I used to work for a homeless shelter in Cleveland and know the population well. A lot of people were really just down on their luck and in need of a room. One of my projects was helping with a new transition house we were opening down the block, where men could graduate from the shelter to paying their own rent. It was an old boarding house that had sat vacant for what must have been decades and was set up perfectly for our needs. The city was enthusiastic about the plan, and for whatever reason the structure was grandfathered in to house multiple unrelated men, despite the fact that a new structure in that location would not be permitted, by zoning law, to do so. The advice the city gave us though was not to tell anyone, especially people in the neighborhood, that we had purchased the building and were renovating it. The city feared that if the neighbors knew then the project would be dead. Thankfully the project ended up succeeding and to this day is a huge success for getting men out of the homelessness trap. I even lived in one of the rooms during the renovation so that someone was on site before the men came, and honestly it was totally fine. It saddens me that other nonprofits can't easily follow the same model because they happen to not be on the same block as an abandoned boarding house that is grandfathered in past zoning laws.
That's so interesting, thanks for sharing this story. I do wish, though, that city governments would be more frank about the need for what we planners often euphemistically call "locally undesirable land uses" and stand up to neighbors who think they control what happens well beyond the boundaries of their property. As this post makes clear, yes there are tradeoffs, but there is a net benefit that accrues to the city as a whole (and society in general). Elected officials and other community leaders should make a case for interventions like this. I believe that many years of disingenuous BS from politicians on a range of issues has got us to the possibly ungovernable place we're in today.
Honestly when localities have the clear right to do their project I have seen politicians fight for them. Not always, and maybe they’d rather do it quietly.
But it’s more than just fighting with nimbys in public there’s often a legal process that can stop you in your tracks, quite often controlled by political rivals of the relevant politician. It’s more than courage to pick those fights it’s very often stupidity.
City governments are responsive to voters, and very few things are more motivating to voters than making them feel unsafe and/or reducing the value of their most valuable asset.
And putting a bunch of homeless people (many of which are drug addicts) near them does that.
From my experience living in SF for 5 years, I just don’t think that the most visible and problematic homeless individuals could be moved from a tent on the street to an SRO to address their problems. These individuals with severe mental health or drug addiction issues aren’t going to be cured just by moving off the street. Further, they’ll still need to panhandler or steal to continue to make ends meet; particularly funding their drug use. And that is the behavior that everyone wants to see addressed.
I believe that any plan to address homelessness needs to make a clear differentiation between these two different groups of people since the socially disruptive group is the one that most residents have in mind when discussing homelessness. SROs can certainly help the people that are just downtrodden and need a cheap place to live. The individuals with severe mental health or addiction issues need another plan. A plan that likely involves coercion into treatment and in some cases institutionalization. I think making a strong distinction between the two populations of homeless individuals will be helpful in pushing for zoning changes that help the individuals that are just downtrodden.
I agree with this to an extent but would also urge that there actually aren’t totally unambiguous lines between segments of the housing market or the range of difficulties people are facing. Falling between the cracks and ending up homeless can be an important *cause* of substance abuse and mental health treatment, and it is hard to target resources (including coercion) at those who truly need them when they are floundering amidst a larger sea of housing scarcity.
Not only no hard line, also: living on the street for a while, pushes people in the wrong direction. And by making sure affordable housing is widely available, a number of people will never face homelessness in the first place.
The absence of a hard line is very much part of the problem, though, because neighbors causing you problems in apartment buildings at all levels of the income scale is a cause of immense immiseration even among those presently housed. Cities at large but apartment buildings in particular are basically externality factories. The neighbors next door don't want their baby's sleep (or their own work) disturbed by loud music or a loud TV from next door (and if we're in the context of endorsing SROs I think hoping for soundproofing is a pipe dream). Meanwhile the neighbor one door down gets to deal with both loud music *and* a crying baby at night. While I'll admit this is better than being on the street, it seems like it risks inhibiting helping the genuine strivers back on their feet by making their living situation itself a stressor (in large part due to their more unstable or just plain rude neighbors who may have a comparable income but who are nevertheless less "classy," to use a word that seems to reasonably encompass "being pro-social and observing appropriate norms").
The goal of partitioning the hopeless cases from the people who really just need cheaper housing options seems like it would be best served if there's a quick, convenient, and largely ruthless way of evicting people who make a shared living space an unpleasant place to be, whether through noise, smells, other nuisances or just general freakout or threatening behavior. The trouble is, the same instincts that make urban liberals bleeding heart about not kicking the homeless out also act as a basic constant ratchet against liberalizing evictions, and in this instance in particular that seems like it has some significant downsides that are going to prevent cheap housing from ever aspiring to more than one step up from tent cities.
Your closing points are something I was thinking while reading the article -- people who can be described as "left NIMBYs" are also, in my experience, overwhelmingly opposed to no-fault eviction and favor trying to give full tenant rights to people in quasi-SRO situations like hotels with weekly rents or otherwise making it as miserable and difficult as possible to evict bad tenants. (They all seem very thoroughly convinced that landlords are in the habit of routinely evicting otherwise paying tenants for discriminatory reasons or just for fun.) That kind of attitude needs to be constrained as well, otherwise no one is going to want to build/operate an SRO structure of any size.
Regarding landlords, I think the logic (if you will allow the abuse of that term) is roughly "you can rise to a position of power by being bad, ergo, anyone in a position of power must be bad".
1. Anti-landlord animus is partly due to them collecting rents for the housing shortage.
2. For a subset of lefties anyone who owns capital is bad. That's what makes them socialist.
3. Most importantly is kind of a knee jerk underdogism, were anyone on the down and outs is inherently good and anyone in a position of authority stinks
Yeah this won’t be a great place to live. But that should help with affordability, which is often the biggest problem. No one should be forced to live in one of these buildings, but we need a lot of these buildings so that people can choose to if the price advantage is worth it to them (and hopefully that means that some existing nicer places might get a little less expensive for the people who don’t want to deal with the issues of these buildings).
I definitely agree that decreased eviction protections are needed to make higher-end SROs (SROs that *weren't* the last choice you'd make before living on the street) a functional possibility. Also that the existence of higher-end SROs would have a great effect on the housing markets of American cities, including for the worst off.
You could humanely allow for this sort of change to eviction rules in a long-stay-hotel / shared house setting *if* housing were sufficiently abundant that people kicked out of one place for antisocial behavior had somewhere else to go.
Why does everyone accept "Homelessness Causes Substance Abuse" as an obviously true statement?
I don't really see any evidence for it in my personal experience. I know plenty of people who have slept on couches or in their car for a few weeks or months, myself included. None of us ended up addicted to drugs or in poor mental health.
Whereas I see abundant evidence of drug abuse or poor mental health leading to poor choices, job losses, bad finances and ultimately, homelessness.
If homelessness causes substance abuse at the rate of 3% per person-year, it would both be unsurprising that none of you or your friends picked it up over a few months each, and that when you’ve got tens of thousands of people cycling through homelessness every year this would create a significant number of addicts.
Put people in a position where they have little or nothing left to lose, and also their only social contacts are other people with little or nothing left to lose, many of whom are addicted to drugs, and it would be pretty surprising if there wasn’t an increase in drug abuse among those people.
The data says putting people in “housing first” is remarkably effective in comparison to other remedies. No need to quibble over causation narratives when the data says housing is a key solution.
I'm ultra skeptical because we are dealing with two confounding complexities:
First, this is a human/societal issue, and so it's very rare that the data is conclusive. There are too many interactions between the players involved and it's very, very difficult, or possibly illegal, to do randomized control trials, which are the gold standard of sociological studies.
Second, this is a politicized topic with many passionate advocate groups and motivated political players involved. Inevitably a percentage of the research becomes contaminated by motivated reasoning. It's easy to journalists to be suckered by "conclusive research" and hard to ask the right skeptical questions of the studies.
What 'data'? Why don't you just link to it man? I'm not sure you appreciate what you sound like, imperiously telling us that 'the data' has magically solved the problem, without the slightest reference to which specific study conducted by who when. I think 'the data' is made up until you, you know, produce it (and even then proving causation in social science is basically impossible). You are overly confident in 'the data'
I'm not sure what you appreciate what you sound like. You're being very aggressive, which makes people not want to engage. And meanwhile, *in this very comment thread* there are already discussions happening re the source and quality of the data in question.
I don't know enough about the research on this subject to say one way or another about the causation, but I do wonder whether SROs are as viable today purely due to changes in the nature of who is poor enough to benefit from SROs compared to pre-WW2 American society. (I need to get to work, but I'll say it goes back to my past observations here about the relative composition of "deserving" vs. "undeserving" poor today compared to the kind of idealized late 19th Century-view of poverty that many progressives seem to have.)
