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Comment by Gimpei | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.

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Okay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.

Well it's a fairly entertaining read as someone with no current ambitions of solving any of these crises.

More housing supply doesn’t house people who have no people to pay for those houses. It’s a wealth inequality issue we just don’t want to face.

Why is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?

The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits.

Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction.

Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.

What do you mean by "The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits."? Are you saying it's not obvious that being high all day with no income will eventually lead to eviction from whatever housing you had?

No I am saying your just so story of why homeless people are homeless does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness. Why would this be if your sounds-good-to-you explanation were the actual factor driving homelessness?

does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness

That's just because it's not true. Aspen, Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard and other places with the peak wealth inequality do not see more homelessness (or any homelessness worth mentioning). Liberal cities are the epicenters of homelessness because they all follow the same policies of enablement.

Here’s an example of actual research not your claims which seem to be fabricated from whatever you can free associate:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716220981864

What’s the homeless rate in the luxury enclaves you mention? I couldnt find reliable numbers. Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship - such enclaves can have their own housing dynamics (such as small populations and vacation homes) which don’t negate the larger trend we see when we examine many locales such as large cities and so on. So no, cherry picked counter examples don’t negate the larger statistical relationship between homelessness and inequality.

And attributing homelessness to “enablement policies” is another hot take. It’s just as plausible that enablement policies are enacted as a response to homelessness not a cause.

But at least now we seem to be beyond blaming homelessness on individual traits.

This research has nothing to do with wealth inequality or homelessness. It's simply documenting that young children form attachment bonds with consistent caregivers, whether that's mom, dad, grandma, or a stable daycare worker. The key word is stable. Kids need predictable, responsive caregiving from the same people over time. That's basic attachment theory, not a political statement about economic systems.

Friend, I think you may have gotten your links mixed up.

I am sorry, I cannot read that "actual research" but I figure it did not include places with the most inequality, like ones I've listed?

>Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship

If you know statistics then you might be familiar with the "correlation does not imply causation" turn of phrase. And yes, any counter example destroys a causation claim.

Does an article need to supply all this expertise or can it not just be descriptive?

Also, why does it get upvotes so quickly?

My pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.

I think many like to think HN is excepted.

> Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.

We call that “the voting populace”

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives one.”

Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point?

Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied.

Upton Sinclair was not a meat processor.

> which is fundamentally a housing supply issue

There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.

> There are plenty of houses.

Are there?

Home ownership is a functional unmovable number in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

The problem is that we only have plenty of houses... that are under occupied.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...

We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.

We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...

https://ishc.com/wp-content/uploads/YMCAs2.pdf

> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.

Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/wealthy-bay-area-town-a...

The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...

SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.

Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.

Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)

>Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down.

It makes a lot of sense when you realize who builds and brings capital. Debeers for an extreme example.

I understand why building doesn't happen. OP is saying that even if you build, it's hopeless because demand is endlessly met by rich people keeping prices high.

Let’s say prices go down until houses are sold at cost. Even at cost people with little money won’t be able to buy houses.

Labor costs and a big part of materials cost is driven by landlords

Even when rents go down to cost, they are still going to be greater than zero and labor and materials won't turn free. Cost won't ever be so low that one could afford housing while doing nothing productive and even less so while indulging in a drug habit.

The comment I'm replying to is about working-class families who are priced out

Since the US had been deindustrialized, most of the working class is now in service sector and does not produce much. Thus service labor is discounted and the construction labor is at premium. Basically, if it costs 1000 man-days of labor to build a house all in (materials, tooling, labor itself) it will have to cost 1000*k man-hours of waiting tables, where k is the discount coefficient between doing a skilled back-breaking labor and taking orders from the tables to the kitchen. At some values of k there is just not enough working days in the lifetime.

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