Read the article I linked to about what Houston has been doing. They have significantly reduced the number of homeless people by offering affordable housing and not requiring drug screens for applicants. The new law in Missouri bans the things Houston is doing, by preventing state and federal funding being used for affordable housing and requiring drug screens for people to even live in an approved shantytown.
Steve
Which is great. But note that Houston uses a carrot/stick approach. They ban public camping by the homeless if alternative housing or shelters are available. I would also note that during the time when Houston was reducing its homeless numbers, homelessness in the entire state of Texas was declining. Texas homelessness declined by 35% from 2007-2019. That suggests that much of Houston’s decline was probably due to a strong Texas economy that provided a lot of good paying jobs.
That’s not to take anything away from Houston’s efforts, which are admirable. But again, that emphasizes the point that the key factor in homelessness is the availability of affordable housing. That is what Houston focused on, finding more cheap housing. What Houston is doing is difficult to duplicate in places like SF, LA, NYC, and Honolulu where land is so much more costly and in demand.
One problem I have with this “mental health is the cause of our homeless question” narrative is that it ignores that mental health problems are often themselves a consequence of our social problems. Anxiety and depression are at an all time highs throughout our society, and why not? We have successfully created a fully individualized society in which all responsibility is personal, and all problems are your own. The only way out of our personal problems are through personal solutions, and, failing these, self medicating and escapism become the only real ways of addressing those problems.
The economic challenges facing less well educated people appear insurmountable from the ground. Even an $18/hr job, which looks generous for those of us who couldn’t tell you the price of a gallon of milk, is punishingly meager when trying to survive in the real economy. Rent alone will eat up 2/3rds of your gross income for a one bedroom apartment outside the worst slums in your city. You can’t get near a 600 sq ft apartment in DC for less than $2000/mo unless you’re willing to cross the anaconda.
We have created a ruthlessly individualistic and lonely society, fit only for the economic winners of our own hunger games. If our streets are filled with homeless people high on dope, and suffering from depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental disorders, is it any wonder? Until they happily reconcile themselves to a pittance and a hovel, we will continue to suffer the unsightly problem of the filthy poor littering our streets. But hey, maybe lithium will fix their problems.
Somewhere upthread, I looked at the data: Houston’s homeless population 70/100,000 is below the state average of 89/100,000. Missouri does not have a space problem, but outlaws cities using state or federal money to make affordable housing available, and requires a drug screening to even live in a shantytown. Houston does not require a drug screen to qualify for affordable housing.
Steve
The above is from my first post on this thread and I want to come back to that point. If a person has a career path where he makes less than $60K but still wants to live in San Francisco then he is very likely one bad car accident, one recession, or one health emergency away from becoming homeless. That is in principle no different than the guy who owns beachfront property in hurricane-rich Florida with no flood insurance. If the worst happens in either case, it is sad and regrettable, but it is their fault, their bad judgement.
The question then for the tax payer is how responsible should we be for the high risk behavior of others. I think most would want to help people get back on their feet, but no one wants to enable continued bad judgement. For that reason I suspect few would want FEMA to subsidize a replacement uninsured beachfront house for the FL guy. Does the same hold true for the <$60K worker in SF? How long are you willing to subsidize the housing for someone to live in an expensive city he can’t afford?
I can see a national program where we help the homeless find affordable housing and jobs, but only if they are willing to relocate (if necessary) to someplace where the cost of living allows a permanent solution that does not require continued government assistance.
IOW, homeless in Los Angeles or self-sufficient in Des Moines.
Let me point out the problem with that by tweaking the statement:
Homeless, but with some knowledge of the area and possibly a social support system,
or
Self-sufficient but lonely and lost in a new place, hundreds of miles away from those you already know.
I have thought many times about moving away from my current area to find a lower cost of living. But most everyone I know is here. For introverts like me, moving somewhere without the social support system I have here is scarier than living on the edge of homelessness.
Strange how sometimes even financial decisions can be influenced by mental health considerations.
–Peter
Do a drug screening on each-and-every politician every day they show up to work. How many would pass the drugs tests? If they can’t pass the drug test, they lose all their pay–because that is state funding that allows them to not be homeless in the state. Just applying state law to the politicians…
Any program that is designed to move people would have to include the ability to help people develop a support system (hard to do) and provide a way for people to keep in contact (such as free zoom call centers). This is a difficult thing to do.
Also, while the homeless person may think they have some kind of local support, it may not actually be that good, but maybe a hope/wish of the person on the street…thus their situation
Mike
I think your perspective is generally representative of Americans today. Prior to 1980 about 20% of Americans changed residences each year. That has declined to 10% in 2019. In 1990, 3% of Americans moved out of state each year. That is now down to about 1.5%. There is some historical evidence that in the 19th century as much as 40% of Americans moved each year, an indication that the pioneer stereotype of Americans at that time was justified.