As in, it could end up just being housing for low-to-medium wage workers, not what folks think about when they think "homeless"? I believe it very much could. But if that's the case, then at least we're helping lower income folks (regardless of whether they were previously sleeping roughly or not), and among those lower income folks may be included some who have drug/mental health problems but still manage to cling to their job and piece together the [relatively lower] rent every month, not end up on the street where their already bad situation worsens.
Also, the ice cream place down the street from me is hiring entry level scoopers at $20 an hour. It would probably be easier and less time consuming to do that for a few hours than to pan handle or steal
And you are capable of turning up to work on time.
Running through the friends and acquaintances I've known who have been out of work for extended periods, the inability to make a regular schedule is the biggest reason for that.
In all the cases I personally know, that was either serious mental health problems (depression being the most common) or serious sleep disorders - I have a friend who was eventually diagnosed with DSPS and lives a 28 hour cycle instead of the regular 24 hours. You can schedule things with him as long as you plan early enough so his sleep cycle will line up, but I can't see many employers agreeing to build a shift plan around that.
He works as a self-employed graphic designer/artist now - but he had years of getting fired from minimum wage jobs because he would end up unable to wake up for the start time by the end of the week.
Plenty of poor folks who can’t hold down a job are simply terrible at considering long-term consequences, to the point that they don’t care if they get fired tomorrow because they want to do something late tonight.
Same applies to huge numbers of people who can hold down a job but can’t seem to hold onto a pence of their paycheck past day three, and therefore get booted from an apartment the second *anything* goes wrong for a month.
For every homeless person with serious mental issues there are five or ten people with shitty jobs who struggle to pay the rent.
Helping people who are spending an outsized portion of their income on rent, maybe even stressing out and working a second job to pay rent, is vastly easier than fixing the hard core homeless.
Im often keener to help people in the 20th percentile of the happiness distribution than those in the 2nd percentile because helping the former group— basically functional people who are single parents or have bad jobs — is so much easier.
But it’s the 2% who make urban walkable spaces feel so apocalyptic, and make the middle class feel that they need automobile-scaled development to keep themselves safe and their environment dignified. That then makes it harder to help the 20% who would benefit from more abundant apartments or public transit, because those things are seen (not entirely wrongly) as an invitation to the 2%.
The bottom 1 or 2% of the happiness distribution are either in prison or terminally ill. For the next rung above that— low functioning people without private means — i would advocate CCC style camps. If that option were available, clearing homeless off urban streets would be a much easier sell.
Even when things were much closer to the bone and there was no welfare state, society never got much production out of the most wayward 10th. They are basically a nuisance to be humanity managed.
My experience living in SF was that there were a shocking number of “normies” with jobs slept in cars or offices and used a gym membership to serve as their bathroom. To Matt’s point it would be much easier for social services to focus on the desperately in need if the marginal crowd was better served.
Just as important, I think that creating a large supply of cheap “dorm-like” housing would have soaked up a huge percentage of the young tech workers that were instead living in a 3bd apartment with 3-5 roommates, which in turn would create more space for families with kids where those extra rooms are extremely valuable.
With the COVID diaspora I think we’ve already seen the latter effect, and housing has gotten just a little easier for families with so many tech workers leaving town. But losing population is a bad way to fix a housing problem.
Interesting comment, thank you! How were the "normies" in this situation perceptible? Were they people you knew, or was it somehow obvious what was going on? In Manhattan, where I live and work, the homeless population I see on the street seems mostly to be the desperately-in-need-of-social-services subset.
In my case it was people i knew. Lots of affordable housing is renting a room from your friend here. If the place you are in needs you to move or demands a 1 year lease when you need to leave in a month to move in with a friend that is what happened to my friend.
Another guy was going through a divorce and could not pay for his ex’s place and a place for him and he had to do the car office shower thing for about a year. In both cases they could have afforded something cheep like $700 a month. But renting even a living room is $900.
One guy was legal biller a big law firm DLA Piper. The divorced guy made $80k in tech sales.
No shelter would take them they did not have enough problems. That really ticked me off.
Divorce with kids can take a just-making-it “middle-class” family and relegate one or both parents to at least part-time homelessness, between housing, lawyers, compliance with custody orders, paying interim support, and often major changes in childcare arrangements. Not to mention that financial issues are often the cause of the divorce. A “nesting” arrangement with split custody where both parents spend their custody time at the old family house is common, and keeps the kids stable and the parents away from one another, but both parents need to find someplace else for their time without the kids. I’ve heard of them sharing a second apartment, but that requires a level of cooperation that may not be available.
I'm late to this discussion, but it's worth noting that this phenomenon is quite visible in the latest data sets on homelessness in the Bay Area. In Oakland alone, the number of people living in cars and RVs has jumped 36% since 2019. Most of them are trying to be inconspicuous; they have regular lives and jobs. There's also a significant number who are senior citizens and have "aged into homelessness" for the first time in their lives.
Housing doesn't solve all the problems. But...it's much easier to recover from mental health problems and addiction if you have stable housing. And much more difficult to get and maintain a job if you don't have a fixed address and a place to shower.
Not to mention, in SF, there is a growing segment of the homeless population that do work at least part time and do have some income but are nonetheless priced out of the housing market. SROs seem like a great option for someone like this.
I live in the east Bay i have payed $1600 a month to rent a room in a 4 bedroom house. With the owner and 3 other tenants. That was before the covid price hikes.
The rules where i could not use the kitchen or laundry. And I could not bring anyone over.
At the time that was more than 50% my income. If it was building built for that purpose in central business district it would have been much better than a random house on a random suburban street. Random suburbs do not have laundry mats, or public transportation.
Even if the prices are the same a purpose built structure would have been a big improvement in my quality of life. At $1600 a room in distant suburbs like Dublin there is clearly demand.
Yea for like 10 years renting a room in house was the only thing I would consider i could not qualify to pay $2900 a month for a one bedroom on a substitute teachers income.
Access to the washer and dryer is actually a bigger deal than the kitchen. Most suburbs do not have laundry matts so you have to pack up and drive 20-30 minutes. Building a building built for this purpose in a downtown would be superior to the craigslist renting of rooms that happens otherwise.
Right even if you wanted to pay 80% of your income to have a place with a kitchen and laundry, most landlords won't let you because you have to qualify by income.
In addition to what others have said, I think you're underplaying how disturbed residents get when they see even the non-ill homeless people out and about. A homeless person can be as non-problematic as one can be, but if you're living in a tent, you're still going to be in the way taking up public space, you'll still be dirtier than the average person, you'll still probably smell a little bit, you'll still be recognizably homeless, you'll still inspire a little bit of fear from people who can't tell on sight whether you're one of the "problematic" ones. Just cutting down the sheer number of homeless people is a big win even if you aren't yet addressing the addicts or the people with mental illness.
Well said, and this is where I really dislike euphemizing all these different situations into "homeless" (let alone the euphemism upon the euphemism of "people experiencing homelessness"). I think most people would have significant sympathy for most types of homelessness, and could be sold on the "they just need housing" line for that majority, as long as for the few you describe, the line is something more like "they need something more than just housing".
Adding the words "people experiencing" to your style guide and then patting yourselves on the back for helping is fairly high on my list of Groups pet peeves.
I'd be fine with just bringing back "bum" for the types people are most adverse about (nice and compact with three letters and one syllable), but I don't know if the traditional meaning of the term really aligns specifically with the drug addled and/or mentally unstable.
I agree, Matt Y's analysis seems to focus on "temporary homeless" because out job or other temporary life situation; Would be interesting to see descriptive analysis of the "homeless" that included why they are homeless and for how long; there are stories about mothers with multiple kids who are homeless, but I have no sense of how large this share of the population might be; some years ago it was often said that large share of homeless were individuals pushed out of mental institutions as states reduced size of mentally ill population in state institutions, but that perspective might be out of date. I suspect the census of homeless population in SF might be different than DC or Denver
See link for an intervention that supports those with higher needs (“chronically homeless”). It’s a very souped up version of SRO, but the point is the same - it’s very much the ounce of prevention concept, a much smarter up front investment.
A percentage of the time "normal panhandling" turns into threats and abuse. It's hard to know which type you'll get when you walk by a panhandler, which makes all of them a little bit disruptive.
Where I am in Boston, there are a fair number of homeless people, but none of them are aggressive. My theory is that the police walk a pretty good line of not tolerating abuse while also not cracking down unnecessarily.
