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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I would much rather see people working on solving the affordable housing shortage in the US than on basic income experiments. Because of the high cost of housing across the US, a single childless person cannot live on $1000/month in many places. There are cities where rent on a one bedroom apartment is nearly $1000/month.

If you don't solve the affordable housing problem, basic income doesn't have any hope of ending poverty. If you do, many people who are currently living with terrible distress could make their lives work.

If you are only going to work on one of the two, affordable housing should be the priority. If you want do both, cool. But I'm not really seeing affordable housing given anywhere near the attention that basic income is getting.

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I used to like the idea of Basic Income, but now I think that all the money would go into rents and property owners would absorb all the value.

the problem of affordable housing is actually very simple and the solution is obvious; too many people are moving to big cities; so everyone ends up competing for increasingly limited real estate (in a desperate bid to cut their commute times to less than 2 hours per day).

One of the main reasons why so many people are moving to urban centers is because that's where all the jobs are; it's a direct result of the centralization of capital in the hands of corporations. Corporate HQs are in big cities because they want to get access to the best talent and corporations are more likely to find talent in places where there are lots of people to choose from.

One solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to encourage companies to hire remote workers. Another solution would be for the government to introduce legislation to make the economy less focused on corporate growth.

Due in a large part to corporate lobbying, whenever a politician is presented a choice between a free solution and an expensive one; they tend to pick the expensive one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

SROs used to be pretty commonly available. We tore down up to 80 percent of them over the course of two decades, probably because Baby Boomers were wealthy enough to not need something that cheap. We never rebuilt them.

I think rebuilding them would be a step in the right direction.

I see your point, but AFAIK, there is ample empty housing to ensure everyone in the United States has a roof over their head, so maybe appropriating dis/misused properties toward this end would also be an option?

I don't know. I've spent years researching this issue. I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield, CA. This was long before I was homeless. Then I spent nearly six years homeless and researching how to get myself off the street and back into housing and this was very eye opening.

I would like to read through the several thousand page Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, but I'm having trouble finding the time. I haven't gotten very far.

I am trying to create pilot programs and find things that actually work. I would like to stop just shooting down suggestions that don't work and start saying "Well, we did x, y and z in my small town and that got such and such results and here is how you can try to replicate that." But I'm still struggling to make ends meet myself, and yadda. So it's slow going.

Please excuse my ignorance but I'm just really curious because it's been a few times that I have seen comments on HackerNews by people the were homeless at some point. How does this happen in the US?

In my mind if you have the interest to read HackerNews you would have the skills to get a decent job that would get you off the street. I'm clearly unaware of the obstacles that prevent that and would like to learn more.

I live in South Africa and the inequality here is horrendous but most of that is due to a disparity of education. There is a shortage of skilled workers so in my mind someone with HN interests wouldn't struggle to find enough work to avoid homelessness.

I don't have a nutshell answer for you.

Part of it is that housing policy here has serious issues. We have changed zoning, etc, such that it is nearly impossible to build the kind of walkable communities that existed in this country before the automobile took over. The New Urbanist movement tried to build walkable communities. They found it very challenging to get such plans approved at all.

Another piece is that we don't have good health care policies. Most people on the street in the US have some kind of health issue, whether medical or mental health. Our policies in the US don't do a good job of providing for such people. Most developed countries have much better policies for dealing with people with serious issues of that sort.

Here are a couple of my blogs if you want to try to read through them, though I don't know if that will really answer your question:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/

https://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I would like to see the affordable housing shortage tackled and the health care issue resolved. I think if those issues are not resolved, basic income will likely actually make things worse for poor people who will then get dismissed as not trying hard enough, not managing their UBI, etc. I think giving UBI to people in the current American climate will just mask the real problems and make people who are comfortably well off even more callous about "Not my problem. It's just a personal issue and the world isn't obligated to fix your personal issue."

I already get told on a regular basis that the housing crisis isn't really a problem. It isn't a problem for the well-heeled, so they don't see why others find it so monstrous and impossible.

These still exist in Russia, they're called коммуналка (kommynalka), very good for students etc. I lived in one for uni, I guess it's kinda like halls, but like, all sorts of people live in them.

They still exist in the US, but are much less common and have a generally terrible reputation. These days, new ones seem to only get built as supportive housing for long-term homeless people with addictions and the like who just can't make their lives work on their own. This means some of them aren't even available to the public as a general rental. They end up part of the welfare system, in essence, and you can't get into them without proving need, which is problematic in its own right.

