Hacker News Reader

Comment by PatientTrades | Hacker News Reader

This is the result of population growth. Even if housing is built specifically for poorer and lower income individuals, middle class families looking for housing will inevitably trickle in causing demand and prices to rise naturally. Once again poor individuals will be on the street. The same cycle keeps occurring in cities across America. Properties designed for the poor end up getting bought by middle and upper class individuals, seen this in Washington D.C. and New york firsthand. Other than full blown capping prices that can be charged for rent, I don't see a long term solution.

View on HN

Weird how New York City housed millions of poor immigrants at the turn of the century but we can't support natural population growth and urbanization today.

Weird how you haven't considered population density, or housing safety regulations, or the state of the economy, or the average productivity of immigrants looking for a better life at the turn of the century compared to the homeless in modern cities...

Almost as if comparing NYC 100 years ago to modern Seattle is total nonsense.

> Weird how New York City housed millions of poor immigrants at the turn of the century

Are you really comparing housing standards for the poor today vs 100 years ago? Unless your solution is to throw all poor people in filthy slums like its 1902 I don't see the point of your comment.

Better to let them live on the street then?

I made a similar point on a different article about housing prices in Seattle, and just like you, I was down-voted into oblivion for apparently challenging whatever preconceived notions people have.

Yes, the root problem is population growth. Yes, any organism will continue to reproduce until the population size is constrained by sufficient 'poverty.' The difference is that we are running out of land / unable to keep up with building shelters, rather than running out of food as was common for the rest of history.

Does this mean there are not solutions we should try to enact? E.g. less restrictive zoning? No, of course we should be fighting the problem and realizing there are things we can do in the short term. But, until we get into space and are able to create resources/shelter at an exponential rate faster than potential population explosion, this is not a problem that one "solves" -- only delays/pacifies.

We're not really running out of land or resources, or even getting remotely close to it. Divide the US by acreage and there are more than 7 acres of land per person. Even after taking out farmland, national parks, etc there's still an enormous amount of good land for each person in this country. Consider that a place like San Francisco has a population density pushing 19,000 / square mile. That's, in terms of availability, an extra ~133k acres of land per square mile of San Francisco. China, for contrast, has a population of nearly 1.4 billion in a smaller land area than the US. And the vast majority of their country is also completely empty.

The problem seems to be a sort of network effect in real life. People want to live in cities where there are opportunities. Where are there opportunities? Where lots of people want to live. It'd be an interesting experiment to see a planned city where a large number of individuals/companies agreed, before it was build, to reside there. Bypassing the network effect and ideally make it an instantly desirable location to live. If such an experiment were a success it would create an instantly replicable model that could vastly improve the state of the economy and the country as a whole. But the up front cost of an experiment like this would make something like colonizing Mars seem like the cheap option, even if the costs could be recouped in a fairly short period of time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com