West Coast baby
Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can’t really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I’m not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I don’t understand how you’re gonna have a good sense of community when you share 1sq mile with millions of others in a large city. What percentage of people can you even engage in friendly banter with? The community we have in our modest sized town is so amazing, my wife and I talk about how grateful we are to live here.
Our kids can walk to a dozen different houses where they can play. We are close enough with all those families that we could drop the kids with any of them if we needed to. There are tons of parks and great recreational sports activities to be outside.
I do respect others who choose to live all crammed on top of each other. I love the culture that big cities offer. I just couldn’t live there, it’s too impersonal.
The community would be those who you see at the same café or whatever. Ideally places would have some kind of board or system for people to organize activities. These could be political or just something fun, like a board game night or other things.
As for the kid thing, in many cities the kids will commute to school or other places on their own. We’ve created a system where that’s unsafe in almost all locations in the US, but it isn’t required. We have a society of helicopter parents, partially out of necessity because kids can’t get anywhere on their own.
People don’t really connect outside of echo chambers and then claim they believe in voter fraud because they encountered a different-looking persin at the polls…
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I doubt it.
Housing is expensive near city centers partly because that’s where people want to live. Even if I could 100% WFH I wouldn’t move out of the city to save money. But I suppose that doesn’t apply to everyone.
I understand what’s trying to be said here but I’d pass on that.
I’ve lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can’t hear what my neighbors are saying, don’t need to pay for laundry, don’t need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don’t have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I’m not going back to an apartment.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it’s not required.
Based on what this meme is proposing, I can smell the urine in the elevators from here.
I think the kids are deluded and have no idea what they’re missing. Density is hell. Single family homes are expensive because the vast majority of people don’t want to spend the rest of their lives living in apartments.
They will figure it out when they get about to mid-30s in age
Maybe 40s-50s for some of them. Maybe never for others, but I think the only way they can idealize apartment living is lack of life experience. City living is hip and fun for young people but it gets old. Maybe we’re dealing with extreme extroverts who can’t bear the quiet of a green suburb, and having private space in a personal vehicle instead of being crammed on the bus or train with the general public.
Yup, it’s impossible that people have different preferences and experiences than you.
Maybe I’d be less vocal about it if there wasn’t a loud minority of people - I suspect mostly born after 1990 - who have these opinions largely as a result of lack of other experience. Maybe I’d be less pissed off about it if they stopped moving from huge cities to small ones and fucking up the cost of everything whilst trying to convert everywhere to NYC and Amsterdam.
I’m sick of the Zennial/euro anti-car, ultra pro-urban densification, unopposed bandwagoning online, and I feel compelled to speak up about it.
It sounds a lot like Soviet communist block living to me, yuck
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Exactly. My main reasons why I want a home instead of an apartment is the lack of space, the need to have some private space outside (i.e. a courtyard) and privacy. A lower density apartment building that has all these things could be built, but it would probably be a luxury apartment that would cost an obscene amount of money.
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I can’t hear my neighbors, don’t need an elevator, and don’t need a garage because I don’t need a car. I don’t have a back yard but I’m pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
Other than SF. Where do you live in CA that doesn’t require you to need a car?
I know you can make due. I lived without one for a long time, but it was a the biggest pain the ass not having one. Unless I only wanted to stay in my little local bubble.
Maybe I didn’t read carefully. I live in New York, so I can’t speak to California really.
You (or whoever) can opt to live in a cute neighborhood, I would. But you cannot opt to live in a cute neighborhood in the middle of a massive city. I think that’s the key piece here.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it’s just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother’s apartment I can hear his neighbor’s coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit’s got tissues for walls I swear.
You could meet all of your apartment complaints with some decently designed medium density projects. I agree though that not everyone needs to live in a towering skyscraper
Good for you since you can afford it. Most people cannot. Which means you would still have your house in the suburbs somewhere, but all of these problems would be solved.
You assume I make a lot of money. I don’t.
No, I assume you can afford it. There is a huge difference. Other people can’t afford what you have.
You are still paying for laundry. As a homeowner the full cost of replacing and maintaining the machines is on you. You also have to pay for the electricty and the water usage.
So what? This is standard and it’s perfectly acceptable for the average homeowner. It sucks a million times worse to have to go to a laundromat, I’ve been there and done that.
Having to share on-site laundry facilities with other residents is bad enough (especially with the BRAND NEW machines breaking down all the time). If I had to go hang out at a laundromat every couple weeks for hours, I’d be even more depressed…
I used to just put in mine and leave. Nobody stole my clothes that I know of but I’m sure it happens on occasion.
Probably depends how busy it is and the area. But yeah knowing my luck, my clothes would get thrown on the floor or something if I didn’t stay to watch it.
Question from a European: Why does living in an apartment mean you have to go to a laundromat? Do apartments in the US not have washing machines?
It’s a mix of some that do and some that don’t. Many apartment dwellers have a coin-operated laundry facility on the premises of the complex or nearby that they use if they don’t have washing machines in their apt.
I think you’re making the common mistake of thinking that advocating for dense, mixed use housing means YOU can’t have a single-story home. In reality, rezoning for this kind of thing makes your preferred kind of living much more attainable.
