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Comment by splithalf | Hacker News Reader

Some like to pretend that we can just build infinite new housing, for free or almost no cost, and that will give everyone a nice American level luxury dwelling, all with no environmental costs. I feel like such opinions are built on ignorance or at the very least naïveté about the home building industry. One can invest in the home builders to profit from these misinformed opinions as they increasingly drive policy towards deregulation and corporate welfare for the mega-developers.

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Maybe some people believe that, but overall that seems to be more of a straw-man argument if anything. I believe what is more common is the thought that we, as a country, can provide housing for people who have no place to live without making a large impact on tax payers below the upper class. Or is this naive in your opinion as well?

It’s innumerate I would argue. There are a lot of “ought to be” aspects to life but it’s not a very useful layer of thought. I prefer thinking about “what is” and from there think about changing things for the better. By “what is” I’m referring to empiricism, collecting data and using numbers to facilitate reason. The two modes, what ought to be vs what is, needn’t be incompatible, though acceptance is a difficult first step for many. In any case, if there is solid empirical evidence for the yimby-topian fantasies I hear, about how mixed used shopping plazas will solve the worlds ills, literally, I’ve yet to be convinced by any of it but I’d love to read any studies you might provide.

Public policy constantly requires leaps of faith to try to make the country better. You can't know that providing housing to the homeless helps them until you actually try it for the first time.

What is: Based on currently available numbers, there are about 59 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.[1]. We do not have a shortage of houses, but instead a shortage of desire to house the homeless.

What makes you think we, as one of the most powerful countries in the world, cannot provide housing to the homeless?

Also, if you want to actually have a conversation about this, I would appreciate if you don't belittle my comments.

[1]: https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/

I agree that vacant units, and units that are unsafe due to lead, asbestos, etc... are a very real problem and a good target for public policy. I think the idea that I often hear, that we can build new homes until rents are so low it decreases homelessness, to be a poorly thought out idea. To see a good example of how it turns out, look at San Jose’s new google village. Homelessness increases while the developers and google get rich, and the public get a few hundred “low income” studio apartments that if they don’t sit vacant will end up renting to the googlers who are the only ones who can actually afford the $3000 “low income” rent, for example.

> we can just build infinite new housing, for free or almost no cost,

Nobody said anything about building housing for free, but we definitely could build way more housing than we currently are. Why is that ignorant?

You are spot on here with this assessment. It would be far cheaper to buy busses for these people back to where they came from to live the lower COL life they can actually survive in.

How is moving them to another state helping anything? All it does is make their nights colder.

Maybe they're homeless and housing prices are so high because of the fact that there are a myriad of people that make it a landlords market. Meaning, ample demand, minimal supply.

Homesless people fall in several camps. However, why is it that homelessness is a bigger issue in CA vs NY? Likely because CA has been lax on homelessness to a degree where aimless vagabonds and drug addicts think it's acceptable. It's not. For reasons economic and ethical. Nobody wants homelessness and nobody wants to be homeless. But from the outside looking in, when you tolerate it like CA does, it seems like a lot of homeless people are content with it. Which sets a precedent that being homeless is okay in those cities.

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