Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Ogie Oglethorpe wrote:
People are living on the streets because there is a literal shortage of available housing in San Francisco (and California in general). There is a 3-4 million unit shortage statewide. That shortage not only means there aren't enough homes, but it led to the price of existing homes to increase significantly.
That isn't why people are living in the street in California. They aren't checking the classifieds and saying "Well, I like this studio apartment, but I can't afford the last $100 of rent on it". They mostly are jobless. Many have mental illness. They make their money begging for it which is most successful in big cities. You could build 10,000 apartments in San Franscisco and the homeless population would stay unchanged. The year round weather, comparatively good services for the homeless, and enough well off tourists and residents to keep them making enough money begging keeps it.
Increasing housing stock would help the lower income people in the city who have to commute by bus into the city to possibly live closer to work but it isn't coming anywhere close to solving homelessness and in many ways could actually increase it.
Now, the problem becomes that people don't necessarily all want to live in an entire landmass of endless skyscrapers and turning San Francisco into one may do as much harm as good.
Honestly, the only real way to stop homelessness would be a federal program that doesn't make certain cities better for the homeless so you have cities buying bus tickets to California to get them away from their cities. The free market can't solve homeless people.
The homeless in CA are different than the homeless in a place like Chicago. In Chicago, you tend to have mentally ill individuals who cannot keep a job and cannot support themselves under any circumstance.
In California, the homeless are often families of people who have jobs but the restrictive zoning and other measures have made it impossible to find affordable housing because the inventory is 3-4 million units short (and that inventory shortage is growing each year). These are people who would have a roof over their head if the cost were to be decreased.
So yes, the path Sydney took would solve a substantial chunk of California's homeless epidemic and would also lower costs and improve the financial situation for those who are already in homes.
San Francisco is on a peninsula. They have to build up and they need to build for density. You can't just have NIMBY's using zoning rules to ban any structure over 40 feet tall under the bullshit excuse of "preserving the neighborhood."
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