She suspected the shock had been caused by exposed wiring in the basement, where there was a pool of standing water. In some states, she could have withheld her rent until these safety issues were addressed. Georgia granted tenants no such rights. Nothing prohibited landlords from kicking a renter out for reporting hazardous conditions to the authorities, what’s referred to as “retaliatory eviction.”
So “she got the boot but we passed a law 100 years too late that might stop half of this problem but still won’t let you withhold rent for unsafe housing” is supposed to be OK?
> So “[fake quote containing strawman opinion about rents]” is supposed to be OK
I said nothing about this, despite your insidious insinuation. I’m saying that taking a quote out of context and/or altering it by cutting off a very relevant bit in order to make it more outrage-inducing is bad. Or, to emply your rhethoric, is any amount of misleading and lying in order to induce rage in readers, as long as it’s rage about the “right” thing, supposed to be OK?
Why is renting the wrong answer? From afar, it seems like there are plenty of thriving countries and cities where renters are much more the norm and accepted than in the US, where they're viewed (to borrow and tweak a quote) as temporarily-embarrassed homeowners?
Some of them, like Germany, struggle through problems with their systems as well. But their problems don't appear to be as devastating as the ones facing the USA.
In Germany it is quite hard to get a renter out. The rights of the tenant are very much protected, exactly so that people feel secure in their (rented) homes. I can't imagine living in a home where the landlord could easily terminate the lease.
As I read the story, this is not a termination of the lease, but rather an expiration of the lease and an election on the part of the landlord to not offer a subsequent lease.
Tenant and landlord mutually agree to a lease contract of defined term. That term runs; both sides live up to the agreement. Tenant and landlord do not mutually agree a follow-on contract. Tenant moves out.
Strikingly, this crisis of housing insecurity is erupting in America’s richest, most rapidly developing cities. New York,... Washington, D.C., ... Seattle is close behind. In Los Angeles and Charlotte, San Jose and Nashville, the trends are similar. Unemployment is at a generational low; corporate profits have surged; ... Yet the teachers, maintenance workers, supermarket cashiers, and medical assistants who help sustain these cities are getting relentlessly priced out of them.
I am not sure if this is naivety or if the author is being disingenuous to make a point, but the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an addiction problem, where it's not an addiction problem, it's almost always a mental health problem.
Not to minimize the plight of Cokethia, as the economy is clearly broken (and getting rapidly worse) for those who can't demand premium wages.
No. There is a lack of affordable housing because the economy doesn’t have a way to cope with widening gaps of productivity (not to mention systemic and historical racism).
However, the vast majority (writing from a phone on train so I’ll have to challenge you to prove me wrong rather than cite, but the statistics are clear on this) of homeless people are deep in the throes of addiction or, mentally unstable.
The working family that can’t make ends meet absolutely exists, I am not in anyway challenging that.
But, go to one of these tent cities yourself , where these exploding homeless populations exist, and it will be apparent that people are so addicted that there is not rent that would be “affordable” as their basic human needs aren’t even being met for them to be functioning in a positive economic way.
Essentially these people are sick, in a genuinely diagnosable way, and that sickness manifests in self harm. IMO, it’s pretty clear that this mass sickness (primarily the opiate crisis) is the leading cause of these exploding homeless populations.
If you define taking pain pills to get high as “taking too much medicine” and then making bad decisions while withdrawing is “too little medicine”, then yes that is a very significant minority of people ending up homeless.
But it doesn’t account for people addicted to meth, or alcohol, or people suffering from schizophrenia, etc.
I have not gone so far to make a proposal, which would depend on the hypothetical resources available to execute a plan.
I am just providing context for how to think about the problem in a way that (much) more closely maps to reality than low-earners getting displaced due to gentrification and wage stagnation.
I take issue with the fact that your map of reality is precisely what causes people to slip through the cracks into homelessness. Thinking about the issue as a sickness is actually just an avoidance of the problem. You are trying to reduce and abstract it away to the domain of medicine rather than to address it head on as a complex system of systems.
It appears to me now that we need more than one word to describe the various kinds of homeless: one group of mentally ill/drug addicts that can’t keep it together under best circumstances, one group that might just need education/training to get into the groove, one group that’s priced out by urbanization despite holding a proper job, one group that actually likes their freedom.
Lumping the four groups together creates a great deal of confusion - you can often find people arguing that homeless need more homes vs homeless need job training vs mental health care etc. We’re just talking about different people.
Absolutely this. I’ve done a some volunteer work with the first category through a wonderful non-profit, but it was sad to see just how lost some people were in addiction. Comparing them to someone who is otherwise sane, but disadvantaged by some aspect of their life, is a thoroughly unfair comparison.
The chronically homeless are almost all in the mental illness/drug abuse category. The ones that just need training and/or already have a job and are priced out can access lots of services, move, and otherwise find a way out.
In this situation it’s really hard to blame corporations for all the problems when the key issue - zoning restrictions that prevent the construction of dense, low-income housing - is entirely caused by the government and by extension the people who elect them.
Allow developers the freedom to build huge apartment buildings and the housing crisis will be severely mitigated. The answer from the left is always more taxes, more government, more red tape and it blinds them to the true problem.
It's worth noting that most housing developers need to be prompted and incentivized pretty aggressively to build affordable housing in high-value areas even when they're allowed by law to do so.
Usually what happens is they raise or borrow a bunch of money to build much higher margin housing (e.g. hip condos instead of affordable apartments) until the market is saturated with still more unaffordable housing.
Without explicit incentive structures or requirements like, "You must build X number of affordable units for every Y number of luxury units." things tend to stay pretty broken.
It's not surprising that they prioritize higher margin housing, since 'luxury' apartments are barely any different than affordable housing units. It doesn't cost a developer that much extra for them to dress up a basic apartment as luxury with a stainless steel fridge and granite counter top when they're doing it in bulk.
I will grant you that it may take subsidies and artificially low loans to incentivize developers to build low-income housing. But in many places that already exists. The real issue is there is no land to build, and the permitting process takes forever and ultimately results in a negative outcome more often than not.
The California Assembly recently passed AB-1482 which will lead to statewide rent control if signed by the governor. I personally believe more in increasing the supply than attempting to control the existing supply, but no matter what, signing this without demanding SB-50-like concessions to make it easier to increase supply near transit was a real miss IMO. SB-50 got pushed into 2020.
What do you think would happen to all that “luxury housing” if there wasn’t all the red tape and we allowed as much as the market could bear?
In earlier eras the answer was it didn’t stay luxury housing, but moved down market as shinier and newer buildings kept coming online, and as overeager developers built more fancy housing than there turned out to be a market for.
Then when you have all those landlords and more housing units than are needed, there’s price pressure all the way down, and a lot of upward mobility as people slide up into slightly nicer homes, leaving a bunch of reasonable quality homes open all the way to the bottom of the market.
We haven’t had anything like free market supply of housing since the FDR era, so this example is so far removed from living memory that most people can’t even imagine it.
That has not been my observation from my environment or from the data over the last couple decades.
Usually what happens, is in order to keep the asset value high they'll sit on vacancies for as long as they possibly can to avoid having to recognize a lower value on the property, until it becomes advantageous to do so as a write down after they're done leveraging themselves based on the inflated asset price.
What you’re advocating for is exactly the status quo that got SF into this mess. “Build X affordable units per Y luxury units” has been the go to line for every shitty NIMBY supervisor for the past 10+ years and we’ve clearly seen all it does is result in a lot less of both.
We need housing in absolute numbers, real units to fill the very real jobs to housing imbalance of 150,000 more jobs than housing units that were added to the city over the past decade. And we need real units of subsidized housing as well for those at the very bottom of the economy. What we don’t need is feel-good percentage requirements where the denominator just ends up being close to 0.
Also, so-called luxury housing is often like ~15% more expensive than the median housing price in many areas. It’s a name that makes it easy to hate on, but like it or not it is housing for real middle and upper middle class people. The amount of hate it gets, you would think we’re talking about housing for billionaires or something.
I'm not advocating for anything. I don't have a horse in this race.
