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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Instead of stroking his ego by racing Branson to space, Bezos could personally buy each of these people a home in the Bay Area and wouldn't even notice a difference in his lifestyle.

Tax the rich. Spend it on social programs.

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Who’s Bezos supposed to buy the homes from? It seems like there is already a higher than average number of people living per house here, so distribution of housing is not really the problem. The total number of homes is too low. It would help if Bezos could build a huge number of new housing units, but that’s illegal (which is the problem).

Start ratcheting up the property tax to improve utilization. Unaffordable homes are only affordable if the cash flow requirements are low.

If there was an extra 3-6% property tax, it would align interests towards construction and punish speculators.

Yes, that would be ideal!! However homeowners in the late 1970s wrote into the state constitution that property taxes would be based on purchase price, and never increase more than 2% per year.

It's called Prop 13, and it needs to die. However, I fear it won't until there is a generational change.

Most cities, even those with large homeless populations, have many times more vacant homes. True even in regions with housing shortages like the SF Bay Area. Presumably in this fantasy scenario he'd buy some of those.

There are enough empty houses to house every homeless person in the country: there are ~ 19 million empty houses in the country. (in 2019)

Shipping people to other states against their will, and away from their connections, support networks, and whatever else they say need, is both unethical and counterproductive.

Who the hell cares about homes nobody wants to live in? Build homes where people want them, don't let a few wealthy assholes hoard the best climate from everyone else. Why defend the interests of rentiers and landlords like this? It helps no one except the very wealthy.

We did this in the 50s to Mexico and the result is the modern Mexican state. This is truly one of the worst things you can do.

I wholeheartedly agree.

I never meant we should ship people places, just that “supply” exceeds “demand”. Capitalism is an inherently inefficient mechanism for the distribution of resources. It favors the aggregation of capital over efficient distribution.

When you write "there's enough empty homes to house every homeless person," the only possible interpretation I can come up with is that you're saying that capitalism has provided enough housing already, and that we should use those existing houses.

Is there another interpretation that you can provide me, that I'm not understanding? Because I see that claim repeated all over the place, and I only see it in response to the idea that we should build homes where people want them, as a reason for not building homes.

I would be greatly relieved if there was an interpretation of that statement which was not just a defense of the status quo.

My point, which seems to have soared over the heads of my detractors in this thread, is that the ultra rich should be taxed at a higher rate, and that money used to fund programs that combat homelessness.

Jeff Bezos and the other dragons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H billionaires have demonstrably too much wealth, to the extent that they can afford dick-measuring contests like "whose CEO can get to space first, for no reason whatsoever".

The measure of a great society is by how it treats its least fortunate members.

The problem here is not the ultra rich, it's the moderately rich that are blocking housing.

There's more than enough money for people to pay for the building and maintenance, it's just that local land owners have said "we don't want to share"

All of Bezos' money isn't going to fix that problem. The problem here is wealth inequality, but it's the inequality of land wealth, not dollar wealth. The problem is excessive greed, not of Bezos, but of local homeowners and politicians. A former mayor literally joked about building a wall around Cupertino. That is the asshole that needs to be backed against a wall to fix this problem.

A fine opinion, but the only nexus to the news story we are commenting on is the exhortation for Bezos to go buy a bunch of houses (which would only push prices even higher and make somebody else homeless).

There was no such exhortation. I used the word "could", not the word "should", for a reason. That reason was to illustrate that he can afford a tax and should be levied one.

For what it’s worth, Bezos is associated with Amazon, not Apple.

That’s not why they are homeless.

"A chronically homeless person costs the tax payer an average of $35,578 per year. Costs on average are reduced by 49.5% when they are placed in supportive housing. Supportive housing costs on average $12,800, making the net savings roughly $4,800 per year."

This has been known for a long time. It costs the public less to provide direct federal and state-financed housing for the homeless than to keep them on the streets. Finland and many other countries do this and they have the happiest people in the world. States like Utah have also implemented successful programs based on this model. The question isn't what do we do, it's why aren't we doing what we know works.

People don't become homeless because they run out of resources, they become homeless because they run out of relationships.

What you're proposing is me, in another state, city, neighborhood, paying for your states issue(s). My neighborhood, state and city has no homeless issue. In part because we have functioning churches, family units, etc

In SF, a portion choose to be homeless (have you ever asked them? I have). Many couldn't handle or don't want to handle the public housing (which SF has) requirements.

> Finland and many other countries do this and they have the happiest people in the world.

Finally, some facts -- they are "happy" because they have a functioning, nationalistic and proud culture. Aka their society works. This keeps people from being homeless, lowers drug abuse rates, etc

- 83% of the country has a man and a women with or without children married or co-habitating [1]

- ~100% white, 93% Finn

- 88% Speak Finnish as their first language

- 71% Lutheran

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101541/families-by-type...

> What you're proposing is me, in another state, city, neighborhood, paying for your states issue(s).

"An Associated Press Fact Check finds...High-tax, traditionally Democratic states (blue), subsidize low-tax, traditionally Republican states (red)..."

https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxe...

Your answer is seriously "race mixing bad"?

No, what keeps people homeless here is giving them homes and money for food. This is trivially verifiable.

That's a broad brush. There are a great many reasons why people become homeless in this country.

I'm not endorsing the idea of bezos buying houses for them, mind you, but for a lot of homeless people in this country that would be a lifesaver.

Are there even enough vacant housing units in that area for all the homeless if you ignore the price?

A lack of social funding in America is, in fact, contributing to the homelessness epidemic.

You are answering a question that wasn't asked.

Did the poster make a causality statement?

The implication was that if they just had a house their lives would turn around. This isn’t the case for a lot of people as it’s an addiction or mental illness problem.

Multiple case studies and real world examples show the opposite. It's cheaper to provide housing for the homeless, there's more success with drug/alcohol/mental illness programs when they have housing, and many of them do get a chance to re-enter the job market.

Can you link me to some of these studies?

They wouldn’t be homeless anymore, though. I think that’s a pretty solid improvement, regardless of any other challenges they have in their lives.

The point is though that a lot of them might be. Besides houses aren’t cheap or free you still have all kinds of bills to pay so your basically giving an addict a burdensome issue. Homeless shelters are a much better place for someone just trying to get clean and off the streets. There’s also an abundance of beds in homeless shelters because a lot of the people don’t want to get clean or off the streets.

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