[HN Gopher] Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a singl...
___________________________________________________________________
Los Angeles is spending up to $837k to house a single homeless
person
Author : totaldude87
Score : 253 points
Date : 2022-02-24 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ktla.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ktla.com)
| nimbius wrote:
| the fact that _any_ housing is getting built is frankly a
| refreshing turn of events.
|
| for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city of
| landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail rising
| taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up creating a
| cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly nothing in tax
| and resist any attempt to create additional housing. They coast
| on a bubble of six-figure increases in equity _per year_ with
| little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in inglewood from
| fetching a cash-only two million dollar price.
|
| when legislators typically try to address the very same landed
| gentry's cries for relief from the homeless, they wind up
| collecting windfall bond measure revenue. as they gain momentum
| and start striking ground, most communities put up fierce NIMBY
| opposition and mire whatever initiatives that are approved in
| court. the city in turn eventually gives up, settles, and uses
| the remaining funds to quietly continue sanitation and cleanup
| efforts of camps, occasionally running the homeless away for a
| day or two.
|
| for the city to bemoan rising costs and slow pace is a bit ironic
| as well. when LA decided to give up on property taxes it had to
| find a way to make up the difference. hence a league of esoteric
| inspections and byzantine permitting started popping up for new
| homes. it means contractors sit idle and watch the price of
| lumber skyrocket while your self-licking ice cream cone melts in
| the sun.
| throwaway98211 wrote:
| > for people unfamiliar with los angeles, is very much a city
| of landed gentry. republican legislation designed to curtail
| rising taxes for elderly residents 40 years ago wound up
| creating a cloistered elite of land-owners that pay nearly
| nothing in tax and resist any attempt to create additional
| housing. They coast on a bubble of six-figure increases in
| equity per year with little to prevent a ramshackle bungalow in
| inglewood from fetching a cash-only two million dollar price.
|
| yeah right... this is all 'the republicans' fault. Say what you
| will about conservatives, but a party that has held majority
| since the nineties (and more recently a supermajority) has no
| one but themselves to blame.
|
| Obviously prop 13 / single family zoning has had an effect on
| housing, along with taxes, onerous building codes and
| environmental regulation. However, as long the Homeless
| Industrial Complex controls the narrative with well-intention
| voters, and gets to call the shots on where / how to 'address'
| to problem, the problem of pervasive homelessness is not going
| to be fixed. We've simply created the wrong set of incentives.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| > curtail rising taxes
|
| That, of course, was Proposition 13, a ballot initiative. The
| fallout was exactly what people predicted.
|
| Prop 13 did two things. It capped property taxes, though there
| have been a variety of ways of getting around that. The other
| thing was it capped increases in property taxes.
|
| Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in property
| values, and simultaneously have affordable housing.
|
| Imagine, here in the SF Bay Area, 100,000 apartments magically
| appeared tomorrow morning. I don't think we'd see rents going
| up 15% a year after that.
| zamfi wrote:
| > Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in
| property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing.
|
| Sure you can, you just also need to build new housing. The
| key is that the new housing has to be higher density than the
| old housing -- the value is primarily in the land, not the
| house.
|
| If a developer could legitimately and easily build a 4-plex
| where any single-family home exists right now, the prices of
| SFHs would likely stay high -- they are still a luxury, and
| become more so as they become rarer, raising prices further
| -- while the units in a 4-plex (still housing!) are more
| affordable.
|
| Everyone wins. Except we can't do that, because we can't
| build denser housing in basically any of California.
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| As of recently, you _will_ be able to build a fourplex on
| any SFH plot, with the passage of SB9! It 's not perfect,
| but it is a massive step in the right direction.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > Not quite Prop 13 but you can't have high increases in
| property values, and simultaneously have affordable housing.
|
| If you means test things, it can work better. If you're an
| artist or a retiree in san francisco, and then someone goes
| and invents the internet, prices will go way way up around
| you. If you don't want to force the artists and retirees to
| learn to code to keep up with housing catering to newcomers,
| something like prop 13 helps. But then if they _do_ go and
| learn to code, taking advantage of the new skyrocketing job
| market, then they don 't need prop 13 protections. Prices
| went up but their income kept pace, so they don't need the
| protections.
|
| A lot of these kinds of issues seem to come back to lack of
| means testing or poorly implemented, non-holistic, perverse
| incentivizing means testing.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| Actually this proposition made it "less illegal" to be poor and
| a homeowner. Now poor people can keep their homes even if,
| through no fault of their own, property values rise around
| them. Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other
| item do you continually need to pay for after you own it? And
| why is the amount you need to pay pegged to what other people
| in the neighborhood around you are doing?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other
| item do you continually need to pay for after you own it?
|
| City infrastructure needs constant maintnence, city services
| need to be constantly funded. And local schools (where most
| property tax in much of the USA goes) keep going even after
| your house is built (suffice it to say, areas with the best
| schools have the highest property taxes).
|
| > And why is the amount you need to pay pegged to what other
| people in the neighborhood around you are doing?
|
| The more developed your property is, the more city services
| you consume. And this is ignoring the speculation deterrence
| that property tax enforces, which is very important also.
| dahfizz wrote:
| My municipality charges a yearly excise tax on cars, which is
| functionally the same as property tax. I have the same
| philosophical objects to both, but the car tax is pretty low
| so practically it is not worth getting upset about.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| > Property taxes in general are a complete sham, what other
| item do you continually need to pay for after you own it?
|
| A sham? Unless you argue that most people are buying property
| under false pretenses, especially given the public nature of
| property taxes, the expectation would be that those
| purchasing land do so understanding the existence of on-going
| financial duties.
|
| As to why land is potentially materially different from other
| assets:
|
| 1. Land is only yours while some party will coerce all other
| parties to respect your claim. The cost of that
| infrastructure is on-going.
|
| 2. Most land might accrue some small value because of the
| actions of the land owner, but mostly accrues in value
| because of externalities from the action of others. Taxing
| those externalities so that the commons benefits rather than
| the individual seems at least equally as just as the current
| model where the wealth generated by collective action is
| overwhelmingly privatized. Reasonable arguments can be made
| for deferring that tax until sale or equivalent, rather than
| on a continuous basis.
|
| 3. In terms of being inexorably linked to specific
| governments, land is much more akin to citizenship and / or
| residency than fungible widgets. Citizenship and residence
| also frequently incurs ongoing tax duties.
|
| 4. Other scarce asset classes have been controlled in the
| past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
| Shuang1 wrote:
| Republicans caused all the problems in a city that they haven't
| controlled since 2001, in a state they haven't controlled since
| 1987? That really is incredible! I wonder how they accomplished
| that.
| [deleted]
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| Dig1t wrote:
| I think you're talking about this in pretty black/white terms
| and the partisan framing doesn't do much. Prop 13 is a double
| edged sword IMO.
|
| It does have the problem you describe of landed gentry not
| getting hit with high property taxes, but also it does protect
| middle class people from getting kicked out of their homes due
| to the popularity of the area they live in. My parents are the
| perfect example of this, my dad is a plumber and my mom is a
| teacher, my entire life they barely broke 100k combined and
| were BARELY able to give me and my sibling a decent life in LA.
| If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area
| that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been
| unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same
| thing goes with my grandparents.
|
| California has very high income tax, which arguably compensates
| for the low property taxes. This strikes me as more fair, as
| the high earners are the ones hit with the tax bills rather
| than my grandma, who made nothing and had no way to pay the tax
| that comes with a $2M property valuation, despite having worked
| hard to buy her house when she was younger.
|
| So yeah, you're right in some sense, but its not fair to
| completely ignore the alternative of lower/middle class people
| being kicked out of their homes if they didn't have prop 13.
| The real problem here is the NIMBYism that you describe and
| restrictive zoning.
|
| ALSO, the landed gentry are sort of limited as well. Yes their
| primary home (the one they live in) has a limited tax bill, but
| additional homes they own, they will probably end up renting
| out, and that rental income will be subject to California's
| high income tax.
| shagmin wrote:
| Regarding your last point, I think you're overestimating how
| much rental income is subject to California's income taxes.
| For real estate investors expensive areas like most of CA
| have a reputation for being profitable in a different way
| than most other places.
|
| Often rent alone isn't profitable in CA if you have to get a
| mortgage and even if you don't - the rent you would get is a
| low ROI, so investors rely more on appreciation. For some
| it's considered a win if the monthly cashflow is around break
| even, but some investors bet so heavily on appreciation and
| rely on the low property taxes that they find having a renter
| isn't worth the risk. They just want to own something that's
| going up in value $100,000 every year with minimal hassle.
|
| On top of this, when they go to sell, it will often be
| through a 1031 exchange where they can sell the property and
| not have to pay taxes on the appreciation right away as long
| as they quickly buy another-like property within a short
| period after. Eventually they will have to pay the capital
| gains if they ever just want to sell and keep the money, but
| they've spent years with a negative cashflow (especially if
| they just let the buildings stay empty) which will help out
| with those capital gains taxes.
| andechs wrote:
| > If their property taxes had risen with the rate of the area
| that they bought a house in as we grew up, we would have been
| unable to continue living there and forced to leave. The same
| thing goes with my grandparents.
|
| We're ensuring stability for the older generation, at the
| expense of a younger generation who couldn't possibly afford
| the same neighbourhood they grew up in.
|
| Those with millions in real estate equity can use that equity
| and financial engineering to defer the property tax increases
| until their death.
| 2c2c2c wrote:
| always fun to see prop13ers turn themselves into victims over
| the idea of having to sell their 300% ROI property
| djrogers wrote:
| It's not about selling the house, it's about being forced
| to move out of a city / neighborhood they've been in for
| decades, simply because it got more popular and they can't
| afford a property tax bill several times higher than their
| largest mortgage payment ever was.
| pbuzbee wrote:
| If property taxes were level across properties, wouldn't we
| likely see property values drop, given the presumed higher
| taxes in the future?
|
| I'd rather see us adopt lower but uniform property tax rates
| that are revenue-neutral with Prop 13 rates.
|
| Of course I'm only an aspiring property owner so I have a
| significant bias here.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Prop 19 more or less eliminated the landed gentry problem.
| Previously children could inherit their parent's primary
| residence and get their parent's tax base, even if they
| didn't want to live in the home. Before we bought a house we
| rented and my landlord was in that position. He already owned
| his own home in addition to several other properties in SF...
| yet he inherited his mom's house at a 200k tax basis, a house
| that would sell for $1.2m. His children could inherit the
| house from him, keeping the 200k tax base. And their
| children. And their children. Forever creating a true landed
| gentry.
|
| Now with Prop 19 children can only keep the lower tax basis
| if they use the home as their primary residence and it only
| excludes up to 1m in value.
| rcpt wrote:
| Low income seniors who hit the real estate jackpot can defer
| taxes indefinitely.
|
| It's called the California Tax Postponement Program and
| solves exactly the problem you're discussing.
| TimPC wrote:
| Prop 13 is bad policy as demonstrated by every single area of
| the world that gets by without it. Most cities assess
| property values on a lagging window basis where your value
| for property taxes is set every few years based on the value
| from a few years ago. This generally gives you time to
| prepare for the increase or make whatever financial decisions
| you need to. One thing to keep in mind is that percentage
| property tax rates are necessarily set higher when some
| people pay taxes on values far below market. My region has a
| 0.63% property tax rate which amounts to about $6,300 a year
| on a million dollar home. That might be larger than one month
| of a mortgage payment but it's a reasonable price to pay for
| all the services the city provides. I live in a city where
| this includes garbage, mail, police, fire, transportation and
| sewage infrastructure and a number of other important
| services. The idea that someone who bought a house in 1963
| should pay less than 10% of the taxes that other taxpayers do
| means that someone or several someone's are footing the
| remainder of the bill. You pay a substantial price for that
| as new homes become less affordable with the higher % rates
| of property tax. It's also not clear that being forced to
| sell over high property tax bills is a bad thing as it
| creates new supply on the market. Most people selling a
| single family home could easily afford to live in a
| condominium in the same neighborhood without losing touch
| with the people they care about. Keep in mind the necessary
| condition for selling is the property has gone up by enough
| to make the property tax bill unaffordable. This means
| whomever is selling their home is making a substantial profit
| and portraying them as low/middle income people who are hard
| done by is doing a disservice to anyone struggling in the
| artificial market created by prop 13 and paying the higher
| base rates associated with it.
| Dig1t wrote:
| >prepare for the increase or make whatever financial
| decisions you need to
|
| What does this statement actually mean for an individual
| family? Most working class people cannot just demand more
| money from their employer. So really it just means "get
| ready to move out and find a new home", which means
| uprooting your family, commuting further, finding new
| schools for your kids to attend, potentially worse ones
| because its probably a cheaper/poorer neighborhood.
|
| >It's also not clear that being forced to sell over high
| property tax bills is a bad thing
|
| I just plain old disagree with this; my family would have
| been forced to move because some rich people would have
| displaced my working class parents, and it honestly sounds
| like you consider that a good thing, "well they're poorer
| so they don't deserve to live in a place where a lot of
| people want to live" is really what that argument boils
| down to. Even though they worked hard and saved for many
| years to afford to buy that place. There are very few
| condos in the neighborhood I grew up in, and the ones that
| exist are on the edge of the city in much less desirable
| areas. I would have had to go to a different (worse)
| school, lose touch with my friends and generally have much
| less space than I had as well. Your argument only makes
| sense if you consider people as wanting to live somewhere
| purely as a financial enterprise rather than a good safe
| place to raise a family.
|
| If you eliminated the zoning restrictions and power of the
| NIMBYs then this would allow for the best of both worlds.
| We could continue to allow a tax rate for working class
| people, but also allow the development of more
| profitable/denser units. As people naturally move around,
| companies could buy the houses and redevelop them into
| denser units.