I'm just pointing out that changes in zoning alone don't tend to work to increase affordable housing supply for already high-value, desirable areas due to the inherent market incentive for a real estate developer to try to make more money by making more expensive housing units.
> It's worth noting that most housing developers need to be prompted and incentivized pretty aggressively to build affordable housing in high-value areas even when they're allowed by law to do so.
No car company produces cars for people living on the minimum wage and yet a great many people living on the minimum wage can and do afford cars. Building new housing reduces the value of existing housing.
Indeed. This gets at the root of the problem. Housing can't be both affordable and a great investment at the same time. The latter requires high (and increasing) asset value which eventually precludes the former being increasingly affordable.
The problem with housing is a lot deeper rooted than basic Econ 101 supply & demand models can address.
Cars ARE housing, hence the urgency to have them. When everything else falls through, you live out of your car, and move it on when the police bang on the window.
The article says you need to work 127 hours a week at minimum wage to afford a median two bedroom rent. Is just building more housing enough to close that gap especially when most housing built in the high growth, urban areas is aimed at luxury living?
I think people get fixated on high-density urban construction and miss the impact that is available by simply allowing the next increment of infill in the 80-90% of US urban land that is currently restricted to single family houses on large lots.
If 80% of the housing units in Atlanta suddenly had the option to add a garage apartment, I would expect to see an enormous improvement in the housing market.
Cases like Minneapolis, which basically just made this change, will be important to watch going forward.
No, you have to get people who live nearest each other to be an organized community. Doesn't matter if it's houses, pods, or tents. Doesn't matter what type of community either.
To fix that through market mechanisms, you have to create a glut of housing, so huge as to make its prices go down, at least at the low end. This would affect not only new but also of course the existing housing stock.
Since a house is seen (in US) as an investment and is expected to generally appreciate, this would go very much against the "reasonable expectations" of many people.
You dont need that. All you need is to not make it illegal to build Geos and Skodas. Zone regs right now makes it only possible to develop Mercedes and Audi's.
Look at Houston. The city has literally no zoning laws. Want to build a dwelling that is as small as a coffin in a tiny parcel of land? Ok. Want to build a small house in the middle of a commercial alley? Great!
Houston is by far the cheapest urban area per sqft in the entire US.
Imagine what would happen if you did away with zoning AND HUD. America would build so much that it would transform the homeless issue may in less than 1 generation.
Let them build Geos and Skodas, wherever, and see prices fall
Developers don't have any interest in the occupants beyond their money. After the first wave of sales or rents, they pass the torch. The problem is with the people involved. It's hard to get the ones affected to be involved.
Can low income people ...take off work to plan their community? ...possess the capacity to help? ...have the stability to persist through it? ...be happy in high density? etc.
I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy.
It works for the mobile wealthy, sure. I'll effectively never have to worry about paying for the rent unless I decided to move to like, Manhattan, and probably a ton of HN readers won't either.
It works way better I think to give people a small plot of land, build them a basic house, and let them crack on with it. It's much better for someone to end up with a home in a state of disrepair and have to figure that out, than have a literal lord turf them out. Give a man a fish vs. teach them how to, that sort of thing.
An apartment could also work though the legal structure is a bit more difficult.
To put it another way - people who have literally zero capital are capital-F fucked. You can only ever apply a series of band-aids to that sort of situation, you can't actually fix it.
The poorest people I've seen in council housing or in more rural areas have a hell of a lot more dignity than someone bouncing from apartment to apartment in an expensive city despite potentially being in "poverty" statistically.
In brief - renting is financialization, if you don't have enough Money Points, you go and die. Simple, right?
> I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy.
I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen.
Housing became less and less affordable in rural areas because the people weren't needed there anymore. If we had provided some model to allow people to stay where they really wanted to, which, for most people, is close to friends and family, despite the lack of need for them the economy would have cratered. We are entering a similar time for dense urban areas, where there are more people than there is need for them to be there.
The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019. However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move. They prefer to stay close to friends and family. That is the issue upon us, balancing the needs of the economy and the needs of the humanities.
Hang on, the problem Goodman has is not that she's not needed where she is: she has a job. Her problem is that there are literally no houses there that she can afford to rent or buy.
The free market 'economy' answer to this is that if she can't afford to rent a house or flat, she's not needed.
Absurd? Of course. If that were true, then there would be no supermarkets or corner shops or petrol stations or chicken shops or.... etc, in the entirety of London, a city of 10 million.
Because no-one wants them right, there's no demand, the workers aren't needed. Hang on...
1. Why is that absurd? A company that can only find customers for a widget at $1, that costs $2 to make, continuing to produce that widget because it is 'needed' is the only absurd idea I see here. Clearly the widget isn't needed, even if people are willing to buy it at below cost of production. Doing a job that costs more to do than what is paid back in compensation is no different than our hypothetical widget.
2. Most people in low-wage jobs are subsidized by someone else with a higher income (spouse, parent, etc.). They don't need high wages in order to afford to live. Thanks to that subsidization, they can afford to work for much less than someone who would have to live unsubsidized, while still maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. Those who are not fortunate enough to be subsidized have to compete against them. The mere fact that there is competition means that someone is going to lose, which means someone isn't needed.
3. Price is, as always, a function of supply and demand. If more people were needed for the jobs you mention than is currently being supplied, price would fundamentally rise, shrinking the affordability gap that exists for those who are unsubsidized in low-wage jobs. The jobs are low-wage quite simply because there are more people willing and able to do the job than there are jobs. Which, again, means that people aren't needed.
Finally, this is not an all or nothing situation. Not needing some people does not equate to not needing all people. The role of the economy, and price by extension, is to find that balance.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction you are trying to make? Having a job is not the same as being needed in an economy.
As we know from economics, demand decreases when price increases. Conversely, demand increases when price decreases. Goodman is able to find a job at below the cost of production, so to speak, but if the price were to rise to a sustainable level, nobody would be willing to hire anymore. After all, if people were willing to hire at a higher price, the higher price would already be paid out.
Any business can find customers producing widgets for free. Guaranteed. The hard part is finding customers willing to pay the cost of production + tidy profit in order to show that the market is actually in need of said widget. All Goodman is proving is the former; not brining in enough money to cover the actual cost of providing the job.
> Having a job is not the same as being needed in an economy.
Well, you have to define your context. In Communist Russia there were a lot of un-economical jobs, eh?
To me it seems clear that there is demand for housing that the economic & political system in which Goodman finds herself is failing to supply.
You seem to be saying that there is a dearth of jobs that pay enough money to cover the actual cost of providing the jobs. In that context, I'm saying, let's reduce that overhead. Rather than paying more we could reduce the actual cost of providing the job by building more houses.
That's the whole point of the OP: we stopped building houses that people could afford and now there are people who can't afford housing.
To me the question is why? Why don't we build more housing? Many folks point to "NIMBYism" but I suspect (IANAEconomist) that the real problem is just the tension between cities-as-living-places vs. cities-as-investment-vehicles.
BTW...
> As we know from economics, demand decreases when price increases.
That's merely dogma. It's a common mistake to set prices too low. When I worked for an online marketplace we saw this all the time: people could raise prices and sell more volume. The same piece of jewelry that gathered dust at $15 would sell right away at $45.
>However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move.
I don't think that's the problem.
I think most people who are capable of packing up and moving for better job opportunities will take the chance. The problem is people who are struggling to pay rent can't afford to move. They especially can't afford to move across a state, or worse, to different states. This problem is compacted by the fact that most of these desperate people, like the woman in the article, are making money below a living wage and would likely be moving to a job that pays the same or less.
What struggling people like to do has zero meaning here. The problem is what they can do. They're not Berkeley grads who get to make a half dozen phone app startups, get millions in investments, blow it all on downtown SF office space and beer fountains and write a top blog post on HN about their journey and learning from their failures. They're people working day and night to live in a run down shack that has electrified water and costs a thousand fuckin bucks a month.
