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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here? You can read the report here, an executive summary here, and a transcript of the report being discussed on the Ezra Klein Show here.

Released in June, it’s a statewide study on homelessness in California, the largest of its kind in some thirty years. It’s built on “nearly 3,200 participants, selected intentionally to provide a representative sample, and weighted data to provide statewide estimates. To augment survey responses, we recruited 365 participants to participate in in-depth interviews”. No question as to the state of focus: California is just over a tenth of the American population but nearly a third of its homeless population and nearly half of the unsheltered homeless population.

Approximately one in five participants (19%) entered homelessness from an institution (such as a prison or prolonged jail stay); 49% from a housing situation in which participants didn’t have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder), and 32% from a housing situation where they had their name on a lease or mortgage (leaseholder)...Leaseholders reported a median of 10 days notice that they were going to lose their housing, while non-leaseholders reported a median of one day.

Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot. This also aligns with the finding that only about a third of the homeless even sought out government services, suggesting that most people are not taking advantage of whatever unique government services for the homeless California offers (which aren't good anyway). This overall makes some common sense imo - if you’re so broke you don’t have somewhere to live then your options for travel are likely limited as well.

The paper is interesting as a resource in its own right, but I think it’s most useful combined with the claims made in a book referenced in the Ezra Klein discussion of the report: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.”

The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness. For those who claim that homelessness is mostly a reflection of insanity and addiction, researchers point out that those things are frequently worse in other states with less severe homeless problems (correlations available in the hyperlink).

For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%). The only thing California performs worse than West Virginia on is, predictably, housing costs. Or why does San Francisco, with a poverty rate of 11.4%, have such a worse homelessness problem (0.95%) than much poorer cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, all of which have poverty rates more than twice as high around 23% and homelessness rates around only 0.27%? The clearest answer is the most straightforward: San Francisco is simply twice as expensive to live in (a studio apartment in SF is little over $2k vs a little over 1k for the other three cities). This also lines up with the survey responses, with 89% of respondents saying housing costs were a barrier to them finding housing.

This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens. Jerusalem Demsas compares this to a game of musical chairs: as you take away chairs one by one steadily the slower and weaker kids will find themselves without a place to sit. But if you don’t have enough chairs / are going through a severe housing shortage, of course you’re gonna have a worse chairlessness problem then elsewhere, even if their kids are slower and weaker.

And once you’re out, it can be very hard to get back on your feet. Your credit history is gonna be terrible, as is your appearance. Maybe you live in your car for a while but then it gets impounded because you have nowhere legal to park it and can’t pay for the tickets. Then you’ve lost your shelter as well as your ability to go to a job. From there you’re really in the streets, which is scary - some people may take uppers due to fear of being asleep in public where people can hurt you or steal from you, and thus pick up addictions. Things spiral very fast from bad to worse.

Taken together, these suggest early intervention and a clear policy prescription to build more housing and do what can be done to lower costs - not because every disheveled person on the street is a fresh-faced suburban homeowner waiting to happen, but specifically the opposite - that every poor or unstable person living on the cusp of not being able to afford where they stay bears the risk that it’ll be much harder for them to bounce back from a fall than to sustain where they are.

Interested to hear what other people thought.

Are they basing the poverty rates on a national income cutoff rather than a local cost of living standard? I bet dollars to donuts they are, and until that's corrected for, I don't know why I'd waste additional time entertaining the argument.

...measuring homelessness against housing costs is, of course, measuring against a local cost of living standard. That's the whole point of the study and this conversation. Apply your knee jerk judgment to a sample of areas though and tell me if you think they're incorrect in which areas they label as poor:

Colburn and Aldern note that some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.

Here's another study measuring income relative to CoL if you would like:

A main finding of the study is that the expected homeless rate in a community begins to quickly increase once median rental costs exceed 30% of median income, providing a statistical link between homelessness and the U.S. government’s definition of a housing cost burden

Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot.

This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed, which could even have been preceded by other homeless stints. Elsewhere the report states 34% were born outside of California. I doubt 34% of the homeless in WV were born in other states.

On top of that, these numbers don't start with the problematic homeless population most people are interested in. If I am reading this right, 21% of them have cars.

This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed

Yeah, the relevance of the stat is that homeless people aren't traveling to California for warm weather / permissible legal regimes, they just become homeless in the areas where they already live. This also raises the relevance of California specific factors like housing costs since these people didn't become homeless under a different state government then switch states, confusing the stats. As @huadpe says, about a third born in other states is fairly representative for a normal Californian anyway.

One of the major problems win any homelessness related study or homeless census is that they only interact with the homeless in shelters and the most agreeable ones on the street. The ones in super-camps in the woods or parks are beyond the resources of most organizations and cities to locate, let alone survey. Additionally, the homeless are obviously highly mobile and move around a city throughout the day, so visiting a particular freeway overpass camp won't capture data about any one in a food tent, public library or a block over panhandling. I don't see why this particular paper is supposed to have solved these sampling issues.

The ones in super-camps in the woods or parks are beyond the resources of most organizations and cities to locate, let alone survey.

This. There are people that live mostly "normal" lives and live in their cars or even in the woods. They're clean, showered, hold down jobs. I've heard of undergrads doing this as well as people with blue collar jobs.

I mean, I'm speaking to my experience in Austin, where you go half a mile from downtown and any undeveloped wood will have a massive 10-20 person camp complete with literally tons of trash and thousands of used needles. This is a hazard that comes up in many new construction projects. For commercial work, it gets dozered into a dumpster or buried on site. For state work, it usually turns into a huge health and environmental hazard requiring more consultants and specialists to document and remove these materials (the new TxDOT campus was delayed for almost a year over this issue).

So in my experience, these kinds of camps are some of the worst for drug abuse and theft just generally the most negative kinds of homeless. But it's also a good point that plenty of semi-functional people don't his as well. Hell, I considered doing this in college to save on rent.

As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.

When people talk about San Francisco having homelessness problems, they aren't talking about people that merely lack a fixed address. They're talking about the people living in and defecating on the streets, frequently deranged. People that have defected entirely on societal norms.

Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities. You can build permanent structures on public land and nothing bad will happen. At worst, something bad like a murder happens at the camp and then you'll be kicked out and lose the materials you likely stole to construct your building. You can do drugs openly. At the moment Seattle Police aren't even legally capable of arresting people for drug possession and public drug use.

I don't know if this environment creates total defectors or merely attracts them, it's probably some combination.

I once had a conversation with a gentleman standing around a nightclub exit, who explained that he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left, that he took a greyhound to New Orleans the rest of the year(he didn’t explain what he did there), and that he would live in a cheap hostel when he managed to beg enough.

This man’s lifestyle choices were eccentric, and it’s plausible to me that he doesn’t have the ability to hold down a normal job, maintain an apartment, etc. But he didn’t seem to be the sort to live a lifestyle based on public nudity, drug use, assaulting random people, vandalism, and public defecation. He was polite and normal seeming except for his life decisions when I spoke to him, and more than likely is not on a societal level a problem. I mean, sure, he’d be better off if he was given a free apartment. But that’s not my problem and he isn’t asking for one anyways.

I gave him a fiver for an interesting story and I think that’s a microcosm of someone being low-functioning to the point of not being able to support himself, but not causing problems for others.

Yeah, this guy is self-employed, for some values of "self-employed", and doesn't seem to be hurting people through his eccentric lifestyle.

he supported himself while in Dallas from April to October by giving life advice for tips to women who were crying as they left

What was his apparent age and how did he monetize giving unsolicited advice to devastated strangers ?

He looked like Morgan freeman with more ‘kindly grandfather’ vibes. I’m assuming that helped.

As far as I know, he straight up asked for a tip and crying drunk girls frequently gave it to him.

Yeah I'm not so sure "homeless man explains how he harasses distressed (and probably inebriated) women as they're leaving a night club for fun and profit" is exactly a heartwarming anecdote...

