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It is right, but wrong. The problem is more about where homeless people want to live, which is in premium areas. Look at where your typical homeless encampment is, then ask yourself, "if there was a studio apartment in this location, what would rent be?" The answer is always "astronomical." Most US cities actually have lower population now than in 1950, yet they still have homeless people, along with lots of unused housing stock. How can this be? Because that housing is not in the urban core, instead they are abandoned, formerly working class, neighborhoods who's sons and daughters moved to the suburbs, and the people moved to Florida/died. Why don't the homeless live there? The housing is already there. It is cheap/free, it had plumbing at one point, and could get it again, etc. They don't live there because those neighborhoods are for relatively hard working people who are willing to do a 20 minute commute on a bus/rail. Which the homeless are not.
Yes. There are some cities that dont fit the trend, but the midwestern cities in question have the same problem, just less of it. Homeless people in all cities occupy prime real estate. Even if SF had a bunch of cheap housing, the homeless people would not leave their current positions for it. Cheap housing, will be, by definition (almost), be away from the fun stuff where lots of people congregate. Homeless people want to be where the non-homeless people are.
My contention is that you would get a bit cheaper housing, but it wouldn't change the homeless situation much, if at all. Midwest cities have less homeless because they don't accommodate them as much. In Chicago, I've seen a massive increase in homelessness in the urban core in the last 5 years. The only thing that has changed is they are more accommodated by CPD and the powers that be.
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There's not enough density in those cheaper areas to survive as a homeless person. Less traffic to beg at, fewer dumpsters to go through, fewer bikes to steal.
A bit uncharitable, but I think there is some truth to this, which is why housing doesn't fix the problem. Only raw force can fix the problem.
If you live in eastern Europe, you observe the threat of 'raw force' in action regularly.
City I live in has a modest (~1500 m^2) underpass with a little shopping downtown. A fifth of the time I pass through there I see the cops giving a talking to some crusty looking homeless types. You almost never see any homeless camping out in the underpass being loud & smelly & visually offensive. (a lot of them seem to have piercings, studded clothing or wear leather shit)
Haven't seen them actually beating anyone but Czech beat cops go around dressed in a very militarised fashion and they will happily use force if talking doesn't work.
And if the beat cops aren't up to the task, every city police department maintains a riot company of feisty young cops who relish the odd chance of getting into a serious fight with a band of football hooligans.
pictured: on the left, state police cop, on the right a municipal police officer from the covid era. Town cops are the lowest, least respected, paid and qualified form of cop life. (you should see what people say about them on police forums,lol). About 66% of applicants to state police force are disqualified on personality grounds.
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Such neighborhoods basically do not exist in California.
It should in San Fransico. The city's population is less than in 1950. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/population
LA is probably its own beast. But it still holds that the homeless encampments in LA are, mostly, on extremely valuable land. And my suspicion is that if you built a bunch of row houses in Crenshaw that you would not solve the camp situation.
Many camps are on valuable land, no doubt about it ( although some are on sidewalks where you can't build anything and others are under freeway overpasses). Nevertheless, there are no depopulated working class neighborhoods in California, or at least I've never seen any in all my travels through the state.
I've seen people saying this and I guess it is plausible because California has grown so much since the 60s compared to other places with Democrat-dominated metros. There is probably places to put housing in the central valley and the like though. But no one would use it.
The central valley is largely farmland. There are big cities there (Fresno, Bakersfield) and houses are cheaper there but still roughly 400k. There's no empty neighborhoods and those towns are truly shitholes - which goes to show how much demand there is.
Houses in Fresno or in the sticks in the CV?
In Fresno. The sticks in the CV is almond farms.
Yeah! But it could be housing for the homeless! Save water and fix the tents.
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Your source is re the SF Metro Area, not the city of SF. And it says that the metro pop was 1.8 million in 1950 and 3.3 million today. As for the city itself, per the Census Bureau, the pop was 775K in 1950 and 875K in 2020.
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How can that be? California clearly had vast manufacturing in the midcentury. Where’d the people in this picture live?
At some point, there had to be working-class housing. Unless it was absorbed into Los Angeles sprawl and gentrified, or demolished, it ought to be there somewhere.
They lived in most of the neighborhoods in south-central LA - Inglewood, Hawthorne, South Gate, Bell, Compton, North Long Beach, etc. After the 60's riots most of these areas became heavily black, and now, after a lot of really nasty, but largely unreported interethnic conflict, they are mostly (with a few exceptions) latino.
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In that picture? In Inglewood I guess. Population 100k, median home price 700K.
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California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.
This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.
That’s crazy. I didn’t realize how much it has grown. And more people per unit, when CA cities are known today for squeezing people in?
I wonder how many of those midcentury workers were agricultural. Oversupplied in Steinbeck’s time, their market value seems unlikely to have gone up as they compete with automation and immigrant labor. Combine that with a tripling or more of population…
A lot of the gateway cities which are now completely indistinguishable from any other part of the generic LA sprawl - Norwalk, Artesia, Cerritos, Cypress - which connect LA to Orange County were unincorporated farmlands as recently as the mid 50's. That's to say nothing of the further reaches of the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. That was all agricultural or undeveloped as recently as the 70's.
Also a lot of the housing stock in heavily-immigrant communities is oversubscribed; lots of people try to save on housing expenses by cramming multiple families or large numbers of young men together into a 2- or 3-bedroom house or condo, sleeping in shifts or otherwise living cheek-by-jowl in time-honored tenement-immigrant style.
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TFR rears its head here- a very large percentage of the fifties population were children, who in the fifties shared rooms and didn't expect personal space, thus creating very little demand for housing. Today san fran has almost all adults, most of them single, who generate much more per capita demand for space and housing.
Not following how this is a fertility problem, rather than a general "more people" problem. If anything, don't kids increase (the parents') demand for space? That's one of the textbook motivations for the development of suburbs.
I read it more as that pure headcounts suffer from a lack of comparability if the age distribution is very different. For extreme examples, a family of 5 with 2 parents and 3 kids will use a lot less space than 5 single working age adults that have their own flat each, especially if they live in the same area.
Sure. I suppose I'm coming at it from the employment side. The statistic of interest isn't housing demand per capita. It's housing demand per filled job.
Suppose Bay Area industry has X available jobs. If all adults are single workers, you need X people. But what if each job comes with several nonworkers? In the extreme 50s scenario, you'd have X working men plus X housewives plus 3X children. These households will generate less housing demand than 5 working adults--but more than 1 working adult would on his own.
Obviously, you wouldn't really get 5X the population. The breadwinner supporting a family is not going to work for the same wage as a lone adult. You'd get 5Y, Y < X, as the labor supply curve is further to the left.
Point is, I'm not trying to compare direct headcounts. I think the adult population expands to fill all available jobs. If they're all single, they will demand more housing per capita than a family of five, but less than five breadwinners (and their families). Thus, housing demand per filled job is probably going to be larger when the workers have extra mouths to feed.
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