Major homelessness crisis on the West Coast

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@LoveNotHate: Don't you know what are financial bubbles?

some posters believe themselves to be above the fray and invulnerable to downturns, thus scapegoating those they see as beneath them, as in their bereft position in life due to some constitutional/temperamental fault of the scapegoated parties.

On top of that, because of the high cost of living, those who were displaced in the Santa Rosa wildfires may never be able to return home.

The same kind of thing is happening to people who are teachers, police officers, nurses and the tourism service and hospitality workers in the Florida Keys following hurricane Irma.

On the West Coast, these are your options, depending on your occupation:

1. Doctor
2. Lawyer
3. Major Techie (software engineer, software developer, etc.)
4. Homeless

a skilled tradesman such as electrician, plumber, mechanic will also [for the foreseeable future in any case] find gainful employ somewhere.

I'm not sure if the problem is unemployment or that the many jobs that don't require a trade skill don't pay enough to afford a 400 sq ft. studio apt for 2000$ a month.

People are abandoning having their own little place in favor of renting a room from someone, but even that is like 1000-1200$ per month. (I'm kinda guessing at these figures based on what little I have picked up on the situation).

And then on top of that you have people working skilled jobs that pay well, only being able to afford crappy little apartments that used to be for low income people. The whole thing is ridiculous.

We have all of these housing & financial problems up here a little farther North up the West coast just across the Canadian border. Vancouver now has the least affordable housing in North America & makes the top ~3 list worldwide. You think people can't afford rent/mortgages where you live? It's worse here. Hell, it's literally The Worst lol.

Homeless population is growing, people are living in cars, vans, RV's etc, others are downsizing/adjusting to having several roommates and so on.

It's BRUTAL out there for renters right now. People getting renovicted all the time. Rents increasing by insane %'s - the average one bedroom apartment in the city peaked around $2100/month. That may not seem expensive compared to San Francisco or Manhattan - but relative to local incomes (we make less $ here), it's extremely expensive - hence being the least affordable housing market on the continent.

There are homeless shelters. There's some social housing. There are new units being built to house homeless people. But the demand FAR outweighs the supply.

In the worst neighbourhood, there used to be a lot of SRO (single room occupancy) hotels renting at below welfare rates. Now many have been turned into condos. Thankfully the Provincial Government bought up a bunch of buildings and renovated units for people. Some of the last private operators are notorious slumlords who have dozens of charges against them from the city for not maintaining buildings - I hope the Sahota's lose their buildings & they're turned into liveable units. Still, though, whether private for profit landlords or publicly funded, there's way more demand than housing.

f****d up thing is we've built 1.19x the number of new homes than the number of new households over the last several years. We have nearly 20% EXTRA housing stock for the number of newcomers that have settled here. Not sure if these numbers account for net changes to housing stock, ie includes outmigration of those who've fled. Pretty sure it's net, though. Anyways, all the extra housing stock is being snapped up by speculative investors, most of them from overseas. No one lives in these condos. They're bought up several at a time, held for a year or two, then flipped for a profit - if they haven't been resold several times already, that is.

Now much of the brand new housing that's being built is so obscenely expensive it's obviously being sold to global elite & not to local wage earners. There's a new condo building going up being sold at $3,000/sf = $5M average price per unit. Just shy of an acre of downtown land with a restaurant on it just sold for a record $245M - zero chance there are going to be any condos in those buildings that typical locals can afford.

All of the problems just keep getting worse.. although, house prices seem to have peaked and are slowly coming down in some parts of the market. Only condos are still on fire - but that's likely going to end soon, too, I think.. and then maybe things will settle down to some sort of sanity and we won't have an ever growing homeless problem... but for right now, a whole lot of people are barely hanging on by a thread.

it seems to me that condos [the lions' share of 'em in any cases] have all of the disadvantages of apartment living [still having to pay somebody every month, lack of noise isolation and privacy, having to climb stairs or elevator] and none of the advantages of owning one's own house [relative privacy, relative lack of noise problems, no monthly rent or maintenance fees].

Back in the Fall of 2013, my landlady sent notes out to every tenant which said everyone's rent was going up. I went from $850/month to $1000. At the time, I could barely afford the $850. The $1000 caused me to start living in my car.

Funny thing is, I thought this was going to be temporary, as in two to three months. But here it is, going on five years already, and I'm still homeless. It's still me and Sunny (my car) against the world. My name is in several wait lists. I recently left Seattle because their wait lists are around 4 to 7 years long. The new city I'm homeless in has wait lists around a year to two years long.

Seattle is rapidly headed to where Vancouver [BC] has long been. IOW Seattle is hopeless unless you're in the upper half of income distribution. it useta have a vibrant working class a few decades back. that is history.

Best of luck on that. I fear as time goes on the spillover from Seattle is going to lengthen wait lists all the way up through Snohomish county where rent keeps going up and up steeply as of a couple of years ago.

Portland has a problem with homelessness. People have been rented out of their homes and the landlords don't care. When more people move to Portland from expensive areas like LA or San Francisco, the demand goes up so they charge more for rent knowing people are willing to pay that much for rent. Then they lose their tenants but they don't care knowing someone else will just move in and pay more while the former tenant is left homeless. They don't care.

Portlanders have blamed this on Californians so I hear they don't get treated very well here and if you drive a car with a California plate, you get rude drivers on the road. I don't understand the hate for California here and why everything is being blamed on them when in fact anyone is moving here. Then I read in the articles here that our speed limits are set too low and my husband told me that is just people from California saying it.

For now. Same story here. But, when extremes happen in real estate they happen in cycles. It might take a while, but in the long run one of two things (or a combination of) will happen: Real property & rent prices will come down, or, local wages & salaries will go up. I don't think it's ever happened in the history of the world & capitalism that housing prices continued to skyrocket while incomes remain flat. We're already seeing some declines in detached home prices in various neighbourhoods, and a WILD condo market since speculating on pre-sales & assignment sales is very lucrative and requires less money than homes with land, but in the long run things will come to some sort of balance again. Usually there's a big run up, a bubble, it pops, there's a crash, prices will drop significantly, some lucky people will be prepared to buy then and get the deal of a lifetime at the bottom of the trough as prices bottom out, then prices will be in flux before they settle on an affordable equilibrium that allows locals to own/rent homes comfortably.

Although, Vancouver IS special - money laundering capital of North America aside, it's truly beautiful here & thus desirable by the ultra rich, so prices here will likely always stay somewhere higher than locals can truly afford - they just won't likely stay so astronomically unaffordable as they are now.

[sarcasm]Kind of a mystery why there should be so many homeless on the left coast what with all those kind and generous liberals to selflessly take them into their own homes.
What am I missing?[/sarcasm]

In my experience, rents never go down.