After the riots of the 1960s, the suburbs of big cities took legal actions to insulate themselves from the bad decisions of their urban neighbors.
New York City suburbs like Westchester have passed laws that allow them to give the Heisman to HUD, Albany, and NYC.
At the end of the day, the urban areas have voted for the crime and homelessness. They got what they wanted. In a perverse way I think they don't mind it really. It makes them feel good about themselves.
I agree that homelessness is a very complex issue. Some people are homeless by choice, not circumstance, and more shelter beds won’t make a difference for them.
One example: I have two friends, an unmarried couple, who are traveling musicians. They’re so dedicated to touring that they refuse to settle down in one place and get day jobs in order to pay rent (as do the rest of my musician friends). As a result, they mostly car-camp in summer and scrounge temporary housing from friends around Texas and the Mountain West the rest of the time. Even doing that, they still have to ask friends for financial help much of the time. Ironically, most of their stuff is NOT homeless; it lives in a storage unit in Texas. They acknowledge that they can’t keep doing this indefinitely - they’re both over 50 - but they still choose this lifestyle.
Another example: We also have a pretty sizable itinerant population (mostly single men) in the northern New Mexico mountain town where I live. Many of these folks refuse to go to our local men’s shelter, which bans alcohol, drugs, and dogs. Most of them do leave in winter, which is harsh here, but not all. They live in tents and bundle up in blankets and sleeping bags. If our town built a bigger shelter, “tiny homes,” or other accommodations for them, I suspect a good portion of them still wouldn’t want to stay there. They, too, are homeless by choice rather than by circumstance.
1. Sort of glossed over in all of this is that the 9th Circuit, even after Trump's judicial appointment spree, remains absolutely bonkers and utterly oblivious to any practical ramifications of their policy-by-fiat approach to the judicial power. When your regional federal judiciary won't actually let policymakers make policy, you're obviously going to have problems.
2. Other states, as well as much of the rest of the developed world, have developed a different approach to the regionality problem--make cities geographically bigger. In Texas, you don't really have "suburbs" as they're understood on the coasts, because any town of sufficient size eventually gets swallowed up into the adjacent big city whether they like it or not.
Good idea and worth a try. That said most regional governments I’ve worked with are the most bureaucratic places in the entire world and prefer studying the same thing 10 times before doing anything. Their governance structure also can vary between complete control by the biggest city and total domination by rich exurbs depending on which politician got drunk and bargained away their city’s seats away for road money.
The “and it gets even even worse” answer is the “tradeable quotas” policy that European think tanks and academics kick around every time there’s a refugee crisis—aka “cap and trade but for people.” The refugee version is that every country in Europe has a certain refugee quota; if you don’t hit your quota you can pay for someone else to go over their quota (ie Sweden pays Greece to take more refugees), which solves the “Sweden is not contiguous to any place a refugee might travel through” problem.
Similarly you could imagine a version where cities within a X sq ft radius can pay for beds. If Eugene and Springfield are both supposed to have 1000 beds filled and Eugene takes 1500 and Springfield takes 500, Springfield pays Eugene for the excess costs.
The 9th court ruling effectively said that people have a right to live in whatever city they want.
Which is also sort of a subtext of all housing discussions. There is never an instance when people acknowledge that... maybe New York City isn’t for you.
America needs Kibbutzim. Capitalism doesn't work for everyone and that is just a natural fact. A fact that has caused too much strife since the industrial age began. Small communes spread out across the country could solve housing problems. Of course, residents would be required to work for their housing and resources, however, the communal lifestyle may inspire and motivate those who were unsuccessful in the cut-throat corporatized environment. Israeli kibbutz models have never been attempted in the US as far as I know. If we had Kibbutzim in the US along with substantial and sustainable resources for people suffering from mental illness, homelessness could be a thing of the past.
Camphill communities are kind of like that. I don't know if they are self-supporting, but they seem like good places to live, if you're into that sort of thing, or you are in need of the services they provide. https://www.camphill.org/
I think that "citing" homeless shelters is probably less helpful than "siting" them, although the former has some value in being an actual word, if not the one you intended.
We’re trying a regional approach in Seattle/ King County. Not going great. Who funds what and how it’s overseen are really thorny. Maybe the courts could allow tradable shelter beds-- each city only has to show it’s paid for sufficient beds within 15 miles of the encampment.
Kindly, "Not doing great." is a really gentle way to characterize what we've received in output.
