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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

Mobile home parks are universally reviled by city councils for reducing property values around them, hence there is very aggressive zoning against them. Any type of affordable housing will have the same problem, "it's great, but we don't want it around here". We could solve the problem of homelessness in a heartbeat by just subdividing large residential properties into tiny apartments with just 1 bed and a compact bathroom. But who wants a capsule hotel for the homeless on their street?

Homelessness is always and everywhere a lack of social safety net and class problem, not a housing supply problem (although that could be one of the apparent symptoms).

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We have an offering in my city where apartments/housing is dedicated for a mix of homeless and low-income earners, with on-site support/training. I don't know if it's changed slightly, but I remember something about it originally having a mix including more typical renters as well. I think the idea was that each tenant would be exposed to a mix of people rather than all near-homeless risking it becoming a ghetto.

https://www.housingchoices.org.au/south-australia/common-gro... https://community.solutions/about-us/the-team/rosanne-hagger...

Traditionally, welfare housing here is/was clumped in squat, dingy homes and made for less-desirable areas with depressed pricing.

There was also a scheme (NRAS?) whereby property owners could receive a tax rebate in exchange for offering their property at below market rent. Not sure if it's still active.

"NRAS, which commenced in 2008, provides an annual financial incentive for up to 10 years to approved participants who rent dwellings to eligible people on low to moderate incomes at a rate at least 20 per cent below market rent. NRAS dwellings are not social housing–they are affordable private rental homes."

https://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/housing-support/...

Not just mobile home parks but many small cities and even entire counties have zoning laws prohibiting manufactured homes, which even has the effect of blocking the assembly of some quite high end products that come in 3 or 4 huge "chunks", totaling something larger than a double wide, and are assembled together on site.

I remember looking for housing in the bay area and noticing there were were some mobile home parks with space rent of ~ $300/month, which is cheap. Turns out it was at an over-50 community.

I guess there are some demographics that don't trouble city councils (maybe even match the city council's demographics)

50 year old people have much lower violent crime rates. More likely to keep a constant eye out for trouble makers.

> But who wants a capsule hotel for the homeless on their street?

The same people that don't want the homeless literally sleeping on their street?

Those people want the capsule hotel in some other city - or at least on the other side of their city.

I am sympathetic but I suppose I am one of the person's you describe here. I do not want homeless in my street. I actually don't mind someone sleeping but unfortuantely if you are homeless, lying down isn't the only thing you do on the street. And if it's allowed, how many homeless people are you ok with on your street. I suppose with homeless people on the street, you can anything from just a person keeping to himself to mental health issues to drug use to crime. Now would I want that where my kids play/walk etc. I'll be honest, I do not. Now let me talk about property values too. I worked hard and saved up for x years and bought a house in a good neighborhood (location, location, location as they say), took up a 30 year loan. Now, if the property values drop because there's a homeless camp in the street, then I am under water for a long time, potentially even losing my house. My home, which was also me building wealth for myself when I get old, will also loose value now. If you suddenly take away value from my biggest and long term investment that took years of work, yes, I would not want that either.

I understand the problem and I will support solutions, but just saying let people live on the street in front of my house is simply not one of them.

Imo you bought a house, not the exclusive right to call the streets "yours." If someone has only a street as their home, their claim to calling it theirs is at least as strong as yours.

This attitude is pervasive and subtle but important to challenge in ourselves. Homeless people are citizens, they are the public, they are residents of your city and your neighborhood. They aren't some other, external element that is transiently present. They are your neighbors.

If there's any mention of your/my street, it definitely isn't in the sense of owning the street or owning rights to use it. Public property belongs to the public, no one stops anyone from using the streets, the distinction is using the street and living on it. Allowing camping on the streets without any real plans for sanitation, safety etc and making moral judgements against people who don't think that's a realistic solution isn't helpful. Homelessness is the result of multiple different problems ranging from insufficient jobs/wages, property costs, cost of living, health care, crime, addiction etc etc. Simply allowing camping on the sidewalk or converting al single family homes to 1bedroom studio apartments In an expensive neighborhood won't magically make the homelessness problem disappear.

I'm not making a moral judgement against your policy positions, as I can't really see what they are. I am challenging your apparent belief that you have purchased the right to not be affected by the policies that are in place now.

And I am making a moral judgement against your prioritization of property values over the comfort of your living neighbors, which frankly I find obscene.

Respectfully, I disagree. Yes, you can make it sound as if the homeowner is tone deaf to suffering and doesn't want to take on mild inconvience of property value decreasing. But let me give you a scenario, elderly people who spend decades paying off a house, the value of the house being a big part of their retirement (as is the case with most people, where a home is a big part of their net worth). Say, if the property value falls by half, so does their retirement runway and a real risk of making them candidates to be homeless too as they get older.

I am not saying that a home owner purchased a right to not be affected by current policies. I am saying it never was a policy to make the street or sidewalk a residence and we shouldn't make it a policy now.

