When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own | Hacker News Reader

When the Barbizon Gave Women Rooms of Their Own

newyorker.com

20 pointspepys12 comments

It’s funny to think that the concept of a female only hotel like the Barbizon was a workable idea in 1900, but would be impossible to establish today in our 2020s political climate, certainly not in NYC. It would be possible to set up a coed hotel for “female identifying” people of all sexes, but female only would be a nonstarter. One step forward two steps back it seems.

Have you ever just googled what you're saying is "impossible"? There are multiple female only boarding houses in nearly every metropolitan city [0][1]. Your comment is nothing but factually wrong snark with a political agenda that isn't the point of the forum.

[0] https://tmhdc.org/ [1] https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/why-i-live-in-an-all-women-bo...

(and those two links took all of 15 seconds to find)

It also took 15 seconds to find out that the Brandon Residence For Women is permanently closed.

Have you verified that TMH is female only (not self-id based)? If not, what makes you think it's female only?

It's understandable if you assumed "women only" meant "female only" (as that's what most people understood it to mean from forever go up til about 10 years ago) but you'd be mistaken if you thought it was that simple. In many (most?) cases these days, "women" = "self-identify as women" which means it is not a single sex facility.

How exactly is that two steps back?

It’s a step back if you are talking about sex and not gender expression.

Not everyone is from the US or a Western country.

The broader question is would it be allowed even with that. If it was done for safety reasons, you can make an argument that it’s discriminatory towards men because you are assuming they will be violent. Pretty sure the same justification was used against black/poor/immigrants/etc.

If it’s not for safety reasons, and just a thing, could you enforce it? You can create a place called “A Woman’s Space” but would men be legally allowed to go?

Cheap housing/rent seems to fix so many other issues that I wonder if we'd be better off as a society first focusing on that vs introducing new approaches like UBI. I appreciate New York was not always a nice/safe place to live, but the cheaper housing during those times certainly gave fruit to a lot of benefits to the arts, culture, etc too.

while i'm quite skeptical of ubi, i'm down for radically redesigning the incentives implicit in all aspects of society around housing (like zoning, regulatory oversight, and building codes) so that rising values get inventively plowed back into the community, rather than accumulating unhelpfully in often-far-away wealth hoarding games.

for instance, a more progressive tax system, perhaps leveraging land value taxes and wealth taxes, to make it unprofitable to stagnate land use in the middle of cities. also, let's properly price parking and roads to internalize all the negative externalities they exact on society (e.g., pollution, and distortions against human scale development), to tilt the land use balance back toward humans over lightly-used machines.

Paywalled. Suppposedly ran out of free articles. Please don't link to sites that force this crap.

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If you like reading New Yorker so much they you run out of free articles, maybe it's worth the price.

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