At least in Seattle (I presume most everywhere else in the US), "homelessness" is mostly being so seriously enslaved to some modern particular drugs as to be both unable and unwilling to function in society, combined with a much smaller (but still real) number of dangerously untreated mentally ill that can't take care of themselves, but are too mentally ill to accept voluntary help.
It currently takes more than six months (!!) to evict someone for making no effort at all to pay, so no one misses a week of work and is tossed out on the street.
To hear the city or county speak of this, nearly ever person on the street is some variation of Jean Valjean, desperate enough to steal a loaf of bread, and society is tormenting them unjustly ever since. Meanwhile my employees don't want to work late in evenings (a hotel) because it's too unsafe from the dangerously unstable and the dangerous junkies to use this city's streets, sidewalks, and transit. Jean Valjean they are not. Be well -
Lane County offers transportation - but to where? Both Springfield and Eugene prohibit camping on public rights of way, but only Springfield enforces it (and it shows). Homeless enclaves are cleared after a few days but re-establish themselves quickly. In the end it doesn't matter - I can take you to a permanent just-outside-city-limits hellscape homeless camp/thieves market for all the poverty, mental conditions, and amphetamine psychosis you can carry. Or maybe they're just people who can't make the rent. Or both. Or all of it. You can find a lot more of them living in their cars in more rural areas.
There is no magic bullet. There is also inadequate funding, little enforcement, few care resources, no prosecutorial resolve - Lane County doesn't prosecute petty crimes and, having just made the top-25 list of most expensive places to live in the US, no affordable housing other than prison cells, which are also in short supply (Eugene does not have a municipal jail, though the Lane County facility is located there).
What there is no shortage of is communities that make no effort and would rather tell people "You can't stay here - I don't care where you go, just get off the property", as I heard a shopkeeper in another town say a few weeks ago.
If this seems a bit familiar as we're thrust into the holiday season to be tortured by Mariah Carey and her hellspawn cultural imps, remember that Dickens (and W.H. Davies) wrote it better.
Armchair quarterbacking after the game is always fun, but it's seldom useful for complex, heterogenous problems.
Part of the Greater Vancouver housing problem is that most of the cities/municipalities still have large areas with single-family-only zoning - and zoning is at the municipal level - but that's in the process of changing, so a solution might be on the way.
By comparison to Vancouver (a perennial "10 most livable cities" winner), I live in the Bay Area ... my home is in 3 different school districts, and within a mile of my house, the roads are administered by 5 different cities, the county, the state, and the federal government. There's almost no cooperation between the various towns; the county just adds another layer of unaccountability; and the regional districts (such as ABAG) have no teeth (compared to the Metro Vancouver governance system).
You should probably ask the residents of Jersey City whether they want to open a 2000 bed homeless shelter next door, no? I’m getting visions of the “no-person-is-illegal-except-in-Martha’s-Vineyard” argument.
End sarcasm. Your plan only makes sense on paper. The result is the thorny problem of disproportionally wealthy and elite groups demanding sacrifices to solve society’s ills be made solely by other people because, let’s face it, you’re never going to be able to build migrant housing on Broadway. But if it’s impossible for the wealthy and powerful to absorb a homeless shelter it’s probably too much to ask the poor and disenfranchised to do so either.
See Andrew's comment below and I'll tell my own story. I live in a large metropolitan area, let's call it Mega, near a large body of water in one of the most desireable urban areas in Mega. It's lovely here, I can walk to beach and I'm surrounded by large mature trees and there are many green public spaces. Not surpisingly housing prices are quite high, at least double the Mega average. There is a city owned and run apartment building nearby. It sits on a street with unobstructed lake views. In other words one of the most expensive pieces of property in Mega, worth millions. I'm sure the lucky residents of the 30 or so units love it there, hell I would too! The trouble is, many of the public housing units elsewhere in Mega are rundown shit holes. I can't help but go on and on (ask my wife) about it. Why not sell this very expensive piece of property and buy twice as many units where the poor people live, actually I added the poor people comment just for you. Should subsidized people live in the most prime piece of real estate in Mega? Should at least one family get to live in Beverly Hills? Could Mega achieve a better overall outcome by shifting the lucky 30 a mere 2 miles to a slighlty less nice area? Yes, the correct answer is yes.
Isn’t it amazing how the correct answer is the one that shifts the burden of absorbing all the social ills of public housing on people who aren’t you and to neighborhoods where you don’t go?
