers because it makes for an annoying end-user experience. I was looking at the main slowboring page to see if Matt had a tiered system of benefits with certain "goodies" only for the highest paying subscribers, and maybe this destination page was in that tier!
This isn't like typos (which Matt is also prone too, likely because he is a prolific writer) which are easy for me to self-correct, this type of mistake fundamentally prevents his paid subscribers from reading his stuff.
The destination says it is a "private page", and asks me to let the writer (presumably Matt Yglesias) know this. I wouldn't normally post this here, but I did not see any place in the support page to submit a question, and this issue is not listed there.
just confirming same problem - if it was my blog I'd say "good catch, we will fix this"
Matt -- If you want to have any credibility on this topic, you desperately need to spend the afternoon walking through SOMA in SF and meeting and talking to the people there living on the street.
Your claims of "it's about housing prices" are ill-informed.
Or start by following the twitter feed of a guy with a big heart who has been running a sandwich shop in the middle of soma for the last 10 years: https://twitter.com/bettersoma
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.
I live in Brooklyn. Mike Bloomberg, despite his many faults, did our borough a huge favor in upzoning the Brooklyn waterfront from Greenpoint to Williamsburgh, downtown Brooklyn, and the Fourth Avenue corridor. There remains a lot of low hanging fruit though, and DeBlasio after almost 8 years in office has made almost no progress and hasn't shown any interest. Gowanus, which is within easy reach of mass transit, hasn't been rezoned for denser housing, or housing at all for that matter. What's built there are mini warehouses and cheap hotels. The borough is full of depression era housing projects, many of them 3-6 stories tall in Corbusian garden settings, which should all be torn down and replaced with 50-100 story towers. Of course the longtime residents would scream 'gentrification'. Can't blame nymbyism solely on rich white people. Re homelessness, I recently visited my daughter in DC and was struck by how widespread the homeless encampments there are compared to Brooklyn. What are the two cities doing differently? I'm sure the rates of addiction and insanity can't be that different, and if anything the cost of housing here is higher. Can Matt and Milan please explain.
Denver, where I lived until recently, has a program that seems to be working. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/housing-first-working-denver-city-needs-more-it
A lot of topic-relevant content in this other substack. If you like MY's style you'd probably also like this guy.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-california-governor-gavin-newsom
As always nice work here. It’s always funny to me why people feel the need to complicate this issue. It’s literally right there in the name: “homeless” meaning without a home. Completely impossible to address other issues when a person has no refuge or safe place. You know, like a home.
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.
Public camping in cities seems to have sprung up during the period when massive decreases in crime rates were happening in cities all over country--the 2010s basically. It really makes you wonder if the increasing safety of cities somehow contributed to the whole phenomenon of public camping, and a rise in urban crime could paradoxically lead to less public camping.
While I want to agree with this article, I see one possible flaw in the premise. If the problem for the non-mentally ill homeless was the cost of housing, they generally would flock to where the cost of housing is affordable rather than staying in really expensive cities. Put another way, which is more likely when a person becomes homeless: (1) leaving the suburb/exurb for the city; or (2) leaving the city for the suburbs and exurbs. I suspect (but don't know) that it is #1.
And it is perfectly rational for homeless to congregate in large expensive cities if that's where they find better services, less police harassment, etc.
If people who become homeless leave a lower cost housing area to be in a city with higher housing costs, more housing alone is not the answer. Other commentators have noted the problem of "subsidizing" homelessness, which is a phrase I don't care for. But any solution to the homeless problem that focuses on providing homeless housing will need to address that issue.
I agree on housing, but I'd point out that mental health issues and addiction makes housing first for people affected by these ills difficult politically, at least by treating them as just one more person who needs subsidized housing. And my guess is that we could make a lot of progress on harmlessness with housing first (supplemented with other services) without doing much to reduce the high cost of housing that stands in the way of substantially increasing populations of high-productivity cities.
Neo-liberal (general growth promoting) reforms generally ameliorate a lot of other problems, but it's probably a mistake to try to sell them for their secondary benefits.