Think of it like this. You take a giant suburb of repeating box homes. Take what is a dozen homes next to the highway, and build a couple of four and five story apartments with bars and restaurants and a few grocery stores and hair salons on the first level. Now you’ve made a nice little main street. Put a little office space on the second levels, and suddenly there’s less congestion coming and going every morning and evening, since folks don’t need to take the highway to get to work. Shrink the highway to make room for a bus lane, and add a separated bike lane and nature trail to connect your little main street to the next one a few miles away, and eventually the next major metropolitan area.
The next thing you know, folks like you are still live just fine in your classic American home, but now you have places to shop within walking distance. You’ve got somewhere for your kids to move out to that won’t put them a plane ride away from home. And you’ve got less competition for land. This means that you can get a bigger backyard for the same price, and if your kids want to come back one day to start a family, there are affordable starter homes and condos.
Keep it up, and next thing you know, you can commute to the office without driving and kids can walk themselves to school. You see what I’m saying? You don’t have to live in the apartments to get a lot of benefits.
Based and freedom pilled
YEP. Same here. It’s a world of difference, having room to do whatever you want in peace and privacy.
When I lived in apartments back in the 2000s I couldn’t even leave anything of value on my porch or doorstep without fear of it being stolen. My girlfriend’s bike was stolen from the 2nd floor where it was parked right in front of our apartment door. At my apartment before that a drunk stole a wooden pallet that I had on the porch. They stole fucking wood!
But out here at my rural home, I have land and a garden and we can leave our cars unlocked and bikes or whatever outdoors and nobody messes with it.
So y’all can keep all that urban density and I will stay far away from it most of the time.
Shut your trap and get back to your pod!🔫
Could easily fix “LISA” in the last panel to “USA”, and remove California from the first panel, and boom, you got a meme for the whole country
Yeah, right synae, A single, relevant meme.
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Yeah it won’t really solve it in a single city though. NYC has tons and tons of dense urban housing but still insane housing prices.
…and insane traffic.
…and homelessness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
Population density in NYC ranges from 8.6k people/sqmi to 74k people/sqmi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area
San Fransisco manages 1.1k people/sqmi on average with a San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA Combined Statistical Area density of 953 person/sqmi density.
The insane traffic in New York is easily avoidable if you’re traveling to points on the subway line. If you’re trying to take the Bay Shore ferry to Ocean Beach, you’re going to have a bit of trouble getting from the LIRR to the port, because they never bothered to build a connecting route. But that’s more a feature than a bug - Fire Island is made deliberately inaccessible as an enclave to the New York elites. Getting into and out of JFK and La Guardia airports is, similarly, nightmarish by design (or lack there of). Modern NYC city planners hate you for using any kind of public transit. But I can walk out my front door on 17th street Manhattan at 8am, amble over to the Amtrak, and be in DC by lunch. No other part of the country is like that.
Similarly, if you make it out to the Bronx or the north side of Manhattan (where they’re having all the nasty flooding because nobody invested in proper build up / drainage up there) you can find some pretty cheap housing. Used to be you could find cheap housing all over Brooklyn and Staten Island too, but… it all got developed into “luxury” spaces with more sqft units for a smaller, wealthier group of people.
But to say SF has the same problems as NYC is wildly inaccurate. NYC simply could not exist under the conditions LA and SF have been developed. We’re not just talking “bad traffic” but “not enough physical real estate to store that many cars”. We’re not just talking about homelessness but “physically not enough space for this many people”.
NYC would look more like Connecticut or Rhode Island under the SF development model. Even suburban New Jersey manages higher density rates. At that scale, you’re not “solving” homelessness. You’re just defining it away by denying people the physical space to exist inside the city limits.
The meme presents dense development as a panacea, and it absolutely isn’t. At the end of the day, more units at the same price point won’t solve homelessness and more rail absent sufficient stations/operating hours can’t serve the same public (as NYers are struggling to come to terms with). But the number of people who can and do live reasonably comfortably in NYC at a lower price point vastly outstrips the peers in California. And, as a consequence, the kind of problems NYC suffers from boil down to maintaining a heavily utilized urban environment rather than building one over the suburban sprawl that chokes off development at every turn.
Two totally different problems.
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Not as much as you think. Here’s some trivia for you: which urban area is more densely populated, NYC or LA?
The answer is actually LA. Everyone imagines Manhattan or Brooklyn when they think of NYC but actually a huge part of the city in an economic and cultural sense consists of low density suburbs, enough so that it brings the average below famously sprawling LA. Allowing more density in these neighborhoods would likely help reduce the cost in the core of the city. Some neighborhoods might remain expensive—if you’re competing with investment bankers who will pay any price to be in walking distance of Wall St, adding more housing in other boroughs or satellite communities won’t help with that. But it could make a dramatic difference on overall cost of living in NYC. It’s only expensive because way more people want to live in a relatively small urban core than can fit there.
The same solutions can solve or greatly mitigate these problems in virtually every American city. This is because even large, older cities that predate the horrific car-centric development of the post-war era are surrounded by huge swathes of this type of development.
I’m not american and have never even been there but doesn’t New York city have the same problems? And AFAIK NYC is very vertical.
NYC doesn’t have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
But NYC is also an extremely expensive place to live, and built vertically due to a lack of space for outward expansion.
Might also be good to point out that NYC has a lot more commercial office and high-end condo development than high-density housing.
