Oakland’s not gotten great press coverage lately. First, a food-poisoned TikTok foodie went viral saying that city’s homelessness crisis indicated Oakland was no place for tourists. Then, In-N-Out Burger went viral after announcing the closure of its first store in history near the Oakland airport, citing employee theft and robbery as the cause. Now, Kaiser Permanente, one of Oakland’s largest employers, has
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.
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.
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.
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.