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I think this piece makes a strong point — when there’s already a working model, just copy it instead of endlessly debating. The homelessness crisis is real, and

I think this piece makes a strong point — when there’s already a working model, just copy it instead of endlessly debating. The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option. Of course there’s a chance it fails, but the bigger issue is that no one wants to take responsibility if it does. That lack of strong leadership is, in itself, part of the problem.

nis0s 1y ago
I am not saying it’s okay that anyone should be homeless, but it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S. The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people. https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year, https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/ https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/
- watwut 1y ago
  Why are you comparing amount of homeless people to DUI?
  - superxpro12 1y ago
    Scale of the issue relative to the risk, I think.
  - harpiaharpyja 1y ago
    It's another public health issue that could also be receiving attention which causes harm to people.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 0_____0 1y ago
  771K people isn't a small number. 0.23% isn't a small number when it comes to homelessness. This also doesn't consider people who are housed but are overcrowded or living in otherwise very poor environments. You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem. Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
  - nis0s 1y ago
    Disagree that it’s a growing problem, there are lots of states dealing with it correctly. Look at the article, for example.
    - brewdad 1y ago
      And there are plenty of states that put their homeless on a bus to some other state to deal with. That's not doing anything about the root causes.
      - nis0s 1y ago
        I agree, and I want humane solutions for people who go through this.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  What is supposed to be the relationship between those two things? Will you be comparing it to the number of ham sandwiches next?
  - nis0s 1y ago
    You would think that since DUI operators present a greater social problem, both in numbers and potential to cause harm, there would be all sorts of active campaigns against such an issue. But the present reality is that some issues have great political forces behind them, and the media takes care to paint such issues as “crises”. Maybe it is a crisis, for a certain locality, and that reflects on the governance of that place. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say your local problem is a problem at large, even if that means you get less federal monies to deal with it. Maybe what that means is that people need to reflect on how their localities are spending their budget, or sorting their priorities.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  There's 8300+ homeless people in San Francisco. That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you. There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF. That's a homeless person every 2 blocks. Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.
  - Broken_Hippo 1y ago
    Even if you end homelessness, you'll still be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times everywhere you go. People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous. Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
      Is your argument that, because x% of the population is desperate, we shouldn't care or do anything about x%+y% being like that? y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.
      - nis0s 1y ago
        Please note that someone giving you a quantitative context isn’t necessarily saying don’t care. But it’s important to be mindful of how people use words in the media to describe certain issues because it benefits them politically or financially. The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.
- sethammons 1y ago
  > it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states. An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing. That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.
  - pandaman 1y ago
    > So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing. How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.
    - sethammons 1y ago
      Obesity is an excess of something. If we flip it, you can say that "too skinny is a problem" and there is a difference between someone someone with an eating disorder that makes them avoid food vs those who simply don't eat enough. The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough. Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."
      - pandaman 1y ago
        Perhaps having a severe mental illness is somehow important for you but I still don't see how is it relevant in this context other than it shows that the fraction of homeless with it is ~4x bigger than in regular population so it's likely the rest of them are suffering with less than severe mental illness (not even taking drug addiction into account).
- bdcravens 1y ago
  Whether it's homelessness, DUIs, or fentanyl deaths (only 75k per year!), measuring the impact of something by ignoring the blast radius is disingenuous. All who are touched are part of it. In the case of homelessness, it's a burden on emergency services, creates unsafe environments, impacts businesses, etc.
  - nis0s 1y ago
    I think the article points out some useful ways to deal with the problem at hand.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis." But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long. We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.
  - nis0s 1y ago
    Different US states have implemented useful measures for helping homeless people, but states which are struggling with their implementation have other issues as well. Border states in particular have illegal immigrants to contend with as well, so a housing-first policy for homelessness gets taken off the table right away. California has the means and resources for dealing with its homelessness problem, but the political will is murky.
- captainclam 1y ago
  I've always been surprised by the official homeless population count, but it turns out there's a lot more to it. The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings. It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc). Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-... And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past. It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."
  - saghm 1y ago
    It's kind of wild that they pick maybe the coldest month of the year to do this. You'd think that would be when people are most likely to try to find some sort way of avoiding direct exposure to the open air even if it's extremely short term.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
> The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option. California isn't doing nothing. They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working. If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  Everything except ending the ban on homeowners & landowners building market housing. (ofc they are taking bites out of this apple, especially very recently, but every step is fought tooth & nail by homeowners who prefer the status quo just fine)
- Spivak 1y ago
  I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
  - MontyCarloHall 1y ago
    >Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted. Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case. [*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/
    - HankStallone 1y ago
      Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.
Yizahi 1y ago
The problem is not that lack of examples. Technically, all two hundred something countries could take example of the best one in every metric and just copy most of the stuff to make life better. The problem is that politicians are afraid to do anything (outside of direct and indirect enrichment). No one can blame some John Doe, chief Busybody of the Busyarea, if he won't do something. Because that didn't happen, nothing to point finger at directly, except for "you don't do enough", which is generic enough to be used at anyone and so ineffective at everyone. But if he will do something and it is immediately painful to at at least some group, then he will be blamed and his opponent will do that with pleasure too.
jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
How does Houston deal with those that can't be housed? Sure, 90% retention sounds nice for these people but California has limited housing/higher housing costs, in general, last I had read. The write-up even mentions rising housing costs or the Trump admin taking away their funding can crash the system, so unclear how easily this system could transfer to other cities. Sure, better communicating systems and a better hierarchy will lead to better outcomes for most orgs, but that's a pretty general statement about basically every org out there. I also feel like this write-up sugar coats some of the actions Houston/Texas has been taking against non-compliance. Ticketing homeless people $200 for existing on the streets seems a bit counter intuitive - and Texas has been systematically shipping homeless and immigrants around the country (human trafficking) for political theater, so are they excluding that data? Probably. I'm not an expert, but this write-up really comes off as one-sided since it's only talking about what's not working in California and ignoring some of the background stuff Texas is up to. Overall, do agree that better management and accountability would do other cities favors, but again, that's such an easy statement to make about any plan or org. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-houston/2025/10/01/532418/exclusive-houston-ramps-up-citations-of-homeless-after-july-civility-ordinance-expansion/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-hou...
- nradov 1y ago
  Higher housing costs in California are in some sense an artificial manufactured problem. California should mimic Texas by making it easier and cheaper to build more housing. Take approval power away from local governments, and give property owners and developers the right to build pretty much whatever they want wherever they want.
stonogo 1y ago
That point would be strong, but this article doesn't make that point, or any other points I can tell. It does really weird things like comparing the annual cost of housing one Texan person to building an entire Californian housing unit, changes which definition of "homelessness" it uses (sometimes mid-sentence), ignores Houston's extremely police-oriented approach to the topic (police can cite you for trespassing if you're at a bus stop and don't produce ID), pretends the Texas cities aren't sweeping encampments (they are, right now, on Nance Street), and just generally plays fast-and-loose with the facts in Texas.

