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Comment by somid3 | Hacker News Reader

I’m fking tired of seeing human beings sleeping in tents on sidewalks. I don’t care what they did, what drugs they’ve used, who/what they are escaping, many of them are regular people who weee eaten and chewed up by the machine. We have to engineer a dignified a solution.

I make about $1mil a year and I can’t believe I haven’t done this sooner.

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We have solutions for this. It is called public housing.

My grandmother was homeless until a social worker found her on the streets and got her an apartment (in D.C.). The logistics are actually quite simple.

$5K houses aren't the main solution. We need inexpensive medium to high density apartments.

I will admit in the Bay area, adding a $5K house to every SFH lot might help a bit. In reality it would be $5K house + at least the same in permitting.

Permits are more like 20-40k in California. An ADU is roughly 150-200k after permits. That’s not including land cost.

I live in Austria and we do not have people living in tents on the sidewalk anywhere. (But we have some homeless people)

Part of this is probably due to the fact that I pay 48% of everything I earn in taxes and I am totally fine with it!

This is a problem that will get worst in the coming decades.

to join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241

In San Francisco some pay over 50% in taxes. It's not that the government doesn't have enough money. They have a spending problem and always find new ways to waste it on the homeless industrial complex with very little result. In fact they found a way to spend over $60,000 per tent[1]. Not per home, per tent!

1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...

You don't pay more than 50% tax. No-one in SF does. THe article linked explains how it costs the gov so much to 'house'the homeless.

There are absolutely empirically people paying a 50% percent of their income in taxes in SF.

The highest federal income tax backet is at 37%. the highest california state income tax bracket is 12.7%. San francisco residents pay a .38 payroll tax.

This is going to get you pretty darn close to 50% effective tax rate right there but we haven't even started to look at property taxes or sales taxes. So yeah, there are definitely people paying 50% taxes in SF.

Those are the marginal tax rates. You can’t just add the marginal rates and come up with your actual tax burden, at least in the US. (Can’t speak specifically to property tax in CA)

Honestly surprised to see this misapprehension of progressive income tax on HN

You seem to be the one not understanding here. I said effective which accounts for marginal rates.

Thats why even though those numbers add up to 50%, i specifically said that will only get you close to 50% effective. Also the more you make, the more percentage wise will be paid at the highest marginal rate meaning some people will pay close to their highest marginal rate effectively.

Thats why the whole second point was there about other taxes. Those numbers dont have to add up to 50 for there to be people paying that rate

So yeah, no misunderstanding here. Im well aware of how marginal tax rates work.

I will concede a misunderstanding perhaps of the income distribution in CA.

But the figures you quoted are the marginal rates, and at the federal level that top bracket kicks in at over 500k

in the limit of very high income, your effective rate will start to approach the top marginal rate. But the idea of 500k being the negligible portion of one’s gross income is just so far out of my experience, it’s hard to see why that’s the default assumption.

how many people is that even realistic for? I thought past a certain point peoples total comp started to be more things like equity

Edit: I think I see what you meant by “i specifically said that will only get you close to 50% effective”, initially I just added the marginal rate for federal and CA and thought that’s what you meant by “close to 50%”

I still don’t really know where you’re coming from though — say you’re single and your income is 1 M$, and you don’t do anything aside from standard deduction to reduce, that’s like 46% effective (I forgot payroll taxes before). Is 40k property tax realistic in SF? I genuinely don’t know

Sales tax at 8.5% is another big one.

Austria’s GDP is 429 billion dollars. Population 9 million. California GDP is 3.09 trillion dollars. Population 40 million.

There is no comparison.

California has 7ish times the GDP with less than 5 times the population, so it would superficially have less excuses for homelessness (to be fair, it has less control because the USA extracts more tax from and dictates more policy to California than the EU does to Austria, so arguably the blame belongs at least in part at the higher level.)

USA has 340 million people and borders between states are porous. Yes..it’s indeed arguable.

The EU has 450 million people and free movement, too.

Ok. Austria is better than California and EU is greater than USA. You win. Cheers.

This is not a simple problem. Language barrier alone will prevent people from going to Austria, never mind the weather.

The problem isn't taxation of income. The problem is the lack of taxation of land. The problems in San Francisco got worse precisely because they have property tax freezes. They should give owner occupied units a tax rebate instead of freezing taxes. Also, property taxes should be levied on the value of the land and not the building to reduce bureaucracy and indirect taxation of income.

Fight for mixed zoning[0] and to repeal laws against boarding houses[1]. Let people solve the problem, we're only in this mess because our hands are tied by regulations that favour certain interest groups.

[0] https://marketurbanism.com/2019/03/19/why-is-japanese-zoning... [1] https://www.econlib.org/the-case-for-boarding-houses/

want to team up?

I have a plan to buy land, on that land we add like 5 to 10 glamping spots, one of which is a yurt for us to live in temporarily.

we Airbnb the spots... to pay for building supplies and other things... maybe earn some income too...

we create a big building that is a warehouse basically for common goods that households really don't need to own .. like tools, cleaning supplies, recreational vehicles, etc... the rec vehicles we can also rent to Airbnb's... the idea is every house needs tons of extra space to duplicate things like drills and saws... when you might use those things once a month or year or decade....

if you could just walk down the street and check out some tool... like a library... then maybe we have 3 drills per ten families or whatever we deem necessary to ensure needs are met...

the warehouse could have a commercial kitchen too for community meals etc or people could reserve it for special occasions...

we then could build cheap housing using containers (easier but a little more costly), or earth bags (very difficult work but affordable... also takes longer) then maybe we charge like 200 per month rent per family member, and if we could duplicate this we could create a share system so people could stay at the Zion Utah one when traveling for free, or Disney land... etc...

there might be an opportunity there to also help intentional communities set up glamping camps that maybe keep 50 percent vacancies so it's like a free travel network or plan for residents to travel cheaper so everyone can afford to have more and better experiences via vacations instead of focusing on things and owning more crap we don't need....

Just curious: have you donated to organizations that are solving the homelessness problem? Or do you think the work they are doing is not sufficient and this problem requires another approach.

They don’t think at scale, they are not engineers, they are flawed. I’ve donated over $200k in the past to no change in the overall system.

You can't engineer homelessness away.

to join the group email me at somid3@gmail.com or text me at +1 323-240-1241

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