But that also has a lot to do with how expensive land is, which is mostly due to it being land-locked as mentioned.
This is anecdotal from browsing vagabond sources, but there’s a lot of reasons NYC might have fewer homeless.
A) The pigs and rules on the east coast are a lot more brutal towards the homeless than the west coast. This both leads to migration away from the east coast and for the homeless that are there to be much more invisible.
B) The west coast has a history of being relatively welcoming to the houseless / a lot of lore built up around it, so people tend to gravitate towards it.
C) The west coast has a much more survivable climate than the east coast - this is the reason I hear the most.
As a local, I’ll add what I think are more meaningful differences.
First, most homeless people in CA are locals who were forced out, not interstate homeless migrants looking for a good place to be homeless.
The main reason is that CA doesn’t have nearly as many temporary shelters for people to go to. And as you noted, it’s more survivable to live outdoors.
Overall, NYC still has a pretty big population of folks in shelters, but CA has way more folks living in cars, trailers, and tents.
Yeah there was a whole purge policy Giuliani set up.
Funny how those rules never went away under Dem control.
Not sure how you’re defining “bad,” but NYC has an estimated 100k homeless while LA has an estimated 46k.
https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/#:~:text=In a city of more,one of the other boroughs.
Hm, that article is putting LA at about 75k homeless.
NYC also has more than twice the total population of LA. So homed to homeless ratio is a lot worse in LA
The article says that Los Angeles county has 75k and the city has 46k. As for population, NYC has a population of 8.8 million and LA city has a population of 3.8 million. This means that NYC has a homeless population percentage of 11.3% and LA has a homeless population percentage of 11.9%.
It’s probably a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, NYC is split into the five boroughs each of which is its own county. Some of the boroughs seem to have radically different homeless situations, some being as low as 1000 homeless persons. LA (city) on the other hand is approximately 45% the population of NYC and doesn’t take up it’s entire county, but has nearly the same homeless rate.
At the same time Los Angeles seems to run into other towns and be nearly seamless with them. Should Anaheim get lumped in with LA? If we’re counting those should we expand NYCs area to include Yonkers and Newark?
NYC doesn’t have as bad of a homeless issue as LA.
Because you’ll literally die the very first winter night you’re homeless without shelter in NYC. They have a bunch of shelters, so the problem is less visible, and when they run out of space they bus them to L.A… Those that remain are found frozen to death in the morning.
NYC also has a roughly equivalent homeless population to LA, but LA has less than half the population than NYC.
Being a NYC native, I can agree that if the situation definitely is not visible. But considering the population differences, I’d say it’s not as bad in NYC.
In addition to the other replies, it can also matter where in NYC you’re talking about
https://metropolismoving.com/blog/housing-costs-nyc/
Bronx has a median rent to income ratio of 45%, while Manhattan is 30%. This is primarily due to the fact that median income for Manhattan renters is double what it is in the Bronx, but rent doesn’t scale up the same. Against my own expectation, this makes Manhattan a reasonable-ish place to live, at least if we’re just talking about rent and income.
The only thing I don’t see is how it would fix people being homeless. Many homeless are unable to be properly housed because they have mental illnesses, trauma, etc. If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment. You can’t solve their problems with just providing housing.
There’s multiple groups of homeless people.
There’s the long term homeless, who often suffer from issues like mental illness, and short term homeless, who usually don’t.
High housing prices absolutely causes people to become homeless when they lose their job, become addicted to drugs, etc.
Being homeless is itself traumatic, and exacerbates most issues homeless people have. Affordable housing and giving homeless people an apartment aren’t a panacea, but it does prevent a ton of issues for newly homeless people.
I don’t know if they’re included in the groups you mentioned, but there is also a vehicle dwelling homeless as well. Last I checked, there are over 3 million Americans living full time in a vehicle, whether it be a car, a bus, a van, an RV, or another type of vehicle. Some of them, it’s by choice, but for some of them, that’s all they can afford because housing prices have skyrocketed in so many places.
I don’t see how or where I said I am against giving people homes.
when you said…
The only thing I don’t see is how it would fix people being homeless.
Many homeless are unable to be properly housed because they have mental illnesses, trauma, etc.
If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment.
You can’t solve their problems with just providing housing.
That says to me, four times, that you are against giving people homes. Could you clarify how each of those points is a positive?
Literally none of this says: don’t give people a home. My point is giving them a home is not enough, it won’t solve the problem.
Is this a weird English language thing? Is this a Lemmy or an internet thing? People seem to deliberately put stuff into posts that aren’t said.
It’s even in the text you quoted from me that my opinion is just giving them housing won’t solve the problem.
How the fuck does that say “don’t give them a home”???
I think the missing context is that when you write with majority negative phrasing, people assume your argument is against it.
Consider: “You have to cover apples in sugar and put them in pastry, and then add custard to make me want to consider eating them!”
This sounds like you hate apples, not that you like apple pie.
I thought the situation was more like: “If you got apples you can make an apple pie”. And I was: “No, just apples make a bad pie, you also need the other ingredients”. And then people wrote: “How dare you hating apple pie!”
Are you familiar with the “Housing first” model? It posits that even for people who need medical or living assistance, having shelter, a bed, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a permanent address will allow them and whoever is providing support to deal with compounding factors and receive regular visits, Conversely, attempts to treat something like dementia or substance abuse on the street are next to impossible.