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| Liberal policies is why Los Angles has been dealing with a
| homeless crisis for so long. Spending $837,000 to build a
| single studio to house a single homeless person seems insane to
| most of the country.
| [deleted]
| mullingitover wrote:
| It's nothing to do with liberal policy. It was pure
| corruption that happened right under the noses of voters. The
| sales tax ballot measure to fund housing had an innocent-
| looking line which restricted the contractors eligible for
| the jobs. The contractors had to have experience building
| this type of housing.
|
| The problem with this is that there were only _two_
| contractors that met the requirement, and as a result they
| could charge whatever they wanted since it was practically a
| no-bid contract.
|
| Los Angeles could've spent dramatically less, and housed more
| people, had they simply purchased housing on the open market
| with the money. These prices are pure graft.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| dangStupid wrote:
| quartesixte wrote:
| God. And it was Democrats who pushed for it too IIRC.
|
| Corruption deep on both sides of the aisle.
| mullingitover wrote:
| To be fair, the republican party trashed its brand so
| thoroughly that it essentially doesn't exist in
| California, so we're under one party rule. There is no
| other side of the aisle. It's a shame because
| Schwarzenegger gave the party a winning formula when he
| was governor, but the party swung so far off the rails
| that his centrism makes him a bolshevik to the party as
| it exists now. One party rule isn't good, but we don't
| have any sane alternatives here.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's a shame because Schwarzenegger gave the party a
| winning formula when he was governor
|
| Yes, but "find a political cypher of a celebrity, run in
| an irregular election leveraging a crisis created by
| Republican state and federal policies, and appoint an
| listen to a lot of establishment Dems as advisers while
| ignoring Republican Party insiders and donors because you
| don't need them once you have the dual advantages of
| celebrity and incumbency and don't care about the party
| as such" isn't really a structurally-repeatable strategy.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Liberal policies
|
| Do you have any evidence of that?
|
| > Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a
| single homeless person seems insane to most of the country.
|
| That's not what is happening, in any meaningful way.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Do you have any evidence of that?
|
| This is a totally valid question. Wouldn't the overwhelming
| liberal majority rule in California be evidence in and of
| itself? I guess there could be liberals in name who enact
| conservative policy (or maybe little policy at all), but I
| haven't seen evidence of that.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in
| California be evidence in and of itself? I guess there
| could be liberals in name who enact conservative policy
| (or maybe little policy at all), but I haven't seen
| evidence of that.
|
| Good points.
|
| First, what do the outcomes depend on? Policies of
| California state and local government are only limited
| factors. They do not create the economy, migration,
| weather, real estate development, etc. etc. (though they
| some limited effect on all of them). There are many other
| powers in the world. The government's power to control
| events is pretty limited.
|
| Second, do we see any correlation between California
| government and these outcomes? Homelessness has existed
| worldwide probably for all time. A fundamental question
| is, with what is increased homelessness correlated?
|
| Third, we don't know what the outcomes would be without
| the policy or with other policies. Negative outcomes
| don't indicate bad decisions - things could be worse. If
| you are dying of terminal disease, you don't assume the
| doctor's decisions are the cause, and therefore we'd be
| better off without healthcare. We are dealing with a
| difficult problem.
|
| Finally, not all decisions and policies are partisan;
| people and publics are not politically consistent anwyay,
| and make policies for all sorts of reasons. And
| California has had Republican government on and off for a
| long time, and anything effects of government policy you
| see now are the outcome of decades of governance.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| I think these are good questions.
|
| You can find a nice graphic of homelessness by state
| here: https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-
| action/map/#fn[]=1300&fn[]=2...
|
| States like CA and NY seem to have the most growth in
| homeless population. That might be considered supporting
| evidence.
|
| "They do not create the economy, migration, weather, real
| estate development, etc. etc. (though they some limited
| effect on all of them). There are many other powers in
| the world. The government's power to control events is
| pretty limited." I disagree with this statement, look at
| all the shutdowns as of late. The government seems to
| have almost unlimited power which court systems are
| unwilling to check, they can literally shut entire
| sectors of the economy down and stop home showings, in
| direct contradiction to your statement. In normal times
| they hold enormous influence over these sectors with
| licensing requirements, regulatory schemes, and political
| corruption. The result is migration, which also as of
| late has resulted in net outflows in CA, NY, and IL.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| > Wouldn't the overwhelming liberal majority rule in
| California be evidence in and of itself?
|
| It's a very good point. I find it very disingenuous to
| claim republicans are at fault in a blue state like
| Claifornia. The null hypothesis should be democrats are
| responsible for the state (good or bad) of California.
| Anyone, who claims otherwise, should provide evidences
| for their claim.
| Day1 wrote:
| It seems insane because it is insane. Unfortunately, we
| already started down this path long ago and it will only get
| worse until catastrophe. I.e China takes over.
| spicyusername wrote:
| > Spending $837,000 to build a single studio to house a
| single homeless person seems insane
|
| I don't think it was known, in advance, that this would be
| the resulting cost, assuming that figure is accurate. I don't
| think any rational person would put forward such a program
| and that $837,000 to build a single studio house seems insane
| to everyone, not just non-Californians.
|
| I think the point OP is trying to make is that the
| skyrocketing cost is partly caused by a certain class of
| privileged Californian's continuing to fight the effort to
| build more housing.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > $837,000
|
| That's not what is happening. Per the article:
|
| _14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and one
| project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost
| $837,000 per unit._
| dahfizz wrote:
| This is a meaningless nitpick. Spending "over $700,000"
| to house an individual is just as insane as spending "up
| to $837,000". Its embarrassing and ridiculous either way.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Part of the problem is that due to the mild climate, LA inherits
| a large part of the homeless population of the whole country.
| They come from all 50 states to the west coast. So this isn't
| entirely a problem of LA's making, even though they have to bear
| the costs.
| asdff wrote:
| Nothing is a mild climate when you are homeless. Its going to
| be 39* tonight on the streets of LA. If all you have is a nylon
| tent and no blanket you are probably going to join the ranks of
| homeless who have died from hypothermia this year in LA, which
| outnumbers the people who have died from hypothermia in NYC
| because they actually build homeless shelters in NYC. Six
| months from now the problem will be flipped and you will be
| contending with heat stroke as the pavement heats up to 95*,
| and the city generally lacks widespread cooling centers.
| Honestly a bigger reason why homeless is so overt here is
| because its not criminalized. You can smoke crack or shoot up
| meth openly and police in LA don't care, but try even smoking a
| joint in Baton Rouge or wherever else and you will be sent to
| jail.
| legitster wrote:
| In the last 50 years, cities across the country closed down over
| 1 million SROs
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy) in an
| effort to remove slums or just neglect at increasing property
| value. There are now over half of a million homeless. It's
| honestly impressive the number is not more.
|
| For the 1.2 billion dollars they are spending, if all of the
| apartments were built to the spec of a roadside motel room (~350
| sq ft - or more than double the average SRO), they should
| realistically be able to build over 10,000 units for that kind of
| money (that's including California's exorbitant cost per square
| foot).
|
| It would be like if the government banned motorcycles, and then
| said "okay, instead we'll make you a nice, compact crossover",
| and then handed over design and construction of the crossovers to
| a company that builds snowplows.
|
| What's frustrating is that SROs used to be provided by the
| private market, largely free to taxpayers! How much better a use
| of government money it would have been to just improve the
| situation in SROs than to quietly let them shutter and hope the
| poverty they represented just disappeared with them.
| mwint wrote:
| Basically, we'd be better off if the government had done
| nothing. Seems like that happens a lot.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| More like, we'd be better off if voters didn't demand short-
| term actions with negative long-term effects.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Precisely this. In LA there are constant referendums about
| homelessness, in CA massive budget increases, and yet,
| nobody will allow a shelter or multi-family unit to be
| constructed in their neighborhood, lest their soaring land
| value peak.
|
| In CA, it's my firm belief that people have a tad too much
| power over the minutae of government operations. What did
| we even elect people for if we are going to try to solve
| everything with referendums and protests?
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| Luckily, SB9 and SB10 are massive pushes in the right
| direction for California, accompanied by incandescent
| rage of my local NIMBYs.
| nine_k wrote:
| For some reason, referendum-soaked Switzerland is
| governed somehow more sanely.
| richardfey wrote:
| Relevant:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Switzerland
| honkdaddy wrote:
| If you somehow could swap the US population with the
| Swiss (times 30, of course), I imagine our homeless
| problems would evaporate within a few years. I believe
| homelessness represents a social issue in North America,
| not a political one. I live in New York and I don't think
| any amount of affordable housing, handouts, or government
| intervention solve fix the problems of the people I walk
| past every day, nor will they stop the pipeline of people
| soon to be in the same position.
| sfe22 wrote:
| So CA is too democratic in your opinion? It should slide
| more towards tyranny?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Absolutely not. Democracy can be fair and open elections,
| not crowdsourced legislation.
| setr wrote:
| Sounds more like too much direct democracy, and needs to
| slide further towards representative.
| rsync wrote:
| Is that your opinion on marijuana policy in California?
|
| Which issues, pray tell, are best governed by local
| control and which are best governed by top-down, remote
| decision makers?
| sfe22 wrote:
| The emperor can also be your representative, and so is
| Putin to russians, and the slightly more complex US
| system. The slider is democracy to tyranny, just because
| we dont yet have democracy in most or all countries
| doesn't change anything here. We just have twisted its
| meaning to describe some decision power when choosing
| tyrants. Either all decide equally-democracy , or fewer
| to very few or one-tyranny.
| Jarwain wrote:
| Feels like a flamebaity false-dichotomy.
|
| Is it really tyrannical to, say, elect officials to act
| on our behalf and consider long-term impacts and x-order
| effects?
|
| Because to me that just sounds a little more "republic"
| and a little less "direct democracy".
| boredumb wrote:
| Total democracy is mob rule of the majority.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's exactly it. One of the reasons that the US (and
| other representative democracies) have limits on direct
| voter rule explicitly to prevent a "too democratic"
| situation yielding "mob rule" outcomes.
| sfe22 wrote:
| Sounds like a reason to justify tyranny to me. What do
| you mean mob rule. In a (true) democratic society just a
| small group can change something the majority disagrees
| with because they got together? The majority is also
| together in the same matter isnt it?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, the idea recognizes two concepts:
|
| - We don't want the minority enforcing on the majority
|
| - We don't want a plurality or even a majority enforcing
| on a minority under certain circumstances
|
| So, for instance, even if 300 million Americans think
| "sfe22 should be stripped of their assets and have it
| given to us 300 million" that's not going to happen. Yes,
| that is 'tyrannical' of you to have such power but it is
| so nonetheless.
| sfe22 wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't agree. If 95% Americans want to
| steal my assets, something is wrong with the them (or
| me), and I should have probably seen it coming and leave.
| Why would I want to live in such extreme society anymore.
| If I was used to set an example that still would tell
| many a lot about this hypothetical america. Would a
| tyrant really be of any help then, maybe if it was
| somehow "good" to me, for a limited time but definitely
| does not justify its existence and cost on freedom and
| wealth.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Right, and that's your thesis for the world, but America
| lives under a different thesis, and some individual
| rights are protected, _even_ if 95% of people disagree.
| sfe22 wrote:
| Who decides what are individual rights? Would they be
| held up if 95% disagree with it? I mean it might work
| idk, it would just not be a democracy.
| iso1210 wrote:
| That's the paradox isn't it. Mob rule ends up being
| tyranny.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Voters didn't order the SROs in bunker hill destroyed.
| Follow the money. Who stood to gain in the time when that
| SRO was raized into a parking lot then turned into the
| hotel Bonaventure in downtown LA? It wasn't voters, it was
| a handful of politically connected people.
| legitster wrote:
| I think you may underrate how much people in the local
| community hated SROs. It was definitely politically
| popular at the time to remove them.
| GlobalFrog wrote:
| And why not allow them now? If you compare the housing
| market to the job market, the general opinion (in the US)
| is that there should be very few restrictions for jobs in
| terms of low salaries and work conditions (and the lack
| of unions allows that). The same reasonning should allow
| to have low quality housing but cheap. But there are no
| downside for the ones who profit from employing people
| with very low salaries and very poor work conditions,
| whereas letting exist cheap housing indeed makes the
| property value around them go down. So it is really a
| choice made today not to reduce homelessness.
| asdff wrote:
| Yeah, voting whites hated the low income blacks latinos
| and asians who rented these, doesn't mean it was the
| right thing to do.
| long_time_gone wrote:
| You can drill-down to a specific SRO building to find a
| unique story, but the overwhelming trend from 1960-2010
| was to eliminate SRO because of health and safety
| concerns.
