Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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That argument boils down to "I'd rather let poor people be homeless than allow less than middle class housing to exist at all."

I spent nearly six years homeless. I got off the street by moving into an SRO.

An SRO with access to electricity, heat, bathroom facilities etc beats the hell out of living in a tent, peeing in the bushes and living in fear of being rounded up by the police for being too poor for my existence to be legal.

I'm working on resolving my personal problems and raising my income. I still struggle to make ends meet every single month. I'm not a drug addict and I don't have a mental health diagnosis.

I do have two special needs sons who still live with me and I'm medically handicapped.

If you really want to outlaw poverty, you basically need to start applying the death sentence to anyone who has intractable personal problems, no matter the cause.

Beat up by your husband and no place else to go but a shelter? Oh, death penalty for you.

Gave birth to a child with an expensive genetic disorder? The baby needs to die so you can keep being a productive member of society.

Etc.

I don't think that works so well, personally. Our current system does a poor job of helping people find their way back to a middle class life once things go wrong somewhere and, so far, no one is quite yet proposing the death penalty for such problems. Which means people barred from having minimal housing become an increasing drag on the system because they have no immediate way out of their predicament.

That's not intended as hyperbole:

The average life expectancy in the homeless population is estimated between 42 and 52 years, compared to 78 years in the general population.

https://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/health.html

Our housing policies are killing people, just more slowly and with more plausible deniability than putting a bullet through their brain. And some do get murdered simply for being homeless. Four homeless individuals were murdered in their sleep in New York recently and three years ago someone was setting tents on fire in San Diego.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-crime/man-accuse...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/san-diego-police-looking-for-pers...

> That argument boils down to "I'd rather let poor people be homeless than allow less than middle class housing to exist at all."

No, it really doesn't. My argument boils down to "poisoned/expired milk is never worth it, even if it would help reduce the price of milk".

> I spent nearly six years homeless. I got off the street by moving into an SRO.

I'm glad you found something that's better than nothing. I totally get how an SRO helped you out, and that you want to maintain that step for others. That's a good and admirable thing. But this is not an argument for SROs. It's an argument for more real apartments.

If you had not managed to land an SRO, but had instead found a coleman tent, and it had helped you out, should we provide free camping tents to the homeless? That's not a solution, it's a band-aid. SROs are obviously much much nicer than this, but ultimately are just a much nicer band-aid.

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We don't need to create "shittier" housing to get homeless people off the street. We don't need to revert back to tenements. The solution to homelessness is housing -- real housing -- the kind that meets all relevant local regulations. We can do this just as easily as SROs, for nearly the same price, there's zero reason not to build real housing for everyone. Including those with low income. Including those with no income.

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If your complaint is that no one is doing this housing (or not doing it properly), then I agree with you 100%. I personally believe housing is a fundamental human right, and that the government should be compelled to provide free housing to all citizens, automatically, by right of law. It should be systematically impossible for any citizen to ever be "homeless". (In the same way that's systematically impossible for a child to be "uneducated", since a public K-12 education is guaranteed for free to all citizens. In the same way that it's systemically impossible for almost any citizen to be "emergency-less", anyone can call 911 almost anywhere in the US, and be automatically connected to local emergency services, even if their cell phone isn't paid up, even if their provider is roaming, even if they borrowed it from a friend, even if they have no income at all, and so on)

For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes

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

Missing Middle housing is being widely advocated for. It is also, to use your phrasing, "shittier housing." It is smaller and more dense.

Part of why we have such a big problem is because housing standards have steadily crept upwards for decades. In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and housed about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is over 2400 sqft and houses about 2.5 people.

Our housing standards have gotten ridiculously inflated such that only rich people can afford them. The solution is absolutely to start setting some more reasonable standards for basic housing such that we stop actively pushing people out into the street.

Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-11-20/the-homel...

I'm not saying "Let's go back to grass huts with dirt floors and no plumbing." I'm saying that renting a room was a perfectly normal thing at one time and wasn't considered to be "slum" housing.

It was fairly normal for young people from even wealthy families. This tradition lives on and is preserved in the form of college dorm rooms and military barracks.

These are typically intended for people in their late teens to early twenties who are unmarried and childless. In both cases, it is normal for them to eat at a dining hall of some sort as a routine thing.

We cannot solve our current housing crisis by arguing that housing is a basic right and then setting such high standards that we can't afford it as a society.

I have six years of college. I have an incurable medical condition. I occasionally get a bit of money out of compassion from people who don't know me well, but charity is not enough to resolve my problems.

