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SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big

SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month, as at the cheaper rent saving money is actually possible. We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect? Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.

slg 23d ago
What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people. People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.
- mrngld 23d ago
  I think the burden of proof is on your position. When activists in my area pick a fight with local government, it's never over that invisible group. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they don't give a rip about the veterans living in the forest over by the VA hospital. I've never seen them over there. They're too busy picking fights defending the ones pooping at the downtown parks (and not in the public toilet) or trying to get city funding and approval for safe drug use, etc. Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward. There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.
  - adwn 23d ago
    > they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?
    - miriam_catira 22d ago
      Point in case - my 75-yr-old retired parents staff one of those church showers in one of the most affluent towns south of SF. They have time, because they're retired. The people using those showers can't volunteer, they have jobs they have to get to. That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.
    - hackable_sand 22d ago
      HN comments always seem to be driving in the right direction and then yank the steering wheel at the last moment. Gotta be some kind of weather vane for you guys.
      - adwn 22d ago
        Please elaborate. Where does my comment leave the "right direction"?
        Natfan 22d ago
        how can a volunteer group only consist of one group of people? surely then they aren't volunteering, but rather being volunteered
        ashf023 22d ago
        Being volunteered to help clean the facilities they depend on and otherwise get for free?
- xp84 22d ago
  Thank you for being one of the few to draw a distinction there! The thing is, that second group are arguably already being helped by the many, many taxpayer-funded services we already have. They use the resources as intended to get back on their feet. I know it's not a fun time to be in that boat, but as long as it's a temporary boat and not a permanent predicament, it's not a societal emergency. To be clear, I'd support any reasonable policy specifically targeted and proven to help people who are in this situation. One more thing: > something as simple as lowering rent prices Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.
  - dgoldstein0 18d ago
    Rent control won't really solve the problem as it can only help people who already live in the city but makes rents even higher for new residents - there have been studies that essentially find that rent control essentially just transfers money from newer residents to ones who have lived here a long time. And worse, it a removes incentives for improving existing buildings and for current tenants to move, thereby reducing liquidity in the market - eg if you would like to upsize or downsize for whatever reason, being locked into a good rent controlled price is a strong disincentive. The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that. But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.
phyzix5761 23d ago
[flagged]
EduardoBautista 23d ago
Many of the homeless don’t have jobs. They wouldn’t be able to afford rent in Bangladesh.
- simiones 23d ago
  Becoming and then staying homeless for a significant time is often almost irreversible. The key is to prevent people from ever getting there, as much as you can - and that is the point the poster above was making. The fall from house + job > house > no house makes it very hard to ever get another job that actually pays enough to go back to having a house.
- mx7zysuj4xew 23d ago
  In Bangladesh someone can put up a plywood shack somewhere and call it their home Anyone living in a tent city would most likely not only survive but thrive there
  - xp84 22d ago
    The tent city people here are all on meth and fent, sadly. That's why they're there. They can't thrive anywhere.
59percentmore 23d ago
Semi-related anecdotes: After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful. In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple. People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.
xp84 22d ago
> SF - problem... is largely cost of housing Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"? > Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work." The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc). A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do. So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there. (All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.) Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)
- samus 22d ago
  > Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.
piltdownman 22d ago
From about 2010 onwards we have had the phenomenon of the High-Income White Collar Itinerate - the Silicon Valley worker living in a converted van, or the remote coder working from a LOC country with low barriers to entry regarding Visas and Taxation. These being the 'privileged' demographic. The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%. https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/ https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/ The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s. https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living-arrangements-of-young-adults/ https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living... In other news, U.S. Home Prices Are up 29 Percent Since 2019. https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estate/us-housing-market-outlook https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estat... tl;dr Americans will vote for an Economy over a Society, so long as Social policies continue to be villainized in political discourse.

slg 23d ago

What you say is completely true, but part of the problem is that people have very different ideas of what they are talking about when they talk about homeless people. People who tend to complain about the homeless are generally only complaining about the visibly homeless (i.e., the people living on the street). Meanwhile the people who advocate for helping the homeless are more likely to also care about the invisible homeless who tend to make up the majority of all homeless people. These are the folks who might have jobs, live in their car, have a gym membership to shower, etc. You could spend a lot of time with many of these people and have no idea they were homeless and as a result they aren't included in many people's perception of the problem of homelessness. Therefore, it's hard for people to believe that something as simple as lowering rent prices could actually solve homelessness for a majority of homeless people.

