Elections Newsome Keeps His Governorship-- Results Not Close

[Jack V Savage]

I'm not going argue the root cause of homelessness anymore, clearly we aren't going to agree in this.

Why not, though? It's not like I like chocolate and you like vanilla. When housing costs go up, homelessness goes up, and when housing costs go down, homelessness goes down. As I said, this is obvious if you think about it, and also very clear in the data.

This sounds great, but how are they going to make the housing affordable? Sure, sounds like tax liability will be reduced which won't necessarily put a huge dent in the cost. But how are unemployed people living on the street going to afford them even in spite of tax credits? How do they determine who qualifies?

Increasing supply => lower prices => fewer people who can't afford it. The beauty part is that there is no need to "determine who qualifies" to benefit from the free market.

This sounds like it will benefit your typical middle class earning family.

Certainly them too. Benefits will be extremely broad:

The housing theory of everything - Works in Progress

But the people who are suffering most from the housing shortage are the homeless, and they are the people who will benefit the most from ending it.

If this works, great. But I'm skeptical considering most municipalities would rather zone area for commercial use because they get more property tax returns on it, which is the downside to Prop 13.

Look into it more. You're knee-jerking objections that I think would melt away if you first took a few moments to understand the issue.

And for the record I'm all for building more properties to make housing more affordable for buyers instead of constantly zoning for rentals which almost always what we see usually.

Good lord, no. Let the market take care of it. I've never seen a libertarian who is more into central planning. There are certainly things markets don't work for--like distributing income to non-workers (which does require transfer payments) and dealing with externalities (which calls for regs). I'm not religious about it like some people, but for most things, market-based solutions work best.

But I would bet you that even with low income housing being built, you aren't going to put much of a dent in homelessness. The lower class people who work and support their families are going to benefit of course from this, which is good. But I don't think the people who phoned it a long time ago, suffering from addiction and/or have mental health issues are going to be lead to water because of this.

They'll stay on the streets unemployed because that's the life they know. Unless they get the help they need first to be a contributing member of society. Then, maybe they'll be more likely to work and take advantage of low income housing opportunities.

It's a pretty long-term bet, but these are two of the biggest steps to reduce homelessness that we've seen, and I think more are coming. I expect reductions to start almost immediately. It's a lock that Newsom will leave office with a lower rate than he took office with. I'll have to dig into the numbers more to predict the magnitude of the decline.

 

[Fluffernutter]

Will this increase the California exodus?