Ezra Klein

Mr. Steyer, you said the most compassionate thing we can do is revive the interim housing to get people where they want to be.

It's not a new strategy, building interim housing from shelters to other approaches.

And it tends to run into two problems.

One is that communities often don't want it and they fight it very, very hard, much harder than they fight a normal apartment building or something like that.

Another is that many unsheltered people refuse to go into it.

These are often very, very restrictive spaces.

You can't bring your partner.

You can't bring your pets.

So how do you solve those problems that have made interim housing not the answer that many people hoped it would be?

Well, let me ask you about interim housing, not even as an emergency question.

You read American history and you've got Abraham Lincoln in boarding houses all across his travels as a lawyer.

You used to have a lot of housing that worked more almost like college dorms do today.

You had a lot of housing where people would come in and there were shared bathrooms.

There was a shared kitchen.

It was a lot of people in a single home.

And we functionally zoned a lot of that out of existence.

And so things that were very, very, very low-cost housing that exist in between what we think of as a home or an apartment now and the street no longer exist because we made them illegal.

Should we make them legal?

Should interim housing be more than an emergency measure?

Mr. Porter, before people become homeless, they are housed.