Building a single new unit of housing in SF costs like $400,000 and takes years of cutting through red tape.
There’s far fewer homeless in the Midwest because homes are actually affordable. The poverty, squalor, heroin addiction is just as bad. It’s just out of sight.
Housing has very little to do with it. SF has always been an expensive city to live in and its surrounded with suburbs with affordable housing.
There are almost no homeless people in the surrounding areas because they come to SF for drugs and they know they won't be prosecuted for living their lifestyle. We're literally killing people by tolerating their bad behavior.
Mental health and addiction problems are substantially ameliorated by inexpensive housing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193206 and it is easier to maintain housing that is inexpensive than housing that is expensive.
The extent to which people ignore the obvious point that homelessness is exploding in the most expensive cities, like SF, but not in less expensive cities, I find mind boggling.
San Francisco is a good case study in what happens when you don't build enough housing - people who were previously able to afford cheap apartments now can't and do all of their business out in the street.
Other cities and states have worse problems with drug use but don't have problems with homelessness because housing is more affordable there.
SF already spends an exorbitant amount on housing the homeless ($241M in 2016). Its poverty rate is also not particularly high by American city standards (9.6%, vs 11.3% for the surrounding Bay Area, 19.6% for LA, 19.0% for NYC, 34.5% for Detroit).
The main reasons there's such a visible homeless problem are:
1.) Housing crisis in general. A lot of that $241M goes to lower-income residents who are at risk of homelessness, not ones actually on the street, to keep them in their homes. From there, it largely goes to the landlords, if the apartment isn't rent-controlled, since it's more money chasing the same amount of housing. If the apartment is rent-controlled, it goes to the tenant + other landlords, since rent-controlled apartments drive up the rent for everybody else.
2.) A general laissez-faire attitude toward the homeless. SF has a strong culture of live-and-let-live; if you don't bother the homeless, they won't bother you. (This attitude may or may not reflect reality, but it's the culture.) There's widespread opposition to criminalizing homelessness and say arresting or tazing homeless people.
3.) Poor mental health & substance abuse services. This is a legacy of history: JFK moved responsibility for mental health services from the state to federal government, Reagan consequently cut the budget for the state of CA's mental health services, and then when Reagan was president, he moved responsibility back to the states, without any corresponding increase in funding. As a result, the mentally ill are nobody's problem, so they just sorta hang out on street corners or wander across major boulevards.
4.) Mild climate. SF is an attractive place to be homeless. I grew up in Boston; we didn't have much of a visible homeless problem. Why? Because come wintertime, they would all either freeze to death or huddle together in the subway stations, keeping them out of public view unless you took the T. In SF, they sprawl all over the Tenderloin, the Mission, the Civic Center, SOMA, etc, all of which are prominent neighborhoods that get a lot of gentrified and/or tourist traffic.
San Francisco has some of the most expensive real estate in the country. [1] When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area like two decades back and looked at housing prices there, SROs[2] were like $1000/month or so. That's a single room, not an apartment.
San Francisco has really lovely weather most of the year. It has highly desirable weather if you are homeless: Not much rain and mild temperatures year round.[3]
I think California is currently the dumping ground for a lot of America's homeless. I have heard that homelessness is down in other states and up in California.
I think part of what happens is people go there because the weather is very homeless-friendly and then get stuck in part because housing costs are so high in California. I think California will not really solve its homeless problem until the entire US decides to resolve our lack of affordable housing.[4]
I spent nearly six years homeless, most of it in California. I left the state to get back into housing. I have six years of college and yadda, so what I was able to pull off may not be what most homeless people can do for themselves in the face of a broken system.
(Edit: years before I was ever homeless, I took a college class from SFSU called Homelessness and Public Policy. The above paragraph was intended to suggest I'm somewhat knowledgeable about the topic.)
I am still dirt poor and trying to establish an adequate income while being told it's somehow my fault that my poverty is intractable and no amount of rebutting the myriad explanations for how it is somehow my fault ever seems to really change the situation.
I've been repeating a lot of this for years on HN, seemingly to no avail. I'm frankly amazingly exhausted at this point.
The size of the visible homeless population in a city is mostly determined by the cost of housing and how cold it gets in the winter. SF is basically a worst case scenario of being insanely expensive but also warm enough that they don't feel an obligation to build shelters so people aren't freezing to death. People are homeless because it's too expensive to live, not because we're not punishing them harshly enough for being poor.
If you were building cheap homes, say at 120k a pop, you could build 2,000 such homes every year. The total homeless pop in SF is 6,000. In three years you could build 6,000 such homes in say Mississippi or some other middle of nowhere place where land is very cheap.
This is propaganda. Nearly all the homeless you see on the streets are addicted to heroin, fentanyl, or meth, or some combination. You cannot afford housing at any level when you’re doing those kind of drugs. And most of the homeless in San Francisco aren’t locals.. the vast majority come here for the permissive drug laws, social benefits like SF’s homeless assistance program that pays them $500, and the weather.
Cheaper? They're homeless, the cost of living in SF doesn't mean much if you have no money and live on the streets.
As the article mentioned, homeless like SF because of how much the city spends on them:
> The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before. Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.
Also the moderate climate, and there's so much wealth it's excellent for panhandling.
Don’t think building more homes in SF would help with homeless problems. The thing about SF and CA in general is that it is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire world.
The kind of homeless people in SF is not the same as the kind that can't afford housing. The homeless people in SF have given up on life. They're drug addicts. They're violent. They've been homeless for a long time even.
Even if you give them free housing, they'll mess it up somehow. They can't hold down a job. They don't take care of the home. They'll abuse the home until it's unlivable.
If it's truly unaffordable housing, why the hell are they in SF? Go to somewhere that is 1/4th the price. Plenty of places in the US.
Nothing is affordable when you are addicted to opiates, and have to spend every cent to get them.
No one who has been to SF within the last few years would contest that the majority of the homeless there are drug addicts, due to the effective legalization of buying and selling drugs its right in front of your eyes (and under your feet in the form of needles)
Well, as you point out, assuming the SF stats apply to the entire US is a stretch.
But regardless, do you think the only reason why people are homeless is because they can't afford a home? They did a survey in SF and 60%+ were homeless due to mental health and/or drug and alcohol issues.
The social services provided, combined with milder weather, make SF a better place to be homeless than other areas. Surely homeless people, just like the rest of us, are attracted to cities that serve them better.
If you built every homeless person a house I don't think there would be any less homeless on the streets of SF. Homeless in LA who desire a house would simply migrate to SF. A Greyhound bus ticket is not that expensive.
So until you find a solution to homelessness in the entire USA, or at least the Western USA, I can't see any one city solving the problem (as opposed to moving the problem to a different city).
The data doesn't really back this claim up. There are parts of the country where drug use is very high, and yet they don't have as many homeless people per capita as SF. There is a very clear correlation between homelessness and house prices, and not a clear correlation between drug use and house prices. Additionally, the mere fact of being homeless often results in increases in mental illness symptoms and drug use, so trying to get people to not be drug addicts while not giving them a home means you aren't taking away what is often one of the biggest causes of their drug use.
There’s far fewer homeless in the Midwest because homes are actually affordable. The poverty, squalor, heroin addiction is just as bad. It’s just out of sight.
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