As long as its safe to occupy for permanent living it should get permitted, not sure how its much different than a hostel/rooming house-like arrangement. You don't need a kitchen and bathroom in your unit to live.
Safety will always be a top argument to constrain and block off new housing. Look at current building codes. Sure all those things make us safer -- if you ignore the homeless left on the streets and the people who no longer have money left over for good food, education, and healthcare after paying the high price it costs to build an up-to-code house in America.
You can restrict housing practically as tight as you want by raising permitting requirements, safety assessments, and safety factors and other safety features until it's practically impossible for anyone but the rich to build.
There are people out there that would be safer in a run-down tinder-box shack than an up to code and zoned house. Not because the house is safer, but because it allows them to have an affordable roof over their head and round out their finances for other things that bring them wellbeing. Building and zoning codes fail to account for this.
China has a lot of people living in subbasements ("ant tribe", not just the immediate floor before ground, but the 3rd or 4th floor below ground). No egress, crappy ventilation (mold is a huge problem), but its cheap. Also, a lot of restaurants in Beijing have their staff sleeping out in their dining room after they close up as a form of worker dorms (people also sleep in their shops, which is why they cover the windows up after closing). So this is all very crappy housing situations, but its cheap, and one reason why China doesn't have a huge homeless problem (though still larger than the government admits).
Japan has a lot of 2.5 tatami sized apartments that you can get for $500/month (even in Tokyo). No heat, but you can plug in a space heater. Shared toilet, and no shower necessarily in building (so you have to use a bath house down the street).
America goes out of its way to avoid such living arrangements, and to avoid things like slums. I think we could do a better job at creating lower end housing, however, by sacrificing some of our livability principles. But it isn't going to fix the guy who wants to cook meth in their state provided housing.
My opinion is that the problem with SF isn’t as much housing. It is more with mental health and drug addiction. You do know where many immigrants live right? It isn’t so much on the streets. It is 16 packed into a single apartment. So the mechanisms people talk about already exist. It is that the homeless can’t work because of mental or social issues that compound with drug abuse. You need to fix the mental issues, social issues, and the drug abuse. The housing helps a little but the underlying problems are still there. I think the results already show this.
> It is that the homeless can’t work because of mental or social issues that compound with drug abuse.
You mean "chronic homeless." There are homeless that you don't notice because they aren't standing out. They are living in cars or maybe crashing on someone's couch. Let's not equate homelessness with mental illness drug abuse.
We can just measure this. What percentage of people we give just housing to get off their feet after say a year or two? What percentage of people we allow to shoot up in city approved areas go clean after a year or two? From what I have read, it is a percentage in the low single digits.
We are perpetuating a permanent dependent underclass along with a bureaucracy that is incentivized to maintain the class to maintain their power.
How? Getting accurate statistics is impossible, and what we get is self reported. "I'm not on drugs anymore!" (while smoking fent) is not uncommon. Every group will roll out self reported data to support their positions, scientific studies are frowned on, if they are even possible anyways.
SROs were a housing solution for low-income people who were not functional[1] enough to live with roommates, but were functional enough to be able to live alone.
When we got rid of them, many of their former inhabitants ended up on the street.
[1] For an incredibly broad definition of 'not functional'.
I agree. Your Democratic mayors and supervisors did that. They tore down the SOMA SROs and replaced them with tech campuses without a plan of where to house those people. But it is multi-factorial. You have mental health institutions closed down a decade earlier as well. They should have been reformed instead of closed down.
> Your Democratic mayors and supervisors did that.
You mean: the people who run the cities did that, who all happen to be incredibly Democratic. They also did it in San Diego, where I bet a Republican mayor was in power at the time (since you know, that was mostly true in the 80s, 90s, and 00s), but economics rather than political ideology was the main driver of the gentrification.
> You have mental health institutions closed down a decade earlier as well.
Mostly by that famous Democrat named Ronald Reagan?
I grew up in SF and I was astounded how a city that had trouble getting anything built managed to tear down a neighborhood in such short order. It was as if Brown was in cahoots with powerful developers and used his political power to push it through. Up went a bridge to his liking, down went the Embarcadero, up went a ballpark, and all the SROs went poof. Newsom goes and continues all the policies. Development after development.
Now twenty years later, you have Newsom as governor and angling for the Presidency. Not one peep about how his policies helped cause those problems.
Why was it so easy to build all those tech campuses and tech dorms yet so hard to build anywhere else in the city? People complain about NIMBY SF but where was the NIMBY there and then?
This has happened across the entire country, in big towns and small, in red states and blue, (and, to a great extent, across the rest of the developed world). I assure you, the Democratic boogiemen are not responsible for such a broad international failure.
It wasn’t Democrat boogeyman. It was those people fronting for those interests. Those people in SF happened to be Democrats. And those Democrats are still fronting for those interests. I disagree with the fronting of interests and those Democrats were complicit and still are. If there is a Democrat who won’t front for those interests, I will gladly vote for them. In fact I have.