Never underestimate the power of charm. What may, heard secondhand, or when read on the page, seem to be opportunistic manipulation can, in the moment, take on a transcendent feel, like contact with the divine. Various cognitive twists then immunize the tipper from ever feeling they've been manipulated, even after-the-fact.

As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.

I don't think so. There's more than enough room to talk about how to deal with whatever percent of homeless people are the most destructive (probably mental institutions) and also talk about what drives homelessness overall. Being homeless is bad in of itself and whether or not every homeless person bothers us, they are all suffering.

Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities.

Correlation wise, the relevant difference (not just among these three cities but for cities across the country) seems to be the cost of living. NYC and Chicago are much less permissive than Seattle and Portland, clear out homeless encampments and arrest public drug users regularly, and it hasn't made their homeless situation much better. To my understanding the really significant legal difference in the west is just that they can't clear homeless encampments unless they have a place to resettle the homeless too. This seems reasonable enough (and clearances still happen anyway); if you don't have anywhere to put the homeless then you're not actually getting rid of an encampment, just moving it down the road. Likewise, states don't have homelessness because of public drug use (or you would expect states with more drug addicts to have more of this), they have public drug use because their drug addicts live outside.

I think a major problem is that there’s a lot of wiggle room for motte and Bailey around the issue. When people want sympathy they talk about a guy just down on his luck. When they want to remove them, they’re drug using street shitters.

I think intervention might only be possible in the early stages though. Once you’ve gotten to the place where you’re drug addicted, haven’t held a job in ten years and are infested with lice, the chances of you getting back to even working class are pretty small.

I think a major problem is that there’s a lot of wiggle room for motte and Bailey around the issue. When people want sympathy they talk about a guy just down on his luck. When they want to remove them, they’re drug using street shitters.

I agree that people describe homeless populations (indeed, all populations) as more or less sympathetic depending on their own sympathies. But I hardly see how that (alone) has anything to do with mottes / baileys. Not every form of intellectual dishonesty should be shoehorned into a motte-and-bailey framework.

Per Scott:

So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.

I think intervention might only be possible in the early stages though. Once you’ve gotten to the place where you’re drug addicted, haven’t held a job in ten years and are infested with lice, the chances of you getting back to even working class are pretty small.

Yeah I agree. This is crucial though because we're not dealing with a static homeless population, we're dealing with a growing one. Supposedly homelessness has grown at a rate of 6% a year since 2017, so there are many people that could still be prevented from falling into a state where it'll be a lot harder to pull them back from.

Any sort of good rule has to recognize both situations and have separate systems for dealing with such.

E.g.

I remember feeling extremely awkward and sorry one freezing winter having to looking at an old couple (65-75) sleeping under a pedestrian bridge in what looked like four sleeping bags (per person) and a big pile of felt insulation. Their campsite wasn't a mess. Then I talked to them and they turned out to be fairly happy. Didn't even have a mess, their kitchen stuff was lined up on the concrete behind their bedding, they had a stove.

They had been evicted, but seemed quite content , they said they had another apartment lined up in two months time and this was strictly temporary. Felt better after that, it made me feel bad going past them twice a day.

NYC and Chicago are much less permissive than Seattle and Portland, clear out homeless encampments and arrest public drug users regularly, and it hasn't made their homeless situation much better.

It's far better in NYC than San Francisco. One source gives an unsheltered homeless population of about 4400 in San Francisco in 2022. Here we have a number of 4042 for New York City. New York City has over 8.4 million people; San Francisco about a tenth of that.

No, it's not housing prices.

New York City has enshrined Right to Shelter where the homeless have to be housed, even at high cost hotels if they refuse. The total homeless population for SF is 7,754 and the total population for NYC is 83,649, twenty times higher than the number you cited. On a population basis NYC and SF both have homelessness rates near 0.95%, quite in line for two of the most expensive cities in the country.

And also, come on. Even if you had been right you can't just cherry pick one city and say that overturns the finding that housing costs have the highest correlation with homelessness across the country.

This is a refusal to distinguish between the homeless as officially defined, and the homeless that people think of when talking about the homeless problem.

In fact, most people consider homelessness to be bad unto itself, and the fact that it costs NYC $2.2 billion yearly to manage its extraordinary homeless population is indeed the kind of thing we care about averting through policy. You personally might be talking about something else but this is a conversation about homelessness and how to reduce it. I would know, I started it.

Is part of that just that if you refuse to accept help in New York(IIRC there's plenty of it available and homeless are guaranteed shelter there), you die in winter, whereas in San Francisco you don't?

Nah, I've been to NYC in the winter -- they just sleep on the steam grates and/or ride the subway all night.

NYC has very few unsheltered homeless people because it is legally mandated to provide shelter.

The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness.

It is right, but wrong. The problem is more about where homeless people want to live, which is in premium areas. Look at where your typical homeless encampment is, then ask yourself, "if there was a studio apartment in this location, what would rent be?" The answer is always "astronomical." Most US cities actually have lower population now than in 1950, yet they still have homeless people, along with lots of unused housing stock. How can this be? Because that housing is not in the urban core, instead they are abandoned, formerly working class, neighborhoods who's sons and daughters moved to the suburbs, and the people moved to Florida/died. Why don't the homeless live there? The housing is already there. It is cheap/free, it had plumbing at one point, and could get it again, etc. They don't live there because those neighborhoods are for relatively hard working people who are willing to do a 20 minute commute on a bus/rail. Which the homeless are not.

Yes. There are some cities that dont fit the trend, but the midwestern cities in question have the same problem, just less of it. Homeless people in all cities occupy prime real estate. Even if SF had a bunch of cheap housing, the homeless people would not leave their current positions for it. Cheap housing, will be, by definition (almost), be away from the fun stuff where lots of people congregate. Homeless people want to be where the non-homeless people are.

My contention is that you would get a bit cheaper housing, but it wouldn't change the homeless situation much, if at all. Midwest cities have less homeless because they don't accommodate them as much. In Chicago, I've seen a massive increase in homelessness in the urban core in the last 5 years. The only thing that has changed is they are more accommodated by CPD and the powers that be.

There's not enough density in those cheaper areas to survive as a homeless person. Less traffic to beg at, fewer dumpsters to go through, fewer bikes to steal.

A bit uncharitable, but I think there is some truth to this, which is why housing doesn't fix the problem. Only raw force can fix the problem.

If you live in eastern Europe, you observe the threat of 'raw force' in action regularly.

City I live in has a modest (~1500 m^2) underpass with a little shopping downtown. A fifth of the time I pass through there I see the cops giving a talking to some crusty looking homeless types. You almost never see any homeless camping out in the underpass being loud & smelly & visually offensive. (a lot of them seem to have piercings, studded clothing or wear leather shit)

Haven't seen them actually beating anyone but Czech beat cops go around dressed in a very militarised fashion and they will happily use force if talking doesn't work.

And if the beat cops aren't up to the task, every city police department maintains a riot company of feisty young cops who relish the odd chance of getting into a serious fight with a band of football hooligans.

pictured: on the left, state police cop, on the right a municipal police officer from the covid era. Town cops are the lowest, least respected, paid and qualified form of cop life. (you should see what people say about them on police forums,lol). About 66% of applicants to state police force are disqualified on personality grounds.

/images/16922797215488982.webp

Because that housing is not in the urban core, instead they are abandoned, formerly working class, neighborhoods

Such neighborhoods basically do not exist in California.

It should in San Fransico. The city's population is less than in 1950. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/population

LA is probably its own beast. But it still holds that the homeless encampments in LA are, mostly, on extremely valuable land. And my suspicion is that if you built a bunch of row houses in Crenshaw that you would not solve the camp situation.

Many camps are on valuable land, no doubt about it ( although some are on sidewalks where you can't build anything and others are under freeway overpasses). Nevertheless, there are no depopulated working class neighborhoods in California, or at least I've never seen any in all my travels through the state.

I've seen people saying this and I guess it is plausible because California has grown so much since the 60s compared to other places with Democrat-dominated metros. There is probably places to put housing in the central valley and the like though. But no one would use it.