I agree, but I think the problem there is how to distinguish, "Buddy, can you spare a dime" style panhandling from thinly-veiled physical threat style panhandling.
There are a few other arguments for allowing boarding houses and getting rid of family-only zoning:
1. In typical roommate situations, all people on the lease are responsible for the entire rent amount. So if you're splitting a $1500 3-bedroom, and two of your roommates decide to bail on rent, you'll be on the hook for the entire $1500. A person may prefer to rent just a room in a 3-bedroom house (especially if he's not picky about who his roommates are) and only be on the hook for his portion of the rent, but current regulations often prevent this kind of leasing.
2. The current roommate laws prohibiting more than a certain number of unrelated persons from living together discriminate against non-traditional families, including couples who choose not to get married, those in polyamorous relationships, and LGBTQ people who live with "chosen families."
3. Roommate laws (like in NYC preventing more than 3 unrelated persons from living together) are often laxly enforced until someone makes a complaint. But that means that if you're living in an illegal group situation, your housing may be at the whim of a cranky neighbor.
4. Family-only zoning creates a lot of barriers to create intentional living communities, which creates a problem for people who want a communal aspect to their living, whether they are single or not. I think there's demand for this kind of living setup that is being unmet.
I'd like to think that cranky neighbors are responding to the problem with noise that 4 unrelated bachelors are creating in their shared unit. Sadly, years of living in HOAs tell me that it's just one nosey neighbor who decides they are going to be the local housing cop who is jealous that the Golden Girls living together are somehow a problem.
But it's this idea that some people in society deserve to have stable housing. If you're married and form a traditional nuclear-family, you deserve stable housing. But if you're unmarried, or if you're queer, or if your family/home life doesn't conform to society's norm, then your housing is at the whim of the self-appointed local housing cop.
It's absolutely boggles my mind that NYC requires 680 sqft per unit. When I moved to Cleveland, OH for my first job put of college, I rented a 320 sqft studio apartment. I even had my girlfriend move in and live there with me for about six months before we moved to a bigger place. Our current 2BR is only about 700 sqft.
I'm pretty rusty on the Zoning Code, but I believe its generally 400 square feet for a studio apartment. There was some sort of micro unit demonstration projects a few years ago that went a little smaller than 400, but they might have needed special permits or only be allowed in special districts (so don't quote me on micro-units!).
I just looked up studio apartments for rent in Brooklyn on Streeteasy. Lots under 500 sq feet, including a new build where the effective living space (plus a bathroom) was 189 sq feet. There was also a long hallway where you could store a bicycle but otherwise served no purpose except to get from the front door to the living space. Adding it all up probably got you over 400 sq feet, but the functional living space was under 200.
I am by no means signing up to live in a 400sqft or smaller unit, but when I think of that as being a US-standard 20x20 two-car garage, it seems like you could fit something highly functional in a somewhat smaller space.
Yeah, in San Diego, I had an apartment that was ~450 sq ft, with a bed that pushed into the wall. When the bed was in it felt decently sized, and I hosted dinners for 14 people in there. 680 sq ft is also bigger than my current 1.5 bedroom (2.5 room) place in Tel Aviv, which I live in very comfortably with my partner.
I have an ADU on my property (built long before ADUs were a thing) that's 470 square feet. It's quite small, but the positive tradeoff that I pitch is that at least it's a separate house.
I assume this is only for new construction, since I live in an NYC apartment that's 2BR and 617 feet (and old). Would be curious to understand how a size minimum was part of pushing out already-existing SROs if it wasn't part of closing already-existing apartments like mine.
I am a casual follower of housing policies (one of the reasons I subscribed to this newsletter) and this is probably the first article I have read that addresses housing expectations. In other words, I read/hear a lot about the need for more housing but not much discussion about a general definition of what we expect the basic standard of living to be.
I think it may be a more productive (and informative) conversation to start with laying out what are the bare min. standard of living conditions for a family of four/single/etc. Instead, the public just hears about laws that require new builds to contain a certain percentage of “affordable housing” without really getting a sense of what that housing looks like.
In my line of work, I represent a lot of homeless people. When it comes to housing, their expectations are understandably low. One of the main benefits of housing for them (besides shelter from the elements) is security. A place to put their things and lay their head at night without fear of being assaulted and robbed. One client recently, who used meth, said she used because she needed to stay up and guard her things. It also provides dignity, which can provide tremendous benefit to one’s outlook on life and motivation for positive change.
As it stands now, for me at least, the “affordable housing” debate is ambiguous as to what an affordable unit looks like. I’m sure the definitions are spelled out somewhere but part of my point is why isn’t it very clear what we are voting on? For example, an article regarding a city council code may say: “The new code will require all new builds to include 15% of affordable units.” The article will not explain exactly what an “affordable unit” is and why it’s defined that way. If this aspect of the debate was put into sharper focus, I think we would be having different conversations, as I assume, some homeless would say “I don’t need all that, I just need xyz.” This guess about what a homeless persons housing expectations comes from my experience having them as clients but also two anecdotal examples (helping build fencing around a tiny home community for the homeless and seeing 10s of homeless being “evicted” from climate controlled storage units they were living in).
It's a common misconception that "affordable" and "luxury" are designations of the physical characteristics of a unit. Any not-obviously-a-shithole apartment in San Francisco is a luxury apartment, and the vast majority of new units marketed this way hew pretty close to the legal minimums already in terms of square footage, mix of bedroom counts, access to light and air, etc. The "affordable" units in the same building are no different physically. Activists get really mad and the building faces a steeper battle for approval if there's any appearance of a "tale of two cities" in the plans. What is different about the affordable units is simply that they're offered by lottery or waiting list to people who meet a means test, instead of at the market clearing price.
Usually this test is like "50% of area median income" or "75% of area median income" or something -- these units are for the lower middle class, not the homeless.
Thanks for fleshing some things out for me. I did conflate "affordable housing" with "homeless housing" but regardless I would have said the same thing. To add on, its odd to me when we read about these issues, I never see a quote from someone who is lower middle class or homeless saying "what I would like is..." I have to assume input is sought out from the affected groups but its odd that it doesnt make it to the public in the form of articles on the subject.
I am less inclined to support a change in code mandating a certain percentage of new builds to be "affordable" then a change in the code by loosening (or promoting) the type of housing to better fit the needs of the community.
This is a great point, similar to one made by Alain Bertaud about NYC's affordable housing policy in Order Without Design (an excellent book). Affordability here, as in many other places, is defined in zoning as tied to HUD's Area Median Income, but as projects move through the land use review process, community groups, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council will often change the unit mix and specify things like X number of three-bedroom units. Even leaving aside the issue of what affordable actually means, as Bertaud pointed out, this forces people who qualify for this housing, succeed in the lottery, and have enough money to pay for what is actually built to consume/pay for more floor area than they desire.
I don't know exactly how these laws work, but I and young people I know have lived in group housing situations in various west coast cities. I think there's actually huge relatively normie young people demand for these kinds of places. Lots of young people working crappy jobs, figuring stuff out, who would love cheap housing, so the "undesirable" framing kind of caught me off guard. I can see that as a factor, but... we have homeless shelters and methodone clinics, and yet SROs are a bridge too far?
The proposition of SROs looks pretty good and may work for many people - but with a huge caveat- the mental health status of potential residents sharing kitchens and bathrooms. SROs would probably require supervision to manage problems that are frequently found in close living in poverty: Hygiene issues ( particularly) the gross kind), food theft, smoking indoors (fire hazard), squatting (often an incarcerated tenants apartment used as a crack house). To be clear- mental health can mean depression, addiction, psychotic or developmental disorders.
Private, non-resident landlords deal with these problems by non-lease at-will arrangements to ease evictions. That’s currently how many people have become homeless. I think your concept would require very robust social services and public or NGO ownership for viability. It’s hard to see how a real estate investor seeking cash flow and capital appreciation would tolerate frequent agency involvement and non-evict-able tenants.
The solution is to allow those private landlords to evict people much easier. Let them run the place like Ma Bailey did in "It's a Wonderful Life".
The model Matt uses -- the college dorm -- is a good model: the owner selects the residents, provides basic amenities, has an on-site manager and kicks residents out for bad behavior. I see nothing wrong with allowing this same model for people who don't go to Harvard.
Where do you appeal such a decision if you're a college student? I may agree with you that perhaps it should be easier to evict a problem tenant in one of these situations than in a regular apartment, but maybe with a backstop appeals board _specifically for these situations_?
I'd like to see reduced regulations as Matt proposes combined with more landlord-friendly policies that allow landlords to enforce behavior standards.
