Approaches to providing affordable housing for non-profit workers

Apparently the 80% number includes hospitals and fee-for-service revenues (think Medicare or Medicaid) which isn’t quite what I’m getting at. I’ve edited the able to refer to the 65% of government funding for “human services” non-profits as reported here: https://www.councilofnonprofits.org/sites/default/files/docu...

Have you ever tried talking to a baby? Good luck getting the information you seek. Their communication skills leave something to be desired.

There's a Youtuber named Hotep Jesus who had an interesting plan about cleaning up after the various protests/riots. His idea was to give all the government contracts for cleanup to minority owned local businesses. Additionally, he discouraged people volunteering to help cleanup for free. This would create a big local stimulus for the local community, people would be learning skills like how to install windows, how to rebuild structures, re-pave roads, plumbing, etc. Some wiggle room could be given on licensed professionals there. Of course, the work would have to be to code, and oversight by a skilled/experienced person is necessary for important things like buildings, but with guidance people could pick up a lot of skills.

> What if, instead of volunteering to clean up roads, the city collected taxes, and paid a living wage with benefits to people cleaning up the streets.

Viewed through the lens of equity concerns, I worry that the result of your hypothetical is a bureaucracy of unionized, mostly white college educated managers overseeing the street cleaners.

My hope is that recent events make us think hard about the nature of need in America and how we address it. Over 90% of white people are above the poverty line. The median income of a white household is $70,000, versus $40,000 for a black household. 60% of all homeless people are black or Hispanic. We talk a lot about middle-class "stagnation." But median wealth for white people has more than doubled, after inflation, since 2000. It hasn't budged at all for black people.

More than ever, we are recognizing today that a huge part of systematically addressing poverty in America is about addressing race disparities. That’s critical: the black-white income gap (at the median, so forget about Jeff Bezos) is proportionally the same size today in 2020 as it was when George Wallace ran for President in a segregationist platform. Meanwhile, we have spent vast sums on the premise that the best way to remedy racial disparities is through government programs for education and creating “good jobs with benefits.” State and local spending per person has therefore doubled since 1977.

But it turns out that much of that spending merely perpetuates those gaps. For example, increased education spending (which has tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars per student since 1970) has overwhelmingly gone to white, college educated teachers and administrators. (Indeed, black people were actively excluded from many of these jobs by unions.) Cities with majority black and Hispanic populations owe hundreds of billions in retirement and health benefits to retired teachers, police, etc., who are overwhelmingly white.

Now, that’s not an argument for saying that we should, for example, renege on those obligations. But we certainly shouldn’t perpetuate the disparities. If we are appalled by say homelessness in American cities (and we should be), we should figure out how to efficiently channel money to homeless people or people likely to suffer homelessness. Not to some government bureaucracy which by its nature is likely to be staffed with people who have various indicators of privilege (white, college educated, from a middle class household—who do you think government agencies tend to hire?)

The UN's annual budget isn't extraordinary, and it's certainly not the largest nonprofit of them all. As the very off-the-cuff numbers mentioned elsewhere in this thread hint at, the largest nonprofit in the world is probably involved in healthcare. (some very quick googling suggests the UN, the Gates Foundation, and the Kaiser Foundation all have annual budgets close to $3 billion, with Kaiser the highest at $3.5B)

It actually would be interesting to know how the UN addresses hiring and diversity in the companies they contract with, but their hiring is not a force that's going to move society in any direction.

> You can't help the homeless if the workers who help them can't afford to live near the people they're trying to help.

It’s certainly true that some fraction of non-profit work is hands-on social work, and yes, those people do need to live near the people they serve. But I think it’s fair to say that non-profits should think really hard about who really needs to live in NYC/SF/etc. versus the degree to which they’re just subsidizing the lifestyle choices of college-educated white workers who could do the same work from somewhere else.

