People seem to think tech companies produce homelessness because of income distribution, but that's false. It's the increase in population due to those companies bringing in more workers, and their city's corresponding failure to allow new construction, that causes homelessness.
-
-
Show this thread
-
So if you want to fix homelessness, you have two choices: either literally prevent companies from hiring people, so the population doesn't grow, or stop single-family-housing zoning and allow very large apartment complexes to be built everywhere in your city.
Show this thread -
Pretending this a problem with income disparity literally helps nobody. It will never solve the problem, even if income disparity is a separate problem you'd like to solve for other reasons.
Show this thread -
And to the best of my knowledge, this is not something controversial. It's widely acknowledged among those who study this problem. Homelessness is a supply / demand problem, not a pricing problem, and if you keep pretending it's a pricing problem you will never solve it.
Show this thread -
Finally, cities can (and some finally are) actually fix this problem. Recently, for example: https://slate.com/business/2018/12/minneapolis-single-family-zoning-housing-racism.html …
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
Presumably this makes sense only if it’s possible to prove that the above natural population increase is actually happening in all cities where the prices are rising.
-
They've done more analysis than just that! There are plenty of analyses specifically tying bad zoning policies to housing affordability problems, for example:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119010000720 …
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
The population of an area is not fixed, i.e. if you make housing cheaper via zoning laws, it will attract additional people from the outside and there still may not be enough housing for everyone.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.