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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

Occasionally as a thought exercise, I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc. There's only so much you can spend on yourself. I could go for a bigger house, but I like my car as is, and I don't want a yacht or a private jet[0]. So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better?

The thing I keep coming back to again and again is public housing. I would just start buying up land and building public housing. Getting the homeless off the streets would improve not just their lives, but also the lives of the people who already have homes who happen to live in areas with a lot of homeless.

I've also considered public pay-what-you-want restaurants.

If anyone wants to give me untold billions, I will get right on it.

[0] I would totally go for a private train car, though.

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The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/10/metro/residents-in-corruption-...

Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors.

Without the profit motive, rental property becomes dilapidated quickly. I think the real solution for public housing is to make it rent-to-own for the tenants so they actually care. Otherwise it just goes to shit.

> The problem is public housing is maintained poorly. People generally beat rentals to shit and public housing is beat up even worse. The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly.

In my dreams I would hire full time staff and significantly incentivize timely work with cold, hard cash bonuses.

> Bad tenants in privately owned rentals get kicked out. In public housing they just make things terrible for their neighbors.

I guess in this fantasy, I own all of the buildings so it isn't really "public" housing. I guess I would have the option of doing something about bad tenants. Rent-to-own is a pretty good idea.

Your fantasy works great for normal people who for reasons can't afford a house but overall treat things well. It doesn't work for someone who has mental issues which sometimes turn violent. (often hard drugs are a root cause - but there are some born this way through no fault of anyone.) I don't know what to do about those but it is a real problem.

In the past society put them in institutions, but that has been out since the 1960s or before - for good reason. Institutions invite by nature invite the staff to abuse the people. Homeless is better than institutions were (even including cases of someone freezing to death). From what I know of prisons I can tell you we have not solved this human nature problem and so I cannot support going back to institutions.

Yes, that is a separate problem for which I don't think there are any easy answers.

While I do not think my old public housing, not in the US though, looked great, it definately wasn't the helpless mess you describe even by a long shot. I think this is a different problem than you describe. Poor maintenance only results if profit is the motive and no penalties are applied.

> The maintenance workers are union and can’t get fired, so they work at a leisurely pace. The admin are union and can’t get fired so their office is a mess and they respond slowly.

The story you linked has little to do with unions. Are unions really the issue?

I've seen a lot of buildings where repairs didn't get done. Their maintenance and admin staff weren't public employees or unionized. They were just regular people. A mix of jaded, bigoted, disorganized, and lazy people (and some kind ones!) without anything making them be better, because there's rarely any consequences for mistreating the poor. Bad behaviour left unchecked becomes the norm, especially when it saves a buck.

Solving symptoms can be helpful, especially in a trauma care type situation, but do you view the lack of housing as the root cause?

Getting people under a roof can definitely help stop the bleeding, but the more important question is how to help solve whatever it was that led to the problem in the first place. If it really is as simple as a lack of available roofs, that would be a very simple problem to fix with all of that Bezos money.

Financialization of housing is the problem, not those who are homeless.

Is public housing the fix there? It seems like that would only work at a scale such that a vast majority of the market is publicly owned, i.e. communism.

Financialization of housing may be much better controlled by limiting what financial mechanisms can be made on top of real estate assets. As it stands, housing and related derivatives prop up a huge amount of "money" and investment portfolios. Government owned housing won't fix that directly, and the government is incentivized to not solve that because it would likely mean economic or monetary collapse.

Austria has highly available state housing of high quality. I don't think they qualify as a communist state, despite one of the more prominent complexes named after Karl Marx.

Interesting, that's a good rabbit hole for me to go down.

Unpopular opinion, but much of the west is at least partially communist these days. We may not have a communist political structure that looks like a 20th century dictatorship claiming communism but we do have plenty of state-run programs that fit really well under a banner of communism (or socialism, or Marxism if the term communism is too loaded).

What Western country has collective ownership of the means of production?

There's a question of degree for sure. Though for one example, the US heavily subsidies certain corners of the farming industry. The industry also has a heavy hand in lobbying and buying politicians so its somewhat up to opinion on which came first and whether it looks more communist or more fascist.

Boeing is another good example in my opinion. Again they aren't technically owned by the state, but the connection between the two is undeniable.

Utility companies in the US are also functionally owned by the state.

My point was never that most western countries are communist. I tried to be really clear in my GP comment that I was talking specifically about state programs that have many characteristics that overlap with communism.

edit to add the obvious one I missed: healthcare. Depending on the country, either the government took over the healthcare industry, the industry captured government regulation, or you have the worst of both worlds in the US where we somehow saw both sides take part in capturing parts of the other (and really ruining the whole system).