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
| eberkund wrote:
| Collectively we would be better off but many individuals
| would not be which is the crux of the problem.
| rhizome wrote:
| Well, what should have been done is enforce laws (and pass
| legislation if necessary) to prevent the SROs from being
| allowed to decline into slums.
| vasco wrote:
| Even if SROs would be slums, they would be better than the
| street slums of LA. How is a tent city better than a
| decrepit building?
| richardfey wrote:
| The tent cannot fall on your head? But I get what you
| mean.
| worik wrote:
| > The tent cannot fall on your head?
|
| That is a good point.
|
| Tent cities are preferable to poorly built dangerous
| masonry.
| asdff wrote:
| Well they were often considered slums by politicians by who
| lived there, not by the craftsmanship of the build.
| dionidium wrote:
| Then you're just back to where you began -- a situation
| where government is going to need to takeover, because
| nobody can make a profit selling flophouses to indigent
| single men if they're required by law to make them as nice
| as middle-class apartments.
|
| What modern Westerners seem entirely unwilling to
| acknowledge or accept is that if you require by decree that
| all accommodations look like middle-class accommodations,
| then you'll absolutely be able to get rid of all those
| worse accommodations, but you won't have done anything to
| address the reasons they existed in the first place.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > nobody can make a profit selling flophouses to indigent
| single men if they're required by law to make them as
| nice as middle-class apartments.
|
| What exactly do you mean when you say "as nice as middle-
| class apartments"? Are you talking about how nice the
| carpeting and hardwood flooring is? How nice the building
| looks from the outside? How likely the roof is to leak or
| collapse? How safe the electrical wiring and fire
| suppression systems are?
| dionidium wrote:
| What if it's closer to the latter? Like, what if the
| building doesn't have GFCI outlets in the kitchens? And
| maybe the roof in one of the bathrooms leaks and there's
| been a bucket under it for the last few months? And maybe
| the heat was out for 12 days last month? What then? What
| if the price of saying, "sorry, that's unacceptable" is
| that those men sleep on the street, instead?
|
| In the West that's exactly what we've done. We've said,
| sorry, no, you can't provide housing that looks like
| that, so the operators of those establishments said, OK,
| then, I won't. And now those men sleep on the street.
|
| We seem to think that we can demand of proprietors
| whatever we want and they'll have no choice but to
| comply. But it's simply not true. At some threshold
| they'll just shut down. And then I guess we can celebrate
| the elimination of "substandard" housing and declare
| ourselves morally cleansed.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but surely there ought to be
| _some_ limit on how unsafe a rental property can be,
| right? For one thing, at some point it actually won 't
| even be true that "it's better than sleeping on the
| street." When the cheap electrical wiring causes a fire
| that burns down the apartment building and kills a few
| dozen people, that probably wasn't better than if the
| victims had slept on the street that particular night. So
| if your landlord is selling you a nightly probability
| that you'll be safer than if you had slept on the street,
| this "better than the street" sound bite sounds a little
| less appealing. Not to mention that the rentees probably
| aren't properly informed of these probabilities.
|
| Secondly, I think it's a false dichotomy in practice. I
| find it very hard to believe that basic safety codes
| alone cause the difference between SRO-style buildings
| and "luxury" or even "middle-class" apartments. What
| percentage of that $800k was spent on the GFCI outlets in
| the kitchen?
| dionidium wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not an ideological libertarian. I just
| happen to think these are genuinely difficult problems
| and the tradeoffs aren't always obvious. In some cases,
| we won't like _any_ of the options.
|
| So, yes, I agree with you. Surely there must be _some_
| limit. But what 's optimal?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't claim to be able to draw up very specific legal
| code here, or even that there is some "objectively
| optimal" answer. I just don't think "it's better than
| sleeping on the street" is a great mode of argument,
| because 1) it might not even be true if people were fully
| informed of the risks associated with every rental unit
| and 2) even if it is true, society might not be willing
| to allow landlords to earn unrestricted profit from
| renting units that are infinitesimally "better than
| sleeping on the street."
| mym1990 wrote:
| Incentives for governments to deliver good results are much
| lower than in the private markets(not non-existent though),
| which is why governments are so bad at capital allocation.
| Its almost like the government wants to look like they are
| doing something, without ever actually following through.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the incentives. The elimination
| of the residential hotels and boarding houses of yesteryear
| (to be replaced with two-or-three bedroom apartments) was a
| deliberate exercise in class warfare, and the governments
| in question were largely delivering what voters wanted.
|
| The remarkable part is the people who still defend the
| measures as for-the-poor's-own-good.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I very well might, but my particular observation is with
| government behavior towards most projects, not just the
| one in this headline.
| peter303 wrote:
| SROs have returned as urban co-housing dorms for z-llenials.
| They consist of a cramped bedroom, sometimes with a private
| bath. But shared cooking, dining and recreation spaces.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I don't buy the argument SROs were removed to get rid of Slums.
|
| In fact, my first apartment, ironically in LA was a very small
| step up from an SRO. It had a private bathroom, but not much
| else.
|
| Now the city has effectively made this housing illegal to
| build.
|
| These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos. It's
| never been about helping people, Garcerti and the boys just
| ripped off the people of Los Angeles.
|
| A more realistic plan would be to offer relocation assistance
| or at the very least relax building requirements.
|
| None of that will happen, my first, my beautiful 600$ apartment
| is now 1300$. I miss the city LA used to be.
|
| I had the privilege of living in a neighborhood with 3$ bottles
| of Soju and 4$ Tortas. It was absolutely amazing.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > I don't buy the argument SROs were removed to get rid of
| Slums.
|
| "Criticizing hotel life was one thing; effectively
| controlling it was another. By 1910, reformers had
| established the idea that hotel housing was a public
| nuisance. From 1900 through the 1940s, interlocking groups of
| reformers and landowners transformed objections about hotel
| life into practices to control living in hotels. For the
| goals of the culturally and socially reorganized new city to
| succeed, aberrant forms of housing had to be prevented and
| removed--slum and hotel alike. Yet gaining control was
| neither automatic nor preordained. Hotel housing was
| entrenched in some areas and in others, still expanding (fig.
| 8.1). A few handfuls of reformers had to do more than
| galvanize public opinion against the notion of living in
| hotels; they also had to establish whole new governmental
| organizations and procedures to give cities and states the
| necessary legal and bureaucratic power." https://publishing.c
| dlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49...
|
| "As with the SFRA's applications of blight and nonbuilding,
| the actions of other hotel-closing agencies were not (in
| their own minds) aiming the wrecking ball at the homes of the
| poor but "eliminating dead tissue," "applying the scalpel,"
| "clearing away the mistakes of the past," and building "an
| attractive new city." About a Norfolk, Virginia, hotel
| district, one planning journal editor reported in 1961 that
| "progress had reached the demolition stage." Local agents
| crowed that they had "reduced to rubble . . . scores of
| flophouses not renowned for adding luster to their city's
| good name."
|
| https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49.
| ..
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > These units for the homeless are basically luxury condos.
|
| What is luxurious about them? Or are you referring to the
| price?
| legitster wrote:
| My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's own
| kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice enough
| place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it out
| today.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > My grandparent's first apartment in SF didn't have it's
| own kitchen or bathroom. They thought it was a nice
| enough place, but you literally couldn't legally rent it
| out today.
|
| Are you defining a unit with a kitchen and bathroom as a
| 'luxury apartment'? Would you live without them?
| nine_k wrote:
| If the other option is living on the street, why not?
|
| The problem is that not everyone has a well-paid IT job,
| and some people barely make ends meet. These people need
| a place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with
| _many_ corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to
| build and maintain. It 's still much better than living
| in a tent as your primary residence!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The question was, is it luxury?
|
| > If the other option is living on the street, why not?
|
| Those aren't our only choices.
|
| > some people barely make ends meet. These people need a
| place to live, too, a cheap, non-advanced place, with
| many corners cut for the sake of it being cheap to build
| and maintain.
|
| And they also, like other humans, need kitchens and
| bathrooms. Also, kitchens save a lot of money - cooking
| is by far the least expensive way to eat.
| nine_k wrote:
| I agree.
|
| But it's better to have one kitchen for several units
| ("single rooms"), than none at all, and not even a single
| room.
|
| Back to the beginning: I don't think that decrepit SRO
| buildings had to be perpetuated. But I suppose that
| moving people out of them should have included an offer
| of some other _affordable_ housing, back in the time they
| were being removed, I need to find out what has been
| done.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > If the other option is living on the street, why not?
|
| That's a big "if." Surely not a significant portion of
| this $800k or the cost of any "luxury" apartment is due
| to it having a kitchen and bathroom.
| reidjs wrote:
| I think the question is would you rather have a shared
| floor bathroom with no kitchen or live on the street. If
| the room is free, sure I'll take the room, but if the
| room has a price and I have no income, I might take the
| street and save the money. I think this comes down to the
| privileged arguing about what's best for the less
| fortunate. Our worlds are so different from theirs, even
| basic communication and understanding is difficult.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| My first apartment didn't have a kitchen. And it was
| fine, we are talking about a homeless shelter. You do not
| need to have stainless steel appliances, it should be a
| short-term stopgap until you find a better solution.
| Historically lower income people had to share common
| amenities like a shower. Just because it would be nice
| for every single person to have a big apartment with
| brand new appliances doesn't make it feasible .
|
| I don't know about you, but given the choice between
| sleeping on the streets or having to share a shower with
| a reasonable number of other people, I'd share that
| shower.
|
| Instead LA built a bunch of vanity projects which provide
| no real help to the vast majority of homeless people. The
| only thing you can really do is move your feet, which is
| what I did .
|
| Anyone struggling to find affordable housing in LA should
| get out. You can move to Vegas and drive in every other
| week to see your friends.
| closeparen wrote:
| No, we are not talking about a homeless shelter or a
| temporary stopgap, these kinds of units _are_ the
| "something better" that people in homeless shelters and
| other temporary stopgaps are in a holding pattern waiting
| for.
|
| Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most
| expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.
| djrogers wrote:
| > Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most
| expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.
|
| Why? Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless
| in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times rather
| than junkies who moved in for better weather and
| benefits, shipping them out seems completely reasonable.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Ship them where? Can other cities ship to LA/SF? How does
| this work?
| closeparen wrote:
| I assume the model would be to build the same kinds of
| supportive housing facilities but to do so in markets
| where the same budget buys more units.
| aaronchall wrote:
| Ask the Democrats and judges if they think that's
| reasonable.
|
| And where will you ship them to? Smaller cities don't
| want them and they'll be inhospitable enough they won't
| want to be there either - they'd rather ship themselves
| back where they can stay close to their drug sources and
| still rotate with their panhandling around enough that
| the locals don't get too familiar with them.
|
| So if you want to do something about the vagrant
| encampments being in the city _you_ live in, the most
| effective thing that _you_ can do is move to where they
| aren 't, which is what everyone else who cared that much
| about it already did long ago.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I lived for 3 years in a college dorm with no kitchen or
| bathroom. I even had to have a roommate.
|
| Some of the best times in my life.
|
| For my senior year I moved into an apartment with my own
| bathroom and kitchen. It turned out to be a step down.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| My apartment in Lausanne had a bathroom and a kitchen,
| except the kitchen was one stovetop and a sink in a small
| cabinet next to the door. It was small, still cost me 900
| CHF/month (in 2006!), but Lausanne is expensive.
|
| I don't think those would be allowed in most (American)
| cities either, I don't think 20 sqm is rentable.
| iso1210 wrote:
| My first place in London in 2003 was PS520 a month, about
| PS875 today. It was a 10 square metre room with a shower
| in one corner, bed in one corner, small kitchen sink in
| one corner, and a door in the fourth corner. There was a
| shared toilet.
|
| Ideally I'd have had a slightly smaller room, but with a
| private toilet (there was certainly enough space in the
| footprint for a 2m*1m toilet/sink/shower), but apart form
| that it was great (given the cost - about half my net
| income), far better than sharing a house. As a young
| person needing to be close to a London office but without
| the luxury of having parents giving me a free room.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > What is luxurious about them?
|
| I'm reminded of a previous thread where I asserted that
| America's poor have a higher standard of living than
| medieval kings :-/
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This...is not wrong. Pioneer Square in Seattle used to have a
| lot of flop houses, part of it being the original "skid row"
| (logs skid to the saw mill, really muddy and not a desirable
| place to live). My grandfather in Spokane unwittingly ran a
| rooming house we cousins called the "empty arms" (inherited
| from his sister), which housed a lot of people who were just
| barely getting by.
|
| Seattle's flop houses are mostly gone now...Spokane's are
| disappearing rapidly and is creating a new homeless problem in
| an area that used to be fairly immune to it (because of access
| to cheap housing).
|
| China/Hong Kong and some of Asia have created a new spin on
| SROs with capsule and pod housing, China leverages a lot of
| sub-basements for SRO housing (without access to windows
| because underground), while Japan has cheap 2.5 tatami sized
| small room apartments. None of these would be allowed in the
| west, they are barely living, but maybe we should start
| thinking about them as an alternative to a much worse
| situation?
| pinephoneguy wrote:
| I'm not convinced this isn't done intentionally to prevent a
| deflationary market.
| mhb wrote:
| How do you unwittingly run a rooming house?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You inherit property from your sister and...after putting
| work into it, realize that you are only getting low-end
| tenants. I guess it is hard to call it a rooming house,
| they were full apartments from what I remember, but we
| still thought of it as a flop house.
|
| It didn't last long, he gave the place to my uncle after
| running it for a few years. My uncle quickly sold it after
| fixing it up a bit, he didn't want to be in that kind of
| business either.
| legitster wrote:
| Publix in Seattle is a perfect example.
|
| A developer bought them out, them combined every 2-3 SROs to
| make a (still small) luxury apartment.
