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Comment by jherskovic | Hacker News Reader

If there was a supply of cheaper housing, I'd agree with this wholeheartedly. Part of the problem is that, in a lot of places (SF, NYC, Seattle, etc) you can price folks into homelessness. Sure, no one is entitled to live in a specific area, but for those who built their lives there, have a community, family, it's cruel to tell them "move to Nowheresville, OH so you can afford a roof"

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I mean, either you are cruel to home owners who have capital or you are cruel to poor people. I know where my priorities would be. Or we could of course try to remove the cruelty completely by not using a market system to manage a natural monopoly (space in a community). But if you choose cruelty, at least be cruel to those that can choose to suffer as opposed that cannot really escape

> I mean, either you are cruel to home owners who have capital or you are cruel to poor people.

False equivalence. There's no reason you have to be cruel to either.

You can always build more housing or provide financial services to help poorer people buy homes. Or just, you know, lower the cost of homes so property taxes don't have to be astronomical and force older people out of their homes to begin with.

If housing costs and property taxes are so high it forces older people out, I don't see how that somehow benefits poor people anyway. They still can't afford those stupid expensive houses.

If you disincentivise individual ownership of expensive land and buildings, building dense housing becomes more profitable. Also, you can pay for social programs with the tax revenue.

>You can always build more housing or provide financial services to help poorer people buy homes.

At the edge of town? Why shouldn't we build more housing in the city center?

You were just told that your plan will cause people to become homeless and your response is “I’ll worry about them when they’re homeless.” You’re a perfect politician: make plans with no thoughts to unintended consequences even when you’re warned about them.

They won't become homeless. They will have to move after selling and incredibly expensive house. As opposed to those who are homeless but are not receiving any tax benefits for not having a home, they will have capital to rent for a long time and/or buy a new one in a cheap area

I’m sorry you’re so misinformed despite all the comments in this thread and on this post spelling it out for you. I don’t wanna go in circles, everything you’ve said in the above comment has already been debunked by others here.

How would a non market based system work for housing though? How do we decide who gets to live in places like Honolulu or Boulder?

That's the hard question. Once you have a community that decides to so it differently, you can use democratic consensus or voting (partial exampl Vienna, lots of counter-market public housing), but to get there you either need force or political will for places like boulder (think cutting off any subsidies for private home ownership and replacing then with mandates to have public bodies or cooperatives build dense-but nice housing in their own backyard. Corruption management would of course be an issue, but at least in my country construction is famously corrupt even in the private sector...). For Honolulu I don't know...but is that actually an issue?

The point I'm getting at is that some places are much more desirable than others. In a market, it's prices that act as a mechanism for deciding who can live in a limited space. For example, way more people want to live on the beach than there are houses on the beach.

And who are the ones that voted against building that cheaper housing?

On the other hand: if you own property, you could take a loan out in order to turn your single family home into a rent-collecting multi-unit house. That’s what people did all the time before zoning laws, and it’s a reasonable way for a retiree to earn an income.

The problem is the zoning laws: we don’t allow people to let out part of their property, so they’re forced either to attempt to downsize into a non-existent market, or get evicted for not being able to afford their taxes.

Would reverse mortgages be an option?

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