A homeless man built a life underground Hampstead Heath (2020)

Well-intentioned actions like the ones in the parent post can actually come with negative externalities that entirely outweigh them; places like San Francisco are learning that particular lesson as we speak.

We need to incentivise people to support actions that will reduce the monetary value of their home. Solve that and we’re golden.

They will then affect other people in the area, both home owners and temporary tenants.

Cambridge, UK is doing an experiment, where they put up little shelters, not totally dissimilar to this, but in homeopathic quantities: 3-4 at a time. It seems to be going well, but (a) that's still tiny number, and (b) I get the impression neighbours still don't like it.

Exactly. You can save a lot of money upfront by demanding cities allow shanty towns and slums but they'll only bring heavy costs and problems down the road that are far reaching and hard to clean up. The richest nations on Earth can more than afford to do better. Real, safe, sanitary housing is not impossible, it just requires investment.

We should also be giving consideration to where we build that housing so that we're not hurting the local environment by pushing biocapacity too far. We need to quit hurting ourselves with stupid shortsighted cheap temporary workarounds that just cause more problems and focus on long term sustainable solutions.

In the NL, around ~1960, many families had like 4, 5 children. Yet managed to live in 1- or 2-bedroom apartments.

Fast forward to today: Many people live single, pairs, or 1-child families. And population has grown. Building on average more compact housing would seem appropiate. But what happens?

In small town where I lived before, there were 5 recent home construction sites. Only one of those is modest sized social housing. How many? Around 30 apartments, in a ~80k municipality.

The other 4 sites (several dozen homes each) are all large, freestanding or 2-under-1-roof homes with like 4 or 5 bedroom, large yard, garage/carport etc. You can be very sure that if you'd check a random house, chances are you'd find a single well-earning person, or a couple living there. Not rarely elderly & retired. Perhaps a 1-child family if lucky.

Not big families with 4, 5 kids that you'd think is a logical match for homes like that.

It's like that almost everywhere. What's built is not what's needed to house a growing population of singles or small families. Instead, what's built is built to serve the well-off, use home (or 2nd, or 3rd) as investment part of the population.

Never mind professional landlords & real estate investment funds that drive up the price of housing for everyone.

This is a political problem first & foremost. Solutions exist if the political will were there. But political establishment won't fix it until things get untennable for a large enough % of the population that it threatens their re-election.

That’s my take on your reasons for not allowing basic shelters, FWIW. We shouldn’t let “but it could have future negative effects!” be justification for having people dying of cancer sleep in doorways, or occasionally actually freeze to death on the literal street.

Well, obviously. Is living in a slum worse than nothing?

Scott Sumner wrote a very good post about this: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/yurt-place-or-mine/

> A peasant village perched on a hillside in a third world country can be aesthetically beautiful, but a shantytown of former peasants on the edge of a large modern urban area (even if the peasants are now better off) is aesthetically ugly.

> I was reminded of this while watching a recent video of Ulaanbaatar, which is attracting mass migration from the Mongolian countryside. There are few more picturesque scenes of rural poverty that a bunch of yurts set up on Mongolia’s vast plains, under a cerulean blue sky:

> [photograph]

> Fortunately, a mining boom has made Mongolia rich, and the peasants are flocking to the cities, and put up their yurts in shanty towns on the edge of Ulaanbaatar—which now has a majority of Mongolia’s population.

> The lady who narrated the show was a Westerner. And she couldn’t quite get past the idea that this urbanization didn’t look very attractive:

>> It’s so funny because in the countryside it seems natural and it seems clean and it seems lovely, and here this is just poverty-struck, and so not natural.

> It’s easy for Westerners and/or upper class people to think they know what’s best for the poor. But unless they’ve actually lived that life, they may end up substituting aesthetic judgments for utilitarian criteria. The Mongolians had to decide whether their country was going to be a place of yurts, or a place full of large open pit mines and cities with high-rise apartment buildings. They chose the latter. The Mongolian she interviewed pointed out that Mongolians wanted to live in these modern apartment buildings because “they don’t have to make fire anymore, they don’t have to carry water anymore.”

The Mongols in the slums outside Ulaanbaatar are richer than the Mongols living a traditional lifestyle off on the steppe, but they are aesthetically offensive to people with power, who would prefer them to be more picturesque and impoverished. Is the situation in London different?

Removing that ultimate threat is NOT in the interests of the government, which greatly utilizes that threat. How else do you force people to work in an open-air gulag 3.8m mi^2, where 1% live comfortably, and 99% dont?

And it's a double-fuckyou with US citizenship renunciation fees at $2350. Like, having a US citizenship is a 3 grand hole in my pocket. And I didn't even fucking choose it. Still, no choice.