I think this would reduce the total homeless population. Then, for those who CANNOT control their behavior to conform with minimum standards, we should bring back a better version of the 1970's style mental institutions. For those who WILL NOT control their behavior, we have jails.
And your position is vastly more compassionate than the current policy of leaving them to rot on the street.
What many seem to be saying is the current situation or horrific. And the proposed solution is pretty terrible so we can’t have that. But pretty terrible is a hell of a lot better than horrific!
I don’t think private ownership of subsidized rentals works very well. It’s inserting a middleman with incompatible objectives into the solution. It’s not as if private landlords have any particular expertise to add value. In actual and economic terms, they are merely collecting rent.
As to the 1970s institutions, I don’t agree. They were warehouses. The tenants we’re discussing are human beings and deserve the least restrictive support situations. We agree that criminals belong in jail, but I’d make a distinction between crime vs mental illness and poverty.
Like Bronx says in this same thread - what they have now is worse than mental institutions. The many mentally ill among the 50 - 100k homeless in Los Angeles (the city I'm most familiar with) do not live with any kind of dignity or support or safety on the streets. In this context "least restrictive" is meaningless from a human values point of view.
Also - I've never been a private landlord but it seems as if it's a business that people develop skills and business expertise in.
Hi Wigan, there’s a big difference between “least restrictive” and neglected.
I agree landlords have business skills focused on collecting revenue in excess of cost. Profitability accumulates as rent increases over time more rapidly than cost. Landlords maximize profit by minimizing cost and collecting market rents. If housing is publicly owned, the pressure on taxpayers to support market rent (landlord profit) is eliminated. I don’t see any real benefit in supporting the privatized public housing model - except for the private property owner.
Is it just okay with you if this has obvious and glaring opportunities for all kinds of housing discrimination and punishment for things that are perfectly fine for more well to do people to do?
So you’re saying we can’t house the homeless in such a manner because their would be opportunities to discriminate and evict them such that they would be on the street?
I mean I think it would be better to have lots of sro type housing available but still expect landlords to be reasonably neutral about legal behavior and expected to treat different types of people equally.
I’d be open to a reform home is still better than nothing but at best that’s 2 steps forward and one back.
If they are discriminating on the basis of a protected class, then prosecute them. Fine with me.
Overall, I think we have far too little law enforcement happening today -- tax evasion, discrimination, petty theft, assault, gun laws -- and should have more investigators, prosecution and quick (but less severe) punishment.
I don't really have a problem with a neutral rule that says you must do the dishes and treat common space with certain respectful norms so much as I do either with discriminatory treatment or ways in which it becomes collective punishment.
We need warehouses!! There seems to be this great myth that all mental health problems can be solved by drugs and therapy. That’s simply not true. Many of these folks can’t be made well enough to survive in the outside world with current technology. They are simply too ill to care for themselves.
There’s a range. There are currently psych nursing homes, but there are a lot of people who don’t have to be confined. The other issue is that the more confinement, the greater the cost.
Micro unit models were all the rage briefly before the pandemic in the Boston area. These were all designed for young post student types so the explicit amenities were nicer than the typical old school flop house/SRO. But most of those weren't built to be flop houses originally, but aged into it as their original use became no longer viable.
So, of course, my thought for each one was, "ah, building the flop house of the next generation today. "
The sad thing about these luxury flophouses is, like -- I would be happy to live in a closet for $75 a month! But I assume they're charging like $1000 a month because they're in these high rent low housing areas.
Pretty sure you are misunderstanding dwelling unit factors in NYC zoning. 680 square feet not the minimum size of an apartment (most studios and 1 Brs are less). I believe it’s an average unit size when calculating the maximum number of units on a given zoning lot.
Agree. Needs a correction. Matt must not have many friends in NYC to take at face value the idea that apartments are at least 680 square feet. I’m a former resident of two NYC studio apartments that were each well less than 680 square feet. The many apartments I was shown by realtors that I did not rent were also always less than that.
Thanks for the Denver shout out, Matt. Note that the official Denver Democratic party line is that the urban camping ban is unethical and they supported large protests against the ban’s 10th anniversary last month---even though an initiative to end the ban was only supported by 20 percent of voters in a D+20 city. The fecklessness of the Republicans in Colorado has left a gaping hole where most of the electorate lives.
Denver's lucky that they're in one of the few states in the West that's in the Tenth Circuit instead in the Ninth Circuit, otherwise their law would be zapped. If that does get challenged in court like it did here in Boise, I'll be curious to see if the Tenth Circuit rules the other way and creates a circuit split that gets SCOTUS to bite on granting cert on the issue.
The Ninth Circuit came out with a bizarre ruling some years ago that held most types of anti-vagrancy laws unconstitutional as violations of the Eighth Amendment.
The flipside is that (1) last year Ballot Measure 303 to boost enforcement of the camping ban failed by approx. 56-44 so it seems the Denver voters aren't that bothered by the situation and (2) who needs to repeal the ban when Denver police really won't bother to do anything to enforce it in the first place? (As evidenced by the encampments sprawling over sidewalks and into the streets that keep springing up literally within a couple blocks of the Colfax police station.)
I have not even read this post yet but am liking and commenting based on the title alone. YES!
(going back to actually read it now)
EDIT: This is great and makes total sense to me in my experience as a planner in NYC who used to live in DC. As a person who was alive in the 70s and 80s, I worry a lot that if cities don't get some kind of grip on this problem, people with choices won't want to live in them.
I also strongly recommend Nolan Gray's work generally (he's at UCLA now and did some research at GMU) to readers of this newsletter. I worked with Nolan for a while and he is a thoughtful and engaging writer.
This is exactly what I work to achieve every day, and it is refreshing to see such well-reasoned points in favor of more housing. My company, Brownstone Shared Housing, makes sleeping pods which transform existing spaces into shared living arrangements without the need for construction. We currently operate two houses in California: One in Palo Alto, and another in Bakersfield.
Brownstone has been in the news a lot lately, most recently on Good Morning America this morning, and the polarizing response to our sleeping pods has been baffling to me. Many people love that we're taking an innovative approach to increasing the density of single family homes so people can share cost and space more efficiently while preserving privacy. However, a loud minority acts as if we are committing crimes more serious than robbery or assault by providing people with an alternative to having to rent their own $2,000 bedroom. What's perhaps most shocking is that it is people in my (millennial) generation who are leading the charge in the Twitter comments, acting as if we are forcing people into the sleeping pods.
This is all to say, irrespective of laws and NIMBY activism, there is a nontrivial culture on the internet of otherwise progressive young people effectively arguing against the type of innovation that will relieve pressure on the housing market and the environment. In my experience, that has been the most counterproductive force as we've grown in California.
I used to work for a homeless shelter in Cleveland and know the population well. A lot of people were really just down on their luck and in need of a room. One of my projects was helping with a new transition house we were opening down the block, where men could graduate from the shelter to paying their own rent. It was an old boarding house that had sat vacant for what must have been decades and was set up perfectly for our needs. The city was enthusiastic about the plan, and for whatever reason the structure was grandfathered in to house multiple unrelated men, despite the fact that a new structure in that location would not be permitted, by zoning law, to do so. The advice the city gave us though was not to tell anyone, especially people in the neighborhood, that we had purchased the building and were renovating it. The city feared that if the neighbors knew then the project would be dead. Thankfully the project ended up succeeding and to this day is a huge success for getting men out of the homelessness trap. I even lived in one of the rooms during the renovation so that someone was on site before the men came, and honestly it was totally fine. It saddens me that other nonprofits can't easily follow the same model because they happen to not be on the same block as an abandoned boarding house that is grandfathered in past zoning laws.
That's so interesting, thanks for sharing this story. I do wish, though, that city governments would be more frank about the need for what we planners often euphemistically call "locally undesirable land uses" and stand up to neighbors who think they control what happens well beyond the boundaries of their property. As this post makes clear, yes there are tradeoffs, but there is a net benefit that accrues to the city as a whole (and society in general). Elected officials and other community leaders should make a case for interventions like this. I believe that many years of disingenuous BS from politicians on a range of issues has got us to the possibly ungovernable place we're in today.
Honestly when localities have the clear right to do their project I have seen politicians fight for them. Not always, and maybe they’d rather do it quietly.
But it’s more than just fighting with nimbys in public there’s often a legal process that can stop you in your tracks, quite often controlled by political rivals of the relevant politician. It’s more than courage to pick those fights it’s very often stupidity.
City governments are responsive to voters, and very few things are more motivating to voters than making them feel unsafe and/or reducing the value of their most valuable asset.
