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Comment by cheeze | Hacker News Reader

Good. It sickens me that there is so much wealth in both the Bay Area and Seattle, yet both cities are going through a homelessness crisis.

I recognize I'm part of the problem and I'm working to help the problem, but I'm only a little guy, not a billionaire.

Tech companies keep building skyscrapers, feeding their engineers food every day and paying their employees ludicrous salaries, yet those employees walk past tons of homeless folks on their way to the offices...

Are there any examples that folks are aware of where a big tech company (or really any company) stepped in to help with a crisis like this? What companies should we be celebrating for being 'good citizens'?

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I don't blame or hate myself for any of the homeless problems here, and you shouldn't either. Blame crooked / regressive SF / Bay Area / California politicians, the voters that keep voting for them, and the climate here instead.

SF could be a much less expensive place to live if supply of housing had ever kept up with demand. If it were less expensive, there'd be fewer homeless people. The regulations here were put in place by regressives. Not our fault.

If politicians hadn't wholesale wiped out mental institutions without any other plan in place, we would probably see fewer mentally ill homeless people. Not our fault.

Many drug addicts go homeless, and it's really hard to accept any personal responsibility for that. Drug addiction is a health problem treated like a criminal problem, and again that's a societal problem.

There are a lot of reasons why homelessness is such a problem here, but they're really large, difficult problems that are _not_ a result of wanting to live and work here.

I don't even think companies should really be to blame either.. these companies are generating enormous wealth and paying enormous salaries to workers here. These workers _live here_ and use their salaries here, which naturally generates other jobs that can provide others their livelihood. This would be a good thing if not for the limited supply of housing, which means attracting more workers results in displacing other, less wealthy citizens.

What realistically do you expect these companies to do to fix mental health issues? Drug addiction? The housing crisis?

Actually many of them regularly donate to charity and have employee charity matching programmes (https://macrumors.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202084918-Ap...)

I'm not sure if only money would help in this case without tackling the fundamental reasons of why people are homeless (lack of social security and affordable housing). California is the state with the highest income taxes but little goes to solve these fundamental problems.

Pointing to companies and claiming "you make money, you should fix everything that goes wrong here" is too simple in my opinion. Companies exist to create wealth for the shareholders. I don't particularly like it but that's how the system is set up.

There's a causal connection in both cases:

When a lot of wealth is generated by a city, a lot of people attempt to move there to cash in on it. The number of people who physically can live in a city is limited by the number of housing units available. If they don't build new housing, then for every person who moves in, another person is going to be displaced, whether that be moving elsewhere or ending up on the streets or moving in with other people. Market mechanisms ensure that the housing that is available goes to the people who are willing to pay the most, which is generally the highly-paid tech workers in SF & Seattle and the financial types in NYC.

The solution is pretty obvious: build more housing.

It's also independent of the amount of wealth that's generated, or whether the new housing is high-end gentrified condos or low-end affordable housing. If the new housing is high-end condos, then all the tech workers move into new construction and people who otherwise would've ended up homeless stay in their existing apartments, or move into the run-down apartments vacated by the tech workers. If the new housing is small affordable units, the high-end tech workers stay put and the homeless move into the new construction.

A requirement to “build more housing” is to make “building more housing” less expensive by removing as much limitations as possible

A startup environment thrives because it easy to start Apple in a garage.

Housing comes with a lot of restrictions for code, land, labor, environment

Make it profitable to build housing for low wage workers

If I may ask - why are you part of the problem?

If you live in a booming city and you have a high paying job then you are part of the problem. You are paying lots of money for rent, which raises the cost of housing, which forces a lot of people who can't afford housing elsewhere.

As an individual it's difficult to not contribute to these problems, and the solution isn't for high wage workers to stop moving to cities either. But it's important to recognize that simply going about your daily life with no ill intentions doesn't mean that nobody is harmed by your actions. We live in complex societies with complex interrelationships and complex rules (laws, regulations, social norms, etc.) that govern them. We have a responsibility to understand the unintended consequences of our actions so we can actively correct for them (through government, laws, taxation, etc.)

So, would you agree the reverse is true then? If you live in a booming city with a low paying job, are you also part of the problem, by placing yourself in a situation where you fail to keep up with the market rate for housing, and force your landlord to evict you?

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