|
| I do not begrudge the developer. If you were to propose the
| opposite (taking an existing set of luxury apartments, and
| subdivide them into more rent paying units), it would
| probably be _more_ profitable, but you would never get the
| plans approved.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Sorry, Publix in Seattle!!?
|
| Ah, "The Publix" - I saw it a few times in ID and was
| confused with the SE/Florida based Grocery Store.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > it would probably be more profitable, but you would never
| get the plans approved.
|
| I'm not sure it would be in this market. Catering to people
| with money is pretty profitable. Catering to lower income
| tenants...even with more scale on your side, might not work
| out, especially with the extra overheads involved (with
| Seattle's strict eviction laws, for example). Most small-
| scale landlords in Seattle are trying to get away from even
| moderate income housing that might require them to fund
| moving costs because of future rent increases (as well as
| rising eviction costs...it doesn't make much sense to rent
| to anyone but a very well funded and low risk techie).
| legitster wrote:
| I remember watching this fight play out in real time in
| Seattle:
|
| https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/somethings-rotten-in-
| roos...
|
| > Most in the crowd were furious about the Sisleys'
| refusal to help keep up the neighborhood. "I feel like
| I'm watching a neighborhood crumble," said David Ahrens.
| Another angry resident added, "These are transient
| places. People are moving in and out. I think you need to
| get more aggressive with them."
|
| > In 1994, after the DCLU took action on a number of
| violations at Sisley properties, including the illegal
| conversion of a house that was zoned single-family into a
| six-unit "residents' club" house, Gilbert brought a
| similar suit against city officials.
|
| Then there's all of the Carl Haglund stuff.
|
| I think people have tried to cater to low income tenants,
| and all of them have been run out of town.
| pempem wrote:
| That's a possibility
|
| The other possibility is that we should root out the
| corruption in this process. I am not generally a fan of
| privitization at all. In the private market however you're
| building 2/2s in LA for less than half of the cost including
| furnishings and fixtures.
|
| By that I mean a 2 bed, 2 bathroom, with all of the
| traditionally middle class loved touches including faux
| marble, and faux wood flooring etc.
|
| The situation LA is in is unconscionable as 4,000/mo
| apartments are going up for rent and developed for less than
| 350k.
|
| The issue here is definitely corruption and not ability,
| cost, or the need to put people in Parasite style apartments.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > The issue here is definitely corruption and not ability,
| cost, or the need to put people in Parasite style
| apartments.
|
| You claim corruption, but provide no evidence of such, just
| that the result doesn't make sense to you. But instead of
| corruption, maybe it is just capitalism at work here?
| Developers go with what the market demands, and that demand
| comes through what the market is willing to pay. In that
| case, they develop $350k units because they can rent them
| out for $4k, that sounds really profitable. Why would they
| bother doing what you think they should do if they can't
| make money doing it that way? Or is it alleged corruption
| that allows this behavior? If so, what kind of corruption?
| pempem wrote:
| I suggest its corruption because I also develop units in
| Los Angeles and have multiple (5 specifically) bids in my
| inbox from the last two weeks for building out completely
| fresh 2/2s on new ground with new foundations in the 350k
| mark. Including all of what I've mentioned. And they're
| definitely making a margin on me.
|
| That would be why specifically 800+k for a unit described
| smells of corruption.
| byw wrote:
| As a single guy and a software engineer, I would pay full
| price for a pod housing if the area is safe convenient. I'd
| rent a co-working desk nearby and save a ton of money.
|
| These types of housing just aren't available in Vancouver (or
| NA in general), but I can totally see a market for it.
| gutitout wrote:
| Saddens me that the top earners in our world have to dream
| of affordable housing so they can save a bit of money.
| Probably not enough to buy a house in that same area. Sigh.
| ipaddr wrote:
| He is in one of the most expensive places that pays below
| market pay. When money fled Hong Kong a lot of it moved
| to Vancouver.
| caddemon wrote:
| Yeah I'm past this point in my life but there was nearly a
| decade post-college where I would have really enjoyed
| continuing to live in dorm-style housing with other people
| at a similar stage of life. Saving money on top of it
| would've made that a no brainer. It's a bit tangential to
| the discussion on SROs to address homelessness, but I wish
| that SROs were a more acceptable housing style for a
| variety of use cases.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Where do all these numbers and other claims come from? Without
| evidence, we're all writing works of fiction - compelling
| stories, but not reality.
|
| > handed over design and construction of the crossovers to a
| company that builds snowplows.
|
| Who is analogous to the snowplow building company?
|
| > SROs used to be provided by the private market, largely free
| to taxpayers!
|
| What do we know about SROs and their outcomes?
| asdff wrote:
| >What do we know about SROs and their outcomes?
|
| That they housed people who today live in nylon tents with no
| plumbing/hvac/security.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What is that based on? And what did SROs provide? Did they
| provide plumbing, HVAC, and security? I never heard of SROs
| being known for their a/c and security, and the plumbing
| didn't have a great reputation.
| asdff wrote:
| They provided your own room with a lock on the door and a
| bed, and a shared bathroom and kitchen, for a price that
| was substantially lower than any other unit of housing on
| offer in the area, so yes they provided these things. If
| these things were lacking, then it was the state of the
| times in code enforcement and you would expect these
| things to be lacking in any lower income housing unit
| during this time as well. That doesn't mean a modern SRO
| would be filled with any more code violations than your
| typical low income apartment today since code enforcement
| has gotten more modern.
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is not a story about government waste, it's a story about
| the high cost of building housing. If you want this price to be
| lower, lower the general cost of housing. The median sale price
| in Los Angeles is about 1 million dollars, and new construction
| sells for more. New construction at $837k is a comparative deal.
| Also, if you read the report, a significant part of the cost is
| intragovernmental transfers, i.e. they are charging themselves
| all the usual impact fees for water and sewer and whatnot.
| polalavik wrote:
| It's definitely both. LA taxpayers set aside some 1 billion
| dollars to address homelessness and instead of coming up with a
| viable solution the city chose to build 20-50 units at a time
| at the tune of 500-800k each to address a problem that exists
| orders of magnitude greater than that solution (~1000x). The
| number of homeless in Los Angeles is in the range of 60-70k if
| not more.
| coding123 wrote:
| Well it is both.
| asdff wrote:
| It is government waste though given the context. It would be
| one thing if this was the price for public housing, complete
| public housing that functions like a private apartment. It's
| not. It's for homeless shelters. These should be spartan
| builds, meant to maximize units for the cost. To me, the modern
| example of the idyllic homeless shelter is your average
| university dorm: 4 people sharing a bedroom, and an entire
| floor sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities. Historically,
| this is how the lowest rung of urban housing has always been
| developed from ancient Rome right up until the 1950s when
| whites used race and class to destroy urban fabric and declare
| SROs (really any neighborhood with poor people) slums, fit for
| conversion to surface parking for white collar office workers.
| It makes no sense to be building these shelters in this style
| of a private apartment with 1 bathroom and kitchen per unit. It
| just drives up the costs and increases developer profit, and
| gives a few people their own kitchen while keeping a lot of
| people cooking in a nylon tent over an open fire compared to
| the alternative of sparing these costly amenities from each and
| every unit, and offering them communally instead.
| daenz wrote:
| Is there any way to fix incentives with government contracts, so
| that the product that is purchased is the lowest price for the
| highest quality? In the free market, there are generally
| incentives for that because companies have a brand, and if you
| deliver poor quality, consumers eventually catch on, your brand
| suffers, and you lose business to your competitors. How does this
| work in the government? Where is the disincentive to keep
| contractors from delivering the shoddiest product for the
| government check? This mechanism seems totally absent.
| haroldp wrote:
| That mechanism is totally absent.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
|
| That is precisely why these things happen.
| chernevik wrote:
| Not really, and this is in the nature of government programs.
| Management has no personal incentive to control costs or
| quality, and many incentives that tend to work against those
| controls.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true for urban multi-unit housing. A whole
| lot of shoddy work gets sold at a high price simply because the
| location is attractive. Single-family and luxury builds are
| more held to this dynamic.
|
| But the mechanism would be the contract itself. It comes with
| requirements. Make high quality and low cost among the
| requirements. Actually hold the contractors to them. Require
| open competition for the bids.
|
| So why does this not work? I'm in defense contracting, not
| building, but at least in that realm, there isn't meaningful
| competition and no credible bill comes in low for a variety of
| reasons, but the biggest I can think of is the security and
| compliance requirements are so high that they represent a
| minimum regulatory hurdle very few contractors can clear, no
| matter how good and/or cheap their work might be, and when
| smaller operations emerge that do a good job and threaten the
| entrenched incumbents, the existing oligopoly just buys them.
|
| What can be done about that is the FTC not approving so many
| mergers and acquisitions on the part of giant contractors, and
| automating and/or streamlining some of the security hurdles. I
| don't think removing them is an option, since critical defense
| systems will be under constant attack by nation state actors
| and need to hold up under conditions of persistent warfare.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's largely illegal in California to have any criteria for
| selecting contractors based on anything other than lowest bid.
| This is because historically cronyism was a worse problem than
| poor quality.
| anamax wrote:
| CA has both cronyism and poor quality.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| My ex used to do some auditing at LA city. Usually these
| contractors are vehicles to give tons of money to well connected
| friends of the city council or mayor for services like
| "consulting" and "management". They also have large amounts of
| middle management. In one case social workers couldn't handle the
| number of required visits per week (I think they each had 30
| clients or more). The solution was to hire more consultants and
| project managers to analyze the situation instead of hiring
| people to reduce the workload to reasonable levels.
| GrantYE wrote:
| ICON's 15.5-foot-tall 3D printers can build the exterior and
| interior wall system for a single-story house in a week. The
| method cuts 30% off traditional construction costs and has been
| proven to produce homes for as little as $10,000. Compare that to
| a recent effort in Los Angeles to build 117 pre-fab tiny homes
| for the unhoused for $5.1 million. Compared to the LA efforts'
| approximate cost of $43,590 per home, ICON could print homes at a
| 4x cheaper rate. - we wrote this for a story back in October. (
| https://news.youexec.com/briefs/texas-startup-will-build-100... )
| The fact that it costs them $800,000 in some cases is just
| ridiculous.
| anamax wrote:
| The $800k isn't being paid to the folks doing the actual
| construction. It isn't dominated by materials cost either.
|
| There are a lot of hands to be filled as money goes from the
| "house the homeless" fund to the actual projects.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Oh yes, my home city.
|
| I left LA for numerous reasons, absolutely unaffordable housing
| was one of them. Most people are doing extremely poorly in Los
| Angeles.
|
| It's the only city where you both have to pay an insane amount of
| rent, and own a car. The bare minimum survive in LA is probably
| around 80 k. But the median income there is only around 70k.
|
| Of the people I was meeting, almost no one had a job or any real
| interest in working. Very bad things tend to happen if you're
| around people like that.
|
| I moved to Chicago after being disenchanted with LA, and I met an
| amazing partner with a great career . I only meet people in real
| life after a particularly scary app experience. Like I said, bad
| things happen if you're around people who don't work. Not that
| you need to make too much in Chicago to live.
|
| A two bedroom in Chicago will run you from 1300 to 1600. You
| don't need a car since it has one of the best public transit
| systems in America, and a monthly Metro passes about a hundred
| bucks.
|
| So let's say you want to split a two-bedroom with a friend, for
| your transportation and housing. Housing you're only spending
| about $1,000 a month.
|
| Compared to LA where that same two bedroom cost $2,600, and you
| need to own a car. Most people just run out and finance
| something. So once you make your payments and your insurance, and
| your maintenance and your gas, you're easily spending between
| $700 to $900 on transportation alone.
|
| Base cost of living in Chicago, 1k + a few hundred for food ,
| utilities and fun. In LA your taking 2100$ + that same few
| hundred.
|
| Plus I got a pretty significant raise when I moved to Chicago! No
| rational person should stay in Los Angeles !
|
| 'But my family's here.' Most of my family ended up leaving
| because they just can't afford to it anymore. Why be the last
| person off of a sinking ship.
|
| The time to fix California's affordable housing crisis was
| decades ago before Prop 13 was passed. Too late now
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Coastal California will never have affordable housing. The
| demand is way too high relative to supply, so people will trip
| over themselves to compete with each other for it, pushing
| prices to the limit.
|
| There may have been a possibility prior to the 90s before it
| was widely known about and the world's population was much
| smaller, but it has been a few decades since it has been
| obvious that demand for coastal California is insatiable, and
| obviously the people living there are not going to want to
| share it with everyone in the world that wants to live there.
| ravenstine wrote:
| LA isn't even better than most other cities. You'd think it
| would be considering how many people have come here and how
| much it costs, but it's possibly one of the most mediocre
| cities in existence. Countries with much smaller economies (yet
| longer histories) than LA manage to have better looking
| skyscrapers and scenery, along with roads that aren't crumbling
| to the same degree. There's some great things in LA, but
| there's great things elsewhere and people are happy in other
| parts of the world. Somehow there are still some "angelinos"
| getting high on their own supply over "la la land". Literally
| no one comes to visit anymore unless LA happens to be on the
| way to something.
|
| It's sad because this used to be the place to be (one of them,
| I mean). At least that's what we wanted to believe.
|
| I'm still in LA because I happen to be paying a ridiculously
| low monthly rent for a 4 bedroom house in an area where I have
| friends and family (yeah... I know). As soon as that rent
| shoots up, LA will have to be in my rear view mirror. Probably
| California all together.
