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Comment by wilfra | Hacker News Reader

Good video. I disagree that the government should do anything about it though. What's the alternative, make them homeless? If there is both supply and demand, let people do what they want. If San Francisco allowed this, there would be far fewer homeless people, but the only options they give them are $2,000 a month apartments or living in the streets. So lots of people live in the streets.

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No, the alternative is to have the government build subsidized housing and then enact strict price controls so that even poor families can afford to live reasonably. That's how it was done in Singapore for example and is why they can live in "spacious" 30-70 m^2 apartments despite having a higher population density than Hong Kong. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore.

Yes this. The HK govt is appalling in its disregard of the poverty line. (>6yrs in HK, and I'm no SG fanboy, but it is SO far beyond HK in this, there is just no comparison)

Can you quantify this? HK has one of the best welfare systems in the world.

I think the problem in HK is the number of undocumented immigrants. No papers, no open borders, surrounded mostly by water, these people are easy to exploit. I was told that many of the construction workers' (building skyscrapers) wages barely amount to the cost of the day's food.

It's sort of amazing the people in these conditions care enough about quality of work to build buildings that don't fall down.

Cough, ahem, well, it was also explained to me that there may be some systematic labor-related problems with construction quality in those buildings. Not exactly related to worker pay-rate, but the gist is that they tend to pour the concrete too wet (because it is easier/faster to work). This is probably because of productivity-based bonus pay for foremen. The difference in strength isn't enough to cause a building to fail under nominal conditions, but catastrophic failure is more probable in some destructive event (weather, earthquake, explosion, etc).

An agency colleague and I did volunteer design and marketing work for a Hong Kong food bank (St. James). At the time it was one of the few food banks in HK (I don't know if this has changed or not, but I'd be surprised if it has). Part of our initial work was research and I was pretty shocked that the HK govt didn't even set a national poverty line. Given a rough line of half median income, over a million HK residents were easily below at the time.

If you're talking strictly social security, even the government acknowledges it has a problem.

Here's a recent SCMP article where the welfare dept itself states that at least 40% of HK residents in poverty aren't covered by welfare.

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1062025/700000-sl...

(mirror: http://goo.gl/GxyTw )

The good news is that the HK govt did, finally, just implement a standard poverty line (half median income). This is the first step and a long time in coming.

I disagree it is the governments job to give people a place to live. From the sounds of it, Hong Kong already does a lot of this. At some point, people need to take care of themselves.

It is absolutely the governments job to give people places to live if they are unable (not unwilling) to do so on their own. The difficulty lies in determining who is truly unable and who is simply unwilling.

It is absolutely your opinion that it is their job.

It is the job of the people to determine what the job of the government is.

That was my point.

You are free to hold your opinion. But at least be upfront with that you consider it an ideological issue as there obviously are reasonable alternatives to having poor people live in prison cells.

they are not being forced to live there, they are choosing to do so and paying rent. they are free to move anywhere else they want, including across the border to mainland china where it is much cheaper.

>I disagree it is the governments job to give people a place to live. From the sounds of it, Hong Kong already does a lot of this. At some point, people need to take care of themselves.

The government IS the people. It's not some alien body as some people (mostly in the US) seem to think.

The government is the people voting to elect some representatives, so they can get some things done for them ("the country") that need massive co-ordination and central planning.

Of course it can go astray (politicians taking advantage of their power for their own benefit and such), but it's not like there such thing as "perfection" anywhere in life, be it private or public.

Right and if the people of Hong Kong thought the government should be providing suitable housing for everybody who comes to Hong Kong (note that many of these people are foreigners) then they would vote in politicians who would make that happen.

Not everybody who comes to HK, but permanent residents in HK. Foreigners shouldn't get to come and grab resources. One of the reasons property prices in HK is so ridiculously high is because of many mainlander speculators coming in buying up apartments, jacking demand even higher. The reason this city needs government intervention is because the government controls the majority of land supply, and there isn't nearly enough to satisfy everybody.

They could set up an emigration plan to somewhere less crowded.

As the video pointed out, only about half of government officials in Hong Kong are directly elected by the population. For the remainder, there is little pressure or incentive to get anything done in this regard.

Are governments here for the sake of their people? Or are people here for the sake of their governments?

