Democrats can't solve the issue of Homelessness

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Another quote from the 2015 Politico article,
posted by itself so as to easily be dealt with as its own thing,

Perhaps this is a difference between Wales and North America?

Back in the 1960's and early 1970's here in New York City, most homeless people were "Bowery bums," as we used to call them, drug addicts and "winos." But this ceased to be the case by the 1980's.

(I also suspect that, even in Wales, you might perhaps be confusing the most visibly homeless people with homeless people in general. Hint: homeless people living in shelters are able to take showers and wash their clothes.)


Therefore, homeless shelters should have small private rooms with doors that lock. For whatever nonsensical reason, homeless shelters here in NYC often have four to six beds per room. People should not be expected to sleep in the same room with other people unless they are a couple. Even a tiny private room, just big enough to hold a small cot-sized bed plus a suitcase or two, would be better than forcing people to sleep with strangers.


No, for most homeless people, it has everything to do with homes themselves. For example, to apply for most jobs and most government benefits, it is necessary to have a home address.


In other words, those with "zero hope" should have no choice but to mug you? (And then go to prison, which costs MORE than a homeless shelter or even a "housing first" program?)

BTW, there is at least some evidence that "housing first" works well even for many of the folks you might deem to be "hopeless." See this academic paper and the footnotes of this Wikipedia article.

From Venice to downtown Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program moved some 1,200 homeless people out of encampments into motels and hotels during her first four months in office. But only 70 people have moved from those temporary accommodations into permanent housing, Bass said recently. That’s a number she rightly finds disappointing.

Of course, it’s not entirely surprising; Los Angeles has a crippling shortage of housing for homeless people and affordable housing in general. But the pace at which Inside Safe participants — or any homeless person eligible for a rent voucher — are housed should pick up when, as the mayor said, “we have hundreds of vacancies in permanent supportive housing.”

New permanent supportive-housing developments are generally not sitting half-empty. Developers know when a property will open. Service providers and homeless services officials can start lining up prospective tenants in advance. The vacancies Bass is talking about are created, mostly, when tenants in permanent supportive housing leave their unit or die. But some of those empty units stay empty for quite awhile, according to developers and city housing officials.



Why? Because even when a homeless person is deemed eligible for a rent voucher connected to an available housing unit, it can take weeks and sometimes a few months for the prospective tenant to obtain the necessary documents to be approved for the voucher and the unit.

Homeless applicants need a driver’s license or other government-issued identification, a Social Security card, proof of their income (usually a very small amount from county-funded General Relief or a larger amount from Supplemental Security Income for people who are disabled or older), a form filled out by a case manager certifying that they are homeless, proof of citizenship or legal residency in the U.S., and a criminal background check. All of these items are time-consuming to collect. Many homeless individuals need the help of a case manager to take them to government offices and help them fill out applications for these documents, which can take hours at a time.

Then, once they have their documentation in order, they need to fill out an application to the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles for the available unit. Then the unit needs to be inspected. Those processes add to the wait time as well.

Yes, people can start trying to get their documents before anyone ever tells them there’s an available apartment. In fact, they may have started, helped by an outreach worker, when they were living in a tent. Sometimes a homeless person gets all the documents before being considered for permanent housing, but those materials can be lost during the wait.



“Imagine going from encampment to encampment carrying your birth certificate and Social Security card in a Ziploc bag and hoping they don’t get stolen,” one service provider said. Or the documents get thrown away by sanitation workers during a sidewalk cleanup. Or damaged by a fire. All these things have happened to homeless people, which means they have to start over.

Maybe a homeless individual was able to get these documents together a few months before they were matched to an apartment. But by the time an apartment becomes ready, some of the documents — for income certification and homelessness status — expire after 60 days, and some people may have to start the process over again.

This is absurd. It’s bad enough that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough apartments for homeless people. But when the city does have available apartments, they sit empty while people document their existence?

Most of this documentation is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for people getting federally subsidized rental vouchers. So Bass has written to HUD officials asking them to expedite the leasing process by giving these would-be voucher holders “presumptive eligibility.” Her request supports a letter already submitted by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Development Authority.

