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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage, because for those completely out of their luck a 20 sq. ft. room with unfinished plywood walls and broken fire detectors is still a 1000% better than a torn-up tent in the park. Granted the place in this article is just a gentrified tenement for hipsters working in entry positions paying twice the national average but want to live in places for those making 3x the average, but that doesn't invalidate the need for ultra-barebones housing.

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> One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage

A more unfortunate reality about the housing crisis is the idea that we need crappy shitholes because wealthy elite want their own home prices ever higher out of reach from normal people.

That seems a non-sequitur. In a free market, the price isn't driven by what the owner 'wants'. Throwing 'wealthy elite' in there seems like snobbery. That sentence doesn't mean anything.

A more interesting observation is, as population grows yet city infrastructure stagnates, housing prices go up. Something like that, that has actual logic behind it.

Housing isn't a free market, it's heavily regulated, with a healthy amount of influence from wealthy interests going into that regulation.

Like, how do you observe the stagnation and not connect it to regulation?

That was just an example, meant to foster meaningful commentary. But let me give it a try:

Limited tax income (we all vote on that), geometric expansion of infrastructure cost as city radius grows, 'bow wave' of old insufficient infrastructure buried under the old city that cost bundles to remediate...you can go on and on.

I know its fun to pretend conspiracies are everywhere, and the man is keeping you down. But there are real reasons for things, and its more helpful to know them. Especially if you plan on voting.

On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics.

On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates.

It's foolish to say that the housing market is anything resembling a free market. And brushing off discussion of specific mechanisms of causality as "conspiracy" is just intellectual laziness.

It isn't even a conspiracy. Lots of people loudly and overtly oppose policies that might lower housing costs (or even just increase supply enough to reduce the rate of increase).

The word "conspiracy" is often used to avoid talking about general motives of individual actors that lead to some emergent behavior. It's basically a combination of an ad-hominem (claiming unreasonable paranoia) and straw man (the high bar of some secretive cabal meeting).

Even before rising to the level of explicit policy, existing residents are generally against new development because it will eg take away open space they've come to take for granted. I actually just had the pleasure of observing a town meeting over environmental concerns for a new development, and one abutter shamelessly asserted the area would be better kept as park (completely out of the scope of this commission). Of course the real answer for how to control adjacent land is to buy it (possibly communally), and then enact your will, but a whole host of issues makes this unwieldy in the US.

"On the supply side, building height and density are directly regulated by local politics."

Would you prefer that the residents have no input into local conditions?

In most cities I've lived, developers had all of the power in local politics because they had the money. That didn't go well either.

"On the demand side, the asset price trend of housing / land is directly chosen by the central government when it picks interest rates."

Hoards of people moving into a constrained area with a shit ton of money clearly have no effects.

And how is "the central government" not a conspiracy theory?

Yes, I consistently vote in favor of local tax increases.

Just blaming "regulation" without qualification is a little vague for my tastes. There are important reasons why we don't just allow anyone to come along and build anything anywhere. Some of those reasons are really good— neighbourhood character, height limits, flood/ecology/watershed management, traffic management, etc.

And some are bad or over-used, like parking minimums, and the various barriers that prevent density and walkability upgrades (low-rises, multi-unit conversions, mixed use development).

Neighborhood character and height restrictions aren't "really good", they are maybe okay sometimes.

Traffic management is a planning problem, but it isn't a reason to not build things (for instance, if you refuse to build things for traffic management and limit density, you probably just end up with more traffic anyway...).

Only watershed management is a legitimate reason for regulation out of your list.

And even then it's not a hard limit. You can always pull a Boston and get the state to let you take the water from a poorer area with plenty of water.

As an aside, Georgia periodically tries to claim a chunk of Tennessee to get access to the Tennessee River.

"“I just want to threaten them and then stick a straw into the Tennessee River,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said during a hearing..." (2018)

If you have been through north Georgia recently, you probably noticed that all of the lake levels are very low. Atlanta takes a lot of water.

Without "regulation" downtown San Fransisco would be a towering mass of high rise apartment complexes. Traffic would be impossible so people would be forced to find alternatives. There would be endless bitching about the eyesores on the horizon and the perpetually congested streets and the ruination of property values for the heavily gentrified neighborhoods.

It's hard to tell whether you're presenting this as worse or better than the current situation.

It would be better for some (more reasonable rents, no need to own a car) but worse for others (retirees who intended to sell their house for millions and move out to the country). It would also force the city to invest in more mass transit, which will inconvenience a lot of car owners.

The regulations have the effect of picking winners and losers, and since the regulations were written by the old established homeowners they were the ultimate winners. If young people and renters want to see change in their lifetime they need to start getting themselves elected to local boards and councils. Local politics matter.

