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California Does Not Have the Worst Homeless Problem in the US

Over at National Review, Isaac Schorr has apparently taken on the task of getting us all to take Caitlin Jenner seriously. It's a nice try, Isaac, but I decline to take the bait. Instead, I'll highlight only this:

With more than 160,000 homeless, California paces the nation, and it’s not particularly close. Worse, that number is on an upward trajectory.

I'm not quite sure what the point is here. That Jenner is bravely speaking truths about the homeless that no one else will take on? Believe me, you can't swing a dead cat in the state of California without hearing or reading half a dozen takes on homelessness, which we all know is caused by the state's general unwillingness to build new housing. There are no big secrets here.

But is it even true that California "paces the nation" in homelessness? Surprisingly, the answer is no. At the very least you need to take each state's population into account, and when you do that California comes in at #4:

This is nothing to be proud of, but it's not the highest in the nation. OK?

UPDATE: The original version of this chart was off by a factor of ten. Sorry about that. It's correct now.

76 thoughts on “California Does Not Have the Worst Homeless Problem in the US

  1. cld

    The Republican response to homelessness is exactly the same as their response to virtually everything else,

    it's someone else's fault and we need to be increasingly abusive to easily victimized helpless victims until they stop.

  2. Doctor Jay

    I have a greater chance of swimming across the Amazon River at its mouth than Caitlin Jenner has of beating Newsom in this election. I do not plan to vote for her.

    AND, it delights me to no end to see lots of positive articles in the conservative press about a trans woman. Articles which use the correct pronoun, I might add.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Caitlyn Jenner wants to be the first governor whose party will not allow her to use her gender-assigned bathroom at the statehouse.

      1. Mitchell Young

        I'll bet you 100 to 1 that the governor has zur own personal, private, exclusive use bathroom.

  3. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    First, Kevin, no talking about about "swinging a dead cat." Second, if CA has a homelessness rate less than half of the District of Columbia's, maybe anyone serving in the Congress should just shut up about homelessness in CA.

    1. Midgard

      160000 of 39 million is less than one percent. The graph in its nature is wrong. How about a free market liquidation??? Bread lines and supply shortages that would make 1980 Soviet Russia grimace.

      1. Rattus Norvegicus

        The percentages are x10. CA has a homeless rate of 0.4%, MT has a homeless rate of 0.1%.

    2. cld

      For some reason I was talking about swinging a dead cat just this afternoon.

      You couldn't swing a dead cat in here, is what I said.

      This is the time we live in.

      And then these two boobs I said it to clearly had no idea what it could mean and seemed to think it was something I might actually think about doing. It was all I could do not to keep bringing dead cats back into the conversation.

  4. Midgard

    Homelessness isn't even a stat. It's a made up analysis for political consumption. There are plenty of homelessness in rural areas that is not counted.

    Whining about California homelessness is 50 years long.

    1. aldoushickman

      Oh, but it is when you can punch down. As in: Why should DC be made a state? It's so poorly governed that it leads the nation in homelessness--why reward that with statehood?

      1. HokieAnnie

        DC has managed to run a budget surplus for over a decade. It is a very well run city despite what racists trolls say.

        The reason DC seems so out of wack is due to the fact that it is entirely Urban, unlike the other states which are a mix of Urban/Suburban/Rural.

        It is a matter of justice that DC become a state. 700,000 residents live in DC and do not have voting representation in the House and Senate. That is a larger population than the states of Wyoming and Vermont.

    2. Mitchell Young

      For some reason DC often shows up on these lists, and its not fair, precisely for the same one of the best reasons that DC should not become a state, it's a city, highly urbanized with exactly one 'industry'. Even the smallest population states are more diverse in terms of modes of life and economy.

      The bestest reason DC should not be a state, of course, is that the Founders were smart enough to realize a city entirely devoted to government would be a permanent fixture in trying to expand that government if given any power. Frankly I think its right to electoral college votes should be repealed.

      1. HokieAnnie

        So you're totally fine with 700,00 residents of DC not having voting representation in Congress? You are totally fine with the families of soldiers who died defending our country not having representation? You are totally fine with the law enforcement officials who defended the Capitol on 1/6/21 not having representation?

