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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The obvious solution to this is to build taller and thus more expensive housing in major city's. Unfortunately simply building large buildings like this directly results in 'slums'.

I suspect the way around this is to require the first X floors to be affordable housing without subsidy, and then let people build as many expensive floors above this as they want. This attacks the problem from both ends by reducing the impact of land prices, avoiding blighted areas, etc. But, avoids directly handing money to developers which is a clear avenue for corruption.

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That plan causes a whole set of other problems when actually executed. First off, two big factors in the price of an apartment are location and amenities of the building. So you can't really build affordable and luxury units in the same building. What you end up with is luxury units and subsidized units. That is certainly a category of "affordable", but the result is a bunch of people will get angry sharing their building with other residents who are paying a fraction of the price for basically the same apartments.

Also not everyone who needs affordable housing is a working class family that is trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. You can get a lot of "less desirable" residents like current and recovering addicts or people with mental illnesses. They obviously deserve affordable housing, but you will find that plenty of people who buy luxury apartments don't want to share the elevator with them.

You can just check the Yelp reviews of any building that has a mix of luxury and subsidized housing to see examples of these issues. Buildings like this always attract bad reviews, suffer from high turnover, and therefore have low occupancy rates among their luxury units.

> a whole set of other problems when actually executed

And those are at least as worthy of direct attention and some solution.

If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city, but maybe society should help them by maximizing the help they get, and that is probably somewhere where simply being costs almost nothing, and where employing caretakers wouldn't cost two arms and a leg per hour, and so on. (And of course this doesn't mean ship all the addicts to Alaska/Wyoming.)

>If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city

If you think about it in another angle, the governments aren't subsidizing to help the tenants as much as they are subsidizing the companies that have to hire people at not executive or programmer wages.

I mean you might get a few people who are willing to commute 4 hours a day, but certainly not enough to satisfy SV's needs. I doubt a company would pay their janitorial staff enough to live there without being forced.

"I mean you might get a few people who are willing to commute 4 hours a day, but certainly not enough to satisfy SV's needs. I doubt a company would pay their janitorial staff enough to live there without being forced."

Of course they would if they had to --- supply and demand. Do you really think companies would not find a way to solve the "my office is a pig sty" problem?

Paying living wages for that area is probably the last thing they would consider, after all else failed, including petitioning government.

Isn’t the minimum wage in SF $15/hr?

Even if it were $100/hr that still doesn’t mean the housing supply would be adequate for the demand.

The only short-term solution that would give sufficient housing supply to the Bay Area would be a massive loss of jobs.

Or smart relocation. Does the marketing department really need to be in the same building as the accounting department, etc?

Either way, SF is having the issue they are having because SV had the exact same problem 20 years ago. Everyone knew this was going to happen.

What normally happens is rather than paying significantly more, you get people willing to live at the margins and take those jobs.

Think people in Tokyo living in "cages". It starts as people renting a 2 BR apartment putting two sets of bunk beds in each room and now you have 8 young wokers playing ~1/5 of a 1br price for the area. But, now you add bunk beds to the living room, or beyond that people hot bunk so someone in the night shift sleeps during the day etc. However, this tends to unsanitary conditions and adds externalities.

The difference though is that Japan builds a lot of housing, so you can still find a 1LDK (1 bedroom equivalent) apartment for under $1500 USD in Tokyo. (and of course, being Tokyo,you can pay much more).

It will be smaller than a typical American apartment but at least you won't be sharing with roommates.

You probably misunderstood my comment.

I think buildings with both subsidized and market rate units are a great idea. (Segregated subsidized buildings seem to be strictly worse.) But as others mentioned subsidized can mean either "low wage normal folks" or "hardcore bath salts addics living on tree bark with 10 dogs and sold the bathtube for drugs years ago, so they smell worse than their dogs". And they need different kind of help. The former can probably be perfectly happy with their current job thanks to the rent subsidy, whereas the latter category is very likely actively harmful to the community and needs serious (expensive) intervention.

Of course we can debate the problem of injecting even more money into a market with already limited supply, and its fairness.

> If someone cannot handle themselves, maybe they shouldn't be given a subsidized unit in a fancy expensive city

You need to solve the problem with your plan where the person who gets labelled "cannot handle themselves" is diverted into an isolated setting with much less stimulation/opportunity. You did say you weren't proposing to "ship" "addicts" to Alaska/Wyoming but there's a much higher level of responsibility than that -- you mustn't write them off / throw them on the scrap heap / set them up for an isolated dependent life by your own standards. It could be you one day.

> you mustn't write them off... It could be you one day.

It's a little discomforting how few people seem to care about that.

> “It could be you one day.”

Why? Barring someone forcibly injecting me with opiates repeatedly or the same with crack, it is beyond unlikely I will ever become addicted to either substance. I don’t think addicts are “bad people”, but once they’ve hit a certain point their physical desire for drugs overwhelms their ability to be present in polite society.

People should be treated with respect and humanity, but they also should not be given a free pass to do anything without consequence. If you’re shitting in the elevator or passing out with a needle in your arm in the restroom in the building it presents a clear problem with the plan of mixing luxury housing with subsidized housing.