Something is very wrong with rent in America. Prices aren't correlated to value or demand anymore. People say rent control measures are bad because they discourage further development, but we already have a problem where those who can refuse to build new homes. Those who already own homes and rent them out prefer to leave them empty and to rot than to accept the fact that their shithole isn't worth what they think it is and rent should drop. They know that eventually someone desperate enough will be swindled and forced to pay their absurd prices, only to be kicked out onto the streets because they can't afford the ridiculous price and maybe some other desperate sucker will take their place eventually.
Sure, maybe people could move to far rural communities where rent is cheaper. While their rent may be cheaper, they may also have zero income due to lack of employment. Farms are being consolidated into megaoperations and the number of necessary staff drops. Getting into a city to work is unreasonable since commutes can take hours, and that's not to mention having to do shopping/cooking/whatever with whatever time isn't left.
I feel like we're reaching a point where we need to offer two options: landlords can offer their properties are a price that average people in that region can afford, or the government can seize unused properties in order to solve the homeless crisis. People will say that nobody will want to build new apartments in a world where that's true, but that's already our problem. Laws are made to punish the homeless in America and it's clearly not working. Punish those who cause homelessness and something is going to change.
The issue is that, loosely stated, most people who don't own are spending 30, 40, 50% of their income on rent essentially anywhere.
It's not sustainable in any sense of the word. Their entire life is literally treading water. I've posted about this before - on an individual level if you can't save money you need to rethink your entire life, yesterday.
Of course, if you've already lost, you already have zero capital, well then you're in a very sticky situation indeed.
Any "solution" that involves a huge percentage of the population being actually skint and forced into making a series of incredibly short-term financial decisions is a band aid.
This is what an economy designed for the wealthy looks like. The bottom end of malleable labour pool participants is a 'feature', not a bug.
The term "unaffordable" I think is too general here. The parent post seemingly defines it based on mortgages and income multipliers.
It assumes this model of people having to trade labour for their housing, in money, incrementally per week/month/whatever, rather than having absolute (ish) dominion over a bit of land and then trading their labour for objects to put on that land (e.g. maintenance of the property).
In that sense, if a home in a rural area costs $5000, it might "unaffordable" if there are no jobs nearby and we assume the person starts with zero capital.
I would expect the model for most _actually_ rural living (aside from people buying holiday homes or whatever) would be that the property is owned outright. Affordability concerns then come from things like being able to run a car, health insurance, etc.
Sure. We may talk like it is a binary issue, affordable or unaffordable, for simplicity, but reality is a spectrum. There are people who can easily afford to live somewhere, there are also people who can afford to live there but are on the cusp of it being unaffordable, and there are those who truly cannot afford it. Colloquially we may refer to those who are only the cusp of unaffordable as being among those who are actually in an unaffordable situation.
Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more than you do.
It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.
>I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen.
For people living homeless in horrid conditions it's not "the best times", it's worse than their ancestors making their living in rural areas...
>The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019.
The best thing for the economy is to see people advocating the above go broke and homeless themselves. That would give some perspective to advocate better policies...
I can't make it through this article. I know what the point is supposed to to be, but it probably will fall on deaf ears. The prejudice against the homeless runs too deep, the desire to justify that prejudice and insist it isn't merely shitty behavior deeper still.
I am probably two or three generations removed from low level German nobility. I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I won (and turned down) a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities in my state.
My father retired from the military as an E-8, a fairly high rank. I was a military wife for about two decades. The ex also retired as an E-8.
I got divorced and got a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company, the biggest non military employer in my home town at the time. While I had that job, I would make small talk at eateries or the like and people would ooh and aah that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the privileged few to work there at all.
Then I quit to go live in a tent for health reasons. That long personal history of always being respected and accomplished and one of the privileged few in whatever circles I ran in was no protection from the prejudice against the homeless. It did seemingly nothing to get me taken seriously, respected or result in real help to resolve my problems.
I'm not sure it makes any difference for me to leave this remark. HN is a bastion of goodness compared to everything else, yet still is part of the problem. It seems to mostly just harm my reputation to talk about homelessness, not convince other people that there are systemic issues grinding people beneath its boot.
The only winning move is to not get ground under that boot. After it has marked you, the entire world will heap abuse upon you, deny you real help and tell you, clearly, you are a junkie or crazy.
I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World" certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual injustice in my life.
I increasingly hate articles like this. They do an even suckier job than I do of making that point and often just give ammunition to the people of the world who want to blame those whose lives don't work. ("Maybe she shouldn't have had six kids!!" Etc ad nauseum.)
> I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World" certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual injustice in my life.
A level of this is absolutely necessary because there's too much wrong in the world.
I used to think a lot about how to solve the issues in my community growing up. I often wonder - could I go back there and help? I have more money now, I know more, etc.
But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on. All I can do is try not to exacerbate the issues.
And yeah, the world doesn't care about you, or me. You're a chicken in a farm and someone's about to lop your head off for a sandwich. So it goes.
But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on.
I'm just one person. I've researched this problem space for many years. I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy well before I ended up homeless.
I think I have some good ideas, but I can't get traction because people with money and power don't actually take me seriously, either online or in meat space.
I think it got one upvote. So I'm pretty fed up and feeling like it won't get fixed precisely because people actively want it to not be fixed, not because it can't be fixed.
I'm a subject matter expert. It doesn't matter. People just want to keep justifying the status quo and calling homeless people junkies and crazies.
Having been homeless, obviously, I'm crazy. No need to listen to fuck all I say, clearly.
It's not the only thing I submitted from that site on that topic that's gotten ignored and I've been given a lot of shit at times over submitting my own stuff, so I think I've never submitted anything of mine more than once because I feel like it would just be an excuse to vilify me.
I'm a woman. When I do the exact same things the guys do, it gets completely different reactions. Pointing that out fails to result in fair and equitable treatment. It just is a new reason to justify open hatred because "obviously, she's a man-hating Feminazi, just here to stir shit up."
In the face of widespread prejudice, there is no good or right answer. Being good enough is never enough. In fact, it's another reason to find you offensive.
I'm the only person who submits my writing here. There have only been two exceptions, both basically a case of people interested in gossip and shit stirring. There is absolutely no one interested in taking my work seriously.
I've been here a decade. I had a corporate job when I joined. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board.
Nothing seems to ever genuinely change the fact that I'm not actually taken seriously. No one thinks I deserve an adequate income. No one sees anything wrong with continuing to exclude me and let me de facto starve while claiming it's somehow not sexism or classism.
(But let's go with your theory. I'll resubmit it. Let's see how much bullshit that gets me.)
Doreen, I've always found your contributions to be both insightful and refreshing, especially in a monoculture like HN. As someone who comes from a similar background, I have a deep respect for your willingness to openly talk about your experiences despite the prejudice and discrimination you face because of it.
Please keep submitting your work. The increasing reality for many working people is that they are one or a few misfortunate events away from losing their livelihood. While many HN have believe that they won't ever have to face that fate, their friends, family and neighbors increasingly will.
Although I am extremely frustrated with a number of things, I do not think this is true in most cases. Of course, you find awful people at all levels of society, but I think most rich people genuinely don't understand the needs of the poor, don't have good opportunities to really get a clue and a lot of what they do falls much more under the idea of "Never attribute to malice what can be readily explained by stupidity" -- only substitute ignorance for stupidity.
One of the reasons I run my big fat mouth on the topic is because I do have a much more privileged background than I understood for most of my life, so I have the opportunity to bridge that gap to some degree.
I wish to hell and back that it wasn't such a slog of an endless uphill battle. I'm tired of my life being such a drag and of feeling so burdened, etc.
But I'm really not down with simply vilifying "rich people" in a broad-brush fashion. I see that as a lazy answer and a counterproductive answer.
I'm fine with calling out specific instances, commenting on known track records of individuals, etc. I'm not fine with "those people" are "just bad people."
If nothing else, it's a pot calling the kettle black kind thing and I abhor hypocrisy.
> I often wonder - could I go back there and help? I have more money now, I know more, etc.
I'm originally from a small rural community in southeastern Ohio. I've often had the same thought. I think I could help, genuinely, but I think there's a problem of acceptance there that I don't know if I could break through at this point. I've been gone for nearly 20 years. I don't really know that community any more. I wonder sometimes if I ever did. Maybe it's just my own ignorance or arrogance or naivety. Because I also don't know my adopted community of SoCal, either.
