Progressives Need To Get Real on Housing
Progressives Need To Get Real on Housing
I Love You, But . . . Some of You Are Not Serious People.
Breaking News: homelessness in the U.S. is at its highest since 2007, which was the year federally-coordinated homeless counts began. It was also the year of the subprime mortgage crisis, sending record numbers of Americans out on the streets. Homelessness declined in the 2010s nationwide, before stalling and then gradually growing in 2018, amid a national housing shortage caused by the Great Recession’s poor home construction and Millennial household formation. Since the pandemic and expiration of housing assistance programs, homelessness has spiked in many non-typical states, particularly in the south.
While this record in homelessness is a national crisis, it’s really California and New York powering most of that growth since 2007. Remove only California and U.S. homelessness declined by 36,000 people since 2007. California has 42,000 more people homeless today than during the Great Recession. Of the top 10 American metropolitan regions that lead in unhoused people, California counties and cities top 7 of the 10. (Simplified spreadsheet here).
Homelessness is a crisis most severely impacting states that are largely Democratic. Per capita, California, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Hawaii and Washington D.C. significantly lead all other peers in residents without homes. Southwestern states like New Mexico and Colorado are also gaining ground. While the federal government has proven incompetent at helping the homeless, it’s time to stop dodging the point that Democratic governments in select areas are uniquely failing.
California — which accounts for 12% of the country but 21% of people without housing — has a culture of stalling, trivializing or weaponizing homelessness. Few in California are up to the task of actually getting people housed at the scale and timeframe necessary, even among its progressive-liberal cohort.
No place was this more evident to me than Santa Cruz, a small suburban town that appears in the HUD write-up seven times because it’s very unaffordable. After barely finding housing there, I picked up on a culture among locals that I found very disturbing. They treated homelessness as a quirky aspect of their town, as if it was a carryover from the counterculture of old, rather than an embarrassing and deadly humanitarian crisis. In old hippie towns like these there are generally two sides on housing woes. The moderates and centrists that want to (and cannot) penalize the homeless out of existence. The other is a left contingent that services the homeless or opposes anti-encampment policies, but refuses to understand the practical and empirical root causes.
While not always electorally effective, the latter does command sway over progressive thought among citizens. Which is very frustrating because they’ll oppose housing projects in a town whose inventory is so small, it’s demonstrably causing homelessness. When challenged on research consensus that homelessness is a housing shortage problem, they will dismiss it as libertarian or free market (which, it’s not), and fall back on the cause being abstractions like capitalism or real estate. They refuse to engage with the stark regional variations in homelessness because it indicates another variable unrelated to our economic system.
Berkeley is even worse because despite being cosmopolitan and highly educated, people who are driven by ideology and refuse inconvenient evidence have swayed the city’s housing policy for over 40 years. Berkeley’s homelessness crisis began back when it was governed by leftists who couldn’t grapple with housing shortages until it was too late. Since then, many progressives defend people without homes, but reject evidence of needing to build homes in favor of exclusively price controls. Usually they’re conservative about their environment changing in ways your average person is also uncomfortable with, but attempt to reconcile that discomfort as conforming to their progressive or leftist beliefs.
Progressive cities that are unable to dent homelessness even with housing first programs inevitably lead progressives to conclude that there aren’t local solutions to homelessness. The only progressive answer is to preach unlikely radical change or that it’s a federal prerogative, but not the fault of their own locality.
Here’s a very recent example with S.F. Supervisor Dean Preston — adamant disbeliever in housing supply impacting home prices — blaming San Francisco’s homelessness crisis on capitalism to right-wing reporters.
[Preston] said that homelessness is a “prime example” of what happens when “you turn the basic needs of human beings over to private interests,” which is “the heart of the approach under capitalism.”
This is true in abstract. The market cannot provide housing for everyone and no capitalist system has done so without government intervention. But are California and New York becoming more capitalist while Texas and Florida are embracing leftism? Has Atlanta, Houston and Austin embraced Soviet Communism by building swaths of homes and reducing homelessness, while Oakland, Los Angeles and New York embraces Ayn Rand? No.
What Preston said is what I’ve heard so many times from exasperated progressives and is the inevitable result of failing to dent homelessness. They’re unable to contend with the fact that socially progressive but very exclusionary regions with lots of demand but little supply in dwellings causes severe homelessness. So they will fall back on capitalism or worse, deny area variations altogether.
Asked why other cities have been able to deal with problems that San Francisco can’t seem to address, Preston said cities across the U.S. are also facing affordability crises, and that San Francisco is not unique.
It’s true that cities are facing affordability crises as indicated by rent burden, but research indicates it doesn’t actually correlate with homelessness as much as absolute rents and housing supply does. (A lot of those places are dealing with low wage issues).
And no, San Francisco is an extremely unique outlier in people without homes. San Francisco accounts for the largest share of homeless children without shelter in the United States. San Francisco account for the largest share of homeless veterans without shelter in the United States. The only reason S.F. didn’t make top 5 in the absolute increase in homelessness is because it has sent its overflow of homeless to nearby Oakland. San Francisco is a giant, 40 year long failure when it comes to providing housing and that is very unique. So are other highly desired coastal cities like Berkeley and Santa Cruz, too.