The central valley is largely farmland. There are big cities there (Fresno, Bakersfield) and houses are cheaper there but still roughly 400k. There's no empty neighborhoods and those towns are truly shitholes - which goes to show how much demand there is.

Houses in Fresno or in the sticks in the CV?

In Fresno. The sticks in the CV is almond farms.

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Your source is re the SF Metro Area, not the city of SF. And it says that the metro pop was 1.8 million in 1950 and 3.3 million today. As for the city itself, per the Census Bureau, the pop was 775K in 1950 and 875K in 2020.

How can that be? California clearly had vast manufacturing in the midcentury. Where’d the people in this picture live?

At some point, there had to be working-class housing. Unless it was absorbed into Los Angeles sprawl and gentrified, or demolished, it ought to be there somewhere.

They lived in most of the neighborhoods in south-central LA - Inglewood, Hawthorne, South Gate, Bell, Compton, North Long Beach, etc. After the 60's riots most of these areas became heavily black, and now, after a lot of really nasty, but largely unreported interethnic conflict, they are mostly (with a few exceptions) latino.

In that picture? In Inglewood I guess. Population 100k, median home price 700K.

California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.

This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.

That’s crazy. I didn’t realize how much it has grown. And more people per unit, when CA cities are known today for squeezing people in?

I wonder how many of those midcentury workers were agricultural. Oversupplied in Steinbeck’s time, their market value seems unlikely to have gone up as they compete with automation and immigrant labor. Combine that with a tripling or more of population…

A lot of the gateway cities which are now completely indistinguishable from any other part of the generic LA sprawl - Norwalk, Artesia, Cerritos, Cypress - which connect LA to Orange County were unincorporated farmlands as recently as the mid 50's. That's to say nothing of the further reaches of the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. That was all agricultural or undeveloped as recently as the 70's.

Also a lot of the housing stock in heavily-immigrant communities is oversubscribed; lots of people try to save on housing expenses by cramming multiple families or large numbers of young men together into a 2- or 3-bedroom house or condo, sleeping in shifts or otherwise living cheek-by-jowl in time-honored tenement-immigrant style.

TFR rears its head here- a very large percentage of the fifties population were children, who in the fifties shared rooms and didn't expect personal space, thus creating very little demand for housing. Today san fran has almost all adults, most of them single, who generate much more per capita demand for space and housing.

Not following how this is a fertility problem, rather than a general "more people" problem. If anything, don't kids increase (the parents') demand for space? That's one of the textbook motivations for the development of suburbs.

I read it more as that pure headcounts suffer from a lack of comparability if the age distribution is very different. For extreme examples, a family of 5 with 2 parents and 3 kids will use a lot less space than 5 single working age adults that have their own flat each, especially if they live in the same area.

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This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens.

So I suppose they're also low-functioning to the extent that they're unable to, you know, move to another state with a much lower average cost of living for whatever reason.

I think this is one of many situations where the typical high-functioning individual underestimates how hard this kind of thing is for the median person, much less the actual underclass. The monetary costs, mental barriers, and organization required to simply move from California to Kansas while maintaining employment and arranging the housing transition well aren't trivial for most people. If someone has already pretty well cratered their situation by alienating a bunch of friends and getting evicted, there's no way they're smoothly making it to the storied paradise of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

If you're low functioning enough to struggle to maintain housing/job, that makes it easier to move, not harder. We're not talking about people who have an established career path or a mortgage or are pillars of their community. If you just lost your burger flipping job and are getting evicted and don't have any friends... Nothing is keeping you anywhere, other than inertia! Pack a suitcase and get on a bus.

(This is, of course, how a lot of people end up in California in the first place.)

It's very easy to forget how, for the lack of a better word, stupid a lot of people are. Most of us here are stuck in bubbles that are probably 1SD above the mean IQ. There are similarly-sized bubbles of people with mean IQ 1SD below the mean. You need to work in a DMV, a Walmart, an ER ward to see a more representative cross-section.

Someone who's IQ 85 can lead a relatively successful life, as long as it's stable. They have a bunch of recipes in their head: go to work, pay your bills, go grocery shopping, find a job that is similar to the old one, find an apartment that is similar to the old one. A thought like "even though the wages are lower in a town like Wichita than here in Frisco, the cost of living is so much lower that my discretionary income might even increase if I move there and continue working 25 hours a week in a fast food kitchen. Therefore, it might be prudent to cancel Netflix and start saving up to afford a move to a flyover state by the time my lease is up for renewal. Where should I move to? I should go on Facebook and see if any of my old acquaintances are willing to talk to me. Maybe one of them will even help me find a new apartment there" simply won't fit into their head.

Someone they trust has to break it down into digestible pieces, cram it into their head and come up with a new step-by-step recipe. If they don't have any relatives or friends to keep an eye out for them or they all are equally stupid, they will stop paying for their apartment, lose their job and end up in the streets.

You're talking to the wrong guy here, I've worked menial jobs before where they would honestly hire anyone with a pulse. My current job is physical labour and though it's more selective you do still wonder how some of the guys dress themselves in the morning. And I don't think it's necessarily stupidity here. There are plenty of dumb as bricks people who actually find life fairly simple so long as they remain on the rails for as long as possible. They're generally incredibly boring and safe and rarely end up as drug addicts.

Rather it's impulsiveness we're talking about. People who just want to have fun. And they're not going to move to Wichita or become fiscally prudent. They're not going to abandon parties and drugs and cool people for Netflix and sensible dinners and the conscientious.

Can you describe - in a detailed manner - what it is like to be a person with 1) social IQ 1 SD above the mean, and in a bubble of same and 2) social IQ 1 SD below the mean, and in the same bubble? Are there "high-social-IQ" strategies that people are using that the socially impaired can't quite pull off? Social isolation is a kind of poverty trap and has the same dynamics.

I have no idea how to measure social IQ, EQ or whatever it's called.

I doubt social IQ bubbles even existed before the internet, various incel forums are probably the closest thing to one. Monasteries, maybe? High EQ monks would climb the hierarchy, becoming priors, abbots, hegumens and bishops, while the rest of the brethren would be content to toil and pray.

Hmm. Incel forums are one example. IRL...hmm. For low social IQ, engineering departments, maybe, although that's complicated by the fact that Aspies can socialize and network OK enough among themselves but flounder when interacting with normies. I've heard tales of technical departments with lots of sperg-engineers, a smaller number of half-sperg liasons, and then a bunch of normies using the sperg-engineers' products. Maybe MIT, half-jokingly described as the largest sheltered workshop for autists in the US, has some of these bubbles.

For high social-EQ bubbles? I'm pretty sure you can find lots of them in DC...lots of bushleague politician types and strivers looking to become more connected.

I specifically avoided mentioning places like MIT and FAANGs on one hand and NYT and various DC-adjacent think centers because they are high-IQ bubbles first and foremost.

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I think this is one of many situations where the typical high-functioning individual underestimates how hard this kind of thing is for the median person, much less the actual underclass.

Yeah, I think that probably people who have severe mental issues are not even capable of walking a few blocks to fill out an application at a government office, or doing it over the phone or online. For them doing something like that is literally as difficult as it would be for me to go pass a test in quantum mechanics right now or climb Mt. Denali right now, given that I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics and have no background in mountain climbing.

If someone has already pretty well cratered their situation by alienating a bunch of friends and getting evicted, there's no way they're smoothly making it to the storied paradise of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Yeah, realistically speaking one would have to catch oneself in one's descent at the point when one still has enough money and mental clarity to be able to pull off the move to Cedar Rapids. But based on my personal experience, I can say that the thought of leaving the area you know and moving someplace you know almost nothing about and know nobody in, just because you cannot afford to stay where you currently are, is very daunting. For me the natural psychological tendency was to try to fight and struggle to stay where I was, and kinda hope that everything would work out somehow. The idea of moving to some other town where you know nobody, in this kind of mental state, can feel very scary and also can feel like a defeat. So I can imagine that some people probably do not actually muster up the willingness to move until they have already blown through too many resources to actually be able to make the move.

