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I'm hesitant to comment on a city that I'm not familiar with, but if what the article is saying is true -- if there are people who are already working and they're still homeless -- then that is concretely a problem with housing costs and wages. > Finding a job, as a classroom aide for special-needs students, was easy. But she struggled to find an affordable apartment. When I met D., her days began at 6 A.M., on a mat on a shelter floor. She dropped her son off at fifth grade, then went to her classroom to teach. I just don't see a way to blame a story like that on "we attract more homeless people than other cities." The problem is your houses cost too much. Whatever the policy solution for that ends up being -- building more apartments and reforming zoning laws, or de-gentrifying neighborhoods, or rent control, or minimum wage increases, or whatever economic theories people come up with -- the individual strategy doesn't change the core problem. The core problem is that if teaching assistants can't afford apartments, the economic math is never going to work out for SF. You are always going to have a high population of homeless people if low-income essential workers can't afford a place to live. No other fix is ever going to change that. > D., the special-needs instructor, also college-educated and fully employed, told me, “Someone housed today, unless they’re making eighty thousand dollars a year, could be homeless tomorrow. That’s the bottom line.” Again, I'm an outside observer here, I don't know what I'm talking about. But as an outside observer, that quote doesn't sound to me like "our social services are too good, so we get too many freeloaders." It sounds like, "we #$%!@ed up our economy and we don't know how to fix it." |