“Why do we have to spend weeks and weeks and weeks trying to get IDs and having somebody prove that they’re poor?” Bass said.

If HUD officials sign off on her request, homeless people would be able to “self-certify” their income and submit documentation within four months of getting the housing voucher. Similarly, they could provide proof of their Social Security numbers, date of birth and citizenship status after they are in the housing.

All this makes sense. We want homeless people to get permanent housing as soon as possible. And it’s easier to collect or update personal records when a person is in a stable home. Some of these requirements were waived during the pandemic, and service providers found that the leasing process went faster.

Last week, Los Angeles, the state of California and four other regions were selected by the White House and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness to be part of an initiative called ALL INside, which is intended to support and speed up efforts to house homeless people. The first thing the federal government can do is stop making homeless people run an obstacle course before they get to move into apartments that are available.

1. I think you have no idea what you're talking about. Rents were already expensive and have doubled over the last few years. Vacancy rates are near zero. A regular 16 year old house in the suburbs an hour from downtown, like the one I live in, costs $1.8M. BC has the highest eviction rates in all of Canada as landlords kick people out to re-develop the property, or renovate extensively in order to double the rent. Vancouver is within the top 3 Least Affordable real estate markets IN THE WORLD along with Sydney Australia & number one being Hong Kong. Many working people live in cars, RV's, vans, or sleep in a park or forest - in a tent or under the stars. I have several personal friends who live in vehicles or aboard boats or in a forest or at the beach etc etc who are not substance abusers - and there are thousands more people like them. There are some sick of paying almost ALL of their money for rent and not having enough for food or transportation, others who live in vehicles 6 months then travel internationally the rest of the year as they're retired, families with kids who are in the news camping in tents desperately trying to find a place to live, numerous posts of people on Facebook groups who were evicted for one of the typical greedy reasons and have been unable to find a place so are sleeping in their truck between work shifts while continuing their hunt for an address.. people wait on lists for government subsidized housing sometimes for 5-8+ YEARS before an affordable unit becomes available. People on social assistance (welfare) or even disability (which pays the most for a government cheque income) are increasingly finding themselves homeless because they cannot even afford to rent a single bedroom in many areas anymore.. not if they like to do things like eat food, or pay for prescriptions. Some just grow tired of being evicted 1-3x/year so someone can make more money so they say F it and just live in a car vs. go through all that stress and worries of finding a place and being subject to the cycles of renovictions OR finding out the reason the place was available and somewhat affordable is all the black mold the landlord painted over that's now affecting theirs or their childrens' respiratory health.

Clearly you have no concept of how difficult it is to find a place here even if you have cash in hand and can afford the rent.. then there's everyone who's seeking a replacement home for the one they lost and finding that monthly rates of skyrocketed $1000+ more than they used to just barely be able to afford. Etc. Not everyone who's homeless is a hardcore drug addict - not by a long shot anymore.

2. Ok. Dislike drug addicts all you want, but numerous studies have shown that housing stability helps people with all other aspects of their lives, drug/alcohol addictions, general physical and mental health etc. It's magnitudes more difficult for people to improve upon these things with the survival mode daily struggles caused by living outdoors. IMO, even addicts should be housed so they have a fighting chance of not being addicts anymore.

People do get rehoused in different communities.

A big issue, though, is that this can mean taking people away from their support network, or their job, or their friends and family.

Moving from Cardiff to Bridgend might not be so bad. Moving from London to Rochester or Tonbridge might not be so bad (but these aren’t exactly places with a lot of housing!).

Also, there’s a reason why small towns are small - most people don’t find them good places to live. Of course, that means that those people who do like them get somewhere cheap to live, but it would be cruel to force people to live in undesirable places when we could just build more homes in cities instead.

Why is it that cities only ever come up during the homeless debate?
Cities are stupid places to find affordable housing, that's why I don't live in one and I'm perplexed why smaller towns are overlooked.

Small towns in both US and UK also have small job opportunities, small health care, small rehab care, small education, small mass transit (if any), and so forth, because the small population is insufficient to sustain such things at any scale above the most minimal.

Many here have train stations, excellent schools and modern hospitals. They also have decent job opportunities if humanities ain't your thing.