Yes I know. And all housing projects I know about pre-select the people they give a home to, often only take in those who are already in the welfare system and all these projects offer extensive additional help.
I feel like some people deliberately interpret stuff into my post just so that they can get angry (not you but, I got some really angry messages).
So to make it extra clear: Giving people a home is great! There definitely should be a home for everyone, it’s a human right!
But just giving people a home will not solve the problem with homeless! Putting people with severe mental illnesses, debt, etc. simply into a home does not work.
If someone’s a jerk, don’t forget that there’s a “report” button for a reason.
A big issue with different social workers and such trying to reach and help homeless people is trying to find them. If they have a fixed address, you know where they will likely be. This makes services to take them to doctor appointments, get them welfare cheques, disability service notifications etc. all become reliable.
I don’t think it’s fair to paint homelessness as an urban planning issue just because housing is a part of the solution to both problems.
is that truly the case, or just a pervasive urban legend?
which studies support this theory?
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not that I don’t believe you, but the reason I asked for studies/sources is I expect to be flooded with stories about how people knows someone who knows someone who knows someone where it didn’t work once or twice (respectfully, this is what your story boils down to), and I hope you won’t be insulted if I can’t consider that a good representation of a much-maligned part of society.
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the study you mentioned, but refused to link to, or quote, agrees with me and not yourself, I quote:
a longitudinal study in London and three provincial English cities of resettlement outcomes over 18 months for 400 single homeless people. A high rate of tenancy sustain- ment was achieved: after 15/18 months, 78% were still in the original tenancy, 7% had moved to another tenancy, and 15% no longer had a tenancy. The use of temporary accommodation prior to being resettled and the duration of stay had a strong influence on tenancy sustainment. People who had been in hostels or temporary supported housing for more than 12 months immediately before being resettled, and those who had been in the last project more than six months, were more likely to have retained a tenancy than those who had had short stays and/or slept rough intermit- tently during the 12 months before resettlement. The findings are consistent with the proposition that the current policy priority in England for shorter stays in temporar y accommodation will lead to poorer resettlement outcomes, more returns to homelessness, and a net increase in expenditure on homelessness services.
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you buried the “extensive further help” clause a little, and your use of “extensive” makes it sound onerous, which is why I responded assuming you were dead against it.
If you had said something like “While I agree housing can help, but there does need to be some support as well” - I probably would’ve taken it differently.
You are right that I could have been more generous in interpreting your use of the word “extensive” as negative.
I think between their argument and your own, yours is the one in more need of citation. Which is more likely, that giving a house to everyone will solve homelessness or that some people have problems beyond just being homeless? He’s not saying that it wouldn’t help some people, he’s just saying that there would still be some number of people who need help beyond this.
I mean, to me, “if someone gives them a house they won’t be homeless” makes way more common-sense than “if you give someone a house they will not live in it”
but asked and answered:
- https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-experiencing-homelessness-housing-has-positive-impacts
- https://www.vox.com/2014/5/30/5764096/homeless-shelter-housing-help-solutions
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36092852
- https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418546/study-finds-permanent-supportive-housing-effective-highest-risk-chronically
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/27/canada-study-homelessness-money
- https://phys.org/news/2017-03-housing-homeless-cheaper-society.html
- https://endhomelessness.org/resource/ending-chronic-homelessness-saves-taxpayers-money-2/
- https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/09/americas/direct-giving-homeless-people-vancouver-trnd/index.html
edit to say: I want to get ahead of “gotchas!” like “it doesn’t solve this problem of this one guy my mate’s Da’s landlord’s daughter heard about through a crack in the wall about a homeless guy who set fire to his free housing!” as you can’t legislate or plan for one whackjob who may not even exist.
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It’s not a gish gallop, it’s a demonstration of a wide range of applications and environments has a net positive impact.
My original question was “which studies…?” (note plural) which sets the context for a reply with multiple sources
If you demand that anyone produces one, single study that solves the problem: impossible, regardless of topic, field and context. Nothing is provable by that standard.
Secondly, that one CNN article mentions that it was on a subset of people does not destroy the entire premise.
I am still waiting on counterexample studies, if you think providing several is beyond a reasonable ask, two would be acceptable.
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We’re not talking about beggars we’re talking about the homeless. it’s ironic to change topic while accusing me of logical fallacies.
I’m sorry you’re not interested in how these ideas have actually been implemented and the level of success they show, but to me that’s the only interesting part. It’s all well and good saying “this solution will/won’t work” but it’s, to me at least, only the testing that matters.
As I just asked someone else: do you really believe that a single failure in a system means the whole thing isn’t worth it? the example I used above is penicillin. As at least one person is allergic, and at least one person experiences no effect: does that mean that penicillin is considered ineffectual to bacterial infections? That seems silly to me, which is why I ask what your threshold for success is here.
You: you need to provide sources
Also you: I’m right, I don’t need sources, you’re moving the goalposts, ignore the fact that I have moved the goalposts.
Fuck you, and your bad faith bullshit.
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Well, I asserted my opinion, asked for a counterexample, wasn’t provided with any, was challenged to provide sources for my argument, did. In context I think its a reasonable response.
I am have yet to be linked to a single, non-hearsay argument.
