There is one class of homeless that we see - the mentally ill, drug addicted, drunk, whatever, sleeping on the street, shitting on the sidewalk.
But there's also another class of homeless we don't see. They have jobs, they might be your coworker or classmate. But they live out of a car or at a homeless shelter.
I and, coincidentally and separately a long-time friend, were homeless for a year while undergraduates. It was a financial necessity to stay in school full time (while working part-time) and not take out student loans. That was over 40 years ago. We both went on get Ph.D.s and become part of the middle class. As homeless students we were a rarity, but it wasn't unheard of--a former roommate student camped out of his car for half a year--just couldn't give up that car.
There is definitely a lot of van life/stealth campers going on here in Seattle, it isn’t hard to notice. But judging by their social media videos, is it fair to call them homeless? It seems like they chose that lifestyle rather than having it forced on them (or maybe it’s a mixture of both?).
Van life is a huge difference from the RVs, who don’t really care about stealth, they just come in, deflate their tires, and call some curb+sidewalk their home, pile up random possessions on the sidewalk to make it impassable. This category is usually drug related, so not hard to notice.
There is also the working poor who become homeless unrelated to drugs, who are living out of their cars. We really should prioritize those cases, which is easy enough to handle with just housing. They don’t need drug addiction treatment, they aren’t going to burn down the home you give them in a few weeks. But all our money is going to the former and not much is prioritized for the latter, which is a huge shame. I think we should hugely prioritize sober shelters and housing that have strict rules, it would really help the working homeless (none of them want to bunk with drug addicts for good reason, which also keeps them from getting help).
By that definition me not living in a mansion overlooking the ocean is also a lifestyle choice. I doubt that many people in cities would live in vans if housing wasn't so unaffordable.
The social media van life trend is one thing. People choosing to live in their cars for financial reasons is another thing. Occasionally the two groups intersect, but there are plenty of cases where someone is living in their van/car so they can afford to stay in or near a location they can’t otherwise afford.
Some people have major debt, medical expenses, family situations etc that drove the original decision. Some people decide to start posting about their car life because why not? But don’t confuse the glitzy social media version of van life for the average experience.
Yes, but you can’t really tell who is one category or the other. We also have no idea what the average experience is. For non-stealth campers, it’s much easier to tell.
Having spent quite a bit of time on the road, it’s usually pretty easy to spot the difference.
That is if you even notice the stealth campers (to your point). But that’s really the original point - most people don’t notice the car dwelling locals, who spend a lot of their time making sure they aren’t noticed.
We have an RV problem so we’ve also gotten good at picking out stealth campers, not that it matter much since I really don’t mind someone who is just sleeping in our neighborhood if they aren’t doing anything crazy.
People sleeping in cars are also common, and pretty easy to spot since unlike a van, it isn’t common to block out all windows in a car. I’m guessing those are all economic cases.
by this logic everyone in Hollywood is a rich movie star because that’s who visible in the media, not the various set designers food workers and all the many others.
Looking at social media influencers and assuming they’re a good representation of the average van liver is like looking at a celebrity and assuming everyone in Hollywood is like them.
I know at least 3 people who spent the last few years living in a van while making over $200k a year. Mostly to travel, but some just enjoy the lifestyle.
> There is definitely a lot of van life/stealth campers going on here in Seattle, it isn’t hard to notice. But judging by their social media videos, is it fair to call them homeless? It seems like they chose that lifestyle rather than having it forced on them (or maybe it’s a mixture of both?).
This isn't referring to the ones who make social media videos about their lifestyle choices. This is people living in a van because while they've lost housing, they still have a vehicle. The people sleeping in a car at the back of a Walmart parking lot, with a laundry basket beside them on the passenger seat.
My city has many trust funds kids living like the poors in a fantasy world (and in >$100k built out vans), but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about with these stats.
I'm essentially homeless. I'm living on the free will of an extremely kind landlord who let me stay in his empty house until it is sold (which it is now, waiting on closing).
I can't get a regular job for another 12 months until my immigration status is resolved, as my USA SSN won't allow it right now.
I do work 16 hours a day though on a number of projects that I'm trying to start.
To be fair, that alone doesn't account for it, since 90m only ~25% of the total population, so it's still skewed. Probably attributable to density and cost of living etc though.
Florida/Washington/California are more hospitable to surviving while homeless. New York has New York City, which has a law requiring it to provide shelter from the elements for all homeless.
Not much of a surprise that there are more homeless where a person is more likely to survive winters and summers without shelter.
Thank you for useful link. It has a dynamic chart and I played with it by adding cold-weather states and desert states.
Excluding people who choose not to sink money into housing, if we consider the demographic where homelessness is not a choice (e.g. mental illness, drug addiction, poverty), what do CA, NY, FL, and WA offer that favours homelessness?
Some factors could be: favourable climate, large cities with more "survival opportunities", food banks, injection sites, and other social services.
Oregon scores high as well.
>" These are the 10 states with the most homeless people, according to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report:
California (171,521)
New York (74,178)
Florida (25,959)
Washington (25,211)
Texas (24,432)
Oregon (17,959)
Massachusetts (15,507)
Arizona (13,553)
Pennsylvania (12,691)
Georgia (10,689)
This is a strange take. Homeless people generally can't afford to travel cross-country and "shop around" for a "home". These states — more accurately, some cities in these states — create homelessless, due to the high costs of living in those cities.
New York City doesn't have a favorable climate.
I think you've reversed cause and effect. The cities with high homeless populations tend to have, indeed need, more services for the homeless.
> some cities in these states — create homelessless
I agree and I understand that it is complex. People may have ties to a city and in a tough economy may not have means and/or opportunities for work elsewhere. Shelters may close or be unable to take more people. But cities also draw people from the surrounding population.
About NYC... the climate isn't comparable to others in this list --
> But cities also draw people from the surrounding population.
Yes, cities draw people from the surrounding population, but the question is whether they draw homeless people from the surrounding population. Which surrounding areas do you think all the NYC homeless are coming from?
> NYC isn't as harsh as Minneapolis, for example.
So? Minneapolis is colder than most cities in the United States.
I met a homeless guy in Seattle from Great Falls Montana once. He made his way to Spokane first, which has a similar historic skid row but doesn’t have the weather and social resources if Seattle. Then he just gradually came to Seattle. I always use great falls as an example now, you aren’t surviving unhoused there, so if you burn your bridges with your friends and family, you will go west to survive. The same is true in Vancouver to our north: it’s mild weather and social resources attract homeless from all around western Canada, it’s much easier to survive in Vancouver than Calgary or Edmonton.
There was a study once that said most of Seattle’s homeless were local, but it was self reported and they all reported having been born and raised in pioneer square, so something was off there. I wouldn’t put much faith I those studies.
I know nothing about how it works on the east coast though.
Here's the thing: cities don't provide social services in order to attract the homeless from surrounding areas. That would be nuts. Who wants to be a homeless magnet? Cities provide services for the homeless because they already have a critical mass of "homegrown" homelessness. This may attract some from surrounding areas, but the critical mass would exist regardless, due to economic conditions in the cities.
Both Canada and the USA have freedom of movement without a residency system. It doesn’t matter what social services the city provides, the cities can’t discriminate who they provide services to based on residency.
