I can't bring myself to finish reading this before I pump.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion

Apparently the European visitor hasn't yet found out about the guns.

1: You get a pass for having a new baby.

1 is in Norfolk, which is where we went in driver's education to practice in a town with more than one stoplight.

Where is the government?

No no no, the government is dealing with it. Just last week the city council voted to ban being homeless on sidewalks in roughly 20% of the city. I'm sure that criminalizing the poors will take care of the problem.

I have a friend who's originally from Greece, works in tech (plain old software engineer, not techbro) and had some health setbacks. He waas living in Silicon Valley, so .... access to some of the best medical care in the country. And he was livid about the hoops he had to jump thru (even with his gold-plated insurance, and ability to pay cash) to get tests and such. One doctor told him how impressed he was that he got all these tests done so quickly. He finally got fed up, and moved back to Greece, where he tells me that he's gotten so much more done on his medical issues, and so much more quickly.

His words: "Banana republic levels of inefficiency. For the US, that is. "

And this is comparing to *Greece*, an ostensible basket-case that we all look down upon.

As he started his email to me: "USA! USA! USA!"

5. "last week" s/b "yesterday"

Lesson 1 from the link 1 is if you're engaging in an activity that is a crime where you live, don't communicate in writing/take notes/tell your pro-life cousins.

Europeans broadly speaking expect center city to be nice, outskirts less so. US post-car cities are basically opposite.

That said, public transit vibe varies hugely from city to city, and I don't know how alarming LA's transit actually is...

9. The problem isn't that a European foreigner expects too much -- I've lived here most of my life. LA's homelessness problem has gotten significantly, visibly, horrifically worse in the past decade, and the obviousness of wealth inequality is really staggering. Huge homeless encampments have sprung up all over the city (although that may soon change thanks to the casual cruelty of our city council, see above). At the same time, middle class and working class housing has disappeared and is being replaced by luxury condominium complexes.

Also, the center city is now "nice," in the sense that there are fancy condos and luxury boutiques and cafes where you can spend thirty dollars on salad. But there are people sleeping on the street right outside.

Everyone likes to be near to a nice salad.

I've lived here most of my life. LA's homelessness problem has gotten significantly, visibly, horrifically worse in the past decade, and the obviousness of wealth inequality is really staggering.

I live in a small/min-sized college town. When I was growing up, there general vibe was artsy/hippie (an the old-school conservative parts of town were often connected to agriculture/timber/fishing) and it felt like inequality wasn't that severe -- there weren't visible homeless people, and there weren't many rich people either. Now there are a lot of homeless people and a lot of Teslas and I have really mixed feelings about it. For a long time, as the city was becoming more affluent I thought, "I miss what it was like when I was growing up, but you're always going to have change and it's probably better to have more money coming in that it would be to stagnate." There are good things about it -- the food has improved -- but there are a lot of ways in which it feels like it's not moving in the right direction.

But what really strikes me is that, if that's happening here, it's clearly not just a big city phenomenon.

I think it's also worth noting that what's shocking the poster isn't enforcement operations against homeless people, it's that there are so many people who are unhoused. I repeat myself about this whenever it comes up, but we have a lot more political energy focused on pushing back against punitive sweeps and on making encampments more livable than on providing humane emergency shelter and readily available permanent housing. Even respectfully treated encampments are a terrible failure of social policy, and we really shouldn't give up on eliminating them by providing enough housing that they're unnecessary.

Reading the raid coverage, the unnamed sources are being identified really noncommittally. Here's the NYT, for instance:

The F.B.I.'s search of former President Donald J. Trump's home on Monday to obtain information related to his handling of classified information is separate from the Justice Department's investigation into the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.

Is Donald Trump's lawyer "familiar with the investigation"? I'd say so! Is the NYT journalist dumb enough to take the word of people on the Trump side for anything? It's not too hard to picture some Trumpist asserting that this is all about classified documents, and getting a nod from a DOJ person about the official rationale for the warrant.

There's a whole other thread for that.

Oops

we really shouldn't give up on eliminating [homeless encampments] by providing enough housing that they're unnecessary.

I agree with this, and I think that, even if other steps are required (beyond abundant housing) housing costs are a significant impediment to any other efforts.

That said, I don't think housing costs are the only factor. I think about this article (but not enough to read the Richard Florida book being reviewed).

Although Florida's position hasn't fundamentally altered, he has become worried that cities are increasingly implicated in inequality. It's true that they are engines of invention, prosperity and opportunity, and that without them our economies would sink, but they are also engines of privilege and, as a result, a focus of mounting resentment. Florida began writing his book before Brexit and Trump. It seems he was prescient. The movements that produced those results were in revolt against what Trump, Farage and their supporters often refer to as the 'metropolitan elite'.

Florida thinks that most half-successful US cities generate inequality in one way or another. But the processes he describes are best exemplified by global 'superstar' cities like New York, LA, Singapore, Paris and London, or those with particular strengths in academic research and the creative and tech sectors - places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Oxford and Cambridge.

...

It also transpired, in ways few anticipated, that globalisation was good for the established global cities in particular. It had been assumed that the growth of an ever larger and more integrated transnational economy would threaten the supremacy of these places. Surely emerging cities would provide the same services more cheaply and efficiently, just as they do trainers, mobile phones and call centres? But it turns out that New York and London have unique qualities that it is very difficult for newer or second-rank cities to replicate: urban infrastructure - roads, trains, homes, offices, parks - developed over the centuries; a vast range of businesses offering pretty much any service you could want; endless employment opportunities; and softer attributes, such as norms of lawfulness, a rich architectural history and cultural life. As the world's economy grew and became more connected, more and more of the world wanted to visit, trade and move to these cities. The market for them expanded, just like the market for Venice, African safaris and other unique or hard-to-replicate places and experiences. Whether you're an Indian billionaire, a Chinese tourist, a graduate from a top university looking for a high-paying first job, a poor migrant or persecuted refugee, the global cities have something to offer. Their populations have grown, their economies have prospered and their universities and cultural institutions have flourished. They have absorbed people from different cultures.

...

Second, over the last few decades those at the top of our economy have become adept at taking ever more for themselves at the expense of customers, employees, shareholders and tax collectors. Florida could have made more of this. Businesses headquartered in New York, London and other capitals have been at the centre of this development, creaming off wealth generated elsewhere.

Perhaps the most important cause of growing city-generated inequality, however, is the property market. As demand on these cities has grown, so has the demand on property. But city property is in short supply, so those who own it see their wealth soar, leaving behind those who don't own property, or own it elsewhere. Thomas Piketty argued that we live in a world where returns from capital are greater than overall economic growth, but beneath the economic formulas is a pretty familiar phenomenon. Most of us who own a nice house in London, New York or Paris earn more from it than from our own labour. In this way cities like London and New York have become vast parasitic centres of what economists call 'rent'. People are getting rich on the back of the work and misfortune of others.

It's hard for a farmer like me.

Also, as long as I'm linking to the LRB, this was depressing.

A longer-term view of Britain's economic malaise is presented in Stagnation Nation, a new report by the Resolution Foundation think tank.* Two headline trends are identified, from which much else follows. First, since the financial crisis of 2008 productivity has grown by just 0.4 per cent per year, compared to an average of 0.9 per cent in the 25 richest OECD countries. Partly as a consequence of this, average wages simply stopped increasing, one of the strangest and most socially corrosive developments in the history of British capitalism. The report shows that between 1970 and 2007, wages typically went up by 33 per cent every decade. Since then, they haven't grown at all. One of the most startling statistics in the report is that there are now eight million younger workers who have never experienced an economy that delivers a rising standard of living through wages alone.

The second overarching problem identified in the report is that Britain has become an unusually unequal society over the past forty years, both in income and in wealth. A low-income household in Britain is typically £3800 a year worse off than the equivalent one in France, something that makes a world of difference to the way this new inflationary crisis is experienced. Meanwhile, total household wealth (what people own, rather than what they make from wages) rose from three times GDP in the late 1980s to nearly eight times at the start of the pandemic, and then shot up further thanks to the emergency monetary interventions of the Bank of England in 2020-21. But many people have no wealth at all. The contribution of 'investment income' (returns on shares, property, bonds etc, as distinct from wages) to Britain's deep regional inequality has doubled since 1997.

I was in LA very briefly in early 2016 - a different world! - and even then it was pretty shocking. I was in downtown and there was some kind of park/park-associated-with-a-municipal-building and there were tons of obviously homeless people sleeping there in the middle of the day, plus people literally sleeping on the sidewalks. Even in the hellhole that Minneapolis has become, we don't see that in downtown.

Radical news outlet Unicorn Riot produced this piece of reporting about real estate investment, racism and policing in Minneapolis that is partly just what one already knows but which contains some surprises.

Unicorn Riot was named in 2015, back when comedy names for small radical projects still seemed funny, and IIRC really got its start reporting on Black Lives Matter and associated protests. Now it is very large and does some pretty decent reporting and it is still called Unicorn Riot even though the last vestiges of humor have been eroded away by the times.

I look back on literally almost thirty years of protesting and being activism-adjacent and it's hard to believe how the mood has changed. Like, I remember getting people together to go down to a big May Day labor protest in about 1998 and the mood was one of gaiety - I'd made all these home-dyed flags, we were all looking forward to the march, it was a beautiful day. I'm sure that young people still do look forward to going to protests with their friends but the light-hearted mood is absolutely gone now.

