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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

Like a lot. Didn't YC even fund that startup that wanted to turn middle class suburban homeowners into slumlords by building rental poverty shacks in their back yards?

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You're thinking of Pippin[0], and yours is about the most uncharitable take I can imagine, and I wasn't even a fan of the idea.

[0] https://spencerburleigh.com/blog/2022/12/21/shutdown/

I would say phrased uncharitably, but factually right on the money IMO. I strongly suspect that if this scaled it would have caused an explosion in the number of landlords while also making property even more expensive because now all of a sudden you can turn every PPoR into a rental as well. Absolute nightmare scenario.

Thankfully the market took care of this idea and they only made 10 "houses" before going pop apparently.

> Pippin

I'm fascinated by how the most ethically dubious companies tend to take their names from Tolkien: Palantir, Anduril, Pippin...

I don’t know what startup you are mocking, but this is a very bad faith way to characterize building ADUs cheaply. You don’t know the first thing about housing, besides making drama about it.

Multi-family units and rezoning single family plots is great. Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition.

Poor people are not children or animals. You can allow for them to just choose not to live in the backyard. For the right price I might have gladly done this.

But this is the great debate of our generation, I suppose. Are people capable of making choices or not?

> Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition

I would have loved to have had this option in college. Glad my landlord saved me from humiliation! (And let us be honest, for every useful idiot who thinks they're helping the poor by constraining their options there are ten homeowners who don't want poor people in their neighbourhood.)

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