None of this is new. The trope of a hobo jumping a train to San Francisco is as old as movies are. Seattle has always been a destination for those without means looking to survive. The original skid row was in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, or Spokane depending on who you ask, and that goes back to the late 19th century.
Seattle does not want to be a homeless magnet, but it always has been, and the city is too progressive to cut off its generous social services, and can’t discriminate with them, and they can’t do anything about the weather anyways, so what the heck else can they do?
It has a lot to do with economic conditions: a well funded city (comparatively), plenty of things to steal, and a reluctant acceptance of property crime are all important in making freattle a destination, the same with the other west coast American and Canadian cities.
an individual real estate agent in Nashville posted this month that "the median price of a single family home here has risen from $178k to $380k in the last five years"
Or, take the non-liberation and crack down on the naked profiteering that is modern real estate. In many areas there appear to be lots of empty living units being kept as investments and second/fourth homes. Anyone owning an empty house or apartment should be taxed whatever amount it necessary to encourage them into at least renting that place out and thereby expanding the pool of available living units in the market.
why does everyone fail to understand that the reason real estate is an "investment" is because prices are skyrocketing because supply is artificially constrained. If we just built properly real estate wouldnt be such a great investment.
My parents happened to buy their house in an area that wasnt super desirable and continued to not be super desirable. If they had just invested their down payment in the S&P it would be worth twice what the house is. But as it is, investors seem convinced real estate is a great investment because governments refuse to let people build so prices continue to skyrocket.
In Japan the value of a building reaches $0 after 30 years because they rebuild everything. A building is an inherently depreciating asset, yet my tenement in Boston build in the 1880's continues to go up in value because they cant build shit.
There is only a finite amount of land. The land value will most likely rise with demand and inflation regardless of the building that is there. Owning a home is an investment because you need a place to live and in the location on where you want to establish yourself. A home going up in value only helps a person on the side and hurts them in the short term because of taxes. Also only accounting for the downpayment is an incomplete investment picture. Most real estate is bought on leverage which multiplies returns.
You cannot force people to think that the value of a building is zero just because you want it to be. We have seen new homes further out command very high prices here in the US because of culture and there are a lot that desire the fit and finish of a new home but for the most part the old homes are still desirable and livable. Eventually old homes are rebuilt or remodeled and if they sell at the lowest point (like after a fire) will be sold for land value.
It doesn’t need to be either/or. We can simultaneously increase housing supply through new construction and disincentivize suboptimal uses of housing you describe.
This just isn't true, especially in areas where housing costs are the worst. I don't have a citation right now, but I'm pretty sure a city in Canada attempted this (Vancouver?) and the returns were paltry, because the underlying fact just wasn't true. There is no glut of empty apartments and condos in markets like California, New York, Washington, Florida, Washington D.C., etc. full stop.
> In many areas there appear to be lots of empty living units
Citation needed.
(There is a problem with Prop 13 in California, where old people stay in houses that are way to big for them, removing supply from the marktet. But that's not the "empty apartments" you're referring to)
It all depends on the definition of empty. I take a practical approach: if there isn't someone sleeping in that unit regularly, it is empty. If I walk my dog through a neighborhood and see countless dark/cold apartments, ones where nobody has seen a light turn on in years and the mail either piles up or has been stopped, those are empty.
Others take different approaches. Some are of the view that a unit is not empty so long as it is listed as someone's "primary residence", irrespective of whether they actually sleep there.
Yeah, something along these lines. Also just making apartments that Americans can be comfortable in. We are so attached to this single family home idea that is unsustainable.
If we have too many people for the good life let’s stop more from coming in and let our below replacement birth rates get us back there. Our population growth is almost exclusively driven by immigration. This seems fixable.
It is. But for some reason you will never find the substring “migra” in these sorts of mainstream articles.
And only one person so far in 150 comments has dared to suggest that the demand side of the equation ought to be dealt with. The political narrative is overwhelmingly powerful and even here crimestop[1] is readily observable.
The land that is next to the jobs is expensive. The construction costs of single homes are going to make it out of reach for those who are in housing precarity, even if you make them "tiny houses."
When I briefly looked into this, it appeared that my town's school budget absolutely dwarfs the budget for things like roads, so if the roads are bankrupting us, we're really screwed if we need to somehow fund education. So I'd be a bit wary of taking their claims at face value.
That is often because the roads, sidewalks, etc. aren't actually maintained properly, they do some minimal patchwork and when it gets too bad, they ask the state to bail them out.
Garbage collection is private, so I assume they're charging a fair price. Water/power cover their expenses through monthly bills. Sewer is mostly covered through monthly bills, with a small amount coming from "other sources" which I don't understand.
Lots of nearby homes are 70+ years old, so it's not like it's just that it's new construction and hasn't encountered maintenance costs yet.
Housing type and housing location have a large impact on energy usage. 1000 homes outside of a city requires 1000 cars, and the structure itself will likely not nearly be as energy efficient as a single unit in a larger building.
"Manufactured house". It's mostly a sorely needed rename to avoid the connotations, but most trailers never get moved once placed so it's not a useful feature to retain.
And also "modular home", which is the middle ground between manufactured and conventional.
Thank you. If new manufactured home / modular home neighborhoods were allowed, relocating homes would be a lot more viable. Trailer park landlords might be one of the worst types of landlords, so it would be great if there was more competition: "From floods to slime: Mobile home residents say landlords make millions, neglect them" https://www.npr.org/2022/08/21/1112299858/from-floods-to-sli...
It's better than homelessness, but in areas where land is expensive, renting an apartment in a high-rise might end up being cheaper than renting a trailer spot.
When said housing is being bought by VCs and companies, then to be rented back to people in the community for 50% more than purchase, yeah it's not going to do much at all.
I've watched my 2 local communities go through this right now. House 10y ago was under 100k. Now is bought by rental firm, and only rented at $2000/mo
And it's also more terrible, that things like the student loan crisis also hits credit, therefore also affecting home ownership. And regardless of paying rental stabily for 5y doesn't matter to a bank and mortgage.
The boomers and older never had to deal with "credit". They did have to prove income. Now, we suffer under 10x worse.
There's so many problems, and they're all tightly intertwined. The result is that simple supply isn't the only fix. Punishing companies for making homes into rentals with exponentiating taxes would help. Requiring banks to accept proof of rental as proof of payment burden would also help. So would reducing/eliminating zoning.
But none of these are palatable to 'The American People' (aka the rich).
Ready Player One talked about 'The Stacks'. And more and more, that seems like what our country is turning towards with our decline.
The biggest issues are zoning and NIMBYs, and these are local. Hard to make a national push, or even a statewide push. I could write 5000 words on how that’s going in California right now (better than expected, but slow).
some of the largest financial scandals in Federal government are around HUD Housing and Urban Development. Here in California the State urban development funds were literally slush funds for the local rulers. People need to see the dark sides of public funding for themselves, saying it here is not enough.
Landlords will soon strong-arm their tenants into granting "permission based access" to their personal financial accounts to fintech firms like FunnelLeasing (that, in turn, use services like Finicity.com) to monitor their tenants IN REAL TIME from the moment of application, throughout the entire lease period, and at every renewal, with AI models making decisions about how to rate the relationship on a level never before possible.
