It's common knowledge that unreliability, not just poverty, contributes to homelessness. People with impairments that make them tough to live with and tough to employ, like drug abuse or illness (and not just mental illness! physical illness can leave you pretty unreliable and tough to live with, too!) are more likely to "enjoy" homeless…
It's common knowledge that unreliability, not just poverty, contributes to homelessness. People with impairments that make them tough to live with and tough to employ, like drug abuse or illness (and not just mental illness! physical illness can leave you pretty unreliable and tough to live with, too!) are more likely to "enjoy" homelessness than the merely-poor-but-otherwise-reliable are. As Rob Baxter and "Uncle Abe's Revenge" mentioned in these comments, we now have drugs of abuse and barriers to employment (like drug testing!) that didn't historically exist. (On the other hand, as Sherm pointed out, opium used to be available without a prescription: that drugs of previous eras were more "natural" and less controlled doesn't mean that addiction to them wasn't a widespread problem.)
But since some significant portion of tough-to-live-with, unreliable people is always with us, we should ask, "How might restricting housing supply, and driving up its cost, create incentives to turf these unreliable people, in particular, out onto the street?"
The higher housing costs are, and the more the middle class relies on housing appreciation to build wealth, the more threatening it becomes for ordinary families to share living space with anyone who might threaten home values. Similarly, the riskier it becomes for landlords, many of whom are themselves of modest means, to tolerate less-than-perfect tenants. While some people hafta get kicked out because, say, they can't stop shooting up or masturbating in front of the kids, it seems likely that many more are kicked out just because they can't contribute enough to the maintenance that keeps property values high. In an environment where housing values are low and even depreciating (as they do in Japan), it would be easier to tolerate the weird household member who makes more of a mess or has less to contribute.
Additionally, the more regulations there are prohibiting boarders (either in a family's spare room or in a boarding house), the less space there is for misfits to simply have a roof over their heads. But homevoters are afraid of having boarders in the neighborhood for fear that boarders are exactly the kind of weirdos who threaten property values. In NYC, for example, boarding used to be a normal way for individuals and even families to live. Some boarding conditions were quite squalid, of course, but simply living around other people could also help the dysfunctional function (other boarders might take it upon themselves to shoo a ne'er-do-well off to his job in time just to get a break from him, and so on). NYC's campaign against SROs (single room occupancy – boarding) seems to have greatly exacerbated NYC's homeless problem:
There are many degrees of squalor, ranging from horrendous pestilence and abuse to "those people let their lawn get shaggy for a few months". The more normal it is to be overinvested in housing, the less people will tolerate even minor squalor, and the greater the pressure on households to kick out anyone who's the least bit squalid. Japan is a country famous for its un-squalid aesthetics, but is also a country where people expect housing to depreciate, rather than appreciate, in value, and which – perhaps not coincidentally – has low rates of homelessness:
"Weirdly, this is presented as a chronic problem — something Japan should have fixed long ago, but hasn’t. But in reality, depreciating real estate is one of Japan’s biggest strengths. Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway.
"As a result, Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall, even as people continued to stream from the countryside into the city."
To make this possible, "Japan has a relatively simple and unambiguous zoning code, one which the national government has repeatedly adjusted in order to allow for more housing growth in Tokyo."
I've previously wondered why the famously industrious Japanese tolerate hikikomori – children who become recluses not contributing to their household. But if housing depreciates in Japan, tolerating hikikomori, rather than bunging them out onto the street to become everyone's problem, makes more sense.
It's common knowledge that unreliability, not just poverty, contributes to homelessness. People with impairments that make them tough to live with and tough to employ, like drug abuse or illness (and not just mental illness! physical illness can leave you pretty unreliable and tough to live with, too!) are more likely to "enjoy" homelessness than the merely-poor-but-otherwise-reliable are. As Rob Baxter and "Uncle Abe's Revenge" mentioned in these comments, we now have drugs of abuse and barriers to employment (like drug testing!) that didn't historically exist. (On the other hand, as Sherm pointed out, opium used to be available without a prescription: that drugs of previous eras were more "natural" and less controlled doesn't mean that addiction to them wasn't a widespread problem.)
But since some significant portion of tough-to-live-with, unreliable people is always with us, we should ask, "How might restricting housing supply, and driving up its cost, create incentives to turf these unreliable people, in particular, out onto the street?"
The higher housing costs are, and the more the middle class relies on housing appreciation to build wealth, the more threatening it becomes for ordinary families to share living space with anyone who might threaten home values. Similarly, the riskier it becomes for landlords, many of whom are themselves of modest means, to tolerate less-than-perfect tenants. While some people hafta get kicked out because, say, they can't stop shooting up or masturbating in front of the kids, it seems likely that many more are kicked out just because they can't contribute enough to the maintenance that keeps property values high. In an environment where housing values are low and even depreciating (as they do in Japan), it would be easier to tolerate the weird household member who makes more of a mess or has less to contribute.
Additionally, the more regulations there are prohibiting boarders (either in a family's spare room or in a boarding house), the less space there is for misfits to simply have a roof over their heads. But homevoters are afraid of having boarders in the neighborhood for fear that boarders are exactly the kind of weirdos who threaten property values. In NYC, for example, boarding used to be a normal way for individuals and even families to live. Some boarding conditions were quite squalid, of course, but simply living around other people could also help the dysfunctional function (other boarders might take it upon themselves to shoo a ne'er-do-well off to his job in time just to get a break from him, and so on). NYC's campaign against SROs (single room occupancy – boarding) seems to have greatly exacerbated NYC's homeless problem:
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1344&context=clr
There are many degrees of squalor, ranging from horrendous pestilence and abuse to "those people let their lawn get shaggy for a few months". The more normal it is to be overinvested in housing, the less people will tolerate even minor squalor, and the greater the pressure on households to kick out anyone who's the least bit squalid. Japan is a country famous for its un-squalid aesthetics, but is also a country where people expect housing to depreciate, rather than appreciate, in value, and which – perhaps not coincidentally – has low rates of homelessness:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/actually-japan-has-changed-a-lot
"Weirdly, this is presented as a chronic problem — something Japan should have fixed long ago, but hasn’t. But in reality, depreciating real estate is one of Japan’s biggest strengths. Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway.
"As a result, Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall, even as people continued to stream from the countryside into the city."
To make this possible, "Japan has a relatively simple and unambiguous zoning code, one which the national government has repeatedly adjusted in order to allow for more housing growth in Tokyo."
https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-built-its-way-to-abundant-housing/
I've previously wondered why the famously industrious Japanese tolerate hikikomori – children who become recluses not contributing to their household. But if housing depreciates in Japan, tolerating hikikomori, rather than bunging them out onto the street to become everyone's problem, makes more sense.