Maybe I'm just feeling cranky.

From Legalize housing, not tent encampments by Matthew Yglesias.  The subheading is The war on rooming houses and SROs was a mistake.

A pleasantly weird set of arguments to my eye.  But, with some interesting research.

Yglesias is very often driven both by ideological convictions and pandering to the issues of the day within the hothouse of the chattering class.  In this instance, the popular leftish desire is to unsettle or destroy single family residential (SFR) neighborhoods combined with a tokenish concern about the homeless leading to a set of policy proposals which seem - strained.  And also leading to ignoring policies likely to actually make a difference.

This echoes a piece I heard on NPR this morning.  I didn't catch the full segment but essentially it was about the ESG people who want to improve energy efficiency in manufactured homes in order to support the AGW religious orthodoxy versus the Social Justice people who are concerned about keeping any and all forms of housing as cheap as possible, especially in a period of time when housing has become so expensive.

Both fair points to an extent, though I am far more sympathetic in this instance to the Social Justice people than I am to the ESG people.  AGW is a faith-based belief system which forces them to make everything more expensive and reduce quality of life for everyone through coercion.  In this example, they want to restrain people's choice of cheaper housing in order achieve better energy efficiency.  For me, that constriction of people's freedom to choose is reprehensible no matter how theologically inspired and well-intended might the AGW people be.

I have no love in general for the Social Justice people but in this case they are right.  The market should function freely to give people the freedom to choose housing options best suited for their constraints.  Policy wonks often lose sight of just how different your range of choices are when you have no savings and/or are on a tight budget.  

Yglesias starts by acknowledging that increased American prosperity over the past 60 years has made American homes better and larger.  It has also reduced demand for earlier forms of housing which were more prevalent in the past.

The 1950 census found 14.1% of the District’s 224,142 occupied housing units to be “overcrowded” (with over 1 person per room). By 2011, that figure had fallen by 2/3, to 4.7%, similar to the 5.3% of homes in 1950 that were extremely overcrowded (more than 1.5 occupants per room).

Boarding houses were indeed prevalent across the nation at least circa 1880-1950.  In Britain as well.  In an era where home mortgages were basically five year bank loans and when there was no social security, everyone, even the middle class, led much more financially precarious lives than today.  

Purchasing a home and paying off was one strategy for men to ensure that their wives had some financial security in the event of the man's death.  With a multi-room home, taking in boarders was a viable business proposition for widowed women.  

Doing genealogical work, I frequently look at Census records from the early decades of the century and scanning through the pages, you frequently see multiple people with different family names in a residence.  Usually a boarding house in a neighborhood.  

And I have direct experience of Washington, D.C. single room occupancy (SRO) hotels.  At Georgetown I had to acquire fluency in German for graduation and while I took the classes and did OK, my progress towards fluency was glacial.  Consequently I returned to campus to squeeze in a summer class for additional practice between my sophomore and junior year.  

I needed cheap housing for a month before the dorms reopened and I found a cheap SRO hotel just off Dupont circle and pleasantly close to the old Second Story Bookstore.  My room was down a narrow dingy corridor, the door had double locks.  The bed frame was military, the sheets clean but thin.  No air conditioning for D.C. in August.  A shared bathroom down the hall.  Payment in cash up front for the week.  

I was neither alarmed nor concerned, just cautious.  I always wore slippers as the floor did not appear to warrant the trust required in order to walk barefoot.  My fellow boarders ranged from somewhat ragged to struggling respectability.  The most striking feature was the painted footsteps that marched up the wall in my room and across the ceiling before they disappeared in the middle.

Oh, and the night I returned from classes to find half a dozen fire engines gathered in front of the hotel to put out a room fire.  Fortunately on a different floor.  

Back to the broader point.  What is notable is that boarding houses went all up and down the class scale.  Respectable middle class people lived in boarding houses, stereotypically retired spinsters, a retired colonel on half-pay, a traveling salesman, etc.  Certainly there were boarding houses in the rough part of town and some catered much more to the pay-by-the night clientele, but that was only one segment of the boardinghouse spectrum.

