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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
They were made illegal by ordinance.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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).
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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I don't know enough about this area to have any confidence in this, but:
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).
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The report (or executive summary) also cites meth.
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.
At least, not until the potheads turn psychotic. At that point they're perfectly capable of violence.
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Perhaps, but this study is mostly looking at unsheltered homeless:
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.
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