> the world doesn't care about you, or me.
Indeed. TFA and this comment thread reminds me of the Bukowski poem, "The Crunch." "...people are just not good to each other."
(FWIW, I was homeless for about four and a half years. Thank God I'm good at computers or I probably still would be. "Don't let the turkeys get you down." There's a lot of injustice in the world and things do suck, but you're not licked yet
DoreenMichele! (I hope this helps!))
Anyway, TFA doesn't get to the point until 2/3 of the way through:
> Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The population of people without stable living situations periodically surged, but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly intractable—arose only in the 1980s. What had been anomalous suddenly became “the common misery of millions,” observed the writer and activist Jonathan Kozol in his 1988 book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Set in a towering New York shelter that Kozol likened to an urban refugee camp, the book sought to excavate the causes of this great displacement. Kozol refused the dominant explanations, all of which emphasized some mix of individual and group pathology: teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drugs, a “culture of poverty.” He offered a different view. In 1970, the United States had a surplus of 300,000 affordable rental homes; under President Reagan, federal spending on low-income housing plummeted from $32 billion to $7 billion. (“We’re getting out of the housing business. Period,” said a top HUD official at the time.) Affordable units evaporated, and with them many of the legal safeguards allowing poor tenants to stay in the relative few that remained. Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”
> people would ooh and aah that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the privileged few to work there at all.
this is my experience telling people you are merely interviewing at Google
I deal with a version of this. I never finished my degree. Yet, I've worked my way up to Senior Software Engineer. I don't lie about it, but I don't offer it up, either, because it has cost me promotions and pay my entire career.
I haven't seen this in the tech hubs of NYC or SF, well I've seen enough exceptions to this to conclude that degrees are not necessary to command competitive salaries in a software engineering track.
Get a third party recruiter and game them employers.
> Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The population of people without stable living situations periodically surged, but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly intractable—arose only in the 1980s. ...
The author goes on to cite declines in federal low-income housing funding as the root cause. What does the full graph of this funding look like going back to the 1800s?
I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the (unsustainable) Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration. It ramped up to a peak in the 1980s, then fell.
Could it be that the true cause of the homeless problem every city in the country faces lies elsewhere than reduced federal funding?
> I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the (unsustainable) Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration.
Why was it unsustainable? Other countries sustain far higher social spend. Do you perhaps mean politically unsustainable? Especially given the stronger lean to the right that the Republicans have manifested last decade.
Funding a massive war effort (Vietnam) while spending freely on welfare programs (Guns and Butter) wasn't sustainable. A few short years later, the country was taken off the gold standard due to its recklessness. The effects of that action reverberate today in the trade war and blooming currency war.
During the 1970s, the US experienced a surge of inflation that wreaked havoc with the economy.
Many countries you allude to are in dire shape - especially Europe. They pay next to nothing (compared to US) in defense and a few have been richly endowed with oil reserves. Their economies have been teetering on recession for years and now are in the unenviable position of facing negative interest rates heading into recession.
I’ve heard it firsthand from someone working with the homeless that some are offered places to live but prefer the street. It’s a mental health crisis as much as it’s about available housing.
That assumes that any housing is better than living in a tent. That assumes that any deal that gets you into any housing is a good deal, or at least not worse than sleeping under the stars.
This was an interesting read, but very slanted. It largely lost me here:
> Most advocates agree, however, that lasting change will come only through massive government reinvestment in low-income housing, livable wages (including pay protections for the growing number of gig workers), and an openness to alternative models, such as community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives. The fruit of the laissez-faire approach—deregulating the private market and hoping that, with enough new construction, affordability will trickle down—can be seen, they suggest, in the hundreds of thousands of Americans doubled up or living in shelters and tent cities.
The idea that we currently have a free market approach to housing is absurdly wrong. We haven’t had anything close to free market conditions in housing for generations, mostly since the FDR administration created the federal mess of agencies to commoditize housing in the first place. This is perhaps the single most important myth that needs to be dispelled. When it takes years to get permission to build an apartment, and 80-90% of the average US city’s land is restricted to single family houses on large lots, that anyone can think we have a “liassez-faire” system is shameful.
Of course homeless advocates, who are largely paid by government programs, think that the problems created by too much government would be best solved by more government.
Earlier in the article the author cited a large scale research effort which came to a much simpler conclusion:
> Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”
This, it seems, people are finally beginning to understand. But still there is so much vilification if developers and landlords, which I believe gets in the way of progress.
The system is deeply broken, and the majority of the individual players in it are honest people trying to follow the rules as they’ve been given, trying to do something they believe is good: create more housing. If the city you live in only allows luxury housing to be built — which is often the case, due to the enormous cost of regulatory compliance, anything cheaper would not be profitable to build — then it’s luxury housing or none at all.
In earlier eras with less regulation it was still true that more luxury housing was built. The difference was that when population growth happened, so much housing would go up so quick that the “luxury apartment” from ten years ago was now middle class, and the fifteen year old building was working class.
TLDR; it’s exhausting to read story after story about how acute the housing crisis is, with so little investigation into its root causes. Why is it that our system leaves such an extreme shortage of housing in the first place, and what can be done to address that? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and therein lie the problems we have to solve.
I feel that you've created a boundary where anybody positing any specific answer to those questions, such as the one in the quote that lost you, you would dismiss as hopelessly slanted. Everything with an opinion will be slanted towards that opinion. I feel anything saying that the causes are murky, and the means of solving them a mystery; that's what you'll read as unbiased.
What I struggle with is, this issue is complex and multi-faceted. I think it’s therefore easy for people to come in with strong preconceptions and cherry pick evidence to support simple answers that fit their worldview.
What I wish is that it was easier to have a more nuanced discussion that didn’t involve demonizing, vilification, or picking sides.
You can't make a law that orders people to care about each other. From an outside view it looks a lot like the erosion of a previously high-trust society. Possibly caused by middle-class economic woes. Those who want to build a family and are not rich have been gutted by various dynamics.
> THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:
> As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — constantly forcing down wages.
> Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make anything at all.
As much as I appreciate some historical commentary on the matter, none of this is revolutionary thought, and the concept is widely understood by the most common everyman. There's nothing left here to ponder nor any insight to extract.
I'll try add to this, though. Yes, rent and land forces down wages, but it's not just your fellow countryman doing it anymore (in so much as a citizen who is not a proprietor of a real-estate driven capital venture), it's companies like Progress Residential and other REITs that are fueled by the financial world to purchase homes and be your new neighbor.
Yes, soon capital structures invested in such companies will mean that organizations like McDonalds and Starbucks will, in the grapevines of their institutional accounts, own a share of an REIT that owns homes in your neighborhood. They will be your new community, and soon your new landlords.
I think the developed worlds should do as New Zealand and other nations caught on to, and protect their citizens from unscrupulous investors, foreign and domestic, looking to prey on the common man looking for a home to purchase.
If a new wave of residential economic folly were to come upon us, the people waiting in the shadows are not individuals with deep pockets looking to become your future rent seeker, but entire institutions looking to purchase neighborhoods wholesale.
I think we owe it to our children and those around us to push for non-partisan legislature that prevent such cancers from overtaking our countries.
> ...the developed worlds should do as New Zealand...
The NZ foreign buyer ban is incredibly weak. For one it’s only on existing homes. Foreigners can still buy land and buy newly built homes with the land under them. There are also plenty of ways around it buying through third parties, etc. On top of this NZ has failed to introduce a capital gains tax on houses. House prices there are some of the most expensive in the world.
Sounds nice but the devil is in the details. Land value tax would be determined arbitrarily not by the market. It’s sounds great if you ignore the problem of actually assessing unimproved land value.
Of course we know “value” is just the amount of money someone traded for something, so Georgism can’t be implemented practically.
When you stop thinking about how awesome LVT is and think about how to calculate it, the whole theory falls apart.
Pretty much. An assessor can write down any assessment they want. All assessed value taxes have this problem. The value I attribute to something can only be objectively defined by a market transaction. And more importantly, people attribute different values to the same thing.
