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FWIW, people who have a problem with street people are largely not concerned with people living in unconventional shelters (such as tents and cardboard boxes). They're concerned with what street people do. Drug use, syringes left on the ground, shit and piss everywhere, piles of trash, theft, vandalism, etc.

Agreed- a lot of people (on HN at least) are hypersensitive to any suggestion that any homeless people are voluntarily homeless, dangerous to themselves or others, or engage in any activities that everyone living around them would prefer they not engage in.

I get it; acknowledging that can be a slippery slope towards demonizing all homeless people, which in turn could lead to people rationalizing not trying to help the situation, or dealing with it in ways that don't help those in need.

But it's dishonest, and it's a weird sort of virtue signaling to try to shame anyone who says they don't like wading around in syringes and human waste and clearly mentally ill panhandlers when they visit SF. Mass homelessness is absolutely a problem not just for the homeless themselves, but for everyone in a city. There's nothing wrong with saying that mass homelessness makes a city a worse place for everyone, not just the homeless themselves. Accepting that makes it a lot easier to motivate people to actually do things to improve the situation.

Anecdotally, it's an issue where people tend to hold extreme positions with no middle ground- either SF's homeless are primarily noble beings fallen on hard times who need our help, or (the other extreme view) they're primarily panhandlers taking advantage of local sympathies and weather and are fine with sleeping in doorways and pooping in alleys if it means they don't have to have jobs. In reality it's some combination, but I have no idea what the demographics are or if anyone even knows.

If there's no common ground with how people define the problem, there's no agreement on the solution. It sucks but if people don't view it as a huge gray area with multiple valid perspectives, it can't ever get fixed in a meaningful way. People will just continue arguing over whether to arrest them all or throw money at them, and the problem will persist indefinitely. Having said that, I really hope the additional funding approved by voters last week turns out to be a step in the right direction that makes a tangible positive difference for everyone in SF, homeless or not. I have no problem with throwing money at the situation if it actually helps.

Now try your sentence with "what black people do" or any other group, and see how it make you feel. You forgot to put in "a minority of." The street people you see (many of which aren't homeless) are a minority compared to the homeless (some of whom pick up litter) who stay mostly out of sight, sleep out of sight, aren't practiced beggars.

> Now try your sentence with "what black people do" or any other group, and see how it make you feel.

So if I have a problem with people who drive drunk, my concerns are invalid because, if I replaced the category “drunk drivers” with “black people” in statements I make about the societal harms caused by drunk drivers, it would come across as racist?

Also, nice try on the “not all homeless” trick, but I’m already hip to that particular rhetorical maneuver. As such, I didn’t use that term. I used “street people” because I am specifically referring to all of the people who are living in public spaces in broad daylight.

Any classification that's actually defined by behavior, such as "drive drunk" as opposed to "streetpeople" is perfectly fine by me, as I think would be obvious. Both streetpeople and homeless are highly heterogeneous groups, so I don't think this affects my point. Which is that your one-to-one mapping is literally stereotyping. Just back off a little, so that you're only complaining about those you're really angry at, please. That's all I'm asking. If you want to say "a majority of" and have proper sources for that, I won't object to such a statement and I would genuinely be interested in the sources.

Do you have a preferred term for the people I am trying to refer to? Specifically, the people who live in public spaces and visit mayhem upon the surrounding community? I am asking honestly. Such a term would be very useful in furthering the discussion around the “homeless”. That was my intention in using the term “street people”.

Also, “street people” is a class that is defined by behavior. They are people who live in public spaces.

Just say "some of." Location isn't behavior and certainly isn't objectionable be itself, nor were you making that objection. At this point at least one of us is cavilling, so I won't reply further.

JFC. In my original post, I was specifically pointing out that people mostly have a problem with behavior and, specifically, behavior other than merely taking shelter in a tent in a public space (aka their location).

I agree that removing restrictive zoning requirements from suburban neighborhoods (which prevent the construction of apartments, for example), would go a long way to address the lack of housing, but it wouldn't fix everything. To assume so is to oversimplify the problem. You still need antipoverty programs and a social safety net.

Not to mention that trying to change zoning laws in suburban neighborhoods is to fight a losing battle.

"The researchers combed three years worth of meeting minutes from 97 cities and towns in the region, and found nearly two-thirds of residents who stood up to speak about proposed housing developments did so to oppose them, while just 14 percent spoke in support."

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/08/30/researchers-...

It is perfectly possible to have too many regulations, but that doesn't mean that the answer is no regulations. The simple fact is that we (human beings) have demonstrated quite well that when there are no rules, exploitative power structures form very quickly and do not self correct. Not to mention things like dealing with the problem of the commons.

Regulations can be useful, since none of us are saints, they are required.

I think you're underestimating the real estate market. A significant reason new developments cost so much is that the land they are built upon costs so much.

For example, in Portland Oregon, where I live, most new developments are being built on expensive real estate in central areas. As a result the apartments built there, even if they aren't particularly nice, end up going for high amounts. This is due to non-physical assets, like location and proximity to public transportation.