A hungry homeless person is everyone's problem and a huge risk. No matter how you slice it, you end up paying the price: the value of your house goes down, the crime rate goes up, etc. It is a myth that you can escape poverty. Sure, you can move to an expensive gated community with a white gloved guard shooing away the "undesirables", but why do you think it's so expensive?

Moreover, a hungry homeless person is a security risk. How many iPhones, GPS's, laptops, etc. are stolen in a smash-and-grab incidents? How many people get hurt? No, not by your friendly neighborhood homeless lady, but by a person who feels they have no other choice but to steal or a person who is hooked on an addictive substance and can't stop?

Poverty also does not take a lot of people. A few percent here and there will cause enough headaches to become noticeable.

And poverty is chronic in society. It's not like if you took all the homeless, poor, and hungry and shipped them off to some unknown land you'd rid of the problem. No, instead more people would be pushed into the margins, becoming poor. You have to treat the cause.

Therefore, if poverty is inherent in certain societal setups, if it is everyone's problem (i.e.: everyone pays the cost) and it takes only a small percentage of people being poor to become a big problem, it is in the interest of everyone to change the societal setup so that poverty is minimized. Your original point was that it's not the government's job to do this. I argue that it is. The government (by the people and for the people) would not be doing it's job if it wasn't taking care of me or the person next to me.

As an aside, some might argue that private charities work much more efficiently than governments when it comes to homelessness/poverty/hunger. Personally, I believe a balanced approach works best. Big slow moving government projects with lots of oversight and restrictions coupled with flexible and quick-acting private charities are much more effective than either of the two.

Wish I could upvote this enough.

Not to mention the toll on the children of the poor who do not get enough good nutrition, education, or a sense of safety and permanence to grow up to be respectable, law-abiding citizens.

That's what I don't get about allegedly intellectual, allegedly fiscally conservative people who are anti-welfare. They think that it's about not "giving a free ride" to people who "don't deserve" it. They are neither intellectual nor fiscally savvy enough to understand that there is always a cost, and to help and house people with welfare -- even people who will never "contribute" -- will cost far less in the long run than the ripple effect from feeling righteous.

You're going to end up paying for it one way or another. Either in expensive prisons with armed guards, or by intervening before things get out of hand.

Is that really how it works in SG? I've been told housing prices are outrageous there and if you're too poor to afford public housing you get shipped off to the poor house and are not allowed to leave unless you can find someone to take responsibility for you.

Note: I've only visited SG so this is 2nd hand info through my friends in SG.

That's sort of how it works here. The Singaporean housing market is divided into HDB (public housing) and Condo (private housing). Condo's nowadays start at around SGD 1m for something small and basic, but aren't such a bad deal with banks charging interest of just 1.8% on a 40 year loan. Most Singaporeans can't afford this with an average monthly wage of just SGD 2,000 per month.

Public housing on the other hand is heavily subsidised and somewhat controlled for PRs and citizens. FYI Singapore was a giant slum up until the government formed the HDB board in the 1960s. The CPF (Singapore's retirement fund) can be used as a deposit against your apartment which nowadays start at SGD 300,000 if you go far from the city. As you can guess, this results in many people having a lot of cash tied up in non-liquid assets when they retire that leads to a host of other issues.

I moved to Singapore 3 years ago from Australia and love the place and prefer life here to Hong Kong any day.

>Condo's nowadays start at around SGD 1m for something small and basic

1,000,000 SGD is about 800,000 USD.

But effectively half that with the (subsidized?) interest rates.

Well, that makes around 1200 EUR.

So, that's even better than the "common" (not avg) monthly wage in many places in Europe. Indeed, cost of living in Singapore must be over the roof…

48% of the HK population already live in government provided/subsidized housing, that's already very high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Hong_Kong#Housing_st...

I was in Singapore and now I'm living in HK. Reading that SG has higher density than HK made was surprising, because here in HK there are so many needle-like apartment buildings, but I didn't see that so much in SG.

I think the reason is that HK does have bigger area than SG but actually far less land is being used in HK (many hills), so practically speaking, the density is higher in HK :)

Public housing or housing vouchers are one thing. Price controls are another. Price controls are absolutely, without a single empirical doubt, the worst policy you could enact. You might as well start torching your housing supply...the effects are the same.

Hyperbolic, but accurate when you've accounted for that.