I'm not suggesting we need SROs everywhere. But I'm hardly the only person recognizing that we need to lower our crazy high standards somewhere. If I were, YIMBY would not be a movement and there wouldn't be resources promoting the idea of Missing Middle housing.

Our housing standards were shaped by the events surrounding the end of WW2 and American housing caters to an idea that a home designed for a nuclear family is the only acceptable housing. Meanwhile, people are delaying marriage, delaying having kids, having fewer kids, living longer after the kids grow up and move out, etc.

We have more families with three or fewer members than we had at the end of WW2 and we don't design housing for their needs. When I got divorced and my husband physically moved out, my sons and I had to start storing sodas in the fridge because the fridge was too large for our needs and if we didn't find some way to fill it up, milk would spoil.

I lived in Germany for a few years. Entire families have fridges the size of what are mostly found in college dorms in the US. You don't absolutely need a 20 cubic foot fridge to serve the needs of a household, but that's what we get, whether it works for us or not.

And in Japan, it's weird to have an oven. Americans who buy homes in Japan typically have to add an oven because that's just not standard over there. But they cook plenty and eat well and have world famous cuisine that has inspired restaurants and restaurant chains around the world.

Consider building a home in Fremont, CA. As of early 2018 you'd pay about $155,000 in fees to build a single-family home, or about $75,000 for a unit of multi-family.

Building a cheap home would be silly. The fees might be several times the construction cost. With the fees already so high, you might as well make the house fancy.

We've also added expensive required features. It seems the voters and/or lobbyists can't bear to see a person living without the latest fancy stuff. I mean things like arc fault interrupters and wired-in smoke detectors, and maybe even solar. That too adds to the minimum price, so you might as well build a bigger and fancier home for a modest extra percentage increase in cost.

You can see it in cars too, and in every other sort of product design. We've decided to put our cost of living out of reach of many people. I'm not saying it isn't nice to have airbags, 3-prong power cords, catalytic converters, and chainsaw brakes... but we're paying for it or failing to pay for it, making the country less competitive (need higher pay) and making people more likely to be homeless.

California has really serious problems. Their housing policies are an issue statewide. I ultimately left the state get back into housing.

I spent over two years in Fresno which has housing costs more in line with the national average than is typical for most California cities. I still couldn't find housing that worked for me.

And that's partly because low end housing in Fresno is often a trailer in a trailer court. For health reasons, I'm unwilling to ever live in a trailer again.

I lived in a trailer for a few months in my twenties. It was horrible and I was deathly ill in it.

We no longer want SROs in the US and the reality is this means a lot of poor Americans are living in trailers which are such lousy housing that you have trouble financing them because their value goes down, not up, over time.

The widespread use of trailers is testimony that if you try to zone "affordable housing" out of existence because poor people shouldn't exist or something, it just slips through the cracks in the system and calls itself a vehicle or whatever to get around that.

In fact, the Tiny House movement probably goes back to some guy who literally put his tiny house on wheels and called it a "trailer" to get around housing regulations because it's not legal in most parts of the US to build a really small house.

And these rules go bad places on a regular basis. Apple Valley, California is full of mansions with crazy large yards because the town set some crazy large minimum lot size intended to "preserve the character" of the rural small town surrounded by farmland and not have it become suburban sprawl. It became suburban sprawl anyway, just on steroids.

The real way to preserve farmland is to create multifamily homes and set aside actual farmland. There are institutions that have studied this. A lot of well-meaning policies don't do what they were intended to do. They all too often do the exact opposite.

Policies have to be more than well intended. They gave to also be well researched and we'll designed.

> (Missing middle) is also, to use your phrasing, "shittier housing."

No, no it's not. I'm not advocating for luxury housing, just housing that meets the minimum requirements by regulation and law. Missing middle is advocating for real legal housing -- the kind that have sinks and bathrooms and bedrooms and such. (And as you already mentioned, they generally don't advocate for "SRO/tenements", presumably for this same reason).

> housing standards have steadily crept upwards for decades

No, no they haven't. The average new construction sizes have crept way up, you are correct. The housing standards -- the minimum legal standards required by law have actually crept downward slightly over the past 10 years, in most areas.

> This tradition lives on and is preserved in the form of college dorm rooms and military barracks.

Yes, and it's bad there too? I don't need to get us off-track, but college dorm living is not healthy nor sustainable.

> we need to lower our crazy high standards somewhere

This is simply not true. There are no "crazy high standards". This is not a real thing that has ever existed.

