Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yingw787 | Hacker News Reader

I think high rent prices are bad for a number of reasons:

Less flexibility in starting a company: You can't choose to bootstrap unless you do it as a side hustle at a megacorp, and it's hard to not compete with a megacorp because it does everything. You have to take VC funding and follow VC rules to some degree, and it may not be a direction you wish to follow. This is a feedback loop.

Oligopsony employment conditions: If you wish to build savings and not spend all your money on rent, you can really only work for the largest and best funded companies, and even then you need to negotiate at a disadvantage, since they have far more information on the employment markets (because they're big) and they each know the other big players (because they're few) and can bound salaries through price leadership. This is also a feedback loop.

I'm concerned we will see fewer "real" companies like Intel/Apple, and more Snapchat clones and e-scooter startups. Less meaningful bets, less drive, and more complacency -- borne out of the desire to cannibalize social trust (e.g. if you work hard, you earn shelter) and the societal fabric (e.g. all people deserve shelter as a basic human right) for privatized financial gain.

Most European countries already recognize that, to some extent. "Sidewalk evictions" are illegal, you (or municipality/local government) have to first provide some replacement apartment before renter can be evicted. Most town/cities have some pool of apartments for that very purpose. Of course those aparments are shitholes most of the time, but still. Of course in practice this protection does not work for everyone, and there are still homeless people in Europe.

>all people deserve shelter as a basic human right

I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become a slave.

There's no shortage of builders. You can just compensate those workers with taxes. If you think taxes are also a form of slavery, that's a different discussion.

You can't fulfill a basic human right contingent on enough taxes coming in. If it's really a basic human right, insufficient revenues or unexpectedly high prices are not an excuse. If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies, and if housing was really being treated like a human right, you'd have to make builders work without pay, or at least involuntarily.

Providing housing most of the time is just a program. Providing housing all of the time with no exceptions, like you would expect from a human right, involves some serious distortions of other values. That's the problem, people are using the word human right when they mean high priority. It's a high priority that I do my laundry, but if society were organized so that I did my laundry at all costs, if we were all convinced that a society where I did not do my laundry did not deserve to exist, then things would get pretty crazy.

A high-priority housing program is how you implement a human right for shelter.

This isn't some paperclip maximalization requirement you adhere to the social contract, and under the wrong conditions will force people into house-building labor camps. Human rights are how you reason about resource allocation. You have a right to a trial by a jury of your peers, but that obviously doesn't mean a judge must preside over your case that same day by threat of force. We can recognize physical realities, while still understanding that if we wanted to, we could provide a social safety net that includes a place to sleep.

> If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies

If your country runs out of money, many human rights are probably in danger.

What will you do when it happens to you? That you have no place to live?

Because it will.

What makes you think that will happen to them? Most people don't end up homeless at some point in their life.

More people than you think and it gets more common over time.

I have no place to live in San Francisco. So do about 7 billion other people. Somehow they get along, by having a place to live on the rest of the planet. So if I won't be able to afford place in San Francisco - which is, unfortunately, my current situation, unfortunately not because I want to live there but because I want to have income so high I could throw out almost $4K for just one bedroom - I would live in a cheaper place. Which is, fortunately, called "the rest of the planet Earth" and is quite large.

Outside of the prison system, legal coercive labor isn't really a thing in the US.

The people building houses are working because they are paid and they prefer that to the existing social safety net.

Right, but housing as a basic human right is not something that exists in the US, at most it is a high priority. If it was really treated like a basic right our society would be unrecognizably distorted around that one thing. A human right is not something you can let slip on a bad day, and that fact has big implications.

If you are allowed to say, "our budget isn't adding up today so some people will have to stay on the wait list a bit longer," you aren't acting like it's a human right. Human rights are maximum priorities, not just high priorities.

An example of a reasonable human right would be that your own government can't kill you without a fair public trial. If a country ended up in a situation where they had to assassinate a businessman to keep their budget balanced, it would be reasonable to say "forget about the budget, you can't just take one of your own citizens out." However, if you had to loosen up the housing program because your tax revenue came in low that year, doing so would be potentially a reasonable option. "Potentially a reasonable option" is not even remotely on the table for human rights violations, which is why housing can't be a human right.

Many rights in the US are only guaranteed in the sense that they "shall not be infringed" or "Congress shall make no law". The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and the right to bear arms, but the government won't build you a church or buy you a rifle.

Housing could be a right in that sense: the government shall make no law preventing the construction of housing. Of course, like all other rights, it would be balanced against reasonable government interests like ensuring that the housing is safe.

>the government shall make no law preventing the construction of housing

The most pragmatic objection to this would be that everything you do prevents the construction of housing - if you build a city hall, you are preventing an apartment block from being built on the same land. Taxes prevent the construction of housing because the reduce the funds available to home builders and buyers. Property rights prevent the construction of housing because they would prevent me from setting up a tent in your front lawn. Making housing a right is a wellspring of endless absurdities, unless you are willing to treat it as a "maybe" goal. Maybe-goals and human rights are disjoint sets.

>Of course, like all other rights, it would be balanced against reasonable government interests...

So, let's look at a real human rights example, being assassinated by your government because you are protesting something. The dictator might claim that they were balancing your life against reasonable government interests - the reasonable response would be, "no interest is so reasonable that what you did would be justified." That's the thesis of human rights, if anything is justifiable then you don't believe in human rights. It's not that complicated.

So, if you think that housing as a basic human right can be suspended for reasonable reasons, you either don't really think it's a human right, don't believe in human rights at all, or are proposing a distorted crazyland.

While I see your argument, I think your bar for "basic right" is perhaps a little too high:

Life: people die every day in the US. In some cases, the government even kills them!

Liberty: We put people in jail

Speech: Incitement to riot; slander

Press: Libel; national security

Religion: If your religion includes e.g. human sacrifice you certainly won't be free to practice it.

And so forth.

I disagree that people paid by government contracts are slave workers. Or maybe you mean tax payers?

Either way, I always avoid phrasing things as positive rights. But they can usually be rephrased as “I believe it would be in the interest of our society and the well being of our people to provide housing for all people.”

“Shelter as a basic human right” means that we have a moral imperative to organise and structure our societies so that that right is fulfilled. If your society is structured so that not enough housing is being created, or so that housing is left empty while there are people without shelter, then that society is running on incorrect axioms and the people who make it up have a moral imperative to change how they do things.

There’s no force involved, it’s a potential principle of self-organisation.

>There’s no force involved, it’s a potential principle of self-organisation.

That means it's not a human right. If your government is engaging in real human rights violations you don't say things like, "potentially maybe we might want to reconsider how we organize our society."

One example of a human rights violation would be, the government makes up for a shortfall in their black budget by engaging in human trafficking. Whatever the solution to that - keep the dictator, change the dictator, give the president a second term; that's all situational, what's not is that you have to quit doing it.

>“Shelter as a basic human right” means that we have a moral imperative to organise and structure our societies so that that right is fulfilled.

Essentially, the problem is, that's not what it means. A human right is a value that you are willing to see your civilization stop existing if that's what it takes to preserve it. If you made housing that high of a priority things would quit working pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you gave public trials to criminals who were willing to surrender, things would go pretty well.

This is totally irrelevant for San Francisco. Even if you're a libertarian (or maybe especially if you're a libertarian) you should support building housing in the bay area.

Nobody's asking for government funds to build housing in SF. Developers are lining up to build housing funded entirely out of their own pockets. People who are pro-housing generally just want to government to stop preventing people from building more high density housing on property they already own.

So, if you're arguing some sort of taxes and government regulation are bad thing, you should be in favor of drastically more housing in SF.

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