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Comment by aeorgnoieang | Hacker News Reader

I'd start by legalizing every form of 'marginal' housing, e.g. boarding houses, micro-apartments.

I have no idea where to start if one accepts the current political, legal, and cultural environment as-is. Assuming you did just accept the status quo as a given, I can better appreciate why the idea of 'just giving homeless people housing' is so enticing. [And there is evidence that it works well. I'm skeptical about the long-run costs and skewed incentives, especially in places in which lots of people want to live.]

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> I'd start by legalizing every form of 'marginal' housing, e.g. boarding houses, micro-apartments.

This. Outlawing "flophouses" throughout the United States exacerbated homelessness, made it much harder for people on the margins to improve their material circumstances, and grossly distorted the housing and rental market by removing the lower end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_hotels_in_the_U...

That section, with that last sentence at the end, is a really beautiful piece of black humor.

This would be huge. When researching, I couldn't believe sleeping in a vehicle was illegal. Building reasonable living accommodations -- no matter the size -- is absolutely something we must do for people.

Housing policy, formal and informal, just drives me crazy. I despair that the future everywhere will look like third world countries, where only relatively wealthy people can afford to live in legal housing. Everyone else, maybe me too, will live in 'favelas'.

Here's a great post about this by a blogger I really like on this topic:

- [Spring In The Silicon Favela – Granola Shotgun](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/02/08/spring-in-the-silicon-...)

But on the plus side, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do once you stop playing by the rules!

We need to offer free camping in federal, state, and county parks to citizens? We have a catastrophe that's just going to get worse. It is homelessness.

We need to allow homeless to sleep in their vechicles, if said parking allows overnight parking.

We need to build Kibbutz's. (Or just give them a field to pitch a tent? A outhouse? Anything?

We need to stop making homelessness a crime. Every homeless person I know is camping illegially. They get tickets. They can't pay tickets. Tickets turn into felonies. It's just wrong.

If Jesus appeared, he would be ticketed for a multitude of municipal/criminal violations in a matter of days?

I think I mostly agree but it's hard to tell because I'm not sure what you meant by turning what seem like statements into questions.

I don't think it's necessary tho to allow free camping in government run (and government owned) parks necessarily. Maybe it would be sufficient to just allow, or not prohibit, someone from renting spots on their property for otherwise homeless people to pitch tents.

It'd also be amazing if someone could figure out how to do an end run around all the laws and regulations that make housing so expensive and time-consuming to build. Where's the 'Uber for housing'? Very likely there is none; housing is too easy to 'attack' as it's most useful when its stationary.

Or maybe that's it – maybe someone could offer 'Japanese coffin-style hotel rooms' in a bus that just slowly drives around a city.

No, because Jesus was well within social norms and was generally accomodated on his travels by wealthier fans/followers?

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