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Comment by s0rce | Hacker News Reader

One of the people listed makes $175,000 he can easily afford his own apartment at, conservatively, $3000/month, or he can have a couple roommates and pay around $1000-1400/month. He chooses not to so he can save money and use the amenities at his work. You shouldn't be allowed to live in cars on the street, people paying property taxes are paying for those streets.

Free parking is the problem here, you shouldn't be able to leave your car on the street anywhere for long periods, especially not living in it. If you do this you are taking advantage of the system supported by tax paying owners and renters.

If the cost of the car registration included the true cost of parking on city streets living in your car would likely be much less attractive for these people who can afford housing but simply choose not to.

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Yes please. I would love the optics of homeless car-campers being forcibly removed from Bay Area NIMBY neighborhoods at homeowners' request. It'll make so much better television, and show so much more clearly who the villains really are, than dreary zoning commission meetings.

In the meantime, it's excellent that homeowners are suffering the consequences of their decision to prevent their neighbors from living in real housing units by waking up to RVs as blight on their neighborhoods. It's not close to proportional for the massive damage they choose to inflict on the lives of those around them, but it's a start.

What are homeowners doing to prevent other people having houses? I don't think that someone buying a house in the Bay Area automatically makes them some sort of evil person forcing others to live in vehicles.

Pushing back against high density development comes to mind. Though I don't live in the area so I'm not sure how much that is a problem with new tech money and how much is with old locals that want to keep SF the same as it was when they moved there.

Homeowners, particularly SFH owners in SF, tend to be very politically active in trying to block attempts at developing high density transit oriented housing. This is especially the case if there is the possibly of said housing being made available to lower income residents.

Homeownership certainly doesn't make someone evil, however, if in addition to owning a home they also attempt to make it difficult for subsequent residents to own a home, all the while taking advantage of the generous subsidies that Prop 13 provides and reaping the benefits of RE appreciation when it's time to sell, I think it's fair to call them out on it.

Well all homeowners who voted for Prop 13 effectively were voting against future homeowners, but this doesn't represent all homeowners. Some are still likely anti-density and limiting new housing but not all.

Most of the people who voted for Proposition 13 were voting against government waste, and against Grandma being forced out of her home of 30 years due to increasing property taxes.

The unintended consequences didn't become apparent until much later.

I recently moved to California and was born after all this started but I'm pretty interested in the early days. Was it honestly believed that this was the best way as a way for grandma to keep her house in days of high inflation and people didn't realize the potential consequences or was it simply sold to the masses under this guise but really it was to benefit existing landowners, creating basically a landowning aristocracy.

There just seem to be so many better ways for fixed income people to keep their homes, like a tax rebate for seniors below a certain income... Although I disagree it is strictly necessary for grandma to keep her home, retires who can't afford their taxes could reasonably be expected to downsize once kids leave home or even god forbid cohabitate with their children as is very common in the rest of the world.

I don't know if people thought Proposition 13 was the best solution but the state legislature hadn't done anything to solve the problem and no one else did the hard work necessary to get an alternative on the ballot. So voters in 1978 had to choose between Proposition 13 or nothing.

How so? Prop 13 protects home owners from eviction due to tax increases, but encourages new zoning and new development since property taxes get rebaselined to market on every sale. Also, despite the high costs, the housing market is still pretty liquid with people paying millions for a shot at home ownership, even though that comes with $15-45K in property taxes each year.

It discourages people from downsizing as empty nesters. It discourages landlords from remodeling/improving their property. It allows long time landowners to sit on underutilized properties for a long time, as they wait for prices to go up even higher, instead of nudging them to redevelop sooner.

The housing market has few properties on the market, which is part of a why prices are so high.

> If you do this you are taking advantage of the system supported by tax paying owners and renters.

Many people living in California, thanks to Prop 13, are also paying almost nothing to the system because they bought their house early on. Many could even afford property taxes on a current market valuation but the law still means they pay much less.