This is simple to illustrate by example: Three people are willing to buy the same property at different maximum prices. Person A is willing to buy at $35k, person B at $30k, and person C at $25k. Any value an assessor writes down will necessarily be different than one of the three people. There is no dollar value intrinsic to the property itself.
So, because land value assessments are easier than property assessments, we should get a smaller margin of error by switching to a LVT. This is good.
Your other point seems to be that no margin of error is acceptable and we should therefore ditch the whole thing.
It's not clear that the societal pain from somewhat inaccurate tax assessments is great enough that we should just set everything to 0. We have lots of data that 0 property tax leads to housing shortages and rampant speculation (cf. Malta for an example) and if you don't tax land ownership you often end up taxing something productive, like income.
> there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything)
There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value". I'm not very familiar with finance so I'm not sure if this is what you you're getting at.
But your idea, that land can't be taxed because it has no value, can't possibly be new as these questions have been around for literally hundreds of years. That being said, I've never heard it before and would be genuinely interested if you can link some papers or books.
Our current issues in the US are partly due to tearing down a million SROs and largely zoning out of existence the ability to create the type of housing being called "Missing Middle" housing.
In the 1950s, the average new house was 1200 sqft and held 3.5 people. Today, the average new house is about twice that size and holds one less person.
We simply no longer build or even allow small spaces in a walkable urban fabric where you can live without a car. The few that have been grandfathered in tend to be very expensive because it's such a wonderful quality of life and we don't build like that anymore.
This is called rentierism, and there are rentierist societies - where the entire societal fabric has been shaped for the benefit of a rentier class, and protection of their rents.
Usually people in the West associate the later with some banana republics or petrostates, but...
I believe it is intellectually dishonest to omit Western idolisation of rentier lifestyle.
Compare a desert tribe jealously protecting their oil derrick, and how, say, IP lawyers protect their patents, real estate hoarders protect their turf, and high finance people protecting their regulatory watering holes.
The most high societal class in US are the people who master the manipulation of artificial scarcities: securities, permits, licenses, legal patents, royalties, copyrights, and etcetera.
And this is pretty much the shopping list that well off, and well connected give to their children by mid thirties.
So what’s the alternative? Suppose we banish all private land ownership in San Francisco. What then? It seems like demand for space is so high people would fight each other to carve out their space. And if you build a house what would stop someone else from tearing it down and building their own while you are on vacation?
Alternatively the government turns into the only landlord, deciding who can build what where.
The "127 hours worked at Federal minimum wage to afford the median rent" is an abuse of statistics in service of a narrative. Literally 50% of all rentals are less expensive, and presumably a poor person would be living in one of those. How many hours for the 20th percentile rent? That would actually be insightful.
I wonder how many hours of minimum wage I would need to work to afford a new BMW.
>The "127 hours worked at Federal minimum wage to afford the median rent" is an abuse of statistics in service of a narrative. Literally 50% of all rentals are less expensive
There are tons of poor people making less than minimum wage (working less than 8 hours or on/off days/gigs (and still not counted as unemployed because of those).
People also need to pay way more than the rent alone (food, utilities, children, commuting, health costs, and so on).
Working less than 8 hours doesn't mean you're making less than minimum wage if your hourly rate is minimum wage. If you take gigs that work out to a lower hourly rate than minimum wage, that's a different story though.
I remember watching the 1988 film God Bless the Child [1] with Mare Winningham as the hardworking yet impoverished mother trying to keep it together for her young daughter. It was so moving, I cried all the way through it and it has left a life-long impression.
I'm not judging but there are 6 kids in that picture. How in the world is she going to manage in the first place with a minimum wage job? I'm surprised she can even afford to feed and cloth them never mind rent.
These kids don't have a chance without a lot of luck. I can only imagine not having a husband or a solid family (brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc) makes things more difficult with no one to give a helping hand.
I just want to ask where the fuck is the father in all of this and why isn't he helping?
I agree that not helping to support your kids is extremely shitty, but that wasn't the most important part of the article for me.
Two of the children were abandoned by their parents, and the mother in this story adopted them. She earns her living doing work that seems to be an unambiguously positive contribution to society, and takes on extra responsibilities (in the form of two entire human beings).
The article paints a picture of a woman who is generous, hardworking, and disciplined, and who is getting absolutely crushed by the modern economy. That seems like a very real story to me, and a mandate to make some serious changes, even if they put a dent in the wealth of some wealthier people.
>I just want to ask where the fuck is the father in all of this and why isn't he helping?
You're assuming too much intellect from the bottom of society, as someone born unto poor parents. They are ignorant beyond all comprehension, you get people who are religiously fundamentalist, quasi mental headcases, and fathers that are dumb as a post.
The people at the bottom of society are basically injured by the system itself and of course they end up making bad decisions, they get the worst education and are in toxic cultural environments like religious cults because they come from families who were historically poor to begin with.
Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. Just ask the Goodmans.
Is the target audience people that explicitly think anecdotes are more important than data? I preferred it when that cognitive error was at least hidden.
The lack of empathy in North American culture is part of the problem. You complain when they make it personal, pointing out individual problems is how you effect change.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadThere’s nothing about this that’s OK.
Stop making outrage-generating posts like this by cutting off relevant information.
I said nothing about this, despite your insidious insinuation. I’m saying that taking a quote out of context and/or altering it by cutting off a very relevant bit in order to make it more outrage-inducing is bad. Or, to emply your rhethoric, is any amount of misleading and lying in order to induce rage in readers, as long as it’s rage about the “right” thing, supposed to be OK?
Homed vs. homeless is just changing problem sets; I've experienced both. Finding a set of problems I'm comfortable with is difficult.
Some of them, like Germany, struggle through problems with their systems as well. But their problems don't appear to be as devastating as the ones facing the USA.
Tenant and landlord mutually agree to a lease contract of defined term. That term runs; both sides live up to the agreement. Tenant and landlord do not mutually agree a follow-on contract. Tenant moves out.
I am not sure if this is naivety or if the author is being disingenuous to make a point, but the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an addiction problem, where it's not an addiction problem, it's almost always a mental health problem.
Not to minimize the plight of Cokethia, as the economy is clearly broken (and getting rapidly worse) for those who can't demand premium wages.
edit: s/and have a lot of dependents//
So, there's a lack of affordable housing because... ...people take drugs?|
Can you expand on that? I feel like I've missed something in your post that explains the logical leap there.
However, the vast majority (writing from a phone on train so I’ll have to challenge you to prove me wrong rather than cite, but the statistics are clear on this) of homeless people are deep in the throes of addiction or, mentally unstable.
The working family that can’t make ends meet absolutely exists, I am not in anyway challenging that.
But, go to one of these tent cities yourself , where these exploding homeless populations exist, and it will be apparent that people are so addicted that there is not rent that would be “affordable” as their basic human needs aren’t even being met for them to be functioning in a positive economic way.
Essentially these people are sick, in a genuinely diagnosable way, and that sickness manifests in self harm. IMO, it’s pretty clear that this mass sickness (primarily the opiate crisis) is the leading cause of these exploding homeless populations.
But it doesn’t account for people addicted to meth, or alcohol, or people suffering from schizophrenia, etc.
I am just providing context for how to think about the problem in a way that (much) more closely maps to reality than low-earners getting displaced due to gentrification and wage stagnation.
Lumping the four groups together creates a great deal of confusion - you can often find people arguing that homeless need more homes vs homeless need job training vs mental health care etc. We’re just talking about different people.
Allow developers the freedom to build huge apartment buildings and the housing crisis will be severely mitigated. The answer from the left is always more taxes, more government, more red tape and it blinds them to the true problem.
Usually what happens is they raise or borrow a bunch of money to build much higher margin housing (e.g. hip condos instead of affordable apartments) until the market is saturated with still more unaffordable housing.
Without explicit incentive structures or requirements like, "You must build X number of affordable units for every Y number of luxury units." things tend to stay pretty broken.
Here is an article about a developer who tried to build a low income apartment building in SF, and the absolutely insane roadblocks the city put in his way https://reason.com/video/san-francisco-mission-housing-crisi...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
https://sf.curbed.com/2019/5/16/18617019/transit-housing-bil...