nis0s 1y ago

I am not saying it’s okay that anyone should be homeless, but it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S. The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people. https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/ For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year, https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/ https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/

watwut 1y ago
Why are you comparing amount of homeless people to DUI?
- superxpro12 1y ago
  Scale of the issue relative to the risk, I think.
- harpiaharpyja 1y ago
  It's another public health issue that could also be receiving attention which causes harm to people.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
0_____0 1y ago
771K people isn't a small number. 0.23% isn't a small number when it comes to homelessness. This also doesn't consider people who are housed but are overcrowded or living in otherwise very poor environments. You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem. Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
- nis0s 1y ago
  Disagree that it’s a growing problem, there are lots of states dealing with it correctly. Look at the article, for example.
  - brewdad 1y ago
    And there are plenty of states that put their homeless on a bus to some other state to deal with. That's not doing anything about the root causes.
    - nis0s 1y ago
      I agree, and I want humane solutions for people who go through this.
pessimizer 1y ago
What is supposed to be the relationship between those two things? Will you be comparing it to the number of ham sandwiches next?
- nis0s 1y ago
  You would think that since DUI operators present a greater social problem, both in numbers and potential to cause harm, there would be all sorts of active campaigns against such an issue. But the present reality is that some issues have great political forces behind them, and the media takes care to paint such issues as “crises”. Maybe it is a crisis, for a certain locality, and that reflects on the governance of that place. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say your local problem is a problem at large, even if that means you get less federal monies to deal with it. Maybe what that means is that people need to reflect on how their localities are spending their budget, or sorting their priorities.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
There's 8300+ homeless people in San Francisco. That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you. There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF. That's a homeless person every 2 blocks. Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.
- Broken_Hippo 1y ago
  Even if you end homelessness, you'll still be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times everywhere you go. People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous. Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
    Is your argument that, because x% of the population is desperate, we shouldn't care or do anything about x%+y% being like that? y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.
    - nis0s 1y ago
      Please note that someone giving you a quantitative context isn’t necessarily saying don’t care. But it’s important to be mindful of how people use words in the media to describe certain issues because it benefits them politically or financially. The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.
sethammons 1y ago
> it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states. An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing. That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.
- pandaman 1y ago
  > So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing. How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.
  - sethammons 1y ago
    Obesity is an excess of something. If we flip it, you can say that "too skinny is a problem" and there is a difference between someone someone with an eating disorder that makes them avoid food vs those who simply don't eat enough. The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough. Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."
    - pandaman 1y ago
      Perhaps having a severe mental illness is somehow important for you but I still don't see how is it relevant in this context other than it shows that the fraction of homeless with it is ~4x bigger than in regular population so it's likely the rest of them are suffering with less than severe mental illness (not even taking drug addiction into account).
bdcravens 1y ago
Whether it's homelessness, DUIs, or fentanyl deaths (only 75k per year!), measuring the impact of something by ignoring the blast radius is disingenuous. All who are touched are part of it. In the case of homelessness, it's a burden on emergency services, creates unsafe environments, impacts businesses, etc.
- nis0s 1y ago
  I think the article points out some useful ways to deal with the problem at hand.
HankStallone 1y ago
A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis." But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long. We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.
- nis0s 1y ago
  Different US states have implemented useful measures for helping homeless people, but states which are struggling with their implementation have other issues as well. Border states in particular have illegal immigrants to contend with as well, so a housing-first policy for homelessness gets taken off the table right away. California has the means and resources for dealing with its homelessness problem, but the political will is murky.
captainclam 1y ago
I've always been surprised by the official homeless population count, but it turns out there's a lot more to it. The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings. It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc). Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-... And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past. It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."
- saghm 1y ago
  It's kind of wild that they pick maybe the coldest month of the year to do this. You'd think that would be when people are most likely to try to find some sort way of avoiding direct exposure to the open air even if it's extremely short term.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