Subsidies have nothing to do with collective ownership of the means of production by workers, those are orthogonal. The state owning a few enterprises also isn't a markedly characteristic of communism.

I expanded more on my other reply so I will diverge us to discuss there, I think you misunderstand the terms you are using.

The roads system. I'd say that works fairly well.

That depends greatly on where you are. The US is a very mixed bag, especially when you consider the state of many of our bridges and overpasses.

Even at the state level, Louisiana is an interesting case. They're better now, but for quite a few years their roads went to shit because they refused to increase the legal drinking age and the federal government pulled funding.

Switzerland as well, and contracts for public housing last 20 years.

I really doubt someone would call Switzerland communist.

Similar to my comment above, there is a difference in having programs that follow closely with communist ideals and having a government or state that labels itself as communist.

I don't have stats for Switzerland handy but did look up Australia earlier. About 4% falls into there state-managed housing programs. That isn't nearly large enough to rival what the Soviet Union had for example, but the design of the system does seem to match with many communist goals. That is by no means a claim that Australia is communist, just a comment on their public housing program.

The other comment mentioned Austria system of public housing, not Australia's.

I believe you are misguided using the term communism or socialism, those have very specific meaning for an economic system, the overlapping characteristic being that workers own the means of production. That's it, socialised healthcare, public housing and so on are not communist/socialist.

Perhaps you are conflating social democracy with socialism/communism. The Nordics are not socialist/communist, like at all, Sweden has a freer market than the USA, and more wealth inequality, but do have social policies.

Your misuse of the terms is very confusing, I really suggest you brushing on what they mean so your communication is clearer. I got very confused at first on what you meant because there's no way any Western country is even close to Communism/Socialism/Marxism, like 100% not.

Communism? So the road system in the USA is Communist?

Would public housing have to be "a vast majority of the market"? It wasn't before. Also, as others have pointed out it works fairly well in Vienna, Austria.

You are correct about government incentives. Local governments have an incentive to keep property prices high so they can extract more property tax.

> I ask myself what I would do with the untold billions of Bezos, Musk, etc.

The untold billions is in Amazon, SpaceX, Tesla factories & etc... To have access to those we need to dismantle the assets to swap them to the billions they're currently valued at. Then allocate them more efficiently than the pension funds who owns most of the stock in S&P500. These guys are not sitting on a big pile of gold in their basements, they are constantly trying to invest this capital to produce something. These warehouses aren't cheap, nor programmers making 250K/year in Seatle. I am not sure your plan will work as intended :)

The housing market is mostly a supply side problem with bad laws and taxation put on top of it. A lot of emigrees came to USA and had affordable housing until recently. Sure, there are more people now, but the density is way lower than in other countries and we can build way higher than before.

More / affordable housing alone does not fix the homeless problem alone though. I mean it'll help, but it's only one part of that problem.

There are a lot of people, particularly in places like San Francisco who could and would maintain a house if they could just get one. If you get out to someplace like Moline IL most homeless have "issues" and wouldn't be able to maintain a house/apartment if given one - because rent is cheap enough that you can maintain a small room on fast food income levels (it won't be easy, but it is possible). Of course there are a lot of other differences in those cities - you can live homeless in San Francisco a lot better than Moline (where you will freeze to death in winter), and I have no idea what sort of help either city provides for the homeless.

Housing is pretty much a prerequisite for fixing the other problems. I would guess that's it's almost impossible to kick something like a drug problem while sleeping on the streets.

I wish I could find the source, but I am struggling to, so I will have to paraphrase. It was an interview with someone who lost their job, became homeless for a while, somehow managed to claw their way back to having a home and stable employment.

The gist of the interview was, don't judge the homeless for drugs and alcohol. It's often the only comfort they have. What would really help is a home, but the cost of housing is so high that saving all of your booze money would never be enough to rent an apartment anyway. Might as well spend it on something that will make you feel a little better.

>So then the question is, what relatively expensive thing could I do that would solve a lot of problems? That would make a lot of lives better?

I'm pretty sure effective altruists have the same question, crunched the numbers, and figured out it was something like malaria nets or similar interventions in developing countries.

Even if you limit the set of possible projects to things that affect your local community, investing in public housing is probably bad bang/buck ratio given how much capital it takes (ie. hundreds of thousands) to help one family. Job training programs, micro loans, or funding YIMBY campaigns probably provide larger benefit.