It will literally be possible for the landlords to know which of their tenants are insolvent before many of those tenants know! (An insolvent tenant that has not yet filed for bankruptcy can usually be summarily evicted under contract law, but previously, collecting such evidence of insolvency was time consuming and not cost effective, giving the tenant time to pull out of their tailspin before missing rent payments and filing a bankruptcy petition.)
In practical terms, it means that people just starting out (or starting again) are going to be heavily marginalized and wind up on the streets, group homes, etc. after one of life's many possible adverse events leads to the suspension of their income and depletion of their reserve funds (layoff; family medical issue; automobile accident, etc.) https://youtu.be/56u6g0POvo0
> An insolvent tenant that has not yet filed for bankruptcy can usually be summarily evicted under contract law, but previously, collecting such evidence of insolvency was time consuming and not cost effective, giving the tenant time to pull out of their tailspin before missing rent payments and filing a bankruptcy petition.
The ability to evict someone before missing rent payments seems absurd. Are you saying this is an element of simple 'contract law' somehow, or that, often, boilerplate leases (contracts) specifically have clauses that allow eviction over insolvency without missing rent payments?
I'm not sure what will happen in the future, but I would be surprised if an AI model estimating a person's insolvency would meet requirements of evidence. Maybe the AI knows the renter, say, used a payday lender twice in the last month and that has a 98% correlation with insolvency in the next three months (making up all these numbers, I have no idea, but it sounds almost believable). I would still be surprised if a judge allowed this to become evidence of insolvency. But of course it depends on the jurisdiction.
What is absurd is the new ability for a landlord to each morning see a list of notifications that open to the financial dossiers of those of tenants that were flagged by an overnight AI analysis as being factually insolvent, based solely upon realtime "permission based access" to those tenants personal financial accounts. The "AI model estimating a person's insolvency" is not itself evidence, but the dossiers that were flagged by the AI is direct evidence because it is composed of actual financial statements created directly by the tenants own banks, along with a credit reports showing the tenant's trade-line performance.
Dude… as a landlord in a major American city, I’m lucky to be able to choose my tenants.
And while I’m talking about the regulations we face, let me further enlighten you. By making evictions extremely difficult and time-consuming to obtain, cities like mine have ensured that nobody in a marginal situation will be given a chance. We might like you, like your story, maybe even want to help. It doesn’t take getting screwed very many times before business sense has to take over.
Fwiw, as I’ve mentioned over the years a few times, I’m a liberal… but some of these rules in favor of tenants are fundamentally broken and hurt those they’re supposed to help.
Not sure what your point is, but if you are renting to parties who don't have sufficient income or liquid assets to pay their bills WHEN DUE, then even if they are paying you, you still have recourse to end your contract with them. The question is, how would you know (and be able to prove) with a level of certainty sufficient to justify reclaiming possession of your property on such grounds without being successfully sued? Why not just wait for them to default on their rent? Well, if your tenants gave "permission based access" to their financial accounts over to a third-party service that you subscribed to, that third-party service could tell you and produce copies of the tenant's financial statements issued directly by the tenant's bank. The point of my original post is only that this new technology will result in increased homelessness.
Seen from the outside the US has an extremely harsh opinions on the homeless. I have often read of homeless people use of public libraries, as an argument against having public libraries at all. With a small social safety net, its weird to think that one can be without large amounts of homelessness.
I disagree. Coming from Europe the problem is that the US is filled with homeless people everywhere. It really is a crisis. Whereas in Europe you don’t really see them. It’s incomparable (and yet we still complain about homeless people in Europe).
For example I used to looooove hanging out at libraries, that’s until I moved to the US where they are crowded with homeless people.
Interesting, Europeans don’t typically say “coming from Europe” as countries in Europe are quite different. Where are you from originally and where are you in Europe?
Anecdote: the people I’ve met who feel most strongly about that are upper middle class and upwards non-religious folks, and mostly those living in or near cities.
My parents brought me up serving at food kitchens and donating to the homeless even as the recessions of 200x were hitting our family. We weren’t alone in doing that.
In my anecdotal experience the religious folks are even harsher and more hostile toward the unhoused than secular people, but that's often because they run "programs" for unhoused people which require religious participation to receive aid, and I think they're chuffed people don't take advantage despite the religious coercion.
there’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.
The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.” Those last two are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere. We’ve worked on Los Angeles Prop HHH proposals, and, despite that Proposition raising $1.2 billion for housing, not much has materially changed. Why? California makes building anything, anywhere, astonishingly difficult. Until we can increase the supply of housing, we’re going to see homelessness problems.
Seattle has a lot more construction than LA and SF, and it’s zoning is a lot more flexible (no parking minimums), yet we have an outsized share of the unhoused problem (on a per capita basis, larger than LA or SF). I’m not saying housing policy isn’t a blocker, but it can’t be the only one, we can’t seem to build our way privately out of the problem at least here.
More drug addiction services are needed before we can really treat this problem. Even putting them up in hotels is incredibly expensive because the damage that has to be repaired.
No. All the new housing is consumed quickly by new arrivals who aren’t unhoused. Build it and they will come, induced demand applies as much to housing as it does to freeways.
Speaking from personal experience people move to Seattle not because there’s large supply of housing but because it is where there are high paying jobs. It’s the only reason I’m in Seattle and I can say the same for several coworkers, so wouldn’t call it induced demand.
People move to where they can make a decent living, which increasingly means big cities. Saying it’s induced demand makes it sound like it’s insatiable but really it just the ratio of housing to high paying jobs is way out of whack.
It’s induced demand in the sense that the housing enables those jobs, or to say, less people would come here for those high paying jobs if the housing market was more bonkers like in SF or Hong Kong. If they weren’t building housing at a crazy clip, Seattle would be less appealing even to you who is just here for the job.
That demand can't go to infinity, though, right? I would think the new arrivals would be stimulating factor to build more houses, on the economy, produce new tax dollars for roads, etc.
No, it can’t go to infinity, and in fact, we are only limited by the USA population plus anyone who can immigrate. Are you suggesting that Seattle build its way out of the nation’s homeless problem on its own?
Does everyone have the right to live in certain popular cities? This is an important moral question I guess, because our housing crisis isn’t evenly distributed.
No, I don't think I'm suggesting that Seattle build a house for everyone in the US + immigrate; only maybe that there is some curve where building more doesn't result in increased demand.
I don't see why some would have more of a right than others to live in a place on a baseline level and at the same time I don't think it would be right to force people out of their homes just to make it fair to everyone to have a chance to live there.
If a place is desirable, the people who were already there are more likely going to be the ones who have been contributing towards making it a desirable place to live than ones who were not already there.
Everyone has the legal right in the USA to live anywhere else in the USA, we don’t have a residency or hukou system. But without some other limiter, like price via supply and demand, this legal right alone is unworkable.
Seattle is a destination not just for rich techies, but also for the unhoused. Spend any amount of time at the greyhound bus station and this will be obvious, or take a greyhound across country, people get on at prisons with an open bus ticket, if they have no where else to go, they will head toward one of the west coast cities to survive, and who can blame them?
So we have a net influx of professionals with money who want to live in a popular city, and unhoused people who want to live in a city with more generous social services and mild weather so living outside won’t kill them.
On top of that, you have the residents that were already there, feeling like they are being attacked on both sides: rich young professionals pricing them out of the housing market, and poor unhoused neighbors stealing their Amazon packages and pooping on the sidewalk.
