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Comment by pasabagi | Hacker News Reader

The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity? You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes. A car, despite being an industrial miracle assembled out of precision parts, is far cheaper than a house. Food insecurity is largely manageable for most people in rich countries.

The answer is, of course, politics - and that's also why you'll never solve homelessness with a better capsule hotel.

A friend of mine works for the city in Strasbourg, and the mayor's office wanted to improve the situation of the homeless, so they installed some basic amenities for a homeless camp. Within a fortnight, the police had trashed the amenities. If you make the situation better for the homeless in a state that wants the homeless to go elsewhere, the politics will unsolve your solution.

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> Within a fortnight, the police had trashed the amenities

This sounds like a convenient anti-police narrative to me.

I've never worked with homeless directly but I have several friends who have and one who still does.

There's probably no broad demographic in society that is more efficient at destroying their own amenities.

Granted, that's usually addicts.

And I know not all homeless are addicts, not all addicts are homeless, but it is undeniable that there is large overlap between the two groups

Anyways, my point is that blaming the police for destroying the amenities feels very fishy to me.

Some of the homeless people don't want a home. They don't even want to be in the system, now become someone says that's anecdotal, I'm not saying ALL OF THEM, I'm saying there's a minority of them, who are in fact fugitives, or maybe they just don't want to go back to their old lives due to some trauma or stress. Even so. My point being, you'll never 100% solve homelessness. Some are also dealing with serious mental issues.

I was part of a homeless non-profit for about a year so I got exposure to all sorts of different scenarios. We were able to get some off the street, some literally had relatives who would have given them a home, but they needed to sort through their personal issues first.

You can't fix everyone even with infinite resources unfortunately, I'm not saying that if you can help don't, I'm just saying, I feel like some people think they can end homelessness, we're too far from that.

> Some of the homeless people don't want a home.

To understand the problem we should first define what is 'a home' is and then we should ask homeless about what they do understand as 'a home'. People who never actually interacted with homeless in any [bigger than some spare change] capacity would never understand that.

> They don't even want to be in the system

And this one is even harder, because most of them has a deep aversion and/or distrust for 'the system', for whatever reason.

> We were able to get some off the street

Kudos to you and your fellows, but, as you probably know already, many, many who get off the street gets back, often in a quite short time.

> part of a homeless non-profit for about a year

If you don't mind and the reason for quitting was related to it - what was the reason? Idle curiosity from my part.

The fact of the matter is that specifically in the US, cops hate homeless people.

Cops are violent and empowered and from my own subjective experience absolutely will take anything as an excuse to destroy anything belonging to homeless people, from amenities to personal belongings. I dont see anything even remotely fishy about the idea of cops actively destroying social amenities. Regardless of any problems that may be more or less likely in a homeless population that doesnt change the fact that cops are a tool of anti-social conservative politics and actively try to prevent social programs from working or being implemented.

You make a good point. A post about a specific event wherein police trashed amenities is a convenient narrative, whereas broad talk about demographics is not.

In a similar vein, in Portland, Oregon it is common to see police employ heavy machinery to bulldoze homeless camps. It is convenient to say that the police are responsible for that because we do not know that the police aren’t themselves homeless and demolishing their own camps (something they would be demographically inclined to do as homeless people)

The facts aren't in question, although the police say they 'evacuated' the camp (at four in the morning, with force) - and they've done so four times, destroying everything in the process.

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20221206-strasbourg-city-mayor-...

I don't see any statements in your source suggesting the police used force, so maybe the facts are in question after all?

The police dismantling an illegal tent city is not the same thing as "the police destroyed amenities that the city provided to the homeless"

>The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity?

I'm working on a deal right now that could be a 40 house development... or it could be nothing. Why? Because the infrastructure doesn't exist to support the development, and it could be as much as $2MM to put in the infrastructure (think street and sewer), and because of setbacks, etc, it could be down to as few as 20 houses without some kind of variance. And that's before the cost of the land and the cost of the construction, all of which would rest on the shoulders of the developer. Shoes, a car, etc an assembly line can be configured and stamp out near identical products year after year. Even if you intend to build generic tract houses (like this development would be...), you still have tremendous up front costs and "tooling" and the variation of each new development -- location, elevation, access to services, etc.

In many markets, especially the most expensive ones, the cost of housing / real estate has nothing to do with the cost of construction.

A garden or a parking space in London, NYC or Sydney can be hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Of course - and that’s part of what I was trying to convey to the previous posted about why housing is different than cars and shoes.

Construction costs are a significant portion of the cost of (new) housing in nyc because of the labour cartel situation

While there are legitimate planning problems (does it make sense to run utilities out to serve yet another suburb?) that are separable from pure politics, I think you're sort of burying the lede when mention the 'cost of the land' then quickly move on to other topics.

'Cost of land' is inherently a political question, because land is not generally produced by human labour. It exists, then is divided according to some moral or political criteria. A state cannot arbitrarily say 'everybody gets a free car', because the car industry will go bust, then nobody will get a car. A state can (and states have) say that you can divide land ownership in whatever way you want. It's a purely political decision.

In many countries, areas, and states, land costs account for the massive majority of new construction costs. What's more, they force planners and developers to act in a counter-intuitive way to work around them. They incentivize insane behaviour, like empty lots in the middle of highly dense cities, due to the logic of financial speculation.

You can't 'fix' housing without fixing the political question, which ultimately starts with making people broadly recognize it is a political question, and addressing it as such.

> I think you're sort of burying the lede when mention the 'cost of the land'

Not at all - you wanted me to answer or address a different topic than the previous poster. They wanted to understand the difference between commodities. My main point was not just about cost, but about the difference in production as well as a nuance around regulation. In my market, land costs while important are not the gating factor in whether something can be developed.

I do real estate and politics for a living, but I can’t quite wrap my head around the rest of your point. I think you are advocating for some kind of government reallocation or loosening of property rights, which makes me very uncomfortable but also would not be anywhere near how I would fix housing in my state.

> I think you are advocating for some kind of government reallocation or loosening of property rights

I'm really just drawing attention to the fact the relevant property rights (what you can build, who can live there, how much it is worth relative to other things) are the product of continuous government intervention (planning, consultations, law, etc). Further, the government has basically free reign to legislate however it likes, unlike regulating conventional industries (automakers, etc).

My point is not that the government should just seize all inner city land - that would work, but it would also work to just rebalance the right to own land against the right to shelter in planning law, then use existing procedures to work out the consequences. For instance, one thing that could help would be to obligate developers to increase the number of housing units on a residential site if they redevelop.

Oddly enough, the only way you can really make housing a commodity item would be to build capsules or other types of mobile homes that can be purchased separately from the land they are parked on. The Nakagin Capsule Tower comes to mind[0] but it's far from a solved problem since you'd need similar infrastructure to a container port to move the capsules around but since you don't move them often the infra itself has to be movable so it can go where the demand is, which is a pretty big ask if you're only moving one capsule. The only existing format is the traditional mobile home which is limited to single story and low density which means it can't be located near urban centers that need it the most. So, you're kind of stuck with the problem of it being easy to build small homes but really hard to find a place to put them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower

Well, it's really hard to find a place to put them because of planning regulations, and because of land costs.

If you, for example, nationalized all inner-city land, you could easily find plots to build high density housing. At which point, you're stuck there wondering why you should bother with the capsules: it's cheaper to just prefab the building in concrete then assemble at site. That's what the kruschevkas are: you leverage economies of scale to produce millions of units of housing for peanuts.

Obviously, nationalizing inner-city land is hard in the current political makeup of most nations today: real estate is a favoured investment for very rich people, and they have a lot of political power. So the question of housing becomes less one about houses, and more about what kind of finessed regulation you need to avoid offending the small number of very wealthy people that own inner city land, while actually allowing the state to build on it.

Nationalizing inner city land would likely have many unintended consequences. I could see it resulting in migration of people and businesses away from the nationalized area only to regroup at a new center that wasn't restricted by direct governmental control. Reasons for that that spring to mind are that planning permissions would certainly be a nightmare, difficult to obtain and extremely slow. If there was a hard quota of apartments vs commercial space it could create a bad situation for businesses and drive them away. The types of residential units may not meet the demand which could drive segments of the population to seek housing elsewhere even if the costs were higher. Poor design decisions for the units constructed could produce areas conducive to crime or just make it unattractive or inconvenient.

There's a long history of national building projects in many countries that have created problems like these.

In Europe there are very many successful examples of national housing projects, indeed many countries have large portions of the housing stock in public hands to this day.

This was generally instituted after WW2, which left the EU housing stock in a far worse condition than the US's today, and left the EU totally impoverished.

So, you can come up with hypothetical problems, but practical experience shows it can absolutely work.

The US has a long history of public housing as well and it suffered and suffers from very real problems.

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but take issue with "You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes". Seems like an odd take, shoes can easily be 100-200 currency, or maybe 20-40 on the extreme cheap end if you get lucky, of course I see people who are literally too poor to afford them. I've been too poor to afford them, it's only because I could put them on an existing credit card that I was able to get any, otherwise I'd be looking for scraps.

Yeah a lot of homeless people are too poor to afford shoes and only have shoes thanks to donations.

You can get them cheaper at second hand stores.

> You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes.

When I was younger, there were people in my town that were too poor to afford shoes. This was in the US, no less.

> The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity?

Homes can be a commodity. The problem is that the land they sit on is not. Land is relatively fixed in supply and land that is useful for living on is even more limited.

The cost of building a house can continue to go down, but without land costs changing it doesn't really matter.

My new house in central Austin probably cost $100k in labor + materials to build, but the land is worth $500k+.

So you can come up with $50k houses all day long, but developed land in desirable areas continues to go up due to over-regulation, NIMBY, zoning, etc.

Costs seem to keep going up in California with endless red tape and permitting and labor costs.

Those are symptoms, not causes. A lot of the value of land in California is proximity to good services and high ROI as regards social and career. The red tape, permitting, and labor costs are market-derived cash extraction mechanisms. Your problem is rent-seekers, not government.

> The red tape, permitting, and labor costs are market-derived cash extraction mechanisms. Your problem is rent-seekers, not government.

Red tape and permitting is government, though. Rent-seekers in government, maybe, but government nonetheless.

Rent is income that the government enforces your right to collect. A distinction between 'rent-seeking' and government is meaningless.

You could say the same of any economic relationship mediated by money...

>My new house in central Austin probably cost $100k in labor + materials to build

I would be very curious to know more about this, as in my area, you can barely build a large barn for that.

I have a small house. When I bought it, the appraisal + insurance valued the actual "house" around $120k or so, everything else was just land.

Trailer parks. Mass produced, identical, movable. Government regulation prevents it for the most part with laws saying "you must pay us yearly for owning a shoe" among others.

> You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes.

Not sure where you're talking about, but if you're in Strasbourg like your friend, I lived for a while in Belfort, and Strasbourg and Basel were the two biggest cities nearby.

In both of those cities, I saw significant problems with poverty, and people I'm fairly confident were too poor to afford shoes.

its a lot easier to manufacture a shoe than a house(that people will actually buy)

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