In earlier eras the answer was it didn’t stay luxury housing, but moved down market as shinier and newer buildings kept coming online, and as overeager developers built more fancy housing than there turned out to be a market for.
Then when you have all those landlords and more housing units than are needed, there’s price pressure all the way down, and a lot of upward mobility as people slide up into slightly nicer homes, leaving a bunch of reasonable quality homes open all the way to the bottom of the market.
We haven’t had anything like free market supply of housing since the FDR era, so this example is so far removed from living memory that most people can’t even imagine it.
Usually what happens, is in order to keep the asset value high they'll sit on vacancies for as long as they possibly can to avoid having to recognize a lower value on the property, until it becomes advantageous to do so as a write down after they're done leveraging themselves based on the inflated asset price.
It sounds like something is wrong with lending if someone is willing to lend to them based on inflated asset prices!
We need housing in absolute numbers, real units to fill the very real jobs to housing imbalance of 150,000 more jobs than housing units that were added to the city over the past decade. And we need real units of subsidized housing as well for those at the very bottom of the economy. What we don’t need is feel-good percentage requirements where the denominator just ends up being close to 0.
Also, so-called luxury housing is often like ~15% more expensive than the median housing price in many areas. It’s a name that makes it easy to hate on, but like it or not it is housing for real middle and upper middle class people. The amount of hate it gets, you would think we’re talking about housing for billionaires or something.
I'm just pointing out that changes in zoning alone don't tend to work to increase affordable housing supply for already high-value, desirable areas due to the inherent market incentive for a real estate developer to try to make more money by making more expensive housing units.
No car company produces cars for people living on the minimum wage and yet a great many people living on the minimum wage can and do afford cars. Building new housing reduces the value of existing housing.
The problem with housing is a lot deeper rooted than basic Econ 101 supply & demand models can address.
If 80% of the housing units in Atlanta suddenly had the option to add a garage apartment, I would expect to see an enormous improvement in the housing market.
Cases like Minneapolis, which basically just made this change, will be important to watch going forward.
Since a house is seen (in US) as an investment and is expected to generally appreciate, this would go very much against the "reasonable expectations" of many people.
You dont need that. All you need is to not make it illegal to build Geos and Skodas. Zone regs right now makes it only possible to develop Mercedes and Audi's.
Look at Houston. The city has literally no zoning laws. Want to build a dwelling that is as small as a coffin in a tiny parcel of land? Ok. Want to build a small house in the middle of a commercial alley? Great!
Houston is by far the cheapest urban area per sqft in the entire US.
Imagine what would happen if you did away with zoning AND HUD. America would build so much that it would transform the homeless issue may in less than 1 generation.
Let them build Geos and Skodas, wherever, and see prices fall
Can low income people ...take off work to plan their community? ...possess the capacity to help? ...have the stability to persist through it? ...be happy in high density? etc.
It works for the mobile wealthy, sure. I'll effectively never have to worry about paying for the rent unless I decided to move to like, Manhattan, and probably a ton of HN readers won't either.
It works way better I think to give people a small plot of land, build them a basic house, and let them crack on with it. It's much better for someone to end up with a home in a state of disrepair and have to figure that out, than have a literal lord turf them out. Give a man a fish vs. teach them how to, that sort of thing.
An apartment could also work though the legal structure is a bit more difficult.
To put it another way - people who have literally zero capital are capital-F fucked. You can only ever apply a series of band-aids to that sort of situation, you can't actually fix it.
The poorest people I've seen in council housing or in more rural areas have a hell of a lot more dignity than someone bouncing from apartment to apartment in an expensive city despite potentially being in "poverty" statistically.
In brief - renting is financialization, if you don't have enough Money Points, you go and die. Simple, right?
I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen.
Housing became less and less affordable in rural areas because the people weren't needed there anymore. If we had provided some model to allow people to stay where they really wanted to, which, for most people, is close to friends and family, despite the lack of need for them the economy would have cratered. We are entering a similar time for dense urban areas, where there are more people than there is need for them to be there.
The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019. However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move. They prefer to stay close to friends and family. That is the issue upon us, balancing the needs of the economy and the needs of the humanities.
The best thing for _the people_ is to structure the economy around them, not the opposite.
I stated nothing about urban vs. rural living, more the ownership structure. Renting as an issue, not urban as an issue. Though it may well be, yes.
Absurd? Of course. If that were true, then there would be no supermarkets or corner shops or petrol stations or chicken shops or.... etc, in the entirety of London, a city of 10 million.
Because no-one wants them right, there's no demand, the workers aren't needed. Hang on...
2. Most people in low-wage jobs are subsidized by someone else with a higher income (spouse, parent, etc.). They don't need high wages in order to afford to live. Thanks to that subsidization, they can afford to work for much less than someone who would have to live unsubsidized, while still maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. Those who are not fortunate enough to be subsidized have to compete against them. The mere fact that there is competition means that someone is going to lose, which means someone isn't needed.
3. Price is, as always, a function of supply and demand. If more people were needed for the jobs you mention than is currently being supplied, price would fundamentally rise, shrinking the affordability gap that exists for those who are unsubsidized in low-wage jobs. The jobs are low-wage quite simply because there are more people willing and able to do the job than there are jobs. Which, again, means that people aren't needed.
Finally, this is not an all or nothing situation. Not needing some people does not equate to not needing all people. The role of the economy, and price by extension, is to find that balance.
As we know from economics, demand decreases when price increases. Conversely, demand increases when price decreases. Goodman is able to find a job at below the cost of production, so to speak, but if the price were to rise to a sustainable level, nobody would be willing to hire anymore. After all, if people were willing to hire at a higher price, the higher price would already be paid out.
Any business can find customers producing widgets for free. Guaranteed. The hard part is finding customers willing to pay the cost of production + tidy profit in order to show that the market is actually in need of said widget. All Goodman is proving is the former; not brining in enough money to cover the actual cost of providing the job.
Well, you have to define your context. In Communist Russia there were a lot of un-economical jobs, eh?
To me it seems clear that there is demand for housing that the economic & political system in which Goodman finds herself is failing to supply.
You seem to be saying that there is a dearth of jobs that pay enough money to cover the actual cost of providing the jobs. In that context, I'm saying, let's reduce that overhead. Rather than paying more we could reduce the actual cost of providing the job by building more houses.
That's the whole point of the OP: we stopped building houses that people could afford and now there are people who can't afford housing.
To me the question is why? Why don't we build more housing? Many folks point to "NIMBYism" but I suspect (IANAEconomist) that the real problem is just the tension between cities-as-living-places vs. cities-as-investment-vehicles.
BTW...
> As we know from economics, demand decreases when price increases.
That's merely dogma. It's a common mistake to set prices too low. When I worked for an online marketplace we saw this all the time: people could raise prices and sell more volume. The same piece of jewelry that gathered dust at $15 would sell right away at $45.
I don't think that's the problem.
I think most people who are capable of packing up and moving for better job opportunities will take the chance. The problem is people who are struggling to pay rent can't afford to move. They especially can't afford to move across a state, or worse, to different states. This problem is compacted by the fact that most of these desperate people, like the woman in the article, are making money below a living wage and would likely be moving to a job that pays the same or less.
What struggling people like to do has zero meaning here. The problem is what they can do. They're not Berkeley grads who get to make a half dozen phone app startups, get millions in investments, blow it all on downtown SF office space and beer fountains and write a top blog post on HN about their journey and learning from their failures. They're people working day and night to live in a run down shack that has electrified water and costs a thousand fuckin bucks a month.
Something is very wrong with rent in America. Prices aren't correlated to value or demand anymore. People say rent control measures are bad because they discourage further development, but we already have a problem where those who can refuse to build new homes. Those who already own homes and rent them out prefer to leave them empty and to rot than to accept the fact that their shithole isn't worth what they think it is and rent should drop. They know that eventually someone desperate enough will be swindled and forced to pay their absurd prices, only to be kicked out onto the streets because they can't afford the ridiculous price and maybe some other desperate sucker will take their place eventually.
