Ask anyone who actually works with unhoused people to get them into housing: there are almost no shelter beds and almost no permanent housing opportunities in California. If a person in a tent on the sidewalk says they'd like to move inside, the paperwork takes a couple of months, getting a housing voucher takes a couple of months, and then finding a place that will rent to them takes a couple of months. Meanwhile the person is still on the street with no restroom, no shower, no safe place to keep their identification and other paperwork, and getting limited sleep. Their encampment may be "cleaned up" by the city and then they've lost all their stuff, and the case manager has to go search for them and probably start over. A recent study (by McKinsey) found that while 207 unhoused people in Los Angeles become housed daily, 227 lose their housing and join the ranks of the unhoused each day. The meager "resources" (money, vouchers, shelter beds, and dedicated PSH apartments) that are available are mostly reserved for people who are chronically homeless. To its credit, Oakland is trying to be compassionate.
When it comes to government programs only trying something radically new will really change things. I'm not sure what that could be, but unless there's a way to triple shelter beds and cut red tape in half not much will change. I guess I'm just reacting to what I'm reading as a proposal to throw more resources at the problem.
The only thing that really moves the needle on the homeless situation is housing supply. Detroit doesn't have less homeless b/c they have better resources for them, it's simply that supply and demand of housing titles towards supply. California probably spends way more on social programs directed towards the homeless and near-homeless than most of the other states but is stuck with the worst problem because of housing supply (and to a small degree, the weather). Zoning reform really is the magic bullet imo
Interesting and comprehensive analysis with at least one serious omission.
Affordable housing has never meant new housing. This combination of 'new' and 'affordable' applied to housing is impossible, as your analysis proves with new homes costing $1M to build. If you do the math and the population numbers, it is clearly nonsense. Taxpayers cannot do it.
Housing has always been built with private investment (there, I said it) based on the profit motive (yes, that's what makes everything happen) and operating under 'reasonable' government regulations. Affordable housing has always been USED housing. Hand me down, like clothes or cars.
But with no new housing being built, the supply of old housing dries up under the pressure of demand. Result: homelessness.
Low rents and home prices have always occurred after periods of overbuilding. To restore affordability, promote and manage reasonable overbuilding.
Solutions: Strip away all but the most important regulations. Lots of obsolete zoning and building rules. Never reviewed and cleaned out. The State is starting but just scratching the surface.
Then the engine of homebuilding will restart.
Finally, there is an enormous contradiction between our market economy in housing and the emotional claims of residents to their given geographic place on earth. Land and homes and apartments are for sale to the highest bidder, a system that triggers more supply to be built and allows us to have mobility that most of the world envies. However, we also have real feelings for places where we feel we belong, our family belongs, and our 'people' (dangerous!) belong. (Chinatown? Little Italy?) 'Home' is not just a house or an apartment and 'Neighborhood' is not just where I currently can afford to live. But cities and neighborhoods change and our market economy would respond, if we let it. But we demand no change, scream about 'gentrification' and listen to claims that the unhoused are 'our people' and deserve to live in our expensive city because a survey run by nonprofits that serve them found that 70% of them said (?) they lived in the County (??) sometime in the last 10 years. Most of us cannot decide to live in the highest priced neighborhoods, camp out there, and demand the other citizens build us a home there.
It's not rocket science. The scale of ignorance about basic economics staggering.
The solutions are there if we abandon the myths and assumptions that no longer apply and pick up the tools again we have always used.
I have takes about the regulatory environment coming up based on Terner Center's latest feasibility report, but yes I agree broadly that all but the most essential safety and labor regulations should be ended since the vast majority of them do not achieve policy outcomes they're stated to achieve. I also don't mean to imply just subsidized housing was the only solution, after all the jobs - housing ratio is majority private market housing to begin with. I'm criticizing these affluent communities for not pulling their weight in allowing private development.
I recommend the UCLA Housing Voice podcast on an in depth look at homeless people in California. People are not coming to California to be homeless, mainly because someone who is about to become homeless doesn't have the resources to move to California, or really even to move to another metropolitan area. (From SF to Oakland, yes, that's the same metropolitan area.)
I agree with almost all of Dr. Kushel's recommendations.
My post did not mention the 900 pound gorilla in the homelessness room: Mental health and substance abuse treatment in State facilities. California once had both, however flawed. Now they are both essentially unavailable to the mass of people that need them. Helping low income people find shelter they can afford in whatever location they can afford is one problem I addressed. But what about the people who, for whatever reason, are not capable of connecting with the market or services? We are caught between needing to help them but respecting their 'freedom' to refuse help and harm themselves. Until we reconcile the two, we are doomed to watch helplessly as large numbers of people suffer horribly and needlessly.
Another thing—I'm not attributing this to you, but I do hear a lot that we should provide mental health treatment and that would solve many of our woes. Mental health treatments don't always work! A quick Google shows that schizophrenia treatments don't work about a third of the time. And there's reason to believe that for homeless people, that percentage would be higher, because some of the mentally ill potentially homeless people got the treatments and they worked and so they never became homeless and mentally ill.