So how does building more housing alone get us out of this cycle? The rich professionals will gobble up the new housing, and tell their friends in the Midwest to come move to where the fun is. The unhoused neighbors couldn’t afford that house anyways, but they might be lucky and eventually score a free apartment or tiny home from the various social services in the area. So they move from their camping spot, but someone else has just arrived on a greyhound to take their spot over.
Maybe building more doesn't get your out of the cycle. Maybe it helps. Personally, I've only visited Seattle once and don't have any desire to return to live or visit. I would likely be happy taking up space in the MidWest that the rich young professionals are leaving behind.
I only think that there's usually a balance to things that sometimes require a lot of time to pass in order to correct.
Anyway, I appreciate all of your responses and your perspective.
I think not wanting to live in Seattle is fine, there is much to offer in the Midwest, although I lived in Toledo almost a lifetime ago. More to the point, we are pretty full, our growth should have ended and we should be losing people ATM until we level off, we can’t grow like this forever. It’s time for Charlotte and Raleigh to grow, or maybe Cincinnati. Or Texas. It wouldn’t be Seattle’s loss, we can stand to be less popular for awhile.
> only maybe that there is some curve where building more doesn't result in increased demand
In theory sure, if the supply approaches infinity then at some point an additional housing unit has zero value. But these are houses, which in practice are expensive to build so supply will never approach infinity.
Can you name at least one US city where housing used to be expensive and they built so much that it resulted in excess supply and a consequence it is now cheap to live there (and the city continues to thrive - not talking about bankrupt ghost towns)?
As far as I know (but curious to see if I'm wrong) there isn't any case where that point in the curve has been crossed.
The densest area in the country is Manhattan, not known for cheap housing. So if even the densest housing area has not crossed that point in the curve, it's an argument that maybe it's just not possible to do so in practice.
This theory is always posted in these threads but there is no answer how come the places with the most expensive real estate have no homeless. Aspen, Hamptons, Malibu, Beverly Hills, Martha's Vineyard etc. etc. do not have homeless encampments, which should have been huge according to this theory.
The trick it uses is introducing a continuity with the "easier" term. There is no such thing in reality. If you have no income you won't be renting either $1000 nor $10000 apartment despite the former being "easier" to afford. And if you have income you will move to the housing you can afford and won't be hanging under an overpass just to piss off the landlords.
The big elephant in the room, is those who have homes aren't ever going to let go of their homes for anything else than 100+% profit, it's in their best interest to not allow any other competition. Neighborhoods that argue over inches of fences and HOA colors, routinely come together to block apartments and other housing.
This holiday season, family members will be openly bragging about how their home is worth 1.7 million, which they purchased for 300k. The room full of apartment/roommate living student debt loaded will get very quiet.
I don’t see why neighborhoods should have to allow more homes to be built. America is huge and mostly empty, there’s tons of land to build on before we start trying to ruin existing communities. When I hear this it just sounds like trying to set the precedent of screwing people out of their land. Your mention of profit sounds like trying to do so without fair compensation, which currently is at least required for eminent domain.
Yes, there's lots of houses in suburbs with empty bedrooms. If there was an incentive for boomers to rent rooms in their houses like in the 1920s. But that is risky for the boomers.
How about to reduce risk, but reward lucky ownwes, a lot of houses too big for aging boomers, could have incentive payments to sell to HUD to convert into rooming houses, with lockable bedrooms rented separately, and the shared kitchens and bathrooms cleaned by HUD, and quick evictions for any troublesome renters.
So more like renting at a YMCA or backpackers' hostel, ideal for the working poor.
What have we been doing? As far as I can tell, at least in the Bay Area, we have so many NIMBYs blocking everything that we’re practically doing nothing.
There is not enough empathy for those who are struggling.
There are many people who are not comically wealthy San Franciscans, who have worked their whole lives to live in middle-class communities across America that are being ruined by a sudden focus on density instead of building outward, driven by landowners who "don't give a shit about the people of <insert community name here>" (actual quote from personal experience), enabled by laws and policies that have noble goals but were written in an unthoughtful, easily-exploited way and put in place by partisan bodies.
I'm not trying to downplay the complexity of the situation - I'm just saying that you alienate more people than you think with this common format of sarcastic hatred based on the extreme example of the bay area.
I would like to say that, having lived in a city that built very outwards (Houston, Texas), and several denser cities (most notably Paris, France which is very dense), I prefer the quality of life in dense spaces. Being too spread out means that you have massive commutes to be able to get anywhere. Being built up means you can do everything on foot.
I don’t know what makes people think that this is a difficult problem to solve or that the government is trying to solve the problem. It’s quite the opposite, nearly all governments are trying to increase property values. This is both to win support from older voters who own property and to increase their tax revenue. Actually lowering home prices will upset their constituents and disrupt their budgets, a lose/lose proposition. Meanwhile most young people do not really understand what is going on and are easily convinced that the these same leaders are doing everything they can and it is all the fault of some greedy investors/banks/etc. for which the government is powerless to oppose.
In my opinion a lot of the push to put ever more emphasis on “social” issues we have seen lately is to distract the growing number of young voters from economic issues so that these efforts can continue.
> The house itself is a depreciating asset just like a car.
You can't compare a house and a car in terms of value.
Both require maintenance and both can decay to unusable if left abandoned too long. That much is similar.
But maintaining a car beyond the point where parts are available becomes very expensive since everything becomes a custom job. There are few 100 year old cars running around and those which exist are a labor of love, but from an economic perspective makes no sense. It would be far cheaper to just buy a new car.
This never happens with housing. You can maintain a house indefinitely, through many generations and it never becomes cheaper to buy a whole new house. (Barring some disaster to it, natural or human-induced, of course.)
So a house can't become a depreciating asset. A roof over your head will always have value (that's why this whole discussion exists, everyone agrees there is value to a home) and since that house will last essentially forever, it can't possibly become worthless.
Unless you’re invested in real estate in which case your incentives are to keep the system in place.
That's the hard part. I imagine most homeowners are of the idea "I got mine, who cares about anyone else?" We see this line of thought in many parts of politics. Honestly, I'll take a bath on my home value if it means my kids, their friends, my niece, etc. get to secure housing. I don't care. Hell, I might find myself in a hard spot in the future and I don't want housing to be an issue. Housing is so important to one's dignity, ability to work/access some services and safety. There's no reason people should be collecting houses like baseball cards.
> It’s pretty clear that treating housing as an investment and not as a fundamental right has led us
No, it's pretty clear that insufficient supply in certain areas has led us here. Treating housing as an investment is just a symptom (it's really unavoidable if the good is scarce).
If people are building enough supply around your land, your land will eventually not grow as fast or even go down in value. If all the demand is met by the apartments around your land why would anyone want to develop the land when there isn't return. If their isn't any potential for return why would someone else want to buy the land?
That is not clear to me at all. What I have learned from schooling is that this is a supply and demand problem and that if you want the price of housing to be less you need to either raise the supply or lower the demand.
