The US could end homelessness but would need to stop immigration and change the constitution which could force people in shelter. Not sure it's the outcome we all want.
> US could end homelessness but would need to stop immigration and change the constitution which could force people in shelter
Immigrants are a tiny fraction of the homeless [1]. And we’ve tried criminalising homelessness; incarceration is forced shelter and incredibly expensive.
In Canada the majority of shelter beds go to refugee claimants. I believe it is highly like many illegals in the US are homeless and make up the majority of homeless people. They are not part of the numbers you provided.
In 2022, the majority (90.3%) of shelter users were Canadian citizens, which has been the case for all years of analysis since 2015. The proportion of refugees and refugee claimants in the shelter system was 2.0% in 2022, up from 2021 (0.9%) but down compared to pre-pandemic (2019, 4.1%). Pandemic travel restrictions in 2020 and 2021 may have contributed to a decrease in the number of asylum claims, with a partial recovery in 2022.
As of March 2023, refugees and asylum seekers made up 30% of the total population in Toronto's municipal shelter system. At that point they were upto 2,900 but that number has risen to over 4,200.
according to that 'adults participating in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions' .. It also says foreign born is 1% vs native at 1.7% - so they are both 'a tiny fraction'
Whether or not a large percentage, or a large number or small number of immigrants are homeless or not,
one must assume that if 11 million people left the US next month, the price of rent in many places may go down a bit, and some currently unhoused people might be able to afford a cheaper place.
Of course another side is that wages in some industries will rise, and that may put more people into a position where they can afford an apartment.
What I'd like to see is how inexpensive optional housing can be made.
There are 10 million empty homes [0] and ~700,000 homeless. No matter how you slice those numbers you still have more empty housing stock than homeless right now.
My first read of this document leads me to believe that there are only about 341,000 housing units available for rent, there are some for sale at an average price of $373,000.. but many or most of the empty housing units are like second homes and such and not 'available'.
So we have 350k open units and 700k people without homes, average rent is around $1500..
just looking at the data my guess is that we have about 700k people who don't have an extra 2 grand every month to put into housing.
(and I think it's way higher personally, maybe not counting the couch surfing relatives who can't afford their own place, and others who are living in over crowded situations of basements )-
I'm sure there is much more to it than the averages, like a lot of the homeless are in areas where the average rent is much higher and 1500 - and the few places where rent is $800 likely has less homeless, (and also has less other things like jobs and public transit) -
and really if it is 10 million or a quarter a million empty places, I don't see how that matters if no one can afford any of them.
Those houses sitting empty with no-one in them is exactly why the price of rent is so high. The supply is there but it's being hoarded by 1% of the population. Write laws that would force people to rent out their secondary houses, condos and apartments (with the threat of having it seized if they don't) and watch the prices immediately start to fall.
Housing as infrastructure, like roads and electricity.
We will exit an era where housing prices always rise, because both taxes and insurance will become unaffordable. I see a combination of publicly managed apartments (like Germany or Austria) with a much smaller private market for houses. The end-game is housing managed like infrastructure, with most of it publicly managed but a few privately managed/owned houses for unique or highly desirable spaces.
There is also a crisis in affordability of apartments, with a report [0] showing a collapse in lower-cost apartments that is partially driving homelessness. It is especially hard for fixed-income folks.
> arrest the homeless
Most homeless are working homeless. They crash with friends and family, or they live in their cars/trailers. Others are pushed to the periphery or out of their job market entirely; San Fransisco's struggle for service workers is a reflection of this trend, but it's hardly unique to the Bay Area. We need workers for just about everything, and those workers need a place to stay.
While this won't solve street-level homelessness, right now most homeless programs cannot move recovering people into permanent housing due to affordability and shortages. There are long waitlists right now for Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing because of the shortages. There are camp grounds or shelters, but those are only temporary. Having more stock available also means these homeless programs can provide much needed stability for recovering people and get them away from places/people that might cause them to relapse.
> Does the government eminent domain the houses
I see a collapse in house prices, and that might cause private equity to dump a bunch of housing stock into the market. To prevent a total collapse government would step in and be a buyer-of-last-resort, which will kickstart the publicly managed housing initiative. Another is insurance, where private insurers step away leaving governments to either rebuild after disaster or face a new homeless crisis. There's also banks holding a lot of mortgage paper that can go underwater forcing another intervention.
I see plenty of cases of market dysfunction that requires government to step in without explicitly eminent domain, which is why I see housing-as-infrastructure becoming the 21st century solution.
You're assuming that the major challenge is the lack of a home, because the term we choose to use as an umbrella implies that. For some people it's even true, but they tend not to be CHRONICALLY homeless, and that's the population of major concern. Chronically homeless people have extremely high rates of mental illness and substance abuse; depending on how you slice it, a third or more are schizophrenic or something similar.