I remember moving to Berkeley in 2003 and being shocked at the mentally ill that were hanging around. I grew up taking the same bus as patients of the mental hospital (wow, that is probably not the term any more) but I never felt unsafe the way I did in Berkeley.

As for other inequality, see my rant about how schools are funded by property taxes, also quickly developed upon arriving in Berkeley.

Radical news outlet Unicorn Riot produced this piece of reporting about real estate investment, racism and policing in Minneapolis that is partly just what one already knows but which contains some surprises.

Selfishly* I'd be curious to know more about what LB and Frowner would think is the best policy approach to promoting new construction.

* In a previous thread I had a back-and-forth with LB in which I described myself as YIMBY with some hesitation, and LB was pushing back on, "why hesitate?"

I compromise and am a YIELOLSD. Yes in East Liberty, Oakland, Lawrenceville, and the Strip District. That's where they're going to build stuff anyway.

Strongly agree with 14.

Also one key point here is that less enforcement across the board isn't good, one of the things the post specifically mentions is intense sexual harassment of women on transit. That should have more enforcement! Less destroying tent cities, more protecting women from sexual harassment and assault by homeless people (and frat brothers too!).

Finally, this is a great example of the kind of thing that has convinced me that American is bad in ways that are pretty difficult to fix. Yes Republicans cause a lot of problems, but if you basically got rid of Republicans entirely and had a supermajority of Democrats everywhere then you'd have... California and Los Angeles...

Tents are springing up in downtown DC. That was not a thing pre-pandemic.

To 6, yes the US is bad, and US healthcare is bad in certain idiosyncratic ways, but waiting forever for tests is the norm in the Anglosphere. Canada and the UK are perhaps even worse than the US!

Let's solve two problems at once and hire the homrless to run death panels to make quick decisions on health care.

25: A lot of CA and LA's problems are caused by Republicans in other states. I'd argue it's a credit to your city for it to have a homelessness crisis, because it means you're more welcoming to the homeless than other cities.

8: I feel bad for the guy who helped them dispose of it. As far as I could tell he did none of those things.

Here I can at least easily blame our homelessness problems on Republicans in the simplest way, namely I'm pretty sure the homeless population here are Trumpers by a huge margin. But I doubt that's true in LA.

Re: homeless/unhoused. I'm not sure how much put mentally ill homeless have increased visibly in the way they have elsewhere.

Downtown Boston doesn't seem to have a ton - at least not in the nicer areas - financial business and touristy. Methadone mile near BMC had big encampment of drug users, and that has definitely grown. I don't go there, so I don't see it.

I hear more about it in Lowell. And I think there's a lot of people in poorer areas, Lawrence and Lowell, for example, who are couch surfing with friends and family. That's a problem with kids. And ai see the single mothers in transitional housing (motels) in the suburbs. The couch surfers would probably be fine if there were more affordable housing.

32.1 My hunch is that some of that isn't exactly about mental illness, but about a shift back from opiates to meth. The shift from meth to opiates here (I forget exactly when, but maybe 6 or 7 years ago?) lead to a noticeable increase in the number of homeless people and a noticeable increase in overdose deaths, but also a noticeable decrease in unpredictable and threatening behavior. The past year or so there seems to be a shift back to more unpredictable and threatening behavior, some of which is obviously meth-related, and some of which it's not clear to me whether it's meth-linked or not.

I meant to say "Lawrence and Lynn" and not "Lowell" twice,

The 3 Ls. Lynn, Lynn City of sin.

23: If I were right now empowered to solve our local housing crisis and had a heavily armed praetorian guard to help me do it but had to start right away and could not do much consulting, here is what I'd do:

1. Deal with visible street-level homelessness by using city funds to buy or lease several small hotels. I would provide different levels of accommodation at different sites, I would concentrate doctors, dentists and social services navigators at each site and I would provide both transit vouchers and purpose-transit so that people would not feel totally cut off from needs that were not onsite. I would expect and accept - while trying to mitigate - damage and problems in sites that deal with people who have years of homelessness, lots of trauma and substantial addiction issues.

2. I would provide housing vouchers both to people emerging from homelessness and people at risk of homelessness. The best way to deal with homelessness is to keep people in their existing homes.

3. I would immediately begin repairing existing public housing instead of letting it get rundown with a view to bulldozing it or privatizing it, which is what's been done ever since I moved here in 1997. If possible I would build new city-run sites modeled on the existing small-scale public housing that remains. If land issues made that impossible, I would begin building larger public housing modeled on some of the fairly successful new Native-run buildings near where I live now.

4. I would [mumble mumble French Revolution] our existing mayor and replace him with any minimally competent civil servant without close ties to property developers.

5. I would seize a lot of police funding and redirect it toward crisis intervention teams and city services, including city services for existing homeless encampments until people could be gotten into hotels.

Honestly, we need public housing, ideally small apartment buildings with green space. The city needs to build it and run it. We need to take pressure off the bottom of the market and we need to stop letting middle men skim rents and fees. This is a blue city in a blue state; we can absolutely run decent public housing if we just throw some money at it. Developers are crooks and liars and build shitty buildings; we don't need a bunch of thin-walled stick built garbage like I've been inside.

Also I would build or convert a bunch of bedsits (basically one jump up from SROs because they should all have kitchenettes and bathrooms). Many, many people would be happy with a solidly built small studio at a modest price. Again, this would take pressure off the market.

I'd look into laws about boarding houses and see if the city could support safe, up-to-code conversions so that people could board in different parts of the city and so that people could make a modest living by running a boarding house.

In short, I would try to overwhelm developers by creating city-funded affordable housing to take away upward pressure on rents. I would also inspect and rules lawyer the fuck out of them and enforce all tenants' rights laws fully.

That is assuming that we can't just have a revolution and break their haughty power that way. But honestly, it will be easier to have a revolution than get rid of our existing trash mayor and his buddies.

Yes Republicans cause a lot of problems, but if you basically got rid of Republicans entirely and had a supermajority of Democrats everywhere then you'd have... California and Los Angeles...

I'm not especially knowledgeable about homelessness issues, but the problem of wealth inequality is a national/global one, not one caused by local Democrats. The failure to build sufficient housing is a local issue to be sure, but I don't see how bringing more Republicans into office would help that problem. LA mayoral candidate Rick Caruso is basically a Republican, having switched party affiliations just prior to launching his campaign in a cynical effort to make himself seem more palatable. He's best known as the builder of fancy fake-Main Street-style malls. They're like weird fantasies of bygone America (one is actually called "the Americana"), where wealthy shoppers can ride little trains from the Apple Store to Tiffany, as Dean Martin and Peggy Lee are piped in from speakers hidden in the foliage. Although they're built to resemble manicured, grassy parks, there are no homeless people, because they are immediately kicked out. I very much doubt that LA's housing crisis would improve under his stewardship.

Bringing more Republicans into office obviously wouldn't help, that wasn't what I was saying at all. My point is that even Democrats suck, like everything in America does, because they're American.

Totally support some parts of 35 (housing vouchers, buying/leasing hotels, building lots more public housing), but greatly confused by the hostility towards "developers" -- what are the connotations of that word beyond people who build buildings?

Everyone likes to be near to a nice salad.

This made me laugh way too hard.

Yeah, Frowner's ideas are good, and I don't have specifically different or better in any realistic sense -- that is, I'm sure that there are specific problems with any off-the-cuff idea that I'd need more expertise to work around, but these are general ideas. I like the 'bedsit' format for one level of housing, I had been thinking about well-run SROs as something that should be reintroduced, but bedsits would be better if they were roughly comparable in resources required.

Really, what I think is necessary is lots and lots of different simultaneous approaches. General YIMBY upzoning and allowing the building of dense market-rate housing, all that kind of thing, to relieve the pressure of housing scarcity generally. Investment in currently existing public housing to get it all in good shape. Building more public housing, and in locations that are accessible to public transit and jobs. Emergency financial assistance to people in danger of becoming homeless. Accessible emergency mental health care and drug treatment, again, to keep people from becoming homeless. Safe, humane emergency shelter to get people off the streets the same day. Different levels of supported housing for unhoused people with different levels of functioning and needs.

Not everyone who's living on the street needs the same thing. A young healthy person who just can't make the rent right now might not need more than a bedsit or SRO; someone with complicated medical or mental health or substance use issues might need much more. But we should be supplying all the different levels of what's needed, and connecting individual people to whatever it is they need.

39: But are you alone, near the salad?

I am kind of with torque, though, on developers. If we're not positing total revolution, some housing is going to be built and owned privately, and I want to increase the supply of private housing simultaneously with increasing the supply of public housing. I want housing in desirable areas to be abundant. And that, I think, means developers.

If there are quality issues with what's being built, that's a matter for building codes, but I would hesitate to make the perfect the enemy of the habitable.

Even public housing is built by developers, no? Or is the idea to have the army do it?

35 is good, and it's interesting to think through my response. My first reaction was, "these all sound like good ideas, and presumably they've been tried in other places are there good examples of success?"

My second thought was, "what threshold am I using to define as success?" Just as a thought experiment, if there was an initiative in my city which ended up reducing chronic homelessness by 50%, and the number of people who were sleeping in cars or couch surfing by 60%, that would be a huge success and would still mean a larger unhoused population than I remember from 20 years ago -- which is just to say that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and subconsciously act like the only standard is total success.

