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Comment by lorddoig | Hacker News Reader

Why are tents such a bad thing? If it comes down to a choice between waxing lyrical about hopelessness or buying some tents in bulk then it really seems like a no brainer. It's a band-aid for sure but it's better than this, no?

Also I see the minimum wage as harmful in this situation - you can tell yourself and the world that an hours worth of human time is always worth at least x USD, but it will never make it true. Policymakers do not set minimum wages with someone struggling to get off the streets in mind, but rather with someone in an altogether much less dire situation, and in doing so they raise the barrier too high. Hiring a homeless person for $5/hr would in many cases bring great utility to both parties: outlawing such transactions seems absurd.

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Because tents alone are not enough. You need to account for sewage and sanitation, power, and all the rest of dealing with a large number of homo sapiens crammed into a small space.

The thing is as a society we have plenty of resources and could enable most people to live with at least a minimal level of stability and security. But we don't want to. We've decided that our greatest economic centers work best when they're seething rat piles with the King Rat being pulled down and replaced every so often.

Your comment about tents is a bit much. There is a better point to be made about innovating on lower cost housing situations (building and design codes usually drive up cost). Can we make safe buildings with shared recreational and common areas to cut down on square footage and lower rent? Can we save on space and costs in the long run by improving noise insulation? Why couldn't there be a WalMart (or whatever your preferred alternatives are) on the bottom floors of a high rise apartment?

Though I fully agree about minimum wage laws. It's a big risk to hire someone off the street if you can't even start her at a lower introductory wage that ramps up aggressively with proven performance. Governments that mandate high wages must logically assume responsibility for figuring out a way to make sure everyone can do something worth $12/hour (or whatever the wage is). Alternately, an aggressive guaranteed income or earned income tax credit can help with this sort of scenario. But it needs to be paired with a drop in the minimum wage to work.

Of course tents are not a long term solution, but vagrancy has been a problem for centuries and we still haven't solved it despite much chatter just like this. My point is that assuming we can't do anything substantial/long-run now then surely tents are better than nothing while we take another 50 years trying to figure this stuff out? They're functional, they're cheap, and they're leagues better than sleeping behind a dumpster. Siting them might be a headscratcher, and one I can't really comment on being several thousand miles away from SF.

>> Why are tents such a bad thing?

Fire hazards, mold and mildew, there's no real security, they are probably left behind creating a garbage problem...

Right. It's substandard, but the government isn't building or subsidizing alternatives, so just banning tents doesn't really help.

There are ways of building structures better than tents relatively cheaply, but it would almost certainly be illegal. And even tents require land to put them on. And no one wants homeless people living near them.

Minimum wage screws the people whose labor isn't worth $7 an hour, but it does help the minimum wage workers whose employers can afford it. So it can be a net benefit. Arguably, since those people now have to compete against all the new unemployed people who want their job, on things other than wage.

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