No offense, but I could care less about some boomer who will only make 500% profit off of his house rather than 1000%, vs letting people who aren't developers live in the city they work in. Car users benefit from better transportation because their repair bills go down, and there are less cars on the road.

Also, its hard to get elected to local government in places you don't live in.

No offense, but it is hard to care about the problems a bunch of 20-somethings making multiples of the median household income have finding apartments for prices they want to pay. Particularly if they don't live in the area they want to diddle around with.

First of all, they probably wouldn't make as much, at least at entry level, if cost of living wasn't so high. Second, the silicon valley ecosystem isn't even mostly populated by developers, the rest of the people making below median household income need places to live too. The housing problem isn't a "rich millennial vs rich boomer" scenario, it's "rich boomer vs literally everyone else". Maybe if they had to pay property taxes on the current value of their property they'd move somewhere else, and we wouldn't have this issue.

Would the rents actually be better, or would people now in Oakland move into SF?

The retirees could sell their property to developers for millions. The losers would be those who want to continue living there, but are taxed or zoned out of their homes. See "gentrification" and "regulatory taking".

Increase the supply and the price eventually has to drop. Basic supply and demand. That said, this problem has been allowed to grow exceptionally big and there is an fantastic amount of pent-up demand that would have to be satisfied before prices really started to normalize.

Add anti-lock braking systems and automobiles have to be safer. Basic physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law

If people in Oakland want to move into SF and can afford it at current rents, they're doing it now.

> neighbourhood character

That's actually a really vague, bullshit reason cited by people who want to keep, say, people poorer than them out.

To provide a bit more substance: if you never build any new housing, and prices go up and up, maybe the physical form of the neighborhood stays the same, but the character of the people who can afford to live there absolutely changes.

> neighbourhood character, height limits

Absolutely not. These are horrendous reasons and take much of the blame for the housing crisis. We must build upwards to house people.

Neighborhood character and height limits can mean a lot of things and be implemented for different reasons. If done in the NIMBY sense of "you can't have anything I don't like", yes it's horrendous.

But there's a reason Paris "feels" different than Dallas, or Brooklyn different than Manhattan. A big reason I enjoy traveling is to experience these difference "neighborhood cultures". Without some restrictions, you risk destroying what makes a city special.

I'm not making any sort of value judgment here--it's not up to me alone to decide "character is more important than housing" (or vise versa), and I won't pretend to know where to draw the line on those restrictions.

Height restrictions are often put in place because the underlying infrastructure (water and sewage, electrical grids, traffic/roads) and occasionally even the ground itself simply cannot support a high rise every block.

Part of the reason Paris feels different is that they've mostly allowed the city to grow up, everywhere, instead of just a few places. The latter is more likely to lead to not very friendly feeling skyscrapers without a lot at the street, human level.

And it also helps a lot that it was not mostly built for automobiles like so many Post-WWII cities in the US have been.

Ha, I knew putting that in there would be contentious, but I suppose that's my fault for doing so in a comment specifically calling out the vaguery of "regulations".

In any case, I think it's obvious that someone currently in a single family home doesn't want a 40-story highrise going up right next door to them. So in the absence of explicit zoning, perhaps there could be some formula like limiting new construction height to no more than 50% taller than the median height of buildings within a 1km radius or something. This would still permit triplexes and low rises in established neighbourhoods, without having existing homeowners be completely taken advantage of.

Lest my sincerity be doubted, my downtown neighbourhood in Kitchener is a total jumble— it's mostly century homes, but a bunch of them have been duplexed or triplexed, plus there are the occasional chunky multi-unit buildings and townhouse strips, and even a few larger rental towers. I think it's great! Take a look:

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.4550536,-80.4917221,331a,35y...

"Neighborhood character" is not a good reason to not build.

Regulation means you don’t get half-arsed made houses that have no fire alarms or come down in the middle of the night, have no running water or have dangerous electrical work and follow no building codes... the kind of housing we used to see in pre-WWII shanty-town housing.

That’s the other extreme to government only-housing (i.e. socialist economy housing). We’re in the middle somewhere and sometimes NIMBYism gets the best of us, but Houston is a decent counterexample.

I think the OP is referring to zoning regulation and not housing regulation. Zoning in the Bay Area is truly horrendous. There's vast swaths of land that's mandatory detached single home only. Some cities in the Bay Area, for example, even ban a second storey.

I wasn't really being specific, I was simply addressing the statement that housing prices are a 'free' market, which they aren't.

There are probably good zoning type regulations (things like controls on industrial activities) and there are certainly excessive building regulations. The classic problem of regulation is doing it right, not the question of doing it vs not doing it.

Well housing prices were driven up here by foreign investors and gangsters using property to launder money.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5259196/home-prices-in-metro-vanc...

That is not at all a natural spike in housing prices and it's pretty much made housing unaffordable here.

