The article you are quoting is from 2018. An article from 2019 says:
For this map, we analyzed the states with the most available housing based on population. We divided the number of housing units available in 2019 by the state’s population in order to determine the states with the most available housing per capita.
By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita.
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith, but it doesn't actually rebut my statement that this is not a problem that is likely to be solved by solely local efforts.
Adding more lanes to a freeway tends to not solve the problem of congestion. If you want fewer cars on the road, you need to make it feasible for more people to get where they want or need to go some other way: walking, cycling, public transit.
Our current financing mechanisms, housing policies and general expectations for what constitutes good housing are rooted in policies developed post World War II to help solve the housing crisis of that era and it gave birth to the modern suburb. We now have policies and practices that make it hard to build and finance anything other than single-family detached homes and various trends have pushed up average size of new homes while the average number of people living in such homes has shrunk.
Does California need more affordable housing? Absolutely.
So does every other state in the US. And other states are generally more affordable than California, so if other states will also address their housing issues, you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing.
I tried to understand what that deedclaim.com article was saying and completely failed. There are obviously not 2.75 houses per person in California. I have no idea what that number is trying to indicate.
I'm not sure either. It really only is intended to support the point that this isn't a good way to try to "rebut" my statement and I didn't try hard to find a highly reliable source, which is generally a bad idea, especially when posting to HN.
Here is another figure:
California ranks among states with the lowest vacancy rates, according to a new report by LendingTree.
But because California is so large, it still has the second-highest number of vacant homes - about 8.7% according to the report, or around 1.2 million empty homes.
There are lots of empty homes in the US and lots of homeless people on the streets and lots of people with modest incomes struggling to find housing they can afford that works for them financially and in other ways. The empty homes are often not homes that would serve the needs of homeless people well. You can have a lot of empty homes and still have a lot of people on the street and California does have both.
I tend to talk about walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods rather than affordable housing because the phrase "affordable housing" is a hot-button phrase and most people seem to think it means either government projects or poverty housing (or both). It's a really tough topic to communicate well on and I have been absent from HN in recent weeks, as is common for me around the holidays, and I'm probably making a mistake trying to discuss this at all.
It's not really a central topic of focus for the forum and it's endlessly frustrating trying to do that Vulcan mind meld "my mind to yours" and convey what I am thinking by little black characters on a light background. It routinely gets very wildly misconstrued and it's very unusual for people to actually care to understand my point. Most are just waiting to shoot it down and reassert whatever they already believe is true, which often boils down to "Let's just round up homeless people and throw them in jail!"
> By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita
I don't know how deedclaim computed those numbers, or the reliability of the source; but California most definitely has a shortage of housing. The numbers I quoted come from the McKinsey Global institute study: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckin...
And local policy is very much a problem. Briefly as described in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY, California has a lot of housing restrictions, a high cost of construction, and processes that make it easy for housing opponents to block new developments.
And your statement "you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing." is not an accurate characterization. Most of the homeless in California are Californians. Quoting from 2023 UCSF homeless study (https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...): "People experiencing homelessness in
California are Californians. Nine out of ten
participants lost their last housing in California;
75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing"
I've spoken to people and read articles where they moved to California to stay with a friend temporarily and try to find work or a similar scenario, it didn't work out and they ended up homeless. If your last address was prison in California, your last address makes you "a Californian."
Those stats tend to be self reported. They tend to try to frame the local homeless as members of the community in which they are currently homeless in order to try to convince people to see them as human beings deserving help and compassion because it's already far too common for cops to drive them to the edge of town and dump them or stick them on a bus to elsewhere.
It's illegal to dump homeless people that way but it's common knowledge that it happens. And it's a known thing some hospitals and such in other states release people, stick them on a bus and send them to California.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I traveled to California as a homeless person to camp there. I left California to get back into housing after all attempts to get into housing in California failed, even though I repeatedly relocated to someplace cheaper within California to try to arrange it.
I have talked to homeless people in person or online for years. I know for a fact other homeless people choose to physically relocate to more temperate, drier climes to survive it. You can go on reddit and find questions about "where to go" as a homeless person. Warmer and dryer are two frequent criteria sought.
I've participated in the planning stages of an annual point in time count. I'm familiar with the enormous challenges involved in getting useful data on a population that does its best to remain invisible.
The highly obvious homeless are the tip of the iceberg. There are far more homeless in stealth mode hiding it from their employer or their college, sleeping in a vehicle or couch surfing or living in situations not intended to be permanent housing, such as hotels.
I'm confident that my characterization of the situation is accurate. And that the people publishing data on homeless populations rarely have good data to begin with and then routinely spin it to serve a political agenda of trying to get some compassion and sympathy for people instead of more abuse.
I don't want that. I want housing solutions, not a pity party, and I've been pursuing education and doing personal research etc for decades to try to serve that goal.
So I guess we can agree to disagree because that's a big fat NO from me, sorry.
> By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita.
I just read the article. I think the article makes a grave error. It is not 2.37 houses per person, which would be absurd. Instead it is 2.37 persons per available house. So instead of being 2nd easiest to find housing, California is 2nd most difficult. This is also borne out by the new construction rates in California, which has faced huge population growth but below national average house construction.
For this map, we analyzed the states with the most available housing based on population. We divided the number of housing units available in 2019 by the state’s population in order to determine the states with the most available housing per capita.
By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita.
https://www.deedclaim.com/states-with-most-housing-growth/
A favorite quote of mine: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It's often attributed to Mark Twain, who popularized it. He attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith, but it doesn't actually rebut my statement that this is not a problem that is likely to be solved by solely local efforts.
Adding more lanes to a freeway tends to not solve the problem of congestion. If you want fewer cars on the road, you need to make it feasible for more people to get where they want or need to go some other way: walking, cycling, public transit.
Our current financing mechanisms, housing policies and general expectations for what constitutes good housing are rooted in policies developed post World War II to help solve the housing crisis of that era and it gave birth to the modern suburb. We now have policies and practices that make it hard to build and finance anything other than single-family detached homes and various trends have pushed up average size of new homes while the average number of people living in such homes has shrunk.
Does California need more affordable housing? Absolutely.
So does every other state in the US. And other states are generally more affordable than California, so if other states will also address their housing issues, you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing.