alt Hacker News> We need to solve the job issue. If thoughtful analysis is done on this, it may actually turn out to be that the lack of lodging is a secondary issue, It may be the root issue is the inability for a sub-segment of our population to a stable 40 hour a week job that is the real Core problem.
It seems like a stretch to assume this is a jobs issue. You could make the same argument that it’s a lack of working enough hours. I’m not saying it’s either, simply that hours worked is not proof alone that the problem is the lack of jobs.
That said, housing prices continue to outpace household income [0], which should be a lot easier to explain as a cause for the problem that many cannot afford housing where they were able to before. Especially in California where there’s a greater incentive to hold on to a house and extract rent from it due to prop 13, and infamous amounts of attempts to constrain housing supply through regulations and lawsuits.
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1MH1V (Real Median Household Income vs Median Sales Price of Houses Sold)
Do me a favor. Tell me why do you think it's a stretch (to assume that this is a job's issue). This would appear to me to be an intuitive statement and possibly is simply created because you've already made up your mind. Unfortunately, after we make up our mind to do something, our brains are heavily subject to confirmation bias, which means it's incredibly difficult for people to take in new information or to consider new viewpoints. On the other hand, if you have good rational, logical rationale, then it should be able to be laid out fairly crisply.
However, I think it's intuitively obvious that there is a social contract that people should be expected to work a 40-hour work week. And when we find they can't work a 40-hour work week, and then they are homeless, this would appear to me to be a problem. Feel free to tell me why you would think this would not be a problem.
In your reply to me, your way of dealing with the job issue is to simply take what you initially thought and provide yet one more graph. However, this meaningfully doesn't add anything to the conversation because I already stated that it is clear that there is a correlation between housing and homeless.
As I stated, I'm familiar with Gregg Colburn, who has a methodology which goes well beyond simply doing a Fred graph. In his methodology he basically takes a look at different Geos and the different lodging cost in those geos and then he wraps it back into homelessness. There is no doubt when housing becomes more expensive, people find themselves out on the street.