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Comment by unsnap_biceps | Hacker News Reader

I currently live in a petty remote area and we have literarily zero homeless folks in our hamlet area. (We actually have a fairly robust program that provides housing for folks in need). We have one fast food restaurant in the area and it's a McDonalds. It was one of the main hangouts for folks in the area. We would have weekly meetups there. After Covid, they closed the seating area and installed the touch screens. They went from employing around 7 to 9 folks down to only 3 and talking with the franchise owner, they're not planning to ever hire back up and re-open seating. He did mention that the gross revenue is way down, but net revenue is about the same and his stress in managing the location is way reduced with the headcount reduction and simplification of the business.

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Never having to deal with a member of the public inside your property is a huge liability and hence stress reducer.

so is not opening a service based business

Sure but it's also a scaling factor. People are going to choose the tradeoff that's right for them or their insurance costs.

Capitalism working as intended. Wealth extraction without having to give back to the community.

They give back by paying taxes.

Like i think the intended path here is that taxes pay for a library, a park, or a community center. Having random businesses create hang out spots out of the goodness of their heart is not the intended path. They can if it makes sense for their business, but community needs should be primarily funded through taxes not business charity.

Only yesterday some people on here were trying to convince me that taxes were literally like slavery for rich people!

If it’s that bad for wealthy folks, imagine the impact on everyone else.

Would make sense, your reasoning, if they actually paid taxes. Unfortunately everything is very broken on that front, labor pays much higher taxes than corporations, the richest don't pay taxes at all, and the shortfall is plugged by cutting public services and issuing debt on what remains.

The comment thread is about a McDonalds franchise owner. They are not going to be committing Apple-level tax evasion. They will be paying taxes like everyone else.

Not “like everyone else”. In comparison to an employee, a business owner has a vast array of tools available to them to limit taxes.

Income tax on employees is a tax on the business

That's right, if my income gets taxed more, it's my employer that could default on his mortgage.

You are being sarcastic, but yes that is indeed how it works.

Increased payroll taxes increases expenses for the business and if expenses increase enough business will go under.

Wage taxes suck for the employee, but they are not the only party affected.

> Increased payroll taxes increases expenses for the business

The amount of disconnect from reality is staggering.

You can just choose to not buy hamburgers from that McDonald's. No person needs unhealthy food.

I haven't eaten that sort of food for over a decade.

Sounds like that is the path this business owner took.

One macdonalds deciding they dont want to be a sit-down resturant anymore doesn't prevent anyone else from opening a competing resturant.

But on the other hand... Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out. At least that's what they say. I often see McDonald's fill that niche for older folks.

Haha yeah there are people like that in the Netherlands.

And then everyone comes with their laptop to work and it becomes an open office.

Is that a bad thing?

it is if you want the place to be financially viable.

I’m going to build a cafe inside a faraday cage someday.

Just to see what happens.

Maybe I’ll not serve alcohol and call it Zero Bars.

Better yet, serve alcohol and call it Bar/No Bars.

The common non-tourist behaviour in a café in Vienna is to sit there talking for hours, buying a few cups of coffee total. It has been like that since before laptops were a thing. Yet the cafés remain viable.

Same here in Greece.

For the case of

> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out

Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the human perspective.

I think it's pretty common today though. There are a number of cafes with a lot of seating where I see a whole lot of tables with someone seated working on their laptop.

Cafés as a place to be for cheap where the weather can't reach you while you read the newspaper you can't afford or a book or plan a revolution is quite old. Like centuries old, perhaps millenia if you count gossip and include inns.

I suspect the economics have changed in a lot of cities though.

The $10 comfortable folding chairs that recently became available changed the equation for me. Rather than sitting in a cafe, I much prefer to take my laptop and a chair and go sit in a nice park, on the beach, or even in the woods.

What chair is that?

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005005339996025.html

Ah, that is not comfortable for me with a laptop!

Thanks for sharing the link though.

That can all be trivially fixed by style of seating and tables, removing all power outlets and so on. People who don't go there to work won't care.

I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.

You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%, 100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food, only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of these office workers. Bar seating is especially space-efficient for this.

The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe owners.

Yeh having to deal with actual customers is such a pain.

This but unironically

The platonic ideal is no customers, no employees, no management, and no government.

Just AIs trading Bitcoin with each other.

The platonic ideal is doing only your preferred form of work, and getting paid universally usable currency.

> I currently live in a petty remote area and we have literarily zero homeless folks in our hamlet area

This is a common observation and should make more people ponder: why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?

Correlation is not causation. One does not increase the other, rather the rise in one is correlated with the other.

I disagree. As the comments point out, there is an extremely clear mechanistic explanation as to how these are causal.

I'd suggest high local wealth and economic productivity tend to correlate strongly with increased housing costs.

People move there for the jobs, and the ones who do have jobs tend to have relatively well paying ones, so can pay more for housing. But the ones who don't have a well paying job are in trouble...

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...

So these people decide to become homeless instead of moving to a nearby area with a lower cost of living?

Like everyone else, homeless people tend to have ties to specific areas, and by the time you're homeless you tend not to have the capital required to move and restart someplace else.

Basically at what point do you decide you're "failing" (no moral valence intended) in one area in which you have a support network that you're willing to risk moving to a totally new area and starting over? At that point, do you have the resources required to do so successfully?

I live in Boulder and homelessness is a big problem here. Some people tie it to housing costs, which I don't buy. There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to get to Boulder for some reason.

And how good is that support network if it leaves you camping in a tent down by the river? I'm not taking about moving across the state, just down the road a bit.

> There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper

Someone who doesn't have a job can't afford "substantially cheaper" housing anyway.