And putting a bunch of homeless people (many of which are drug addicts) near them does that.
From my experience living in SF for 5 years, I just don’t think that the most visible and problematic homeless individuals could be moved from a tent on the street to an SRO to address their problems. These individuals with severe mental health or drug addiction issues aren’t going to be cured just by moving off the street. Further, they’ll still need to panhandler or steal to continue to make ends meet; particularly funding their drug use. And that is the behavior that everyone wants to see addressed.
I believe that any plan to address homelessness needs to make a clear differentiation between these two different groups of people since the socially disruptive group is the one that most residents have in mind when discussing homelessness. SROs can certainly help the people that are just downtrodden and need a cheap place to live. The individuals with severe mental health or addiction issues need another plan. A plan that likely involves coercion into treatment and in some cases institutionalization. I think making a strong distinction between the two populations of homeless individuals will be helpful in pushing for zoning changes that help the individuals that are just downtrodden.
I agree with this to an extent but would also urge that there actually aren’t totally unambiguous lines between segments of the housing market or the range of difficulties people are facing. Falling between the cracks and ending up homeless can be an important *cause* of substance abuse and mental health treatment, and it is hard to target resources (including coercion) at those who truly need them when they are floundering amidst a larger sea of housing scarcity.
Not only no hard line, also: living on the street for a while, pushes people in the wrong direction. And by making sure affordable housing is widely available, a number of people will never face homelessness in the first place.
The absence of a hard line is very much part of the problem, though, because neighbors causing you problems in apartment buildings at all levels of the income scale is a cause of immense immiseration even among those presently housed. Cities at large but apartment buildings in particular are basically externality factories. The neighbors next door don't want their baby's sleep (or their own work) disturbed by loud music or a loud TV from next door (and if we're in the context of endorsing SROs I think hoping for soundproofing is a pipe dream). Meanwhile the neighbor one door down gets to deal with both loud music *and* a crying baby at night. While I'll admit this is better than being on the street, it seems like it risks inhibiting helping the genuine strivers back on their feet by making their living situation itself a stressor (in large part due to their more unstable or just plain rude neighbors who may have a comparable income but who are nevertheless less "classy," to use a word that seems to reasonably encompass "being pro-social and observing appropriate norms").
The goal of partitioning the hopeless cases from the people who really just need cheaper housing options seems like it would be best served if there's a quick, convenient, and largely ruthless way of evicting people who make a shared living space an unpleasant place to be, whether through noise, smells, other nuisances or just general freakout or threatening behavior. The trouble is, the same instincts that make urban liberals bleeding heart about not kicking the homeless out also act as a basic constant ratchet against liberalizing evictions, and in this instance in particular that seems like it has some significant downsides that are going to prevent cheap housing from ever aspiring to more than one step up from tent cities.
Your closing points are something I was thinking while reading the article -- people who can be described as "left NIMBYs" are also, in my experience, overwhelmingly opposed to no-fault eviction and favor trying to give full tenant rights to people in quasi-SRO situations like hotels with weekly rents or otherwise making it as miserable and difficult as possible to evict bad tenants. (They all seem very thoroughly convinced that landlords are in the habit of routinely evicting otherwise paying tenants for discriminatory reasons or just for fun.) That kind of attitude needs to be constrained as well, otherwise no one is going to want to build/operate an SRO structure of any size.
Regarding landlords, I think the logic (if you will allow the abuse of that term) is roughly "you can rise to a position of power by being bad, ergo, anyone in a position of power must be bad".
1. Anti-landlord animus is partly due to them collecting rents for the housing shortage.
2. For a subset of lefties anyone who owns capital is bad. That's what makes them socialist.
3. Most importantly is kind of a knee jerk underdogism, were anyone on the down and outs is inherently good and anyone in a position of authority stinks
Yeah this won’t be a great place to live. But that should help with affordability, which is often the biggest problem. No one should be forced to live in one of these buildings, but we need a lot of these buildings so that people can choose to if the price advantage is worth it to them (and hopefully that means that some existing nicer places might get a little less expensive for the people who don’t want to deal with the issues of these buildings).
I definitely agree that decreased eviction protections are needed to make higher-end SROs (SROs that *weren't* the last choice you'd make before living on the street) a functional possibility. Also that the existence of higher-end SROs would have a great effect on the housing markets of American cities, including for the worst off.
You could humanely allow for this sort of change to eviction rules in a long-stay-hotel / shared house setting *if* housing were sufficiently abundant that people kicked out of one place for antisocial behavior had somewhere else to go.
Why does everyone accept "Homelessness Causes Substance Abuse" as an obviously true statement?
I don't really see any evidence for it in my personal experience. I know plenty of people who have slept on couches or in their car for a few weeks or months, myself included. None of us ended up addicted to drugs or in poor mental health.
Whereas I see abundant evidence of drug abuse or poor mental health leading to poor choices, job losses, bad finances and ultimately, homelessness.
If homelessness causes substance abuse at the rate of 3% per person-year, it would both be unsurprising that none of you or your friends picked it up over a few months each, and that when you’ve got tens of thousands of people cycling through homelessness every year this would create a significant number of addicts.
Put people in a position where they have little or nothing left to lose, and also their only social contacts are other people with little or nothing left to lose, many of whom are addicted to drugs, and it would be pretty surprising if there wasn’t an increase in drug abuse among those people.
The data says putting people in “housing first” is remarkably effective in comparison to other remedies. No need to quibble over causation narratives when the data says housing is a key solution.
I'm ultra skeptical because we are dealing with two confounding complexities:
First, this is a human/societal issue, and so it's very rare that the data is conclusive. There are too many interactions between the players involved and it's very, very difficult, or possibly illegal, to do randomized control trials, which are the gold standard of sociological studies.
Second, this is a politicized topic with many passionate advocate groups and motivated political players involved. Inevitably a percentage of the research becomes contaminated by motivated reasoning. It's easy to journalists to be suckered by "conclusive research" and hard to ask the right skeptical questions of the studies.
What 'data'? Why don't you just link to it man? I'm not sure you appreciate what you sound like, imperiously telling us that 'the data' has magically solved the problem, without the slightest reference to which specific study conducted by who when. I think 'the data' is made up until you, you know, produce it (and even then proving causation in social science is basically impossible). You are overly confident in 'the data'
I'm not sure what you appreciate what you sound like. You're being very aggressive, which makes people not want to engage. And meanwhile, *in this very comment thread* there are already discussions happening re the source and quality of the data in question.
Found an article by an author you may enjoy! https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions
I don't know enough about the research on this subject to say one way or another about the causation, but I do wonder whether SROs are as viable today purely due to changes in the nature of who is poor enough to benefit from SROs compared to pre-WW2 American society. (I need to get to work, but I'll say it goes back to my past observations here about the relative composition of "deserving" vs. "undeserving" poor today compared to the kind of idealized late 19th Century-view of poverty that many progressives seem to have.)
As in, it could end up just being housing for low-to-medium wage workers, not what folks think about when they think "homeless"? I believe it very much could. But if that's the case, then at least we're helping lower income folks (regardless of whether they were previously sleeping roughly or not), and among those lower income folks may be included some who have drug/mental health problems but still manage to cling to their job and piece together the [relatively lower] rent every month, not end up on the street where their already bad situation worsens.
Also, the ice cream place down the street from me is hiring entry level scoopers at $20 an hour. It would probably be easier and less time consuming to do that for a few hours than to pan handle or steal
If you can easily shower every day and become presentable.
Yea exactly. An SRO would make it 1,000 times easier to get back on your feet compared to a tent
And you are capable of turning up to work on time.
Running through the friends and acquaintances I've known who have been out of work for extended periods, the inability to make a regular schedule is the biggest reason for that.
In all the cases I personally know, that was either serious mental health problems (depression being the most common) or serious sleep disorders - I have a friend who was eventually diagnosed with DSPS and lives a 28 hour cycle instead of the regular 24 hours. You can schedule things with him as long as you plan early enough so his sleep cycle will line up, but I can't see many employers agreeing to build a shift plan around that.
He works as a self-employed graphic designer/artist now - but he had years of getting fired from minimum wage jobs because he would end up unable to wake up for the start time by the end of the week.
Never underestimate simple time preference.
Plenty of poor folks who can’t hold down a job are simply terrible at considering long-term consequences, to the point that they don’t care if they get fired tomorrow because they want to do something late tonight.
Same applies to huge numbers of people who can hold down a job but can’t seem to hold onto a pence of their paycheck past day three, and therefore get booted from an apartment the second *anything* goes wrong for a month.