Houston, a blue city, ranked 2nd in the nation in reducing its homelessness since 2007 and getting people housed. The region’s count went 10,000 to 3,200 from 2007 to 2023. Doing the exact same Housing First programs, but also building many homes so that their tremendous population growth didn’t worsen homelessness. Something that is completely foreign to California cities which refuse to learn from any other place, ever.
I used to think if you let the crisis get bad then people will figure out the solutions, but memories erase politically inconvenient thoughts. Here’s Tim Redmond, who is the most prominent left-wing voice in San Francisco against building any more private housing. He’s attempting to claim S.F. housing was much better before Silicon Valley arrived and debunk housing supply determining home prices. (Bold emphasis was in original piece):
That’s not about the Yimbys and supply-side economics, it’s about what the housing market is always about, which is demand. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1981, there were almost no homeless people.
No homeless in San Francisco in 1981? You don’t even have to be a Discourse Lounge subscriber to know that’s not true.
Williams argued that the estimate of 8,000 to 10,000 homeless in San Francisco is overly optimistic. "My guesstimate is that there are at least 15,000", he said, "and it's increasing every day because there are so many who are losing their homes within The City."
City Is Urged to Find Shelter for Homeless, San Francisco Examiner. Nov 24, 1982
Not to rag on Redmond too hard, he like many progressives was part of an early wave of gentrification that predates this one, but that’s the problem. There’s no uncomfortable self-reflections. Until there’s a willingness to listen to evidence and examine solutions outside our own boundaries or ideologies, this crisis will probably persist for another 40 years.
Readers know that I primarily take down the moderate’s take on homelessness because they usually run governments in most socially progressive places. And they’re still wrong: it’s a housing supply problem, not a drug problem. The states that led in drug overdoses in 2022, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana, all have fewer homeless people today than in 2007. What annoys me about progressives is that they know what I say is true, but don’t want to admit it because a developer might make money or capitalism won’t be abolished.
It’s frustrating living in a place that has, is and will continue to refuse to contend with reality. Berkeley is never going to solve its homelessness crisis because as much as I love the people in my hometown, they are just not serious people. For all their degrees, they are quick to ignore evidence when it discomforts them. Keeping homeless people alive, defended from attack and resourced with services is vital — but only half the equation. The solution is housing, towers everywhere, that radically transforms the character of the city. Time and time again, with BART housing, downtown housing and more, they’ve proven unserious on that front.
I would much rather been spending my time debating with progressives how best to maximize the yield of housing supply necessary to reduce homelessness. Which I would be if this were a leftist country. Instead we’re arguing about whether housing supply impacts prices at all. Sigh.
I will say that the state of California is at least moving in the right direction, if not localities. The judicial system is dealing with moderates by making it increasingly hard for cities to conduct homeless sweeps without shelter beds being available. The legislature is cracking down on NIMBYism in progressive communities by suing or forcing them to build housing.
Congressional progressives unlike their local counterparts are extremely good on housing supply. Between Rashida Tlaib proposing mixed-income public housing and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez conditioning endorsements on ending exclusionary zoning and building homes, it’s looking brighter in Washington than it does locally.
Re Tim Redmond: I am pretty sure he’s the guy who wrote an article in the SF Bay Guardian during the dot-com boom, saying something to the effect of “please do not build more housing, as it will encourage more people to move here, and we can never ever build enough housing to satisfy demand. Therefore we must try to keep people from moving here.” (It’s been decades and my memory is probably faulty, but that is what I remember.)
It’s a truly galaxy brained take, yes, but I’ve seen it from liberal NIMBYs everywhere. Basically, “Where’s my Hukou Policy? People need to learn to bloom where they are planted, and stop moving to [city name]!” Ironically, many of them were newcomers once, but I guess…one of the good ones?
Having briefly lived in Berkeley lo these many decades ago, and in San Francisco for far longer than that, I can absolutely attest that there has been a homeless problem and discussions about it beginning in the 80’s. NIMBYs almost always have to say something along the lines of “It’s Reagan’s fault for closing mental institutions, which is why we have a homeless issue.” Never mind that deinstitutionalization started as a humanitarian movement to free people from “snake pits” on the Left, and that the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act was the work of Democrats.
I also heard that the homeless are but free spirits who *want* to sleep under the open sky. Yes, I know there are a few to whom this applies, but the vast majority of homeless people do want some sort of shelter. That, or “blah blah other states bus their homeless here,” but that’s not really true. Yes, it’s easier to be homeless in the Bay Area compared to, say, Arizona or Minnesota, but the vast majority of unhoused people lived in the state before they lost their housing.
Liberal NIMBYs are just going to have to deal with more housing being built, and their dear little quirky quaint enclaves changing. Which to me sounds a lot more like conservatism. Places change; that’s the nature of cities and towns. It’s not the 70’s anymore, your precious quirky college town IS going to change, just like you’re not driving around in your Chrysler Cordoba with its fine Corinthian leather in the 2020’s.
I’m glad the YIMBYs are winning. “What if that older homeless person is me one day” is not really a groundless fear.
>"but don’t want to admit it because a developer might make money or capitalism won’t be abolished."
Great line, really gets at the heart of much of the issue, in addition to the mentioned not wanting the local area to change.
1. Zero-sum thinking has taken off amoung progressives, leading many to assume that hurting capitalists means helping the poor and that capitalist profits must come at the expense of the poor.
2. The more radical progressives engage in a "shoot the moon" strategy of revolution or bust, so they fight incremental improvements that make capitalism more palatable