How homelessness in California turned from nuisance to disaster - ForumDaily
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How homelessness in California went from a nuisance to a disaster

Residents of a wealthy city like San Francisco have long hated to see the extreme poverty of the homeless on its streets. Walking through the city center, you can see tents, homemade cardboard beds, and human excrement on the sidewalks. Impoverished people lie on the ground while high-paid professionals sweep by, writes NPR.

Photo: Shutterstock

In 2018, a UN representative visited San Francisco as part of a round-the-world trip to study housing conditions. She was shocked by what she saw. Her report concluded that the city's treatment of unsheltered people is "cruel and inhumane treatment and a violation of multiple human rights, including the rights to life, housing, health, water and sanitation." The number of homeless San Franciscans has only grown since then to more than 8000 people, most of whom sleep on the streets rather than in shelters.

San Francisco is pretty typical of major American cities these days, especially on the west coast. Beggar-filled tent cities have sprung up from San Diego to Seattle. As of January 2020, there were about 151 homeless people in California alone.

There are many problems. The horrors of childhood trauma and poverty, mental illness and chronic drug use undoubtedly increase the likelihood that someone will live on the street. But Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says the root cause of the crisis is simple: housing has become too scarce and too expensive.

A few years ago, a group of economists at Zillow found that once cities cross the threshold that a typical resident must spend more than a third of their income on housing, homelessness begins to skyrocket. When incomes do not keep up with rental prices, a cascading effect occurs in the housing market: people with high incomes start renting houses that were previously rented by people with an average income, people with middle incomes start renting places that people with low incomes have rented, and the latter stay in predicament.

On the subject: Dump, violence and drugs: how a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood became a homeless camp

Homelessness hasn't always been a disaster

“In the 1970s, there were enough affordable apartments for every low-income family that needed them—and we really didn’t have homelessness,” Roman says.

By the 1980s, homelessness had become a chronic problem. There were many factors, including the federal government's decision to cut the budget for affordable housing. By that time, the California state government had significantly cut taxes and cut social programs, including for mental health facilities, as a result of which thousands of people with mental illness and other difficulties tried to survive on their own.

However, the main reason for the crisis comes down to supply and demand for housing. As regions like the San Francisco Bay Area became a magnet for high-paid professionals in the computer economy, they were unable to build enough new units to meet demand.

A 2016 study by the McKinsey Global Institute found California would need 3,5 million new housing units by 2025 to cope with its chronic housing shortage. But new housing construction has only slowed, despite a pledge from Governor Gavin Newsom to spearhead the effort.

Many advocates say California needs some kind of new rent control program, but the city of San Francisco passed such a law back in 1994, which helped keep existing tenants from moving out but only exacerbated a deeper problem. The 1994 law convinced large numbers of homeowners to take their rentals off the market, sell their apartments, or demolish them and build new ones because the law did not apply to new construction. Research shows the law caused the city's rental supply to decline by 25% at a time when demand was rising.

The result of all this is obscenely high rental rates and real estate prices. Combined with stagnant wages in a huge number of low-income jobs and a lack of political will to spend significantly more on subsidized housing, it is easy to understand why large numbers of people are living with their parents and moving to urban areas, increasingly expensive suburbs and being pushed onto the streets.

On the subject: Homeless tents in San Francisco are more expensive than renting an apartment in the city

How is this different from, say, New York?

Booming cities in other states may have done better than San Francisco and Los Angeles, at least by bandaging the bleeding wound. New York City, for example, has a “right to asylum” and an extensive shelter system that helps people sleep indoors every night. The homelessness rate in New York is the same as in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but it is different.

As of January 2020, 72% of homeless Californians were unsheltered. Compare that to New York State, where only 5% are unsheltered—homelessness is there, but not nearly as bad. Warmer weather on the West Coast, which may change perceptions of the harshness of outdoor life, may play a role in the difference, but New York has a "right of refuge" due to a 1979 court decision interpreting the state constitution as granting such a right residents.

Instead of building a large system of shelters, California cities have taken a more lax approach—basically confining homeless people to specific areas, such as the Tenderloin in San Francisco or Skid Row in Los Angeles, and then selectively prosecuting them for they live on the street.

What the pandemic has changed

Tristia Bauman, senior attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center, says California cities have historically been as energetic as other cities in forcibly demolishing camps and punishing people for homelessness. However, in 2018, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cities from punishing people for sleeping on the street when they don't have access to domestic shelter or long-term housing. Following this ruling, and in line with CDC recommendations during the pandemic, homeless camps are increasingly being allowed in West Coast cities.

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Last year, Californians of all political views called homelessness the biggest problem they would like the state to solve. With political backing, legal intervention, and billions of federal dollars from the Biden administration for the cause, California politicians are finally trying to do something important to help the homeless and unsafe.

Governor Newsom recently announced a $12 billion plan, promising to “provide 65 people with housing, more than 000 people with stable housing, and create 300 new housing units.” The initiative builds on programs implemented during the pandemic to convert hotels and other buildings into housing for homeless people. San Francisco Mayor London Breed wants the city to spend more than a billion dollars to solve the problem over the next two years.

But until California can address the root cause—a chronic shortage of affordable housing and a continued failure to significantly increase new construction—the state appears doomed to struggle with obscene levels of homelessness.

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