mrngld 23d ago
I think the burden of proof is on your position. When activists in my area pick a fight with local government, it's never over that invisible group. Indeed, as far as I can tell, they don't give a rip about the veterans living in the forest over by the VA hospital. I've never seen them over there. They're too busy picking fights defending the ones pooping at the downtown parks (and not in the public toilet) or trying to get city funding and approval for safe drug use, etc. Now, you're right that there are people that do care and put tremendous effort into that more invisible group. Churches and church-backed organizations do a lot of that. Difference is, except for fund-raising from like-minded folks (and a lot of them hate even asking for money), they go about their work quietly, without seeking attention or reward. There'd be the possibility of joining forces, but not with the DSA-types that jump in the limelight and scream the loudest and advocate for free needles. The people doing the bulk of the hard work don't want to make a statement on Palestine, they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift. They need men willing to be mentors, etc. They care about the actual people they're serving, not trying to bring about glorious revolution. The two groups aren't compatible at the moment.
- adwn 23d ago
  > they just want volunteers for the hard-to-staff weekday shower-cleaning shift This may sound like a loaded question, but I assure you, that's not my intention. If you want to provide for those "invisible" homeless, who aren't drug addicts or mentally ill, shouldn't the primary volunteer pool consist of exactly those invisible homeless people? Or in other words, once you have organizers, why do you need external volunteers for cleaning the showers?
  - miriam_catira 22d ago
    Point in case - my 75-yr-old retired parents staff one of those church showers in one of the most affluent towns south of SF. They have time, because they're retired. The people using those showers can't volunteer, they have jobs they have to get to. That's the point here, the invisible homeless are people who are _fully employed_ but they're still too poor to have homes to live in.
  - hackable_sand 22d ago
    HN comments always seem to be driving in the right direction and then yank the steering wheel at the last moment. Gotta be some kind of weather vane for you guys.
    - adwn 22d ago
      Please elaborate. Where does my comment leave the "right direction"?
      - Natfan 22d ago
        how can a volunteer group only consist of one group of people? surely then they aren't volunteering, but rather being volunteered
        ashf023 22d ago
        Being volunteered to help clean the facilities they depend on and otherwise get for free?
xp84 22d ago
Thank you for being one of the few to draw a distinction there! The thing is, that second group are arguably already being helped by the many, many taxpayer-funded services we already have. They use the resources as intended to get back on their feet. I know it's not a fun time to be in that boat, but as long as it's a temporary boat and not a permanent predicament, it's not a societal emergency. To be clear, I'd support any reasonable policy specifically targeted and proven to help people who are in this situation. One more thing: > something as simple as lowering rent prices Suppose you solve that (by market means, constructing an incredible amount of homes, or by communist means, by draconian rent-control cutting all rents by 70%). A 2-bedroom apartment in SF is now $1,200 and there are 50,000 of them vacant. Would these apartments not be immediately rented by 50,000 households from elsewhere who have always wanted to live there but haven't been able to afford it? Either the rents would shoot right back up if we're letting markets function, or the apartments would be insta-filled by a few very lucky people, with a years-long waiting list for any housing that ever opens up. There will always be one more person who will be happy to move to a great climate, top-tier city, unless the rents are obnoxiously high.
- dgoldstein0 18d ago
  Rent control won't really solve the problem as it can only help people who already live in the city but makes rents even higher for new residents - there have been studies that essentially find that rent control essentially just transfers money from newer residents to ones who have lived here a long time. And worse, it a removes incentives for improving existing buildings and for current tenants to move, thereby reducing liquidity in the market - eg if you would like to upsize or downsize for whatever reason, being locked into a good rent controlled price is a strong disincentive. The better solution is definitely "build an incredible amount of homes" though $1200 probably is not be obtainable even at extreme ends of possibility. We also should consider it a region wide problem and not just an SF problem - the whole bay area needs to build more, as rents in Oakland, Daly City, San Mateo, etc are related to SF prices as well. If the region is going to add jobs we better add housing at the same rate, and we've massively failed at that. But anyway if the market actually starts functioning as new supply appears any tent decrease would incrementally attract some new tenants from elsewhere. Rents only shoot back up if the supply increase isn't sustained addition, or we somehow artificially lower rents for a short period. In a functioning market we should find an equilibrium price and when demand spikes faster than units can be built, be development would spring up that in a few years would push prices back towards normal (as jobs / the economy clearly moves faster than new housing can be constructed). But even in the booms when construction should be seeing the influx of people with high salaries and trying to develop new housing to keep up... Well, the volume of new housing just didn't keep up.

