Enough Housing

20th August 2024

Hey Hank,

I guess I’ve been watching a lot of your videos in the last few days and something you said needed clarification. You mentioned that homelessness was the result of there being not enough housing and advocated for building more. This is true enough, but there are other solutions.

The problem lies in that we try to bring the housing to the jobs and not the jobs to the housing. I live not far from Los Angeles, and in Los Angeles most people need two jobs to afford their housing. Building more would drive down the price, but there are already more empty homes than un-housed people.

Further down the line, people will buy houses as investments and use them as rentals which are a big thing where I live because of tourism. There are any number of small towns and lesser cities where the rent is low, but there are no jobs to keep people in the houses.

I wrote a letter to the Governor once recommending that we install the infrastructure for recycling, most of our blue bin waste goes to landfills, in nearby California City which has all the space to build more and no people to live in the houses they have.

To install this industry in Los Angeles would be pointless. There are more than enough jobs to go around here but everyone needs more and more of them. Trying to force more and more into any space will eventually result in higher pressure. There are only so many places where you can build homes in the big cities, and housing projects have their problems.

Meanwhile, there are homes in smaller cities with no one to fill them. We can build homes where there are jobs, and place jobs where there are homes but only one solution brings life to fading communities. Truth be told we should do both.

As a final point, why would I bring this up with you? I mean, homeless advocacy is not your major focus, but you have so much larger of a voice than me. I wrote a few letters to the Governor of the State of California about this and I have no idea if he read or even saw them. You could make a video and the whole world would hear you.

Best,


Richard Leland Neal