Excellent analysis Diane. I really like that you cited your references and debunked their theories without ad hominin attacks. I'm going to dive deeper into your substack articles.
I agree that low pay and high rents (and house prices) contribute to homelessness, but in my 25 years of experience working in San Francisco, I can assure you that the large majority of homeless in the city are hard drug users and/or severely mentally ill. They do not look like short-term homeless at all.
The people who are not hard drug users or mentally ill tend to live with relatives, or in shared apartments, or move out of this area to somewhere they can actually afford an apartment on the local wage.
Not saying that the homeless are bad people, only that the issue is primarily hard drugs and mental illness around here.
To raise wages, we would need to completely halt illegal immigration and deport the millions of illegals who drive down wages for the lowest jobs. The rich (especially meatpacking and construction owners) profit hugely by employing illegals at the expense of the poorest US citizens, mainly blacks.
Also, outsourcing of manufacturing to China also eliminated millions of jobs (again, making rich people much richer). A possible solution there is tariffs on Chinese imports.
You are wrong about the percentage of the homeless that are hard drug users and/or severely mentally ill. The majority of hard core homeless who stay homeless for a long time and the majority of visible homeless are no doubt those. But about 20,000 people experience homelessness for some period of time over any given year in San Francisco: the vast majority "self resolve" without any government help.
I have been homeless twice on my life and both times I was employed. The first time was when I dropped our of college and went back to my rural small town. I did not want to live with my parents so I slept on a friends couch for a while and worked part time for minimum wage at KFC while I tried to scrape together some money. I got in a fight with my friend so I moved to a spot down by the river near the city park. Every day, I would get up before dawn, wash myself up in a public bathroom and get in my car and either go to work or the library. I washed my clothes in a laundromat. I eventually joined the military to get out of that situation. I was smoking some pot at the time but did not really have a drug or mental health problem. I was just poor and down on my luck.
The second time was after I got out of the army. I had some money but was looking for a shared household where I could have roommates. I had some acquaintances where I slept on the couch until I found roommates. This was more brief, about six weeks. I made sure to make myself welcome by cleaning the bathroom, washing the dishes and making myself scarce during the day. I was working full time and taking community college classes, so that wasn't hard. This was in an expensive, high opportunity city, and I already had what was a pretty good job, so moving to a cheaper place and making my savings last would have been the wrong choice.
The experience of most homeless people is a bit like mine: down on their luck due to job loss, divorce, a fight with their parents or boyfriend and ending up temporarily without housing. Some sleep in their car, some crash on a friends couch, some sleep rough. I see Latino immigrants who sleep out of the way in the mission out hustling for work the next day. I doubt they stay homeless for long.
If we want to reduce homelessness in the long run we need to build more housing. It will take a long time but it's the only real solution, short of providing government housing for everyone who wants it. This would have to a federal solution as one city cannot do it alone. Back in the seventies, we had government supplied housing for those who were extremely poor as housing of last resort. It was run by HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) and the housing was despairingly called "The Projects". It was filthy, dangerous, vermin infested and in poor condition. I know, I lived there for a while when I was a teenager. It was still better than being homeless though.
Thank you for telling us about your experience. I agree with you that building more housing is a good idea and should help people who were in a similar situation. Some (like you) do run into a temporary problem and are able to get by with help from friends and/or family. But hardly anyone even notices this type of homelessness.
The problem is with what I called chronic and intermittent homelessness in a previous post (https://dianey.substack.com/p/homelessness-is-an-incentives-problem) -- that is, people who even in the best-case scenario just can't afford local rent. No amount of building will fix their problem.
The "vast majority of homeless" sounds like a reference to those homeless on a particular night. There could, over the course of a decade, be many more who have been homeless on a transient basis. But that is not the problem to which we refer when we speak of the homeless. At any moment, the majority of the homeless are the long term homeless. They are the most noticeable, the most disturbed and the most disturbing.
"To raise wages, we would need to completely halt illegal immigration and deport the millions of illegals who drive down wages for the lowest jobs. The rich (especially meatpacking and construction owners) profit hugely by employing illegals at the expense of the poorest US citizens, mainly blacks."
--- If you think American citizens, whether they be black, white, brown or lavender are going to work in meatpacking and construction labor for any amount of money, I've got sand in the desert to sell you.