Of course, but when you don’t have a skill set that allows you to get away with it, problems arise.
For every homeless person with serious mental issues there are five or ten people with shitty jobs who struggle to pay the rent.
Helping people who are spending an outsized portion of their income on rent, maybe even stressing out and working a second job to pay rent, is vastly easier than fixing the hard core homeless.
Im often keener to help people in the 20th percentile of the happiness distribution than those in the 2nd percentile because helping the former group— basically functional people who are single parents or have bad jobs — is so much easier.
But it’s the 2% who make urban walkable spaces feel so apocalyptic, and make the middle class feel that they need automobile-scaled development to keep themselves safe and their environment dignified. That then makes it harder to help the 20% who would benefit from more abundant apartments or public transit, because those things are seen (not entirely wrongly) as an invitation to the 2%.
The bottom 1 or 2% of the happiness distribution are either in prison or terminally ill. For the next rung above that— low functioning people without private means — i would advocate CCC style camps. If that option were available, clearing homeless off urban streets would be a much easier sell.
Even when things were much closer to the bone and there was no welfare state, society never got much production out of the most wayward 10th. They are basically a nuisance to be humanity managed.
The idea of putting undesirable populations in camps is, for excellent reasons, not only a non-starter but radioactive.
Pointless nitpicking that requires you to ignore the actual meaning of the sentence… isn’t helpful.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
It also helps that they’re generally vastly more sympathetic, lol.
My experience living in SF was that there were a shocking number of “normies” with jobs slept in cars or offices and used a gym membership to serve as their bathroom. To Matt’s point it would be much easier for social services to focus on the desperately in need if the marginal crowd was better served.
Just as important, I think that creating a large supply of cheap “dorm-like” housing would have soaked up a huge percentage of the young tech workers that were instead living in a 3bd apartment with 3-5 roommates, which in turn would create more space for families with kids where those extra rooms are extremely valuable.
With the COVID diaspora I think we’ve already seen the latter effect, and housing has gotten just a little easier for families with so many tech workers leaving town. But losing population is a bad way to fix a housing problem.
My buddy did that. I came close
Interesting comment, thank you! How were the "normies" in this situation perceptible? Were they people you knew, or was it somehow obvious what was going on? In Manhattan, where I live and work, the homeless population I see on the street seems mostly to be the desperately-in-need-of-social-services subset.
In my case it was people i knew. Lots of affordable housing is renting a room from your friend here. If the place you are in needs you to move or demands a 1 year lease when you need to leave in a month to move in with a friend that is what happened to my friend.
Another guy was going through a divorce and could not pay for his ex’s place and a place for him and he had to do the car office shower thing for about a year. In both cases they could have afforded something cheep like $700 a month. But renting even a living room is $900.
One guy was legal biller a big law firm DLA Piper. The divorced guy made $80k in tech sales.
No shelter would take them they did not have enough problems. That really ticked me off.
Wow, that is incredibly damning re the state of housing in the Bay Area (probably elsewhere as well). Thanks for sharing this story.
Some one else needs to make housing decisions here
Divorce with kids can take a just-making-it “middle-class” family and relegate one or both parents to at least part-time homelessness, between housing, lawyers, compliance with custody orders, paying interim support, and often major changes in childcare arrangements. Not to mention that financial issues are often the cause of the divorce. A “nesting” arrangement with split custody where both parents spend their custody time at the old family house is common, and keeps the kids stable and the parents away from one another, but both parents need to find someplace else for their time without the kids. I’ve heard of them sharing a second apartment, but that requires a level of cooperation that may not be available.
The handless you see are only a fraction.... Most homeless in NYC are families
I'm late to this discussion, but it's worth noting that this phenomenon is quite visible in the latest data sets on homelessness in the Bay Area. In Oakland alone, the number of people living in cars and RVs has jumped 36% since 2019. Most of them are trying to be inconspicuous; they have regular lives and jobs. There's also a significant number who are senior citizens and have "aged into homelessness" for the first time in their lives.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Homeless-populations-surge-11-in-San-Jose-and-8-17176329.php
Housing doesn't solve all the problems. But...it's much easier to recover from mental health problems and addiction if you have stable housing. And much more difficult to get and maintain a job if you don't have a fixed address and a place to shower.
Not to mention, in SF, there is a growing segment of the homeless population that do work at least part time and do have some income but are nonetheless priced out of the housing market. SROs seem like a great option for someone like this.
I live in the east Bay i have payed $1600 a month to rent a room in a 4 bedroom house. With the owner and 3 other tenants. That was before the covid price hikes.
The rules where i could not use the kitchen or laundry. And I could not bring anyone over.
At the time that was more than 50% my income. If it was building built for that purpose in central business district it would have been much better than a random house on a random suburban street. Random suburbs do not have laundry mats, or public transportation.
Even if the prices are the same a purpose built structure would have been a big improvement in my quality of life. At $1600 a room in distant suburbs like Dublin there is clearly demand.
This is horrifying...
It's a lot less horrifying than not having this option, and having to pay 80% of your income for a place with a kitchen and laundry.
Yea for like 10 years renting a room in house was the only thing I would consider i could not qualify to pay $2900 a month for a one bedroom on a substitute teachers income.
Access to the washer and dryer is actually a bigger deal than the kitchen. Most suburbs do not have laundry matts so you have to pack up and drive 20-30 minutes. Building a building built for this purpose in a downtown would be superior to the craigslist renting of rooms that happens otherwise.
Right even if you wanted to pay 80% of your income to have a place with a kitchen and laundry, most landlords won't let you because you have to qualify by income.
Yea also if you have side hustles like Door Dash for income you cannot really use it to qualify. It isn't consistent enough.
The home owner turned his single family home into a 4 plex…
In addition to what others have said, I think you're underplaying how disturbed residents get when they see even the non-ill homeless people out and about. A homeless person can be as non-problematic as one can be, but if you're living in a tent, you're still going to be in the way taking up public space, you'll still be dirtier than the average person, you'll still probably smell a little bit, you'll still be recognizably homeless, you'll still inspire a little bit of fear from people who can't tell on sight whether you're one of the "problematic" ones. Just cutting down the sheer number of homeless people is a big win even if you aren't yet addressing the addicts or the people with mental illness.
Urban Institute did recent. study of characteristics of homeless population available here
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103301/unsheltered-homelessness.pdf
Well said, and this is where I really dislike euphemizing all these different situations into "homeless" (let alone the euphemism upon the euphemism of "people experiencing homelessness"). I think most people would have significant sympathy for most types of homelessness, and could be sold on the "they just need housing" line for that majority, as long as for the few you describe, the line is something more like "they need something more than just housing".
"The priced-out"?
Adding the words "people experiencing" to your style guide and then patting yourselves on the back for helping is fairly high on my list of Groups pet peeves.
I'd be fine with just bringing back "bum" for the types people are most adverse about (nice and compact with three letters and one syllable), but I don't know if the traditional meaning of the term really aligns specifically with the drug addled and/or mentally unstable.
I agree, Matt Y's analysis seems to focus on "temporary homeless" because out job or other temporary life situation; Would be interesting to see descriptive analysis of the "homeless" that included why they are homeless and for how long; there are stories about mothers with multiple kids who are homeless, but I have no sense of how large this share of the population might be; some years ago it was often said that large share of homeless were individuals pushed out of mental institutions as states reduced size of mentally ill population in state institutions, but that perspective might be out of date. I suspect the census of homeless population in SF might be different than DC or Denver
Wouldn’t SROs provide a sort of policing mechanism and socialization for their residents?
See link for an intervention that supports those with higher needs (“chronically homeless”). It’s a very souped up version of SRO, but the point is the same - it’s very much the ounce of prevention concept, a much smarter up front investment.
https://www.enterprisecommunity.org/blog/housing-first-ohio
A percentage of the time "normal panhandling" turns into threats and abuse. It's hard to know which type you'll get when you walk by a panhandler, which makes all of them a little bit disruptive.
Where I am in Boston, there are a fair number of homeless people, but none of them are aggressive. My theory is that the police walk a pretty good line of not tolerating abuse while also not cracking down unnecessarily.
And as unpleasant as it is, panhandling pretty clearly has First Amendment implications.
I agree, but I think the problem there is how to distinguish, "Buddy, can you spare a dime" style panhandling from thinly-veiled physical threat style panhandling.
Oh yes, there are absolutely cases where it can intrude beyond simple free speech acts.