If someone rented an apartment with some friends there is a good chance the landlord is paying peanuts in property tax anyway.

Addressing the property tax imbalance is far more important than kicking out people living in cars. Many of them are genuinely out of options, despite this anecdote.

I agree Prop 13 is also terrible, leads to large inequity in property taxes, and this problem should be solved, however, I'm not sure its directly related to whether you should be able to live in your car on the street for free.

I agree it's a separate issue, but if the reason is "these people aren't paying property taxes" then it's a much lower priority than reforming Prop 13.

>> If the cost of the car registration included the true cost of parking on city streets living in your car would likely be much less attractive for these people who can afford housing but simply choose not to.

If the cost of property taxes included the true cost of owning a house in the bay area, living here would be a much less attractive for people who cannot afford housing here but simply got in earlier and live at the expense of newcomers (who are working hard and struggling to make ends meet)

This view presents a selfish and very NIMBY attitude.

The gentleman in question paid off his student loans, contributes to his retirement, and sounds OK with life. None of that has ant bearing on if he should live on the street.

Anti-density home owners in California might be the problem. They shouldn't be able to stunt the housing market for long periods, especially not living in it. If you do this, you are taking advantage of the system supported by tax paying citizens who balk at, or can't afford, to rent.

If the cost of supporting regressive anti-density measures included the true cost then home owners would be overturning Prop 13 and removing building height restrictions. Instead, they simply choose not to.

> You shouldn't be allowed to live in cars on the street

Why not? You cite taxes. If i am allowed to park my car overnight somewhere, what would disallow me from sleeping in that same car over the same period?

I live in a beach town popular with people driving down the Australian East coast in vans. The problem we have here is that these vans don't have toilet facilities so you end up with people using the bushes along the beach as toilets.

So catch the people who are using the bushes as toilets don't make it illegal for people to sleep in their cars.

Right so then how do you offset the cost of having to hire rangers to patrol the beach areas at night all year round? And how does that fix the problem where people just wait for the ranger to pass then quickly go and do what they need to do?

It's not an easy problem. The town I live in is debating it and working with other coastal councils to try and come up with solutions since the drivers do bring in a lot of revenue to the towns. Overnight washrooms are prone to vandalism that makes them costly to maintain for an example of a problem with an "obvious" solution.

I agree it's not an easy problem to solve.

You are going to need rangers to patrol anyway to see if the cars/vans have people sleeping in them.

Have overnight washrooms and have cameras to monitor them(obviously not inside the washrooms) as well as the streets. It's not a foolproof solution and the council still has to make a decision if all the expenses are worth it or not.

>You are going to need rangers to patrol anyway to see if the cars/vans have people sleeping in them.

Yes but they only have to do a single pass and they can nab everyone sleeping in their vehicle. To catch people going to the toilet in public they need to be there all the time.

>Have overnight washrooms and have cameras to monitor them(obviously not inside the washrooms)

What good do cameras outside the washrooms do to stop vandalism inside?

Well if you make those arguments then yes banning sleeping in cars is the easier solution.

Easier but not ideal. Which brings us back to it being a really tough problem.

California at some point changed most restrooms to be vandalism resistant (metal toilets, no toilet seats, etc). It's worked fairly well.

They have switched the highway rest stops to these around me. I did stop at one a few months back where someone had stuffed various stuff in all the toilets to make them unusable. They must have did quite the number on them since it was still shut and fenced off over a week later when I drove past it again!

We can solve this problem simply by only allowing people to sleep in cars plumbed into the sewerage system.

What about other people who want to use parking in the neighborhood, if your RV is parked in the spot permanently no one else can use the spot. If there was a parking tax, even an absurd one with Prop 13 level restrictions it would still be better than free parking for your RV on the street.

> You shouldn't be allowed to live in cars on the street

There is no good reason you shouldn't be allowed to, as long as there's no disturbance.

