The population of California constitutes 12 percent of the US population. Source
Today, someone suggested to me that I'm wrong about California being the dumping ground for the nation's homeless problem because they think only 18 percent of California's homeless are from out of state. That's a questionable stat to begin with, but you don't need the majority of California's homeless to have recently moved there for California to be the dumping ground for the nation's broken housing policies.
All you need is for that 18 percent to comprise a very large share of the chronically homeless, the folks who can't seem to get their act together, the folks who remain homeless for years and years and often require very large dollar amounts of homeless services, such as ER visits.
If you are homeless and have serious personal problems that will take years to sort out -- IF they can be resolved at all -- what better place to go hang than someplace with temperate, dry weather and lots of big cities, which appeal to a lot of homeless people both because they are LGBTQ friendly and they tend to have services and you can kind of disappear in the crowd in a way you can't do in a small town?
America's homeless problem is a housing policy problem rooted in part in lots of tax and financing infrastructure that goes back to the post-World War II era when "the boys" came home and we began throwing up huge swaths of single family detached homes because the returning soldiers had military benefits that helped finance that.
We have relatively little means for financing and building other forms of housing. We have torn down more than million SRO's in the decades since and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle Housing.
This is a national housing crisis. California is just getting the brunt of it for a long list of reasons that aren't entirely their fault.
Blaming California may make people feel morally superior or it may be emotionally gratifying for a few minutes, but it doesn't get people off the street. You don't end it by looking for a convenient scapegoat and blaming them for the problems of the entire nation, especially when they are, arguably, the victim of this problem.
Our housing issues are an inheritance from the ghost of Christmas past. We built all this housing back then because we could and it helped resolve a dire housing crisis at that time, but it was far from perfect and over the decades it has significantly skewed the kind of housing stock we build and the kind of housing stock we allow to remain up.
This has become a very serious problem. If you want someone to blame, blame history.
But it isn't some kind of pure evil history. We are victims of our own success.
We did a thing that worked and worked well in a certain time and place and then decided "Oh, that worked! Let's do more of that!" and now it is biting us in the butt.
Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"
HN Discussion
As of January 2019, 27% of people experiencing homelessness in the entire United States are in California. In California, 72% of people experiencing homelessness are unsheltered, which is the highest share of unsheltered homelessness of any state. Nationwide, more than half of the people experiencing unsheltered homelessness reside in California. SourceI believe the lovely weather is a factor. California has large areas that are dry and fairly temperate.
Today, someone suggested to me that I'm wrong about California being the dumping ground for the nation's homeless problem because they think only 18 percent of California's homeless are from out of state. That's a questionable stat to begin with, but you don't need the majority of California's homeless to have recently moved there for California to be the dumping ground for the nation's broken housing policies.
All you need is for that 18 percent to comprise a very large share of the chronically homeless, the folks who can't seem to get their act together, the folks who remain homeless for years and years and often require very large dollar amounts of homeless services, such as ER visits.
If you are homeless and have serious personal problems that will take years to sort out -- IF they can be resolved at all -- what better place to go hang than someplace with temperate, dry weather and lots of big cities, which appeal to a lot of homeless people both because they are LGBTQ friendly and they tend to have services and you can kind of disappear in the crowd in a way you can't do in a small town?
America's homeless problem is a housing policy problem rooted in part in lots of tax and financing infrastructure that goes back to the post-World War II era when "the boys" came home and we began throwing up huge swaths of single family detached homes because the returning soldiers had military benefits that helped finance that.
We have relatively little means for financing and building other forms of housing. We have torn down more than million SRO's in the decades since and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle Housing.
This is a national housing crisis. California is just getting the brunt of it for a long list of reasons that aren't entirely their fault.
Blaming California may make people feel morally superior or it may be emotionally gratifying for a few minutes, but it doesn't get people off the street. You don't end it by looking for a convenient scapegoat and blaming them for the problems of the entire nation, especially when they are, arguably, the victim of this problem.
Our housing issues are an inheritance from the ghost of Christmas past. We built all this housing back then because we could and it helped resolve a dire housing crisis at that time, but it was far from perfect and over the decades it has significantly skewed the kind of housing stock we build and the kind of housing stock we allow to remain up.
This has become a very serious problem. If you want someone to blame, blame history.
But it isn't some kind of pure evil history. We are victims of our own success.
We did a thing that worked and worked well in a certain time and place and then decided "Oh, that worked! Let's do more of that!" and now it is biting us in the butt.
Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?"
HN Discussion