Homes should not be an investment vessel. We have policies that make them reasonable investments, which leads to price increases, scarcity, NIMBYism, etc.

it never was a policy to make the street or sidewalk a residence

That's literally the end-result of NIMBYism run rampant. If you don't want lower income housing (or homeless shelters, or drug treatment centers, or mental health case facilities) anywhere near your home, then you have to accept that there will be a population of people that need any of those things who now must go without, which then leads to homelessness, crime, etc.

The extreme outcome is walling off neighborhoods and hiring armed guards as they do in many parts of South Africa.

You disagree with my moral judgement about your stated view? You don't get a vote in that lol.

"Property value" is strongly correlated with the quality of life. Blaming people for wanting better (or, at least, not worsening) life for themselves and family will not get you far. Even if the current ideology encouraged that, in the long term it's not going to survive as the people's nature is not going to change.

So perhaps you shouldn't have bought a house? You are now a slave to some materialistic object.

I owned houses for a long time. Wouldn't say a homeless person sleeping on my street would be a problem.

I eventually sold the houses, btw and sleep much better now. But I understand the Bay Area is built on status unfortunately.

With an entire system built with incentives to use home ownership as a way to build personal wealth, just saying do not buy a house isn't really an option.

If I'm reading your comment correctly, housing supply problem being an apparent symptom seems to be your way of saying "we could fix that easily if we wanted to, but we aren't fixing it, therefore we don't want to fix it."

And I don't exactly disagree, but surely you see how it's just slightly more complicated than that, and also how fixing the housing supply symptom (i.e., homing the homeless) would really help?

There should be enough housing for everyone that wants to live in a given area, and it should be housing people would want to live in.

That includes the currently homeless, and also those who can't afford to live where the rest of their life says they should.

Lack of social safety nets and lack of affordable housing both come from the same root cause, too much greed combined with too little empathy. 'I got mine, time to kick the ladder off the wall.'

Ok. 400 million people globally want to live in Manhattan. How do you solve that?

Do you think that's because Manhattan is such a great place to live or because people globally would love a life that's not a life of poverty?

Build more Manhattans.

1. That wasn't the original claim, which was "There should be enough housing for everyone that wants to live in a given area". People don't want to live in Manhattan 2, they want to live in Manhattan.

2. "Build more Manhattans" is easier said than done. Even petro-states with astronomical amount of money to splash around have a hard time building a "Manhattan". Dubai might be very shiny and the financial capital of the middle east, but it's no Manhattan.

Also, "claim" is too strong. This is the __aspirational__ sort of should. "We SHOULD all be kind to each other."

Is that a hypothetical or your actual belief?

I don't know Manhattan very well, only what I've seen on TV and in Movies.

Back of napkin answer:

Build bigger buildings, lots of them. All of those 'quaint' places with 2-6 story buildings? 50-60+ story sky-scrapers.

However that's probably also the answer you assumed. Yes that would change the 'character' of a place, because the only way of keeping that the same is to keep the number and type of people in a place the same. How could someone preserve an idea that directly contradicts a reality? No, there would need to be a new idea that supports the desired conditions. Hopefully a good idea that is well executed.

As another commenter said, 'more ''Manhattans''' is another way, try to replicate the sort of feel / idea at existing scale or larger in other locations.

My own comment was about the technical and physical goals a society should strive for, which are within reach, should we the people have the will to reach for them.

Where do I sign up for my 10k sq ft lot on the Southern California coast?

That's not at all what the parent post is suggesting.

I know. The point was it is easy and useless to write:

>There should be enough housing for everyone that wants to live in a given area, and it should be housing people would want to live in.

The hard part comes in executing, where you have to define “housing people would want to live in (which people?)” and who is in the set of “everyone” whose opinion is gathered about wanting to live in a certain area.

Who wants to live in a capsule either?

It depends what the other options are.

Mobile homes aren't great, but they beat a tent or a cardboard box. And they provide some stability compared to not having any tenant / property rights.

Also a cheap option that doesn't involve sharing walls. I looked into living in them because I have PTSD and hypervigilance + the lack of insulation in the buildings/apartments affordable to the poor = a living hell. And without addressing the PTSD, I couldn't have the fortitude for a job paying any better.

I rented one for a while and it was far better than 'not great'. Only downside really was the noise from the air circulator located inside, otherwise it was pretty much a normal 3 bed 2 bath small home.

Don't worry, I'm sure someone will come along and suggest we build $150,000 tiny houses, or shipping container houses. Mobile homes are just not cool enough for the bro who wants to save the homeless.

Wow do you really think a mobile home is only slightly better than a tent or cardboard box?

I didn’t say that.

You might benefit from re-reading what I wrote and assume the best possible interpretation of what I wrote.

Someone who's tired of getting rained on, assaulted when they sleep, picked up by the cops, and not having anywhere to wash their person or clothes?

I don't want to live in my current house. I want a mansion, complete with indoor pool, bowling alley (I haven't been bowling in 15 years, but just in case I get the urge I want one in my house), large shed for my antique car collection (which of course I want the money to afford to have), plenty of land for horses, with an entrance to the subway just outside the door. The above is not a complete list, and I'm sure you can come up with lots of other things you would like in a house that you cannot afford.