I know a contractor who has tried to get American citizens to work at a very generous price and he says they just won't do it no matter what he offers them. Young Americans just won't do certain work anymore.
This is all very reasonable but it does seem to omit the very high correlation between regional housing affordability and homelessness. There's fairly low homelessness rates in the most struggling rural areas of America, for example, despite plenty of drug and alcohol problems in places like Native American Reservation, Appalachian Coal towns, etc... And it's not because WV and NM are simply exporting all their homeless.
It seems like there are several complicated things that confound any analysis. The first is homeless moving around, which I believe primarily happens regionally and explains a lot of why there are so many homeless in Downtown LA but not as many in say, Pasadena. There is also probably some long-distance moving but it's more related to regular moving patterns and people finding themselves homeless after relocating, rather than long-distance travel after being homeless. Also a lot of ex-inmates end up homeless very soon after release.
The 2nd thing is that drug, alcohol or mental problems are a bigger impact on WHO is homeless than on total numbers, at least within a region. If there isn't enough housing to go around, like on the West Coast, people with the above problems will lose the game of musical chairs first. If there is enough housing, like in Appalachia and most of rural America, even the drug addicts are often housed.
That's not to say drug/alcohol / mental problems have no effect on total numbers, they definitely do at the margins. There are certainly people who can't live anywhere and will have a hell of a hard time finding a roommate. But it's not the primary cause of total homeless numbers or we would see stronger regional correlations.
"The obvious next step in their analysis would be examining changes in housing prices over time, and observing whether these have the predicted effect on area homelessness rates."
I lived in San Francisco in the 80s when rents were low. There were in fact very few homeless. As rents have gone up, so have the number of homeless. This fits their thesis.
Thank you for continue to speak about this. If only our leaders had some common sense they would agree with you. Will you write about the recent audit that took place in California?
Excellent analysis Diane. I really like that you cited your references and debunked their theories without ad hominin attacks. I'm going to dive deeper into your substack articles.
Lax enforcement of laws against hard drug use and generous homeless benefits explains the intense concentration of homeless in the Bay Area.
That is, Democratic policies attract the homeless drug users.
The overwhelming majority of homeless are not homeless for very long and most of them don't use drugs.
Lax drugs laws might attract homeless drug users but they don't cause homelessness in the first place. Low pay and high rents do.
He stated ..... without evidence.
I agree that low pay and high rents (and house prices) contribute to homelessness, but in my 25 years of experience working in San Francisco, I can assure you that the large majority of homeless in the city are hard drug users and/or severely mentally ill. They do not look like short-term homeless at all.
The people who are not hard drug users or mentally ill tend to live with relatives, or in shared apartments, or move out of this area to somewhere they can actually afford an apartment on the local wage.
Not saying that the homeless are bad people, only that the issue is primarily hard drugs and mental illness around here.
To raise wages, we would need to completely halt illegal immigration and deport the millions of illegals who drive down wages for the lowest jobs. The rich (especially meatpacking and construction owners) profit hugely by employing illegals at the expense of the poorest US citizens, mainly blacks.
Also, outsourcing of manufacturing to China also eliminated millions of jobs (again, making rich people much richer). A possible solution there is tariffs on Chinese imports.
You are wrong about the percentage of the homeless that are hard drug users and/or severely mentally ill. The majority of hard core homeless who stay homeless for a long time and the majority of visible homeless are no doubt those. But about 20,000 people experience homelessness for some period of time over any given year in San Francisco: the vast majority "self resolve" without any government help.
I have been homeless twice on my life and both times I was employed. The first time was when I dropped our of college and went back to my rural small town. I did not want to live with my parents so I slept on a friends couch for a while and worked part time for minimum wage at KFC while I tried to scrape together some money. I got in a fight with my friend so I moved to a spot down by the river near the city park. Every day, I would get up before dawn, wash myself up in a public bathroom and get in my car and either go to work or the library. I washed my clothes in a laundromat. I eventually joined the military to get out of that situation. I was smoking some pot at the time but did not really have a drug or mental health problem. I was just poor and down on my luck.
