Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.
What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.
It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".
Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.
I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.
I can understand not wanting to give windfall profits to folks like my dad who did nothing but the government could buy land and develop it. Also they could maybe actually make something attractive? People tend to hate new development because it's so ugly. Maybe we could build like Cambridge or Venice rather than endless boxes.
I'm wondering if it's okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
There's an Australian quote from the 80s I can't recall the source of right now, but it's something along the lines of "we're a country of people serving each other flat whites", indicating that the primary spend in economy is local service based.
I suspect that's true in most western countries - cafes, supermarkets, dog grooming services, dentists, hairdressers, etc. Many jobs exist where people are, and if a new suburb or city were to crop up, commercial areas would be planned and a smart council could incentivise by discounting rent for the first X years or similar programs.
These towns often have a bit of a reputation for being full of, well, 1960s architecture and being a bit dated and unexciting, but frankly that's just a lot of the UK. Functionally, I have been to a few of them and they are just fine, if a little boring, places to live.
> [is it] okay to have the government take over properties that are simply poor uses of land even if the owners don't want to sell?
I mean, happens all the time with infrastructure projects - roads, railroads, power plants.
Net migration (immigrants - emigrants) in 2024 was about 0.63%.
I would hope the productivity advances in the last 75(!) years would allow the Uk to build enough homes for 0.63% growth, when our 1950s tools and technology allowed them to accommodate a 0.52% growth
So no hate to the author but this feels like pointless political posturing
In addition, the causality is sometime backwards. The substance abuse and mental issues come after homelessness as people try to cope with the incredible stress of life on the streets. This, of course, makes it even harder to pull out of the downward spiral.
It’s tough but I encourage everyone to find a way to support/volunteer reputable organizations in their areas
Sure, this is what I'm talking about when I say there is a gradient. But for argument sake/illustrative purposes though - what would housing have to cost to end homeless? And bonus question - what would zoning laws have to look like to get to this price?
I imagine the answer would have to be "free" but we know for a fact that wouldn't end homelessness because homeless shelters exist that cost $0 and homelessness still exists (yes, even where there isn't overcrowding).
And sure yes, I'm sure there are people that are hanging on by their finger nails - if rent goes up $100/m they'd have to live in their cars but I'm skeptical that zoning law reform is the thing that's going to save them (or end homelessness as the OP suggests)
Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless.
Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and then fall into this state. So if you want to reduce the number of crazy people on the street, then people need stability and homes to cut off the pipeline.
I think a more common situation is that they are on the street because they are unstable, but being on the street makes it much worse.
Each of them lived with my family for two years. All my wife and I did was let them exist in their own space with no pressure to do anything (other than coexist in our house, but that's purely logistics).
Both of them have gone on to go to college and pursue their respective dreams. The elder of the two lives independently, and the younger just shipped off to college.
The broader point being that most people just need a support network and a stable place to live to start to thrive.
Granted, that's just anecdata on my part, but it seems to line up with moth metal health studies I've read when it comes to homelessness.
Suppose you're living in LA or NYC, and you lose your job, get evicted (takes a few months and you can't land on your feet by then) and then move all your stuff to a shopping cart and start sleeping under a bridge?
I'm sure this has happened, but if I were in that situation I would begin by moving out of one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Go to the library, find cheap cost of living and high job availability place, and get a one way bus ticket there. Literally anything is better than living on the street.
This is all to say I'm skeptical of the explanation that people living on the street are just like me except with bad luck. Temporarily, sure. A few nights crashing on someones couch or sleeping in a park or bus station. But chronically homeless people.
I think the overwhelming majority of them are not rational actors (could be induced by drug abuse, mental illness, some combination of the two). So giving them keys to a home won't really solve their problems.
The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.
The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)
- not have any family
- not have any friends
- not have any savings
- not have anything they could sell
- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?
You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.
It used to be rare. But LA managed to make $700,000 the minimum cost for housing someone. That is a studio or one bedroom, without laundry. That is why LA City and LA County terminated the current housing organization (LAHSA). LA and San Francisco spent billions and accomplished very little. They probably housed two or three people/households per day. Now they get to stop the easy way, due to they are out of money. LA has a $1 billion budget deficit.
Two years ago, a small part of San Francisco with camps was so bad, two people were dying per day from overdose, and that was with handing out hundreds of doses of free narcan daily.
https://southpasadenan.com/l-a-county-moves-to-strip-funding...
As an added bonus, 33% of fires in LA were started by homeless. When asked about this, the fire chief pointed out that the city budgeted more funds for the homeless ($961 million) than the fire department ($837 million).
https://abc7.com/post/third-las-fires-last-years-involved-ho...