        Shame on you.

        The founders were smart and dumb at the same time. They locked out a majority of the persons living in the US from having the right to vote. One should not look to the founding fathers for the last word on who gets to participate in our Democracy.

      2. ScentOfViolets

        Read the Federalist Papers, have you? Care to point out where ' the Founders were smart enough to realize a city entirely devoted to government would be a permanent fixture in trying to expand that government if given any power' appears in those sacred texts (I mean, you _did_ capitalize 'Founders', amirite?)

      3. kkseattle

        DC obviously has more than one industry. But since the last inane reason—no car dealerships!—was exposed as being a ridiculous lie, move into the next inanity, amirite?

    3. Jasper_in_Boston

      DC is not a state.

      Thank you for educating us. I'd been wondering why there aren't 51 stars on Old Glory.

  5. Leo1008

    Counting NV and CO as blue, nine out of the top ten are blue states (or districts)? And they are widely dispersed through different geographic areas and climates? It's one thing to say that CA is not building enough housing, but is there a pattern here regarding blue states in general? Or is the difference not actually that great between the top ten and the next ten after that?

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        This is literally the plot of the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode "Psycho Pete Returns".

    1. weirdnoise

      I think urbanization is a good part of it, as are social services that bring homeless people into contract with a bureaucracy that can count them. And, of course the attraction of having such services.

      This isn't to say that California doesn't have a housing problem (both cost and quantity) that contributes to homelessness. But cooking up a single number to measure homelessness is a fool's errand.

    2. cephalopod

      I think it has a lot to do with being high wage, urbanized states.

      When you have a booming urban economy, housing starts to become expensive. It's hard to build in those booming urban areas because empty land is already scarce. When the wages you have to pay the construction workers are high, it becomes that much harder to build enough housing.

      People talk a lot about zoning, but construction costs are so high in many areas that there is no amount of zoning modification that will make it affordable (short of allowing shacks without electricity and plumbing - but that's just a tent city, which the homeless are already living in). The minimum wage is a floor, and that floor goes farther in some states than others.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        >>>People talk a lot about zoning, but construction costs are so high in many areas that there is no amount of zoning modification that will make it affordable<<<

        Tokyo builds more housing each year than California, a jurisdiction that's about 3x as large.

        It's supply constriction, plain and simple. (Also, construction wages are really a pretty tiny portion of the cost of bringing new housing online; in general -- and this is especially true in pricey blue metros -- by far the biggest cost is land).

        1. ScentOfViolets

          Well here's the thing, and let me quote Yglesias on this (which, believe me, I seldom do):

          "We’ve switched from a system in which owning a piece of real estate means you’re entitled to do what you want with it, to one in which owning a piece of real estate means you get wide-ranging powers to veto activities on your neighbors’ land."

          1. KenSchulz

            He should move to New England swamp-Yankee country. Lots of MYOB tradition here. I confess I had a rusting lawn tractor on my property for a quarter-century before I finally had it hauled away.

        2. KenSchulz

          Many rural areas and small towns in the US have been losing population as people move to the cities for more economic opportunities. They don’t bring their houses with them. Supply and demand, and the need for new-dwelling construction are local issues.

    3. illilillili

      Yeah... why would urban areas have higher per-capita homelessness than rural areas. It's a conundrum all right.

  6. bbleh

    Yeah I'm not so sure I'd trust numbers on homelessness to be equally accurate among states. I kinda think some states are much more likely to undercount than others, and I can't imagine ANY state actually has a true count. There are both immense practical difficulties AND material disincentives to counting homeless people.

    (And yeah, DC is not a state.)

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      I remember when the Census Bureau trying to get an accurate count of the homeless in the 1990 Census was a culture war minefield.

    2. HokieAnnie

      But DC should be a state, 700,000 citizens are denied voting representation in Congress. That's more people than live in Wyoming or Vermont.

  7. ey81

    Although Kevin is right that only per capita measurements are meaningful, my outrage at NR's deception is muted due to the number of attacks on Trump I have read based on the US having the most COVID fatalities of any country.

  8. Clyde Schechter

    "...which we all know is caused by the state's general unwillingness to build new housing.