Second, I just did a quick search for studies on the success of the housing first model -- I don't feel well informed but have the sense that it's been successful. This is the most assertively positive version:

My own favorite study of the PSH model--the study I find myself returning to again and again--comes from here at BHHI. Margot, fellow BHHI faculty member Maria Raven, MD, and Matthew Niedzwiecki, PhD, conducted a randomized control trial of a PSH intervention offered in Santa Clara County on a Housing First basis. (For those who don't consume much social science research: Randomized control trials are just about the closest you can get to replicating ideal laboratory conditions when studying a policy intervention out in the field.) The target population for this intervention was people with extremely high needs; as the researchers noted in their writeup of the study for Health Services Review, "Participants averaged five hospitalizations, 20 visits to the emergency department, five to psychiatric emergency services, and three to jail in the two years prior to being enrolled."

In other words, this Housing First-aligned treatment was specifically for the hardest-to-treat members of Santa Clara's unhoused community. The results of the intervention were extraordinary: 86% of those who received the treatment were successfully housed and remained housed for the vast majority of the follow-up period (which averaged around three years). Similarly, there was a sharp drop in utilization of emergency psychiatric services among the treatment group, corresponding to a rise in scheduled mental health visits.

But the conclusion:

So why is California still experiencing a homelessness crisis? It's not because we don't know how to house people. Rather, it's because the scale of public investment in Housing First infrastructure doesn't match up to the enormity of the problem. While the state took a step in the right direction this year when it allocated $12 billion out of its most recent budget to fighting homelessness, it will take years of work to adequately build up California's existing Housing First infrastructure.

Feels like it runs up against the problem that CA has seen unbelievable costs building affordable housing. That isn't a critique of the goal of available housing, just a concern that getting there will require more than just scaling up the existing process.

This paper suggests positive results, but not quite as dramatic.

In addition to these trials in the United States, a $110 million five-city randomized controlled trial was conducted in Canada called At Home/Chez Soi. Similar to studies conducted in the United States, this trial found that Housing First participants spent 73% of their time in stable housing compared with 32% of those who received treatment as usual.

And this is an excellent long-form piece about the difference between a successful program in Houston and a more mixed result in San Diego

Over the last decade, San Diego embarked on a very different journey, launching a series of one-off projects -- some modeled on Housing First principles. Compared to the 55% decline in homelessness in the Houston area since 2011, the number of homeless people in the San Diego area has decreased just 19%, to about 7,700, according to the latest official homeless census.

San Diego's handful of Housing First initiatives were successful in housing more than 1,000 homeless people, records showed. And, according to one study, millions in taxpayer dollars were saved compared to taxpayer-funded services frequently used by the homeless.

...

Similar to Houston before its overhaul, San Diego operated "without a strategic plan to guide its spending decisions, organizational structure, and overall strategy," according to a city audit in February 2020. Without such a strategy, city leaders and providers weren't able to unify around a Housing First vision.

In the past, the city focused its funding on emergency shelters and caring for homeless people with disabilities. From 2010 to 2018, San Diego spent more than $62 million on permanent supportive housing and more than $30 million on shelters, city budgets show. However, from 2015 to 2018, the San Diego area had one of the highest percentages on the West Coast of people returning to homelessness after two years, and the length of stay in emergency shelters also increased.

There are parts of the government that aren't the army. It would be perfectly conceivable for a state government to directly buy land, hire architects and contractors, and just build stuff. I agree that fixating on developers as a problem is wrong, but they're not a logical necessity.

This time, leave Mother Cabrini out of it.

I agree they're not a logical necessity, I disagree that the anywhere in the US has the state capacity to do it. It's also hard to imagine state governments paying competitive rates for the people doing said buying and hiring (we'll call them schmevelopers).

I'm feeling very warmly toward Mother Cabrini right now. She's the unofficial patron saint of parking, and she came through for me after a long drive on Sunday. I mean, it makes sense that she would, she's right in the neighborhood.

Ok, whatever, "developers" in the sense of "investment-oriented companies that build housing which will be privately owned with a view to generating a profit". The companies that are building, eg, the new, expensive, tax-break-receiving lofts downtown aren't just innocent little bunnies who own construction equipment and stumbled into building $2500 a month one bedrooms; they are lobbyists and crooks who build as badly as they can and offload what they build as soon as they've extracted as much money as possible.

Minneapolis has a lot of new construction; it's just that it's all built with the idea of charging as much as possible to the richest possible tenants. I needed to stay with a friend to help out for a couple of months a few years ago and she lived in one of those places - a recently built upscale apartment building in a trendy neighborhood. In the still of the night, I could hear the guy in the apartment next door snoring through the walls. I hate to think of what would have happened if there had been a fire, since everything was incredibly flammable and shoddy. And the rent! Oh my god, it was almost $2000 a month. I was sleeping next to this enormous single-paned window with a "view" of the similar building across the street and I nearly froze every night. That glass was like ice.

Notice that you are paying stupid money to live in Minneapolis. Even back before everything went to shit here people shouldn't have been paying loony tunes rents like that; I mean I like Minneapolis but it's not exactly cosmopolitan, you know?

47: State governments don't pay "competitive rates" for lawyers either, but they still manage to hire some and we do adequate jobs.

48: I didn't realize. Maybe we can get someone to make it official?

were successful in housing more than 1,000 homeless people

As of the recent Point in Time Count, Sacramento has more than 8,000 unhoused residents, up 30% in the last couple years.

Relatively large successes still aren't keeping pace.

I agree with the 'do it all' approach, but every single location gets immediate pushback. The anti-homeless mood around here is getting pretty ugly.

If opiates/meth are a big driver of the real visible problems (and when you ride your bike by the tweaking/crashing people, it is hard to deny), then I'd want to see simultaneous medical delivery of these drugs and lots of treatment options and harm reductions and legalization.

50: Fair enough, I retract that somewhat, though I do think state governments are having increasing problems recruiting. School teachers most notably, but also pretty much across the board.

For example, we're trying to hire a new entry level admin position here, and the search completely failed, exactly one qualified applicant who found a better job. American states are too cheep to hire in a workers market.

In terms of visible, street-level homelessness, I would like to start by talking to a broad range of homeless people in as much depth as possible.

Some questions that may have been partially answered for Minneapolis elsewhere:

1. What is the gender and age break-out of homelessness? I know the statistics on race and sexuality.
2. Some kind of tabbed data about how long people have been homeless, whether they have been homeless more than once, etc
3. Which comes first, addiction or homelessness? I am personally betting that homelessness often comes first, or at least housing precarity often comes first.
4. At what age did now-adults first experience homelessness? Did they have family or friends who were also sometimes homeless?
5. Why do they think they're homeless?

A lot of long term street-level homeless people here are Native, and you don't need to be a genius to grasp that their situation is overdetermined.

If you read that Unicorn Riot piece I linked upthread, it has a bunch of stuff about how MPLS, unlike the rest of the metro, has gotten richer and whiter in the past ten years, and it has some statistics on houses bought up by investment firms in the recession.

I cannot help but feel that rental companies are to blame for a lot of literal street-level homelessnes. Literally almost twenty years ago, before I had even heard of Unfogged, I had a job which involved doorknocking basically every house in my large, low-income neighborhood, many of them twice. I have literally walked every street of this place. But anyway - at the time, there were still a few old-style boarding houses, some for singles and some for families. I also chatted with a lot of people who were living with three or four other people in a really small apartment. Most of those people were recent immigrants or Native. The boarding houses have all been torn down now - I used to go by most of them regularly on my bike. Rents are a lot higher and property companies enforce a lot of rules about visitors and unrelated people living together that smaller landlords didn't. I would not be surprised if a lot of the people who used to live in those places are homeless now.

So the main problem is that our cities and states are too weak, crooked and/or failed to tax adequately, or if they tax adequately, they are too crooked and/or extorted by the cops and the corps to pay for services. There's a lot of money in Minneapolis; whenever I go to any of the fancy neighborhoods I am astonished by the huge number of gentrified businesses and restaurants that have sprung up in the last few years. The retail landscape is completely different than it used to be. There is absolutely no mere dollar reason that we can't solve these problems - the are insoluble not because the money doesn't exist but because the state is too weak to get the money.

I keep repeating this, so I've likely said it here before.

I saw some infographic I can't find again that said that pre-WWII, half of the people in NY rented by the bed (boarding houses) rather by the apartment. If you take away the affordable model of housing for *half the population* you just aren't ever going to be able to replace that.

That's true, and the original Reddit post hit on it. We jumped right in to discussing the bottom end, but there's the rich end as well.

It's not just a matter of failing to tax, it's often a matter of affirmatively prohibiting cheaper housing like boarding houses, SROs, and so on. I don't know local Minneapolis law, but I'd bet that the missing boarding houses haven't been replaced because they're forbidden now. If I'm right about that, that sort of thing is part of what needs to be changed.

I don't think all the boarding house residents were there because of poverty. My dad lived as a boarder for over a decade before he got married. He didn't live in an apartment because then he would have had to clean up after himself and, though he did fine at that later in life, at the time it never occurred to him that he should do so. There were widows with too much house and too little money, there were single men who assumed a house was what a woman kept and who had income.

As someone who lived in two different boardinghousesconvertedtostudentcoops, I don't think they have to be designated as the poor person option. I think they're great for community as well.