They used to be just normal rentals for people just starting out who didn't have much money. If you watch old movies or movies set in a prior era (like "A walk in the clouds"), this was normal market-rate housing for folks without tons of money. And that's mostly not the case anymore in the US.

Also, the last time I looked -- back when I actually lived in the San Francisco Bay Area well over a decade ago -- SROs in San Francisco were already more than $1000/month.

> it's a direct result of the centralization of capital in the hands of corporations.

We need a progressive tax on corporate revenue (ex > 100M 0.1%, >250M 0.3%, >500M 0.5%) so companies have to pay more if they use economies of scale to consolidate power. It should be more expensive to be big.

>> It should be more expensive to be big.

It is, but they can afford it because when it comes to access to capital, they're at the front of the line. When the Fed creates new money through government loans or engages in open market operations, corporations are the first entities to get a hold of that money. It's like they have pipelines that feed new Fed-generated cash straight into their bank accounts.

Just look at Oracle; their software is mostly legacy. They make all their money from huge government contracts. The government doesn't really care about how inefficient or expensive Oracle is because the money comes from taxpayers; if the government overspends, they can just get more money from the Fed.

> When the Fed creates new money through government loans or engages in open market operations

Perhaps the government needs to create that money through UBI instead.

Interesting, I guess from that point of view, UBI does seem better.

There are only “too many” people moving to big cities if you take as given that most of their land area must retain its small-town character forever.

You want the population clustering into big, transit-centric cities to unwind car-dependence and avert climate change.

People forget that the suburbanization of American cities was a very unique situation brought about by a mix of government policy, rural mythos, and racism.

The current urban migration is basically a reversal to the mean and should be beneficial in the long term.

It was a unique situation. But it was largely brought about by huge pent up demand for housing combined with the relatively sudden the means to meet it.

Racism absolutely played a role in how it went down, as did government policy. But the invention of the modern suburb grew directly out of the events of WW2 making it possible for the US to rapidly build large numbers of homes.

Except that suburbanization in tbe United States began well before WW2 and accelerated in the 60s and 70s, long after any post-war prosperity effect.

People moved away from urban centers because they believed (correctly) that living in dense cities detrimentally impacted their health. This later accelerated in part because of racial reasons.

Housing demand could have easily been met (and was met in Asia and Europe) by building denser urban structures, which is what you would expect to happen if there was a confluence of housing demand, increased wealth, and a general interest in living in cities. There was no interest in the latter, which is why suburbanization took place.

Bad for their health compared to driving all the time? Before indoor plumbing, maybe. Now? No way.

Even if they're encouraged to hire remote workers, lots of them will still choose to live in urban areas because that's where the new and exciting things are for many software devs (yes, I know not everyone is into that. I'd still say that more are than are not).

Yes, but as you say not everyone wants that; also, maybe a large number of people will decide to live 2 hours away from the city center instead of 1 hour away (especially if they only go to the city on weekends) and that should also help to bring down prices.

There are some interesting comments in this thread. I still think that rents would absorb a lot of the value from UBI, but I'm starting to think that UBI might work from the perspective that injecting money into the system so that it is captured by lots of small landlords is a better alternative than injecting money into the system so that it is captured by large corporations and then hoping that it's going to trickle down.

Capital naturally wants to aggregate and trickle up, not trickle down. So if most of the newly minted Fed money was injected at the bottom (instead of at the top as is the case now), it would probably flow through the whole system more efficiently.

another option: use economic incentives to move jobs out of the big cities.

Note that the University system is a form of this - and it worked! springing up "college towns" all over the country, many then creating job centers for decades.

The problem is that big cities (esp Silicon Valley) have figured out how to "poach" newly formed companies: you can have my capital, but I need you to relocate...

If you don't solve for affordable housing first, then basic income dollars will simply be sucked up by landlords and contribute to even more inflationary pressure in the rental markets. There's already evidence for this in neighborhoods where Section 8 vouchers are predominant.

That's why I think basic income should be financed by progressive property tax.

It should quickly progress so that you have to sell your eleventh house to pay annual tax for tenth and to count your properties you should include the ones you own directly but also the ones owned by entities you own.

This tax would be even good if the money gathered was used for any purpose other than basic income. It incentivises ownership by dropping property prices and discourages rent seeking hoarding of finite and basic resource.

But there is affordable housing. The only problem is that the affordable housing is not in the big cities that those people would like to live in.

Go to a smaller town and housing is pretty cheap there. If you get a larger influx of people moving there because of cheap housing, then those cities will suddenly have more job openings available because they have to meet the needs of more people.

