Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The thing is, in the US the "sectioned off area of a bigger room" model of housing has been legislated and regulated out of existence. Similar for the other option the very poor (read: serfs) had in the Russia of the period Crime and Punishment is set in: just build something yourself to the best of your ability. The result was not always great, and there are all sorts of reasons (starting with fire-spreading externalities) for modern building codes, so I'm not suggesting it's necessaily desirable or viable to go back to where we were in the 19th century regarding housing. But the upshot is that building and health codes enforce a minimum quality on housing that surely feels unexceptionable to the people writing them while at the same time serving to price people out of housing.

Honestly, I think the role of stuff like this is exaggerated... if you look at real examples. Base level building cost per sqm at the low end is pretty low but..

1 - IRL, especially in urban markets... rental markets tend to have a pattern where not far below median prices, quality falls off a cliff. For every dollar you save, you lose a lot: sqm, finish, location, etc. By about 0.5X median prices, there is often nothing. Conversely, in suburban & rural markets, quality per dollar tends to explode somewhere not far above median.

2 - This is usually less true for owner-occupied or other types of housing.

I think the end of tenement-type housing has as much to do with culture as it has to do with pure economics or building norms. Most of those, originally, had live in owner-operators. It was a way to make housewifing into a business. Apartments didn't really exist yet.

It feels like we do our best to make poverty “invisible”. I often think of how much land would be taken up by slums. The US still is reeling from the idea of the “projects” in LBJs war on poverty - mainstream politicians literally won’t even use the word “poor” anymore. We still don’t have any sort of coherent policy for where to put poor people, especially the homeless.

From what I have seen, allowing worse conditions for a renter doesn't significantly change the price floor, it just changes what they are given at that price floor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com