Before labor-saving appliances, it wasn't just community but simply how you could get the domestic work done if you couldn't afford servants and were not so poor that you had to do everything yourself.

The tricky thing about 61 is that they're not likely to function well both as a community option for people who can afford other housing, and also as a place where meth addicts can live. You kind of have to pick one or the other, because people who can afford not to share hallways with meth addicts will move out.

I think we're hoping that the meth part is mostly because of living unhoused and after some housing (or having never lost housing) and treatment, isn't still a factor.

But yes. It sucks to live near or with addicts.

My parents housed a homeless (or at least insecurely homed) recovering opioid addict for a while, and it was ok for a while until he fell off the wagon. There's certainly a big interplay between housing and addiction, but fixing the housing problem isn't going to come close to fixing the addiction problem. Yes some people don't have families, or have families that can't afford a spare room for a relative, but in a lot of cases people have to burn through a lot of good will from their family before they end up on the street and more often than not addiction is going to be what burned those bridges.

And this is why we need halfway housing and we need something like "wet" shelters - halfway housing to support people who are trying to get off whatever they are on and some kind of "wet" housing for people who can't get off of it. I'm not saying that I'd like to live with a bunch of meth users, but they have to live somewhere, and chaos with a roof and someone to call 911 is better than "that vacant lot, at least until the cops move them along".

I add that there are more high-functioning heroin addicts than popularly believed - a friend kept their heroin addiction secret from all of us for years while [doing a fairly demanding thing], maintaining a marriage and having a full, fun social life. Then, boom, overdose, the whole thing came out. This person managed to get through rehab a couple of times, is no longer on heroin and is leading a normal life. I used to know another person who, it turned out, was stealing from a local volunteer project because he was using heroin. He had been completing a pretty rigorous academic program, also had a pretty active social life and seemed pretty normal - we used to hang out all the time, and I assume that he was, like, shooting up in the bathroom occasionally. He's recovered too but we're not friends anymore for unrelated reasons.

My point being that some people who are on heroin, at least, are going to be able to live fairly normal lives as they try to get off heroin and will therefore not have complex housing needs.

63: Part of what's necessary is different categories of housing that serve people with different needs. There are going to be some people with addiction or mental health issues that may make them difficult tenants for boarding houses (and that's not going to be everyone with additiction or mental health issues, plenty of whom might be fine neighbors). That doesn't mean that boarding houses shouldn't exist, it means that people in circumstances that will make them difficult tenants should be in some different form of professionally supported housing.

I'm waving my hands here, but it really all does come down to being willing to spend the money. And not even necessarily that much money, when you net out what you would save on decreased emergency costs, but even if it is a great deal of money it'd be worth it.

Crossed with Frowner, but yes, also what they said.

66: I bet there are people who use heroin in a way that wouldn't be problematic but for it being illegal.

6 et seq much of my new job involves learning how happy people in my new home (Brigadoon) are with their healthcare. Crom the dog assists by making me seem harmless and approachable. And most of them are heartbreakingly understanding - they know how much of a backlog COVID has created and they don't want to be a bother. They'd rather like some dental care (this is an issue nationwide) and some of them suggested I should napalm their local doctors surgery with the doctors inside but apart from that they're happy within their modest expectations.

My folks have been more cognizant in the last few years that upzoned private development, while a vital form of harm reduction, may not give the visible results people need at the lower end of the market in nearly enough time, and we need to put our shoulder into upping state capacity alongside. A state social housing agency with a new mandate to stop building housing as spun-glass one-offs, to get the costs down by routine, plus have enough middle- and upper-income admixture to pay for themselves could get around the public funding constraint by one new building paying for the next.

I'm not saying that I'd like to live with a bunch of meth users, but they have to live somewhere, and chaos with a roof and someone to call 911 is better than "that vacant lot, at least until the cops move them along".

This is logical but anecdotally, this article quotes a couple of people saying that preferred living on the street to living in the existing cheap beds.

Regent tenter Alan Heath said he prefers living on the street to SROs, where the wheelchair user said "I've been attacked, I've been beaten."

"I feel safer in a tent out here than I would in one of these buildings around here," said the Heath, who turns 60 Aug. 30. "I feel a lot safer and calmer, it's a lot more peaceful being out here in a tent."

...

"Basically we were on the street for the past five years, because livin' in the Brandiz (Hotel) is like livin' on the street," said Lagrelle, 29, originally from Alberta. "You might as well live on the streets if you're livin' there."

"I'd rather sleep on Hastings than sleep in the (bleeping) Brandiz Hotel, I'll tell you that much," said Wolfe, 31, who was born in Saskatchewan. "Seriously. He would sleep there and I would sleep outside."

That isn't an argument in favor of people living on the street as a best option but, again, trying to think about what the challenges are (and what is the threshold to count a plan as successful)

Interesting article with more detail about the hotels like the one mentioned in the article in 72 with more details on the challenges and the current status of their plan to turn them around: https://thetyee.ca/News/2009/10/29/BeaconForHomelessness/

73: That is a good article, thanks.

Basically the biggest challenge in that article is how do you keep drug dealers out of a building that everyone knows is full of potential customers? In particular, you can't just let anyone rent a room there, and you have to carefully monitor who enters the building. An SRO where you can just rent a room if you want to is a non-starter for housing recovering addicts.

72: Yes, the existing cheap beds are bad! And honestly, if some people just prefer a tent in general, well, society can handle a few people in tents down by the river, etc.

But the existing cheap beds are bad because they are lousy buildings badly administered. I mean, I've lived in a lot of apartments in my time and never gotten beaten up in the hallway.

The other thing is, people get beaten and killed on the street, too. There was a murder last week in one of the encampments and nobody knows (or nobody is saying) anything about why it happened - one of the big guys in the encampment and someone just walked into his tent and shot him. I talked to someone at my volunteer thing who knew him and was talking about it.

I'm not totally sure how to separate violent people from non-violent reliably. I think you could probably do a rough job by separating teens, families, single women, single men who preferentially seek out quiet housing and the rest of the men, plus probably sorting by age.

If I had my praetorian guard and were facing this problem, I would ask homeless people. I would particularly ask who had lived in a peaceful and stable encampment and how that happened. I have seen one from the outside that was all women, had de facto walls around the encampment and had some people who were out front every day.

At some point you're going to get into the ugly problem of enforcement because you're going to run into some people who won't or can't live peacefully among others, but I think there are a lot of structural ways to minimize the number of times this problem occurs. Again, I would talk to unhoused people or people who have gotten out of homelessness and ask them a lot of detailed questions before coming up with a plan on this.

73: Err, not current, that article is from 2009.

Also, this thing I'm about to say is not something I can defend with specifics, but it's a strong impression.

I think there's a disproportionate amount of coverage of unhoused people who refuse the shelter that's available to them because it's a way to blame them for living on the street and to take the responsibility off the local government for providing shelter. I see stories about people who refuse to live in shelters; I don't see stories about safe, well operated shelters/halfway houses/low income housing sitting vacant because people prefer to live on the streets.

I can't prove that refusal to accept shelter isn't a significant driving force behind homelessness, but I really don't believe that it is.

I think there's a disproportionate amount of coverage of unhoused people who refuse the shelter that's available to them because it's a way to blame them for living on the street and to take the responsibility off the local government for providing shelter.

I think it can cut either way.

During the debates about the local encampment people from the city would often say, "we have empty beds in the shelter; they should go there" (as a way to blame them for choosing to live on the street) and advocates were saying that there were a significant number of people who (1) didn't want to go to the shelter because they objected to the religious content, (2) didn't want to go to the shelter because they liked having more space or (3) had been trespassed from the shelter because of previous behavior. I don't know how large those numbers were, but the concerns were definitely being raised to push back against, "they should just go to the shelter."

Yeah, that's how journalism works. The person on the street who doesn't want to go to a shelter in right out there on the street, and willing to give that opinion. Any other narratives are more complicated and would require journalists to work differently. And would be more challenging to viewers.

I was at a city council candidate candidate forum last year -- I probably related this story at the time -- and one participant asked the candidate (an incumbent) why we weren't hearing more about the city's very considerable efforts to help the homeless people. Why aren't we hearing more success stories? It isn't because there aren't any, it's because part of the success comes from treating people as people, with privacy, dignity, etc.

This is a small town. To people driving by, including media types. the people in camps are an undifferentiated mass. The city social workers know a whole bunch of them quite well, and work with them, given the resource constraints. Of course, the fact that getting a job paying the medium income isn't enough money to afford much of anything means that the people sleeping in cars and couch surfing are just waiting for an opening in an apartment to share, or a chance to move away.

Yeah. No one thing solves the whole problem, but all that last class of people needs is public housing at reasonable rents. Their only real problem is that market rents are unreasonable and out of reach.

I agree with everything Frowner and LB have said in this thread. Frowner's ideas in 35 are all excellent and are indeed things that various cities are already doing. As I've said before, this isn't a problem that we don't know how to solve. It just takes way more resources and political will than anyone has been willing to put into it so far.

To clarify one point: public housing is built by public housing authorities, which are governmental or quasi-governmental agencies funded by HUD. Every city and state has one, which can be either a stand-alone entity or an agency with other functions too, and there's also a parallel tribal housing authority system that has different rules and has been able to do some really interesting work in some places. These authorities are indeed considered "developers" in some contexts and certainly fill the same role in project development as private sector developers. The physical construction is almost always done by private contractors for both public and private housing projects.