Especially when the (jobless) renter is getting $1000 a month but is only spending $600 on rent. That's $400 a month per new renter that is going into the local economy through grocery stores, bars, and public transport. That's new jobs being created.

What small town would that be? Definitely not one on the West Coast. It's around $1000 for a one bedroom here in Humboldt County, and at least $350,000 for a decent 3 bedroom house.

> Because of the high cost of housing across the US, a single childless person cannot live on $1000/month in many places. There are cities where rent on a one bedroom apartment is nearly $1000/month.

Let me correct that for you: a single, childless person cannot maintain a lower-middle class living standard on $1000/month. If you start giving up amenities, you can live on less money. You don't need cable TV, nor do you need to have a budget for eating out. Of course, the two single biggest savings you can do are a) move to a lower cost of living area and b) get a roommate or two. Half the rent of a 2-bedroom apartment is going to be about 50-60% the rent of a one-bedroom apartment.

Basic income shouldn't be targeted to ensuring that people can afford to bum around on no income in a high-cost of living area. If you want to live in a high-cost location, you should secure the income to live there.

Sam Altman and other tech giants are proposing basic income as a means to provide for people incapable of getting jobs due to automation permanently eliminating jobs for large numbers of people. They predict permanent unemployment of up to 80 percent of the population.

The jobs being eliminated currently pay between $20k and $50k. Once they eliminate those jobs, they are talking about giving you about $10k and no hope of ever having a full time job again.

Please go talk to the people who are proposing UBI as a solution to this scenario, not me. I am not actually pro UBI. I am for seeing this as another industrial revolution and further improving worker's rights. Among other things, the first industrial revolution gave birth to the expectation of a 40 hour work week in order to spread earned income around.

I am all for people working for a better life. But people like Sam Altman would like to design a world in which that is simply not possible for most Americans and would like to then throw a few crumbs to the masses for whom a job is simply not a possibility in the world they foresee and would like to optimize for.

(Though I think if your goal is to eliminate jobs -- rather than find ways to redistribute work -- then UBI needs to be designed as a middle class income, not a poverty level income. Otherwise, you are an asshole in my book if this is the world you want to design for people who aren't already millionaires.)

In my city in socal you can't even get an apartment for $1000. If you find one that cheap it's probably got a terrible cockroach problem.

Half the rent of a 2 bedroom apartment is never 50% of the rent for a 1 bedroom apartment, or they’d be the same price.

Lets, for the sake of argument, say you could solve the housing crisis instantly. Suddenly, homes in major cities drop to $100,000, thanks to some hypothetical government backed program.

The part of the problem that nobody ever seems able to solve, is what you do for existing owners who are locked into a 30 year mortgage on their $1,000,000+ property. You would effectively be wiping out their life savings. There would need to be some way of appeasing the existing owner base, before you can ever solve the housing crisis.

That's not what I am suggesting at all. I am suggesting we need more small spaces, like SROs (I have already linked to the Wikipedia article on that in a different comment).

In the 1950s, most new homes were around 1200 square feet and held about 4.5 people. Today, the typical new home is over 2400 square feet and holds about 3.5 people (IIRC).

I see zero reason why 2400 square foot homes would lose any value whatsoever if we built more small homes so people who can't afford a house that big can still afford a place of their own.

> I see zero reason why 2400 square foot homes would lose any value whatsoever if we built more small homes

One factor why house prices are high is that demand exceeds supply. By building small homes, a lot of demand would be catered to by a new pool of housing. Heck, even those who could afford bigger houses but prefer smaller houses for whatever reasons (eg. frugality) would be removed from demand side. So now there would be a downward pressure on house prices.

In much of the US, homes are gaining value at better than minimum wage rates per hour. Given that people working minimum wage jobs cannot work 24/7, owning a home is putting money in your pocket faster than a minimum wage job.

This means that downward pressure on home prices amounts to slowing hyperinflation to a more reasonable rate. This isn't remotely the same as gutting the equity for existing homeowners (much less putting them "upside down," where they owe more than the house is worth).

http://www.worldpropertyjournal.com/real-estate-news/united-...

I think the fear of not being able to find a job is a large part of the reason people don't just move somewhere cheaper when they can't afford housing. There are of course other reasons, e.g. community, for staying in expensive areas, but I think people would be more likely to move to where they can afford housing if they have an guaranteed income stream. Theoretically this would also decrease demand on the low-end of high-price housing areas, lowering prices.

Or move to another country like Mexico or Thailand.

You can't outright move to Thailand at least. You'd need to do visa runs in neighboring countries but couldn't live there 365 days a year.

Those were just examples. There are dozens of alternatives.

Countries you could outright permanently move to? Which ones?

You mean countries that you can simply land and live forever without a visa? I doubt that exists.

But it should be easy to get a visa to live in Mexico, Costa Rica, Portugal, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, etc.

Thailand and India are more complicated, yes, but getting out for a couple of days every and year and coming back is not such a big issue.

I think it's funny that Americans (I assume you're American, just based on statistics) thinks that moving to another country is just a thing you can decide to do, given the current immigration debate in the U.S...

I'm not American. I'm Spanish and have been living in Mexico for close to a decade.

Good luck being old (not 40-50’s) in Thailand with some money you’ll be taken advantage off to death and that is putting it mildly.

Moving to countries which are objectively unsafe outside of a few protected tourist hotspot areas isn’t a good idea for anyone who’s vulnerable.

I say this as someone with a bit more alimony than the $10k frequently cited as the expected figure for basic income who also has portable earned income who was willing to move to almost anywhere in the Western US to get back into housing.

Finding something under $550 almost anywhere I'm the US that isn't senior housing or a trailer is challenging. They exist, but it's not as readily available as many people seem to imagine. There are places for less than that, but if you expect some kind of decent housing on a budget, it's a tough thing to find.

I live without a car and that complicated things. A lot of places don't have walkable neighborhoods or good transit. If you need a car to get around, that substantially increases your real cost of living.

I get really tired of repeating myself on this topic. I also worry that I will get viewed as someone harping on it or with a political agenda for simply trying to rebut the endless statements about how poor people can just move someplace cheap.

I'm poor. I have portable income. I'm a former military wife who doesn't mind moving. And I found it incredibly challenging to find someplace to move that I could afford and where I could readily access basic essentials like groceries and good internet service without a car.

If "just move someplace cheap" was all it took, I would have shut up about my problems years ago and just sat around humming to myself about how slick I am and how all the other poor Americans are just dummies who are doing it wrong. It's really not that simple. Even if you have portable income, finding an affordable, livable place in the US is challenging.

I mean its absurd to think you could find what you're looking for. The US is very obviously not built for cars, so if you want to go against that you'll need to pay more. Or just find a place for $450 that isn't walkable, and pay $100/mo for a car.

Nice theory, but I am no longer capable of driving.

As the American population ages, this is increasingly becoming an issue. If you need to drive to maintain your independence, you lose your independence when you can no longer safely drive, possibly because you simply don't see well enough anymore, even if you are otherwise competent.

My sucktastic eyesight is part of why I no longer drive.

Indeed, many people are, for one reason or another, unable to drive, especially elderly. My grandparents were, and soon my parents will be, facing this in Sweden. Even with its comparatively awesome public transportation (Sweden also has services that provide subsidized transportation to elderly so they can go to the grocery store, etc.), isolation is still an issue unless you live in an urban area. In the U.S. it has to be next to impossible.

Thank you.

One of the issues in the US is that small towns and rural areas often lack high speed internet. If we could spread high speed internet to small towns and rural areas, that would help. It would make it easier to shop online for things not supplied by local stores, keep yourself entertained, do some socializing via internet and even have an earned income as a remote worker if that's what you want.

This was one of the things I checked for before moving to a small town to get back into housing. Since I do earn money via remote work, I need reasonably high speed internet to make my life work. I can't function on dial-up speeds.

Many people casually suggesting poor people should move to cheaper parts of the US don't seem to realize that those places may not have high speed internet. Good internet access can go a long ways towards making life without a car work. If you have neither a car nor good internet, moving someplace cheap in the US can be a serious hardship that cuts you off from having much of a life at all.

Have you thought about leaving the US? I moved to the Czech Republic (US citizen) and you can live well here - without the car and lower income. Very good public transportation, it's safe, not a lot of violent crime, and the prices are quite reasonable. (For now - everything is going up in price, but I can still live quite comfortably)

I considered moving to Mexico and did substantial research into that possibility before deciding against. I'm off the street. My firsthand testimony on the topic is absolutely not a solicitation for advice for me personally.

Saying poor Americans with portable income should just leave the country doesn't strike me as a real solution, for a long list of reasons.

> I live without a car and that complicated things.