|
| Some are probably gonna downvote me, but guess what, I got
| highly downvoted back in ~2015 when I was pointing out the
| decline of San Francisco; now it's issues are commonly
| accepted. You can't explain away the need for _poop patrols_ ,
| the garbage overflowing in the streets, or the fentanyl
| zombies. Eventually people won't be able to deny that LA is
| suffering serious socio-economic issues, just as how few will
| apologize for SF anymore.
|
| Believe it or not, I _want_ these places to succeed. That 's
| why I openly criticize them. Cities in California are my home.
| dont__panic wrote:
| I live in Denver, and the situation is much the same. Rampant
| crime, rapidly ballooning prices, and a public transit system
| so awful (in city limits; commuter rail is OK if you need to
| get between the suburbs and the city center) that you need a
| car.
|
| What's especially weird is that this city is so flat, the
| weather is so decent, and the distances are so small, you
| could easily make Denver a paradise for walking and biking.
| But instead we just keep doubling down on cars for getting
| around the city, street parking, and unsustainable car
| suburbs.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| I appreciate the need to help homeless folks, but I don't
| understand why they need to be housed in California. Why can't we
| build housing for them somewhere else, where it's cheaper?
| coding123 wrote:
| This pisses me off a LOT.
|
| I'm currently owner building a house. It's going to end up
| costing 100k and I'm doing this paycheck to paycheck.
|
| Doing it because I can't afford a house. I'm too old to have a 30
| year mortgage.
|
| Is LA willing to send me 1/8 of that cost to house my wife and I?
| And we'll do it ourselves.
|
| Can the homeless build their own houses? Are these people just
| going to be getting hand-outs forever?
|
| Why don't they just give Habitat money? This is insanity. I hope
| the LA administrators that started this mess are fired beyond
| fired.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Why are you too old to have a 30 year mortgage?
| coding123 wrote:
| I don't want to work through my 70s and possibly 80s
| [deleted]
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| CA tax money is the biggest racket in the world.
| slg wrote:
| >The audit found 14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each,
| and one project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost
| $837,000 per unit.
|
| It sounds like that "up to" in the title is doing a lot of work
| if 86% are below $700k. I would also like to throw in the added
| context that the median home price is roughly $915k[1]. Also be
| mindful whether we are discussing LA county or LA city. The
| article is about an LA city program. Housing in LA county will be
| cheaper and the median there is just under $800k[2]. So all of
| these projects are under the median cost of housing and the
| overwhelming majority are at least 25% below median.
|
| This doesn't seem like much of a controversy once you know that
| context. Housing in LA is simply expensive.
|
| [1] - https://www.redfin.com/city/11203/CA/Los-Angeles/housing-
| mar...
|
| [2] - https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-04/what-l-
| a-c...
| legitster wrote:
| I think this is a great point, but may still disagree with it.
|
| To put it another way, we are taking people out of
| homelessness, and putting them in houses that are more
| expensive than 30-40% of units on the market. So the members of
| the program are getting a much worse deal than if they were
| just given money directly to pay rent.
|
| The cost to house homeless shouldn't be slightly below median.
| Realistically, it should be in the 1th percentile.
| slg wrote:
| Remember these are new units and those median prices are for
| all units regardless of age and condition. It is really
| impractical to build new units in the 1st percentile. Those
| are almost always going to be old units that are poorly
| maintained.
|
| You also can't just give this money to homeless people and
| let them buy or rent their own places because the fundamental
| problem is a lack of supply. Simply giving them money would
| increase the cost of homes for everyone else and in turn feed
| into a cycle of creating more homeless people. The city needs
| to build new homes to increase the supply.
| legitster wrote:
| This is that classic "you can't grow old forests" problem.
|
| If someone needed a car to get to work, you would never
| think of providing them with a brand new one. But we are
| kind of in that situation with housing.
|
| I think the city could have saved a bunch of money here
| sourcing existing housing, then putting the savings into
| funding general new construction. But a $100 million
| kickback to a developer to add 1500 units is somehow less
| politically popular than $1 billion dollars for 1200 units.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >But a $100 million kickback to a developer to add 1500
| units is somehow less politically popular than $1 billion
| dollars for 1200 units.
|
| Even assuming this is true, there are plenty of reasons
| this might be a good deal. One is greater control over
| construction, alignment of incentives (i.e., the
| developer incentive is to put up the worst pieces of junk
| they can get away with), long-term ownership if this is
| to be a long-term program, etc.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > So the members of the program are getting a much worse deal
| than if they were just given money directly to pay rent.
|
| There are programs like that, including large ones like
| federal Section 8. It's not simple at all: Landlords will
| often refuse to rent to Section 8 participants. Also, people
| who are unhoused often need other services in order to get
| back on their feet.
| thebean11 wrote:
| I thought section 8 housing could _only_ be rented to
| section 8 participants?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Unless I'm confusing my programs, Section 8 is a voucher
| that is used to rent market units.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| Correct. I have section 8 tenants in one of mine. They
| pay around fifteen percent of their rent, and the
| government pays the rest. There are advantages and
| disadvantages, but we're three years in and they're good
| tenants. Ten times better than the colleges students I
| always had in there before.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| That's the dirty secret that some don't want to
| acknowledge: there are plenty of people for whom life has
| just been unkind to and they aren't slobs just because of
| their income level. This is doubly true for most poor
| immigrant families... of all the homes I've been in which
| were owned by Spanish speaking families, I've rarely ever
| seen one that wasn't spotless, much less organized. I
| helped a few neighbors move out of their homes and after
| we got done moving the furniture, they literally just had
| to sweep the dust that had accumulated underneath the
| furniture and they were done with cleaning on move-out.
| cosmie wrote:
| Section 8 isn't restricted to just subsidized housing
| developments[1]. It can also be used as a subsidy to any
| private market rental as well, where the landlord is paid
| the subsidy from the Section 8 program and the tenant is
| responsible for any rental costs above that (if any).
|
| That said, it's a hassle for landlords. They have a
| separate contract and commitments with the local housing
| authority that disburses the subsidy, in addition to the
| lease with the tenant. And are subject to annual home
| inspections by that housing authority. And most
| importantly in a booming market, there are legal caps to
| how much a tenant's annual income can be dedicated to
| housing and utilities. Between the income limits to
| qualify for section 8 and the cap on income that can go
| to housing, the amount that an individual can actually
| spend on top of the subsidy is fairly limited and may not
| bridge the gap to going-rates for private rentals in an
| area. Between that and the stigma attached to the quality
| of tenants using section 8, it's common for private
| landlords in a good market with a standard or better unit
| to pass on a section 8 applicant and hold out for another
| tenant with fewer strings attached to the transaction.
|
| [1] https://www.hud.gov/topics/housing_choice_voucher_pro
| gram_se...
| omegaworks wrote:
| And unfortunately, in certain areas that used to be
| affordable to low income working class people, the folks
| that win the lottery for the few Section 8 vouchers can
| drive up rent, as that flat rate is now considered the
| floor that landlords can charge.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Hmmm ... Section 8 is not known for paying a lot, afaik,
| and not a large source of demand. Also, rents have been
| shooting up while Section 8 has (afaik) not.
|
| But do we have data anywhere? (I don't.)
| nate_meurer wrote:
| Section 8 pays close to market rate, otherwise the
| program wouldn't get anywhere. My section 8 unit is tad
| cheaper than what I could get otherwise. But my rents are
| always lower than market anyway.
|
| The tradeoff is that the government always pays on time,
| and there is some motivation for tenants to behave (e.g.,
| noise, nuisance, property upkeep) in order to keep their
| section 8 voucher in good standing.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think comparing to the median SFH price is a bit apples to
| oranges. Keep in mind that (as far as I know?) the city isn't
| building actual houses. Most of these developments are more
| like college dorms or fancy campgrounds (e.g. a parking lot
| with a bunch of one room 8x8 shelters and a communal bathroom-
| granted those "tiny homes" are probably not the ones costing
| over $700k).
| slg wrote:
| The sentence before that quote I pulled was " _Most_
| [emphasis mine] of the units are studios or one-bedroom
| apartments. " That seems to imply that the 14% above $700k
| are probably 2 or more bedrooms and are designed for
| families. The article has no details on the costs per unit
| for the other 86% that likely include those dorm room style
| units.
| thebradbain wrote:
| You're right that SFHs definitely skew the median average up,
| but as someone who lives in Los Angeles -- you would be hard
| pressed to find a brand new apartment unit in the city for
| less than $800k. Anecdotally, almost all new-build condos
| I've seen (and I saw a lot, when I was home shopping across
| many different neighborhoods) are just as expensive, if not
| more expensive, than old/partially-renovated SFHs (which is
| what I ended up getting). This is pretty universal real
| estate rule across all LA neighborhoods, per my realtor: new
| sfh > new condo >= old sfh > old condo (old meaning it's in
| need of at least some non-cosmetic renovation or structural
| retrofit)
|
| Part of the issue is the zoning code as it is really only
| makes it possible for developers to build larger/luxury
| developments. You don't see many 4plexes getting built
| because all of the red tape makes it less profitable than
| building a new SFH on a multi-unit lot (which I've
| unfortunately seen happen when a charming but old 4plex got
| demolished in place of a new build McMansion). Hopefully sb9
| and sb10 change that.
|
| I'm short, I think that at least among new build condos, Los
| Angeles social housing is still at or below median price per
| unit. It's a shame it's that expensive, but that's the hole
| CA dug itself into by not allowing more housing to be built
| organically.
| rhizome wrote:
| The city isn't spending $837K to house one homeless person,
| they've spent that on housing the _first_ homeless person in
| that unit. Unless they 're planning on these people never
| improving their situation to the point of moving out and for
| the unit to be destroyed in the process, the units can be
| reused. We'll see if the paper writes a story on how the cost
| of housing a homeless person has been cut in half after the
| units turn over to new tenants after the old ones move into
| their self-sufficient lives.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > The city isn't spending $837K to house one homeless person,
| they've spent that on housing the first homeless person in
| that unit.
|
| Unless they are housing functioning tenants (the easier
| homeless cases that don't involve mental illness or substance
| abuse, the ones that can get back on their feet with some
| help), those units are likely to get damaged quickly and
| require extensive refurbishment within a year or two.
| Hopefully they are using discretion in who gets that housing,
| or it will wind up costing them another $100k every couple of
| years to keep the unit inhabitable.
| rhizome wrote:
| An effective homeless program probably has to include
| rehab, occupational therapy, and related services, yes.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There is a fallacy here: it is not just "one homogenous
| group of homeless" that you can help with the same
| turnkey solution. No, there are easy cases (people living
| out of their cars, still capable of holding down jobs,
| they just need help) and there are hard cases (people who
| lost their jobs and housing because they got addicted to
| drugs or couldn't stop drinking, or fell into mental
| illness), and probably many cases in between. We should
| throw lots of resources at easy cases: get them housing,
| make sure they can continue working or get them work,
| subsidize their rent but don't just give them a place
| (because people will value what they have to pay for vs.
| what they are given).
|
| Hard cases...I'm not sure if many of them are ever going
| to be normal again. Many people with fentanyl addictions
| are just really messed up, and there isn't much we can do
| to solve their addictions. Same to a lesser extent for
| alcoholism, and mental health problems. Housing first
| also doesn't work well for them, because their addictions
| are so strong that they trash housing given to them, sell
| what they can, and wind up on the streets again because
| it is the best way to support their addiction.
|
| I think because hard cases are so hard to solve, we
| should devote almost all of our resources on (a) kids (so
| they can avoid this fate) and (b) easy homeless cases so
| we can prevent them from becoming hard cases.
|
| Many homeless advocates seem to want it both ways: that
| not every homeless is an addict (true), but that we
| should throw the exact same resources at addicts as we do
| at people who just couldn't pay rent (false). I don't
| understand why they do this, it doesn't help their cause
| (and they don't make progress because their solutions are
| not well matched to the problems they are solving).