What the owners want (in terms of $ for their house) impacts the supply of houses, which impacts the price of houses. It is further impacted by city councils restricting building new housing (city council is composed of home owners) who have an incentive to raise the value of their house to what they want.

Real estate prices are inextricably linked to the wealthy, even just the upper-middle and middle classes. With the stagnation of wages and the limiting of the workforce, one of the only remaining routes to long term prosperity and social mobility is property ownership.

This, if you're interested, is also why despite being emancipated for decades, African Americans are still insanely poor compared to whites; they can't afford property, which is the primary mechanism for enriching subsequent generations. They rent all their lives because it's all they can afford, and they have nothing to give their children when they die.

Sorry for the bunny trail. Anyway, the problem is that everybody is always saying "we need more low cost housing" but what they tend to mean is "we need more low cost housing away from me", the good old NIMBY. Because property ownership is the only steady mechanism for upward social mobility, home prices must rise. Because home prices must rise, low cost housing must be away from you, because if it isn't it lowers the value of your home by virtue of being next door.

I experienced this personally; when a foreclosed home in my neighborood sold for way under market value, the value of my home at its next assessment dropped by about $3k.

So again; because home ownership is the only reliable path to long term wealth, people are very defensive (rightfully so) about keeping their property value up. This is where you get into how markets are always the best mechanism for generating wealth, but the tradeoff to that is they're terrible at allocating resources efficiently.

Maybe just live in an affordable area.

And be self employed because there are no jobs in the area.

The jobs will follow when employers can’t hire anyone. If one wants to live in a urban dump to have a certain job, that’s fine, but don’t expect government intervention if they employer does not pay a living wage.

So the plan is to move somewhere with no jobs and wait for the opportunities to materialize?

It’s not binary. Move somewhere with some jobs, maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living. Then other (higher paying) jobs may follow, which will raise the pay for everyone.

>maybe for lesser pay with better cost of living.

That's almost never a good economic decision.

In reality what people tend to do is move far outside of the city and commute an hour or more each way into the city. And this is only a feasible because the negative externalities of car ownership are heavily subsidized.

You could be a programmer and work remotely.

Rather than just wish rich people would change, it's worth considering why they want home prices out of reach.

One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc.

As a thought experiment, imagine that as part of the housing solution, your kitchen and one of your closets are going to be converted into extremely cheap housing for new neighbors. You don't get a say in who moves in.

You might luck out and get instant friends. Or you might get neighbors from vastly different walks of life and, because you're such an open-minded and enlightened person, you will become good friends with them, maybe even live some sort of hilarious good-natured "opposites meet" sitcom life with them. But, since you won't have any option to kick these neighbors out, also think: are there any ways this scenario could possibly go wrong?

For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.

Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it? One option would be to outlaw such extreme people as in that example, but that's obviously a no-go. Or people could be segregated based on various criteria, but that's pretty much a no-go too. So it's a real head-scratcher. It's currently 'solved' (poorly) by using housing prices as a proxy for class. This is a lousy solution, but if you're going to get rid of it, you need to be conscious that it is a solution to something, and you need to replace it with some other solution.

> One possible answer: they want to limit who they live nextdoor to. This sounds dickish, but, overall, on average, it serves as a rough proxy for "not living next to hillbillies who shoot fireworks all night", etc.

That's a possible answer, sure. But I find that "the merely poor" and "hillbillies" often don't really overlap much. The merely poor can't afford their own home. "Hillbillies" generally live in the middle of nowhere and generally don't want to live in the city anyway. There's far too many people who'd try to hell "hillbillies" how they can and can't live.

> For example, say one of your new neighbors is an outspoken homosexual, and the other is an intolerant redneck. Then, despite yourself being perfectly tolerant and reasonable, trouble is inevitable. And you're going to be right there in the middle of it.

I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me.

> Assuming you absolutely want to avoid a scenario like the latter, how can you accomplish it?

Here's a thought: why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors? If I don't like what they do, then use the force of law to force them to change. If the force of law doesn't exist for the change I want, then perhaps I am in the wrong.

Careful of mixing up cause-and-effect. Plenty of hillbillies would love to live on the beautiful California west coast next to the beach, if they could afford it. Anyway, hillbillies was an obvious stand-in for all sorts of bad neighbors, whether that be the guy with the constantly barking dog, the drunk, the guy always playing his loud subwoofer, etc.

>as it doesn't involve me

When your neighbors are shouting at each other with you in the middle, it involves you.

>why should I be permitted to hate my lawful neighbors?

You absolutely shouldn't, for we should all love our neighbors. But you should absolutely be allowed to hate your neighbors' actions.