This conspiracy theory that people who own real estate are limiting supply so their investments go up is not reality. People indirectly want to limit supply because they enjoy their neighborhood the way it is. It turns out what they enjoy about their neighborhood others enjoy about the neighborhood so the price goes up. It doesn't mean that they are overall goal is to increase the value of their house. The evidence is that adding public transport and rezoning to higher densities and commercial use would increase the value of their property a lot but most oppose that because that is not why they bought in the neighborhood.
> If you remove real estate as a form of investment, no new apartment buildings will be built.
this isn't true. vienna's social housing program is a good example of how this works. and they have cheap median rent in 2023 compared to other cities their size.
What would happen is there wouldn't be a giant payout for construction anymore, so public housing could finally get bids that aren't 3x what private goes for. For decades the problem hasn't been cities refusing to build, it's that contractors fuck cities on bids.
If prices go up because demand is high and supply is low, then the way to fix this is by increasing supply.
If you cap the prices, supply will be even lower and you get shortages.
A pricing problem is when you have sufficient supply, but the sellers in the market are colluding to fix high prices. This can be fixed by trust breaking and/or price controls, but this isn't what's happening in real estate. Real estate is an extremely competitive market.
Government can build if private industry will not. If you argue "we can only fix this with the private sector and private investment", welp, we tried that and we're plain ol' fucked at the moment.
Define we. My example shows government housing can be done. Swap out people and policy if needed. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Einstein
Part of the problem is the problem statement. Low-income housing seems to be secondary as to how we are spending the money. A lot of the money is going to homeless programs and shelters vs trying to figure out how to lower the price of homes in a sustainable way.
In Seattle, there’s lack of housing, but the bigger driver appears to be easy access to drugs like fentanyl and no consequences to anyone involved in using or selling them.
There are tons of people doing hard drugs in Seattle that aren't being a menace to society. I'm not sure why you can't just criminalize the actual problem.
I don't think we should be locking people up for years because they were minding their own business and being productive members of society and happened to run into the police at the wrong time.
At the same time, it would be nice to do something with people who are fine to beg for money on the street, do nothing productive, and be high on drugs until they die.
Most cities with these problems have resources for people who are willing to get help. Yet we let people refuse that because they'd rather continue doing drugs and not being productive and at the same time ruining all public spaces.
Something needs to change.
Hoping that those people will just change is a bad strategy. Leaving them be is an option - but it's growing less popular.
Putting people that need help in jail is the dumbest solution one can think of. You’re not solving ANYTHING. You’re just swiping what looks bad under the rug. The US prison system has already imploded.
there was an article on the front page of HN recently about the flaws in the current drug policy in, if I'm not mistaken Portland. Basically, not throwing junkies in jail doesn't actually help them sober up if there isn't a proper plan in place, so they're stopping that approach in favor of a more strict approach where doing drugs in public is a crime.
Before you make assumptions about my person opinions, I'm very pro-legalization, I think prohibition of basically anything is very misguided. If I were in charge, everything, including heroin and fentanyl, would be legalized, taxed, and regulated.
The lack of affordable housing in Portland drives homelessness; and being homeless pushes people to use meth during the night to stay awake so they can protect themselves and fentanyl so they can feel joy while living in truly wretched conditions. Keeping people off the street by building affordable housing and preventing people from despairing avoids a raft of social ills.
That said, per your point decriminalization of possession and public intoxication, measure 110 was a poorly written law that should have decriminalized drugs after harm reduction, substance abuse clinics, and housing options were in place first. The current situation wasn't guaranteed to happen; unfortunately city and county leadership like to wear their pants on their head instead of actually getting work done. This was as much if not more of a failure of governance to execute as it was a failure of policy.
It wasn't so much about the flaws in the current drug policy in Portland, as flaws in implementation.
Portland planned to decriminalize a lot of things and put a bunch of other measures and support systems in place. COVID and other things hit, and all that got enacted was decriminalization with none of the guard rails or help mechanisms, with predictable outcomes.
> easy access to drugs like fentanyl and no consequences to anyone involved in using or selling them.
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You can literally watch interviews with the homeless in SF and Seattle. They cite these facts straight-up as to why they live in SF and Seattle. You have to be actively lying to yourself to come to a different answer.
In the spectrum of “things that have had an effect on Seattle’s homeless stats”, do you think this recently elected council’s recent decision has had time to have an effect?
If not, doesn’t it seem likely that previous looking the other way has contributed to the current status?
while I agree that basically any news outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch is heavily untrustworthy, I'd like to point out that property values are not necessarily correlated with quality of life.
Within a given city, yes, the nicer bits are more expensive. Between different cities, however, it is totally possible to find one city is both cheaper and nicer than another (with the possible caveat of being smaller, and perhaps if you can't WFH, not as many jobs).
To use an example I know well, basically every city in France outside of Marseille is nicer to live in than Paris, but Paris has real estate prices that are 2-4x most other cites.
I imagine you could find similar things in other countries as well - Amsterdam vs Eindhoven in the Netherlands, for example.
The article neglected to link to the actual report, which was the USA’s Department of Housing and Urban Development’s January 2023 Point-in-Time Count Report.
I'm involved in an Intervention Hostel in Poland/Europe. Many people need short-term help, not only with homelessness but they also need some real support.
What is provided by the city, is only some night shelter, where they can eat, sleep, and wash. The thing they don't get is a psychiatrist and psychological treatment. The Intervention Hostel provides that too.
From my perspective, one of the main problems is that, in general, people are not interested in helping those homeless people. We have problems with gathering money, there is no city support, and we also have higher costs (because of the psychiatrist and psychological treatment). We have quite nice results, but every three months we think about closing it due to lack of funds.
The thing that made me really sad was that when a couple of days ago one of Polish parliament members hit a woman and used a fire extinguisher on a hanukkah menorah, people gathered over $50k in just a couple of hours to support him.
However, when I was in USA a couple of years ago, I have never seen so many homeless people on the streets. This is really worrying and sad.
There is not a 100% one size fits all system. There are too many cultures and beliefs, and different people to think that one system is going to get 100% of the people. 0.2% isn't horrible. Could be better and with advancements hopefully we get better but we need to allocate our resources in priority and there are a lot of issues that are going to get priority above this issue.
Don’t frame it as if we have been experimenting like dispassionate scientists. Wannabe socialist upstarts have been meddled with to stop the “contagion” and to benefit the corporations of whatever country (banana republics) instead of the natives.
It makes sense that this is true. We've been systematically underbuilding housing since at least the 1980s. Lots of places had old, run-down surpluses that were being "revitalized", hiding the issue for decades. But now the housing shortage is being felt almost everywhere in the country.
And yet, every year, we're still underbuilding relative to our population growth, thus making the problem worse. Unless our population starts to shrink like in Japan or Russia, we're either going to need to build A LOT of new housing or deal with an ever increasing population of homeless people.
Even a slowly shrinking population is probably not enough to fix the problem, because rich people like to buy vacation homes, and we have a lot of rich people. We'd need rapid population decline, like what would happen from some catastrophe. I recommend building homes instead of that.
Population has also increased from 300 million to about 340 million, or more than 10%. Nothing else changing, we'd expect the number of homeless to be 10% larger than in 2007.
It really bothers me that quite a few cities want to address homelessness by shipping them to California on taxpayer dollars and then California is given a hard time for not housing them all. California really needs to be building a database and only serving Californias who have become homeless and helping get the others back to their home states. There is no moral obligation to give somebody who took a bus from Oklahoma for free a home in some of the most expensive cities in the country.