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| A large part of the cost is ongoing things like 24/7
| security, sharps disposal, maintenance, etc. The costs per
| placement will hopefully go down over time but I don't think
| they will scale linearly
| 1024core wrote:
| > Unless they're planning on these people never improving
| their situation to the point of moving out and for the unit
| to be destroyed in the process, the units can be reused.
|
| You'd be surprised to learn how _little_ planning is done for
| the next step. Authorities (at least here in SF) are
| myopically focused on moving people into housing; there is no
| step 2 after that. That 's why we have to keep building more
| housing, as people are not graduating out of the housing to
| make room for others.
| rhizome wrote:
| No, I wouldn't be surprised, that's why I used the word
| "planning" instead of "assuming" or "leaving them to..." As
| the saying goes, "Failing to plan is planning to fail."
|
| In SF you have to account for the fact that the city is de
| facto prohibited from spending money on anything other than
| piecemeal programs, not to mention the upkeep and staffing
| to alleviate the deterioration of existing housing options.
| Every few years somebody manages to convince enough
| Supervisors that they've found a silver bullet and to give
| them some money for a meager pilot program to help a hard
| problem that requires actual money, experts, and priority.
| Oh, but there's pushback from $300K/yr techbros who have
| lived in SF _for over two years_ and are sure it 's all
| gone out of control ever since they had to step over a
| needle once. There are lots of knowledgeable and motivated
| people working in homeless and drug outreach along with
| related organizations that have like zero dollars. I'm not
| one of these experts and experienced people, but I'm pretty
| sure they should be funded and integrated more into an
| overall program.
|
| In Sacramento they're preparing to kick people out of their
| hotel program, but the Sheriff is waiting with bated breath
| right outside the door:
| https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article258051333.html I
| half expect them to describe putting the homeless in jail
| as a savings.
| johnmarcus wrote:
| Journalism is left to the comments these days. God forbid a
| professional journalist actually present factual information in
| a clear and concise way for people to digest and make decisions
| for themselves.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| The sad part is how long such spending has gone on across the
| state.
|
| They're homeless because they're mentally ill, not because of the
| tautological nonsense of "they're homeless because they haven't a
| home". The mental illness is exceeded only by the stupidity of
| the policies.
|
| Instead of the singular focus on establishing state-paid housing,
| _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless is far
| overdue. The option of shooting-up and camping on the streets
| clearly has not worked in any way -- show me the data for how
| that helps anybody.
| re6fae5Wied5tha wrote:
| I think it would probably be more effective to consider
| sociopathy a disqualifying condition for public office than to
| round up the homeless and send them to concentration camps.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Something like 85% of those homeless have unresolved
| psychiatric & drug-abuse issues. It's not compassionate to
| let them do their thing, and squat in filth on public
| sidewalks untreated.
| vkou wrote:
| No, it's not particularly compassionate, but when no
| alternative exists, it's better than criminalizing poverty,
| or from sweeping people out of 3rd street, into 4th street,
| and then, three weeks later, back to 3rd.
|
| You'll find that most progressives don't actually like
| people camping in parks, they just think it's the best
| option out of all the shitty ones currently available.
|
| If you want to fix homelessness, you need to provide all
| three of housing, psychological, and addiction services.
| Housing, not shelters - most people prefer sleeping in a
| tent to sleeping in a shelter. If you're not doing all
| three, you're just wasting your time and money.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept
| mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure
| facility under state custodial care is criminalizing
| poverty. Doing that would make the housing problem all
| the more solvable for those homeless whose ultimate and
| not proximate problem is affordability of shelter &
| transport.
| vkou wrote:
| > I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept
| mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure
| facility under state custodial care is criminalizing
| poverty.
|
| I live in Seattle. Please tell me which facility within
| 50 miles of me will both safely house people, and provide
| psychiatric/drug treatment for them, and I'll get right
| onto advocating for getting people out of tents and into
| that facility. Does it have a name, address, and website?
|
| Also, it needs to have room for _5,500 unsheltered_
| homeless people. [1]
|
| That facility, of course, does not exist. _This is my
| entire point._ In some parallel universe where support
| services exist, I 'd prefer them being used over people
| living in tents. I'd even support mandating them, because
| I also don't like stepping over human shit when I take a
| walk in my neighborhood. We don't live in that parallel
| universe, though, and the services that exist aren't up
| to the task. Shelters are unsafe, have incredibly limited
| admission hours, are often at capacity, don't provide
| enough support services, and refuse to take addicts.
| There's a reason people are sleeping in tents, and that
| reason isn't 'they don't know that shelters exist'.
|
| Those people know shelters exist. Those shelters either
| don't want those people, or those people don't want to
| live in those shelters, because that life is worse than
| living in a tent by the overpass. If we're going to talk
| about compassion, I'm not sure how compassionate it is to
| force people into a living condition that's worse than
| the squalor they already live in.
|
| As of February 23rd, 2022, we have exactly three options
| that we can implement.
|
| 1. Sweep the streets and 'house' all homeless people in
| prison. [2]
|
| 2. Keep sweeping tent cities from street to street,
| shuffling people between 3rd and 4th and back to 3rd and
| back to 4th. [3]
|
| 3. Do nothing and let people live in tent cities.
|
| There is no option 4. It doesn't exist. I'd like one to
| exist, but it doesn't.
|
| I don't like any of these three options, but the one I
| dislike least is #3. We just voted for a city council
| that is going to double down on #2. My prediction is that
| four years from now, we'll be _exactly_ where we are
| today. Nobody 's building a magical housing and treatment
| facility for 5,500 people.
|
| [1] There are, at any point in time, ~6,000 sheltered
| homeless and ~5,500 unsheltered homeless in King county
| (population 2,200,000).
|
| [2] This is what people mean when they talk about
| criminalizing poverty.
|
| [3] This is what we call 'Re-arranging deckchairs on the
| Titanic'. This can be done on a local level, by sweeping
| tents out of neighbourhoods which complain the loudest,
| on a municipal level by having suburban police arrest
| people and release them in the city center, or on a
| national level, by giving mid-western homeless people a
| one-way bus ticket to the coasts. The net result is the
| same - it doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it
| around.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| <q> Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment
| facility for 5,500 people. </q>
|
| Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not
| because the facility is impossible to build or run, but
| because it would require the political will to compel
| anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held
| there on the condition of accepting some form of
| treatment or further counseling.
|
| It is not magic; the tent city phenomena is not a
| permanent fixture of big west coast cities.
| vkou wrote:
| > Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not
| because the facility is impossible to build or run, but
| because it would require the political will to compel
| anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held
| there on the condition of accepting some form of
| treatment or further counseling.
|
| Nonsense. It's not being built because city voters (and,
| more importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their
| money more than they like not seeing tent camps.
|
| Complaining on AM radio about tent camps is free, fixing
| the problem is expensive.
|
| You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman, when
| progressives aren't the ones winning city elections, or
| in control of the council. The winners of the most recent
| one are all status quo corporate candidates, who have
| _zero_ qualms about fucking with homeless people (hence
| the re-introduction of the sweeps), but have every qualm
| about actually spending money on solving homelessness.
|
| Musical chair sweeps are cheap, solutions are expensive.
| The political will to do something is there, it's just
| not the political will to do anything useful. You can't
| with a straight face blame progressives and bleeding
| hearts for not solving the problem, when they aren't the
| ones running the town.
|
| > I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept
| mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure
| facility under state custodial care is criminalizing
| poverty.
|
| > but because it would require the political will to
| compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy
|
| ... So, hold on, let me get the record straight, is
| poverty and/or mental illness a crime or not? You seem to
| flip-flop on this from one post to the other.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| <q>It's not being built because city voters (and, more
| importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their
| money more than they like not seeing tent camps.</q>
|
| I think that the burden ought to fall not only on King
| County voters, but on the WA & Fed. gov't to an extent.
| My cursory feeling is that my good progressive friends in
| Seattle would be happy to pay a tax increase, if that
| were to translate into a guaranteed significant reduction
| in misery.
|
| <q>You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman</q>
|
| Sorry, no. Well, not this time. The failing in this case
| is that there's no guarantee that anyone would remain in
| such a facility against their will, given that neither
| being an addict nor insane is enough to keep someone in
| jail in and of itself.
|
| <q>you state that homelessness is not a crime, but in
| this one, you state that it is.</q>
|
| I'm comfortable with the first two instances of sleeping
| rough or public drug use being misdemeanors; after that-
| you've gotta go.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Requiring treatment as a prerequisite for housing _is_ the
| status quo, and it has not been working.
| flerchin wrote:
| Treatment would IMO, include housing while under treatment, and
| some sort of halfway-housing afterwards.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Is there an "afterwards?"
|
| I don't know if there are "one time" or "one shot" solutions.
| Certainly there are some unhoused that can be helped by that
| but I'm under the impression that most have issues that go
| substantially beyond a one time check or a pill or a one time
| treatment.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| Yes, exactly right. That is where they can learn and
| establish structure in their life, and build a foundation.
| These were once referred to as Independent Living Skills.
| Once taught and established, then they can hopefully
| translate that into a healthier life on their own.
| lisper wrote:
| > They're homeless because they're mentally ill
|
| Some but not all. There are many disparate causes of
| homelessness and mental illness is just one of them.
|
| > _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless
|
| That is hard to implement in a free country.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| yeah communism is bad because it expects people to be fed and
| housed on state expenses while capitalism throws freeloaders
| off the wagon.
|
| sure its such a difficult proposition to implement in a free
| country. i mean i am in india and every poor household gets
| basically free rations every month, free healthcare in
| government hospitals and now even a medical insurance for
| treatments in private run hospitals at no cost. sure that
| costs a shit tonne of money but what else to do with the tax
| collections? spending on weapons is one but other than that,
| yeah.
|
| i have to ask, why is construction costs so outrageous in the
| US? here, labor costs ~$6-8/day, on an average the cost of
| construction per Sqft is around inr 2000-3500 or $25-$44
| /sqft. there are resources that say usa average costs around
| $100-$200.
|
| that is a lot confusing because the article mentions
| $837000/150=5580 sqft. is that a good size home for homeless?
| lisper wrote:
| > communism
|
| Who said anything about communism? I was talking about
| forcing people to undergo mental health treatment against
| their will simply because they can't afford a place to
| live.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| i was talking about "Free country". i feel sympathy for
| mental health treatment, that is why i said in india,
| medical treatment is essentially free now for rich and
| poor alike which is kinda big deal when it comes to
| increasing the overall health of communities. if you have
| less people who are sick, only because they did not have
| money for procedures otherwise, that is great.
| pueblito wrote:
| Unskilled labor starts at $15/hr. A loaf of fresh bread is
| $5.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| "That is hard to implement in a free country"
|
| The past 2 years proves that entirely untrue.
| lisper wrote:
| Huh? How?
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| We required everyone to get COVID treatment. (Especially
| in california)
| mmoche wrote:
| Not only was it not "required," nearly 30% of the state
| of California remains short of full vaccination and
| restrictions are dropping daily.
|
| You can demand an end to "mandates" and public health
| emergencies, but you must then applaud when those things
| end.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Not technically required, but required for many
| workplaces. I do applaud an end to mandates even though I
| support vaccination and am vaccinated and boosted. And
| therein lies the problem.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > Requiring medical treatments
|
| > Free country
|
| That choice is a radio button, not a checkbox. Can't have
| both.
| [deleted]
| Edmond wrote:
| Not sure why you're being down voted, this is the most honest
| statement about so called "homelessness" in the united states.
| It is affordable housing advocates essentially leveraging the
| mentally ill while completely ignoring their plight.
| GrantYE wrote:
| But if you ask anyone who works to house the unhoused, the
| affordability of homes is the problem. If you don't have
| shelter to rely on, how can you possibly treat your mental
| illness in a safe environment. I actually think it is truly
| both. IT's the lack of available mental health treatment and
| the lack of affordable housing. Neither can be fixed with the
| perverse incentives of the current system we have.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If the goal really was to get as many people off the
| streets as possible, why don't our builds look more like
| the dorms at ucla with shared facilities instead of private
| apartments with a kitchen built and bathroom built into
| every unit? Follow the money and see that this is a cash
| cow for certain developers and nothing more.
| Edmond wrote:
| With the exception of treatment facilities/hospitals and
| housing as a basic necessity for all, housing really
| shouldn't be a central part of the discussion when it comes
| to people living on the streets, housing (or lack thereof)
| is not their problem.
|
| Almost all people you see on the streets end up there after
| burning all bridges in their personal lives because of
| their illness. You may not be aware of this but there are
| in fact a lot of options in existence for housing such
| people, it doesn't work because they are ill and without
| treatment (forceful), it is hopeless trying to help them.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| America can build houses but free mental health care for all?
| It took Democrats 50 years to get the paltry affordable care
| act through.
| istjohn wrote:
| They're homeless because housing costs are absurd in
| California. There are mentally ill people all across the
| country, but few places have a housing crisis anything like
| that in California. Only a quarter of the homeless in
| California suffer from severe mental illness[1].
|
| 1.
| https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-08-07/men...
| zdragnar wrote:
| California attracts homeless people because of its relatively
| temperate climate, lax policies on camps, and pays more than
| other states (recent interview guy said he was getting 800
| cash plus 200 food stamps a month).
|
| Back in June or July 2021, the governor invited the homeless
| to come to California with promises of free housing during a
| press tour.
| narrator wrote:
| Homelessness, like healthcare reaches a point of diminishing
| marginal returns where the problem just gets worse when more
| money is spent on it. If there was a hard upper limit on spending
| and then the government just had to get creative on doing things
| efficiently, things would work out better.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| This article is a perfect example of how word tenses can be used
| to manipulate and misrepresent information.
|
| The title says that the city "is spending" an amount, which
| suggests that this is a routine cost, leaving the reader of the
| headline to fill in the blanks 'oh, is spending annually?'.
|
| But the tense in the article itself is different:
|
| > Most of the units are studios or one-bedroom apartments. The
| audit found 14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and
| one project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost
| $837,000 per unit.
|
| "Is spending" != 'expected to spend'.
|
| The former has the unstated implication that this is a recurring
| cost, or at least that this is a cost the city is in the process
| of spending, whereas the article explains that this is only a
| projected cost.
| kavaruka wrote:
| :( this link is not available in Europe
| mrweasel wrote:
| At least you're important to them. Which is a nice sentiment,
| as they struggle to find a way to be in compliance with a three
| year old law. A law that just require them to respect the
| privacy of their visitors.
| tapatio wrote:
| Where's the link to sign up? I'm ready to check out of the rat
| race.
| babelfish wrote:
| Okay, start by becoming homeless.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Step 1, get on hard drugs
| justinzollars wrote:
| I can't understand why California politicians aspire to spread
| their ideas nationally. There is so much grift and lack of
| results.