What amazes me is people draw unsubstantiated conclusions pased on pre-conceived notions. I regularly travel the two miles to the much more affordable neighborhood I referred to. I fact I was there yesterday to have my car repaired and my eldest child lives in that same area. I also travel there regularly for grocery shopping. And there are absolutely no "ills" from the public housing from the very expensive location I referred to, you're just making stuff up.
Just stop. You don’t want public housing in your neighborhood and you’ve seized on real estate prices as the sole deciding factor of where that housing should be located in order to rationalize that feeling to yourself. It gives you the luxury of pretending you’re in favor of public housing while at the same time having the muscle to keep it at a distance.
The neighborhoods you’re offering to move public housing to - not just move it, but double the number of units! - are far less able to absorb the impact. Their schools will be less equipped to take on children who don’t speak English - a constant problem for districts with subsidized housing - less able to provide work and services because they have less money, and have less wiggle room to take on as all the other negatives associated with large concentrations of poverty.
You know absolutely nothing zero, nada, zilch about my particular example, who lives where and capacity of services in either location. Did I mention language, no, why are you bringing that up? Are you making some unjustified assumptions, yes. Are schools at capacity where I live, yes. Is there capacity in the other neighborhood, neither you or I know. Take your strawman and go home.
The "Park Axis Aoyama 1-chome Tower" is in one of the most expensive areas of Tokyo. It's built on city land, with a 50-year lease. One of the conditions for building it was that it include affordable housing, so there's the 都営南青山一丁目アパート (Metropolitan Government Aoyama-1-chome apartments) next door. Here's streetview, with the luxury apartments behind: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4AgeaNXpudQuYM3e7 (it also contains a daycare, and the luxury apartments contain a supermarket and a branch of the city library; and, yes, those are single-family houses across the street; and one of the imperial palaces is a couple of blocks away)
After the riots of the 1960s, the suburbs of big cities took legal actions to insulate themselves from the bad decisions of their urban neighbors.
New York City suburbs like Westchester have passed laws that allow them to give the Heisman to HUD, Albany, and NYC.
At the end of the day, the urban areas have voted for the crime and homelessness. They got what they wanted. In a perverse way I think they don't mind it really. It makes them feel good about themselves.
Call it the Hairshirt Of Virtue.
I agree that homelessness is a very complex issue. Some people are homeless by choice, not circumstance, and more shelter beds won’t make a difference for them.
One example: I have two friends, an unmarried couple, who are traveling musicians. They’re so dedicated to touring that they refuse to settle down in one place and get day jobs in order to pay rent (as do the rest of my musician friends). As a result, they mostly car-camp in summer and scrounge temporary housing from friends around Texas and the Mountain West the rest of the time. Even doing that, they still have to ask friends for financial help much of the time. Ironically, most of their stuff is NOT homeless; it lives in a storage unit in Texas. They acknowledge that they can’t keep doing this indefinitely - they’re both over 50 - but they still choose this lifestyle.
Another example: We also have a pretty sizable itinerant population (mostly single men) in the northern New Mexico mountain town where I live. Many of these folks refuse to go to our local men’s shelter, which bans alcohol, drugs, and dogs. Most of them do leave in winter, which is harsh here, but not all. They live in tents and bundle up in blankets and sleeping bags. If our town built a bigger shelter, “tiny homes,” or other accommodations for them, I suspect a good portion of them still wouldn’t want to stay there. They, too, are homeless by choice rather than by circumstance.
Couple of random thoughts:
1. Sort of glossed over in all of this is that the 9th Circuit, even after Trump's judicial appointment spree, remains absolutely bonkers and utterly oblivious to any practical ramifications of their policy-by-fiat approach to the judicial power. When your regional federal judiciary won't actually let policymakers make policy, you're obviously going to have problems.
2. Other states, as well as much of the rest of the developed world, have developed a different approach to the regionality problem--make cities geographically bigger. In Texas, you don't really have "suburbs" as they're understood on the coasts, because any town of sufficient size eventually gets swallowed up into the adjacent big city whether they like it or not.
Good idea and worth a try. That said most regional governments I’ve worked with are the most bureaucratic places in the entire world and prefer studying the same thing 10 times before doing anything. Their governance structure also can vary between complete control by the biggest city and total domination by rich exurbs depending on which politician got drunk and bargained away their city’s seats away for road money.
