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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I've often wondered how much of the western homeless crisis is due to not allowing ghettos/slums to exist, the last place the very poor could afford rent. Cities have essentially made them illegal over the past 30yrs. Once it gentrifies it's gone. Including even large blocks of subsidized apartment buildings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes

All housing is now very carefully planned top-down. The only ones who get past all the red tape are high end condos or far-off single-family suburbs. So city government's only idea is to force each of those fancy buildings to have a subset of units as affordable housing. The supply of those is never enough to keep up. Government made buildings now take forever or straight up fail.

Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.

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> western homeless crisis

Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?

The US and Canada (and to some extent elsewhere) have been experiencing a lot of homelessness and open air drug use due to fentanyl, housing unaffordability, and "community" mental health treatment rather than "mental hospitals."

This is primarily an anglophone board so they are (perhaps inaccurately) referring to the Anglosphere which has far worse housing performance than elsewhere https://www.ft.com/content/dca3f034-bfe8-4f21-bcdc-2b274053f...

Global, I guess. It has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis

There's specific pages for some individual countries, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_crisis_in_the_United_S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_housing_in_Canada#A...

This one is about housing crisis, not "western homeless crisis".

At least in Europe it is not (yet?) causing very large scale of homelessness problem.

I find the name "housing crisis" misleading, because if I look at average floor area per capita, I think we should call this "expectations changed faster than buildings". For example https://doi.org/10.2908/ILC_HCMH01 (variation between 43 to 141).

I'd say it's a bit more complex as you have to deal with capital financing and a number of regulations like parking in cities that lead to issues.

Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Stockholm all have it.

US, Canada, Australia[1], Ireland [2], and many other places.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9vg923vkdko [2] https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/03/...

In rural Gabon, presumably I wouldn't be renting but would own my own unsafe shanty. It's really tempting. But living in Libreville has more of a ring to it.

> Out of sympathy they removed an option for the very-poor and haven't come up with a replacement solution.

That doesn't seem like a fair take. You're implying that the sympathetic people who outlawed poor houses are the very same people who won't build anything new. That's not true.

What? It's literally the same regulatory agency in this case, and more broadly it's the same ideological strain of banning doing X without also doing undesirable thing Y and not caring about whether that reduces the rate of X. Unless you are talking about the housing developers themselves, in which case you are falling for the same thing yourself.

"Ideological strains" arent people, nor are "agencies".

Democratic politics will always be about compromise. Compromise means you don't get do all your Y's. It's the purpose of the system. We will never (I hope) live in either the libertarian nor the socialist utopia, not just because neither of those places really exist, but also because democracy doesn't lead to that.

If you every find yourself thinking that "this problem would be solved if only we were closer to my utopia" then you're the ideological one.

I didn't say 'utopia'. I can name exactly the things I want changed, and exactly what the proximate effects will be of doing so, good and bad.

Yes, agencies are people. If you think that it's dishonest to castigate the SFHA for taking one action and not taking another because the one action was a little while ago and therefore there's been some personnel churn since, you are being unserious. Have you ever complained about past and present actions of e.g. Microsoft?

The problem is zoning and building codes, which combine to effectively ban ghettos.

People generally don't realize how much of the regulatory apparatus in the US comes from racist origins.

Making people live in slums/shacks isn't a solution to the western "homeless crisis".

This website has been often prone to "social justice" recently, I'm amazed somebody can get away with such an idiotic comment without being flagged to hell.

Houses are "carefully planed" because you don't want poor people to die in them due to poor construction, carbon monoxide when they need heat during winter, or a fire that would spread to other houses due to cheap materials, that's why,you know, the stuff that happens regularly in third world slums, but you can't fathom that fact.

Housing regulations have nothing to with protecting the people inside them.

They are there to outsource inspection costs to tax payers for the banks to protect their loans on the houses themselves.

And help nimbys protect property values.

And create more bureaucracy for former contractors as most inspectors are.

And reduce competition for existing contractors.

And increase revenues for housing materials retailers.

Housing regulations have zero benefit to the people who live in the house or don't live in the house because there aren't enough houses so people die in the cold.

I'd be happy with just allowing more low/middle-market housing development which is what eventually seeds low income housing. I don't think anyone's calling for more slums but rapidly building houses and less aggressive urban planning is the only way to solve what is easily the #1 social problem here in Canada and many parts of the US/Europe and Australia.

"Slums" in the west are mostly just old apartments that used to be middle class or cheap buildings in less 'desirable' locations. They aren't people living in shacks.

In a housing shortage those old buildings which would normally decline in rent still cost $2000/m in many cities like Toronto due to lack of supply. And no developer can afford all the headaches just to build a new affordable low-rent buildings either.

I have a better idea to solve the western "homeless crisis", tax your salary and capital gains much more to finance affordable public housing construction. That way, nobody dies in some hazardous shack you think should be allowed to be built by slum lords. Done.

Your "solutions" are so cynical you really want homeless people to die.

> tax your salary and capital gains much more to finance affordable public housing construction

I would have taken that position when I was younger so I won't be too critical. But IRL trusting centrists politicians to spend that money properly and actually build mass housing is mostly a pipe dream. They can't even build a single railroad in the country let alone hundreds of thousands of houses in the city proper.

Radicals rarely take government for long... and as long a capitalism is the only true wealth generator for the public I wouldn't gamble on the far-left being the party that achieves that rare feat (absent a dictatorship).

It's easier to just campaign for government to do less instead of more. Just let people build things they need. There's already massive pent up demand and private capital ready to build housing the second government lets them. It doesn't need risky advertising for more taxation.

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