The second time was after I got out of the army. I had some money but was looking for a shared household where I could have roommates. I had some acquaintances where I slept on the couch until I found roommates. This was more brief, about six weeks. I made sure to make myself welcome by cleaning the bathroom, washing the dishes and making myself scarce during the day. I was working full time and taking community college classes, so that wasn't hard. This was in an expensive, high opportunity city, and I already had what was a pretty good job, so moving to a cheaper place and making my savings last would have been the wrong choice.
The experience of most homeless people is a bit like mine: down on their luck due to job loss, divorce, a fight with their parents or boyfriend and ending up temporarily without housing. Some sleep in their car, some crash on a friends couch, some sleep rough. I see Latino immigrants who sleep out of the way in the mission out hustling for work the next day. I doubt they stay homeless for long.
If we want to reduce homelessness in the long run we need to build more housing. It will take a long time but it's the only real solution, short of providing government housing for everyone who wants it. This would have to a federal solution as one city cannot do it alone. Back in the seventies, we had government supplied housing for those who were extremely poor as housing of last resort. It was run by HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) and the housing was despairingly called "The Projects". It was filthy, dangerous, vermin infested and in poor condition. I know, I lived there for a while when I was a teenager. It was still better than being homeless though.
Thank you for telling us about your experience. I agree with you that building more housing is a good idea and should help people who were in a similar situation. Some (like you) do run into a temporary problem and are able to get by with help from friends and/or family. But hardly anyone even notices this type of homelessness.
The problem is with what I called chronic and intermittent homelessness in a previous post (https://dianey.substack.com/p/homelessness-is-an-incentives-problem) -- that is, people who even in the best-case scenario just can't afford local rent. No amount of building will fix their problem.
Don't forget the downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on rents that massive illegal immigration causes.
The "vast majority of homeless" sounds like a reference to those homeless on a particular night. There could, over the course of a decade, be many more who have been homeless on a transient basis. But that is not the problem to which we refer when we speak of the homeless. At any moment, the majority of the homeless are the long term homeless. They are the most noticeable, the most disturbed and the most disturbing.
"To raise wages, we would need to completely halt illegal immigration and deport the millions of illegals who drive down wages for the lowest jobs. The rich (especially meatpacking and construction owners) profit hugely by employing illegals at the expense of the poorest US citizens, mainly blacks."
--- If you think American citizens, whether they be black, white, brown or lavender are going to work in meatpacking and construction labor for any amount of money, I've got sand in the desert to sell you.
I know a contractor who has tried to get American citizens to work at a very generous price and he says they just won't do it no matter what he offers them. Young Americans just won't do certain work anymore.
I want to marry Diane Yap and sire a nation of children.
wow ironic its worst in states full of Marxists🤔
This is all very reasonable but it does seem to omit the very high correlation between regional housing affordability and homelessness. There's fairly low homelessness rates in the most struggling rural areas of America, for example, despite plenty of drug and alcohol problems in places like Native American Reservation, Appalachian Coal towns, etc... And it's not because WV and NM are simply exporting all their homeless.
It seems like there are several complicated things that confound any analysis. The first is homeless moving around, which I believe primarily happens regionally and explains a lot of why there are so many homeless in Downtown LA but not as many in say, Pasadena. There is also probably some long-distance moving but it's more related to regular moving patterns and people finding themselves homeless after relocating, rather than long-distance travel after being homeless. Also a lot of ex-inmates end up homeless very soon after release.
The 2nd thing is that drug, alcohol or mental problems are a bigger impact on WHO is homeless than on total numbers, at least within a region. If there isn't enough housing to go around, like on the West Coast, people with the above problems will lose the game of musical chairs first. If there is enough housing, like in Appalachia and most of rural America, even the drug addicts are often housed.
That's not to say drug/alcohol / mental problems have no effect on total numbers, they definitely do at the margins. There are certainly people who can't live anywhere and will have a hell of a hard time finding a roommate. But it's not the primary cause of total homeless numbers or we would see stronger regional correlations.
High rents plus poor people cause homelessness.
"The obvious next step in their analysis would be examining changes in housing prices over time, and observing whether these have the predicted effect on area homelessness rates."
I lived in San Francisco in the 80s when rents were low. There were in fact very few homeless. As rents have gone up, so have the number of homeless. This fits their thesis.
Thank you for continue to speak about this. If only our leaders had some common sense they would agree with you. Will you write about the recent audit that took place in California?