This trend is something I don’t really understand, as I’ve lived in four different states and seven cities, moving for better educational or economic opportunities. Got no regrets, all have been positive experiences. Difficult at times, but ultimately beneficial. These days of free long distance calling, email, zoom, and social media, keeping contact with distant friends and family is easier than ever so one would think that would make moving easier. Not so.
This is a portion of the abstract of a paper behind a paywall of a recent study on the impact of declining residential mobility.
> “… Using a theoretically informed analysis of mobility trends across the developed world, we argue that a shift from a culture full of people moving their residence to a culture full of people staying in place is associated with decreases, among its residents, in individualism, happiness, trust, optimism, and endorsement of the notion that hard work leads to success. We use the United States as a case study: Although the United States has historically been a highly-residentially mobile nation, yearly moves in the United States are halved from rates in the 1970s and quartered from rates in the late 19th century. In the past four decades, the proportion of Americans who are stuck in neighborhoods they no longer wish to live in is up nearly 50%. We discuss how high rates of mobility may have originally shaped American culture and how recent declines in residential mobility may relate to current feelings of cultural stagnation…” APA PsycNet
My guess is that it is also leading to increasing levels of homelessness in major cities that have rapidly rising housing costs. People are being priced out of the housing market but are unwilling to move to some place more affordable.
Which again leads to the fundamental question that no one seems willing to address: Is it the government’s responsibility to subsidize the housing of those who can’t afford to live in a high-cost city, but are unwilling to move? I don’t think it is, but I may be a minority of one.
Thanks for that data. Interesting. Could it be that moving is a larger pain in the neck than it used to be? The number of things that have to be changed when you move? Bank, broker, doctor, dentist, phone number, magazine subscriptions, were all things in the 60s and 70s. Has anything else made moving more difficult? Is it because people have more stuff that they would need to move now? In the burbs where I live, many houses have all the cars parked in the driveway, because the two story house, with a full basement, isn’t big enough to hold all their stuff, so they have their two car garage packed to the door with stuff too.
It is almost counter-intuitive that people would be less mobile now. It used to often be the case that you would work in a single place for 20-30 years, then retire. Now, with employees being treated as expendable, decades long employment in one place is no longer a thing. .
Or is it something else? I remember when Allentown was the poster child for the rust belt in the 80s. The “news” interviewed a young, fit, guy in Allentown. He said “I can’t move, my roots are here”.
I think it’s clear that there is less liquidity in the housing market now (fewer listings, higher sales and rental prices, higher financing costs). Seems this would be one contributing factor to less mobility.
You might not understand it because you have been financially secure. And have a functioning family relationship in your immediate family (spouse and children).
Let’s look at it from a different perspective. You’re a divorced mother of two grade school children. Your ex also lives in the area. He has visitation rights with the children. If you want to move to another area, you have to deal with visitation rights. You might lose custody of your children. So you don’t move.
With you and your ex living separately since the divorce, the money the two of you made doesn’t go as far. You have to pay for two housing costs when that same income used to pay for one. Plus you have to pay for child care after school so you can work. (Alimony and child support don’t increase the total income, they just allocate how that income is split between the two parties.) The two of you could agree to both move to a lower cost area, but if you could agree on things, you probably wouldn’t have gotten divorced in the first place.
And then there’s the cost of moving. Even with a more frugal lifestyle, there’s costs to a move. Moving a modest collection of belongings still costs money. Abandoning some old items and replacing with new in the new place costs money. Deposit and first month’s rent is a cash flow issue if you have little savings. People in lower wage jobs don’t get relocation benefits or signing bonuses. They switch from a $10/hour job to a $12/hr job. And since moving isn’t instantaneous, there’s going to be a couple of non-working days during the move. Even those affect people living on the edge.
If I were to look for a cause for lower mobility, I’d at least consider the difficulty of relocating for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum. When we had a vibrant middle class - let’s over simplify and call that the 1950s and 1960s - relocating was easier for a larger portion of the population. As income and wealth have become more concentrated, a larger portion of the population is less able to afford relocation.
I just did a quick search to see how much of the population has less than $1000 in savings. Numbers vary quite a bit, but seem to be somewhere around 50%.
Let’s do a quick exercise. You earn the median wage in the US, which will give you about $1000 a week. And you have saved $1000. You want to relocate. Today is payday, so you have a total of $2000 available to you. And let’s assume you have a new job lined up that pays you the same wage, but is in a lower cost of living area. Where in the country could you move to on that budget of $2000 and survive one week until your next pay day?
Extra credit question: Is that a place you personally would be happy to live?