To the OP, obviously this is a problem lots of places but LA is notorious for being exceptionally bad for reasons that are unclear at a distance.

I haven't been to LA recently, is LA exceptionally bad in the context of California? Or is it more accurate to say California is exceptionally bad?

I haven't been there in a long time, but the impression I get is that LA is unusually bad even by California standards.

Sacramento and Oakland are visibly surprisingly bad. Bad like shocking-to-me and I am not a naif on living in Sacramento.

If you look specifically at overcrowding statistics, LA is a league above the rest of California and the country.

LA is so crowded that UCLA had to move to the Big 10.

In related news, several people drowned in the flooding caused by the insane rainstorms in Seoul over the past couple of days, including a family who lived in a half-basement apartment. These apartments were made notorious by the film Parasite, so of course this is the detail that caught international attention. In response, the Seoul metropolitan government is banning residential half-basement apartments. They haven't announced plans for how they're going to make up the housing stock elsewhere; there may not be any such plans. As long as the most visible sign of overcrowding and poverty goes away, the problem is as good as fixed, apparently.

I lived in a basement apartment in Columbus, Ohio once. But only during the week because I was commuting to Pittsburgh. It did flood once, but only like an inch deep.

To answer about whether CA is unique (and whether LA is unique to CA), California has had an outrageous problem with the unhoused since I was a kid. I used to visit family every summer, and I remember our path around multiple downtowns being blocked by aggressive, frightening panhandlers in the late 80s. City regulations changed to make it illegal for panhandlers to block pedestrian paths, and the population seemed to wax and wane, but California has mild temperatures and generally humane policies. For example, beaches with public showers and bathrooms and few cops hassling the unhoused. People heading there for kind of romantic reasons with their last few dollars hoping for a dream come true. The folks I'd see got noticeably younger in the 90s (think runaway teenagers), druggier in the 2000s (teenagers on meth). One morning in the late 2000s, I came across a guy dead on a bench (EMS arrived basically immediately after we clocked that the guy was probably dead and not asleep in an odd position so didn't get close enough to get a pulse). I've lived in a few places across the US, and I've never seen anything like California in terms of how many people are out on the streets.

LA, even for California, is extra horrifying. I don't know exactly what's going on, but I am guessing that San Francisco proper (1) doesn't have many folks left who were one bad stretch from losing housing and (2) has fewer public/outdoor type amenities (3) is smaller so there are just fewer people sleeping rough so no giant camps. Friends we saw last Christmas in LA have been watching as camps under freeways have grown and grown. They've lived there almost ten years, and they say they've never seen anything like it anywhere.

For what it's worth, I see more unhoused folks here in my small town than I have in the past 15 years or so, but it's hard to say whether it's geography, local poverty, or temporal trend.

I want to believe in public housing, but having grown up outside Chicago when the "projects" were at their most derelict and dangerous (prior to their demolition), I am really hesitant to feel optimistic about anything where you put a bunch of troubled people in multiunit housing. I mean, that certainly makes the most sense on paper, but I am having trouble imagining the continued efforts and resources needed to keep things from crumbling. Better than sleeping outdoors? In Chicago, yeah, probably.

Apparently, Brad Pitt says we're all going to die. On the one hand, he's just an actor. On the other hand, he's got an agent who is probably connected to many great sources of information that aren't common knowledge.

Well, we are all going to die. Some of us sooner than others.

I feel he wouldn't have bothered to say anything if he didn't have specific knowledge that it was all of us, soonish.

Anyway, I'm not saying that if I knew a comet were racing to the earth, that definitely among the first people I'd tell would be Brad Pitt's agent. But I'm also not saying it wouldn't be Brad Pitt's agent for certain.

93: Public housing exists in other places. It exists in New York, and it's shitty because NYCHA doesn't do maintenance, but it's not a dystopian horror of tenants murdering each other. If the plumbing and plastering and painting were adequate it'd be fine. Just because people can't afford market rents doesn't mean they're too dangerous to live indoors.

There have certainly been public housing horror stories, but they're not inevitable. You just have to spend a reasonable amount of money on upkeep and it works.

Public housing in general isn't a place to shovel everyone currently in an encampment immediately into the same apartment tower. It's so the encampments don't keep on filling up every time someone who isn't yet "troubled people" can't find an affordable place to live someplace that lets them make it to their job, and ends up on the street and becomes "troubled people".

We knew someone in NYC who had somehow inherited the apartment he grew up in in the UWS projects. And it was nice enough and cheap enough that he planned to stay there forever, and worked part-time so as to be able to keep it.

I want to believe in public housing, but having grown up outside Chicago when the "projects" were at their most derelict and dangerous

Well, a lot of that was deliberate neglect. But speaking to the track record with public housing in the US overall, one of our idiosyncrasies is that our fully-public housing is normally limited to low-income only. Most countries do mixed-income and that seems to be more sustainable, both financially and politically. And one of the forces that pushed us into this low-income-only model back in the thirties? The real estate industry.

Minneapolis has long had potentially pretty decent public housing - small apartment buildings scattered around a sort of "campus", usually. Our incredibly corrupt and vile political class has been pulling the same bait and switch for literally twenty-five years - one of the first things I remember when I moved here was a situation where they claimed that the buildings "needed repair" and they were going to repair them and everyone should move out (but the city wouldn't find them anyplace to live meanwhile) and in two years they could all move back in to the repaired buildings. But by happy coincidence the buildings were privatized and the rents went up and all those people never moved back in after all. And they've done this same thing multiple times, intercut with sheer privatization as they are attempting to do with some of last public housing we've actually got.

Grimly, several of our most "progressive" city council members, elected on comparatively radical platforms, are in bed with various property companies and have been working to privatize. On that note, the vast majority of our "progressive" city council people have proven to be huge disappointments - the one who made a lot of noise about how radical and anti-racist she was has turned out to be this hugely pro-business cop-friendly person who is IMO making the homelessness problems worse in my immediate neighborhood.

If people want to make decent public housing, they can. If they want to stick people into badly designed and unsuitable banlieux until the land values go up enough that it's necessary to kick them out again, then they'll have a lot of crime and misery and hopelessness, which they will then use as a justification to do nothing.

Minneapolis is, frankly, a trash fire. It used to be a comparatively well-run city but increasing economic polarization has changed the political picture so much that it's hard to see how anything can get done that actually helps the bottom 25%. I really used to love it here and now I don't - things have changed so much that it sometimes seems pointless to even live in the city proper except that I can bike commute. It's like your choice is crime, needles, noise and trash or wealthy neighborhoods that hire their own extra police.

102 last basically sounds like America.

My brother and his wife live in Mpls, and a few years back, my sister-in-law was very excited about a candidate -- I don't remember whether city or county -- and did all the volunteer things. The candidate won, and I sure hope it's not the person you describe.

[I looked it up, and it was county. They live in District 4.]

My point about multiunit public housing for folks with low income is that things go wrong in the same predictable way (basically, there's not political will to fund decent housing for everyone who can't afford it). The ending where things are demolished and land is sold to a developer is fairly predictable, too. Perhaps lead abatement and building renovations would make NYC public housing a nice place to live. And perhaps the housing authority has done the numbers and it is more cost efficient to renovate than it would be to sell and move residents elsewhere because housing is uniquely expensive and scarce (Chicago's government relocated lots of families to lower cost suburbs - I can't remember how funding worked exactly, but it was a nasty thing to do). I can't think of any major US cities that have public housing that I think of as a fine place to live/raise a family, but maybe I'm wrong! I'd personally be happy to appoint anyone here to be a housing policy dictator with generous budget with planned transitions to the next lefty dictator in line for generations.

In all seriousness, my comment is more about how to spend imaginary housing dollars. Building multiunit complexes is one possibility. Increasing value of vouchers/subsidies like Section 8 is another. I suppose that theoretically, building something like SROs/buying hotels/etc is a third. The downside to the first is that it's hard (for me) to imagine cities handling property management of (let's say) city-owned mixed income housing. If they subcontract it to for-profits, there's money wasted (enriching the property management). Maybe subcontracting to nonprofits would work sustainably with mixed income residents? That's a lot of housing, though, if you want to stay below, say, 20% of residents needing subsidization, because now the city is managing (in some way) 5X the number of units needed for low-income residents. Fine with me, I like big governments and I cannot lie. But that's almost certainly not universally true of other taxpayers. And increasing direct subsidies/vouchers is good, too, but the money is going back to property owners/management and probably not really encouraging them to make capital improvements to properties. SROs/hotels seem like they'd be appropriate as transitional housing, not longterm, but sure. I liked the eviction moratoriums during COVID. I think keeping folks in housing they are in is good and worthy of funding, too (mostly for simplicity - still making the rich richer). I just am not sure what is sustainable over longer periods of time without that generously funded housing dictator.

I'm not saying that you're wrong about the difficulty of getting the necessary funding for housing, that is a big political lift because American voters don't like helping poor people and they don't like building housing. But it's a political problem, not a policy problem. There's nothing particularly confusing or difficult about what needs to be done: increased supply of unsubsidized housing AND subsidized permanent housing AND transitional housing AND services that keep people from losing the adequate housing they have AND services that support currently unhoused people with issues that interfere with moving them back into housing.