    I am so sick of hearing that. It's a bizarre way to think about the problem.

    First, there are a sizable chunk of the homeless who due to mental illness are incapable of maintaining their own households. All of the US deinstitutionalized those people decades ago. Granted the conditions in many of those institutions were deplorable and inhumane--but instead of fixing those, our society chose to toss these people out into the street and abandon them altogether. For the left, at the time it was a civil liberties issue, and on the right they were happy to stop spending money on them. We still have a mental health care system that is incapable of dealing with them. Building more housing will do nothing for these people.

    Then there are the people who are simply priced out of the housing market. And this has generated the constant civil war between those who want existing communities to build more housing, and more affordable housing, and those communities who resist having their quality of life diminished by overcrowding, congestion, traffic, etc. Well, in that civil war, I'm on the NIMBY's side. Look at our roads: they are already inadequate to the people we have living here. Bring in more people and the gridlock will jump to 24/7 instead of just 12/5. Our water system does not have the capacity to support many more people. We already experience rolling brownouts and blackouts in the summer--what will happen if we increase the number of people drawing electric power? The infrastructure is simply inadequate to accommodate increased numbers of people.

    So what to do? Well, the first thing to notice is that huge swaths of California are uninhabited desert. Of course, nobody wants to live there because there are no jobs there, and commuting to where the jobs are is already awful even from nearby. But there lies the seed of a solution. Why are all the non-agricultural jobs concentrated in a few large cities in the coastal region? If we have seen anything during the pandemic it is that corporations do not actually need to have all their people physically present in offices to run. It's just a matter of "we've always done it that way" combined with some sociopathic need for managers to feel in control. (Yes, I acknowledge that some types of work need to be done physically in certain places--but a great deal could be done anywhere.)

    The solution is to develop infrastructure, housing and commercial facilities in remote areas and force businesses that want to expand or open physical facilities to do so in those areas, and mandate that businesses allow employees to work from home to the maximum extent that employees want and is compatible with actually getting the work done.

    If we break the geographic concentration of businesses, the housing problem will solve itself.

    1. Leo1008

      "those communities who resist having their quality of life diminished by overcrowding, congestion, traffic, etc. "

      Building more housing is not synonymous with overcrowding, congestion, traffic, etc.. This is one of the many common and pernicious "ideas" offered by NIMBYs, and it is as shallow as most of their other "arguments" as well.

      If someone wants to argue that transit, infrastructure, and other long term planning goals should be incorporated into housing construction - I'm all for it. But this NIMBY argument is different: either they're ignoring the fact that these vital aspects of the situation can ameliorate the issues they're supposedly concerned about, or they're buried so deep in the NIMBY propaganda that they haven't even considered these factors at all (and, in most NIMBY cases, it does often come down to immersion in a level of propaganda that trump and Fox news can only enviously dream about).

      After propping up an absurdist fantasy about the looming threat of a dreaded "Manhattanization," the NIMBYs usually - in their typically myopic manner - refuse or fail to see the real problems we are faced with: we're either going to adjust with the times and adapt as necessary with our circumstances or we're going to perish.

      Throwing up your hands and insisting "I got here first, I got mine, Screw the rest of you" (And that is, basically, all the NIMBYs are doing - even though they try to disguise it in different language) is a good way, if not the best way, to insure their own destruction as well as that of everyone else.

      But in many major metropolitan areas throughout states that lack sufficient housing - such as CA - there simply are no affordable places for students, teachers, restaurant staff, new immigrants (and future entrepreneurs), retail workers, transit operators, police, firemen, and countless others to live. The areas that adopt an idiotically NIMBY approach and thereby keep all these people away by refusing them affordable housing are simply killing themselves. These NIMBYs will show up at restaurants or try to send their grandkids to school and then they'll rant and rave when they can't get everything they want at those establishments which they themselves have done such an excellent job of undermining.

      The future means growth, change, and adaptation, whether any of us like it or not. And we're not going to be able to keep all of that change out of our own lives or conveniently ship it off to some remote locations somewhere. Such plans are as impractical as they are both unwise or just plain inhumane.