–Peter
I’m sure folks can find many reasons for not moving. Virtually all those reasons were relevant to Americans of past generations, they just tended to matter less back then than the attraction of new opportunities. The great diaspora of southern African-Americans to the northern states in the early 1900s were mostly the poor. Same with the Dust Bowl migration from the Midwest to the West Coast.
A fundamental element of the notion of American exceptionalism is that we are a people possessing an abnormal amount of the “pioneer spirit”, which I see as the willingness to disrupt the status quo to search for new opportunities. Our historically high residential mobility was an example of that, a difference between us and most of the rest of the world.
It is a great political irony that the Make America Great crowd seems to be lacking in one of the traits that actually made America great—the willingness to move for new opportunities. It may be that America’s future success will depend on how many of the refugee/immigrants, who are willing to travel hundreds of miles across deserts for a better life, we take in. A much needed re-infusion of our lost pioneering trait.
I spent some time in Iowa City. Nice mid-sized university town with good restaurants, shopping, excellent schools and cultural events. Average rent today is about $1000, which given your example of $1000/week income comes out to housing being 25% of income. Very little crime and friendly people who you get to know because you see them all the time. Iowa City is one of the most expensive places in Iowa. The larger city of Cedar Rapids is 30 miles away, another pleasant place where average rents are about $700. Also has good minor league baseball team with cheap tickets.
There are lots of nice places to live with relatively low costs of living.
Now you’ve got me researching and learning more about travel, migration in particular, in the 1800s and early 1900s. I’m finding plenty of interesting info on the “why” part, but precious little in on the practical side - how the migrants actually traveled. I’ve come across a bit about traveling the Oregon Trail - seems that was a nasty and difficult trip. And not necessarily for the poor. You needed to bring lots of food, a wagon to carry that food, livestock to pull the wagon. Not an inexpensive exercise.
I’m finding less about practicalities of the Great Migration of the early 1900s. It appears that railroads were important important in that travel, but precious little else about the trip itself.
Still, very interesting stuff to read and learn.
And that has me thinking a bit more. I wonder if the “pioneer” spirit that we talk about of people from a century or more ago is now called the “entrepreneur” spirit. It seems to me that there are a lot of similarities. Back then, the way to make a better life was to move to a new place. With the technology of the last couple of decades, you can make that better life right where you are. You no longer have to move to find - or create - that opportunity.
–Peter
Bank? You can do it all online and with ATMs. Only need a local one, because???
Broker. All online
Doctor/dentist. still need those
Phone number. Don’t need to change this, your cell works everywhere.
e-mail works the same everywhere so it makes it easier to move and stay in touch with friends and many businesses.
Mike
Perhaps you missed the part where he was talking about the 1960s? The only online place I can recall from the 1960s is a clothes line.
Which, depending on your neighborhood, might have been the chat room of the day.
–Peter
That is my point: it is easier to relocate now, than it was 50 years ago, unless there is something else I am not familiar with. I moved a lot from the 70s into the 90s: Kalamazoo/Columbus/Dearborn/Kalamazoo/Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo/Motown. That includes two different places in Grand Rapids, in sequence, and three different places in Kalamazoo.
Why are people less mobile now, than they were 40 years ago, when there was more legwork/voice phone calls/change of address mailings, to be done?
Steve
That “rugged individualist” narrative amuses me. I have heard it for decades. Over the decades, what I have found, in nearly every social setting, from the office, to the school, is a demand for conformity, not tolerance for “individuality”.
Steve
But do you need the SAME dr/dentist GROUP every time?
Dental services are “industrialized” in that the service provided by one group is the same as that of another.
Much of “medicine/dr” services, too, are mostly the SAME.
Patients have been trained to believe that “my dr” is special.
But, mostly, the services provided (especially from dr groups) are similar enough as to be “no real difference”?
ralph
Every time you change job, you probably have to change to a new doc, who is “in network” for the coverage from the new employer. When OD (Selectcare) laid me off, I started at WPI (Blue Cross). Had to find a new doc. Picked one out of the Blue Cross network book, called to make an appointment. A few days later, message on my answering machine “doctor will not be in that day, call to reschedule”. So, I called and made a new appointment. Few days later, message on my answering machine “doctor will not be in that day, call to reschedule”. Thumbed through the Blue Cross directory to find someone that might be more reliable.
When I retired, far too young to qualify for Medicare, I bought coverage from United Health. Existing doc didn’t take United Health, so looked over the “in network” list for UH and found someone else.
That is three docs in the space of 15 years, while I lived in the same place.
As many have probably noticed, we are in Medicare “open enrollment”. TV is flooded with ads from Medicare Advantage plans. I have noticed, with amusement, the ads showing a string of people saying “I called to check…”, as some of those people called “to see if my doctor is still in the plan”, a subtle way of reminding people that, unlike Medicare, which is open to “any willing provider”, MA plans lay the “out of network” trap for people to fall into.
Steve