Vouchers without controls drive up prices, becoming a transfer from govt to landlords.

Public owned housing is the answer.

Vouchers with artificial limitations on new development drive up prices, becoming a transfer from govt to landlords

Eliminating artificial limitations on new development is the answer.

People are driven to these places by economic opportunities. They are not living in cages because they have nothing else to do, but because they want to live in Hong Kong, even much better conditions in mainland China is of no interest to them. This is like how people abandon their well built, fully paid out 3-bedroom apartments in mainland Russia and flock to Moscow where they share rooms with strangers, with 5-10 people living together in an apartment in their 30s. This isn't poverty, this is how people try to escape poverty. They cannot be helped to do it (otherwise more people will flock in - you can't move all China/all Russia to Hong Kong/Moscow), and should not be banned from trying (that kills economic progress, with Russians staying in Russian province means they will simply slowly die of vodka, in Moscow they might do something useful, i think same goes to Chinese).

> the government build subsidized housing and then enact strict price controls

You're aware that the US has been doing this since the 1950s, right? And it hasn't worked as well for us?

Or, take money from people who are minted and have lots of money and use said money to make these poor people's lives less awful.

Wealth distribution on this planet is fucking terrible.

That works once, then it stops working in the future and backfires because people would no longer be motivated to create wealth in that jurisdiction. Which means no jobs and no tax revenue.

How long does it take to stop working? I'm living in Copenhagen, and it seems to have been working here for quite a while now. And it makes the city much nicer for everyone. As a middle-class professional, I don't need the social welfare system myself (at least, not currently), but I still do benefit from the quality of life that comes from living in a city with very low crime, relatively low poverty, and reasonably good (though far from perfect) economic equality.

Occasionally people do leave, whether for tax reasons or other reasons, but on the whole even the wealthy agree that the quality of life you get from living here is worth the expense paid in taxes, compared to moving somewhere that's more unequal and more violent. If anything I would guess there is a net influx of well-off people, and there would be more of one if immigration rules were loosened, to make it easier for wealthy people to move here from outside Europe.

> How long does it take to stop working?

For Denmark, about another 7 years. Why do you think the government is acting the way it does? (For those not familiar with the situation, pursuing a reform strategy in straight opposition of explicit pre-election promises). By then, the baby-boomers will have retired and the smallest generation in modern history is left to pay for everything.

As for crime, there is no evidence that low inequality causes low crime rates, or the opposite. Significantly more inequal Switzerland and Singapore has lower homicide rates.

> As for crime, there is no evidence that low inequality causes low crime rates, or the opposite.

This study disagrees: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s...

That's some nice confirmation bias you've got going on there.

Do you honestly believe the ultra-rich work for money?

Imagine, if you were a multi-millionaire, would you go to a job you hated for 60 hours a week?

Do you honestly believe that there is no level of taxation where the ultra-rich (and the moderately rich which is where most tax-revenue comes from anyway - there are just many, many more of them) will react and leave?

Can you provide a source/study for this?

You need a source to confirm that if you take the wealth away from the rich people in your tiny island nation, other people are not going to be motivated to create wealth there in the future?

Hong Kong and Singapore thrive because they are low tax, low regulation havens for the rich. Start enacting 'eat the rich' policies and the rich will go elsewhere.

Yeah, you're saying it as a fact so I assume the scenario has played out before and has been documented.

You're implying that it could possibly be inaccurate, so I assume the opposite scenario has played out before and has been documented. Can you provide a link or source?

Not really. Wealth attracts people primarily due to change in relative status as compared with other people. So if you do progressive taxation, someone who makes 1 million before tax still ranks higher than someone who makes 2 million before tax, even if ends up that they make 700,000 and 1,200,000 respectively. Due to the marginal utility curve of having more money, they really aren't that different off in other non-status related respects either.

It certainly can have adverse affects on investment payoffs that distort market logic; if you could figure out a way to progressively tax consumer consumption instead of income you could get around that.

Rich people who live in Hong Kong do not view their relative wealth like people who live in Manhatten, because they surely travel frequently and are thus acutely aware of just how much richer they are than everybody else on the planet, while rich people in Manhatten can get trapped in the cognitive bubble you are describing and misunderstand their relative wealth.

Singapore, being a rich island nation, works the same. If they started taxing the shit out of their rich it would certainly result in many of those people leaving the country and many, many more not setting up shop their in the first place.

