What difference does it make ?

[vvalkyri]

So I should be getting ready to drive out to Rockville but instead I've spent longer at Eastern Market. I walked past this guy on the way to the car and then walked another couple blocks to the car and got a few hand warmers and toe warmers out of the trunk and walked the couple blocks back and gave him those and a five that I had on me. He asked

Comments

[achinhibitor]

Maybe a few thousand dollars to get into an apartment.

Perversely, it's well-known how to fix a lot of this trouble: Alter the local laws so it is legal to build additional housing in the metro area. All the analyses I've seen say that homelessness in prosperous metro areas is growing for the same reason: people aren't allowed to build new housing, so the housing supply is fixed. As more people get well-paying jobs, the price of housing rises, and people who don't have good incomes are forced out. The ones that are well-organized decamp for cheaper parts of the country; the ones that aren't go onto the streets.

Of course, fixing this is really hard, because so many of the current residents have all their money locked up in a house, and the one thing they want is for the prices of houses to go up.

[vvalkyri]

I saw him again today sleeping in the rain there was another guy there who said that he used to be on C Street, and there was a gal who works at a local soup kitchen who said that for a couple years he'd actually been in an apartment.

I had trouble figuring out about the guy who said that he'd been there said that there had been a social worker come by said that once upon a time there used to be a place homeless people could store their stuff but also kept speaking in terms of scooping people off the street

[vvalkyri]

That said, this guy was keeping trash with him There's a lot more going on than just the affordability of housing.

[vvalkyri]

But yes, that's especially an issue in LA and San Fran. things are a little weirder in DC - we've got a whole lot of apartments going up. But I'm not sure how many of them would count as affordable.