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ok here’s my argument: most homeless people aren’t like you describe, these kinds of programs benefit the vast majority and the tolerance of failure lies within expected bounds to believe the program is an overwhelming success (as evinced by the links above).
Although I fail to see how that couldn’t have just been taken as read by any sensible reader.
You don’t know how peer reviewed science works, and aren’t worth talking to.
The fact that you think that providing housing doesn’t work, when we have multiple countries worldwide that prove it does, just goes to show that you are a selfish bigot that doesn’t want to solve the problem.
giving a house to everyone will solve homelessness
Pretty much yeah. This is what Finland did.
No it did not. Finland helped about half of the homeless people. And that’s a very generous estimate because it’s only those homeless people who are actually accounted for.
This is because they only select those who can be housed and are already part of the welfare system. It’s also not just putting people in an apartment. There is still a lot of drug and debt counseling and mental help provided in the background.
And that’s for the model country for the housing first approach.
Homelessness in Finland is bit different to most countries. You are counted as homeless even if you are living at friend’s place or in an institution.
There are only around 300 actual homeless people. Everyone is given a place to sleep and live at.
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No, there aren’t statistics about these people. Just experiences and the experiences of others who work with them.
Many homeless people refuse to take up help like housing because they do not want to cooperate with helper organisations. And they also don’t want to get interviewed: https://idw-online.de/de/news765112
We don’t even really know how many there are because there are no reliable statistics. How would you count them anyway?
All housing first projects pre-select the people they give a home to. The reason is clear. They don’t have homes for everyone, so they take those which will give the best results. In Berlin, Germany they literally have to write applications for the project: https://www.berlin.de/sen/soziales/besondere-lebenssituationen/wohnungslose/wohnen/housing-first-1293115.php
https://housingfirst.berlin/aufnahme
And they need to already be in the welfare system!
The same goes for Finland, which is the model country for a housing first approach. Putting people who already are in the welfare system in homes with help offers has the best results. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol22num2/ch4.pdf
Best results means it works for about half of homeless people.
For the other half, they need a step-by-step approach to have them able living in a home again (or for the first time in a long time). You can’t just put them in an apartment with an address for counseling and that will work out.
Source: you can read about that in the PDF above, for example. Or any other study about the homeless which usually mentions at least the many who fall through the cracks.
These are migrants without refugee status and people with severe drug and alcohol abuse issues or other mental illness. It won’t work to “put them out of sight out of mind”.
Homeless people aren’t a homogeneous group of people. And while it works for some, housing first is not the solution. Because it leaves an estimated half of them behind. It also omits that there a still a lot of help going on in the background. It’s not just give them a home and that magically solves all their problems. Far from it …
Even if it has issues, housing first solves far more problems than any other solution. If you are so opposed to housing first initiatives, then propose an alternative solution that will work better.
I’m waiting.
You can’t.
Why do you think I am against housing first? I never said that I am against that. I said it does not solve homelessness. You need additional systems in place to solve it.
I’m on mobile and can’t read German, I’ll have to wait until later to run those articles through a translator to see what they’re getting at.
But I do wonder about you saying we can only halve homelessness instantly, and the next quarter needs some help, and the next 10% needs a lot of help and after that things get more diffocult: that means it doesn’t work and isn’t worth trying at all
Wouldn’t halving homelessness be pretty damn successful?
Of course it is great but it won’t solve homelessness. Which is what the image suggests. And obviously it doesn’t.
What’s your tolerance threshold for a solution? One source I quoted elsewhere said it would solve up to 75% of homelessness.
People are allergic or immune to penicillin, that doesn’t mean that its not a solution to bacterial infections.
If someone said “Penicillin solves bacterial infections” I would also say this is not true. There are bacterial infections which can’t be cured by penicillin and some people can’t take it at all.
Understood. How should one phrase a vast majority success with a tolerance of a minority of failures in casual conversations?
You can’t solve all their problems with just providing housing, but it would some.
One thing I think people fail to see often when considering programs like this is the generational effect. A program to provide people housing might be considered a failure to some people because many may still choose to do drugs, will ruin their apartment, be violent to their neighbors, etc., some honestly valid concerns. But consider the shockwave 60 years down the line, for the next generations.
Homelessness and drug abuse are generational. Think of a person who would have been homeless who has a child. Was mentally ill and didn’t take very good of the apartment, but not enough to not raise the child. Despite this, that child now has astronomically better chances at a decent life than if they had been raised on the streets or put into foster care just because they had housing and stability
You continue generation after generation, and though many people will be considered “failures” of programs like this, the rate of them continues to decrease because the success stories are now out of the system, out of the cycle.
The problem is half measures, which is what we have today. Bandaid fixes that don’t get to the root of the issues homeless people deal with, keeping them in the cycle but doing… Something? So they can say look we care…
This assumes you kick them out after putting them into it.
No, you need to provide additional help to keep homeless people off the street. I only have experience with homeless in Germany, though. The reasons for homelessness can be different depending on the country.
I don’t understand how the high density housing solves traffic. In lieu of an additional solution (public transit) I think it would make traffic worse.
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The argument seems to be: high density housing would naturally result in public transit infrastructure. I don’t think that line of reasoning makes sense, it’s certainly not an obvious inevitability that public transit will always, naturally appear.