An over reliance on public transport really isn't healthy anyway. It makes people's world a lot smaller and they become a captive audience to mental house prices.

Many here in US such as my midwestern town of about 7,000 do not.

Being the county seat we DO have a courthouse and jail,
But hospital?
Nope.
Nearest hospitals and Emergency Rooms are in the moderately sized college city 30 miles away.

Train station?
Hahahaha! This is the USA.
Nearest Amtrak station to my town is about 50 miles, 80km, away.
Second nearest is about 100 miles, 160km, away.
Even though a very large freight railroad runs through town.




Oh? And how would the homeless who do not own a car and can not finance one count as your people who are "over reliant" on public transport?

Why is it that cities only ever come up during the homeless debate?

Cities are stupid places to find affordable housing, that's why I don't live in one and I'm perplexed why smaller towns are overlooked.

I can't really take homelessness seriously when the epicenter seems to be LA, London, New York, Paris and so on. Have these homeless people ever contemplated trying to find a place they can afford to begin with rather than just shoehorn themelves into the middle of LA?

For £500 a month, someone can rent an entire small house where I live but when you move into Cardiff, no chance.

Regardless, living very close to a city is asking for trouble.

Small towns are great places to live, better than cities I think. The local cinema here cost £2.50 on weekdays to see new releases, food is cheap, we still have all the fast food restaurants you could ever want, super stores, good road networks and a fair number of jobs. A lot of people in smaller towns are making serious bank.

The problem seems to be people who are just institutionalised to city life being stubborn. Many just can't contemplate living in a smaller town and when the issue of homelessness is brought up, massive expensive cities are too and sympathy starts to wain.

Cities are very expensive, more so than they should be but only a fool fails to adapt. If someone has an arts degree then they need to be realistic and give a large city a miss for the time being. The population could honestly do with being spread about a bit rather than just concentrating more and more within cities anyway.

Houses are very easy to afford outside the influence of cities.

In December, Denver’s city council approved a controversial up-zoning request from Great Divide Brewery that allows its property to be developed into a 16 story building with a 4-story slender pointed tower, a common characteristic of skyscrapers.

Even though the brewery said it has no plans to sell its property in the near future, some councilmembers expressed concern that the new zoning classification makes the property more valuable to developers than business owners.

Others mentioned that the property’s location poses a threat to the city’s efforts to combat homelessness should it sell to a developer. Located in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, Great Divide is near several of Denver’s homeless service providers, income-restricted housing units, and day work programs.

Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca, who represents the neighborhood, said building luxury or market-rate housing in this neighborhood would raise property taxes and rents for people already struggling to stay housed and take valuable jobs away from the community.

“Right now, in a global crisis, during a global pandemic, this brewery could go out of business, and they might want to sell to a developer who will build a 16-story luxury development,” Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca said at the time.
While requests like this are common in cities across the US, they serve as examples of how zoning ordinances can both create and perpetuate homelessness.

For starters, zoning codes that focus on a building’s built form rather than its economic context within a city discourage competition for low-income housing and do not allow the free market to work.

By doing so, exclusionary zoning ordinances stunt the growth of affordable housing supply by limiting what housing types are acceptable to build, thereby threatening housing security for low-and-extremely-low-income earners. Moreover, exclusionary restrictions handcuff a city’s ability to provide shelter for people experiencing homelessness.

For example, a homeless shelter in Denver cannot have more than 200 beds, are prohibited in most of the city’s residential and mixed use districts, and must provide commercial parking. If a rezoning request for a shelter comes to the Planning Board, the body must consider whether the shelter will “substantially or permanently injure the appropriate use of conforming residential properties located within 500 feet of the proposed use.”

CPD estimates the number of parcels available within the city that meet these criteria number around 1,200, primarily in industrial areas and along transportation corridors.

Denver has made strides to eradicate its exclusionary policies of yore. CPD has passed several plans that mention “affordability” and “equity.” These plans will guide future zoning ordinance changes in years to come.

However, experts disagree whether density and single-family zoning can co-exist. Denver’s most recent comprehensive plan—Blueprint Denver—mentions leaving areas zoned as single-family alone.