      And there isn't even space in this rant to get to all of the environmental devastation wrought by the godforsaken wrongheadedness of your average NIMBY lunatic.

      Get with reality or just get out of everyone else's way; because ultimately the adults will need to deal with all of the problems that the NIMBYs of this world are so busily and wholeheartedly contributing to with all of their damn might.

      1. illilillili

        People can say "build more housing to solve homelessness" but if you point out that building more housing will increase congestion, you're a NIMBY because you didn't say "or make plans for infrastructure as well".

        That's quite the double standard you have there. People who agree with you should never have to mention the details in the backs of their minds, and people who disagree are required to lay out each and every argument in triplicate.

        Also, New York City did quite a bit of infrastructure planning and house building and still has high per-capita homelessness.

    2. Jasper_in_Boston

      I am so sick of hearing that. It's a bizarre way to think about the problem.

      There's nothing bizarre about it. The notion that supply restriction drives housing scarcity and lack of affordability, which in turn intensifies homelessness, is utterly uncontroversial.

      1. Leo1008

        NIMBYs generally don't like to be told they are anything other than wholesome sweetness and light.

  9. dspcole

    Hmm. I think that is an incorrect use of the term “swinging a dead cat” . I believe it is used when referring to common physical objects such as “ you can’t swing a dead cat in New York without hitting a Tesla “ or ” you can’t swing a dead cat in the hallway of a hospital without hitting someone who thinks healthcare is too expensive”. Amirite?

  10. rick_jones

    The importance of normalizing to population mean you’ll drop the absolute counts from your daily COVID updates?

  11. cld

    If congestion is an issue we could eliminate the weekend and institute a three day work week, where half the people work one block of three days, the other half the other block, with a fourth day as a wild card for whatever. And when you're in your off-block you can still contribute your time remotely.

    That will ease congestion.

    1. JonF311

      Just keeping current work from home practices also eliminates a lot of congestion. Traffic here in the Baltimore region has recovered from the Zombie Apocalypse phase last spring, but it's still not back to pre-Covid gridlock. You can hop on the Beltway at rush hour and not be in a bumper-to-bumper mess.

  12. tuckermorgan

    It's not a like-for-like comparison and as somebody who's literally collected and submitted this data to HUD, the statewide comparisons depend on a lot on context and geography. HI, CA and OR are compositionally worse for homelessness than DC, NY and MA. DC is a city so it's rate should be compared with other major city rates of homelessness, DC probably is getting a . By major cities LA had a PIT count of 63k for 4m residents, so about 1.5% compared with DC at 0.9% which is the same rate as NYC. Honolulu has the highest rate, but most cities out west have relatively high rates because they've gotten so expensive so quickly and the weather means that people won't literally die from the cold. NY and MA have statewide requirement to shelter laws so the number of families with children who are homeless is somewhat higher because they're providing emergency shelter to more families than might otherwise be counted on the PIT. It's pretty different ways the homeless population presents between places, but the places where it's worse are all unified by the cost of maintaining housing.
    The people who spend a long time homeless do often have medical, substance use and mental health issues, but it's also still a cost and availability issue. If cities had rooming houses that people could rent a room for less than half of an SSI check there would be a lot of people with those issues who'd still have a room of their own. And if the suburbs all had to have at least 1/4 of the residential zoning for 12 units per acre then the cost of renting apartments for families would drop significantly in the suburbs and many fewer would be one bad break from having nowhere else to go.
    If you want to make a dent in it in a high cost, coastal area, the best way to do so immediately is to lobby your local area to convert motels to permanent housing for homeless folks. That's the best short term solution since we don't want the only way vacant units to show up is through evictions and building is too long term to help with the immediate problem. There's lots of funding from COVID, but nothing to spend it on- it's the same problem for individuals trying to buy houses as organizations trying to buy buildings.

  13. illilillili

    Yeah, I also can't think of any reason why South Dakota and Arizona might have lower per-capita homelessness.

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      Saying California "builds a lot of housing" is like saying California "births a lot of babies" or California "uses a lot of electricity." California is by far the largest state in population, fully a third larger than it nearest competitor. So, of course California will inevitably be a national leader in terms of housing starts most years (at least in absolute numbers).