It complicates things quite significantly. In fact, if you were to remove this constraint then the problem becomes much more tractable. This factor alone limits you to urban locations because public transit alone is hard enough to find and absolutely nowhere in the US had decent public transit outside of an urban core except for a few cities that are already expensive to start with. There are not many of these places where you are not going to be competing with either university students, well-paid 20/30-somethings, or both.

To be honest I don't think any American city is going to provide this and until Americans get over their automobile fetish I don't think any place will even try to serve this requirement. It is quite normal in Europe, but only big, expensive cities work well for people without cars.

Western US is considerably more expensive than the southeast, but I can understand your desire to not live in the hell-hole which is the deep south.

I have a ragweed allergy. The West Coast has substantially less ragweed than most of the continental US.

My medical bills are supposed to be thousands per month. I live on under $2000 per month most of the time. I am vastly more productive in dry areas with little ragweed and I need much less in the way of medical care.

This is part of why a lot of these one-sized-fits-all solutions for poor Americans are fundamentally bad ideas: They optimize for one metric only -- upfront cost -- and completely ignore large numbers of other issues.

The reality is that "cheap" solutions are often very expensive. Poverty is an expensive way to live.

If you look at the lifetime cost of a solution, the "cheap" answer is often the absolute most expensive in the long run.

It's tough to be in your situation. Not being able to drive really does block you from moving into the cheaper rent areas.

I'm wondering if you've thought of how much having that portable income would have helped you if you were actually able to drive.

If 90% of people with portable income were able to drive would they be able to move to cheaper places successfully? If that were to happen then the 10% who couldn't drive would suddenly find less competition (and therefore lower costs) for renting places in the areas that actually had good public transit options.

> There are cities where rent on a one bedroom apartment is nearly $1000/month.

And I think the reality of this statement is lost of many folks, because it's not just large cities that have this problem. I live in a moderately sized city (~100k people) and rents here are nearly $1000/mo for an average one bedroom apartment.

In Seattle and SF it's more like $2000 per month.

Minimum in my experience. I haven’t been able to pay under $2000 for a 1 bedroom in the 7 years I’ve lived in Seattle. The cheapest I’ve gotten was $2100 but that was a place where you had to deal with mold, you heard your neighbors every conversation, and the whole building shook when the washing machine downstairs ran.

Calling it an affordable housing "shortage" implies that we need more housing in order for it to become affordable. The fact is there is already plenty of housing (people live somewhere don't they?) the problem is that it is unaffordable because supply and demand will never cause the rents to go down en masse. It's one of the few limited resources that people are forced to buy that essentially has no maximum price.

Everybody starts getting basic income? Rents will rise to eat up the majority of that income without some external control. The same way we needed unions, minimum wage, etc. we need a collective bargaining system for the renters vs. landowners. Rent control, what have you. It's kind of the antithesis of the American dream but what we have isnt working all that well.

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...

There is a serious homeless problem in the US. Some folks "living somewhere" are living in a tent or an illegal Air BnB etc.

As a percentage what are talking about? There are homes and apartments aplenty, the biggest issue is the economics of it. What would cause rents to go down? An oversupply? What would cause an oversupply? Barring some regional crash it would have to be overbuilding. People aren't dumb and they won't overbuild. They will build as demand increases but they certainly won't lower prices. If anything they will raise them. It's obvious.

It’s unaffordable because many people are inherently selfish and want to live in desirable locations as opposed to the already afforable areas that the majority land-mass of the USA consititutes.

I dont think that's it at all. Even in "undesireable" places the rents approach what a median income earner can afford anywhere. It's akin to why we have minimum wages. Without them people will work (out of desperation) for pennies because they have to.

> people live somewhere don't they?

They live together when they prefer to have their own base (like 4 workers sharing the same 2 bed-rooms). They also live with their parents, as inconvenient as it is.

No there is a housing problem.

What is the cause in your opinion? Undersupply? Or an economic stable equilibrium that sucks for everybody besides owners?

Imho, housing technology is stuck in the last decade. There is no reasonable government that is trying to fix the problem (housing requires transportation and common infrastructure). Hong Kong is an example of how to let everyone live together.

The west could leverage by doing that plus having an option to have a country side home and car for the weekend. Instead we have busy highways, old buildings, slow common transportation, etc...

New York is a good example but it blows my mind why they don't invest more in the subway, modernize the buildings, etc... Plus it cost a fortune to live there.

The housing we have is in parts of the country with few economic prospects, such that people would rather be rent-burdened than continue living in them. There is not nearly enough walkable, transit-connected housing in major urban centers, because it’s usually illegal to build, and that’s what’s in short supply.

