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Homelessness: causes and solutions
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Oh I agree. I really want to see some hard numbers on RealPage's suggested vacancy rates. So far everything I've seen says that they tell landlords to willfully keep some % of units vacant and will pressure landlords to comply, but I haven't seen anything firm on how many vacancies that actually amounts to.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think mcdermott is presenting it as a bad take, so he can argue against it. I suspect he agrees with you.
I've also seen that idea espoused a lot. "If you can't afford it here, just move" and it's a terrible take (for reasons both you and he mentioned.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Oh damn. My bad. It has been a long week and I got distracted. I should probably call it a night for deep discussions. Apologies for needless argument.
I remember talking about it with a friend of a friend in town from Seattle a year or two back. He was saying that they're building so much more than ever, but rents keep going up. So it's all just luxury housing gentrification and proves building more doesn't help. I checked the new housing starts permits, and it had only barely just got back to the normal pace of new construction in the 90's and 2000's for Sea-Tac CSA. Which is to say it isn't filling in the hole from the '08 collapse, it's just going from drowning to treading water. But that felt like a staggering amount of new construction, because it was so low for a decade. Again, the whole Bay Area is building a lot fewer units than the MPLS metro area in nominal terms, and the Bay has ~double the population.
It was unclear to me if they recommend different occupancy rates for different buildings or neighborhoods. Like, is it 95% on average across all RealPage customers or do they tell some landlords to operate at 95% and others at 90%?
At the city scale, a vacancy rate of 5% for rentals is not that high. 5% is a tight market and 7% is more comfortable. There has to be room for people to move around. Below 5% you start to see shit like shadow markets and, relevantly to the thread, rising homelessness.
If it turned out that RealPage customers held 5% vacancies on average, I sleep. Over 8%? Real shit.
Plenty of other reasons to hate on RealPage/Yieldstar though, beyond vacancy rates.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, exactly.
Basically, where I'm coming from is this: a lot of housing discussions, especially online, degenerate into an argument over whether there is (or is not) a big picture housing shortage.
And there is. Nothing in the housing market makes sense except in light of a shortage. (With respects to Theodosius Dobzhansky.)
Usually the counterargument is that there's some cache of unoccupied housing willfully kept vacant by tight-fisted speculators, and what we need to do is get those units in the hands of the people rather than build new housing. I've already encountered too many people out there in the wild who are making hay out of the RealPage vacancies to argue that there isn't a shortage.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And the local government, whose revenue relies on people wanting their ‘investment’ to keep going up, and terrified that the local economy will collapse if their wealthy retirees leave for greener pastures, refuses to do anything that would admit they have a problem.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Even small changes in migration patterns can cause wild price swings in trendy areas or areas that are suddenly viewed as undervalued, there just isnt that much supply and city exoduses involve large populations.
Thank for being part of a PiT count, they are a valuable tool for decision makers even if they are always an undercount, but that’s just a reality.
We’ve had to do research on shit like proximity of social housing to schools, property values around social housing etc, to have data to respond to the claims that “people in this housing will be dangerous to kids” or “this housing will bring down my property values”
The answer to all of that is “no” of course.
Homeless count data always shows that the homeless population in the area are largely medium to long term residents too. Cause the flip side of “you should have moved for cheaper housing” is the “these homeless people are obviously not *real* residents of <city>”
Not that being wrong stops them
Now that they've updated the zoning laws around here the nimbys seem to have pivoted to "it is inappropriate and indeed abusive to raise a family in an apartment," which tells you all you need to know about where people whining against any and all housing development in this city are coming from.
Another favorite is "apartments shouldn't be built within line of sight of any house valued at over $500,000." That one's coming from one of the mayoral candidates, who is steamed that the city approved zoning changes that will allow such buildings to exist. Blagh.
It's frustrating that there's basically no way to reach people thinking stuff like that other than "run up the building over their objection and see if the results manage to get through their nostalgia goggles twenty years later."