#LegalizeFullHouse
There are a few other arguments for allowing boarding houses and getting rid of family-only zoning:
1. In typical roommate situations, all people on the lease are responsible for the entire rent amount. So if you're splitting a $1500 3-bedroom, and two of your roommates decide to bail on rent, you'll be on the hook for the entire $1500. A person may prefer to rent just a room in a 3-bedroom house (especially if he's not picky about who his roommates are) and only be on the hook for his portion of the rent, but current regulations often prevent this kind of leasing.
2. The current roommate laws prohibiting more than a certain number of unrelated persons from living together discriminate against non-traditional families, including couples who choose not to get married, those in polyamorous relationships, and LGBTQ people who live with "chosen families."
3. Roommate laws (like in NYC preventing more than 3 unrelated persons from living together) are often laxly enforced until someone makes a complaint. But that means that if you're living in an illegal group situation, your housing may be at the whim of a cranky neighbor.
4. Family-only zoning creates a lot of barriers to create intentional living communities, which creates a problem for people who want a communal aspect to their living, whether they are single or not. I think there's demand for this kind of living setup that is being unmet.
I'd like to think that cranky neighbors are responding to the problem with noise that 4 unrelated bachelors are creating in their shared unit. Sadly, years of living in HOAs tell me that it's just one nosey neighbor who decides they are going to be the local housing cop who is jealous that the Golden Girls living together are somehow a problem.
But it's this idea that some people in society deserve to have stable housing. If you're married and form a traditional nuclear-family, you deserve stable housing. But if you're unmarried, or if you're queer, or if your family/home life doesn't conform to society's norm, then your housing is at the whim of the self-appointed local housing cop.
HOAs delenda est.
It's absolutely boggles my mind that NYC requires 680 sqft per unit. When I moved to Cleveland, OH for my first job put of college, I rented a 320 sqft studio apartment. I even had my girlfriend move in and live there with me for about six months before we moved to a bigger place. Our current 2BR is only about 700 sqft.
The minimum square footage is incorrect and the dwelling factor Matt uses is to calculate maximum density, not individual apartment sizes.
That honestly makes more sense to me. Do you happen to know what the correct figure is?
I'm pretty rusty on the Zoning Code, but I believe its generally 400 square feet for a studio apartment. There was some sort of micro unit demonstration projects a few years ago that went a little smaller than 400, but they might have needed special permits or only be allowed in special districts (so don't quote me on micro-units!).
I just looked up studio apartments for rent in Brooklyn on Streeteasy. Lots under 500 sq feet, including a new build where the effective living space (plus a bathroom) was 189 sq feet. There was also a long hallway where you could store a bicycle but otherwise served no purpose except to get from the front door to the living space. Adding it all up probably got you over 400 sq feet, but the functional living space was under 200.
I am by no means signing up to live in a 400sqft or smaller unit, but when I think of that as being a US-standard 20x20 two-car garage, it seems like you could fit something highly functional in a somewhat smaller space.
An unending series of East Asian reality TV shows featuring Japanese interior architects would suggest this is the case.
Or the cute display rooms at Ikea.
Thanks for the clarification
Yeah, in San Diego, I had an apartment that was ~450 sq ft, with a bed that pushed into the wall. When the bed was in it felt decently sized, and I hosted dinners for 14 people in there. 680 sq ft is also bigger than my current 1.5 bedroom (2.5 room) place in Tel Aviv, which I live in very comfortably with my partner.
I have an ADU on my property (built long before ADUs were a thing) that's 470 square feet. It's quite small, but the positive tradeoff that I pitch is that at least it's a separate house.
I assume this is only for new construction, since I live in an NYC apartment that's 2BR and 617 feet (and old). Would be curious to understand how a size minimum was part of pushing out already-existing SROs if it wasn't part of closing already-existing apartments like mine.
I am a casual follower of housing policies (one of the reasons I subscribed to this newsletter) and this is probably the first article I have read that addresses housing expectations. In other words, I read/hear a lot about the need for more housing but not much discussion about a general definition of what we expect the basic standard of living to be.
I think it may be a more productive (and informative) conversation to start with laying out what are the bare min. standard of living conditions for a family of four/single/etc. Instead, the public just hears about laws that require new builds to contain a certain percentage of “affordable housing” without really getting a sense of what that housing looks like.
In my line of work, I represent a lot of homeless people. When it comes to housing, their expectations are understandably low. One of the main benefits of housing for them (besides shelter from the elements) is security. A place to put their things and lay their head at night without fear of being assaulted and robbed. One client recently, who used meth, said she used because she needed to stay up and guard her things. It also provides dignity, which can provide tremendous benefit to one’s outlook on life and motivation for positive change.
As it stands now, for me at least, the “affordable housing” debate is ambiguous as to what an affordable unit looks like. I’m sure the definitions are spelled out somewhere but part of my point is why isn’t it very clear what we are voting on? For example, an article regarding a city council code may say: “The new code will require all new builds to include 15% of affordable units.” The article will not explain exactly what an “affordable unit” is and why it’s defined that way. If this aspect of the debate was put into sharper focus, I think we would be having different conversations, as I assume, some homeless would say “I don’t need all that, I just need xyz.” This guess about what a homeless persons housing expectations comes from my experience having them as clients but also two anecdotal examples (helping build fencing around a tiny home community for the homeless and seeing 10s of homeless being “evicted” from climate controlled storage units they were living in).
It's a common misconception that "affordable" and "luxury" are designations of the physical characteristics of a unit. Any not-obviously-a-shithole apartment in San Francisco is a luxury apartment, and the vast majority of new units marketed this way hew pretty close to the legal minimums already in terms of square footage, mix of bedroom counts, access to light and air, etc. The "affordable" units in the same building are no different physically. Activists get really mad and the building faces a steeper battle for approval if there's any appearance of a "tale of two cities" in the plans. What is different about the affordable units is simply that they're offered by lottery or waiting list to people who meet a means test, instead of at the market clearing price.
Usually this test is like "50% of area median income" or "75% of area median income" or something -- these units are for the lower middle class, not the homeless.
Thanks for fleshing some things out for me. I did conflate "affordable housing" with "homeless housing" but regardless I would have said the same thing. To add on, its odd to me when we read about these issues, I never see a quote from someone who is lower middle class or homeless saying "what I would like is..." I have to assume input is sought out from the affected groups but its odd that it doesnt make it to the public in the form of articles on the subject.
I am less inclined to support a change in code mandating a certain percentage of new builds to be "affordable" then a change in the code by loosening (or promoting) the type of housing to better fit the needs of the community.
This is a great point, similar to one made by Alain Bertaud about NYC's affordable housing policy in Order Without Design (an excellent book). Affordability here, as in many other places, is defined in zoning as tied to HUD's Area Median Income, but as projects move through the land use review process, community groups, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council will often change the unit mix and specify things like X number of three-bedroom units. Even leaving aside the issue of what affordable actually means, as Bertaud pointed out, this forces people who qualify for this housing, succeed in the lottery, and have enough money to pay for what is actually built to consume/pay for more floor area than they desire.
I don't know exactly how these laws work, but I and young people I know have lived in group housing situations in various west coast cities. I think there's actually huge relatively normie young people demand for these kinds of places. Lots of young people working crappy jobs, figuring stuff out, who would love cheap housing, so the "undesirable" framing kind of caught me off guard. I can see that as a factor, but... we have homeless shelters and methodone clinics, and yet SROs are a bridge too far?
I get the impression that the laws work mostly by people ignoring them, and then hoping that a cranky neighbor doesn't call the cops on them.
The proposition of SROs looks pretty good and may work for many people - but with a huge caveat- the mental health status of potential residents sharing kitchens and bathrooms. SROs would probably require supervision to manage problems that are frequently found in close living in poverty: Hygiene issues ( particularly) the gross kind), food theft, smoking indoors (fire hazard), squatting (often an incarcerated tenants apartment used as a crack house). To be clear- mental health can mean depression, addiction, psychotic or developmental disorders.
Private, non-resident landlords deal with these problems by non-lease at-will arrangements to ease evictions. That’s currently how many people have become homeless. I think your concept would require very robust social services and public or NGO ownership for viability. It’s hard to see how a real estate investor seeking cash flow and capital appreciation would tolerate frequent agency involvement and non-evict-able tenants.
The solution is to allow those private landlords to evict people much easier. Let them run the place like Ma Bailey did in "It's a Wonderful Life".
The model Matt uses -- the college dorm -- is a good model: the owner selects the residents, provides basic amenities, has an on-site manager and kicks residents out for bad behavior. I see nothing wrong with allowing this same model for people who don't go to Harvard.