While the sort of effort that would be necessary is a lot of money, and I'm not going to claim it completely pays for itself, it does have serious payoffs: straightforwardly economic, in that "troubled people" living on the streets cause a lot of expensive trouble that goes away if they have decent housing; direct benefits to the people getting housing and services of course; and massive indirect benefits to other residents of the cities where unhoused people are concentrated.

If you take as an axiom that spending on housing and services will be stingy and mismanaged to the point of uselessness, then it follows directly from that axiom that the spending will be pointless wasted money. But there's nothing making that a law of nature -- the kind of money that would make a real difference is big but by no means impossible, if we could sell it to voters.

Re Section 8. My old landlord had several buildings in town and 2 different LLCs. Our building never had Section 8, but one of the other buildings did, and in the end it was "too much trouble". I don't know if that meant they found it administratively burdensome. Hell, they didn't keep track of the interest in our last month's rent and had to pay us the full 5% per year when we left. Or, it might have been that they found the section 8 tenants difficult/less reliable in some way.

Not being aware of public housing where you'd want to raise a family depends tightly on what you're calling public housing. But if you want a program that used government action (tax abatements and subsidized mortgages) to build middle-class affordable housing in New York, the Mitchell-Lama program created a whole lot of housing that I would literally be very happy to live in and would have been happy to live in when my kids were small: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell-Lama_Housing_Program

I think most of the buildings are out of the program now, but when instituted it worked as it was intended to.

You could say that it enriched developers -- "still making the rich richer". Fine. If you're going to argue both that it is impractical for the state to directly provide housing in the quantities needed, and that it's unseemly to provide housing through private markets because it's "still making the rich richer", then yes, the problem is insoluble. Me, I think that if there's a cost-effective way to spend public money that provides decent housing where it's needed, I am indifferent to whether it produces a certain number of rich people. I am happy to deal with that problem through progressive taxation.

I remember seeing stories about how to better implement housing vouchers, does anyone know if there are continuing success stories?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/4/20726427/raj-chetty-segregation-moving-opportunity-seattle-experiment

It is interesting to reread this, now, and think about how much more familiar YIMBY arguments have become in the last three years. It mentions building more apartments at the end, but I feel like the same article, now, would foreground it much more strongly.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/10/21001692/housing-vouchers-discrimination-racism-landlords

That's a credit to the YIMBYs, that they have been making the argument, and a good reminder that it's only recently that it's been a mainstream issue (in a significant way).

SROs/hotels seem like they'd be appropriate as transitional housing, not longterm, but sure.

Hlafway houses also, which have pretty close oversight and strict rules that might make them an easier sell. IMO since the problem is basically political, some way of personalizing a halfway house or an SRO as a helpful solution rather than a blight to be avoided might sway votes; I know someone who runs public housing for developmentally and otherwise disabled people in downstate Illinois. He's trying to raise public awareness of the existence of his agency-- that is, just to ask as many people as possible "who serves the disabled?" Frowner mentioned the importance of keeping dealers out.

No idea about how effective or quick this could be, but public health ads seem to basically work this way. On the other hand, it seems basically helpful to Dems that broad public health measures for COVID are basically over, the public's preferred level of awareness for any real problem seems to be zero. Shrug emoji I guess.
Some way of publicly making the point that the narrow step of having a public housing backup for people having a few rough years saves money and human beings.

Or, it might have been that they found the section 8 tenants difficult/less reliable in some way.

We rent out our old house to friends who are on Section 8, and that experience has made me even more puzzled by the widespread hostility of landlords toward Section 8. It's a great deal for landlords! Tenants pay a fixed percentage of their income in rent, then the government pays the remaining rent directly to the landlord. It dramatically reduces the risk of nonpayment compared to just renting to someone, and the paperwork isn't particularly onerous. I think it is fundamentally just prejudice toward the sorts of people who are on it.

Some guy at a talk I once attended pointed out that if your plan is to provide substandard housing, Section 8 has its problems. I think the key is to not say that part directly.

112: I mean, basic hostility was my default assumption.

I do wonder if there are enforced safety standards. know around here, people often don't want to sell a house to someone with a VA loan, because the VA is super strict about lead paint, like even a shed on the property with lead paint is a no-go. Our housing stock here is old (lots pre-1978) and it was historically extremely expensive to delead. I think there is now encapsulation paint that isn't perfect but the cost is not as prohibitive. In a hot housing market, many people (I did) will waive the lead inspection piece, because I'm sure there's some somewhere.

Public financial support for lead remediation would be great!

113 beat me to it, but I was trying to say that in 114.

It dramatically reduces the risk of nonpayment compared to just renting to someone, and the paperwork isn't particularly onerous. I think it is fundamentally just prejudice toward the sorts of people who are on it.

Interesting. The link in 110 documents that it's quite common for landlords to refuse the vouchers but doesn't really explain why (other than paperwork and, in some cases, the value of the vouchers not matching the local rents).

I wonder if it's not just individual prejudice on the part of landlords but also a community dynamic -- if they know that other landlords are hesitant to take the vouchers then it makes it seem risky, regardless of the actual risk.

The article in 110 links to a letter to the editor from the Director of the Maryland multi-housing Association which is very vague

The Section 8 voucher program, established by the U.S. Department Housing and Urban Development, is also riddled with challenges. For instance, it is and always has been a voluntary program. It should remain voluntary. Doctors are not required to take Medicaid. Grocery stores are not required to take food stamps. Why is this different?

Some rental housing providers have no desire to participate in the Section 8 voucher program for a simple reason - the governmental bureaucracy. Public housing authorities and HUD make this program onerous with extra inspections, paperwork including a qualification process and an inequitable HUD contract. If HUD loosened some of these burdensome requirements, perhaps more rental providers would participate in the program.Some rental housing providers have no desire to participate in the Section 8 voucher program for a simple reason - the governmental bureaucracy. Public housing authorities and HUD make this program onerous with extra inspections, paperwork including a qualification process and an inequitable HUD contract. If HUD loosened some of these burdensome requirements, perhaps more rental providers would participate in the program.
Posted by: NickS | Link to this comment | 08-11-22 8:56 AM

I've seen similar complaints about the Section 8 vouchers; that they're a huge hassle.

Why do we make food stamps/medicaid couchers/section 8 vouchers voluntary? I know the answer is that the providers prefer it that way, but I'm asking semi-rhetorically anyway.

I do wonder if there are enforced safety standards.

There definitely are quality standards, and you have to have the property inspected. The standards are really basic though. The inspection is much less thorough than, say, the kind of home inspection you need to sell a house. I'm sure plenty of slumlords don't want even that level of scrutiny, but if their properties wouldn't pass this inspection, yikes.

117 sounds like 100% self-serving bullshit. I'm sure some PHAs add extra paperwork that makes it more of a hassle, but it's telling that they don't give any specifics. HUD does mandate the terms of the contract, but they're fine and totally in line with what a reasonable landlord should be putting in a lease anyway.

119 I think in Oregon landlords are not allowed to discriminate against section 8. That's the rumor, anyway.

120: The talk I saw was about Youngstown, Ohio.

around here, people often don't want to sell a house to someone with a VA loan, because the VA is super strict about lead paint, like even a shed on the property with lead paint is a no-go

Federal programs definitely take lead abatement very seriously. Interesting thing I learned from a colleague recently about lead: we very rarely run into it in Anchorage. I thought this was because the vast majority of our housing stock post-dates 1978, and that is true, but he said even in older houses there's very little lead paint. The reason is that lead paint was expensive and no one in those days could afford to bring it up here. The only entity that could, actually, was the military, so the only times he's seen lead paint on a property was on houses that were owned by military officers who would sneak a little paint from the base to do touch-ups on the trim and so forth. He's never seen a whole wall painted with lead paint in 20 years of doing this work.

I'm assuming housing in Ohio has to be worse than in Pittsburgh and one thing I learned from canvassing is that many inhabited houses don't look habitable to me.

I've lived here most of my life. LA's homelessness problem has gotten significantly, visibly, horrifically worse in the past decade, and the obviousness of wealth inequality is really staggering.

Indeed, the only time I've ever properly visited LA was exactly 10 years ago. And while the homelessness was worse there than anything I'd seen on the East Coast, it was comparable (and, frankly, made sense in a simple "easier to be homeless where it doesn't get life-threateningly cold" way*). Pictures I see now are literally incomprehensible to me, and apparently Skid Row is vast and yet doesn't come close to encompassing the most visible parts of the problem. It's literally hard to comprehend.

I realize this comment is late by a day or so, but I think it's hard for people to understand A. how bad it is and B. how recent it is.

*I know it's not true that homeless people migrate to warmer climes, but I don't see how it can be possible that there's zero correlation. I suppose a good test case would be Floridian cities, where building is famously easier than in CA but the weather is similarly clement

Florida is unbearable in the summer in a way that isn't true for coastal California.

*I know it's not true that homeless people migrate to warmer climes, but I don't see how it can be possible that there's zero correlation.

The link in 44 last says, of Houston:

In 2011, the Houston area had one of the highest homeless populations in the country, with more than 8,400 people without stable housing. By January 2020 that number had decreased by about 55% to around 3,800, according to the latest government homeless census. The city had earlier ended its U.S. veteran homelessness by combining local, state and federal resources to house 3,650 veterans over a three-year period, according to government data.

The 2011 figure is similar to the number Megan reported for Sacramento, but Houston is almost 5 times the size. That is a depressing comparison and, without knowing anything about the details, suggests that it really is easier to build in TX, and that makes a difference. There are probably other important differences, but CA doesn't look good.