Probably, or just too poor, or that would remove them from family members they can occasionally borrow money from or w.e.

As the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s/trap house or in their car or couchsurfing. Even the majority of homeless people of no fixed abode aren’t like those living in tents on Venice Beach. These people can indeed be helped by cheaper housing costs or state-subsidized housing schemes. But they also aren’t what is usually meant by the public when talking about the homeless problem.

The problem is with the minority of homeless who are psychotic fent or meth addicted predators. These are the people living on the street in San Francisco or LA and causing problems for everyone else. Demography of the more general “homeless” population isn’t relevant. These are people who deliberately refuse shelters with space because they want to stay on the street to do drugs, offering them housing isn’t going to solve that problem or associated problems with drug-related crime done by people who want a fix.

It seems plausible that the absence of affordable housing for the first type of person creates a pipeline whereby they are more likely to become the second type of person.

I disagree. Lots of people are poor, very few are meth/fent addicts. Normal people don't end up living in a tent on the sidewalk and doing fent if they lose their job or have difficulty with housing - they rely on their friends/relatives or services available. Methfent addicts do not do this, because they've systematically burnt every bridge they've ever had through stealing and abuse and none of their former friends or relatives will lift a finger to help them anymore - in other words, the addiction came before the financial troubles and exacerbated them.

I think OP might be wrong, but because the number of street junkies and organized thieves are 10x lower than the number of temporarily unhoused / living in cars, a 10% chance of the latter converting to the former significantly increases the rate of the former.

This is why I emphasized in the OP and as well that there are many states with worse drug addiction problems than California but less homeless people. West Virginia, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire are in the top ten worst opioid addicted states but the bottom ten for homelessness. What sets California aside is that their drug addicts (and other low functioning people) can't afford to stay off the streets.

This seems likely.

But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.

Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Meanwhile, there are lots of countries with essentially zero drug use. Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Japan have don't have drugs. And unlike the Prohibition Al Capone memes, these countries also have very few if any gangs. We could reduce drug use by a ton and it wouldn't be that hard. All it would take is a serious effort to criminalize drugs.

And before anyone says "War on Drugs didn't work", we should take a look at the overdose stats. Overdoses deaths in the U.S. are up 1000% since the 1980s. The correct take, IMO, is that the war on drugs did work. We just didn't do it hard enough and gave up too soon.

Meanwhile, there are lots of countries with essentially zero drug use. . . . China . . . [doesn't] have drugs. And unlike the Prohibition Al Capone memes, [it] also ha[s] very few if any gangs.

I doubt this, given that China is a major producer of fentanyl. I find it very hard to believe that the Chinese megacities don't have their (albeit probably smaller) share of strung-out junkies and losers. There's no magic property of Chineseness that protects against drug abuse or opioid addiction - ask Lin Zexu!

Similarly, I find it hard to believe that there isn't significant organized crime in China, even particular to drug manufacture. Instead I would expect that, in a society without strong rule of law norms and heavily dependent upon petty corruption and personal connections, the crime would just have a blurrier relationship to official power than it has here in the U.S.

There's no magic property of Chineseness that protects against drug abuse or opioid addiction

No, they simply have the state capacity and population buy-in to prosecute drug dealers. It's not a Western country, things are different. They really do have almost zero street drug use or street crime.

This is the kind of thing that is easily falsifiable. Just visit their cities. Many visitors have Paris Syndrome in reverse. Westerners think that crime and squalor are just "part of living in a city" but Asian cities have none of it.

You are of course correct that China does have lots of official corruption.

But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.

Drugs are definitely a factor, but if this were the main driving cause then you would expect to see more of the states with the worst opioid problems, like West Virginia, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, to have the most homelessness, but instead they're in the bottom 10 nationally

Yeah, but 3/4 of those are islands. Keeping any sort of contraband out is orders of magnitude easier when the contraband must come in through known ports of entry. Ships and planes can be searched, bags can be searched, and since you don’t have large continuous borders with other countries, the odds of random coyotes and mules crossing in the wilderness unseen goes down substantially.

Maybe drug control can work, but I don’t think we can get to zero without sealing our borders like North Korea.

You can get a really shitty studio apartment for something like $150 usd a month in a crappy area of Osaka for example.

Yeah that's a good point. We've made shitty housing illegal in the U.S. That Osaka apartment would almost certainly be illegal to rent in the United States. But another factor is that there is no underclass in Japan. It's not worth renting to the underclass in the U.S. for $150/month because the damage they do to your unit will easily exceed that.

That sort of job does not get a roof over your head in most of the US, and certainly not in high cost cities.

It's worth pointing out that Section 8 government housing allows menial wage workers to get a much nicer unit than the equivalent worker in Japan. But, obviously, as a government program there are a million hoops to jump through.

In any case, the drug zombies on the streets of San Francisco aren't capable of holding a job at all.

I wonder when that changed and why? It used to be a viable business and major cities were replete with flophouses and boarding houses and long stay hotels of various qualities.

They were made illegal by ordinance.

There’s still flophouses. I can go on Craigslist right now and find single bedrooms with access to a bathroom for $500/mo in DFW. If I’m willing to compromise and live in a cubicle, or in the far suburbs, or the serious hood, I can get a lower price.

Now I can afford to not do that, but the point is that the code of tenants rights and housing code and the like don’t stop people in four different counties and who knows how many cities from doing it. Somehow the difficulty evicting when people in the market for $500/mo housing predictably have trouble paying rent doesn’t deter people from offering it.

What does "a crappy area of Osaka" entail, exactly? Presumably the low crime rate means you don't hear gunshots, can leave things outside without them being stolen, etc.

One of the stronger anti-YIMBY arguments is that cheaper housing in your area, specifically, means the people who cause crime, theft, and generally unpleasant things will move in. A subtler argument is that, sure, you can prevent that by enforcing the law and maintaining strict standards of behavior - but politics doesn't support that, maybe it'd be racist, etc.

I'm not sure how true this is. I'm pretty sure marginally cheaper housing - the kind where there are (exaggerated numbers) now 2x as many top-tier apartments, and people love those so their price only goes down 10%, but and that daisy chains all the way to rent being 20% cheaper in less desirable areas - doesn't cause that. And you'd expect new development to, mostly, be that, because developers want to maximize profit so they'll only go as far down the demand curve as competition forces them to. Do mandated affordable units mess with this? My vague sense is no, but idk.

But it might be a stronger argument against zoning that allows a new building full of cheap apartments a tiny bit bigger than a college dorm, the kind that'd cost whatever the equivalent of that $150/month here is.

Even without that, I have a strong sense that the general reaction to the permitting and construction of a bunch of dorm room-size apartments would be negative. Building codes don't really allow it, anyway. Are there any other good reasons to oppose it?

East Asian culture cannot be ported over to the West and even if it could be, I would not find it desirable. Those cultures have their own problems, like over-deference to authority and ridiculous work hours. Adopting East Asia style legal approaches to drugs without porting over their culture would not necessarily lead to East Asia style drug outcomes.

Anyway, further criminalizing drugs is a non-starter for me. For me it's an issue of liberty. From my perspective, the war on drugs gives the state excess power over individuals. Yeah, drugs sometimes kill people. Drugs are a tool. Many tools sometimes kill people. I do not want the state to be able to control what I put into my body. The whole idea of it is ridiculous to me and I cannot understand the mental attitude that is okay with it.

Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Done by for example USSR/Poland - by building more housing (significantly improved via central planning spending in Moscow, in Poland it was mostly reconstruction after WW II and unbreaking economy).

Though note it went by providing enough supply that you can buy house/flat at all and you do not have many families living in a single flat anymore as a standard solution. Also, people getting richer (see prices in terms of how long you need to work for place to live in! Though nowadays things are rather getting worse).

Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Making housing perfectly affordable might be a hard problem but making it significantly more affordable than current day california is an easy problem. Just remove the artificial restrictions to building new housing and the market will do the rest.

Fixing housing affordability issues seems is a hard problem. Fixing housing affordability has never been done by any country (as far as I know).

Most places in the US have "fixed" housing affordability, in the sense that someone who works 2000 hours a year at the real local minimum wage (which may be higher than the statutory minimum if the economy is good) can afford a singlewide trailer home and/or a room in a shared house. AFAIK, the only major cities with good jobs where that is true are in Texas.

Japan has "fixed" housing affordability in the sense that an unskilled worker can afford a room in a SRO, even in Tokyo.

In none of these places is homelessness a major problem.

Just remove the artificial restrictions to building new housing and the market will do the rest.

I used to believe that but I'm starting to have second thoughts. Look at square feet of housing per capita in the U.S.. It's never been higher. California is uniquely stupid of course, but there is lots of housing going up all over the country. But prices keep going up too. This despite interest rates which have made housing less affordable than ever.

Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.

My personal thesis: Housing prices behave like a meme stonk. They go up because they go up. China proves how far this insanity can go before it hits a breaking point.

Housing is hard because no one knows what to do. On the other hand we KNOW how to stop drug use because we have examples from other countries. We don't have those examples.for housing. Until we get examples of what works it's just, like, your opinion man that building more houses will fix affordability.

Population growth? What population growth? California is shrinking and the U.S. has flat-lined. And yet still housing prices go up.

We are allergic to actually counting the number of immigrants in this country. We're probably undercounting the population by around 20 million, which would definitely be enough to put upward pressure on housing costs.

I don't know enough about this area to have any confidence in this, but:

Look at square feet of housing per capita in the U.S.. It's never been higher

One of the effects of something like restrictive zoning and building codes is precisely to increase square feet per capita. Units per capita or something is probably a better measure. Which doesn't look up to me, although that may just be the wrong graph.

Yeah, you're probably right. Although the graph you sent shows their has been no significant reduction in units/capita since the year 2000. So what changed? Why have housing prices outstripped inflation for decades?

My personal answer to this is that inflation has been systematically understated in official figures for political reasons, and that if you use more rigorous and accurate means of calculating inflation things will line up a bit better. An additional factor would be large financial firms having a real estate strategy consisting of buying up huge swathes of housing stocks and then renting them out - Blackstone is the single largest owner of family rental homes in the USA (or at least they were, and there's this vast and purposefully impenetrable web of holding companies designed to obscure this).

Housing is hard because no one knows what to do.

Just be like Houston and don't have zoning or red tape. Housing is affordable and it has an absurdly low homelessness rate, lower than Denmark.

Even Houston isn't immune. Prices have gone up 7.1% per year since 2015 (as far back as I can easily check). Inflation in this period has averaged just 3.1%. https://www.zillow.com/home-values/39051/houston-tx/

But it gets worse. The average mortgage rate right now is around 7%, while in 2015 it was less than 4%.

For a buyer with 20% down, I calculate that the monthly payment to own a home in Houston has increased by 150% since 2015, or a whopping 12% per year. While I'll concede that Houston prices are still quite reasonable, their zoning is not a panacea.

Stonk-bubble mentality can eat any increase in housing supply. We need speculators to feel actual pain to reduce house price increase expectations.

Start by making depreciation not tax deductible unless you can prove that your property actually went down in value. Currently, you can "write down" the value of your investment over 27.5 years. This lets you take a paper loss and pay no taxes all the while your property is actually going up in value.

But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.

I think it's meth much more than opiates. Opiates can kill you and make you unproductive, but they don't fry your brain and give you psychosis like hardcore simulants do.

And before anyone says "War on Drugs didn't work", we should take a look at the overdose stats. Overdoses deaths in the U.S. are up 1000% since the 1980s. The correct take, IMO, is that the war on drugs did work. We just didn't do it hard enough and gave up too soon.

The main reason overdoses are up is that fentanyl is really potent and easy to overdose on, but it's also the most popular illegal opiate because it's cheap to make and can be smuggled across the border in large quantities because it's so concentrated. If lower potency opiates (and narcan) could be purchased legally over the counter, fentanyl use and fentanyl deaths would plummet.

If lower potency opiates (and narcan) could be purchased legally over the counter, fentanyl use and fentanyl deaths would plummet.

Only if we legalized it the right way, which we wouldn't. Look how we legalized marijuana. See how it's celebrated and commercialized now with billboards and brightly lit stores in every shitty small town in America. If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof - as will overdoses.

I would advocate a method where junkies can, under medical supervision, get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun. That would have the effect of making street dealers unprofitable while reducing the chance of non-junkies getting hooked. Long prison sentences for dealers will do the rest.

get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun.

But that's exactly why street dealers would still be popular.

And that's why we should arrest the dealers and throw them in prison for decades.

Push/pull works better than just push (prison) or pull (medically-supervised injections) alone.

If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof - as will overdoses.

Usage would go up, but overdoses would plummet because people could dose accurately.

Why do you assume they would? People are dumb and don't pay attention to what's in their chicken nuggets - suddenly they're going to turn into savvy consumers when it comes to doing complex chemistry calculations to determine correct dosing, and batch testing to ensure that the product isn't being stepped on or cut with fentanyl as it often is currently?

they're going to turn into savvy consumers when it comes to doing complex chemistry calculations to determine correct dosing, and batch testing to ensure that the product isn't being stepped on or cut with fentanyl as it often is currently?

This is what junkies do already -- many of them are good enough at it to survive for many years!

If the junk is government supplied/inspected, the whole point is that is won't be stepped on -- inform them of a dose that is unlikely to kill a zero-tolerance user, and let them figure the rest out themselves. They are quite resourceful -- this way if they OD at least nobody will be able to say it wasn't their 'fault'.

If we do the same for opioids, usage will go through the roof

You don't need the dependent clause. We can just do the math (economics). Many moons ago, at the old old old place, I did an estimate, ignoring any effect of removing criminal penalties, ignoring any effect of branding/marketing/whathaveyou, ignoring any cultural or other developments which could change the elasticities, of how usage of marijuana might change in response to the change in price that was observed. Let's just say that anyone who thinks that usage of drugs is going to go down (or even stay flat) in response to legalization is getting high on their own supply. Marginal Revolution just referred to Portugal. The Bloody Atlantic is almost going after Oregon. It was trendy to think otherwise for a while (I believed it when I was a kid), but like most silly lefty trends, at some point the need to shut out the data and embrace cognitive dissonance becomes too difficult.

The question isn't whether drug use will go down; it's whether ODs will go down. I suspect they would; if you know how much you're getting you're not going to OD because your usual hit is 10x the potency.

Of course if you legalized hard drugs the way pot has been legalized in NY or NJ that might not work, but that's because government can screw anything up. You also can't just decriminalize possession (like Oregon did); you have to legalize production and sales.

This line of thinking is tempting as well, that it's just product uncertainty. There may be some factor, but I'm skeptical that it would be the overwhelming factor that a lot of people think. One could easily talk about two movies from this image. In one movie, fentanyl is primarily about product uncertainty, and that has driven a rise in deaths. In another movie, fentanyl is just way more potent and way more dangerous in general, so of course it's going to be higher. But hell, there are still quite a few prescription opioid deaths there; those are chugging along, even though they don't have the same product uncertainty problem. Instead, they mostly fit into the ordering just fine in terms of inherent danger of the substance, regardless of product uncertainty.

Even alcohol is still chugging along, causing deaths, even though there's basically no product uncertainty there. People still try to cram as much as they can into their bodies, just to see if they can and to see if it feels "super awesome, yo". They still party and try different shit, not actually paying all that much attention to what someone is pouring for them or what pill was handed to them. Certainly not carefully looking up the risk statistics of mixing substances and consulting a dosing chart or whatever. Nah, it's, "GET DAT SHIT IN ME AND LET'S GET SUPER HIGH!"