Your solution would give free reign to developers to cut costs and still rent the housing out for exorbitant amounts because the housing market in SF is already so ridiculous. It would take a lot more than 1 square mile to significantly affect the market.

Then start new cities in open areas and create incentives (just in the beginning) for business to move jobs there. There's so much open space surrounding the bay area. In the east bay, From our clogged 6 lane highways, i can see nothing but green and yellow for miles as far as the eye can see.

I have friends in Tokyo renting 1 bedrooms in the city center for $500 ~ $900 month.

Those buildings were not built as affordable housing. They became affordable housing when other developers built newer, nicer buildings somewhere else in Tokyo. Older buildings had to lower prices to keep tenants coming.

Unless there is a literally infinite supply of rich people, I don’t see how increasing supply cannot create more affordable housing.

Likewise, land values are so high because the completion over developable land is so fierce. As with buildings, increasing the supply of developable land will also lower prices.

It's counter intuitive but sometimes adding supply actually increases demand. Of course at some point you do run out of rich people, but there are a lot of rich people now so that can take a long, long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

This pertains to traffic, not housing market. This does not seem relevant to the dynamics of supply and demand for housing.

How big is a Tokyo 1 bedroom renting for $500/month? Are you sure it isn’t a < 50sqm micro-studio with shared bathrooms?

50 square meters would be very large for a 1 bedroom in Tokyo. My 3 bedroom two hours outside Tokyo was 85m^2 and cost around 2500/month.

Ya, they would be much smaller.

Rents in Tokyo appear cheap, until you look at them on a square meter basis.

This is an interesting contrast though - similarly in Paris, apartments can get much smaller than SF. The difference is, in SF, you simply don’t have the choice.

A lot of that has to do with American building and rental codes.

Never tried to rent in Tokyo, but I can imagine the prices are astronomical in any decent areas.

They really aren't, they are just small compared to western standards. You can get a two bedroom in Shinjuku for $1900/month, it's just going to be around 625 sqft. Transport in the Tokyo area is so good it's not really a big deal to live further out either.

A big reason is that the Japanese land zoning approach is far more rational than the US approach. Much has been written about it[1].

1. https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

That's astronomical for that amount of space.

Re the $500 per month friend; 1 kitchen/dining, bathroom, 1 separate bedroom, no living room. So nothing shared. Not sure the exact square meters, but it is very small.

The secret to the cheap price is simple: the building was built in the 1970s (ancient by Tokyo standards).

Edit: no need to take my word for it. A quick search on suumo.jp will show the abundance of Tokyo apartments available for under $900 (~¥100k).

Tokyo housing is very affordable.

I’ve seen some pretty shabby housing in Japan. Some lacked indoor heating even (well, Japan did invent the kotatsu for a reason). I don’t think it is very comparable to housing in say Sam Francisco. They get affordability through various means that wouldn’t be allowed in the states.

Japan has very high standards for buildings. Their building codes ensure structural integrity during earthquakes, prevent spread of fires, and ban usage of hazardous materials like asbestos. Japan also has environmental building codes that mandate levels of energy efficiency for new buildings. As in the US, they are still relatively new, but have been strengthening over time.

If there really is a law in the US against building homes without central heating, then it is a rather idiotic one.

I lived in a Japanese apartment without central heating. I bought a $75 space heater and was never cold.

The grandparent pointed out that the housing options in SF are luxury condos and $50 tents. Maybe that's because the laws in SF basically prevent developers from building anything in between? "Can't be more than x tall, can't be in these areas, must have x amount of parking, with x kind of heating, x amount of green space, and at least x sq feet per unit, " and on and on. With all those zoning and building regulations, it doesn't really surprise me that the only kind of housing you can reasonably develop and make a profit on is luxury condos.

> < 50sqm micro-studio

Ah, the spoiled Americans. Here in Poland I live in a 1br appartment (two rooms, kitchen, bathroom) that's 37 sqm. Perfect for one person, livable for two or even two and a child.

I lived in something that small in Switzerland. They even had immigrant families sharing that space. My only point was that we should compare apples to apples, not oranges.

In S.F and Vancouver, the city can't expand in most directions thanks to salt water. Therefore, the old buildings tend to be razed, in order to make room for a new buildings. This is a stark contrast to say, Houston or Calgary.

Up until this year, Vancouver had one of the highest proportions of single-family-housing zoning (over 60%). Vancouver is one of the worst cases of restricted (low-density) development in North America. Vancouver's housing problems are political, not geographical.

They're both, I have lived in Van. The politics aren't great there, but they were actually worse in prairie cities I've lived in. It's just that the geography prevented old buildings from being replaced so frequently in cities that were able to expand in every direction, which helped the poor quite inadvertently, yet considerably.

SF has plenty of room for growth without increasing the land area.

NYC, for example, has population density of 10.4k/sq km versus SF's 6.2k/sq km. Paris has ~20k / sq km.

Tokyo is hard to get a good stat for since Tokyo officially includes a handful of mostly unpopulated islands, but I think if the islands are excluded the density is around 8.5k/sq km.