I don't really understand how California functions. I have a cousin who lives there that I could ask, but he's never lived somewhere normal to understand the contrast.

I hate to think of what would have happened if there had been a fire, since everything was incredibly flammable and shoddy.

For the record, those apartments are, every single one of them, 100% sprinklered, and nobody has ever died from a fire* in a sprinklered building in the US. And those flimsy, hear-through walls are nonetheless built to withstand fire (in the absence of sprinklers) for 1 hour.

I know it all seems shoddy, and in many ways it is, but fire safety is, if anything, excessive and driving up costs in new construction, not the reverse.

*normal fire, not 9/11 or a fire associated with another disaster like an earthquake

If opiates/meth are a big driver of the real visible problems (and when you ride your bike by the tweaking/crashing people, it is hard to deny)

I can't find it now, but a week or two ago I read a lengthy article (The Atlantic maybe?) from 2018 about the rise of non-ephedrine-based meth that seems to be driving a lot of this. Here's a contemporaneous article that covers a lot of the same ground. Essentially, synthetic meth (for want of a better term) can be made cheaper and in vast quantities, so it's driven the other stuff off the market.

But they don't have the same effects: the other article I read talked to lots of current and past users who describe it as a completely different kind of high, very manic, and very associated with violence and antisocial behavior. NGO types describe much less ability to stay housed bc of the behavior--someone who could couch-surf with friends on old meth would find himself on the street with the new meth.

It's clearly not the whole story, but it seems to explain the rapid and recent changes we've seen in homelessness (after all, NIMBYs didn't like shelters in 2012 either, and zoning laws are 60-100 years old).

I haven't been to LA since 1999/2000. Went to Claremont, CA for my sister's graduation in 2004, but I don't even think I flew into LAX.

I was last in Los Angeles in about 1985, so obviously I'm the expert.

124: My husband says that it was biggest from aftr the civil war to the 30's. I'm sure that the 1904 Tudor house air grew up in was loaded with it, but the amount gradually went down over time, so that postwar housing had less. My neighbor across the street with a house that is basically identical to mine did the home test and found nothing. If you do a professional test, it gets recorded, so I'm nervous about that.

101 is super-correct. In the 1990s people started to move towards mixed-income projects (this was an aspect of HOPE VI), but this was then tarred as gentrification. IOW, some chunk of activists decided that poor-only public housing was the only equitable way to do things, and there's now very little consensus on how to build public housing at all, so all the energy and $$ goes into privately-developed, mixed income projects with subsidized units that tend not to be sufficiently scaled (partly bc of the financing and available subsidies).

I wonder how much of the opposition to subsidized housing that is intended for mixed income residents, rather than 100% for lowest income residents, is really sincere "activists" and how much is disingenuous NIMBYs who would oppose literally anything. It just seems like any housing has something that makes it intolerable to neighborhood residents.

I can't find it now, but a week or two ago I read a lengthy article (The Atlantic maybe?) from 2018 about the rise of non-ephedrine-based meth that seems to be driving a lot of this.

If you mean violence or other problems among the homeless, maybe. If you mean homelessness itself, no. Homelessness correlates with rent levels and not at all with mental health or substance abuse prevalences. Once people become homeless, that can bring on or exacerbate drug problems, sure.

One of the reasons you have to tackle housing for low- and middle-income people - the unforgiving rental market is the pipeline to homelessness.

So I can try meth if I own a house.

127: IMO/IME once you get away from the immediate coast, SoCal is plenty damn unbearable. It's 95º in Riverside right now, and sure the humidity's low, but there's no breeze and the UV Index is 10. The high every day in the forecast is 97º or above. Tampa's 87º with an identical heat index. Neither is pleasant without AC, but neither will kill you (Houston might--as humid as FL, as hot as CA). And neither will kill you in January either.

128: Oh, for sure. CA (and I guess increasingly WA and OR) is the worst in the country bc it's some of the best weather and some of the least construction, and the latter is a bigger factor. I'm just saying I don't think the former is a non-factor.

I think that's a false dichotomy and a lot of it is sincere activists who sincerely oppose literally anything. Like the lefty NIMBY candidate for mayor in my town was the CEO of our habitat for humanity, and is led our local anti-upzoning effort to keep housing rare.

136: NIMBY opposition is like background radiation, consistent and basically information-free. But I know people IRL and online who are absolutely sincere, lefty housing activists who oppose anything like mixed-income housing for essentially Frowner-y reasons: they want gov't-provided housing below market rates, and they don't want it provided indirectly in buildings built by for-profit developers.

And while pseudo-left NIMBYs have taken up "not enough affordable units" as a way to torpedo projects, there are genuinely sincere lefties saying the same thing. The fight we had to save our park was intimately tied up in affordable housing, so I got to know the sincere, hard core activists pretty well, and I'm telling you this was their POV. The leader of the neighborhood development nonprofit, most of whose work is in affordable housing, said in a closed meeting that she could not support any housing on the site unless it was 100% affordable, because she knew that the grassroots people would (metaphorically) riot.

More globally, IMO if you deny that counterproductive, performative purity politics are a significant factor in left-leaning activist and nonprofit spaces these days, that tells me you aren't very engaged in those spaces (or aren't being honest).

Like the lefty NIMBY candidate for mayor in my town was the CEO of our habitat for humanity, and is led our local anti-upzoning effort to keep housing rare.

Wow, that's... really something.

Habitat is a very decentralized organization and the local chapters vary a lot in outlook and capacity. Our local one is great and we do a lot of projects with them.

Yes, I do know you're right about the sincere NIMBYs. My neighborhood over the last decade there was a lot of organization against upzoning, and while I thought the opponents were wrong, and kind of bafflingly wrong, the ones I knew were sincere lefty people. They were just absolutely convinced that building mixed market-rate and subsidized housing would lead to rents skyrocketing and mass evictions for current neighborhood residents.

I lost track of which comment of wendy's I'm replying to, but the scope and scale of the California housing crisis has become almost unimaginably bad. There are major encampments of unhoused people not just in LA, but also in SF, Sac, Santa Cruz, and a bunch of other places (even Davis now has four fairly large encampments). There's a lot to say about the issue, but I tend to agree with LB and frowner: the only plausible solution at this point is trying a holistic approach on the supply and demand sides, using public and private money, and accepting that achieving decent results will be pretty bumpy in a lot of cases.

The problem with that perspective, I fear, is democracy. Teo explicitly and others implicitly talk about a lack of political will. I think that's right, but I don't think it's born entirely of cravenness or cowardice. I think decision-makers either believe or maybe correctly apprehend that voters have basically zero tolerance for the messiness mentioned above that will attend to helping the so-called undeserving poor. That's true partly because we're an individualistic, mean nation, but also because our media landscape militates against communitarian, cooperative approaches to solving hard problems. (There's a chicken-and-egg problem there, and I don't know the solution.)

Put another way, I'm pretty sure that the root rather than proximate cause of the housing crisis, at least in California, is inequality. I'd like to think that if the Democratic Party were genuinely committed to fighting inequality, a variety of other good things would follow. But I'm not sure I'm right about that. And I'm pretty sure that this generation of Democratic leaders isn't much interested in the kind of fight against inequality that I imagine is necessary to make this is a more just and decent state and nation. As ever, I blame the legacy of Ronald Reagan. And capitalism.

A lot of people really just sincerely and fundamentally do not understand the economics of housing. It's a really difficult problem especially on the left because explaining it sounds like glib Econ 101 and left-leaning people are naturally predisposed to distrust that sort of explanation. With good reason! It is a misleading oversimplification in a lot of contexts. In this one it isn't, though. Supply and demand really do explain most of what's going on.

The problem with that perspective, I fear, is democracy. Teo explicitly and others implicitly talk about a lack of political will. I think that's right, but I don't think it's born entirely of cravenness or cowardice. I think decision-makers either believe or maybe correctly apprehend that voters have basically zero tolerance for the messiness mentioned above that will attend to helping the so-called undeserving poor.

Yeah, I agree with this 100%. I've been emphasizing that the solvability of the problem as a technical matter, but I don't want to the downplay the extent to which the politics are really, really difficult. Decision-makers are making bad decisions for political reasons, but they're not wrong about the politics.

How big is the problem of Anne Heche cutting the housing supply by driving into houses?

Medium.

Very big for Anne Heche.

146.2: The other big political problem with making progress on homelessness is that it's not that voters don't care, it's that they only care about the most difficult part of the problem. If you find a way to house everyone who isn't a meth addict or a violent drunk, that'd be a wonderful thing and something we should absolutely do, but selfishlessly it's only the meth addicts and violent drunks that cause direct problems for me when I want to go pick up pastries and have to walk by a large encampment to get there. And it's hard to continence spending large amounts of money on something that doesn't make progress on what many voters will see as the "real problem." In a sense that's opposite of the "undeserving poor" problem, I think you could get people to spend money on people they saw as completely unworthy of help if it genuinely improved safety and street-level aesthetics.

146.1: On the LA front I was trying to find info on the places with the highest homlessness *per capita*, and I found a few articles but nothing citing their sources so I'm a bit skeptical. But it does look like smaller beach towns have rates at least as high as LA (SC, SB, SLO).

I think you could get people to spend money on people they saw as completely unworthy of help if it genuinely improved safety and street-level aesthetics.