Sure, maybe people could move to far rural communities where rent is cheaper. While their rent may be cheaper, they may also have zero income due to lack of employment. Farms are being consolidated into megaoperations and the number of necessary staff drops. Getting into a city to work is unreasonable since commutes can take hours, and that's not to mention having to do shopping/cooking/whatever with whatever time isn't left.
I feel like we're reaching a point where we need to offer two options: landlords can offer their properties are a price that average people in that region can afford, or the government can seize unused properties in order to solve the homeless crisis. People will say that nobody will want to build new apartments in a world where that's true, but that's already our problem. Laws are made to punish the homeless in America and it's clearly not working. Punish those who cause homelessness and something is going to change.
It's not sustainable in any sense of the word. Their entire life is literally treading water. I've posted about this before - on an individual level if you can't save money you need to rethink your entire life, yesterday.
Of course, if you've already lost, you already have zero capital, well then you're in a very sticky situation indeed.
Any "solution" that involves a huge percentage of the population being actually skint and forced into making a series of incredibly short-term financial decisions is a band aid.
This is what an economy designed for the wealthy looks like. The bottom end of malleable labour pool participants is a 'feature', not a bug.
Like, people weren't driven off by land prices, they just went to work in cities because the income was much more attractive.
It assumes this model of people having to trade labour for their housing, in money, incrementally per week/month/whatever, rather than having absolute (ish) dominion over a bit of land and then trading their labour for objects to put on that land (e.g. maintenance of the property).
In that sense, if a home in a rural area costs $5000, it might "unaffordable" if there are no jobs nearby and we assume the person starts with zero capital.
I would expect the model for most _actually_ rural living (aside from people buying holiday homes or whatever) would be that the property is owned outright. Affordability concerns then come from things like being able to run a car, health insurance, etc.
Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more than you do.
It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.
For people living homeless in horrid conditions it's not "the best times", it's worse than their ancestors making their living in rural areas...
>The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019.
The best thing for the economy is to see people advocating the above go broke and homeless themselves. That would give some perspective to advocate better policies...
Why I don't want to own the land my business is built on: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49210150
I am probably two or three generations removed from low level German nobility. I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I won (and turned down) a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities in my state.
My father retired from the military as an E-8, a fairly high rank. I was a military wife for about two decades. The ex also retired as an E-8.
I got divorced and got a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company, the biggest non military employer in my home town at the time. While I had that job, I would make small talk at eateries or the like and people would ooh and aah that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the privileged few to work there at all.
Then I quit to go live in a tent for health reasons. That long personal history of always being respected and accomplished and one of the privileged few in whatever circles I ran in was no protection from the prejudice against the homeless. It did seemingly nothing to get me taken seriously, respected or result in real help to resolve my problems.
I'm not sure it makes any difference for me to leave this remark. HN is a bastion of goodness compared to everything else, yet still is part of the problem. It seems to mostly just harm my reputation to talk about homelessness, not convince other people that there are systemic issues grinding people beneath its boot.
The only winning move is to not get ground under that boot. After it has marked you, the entire world will heap abuse upon you, deny you real help and tell you, clearly, you are a junkie or crazy.
I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World" certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual injustice in my life.
I increasingly hate articles like this. They do an even suckier job than I do of making that point and often just give ammunition to the people of the world who want to blame those whose lives don't work. ("Maybe she shouldn't have had six kids!!" Etc ad nauseum.)
A level of this is absolutely necessary because there's too much wrong in the world.
I used to think a lot about how to solve the issues in my community growing up. I often wonder - could I go back there and help? I have more money now, I know more, etc.
But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know what's going on. All I can do is try not to exacerbate the issues.
And yeah, the world doesn't care about you, or me. You're a chicken in a farm and someone's about to lop your head off for a sandwich. So it goes.
I'm just one person. I've researched this problem space for many years. I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy well before I ended up homeless.
I think I have some good ideas, but I can't get traction because people with money and power don't actually take me seriously, either online or in meat space.
I wrote this recently and submitted it to HN.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small-tow...
I think it got one upvote. So I'm pretty fed up and feeling like it won't get fixed precisely because people actively want it to not be fixed, not because it can't be fixed.
I'm a subject matter expert. It doesn't matter. People just want to keep justifying the status quo and calling homeless people junkies and crazies.
Having been homeless, obviously, I'm crazy. No need to listen to fuck all I say, clearly.
I'm a woman. When I do the exact same things the guys do, it gets completely different reactions. Pointing that out fails to result in fair and equitable treatment. It just is a new reason to justify open hatred because "obviously, she's a man-hating Feminazi, just here to stir shit up."
In the face of widespread prejudice, there is no good or right answer. Being good enough is never enough. In fact, it's another reason to find you offensive.
I'm the only person who submits my writing here. There have only been two exceptions, both basically a case of people interested in gossip and shit stirring. There is absolutely no one interested in taking my work seriously.
I've been here a decade. I had a corporate job when I joined. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board.
Nothing seems to ever genuinely change the fact that I'm not actually taken seriously. No one thinks I deserve an adequate income. No one sees anything wrong with continuing to exclude me and let me de facto starve while claiming it's somehow not sexism or classism.
(But let's go with your theory. I'll resubmit it. Let's see how much bullshit that gets me.)
Please keep submitting your work. The increasing reality for many working people is that they are one or a few misfortunate events away from losing their livelihood. While many HN have believe that they won't ever have to face that fate, their friends, family and neighbors increasingly will.
One of the reasons I run my big fat mouth on the topic is because I do have a much more privileged background than I understood for most of my life, so I have the opportunity to bridge that gap to some degree.
I wish to hell and back that it wasn't such a slog of an endless uphill battle. I'm tired of my life being such a drag and of feeling so burdened, etc.
But I'm really not down with simply vilifying "rich people" in a broad-brush fashion. I see that as a lazy answer and a counterproductive answer.
I'm fine with calling out specific instances, commenting on known track records of individuals, etc. I'm not fine with "those people" are "just bad people."
If nothing else, it's a pot calling the kettle black kind thing and I abhor hypocrisy.
I'm originally from a small rural community in southeastern Ohio. I've often had the same thought. I think I could help, genuinely, but I think there's a problem of acceptance there that I don't know if I could break through at this point. I've been gone for nearly 20 years. I don't really know that community any more. I wonder sometimes if I ever did. Maybe it's just my own ignorance or arrogance or naivety. Because I also don't know my adopted community of SoCal, either.
> the world doesn't care about you, or me.
Indeed. TFA and this comment thread reminds me of the Bukowski poem, "The Crunch." "...people are just not good to each other."
Anyway, TFA doesn't get to the point until 2/3 of the way through:
> Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The population of people without stable living situations periodically surged, but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly intractable—arose only in the 1980s. What had been anomalous suddenly became “the common misery of millions,” observed the writer and activist Jonathan Kozol in his 1988 book Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America. Set in a towering New York shelter that Kozol likened to an urban refugee camp, the book sought to excavate the causes of this great displacement. Kozol refused the dominant explanations, all of which emphasized some mix of individual and group pathology: teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drugs, a “culture of poverty.” He offered a different view. In 1970, the United States had a surplus of 300,000 affordable rental homes; under President Reagan, federal spending on low-income housing plummeted from $32 billion to $7 billion. (“We’re getting out of the housing business. Period,” said a top HUD official at the time.) Affordable units evaporated, and with them many of the legal safeguards allowing poor tenants to stay in the relative few that remained. Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”
this is my experience telling people you are merely interviewing at Google
Get a third party recruiter and game them employers.
The author goes on to cite declines in federal low-income housing funding as the root cause. What does the full graph of this funding look like going back to the 1800s?
I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the (unsustainable) Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration. It ramped up to a peak in the 1980s, then fell.
Could it be that the true cause of the homeless problem every city in the country faces lies elsewhere than reduced federal funding?
Why was it unsustainable? Other countries sustain far higher social spend. Do you perhaps mean politically unsustainable? Especially given the stronger lean to the right that the Republicans have manifested last decade.
During the 1970s, the US experienced a surge of inflation that wreaked havoc with the economy.