I'm saying of sound mind not as pejorative to be clear but I think for most people of "sound mind" they could figure something out that's not living on the streets (getting roommates, moving somewhere cheaper etc)
It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.
Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.
What you are seeing is that when the cost of housing goes up it's the people on the margins of society who are pushed onto the streets first and have the hardest time getting back into stable housing. That doesn't mean the cost of housing wasn't the driving force.
This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.
For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.
Normally when we talk about “humanizing” a problem it’s one that doesn’t have a directly visible human element. But everyone has seen actual homeless people. It’s not something that we are just aware of as an abstract problem.
What exactly is the cultural barrier to seeing what ought to be very obvious? I.e. that homeless people are regular people who are down on their luck, or who are victims of broader societal failings.
I disagree. With some exceptions, most people would rather be sheltered if they could just make rent, but they can't. Often it is mental health or substance abuse, other times it's rising rents and jobs that just don't pay enough even to get a room in a basic shared flat. Yes, housing may be cheap _somewhere_ but it may not be a place where people are able to actually live and support themselves.
While not directly about homelessness, I found Evicted (Matthew Desmond) a very eye opening book (at least for me, who only relatively recently moved to the US despite being a US citizen). There are so many people who are right on the edge that all it takes is one bad illness or other mishap to fall off, and once you're off it's really hard to get back on and stay on.
I don't disagree that many people disregard the problems of the homeless however I want to be abundantly clear that that I'm arguing against
> by simply losing income and not being able to afford rent anymore.
It's not simply that, things have to be going wrong in your life (not necessarily your fault) that losing your income puts you on the streets. Which goes back to the gradient - for some people losing their income will have no visible impact, for some they'll be under a bridge but which one it ends up being will depend on other factors in your life (having savings, friends, etc)
For example, there is a rental cartel operating in the USA.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
AirBnB is a factor.
The bulk of homelessness is a housing problem [0]. Per-capita rates are the highest in the most expensive places to live. This isn't because homeless people migrate to the places w/ the best homelessness programs either: they're largely long-term residents of their cities [1]. Homelessness is increasing because incomes are not keeping up with housing costs [2]. Since 2001 incomes have increased 4%, while rents have increased 19%. While severe illness can lead to homelessness, it also works the other way around [3]. There are many homeless families, often headed by women but many are also "intact" families [4]. People of color are also dramatically overrepresented: Black Americans are 13% of the population but 40% of the homeless [5]. It's hard to imagine Black Americans are 3x more likely to have severe mental illness or addiction problems.
I think it's pretty conclusively a housing cost problem. Maybe not entirely, maybe not everywhere, but it does seem like we'd take care of most of the problem in most places by bringing down housing costs.
(n.b. the NIH book source is from 1988, but I found most of its basic findings were corroborated by more recent sources)
[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex....
[2]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[3]: https://community.solutions/research-posts/the-costs-and-har...
[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218239/#ddd00010:~:tex...
[5]: https://endhomelessness.org/resources/sharable-graphics/raci...
Horrible, but despite those increases, there are not rental units going unoccupied in any large number. Cutting prices will not house more people, if all the rentals are already full.
What is supposed to happen is that as rental prices go up, supply is increased to capitalize on it. But that's not happening, in most areas, for various reasons.
The core problem is the curve of population growth versus the curve of housing units. Prices are an consequence of that, not the cause.
Which is to say a family who lost their home and is living with a friend while supportive housing services is getting them accomodations is considered as 'homeless' as the crazy man who sleeps under the bridge and exposed himself to young girls.
Everyone is supportive of the former and by and large this group is helped and gets housed.
The latter... No one needs that
There is a well demonstrated and strong correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates. There are absolutely cases where the root cause is pre-existing mental health issues or substance abuse but it is simply not true to say that housing costs are rarely the problem.
Further, homelessness can cause substance abuse and mental health issues. So even if you can look at somebody today and say "wow that person has a massive addiction to meth and clearly just giving them a roof won't solve everything" this does not mean that the reason they became homeless in the first place was a substance addiction.
Building more housing will not solve all homelessness. Frankly, so what? Almost no problem on the planet is solved by a single thing. It'll solve a substantial portion of homelessness. That's still good.
You might be interested in this podcast Bad Faith: Episode 478 - The Abundance Conspiracy (w/ Sandeep Vaheesan, Isabella Weber, & Aaron Regunberg)
Episode webpage: https://www.patreon.com/posts/130189560
Sometimes the need to overcomplicate is itself irrational.