If you look at the list above you will realize that some things are contradictory - you cannot have everything no matter how rich you are. It gets worse when you start adding more desires.

Some of use have enough money to afford a nicer house than others. However when you get down to what you actually need to live a capsule is a good minimum - nice enough that if you cannot have more you still have an acceptance quality of life. However not so nice that people who could afford more refuse to contribute to society.

Yes, it's a minimal baseline that can be cheaply provided, that still preserves 90% of the dignity of human beings, their health, safety and ability to work, without unduly burdening other taxpayers.

A safe bed could be recognized as a basic human right without leading to a "world of lazy people" moral panic.

A safe bed, clean bathroom, and a small kitchen with space to eat. Doesn't take much space, and is what the homeless who can handle a house need. (not all homeless can handle a house)

You would solve homelessness problem for some people and create a crime problem for others.

Do you presume the homeless have become so due to their intrinsic criminal tendencies? If that's the case, any citizen has a legitimate objection against crime, so there is no solution to homelessness other than segregating them into some walled of, far away city.

You cannot talk about the homeless as some monolithic group of people that are all the same. Some of them are schizophrenic and their nature is crime because their brain is haywire. Some of them are addicts (both legal and illegal) who would be nice people if given treatment for their problem. Some are at nice people, but they are at the bottom of the intelligence chart (not to be confused with IQ, but instead what people think of as intelligence despite it not being well defined) and mentally unable to hold a job that could support themselves. There is a lot more, but I'm not a homeless expert. The above are just specific people I know (either family or family of close friends).

Some homeless are also criminals, some are not. Some of the criminals would turn away from crime if given the proper help, some will not. Some of them will refuse help unless it is forced on them - we have as a society rejected the needed force because of rampant abuse in the past. Each situation is different. Some of them are easy to solve - most are not.

No. I presume that low-income neighbourhoods have higher crime rates than high-income neighbourhoods, which is universally backed up by statistics.

That's circular reasoning. We get it, you don't want to be poor, nobody wants that, but it's not entirely clear why society should humor your desire to concentrate crime in areas other than where you reside. If anything, crime in rich areas should be more tolerable since rich people have higher capacity to defend themselves, higher economic tolerance to property crime (are insured, have savings etc.), and higher political influence to have something done about it, leading to less crime overall.

I.e crime is not a characteristic of poverty or the poor, but a specific policy failure in dealing with it.

In my opinion government should be subsidizing private companies to compete for creative solutions to solve the problem and reward the winner that solves it. Whatever the solution I think we've seen government has not been able to solve it. Maybe some business can give some basic work in exchange for food and housing, and for laws to adjust and allow this. If enough of these types of jobs existed it could be a way out of homelessness.

And I agree, although housing is the objective, it's not necessarily the solution to the problem, mainly because of how markets keep going up and space is limited. People need a way to start earning income without worrying about rent.

How about we start actively taxing private companies that feel the need to make a quick buck over people backs? Especially without contributing any real value to society, and with society I don't mean the economy.

Who decides what is "real value" and how much of it is being contributed by some activity?

We can start by implementing policies designed to reduce rent seeking activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

How about we solve society's problems without taking other people's property with violence or threat of violence?

Exactly. Make private property “owners” give it back to the public.

You're saying "exactly" and then advocate exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about. "Making" somebody do something with their property is the very definition of violence.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but all of your private property originally came from the commons. It seems arbitrary to call retrieving stolen property violence, but not the original theft.

Emotions about the unfairness of profiteering companies aside. How would you even define those properties. "quick buck", "over people's backs", "contributing real value", "to society"?

It's easy when you have a nebulous and noble goal, but you have to define it in terms that make sense and can be quantified and defined. Otherwise you'll just create a "Ministry for Company Fairness Contributions" filled with angry people that will abuse their powers for any number of reasons falling on the "evil/noble" scale.

Increased property taxes on non-resident owners.

That tilts the housing market (ie. buying/selling houses, rather than leases) to favor resident owners, but it makes it even more expensive for people who have to rent because the tax ends up being passed onto the renters.

In theory, if it's implemented as a true land-value tax (only taxing the value of the raw land, not the improvements/buildings), that doesn't happen.

But, yeah, somebody with a stronger economics background (than my undergrad degree, which I've never used professionally) would have to do some calculations on whether preventing mass corporate ownership via taxation would be a net positive for the market as a whole.

I tend to suspect it would be positive.

Rents and speculation or any activity that allows someone to siphon off the productive gains of society that they had no hand in producing.

For example, a company in nowhere-ville develops Mr. Fusion (home edition) and needs to expand rapidly. Rents and land prices double overnight which results in the cost of labor rising which slows expansion.

There are many opportunities for rent extraction in capitalistic systems and some degree of rent and speculation are necessary to establish a market but when society allows for excessive rent taking and speculation it becomes dead weight on productive investment.

For example the “billion dollar industry” for sand that makes computer chips (https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pu...) is an example of companies with little or no investment in the technology around chips who were able to extract large sums of money simply by controlling a sand pile.

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