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