[jseliger]

Short answer: CA has been underbuilding housing for close to 50 years (https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/) and now has a severe housing shortage, to the point where a parodic response, like "California will try absolutely anything to reduce homelessness, except build more housing" (https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...) is the only reasonable one.

I've worked on Prop HHH and other proposals designed to reduce homelessness in California: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but none of them work, or can work, without making housing easier to build.

Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Section 8, and other income supports to keep a person housed. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of "housed" to "homeless" goes up with it. So yes, mental illness and drug abuse are factors, but they're factors exacerbated by housing costs. They're really red herrings relative to overall housing costs.

[handmodel]

I find it offensive when people bring up mental illness and drugs as the cause of homelessness in areas where housing is so expensive. Like - are we expecting people who have been on the streets for a year to be able to get off drugs and instantly walk into a job making 45k a year?

Trailer parks get made fun of but they often cost only a few hundred dollars a month so a person can be in and out of work there to either save or as a stop-gap if they are running out of money. There is no option in California for those with no savings and whose problems have caused them to be out of work for awhile - other than rely on the generosity of others and the state.

[mason55]

The real issue is conversations that talk about a single cause or single solution. There are lots of causes that need to be addressed and solved separately.

But what happens is one person says “build more housing” and another person says “the park near me is full of people who intentionally live on the street!” And you just end up with these intractable conversations where everyone talks past each other.

Humans are bad at nuance

[zwieback]

Exactly. To be fair, though, people working on homelessness are fully aware of the complexity, it's just everyday conversations that are not nuanced at all.

[akira2501]

I think 2008 had a massive impact on California that hasn't really been accounted for. Add to that, and the article points this out, wages aren't tracking with the price of goods and I think this has an oversized impact in a state like California that has such a high out-of-state and out-of-country interest in living here.

I'm also concerned that Newsom is planning spend $12 billion but barely make a dent in the problem itself; particularly when HUD puts the cost at solving homelessness in the United States as a whole at $20 billion. This is another "consultant giveaway" that Newsom and the state of California are particularly good at.

Meanwhile, the street that our company is on is literally _filled_ back to back with RVs, litter, crime and literal human waste running down the gutters. It's beyond frustrating.

[silvestrov]

> before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs"

they should also consider that the Nordic countries also have those problems but much fewer homeless. We don't have resources to treat all people with mental illness.

The main difference to Denmark is that the city must find housing for homeless people (by law) and they get enough money to not descend into a hole they cannot get out of.

[mc32]

Denmark is small and they have enforceable borders.

Calif can’t tell someone from Nevada or New Mexico, don’t come here. Regardless of origin, Calif is saddled with dealing with the homeless. Denmark can contain the issue.

[anoncake]

Size is irrelevant (less people = less resources to take care of less homeless) and Denmark is part of the Schengen area.

[kaiju0]

I'm cool with that as long as its greater than 20 miles from my house, says everyone.

[jfengel]

A thing I haven't heard addressed: housing is more than walls. Building houses also requires more utilities, more schools, and above all more roads. San Francisco currently has the 7th worst traffic in the US. If you build more walls for people to live in, will the rest of the city's resources be able to keep up?

I realize that we're talking about a situation where people are already living there and putting strains on those resources even if they don't have walls around them. And we do want them to have those walls, to keep them safe and make the city more livable for everybody.

But San Francisco especially is simply limited in where you can build more roads (and schools and playgrounds and other things). Even if we could create new housing with the snap of a finger, wouldn't the city still have enormous resource problems?

I'd expect a city that wants to build new housing would demand a charge to help cover those costs. That's going to make the housing more expensive. So would it actually end up solving any of the problems of homelessness?

(I do apologize that "just asking questions" often looks insincere. I don't live in SF and I'm not an expert on housing or homelessness. You seem to know what you're talking about and I'd be interested in filling in these gaps.)

[km3r]

SF being the tech capital of the world is going to have a very high amount of workers who are now remote. This creates a unique opportunity to build more housing that can use the existing now less utilized infrastructure. The then higher ratio of workers paying taxes to infrastructure should allow additional improvements to that infrastructure.

[throw737858]

Most homeless people can build their own houses/shelters. But cities should provide access points for water, electricity and other utilities. And it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives!

[baumy]

> it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives!

This seems pretty obviously like a bad idea to me. What's to stop someone from erecting a large structure inside a public park, stealing the right to use that land from the public and taking it for themselves?

Having lived in Seattle until very recently, I can attest first hand that the answer to that question is: nothing. So your assertion here seems like it would lead to a state where the first person to create a structure on public land and live in it effectively converts that land into their own private property. To be frank, that is absurd.