> the land they are built upon costs so much

The land costs so much because so many people want it. So many people want it because they want a place to live. If you build up, you provide places to live with less land, reducing demand on lane. It doesn't matter if it's high value condos being built, you're still providing an increase in the housing supply, which reduces prices for the entire market. If the high end market gets more supply, prices fall there, allowing more people access to that market- which reduces demand in the next-lowest band of prices, repeating the process.

I'm desperately trying to find the article I read on it but Portland is actually a shining example of this working. (Someone tell me I didn't make that story up in my head, because I swear I saw it here!). Portland allowed high end condos to go up and low-end rentals went down in price.

The problem is that NIMBYs elect politicians who won't allow real development, because they want their houses to be "investments". But you can't have housing be a "good investment" vs the market, with prices of housing constantly increasing faster than inflation, while also having your children buy houses at the same price (inflation adjusted) that you did.

> Sure, maybe you don't like what happens in version 1. But, if we never iterate on this problem, we'll never make progress on it and in a 100 years we'll still be talking about this same self imposed problem which is completely solvable.

I think the iteration already happened. The v1 was sometime at the XIX century and were currently and v1000 or something.

No, anarchy is not a solution to over-regulation. If it were, then we would not have regulations. Markets are not a solution for all problems: market failures are quite real, and no, they are not all caused by government.

> Markets are not a solution for all problems: market failures are quite real, and no, they are not all caused by government.

This particular market failure is definitely caused by government.

Homelessness never existed before government regulations?

Not answering your question directly, but the homeless crisis in the US seems to have hit the radar in the early 1980s.

Part of that may be changing terminology -- earlier use of "homeless" tends to focus on "people made homeless" (or "... left ...") after some calamity: structure fire, flood, hurricane, etc. In the 1980s "homeless" became a chronic condition. Other terms may have existed for the long-term unhoused. I'm not aware of them.

What specifically changed, I'm not certain, though circumstances leading to the role of real estate as an asset rather than a utility may be part of that.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homeless%2C%20...

> Homelessness never existed before government regulations?

The context of the parent comment is high real estate prices in San Francisco, which are caused by government regulations.

They're arguing for the removal of regulations in a general sense, not just specific problematic regulations. The solution being proposed is incorrect, regardless of whether the problem has been correctly identified.

I lived in a $3000/mo condo that was a 45 minute BART ride away. By myself. Without stock options.

There are ways to live in the bay, but I'm looking forward to SF trying new ways to content with the street life problems there. Ultimately, it was definitely a discouraging element of life in the city.

The cost of your "regulation free zone" will likely be measured in human lives. Does that seem like an acceptable risk?

The cost of the current homeless situation can also be measured in human lives

That's just in the beginning. Not every regulation saves lives - some are just on the books to protect rent seeking entities and lobbyists, and some are just there because they've always been there.

This is true of course, but it's always a giant red flag for me whenever someone refers to the vague concept of "regulations" as being the problem, vs. complaining about specific regulations. Complaining about the very concept of regulations seems really naive, like precoscious high schooler who just had his mind blown by Atlas Shrugged naive.

The current POTUS made a campaign promise that he would only allow a regulation to be added if two more were eliminated. This is asinine. If there are unnecessary regulations, get rid of them. Get rid of them because they're unnecessary or counterproductive, not because they fall into a category of legislation referred to as "regulations". Losing a regulation isn't an inherently good thing any more than gaining one is an inherently bad thing. The only thing that matters is whether or not it's a net positive, and that's specific to each regulation. It's like saying, "there's too many laws! We need to get rid of some laws!", and proceeding to randomly choose laws to get rid of until numberOfLaws <= totallyArbitraryMaximumLawCountThatSomeoneMadeUp.

"Regulatory theater" with many laws, almost no money for enforcement, and small penalties that are never updated for inflation seems very common to me.

Fewer, well-chosen regulations with very strong penalties that easily pay for strict enforcement activity - that's much rarer; and I'm cynical enough about how gets to influence lawmakers, that I know why that is.

Ah, the “you just want people to die” argument. I wondered when that would show up.

How about a largely deregulated area where you can mix housing and business zoning. Like we use to with downtowns. At the same time get rid of the caps on building height. Tokyo has tall buildings and earthquakes. Allow SF to modernize. A 60 story apartment building neutralize the cost of the property.

Another option is to make SF a stronghold for the rich. Nothing wrong with that either. Push the poor out to locations they can afford.

Few will die in either scenario.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The OP literally made the argument that, in the extreme, people must have to die if regulations are relaxed. OP did not assume good faith. OP pushed the argument to the extreme. I responded by pointing out that out. I appreciate civility, but won’t assume good faith when the other participant has shown bad faith.

"Ah..I wondered when that would show up." was just being condescending and snarky. "But they started it!" is not a defence.

It's possible that innovations established in the the area that is absent of regulation may save lives, possibly more lives than would be saved by applying the preexisting regulation to that area.

While there is some truth that some regulation is needed to account for living in the Ring of Fire and also for SuperFund sites created in the 20th century, NIMBYs tend to overly abuse environmental impact concerns in order to stop high density housing development and even business development; which has helped exacerbate the housing crisis.