It seems to me that a major factor contributing to the homelessness crisis in California is that there is a legal floor on the quality of a house that can be built, occupied, or rented. That legal floor is the lowest-rung on the ladder out of homelessness and in California its cost makes it too high for a lot of people to reach. Other countries deal with this by not having such a floor, which results in shantytowns and such. Those have their own significant problems, but it isn’t obvious to me that those problems would be worse (for e.g. California) than widespread homelessness. Am I missing something I should be considering?
It’s basically the NIMBY problem. Low-quality housing decreases the value of nearby housing. The quest to change rules to get more housing built is one of the central political battles in California.
It would be instructive to compare with the homelessness in Vancouver, which has no such legal floor. There must be a comparative analysis out there somewhere.
The alternatives? Like, in Europe, you will generally encounter very few homeless people, and yet no shantytowns, and decent building codes?
It starts with the fact that we have a comprehensive social system that will cover rent in minimum available housing if you lose your job, because we realise that losing you house too will totally fuck you up in ways in noone’s interest. There are projects that build on the basic idea—that the solution to homelessness is giving them fucking homes, and then sorting out the rest—in the US, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First They work well.
California adopted a “Housing First” policy several years ago. The number of people experiencing homelessness continued to rise thereafter. Much of the problem seems to be that there just aren’t a lot of homes to be had, because it is time-consuming and expensive to make them (and/or illegal to make them quickly and cheaply).
It seems to me that a major factor contributing to the homelessness crisis in California is that there is a legal floor on the quality of a house that can be built, occupied, or rented. That legal floor is the lowest-rung on the ladder out of homelessness and in California its cost makes it too high for a lot of people to reach. Other countries deal with this by not having such a floor, which results in shantytowns and such. Those have their own significant problems, but it isn’t obvious to me that those problems would be worse (for e.g. California) than widespread homelessness. Am I missing something I should be considering?
It’s basically the NIMBY problem. Low-quality housing decreases the value of nearby housing. The quest to change rules to get more housing built is one of the central political battles in California.
It would be instructive to compare with the homelessness in Vancouver, which has no such legal floor. There must be a comparative analysis out there somewhere.
The alternatives? Like, in Europe, you will generally encounter very few homeless people, and yet no shantytowns, and decent building codes?
It starts with the fact that we have a comprehensive social system that will cover rent in minimum available housing if you lose your job, because we realise that losing you house too will totally fuck you up in ways in noone’s interest. There are projects that build on the basic idea—that the solution to homelessness is giving them fucking homes, and then sorting out the rest—in the US, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First They work well.
California adopted a “Housing First” policy several years ago. The number of people experiencing homelessness continued to rise thereafter. Much of the problem seems to be that there just aren’t a lot of homes to be had, because it is time-consuming and expensive to make them (and/or illegal to make them quickly and cheaply).