Maybe I'll try putting it this way... the belief that it's just about product uncertainty smells to me a lot like one of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. Sure, you may be a rich upper class person who can manage to make casual cocaine holiday work in your life, so long as there isn't product uncertainty in your cocaine, but for many many other people, life just isn't like that. Intense addiction, the need to try always-increasing quantities, and frankly low intelligence/conscientiousness is just going to lead to deaths mostly in proportion to how inherently dangerous the substances are. Product uncertainty can play a role, but a more minor one.

Finally, even if acute ODs do go down a little, what is the cost in terms of long-term mortality? During alcohol prohibition, the government was literally poisoning alcohol, and yet the health benefits in terms of long-term mortality and such were much more significant than the acute effects of their literal, intentional poisoning.

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The key thing isn’t the treatment options. Surprisingly opiates are enjoyable and they don’t want to quit and they also don’t want to do it in the environment you describe.

Jailing dealers would do a lot of the heavy work alone. Clearing out the city-center encampments for doing the dope would do a lot. Yes I know you said long prison sentences for dealers but that’s the hard part we have no appetite for right now. Afghanistan solved the dope issue without treatment centers. They just jailed everyone high for a couple months till they were sober.

Also supposedly the Euro countries that did the legalizing thing cleared out the encampments etc. but I don’t see political will in those cities to do that.

Yes, I agree. Clearly strict enforcement is the only real way to solve the opioid problem which is currently killing over 100,000 Americans every year. Every "soft" method has either been ineffective or made the problem worse. But I do think a push/pull might work better than push alone. Giving junkies a way to comply with the law without having to go clean seems like a useful outlet valve for when we do start actually arresting dealers.

Afghanistan solved the dope issue without treatment centers. They just jailed everyone high for a couple months till they were sober.

There's something amusingly ironic about Afghanistan, a country the US military helped to ensure produced large amounts of opiates during the occupation, being capable of solving this particular issue.

I would advocate a method where junkies can, under medical supervision, get free opioids in a super boring and lame way that ensures no one will ever do it for fun.

Scandinavian way, System shops for drugs? Does it work in Sweden in lowering alcohol use?

Yes. Somewhat.

"In 2016, annual alcohol consumption per capita (for those aged 15 years and older) was 9.2 liters of pure alcohol in Sweden and 7.5 liters in Norway, compared to the European region's average of 10.3 liters."

The monopoly/system shops way of selling alcohol means that there will be no advertising and no discount/bulk buying which would lead to over-consumption.

The report (or executive summary) also cites meth.

31% reported regular use of amphetamines, 3% cocaine, and 11% non-prescribed opioids. Sixteen percent reported heavy episodic drinking.

I realize that meth is probably cheaper per hour spent fucked up, but when you have twice as many tweakers as drunks…

I've spoken to bosses of low-skilled labor who actively prefer hiring alcoholics because if they're drunk every night, they go to bed before 10, and get up at 4 too hung over to go back to sleep, and get to work on time because what the fuck else you gonna do in the morning, and then do their work until quitting time because they don't want to be pressured to take overtime- that would cut into their drinking- so on the whole they're a lot better workers than tweakers or potheads. It's possible that low functionality people do better on booze, at least compared to other substances.

The problem with drunks is that they commit violent crimes (particularly domestic ones) in a way which potheads don't - not that they can't hold down jobs. In most of America, also that it is impossible for non-rich people to avoid driving (rich people can afford taxis) so if you are drinking you are probably drink-driving. Stimulants don't make you as bad a driver as depressants like alcohol.

The problem with drunks is that they commit violent crimes (particularly domestic ones) in a way which potheads don't

At least, not until the potheads turn psychotic. At that point they're perfectly capable of violence.

As the other replies have said, the vast majority of “homeless” people are unemployed or mostly unemployed people living in their parents’/friend’s house or in their car or couchsurfing.

Perhaps, but this study is mostly looking at unsheltered homeless:

More than three quarters (78%) noted that they had spent the most time while homeless in the prior six months in unsheltered settings (21% in a vehicle, 57% without a vehicle). Over the prior six months, 90% reported at least one night in an unsheltered setting.

I’ve seen a lot less “unsheltered homeless” people around Houston the last few months. It’s not hard to convince people to leave the streets when the temperature is 100 and the dew point is 75.

I’m at work right now and unable to read the whole report at this time, but the question that jumps immediately to mind is: How many of the people surveyed are so-called “hidden homeless” - people who are couch-surfing, living in their cars, staying with a succession of family members and friends without officially establishing a long-term residence, etc. - versus the “chronic homeless”, i.e. the ones living on the actual streets?

If I lost my job tomorrow, I feel like I could find a new one fairly quickly, but let’s say for some reason I couldn’t. I have some savings that could get me through for a while, and even if I didn’t, I have a network of family and friends on whom I could rely on temporary financial/housing assistance.

So, even though I live in a very high-COL major city in California, that cost of living would not result in me living in the street unless a ton of other things went wrong in my life simultaneously. Namely, I would have to burn bridges with a lot of different people in my life in order for things to get to that point.

Even if my entire family and social network were much poorer than they are, presumably they would still have couches I could sleep on and bathrooms which I could use to shower and shave. They wouldn’t let me get to the point where I’m a filthy bum sleeping on the sidewalk.

So, yes, I can fully understand how high COL could contribute to a larger number of “hidden homeless” - functional individuals who are down on their luck and temporarily relying on help from others - but I don’t think it does much to explain the proportion of homeless people who become “chronic homeless”; these people must have been real fuck-ups to have exhausted the generosity of all of the people in their lives who could have pitched in to prop them up while they get back on their feet. Again, I understand that people who grow up in an impoverished family/social situation have a smaller pool of assistance to draw from, but I still don’t understand how a person with family and friends ends up out on the streets unless they have consistently done something to wear out their welcome with the people who could have at least provided the bare minimum support, namely a roof over their heads.

Some examples of how someone would wear out their welcome with the people in their lives: chronic alcoholism/drug abuse, stealing from others (like, for example, to feed the aforementioned alcohol/drug habits), domestic violence/threats, being so mentally ill that you’re considered a liability by others, being generally insufferable to be around, etc. People get to the point where they give up on helping you because their investment is wasted, and they can’t bear to be responsible for you any longer.

So, I don’t know to what extent high COL explains those people. Again, I haven’t yet read the report, and maybe it explains a lot of this stuff.

There’s also the factor that high COL localities tend to have many more people in lower working class households, so the family and friends of lower working class people in San Francisco simply have less ability to put up a down on their luck friend or relative because their houses and apartments are overcrowded already.

I think you're also overlooking that low-functioning-but-not-cartoonishly-deranged people are simply incredibly frustrating to deal with when they won't get their shit together and insist on abnormal behavior. People who could solve most of their problems with "just be normal" don't get much sympathy as page five news stories about floridaman, and in real life they wear out their welcome pretty fast. Not by pissing people off, not by doing drugs, not by getting in fights and causing property damage, but just by needing a helping hand because of their own poor decisionmaking and frequently enough refusal to do mildly unpleasant or boring things.

Thanks for your perspective, voted for AAQC.

This perspctive is what I agree often gets missed when we talk about homelessness. It's strange to me that even when a strong study is presented that says hey, maybe homelessness is about, you know, HOMES, so many people here immediately jump to drugs and shitting on the street.

The real problem is that housing, a basic human need (maybe right depending on your beliefs) is denied to many because they simply cannot afford it. And this isn't a complex problem like many try to make it out to be - as others have said, if we just stop artificially constraining the supply the market will help solve the problem. It won't fix it entirely of course, but not shooting ourselves in the foot repeatedly is a good start.

It's strange to me that even when a strong study is presented that says hey, maybe homelessness is about, you know, HOMES, so many people here immediately jump to drugs and shitting on the street.