Do people realize how difficult it is for normal person to move across the USA? I did it before, it was expensive and a difficult move. Housing is a problem and it’s sad that moving cross country will continue to become less and less accessible to people who could provide California economy a nice boost
We are in the period following the end of COVID era relief, including, in many areas, eviction protection. Without diving into the politics of whether or not that relief was a good idea or not, this makes complete sense.
Seeing that wages mostly remained same but inflation shot up, I’d imagine homelessness would also shoot up.
It is a paradox that the world’s richest country has such a high level of homelessness.
I think in 50 years we’ll either view current homelessness and poverty now like we view slavery or that the technoelite will use AI and regulatory capture and further the divide with quarter of country barely surviving.
US compared to its developed peers has lower life expectancy. That surprised me.
So many people refusing care because they can’t afford it and die early.
650k out of 340M is an astonishing number. That's almost one in 500 people who don't have a place to call home in the richest country in the world. There were more than 500 people in my high school class ...
Anything that affects 650k people has more than one cause, but we have mountains of evidence to show us the main cause: housing is too expensive.
We don't build enough housing and the housing we do build is far too expensive. We then give homeowners and real estate developers so many tax breaks, loans, and other incentives such that America is completely addicted to housing-as-investment and the ever-rising price of a roof over one's head.
It makes me ashamed to live here. It makes me ashamed to have a home of my own.
If you're in the Bay Area and you want to help locally, I can personally recommend Larkin Street Youth Services as an excellent organization: https://larkinstreetyouth.org/
On the contrary, the prevalence of mental illness and other issues in the population is much higher than 1 in 500 (probably 10x that rate, at least), so while you think this number is high, I don't think it's crazy at all. Many of these people would probably have been forcibly institutionalized in the past (which some people think is better, and others think is worse).
If we forcibly institutionalized the homeless, we would have zero homelessness overnight (but would that necessarily be better?). So judging simply from the numbers can be misleading.
However, the trend of homelessness going up 12% year over year is a real issue, though the proper comparison point would probably be 2019 since there has been a lot of government intervention to artificially lower homelessness over the past couple of years (which might be long-term unsustainable given the budget deficits).
What about embracing forms of tent cities rather than disparaging them? Homo Sapiens have been sleeping in teepees and portable huts for roughly a hundred thousand years; we have evolved to survive in such. Have shared showers, restrooms, washrooms, etc. I can't say it would work in all climates, but in many.
Would you really create vast amounts of permanent housing of the lowest quality? That doesn't even work with proper walled houses let alone tents. See favellas or Kowloon walled city.
Dealing with homelessness is a massive money suck with no real return (in the quarter).
Homeless people arent making any money that goes into taxes... or businesses.
Homeless people aren't stimulating the economy.
Laws that apply equally to everyone (like not living on the streets) can be used to make them go elsewhere.
I don't see why they matter at all. We all know "The Economy" is rich peoples' assets, and these people don't matter one bit. And, "The Economy" is doing GREAT!
Thank you for articulating why the problem is hard to solve. There is very little (financial) incentive to solve it, at all. It’s all cost with little upside. It’s not like new roads or new infrastructure which creates jobs in the short term and prosperity in the long term. At least it’s not currently billed that way. It’s medical bills and social workers and shelters that just prolong the existing problems.
To be fair, it behooves local governments to solve it. However, the moment a community does do something good, like UBI or small apartments, they get flooded with every other community exporting their homeless there.
Same goes for states as well. Any state gets inundated, and quality of help goes down.
And a national level plan has no traction. Capitalism itself implicates these people are just lazy and should help themselves. So there's no good (or any) national level plan.
And the business part of the economy (rich people) just want them to be 'away'. The term "Greyhound therapy" is precisely that - rich people/local govts will buy you a ticket to go somewhere else.
In the end, having these people with a home and stable living would ABSOLUTELY help local areas, and reduce massive burdens on services. But again, political will says these failures of the capitalist machine is somehow 100% their fault, and shouldn't be helped.
In addition to an insufficient stock of housing, people really struggle with the down payment on a home. It would make a huge difference if the federal government had an accessible program that gave lower/low-mid income people guaranteed loans at a subsidized rate (maybe a gradual phase out up to a family income of 150k?).
I've seen this in some countries. Any subidies are sucked up by the construction industry and built into the prices, already when announcing such a program.
Yeah no, Bezos net worth alone is more than all the money the US goverment has given to Ukraine, and the money given to Ukraine and for financial and humanitary is a complex and subjetive issue because many believe it helps the US itself in the long term due helping mantain stability in Europe, some belive otherwise of course, its a complex issue for sure but nowhere similar to billionaires which are just citizens and money hoarders.
Yet another side-effect of increased wealth inequality. You can call it a homelessness, housing, socioeconomic, or political crisis, but it's all a manifestation of one central problem. I worry this skew will only be further exacerbated by the asymmetric yields of ML-driven market capture, since we have no cohesive plans to smooth this transition in the United States.
To me, a big part of the issue goes back to 2008 when Bush almost destroyed the economy and enabled Corporations to take over the Residential Housing Market (via low interest rates and foreclosure).
Now these companies make people pay most of their income for rents, thus giving them the illusion the economy is bad.
It is simple, people judge the economy on the amount of disposable income they have. Sadly the pols do not understand that.
BTW, I noticed your '/s', but seems many people missed it.
I'm staring at the 653,000 figure and still can't determine if I'm shocked because it seems surprisingly low or high. Perhaps it's because the previous poster dropped a 40 million number that moved my frame of reference.
To put it into perspective for myself, 653,000 is larger than the following cities, based on 2022 estimates:
- Boston
- Portland
- Louisville
- Memphis
- Detroit
- Baltimore
It says in the article that its 653,000, not 40 million. Not really sure where you are getting that figure, however it appears that the actual number is under a million people
No it’s still a very small number. For comparison that’s about the same amount as Germany, a nation less than 1/3 the size. The US simply does not have a serious homeless issue and it definitely isn’t “bad for a developed nation.”
Yes when it’s that small of a percentage it can be argued that homelessness isn’t the problem. Mental health and drug addiction is but those have different solutions and namely ones that can’t be argued to have a left economics solution.
I wonder if this stat includes the economic migrants, if not it could very well be much larger. This news article mentions there have been 2.8 million encounters at the border this year from Sept 30.
Migrant workers usually live in some kind of shared housing with other migrant workers and send money back home each month.
I’m sure some do end up homeless especially if anything goes wrong
There is currently a push by you know who to make “illegal aliens” a naughty word, a word that only the most ignorant would utter. They think it’s a pejorative because it’s associating everyone who enters the country (illegally) with a crime. However they’re ok with calling them all “migrants” or “asylum seekers” even though clearly, the vast majority are not. As you can probably tell, I am against this war on words, and think that you should be able to call a thing what it is.
I believe the actual technical term these days would be "asylum seeker" which is actually a legal status. Perhaps they are taking advantage of that status to seek immigration for economic reasons and so "economic migrant" is also a fair description.
Interestingly, if you work with construction crews in South Texas (I do not, but my parents dabble in the business), you'll find that Spanish is an invaluable language. I don't know what that says about legal status (it seems rather impolite to ask the people who are building your house for you), but it seems like these people may be part of the solution to the housing issues.
