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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> If the options are "people have conflict over who cleans the kitchen" and "rampant street misery" the decision is obvious, at least to me.

Arguing over who cleans the kitchens is the version of the problem for friends who know each other. If you try the same arrangement and add people with severe mental health problems or drug problems randomly into the communal kitchens you would get something far, far worse.

I only brought that up as an example of what happens in the best case of friends choosing to live together, not as a suggestion of what it would be like with public strangers mixing together.

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The person who runs the hotel isn’t doing it to house the homeless out of the goodness of their heart.

If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business. Maybe don’t do it next time.

And that is a good thing. It forces people to actually abide by the social contract.

And there will be people who can’t deal with that, and can’t live anywhere, but here’s the thing.

You need a first step on the ladder for people who are ready to actually enter society. Otherwise they never will.

> If a person abuses the shared kitchen, they get kicked out. This is a business.

Not any business, it's a landlord-tenant relationship.

You can't simply kick out a tenant. You have to do a formal eviction process. In many cities this requires collecting evidence of contractual breach, proving that the tenant was notified they were being evicted (such as through a paid service to officially serve and record delivery of the notice), and then following the appropriate waiting period and other laws. It could be months and tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees before you can kick someone out of a house.

Contrast that with the $213 inflation-adjusted monthly rent that the article touts. How many months of rent would they have to collect just to cover the legal fees of a single eviction?

>It forces people to actually abide by the social contract.

"social contract" is just "abide by the terms of the contract they signed" or "hold up their end of the deal" in this case.

> you would get something far, far worse.

Those 'far far worse' things are already happening to the unhoused, they're not unique to SROs and low-cost hotels, so all that keeping people unhoused does is make their lives even worse.

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