With density and admitily mixed development, it is pretty simple to live within walking distance of everything around you. A car just needs much more space then a pedestrian and you do not park your body at the site of the street. Other then that the key to good public transport is high frequency. So for a transit connection the more people want to travel the route, the more high frequency makes sense.
The only reason not to build public transport is not having the density to support it…
Public transit works perfectly fine in a low-density situation. Your urban planning needs to accommodate it, though, with walkability being a prime concern.
A car-centric city will never mesh well with public transit no matter how dense it is. The best you can hope for is good subway coverage but that’s expensive and can’t be done everywhere. Nobody wants to take the bus if they feel they have no safe route to the bus stop.
But if everything is opened up with proper sidewalks and bike lanes and maybe tram tracks, if street lights prioritize pedestrians over cars, if walking to the nearest convenient stop feels safe and effortless even if it’s two miles away – then you get public transit that actually works.
It’s not terribly difficult. But your urban planning can’t be car-centric or you’re getting nowhere.
I think when a lot of people say high density, they don’t mean 100floor residential buildings are all the housing, but tend to think of something more akin to densely packed midrise buildings and green spaces. If you have the later, there simply is not space for cars and high density. Large universities come to mind, where there may be 50k people using 1-2sq mile while 5+ story buildings are rare. You would have to walk a mile or two to get to a car to drive 6 miles around to the other side of campus at 5mph to walk a mile or two to get to you class 1000ft away from your starting point if they were car centric.
You don’t even need public transit at that level of density but it’s an option.
I agree with everything except your first point. It doesn’t work at all in a low density setting, to the point that low density areas are always subsidized by high density areas. Low density needs to start paying their taxes and stop relying on the urban centers to build their infrastructure.
You can’t have efficient public transport with low density housing. Also high density housing makes it easier to have things like supermarkets within walking distance of everyone.
It doesn’t solve it, but I can see how it would help to solve it. If everyone lives in super low density suburban neighborhoods, public transportation doesn’t make any sense. You can’t build a train station that would realistically serve a dozen people tops.
Higher density makes public transportation a viable option, which in turn reduces traffic and pollution.
Also high density mixed used means you don’t need the car every time you need to go grocery shopping, or to a bar or even to a park. You can go by foot
How do you get all your groceries on foot? Do people buy personal handcarts or something? I live in a 1 BR apartment and I just would not have space for something like that.
Well, it depends. Where I live I have a grocery store like 100m from home, and I go by foot there. One or two bags (the reusable kind that don’t melt away) and you just go, get what you need, go back home. Nothing special. I’ve also seen older people use like a mini trolley thingy with a bag attached in order to bring home the groceries. When you get home it folds and you can just put it behind a door or something.
In Holland I’ve heard they also really like cargo bikes, but where I live there’s not enough bike infrastructure for that. I don’t live in a big city center like Paris or Milan btw, but in a medium density city on the outskirts, so I can also use a car and often do, especially if I need to buy lots of stuff. But if I just need a couple things, going by foot is way easier and faster.
Simple, you don’t buy a carts worth of groceries at a time. When you can walk to the grocery store in 5 mins it’s easy to go twice a week or more. Hell, I went to the grocery store 3 times in a half hour because I kept forgetting stuff for a recipe I was making.
Also there are plenty of foldable carts that could fit under a bed or in a closet.
High density basically makes the case for transit itself.
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Same with homelessness. The last city I lived in offered free housing with 3 meals a day for the homeless, as in they got their own little tiny house basically that was actually kinda nice. But tons of homeless weren’t interested. They just stayed on the street. I’m curious how just making dense apartment style buildings would just fix the problem.
Often, those programs failing is because of having strings attached that people don’t like.
However, ask yourself this: why do people become homeless in the first place? Does it have anything to do with the price of housing?
Similarly I’ve heard they are not always nice/safe places to stay and belongings are often stolen.
I’m not sure about the extra strings attached on that program but you’re probably right, there was probably something in there that was deterring some of them. It was still surprising to me to see so much disinterest in the program.
As for why there are homeless… in my experience, no it’s usually not the price of housing. It usually has to do with drugs or mental illness. Now i’m absolutely no expert so the price of housing may be the main reason by a long shot but in my limited experience with people i’ve known and met that were homeless (which is admittedly and obviously a tiny number compared to all the homeless in this country), the large majority of them were put in that situation cause they were super addicted to drugs so that’s where all the money went and they couldn’t hold a job, or they had big time mental issues.
Given the same drug addiction, are you equally likely to become homeless somewhere with really cheap housing vs somewhere with really expensive housing?
I would imagine less expensive obviously. But I would have also thought the same if the housing was free and that wasn’t the case! lol
Housing price is highly correlated with homelessness. In fact, homelessness rates across geographic areas are much more closely correlated to local housing costs than to local substance abuse rates, mental health problem rates, poverty rates, social safety nets, etc.
Whereas if you were right, you’d expect homeless rates to correlate better with local substance abuse rates.
Which is to say: if you ask yourself why one person in San Francisco is homeless and another isn’t, the answer is probably losing a job or drug abuse. If you ask yourself why someone in SF is homeless but someone in Huntington West Virginia isn’t, the better answer is access to cheap housing in WV.
That could alleviate those problems, but I doubt it’d actually solve them. Not to mention, they could also get worse:
- Cost of living -> Could actually be driven up. Stuff always tends to be more expensive in dense metropolitan areas. Big corpos and rich assholes would buy up as much real state as possible.
