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Comment by curryst | Hacker News Reader

If you're willing to discard any objections to the contrary, it's also easy to fix on the other side too. Require rental contracts to be filed with the city like deeds are, and immediately remove anyone reported as trespassing in a place where they don't have a lease on file with the city.

I think you're also ignoring that we're not out of housing. We're out of housing in the places many people want to live. If you go to Detroit, you can get a house for a song. Alaska will literally pay you for living there.

There's a difference between having a place to live, and living somewhere you want to live. The former is easy to solve, the latter is hard to solve because demand is often driven by exclusivity.

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You make it sound like people don't want to leave in these places just because they don't like the climate or something. They don't want to live there because they can't live there. Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless.

If we want to have people to stop moving to big cities and live wherever they can afford, we need to have the infrastructure to allow people like that to work and socialise. I'd love to buy one of those 1$ houses (although these don't seem to exist as such in Central Europe) and move to some dying industrial town, but if that meant I'd have to work for minimum wage in that one local pub or gas station, and if there were no other people under 50 in a 100km radius, I don't think I'd last long there. I'd rather take my chances in the city.

> Like yes, they could survive there, but most people couldn't get a decently paying job so even if you get a house for 1$, you're still brokr, just not homeless.

Nobody owes you a beautiful life.

It's not about a beautiful life. Housing is cheap both in places with little economic opportunity and especially in dying areas where former opportunity led to the construction of more housing that is needed after the opportunity dried up. These places are withering plants cut off from sunlight and water. It's like you stood in the oasis and opined that there was all that barren desert to grow in and how silly it was that the plants competed for space near the water.

Take a dying area with plentiful houses for cheap move a bunch of people there. It would cease to be cheap and if there is no outside money flowing into an area populated with the poor they wouldn't be able to resolve each others poverty merely by passing the same scant dollars back and forth and pumping each others gas and making each other pancakes. Instead they should all starve together.

You are asking to have your cake and eat it too. Half the nation is fairly poor. They can't ALL simultaneously move to the low rent district and simultaneously take advantage of the lesser cost of living while all working the small modicum of low wages jobs that are fewer in number in total than the number of folks and reorganize America based on this new theory if for no other reason than this relocation by people living paycheck to paycheck costs more than they have and they would tend to in a poorer area descend further yet down the economic ladder as they moved from not being able to afford to live well in <insert city> to not being able to live well enough in <insert poor area> where they have no family or support.

1. That's debatable. Some would argue every person is entitled to a good life in absence of any actions that would take that entitlement away.

2. It's not about anyone owing anyone anything. You can go to the city and have a small chance at a good life or move to Alaska and have guaranteed survival but nothing more. It's a tradeoff like any other. What it isn't is people rushing to live in a big city out of convenience despite the alternative being just as good otherwise, which is what people often claim - that's what I was talking about.

We decide as a group what we owe people. You could just as easily declare that no one owes you the respect of your property rights.

>We decide as a group what we owe people.

That's only if you believe that all moral systems are equally valid so whatever the majority wants is right. But I doubt you believe that, because the majority could decide something like "it's okay to rape girls under 15" or "all Jews belong in ovens".

I would tend to agree with you, with the exception that there are too many regulations preventing new housing from being built, for reasons that have nothing to do with safety.

If you're homeless in Seattle how are you going to buy a house (or rent an apartment, even) in Detroit?

You might argue that they should've made better decisions earlier - "my housing is precarious, time to move with my last few bucks before I'm totally out of money" - but then what is your proposed policy for dealing with bad decisions? Do you plan on doing things to try to prevent it? Or try to criminalize bad decisions?

If there is lots of housing in places where there used to be good jobs then there isn't a lot of housing because for practical purposes. It's the same as replying to the issue of poverty with there are N good jobs unfilled when N is some small fraction of the number of people in poverty.

It's trivially true that some can and in fact will climb out of poverty by accepting those N jobs and simultaneously true that most can't climb out of poverty via those jobs alone because multiple people can't accept the same position.

Most of the people who are on the edge of not being able to afford <insert city here> can't all move away into the suburbs let alone Detroit because they can't earn enough money for all the things that aren't cheaper and it would cease to be cheaper as soon as collectively chose to do so. It is only cheap because its undesirable.

So, have a domestic armed force checking people for rental papers and imprisoning them if they don't check out.

That's considered an "easy fix" now?

If rental contracts could be registered with the state and enforced that effectively, they could also be enforced against landlords who fail to uphold their obligations as enumerated the contract.

I don't know a single regular on r/landlords who wants that to happen. Just today there was a landlord trying to force a tenant to pay for a window broken by an unaffiliated third party (collateral damage from a neighbor's domestic dispute) when the lease very clearly said the landlord was responsible.

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