Comment by benten10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benten10 | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you!

I can see how one might feel 'just move' is a good argument, but really NO! In chinatowns all over the country, whenever low-income residents are being priced out, the argument is always 'you can just find another place to stay'. They've lived there for decades, if not more. That's where all the people they know are. They are poor but they do have a support system, that lives with them. When they move away, not only are they economically helpless, but also socially helpless.

To tell people to just 'move away' is very dense, IMHO. You might not feel the same way about places you live in, but some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live. Consider the fact that when there's natural disasters/flood/earthquake/radiation leaks, there's not insignificant percentage of people who would rather stay where they are and suffer the consequences rather than move away. Which is why evacuations often have to be FORCED! People would rather die than move away from their homes. You cannot just say 'they can just move away': the concerns are valid.

> some people feel VERY STRONGLY emotionally about where they live

Those feelings are a luxury. Taxpayers should not be forced to bear the cost of someone's emotional attachments.

I would prefer tax dollars be spent on relocation assistance + job placement to help get people on a sustainable path.

I can also understand that. Now these people, not making a lot of money. They at least had a social support system, happy with friends families etc. They had a place they could call their own, and the pride that comes with it. You've taken their support system out.

In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.

> In short, it is cheaper to build them houses and put them there, than to put them in prisons. Whether people get happy in places they like, or they get pissed at the system and live in prison, it's your tax dollars either way.

This solution makes me really uncomfortable.

You're completely disregarding the individual and saying that we are responsible for creating an environment for them and ultimately, we are responsible for their behavior.

These are independent, adult people who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions, good or bad, and living with the consequences of those decisions.

It shouldn't be the public's responsibility to remove them from neighborhoods or 'build them houses and put them there' as you said.

If low income people want to live in one of the most expensive areas in the world, they can. But they shouldn't expect to live well.

You know, it's quite possible to treat adults as independent agents who are responsible for their own actions and yet acknowledge (and possibly even be sympathetic to) the fact that these same adults can be subject to external forces which put them in a really tough spot.

Of course. But what about the people who are in a tough spot because of internal forces? Surely you don't think the woman in the first video fell pregnant a second time because of external forces?

Yes, some people do have the story of "got laid off after 35 years, company stole my pension, now I'm homeless", or "had a long, expensive medical emergency, now am homeless". You can pinpoint the external force. But this piece showed one thing in particular that was striking: it seems it's rarely one major event that plunges someone into a bad situation like these (consider that none of these videos had one "this is what happened" sound bite). It seems like it's the snowball effect of bad decision after bad decision.

What do we do with people who are in really tough spots because of the compounding behavior of bad decisions? "We invest in the educational system so kids learn how to avoid these spots" -- ok, great, but what do we do with THESE people, today?

Accepting the "external forces" thing is a slippery slope, because now somebody is the arbiter of You Did It To Yourself vs. It's Not Your Fault. Who can we trust with that position? Is it even moral to make that judgement? Was this whole comment satire on being the arbiter of justice?

Grapes of Wrath, iPhone edition.

edit - it seems strange that many well paid technocrats will happily hold sway on the possibilities of sea-steading, or building fusion reactors, or anything involving a giant laser, or suchlike, but throw up their hands and declare the problem of houses for the poor people they or their workforce are displacing to be an insurmountable fact of the economy that can only be solved by the poor people moving to somewhere that hasn't yet become cool. And to be utterly cynical about the whole thing, if rich folk really want to build a city on a hill, they probably shouldn't price out all the trades if they want it to function in the long run.

Why not?

If enough of us decide that emotions are worth supporting, why shouldn't taxpayers make that a priority?

If you convince enough to change the laws, then the nature of our system is that they will be convinced. The question is, can you convince enough. Perhaps I see many luxuries as not worth supporting, at least not until other problems are solved (and being government revenue is limited, sometimes being low priority means not being funded at all).

I think you mean 'people ho pay more tax'. People living in poor neighborhoods typically pay taxes as well - on some of their income, most of their consumption, and on their residences since their rent is inclusive of property tax.

I do not understand this insistence that money spent on building more housing here is bad whereas spending the same amount of money on having 'those people' move out of sight to somewhere else is somehow good.

I do not understand this insistence that money spent on building more housing here is bad whereas spending the same amount of money on having 'those people' move out of sight to somewhere else is somehow good.

Where does this housing get built? Why would you build it on some of the most expensive land (SV) in the lower 48?

I think the gap in your understanding is because you're just not listening to everyone telling you that the government's limited money will go further if it doesn't have to render/compensate landowners in the most expensive real estate market in the country.

It's ludicrous to suggest that the government spend money buying land to build co-op housing in SV.

The problem in SV and much of SF is the unwillingess of property owners to tolerate too much upward building and their use of the private right of action granted by the California Environmental Quality Act to stymie development at the planning permission stage. Incumbent landowners try to maintain the value of their investment by limiting any increases in density. We might, for example, do better to abandon zoning and instead set up mechanisms to auction development rights, eg http://marketurbanism.com/2012/01/06/the-coase-theorem-in-la...

Living in an area can be more than an emotional decision - for example, nearby family members might provide free childcare. Moving elsewhere would cause childcare to be a (large) financial burden.

A family on the edge doesn't always have the luxury to move.

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