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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30158 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.

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.

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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