I agree, but there's a range of people who live in their cars. Some cause destruction, trash and probably aren't employed or trying to work in a legitimate way. Hard drug use, crime etc are all likely.

Then the problem is destruction and trash, but I think criminalizing sleeping in your car in and of itself is a terrible way to address that.

When you live in your car and you wake up in the night needing to go to the toilet what do you do?

You make it sound like having a weak bladder is a given. 'Don't wake up in the middle of the night needing to go to the toilet' is a perfectly viable option.

You make it sound like having a strong bladder is a given. You make it sound like having a weak bladder is required.

Neither of these is true. You haven't posted a solution to the problem you've just tried to imagine a world where the problem doesn't exist.

No I don't. The solution is don't live in a van if you have a weak bladder.

Except that isn't a solution because lots of people obviously do live in their van's without the ability to go from when they get to it to when they can get to a washroom next without having to go.

So to implement your "solution" we'd need to what. Assess bladder strength in individuals then give them some sort of license to allow them to sleep in their cars?

No, you'd attach a strong punishment to public urination/defecation and then let people be their own judges on whether or not they can handle van dwelling.

If it's a problem then keep increasing the punishment or ability to catch perpetrators.

If a strong punishment doesn't solve the problem why would increasing it help?

>ability to catch perpetrators.

How do you do this in a way that is affordable to local councils?

See this is another non-solution from you. In a perfect world we wouldn't have a problem but a perfect world is the only place where these solutions are going to solve one too.

Where is a strong punishment not solving the problem? Increasing it creates fear of consequences.

Cameras are cheap. Hell, just a slap a bounty on footage.

Because there is already punishments for it and in some places like the US they are already very high(in that they can sometimes get you on sex offender registries). But the problem still exists. Alas just increasing punishment isn't a solution. Especially when the likelihood of catching someone is low.

>Cameras are cheap.

Paying to have people watch them isn't cheap though and it's not like with a store where you only need to check it when there is an incident you need to watch it all the time. You need people monitoring a lot of cameras all the time.

In a car that's going to be a problem, but in anything larger (van, RV, box truck, etc.) a "honey bucket" may be an option, or probably better a camping toilet homemade or commercial (heavy plastic bag, seat of some sort, cat litter whether clay or crystal/dessicant).

Most van's I've seen/been in don't have the space to use one really but it's a possibility and more so in the larger vehicles(though RV's should have a full toilet). Of course you then have the problem of people not emptying them in appropriate dump facilities and leaving human waste in public garbage bins.

Human waste in public bins is likely an unavoidable element of this, but if "properly" handled/packaged at least it's a contained problem. The impression I've got is that in some parts of San Francisco human waste on the sidewalks can be more of a problem.

Of possible relevance: http://newatlas.com/bog-in-a-bag-backcountry-toilet-stool/24... and apparently supplies for such are called WAG Bags https://www.rei.com/product/662978/cleanwaste-wag-bag-waste-... - and they're even landfill approved and "can be disposed of in trash with regular garbage"

Edit: from the comments on the REI page, two other brands are "Biffy Bags" and "Restop Bags"

You drive to a restroom.

> You shouldn't be allowed to live in cars on the street, people paying property taxes are paying for those streets.

Because of Prop 13 homeowners are the ones getting a free ride on property tax. The wide streets in SF, so big you could build another row of buildings in the middle, are caused by Americans' obsession with putting cars in places that could be served by subways.

From the guy you're talking about : https://frominsidethebox.com/post/i-dont-live-in-a-truck/576... "I don't live in a truck. I just sleep in a truck. Living is what happens when you wake up."

I don't know if I agree with what you are saying, butI am awfully tired of reading stories glorifying these weirdos for living in a car.

I don't see any problem with someone wanting to sleep in their car in a parked lot that otherwise wouldn't be occupied. The fact that homeowners pay property tax doesn't have anything to do with anything. I rent and I don't pay property taxes either.

If it makes you feel better, these people pay income and sales tax.

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