There's a LOT of data to suggest this is wrong. It's just too easy to demagogue programs that help the undeserving poor. Voters seemingly only want punitive solutions the problems associated with people whom they think deserve their fate.

There are some words missing up there. I suspect you get the point.

I think I've said this here before, but when I was in Berkeley in 2020, there was a very different kind of homelessness than what I saw here. I lived right by the border of an industrial area, and there were just *tons* of vans/rvs/campers parked semi-permanently there as cheap housing. This seemed to be a very different group of people from the tent city a mile away, and really seemed to be driven directly by housing costs in a way that's just very different from what we have in my town.

but selfishlessly it's only the meth addicts and violent drunks that cause direct problems for me when I want to go pick up pastries and have to walk by a large encampment to get there

If only more homeless people took the time to cause you problems.

153: the housing crisis in Santa Cruz is literally unbelievable. Literal miles of the riverfront are now given over to an encampment of unhoused people. As I said, Davis now has four fairly large encampments (two are along the highway, one is along a railroad cut on the north side of town, the fourth is along a different railroad cut near downtown). They vary in size, but I think the largest has +/-100 people living there. That's tiny compared to what one sees in LA or even SC, but it's so much bigger than any of the communities of unhoused that used to be here that I don't really know what to make of the change, which, by the way, predates the pandemic.

Everybody in MA who doesn't already own real estate wants there to be more housing that is more affordable here, not just people who risk being homeless. Now that I own a house, I don't really care if it's value doesn't skyrocket, but I don't really want it to drop below what I paid for it.

Its, damn it.

"what I paid for its"

I don't want to the downplay the extent to which the politics are really, really difficult. Decision-makers are making bad decisions for political reasons, but they're not wrong about the politics.

A depressing thought that I had recently -- I'm not sure that there's any policy (on the broad intersection of growth / housing / homelessness / rent) which would be broadly popular _even if it succeeded_. I mentioned before the FAQ on the city website that says, essentially, housing has been underbuilt for the last 10 years, and we need to build at rate X for the next 10 years to make up for it. Let's say that the mayor and city council really made an effort and we were able to build 7X units of housing over the next 5 years, would any of them make that a prominent part of their re-election campaign?

I'm sure their flyers would mention a decrease in average rent (if that happened) and some vague lines about housing affordability. But I don't know that, "look at how much housing we built" would directly be a winning issue even if it was built on time, and under-budget . . . .

Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's not a happy thought.

Why don't more people from California not move here, driving up the value of my house and providing a bigger margin to offset the militia vote in exurban and rural Pennsylvania?

Honestly, they don't even have to drive up the value of my house. I'll tell them how to make an offer without sounding like someone who is used to paying much more for a house.

Here all the anti-upzoning people got signs saying "[Current mayor] we didn't elect you to destroy the neighborhoods!" It's all CHANGEBAD all the way down. (I'm sorely tempted to get a sign that says "[Current mayor] I elected you to destroy the neighborhoods!")

I didn't vote in the primary for mayor, so it's not my fault.

162: I think you're correct about that. The silver lining, such as it is, of doing something dramatic to improve housing supply is that it would in fact cause rents to go down, so there would ultimately be something to brag about. Building more housing itself, though, would still probably be a political loser.

Voters seemingly only want punitive solutions the problems associated with people whom they think deserve their fate.

Yeah, UPETGI is right that it's the most visible homeless that drive the most urgent calls to "do something," but what the vast majority of people mean by "do something" is "get those people away from here." Providing them with safe, stable housing is usually not within the range of methods people have in mind. I was once at a community council meeting where one guy seriously proposed calling out the National Guard to deal with the homelessness problem. The local officeholder he was talking to (who is not super great on these issues himself) noted why that was a bad idea, to his credit.

"We could either provide housing and comprehensive social support or a bus ticket."

"Or we could destroy their stuff so often, they buy their own bus ticket. "

You're probably right, people are terrible. But the thing is I totally get why people want "get those people away from here" (even if it's not a noble sentiment), but it's totally bizarre to me to care whether that's done in a punitive way or not. How would people even learn exactly how you'd done it? It's weird to me that if it actually succeeded, that anyone would even bother to look into exactly how it happened.

That sounds so strange to me that I think I'm misreading you. Don't you think that lots of people, even if they found the existence of encampments unpleasant, would wonder what had happened to the people in them if they suddenly disappeared and be opposed if it turned out what had happened to them was bad? I'm sure not everyone would feel that way, and even of the people who would feel that way, they probably wouldn't be committed to doing something about it. But it's not surprising at all to me that lots of people would be at least somewhat opposed to the punitive removal of unhoused people.

That's the reverse of the position I'm arguing against. Von Wafer (and perhaps Teo?) is arguing that people would be opposed to said removal unless it was explicitly punitive (on the basis of opposing free stuff for "undeserving" people). I'm arguing that if it worked probably most people wouldn't care if you went about it in a kind way.

Er, "people wouldn't be against it *just because* you did it in a kind way."

I'm not sure if LB was responding to UPETGI or me, but FWIW I think lots of people would not care one bit what happened to the homeless once they were gone, and of the portion who did care there would be a split between those who thought it was too punitive or not punitive enough.

There's a lot of fear and hatred out there directed at the homeless, and not a whole lot of empathy. Even as the housing crisis gets so bad that more and more formerly stably housed people get sucked in.

173: Oh good, I completely misunderstood you. I was baffled.

I'll sign on to 175 and add that there's a massive literature on the difference in perception of so-called deserving and undeserving poor people in the United States. Unhoused people, in my experience, generally include both, but are perceived as overwhelmingly the latter. The fact of being unhoused, for most observers, renders an individual underserving.

I'll add that I generally agree with teo (and I think also with LB and frowner) that dealing with the housing crisis shouldn't be an especially thorny problem mechanistically--in other words, we know with a fair amount of confidence how to solve the problem--but in the context of American culture and political economy, it becomes nearly impossible to implement those solutions. So while it's possible to house people in humane ways, it seems overwhelmingly like we're not able to do that, because the politics will, at least for now, militate against those kinds of solutions and leave policymakers defaulting to punitive action (or not action at all).

Yeah, what Teo said in 175.

131 is the "new meth" hypothesis, put forward by Sam Quinones.

I don't know how to evaluate it, but it sure did feel like the streets got way more insane around then (I say that as a casual observer who bikes through them). I'm pretty sure there will have to be simultaneous drug treatment programs, possibly that included providing a clean supply in a safe way. If that eliminated some of the visible hoarding and raging and shouting, it'd go a long way.

The compassionate city councilmember in Sac is facing a recall for not supporting sweeps. I am real curious to see how that turns out.

Pittsburgh now has a highly visible row of tents along the river trail as well as guys who ride little 100cc motorcycles to deliver food carried in backpacks. It's all very much like a real city here.

The bartender is cooking because the cook isn't experienced. Why can't Biden fix this?

On the subject of local elections, I went hunting for the city list of candidates, and found you could click through and see their applications (hand-written on a form and scanned in, because we're from the future.) The date of birth had been blacked out, because that would be improprietous. But they left the field with the length of time that the candidate has lived continuously in Texas. So we can't say how old our mayor is, but she has been living here for 67 years and 9 months. I don't know why I find this so funny.

Pittsburgh now has a highly visible row of tents along the river trail as well as guys who ride little 100cc motorcycles to deliver food carried in backpacks. It's all very much like a real city here.

You'll be au courant when they're riding legally shaky no-pedal ebikes from China, like in NYC.

So we can't say how old our mayor is, but she has been living here for 67 years and 9 months.

According to HB 1280, you should wish her a happy birthday today.

I'm pretty sure there will have to be simultaneous drug treatment programs, possibly that included providing a clean supply in a safe way.

Problem is, there's not a lot of good treatment options for stimulant use. Contingency management ( = small, immediate rewards for meeting treatment goals) is the only thing that has any evidence base whatsoever, and it has been taking a LONG time for federal policy to come around to allowing real money to be spent on that.

172: Don't you think that lots of people, even if they found the existence of encampments unpleasant, would wonder what had happened to the people in them if they suddenly disappeared and be opposed if it turned out what had happened to them was bad?

[German history has entered the chat]

No.

142: ... if you deny that counterproductive, performative purity politics are a significant factor in left-leaning activist and nonprofit spaces ... that tells me you ...

don't know much about leftist history.

189: Goddamn Mensheviks.

190: Ilyich, we don't say G-d, we're atheists!

Trump was apparently stealing information about nuclear weapons, so Brad Pitt was right.

186 made me lolsob.

187: This isn't my field so I don't mean to be discovering basic principles. Maybe I mean harm reduction? Just that people get clean drugs ("old meth") in safe ways, so at least they aren't tweaking on the streets. If street-level optics are the main concern for those who don't care about the people themselves, then whatever drug policy makes the street optics better.

Blume!

Old meth was pretty bad too! Meth is really really bad.

(It does seem like if things here last decade are any indication, people will switch from meth to heroin if you just make the heroin cheaper than the meth, so maybe safe free heroin would be enough to get people off meth? Or maybe it was a cohort replacement effect?)

I've heard anecdotally that people are now deliberately mixing in fentanyl when making meth. The worst of both worlds!

On point, in today's Bee:

Sacramento County bends to the will of constituents who just want the homeless to go anywhere else but here, writes Robin Epley. | Opinion

https://twitter.com/sacbee_news/status/1558064126773035010