Why must the solution involve more than that?
https://www.joe.co.uk/news/swiss-city-offers-beggars-one-way...
You border security and permit system kicks out anyone with even a remote chance to become homeless, you're welcome.
But here in California every state law deregulating real estate development has been abused by developers to build more $2M-$3M houses.
This does NOTHING to help homelessness...
hint: its not the fiscal conservatives, billionaires or private equity firms.
Those guys will say, "Hey, thanks for getting these poor folk to vote against their interest. We'll take it from here and proceed to build the luxury buildings that were too annoying to build before instead of those unseemly affordable housing projects."
0 - https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb5.html the 2024 "crime bill".
People living in their cars is a kind of shadow population that is almost impossible to count. I lived in a small-ish town with literally a handful of the type of homelessness we normally think of, yet at least once per month I would see someone getting gas that was clearly living in their car, and this was at a really cheap gas station nowhere near the interstate, so it was locals who knew where to get gas.
Honestly I think sometimes building (compassionate, 21st century) mental health "asylums" and treatment centres would do more to end homelessness.
They cause disproportionate damage to cities and the cause of aiding homeless itself. It's asinine to conflate the two issues and waffle back and forth between "more houses" and nimby name-calling. Neither will help.
We should have 21st century asylums and more houses. I won't accept a false choice, we can do both. (I'd argue we also need subsidized job relocation programs so people don't get stuck in high CoL areas looking for minimum wage jobs. There are very affordable areas to live in USA that want workers, let's make this market more efficient).
Rounding all the homeless up into an asylum is just sweeping the problem under the carpet.
There really aren't many ways to meet halfway - to have living spaces where you can live up to your abilities and have safety nets for the areas where you struggle. We have "halfway houses" to help people re-enter society after crashing, but not much to catch people before they fall.
(We do have some programs that try to help, but they are swamped, or inefficient, either expensive or under-funded, or some combination of those things. )
It is very obvious that the housing availability is a major factor.
Of course, who will pay for it? There's plenty of money but it's all in corporations and shareholders.
And yes, as housing becomes less available, people with mental health issues are among the worst affected.
Republican states like Texas do a significantly better job, as you can see by looking at annual per capita new housing, and lower rental inflation.
There's a growing liberal movement to change this status quo but they're still not that influential beyond rhetorical support from some Dems.
California is a bit embarrassing. We’ll see how the Builder’s Remedy and laws like SB 1123 play out, I suppose.
NIMBYism is an economic issue, not a culture issue. It has far more to do with how much impact the new housing is expected to have on the value of people's property. Or more saliently, the equity they have in the property. If people expect that nearby housing will cut their $500k equity in half, they're likely to petition against it, regardless of whether their governor is a Republican or a Democrat.
NIMBY isn't red or blue, it's just fear and greed.
Lmao
[0]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
> Nashville home prices went up in May 2025, but not by much compared to last year.
> Average sale price $853.8K; median price stayed flat at $613K.
> But here's what's interesting: sellers had to drop their asking prices more than before. The average list price was $1.012 million, but homes actually sold for about $158K less than that...
> More Homes Available for Buyers: Active inventory jumped +29% compared to last year.
> Total inventory (including homes under contract) increased +16%
> Sales Activity Slowing Down -18%
[0]: https://www.nashvillesmls.com/blog/nashville-housing-market-...
Median income goes towards old housing.
And nobody wants to see their real estate property decline in value…
For at least a little while, a massive influx of supply of dwellings entirely eliminated rough sleeping in the UK, mitigating the harshest impacts of homelessness for thousands.
Maybe in the US it is about building houses, but at some point it isn't anymore. I once wrote this here: [0]
Starting a new home construction in a location with falling housing prices isn't an obviously winning business strategy.
Ideally you want the only competition for housing land to be multiple humans wishing to live there. The homogenity of human wants and needs will ensure you don't get ridiculously unpredictable outcomes. You will also benefit from network effects.
However, BlackRocks use for land is completely different. So many things stop mattering when the land is being pieced up and the risk distributed to a million retirement accounts.
Over-financialisation hurts the intended use of scarce resources. Today, no human has the ability to consider it important owning independent personal access to scarce resources such as farmland and water bodies. Similarly, I predict, people will be forced to stop wanting personal housing land. When, is the question.
Will the same happen for housing? Everyone starts out naturally "short" one unit of housing. To gain housing, you can rent or buy it. Buying it puts you "even" in the same way as above: your ownership and your usage is in balance.
I don't see the factor that would cause people to stop wanting personal housing land.
Do you remember that teacher in school who would sometimes lash out at a poorly performing student?