> The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option. California isn't doing nothing. They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working. If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.

appreciatorBus 1y ago
Everything except ending the ban on homeowners & landowners building market housing. (ofc they are taking bites out of this apple, especially very recently, but every step is fought tooth & nail by homeowners who prefer the status quo just fine)
Spivak 1y ago
I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  >Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted. Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case. [*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.

Yizahi 1y ago

The problem is not that lack of examples. Technically, all two hundred something countries could take example of the best one in every metric and just copy most of the stuff to make life better. The problem is that politicians are afraid to do anything (outside of direct and indirect enrichment). No one can blame some John Doe, chief Busybody of the Busyarea, if he won't do something. Because that didn't happen, nothing to point finger at directly, except for "you don't do enough", which is generic enough to be used at anyone and so ineffective at everyone. But if he will do something and it is immediately painful to at at least some group, then he will be blamed and his opponent will do that with pleasure too.

jsbisviewtiful 1y ago

How does Houston deal with those that can't be housed? Sure, 90% retention sounds nice for these people but California has limited housing/higher housing costs, in general, last I had read. The write-up even mentions rising housing costs or the Trump admin taking away their funding can crash the system, so unclear how easily this system could transfer to other cities. Sure, better communicating systems and a better hierarchy will lead to better outcomes for most orgs, but that's a pretty general statement about basically every org out there. I also feel like this write-up sugar coats some of the actions Houston/Texas has been taking against non-compliance. Ticketing homeless people $200 for existing on the streets seems a bit counter intuitive - and Texas has been systematically shipping homeless and immigrants around the country (human trafficking) for political theater, so are they excluding that data? Probably. I'm not an expert, but this write-up really comes off as one-sided since it's only talking about what's not working in California and ignoring some of the background stuff Texas is up to. Overall, do agree that better management and accountability would do other cities favors, but again, that's such an easy statement to make about any plan or org. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-houston/2025/10/01/532418/exclusive-houston-ramps-up-citations-of-homeless-after-july-civility-ordinance-expansion/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-hou...

nradov 1y ago
Higher housing costs in California are in some sense an artificial manufactured problem. California should mimic Texas by making it easier and cheaper to build more housing. Take approval power away from local governments, and give property owners and developers the right to build pretty much whatever they want wherever they want.

stonogo 1y ago

That point would be strong, but this article doesn't make that point, or any other points I can tell. It does really weird things like comparing the annual cost of housing one Texan person to building an entire Californian housing unit, changes which definition of "homelessness" it uses (sometimes mid-sentence), ignores Houston's extremely police-oriented approach to the topic (police can cite you for trespassing if you're at a bus stop and don't produce ID), pretends the Texas cities aren't sweeping encampments (they are, right now, on Nance Street), and just generally plays fast-and-loose with the facts in Texas.