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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

> I think the people complaining in this thread would complain about anything.

This specific thing has a history all tangled up with bad company behavior during the labor movement. You'd get the same reaction about a company paying in scrip and having a company store, no matter how many paragraphs one may compose of reasoned arguments that it's a decent, or even great, idea. People's first reaction will be, "yep, seen this before, fuck that" and they'll not pay attention to all the words about what a good idea it actually is.

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> People's first reaction will be, "yep, seen this before, fuck that"

And that would be the right one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Company towns still exist in China. Heck, I think my wife owns a duplex in an education related development her father worked for. Full blown SOE company towns (not just buildings or neighborhoods) are stranger but then again employment is pretty much guaranteed for life (iron rice bowl) if you get to live there.

When has this specific thing happened before?

It isn't literally the same thing as a company town but the concept from the headline at least is close enough to cause a pretty visceral reaction. Honestly, even as explained in the top level comment I am uncomfortable with my corporate employer having any rights to my property after I leave their employ no matter how 'weak' they may seem. Work should be a fair exchange of labor or product for capital, imo. It's more a symptom of housing being used as an investment than as actual housing for humans that this is considered a good deal. If housing wasn't increasingly difficult to come by, this wouldn't even be on the table as a compelling offer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

The restriction that you have to own it for 3 years because you're getting it at cost seems aligned with nearly every government mortgage subsidy. They're normally loans that have to be repaid if you sell within a time period. And ROFR at market value after that doesn't seem like it has any negative effect on the seller.

And, to be clear, these restrictions would apply to someone who was still an employee and wanted to sell, not just to someone who wasn't an employee anymore. The restrictions are because of the financial considerations being offered at the purchase of the home, not because of the employment relationship.

Yeah. It's not super terrible. The restrictions are pretty reasonable to keep the company from being overrun with people that take a job, buy a house, and leave.

I don't think it's great for competition since smaller companies won't be able to offer the same incentive, but it does create downward pressure on the housing market and at least the employees end up owning a major asset.

Another way to look at it is the company providing enough total compensation for their employees to buy a house. It almost seems unnaturally altruistic which kind of freaks me out. Lol.

But if you leave before X years you get.... affordable housing for that period rented below market rate to you.

So employee lose what exactly ? (I assume) they wouldn't be able to mortgage a property at market rate without it

> If housing wasn't increasingly difficult to come by, this wouldn't even be on the table as a compelling offer.

Well, the city doing exact same thing would certainly be preferable, but this is still helping the problem

Cotton/plantation sharecropping, ~1860-1950 in the US south.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

Generally exploitive features include: an exclusive buying right by a certain party (allowing them to set prices), incidentals and necessities of life only being purchased from a certain party, mortgaging future assets in exchange for current goods/services (often with steep or complex credit terms), and restrictions on free sale of assets to arbitrary third parties (preventing price discovery and realization of fair market value).

As GP observed, these specific modern agreements generally avoid those pitfalls.

> As GP observed, these specific modern agreements generally avoid those pitfalls.

That’s why I asked for when this specific thing had happened before, rather than “when has an employer ever done a bad thing”

How about Ford, in Dearborn MI? They were really into controlling their workers' behavior outside of work. If Ring had existed in Henry Ford's time, he would have had surveillance cameras in every home, reporting to Ford's internal sociology department.

https://askus.thehenryford.org/faq/169797

https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

The Ford Homes are not to be confused with Fordlandia, Henry Ford's disastrous attempt to build a utopian rubber plant in the Amazon rainforest.

This is such a visceral "oh no" for so many people that I've seen part of the rising tension of multiple horror movies, including one released this year, be either revealing or highlighting that an employee will be sleeping on employer-owned property, which the viewer is expected to implicitly understand to be dangerous. Which, in the horror tradition, goes back to gothic horror—Dracula, the live-in governess, that kind of thing. It's a well-trod trope that this situation makes one vulnerable.

Now, none of this (and even my original post) means it's necessarily a bad idea—but that, the actual history and the way we read that situation in fiction, is why people are inclined to immediately have a bad reaction to such a plan.

Coal mining towns mostly.

Companies built worker housing (and charged for it), paid workers in scrip that could only be redeemed at the company store. It became de facto slavery.

yes, there's a famous song "16 tons" written about it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons

Throughout almost all of human history. An exceptionally few persons of any population owned their own dwellings, most people were a variant of servants/serfs/slaves to the landed gentry. Today's ruling generations decided that this order of things had to come back - and here we are again.

Some examples are the TVA/Arthur Miller's Norris TN, Pullman Chicago, Fordlandia in Brazil and Lowell MA (mills), with the latter 3 being popularly known mostly for the associated labor strikes.

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