Because it amounts to a bait and switch. The people pushing this study have preferred policies about subsidized housing, and they're using the claim that the homeless problem can be solved with those policies to push them. But the "homeless problem" as most people understand it isn't about people couch-surfing or living in their cars or even illegal immigrants making camp near Home Depot; it's about the drug-addled street shitters who make life miserable for everyone else. And you can't fix that with homes; you can give those people homes and they'll wreck them in short order.

But the "homeless problem" as most people understand it isn't about people couch-surfing or living in their cars or even illegal immigrants making camp near Home Depot; it's about the drug-addled street shitters who make life miserable for everyone else. And you can't fix that with homes; you can give those people homes and they'll wreck them in short order.

I see it as a nuanced problem with more than one solution. Ideally we strictly police the defectors ruining the commons, but at the same time we tackle the issue that is creating them in the first place.

Personally I'm for stricter policing of public spaces, crackdown on illegal opiate/meth dealing, and building more housing. Just because we do one doesn't mean we can't do the rest.

"Fixing the root cause" is the standard leftist answer to all our intractable problems, and as can be determined by "intractable", it doesn't work. The root cause of street shitters simply isn't high housing costs anyway.

The root cause is something close to personal responsibility and lack of religion, in my opinion. I hope to fix that too. But again, you're reducing me to one view.

We can do all of the things I mentioned above and also push for personal responsibility and the importance of religious belief.

What do you think the root cause is?

I don't know what the root cause is. If we found it, I doubt we could do anything about it -- maybe 4000 people out of 4 million are just irretrievably broken by the vagaries of chance. I think the main priority should be containing the problem.

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I mean, true, but the ability to be obscured by lots of people who just can’t afford a house provides cover preventing these people from being beaten by the police/arrested/otherwise persuaded to change their ways.

They aren't obscured at all except by those deliberately conflating them. And it isn't that preventing them from being beaten or arrested; it's another part of the leftist memeplex, a part I'm more sympathetic to (though getting less so).

As for those who just can't afford a house, I have no sympathy. If you can't afford San Francisco because the prices are too damn high, there are 332 cheaper cities with populations over 100,000 that you could move to. I can't afford to live in SF either, why should I subsidize those who are living there without a fixed address?

As much as I sympathize with your individual plight, I don’t think it counts into the “homeless problem” in the society’s view. Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much. Indeed, there are a lot of poor and struggling people on this planet, and I can’t spare too much energy or emotion on you.

Instead, what I see as an actual problem is crazy, unpredictable, aggressive hobos taking over the commons, and making the city dangerous and unlivable for normal people, while collectively consuming more government resources per capita than the poorest working people actually subsist on. This is the problem for me, because it actually affects me in a substantial and negative way.

My point here is that you are or were not like them, and it is unlikely that any solution that applies to one group will also apply to the other. The hidden homeless are overlooked on purpose, because they are only a problem to themselves, not to anyone else.

Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much.

Be that as it may, some of your tax money is already being used to, supposedly, help the homeless. I am not sure what you would prefer, but you can of course support not spending tax money on this. If you do support spending tax money on it, then there is a question of whether it should be spent as it is currently being spent, or whether more of it should be spent to give the homeless housing.

How many of the people surveyed are so-called “hidden homeless” - people who are couch-surfing, living in their cars, staying with a succession of family members and friends without officially establishing a long-term residence, etc. - versus the “chronic homeless”, i.e. the ones living on the actual streets?

Here's their breakdown:

More than three quarters (78%) noted that they had spent the most time while homeless in the prior six months in unsheltered settings (21% in a vehicle, 57% without a vehicle). Over the prior six months, 90% reported at least one night in an unsheltered setting.

re:

Namely, I would have to burn bridges with a lot of different people in my life in order for things to get to that point.

I think it definitely remains true that becoming homeless doesn't require just having lost your house, but probably having lost your friends as well. This is part of why I described (I should probably clarify this is my own take rather than the study or podcast's) that we're talking about a demographic of pretty low-functional people that are near the bottom of society in general. But clearly in states with twice as much poverty, worse opioid problems, etc, if these people can afford a place to stay it makes a pretty siginificant difference in whether they'll wind up on the street, where their pathologies will become a public nuisance/safety issue, and where it becomes significantly harder to get someone back from after they've landed there.

I wonder how much of California's homelessness problem stems from a large portion of their population being transplants? West Virginians today are pretty much all descended from people who lived in West Virginia in 1950 and so have nearby relatives, whereas Californians very frequently are descended from people who didn't live in California in 1990 and so have few to no nearby relatives.

That's a good point, I'm not sure. Here's what I dug out of the paper though not sure if it really answers our question:

Overall, 36% of participants had sought help to prevent homelessness, but most sought help from friends or family, rather than non-profits or government agencies...

Seeking support was more common for adults in homeless families, where 61% sought assistance. The most common sources of support sought across all participants were friends and family (22%); community-based organizations, religious organizations, or domestic violence services (16%); and government agencies (8%) (Figure 20). Adults in families sought help from any source more frequently than single adults and TAY.

Twenty-three percent of all participants received help. Adults in homeless families were more likely to receive help; nearly half (48%) of adults in families received help of any kind (compared to 21% of single adults and 24% of TAY). The most common reported types of support received were from friends and family, community-based organizations, and government agencies. Adults in families received help from any source more frequently than single adults and transition age young adults

More remarkably, for where people stayed the previous night:

More than three-quarters of participants (76%) stayed in unsheltered settings the night prior to their interview; 20% stayed in a vehicle, and 56% without a vehicle. Nineteen percent stayed in an emergency shelter, 0.3% stayed in a domestic violence shelter, 2% stayed in a motel, hotel, or trailer paid for by the government or an organization (e.g., as part of a COVID program), 0.1% stayed in a motel or hotel paid for by self or family, 1% stayed with family or friends, and 0.5% stayed in institutional settings, such as hospitals or jails.

If people had been homeless for less than six months, we asked where they had spent the most time during their episode of homelessness. The responses were similar to where participants had been the previous night: 78% were in unsheltered settings (21% in a vehicle, 57% unsheltered settings without a vehicle). Fifteen percent reported that they spent the most time in an emergency shelter, 0.3% in a domestic violence shelter, 2% in a motel, hotel, or trailer paid for by the government or organization, 2% in a motel or hotel paid for by self or family, 0.5% in a substance use treatment program, and 2% with friends and family.

In fairness, at this point we're interviewing a group of people who've lost all ties with friends / family, whether they had them to begin with or not. Lower down it suggest these people did have connections but their family and friends were just unable to accomodate them for one reason or another:

Families and friends can be a source of housing support for many individuals, providing places for individuals to live. But many participants noted that their family or friends were not able to provide a place to stay (Figure 36). Half (51%) of all participants noted that their family and friends were unable to accommodate them, with 39% noting it as a barrier that impacted them a lot. This issue was more frequently identified as a barrier among transition age young adults (70%, with 53% indicating it impacted them a lot) and adults in families (65%, with 57% indicating it impacted them a lot) than single adults (49%, with 37% indicating it impacted them a lot). This finding could be because family or friends do not have space or resources for the participant to live with them, or because rental agreements for market-rate or subsidized housing may limit the number of residents permitted to reside in a unit, or the length of time a guest is allowed to stay there.

For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%).

The problem with these measures is that they're all looking at these as binary, threshold-type statuses rather than as spectrums where the likelihood of homelessness increases as they worsen. Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of clinically depressed West Virginians and more than their fair share of opioid abusers, but these things are still on a spectrum. Many of the visible vagrants aren't just mentally ill or heavy substance users, they're obviously, visibly stark-raving mad or fentanyl-zombies. Someone that lives a pretty fucked up life and is a functional alcoholic may well be able to maintain a home in a way that the full-on junkie cannot.

