[1053r]

Homelessness in the USA in most places is an emotional or mental problem, but in some parts of the country, it's actually an affordability / NIMBYism / price control problem. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a broad swath of folks who work full time (or more!) who have three choices:

1) Live with roommates, often exceeding the legal limits on the dwelling on the number of occupants, or live in illegal and often not-up-to-code housing.

2) Live two or more hours from their job(s), each way.

3) Live in a van, tent, or truck.

Sometime, people make a sane (for them) choice to choose the last one. Driving around the bay area, one can see these tents and vans in many places. There are obviously thousands of people (perhaps tens of thousands?, it's hard to get a census of these folks) who are plainly visible once you know the signs (blacked out windows, small exhaust vents, generators, etc.)

On the margin, some folks end up sleeping in doorways because of the pressures involved with choosing one of those choices. You could see the evidence for this in a recent article in the Economist which included a diagram of feces complaints spreading out from the Tenderloin (bad neighborhood in central San Francisco) across the city, and the new mayor has hired a "poop patrol" to start cleaning up after them.

Meanwhile, homes that would rent for under $1000/month in many parts of America are renting for over $5K a month. (Actually, in most parts of America, these homes would come with much larger yards, as well as lower prices.) Proposal after proposal to densify the bay area or improve transit get shot down on thinly veiled racist or nakedly self interested grounds. Those proposals that get through are intensely profitable, often to the tune of 5x return on investment or more (not counting fighting the inevitable lawsuits), because the market is so starved for housing.

Forgive the rant, but price controls never work,* and efforts to mitigate the problems caused by price controls are so expensive as to never really solve the problem. The only solution here is to abolish the price controls and the incentives they cause for subsequent laws and zoning which make development impossible. However, that's politically untenable at this time. (So frustration and rants.)

* Actually, the price controls in CA do EXACTLY what they were intended to do, which is to raise the prices on homes, to the benefit of homeowners. As a side effect which many folks foolishly welcome, they also serve to keep Hispanics and Blacks in deeply segregated neighborhoods.

[skrebbel]

I'm a clueless foreigner [0], and HN is my only window into the Bay Area (and, in a more general sense, into America), so I appreciate your writeup. On HN my impression that absolutely everybody agrees that SF and the cities near it should just build more and higher. It appears to solve all the problems (insane rent, extreme commutes, homelessness, poo), so why is it politically untenable? Who exactly is pro insane rent, extreme commutes, homelessness and poo?

I mean, the home owners can't be the voting majority right?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17932484

[1053r]

In many parts of the bay area (SF, Berkley, East Palo Alto), the incentives of large swaths of renters are neutralized on this issue through extremely severe rent control laws. Between rent control and Proposition 13,* the vast majority of residents in most jurisdictions have incentives to either not care, or to actively oppose anything that would lower home values, either by improving transit, or densification.

* Proposition 13 is a law which is effectively "rent control for property taxes." It was passed through a direct democracy provision in the CA constitution, which prevents it from being undone by anything other than another direct vote by the residents of CA. It allows people to own homes worth many millions of dollars, while only paying a few hundred dollars a month on property taxes. This tax rate is inheritable, effectively creating a "landed gentry" class in CA. The tax rate is lost in most cases if the owner moves or does renovations beyond a certain extent, leading to numerous seemingly insane behaviors: for example, tearing down an entire house except for a single small wall, and then building a new house around that wall, or continuing to live in a 5 bedroom home long after all the children have moved out, crowding out a new family from being able to use that space. Worst of all, however, it has created incentives to vote for any and all proposed laws that make new building more difficult, leading to numerous follow on laws.

[komodo]

NIMBY-ism mostly. The people lucky enough to already own property don't want further residential development. It keeps their property values artificially high. There is an unreasonable expectation that if you buy a house in a nice quiet suburb then it should stay a nice quiet suburb the entire time you are living there.

In California specifically, they voted themselves (via referendum) a law which also keeps property taxes down for incumbents

"The proposition decreased property taxes by assessing property values at their 1976 value and restricted annual increases of assessed value of real property to an inflation factor, not to exceed 2 percent per year. It also prohibited reassessment of a new base year value except for in cases of (a) change in ownership, or (b) completion of new construction. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...

[mywittyname]

Let's say you paid $1,000,000 for a home that would fetch $200,000 in most other parts of the country.

What would you do if someone proposed a law that you figured would half the value of your home? Eat the loss or oppose the law?

Property owners in CA are being rational. They don't like the poop, commutes and homelessness. But they aren't willing to take a half-million dollar bath on their real-estate investment.

[skrebbel]

Sure, but my question was why they control the vote.

[erikpukinskis]

If you have $1M for an apartment, you have $1k for a political contribution.

If you can barely afford your $2k rent, you don’t.

[corysama]

Property owners in SF are extremely motivated to be politically active. The insane raises in property values are literally their profits. Voting is not the only avenue. Try to build anything and the whole neighborhood will call for “studies on the effect on the community” to keep you tied up in court for years.

SF does spend a huge amount on its homeless. But, it’s apparently not effective. I can’t speak to why.

[newfriend]

How about the most sensible choice:

4) Move to a more affordable location.

[Nasrudith]

Well there is the thing - jobs usually require locality which mean they come before choosing a home unless you are a retiree in which case they lack services which can be a problem for the aged and infirm. A place with no jobs has cheap housing because nobody can afford it.