The “and it gets even even worse” answer is the “tradeable quotas” policy that European think tanks and academics kick around every time there’s a refugee crisis—aka “cap and trade but for people.” The refugee version is that every country in Europe has a certain refugee quota; if you don’t hit your quota you can pay for someone else to go over their quota (ie Sweden pays Greece to take more refugees), which solves the “Sweden is not contiguous to any place a refugee might travel through” problem.
Similarly you could imagine a version where cities within a X sq ft radius can pay for beds. If Eugene and Springfield are both supposed to have 1000 beds filled and Eugene takes 1500 and Springfield takes 500, Springfield pays Eugene for the excess costs.
The 9th court ruling effectively said that people have a right to live in whatever city they want.
Which is also sort of a subtext of all housing discussions. There is never an instance when people acknowledge that... maybe New York City isn’t for you.
I demand to live in a condo overlooking Cenntral Park. Do you think the 2nd Circuit would help me?
America needs Kibbutzim. Capitalism doesn't work for everyone and that is just a natural fact. A fact that has caused too much strife since the industrial age began. Small communes spread out across the country could solve housing problems. Of course, residents would be required to work for their housing and resources, however, the communal lifestyle may inspire and motivate those who were unsuccessful in the cut-throat corporatized environment. Israeli kibbutz models have never been attempted in the US as far as I know. If we had Kibbutzim in the US along with substantial and sustainable resources for people suffering from mental illness, homelessness could be a thing of the past.
Camphill communities are kind of like that. I don't know if they are self-supporting, but they seem like good places to live, if you're into that sort of thing, or you are in need of the services they provide. https://www.camphill.org/
I think that "citing" homeless shelters is probably less helpful than "siting" them, although the former has some value in being an actual word, if not the one you intended.
You're right that it should be "siting", which is an actual word as well.
We’re trying a regional approach in Seattle/ King County. Not going great. Who funds what and how it’s overseen are really thorny. Maybe the courts could allow tradable shelter beds-- each city only has to show it’s paid for sufficient beds within 15 miles of the encampment.
Kindly, "Not doing great." is a really gentle way to characterize what we've received in output.
At least in Seattle (I presume most everywhere else in the US), "homelessness" is mostly being so seriously enslaved to some modern particular drugs as to be both unable and unwilling to function in society, combined with a much smaller (but still real) number of dangerously untreated mentally ill that can't take care of themselves, but are too mentally ill to accept voluntary help.
It currently takes more than six months (!!) to evict someone for making no effort at all to pay, so no one misses a week of work and is tossed out on the street.
To hear the city or county speak of this, nearly ever person on the street is some variation of Jean Valjean, desperate enough to steal a loaf of bread, and society is tormenting them unjustly ever since. Meanwhile my employees don't want to work late in evenings (a hotel) because it's too unsafe from the dangerously unstable and the dangerous junkies to use this city's streets, sidewalks, and transit. Jean Valjean they are not. Be well -
I'm amused at how many things like this pop up after a parents' football weekend on campus (or the UW-UO game).
In any event, bussing is a bad and unpopular solution as it always is, and has already created quite a bit of flak:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattle-san-francisco.html
Lane County offers transportation - but to where? Both Springfield and Eugene prohibit camping on public rights of way, but only Springfield enforces it (and it shows). Homeless enclaves are cleared after a few days but re-establish themselves quickly. In the end it doesn't matter - I can take you to a permanent just-outside-city-limits hellscape homeless camp/thieves market for all the poverty, mental conditions, and amphetamine psychosis you can carry. Or maybe they're just people who can't make the rent. Or both. Or all of it. You can find a lot more of them living in their cars in more rural areas.
There is no magic bullet. There is also inadequate funding, little enforcement, few care resources, no prosecutorial resolve - Lane County doesn't prosecute petty crimes and, having just made the top-25 list of most expensive places to live in the US, no affordable housing other than prison cells, which are also in short supply (Eugene does not have a municipal jail, though the Lane County facility is located there).
What there is no shortage of is communities that make no effort and would rather tell people "You can't stay here - I don't care where you go, just get off the property", as I heard a shopkeeper in another town say a few weeks ago.
If this seems a bit familiar as we're thrust into the holiday season to be tortured by Mariah Carey and her hellspawn cultural imps, remember that Dickens (and W.H. Davies) wrote it better.
Armchair quarterbacking after the game is always fun, but it's seldom useful for complex, heterogenous problems.
