Let's talk about California Governor Newsom's order to clear out the homeless encampments.

BOTTOM LINE, UP FRONT: Clearing the encampments is a necessary but not sufficient step to ending the housing crisis.

Governor Newsom gave the green light, in the wake of the Grants Pass Supreme Court case, for both state and local governments to crack down on homeless encampments. I'm not against clearing encampments. Tent cities are a public health hazard, and they turn public spaces into zones that decent people avoid. Sidewalks, squares and parks should be for everybody, not just an extension of Skid Row. Decent people everywhere shouldn't have to put up with this shit.

But having said that, if you're going to get rid of the encampments, these people have to have somewhere to go. Otherwise, you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. So, where are all these people, the people in the tents, the RVs, and so on, going to go? Are you going to imprison them for vagrancy, at a cost to the public of $132,000 a year? Push off the problem onto neighboring cities? Cities already do that now - Beverly Hills and Burbank kick out their homeless and leave them on the LA City line.

These people need to have somewhere to go. In other words, you need shelters. And you need to move fast. You need new laws so that the State and local governments have the authority to bypass local authorities and create these types of safe spaces quickly, without NIMBYs gumming up the works. These types of shelters come in many forms. For the unsheltered homeless sleeping on the streets, you need structures. This could mean buying tiny homes in bulk, or buying motels like Project Roomkey, or using the massive glut of office space that opened up after the advent of remote work.

But new shelters are only the start of it. You still need to massively increase the amount of housing under construction. The State has been passing reform after reform to try to bring shitty local governments to heel, but none of it has been enough to make a dent in the housing shortage. Statewide, California has added 2.54 new jobs for every 1 new unit of housing. To keep housing prices stable, that ratio has to get down to ~1.5:1. To reduce housing prices, you need to get that ratio even lower. I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but as long as we keep adding way more new jobs than new housing, the crisis will keep getting worse.

Now, there are lots of ways to build housing at scale. If you're a small local government that wants to build tons of housing, Emeryville, in Northern California, has set up its local bureaucracy in a way that should be a model for small cities across the state. Its population has more than doubled since 2020. The reason that Emeryville has managed to build tons of new housing in a short time is that they're accommodating to developers, and they create a bureaucratic infrastructure that doesn't get too precious about new housing. There are tons of smaller suburbs that could learn from how Emeryville operates.

If you're a larger city, you should emulate Sacramento, which basically turned the big zoning reform bill SB50 into its city zoning law a few years back: lots of new apartments downtown and near train stations, and 4-unit buildings everywhere else.

Of course, if your local city isn't willing to try to fix the problem, the State needs to step up its enforcement of builders' remedy. Fear will bring the local governments in line. (Or, at least, one would hope so.) Coupled with reforms, state and local governments need to start building housing in bulk on land that it owns. The State, in particular, has a ton of expertise at building comfortable but not extravagant apartments at massive scale. Cal State LA is doing just that with its huge numbers of new dorms. So is UCLA. This expertise could be leveraged to build new housing on state-owned land. Singapore is a good model of this, where the government builds huge numbers of condos, but these condos are required to be used as primary residences, and the State gets a cut of the profit when these condos are resold, to prevent speculation.

But how you do it is as important as what you do. In particular, we need to establish in-house expertise to fix the crisis, rather than relying on consultants or non-profits. Consultants are necessary sometimes, but in-house expertise allows you to create lasting institutions that can carry out major capital projects on time and on budget. Nonprofits rarely have the size and institutional capacity to build things at scale.

But, of course, all of this assumes that you want to solve the crisis, rather than just trying to hide the mess before the Olympics.


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