(The Clinton Triangle shelter on Portland's central eastside on a recent day in May 2024.Nicole Hayden, The Oregonian/OregonLive)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
-Theft is a huge issue, even for the homeless, kind of hard to get back on your feet when what little you do have and acquire keeps getting stolen. It only takes one asshole to leave a bunch of people with nothing and that asshole doesn't necessarily have to be another homeless person either. Upside to camping somewhere is that it make sit harder for would be thieves to see what you have and come up with a plausible explanation for why they were near your stuff, that will make you look like a real asshole for insist they back off.
-There is also general safety issues. Again it only takes one shitty person and they don't necessarily have to be homeless, they just have to have access to the shelter. Any setup that ensures that people have privacy and makes it more difficult for abusers to gain access is going to make people feel safer. Group shelters could remedy some of this by having individual rooms, but that adds to costs, comes at the expense of how many people they can hold and finally make sit harder to try justify kicking everyone out during the day. If it's a private room, there is no need to kick everyone out on a daily basis and easy enough to work out something so that if a cleaning crew is needed, things can be setup to ensure everyone's well being, while minimizing a loss of property.
-Reduces negative influences. It's worth considering that some harmful activities can be reinforced by social interactions. So even if a group shelter might discourage drug use and might do a solid job at preventing drug use in the shelter. That is still placing people that haven't develop drug addiction or are trying to quite (hell, could also add some of the other addiction issues here) with people that don't have any interest at all in quitting and it gets worse if they are the pushy sort that tries to get others to do things they like doing. Individual shelters make it really easy to avoid interaction with people and that is extremely handy if one is trying to get away from peer pressures that either get them into addiction or make it harder to get out of one. Probably another reason why people don't go to shelters if they can avoid them because there are plenty of people that get they have a problem and realize the best solution is to not be around people that are hell bent on reveling in that problem.
-Then there is the whole issue where a number of shelters are just run by shitty people that are only running a shelter because they see as an excellent way to get power over people that don't have many options to fight back. See the whole thing of theocratic assholes insisting that people have to go to church and adhere to their religious guidelines if they want to stay at the shelter. Worse, a fair bit of the bullshit isn't even illegal; especially, with how the current SCOTUS has been going. This also means that the people running the shelter could be the thieves, abusers or just bad influences that people are trying to get away from.
My god. A use for tiny homes that isn't just making TLC shows
A whole lot of that theft is by cops clearing camps and throwing everything away. Hard to get an job when you don't have an ID because some cop threw it away last week trashing your belongings.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
The intractable part is deciding who is going to pay for it.
Nah. That's like third on the list at best. #1 is people freaking the fuck out at doing anything. A bunch of programs have demonstrated that you can reduce homelessness just by giving people cash, and the response has been a (mostly GOP lead, because of course) movement to ban those programs.
Money isn't an issue here, if we chose not to spend that money on needlessly imprisoning people, we'd have money for housing because those tiny units are going to be way less than what it costs to build a prison, that likely houses way less people and is just a factory for human abuses.
Putting people in prison makes voters feel safe so they feel it is worth the cost and keep voting for it.
Even more so imo "who has to live next to them".
And/or going full Craig T Nelson
Also this came up in my feed the other day and is just too apropos to not share.
Shelters wouldn't either. Not really relevant.
I guess just presume all those building codes, occupancy rules, etc exist for specific reasons. 'Regulations are written in blood' and all that.
I would happily help construct tiny homes in my free time if GOP interference didn't make it impossible to directly contribute to helping people like that. There's no reason whatsoever for construction safety laws to be so insanely over-complicated save to make it absurdly difficult to build anything, we could absolutely simply building codes and preserve building safety at the same time if there wasn't an entire political party opposed to it.
EDIT: And I'd sure as fuck prefer people living in tiny homes next door than living on tents on the sidewalk.
I wish it were GOP interference, but they are usually the ones trying to get rid of building codes. Almost every time you see a carve out in the IBC It’s because either a Republican businessman who is well-connected paid for it to be removed, or that same person is in the state legislature. And if you look at the permitting process of various states Blue states are way more stringent than red ones. That being said in red states, the GOP would never pay for housing for the homeless, so that really doesn’t come up for them.
And exposure doesn't?
Besides there's a lot of assumptions being made about quality here that doesn't always apply
The smaller ones in the picture are 100sqft, so about the size of a room in a house, and still have insulation, heat, and cooling.