Here's an example of regional government (it was originally put in place to deal with water and sewers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Vancouver_Regional_District#Housing although it hasn't solved the homeless problem (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Eastside#Housing_availability_and_affordability).
Part of the Greater Vancouver housing problem is that most of the cities/municipalities still have large areas with single-family-only zoning - and zoning is at the municipal level - but that's in the process of changing, so a solution might be on the way.
By comparison to Vancouver (a perennial "10 most livable cities" winner), I live in the Bay Area ... my home is in 3 different school districts, and within a mile of my house, the roads are administered by 5 different cities, the county, the state, and the federal government. There's almost no cooperation between the various towns; the county just adds another layer of unaccountability; and the regional districts (such as ABAG) have no teeth (compared to the Metro Vancouver governance system).
Look into Community Land Trusts. They can provide a range of housing solutions that save municipalities in the long run.
You should probably ask the residents of Jersey City whether they want to open a 2000 bed homeless shelter next door, no? I’m getting visions of the “no-person-is-illegal-except-in-Martha’s-Vineyard” argument.
End sarcasm. Your plan only makes sense on paper. The result is the thorny problem of disproportionally wealthy and elite groups demanding sacrifices to solve society’s ills be made solely by other people because, let’s face it, you’re never going to be able to build migrant housing on Broadway. But if it’s impossible for the wealthy and powerful to absorb a homeless shelter it’s probably too much to ask the poor and disenfranchised to do so either.
See Andrew's comment below and I'll tell my own story. I live in a large metropolitan area, let's call it Mega, near a large body of water in one of the most desireable urban areas in Mega. It's lovely here, I can walk to beach and I'm surrounded by large mature trees and there are many green public spaces. Not surpisingly housing prices are quite high, at least double the Mega average. There is a city owned and run apartment building nearby. It sits on a street with unobstructed lake views. In other words one of the most expensive pieces of property in Mega, worth millions. I'm sure the lucky residents of the 30 or so units love it there, hell I would too! The trouble is, many of the public housing units elsewhere in Mega are rundown shit holes. I can't help but go on and on (ask my wife) about it. Why not sell this very expensive piece of property and buy twice as many units where the poor people live, actually I added the poor people comment just for you. Should subsidized people live in the most prime piece of real estate in Mega? Should at least one family get to live in Beverly Hills? Could Mega achieve a better overall outcome by shifting the lucky 30 a mere 2 miles to a slighlty less nice area? Yes, the correct answer is yes.
Isn’t it amazing how the correct answer is the one that shifts the burden of absorbing all the social ills of public housing on people who aren’t you and to neighborhoods where you don’t go?
What amazes me is people draw unsubstantiated conclusions pased on pre-conceived notions. I regularly travel the two miles to the much more affordable neighborhood I referred to. I fact I was there yesterday to have my car repaired and my eldest child lives in that same area. I also travel there regularly for grocery shopping. And there are absolutely no "ills" from the public housing from the very expensive location I referred to, you're just making stuff up.
Just stop. You don’t want public housing in your neighborhood and you’ve seized on real estate prices as the sole deciding factor of where that housing should be located in order to rationalize that feeling to yourself. It gives you the luxury of pretending you’re in favor of public housing while at the same time having the muscle to keep it at a distance.
The neighborhoods you’re offering to move public housing to - not just move it, but double the number of units! - are far less able to absorb the impact. Their schools will be less equipped to take on children who don’t speak English - a constant problem for districts with subsidized housing - less able to provide work and services because they have less money, and have less wiggle room to take on as all the other negatives associated with large concentrations of poverty.
You know absolutely nothing zero, nada, zilch about my particular example, who lives where and capacity of services in either location. Did I mention language, no, why are you bringing that up? Are you making some unjustified assumptions, yes. Are schools at capacity where I live, yes. Is there capacity in the other neighborhood, neither you or I know. Take your strawman and go home.
The "Park Axis Aoyama 1-chome Tower" is in one of the most expensive areas of Tokyo. It's built on city land, with a 50-year lease. One of the conditions for building it was that it include affordable housing, so there's the 都営南青山一丁目アパート (Metropolitan Government Aoyama-1-chome apartments) next door. Here's streetview, with the luxury apartments behind: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4AgeaNXpudQuYM3e7 (it also contains a daycare, and the luxury apartments contain a supermarket and a branch of the city library; and, yes, those are single-family houses across the street; and one of the imperial palaces is a couple of blocks away)