I'm skeptical of that, in part because I think the data you get out of e.g. job training programs is so messy.

Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help.

The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training.

Maybe I overvalue simplicity and certainty, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe there is just something appealing about just directly addressing a need.

>Let's say instead of building houses, I invest the money in job training and crime intervention programs. Maybe employment goes up and crime goes down. Maybe it doesn't. And even if the numbers move in the correct direction, it is extremely difficult to quantify how much I helped versus external variables outside my control. I'd need a team of data scientists just to quantify how much I helped. And at the end of the day, I am still only helping the subset of people for whom those kinds of programs actually can help.

If you have "untold billions" to spend, you can probably spend a few million on data scientists to make sure you're spending your money as effectively as possible. Moreover, impact shouldn't be hard to measure with RCTs (ie. only helping half of the neighborhoods and comparing it to the other half).

>The nice thing about housing and feeding people is that it directly addresses the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You can be 100% certain that you are helping. And you can be 100% certain you are helping almost everyone. Everyone needs food and shelter. Not everyone needs job training.

Right, but by doing so, you're missing out all the possible higher value interventions, especially ones that aren't applicable to everyone, but would have much greater impact.

> especially ones that aren't applicable to everyone

But the point is that I would be helping nearly everyone. Maybe job training would provide higher "value", however that is measured, but I would be leaving people behind, and that does not sit well with me. In a sense, people for who job training would make a big difference are already better off than the people for whom it wouldn't, even if their life circumstances are more or less identical otherwise.

I mean the real answer is with untold billions I could do both, and while we're dreaming I'd like a pony.

I don't necessarily disagree; however, just to continue the thought experiment: Even if housing isn't the most important on a strictly rationalist level, it's possible that the psychological and/or subjective wellbeing effects of having a home make it a good candidate for effective altruism.

> I'm pretty sure effective altruists have the same question, crunched the numbers, and figured out it was something like malaria nets or similar interventions in developing countries.

I wonder how much real world experience goes into these calculations. For instance the theory of malaria nets can be quite different from reality. From Wikipedia [1]:

> Where mosquito nets are freely or cheaply distributed, local residents sometimes opportunistically use them inappropriately, for example as fishing nets. When used for fishing, mosquito nets have harmful ecological consequences because the fine mesh of a mosquito net retains almost all fish, including bycatch such as immature or small fish and fish species that are not suitable for consumption. In addition, insecticides with which the mesh has been treated, such as permethrin, may be harmful to the fish and other aquatic fauna.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_net#Usage

The Gates Foundation is far more credible than effective altruism, so looking at what they do is instructive.

And they do spend a good chunk of money on housing, but they spend considerably more doing things like trying to eradicate polio.

Which indicates to me that while housing might not be the absolute most effective use of a charity dollar, it's high on the list. That feels about right to me.

My controversial take is that I don't actually think Musk has enough to solve the problem.

I did some back-of-the-enveloping once, and I agree. Land acquisition and building are already pretty expensive, and then there's staff + maintenance + utilities over time.

I think the strategy is do it in a couple of prominent areas, and, assuming it actually works out, point to them as success stories and acquire philanthropic funding to keep doing it in more and more cities.

His net worth is $378k per homeless person. You can't solve every homeless person's issues but he does at least have enough to get every homeless person into an apartment.

I'm unconvinced rich person net worth is ever actually the dollar figure that's quoted. So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets. If Musk suddenly became a good person and decided to cash out in order to house the homeless, I doubt he would actually end up with $378k per homeless person.

> So much of net worth is in relatively non-liquid assets.

Which is why it's not bought and sold, but used as collateral to obtain low, low interest loans.

> If Musk suddenly became a good person

Is Musk a bad person?

The question is how many new homeless people will be created once he starts doing this? And how much will the price of the average rental go up?

Only if he could barter Tesla stock for the apartments, or by liquidating very very slowly, so as to not crash the value of the rest of his shares (so he can keep doing this). Unfortunately, neither are very realistic (ignoring, of course, that Musk would never do this in the first place).

There's some aspect of housing that's a positional good. There's only so much land in Manhattan, for instance. However, if refugee-camp conditions (ie. a basic place to live but with poor/no economic prospects nearby) are acceptable, it can probably be done with enough musk level wealth.

So he might have to work together with one other billionaire? The horror.

I wonder if you can make a jobs program out of it too. Hire the unhoused to build their own houses? Kinda like the Civilian Conservation Corps, but for housing.

occasionally, as a thought exercise, I think about breaking into someone else's home and stealing their shit

it's fine because they're rich so they deserve it

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