My cached answer is “Bay area zoning”, but I honestly haven’t looked into it in great depth. There’s a 3-tent encampment literally 20 seconds from the office where I’m at right now in downtown Berkeley.
I think overregulation of land is indeed responsible for high rents and many other problems, but it’s not the main factor in homelessness. Many Western cities with high rents still have much fewer homeless than the Bay Area. There are counterexamples in the other direction too: Moscow in the 90s had a lot of questionably legal construction and a lot of homeless.
Maybe the Bay Area homelessness situation is caused by US society being unwilling to house and feed the homeless in cheaper areas? That might be a simpler explanation, but I don’t know enough.
My cached answer is “Bay area zoning”, but I honestly haven’t looked into it in great depth. There’s a 3-tent encampment literally 20 seconds from the office where I’m at right now in downtown Berkeley.
I think overregulation of land is indeed responsible for high rents and many other problems, but it’s not the main factor in homelessness. Many Western cities with high rents still have much fewer homeless than the Bay Area. There are counterexamples in the other direction too: Moscow in the 90s had a lot of questionably legal construction and a lot of homeless.
Maybe the Bay Area homelessness situation is caused by US society being unwilling to house and feed the homeless in cheaper areas? That might be a simpler explanation, but I don’t know enough.