phyzix5761 23d ago

[flagged]

EduardoBautista 23d ago

Many of the homeless don’t have jobs. They wouldn’t be able to afford rent in Bangladesh.

simiones 23d ago
Becoming and then staying homeless for a significant time is often almost irreversible. The key is to prevent people from ever getting there, as much as you can - and that is the point the poster above was making. The fall from house + job > house > no house makes it very hard to ever get another job that actually pays enough to go back to having a house.
mx7zysuj4xew 23d ago
In Bangladesh someone can put up a plywood shack somewhere and call it their home Anyone living in a tent city would most likely not only survive but thrive there
- xp84 22d ago
  The tent city people here are all on meth and fent, sadly. That's why they're there. They can't thrive anywhere.

59percentmore 23d ago

Semi-related anecdotes: After the Civil War, when many plantation properties became economically unsustainable, occasionally the main house would be abandoned by the owners, and the remaining sharecroppers would take up residence; one house that used to be for one extravagantly wealthy family, now occupied by a handful. In Newport, RI, after the income tax made maintaining grand Gilded Age domiciles untenable, many were subdivided into multiple units. Again, a house for one family (and there servants) turned out to be decent housing for multiple. People keep saying that America has a building deficit, and to some extent, we do. But we also have a lot of physically massive houses that house one family, because those families can currently afford it. Historically, that has not been a permanent state.

xp84 22d ago

> SF - problem... is largely cost of housing Are you talking about the homeless who are actually causing any problems (the chronic homeless)? Or the meaningless statistical group of "Everyone who doesn't have their own/rented home today"? > Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. By virtue of not being mentally ill and addicted, everyone else has "friends" and "family" somewhere who would say "Oh, gee Fred, sorry you lost your job. Sleep on my couch for a few weeks while you're looking for work." The only people who don't are those who have burned every bridge by repeatedly betraying the trust of those who love them (theft, bringing drugs into their home, sexual abuse, etc). A lot of people also sleep in their cars and shower at the gym while putting their lives together. Now, those people DO count as homeless in the official counts, but they aren't the ones causing any problems, and they also consume only a tiny fraction of the public resources that "The Homeless" we see on the streets do. So, while lower rents would help with the official numbers, you would see little improvement on the streets because that's not why they're there. (All that said, I'm sure there's a small pipeline from the 'temp homeless' to the 'chronic homeless,' which is probably 99.9% made up of people who are in the "living in the car" or "couch surfing" phase who make the poor choices to take up an addiction to drown their sorrows.) Separately, the other problem with the "just build more housing" plan is: These cities aren't surrounded by 50-foot walls. They're not closed systems. Say we build so much that the $3000 rent drops to $1000. Now, people from elsewhere, seeing that SF is now as cheap as Fresno, will decide to move there, as the weather is way better, and there are tons of cool things about living in a world-class city by the sea. The low prices pull people from elsewhere just as reliably as low air pressure causes wind to blow towards it. (This is also why these temperate coastal cities can't fix things with money: The more comfortable you make it to be homeless in your city, the more tweakers from the hinterland will gravitate to the city.)

samus 22d ago
> Any person without serious mental and/or substance problems can handle losing their job without sleeping in the streets. This statement is very load-bearing in your whole argument though. Losing a job can completely derail a person's daily habits and cause their issues to worsen, either by the additional stress or by forgetting to keep their meds. It's downhill from there.

piltdownman 22d ago

From about 2010 onwards we have had the phenomenon of the High-Income White Collar Itinerate - the Silicon Valley worker living in a converted van, or the remote coder working from a LOC country with low barriers to entry regarding Visas and Taxation. These being the 'privileged' demographic. The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%. https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/ https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/ The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s. https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living-arrangements-of-young-adults/ https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living... In other news, U.S. Home Prices Are up 29 Percent Since 2019. https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estate/us-housing-market-outlook https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estat... tl;dr Americans will vote for an Economy over a Society, so long as Social policies continue to be villainized in political discourse.