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Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

"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.

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.

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