I will never be in that situation because I won’t allow myself to be in that situation. I might become poor, I might need to rely on subsidized housing, but I will never be “someone who can not handle themselves” as the GP referenced.

I get that you’re trying to evoke empathy, but there’s a sea of difference in behavior and capability of accepting social norms between your average mentally ill substance abuser and your average poorer person who can’t afford housing. These situations are not the same and there does need to be a filter to ensure that the working poor do get affordable housing without reducing them to having to live alongside “people who can’t handle themselves”.

It’s not a nice thing to realize, but it’s the hard truth. We, if anything, should start providing state run mental facilities for long-term patients again. There are a lot of people who through circumstance or birth simply are not capable of coexisting with polite society.

You are making a lot of assumptions about people in that situation. There are plenty of addicts who developed an addiction to opioids without ever taking an illegal substance. Maybe they are prescribed a pain killer after getting into a car accident and that eventually leads to oxycontin which leads to a heroine. Or maybe they experience some traumatic incident that leaves them with PTSD which interferes with their daily life and leads to drug use. No one can guarantee that neither of those situations will ever happen to them.

> I will never be in that situation because I won’t allow myself to be in that situation.

How do you intend to accomplish that? Remember we live in a world where people have accidents with cars, guns, and preparation of prescription medicines. You do not control everyone else, yet everyone else has the potential to alter your lifestyle in a few moments of recklessness or distraction.

Force majeur exists in contract law for a reason.

> How do you intend to accomplish that?

Accomplishing this is simple, but not necessarily easy. You make a choice.

As I mentioned, literally barring someone physically overpowering me and forcibly injecting me with addictive drugs, I will never be a drug addict because I simply refuse to take addictive drugs. Yes, that includes painkillers that may be prescribed. I took none of the hydrocodone tablets I was prescribed after my wisdom teeth extraction. I'm currently using non-pharmaceutical approaches to managing chronic back pain from an injury rather than relying on opiate painkillers which doctors are happy to prescribe.

I am not blaming people for their choices, but I am recognizing that externalities that feed into our choices don't excuse the outcomes.

diverted into an isolated setting with much less stimulation/opportunity.

Opportunity is relative. By giving it to one person, you're taking it away from another.

Were I an addict, I would very much wish someone would treat my addiction instead of enabling it by financially supporting me.

Currently substance abuse is either actively criminalized with enormous costs to humanity (probably millions dead due to the various criminal organizations participating in the trade of prohibited substances) or at best relegated to intervention reality shows.

Furthermore, treatment of most mental illnesses are very superficial nowadays, we have a few volunteer/charitable organizations acting as support systems, but mainly it's pills and some expensive counseling and you're good to go, right back into your old environment, old social circles, old habits, old context.

I'm not saying it should be state mandated, but it could be a lot more state supported.

You could have separate entries for each part of the building and not share amenities, but this gets back to the central idea. If you allow people to segregate by price then they will do so. If every building in a city must have some affordable units then the city as a whole is better off, but it's going to feel less exclusive.

I can see both sides of the argument, but we need to figure out how to build cities that work or we are in for a lot of chaos.

Separate entries are often done, but rightly referred to as "the poor door". I don't think there's much sense in half measures to do affordable housing: making a building that is effectively segregated is less efficient and sensible than the current San Francisco "just pay us" system.

But the poor want half measures a great deal more than they want none. Sometimes a door is just a door, and ya don't need access to the swimming pool, just to your job.

This was tried in New York. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/3...

And from that article... "It’s also worth noting that, even before future poor doors in New York were banned, 40 Riverside Blvd. had 88,000 applications for 55 low-income units."

That was tried before. In Germany they mix / mixed apartments paid by the state with normal apartments.

At the end? Normal people fled. Because more often than not. People living from state are... not really nice neighbours...

I lived in such a "planned" Village.

It started as an expensive nice village. With swimming bath. Saune, bowling etc.

Now it a Ghetto, because everyone with money fled.

Interesting - what was the village? Are there any articles about its decline?

One problem is that the marginal cost of adding another floor increases as you get taller and taller, because you need to install more infrastructure, like elevator shafts, in the building to support them. That also means less usable space per floor. Building taller, at least megatall, is hardly free.

http://voxeu.org/article/tall-buildings-and-land-values

Sure, but you can look at the cost of an extra floor in terms of land costs. If a single family home costs an extra 900,000$ from land costs + some constant C, then stacking X of them is worth it until adding one more 1br home costs more than 900,000$ + C. Granted, there is a feedback loops and you need transportation infrastructure etc for taller buildings etc, still I think the market can happily build taller buildings than most expensive city's let them.

The obvious solution to this is to build taller

Why is this the obvious solution? Why not spread people out instead of trying to cram as many as you can into the same place?

When you spread people out, you don't have a city anymore. It's just an endless suburb. And people want to live in cities, because things happen there. There are jobs, services, public transport etc.

Not just suburbs but ex-urbs and Podunks. I'm more interested in a solution where we don't all have to live in cities to get access to jobs, services, and transport.

Interesting approach, and I've seen similar.

Don't you have to figure out the overall proportion of affordable housing to regular housing?

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