In San Francisco (as one example), I'm arguing that every human (regardless of income) is entitled to 220sqft of living space and a functional bathroom, that every housing unit should at least meet the bare minimum requirements of a "studio apartment" under relevant local and state law.

This is not some crazy high standard that is impossible for society to afford. This is a stupidly-low requirement, that we could easily provide every single citizen in the US, with very little effort. And we should be very wary of any attempts to lower this already-stupidly-low requirement any further down, because lowering those standards will not help anyone in need, but will only be weaponized against everyone else.

Hell, personal functional sinks and bathrooms are so cheap and easy to provide, we give them away for free to every violent criminal in prison. Surely everyone's housing quality should at least surpass a jail cell, right?

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We don't need to revert to SROs / Tenements to house the homeless, we don't need to "lower" any "standards". The minimum regulations are perfectly fine and completely reasonable here. We just need to build these things via public funding, and give them to the people who want/need them.

We didn't "lower" our educational standards to teach school children. We didn't say "well, these regulations are too strict, I guess kids only need to learn to half-read and half-write". We just decided to offer real education to every child, automatically, and with no income restrictions or usage costs of any kind.

We could do the same exact thing with housing. We should do the same thing with housing.

I've enjoyed engaging you. But I don't agree with you.

My first room was the smallest room in the building with just a sink and fridge. I didn't feel I could make a hotplate or similar work in that space.

About two months ago, I moved to a larger room within the same building. I have a private bath and a George Foreman grill now. The fridge died like two days after we moved or something and I don't have the money to replace it.

But the thing is that I and my oldest son both have a serious genetic disorder. Since moving to a unit with a private bath, he has thrown up every single time he has cleaned the toilet.

We didn't want a toilet of our own at first. We didn't want to clean it. Management is responsible for cleaning the shared bathrooms in the building. But I am responsible for cleaning my private bath.

Toilets are not something that see so much use that every single individual needs their own personal toilet.

A large part of the increase in housing costs since the 1950s is due to rising standards and expectations.

In the 1950s, that 1200 sqft new house probably had a heater, but no air conditioning. It probably had a washing machine, but no dryer. Instead, there was a clothesline out back in the yard.

It probably was poorly insulated and had inferior electrical service compared to what we expect today. You didn't need a high electrical capacity and outlets everywhere. You had a radio and maybe a TV.

Home computers didn't exist. Microwaves didn't exist.

Etc etc etc.

A lot that we consider standard and the minimum today was not either at that time. And there are developed countries which generally treat their citizens better than we do here in the US that have smaller homes, smaller refrigerators, etc.

Europe has a lot of household stuff that exists precisely because they expect a high quality of life in spaces that are typically smaller than standard US homes.

I'm not sure why you are so adamant that SROs are wholly unacceptable. I've studied the history of US housing and I have some knowledge of how things get handled in other developed countries. I've also lived this problem space and I'm currently in an SRO.

So you aren't going to convince me that it's inherently evil to have dorm style rooms.

I don't really believe housing is a "right." I believe we need to do what works in practical terms and I don't think that framing is productive.

And lowering our crazy high standards that boil down to "We only build mansions in America" is something that must happen if we are to solve this.

I continue to research how to do that in a way that lowers the right standards because I'm absolutely not interested in creating slum conditions.

Anyway, thank you for speaking with me. But I'm not sure there's any real point in taking this discussion further.

@Doreen: I will speak for Max here and say that we are both on your side.

The kind of political change that would allow SROs to be built where people want them is the same kind of political change that would allow more housing construction generally, it’s the same change that would remove parking minimums and floor space carve outs and kitchen appliance requirements.

So, if we can get that kind of political change and make sure good housing is affordably available to everyone, why compromise and build SROs?

Why are you so interested in completely shooting down the idea of building some SROs? Why are you even arguing with me if you generally agree with me?

If you generally agree with me, you can agree with whatever points you want to agree with, thank me for sharing a wealth of knowledge and stop there without going on to insist "Except this one detail, that I imagine is your entire goal, is completely and totally wrong and must be absolutely shot down for some damn reason."

I'm not talking about "SROs for everyone" or some nonsense.

I've studied this problem space for literally decades at this point. I'm writing at length because it interests me and I know a lot about it and I enjoy the somewhat rare opportunity to talk about it in depth.

But you are posting to...pretend to agree with me while insisting I'm wrong?

I accept this criticism and I’ll rethink my position on this. Thank you for continuing to engage with me on it.

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