      What matters is whether California is building "a lot of housing" relative to the demand. Pretty clearly by that measure, the answer is "no" (although California isn't the only state of which that is true).

  14. Mitchell Young

    How about lessening the stress on the housing stock by limiting immigration to, oh, half a million a year vs. 1.1 million. People act like immigrants live under toadstools.

    1. JonF311

      Florida is very good at hiding its homeless from sight. They keep such people well away from the tourist areas (Key West is a bit of an exception, but it's a small island so not much room to hide the homeless). People I know who travel to Florida claim they never see pandhandlers down there, and they don't always believe me when I tell them (from five years experience living down there) that if you go into the not-so-nice parts of town there's plenty of them. And of course all those gated communities where people with (at least some) money live are pretty effective at keeping the homeless away.

  15. rsjmiller

    Honest question: any theories as to why all blue states lead in this effort? I mean is Texas doing anything different than California to stop homelessness? Or are blue states just generally nicer and more accepting?

    What are the theories?

    1. JonF311

      Utah has a good anti-homeless program- and it's a "housing first" program. The others? I don't know? Maybe they just lock them up in jail for vagrancy for weeks at a time so at any one time there's fewer of them on the street?

  16. D_Ohrk_E1

    *houseless

    What we have here is an issue of an unwillingness to reduce certain regulations so as to allow cheap housing to house the houseless, IMO, particularly driven by a subset of liberalism, called Rich White Liberal NIMBYism.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      I'm not at all sure this is true, at least in specific locales. See my post below where I cite Interfluidity on the subject. Sometimes there is only so much of something to go around, despite all political posturing to the contrary.

  17. ScentOfViolets

    My go-to cite when talk turns to housing in general, California in particular, and San Francisco as the exemplar of all that is wrong with housing policy as practiced by the Golden State in particular particular:

    https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/date/2016/05

    A few takeaways (Damn, I miss blockquotes basic HTML tag support, etc.):

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    "Basically, Fischer estimates a model that puts plausible magnitudes on the price effect of new housing supply. How much new housing would we actually have to build in San Francisco to address the housing affordability problem? The model is certainly contestable, but at least it gives us plausible magnitudes to talk about. To stabilize real rents at their current, absurdly unaffordable level, Fischer finds that the number of housing units would have to increase in real terms by 1.5% per year, holding other factors constant. [*] So, is it plausible that San Francisco could build its way out of its housing crisis? As Fischer notes, that would imply a unit growth rate more than 3 times the average rate since 1975. Hamilton Nolan of build-some-housing-assholes fame concludes that

    Those fortunate enough to have nice places to live in San Francisco (and the rest of the Bay Area) have had decades to get this right. And they haven’t. Drastic measures are in order.

    Decades! Hamilton, you are more right than you know. The last time San Francisco achieved a unit growth rate of 1.5% was in… 1941. So many decades of NIMBYs! What was really different about 1941 compared to now? No exclusionary zoning regs? No pesky environmentalists? Maybe! But perhaps a more parsimonious explanation is the one that Fischer himself gives.

    From 1935 to 1943, the Central Sunset and Parkmerced filled in. From 1944 to 1954, the Outer Sunset and Ocean View were built. And that was essentially the end of the easily developed greenfield housing."
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    You mean there are constraints other than political? That the Green Lantern theory simply does not apply to this situation? Oh my stars and garters!

    1. cld

      You can get blockquotes with the pointy brackets > <, and 'blockquote',

      like this

      but it doesn't move in too far.

      does it work better if you double it?

  18. Dana Decker

    KD: you can't swing a dead cat in the state of California without hearing or reading half a dozen takes on homelessness, which we all know is caused by the state's general unwillingness to build new housing.

    Unwillingness to build new housing ... or, and hear me out ... it could be caused by the rapid rise in population - about 2% a year for half a century - which brings the state population up from 20 million (1965) to 40 million today. That growth in population was avoidable.

  19. cld

    And if you try to swing a dead cat in California you have to get it approved by fifteen different agencies and three commissions whose terms inevitably expire before you get all the approvals so you have to start all over again.

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