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Comment by marcuskane2 | Hacker News Reader

Unironically, this.

America fails its lower-income citizens by pretending they don't (or shouldn't) exist when making zoning and building codes and such.

Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter but drive up costs, and then act surprised that only "luxury" housing gets built.

College students can happily and healthily live in dorms on campus, and yet we treat it as unthinkable that someone working at McDonalds lives in similar conditions. And so we don't build the infrastructure and the McDonalds worker ends up with a far worse outcome, but at least it's out of sight and out of mind that they're sleeping on a couch or staying in an overcrowded illegally-sublet apartment.

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It's absolutely not that some weird and unbelievable force is working to keep poor people from "existing". As it turns out, supply and demand can largely drive the cost of goods like homes, and you can't magically delete that value so poor people can live in the more desirable parts of town.

A college town is, really, only desirable to college students and the businesses that cater to them. Thus, the demand is very low, and almost nobody stays particularly long. The exceptions to this are colleges in or near very large towns, but even housing near the college tends to be much cheaper than housing in the city.

If McD's was a self-contained economy, it too would be surrounded by cheap housing.

I wish we could have conversations about things like this which are based in reality and not some fear of a macguffin enemy trying to "keep the poor from existing".

“supply” is controlled by government regulations. When laws state that the only housing supply can consist of single family houses, then the number of homes will be limited to the number of legal building plots.

Historically, zoning laws were established to prevent cheaper forms of housing from being built in order to keep poor people out from a region. The existence of these laws is precisely because the lawmakers recognized that more dense forms of housing would be built and lived in by poorer residents unless it was made illegal.

This is absolutely a baby slice of the reason. Supply is controlled by a huge number of factors, a large fraction of which are tied to the 2000s housing bubble crashing. It created a large period of time where houses weren't built even as the population grew. This caused a large number of pine tree farms to slow down or shut down, which is why Christmas trees are randomly like $80 each lately. Combine this with large investor demand for the demand-side of housing, and it's clear to see that government regulations play an exceedingly small role in this.

It's hard to describe how little I care about why something was originally created, rather than how it plays out today.

It's also hard to describe how discouraging it is that social progressiveness is the only factor of any issue I see anyone have any knowledge on.

Supply is 100% constrained by regulation. SF (and every other city) requires a permit to build. Go try to get a permit to build something in sf. I guarantee you’ll find a hundred different blockers including if any of your neighbors would like to object. (They will)

If you think regulation is the only constraint on supply, you're wrong.

Let's get rid of the regulations then so:

A. There is no more debate about it

B. Suppliers are motivated to catch up to where the supply chain needs to be at.

Wrong, sorry. The construction costs have exploded in recent years for a number of reasons, not least of which is a constraint on construction supplies. This problem actually exists in more places than SF, and it will have varying levels of contributing factors depending on where you are, but as much as the internet loves to cry NIMBY, it’s simply not the primary factor here.

You may need a permit to build, but it’s not nearly as impossible as Reddit would have you think.

Awesome, I want to build a 6 story apartment building in 20 random locations in 20 random cities.

What are my odds of hitting at least 10 places where I'd get a permit?

> I wish we could have conversations about things like this which are based in reality and not some fear of a macguffin enemy trying to "keep the poor from existing".

There is no other explanation for what exclusive zoning is. By banning the only form of housing poor people can afford you are attempting to "keep the poor from existing". Sure, land prices follow supply and demand so land in expensive places is expensive. But it turns out that we can build many housing units on not much land and amortize the land cost so that even the poor can afford expensive areas, if only it were legal.

There are dozens of explanations, and if you truly believe this is the one singular reason that can be true, you haven’t thought very deeply about this topic.

One to get you started: even the poor have a right to a home that isn’t infested with the fumes of manufacturing. You don’t need to be rich to see the benefit of not allowing slaughterhouses in the middle of section 8 housing, surely?

exclusive zoning is banning certain types of housing. Not slaughterhouses.

And no. I do not believe it is moral to ban certain types of housing, other than unsafe. If you want to build safe housing on your land and your neighbors stop you they are saying poor people are not allowed to exist in their neighborhood.

LOL. That's easily solvable by bunching up related uses: residential with offices, small businesses, etc. Industry would obviously be separated.

We have these in the US and they are falling out of favor because they tend to attract crime and drugs. They are called SROs.

Boarding houses would work for a single person with no possessions. If you have a partner and/or kids, you need a different solution.

> Mandate that housing needs to have individual bathrooms and kitchens for each unit, mandate that each unit needs a parking space or two, mandate a thousand other useless minutiae under the guise of safety or accessibility that don't actually matter

Many of these mandates exist because retrofitting is impossible. Got three new tenants with cars? Get the backhoe; it's time to build the underground car park. Can't get to the crapper because the doors and bathroom are too small for your wheelchair, and you won't take a dump in diapers? No apartment for you! Low income, have kids and need 3 bedrooms? No room in the boarding house. Go somewhere else.

Universal design is not expensive and makes living spaces more inclusive.

https://www.archdaily.com/994337/what-is-universal-design

> need 3 bedrooms? No room in the boarding house. Go somewhere else.

The availability of boarding houses makes this far more possible. If single able bachelors without cars are living in massive accessible apartments with parking spots, that makes them unavailable for those who really need the accomodations.

The problem is that inclusive housing is expensive - if you build a inclusive space with parking or wheelchair accessibility or extra bedrooms, then you're silently excluding those who cannot afford those features. This was basically Hong Kong's government's rationale for why it didn't ban cage homes - doing so would benefit the winners of the public housing lottery but cause the "losers" to become homeless. Feels kind of like a trolley problem to me.

> Universal Design is a concept that proposes the creation of spaces with democratic use, guaranteeing egalitarian conditions in terms of quality of service. The main goal of Universal Design is to allow everyone to use them to the fullest extent possible without the need for adaptations. Considered a concept that applies to architecture and other areas such as product design, Universal Design serves people considering their characteristics, age and individual abilities.

Notably, the design website that you linked doesn't mention anything about making housing cheaper or more affordable.

A better take is Universal Design adds nothing to the cost of building at scale. Anyone charging more for using Universal Design is scamming you.

I think that the cost floor for housing (labor, land, materials) is high enough that "affordable housing" cannot be made without state funding. Helsinki is a good starting point.

I understand the exclusion problem. As you said, inclusive space excludes those who can not afford the space (ghetto by income). Non-inclusive space excludes by physical ability (ghetto by the degree of handicap).

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