This is true. I used to work in supportive housing (Shelter + Care PSH) and very frequently we failed. A homeless person who was housed ended up back on the street. Habits learned from surviving the streets are very hard to reverse, especially when people have been homeless their whole adult life. It's even worse with addiction. It takes time. It takes repeat tries. It may never be solved. But the bottom line is nothing can be attempted until they have a home because treatment never works in the instability of a tent.
I actually have saved in drafts a discussion about San Francisco's supportive housing policies of allowing drug use vs. other supportive housing policies of absolute prohibition. To be frank, I've struggled to take a position because there are pros and cons in both.
It's really, really hard to give mental health services to people who don't have a home to live in. Same with addiction services. For people with serious challenges like that, we need housing with wraparound services, and we are not willing to pay for it or to build it.
This is true. Very hard to help unhoused people with mental health and/or substance abuse problems. But the evidence of the past few years in SF also appears to show that it is also very hard to help people with mental health and/or substance abuse problems in housing that allows freedom, or rules that cannot be enforced. This argues that the only way to help many people is to take away their freedom during treatment.
As a longtime ACLU supporter, this is where I part company with them. This is a very challenging problem, but as Churchill stated, "Americans can be counted on to do the right thing....after they have exhausted all the other options."
My position is that, in regard to the unhoused with mental health and/or substance abuse problems (that significantly impair their decision-making), we have exhausted all the other options. At this point, leaving these folks on the street or putting them in housing without enforcing treatment, not just offering it, seems to me to be cruel and unusual punishment. (But I know I am still in the minority.)
From what I've heard—and maybe Darrell has actual experience here—forcing drug treatment or mental health treatment on someone who doesn't want it is not usually successful. First lets provide enough treatment slots for the people who want treatment and will agree to the rules, before we start forcing people into treatment who don't want it.
But maybe there's a difference between drug treatment and mental health treatment. Maybe forcing mental health treatment works better than forcing drug treatment.
Agree with you about the need to increase treatment slots across the board. But without forcing some kind of detox from hard drugs for some time, people aren’t going to have the strength of will to choose treatment. And if we don’t have housing for them they’re much more unlikely to. Though even then I think we should force it even if jail is the only way
Ask anyone who actually works with unhoused people to get them into housing: there are almost no shelter beds and almost no permanent housing opportunities in California. If a person in a tent on the sidewalk says they'd like to move inside, the paperwork takes a couple of months, getting a housing voucher takes a couple of months, and then finding a place that will rent to them takes a couple of months. Meanwhile the person is still on the street with no restroom, no shower, no safe place to keep their identification and other paperwork, and getting limited sleep. Their encampment may be "cleaned up" by the city and then they've lost all their stuff, and the case manager has to go search for them and probably start over. A recent study (by McKinsey) found that while 207 unhoused people in Los Angeles become housed daily, 227 lose their housing and join the ranks of the unhoused each day. The meager "resources" (money, vouchers, shelter beds, and dedicated PSH apartments) that are available are mostly reserved for people who are chronically homeless. To its credit, Oakland is trying to be compassionate.
When it comes to government programs only trying something radically new will really change things. I'm not sure what that could be, but unless there's a way to triple shelter beds and cut red tape in half not much will change. I guess I'm just reacting to what I'm reading as a proposal to throw more resources at the problem.
The only thing that really moves the needle on the homeless situation is housing supply. Detroit doesn't have less homeless b/c they have better resources for them, it's simply that supply and demand of housing titles towards supply. California probably spends way more on social programs directed towards the homeless and near-homeless than most of the other states but is stuck with the worst problem because of housing supply (and to a small degree, the weather). Zoning reform really is the magic bullet imo
Amen.
We need a *lot* more shelter beds, all over the Bay Area.
Interesting and comprehensive analysis with at least one serious omission.
Affordable housing has never meant new housing. This combination of 'new' and 'affordable' applied to housing is impossible, as your analysis proves with new homes costing $1M to build. If you do the math and the population numbers, it is clearly nonsense. Taxpayers cannot do it.
Housing has always been built with private investment (there, I said it) based on the profit motive (yes, that's what makes everything happen) and operating under 'reasonable' government regulations. Affordable housing has always been USED housing. Hand me down, like clothes or cars.
But with no new housing being built, the supply of old housing dries up under the pressure of demand. Result: homelessness.
Low rents and home prices have always occurred after periods of overbuilding. To restore affordability, promote and manage reasonable overbuilding.
Solutions: Strip away all but the most important regulations. Lots of obsolete zoning and building rules. Never reviewed and cleaned out. The State is starting but just scratching the surface.
Then the engine of homebuilding will restart.