>use the force of law to force them to change

Have you ever dealt with invoking city noise ordinances? It's a long, tiresome process, and meanwhile your neighbors you're invoking them against aren't going to be too happy with you. Take it from me, I grew up poor and lived in crappy neighborhoods. Playing outside as a 6-year-old, it was routine for the neighborhood drunk to yell slurs at me and my siblings. First day we moved in, Dad called the cops on that guy, and the cops basically chuckled at my Dad over the phone. "Welcome to Los Angeles, sir."

"I don't see the problem. Outspoken homosexual can do what they want as long as it doesn't involve me. Intolerant redneck can do and say what they want as long as it doesn't involve me."

And if they get into arguments at the breakfast table?

I had a friend once who had a married couple as roommates. They didn't get along. The weekly RPG session was interrupted by arriving police a couple of times. Problem finally solved by my friend moving to a single-family dwelling.

This conspiracy driven mode of thinking is so detached from reality, I seriously wonder how people with this attitude manage to interact in society.

This reminds me of a mayor of a Canadian town that trialed giving homeless people houses. At first he was skeptical that they should have nice houses, then later realized it didn't matter.

     Why should they have granite countertops when I don't?

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...

You ended that quote too soon.

>"However, I've come around to realize that this makes financial sense."

Clugston says that it costs about $20,000 a year to house someone. If they're on the street, it can cost up to $100,000 a year.

This one is pretty heart warming too:

>He says city staff found housing for one man, but he insisted on leaving to sleep under cars. Day after day, they'd search him out and take him back to his new home. "They did it 75 times, but they had the patience and they didn't give up on him and, eventually, he ended up staying in the house," he says. "Ultimately, people do want a roof over their heads."

> "Ultimately, people do want a roof over their heads."

seems like a slightly unwarranted conclusion.

alternative conclusion: "Ultimately, people will submit to living under a roof if they are relocated by state goons seventy five times."

I mean, do you know what winters can get like in Medicine Hat? Part of it was probably just realizing that they didn't have to suffer in the winter as they're accustomed...

I just need to be shown how to do things 75 times before I figure it out sometimes.

Are you talking about a simple task or a deeply ingrained personal lifestyle perhaps encouraged by mental illness?

I was really just making an example. The person wasn't necessarily being forced to stay under a roof by 'state goons', they may simply have needed to be shown 75 times to figure it out. There are many fields where that is normal albeit usually what we would consider more complex tasks and you'd generally expect someone to latch onto the knowledge faster. There are arts where the most basic moves will be practiced thousands of times to master them and still seek some further layer of understanding. When you consider the range of problems that contribute to homelessness I can imagine someone just needed to see it 75 times to learn it.

hard to say, the article just presents "man relocated 75 times, finally stays put" and the conclusion "ultimately everyone wants a roof over their head" back to back as if that conclusion obviously follows. the reader has no idea whether the guy genuinely preferred his new dwelling or if he just gave up resisting. or maybe the 75th time happened to line up with the first cold night and he decided to stay just for the winter.

I'm not trying to be flippant here; I think we walk a dangerous line when we presume to know what's best for a person and especially when we apply pressure to get them to change their ways.

one of my good friends from high school developed severe schizophrenia after graduating and has been homeless for several years now. he has a standing offer of support from his (wealthy) parents on the sole condition than he start some form of treatment. I and some of our other friends have repeatedly tried to help him get into housing, treatment, or even temporary shelter, and he always refuses. his parents had him involuntarily committed for a few days; he left as soon as he was able. when I run into him and ask how he's doing, he always says he's doing great and loves the freedom of his lifestyle. he doesn't look great, but is it really up to me to decide?

I don't understand why "why should they have granite countertops when I don't?" is a stupid thing to say. The article doesn't explain. Do you have more context, or is there anyone else here who can explain what's wrong with that statement?

Housing has like 30-40 year investment horizons. You don't need shitholes to house people, especially not in the wealthiest society in history.

It sounds awful, and really there should be better-supported and more dignified social options to get people off the streets. But in the absence of those, I think you do have a point here. If nothing else, access to a proper shower is an important stepping stone in seeking out and holding down a job.

I think this is often overlooked.

In decades past single room occupancy housing was far more common. However they were seen as a blight to the city since it was mostly occupied by drug addicts and the poor. So cities and neighborhoods didn't complain once real estate started to take off and they began to be converted into more lucrative forms of housing.

Eliminating the cheapest of the cheap eliminated the lesser of two evils.

>housing crisis

I don't think the housing crisis is the primary driver, rather it's cheap loans and a booming market for urban residential development. They built co-living in Chicago! There is no housing crisis here, if anything they are saying we are overbuilt. https://chicago.goquarters.com/west-loop/

> If you want complete housing coverage, there must be crappy shitholes because a crappy shithole is better than sleeping in the park.

That does not follow. You may be right, but not for that reason.

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