Basic income is more than just about affordability. Higher housing costs is a problem that needs to be urgently addressed beyond just basic income as it diverts and concentrates resources in the renteer class, resources that could be used for other productive economic activity and job creation.

Free markets need 'choice' to work efficiently, consumer choice, manufacturers choice, its always labour who don't have 'real choice' as you need to work to survive, it's not a choice. And no labour market is ever liquid or fluid enough to afford 'choice' and the very nature of labour makes quick choice difficult.

What basic income has the potential to do is introduce choice in this critical component of free markets and give it the same power as capital and consumer choice.

However given how disruptive it is to 'entrenched interests' its an extremely difficult idea to pull off. It defines the bitter struggle between capital and labour for 300 years and there won't be easy wins. Studies, funding, motives, methodologies, data need to be examined carefully as they could be studies simply to discredit the idea and kill it at birth, or reduce it to a 'extremely basic income' as a tool to subsidize employers.

You can't get a decent one bedroom for $1000 in San Diego. It's more $1300 for a decent one. But even $1000 is extremely difficult to find if not impossible. My dad is in a board and care in San Diego so I want to stay near him for awhile. But I work for a startup without funding and I am sick of living with roommates, so I am moving to Tijuana.

Ditto school debt, health care, and child care. If these costs were not (increasingly) the burden of proles, we could all do a lot more with what we have/where we are currently at economically.

Right, if you don't similarly fix the housing bottleneck, then nothing stops rents from just advancing to capture the additional UBI.

I think there's a general problem here, about the "how much you got?" economy -- increasingly many critical goods are charged for in a way that effectively eats up any gain in income. For example, college and health care -- you get hit with an obscenely high bill and they just figure out how much you can really afford and charge that.

A major factor affecting housing affordability is the quantity of credit being assigned to mortgages relative to investment in the real economy. This is well explained by a professor of finance here (52 mins): https://youtu.be/N-FDdHj7rPk

I’m not sure I understand why it would be more important. If you have universal income you can then probably afford to move to a cheaper place. Whereas making housing cheaper is just going to attract more people and you’re going full cycle.

Housing is used as an investment asset and a source of income rather than a home.

If you took all the investors out of the housing market, housing should cost just the price of construction.

In the more expensive areas you are actually paying more for the land than the house.

$500k properties are torn down to build new homes.

And a lot of government policy is based on getting people to buy a home, attaching a lot of net worth to its value. Then, surprise! People vote in a way that keeps up housing costs!

> a single childless person cannot live on $1000/month in many places.

Is this really the demographic that should be optimized for? Seems there's a nice financial incentive to find a partner and split the cost of rent. As a single childless person myself (who has shared rental houses with a friend for several years now to lower costs of rent and keep it "affordable") I've been led to believe that the cost of having children amortizes (especially as you add more children) with incentives, and really pays off as you get into old age. If it were up to me I'd rather optimize for the family unit rather than singles.

We have been optimizing for the nuclear family since the 1950s. Meanwhile, our demographics have diverged from that. This is part of the problem.

We have more singles, more childless couples and more single parents. Their housing needs are not being met. We expect young single people to rent an apartment designed for a family and get roommates.

If that works for you, that's already available. The assumption that someone with basic income should get a roommate is an assumption that they really aren't allowed to aspire to the same things as middle class people, like a space of their own.

A lot of women currently de facto use a romantic partner as a means to cover rent and it causes all kinds of problems. Expecting people to pair off to have a decent place is essentially expecting a polite form of prostitution.

> Expecting people to pair off to have a decent place is essentially expecting a polite form of prostitution.

What it really boils down to is that an average middle class family in the past had a full-time housekeeper. Typically, those housekeepers were single women. Nowadays, that same demographic group has kids of their own. I wouldn’t call it prostitution so much as pragmatism.

I apologise for all the child comments but I find your posts compelling. However, your 3rd paragraph above seems a bit at odds with your idea in an earlier comment to rebuild SROs. In any case, I think the same sorts of housing opportunities should be available to all, which is why I brought up the fact that the USA has ample unused housing, it's mostly just an issue of policy/assholes in power.

I don't see how it is at odds at all. Perhaps you could explain that to me.

This demographic also includes senior citizens on fixed income. Many who are finding it very difficult to pay rent, to the point where some forego eating in order to pay bills.

>Seems there's a nice financial incentive to find a partner and split the cost of rent.

Which then puts you into a situation where your financial and housing security is dependent on a relationship working.

No thanks. That's not a nice incentive.

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