- Traffic -> Without public transportation, this can actually get worse. The distances might be smaller, but the amount of people wanting to get there increases.
- Homelessness -> directly related to cost of living. Having lots of places to live in that you simply cannot afford will force you to live elsewhere
Cost of living is tied to supply and demand, more than anything else. When supply is constrained, prices tend to rise.
People often want to have short commutes and to live in walkable areas.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult.
Cities like NY become expensive because people want to move there, but it’s really difficult to add a lot of net-new walkable, transit accessible housing due to zoning, permitting, etc.
If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
As for traffic, one of the benefits of mixed use development is being able to walk 5 min to buy groceries, eat at a restaurant or go to a pub. Being able to do many daily chores on foot or bike decreases the number of times you need to either drive or take transit.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult. If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
Also @[email protected]
This is a “your mileage may vary” case that definitely depends on where you live. Demand can always be artificially inflated
I live within 10km of a very densely populated city (Brazil), zero houses and hundreds of 12+ stories residential apartments. Problem is, the vast majority of apartments are high value. They’re also in a very desirable area, so the price of a 24 m² apartment is usually the same of a 140 m² house in a less desirable place within 15km
What about moving within said city? There’s plenty of stuff within walking distance, which is great, but the majority of people that do live there work in a different city. Also, most people that work there come from other cities. Since the only “real” public transport is a nearly straight line of metro, traffic is an absolute mess most of the day. I strongly suspect that the original planning wasn’t for such high density, especially when you account for the ridiculously low number of bus lines from there to anywhere and back, but I’d need to do proper research to assert for sure.
Ooh my first mention!
I’m not familiar with Brazil’s housing situation specifically but building more affordable homes and increasing social housing stock would increase the supply and reduce prices.
Definitely feel you on the lack of jobs locally. Its going to take provincial or national planning and investment to fix.
Sounds like a major enough city, I think most major European cities with subways usually have multiple crossing lines and a decent bus network to fill the gaps. Interestingly I don’t even think that’s the weirdest metro layout, personally I have to give it to Glasgow. They have a single subway loop that runs 2 directions and its the 3rd oldest underground rail transit system but it hasn’t had the route changed or expanded in 125 years. They do have an advantage of having a decent bus system though.
- cost of living - can be solved if its social housing provided by the government and/or assigned by need and/or there is a restriction that the properties can only be owned by individuals.
- traffic - if everything is a walkable or cycleable distance traffic should be alright even with poor public transport. Although if we are trying to right the wrongs of bad urban planning you’d like to think public transport, green spaces, utilities and amenities would be well planned out in this scenario.
- homelessness - homelessness is not directly related to cost of living, its more related to lack of a social safety net and social services. The cost of living rising just exacerbates the issue.
For the cost of living thing, ideally you just implement similar good urban planning across the country. The reason some places are so expensive is because they have relatively livable cities compared to most of the country, so people want to move their. If you just improve the cities in places people already want to be for some reason or another, then you’ll just get more people across the country interested in being there unless they have similar options near them. Guess you could alternatively make enough housing for like 50 million people in that one city. Technically, there’s always the excuse of “you just didn’t build enough”. Not sure how the cost per housing unit gets for super structures, particularly since the cost of them includes infrastructure costs we don’t usually value into the cost of the home (pipes, roads, etc) and commercial spaces + residential which would make a small city with huge population possible.
The problem is corporations, and lack of regulation and social services.
Look. Clearly I need some education in this area. Why didn’t the “projects” in the 80’s and 90’s effectively provide these benefits?
Because they were inadequately funded, regulated to low income areas with no jobs and shit schools. They we’re just a glorified hole to stick brown ppl
Unlike this new “grassroots” push for dense, mixed use housing, which will end up as a glorified hole to stick poor people of all ethnicities.
Have you ever been to other major, population dense cities around the world? Like, Tokyo, Kolkata, Paris or, hell, even NYC? They all have dense housing areas and urban planning. It’s very possible to create dense urban design without it becoming a shit hole.
Yeah I lived in NYC for years. It’s a complete shithole urban nightmare with no space, no privacy, no quiet, and no way out. It’s filthy, decaying, and it smells bad. Density is the problem, not the solution.
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NYC has more resources to function than just about anywhere. High tax, both state and city, combined with a massive number of taxpayers. Extremely high road and bridge tolls. Best-case, near-universal ridership of the long-established public transit (and significant rider fees). Very small land area over which to spread its city income.
If they can’t maintain a clean and tidy city with the resources they have, the taxation and manpower required is probably not achievable.
I think that unless you have a non-American (e.g. Japanese) community caretaking ethic that comes with other baggage (and can’t easily be recreated in American culture), the residents will wear it down and trash it faster than it can be fixed. If you put 10m rats in a proportional land area, they’d kill each other - I don’t know why we think it’s healthy for human habitation to exist at that level
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It’s important to reconsider other aspects of urban design as well, though. “lol, just add more people” won’t work any better than “lol, just add more cars” did if taken in isolation.
Walkability, public transit, green spaces, close-proximity shopping and services, and so on all need to be considered. Otherwise you end up with exactly what already doesn’t work but now with more people.
That’s implied when people are talking about proper urban design.