Those are not people you can just stick into a house and wish them well, they need serious help for many years. In most cases that help isn't there, or comes with strings (no drugs, no alcohol) that they refuse to accept. Homelessness in the US is in many respect a mental health and substance abuse issue, exacerbated in the post-Reagan era when our mental health system was gutted and weakened.
If you want to reach those people and keep them off the streets, you need more than just empty houses.
That's true, but they make up a disproportionate number of the "visible homeless" that people encounter in camps, taking drugs on the street, etc. A lot of homeless people are at a low point in their lives, but use the systems offered to them and dig themselves back out. That's why they aren't CHRONICALLY homeless.
They don't represent the same kind of societal problem that poor students, broke divorcees, and people moving through rough patches do. They also don't represent a single population that needs help they aren't provided with already, unlike the chronically homeless.
If you're saying that "homeless" means something other than not having a home, that seems unnecessarily confusing. Re strings - I believe there has been some success in providing no-strings housing and then working on the other problems.
It's a broad term, just like "Sick" can mean anything from having a seasonal cold, to terminal cancer. The causes vary, the prognoses vary, the treatments vary. Talking about "Sickness" without specifics is profoundly unhelpful.
There could be a ghost town with 50 million homes in the middle of the desert, but if there are no grocery stores or jobs there then homeless people can't move there.
The raw number of empty houses is irrelevant. Especially when some of those houses are temporarily uninhabitable, e.g. houses being renovated, or houses in LA right now near the wildfires.
Simpler than that: just roll back the restrictive zoning codes which have been making sufficient development infeasible for many years, thus creating a steadily growing housing deficit. When laws have turned the housing market into a game of musical chairs, someone is guaranteed to be left outside.
I'm often skeptical of simple solutions like this. They tend to assume that the regulation causes the problem, but when looked at more critically, it's clear that the regulation is a formalization of a combination of consumer & business preference.
For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations. If you get into the gritty details, you'll find that they have a whole bunch ofloopholes that seem to favor larger trucks & SUVs. Many people will point to these regulation as causing people to buy light trucks & SUVs, but the data seems to suggest consumers prefer to buy these vehicles and auto manufacture prefer to sell them (they are extremely profitable). I postulate that, if CAFE requirements were eliminated, the best selling vehicle in the USA would continue to be the F-series and other trucks and SUVs would continue to dominate the top 10, because the regulations are influenced by consumer preference, not the other way around.
I think the same logic applies to zoning. People largely want to own single family homes (SFH) in the suburbs; builders largely want to build SFHs in the suburbs. There's no reason to believe that changes in zoning will cause a meaningful shift in consumer and business preference. In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle because economics trump preference, but in most of the USA, there's plenty of space to build housing. It's hard to imagine a developer in Pittsburgh choosing to build housing in an industrial area in the city over some empty land on the outskirts.
I appreciate your skepticism! The proposition that rates of homelessness are primarily driven by housing costs has actually been well supported in research - this Pew article contains many useful references:
As per econ 101, high prices are a function of scarcity relative to demand: we can reasonably claim that regulations which restrict housing development, which by their nature must increase scarcity and therefore housing costs, therefore also lead to increased rates of homelessness.
> In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle
That's a good point, but those are exactly the places which have significant homelessness problems.
In general, this is not a housing preference issue, because opposition to upzoning does not come from people who aspire to live in single-family homes, but from people who already own them. This is a typical example:
As usual with these things, the complaints include a cloud of nitpicky nonsense surrounding a central concern over "neighborhood character", which is a polite way of saying "we don't want apartment-dwelling poor people coming to live near us".
>>which is a polite way of saying "we don't want apartment-dwelling poor people coming to live near us".
NO, it is most definitely NOT that.
It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain. Don't make claims in areas where you have zero knowledge just because you think it helps your point.
I'm in a small sub-/ex-urban town with a rural character which has zoning, and have been involved in local issues. I've never met a single person who feels the way you claim (although there are surely a few examples somewhere). No one looks down on the low income ppl who are here because their families were here before housing started to get tight and expensive. Most everyone either grew up here or came specifically because they WANT to live in a quieter area, have some wildlife, maintain gardens, etc. No one is avoiding poor people, they are SEEKING quiet and green spaces where you can do outdoor activities.
Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing is just stupid. Yes, the current homeowners could get rich subdividing their properties, razing the trees and putting up condos. Great, maybe you get a lower-income population. But getting ANYWHERE useful from here, even groceries or convenience stores, is a 5-10 mile car ride, and the rail station to the big city is 25min away by car. Any low income person is now condemned to replace housing expenses with car expenses, purchase/lease, maintenance, insurance, fuel, etc.. And, they now have a big commute reducing their time available.
It is really simple to just blame other people and yell "they're just greedy!", and it surely makes you feel better and more righteous.
It is much harder to actually figure out complex problems and create solutions that work.
