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Meanwhile, an estimated 553,000 people experienced homelessness in 2018, according to Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data.
The US population was estimated for 2017 at 325.7 million souls. Ignoring the population growth from 2017 to 2018:
553,000 divided by 325,700,000 means slightly less 0.17% experienced homelessness during the year. Less than two-tenths of one percent of the population experienced homelessness.
Did I do my arithmetic correctly?
Less than two-tenths of one percent doesn't seem like the crisis that the mainstream media makes it out to be.
I don't think building vast "projects" out in "the empty space" is even on the right road to a solution. If there were jobs out in those empty places, the situation would be self-correcting.
In this area (suburban Sacramento) four or five years ago you could rent a two bedroom apartment for $700-$900, now they rent for $1300-$1500. I don't know how or when it ends...it's really tragic.
I suppose it ends when governments stop artificially raising the costs of construction of new two-bedroom apartments, and artificially throwing roadblocks in the way of the construction of new two-bedroom apartments. Public sector employees in local planning departments hold developers hostage all the time, making them jump through hoop after hoop after hoop.
No, the solution to the homeless situation is re-opening large public mental health hospitals for the mentally ill and making it easier to commit them...
And maybe if the government didn't subsdize housing and force developers to provide housing for low-income people instead of letting the market run its course, rents wouldn't be so high.
And maybe if the government would take more steps to reduce the glut of unskilled labor we have through both education and border security, wages wouldn't be so stagnant.
But it's so much easier to just tell the 1% they need to pay their fair share, even though they pay about 20x their fair share in federal income tax if you really break it down.
Who said there’s a glut of unskilled labor? There is actually a shortage, ask California farmers. Illegal border crossings are at a 30 year low.
The US population was estimated for 2017 at 325.7 million souls. Ignoring the population growth from 2017 to 2018:
553,000 divided by 325,700,000 means slightly less 0.17% experienced homelessness during the year. Less than two-tenths of one percent of the population experienced homelessness.
Did I do my arithmetic correctly?
Less than two-tenths of one percent doesn't seem like the crisis that the mainstream media makes it out to be.
That’s because it’s not widespread in your area. It’s not media that is saying you can’t even walk down the sidewalk in Portland without tripping over homeless. It’s everyone who lives or visits there. Media didn’t create tent cities in California, they just document them.
I suppose it ends when governments stop artificially raising the costs of construction of new two-bedroom apartments, and artificially throwing roadblocks in the way of the construction of new two-bedroom apartments. Public sector employees in local planning departments hold developers hostage all the time, making them jump through hoop after hoop after hoop.
That doesn't even make sense. Drive through Sac County sometime and look at the amount of new construction, if it was as bad as you claim no one would build here. It's called supply and demand. People are moving to Sacramento from the bay area because they can't afford rent there, so apartments here for $1500-$1800 look like a bargain to those folks and they get snatched up as fast as they become available.
They don't want to work, and often they just cannot bear to be around other people because of their severe mental illnesses. They do want to be in cities, where there are restaurants, convenience stores, a high concentration of people, easy access to drugs and alcohol. Can you imagine being a homeless person in a suburb or exurb? Who you gonna beg from? How you gonna get to the liquor store, or your dealer? In the cities, they can beg, sleep in alleys, doorways, on warm grates, can get food out of dumpsters. The problem with maintaining public bathrooms is that you have to have someone to throw the homeless OUT of them. The public bathroom stalls in Penn Station and Grand Central in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s were unusable - there was a homeless person living in each and every one of them.
No, the solution to the homeless situation is re-opening large public mental health hospitals for the mentally ill and making it easier to commit them, strict law enforcement against criminal activity in and around public housing so that people can live there safely (and the criminals are in prison, instead of menacing the law-abiding poor in public housing), and liberalization of zoning regulations to encourage over-building of dense high rise apartment blocks, so that the supply outstrips the demand for housing. That way, poor could reside safely in public housing, mentally ill would be housed and treated, and the overall cost of housing for working people would come down, with oversupply of housing.
Sure thing...the mentally ill don't want to work? lol that's precious, who do you think is going to hire someone who is seriously mentally ill, would you? I love it when people have these amazing solutions which are not only unconstitutional, but extremely expensive and not in any way a solution that most people would embrace.
I assume your fiance knew he was getting a sweet deal on rent for close to 10 years. That's the time to bank the savings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ocnjgirl
I think another reason for homelessness though that no one has mentioned, is the requirement now of credit checks before you can rent, and the increasing number of people with poor credit from having fallen on hard times whether due to illness or job loss.
As a landlord, yes, I do full background checks of prospective tenants. After all, I'm turning the keys to a $400,000 asset over to a stranger on the promise that he/she will send me a check every month and that it won't bounce and that they won't destroy my asset ... and evicting a scumbag is time consuming, dangerous and expensive... and the scawflaw might trash the unit by, say, buying a few 60 pound bags of Quickrete and flushing them down the toilets, pulling the copper out, stealing the appliances, breaking all the doors and windows, locking dogs inside to poop everywhere --- and the legal system says "oh, that's a civil matter" and suing them is useless because even if I win I actually lose because they have no assets to seize.
I had one prospective tenant for a $600,000 unit tell me up front "My credit report has been trashed because of a divorce and personal bankruptcy. But I make good money - self employed as an engineering consultant. So to lessen your risk, I'll write you a check for a year's rent in advance. The check won't bounce. So even though my credit report sucks, I'm good for the money." I rented to her and she was fine.
At the end of the day, no landlord wants a nightmare homeless person. We *might* want to lend to someone who is homeless but who is a decent human being and who can bounce back. The tough thing is distinguishing between the good types and the bad types who will defecate on the carpet and smear it on the walls.
But who is going to rent to those nightmare tenants?
But no one's going to pay $15/hour with benefits to pick fruit - because they'd go broke with costs far higher than the product value. And no one hires pickers and processors year-round. It's not a matter of hiring cheap; it's a matter of hiring who will take the job at all... and they tend to come cheap.
Immigrants are not one of the US's job problems. Never have been. Sitting around a bar sobbing in your beer because the local Ford plant closed and blaming it on fruit pickers taking all the jobs is just absurd.
California farmers are paying that now, but they still can't get citizens to work for more than a few days no matter what they pay them. And you nailed the reason - it's not year round work, and farms are not usually near towns and cities, so why would someone quit their day job and drive 80 miles a day to work on a farm for $2 more than they were making at walmart when the job will be done in 8 or 10 weeks?
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