“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

The New Yorker sees a homelessness program rife with drugs and crime as hugely successful.

Last week’s New Yorker featured a 15,000–word exploration of what happens when government gives housing to the homeless. The article profiled a Brooklyn supportive-housing program that provides formerly homeless people with private apartments run in accordance with Housing First principles. Building residents face no behavioral expectations.

Author Jennifer Egan portrays a chaotic scene, overrun with addiction, premature mortality, and crime. Nonetheless, Egan (a novelist by trade) argues that this program succeeds in offering residents “a new lease on life” and should be replicated everywhere homelessness is found. Readers may be reminded of the third chapter of Michael Shellenberger’s book San Fransicko: “The Experiment Was a Success but the Patients Died.”

There is a simple solution to the housing crisis: Voters in municipalities across Canada could elect mayors and councils dedicated to stripping away zoning restrictions, while simplifying and lowering the costs of permissions and permits.

Unfortunately, voters in municipal elections tend to be homeowners who benefit from escalating prices and who want to preserve their neighbourhoods. Councils reflect their will.

Opinion: Most politicians believe, apparently mistakenly, voters will punish them if house prices fell. Their self-interests could also be getting in the way.

Most Canadians, according to polls, are willing to see house prices to drop so people squeezed out of ownership, particularly young adults, can obtain some shelter security.

But, despite politicians’ endless rhetoric about fighting for “affordable” housing, they don’t really want home values to drop. There are several reasons why this is the case.

In the heart of Toronto’s industrial Port Lands, there is a street filled with trailers and motor homes — and a 61-year-old carpenter trying to plan for an unknown future.

He’ll be relying once again on a diesel heater through the dark nights of the approaching winter. It would help to have another solar panel on the roof to provide power.

The California conundrum: Fewer people, more homes, but an acute housing shortage

In the last decade, California home prices and rents have soared, an upswing that’s put homeownership further out of reach and helped drive thousands into homelessness.

This escalation coincided with a unique moment in California history. For much of the last decade, the state’s population growth was historically low.

In the last few years, it ground to halt and then dropped — and all the while developers continued to build.

The iconic Las Vegas strip has seen a surge in homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks and in makeshift tents as the city grapples with an affordable housing crisis.

New images taken by DailyMail.com show people curled up in the sidewalk and outside store fronts – with some keeping their minimal belongings in trolleys and encampments.

At least 6,566 people were counted as homeless in Southern Nevada in late January of this year, according to statistics from the Southern Nevada Homelessness Continuum of Care.

The federal government’s removal of GST for rentals in Canada is a welcome step to create more housing affordability but its impact on rents likely won’t be felt any time soon, experts told Global News.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the immediate removal of the five per cent tax for those projects on Thursday. The idea was first put forward as a 2015 campaign pledge by the Liberals but it had never come into fruition until now.

Raj Salwan says he is living in a financial nightmare.

Every month, he is slipping deeper and deeper into debt, covering the costs of a condo he owns that’s occupied by a tenant who isn’t paying and will not leave.

Salwan said his tenant is in arrears of over $34,000. He has had to take out a loan against his own home to cover the mounting costs of the mortgage and utilities.

It’s a mess and unfortunately a lot of good people on both sides get burned.

I would rent my place out and build out a van if I wasn’t worried about being made bankrupt by a “professional tenant.”

The aging of America means more old people on fixed incomes are overwhelmed by the high cost of housing and other financial shocks; ‘not seen since the Great Depression’

NAPLES, Fla.—Judy Schroeder was living a stable retirement in this affluent Florida enclave. Then her apartment building was sold to a new owner during the pandemic and she lost her part-time job working at a family-owned liquor store.

What followed was a swift descent into homelessness.

Faced with a rent increase of more than $500 a month, Schroeder, who had little savings and was living month-to-month on Social Security, moved out and started couch surfing with friends and acquaintances. She called hundreds of other landlords in Naples and southwest Florida but failed to find anything more affordable. She applied for a low-income housing voucher. She began eyeing her 2004 Pontiac Grand Am as a last resort shelter.