This made me feel like I was watching a frustrated lash out from someone who cares.
Captures the author's feelings; but fails as a piece of persuasion.
[1] according to the communists at the world bank: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Whether we do that by gigantic public housing projects, non-profit coop developments, or markets building housing for profit is almost irrelevant to the point that it's currently effectively illegal to build housing in the vast majority of cities.
We should be looking to Vienna, which has had the most success at keeping urban housing affordable and available. They did so by always building more housing all the time. They're doing basically the opposite of what we do in CA where we fight about which type of housing we should build one or two buildings of. We need to just legalize and fast track housing of all kinds.
When a shiny new 2 bedroom apartment is priced at $4200/month, it isn't going to do ANYTHING to resolve homelessness.
Outlaw AirBnB! Outlaw empty "investment" properties. There are a lot of things that could actually help. Empowering the California real estate mafia won't do anything for anyone here except the developers.
Houses are deteriorating assets that only gain their wealth because of the land value appreciation. If you can just build new housing, there is no reason to hoard the existing housing, because your neighbors might try and capture that value before you can.
Just my observation. Tons of overpriced apartments being built at 2x the price of the average renter.
Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.
Of course, most of those who did own extra homes as an investment rented them out as well, so rental prices here has gone through the roof as landlords and common folk with an extra apartment or two has sold the homes.
As housing stock quality improves, everyone upgrades. Which leaves room at the bottom level to get on the ladder into lower quality cheaper housing.
Also supply and demand: if prices are increasing it is mostly because supply is not keeping up with demand.
Lastly, like all other products in a market, we should see a general improvement in quality, this isn't a bad thing (think how cars how 10x more reliable, comfortable and fuel efficient than they used to be).
It's generally much more illegal to build cheap housing, both in the direct sense that building codes require all new housing to be built to extremely high standards, and the indirect sense that in places without by-right development (which is most desirable cities sadly) your neighbours are going to fight a lot more against cheap houses getting built than they'll fight against expensive houses getting built.
> Housing subsidies will be next. Another attempt to prop up the rampant capitalism by means of socialism.
Already been happening for years.
Where I live the majority of affordable housing has been bought up and turned into investment rentals or vacation rentals. They will leave the houses empty instead of lowering rent.
Current average rental cost is 3x what the average renter makes. More apartments are being built (very cheap, inefficient designs) but the cost is still above what the average renter makes.
Collusion is a bigger issue than new builds.
Just my observations from my area.
And who the hell wants a poor person as a neighbour.
Imprisoning homeless people is not an acceptable solution, because imprisonment costs taxpayer money.
A better solution is to let the market work. If you can't afford the rent for a city, you shouldn't be allowed to be in that city at all, even in a prison cell. People who can't afford to live in an inhabited area should be permitted to camp in the wilderness.
Yes, I know the talking point that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but for the sane homelessness is usually a temporary condition, for the insane it is chronic.
Also, of course nobody wants to live with poor people. I don't buy this romantic image of poor people being fair citizens failed by the rest of the society. I moved into a poor neighborhood and immediately had my bike stolen, literally living the meme. Real estate prices are lower here exactly because it's a black immigrant neighborhood full of poor people.
Reducing the price of rent can prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
Sweetheart, I don’t expect you to pick up a hammer and some nails nevermind build a home.
All to live in a place I'd need to buy a gun for a security.
This is in a small Midwestern city. Someone ran down, but overall maybe only a little worse than other small cities I've lived.
I've been trying to find a place for over a year now. I don't have the credit, but have the income. My gf has the credit but not the income. We're basically pariahs.
At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.
At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.
The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".
Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
Is there a reason that the press is always making scapegoats out of tech nerds? The vast majority of people are not employed in tech, and are part of the same society and have very similar self interests.
Truly tired of everything being a criticism of Silicon Valley, as if everyone else are saints.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/minutes-from-the-latest-...
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/welcome-to-westillwork-t...
What you're seeing is a backlash to this influence, and the fairly disastrous consequences it has usually had.
All these replies missed my point. I’m not saying tech is blameless, rather that the press constantly criticizes tech for both doing too much and doing nothing and not fixing society. I would argue that this is toxic and ignores the agency of literally all other professions/people.
Further, to ignore the housing/etc lobbying by basically everyone else outside of tech and make it seem like SV giants control the housing crisis is just boring. Do note that most of the developed world is facing this, not just specifically SV/USA.
Clearly we're consuming different types of media, because on my estimation tech gets let off fairly light relative to the damage we cause.
As practitioners, we're not entitled to get angry about being criticised for the damage we cause at least until we've stopped it.