Finally, there is an enormous contradiction between our market economy in housing and the emotional claims of residents to their given geographic place on earth. Land and homes and apartments are for sale to the highest bidder, a system that triggers more supply to be built and allows us to have mobility that most of the world envies. However, we also have real feelings for places where we feel we belong, our family belongs, and our 'people' (dangerous!) belong. (Chinatown? Little Italy?) 'Home' is not just a house or an apartment and 'Neighborhood' is not just where I currently can afford to live. But cities and neighborhoods change and our market economy would respond, if we let it. But we demand no change, scream about 'gentrification' and listen to claims that the unhoused are 'our people' and deserve to live in our expensive city because a survey run by nonprofits that serve them found that 70% of them said (?) they lived in the County (??) sometime in the last 10 years. Most of us cannot decide to live in the highest priced neighborhoods, camp out there, and demand the other citizens build us a home there.
It's not rocket science. The scale of ignorance about basic economics staggering.
The solutions are there if we abandon the myths and assumptions that no longer apply and pick up the tools again we have always used.
I have takes about the regulatory environment coming up based on Terner Center's latest feasibility report, but yes I agree broadly that all but the most essential safety and labor regulations should be ended since the vast majority of them do not achieve policy outcomes they're stated to achieve. I also don't mean to imply just subsidized housing was the only solution, after all the jobs - housing ratio is majority private market housing to begin with. I'm criticizing these affluent communities for not pulling their weight in allowing private development.
I agree with almost everything you say.
I recommend the UCLA Housing Voice podcast on an in depth look at homeless people in California. People are not coming to California to be homeless, mainly because someone who is about to become homeless doesn't have the resources to move to California, or really even to move to another metropolitan area. (From SF to Oakland, yes, that's the same metropolitan area.)
https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/2023/12/13/62-who-experiences-homelessness-and-why-with-margot-kushel-pathways-home-pt-2/
I agree with almost all of Dr. Kushel's recommendations.
My post did not mention the 900 pound gorilla in the homelessness room: Mental health and substance abuse treatment in State facilities. California once had both, however flawed. Now they are both essentially unavailable to the mass of people that need them. Helping low income people find shelter they can afford in whatever location they can afford is one problem I addressed. But what about the people who, for whatever reason, are not capable of connecting with the market or services? We are caught between needing to help them but respecting their 'freedom' to refuse help and harm themselves. Until we reconcile the two, we are doomed to watch helplessly as large numbers of people suffer horribly and needlessly.
Another thing—I'm not attributing this to you, but I do hear a lot that we should provide mental health treatment and that would solve many of our woes. Mental health treatments don't always work! A quick Google shows that schizophrenia treatments don't work about a third of the time. And there's reason to believe that for homeless people, that percentage would be higher, because some of the mentally ill potentially homeless people got the treatments and they worked and so they never became homeless and mentally ill.
This is true. I used to work in supportive housing (Shelter + Care PSH) and very frequently we failed. A homeless person who was housed ended up back on the street. Habits learned from surviving the streets are very hard to reverse, especially when people have been homeless their whole adult life. It's even worse with addiction. It takes time. It takes repeat tries. It may never be solved. But the bottom line is nothing can be attempted until they have a home because treatment never works in the instability of a tent.
I actually have saved in drafts a discussion about San Francisco's supportive housing policies of allowing drug use vs. other supportive housing policies of absolute prohibition. To be frank, I've struggled to take a position because there are pros and cons in both.
It's really, really hard to give mental health services to people who don't have a home to live in. Same with addiction services. For people with serious challenges like that, we need housing with wraparound services, and we are not willing to pay for it or to build it.
This is true. Very hard to help unhoused people with mental health and/or substance abuse problems. But the evidence of the past few years in SF also appears to show that it is also very hard to help people with mental health and/or substance abuse problems in housing that allows freedom, or rules that cannot be enforced. This argues that the only way to help many people is to take away their freedom during treatment.
As a longtime ACLU supporter, this is where I part company with them. This is a very challenging problem, but as Churchill stated, "Americans can be counted on to do the right thing....after they have exhausted all the other options."
My position is that, in regard to the unhoused with mental health and/or substance abuse problems (that significantly impair their decision-making), we have exhausted all the other options. At this point, leaving these folks on the street or putting them in housing without enforcing treatment, not just offering it, seems to me to be cruel and unusual punishment. (But I know I am still in the minority.)
And thank you both for this thoughtful exchange!
From what I've heard—and maybe Darrell has actual experience here—forcing drug treatment or mental health treatment on someone who doesn't want it is not usually successful. First lets provide enough treatment slots for the people who want treatment and will agree to the rules, before we start forcing people into treatment who don't want it.
But maybe there's a difference between drug treatment and mental health treatment. Maybe forcing mental health treatment works better than forcing drug treatment.
Agree with you about the need to increase treatment slots across the board. But without forcing some kind of detox from hard drugs for some time, people aren’t going to have the strength of will to choose treatment. And if we don’t have housing for them they’re much more unlikely to. Though even then I think we should force it even if jail is the only way