Where do you appeal such a decision if you're a college student? I may agree with you that perhaps it should be easier to evict a problem tenant in one of these situations than in a regular apartment, but maybe with a backstop appeals board _specifically for these situations_?
John from FL - I read your reply and am trying to understand how your solving the problem or if you want to.
I'd like to see reduced regulations as Matt proposes combined with more landlord-friendly policies that allow landlords to enforce behavior standards.
I think this would reduce the total homeless population. Then, for those who CANNOT control their behavior to conform with minimum standards, we should bring back a better version of the 1970's style mental institutions. For those who WILL NOT control their behavior, we have jails.
And your position is vastly more compassionate than the current policy of leaving them to rot on the street.
What many seem to be saying is the current situation or horrific. And the proposed solution is pretty terrible so we can’t have that. But pretty terrible is a hell of a lot better than horrific!
I don’t think private ownership of subsidized rentals works very well. It’s inserting a middleman with incompatible objectives into the solution. It’s not as if private landlords have any particular expertise to add value. In actual and economic terms, they are merely collecting rent.
As to the 1970s institutions, I don’t agree. They were warehouses. The tenants we’re discussing are human beings and deserve the least restrictive support situations. We agree that criminals belong in jail, but I’d make a distinction between crime vs mental illness and poverty.
Like Bronx says in this same thread - what they have now is worse than mental institutions. The many mentally ill among the 50 - 100k homeless in Los Angeles (the city I'm most familiar with) do not live with any kind of dignity or support or safety on the streets. In this context "least restrictive" is meaningless from a human values point of view.
Also - I've never been a private landlord but it seems as if it's a business that people develop skills and business expertise in.
Hi Wigan, there’s a big difference between “least restrictive” and neglected.
I agree landlords have business skills focused on collecting revenue in excess of cost. Profitability accumulates as rent increases over time more rapidly than cost. Landlords maximize profit by minimizing cost and collecting market rents. If housing is publicly owned, the pressure on taxpayers to support market rent (landlord profit) is eliminated. I don’t see any real benefit in supporting the privatized public housing model - except for the private property owner.
Is it just okay with you if this has obvious and glaring opportunities for all kinds of housing discrimination and punishment for things that are perfectly fine for more well to do people to do?
So you’re saying we can’t house the homeless in such a manner because their would be opportunities to discriminate and evict them such that they would be on the street?
They are already on the street!
I mean I think it would be better to have lots of sro type housing available but still expect landlords to be reasonably neutral about legal behavior and expected to treat different types of people equally.
I’d be open to a reform home is still better than nothing but at best that’s 2 steps forward and one back.
If they are discriminating on the basis of a protected class, then prosecute them. Fine with me.
Overall, I think we have far too little law enforcement happening today -- tax evasion, discrimination, petty theft, assault, gun laws -- and should have more investigators, prosecution and quick (but less severe) punishment.
I don't really have a problem with a neutral rule that says you must do the dishes and treat common space with certain respectful norms so much as I do either with discriminatory treatment or ways in which it becomes collective punishment.
We need warehouses!! There seems to be this great myth that all mental health problems can be solved by drugs and therapy. That’s simply not true. Many of these folks can’t be made well enough to survive in the outside world with current technology. They are simply too ill to care for themselves.
There’s a range. There are currently psych nursing homes, but there are a lot of people who don’t have to be confined. The other issue is that the more confinement, the greater the cost.
Micro unit models were all the rage briefly before the pandemic in the Boston area. These were all designed for young post student types so the explicit amenities were nicer than the typical old school flop house/SRO. But most of those weren't built to be flop houses originally, but aged into it as their original use became no longer viable.
So, of course, my thought for each one was, "ah, building the flop house of the next generation today. "
The sad thing about these luxury flophouses is, like -- I would be happy to live in a closet for $75 a month! But I assume they're charging like $1000 a month because they're in these high rent low housing areas.
But $1000 a month in a place where a studio apartment costs $2500, and is close to job opportunities and amenities. Maybe it's not so bad?
Pretty sure you are misunderstanding dwelling unit factors in NYC zoning. 680 square feet not the minimum size of an apartment (most studios and 1 Brs are less). I believe it’s an average unit size when calculating the maximum number of units on a given zoning lot.
Agree. Needs a correction. Matt must not have many friends in NYC to take at face value the idea that apartments are at least 680 square feet. I’m a former resident of two NYC studio apartments that were each well less than 680 square feet. The many apartments I was shown by realtors that I did not rent were also always less than that.
Thanks for the clarification
Thanks for the Denver shout out, Matt. Note that the official Denver Democratic party line is that the urban camping ban is unethical and they supported large protests against the ban’s 10th anniversary last month---even though an initiative to end the ban was only supported by 20 percent of voters in a D+20 city. The fecklessness of the Republicans in Colorado has left a gaping hole where most of the electorate lives.
Denver's lucky that they're in one of the few states in the West that's in the Tenth Circuit instead in the Ninth Circuit, otherwise their law would be zapped. If that does get challenged in court like it did here in Boise, I'll be curious to see if the Tenth Circuit rules the other way and creates a circuit split that gets SCOTUS to bite on granting cert on the issue.
Curious---why would it get zapped?
The Ninth Circuit came out with a bizarre ruling some years ago that held most types of anti-vagrancy laws unconstitutional as violations of the Eighth Amendment.
Believe that's been the case with vagrancy laws since the 70s (to be clear, I am pro-vagrancy laws)
srynerson's on it, the case is Martin v. Boise if you're curious.
The flipside is that (1) last year Ballot Measure 303 to boost enforcement of the camping ban failed by approx. 56-44 so it seems the Denver voters aren't that bothered by the situation and (2) who needs to repeal the ban when Denver police really won't bother to do anything to enforce it in the first place? (As evidenced by the encampments sprawling over sidewalks and into the streets that keep springing up literally within a couple blocks of the Colfax police station.)
I am beside myself with envy that Harvard allowed microwaves in the dorms. Dang #elites!
I have not even read this post yet but am liking and commenting based on the title alone. YES!
(going back to actually read it now)
EDIT: This is great and makes total sense to me in my experience as a planner in NYC who used to live in DC. As a person who was alive in the 70s and 80s, I worry a lot that if cities don't get some kind of grip on this problem, people with choices won't want to live in them.
I also strongly recommend Nolan Gray's work generally (he's at UCLA now and did some research at GMU) to readers of this newsletter. I worked with Nolan for a while and he is a thoughtful and engaging writer.
Nitpick - but this article had a bunch of typos and I normally don't notice any.
Claire our copy editor had to take a sick day and unfortunately it shows, but I hope she’ll feel better soon
Narrator: "It was indeed a tough day for Elaine, their copy editor."
OMG, I just realized on re-reading about the name switch and now I'm dying laughing when before I merely chuckled at this!
we should get one cent refund per typo.
I did, in fact, tell Matt on Twitter back when this whole thing was launching that I would subscribe to his Substack if he had an editor . . . .
I've followed Matt's work long enough that I think I'm immune to noticing any typos in his work. But I'm quite happy that Claire is part of the team!
The typos are how you know it's really him, not Milan impersonating him at the behest of his enemies.
This is exactly what I work to achieve every day, and it is refreshing to see such well-reasoned points in favor of more housing. My company, Brownstone Shared Housing, makes sleeping pods which transform existing spaces into shared living arrangements without the need for construction. We currently operate two houses in California: One in Palo Alto, and another in Bakersfield.
Brownstone has been in the news a lot lately, most recently on Good Morning America this morning, and the polarizing response to our sleeping pods has been baffling to me. Many people love that we're taking an innovative approach to increasing the density of single family homes so people can share cost and space more efficiently while preserving privacy. However, a loud minority acts as if we are committing crimes more serious than robbery or assault by providing people with an alternative to having to rent their own $2,000 bedroom. What's perhaps most shocking is that it is people in my (millennial) generation who are leading the charge in the Twitter comments, acting as if we are forcing people into the sleeping pods.
This is all to say, irrespective of laws and NIMBY activism, there is a nontrivial culture on the internet of otherwise progressive young people effectively arguing against the type of innovation that will relieve pressure on the housing market and the environment. In my experience, that has been the most counterproductive force as we've grown in California.
I agree with the deregulation/allowing SROs and in producing more housing stock overall.
However, I do think we need to separate the mentally-ill (and especially potentially dangerous) homeless from the merely down-on-their-luck homeless.
Throwing them all together into what is effectively a dorm seems like it would be terrible.
We need the ability to discriminate (I know, bad word, but that is what it is) against the dangerous and seriously addicted.
Primarily to protect the rest of the homeless from them, but also to protect them from themselves.