Surely rich people in Manhattan never travel?

Sure they do but on average a millionaire from HK is going to travel internationally a lot more - especially to poor countries - than a millionaire from New York, simply due to geography and living on a small island. All they have to do is walk over the border into Shenzhen to get a sense of just how rich they are. One could conceivably grow up in NYC and never grow to truly appreciate how much their life differs from those in the poorest parts of the World.

Queens/The Bronx/Harlem aren't that far from the Upper East Side... They're not Shenzhen by any means, but they should serve as a decent reminder, especially if they're aware that those places are relatively rich compared to lots of places.

There are plenty of poor people in Manhattan, inequality is very high. But maybe you are right and rich people in Manhattan have more opportunity and desire to insulate themselves. I wouldn't know.

to rebut this sticking to your libertarian premise (which I don't agree with, but you might actually listen then!):

Government intervention caused this. The government strictly controls which land can be built on, and restricts supply so much that this is what is left. If government stopped restricting which land developers could buy, build on, and sell as housing (which is a bad idea for another reasons, but not libertarian ones) then this problem would go away.

Libertarians are not the only ones who believe it is not the governments responsibility to provide for the poor.

It is the responsibility of society and communities to end situations that even allow for the poor to exist, otherwise we are simply sending people to their doom.

Well hey, I'll get on board with that. Sounds like an impossibility though unless you're a country like Kuwait with an endless supply of money you don't have to work for and a tiny population.

Maybe, if there weren't many wealthy people out in the world buying worthless shit with their money, power and influence.

Coming from a family of humble means, poor, whom emigrated to the US from Mexico I can tell you that a lot of the reasons that poor people are poor is because they choose to be poor. So forgive me if I'm not too sympathetic about poor people.

In the USA of all the friends that I had I was the only one to go to college. We were all in the same boat but I chose to study and do my homework and they did not.

Then there were lots of other students that not only would they not care about their studies but they actually made it worse for the rest of us in a daily basis. They got into gangs, smoke pot, bullied other students, where disruptive during class.

You know what, fuck them. They chose to waste their youth, they chose to do nothing with their lives so I don't give a fuck about them being poor. I was there, in the trenches with them and I can tell you that nobody forced them to waste their lives. They did it of their own will.

No, poor people who breed are sending people to their doom.

Let me get this straight. You think that if it were allowed to build on every square foot of HK, that there would be no housing problem in HK? What additional problems do you imagine would be created by the paving-over of every unit of land?

> which is a bad idea for another reasons, but not libertarian ones

I don't think it's a good idea, Libertarians do.

If San Francisco allowed the sale of contaminated food there would be demand for it from people who have no choice. This is really a consumer rights issue. The landlords should provide a basic standard of safety for such high rents. The scope for exploitation is huge and the government should protect people from that. The size issue is less important.

If landlords are exploiting people and providing unsafe places to live, then that should be dealt with. I haven't seen anybody other than you mention those things though. People are just appalled by how small and ugly the rooms/cages are and they feel sorry for the people who choose to live there. The government shouldn't tell people who want to pay to live there that they cannot do so.

They mentioned in the video concerns about hygiene and electrical safety, and cockroaches. Twenty people sharing a toilet, how well do you think that works? What I am suggesting it telling landlords what they can and cannot do, not the residents. Every slum in the world has numerous landlords that don't maintain acceptable standards. To pretend that very poor people have the consumer freedom to challenge that is ignorant.

> I disagree that the government should do anything about it though. What's the alternative, make them homeless? If there is both supply and demand, let people do what they want

Does letting people do what they want include building without permits (esp. on allotments not designated for housing)? It doesn't work this way, governments already exercise strong control over the housing market due to laws and regulations.

I don't live in HK, but where I live, the large property funds (whose demand has nothing to do with housing) have a dramatic effect on prices - they cause an artificial shortage by purchasing everything on the market, thereby increasing the value of their own portfolio (and their rents). So just "letting people do what they want" isn't going to help the housing situation, it just increases the GDP. The government should use the increased taxes (if any - too many loopholes) to compensate the negative effects.

The problem is there is no supply and lots of demand. I'm too lazy to google for this, but the latest figure is something like demand is 2-3x greater than land supply. The government absolutely have to do something about this or this city will implode.

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