Why is the US not tracking all these humans? Count them in the census, let them pay taxes, get them all legal protections under US law. Let them fight to stay in this country with productivity.
I'm pretty sure they'll want to leave once they realize the US government robs people with taxes.
There's a two-tier system going on and we're living in a modern day Rome.
I've come to believe our government is too small to do so. If I was stopped on the street by law enforcement, I wouldn't have any way of proving my citizenship; it's just not something we're typically socialized to in the US. And obviously documents would be pretty easily forged these days (and I believe often are by/on behalf of employers).
I think you would need a pretty strong, centralized database to include various biometrics of all citizens in order to do the thing right, and that's way beyond what I think the average citizen would accept (though I'd actually be willing to participate).
I feel like immigration is like most aspects of the US economy - we leave it up to the market to decide, and labor is a market as well.
You have a good point there. I understand that citizenship is tracked at the federal level and not the state level; although the federal government relies on local county records to prove status. The system requires an overhaul and the states should have a bit more power to police their own territory.
I'm sure we'll get to it one of these decades. Again, I think that a small government ethos will make it quite challenging. It's interesting when you parse the constitution carefully, particularly the 14th amendment, you'll often note that it is all about due process and it does not limit that to citizens only; it seems quite careful in using the words citizen and person.
I don't think it's pedantic to correct a number that is sixty times off. That's absurd. If they said 800k, then sure. 40 million is absurdly off and should be commented about to prevent others from running with that absurdity.
The problem of homelessness isn't due to a lack of money. The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them. When there's a shortage of housing, there's gonna be homeless people, it's basic logic.
The amount of money required to fix the housing shortage is negligible for a country as rich as the US. But money isn't the problem here, politics is. And no amount of money can fix that.
US homeowners made a decision to use their homes as their primary or secondary investment vehicles so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values.
There’s also a good bit of plain old racism involved but people are in denial about it and insist they’re implying something else.
For example, in a nearby community they were proposing some “starter townhomes” priced at $295K (median home price in the area is 350K). These were not rentals, low income, section 8a - they were new construction townhomes on the lower end of the pricing spectrum. People FREAKED out, and suggested they’d be bought up by gangs and junkies and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells and the project was killed. Someone stood up at a zoning meeting and said “Do you really want someone who lives in one of these as your neighbor? Do you want their kids going to our schools? I sure don’t!” To thunderous applause.
I personally can’t wrap my head around the logic. It’s not like these existing homeowners are rich - in fact the sort of person who scoops up a $300K townhome is probably a young professional with an office job who probably make the same or more as the residents complaining that they’ll bring poverty. It’s nuts!
In my city we've had some success naming and shaming those people. After someone makes a really obscene comment like that we figure out who they are, or often we already knew, then one of my group uses their two minutes to put that speaker's name on the record. After these racist pricks realize we're paying attention, they stop coming to council meetings.
>so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values
This logic is so backwards on behalf of homeowners it’s unreal. Which cities are associated with out of control house prices?
SF, New York, Toronto…
What do these cities have a lot of? Housing. Increasing population density increases the tax base, which increases the level and quality of services which increases property values.
> The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them.
Oh, actually I think the problem is that I would like temporary housing to be built for the homeless, just far away from me. But certain people insist that they let homeless people, with their many varied problems, live up the street from me instead.
One would think that being willing to have temporary housing built somewhat distant from any major cities is a compromise on my part, but my opponents insist on getting everything they want and having homeless people live on the exact same block as me. It's like every other topic where people have zero intention of compromising, e.g. no abortions even in the case of rape, no guns allowed period, etc. etc. The internal debate people use to arrive at a position becomes: How can I best poke my neighbor in the eye and force them to exist in a political reality that they despise, instead of compromising? That is the position I would like to take.
And instead of reaching any sort of compromise that could help solve the problem, we get nothing, a political stalemate where no one wins and everyone loses. Politics in the US is absolute trash.
There is already inexpensive housing built far from any major city. How do you propose to get people to move away from their family, friends, services, and jobs?
Imagine believing that government budget sizes are anywhere near large enough to address the housing shortage. Only private activity is at the necessary scale.
Great take. We all know that America has no interests abroad, and it's always better to let the international order unravel. That way, we'll be sending our troops instead in a few years.
It's unbelievable how much we've sent Ukraine while Americans are suffering at dire rates.
If we had hundreds of billions just laying around for crooked foreign nations, surely we had it for school lunch programs, affordable housing, homeless programs, etc.
> It's unbelievable how much we've sent Ukraine while Americans are suffering at dire rates.
Indeed, it's unbelievable how little we actually sent via pallets (compared to past US wars) v. how much we sent in the form of gift cards for Ukraine to buy US surplus military hardware.
It's a very cost-effective program we should continue not just to defend our allies against a dictator but to keep our own economy cranking as money circulates among US employees and US companies throughout the military supply chain.
The ROI is the mitigation of a third world war by a mad despot and the consequential preservation of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It's a hugely valuable investment once you look at the historical costs of appeasement.
Also, to repeat the point with a bit more nuance: most of the money being "sent" doesn't even leave the US economy until it's in the hands of people e.g as wages. US military procurement rules mean that the aid money going to Ukraine for hardware procurement ultimately only goes back to US equipment manufacturers and other US companies in that supply chain.
Tldr: each aid package is largely a gift card to spend at the Made-In-USA gun store.
> The ROI is the mitigation of a third world war by a mad despot and the consequential preservation of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It's a hugely valuable investment once you look at the historical costs of appeasement.
Citation *massively* needed. There is no evidence that a 3rd world war was mitigated. There is substantial evidence that this war has gone on far longer than it would have if the west had stayed out.
> Also, to repeat the point with a bit more nuance: most of the money being "sent" doesn't even leave the US economy until it's in the hands of people e.g as wages. US military procurement rules mean that the aid money going to Ukraine for hardware procurement ultimately only goes back to US equipment manufacturers and other US companies in that supply chain.
I understand this.
What I do not understand is how making a massive wealth transfer from our children and grandchildren to shareholders of the military-industrial complex is viewed as net-positive economic activity.
Taking out a loan against the future productivity of your children isn't suddenly made okay because you spend that money with other Americans to send guns to someone in another country.
It's net-positive activity full-stop, not just economic activity.
The US dollar thrives because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Which in all practical terms means it's backed by our guns, or more precisely our ability to wage war. Closely allied nations and currencies such as the Euro, the Pound, and the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Dollars similarly benefit.
So in immediate terms you may see it as a wealth transfer, in longer timescales opening up our economic horizons (improving economic and political conditions with our allies and opening fronts for investment with new allies) improves our ability to grow GDP, revenue, our tax base, and our ability to do more business in our own currency.
That's pretty much the payoff, if you're looking for one in strictly economic terms.
> It's net-positive activity full-stop, not just economic activity.
Net positive for who? It doesn't seem to be a net positive for Ukraine, who have effectively lost an entire generation of young men.
> in longer timescales opening up our economic horizons (improving economic and political conditions with our allies and opening fronts for investment with new allies) improves our ability to grow GDP, revenue, our tax base, and our ability to do more business in our own currency.