> Can you elaborate on how UBI would help? Homelessness in high-opportunity low-housing-supply regions is not a problem of individuals not having enough cash, and neither is the inability of non-profit workers to live in these places.

Let’s not overstate the “opportunities” available in places like SF and NYC. Lower income people live there because there are a lot of service jobs for unskilled workers. But it’s not like those people are going to be able to work their way up from the mail room at Facebook or JP Morgan. What you have is a situation where these workers have to be in SF or NYC because that’s where the service jobs are, and where landlord can capture a big fraction of the rent that the government might subsidize.

UBI addresses that problem by decoupling wages from location. Someone receiving UBI can move from SF to Bakersfield. That increases their standard of living while limiting the cost to the government relative to trying to support that person in SF of NYC. 1 in 12 people in SF broke their leases during pandemic. Imagine what would happen if the government told everyone tomorrow they they’d get $1,000 per month guaranteed, which they could draw upon either in SF or in Des Moines. It would have the double effect of reducing the demand for housing in places like SF and NYC, and enabling that demand to be diverted to places where building new supply might be much easier.

It is but there isn’t a good fix that satisfies everyone.

Even the USSR had private apartments for people who didn’t want to live in multi-family per apartment arrangements (communal apartments). Obviously not everyone could afford private apartments —very few could, buy they existed because even with all the resources of a top down bureaucracy they could not meet the needs of the people.

Greedy renters is not the reason here: in the original article the author considered building a house for workers on the company land. But that turned out to be too expensive.

Building houses and maintaining them in livable condition is not that cheap.

So long as companies pay proportionally less when you work from a lower cost-of-living place, as most seem to do, it's not going to become especially popular to work from a cheaper location. And why should they -- being able to work remotely is something workers want, and companies have the perfect information of your permanent address; supply and demand dictates companies will continue to be able to get away with this kind of policy. If it works the other way around, and companies will pay more when you move to a more expensive area, I expect California to become _more_ popular, not less.

This makes my head boil.

The Bay Area can also build more of those schools and infrastructure as well. There are so many metro areas, probably hundreds, that have done it before. It’s entirely a political problem. I always hear the NIMBYs complaining about these made up problems and other people choosing to live in “shoebox apartments” as if they’re real problems and not simply them imposing restrictions on everyone else

> it's only so many people can be accommodated in S

This is true but not very important today; as has been clearly demonstrated in many different contexts, that number is a large multiple of the current population.

San Francisco has a population density of 7,000/km2.

Manhattan has a density of 27,000/km2.

San Mateo has a density of 1,000/km2

The bridge was a replacement, and the tunnel is a decade late and still not complete. Both are way over budget. China build 16,000 miles of fully connected high speed rail in the same period of time. I'm going to stand by my statement that the future is not in San Francisco.

We should just close down the planning department or change its mission to mandate very very fast development.

Any reduction in the commute is a net positive for traffic, the environment, and even productivity.

> Non-profits in SF often work directly with vulnerable populations, take Larkin Street Youth Services, for example. their mission directly involves interacting with homeless youth on the streets. San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is basically a giant warehouse in SF.

Sure, not everyone can work remotely. However, even they will benefit from the reduced traffic and commute times.

> Even if you do have no-profit work that can be done over Slack or Zoom, these are still people who'll commute to the beauty parlour, buy groceries at the farmers market, or visit the museum during the weekend - so there are still excess car trips while living in the suburbs versus the Sunset District.

You're not seeing the bigger picture. Not everyone lives in the Bay Area. With remote work becoming an integral part of office culture, this also means not everyone has to work in the Bay Area even when they work for Bay Area companies. ie. They're not going to go to Sunset on weekends; everything is more decentralized. Remote work scales better than just throwing money away when you can't fix the root problem of a limited supply of physical space. If you can't fix available housing inventory, all that happens long term when you give people more money is that housing just keeps getting more expensive. We've already seen this first hand with the large salary increases for Silicon Valley engineers

Where did you buy though? Bay Area has incredibly high prices.