Homelessness is primarily a problem created by the requirement to continuously upkeep your shelter financially or risk losing it.

The ability to perform this upkeep can be wrecked by any number of things, which there is not enough space to list here.

The overwhelming majority of people who fail at this upkeep are saved by their support network, so the actual problem is several orders of magnitude larger than any official statistics.

Most people who lose their shelter fall back on family and friends and may spend years living on couches, in closets, spare garages, cars, etc., without ever being picked up by the "homeless" statistics.

How or why this system came about is beyond the scope of this comment, but it is an iceberg most people only see the tip of. And it is not a necessity, nor is it a reality in many other places around the world.

This seems pretty cut and dry to me.

Single Resident Occupancy units used to be incredibly common - from shared adult dorms to chicken-wire hotels. Now they are non-existent.

In 50 years this represented a loss of over a million housing units! Today there are 500k people living on the streets. I don't think it's a coincidence.

While I don't doubt the statistics brought up in this article, I am skeptical about how the underlying data was sampled. The majority of "homeless" people are not necessarily who everyone is talking about when they think "homeless" (e.g. people dressed in rags sleeping on the streets/doing drugs in public.) I personally suspect that there's quite a difference in that sub-population.

We also make it very hard to climb back out of homelessness - if you've had an eviction, it's very hard to find a place to take you.

I have a friend in Portland, he's a single, male, with no kids, in Portland - and there is no program to help, hopefully you make 3x the rent and can save up first/last, and a months deposit.

What's worse, he has mental health issues, but he makes too much for medicaid and too little to buy insurance, so he can either work, or have healthcare, and those are the options - either way, the only place he can find to live is in a minivan.

Why should issues like homelessness be reducible to one 'primary' cause?

Highlighting housing costs as a significant contributing factor is an important point to make, but there's no need to undermine the other contributing factors through bad faith arguments and cherry picked statistics. Yes, homelessness clusters in cities with robust social programs, esp. those with temperate weather. These same cities are also the most expensive in the US, effectively creating homelessness traps.

As for following in the footsteps of Houston, it's not nearly as feasible for these places. They have up to 10x the homeless populations and 2-3x the housing costs. Compare providing 5,000 units in Houston vs providing 70,000 in Los Angeles.

We should absolutely look to provide more subsidized housing to the needy, but it's clear we aren't aren't able to do it in the most in demand real estate markets in country.

EDIT: numbers

Bold and presumptuous title like we're a hivemind.

There are plenty of homeless people in America who are merely poor and nothing else: no drugs, not drunks, not criminally-antisocial, not crazy, and not desiring to sleep on hostile architecture bus benches. Some are too old to work and don't have a support system. There are no magic bootstraps to pull on and US social services rarely seek out to assist individuals.

The regressions presented on the graphs are misleading at best. The effect of outliers on the fitting looks fairly obvious as are the high density linear areas.

If the problem is housing, and some cities don't have homelessness problems because they have cheap housing... then why don't the homeless people in places with expensive housing go to the places with cheap housing? Is it maybe because they prefer living in the more expensive area even if it means sleeping outside? is there maybe some individual-level incentive playing a factor here? Something is not adding up. Some cities have cheap housing, and others have expensive housing. In theory people could relocate and avoid sleeping outside, at least a huge portion of them, yet instead we see increasing populations in places with expensive housing.

I'm just saying there is something missing from the picture because if housing was the primary cause, relocating would be the obvious solution that most people would rationally choose. Instead it seems like people insist in staying in the expensive housing areas, because I assume the cheap housing areas are boring, and they might not have as many government programs.

It doesn't surprise me that government can't solve this problem, because they are unable to analyze it in the proper level of detail and instead use super high level statistical correlations which have not led to any results.

I wonder how much mental illness and drug abuse contribute to staying in a place you can't afford a roof?

There are varying levels of tolerance of homelessness across the country. On the other side of the equation of tolerance are several factors, including politics but most especially rent prices.

People in cities with low rent prices are far less likely to tolerate homelessness than cities with high rent prices. Cities with high rents will use high rents as a scapegoat for inaction in solving the problem (i.e., “we need to build more housing!” as if that’s a perfectly tenable thing to do on a landlocked peninsula filled with extraordinary regulations on building).

If someone becomes homeless (or rather, is becoming homeless) because they can’t pay their rent, wouldn’t they… move somewhere cheaper? That is in fact what usually happens. Those who become homeless instead often do for reasons other than not being able to afford rent; these people are quitting society. Japan has Hikikomori, and we have the homeless.

"Homeless" refers to many things.

It can refer to a person living in a car, a person living in a shelter, a person living a tent, a person living in a homeless camp, a person living under a piece of cardboard, etc.

Some people become homeless at a point and manage their way out, others stay homeless.

If you are an alcoholic, or a drug addict, and want to get drunk or high or both in a regular basis, you don't like the rules at the shelter... what place is best for you? a shelter with strict rules where you can't drink or get high, or a homeless camp? The homeless camp.

The problem with people like the article author is that they try to monopolize common sense.

A person working at Walmart, earning minimum wage while living in their car, has a very different reality to a drug junkie living in a homeless camp. The term "homeless" refers to both. I would not try to begin a serious analysis by mixing such different things.

> we can build an ample supply of housing and subsidized housing.

Sigh. That’s the conclusion? Land is cheap. Literally most of the US is empty. Housing is stupid cheap. Housing is crowded coastal cities is not.

What the article did highlight really well (maybe accidentally) that homelessness sticks around for multiple reasons: 40% substance problem, mental illness problem, etc. maybe there’s always two factors, maybe that’s why efforts aren’t ending it?

> And, at long last, we have arrived at the actual root cause of homelessness: housing costs.

To prove this point the author shows 4 graphs with R^2 values of 0.55, 0.27, 0.24, and 0.28. That's a tough sell, especially when the non-underlined portion of the abstract he showed reads:

> most people with substance-abuse issues remain homeless for 12 months or longer.

This dude looks like another “content creator” mission on putting out click optimized links with no substance, no data and no real research. These amature opinion distributors are cancer to information society.

I have been studying the homeless problem. In Lansing the problem has exploded 4-5X in the past twenty years. I am looking for a way locally that my tech skills can help, even in a small way.

It was suggested that I learn about the efforts of Celebrity Rehab Dr. Drew who is outspoken on the homeless problem. He wants permission to treat the homeless who are mentally ill. He believes not only can they be helped but returned to productive members of society. But he is opposed by L.A. politicians who have blocked him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRrlIpQ-Hk (9 minutes)