Indeed, as late as the mid-seventies, there was a British comedy, Rising Damp, that ran several seasons based on the antics and dramas of a boardinghouse with a struggling middle class clientele.  

Yglesias seems perhaps unaware of this range.

But in addition to reducing housing crowding through economic growth, the United States has also waged a multi-faceted war against the legality of small dwellings, with boarding houses and single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels driven out by zoning codes. But rather than improve life for those who would have previously lived in these accommodations, the move has largely shifted people into homeless shelters or sleeping on the street. As long as the unhoused are in shelters, they are largely out of sight out of mind as far as the electorate is concerned. But a mix of objective scarcity of shelter space and rising drug addiction has helped increase the number of visibly homeless people sleeping rough in American urban centers.

He seems to be arguing a direct causal linkage between reduction in boarding houses and increase in homelessness.  An assertion I have seen no one else make and for which I believe there is little credible evidence.  Perhaps an information blindspot on my part but I think not.  

This paragraph is a mess of unstated assumptions and conclusions.  How much reduction has there been in SRO hotels in cities and in which neighborhoods?  Is that really a material factor?  Does the reduction in SROs correlate meaningfully with the rise in homelessness?  My suspicion is that the SRO reductions occurred in the 1950s through the 1970s and that the rise in homelessness was more in the 1980s arising from the closure of mental institutions.

He has various riffs on chattering class bête noires such as not criminalizing the homeless and the need for more YIMBYism (don't ask).  

He quotes from some books he has read which make the argument that urban zoning moved against SROs and that is what caused all the homelessness.  Possibly, though I think not.  

What Yglesias is really interested in is having a whack at the fuddy-duddy middle class living in their pleasant single family residence-zoned neighborhoods.  Yglesias wants to take that away from them in order to increase density and thereby reduce housing costs.  He has a conviction that the middle class are wrong for assuming that increasing density will reduce the desirability of their neighborhoods and therefore the value of their homes.  

When home ownership tends to be the single largest form of saving for the great majority of Americans, a mere conviction of a chattering class pundit is probably insufficient to warrant changing zoning rules to their perceived detriment.  But Yglesias offers no evidence for why he believes that increasing density would lead to increasing home value.

He backs away from this position and argues instead that we should allow people to rent single rooms in single family residential neighborhoods.  

But he never constructs the necessary good data argument why the large majority of residents in SFR neighborhoods believe what they believe.  I suspect they are right but Yglesias never shows that they are wrong.  He merely asserts his conviction.

More critically, he keeps coming back to the idea that SROs will solve the homelessness problem, basically arguing that homelessness is a product of expensive housing.  Which I think is materially incorrect as laid out in earlier posts.

Homelessness is primarily a product of mental health issues, substance abuse issues, behavioral issues, health issues and the consequence of bad public policy.  For most the nation, homelessness is much less of an issue than it is in locations where the chattering class congregate (LA, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C.)  The solution is relatively straightforward even if politically difficult - enforce the law, divert those with mental health issues, substance abuse issues, behavioral issues, health issues into appropriate rehabilitative services.  You would shrink the homeless population by 90%, hugely reduce crime by and among the homeless and dramatically reduce the death rate among the chronically homeless.

But that is not what the homeless advocates want (hard work and harder to grift) and the public tends to be untrusting that the taxes needed would be used to good effect.  If it could be shown that the tax support was used well and that such a program reduced the crime from homelessness, I suspect there would be reasonable support.  But with a courageous politician or advocate to make the argument, nothing happens.

Talk about YIMBYism and SROs and densifying SFR neighborhoods is just profoundly unserious and betrays an ideological obsession rather than a willingness to solve real problems affecting real people.  

The whole piece comes off as an ill-considered abstract notion with little basis in reality and profound disregard for middle class Americans making their own good decisions and a totalitarian statist's deep-seated desire desire to impose half-baked destructive solutions on his fellow men without regard to impact on the middle class homeowners or on the homeless.

Or maybe I'm just feeling cranky.