This is a wildly nebulous claim. At "longer timescales" I can claim the same thing: indebting future generations to help defend non allies ("new ally" is an interesting word for someone who wasn't an ally until they needed our help) without a clear ROI is a fantastic way to slow future GDP growth by continually increasing the amount of debt we have to service.
> Net positive for who? It doesn't seem to be a net positive for Ukraine, who have effectively lost an entire generation of young men.
Men who laid down their lives to defend their homeland. This isn't a serious counterargument on your part and devalues your standing as a good-faith participant in this exchange.
> This is a wildly nebulous claim
The history of our nation as a world superpower disagrees.
There's zero reason why the US can't both support Ukraine and help solve homelessness. Homelessness is a product of a restrictive construction policies (namely, many US cities forbid or highly restrict construction of high-density low-cost housing), not a lack of funds.
Don't buy the disinformation;not much of that money was actually sent to Ukraine, most of the money stays in the US. [0]
The US not funding school lunch programs, affordable housing, homeless programs is not a problem of lacking resources. It's an ideological decision. The help sent to Ukraine is actually negligible.[1]
There's more than enough money to go around; just look at the US's regular defense budget. This money being pushed to the MIC instead of to citizens in need is a conscious decision.
You are very naive if you think any of that money would go into helping the people in need. Those huge sums were approved and spent for the benefit of the military complex who traditionally sponsor political campaigns and outright bribe the government and the Congress so that the war machine never stops.
How much was sent to Ukraine in cash, exactly? And how much of that was taken away from housing budgets?
From what I heard, the vast majority of what was sent to Ukraine was military surplus.
(That's of course ignoring some pretty serious points you're making more or less implicitly, eg that Americans are suffering in a way comparable to "being shelled by Russians" or that the help is send to encourage their "being crooked" and not, you know, fight back against invading Russians. And you're also basically brushing off the part where the help came in with strings attached in terms of fighting corruption.)
Some is sold to local police departments. Some is sold to your pick of developing nation warlords. Some is destroyed or used for training.
I do agree that it's kind of fucked up that US military spending is so huge that it can make a major difference to the war in Ukraine with mostly equipment it was going to throw away. But (1) that's not a problem that started in 2022 (2) I think there's a huge hypocrisy in complaining about the fact that this equipment is being sent to Ukraine, and not complaining about the fact that this equipment was bought/built in the first place.
If you want to make a dent in the US military-industrial complex, look at the F-35 program: the budget overrun alone is more than three times the worth of equipment sent to Ukraine (except it was spent in cash).
Ukraine is being attacked by Russia. Ukraine fights for its survival. It has been doing that since 2014, when Russia first attacked Ukraine. It has been doing that without help by the US for 8 years. It will continue to do so, with or without US help.
Fentanyl is also responsible for a lot of this current cap, at least from my perspective in a big west coast city. It seems like all unhoused neighbors are on it, but of course that could just be selection bias (the ones you notice are having fent crises).
The longer you are unhoused, the more that you are in a chronic state of danger. Opioids turn that stress response off for a moment and simultaneously make it harder to get out of the situation that caused the problem.
The Opioid addicts don't care about being seen in a way that the invisible homeless do.
The people whose mental health crises are exacerbated by being homeless are more likely to be visible because they have no reserves left. And Fentanyl is a good way to ignore that mental health crisis for a moment.
I get that. But that’s probably not all of the cases, maybe a few. A lot of them had a support network and simply burned their bridges with them via drug use, and now they are in the streets. But we should definitely prioritize helping the non drug addicted homeless population, get them off the streets as fast as possible, since once they get into fent, helping them is a magnitude harder! And that’s why we should prioritize sober housing. Yes, it’s sad, but once they get addicted to fent, they are probably not recovering from that, so let’s throw our resources at not letting that happen, rather than burning them on people that are very very hard to help.
Ironically, getting the addicts off the street also helps, and the "housing" is more important than "sober." If you can get them stable, they may have a chance.
The drug addiction happens because of the trauma in a vast majority of cases. Poor decisions may compound, but trauma causes rational decisions that also have the negative consequences that compound.
It doesn’t really help. They get off the streets into a mini home for example, or maybe a spot in a RV park, or hotel room. But the city pays $10k/month for that, since housing an addict requires a lot more maintenance and services than housing someone sober, and that’s not even treating their addiction. The costs are unsustainable, the treatment isn’t available or they dont want to go (it’s not jail, they can’t be forced to go to treatment).
And again, treatment doesn’t even work most of the time, especially if the patient is unwilling. We are just throwing away our money here when we could focus it on the non-addicted homeless instead, get them housed, and prevent them from getting addicted to drugs. Sober housing helps these people a lot, and could prevent the problem from getting worse, because once they start doing drugs, it’s pretty much over.
Yes, although not cheaper than prison (only applicable for those that commit felonies and then get a slap on the wrist instead of prison time, but we have plenty of that).
There's causation between homelessness and fentanyl use. Being homeless is absolutely hellish in this country; if your life has fallen apart that you're truly living on the street then there's little support and a lot of danger. Opioids might be one of the only options for you to actually feel happy when the rest of your life is terrible and you've run out of options.
It certainly happens that people get addicted to opioids and then their lives fall apart as a result of addiction but it's important to consider how despair itself can lead to addiction.
It really doesn’t matter in either case. Once they are addicted to fent, they probably aren’t coming back from it. So instead of throwing all our resources at drug addiction, we could instead throw it at getting newly unhoused off the street into safe and secure housing. If housing is their only need, that is a much easier problem than forcing an addict into treatment that probably won’t work.
Fully agree; keep people off the street and get them off the street as fast as possible; and build a culture where deaths of despair are less likely to happen.
In discussing this issue with the EMT and paramedic students I teach, absolutely this.
"If your life had descended to a point where you had to go to the bathroom in an alley and use scrap paper to wipe, or were eating your lunch that you fetched from a trash can on the street in the rain, there's a good chance you would use opioids to numb the pain of that existence, too."
And once you start using some of the most powerfully addictive substances we know, it's not about "flaws of character" or anything else, now you've messed with brain chemistry, in some cases, permanently.
You bring up a great point about selection bias. The "homeless" you see are the ones with the drug/mental illness problems. When I was in college 2 of my friends were homeless. One slept in his car, the other slept in an office building. I would have never known if they hadn't told me.
Ya, we really shouldn’t forget about them. As an 18 year old, I slept in my car for a few days before so I can totally empathize.
It is really sad that we have equated drug addiction with homelessness. We should really treat them as separate problems, since one is much easier to solve with social resources than the other.
Have been following this a little and two things seem to be true:
Looking at the economic numbers, a lot of things look good, or at least, they are not so bad.
Multiple polls asking people how the economy is doing show they think it is doing worse.
Generally Biden supporters push the first point, and Biden detractors push the second. Some of the Biden detractors are Biden voters who want different economic initiatives.
One point is during Covid people got stimulus checks and evictions and student loan payments were frozen. Also interest rates were near zero, FAANGs were hiring like crazy etc.
Now people were hit by inflation and interest rates have shot up. FAANGs haven been laying off, and to some extent Fortune 500 - or at least hiring is frozen. And so on.
But there's also another class of homeless we don't see. They have jobs, they might be your coworker or classmate. But they live out of a car or at a homeless shelter.
It's worth keeping that in mind.