Many countries you allude to are in dire shape - especially Europe. They pay next to nothing (compared to US) in defense and a few have been richly endowed with oil reserves. Their economies have been teetering on recession for years and now are in the unenviable position of facing negative interest rates heading into recession.
Those assumptions are unwarranted.
Not saying there aren’t homeless with nental health issues, just that the situation is very unique to the individual and not that clearcut.
> Most advocates agree, however, that lasting change will come only through massive government reinvestment in low-income housing, livable wages (including pay protections for the growing number of gig workers), and an openness to alternative models, such as community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives. The fruit of the laissez-faire approach—deregulating the private market and hoping that, with enough new construction, affordability will trickle down—can be seen, they suggest, in the hundreds of thousands of Americans doubled up or living in shelters and tent cities.
The idea that we currently have a free market approach to housing is absurdly wrong. We haven’t had anything close to free market conditions in housing for generations, mostly since the FDR administration created the federal mess of agencies to commoditize housing in the first place. This is perhaps the single most important myth that needs to be dispelled. When it takes years to get permission to build an apartment, and 80-90% of the average US city’s land is restricted to single family houses on large lots, that anyone can think we have a “liassez-faire” system is shameful.
Of course homeless advocates, who are largely paid by government programs, think that the problems created by too much government would be best solved by more government.
Earlier in the article the author cited a large scale research effort which came to a much simpler conclusion:
> Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”
This, it seems, people are finally beginning to understand. But still there is so much vilification if developers and landlords, which I believe gets in the way of progress.
The system is deeply broken, and the majority of the individual players in it are honest people trying to follow the rules as they’ve been given, trying to do something they believe is good: create more housing. If the city you live in only allows luxury housing to be built — which is often the case, due to the enormous cost of regulatory compliance, anything cheaper would not be profitable to build — then it’s luxury housing or none at all.
In earlier eras with less regulation it was still true that more luxury housing was built. The difference was that when population growth happened, so much housing would go up so quick that the “luxury apartment” from ten years ago was now middle class, and the fifteen year old building was working class.
TLDR; it’s exhausting to read story after story about how acute the housing crisis is, with so little investigation into its root causes. Why is it that our system leaves such an extreme shortage of housing in the first place, and what can be done to address that? Those are the questions we need to be asking, and therein lie the problems we have to solve.
What I struggle with is, this issue is complex and multi-faceted. I think it’s therefore easy for people to come in with strong preconceptions and cherry pick evidence to support simple answers that fit their worldview.
What I wish is that it was easier to have a more nuanced discussion that didn’t involve demonizing, vilification, or picking sides.
But perhaps that’s naïve.
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm
> THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:
> As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more — constantly forcing down wages.
> Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity to make anything at all.
I'll try add to this, though. Yes, rent and land forces down wages, but it's not just your fellow countryman doing it anymore (in so much as a citizen who is not a proprietor of a real-estate driven capital venture), it's companies like Progress Residential and other REITs that are fueled by the financial world to purchase homes and be your new neighbor.
Yes, soon capital structures invested in such companies will mean that organizations like McDonalds and Starbucks will, in the grapevines of their institutional accounts, own a share of an REIT that owns homes in your neighborhood. They will be your new community, and soon your new landlords.
I think the developed worlds should do as New Zealand and other nations caught on to, and protect their citizens from unscrupulous investors, foreign and domestic, looking to prey on the common man looking for a home to purchase.
If a new wave of residential economic folly were to come upon us, the people waiting in the shadows are not individuals with deep pockets looking to become your future rent seeker, but entire institutions looking to purchase neighborhoods wholesale.
I think we owe it to our children and those around us to push for non-partisan legislature that prevent such cancers from overtaking our countries.
The NZ foreign buyer ban is incredibly weak. For one it’s only on existing homes. Foreigners can still buy land and buy newly built homes with the land under them. There are also plenty of ways around it buying through third parties, etc. On top of this NZ has failed to introduce a capital gains tax on houses. House prices there are some of the most expensive in the world.
Of course we know “value” is just the amount of money someone traded for something, so Georgism can’t be implemented practically.
When you stop thinking about how awesome LVT is and think about how to calculate it, the whole theory falls apart.
Land value assessments should be easier than typical property assessments (which take into account land value already), cf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Assessment/ap...
This is simple to illustrate by example: Three people are willing to buy the same property at different maximum prices. Person A is willing to buy at $35k, person B at $30k, and person C at $25k. Any value an assessor writes down will necessarily be different than one of the three people. There is no dollar value intrinsic to the property itself.
Your other point seems to be that no margin of error is acceptable and we should therefore ditch the whole thing.
It's not clear that the societal pain from somewhat inaccurate tax assessments is great enough that we should just set everything to 0. We have lots of data that 0 property tax leads to housing shortages and rampant speculation (cf. Malta for an example) and if you don't tax land ownership you often end up taxing something productive, like income.
There can’t be a margin of error because there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything). Margin of error compared to what?
People attribute different values to the same property, which is not reflected in any sort of assessed value.
I’ll explain with a question: If I say a property is worth $30k and you say it’s worth $100k what should the assessed value be?
There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value". I'm not very familiar with finance so I'm not sure if this is what you you're getting at.
But your idea, that land can't be taxed because it has no value, can't possibly be new as these questions have been around for literally hundreds of years. That being said, I've never heard it before and would be genuinely interested if you can link some papers or books.
If there is, then how would I calculate the intrinsic value of a piece of real estate, to levy a tax on it?
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
In the 1950s, the average new house was 1200 sqft and held 3.5 people. Today, the average new house is about twice that size and holds one less person.
We simply no longer build or even allow small spaces in a walkable urban fabric where you can live without a car. The few that have been grandfathered in tend to be very expensive because it's such a wonderful quality of life and we don't build like that anymore.
Usually people in the West associate the later with some banana republics or petrostates, but...
I believe it is intellectually dishonest to omit Western idolisation of rentier lifestyle.
Compare a desert tribe jealously protecting their oil derrick, and how, say, IP lawyers protect their patents, real estate hoarders protect their turf, and high finance people protecting their regulatory watering holes.
The most high societal class in US are the people who master the manipulation of artificial scarcities: securities, permits, licenses, legal patents, royalties, copyrights, and etcetera.
And this is pretty much the shopping list that well off, and well connected give to their children by mid thirties.
Alternatively the government turns into the only landlord, deciding who can build what where.
I wonder how many hours of minimum wage I would need to work to afford a new BMW.
There are tons of poor people making less than minimum wage (working less than 8 hours or on/off days/gigs (and still not counted as unemployed because of those).
People also need to pay way more than the rent alone (food, utilities, children, commuting, health costs, and so on).
It means you're making less than 8 * minimum hourly wage each day, so those 127 hours stretch to even more than 15 days of your working month.
So sad to see not much has changed in 30 years.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095227/
These kids don't have a chance without a lot of luck. I can only imagine not having a husband or a solid family (brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc) makes things more difficult with no one to give a helping hand.
I just want to ask where the fuck is the father in all of this and why isn't he helping?
Two of the children were abandoned by their parents, and the mother in this story adopted them. She earns her living doing work that seems to be an unambiguously positive contribution to society, and takes on extra responsibilities (in the form of two entire human beings).
The article paints a picture of a woman who is generous, hardworking, and disciplined, and who is getting absolutely crushed by the modern economy. That seems like a very real story to me, and a mandate to make some serious changes, even if they put a dent in the wealth of some wealthier people.
You're assuming too much intellect from the bottom of society, as someone born unto poor parents. They are ignorant beyond all comprehension, you get people who are religiously fundamentalist, quasi mental headcases, and fathers that are dumb as a post.
The people at the bottom of society are basically injured by the system itself and of course they end up making bad decisions, they get the worst education and are in toxic cultural environments like religious cults because they come from families who were historically poor to begin with.
Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim. Just ask the Goodmans.
Is the target audience people that explicitly think anecdotes are more important than data? I preferred it when that cognitive error was at least hidden.
Do an in depth analysis of the data and talk to experts with varied opinions? Nah....
Find an anecdote that pulls at the heart strings and use vague language to insinuate it’s a “crisis”? We have a story!!