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Comment by cudgy | Hacker News Reader

Is this really the boogeyman issue that is always mentioned on HN?

Many cities have plenty of existing buildings that could be repurposed and many cities real estate prices are extremely high due to the land already being built out. Very few if any government budgets can afford (nor should they) to place homeless in ultra-expensive markets; it would be inefficient to do this.

Homeless may need to be placed in outlying areas (outside even the jurisdiction of where the homeless originated) where real estate is cheaper. Coordinating this though may be difficult since many homeless bring crime and drugs with them.

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> many cities real estate prices are extremely high due to the land already being built out

This has the causality backwards. Places don't become expensive due to the land being built out. The land gets built out because it's expensive, and in the process reduces the price of housing.

And here I thought the boogeyman issue was Houston’s lax building codes letting all those people live in a flood zone but, sure, we can concentrate them in camps in the middle of the desert “for their own good”. We’ll keep the floodlands for the middle class.

Not sure of your point since the middle class would be living in a flood plain and the “camps” would be on dry land.

Doesn’t it make sense to have a centralized area with services for mental health, job training, housing to assist the homeless? And doesn’t it make sense to build these facilities in areas with cheaper land costs than downtown areas like San Francisco so that money spent reaches more of the homeless?

After all, the goal is to help these people as effectively as possible, without letting our individual conscience regarding having to move them to another area impact the efficiency of the operation.

Which is only viable because the Federal government throws money at them to rebuild after every flood.

>Coordinating this though may be difficult since many homeless bring crime and drugs with them.

Replace 'homeless' with any other minority group and you basically have the ethos of the American real estate market for the past 100 years.

America's strategy of the wealthy simply relocating undesirable groups without actually solving any of their problems is a very short-sighted one (read the classic: "San Francisco's problems today are the rest of America's problems in 20 years")

Which wealthy people are going to be forced to sell their home for new development in San Francisco? That’s what it is going to take. And where do these people live while the taller buildings are being built? And how much will it cost to build these new, shiny tall buildings? And how many homeless will actually be able to live in these new shiny buildings? None. These new shiny buildings will house more bourgeois techies, existing wealthy, and professional class people.

Also, This is not about a minority group. It is about people with no money, which believe it or not exists across all minority groups.

Minority != racial/ethnic minority.

Homeless people are by all definitions a minority.

I can’t really understand why you are asking the other questions (accidentally replying to another comment?)

Of all the parcels in San Francisco, perhaps 1000 are terminally "built out" and the overwhelming majority of the rest are severely underused as detached simplex houses or parking.

This is absolutely correct.

Source: bought a house in SF in the past year. The majority of SF's land area is single-family housing. There's as much undeveloped land in Sunset backyards as there is in all of Golden Gate Park - possibly more. Lots of single-family and duplex houses on the two blocks adjoining both N and L train lines.

Not to mention everything south of SF (Daly City, San Mateo, Mountain View, etc) is nearly 100% suburbia with absolute prohibitions on density of any kind.

I agree, and I'm not sure why people are downvoting you. SF is slightly more dense than Jersey City, so it should look like a slightly more built up version of Jersey City, not a bunch of single family houses and homeless on the streets. The built up portion of SF is tiny compared to the rest of it

There should be federal laws protecting your right to build to prevent cities like SF from preventing the construction of housing to try and push out poor people

And the single family homes are shit! They are not seismically sound, they have poor to no insulation, single pane windows, 2x4 framing, rusting rebar destroying the foundation walls, and sketchy electrical. SF is supposed to be pro environment. If they were, they would permit the demolition of a lot of crappy unsafe houses and they'd build some new buildings that are actually up to modern standards.

Source: lived in midtown terrace for years in a serial-numbered home from '56. everything was bad. No functional ground in the electrical panel, plenty of paper-jacked BX wire. actually no insulation. My 1000 sq ft of living space in SF used as much energy in the winter as my 4k ft house in Colorado does, and the climates are way different.

Almost any home built in 1956 is going to be under-provisioned with respect to utilities and insulation by today's standards. I doubt this is specific to San Francisco.

my point was that it is non-economic to retrofit these homes, rather than just building new buildings. You'd spend more time permitting a seismic and environmental retrofit and still get a worse result and still only house one family.

i hope it's not surprising to you that some homeowners do pay to upgrade their place so it's actually maintained over time. if you don't do that obviously things will get worse, not better in 60+ years! I'm not sure why you think this is a SF phenomenon.

so no, not all SFH in SF are shit.

So tearing down existing extremely expensive houses and building new, even more expensive taller homes is the solution for the homeless? This is wrong on so many levels and would result in the continuation of homelessness and could eventually lead to people / voters feeling there is no solution at all.

Yes.

You're not seeing the full picture because you're not looking at the problem long-term. The cheap housing of today is the expensive stuff built 30-40 years ago that has depreciated. I drive by mansions built in the early 1900s that have become apartments for college students.

Houses depreciate as tastes in style and location shift over the years. I've walked through ghettos where the buildings have beautiful Italianate brick work that probably cost a fortune to build new.

In 30 years, those trendy apartment buildings you see popping up all over will be subsidized housing.

Building taller (we're talking 5 stories, not 100) apartment buildings results in more apartments on the same land. It's not rocket science.

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