| Forge36 wrote:
| How many years will the houses last? Is this land
| cost+improvements?
|
| What is the average cost? 800,000 per unit is high. But that
| appears to be the upper end of the bell curve.
| the_optimist wrote:
| The primary measure of success in the last two generations in the
| United States has been an ability to combine plausible
| incompetence and graft, while remaining protected under a banner
| of nouveau political theory. Los Angeles has a tremendous pool of
| talent in this regard, perhaps some of the best in the world.
| Areas which are very obviously less afflicted include areas of
| 'Los Angeles County' outside of --and quite distinct from--the
| very broken "City of Los Angeles," and adjacent counties, such as
| Orange, Ventura, and Kern, all of which are wildly superior in
| the physical realization of governance.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| In the same way that Silicon Valley was enabled by Cold War
| defense spending, perhaps the entertainment industry created
| the LA Charitable Griftocracy.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I have seen events unfold at the School Board level which
| stretch the imagination -- a combination of poker face, herd
| mentality, deniability and secrets keeping, and unending, years
| long funding cycles. BUT "the primary measure of success in the
| last two generations" is just snark, since there has been lots
| of success in other ways. The problems here are bad though,
| since some kind of natural selection has resulted in people and
| processess that are very hard to get rid of, even while flatly
| and objectively failing in plain view.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Wildly superior in the physical realization of governance?
| Please. The reason why you don't see homeless in these places
| is their policy is to use their police to force these people
| into LA. Go to venice and note how the tents stop immediately
| at the border with santa monica, and no its not because
| everyone who sets up in santa monica gets put into a shelter.
| buzzert wrote:
| Be careful trying to spin this as a negative thing. A lot of
| people would actually be quite happy with their police force
| moving homeless people out of their town, regardless of where
| they end up.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| This headline seems misleading. First, these are one-time costs,
| but most reporting on programs like these are annual costs.
| Second, this conflates a lot of numbers. _Most_ are one bedroom
| (which could house a small family, as sleeping on a couch is more
| comfortable than a car), but the _most expensive_ is $837,000.
| There 's nothing even stated that the most expensive one-bedroom
| is $837,000). In fact, 86% are under $700,000 to build. In fact,
| they plan to hit 10,000 units in the next 5 years, with it seems
| about half of those coming from the first $1.2 billion
| allocation.
| 1024core wrote:
| _The scope of the expanding problem can be seen in the city
| budget: When Garcetti took office in 2013, the city was spending
| about $10 million treating homelessness. The budget he signed
| last year included about $1 billion._
|
| Someone is making a lot of money...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Like all government housing projects, they'll turn into slums
| within a decade, and then be razed as urban blight.
| ShowalkKama wrote:
| For the european fellows:
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is...
| jayd16 wrote:
| It never says how many people are housed in a single "unit." The
| number could be very misleading.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| This is such sloppy journalism: > one project under development
| expected to hit as much as $837,000 for each housing unit,
|
| How typical is that? where is it? how long is it expected to
| last? what other features does it have? Does that include one-
| time architecting costs that make future developments cheaper?
|
| > HHH project includes 8,091 housing units -- most with connected
| services for mental health and substance abuse treatment
|
| so how much of the $800k goes to the mental health etc services?
| the paper apparently read the audit, but doesn't bother going
| into any detail about this.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > so how much of the $800k goes to the mental health etc
| services?
|
| Is it clear that any of it is meant for those services, or
| could they all be extra costs above and beyond it?
| tempnow987 wrote:
| $837,000 is just the cost of the unit.
|
| If you are housing actual homeless, you MUST offer supportive
| services on-site or have some other types of supervision or these
| units are going to be trashed.
|
| You MUST budget for a lot of ongoing costs.
|
| I'd say $800K+ per unit + maybe $100K+/year for supportive
| services / maintenance etc?
|
| One question is, would that 800K + $100K/year go further
| somewhere else?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| On the other hand, unless whoever ends up in the unit never has
| a family, stays in the unit the rest of their life, and the
| unit only lasts a single person's lifetime, it isn't going to
| house only one person.
| pooper wrote:
| > One question is, would that 800K + $100K/year go further
| somewhere else?
|
| Where is that money going now? Who gets this money now and why
| would they give it up?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Before it went into people's pockets, so they could care for
| their families and improve their life conditions.
| vannevar wrote:
| Are their life conditions improved by having homeless
| people all over the place?
|
| There's a price to pay for living in an organized civil
| society, because people have learned the hard way that
| having an organized, civil society is better for their
| families and life conditions.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That is a balancing equation, not an absolute.
| conductr wrote:
| It's an economic solution. And quite simply, money goes
| further and could be used for more services elsewhere. It
| just feels icky to relocate folks that are already down.
| NIMBY at it's worse. But, done right, could absolutely be
| a better situation for all.
| banannaise wrote:
| Realistically, that money was going to police, to harass
| this person for sleeping on the street. This is, obviously,
| also expensive.
| rglover wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Government stole it from tax payers to then act as a poorly
| run pseudo-charity, which is actually just a way for them
| to skim cream like mobsters while pretending to "do good."
| The foolish lap this up and immediately get defensive at
| anyone who proposes that, maybe, just maybe, politicians
| are lying to them and using their good nature against them.
| Maybe.
|
| So, we get a consistently declining standard of living for
| everyone, decaying urban centers, and increasing numbers of
| homeless people, or, the truth: real lives that need real
| help being used as political chess pieces by a cadre of
| narcissists who are master manipulators.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Government stole it from tax payers
|
| Actually, we agreed that it was a good idea and organized
| our government to carry it out, and we broadly support
| it.
|
| > The foolish
|
| Commenters and citizens who disagree with you are
| "foolish"? People can't possibly disagree with you for
| legitimate reasons? Is your opinion the standard by which
| we measure legitimacy? Lucky I met you!
|
| > decaying urban centers
|
| Urban centers have been doing well overall, absent the
| pandemic, though certainly, as with everywhere, there are
| problems.
| rglover wrote:
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's not the cost of the unit, per the article:
|
| _14% of the units build exceeded $700,000 each, and one
| project in pre-development is estimated to cost almost $837,000
| per unit._
| tempnow987 wrote:
| OK, so units may cost $837K. Is that all inclusive of all
| necessary services (maintenance, supportive services,
| utilities etc for the life of the unit)? Or are those going
| to be extra.
|
| I ask because the housing department housing in SF is mind
| boggling expensive just to _operate_ even after they did the
| build piece especially if you do all in costs vs revenue (ie,
| tax base is low - > govt owned often exempt and service needs
| are high from maintenance, policing, health response etc).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > OK, so units may cost $837K.
|
| That's not what it says: It say only 14% cost 700K+ (i.e.,
| 86% cost less than 700K), and _one_ project _might_ cost
| 837K. In other words, the 837K are a small number of
| outliers (unless it 's a really big project, of course) and
| based on a projection.
|
| > Is that all inclusive of all necessary services
|
| Yes, I agree that should also be considered, and I think
| those services are essential. However, it's important to
| keep down construction costs too.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Yep you can't just put a psychotic person in an apartment and
| walk away. Homeless people have issues that made them end up on
| the street.
| dangus wrote:
| I think the high cost has a lot to do with the fact that we've
| moved well beyond the preventative phase of care.
|
| We are paying extra to correct years of bad zoning and
| healthcare policies. This is the price of bad city planning and
| expensive non-universal healthcare.
|
| I wonder if UBI would be more cost efficient, especially for
| people who are not yet homeless but in danger of becoming
| homeless.
|
| Still, I think getting people housing is the right general
| approach.
| logifail wrote:
| (I apologise in advance for my apparent ignorance on this) but
| are we sure we properly actually understand _why_ people are
| homeless?
|
| Is there a proportion of homelessness that is to some extent -
| although I hesitate to use this word - "voluntary"? Is there
| really nowhere else to go other than to sleep on the streets?
| rmason wrote:
| Do you realize that you could give that homeless person a first
| class ticket to Detroit? Put them up in a hotel until an
| abandoned house could be totally rebuilt for them. Pay their
| electricity, water, heating costs and taxes for the next ten
| years and still save California taxpayers $600,000!
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Do you realize that forced relocation is a crime against
| humanity?
| coding123 wrote:
| Not a huge deal to get past for me.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| Not if they are unlawfully occupying a space to begin with.
| antihero wrote:
| Yes but would they want to go?
| [deleted]
| reedjosh wrote:
| But why should others have to pay for locating homeless
| people where they _want_ to go. It's giving money to them.
| It's an offer.
|
| It's not like you _must_ go there, but to expect tax payers
| to build homes where it's far too expensive to build...
|
| It's like sending the same people to a fancy restaurant. In
| what way does it make sense?
|
| To me, government intervention caused this, so maybe they
| should just peel back their building restrictions?
| peter303 wrote:
| A conservation think tank issued a report saying Denver spends
| about $400,000 per year per unhoused person.
|
| https://commonsenseinstituteco.org/the-economic-footprint-of...
|
| But drilling down finds 10% of that is direct budgeted other
| other 90% indirect like the cost of police sweeps, mental health,
| etc.
| worik wrote:
| I do not understand the cost breakdown.
|
| So a developer wants to build a hundred basic units (350 square
| feet/30 square metres) in a block and the cost is costing eighty
| million dollars?
|
| We can do much better. Where are the factories building the
| prefabricated units to build apartments from?
|
| I have a friend from East Germany who's parents grew up in the
| Stalinist apartments. They solved this exact problem in the early
| 1950s. What is wrong with LA?
|
| And not to pick on LA. This is a problem throughout the West as
| far as I can tell. What is wrong with us? Why can we not
| efficiently build housing?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Sustainable!
| banannaise wrote:
| Homeless-care services like this are the equivalent of dealing
| with tech debt. Every homeless person incurs gigantic recurring
| costs, and to make them no longer homeless requires even larger
| temporary costs. All of this could have been avoided by solving
| for the tech debt that leads to homelessness, but there's
| apparently no real appetite for investing resources into that.
|
| So now we have to pay down our tech debt. As you can see from the
| reaction to programs like this, we're more likely to simply sink
| escalating maintenance costs into the existing system instead.
| burnoutgal wrote:
| They're spending money to build housing, which will be used to
| house people without homes. The headline makes it sound like
| they're paying a million dollars in rent, but in fact this is
| real estate development.
| chernevik wrote:
| That's still a mighty expensive unit.
| kansface wrote:
| 40000 * 837000 = 33.48 billion dollars. This solution, as
| implemented, can not possibly solve the problem, ever. The
| upkeep on the housing alone would be a billion dollars a year!
| shkkmo wrote:
| 837000 is the maximum, not the average, so your math is just
| made up BS.
| GrantYE wrote:
| Its because they don't actually want to house the unhoused.
| They want to make it seem like this impossible challenge to
| provide affordable housing that doesn't cost the average
| person in LA $1M+
| kyleblarson wrote:
| It is the homeless industrial complex. A massive grift.
| Kalium wrote:
| San Francisco had a similar problem in recent years, where
| trying to build housing for the unhoused was running a cost
| of about a million a pop.
|
| It's perhaps possible that this isn't a deliberate display
| of incompetence, but a set of systemic problems that make
| housing in California very expensive to build.
| vkou wrote:
| Also, it's worth noting that building a house isn't a
| hole that you throw money into, it's an asset that
| appreciates.
| scantron4 wrote:
| Not if it gets trashed by the residents.
| vkou wrote:
| In a world where housing prices grow in an unbounded,
| absolutely detached from reality manner, it is.
| bbarnett wrote:
| It's actually the land which goes up in value. Houses go
| down in value, like a new car.
|
| Sometimes this is masked, by regular maintenance,
| retrofits, and repairs. But if left to pot, a house is
| eventually worthless, then even a cost, for the new owner
| has to tear it down and rebuild.
|
| Land appreciates. A house costs.
| Retric wrote:
| Depends on the house, but houses can get more valuable
| much faster than the minimal maintenance costs associated
| with them. That's less common in earthquake zones, but
| scarcity can easily drive up prices because "they don't
| make them like they used to" or something interesting
| happened in the location etc.
| zdragnar wrote:
| That is definitely not a universal truth. Anyone who has
| rented out a house knows just how expensive a bad tenant
| is.
|
| I have had a few friends who were in that position
| because they had to move but couldnt sell their houses
| (2008-2014 era roughly). They would have been better off
| taking the loss on leaving it empty after taking out
| loans to undo the damage done.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They can choose anywhere to build, the government
| controls zoning, and they're making apartments. Doesn't
| that get past all the big systemic cost problems?
|
| Though the article doesn't actually say anything about
| average costs or cost per type of unit, and since this is
| a professional news outlet they don't link their
| sources...
| bbarnett wrote:
| The people control zoning, and thus, where things are
| built.
| Kalium wrote:
| > Doesn't that get past all the big systemic cost
| problems?
|
| You would think so! Unfortunately, this is not the case.
| In SF, some of the systemic issues are planning processes
| voted into the city charter decades ago, so the city
| doesn't get to bypass them. Some of the larger issues,
| such as land price and CEQA, are state-wide issues that
| cities can't avoid.
| Retric wrote:
| On one hand: _The program "is producing more units than
| promised, at a lower cost than expected," Garcetti wrote._
|
| But I have trouble thinking that's an efficient use of funds.
| throwoutway wrote:
| It sounds to the reader just like it is in reality:
| overspending on real estate.
|
| That's a ridiculous sum of money for one unit of housing any
| way you look at it.
