> why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?

May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.

I think two factors - high productivity leads to high cost of living, which means people without labor skills have a hard time making enough money for food and shelter.

But ALSO - these areas tend to lean towards higher levels of social services such that they have much higher homeless shelter / services / etc per capita.

So while many people may go homeless in place, certainly there is some homeless migration towards areas that actually provide food/shelter and don't harass/arrest them/chase them away.

Don’t discount the weather. Sure is nicer to be in Hawaii in December in a tent than in Michigan

That explains a lot of west coast & Hawaii but not NYC…

NYC has a right to shelter law.

Precisely which is how the rest of the state leaves NYC to shoulder the responsibility

I'd suggest high local wealth and economic productivity tend to correlate strongly with increased housing costs.

People move there for the jobs, and the ones who do have jobs tend to have relatively well paying ones, so can pay more for housing. But the ones who don't have a well paying job are in trouble...

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...

So these people decide to become homeless instead of moving to a nearby area with a lower cost of living?

Like everyone else, homeless people tend to have ties to specific areas, and by the time you're homeless you tend not to have the capital required to move and restart someplace else.

Basically at what point do you decide you're "failing" (no moral valence intended) in one area in which you have a support network that you're willing to risk moving to a totally new area and starting over? At that point, do you have the resources required to do so successfully?

I live in Boulder and homelessness is a big problem here. Some people tie it to housing costs, which I don't buy. There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to get to Boulder for some reason.

And how good is that support network if it leaves you camping in a tent down by the river? I'm not taking about moving across the state, just down the road a bit.

> There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper

Someone who doesn't have a job can't afford "substantially cheaper" housing anyway.

>There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to get to Boulder for some reason.

That's great! But if you have no place to store your clean (or dirty) clothes, or to shower, how many landlords are going to rent to you? How many employers are going to offer you a job?

Those are not rhetorical questions.

You're talking about getting out of homelessness, I'm talking about not becoming homeless in the first place. It's not like rent increases happen overnight

You said "I live in Boulder and homelessness is a big problem here...And how good is that support network if it leaves you camping in a tent down by the river?"

Nope. Definitely not talking about homeless poeple. Gotcha.

1. Remote areas often have some kind of very cheap housing available. It may be low quality housing, but at least it's very affordable.

2. Remote areas don't have services that cater to homeless people.

I have an interesting observation about homelessness. I live in a country where the average household makes about US$6000 a year.

The cost of living here is about 1/2 of the USA, with rents about 1/4. The unemployment rate is about 5%.

Homelessness is very, very low (to the point of near invisibility) and mostly limited to illegal immigrants.

The thing that seems to make homelessness a non-issue here is the tolerance of ad-hoc construction. This leads to neighbourhoods where construction is really low cost / quality, but people are housed.

I don’t really understand why these neighbourhoods don’t devolve into hotbeds of violent crime as I would expect them to in the USA, but they mostly don’t.

Mostly, the construction tends to improve over time, and the neighbourhoods often gradually metamorphosize into more contemporary and inviting areas with vibrant small businesses and elegant homes.

I often wonder if it’s cultural, as poverty is not seen as failure but rather a temporary condition to be transcended as possible?

Which country is that?

Dominican Republic

Doesn't Dominican Republic have like a 50% higher homicide rate than the US? Or do you mean it's just not localized in the spots you'd expect it to be?

Normalize it by region, maybe. Mexico has much higher homicide rate, for example.

The DR has a homicide rate similar to the worst 20% of US states, but much lower than the most murdery ones.

Yea that's why I was wondering if GGP was talking about specific areas. There's certainly cities in the US with eyewatering violent crime rates (St Louis, Baltimore, etc). Not sure if OP was specifically talking about a similar localization within the Dominican Republic.

Idk. IMHO the crime exposure here is pretty insignificant if you aren’t going to the tourist hotspots. At the touristy places it’s about like NYC risk wise.

It’s not high for a developing nation. since 2015 the average is about 13/100k. By comparison, Louisiana is 19, New Mexico is 14, Missouri is 13, Maryland is 11, Alaska is 10.

>dominicans

>no homeless

bro if everyone is homeless than nobody is

? Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I’ve lived here for over a decade and have seen very few people that don’t have a home of some kind. Family connections obviously play a large role.

You're swapping cause and effect. Places with lots of economic opportunity and significant public services to assist the homeless are the place where you can have large homeless populations, ie large numbers of people just barely scraping by. Decrease the money flowing in and the population will go down, because they would no longer be able to survive. Those who can will go elsewhere, you can imagine what happens to those who can't leave a place where they can't survive. One must be very careful using "number of people observed with a particular symptom of the problem" as a proxy for how well the problem is being handled.

High-productivity places without lots of public services also have a lot of homeless people though

There's still money in those places to support people even if it's not flowing through public services. Many homeless people work, and it's easier to get work in high productivity areas. Most of those who don't rely on generosity from people who do.

Because the wealth isn’t distributed properly. Fairly obvious I’d say.

Correlation is not causation. One does not increase the other, rather the rise in one is correlated with the other.

I disagree. As the comments point out, there is an extremely clear mechanistic explanation as to how these are causal.