It’s extremely dangerous to assume that.
Who would be doing the sticking, and why would they do it? There’s plenty of demand for dense, mixed-use housing - I don’t think anyone’s going to be made to move in.
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Have you ever seen a city outside the US? I live in São Paulo - you can literally walk for two minutes (no hyperbole) and go from a rich (as in LOADED) neighborhood to a lower-middle class one.
This is absolutely in the US too. I’ve lived in multiple different cities where gigantic mansions with in ground pools and tennis courts and two Maseratis in the garage are like 2 blocks from busted ass poor neighborhoods
I saw a video that they intentionally made the projects bad to try to “incentivize” people to get out of them. The whole stupid pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
It also centralizes the problem, which intensifies it. What you need is communities of mixed income, which has effects on schools, hospitals, stores nearby, etc.
This is less about the government building things and more about the government changing zoning so denser communities are built.
Can you be more specific?
I think others provided the type of context I was looking for but when I think dense living I think of the dense high rise projects that were built to provide low cost, section8 housing that theoretically were supposed to provide benefits to poor folks that I assume would also include the benefits discussed in your meme. However they were notoriously dangerous and had a myriad of problems that made them far worse and extremely dangerous for residents.
I’m a big fan of trying more than one thing at once, so even though I think it’s possible to learn lessons from effective public housing projects in Europe, I also think that we can achieve a lot through the private market. In CA, there are a lot of zoning barriers to building this kind of stuff. Even without government assistance, we can get some of this just by removing prohibitions on building this in a lot of areas.
Pfft and not fill our valuable real estate with lawns and parking lots?
I don’t like the idea that the colonisers took the land at the barrel of a gun (inc in England with the Enclosure Acts) and we’re demanding…a shell in return.
Well designed, small, community living based on the ideas of the Commons would be just as effective as all of the above without forcing us to live on top of each other having zero connection to the land effectively in dog kennels or shipping containers.
Connect to the local; don’t create ant nests.
I don’t think it’s a choice between one and the other.
First, the goal isn’t to make an endless sea of identical skyscrapers. It’s to make a blend of large and medium ones with rowhouses and duplexes mixed in, and then use the space that creates to make big, expansive parks and natural spaces for everyone. And if you want to start a commune, now there is a lot more space for communal, rustic living much closer to major cultural and transit hubs.
So like London…where I’m from…where those two articles describing the urban hellscape are located…
All that happens is people get stuffed into smaller and smaller locations.
Well unless you’re a First Nations or American Indian tribe member you don’t have any more claim to the land than the Europeans who stole it from them.
Hold up a sec: I think this sometimes gets overlooked, but a right to occupancy has to recognize being born somewhere or growing up there as an entitlement to continued residence.
None of us have control over how our parents brought us into a specific location, or what atrocities our forebears committed. And every child has a right not to be deported, full stop.
You know people outside of the Americas use this site, right?
Anytime you have people living in dense, highly populated areas it will make nearby land a premium. High demand for land (and the resulting high prices) will result in high rent and high cost of living.
I’m not really sure how to fix this. You could have some government managed system for what businesses get the high demand land, but that will result in less popular stores being in the best locations and greatly incentivize corruption as businesses want highly profitable locations that can only be granted by politicians.
To fix this that kind of development has to be far more normalized. A big part that drives up those land values is because that style of development is both rare and desirable. If it becomes desirable, common,and meets housing/commercial needs, the market will become more competitively priced.
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Japan has declining population, unlike basically every county in the world.
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20 years ago, Japan’s population was basically flat. It has the same population today as it did in 1995, having gone up and then down by only a couple million people in between.
Land prices in the US were also low 20 years ago, before we added another 45 million people to the demand side of the equation.
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That’s an oversight on my part. I didn’t look at tonight l Tokyo specifically
Actually, at some point the graph flips around. If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium (rich people hate living near poor people).
But you can’t make Everywhere dense in the USA - have you looked at the size of the land? It’s huge and mostly uninhabited
Considering the price of home ownership near city centers, I’ll call bullshit on that one.
Haha what? Please explain exactly what is “bullshit” about any of that.
“considering the price of home ownership near city centers” - yes those homes are very expensive and overpriced
What does that have to do with the massive square mileage of the USA and how most of it is uninhabited? Do you think that there is any possible way to turn all of that massive land area into a dense urban environment?
Are you seriously this slow? What makes you think that every cm² needs to be paved and covered in concrete? Here’s a little non-secret for you: most land of most countries is inhabited.
No I think it is you who are slow to understand what the conversation is even about. I responded to your comment, “If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium” by saying that you can’t make Everywhere dense.
You can’t make Everywhere dense in the USA because there are 3.7 million square miles of land that make up the USA. Much of that land does not have humans occupying it. The cities where most of the population stays take up only a small fraction of those millions of square miles.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/nobody-lives-here-mapping-emptiness-in-the-us-and-beyond/
Congratulations on confirming you are extremely slow. Again, why the fuck do you think anyone should build densely in the middle of the Mojave, instead of simply doing so in cities - where people actually want to live?
I have a lot of suggestions, but one that I think you’d find particularly interesting is land tax rates.
This video is 46 minutes, but it’s the mayor of Detroit explaining why low taxes on land incentivize blight and abandonment instead of productive use.