[throw737858]

No, they would not live there indefinitely. California has eviction process for tenants.

[Pet_Ant]

> it should be illegal to bulldoze structure where somebody lives!

If you buy an empty lot as an investment, and then the city grows and you want to sell that lot so that a developer can build a high-rise, you want to stop them? I mean unless you want to ban ownership of land then you are in a tricky resource. What if someone builds a lean-to in your hedge?

If anything, maybe we need to zone areas for improvised housing. Would make it easier to police for violence and to provide access to community resources.

[throw737858]

New development already has to follow rules to prevent gentrification.

[istillwritecode]

I don't buy the "just build more" approach. More market rate housing isn't guaranteed to make it affordable, and there is even evidence to suggest otherwise. The principle of induced demand seems to occur here. One way that supply and demand helps the problem is that some move elsewhere for better opportunity.

[handmodel]

If the population of California were to grow by 35% in the next 30 years but only 5% more housing units were built - do you posit the housing prices would get more expensive or less?

That is pretty much what has happened. It is clear building more lowers the average. Keep in mind that homeless people may not have even been in "affordable housing" five years ago! Imagine how much better financial situation someone who lost their job last year would be in this year if they had been paying $1000 rent instead of $1400 for five years. Sure they would have spent slightly more in other areas - but they also would have saved more on average and have more fallback.

[jeffbee]

The marginal economic model of housing is much easier to explain. If I were to bulldoze a million houses, what would happen to the price of houses?

Now what happens if I build a million houses?

[handmodel]

100% agree.

I understand induced demand can exist but this is a second order effect that is clearly far less impactful than the first order effect of supply and demand.

[istillwritecode]

Another thing that will reduce prices is to reduce desirability. Growing the population by another 30% might be good for bar crowd, but will degrade the value of the bay area's natural areas for many. The increased traffic in the bay area has also reduced livability. Living is SF and commuting to Apple by bus is only sustainable if we get many more people to commute by bus (not just FAANG employees). I see almost nothing being done to solve congestion problems and this is intimately tied to housing and population growth. Unfortunately we are squandering resources on HSR.

[km3r]

Please show me that evidence, because I have seen otherwise, and a basic understanding of supply and demand leads to the default assumption that increased supply will lower costs.

The ONLY way to make housing affordable to make market rate housing affordable. That means you need to build enough that they are forced to lower prices. Couple this with a vacancy tax to prevent manipulative property management tactics, and there is no logical reason why increased supply would not lower prices.

Here is a paper addressing many concerns of "supply skeptics" : https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf

[angst_ridden]

And yet we also have a massive under-occupancy in some areas of LA cough Venice Beach cough Mar Vista cough where a lot of homes are owned by corporations for occasional use by traveling employees, people in other countries parking finances here, or people who AirBnB them for 180 days/year.

In one block where I was working in Mar Vista, four older homes have been knocked down to build McMansions in the past year. All four are owned by LLCs, and all four are vacant.

As for homelessness, we could solve a significant chunk of the problem by having decent healthcare/insurance available to people. I know two people - who had insurance - who ended up losing their houses due to healthcare expenses.

Of course, the above personal experience should be tagged as "anecdotal" not "evidential."

[jimrandomh]

The vacancy-rate statistics do not back this up. Compare the residential vacancy rates for California vs the US as a whole: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CARVAC and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USRVAC . Every city has some vacant properties, due to turnover and renovations and other factors.

[handmodel]

I wish they weren't zoning more single family homes but the true vacancy is not a few empty houses but the fact that the houses are not apartment complexes.

The vertical space is the true vacancy. When people say the LA vacancy rate is higher than the homeless rate this implies A) apartments empty because they are switching leases or getting renovated are usable (they aren't) and B) also implies that everyone who wants their own housing has it (not true - plenty of young people are living at home and plenty of people are crammed into apartments with strangers they don't want to be).

Until you build enough housing for everyone who wants a house there isn't enough housing.

[jeffbee]

There is not widespread vacancy. Aggregate vacancy rates are at all-time lows statewide. There may be small jurisdictions with exceptional vacancy rates but if you are going to claim them please bring some hard evidence so we can evaluate the claims.

In my city NIMBYs are always making shit up about vacant buildings but it never turns out to be objectively true. One of their favorite targets that they always point to as "vacant luxury towers" is in reality 97% occupied. So, please don't throw out vacancy trutherism unless you are prepared to back it up.

[angst_ridden]

Like I said, this is anecdotal. I'm anything but a NIMBY, though. I want them to build homeless shelters in my neighborhood. We desperately need affordable housing.