The groceries and convenience stores and so on will naturally appear once density increases if they are allowed to. It's a non issue.
I'm sympathetic to your plight seeing the character of your neighborhood change if public housing is built, but society has to balance it against the plight of people who are forced to change their neighborhood due to poverty, and on the balance their plight is simply worse than yours.
Unlike them, in such a scenario, you get to sell your land whose value now increased and go somewhere else with similar attribute.
Any society that cannot make this obvious decision to inconvenience some to save others is doomed to failure.
Where we are talking about areas that are already almost entirely paved with sidewalks and minimal trees or yards, etc., then we agree — there's no environment to preserve — it is just the character of the human-only habitat. converting this from single-family postage stamp lots to high-rise apartments is in most cases a reasonable tradeoff.
But NO, you obviously do not understand, let alone have any sympathy for, preserving environment and habitat. It is not merely inconvenient, what you propose is death for everything from the insects, birds, flora, fauna, and 50-year-old endangered turtle living in the wetland behind my neighborhood. Paving paradise and putting up a parking lot is not a solution.
Beyond that, you are proposing to literally steal uncounted millions of dollars of built-up value. Everyone in this area has willingly paid large amounts of extra costs and far higher taxes to maintain its character, purchase lands for greenspace preservation, trails, etc. It is not mere inconvenience you are talking about, it is literally stealing all of that extra value, and handing it to the developers who will strip the land and put up (almost universally shitty quality) buildings and pavement. You need to compensate the residents who will be displaced, not merely hand their value over to the developers, destroy the habitat and "inconvenience" the current residents.
Moreover, even if grocery and convenience stores "popup" with demand, they will still require cars to get to for almost everyone. It also fails solve the problem of where will be the JOBS or any other supplies. Most things will still be a significant drive away, and you've just solved one problem (lower housing cost) to add another — the requirement to spend money on multiple automobiles per family. And the added pollution and resource usage.
Your problem is you think there is a single simple solution that applies everywhere. You are wrong.
In some cases, it is a great solution. In others, you are literally destroying everything to gain nothing, because you can't be bothered to think about it more deeply. Any society doing that is doomed to failure.
> groceries and convenience stores and so on will naturally appear
I'm sorry, but that's not how that works. not if you really want it to happen. There's conversations between high level government officials and corporate execs to make things happen. negotiations are had, and contracts are signed. theres a city planning agency that has a CPC.
All of that is to say, there's entire industry just in the planning of cities. while we're building housing for the homeless, let's also engage them and build a viable town and start with that, and not just build the center square with hope and wishes. (Hope is not a strategy.)
> Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing is just stupid.
It's a good thing I am not talking about locales like yours, then; unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem, akin to the ones you see in big cities whose history of inadequate development due to strict zoning regulation has created a persistent housing crunch, nothing I said pertains to you.
> It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain.
You're not making this point of view sound any more appealing by defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.
>>unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem...nothing I said pertains to you.
Well, the current town has no homelessness problem, but there ARE most definitely laws in place (Massachusetts 40B) that specifically seeks to override local zoning and mandate low-income housing in ALL towns.
So, while we agree that what you said should not pertain to me, the people making the actual laws most definitely apply it to me.
I don't know why there is the disconnect, perhaps some misguided "it must apply to everyone everywhere" cop-out to avoid the actual complexity, but the fact is that the rhetoric is very destructive.
>>defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.
The DEFINITION is "quiet, low traffic, wildlife, gardens, etc.".
The COST is defined in money as well as work.
The point is that those things are not free — they cost a lot of work and yes, money in both taxes and improvements and maintenance. More importantly, it is not cost-free to decide to destroy those valuable things. Especially when the result will not help the people you are intending to help.
Paying for the social services is possible. The difficult issue is some people don't want to go to a homeless shelter because they want to maintain a level of freedom while others fear they will be robbed/raped at the shelter.
> The difficult issue is some people don't want to go to a homeless shelter because they want to maintain a level of freedom while others fear they will be robbed/raped at the shelter.
A bit of a strawman, social service doesn't have to mean homeless shelter, so no, no one is forcing anyone to do anything. Problem is in many places at least where I live, there just isn't enough money to serve all the people that need the various levels of help.
Homeless people go to homeless shelters from that point they could go into secondary housing or other programs.
In my city they wanted to end homelessness 25 years ago. They had enough money to do so and went ahead. They found a 1/3 refused to come in even on the coldest days for various reasons. The fight became do you let them stay and sleep on the street or do you force them into shelters/jails.
What is more humane? The let's leave them on the street but send people to feed them approach won over the forcible removals.
So homelessness remained.
When people say they want to end homelessness I don't think they realize they need to jail some of them.
Immigrants are a tiny fraction of the homeless [1]. And we’ve tried criminalising homelessness; incarceration is forced shelter and incredibly expensive.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/