Now, that said, I would agree that some of this is going to come down to the fact that a functional alcoholic that does odd jobs is a lot more likely to be able to keep a shack in a holler than afford a condo in San Francisco. From that angle, I'm inclined to agree with the core of the Klein thesis, but I do think it overbakes it a bit by implying that there isn't a distinct that is not merely addicted or simply homeless, but absolutely gone. Even there, I would agree with the Demsas story of spirals being important, and I hear some of that echoed listening to Jared Klickstein tell his story of homelessness and meth addiction, but the extent of the problem in San Francisco and Skid Row seems to me like there's more going on than mere housing prices.

edit - Where I probably disagree most vigorously with the people that think it's a housing problem is on policy solutions. OK, I agree, people have a tough time and wind up spiraling downwards because they couldn't afford basic housing. Perfect, we know the answer - deregulate the shit out of the markets. Allow people to people super cheap housing that's basically just little hostels that they can rent out really cheap. Decrease the regulation on housing standards. Allow windowless rooms. Just have the government stop throwing up massive barriers to entry and the problem is basically solved, at least if the West Virginia example tells us anything. But no, that's not the solution, it's building $200K/unit "affordable housing" in dense urban corridors and moving in crack addicts that will destroy the places and make it miserable for any decent people that might have wanted to live there.

I would agree that some of this is going to come down to the fact that a functional alcoholic that does odd jobs is a lot more likely to be able to keep a shack in a holler than afford a condo in San Francisco.

Eh not necessarily. A big chunk of the legal profession is pretty fucked up, often including abuse of one or more substances (prescription pills, alcohol, illegal narcotics, you name it) and still manages to hold down a job at Manatt, or whatever.

Your functional alcoholic construction worker when he feels like it(sheet rockers and painters in particular are notorious for this) type is simply not going to, though.

Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of clinically depressed West Virginians and more than their fair share of opioid abusers, but these things are still on a spectrum.

West Virginia does specifically have a higher opioid addiction problem than Cali so I don't think it's really measuring functional alcoholic businessmen-types. Still though, true, it may be hard to measure severity of addiction, and maybe the Californian addicts are just mega addicts/worse than their WV equivalents? That still leaves with a lot to explain in terms of why poverty is so much worse in other places and homelessness so much better.

but I do think it overbakes it a bit by implying that there isn't a distinct that is not merely addicted or simply homeless, but absolutely gone.

I don't actually think they disagree here, there are definitely people beyond all help and who will never manage their own life even if you give them a mansion. I think they're mostly arguing against the reverse extreme, the idea that the homelessness problem can really just be boiled down to drugs to the neglect of other factors with stronger correlations. For instance, re your complaint at the bottom:

Perfect, we know the answer - deregulate the shit out of the markets. Allow people to people super cheap housing that's basically just little hostels that they can rent out really cheap. Decrease the regulation on housing standards. Allow windowless rooms. Just have the government stop throwing up massive barriers to entry and the problem is basically solved, at least if the West Virginia example tells us anything. But no, that's not the solution

They actually do address that as a solution:

EZRA KLEIN: One thing that the Housing First discussion always brings up for me is the question of the second house or the second unit, let’s call it, because you can imagine a world where we have a bunch of, more than we do now, taxpayer-financed homes, tiny homes, shared apartment buildings. Maybe we build things that are more like dormitories with shared bathrooms, that kind of thing.

People then need a place to leave and go to next, right? One thing about a lot of these communities is there are a lot of strictures on them, right? You want to have partners, you want to have your dog there, et cetera. So what happens when people then want to move out onto their own? And do you have a housing market where there are cheap units somewhere for the people who need them?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Mhm.

EZRA KLEIN: And this is a point that many people who focus on housing have made. But we used to have just a lot more midrange housing options. We used to have things that were more like dormitories.

You used to have boarding houses. You used to have things where the building code didn’t make sure that everybody had a bathroom, right, or their own bathroom, and that one of the things that even if you got a lot of shelters in place for, when people then get low-level jobs again, and they have some income but not that much, do they have somewhere to live?

So how do you think about that — I don’t want to call it the middle of the market because it isn’t the middle. It’s lower rungs on the ladder that used to exist, and we kicked out by basically making them illegal to build.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Mhm.

EZRA KLEIN: But it means that even if you do have finance shelter for a while, there’s often a really big gap between that and the next home that is out there for you to get.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: The people in this study, when they lost their housing, had an average income of $900 a month. Likely a lot of that is from social services as well. It may not be from a job. That is not enough money to save up for a down payment or to save up for even a monthly rent in most of the cities that we’re talking about here, or even in the adjoining suburbs. And so there is this real problem of how you bridge the gap to that second place.

And I want to be clear, there’s just not a simple, near-term solution to this problem. And everyone wants that to exist. And it just — it does not exist. There’s not going to be a way to build hundreds of thousands of units very, very quickly of this kind of housing.

But what you explained in your question here is that that is sort of like a manufactured problem. So SROs, single room occupancy hotels and housing options were a real problem when we think about housing quality. And people had the correct intuition that it’s unreasonable to say just because you are living in poverty, that you have to live in a place that is so run-down, so below code that no one would allow their children to live there.

And the problem is the policy response says, OK, we’ll just ban that type of housing. We’ll just say you’re not allowed to build that sort of thing anymore. And that will solve the problem.

But you can’t ban poverty, right? There are going to be poor people. And if there was an alternative outside of an S.R.O., they would have already been living there.

So there’s not really an alternative to saying, how do we make sure that there’s a bunch of cheap options that exist in the market, and saying, what we’re going to do is we’re going to outlaw all cheap forms of housing. I don’t think that that means we need to accept the kinds of housing quality that we saw in S.R.O.s, in the ’70s in New York City. I think it’s very clear that there should be some level of subsidization that we can have, and code enforcement that we can have to make sure that those are up to code.

But we have to accept that there’s going to be housing options to ensure that poor people are not on the street, that there are housing options for people who are low income. And what that means is that those are not going to have as nice amenities. It means that you might have to share amenities with people. One of the recommendations in this report is to explore shared living arrangements for people.

I mean, section 8 kind of obviates the need to build shitty tenement houses for people who can't afford anything else, doesn't it?

I think it certainly could hypothetically (and would be better than just "worse" market rate stuff), but it's the same problem really: public housing gets blocked by zoning restrictions just like all the other housing, even moreso.

Building subsidized housing—or for that matter, market rate rental housing—is illegal in most parts of the U.S. Local zoning laws prohibit structures other than single-family detached homes on the majority of land across cities and suburbs.

Well yes, in the world we live in there simply is not enough housing to meet demand. But ‘building more section 8’ seems like a strictly superior option to ‘building krushchevskys’ and much more likely to happen.

No disagreement, I'm fine with more section 8 and I've said somewhere else in this gigundo thread that I think there's a role for a healthy mix of both public and private solutions. There's plenty of room as well for a less regulated housing market though that doesn't actually include tenements or really cruel situations either. I'm thinking of stuff like the requirements that American buildings have two fire escapes without evidence they result in less fire deaths, regulations that make it way cheaper to build under five stories unless you're going to make a mega high rise, all the way to laws against Accessory Dwelling Units that keep you from renting out spare rooms or converting your garage into an extra room (the latter were cited in particular as a solution that might make it easier for people to house their temporarily homeless relatives.)

This is kinda pedantic but even krushchevskys at the time represented an increase in amenities for a lot of people who had never had indoor toilets or running water. A lot of them are still around today, some quite nice after remodeling, the kind of thing young PMC might be renting.

Sure, I totally agree that cutting regulatory red tape on the housing code would reduce rents and that that’s a good thing.

Yeah, that's a pretty good reply! I actually listened to the podcast, but it was back when the episode came out and I thought I recalled it being much more heavily in the direction of acknowledging the policy problem, but then shifting back towards trying to determine how governments should subsidize this. My basic position on government housing subsidies is that they always result in increased aggregate housing spending, usually drive up the lowest-cost options, and are generally inferior to simply leaving people to their own devices with nothing more than really basic guidelines in place.

Yeah agreed. Imo there's probably room for a healthy mix (kind of unavoidably for those homeless who do actually need to be in the equivalent of a mental institution) but I also assume it's cheaper/more efficient if a lot of it happens on the market.

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