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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.
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.
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.
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.
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