|
| I'm glad they're housing the homeless, but are you telling me
| that there's no way to build this cheaper?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha, this is normal among so-called progressive circles. They
| subscribe universally to the "if it's not good enough, it's
| better to have nothing". So you can't provide crappy housing,
| it's better for people to be on the street. You can't provide
| crappy jobs, it's better for people to have no jobs. You can't
| provide crappy healthcare, it's better for people to die.
|
| The secondary aspect of this is that these people will fight
| tooth and nail to ensure that crappy things don't exist but will
| put up some token "We should have X" to get the good thing built.
| Progressives...
| linksnapzz wrote:
| I'll cut them a deal. LA can send me a check for merely $500,000;
| and I'll agree to never camp out on their streets. I also expect
| some sort of formal recognition for helping them meet their
| targets of reducing homelessness.
| RIMR wrote:
| We get it, your socioeconomic status makes you confident that
| you'll never be affected by this problem, and you have no
| interest in improving the world for the people who are.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Funneling nearly a million bucks per homelessperson-head into
| the pockets of politically connected developers is not
| "improving the world", unless you happen to be one of the
| developers. The quanta of utility that they get from this
| will be much larger than any homeless person who gets a
| dwelling out of it, especially since they most likely need
| medical and supervised psychiatric treatment more.
|
| My ability to see that LA is not actually looking for a
| solution, leads me to want to capture some of the cash they
| are foolishly setting fire to in order to prolong their
| problem.
|
| Also, my socioeconomic status is such that I could really use
| a half-mil, tbh.
| zdragnar wrote:
| There are a lot of places in the country where you can live
| very comfortably for years on 500k.
|
| The idea that the _only_ solution to homelessness in LA is to
| build $500-800k units is plain pure foolishness.
| banannaise wrote:
| Sure, assuming that you start out with solid physical and
| mental health. Guess what homelessness does to a person's
| physical and mental health?
| jseliger wrote:
| L.A. is fighting against CEQA, Prop 13, and its own bureaucracy
| and process: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-
| economics-....
|
| If we're actually going to do something substantial about
| homelessness, we need to focus on abundance, not scarcity, and
| supply-side progressivism:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opinion/supply-side-progr...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| " fighting against CEQA" this is like identifying the color of
| the shirt that a security guard is wearing, and declaring it to
| be the problem. CEQA was enacted because, under the banner of
| "free markets" .. unbelievable, extreme, vast, sustained
| chemical pollution was laid out into the open air, soil and
| water, for profit, again and again and again.. Ordinary people
| literally cannot believe things that have been done in
| California and elsewhere, for short-term profits
| asdff wrote:
| And today CEQA exists for nimbys to stall housing and
| infrastructure while polluters remain unaccountable.
| JadeNB wrote:
| The title (which comes directly from the article) is surely
| clickbaity at best. It is not the case that there is one homeless
| person, whom LA is spending $837k to house; it is the case (so
| says the article, anyway) that LA has a massively overspending
| project whose amortised cost works out to "up to" (what a weasel
| word) $837k/person.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| I'm finishing construction next month an 1,100 sq/ft single
| family home in the north bay area; a very high cost-of-living
| region. We started construction in Sept 2021, after an
| intentional delay of a couple months to let lumber prices drop
| after peaking in May-June. My home will be built for about $350k
| (less land acquisition). I'm acting as contractor and have
| connections in the industry so very few can build at my cost.
| BUT, When I see numbers in articles like this ($837k ea), after
| dealing with pandemic construction pricing myself, it's painfully
| obvious there is a terrible lack of cost-control. This is not a
| sustainable solution. And scapegoating on the pandemic is not
| helpful.
|
| I'm convinced most government agencies cannot manage this type
| construction in an affordable way, including my home county of
| Sonoma where we are spending $250k - $350k per homeless person to
| house them in refurbished hotel rooms (remodeling, not new
| construction).
|
| I don't know _what_ the solution is, but I have become convinced
| that local governments cannot build their way out of this. We
| have to come up with something better.
| _jal wrote:
| Now build that in downtown LA explicitly for housing homeless
| folks, and let us know how your permitting process goes.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| You would think that the city of LA would be able to do
| something to alleviate the permit process that the city of LA
| created to reduce the building costs being funded/managed by
| city of LA.
| asdff wrote:
| Maybe if the permitting process wasn't just a device for
| grifting in LA county.
| com2kid wrote:
| > My home will be built for about $350k (less land
| acquisition).
|
| How in the world? I got multiple bids in Seattle to add a
| 200sqft dormer, 125k was the lowest bid I got.
|
| A single bathroom around here costs a minimum of 15K to build,
| just to get people out to install the basics.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| I would like to publish a series of posts on my build
| process, including cost breakdowns, because I know there is
| interest after seeing some similar posts
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30193899)
|
| Without knowing much about your project, a dormer add can get
| expensive because you are modifying the structural envelope
| of the home. although the new sq footage may be small, the
| building process is involved and risk is high because your
| modifying roof-lines, bearing walls etc. A dormer addition is
| not simple.
| legitster wrote:
| The problem is the government bidding system is completely
| borked. Especially in a state like California.
|
| The government would do better if it only acted as a buyer. "We
| will pay for any new units that are constructed that meet these
| qualifications" and let the thousands of independent developers
| and contractors do what they do.
| sjg007 wrote:
| So you are saving ~30% right? Plus the land at probably <250k
| means $600k max net cost. I imagine the area you live in has
| $800k-$1m houses.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| About right, might be saving closer to 35%.
|
| Land cost was $500k in 2018, but its 3 acres, had existing
| utilities, and I can re-build another existing structure on
| the property what was red-tagged and will be 2 bed 2 bath,
| ~1800sq/ft primary dwelling. The one currently under
| construction is technically the accessory dwelling unit, but
| it really is a stand-alone house.
|
| With just the new ADU, we will be in ~$850k but appraised
| value is expected to be $1-1.3m. When we spend another
| $350-$400k re-building the primary dwelling, it will probably
| be worth $1.6-$2m with ability to rent one unit.
|
| The metric I care most about is my sq/ft build cost which
| will be around $300/ft. This is incredibly low for a custom
| home which ranges in the $400-650 ft range for a decent
| quality custom and $1000+ ft for higher-end residences.
|
| The sqft size of units in LA is not mentioned, but based on
| the video, they are between 400-600 ft. $837k / 600 sqft =
| $1395 ft. _Wayyyyyyy_ too high for "affordable" housing.
| hardtke wrote:
| Are your subcontractors fully insured? Do they fully pay
| workers compensation? Are their employees legally authorized to
| work in the US? There is a quite substantial price premium in
| the market now for contractors that follow the law, and
| government projects are forced to follow the law.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| I work full-time as a subcontractor on commercial projects in
| the SF bay area and am fairly familiar with the costs
| associated with insurance, workers comp etc. We utilize union
| labor to install our projects. And you are right, it does
| cost a lot to follow the laws. But those costs are not nearly
| high enough to explain how 400-600 sq/ft units are being
| built for between $1,100-$1,400 a square foot. My _guess_ is
| much of the cost bloat is "administrative" and has nothing
| to do with real construction costs.
| dealforager wrote:
| The solution is real free markets. Constant government
| intervention in the housing market, the stock market,
| education, healthcare, and everything else under the sun has
| led us to where we are today. It always feels nice for a bit
| when the government bails you out, but the long term
| consequences are always much more severe. Prices are
| information and when all the information is polluted, it
| becomes very difficult to have a functioning economy. It's the
| same thing that happens in social media, trolls and bots
| pollute the information so it's impossible for most people to
| tell the truth apart from fiction. Unfortunately the regulatory
| capture is so deep and the problems have gotten so bad that I
| don't know how this can be solved without an extreme event.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > The solution is real free markets.
|
| A ludicrous suggestion.
|
| The "free market" optimizes for one single thing: Profit.
|
| Providing housing for homeless people is not profitable, and
| so a free market would never do it.
|
| > Constant government intervention in the housing market, the
| stock market, education, healthcare, and everything else
| under the sun has led us to where we are today.
|
| Health care is in the same boat. If a poor person gets
| cancer, the free market would gladly let them die. They
| wouldn't be able to pay for treatment.
|
| Education is similar. If the government didn't provide
| schools, a considerable portion of children would go
| uneducated.
| holbrad wrote:
| Optimising for profit can lead to both massive positive and
| negative effects.
|
| So the obvious question is how you balance those negative
| effects against the positive. This is where regulations and
| governments have to step in, though that certain has it's
| own massive issues.
|
| Health care has a lot of unsolved problems, from my
| perspective no group is actually doing well (Just varying
| shades of bad, I'm from the UK). There are so many ailments
| that can't currently be treated well (Despite having spent
| decades studying them, though that seems to be a systematic
| failure of academia)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Optimizing for profit greatly incentivizes innovation as
| corporations compete, I'll definitely give you that.
|
| But it also leads to a poorer customer experience (long
| hold times as call centers are understaffed, cheap and
| flimsy materials, I could go on...), exploitative dark
| patterns, rent-seeking, and more.
|
| And then there's the fact that corporations would happily
| dump toxic waste into rivers to save a few dollars if the
| EPA didn't exist to stop them. They will gladly burn the
| atmosphere in order to show growth on their quarterly
| report.
|
| > So the obvious question is how you balance those
| negative effects against the positive. This is where
| regulations and governments have to step in, though that
| certain has it's own massive issues.
|
| Agreed. Corporations can't be free to do whatever they
| want, but finding that happy medium of reining them in
| without stifling them is hard.
|
| It doesn't help that our politicians are for sale.
| Corruption runs rampant.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Why would free markets help homeless people? Is there any
| basis for this, other than claiming that one's favorite
| solution is the best? Free markets serve those who pay the
| most, which is good for allocating iPhones, but not for
| healthcare, basic housing, basic food, education, safety,
| etc., which should not depend on ability to pay.
|
| > It's the same thing that happens in social media, trolls
| and bots pollute the information so it's impossible for most
| people to tell the truth apart from fiction.
|
| Isn't that 'real free market', unregulated?
| tgflynn wrote:
| > Free markets serve those who pay the most
|
| As someone who has spent years in a low income situation
| due to health issues that hasn't been my experience. At
| least up until the pandemic food as well as many
| manufactured products, which are relatively unregulated,
| were quite affordable even for the lowest incomes. There's
| a large enough market of low income people so that
| companies like Walmart, dollar stores and even Amazon can
| make money serving that market.
|
| Housing and medical care, on the other hand, are completely
| unaffordable for a significant fraction of the population
| without government assistance.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I am not doubting your experience, but I don't think we
| can project that to the larger situation.
|
| > At least up until the pandemic food as well as many
| manufactured products, which are relatively unregulated,
| were quite affordable even for the lowest incomes.
|
| The data shows otherwise, that many people haven't been
| able to afford food (think of school lunch programs) and
| especially quality food. Also, large 'food deserts'
| exists in poor communities where food is unavailable
| beyond very expensive small stores.
|
| > There's a large enough market of low income people so
| that companies like Walmart, dollar stores and even
| Amazon can make money serving that market.
|
| I've thought that, but it turns out that they don't often
| don't serve low-income people. I've also spent plenty of
| time in low income areas, and retail options are very
| slim. I've been in the best grocery store in the
| neighborhood, where fruit scales were rusty, and it stunk
| of something rotting. It was packed.
| tgflynn wrote:
| Well, I know that I could live spending less than 50% of
| my monthly income on food. Ignoring other subsidies
| however my rent would cost over 80% of my monthly income,
| so if I paid my rent, as people are likely to do first,
| it's true that I wouldn't have enough money for food.
|
| So what I am saying does not contradict the claim that
| many people can't afford enough food, since most of their
| money is going to rent.
| holbrad wrote:
| Generally for most goods markets work really well. There's
| two intrinsic failure cases: externalities and monopolies.
|
| So arguably housing fits into the monopoly bucket,
| especially if you lean towards a land value tax.
|
| Safety and a monopoly on force most would argue are the
| domains of government.
|
| But the rest of your examples seem fine to be market based,
| though the devil is in the detail.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Generally for most goods markets work really well.
| There's two intrinsic failure cases: externalities and
| monopolies.
|
| I agree, but you are omitting two other cases: Equity and
| availability.
|
| Again, markets are built to serve those who provide the
| highest profit. That's fine for iPhones, but not for
| health, safety, education, basic food, and basic shelter.
| Everyone should have those, regardless of how much profit
| they provide.
|
| Markets also depend on 'creative destruction', businesses
| fail and their goods and services go away. That can't
| happen with healthcare, food, education, safety, and
| shelter. There are 'food deserts' in poor communities,
| where people can't get anything but expensive corner-
| store groceries. We can't have a safety, education,
| shelter, or healthcare desert (or a food desert).
| holbrad wrote:
| Markets provide availability of goods, as long as you can
| accept price variability.
|
| I'll reiterate for safety and land I think these things
| fail for the reason I mentioned originally.
|
| Healthcare I could certainly see working in a mostly
| market led way, I'm personally from the UK (So extra
| heretical to say)
|
| Food is a bad example, as availability is ultra high.
| Fresh produce is scarce in areas due to low demand. Low
| demand leads to higher prices.
| vasco wrote:
| > Our European visitors are important to us.
|
| > This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the
| European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is
| protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
|
| Thanks, I guess?
| tgv wrote:
| It's weapon grade American bullshit.
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