>There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to get to Boulder for some reason.

That's great! But if you have no place to store your clean (or dirty) clothes, or to shower, how many landlords are going to rent to you? How many employers are going to offer you a job?

Those are not rhetorical questions.

You're talking about getting out of homelessness, I'm talking about not becoming homeless in the first place. It's not like rent increases happen overnight

You said "I live in Boulder and homelessness is a big problem here...And how good is that support network if it leaves you camping in a tent down by the river?"

Nope. Definitely not talking about homeless poeple. Gotcha.

I think two factors - high productivity leads to high cost of living, which means people without labor skills have a hard time making enough money for food and shelter.

But ALSO - these areas tend to lean towards higher levels of social services such that they have much higher homeless shelter / services / etc per capita.

So while many people may go homeless in place, certainly there is some homeless migration towards areas that actually provide food/shelter and don't harass/arrest them/chase them away.

Don’t discount the weather. Sure is nicer to be in Hawaii in December in a tent than in Michigan

That explains a lot of west coast & Hawaii but not NYC…

NYC has a right to shelter law.

Precisely which is how the rest of the state leaves NYC to shoulder the responsibility

> why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?

May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.

I have an interesting observation about homelessness. I live in a country where the average household makes about US$6000 a year.

The cost of living here is about 1/2 of the USA, with rents about 1/4. The unemployment rate is about 5%.

Homelessness is very, very low (to the point of near invisibility) and mostly limited to illegal immigrants.

The thing that seems to make homelessness a non-issue here is the tolerance of ad-hoc construction. This leads to neighbourhoods where construction is really low cost / quality, but people are housed.

I don’t really understand why these neighbourhoods don’t devolve into hotbeds of violent crime as I would expect them to in the USA, but they mostly don’t.

Mostly, the construction tends to improve over time, and the neighbourhoods often gradually metamorphosize into more contemporary and inviting areas with vibrant small businesses and elegant homes.

I often wonder if it’s cultural, as poverty is not seen as failure but rather a temporary condition to be transcended as possible?

Which country is that?

Dominican Republic

Doesn't Dominican Republic have like a 50% higher homicide rate than the US? Or do you mean it's just not localized in the spots you'd expect it to be?

Normalize it by region, maybe. Mexico has much higher homicide rate, for example.

The DR has a homicide rate similar to the worst 20% of US states, but much lower than the most murdery ones.

Yea that's why I was wondering if GGP was talking about specific areas. There's certainly cities in the US with eyewatering violent crime rates (St Louis, Baltimore, etc). Not sure if OP was specifically talking about a similar localization within the Dominican Republic.

Idk. IMHO the crime exposure here is pretty insignificant if you aren’t going to the tourist hotspots. At the touristy places it’s about like NYC risk wise.

It’s not high for a developing nation. since 2015 the average is about 13/100k. By comparison, Louisiana is 19, New Mexico is 14, Missouri is 13, Maryland is 11, Alaska is 10.

>dominicans

>no homeless

bro if everyone is homeless than nobody is

? Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I’ve lived here for over a decade and have seen very few people that don’t have a home of some kind. Family connections obviously play a large role.

1. Remote areas often have some kind of very cheap housing available. It may be low quality housing, but at least it's very affordable.

2. Remote areas don't have services that cater to homeless people.

Because the wealth isn’t distributed properly. Fairly obvious I’d say.

You're swapping cause and effect. Places with lots of economic opportunity and significant public services to assist the homeless are the place where you can have large homeless populations, ie large numbers of people just barely scraping by. Decrease the money flowing in and the population will go down, because they would no longer be able to survive. Those who can will go elsewhere, you can imagine what happens to those who can't leave a place where they can't survive. One must be very careful using "number of people observed with a particular symptom of the problem" as a proxy for how well the problem is being handled.

High-productivity places without lots of public services also have a lot of homeless people though

There's still money in those places to support people even if it's not flowing through public services. Many homeless people work, and it's easier to get work in high productivity areas. Most of those who don't rely on generosity from people who do.

Touch screens have been around for a long time. Just like the situation on the upper end with AI: I don't think it's the technology, people are actually getting worse at socializing (creating stress for the people responsible) and so socialization is becoming more expensive and opportunities for it are becoming more rare.

This could get a lot worse before it gets better.

McDonalds broadly rolled out touchscreen ordering after covid became a thing. That’s why it gets called out in these discussions.

Ironic because it involves hundreds of people touching the same object. Not the best for infection control!

I am under the impression most infections from infectious disease is from airborne particles.

They existed before Covid but many franchisees didn’t want to bother with the expense (or saw relatively bad uptake).

Now they’re ubiquitous but mainly for people who don’t use the app, it seems.

My general observation is that a lot of self-service wasn't super-popular pre-COVID. But, now, it's become more entrenched and a lot of people just grumble and deal with it while a lot of stores made the investment and accept the (probably overall) reduced cost even if customers don't love it. My local DIY home store doesn't even really have regularly-staffed full checkout lanes any longer.

How do you know there are "literally zero homeless folks" in your area?

Often advocacy groups or municipalities will perform counts on specific days each year.

So while one does not need to say "literally" in that sentence (it wasn't figurative, after all), it is possible to say "zero homeless folks" as there may be data backing the statement up.

Yes- I live in a pretty affluent Los Angeles suburb and we recently just hit "functional zero" street homelessness.

"To achieve Functional Zero, the number of individuals placed in interim or permanent housing must be greater than the number of individuals who become homeless over a six-month period, and the homeless population, as a whole, must have a median duration on the streets of less than 90 days."

The data is gathered by the city as well as local nonprofits.

(Deleted because misplaced)

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