The homelessness problem is also visibly the worst it's been in my lifetime.
I'm genuinely doubtful the problem is lack of housing alone. The person curled up under the bridge, the person screaming on the corner, they need more than another apartment they still can't afford added to the world. That doesn't help them.
No matter how many of these luxury apartment buildings you build, these people can't afford the rent. The owners of the buildings would seemingly rather see them sit at quarter occupancy than lower rents, and it's kind of understandable.
We're drowning in unaffordable housing and people are still homeless.
The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unrestricted space to develop a couple miles away in the next town.
It's a tough problem.
i dont even know what it would mean to build a new non-luxury apartment. No one has ever explained this to me. New housing is always lampooned as being shit quality yet luxury at the same time just because it has.... cabinets that arent falling off the walls and a floor that isnt slanted so badly that i roll away from my desk?
When the existing current housing stock is so old and bad you just need to build to bring up the average quality of an apartment. Rich people will go to the new stuff and it brings up the floor of housing quality.
And to say "just build so much that supply > demand and prices will drop" doesn't work, because private developers won't build housing they can't make a tidy profit on.
So yes if you are willing to live in areas :
- without jobs, - without healthcare - in ghost towns
In reality it's always the fault of the politician who refuses to make necessary change because it will hurt their personal career. This entire article reeks of christian self flagellation.
Massachusetts passed a law mandating upzoning in communities well served by public transit:
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/multi-family-zoning-requir...
And town voters in certain communities have instead consistently voted down plans to move into compliance, and instead choose to endlessly sue the state to delay it:
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/03/27/timeline-t...
These voters aren’t hypothetical scapegoats - they’re real.
Most of the people being ridiculed are not homeowners looking down their nose at the homeless, they are basically renting from the banks and chained to mortgages. They will become homeless themselves if the value of housing drops too far from what they borrowed.
It will also have ripple effects in the form of banks going under, retirement funds being depleted, and the economy as a whole tanking. If homes become cheaper too quickly the result will be a lot more homeless, not fewer.
In short, there are very valid non-selfish reasons why people, corporations and politicians don't want to make homes lose value too quickly. It's not malice against the homeless.
This is a systematic problem in many western nations and it doesn't have a simple solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods
Now, if the risk was assessed reasonable, the risk would be priced into the housing in those regions and industrial activities in these regions. Austria, germany and some other regions would see significant drops in value. Same goes for florida and california, with forrest fires and hurricanes. The market can not be rational, if your lifelihood and pension depends on it.
1. They never had a home before so they kept living like that
2. They had a home before but then they couldn't afford it (or whatever other reason)
I doubt we have a lot of case 1 (born without a home). For case 2, I doubt building more homes work, because if you are homeless, that not only means that you can't afford buying a home, but you cannot afford renting one as well, and you are most likely jobless. I doubt building more homes are going to solve the issues. For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness.
This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building houses reduces homelessness, increases supply for everyone, and lowers housing costs for everyone. It has no economic downsides, and significant personal upsides for everyone (cheaper housing and more options for you, dear reader).
[0]: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ (taken from elsewhere in this thread) [1]: https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314...
Cheaper housing helps prevent this.
It's not always all or nothing - sometimes you might be able to afford rent if rent were cheaper.
> For case 2 you need more social housing and other support.
"Build more homes" includes social aka public aka "affordable housing".
Of you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.
The problem is lack of a working welfare infrastructure. People become homeless because they're unlucky and once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up.. it's a failure of state at so many levels. Real estate development is the least of them
> Sry lack of new houses seems doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness. If you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.
This would only make sense if the smaller houses were reasonably priced as opposed to the bigger ones. This is not the case.
And creating more housing would absolutely be a step in the right direction in terms of reducing extreme housing prices. Unless you don't believe in demand and supply economics, that is.
> Once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up
Yes but that's partly because they can't afford to rent even basic lodging, let alone afford to buy one, and a basic roof over one's head is a pivotal basic need for most things one needs to do in life.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t also need things like better support and easily-accessible government healthcare, but we have to recognize that these things are all connected. Salt Lake City somewhat famously found immediately housing people helps with mental/substance abuse issues simply because all of the other problems in life are more approachable when you’re not sleeping on the street, missing appointments, and having your essentials stolen.
Still, I sincerely believe more people would choose to be homeless if they tried it, because there is nothing inherently bad in living in a tent if the climate allows it. It's just like tourism but with more amenities available due to urban infra + the stigma (that people mostly learned to ignore due to cultural conditioning of the 70s-today period).
Do you know this first hand? Have you tried it?